MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KronisLV | 2025-09-27 13:30:46+00:00
As someone who's worked with both more fragmented/modular codebases with smaller classes and shorter files vs ones that span thousands of lines (sometimes even double digits), I very much prefer the former and hate the latter.

That said, some of the models out there (Gemini 2.5 Pro, for example) support 1M context; it's just going to be expensive and will still probably confuse the model somewhat when it comes to the output.
by leakycap | 2025-09-27 13:32:04+00:00
Almost any developer familiar with HTML would be willing to write HTML if they were paid similarly to making something flashy in React (to use your example)

Because I don't believe this is a real issue in the marketplace, I will write HTML for your client if they are truly unable to find someone. Writing HTML would be the easiest paid job I could imagine in my field right now.
by grayhatter | 2025-09-27 13:32:31+00:00
It's actually not that useless. Everything organic, or interacting with something natural follows the power law. Or 80/20 if you prefer.

When working on security and integrity issues, we found 10-20% of all traffic would be inorganic. The more course the metric, the more likely it was to be exactly 20%

To me, knowing nothing about this specfic domain, and just abuse/integrity in general, 45% means it's well over double what I'd expect from an unmanaged source. Well over double, because true double wouldn't be 40% (20/100) + 20 = 40/120 = 33%

This heuristic tells me it's specific, targeted, and well above the background noise youms might ignore for higher priorities. In other words, it's a problem that's actionable.

Here, I assume stoking anger and outrage is the goal. That's why it not being 20% is significant.
by gus_massa | 2025-09-27 13:32:40+00:00
I studied 2x2 linear equation system in high school at 14 (13?) y.o. It was a technical school with more math and physics, and later specialization (like chemistry, electronics, building, ...). I think in a normal school they study that at 16 y.o.

We also teach 2x2 systems to 18 y.o. in the fists year of the university for architects, medics and other degree that don't need a huge amount on math. (Other degrees like engineering or physics get 4x4 or bigger systems that definitively need the Gauss method.)
by arevno | 2025-09-27 13:32:59+00:00
> it's a formalized "old boys club" dynamic

There's a risk that this happens, sure, but it can be more charitably read as allowing/retaining people like Steve Jobs or Linus Torvalds, who, despite being assholes, are effective assholes and usually spew vitriol only in the interests of the product itself.

Weighing annoyance against contributions is a valid methodology. Your concern is valid, as well, so governance should always be introspective enough to ensure that the metrics of "annoying" and "useful" are objective ones and don't grandfather in the insiders.
by pornel | 2025-09-27 13:34:35+00:00
In this case I agree. Small, short-running programs that don't need to change much are the easy case for C, and they had plenty of time to iron out bugs and handle edge cases. Any difficulties that C may have caused are a sunk cost. Rust's advantages on top of that get reduced to mostly nice-to-haves rather than fixing burning issues.

I don't mean to tell Rust uutils authors not to write a project they wanted, but I don't see why Canonical was so eager to switch, given that there are non-zero switching costs for others.
by scosman | 2025-09-27 13:34:48+00:00
This is great. I made a download button a while ago. The Apple and Windows logos scale down, look great, and are easily identifiable. Tux is great, but just doesn't scale down. Tried about 10 variants to get one that is recognizable, but also works at smaller sizes.

Many attempts at this from many people: https://www.svgrepo.com/vectors/linux/
by nickpsecurity | 2025-09-27 13:35:00+00:00
I was responding to their claim by starting with an assumption that it may be correct. I don't know the cost data myself. Now, I'll assume what you say is true.

That leaves computation and memory use of two passes plus interlayer communication.

I think backpropagation doesn't occur in the brain since it appears to use local learning but global optimization probably happens during sleep/dreaming. I have a lot of papers on removing backpropagation, Hebbien learning, and "local, learning rules."

From there, many are publishing how to do training at 8-bit and below. A recent one did a mix of low-bit training with sub-1-bit storage for weights. The NoLayer architecture might address interlayer better.

People keep trying to build analog accelerators. There are mismatches between their features and hardware. Recent works have come up with analog NN's that work well with analog hardware.

A combination of those would likely get cost down dramatically on both inference and training. Also, energy use would be lower.
by tromp | 2025-09-27 13:36:13+00:00
The bottom of my home page has this as a PostScript signature:

%!PS % -John Tromp http://tromp.github.io/ /t{dup 1 sub gsave dup 0 gt{[.4 .2 -.2 .4 .4 .2]concat t currentgray .8 mul .2 add setgray -1 1 scale t -1 2 translate t 1 -1 scale t[0 1 1 0 0 2]concat t pop}{0 moveto 1 0 lineto 0 2 lineto closepath clip fill}ifelse grestore}def 10 10 translate 600 600 scale 5 t showpage

which outputs this pinwheel tiling https://tromp.github.io/img/pinwheel.pdf
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-09-27 13:36:17+00:00
I'm sure a lot of people on HN are very aware of AI, bots, manipulation.

But I have to say, it is getting harder to tell. If you think the AI slop is the only AI content, you are missing all the AI content that is good and nobody is noticing.

Its just that AI tools have become so wide spread that a lot of people are generating low quality slop. That is hiding the realistic slop.
by like_any_other | 2025-09-27 13:37:07+00:00
> If you think it's silly because it's not a restaurant you go to

It would be fine if Cracker Barrel was just an isolated example - I would guess then it would be just a curiosity, not an "outrage". But it's not isolated - it's a broad aesthetic trend in everything from architecture [0] to art to graphic design [1].

It's that trend people object to. Cracker Barrel is just the latest slice of the salami.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/architecture/comments/199sjmn/thoug...

[1] https://medium.com/@zuktechnologies/why-modern-logos-all-loo...
by treetalker | 2025-09-27 13:37:44+00:00
The online version of Webster's 1828 is pretty good (third-party project because the work is in the public domain):

https://webstersdictionary1828.com/

To go the better route, here's a HN post about adding Webster's 1913 to the macOS dictionary app (the dictionary is very good):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29733648

If anyone is aware of a .dict file to add Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition (1942) to the MacOS Dictionary app, please post! That would be the holy grail for me.
by Zigurd | 2025-09-27 13:37:54+00:00
Two things about this:

1. This is a national security matter. Epstein's business, such as it was, wasn't pimping the underage to rich men, it was blackmailing for his own account and selling blackmail material to anyone willing to pay him enough. That means state actors. And that means we can't trust anyone who was in Epstein's circle with national security work.

2. It wasn't just underage females. Gay men can be blackmailed, too.
by diego_moita | 2025-09-27 13:37:56+00:00
Comparing this logo to the original reminds me the whole discussion about skeuomorphism (that's when GUI icons imitate closely things from the real world).

Icons that strongly resemble things from real life are, quite often, problematic at representation, especially in smaller sizes. They take more time to understand and decode, they're prone to confusion.

But anti-skeuomorphic icons also have a problem of their own: they become so abstract that quite often we don't know what they represent. They become cold and soulless, like corporation logos. An example: I look at this new icon and what I see is Darth Vader with an open big mouth.

It is like comparing IKEA furniture and Bauhaus or Scandinavian design against Art-Noveau or Antonio Gaudí's architecture. The first are (as Nietzsche would say) apolinean, elegant, subdued and functional. The second are dionisiac, fun, a feast for the senses.
by jvanderbot | 2025-09-27 13:38:21+00:00
Sure, but how is methane obtained if not from a byproduct of drilling up oil? Isn't it the "gas" in oil&gas?

It's probably a good move to "hydrogenize" the economy if we can, but it sure would be nice to move away from extraction into something that's more sustainably produced in-situ. Either electricity, or even methane synthesis.
by pron | 2025-09-27 13:39:10+00:00
A Jewish home isn't necessarily an exclusively Jewish home. My country is the national home of the English people, but it isn't a national home for that people exclusively (although some wish to change that). And while it certainly sees to me that the situation in Israel can best be described as apartheid, I don't see the point in using a term such as "political Zionism" that is also used by people who identify as its supporters to mean the opposite of what you say it is. I.e. some people support a binational Jewish-Arab state in the name of political Zionism. If different people have wildly different interpretations of a term - interpretations that go as far as being on opposite sides of the core issue - that term becomes useless.

As to Zionism having an explicit ethnic meaning, that is obvious and non-surprising. Political Zionism was formed in Europe at a time of ethnic and national awakening (and as a result of centuries of oppression against Jews and other ethnicities), and further shaped in the time of national struggle against colonialism and multinational empires. At least until the sixties (if not the nineties), ethnonationalism of ethnic minorities was seen as a progressive position against conservative multi-ethnic/national empires. You can see traces of such "left-wing nationalism" not only in Israel (obviously, I'm not referring to its current ruling coalition), but also in Ireland and in Asia. Ideological (rather than pragmatic) support of a Palestinian state - which is just as "racialised" as a Jewish state - is also a form of that. If you want a "feel" for that in the US, think Malcolm X or the Back-to-Africa movement, and especially Marcus Garvey, who was expressly inspired by Zionism and Irish nationalism.

Of course, even as early as the 1920s and the rise of right-wing nationalism, many on the left recognised that left-wing, "emancipatory", nationalism can quickly turn into right-wing, oppressive, nationalism and warned against that when it came to Zionism as well as other national movements of the time. I think they ended up being proven right in almost every case (including the famous examples of Israel and India), but emancipatory nationalism did play an important historical role in decolonialism, and in the case of Israel, it also helped save the lives of many Jews fleeing the horrors of oppressive nationalism (mostly in Eurpoe, but later also in the Muslim world).

But imagine Black Nationalism had succeeded and become oppressive on a national level, how hard it would have been to talk simply about "Black Nationalism", and how it would have meant different and probably opposite things to different people.
by Applejinx | 2025-09-27 13:40:28+00:00
Is a scrapbooker an artist? If a scrapbooker is an artist because of what collage is, is a MtG card collector picking layouts to arrange their cards in the array of plastic sleeves you can get, an artist?

If the MtG card collector is not an artist does that mean they're bad and need to stop?
by leakycap | 2025-09-27 13:41:06+00:00
I sense you don't like being wrong, but your memory is not serving you well

Self-signed symbian apps:

- had no lasting persmissions... EVERY single time a self-signed app did something like use network or bluetooth, the user gets a popup... every.single.time

- had no background task ability; save before you switch apps! and music players? nope.

- could not write to or browse the general phone filesystem - could only write to files created BY that app

- could not use any of the phone functions (call records, making calls, filtering calls, recording calls, SMS/MMS)

- had no kernel access for any access to custom plugins or methods outside the official SDK

The self-signing tools provided for Symbian devs were MakeKeys and SignSIS & barely worked then. Nowdays, getting them to work takes a dark art incantation and rolling your VM back in time a few decades.

Symbian was a shaky, shortsighted OS that switched directions in software and hardware multiple times before finding a lane that it quickly abandoned.
by lyu07282 | 2025-09-27 13:41:10+00:00
But they kept the word "Cracker" in the logo! That's why it was so confusing. Was the outrage about them keeping the word? But then they changed the logo back to its original that also had the word? It just makes zero sense. That's why it seems plausible that it might have been inauthentic, even right-wing people are still capable of basic logical reasoning.

Perhaps it was literally the result of an algorithm, pattern matching the word "cracker"? Like there was a idiotic controversy of Hasan saying the word awhile back, so the algorithms may have learned that. Perhaps a bunch of right-wing people all of a sudden got the name change announcement recommended in their feeds because of the keyword and it just spread from there. I think that is the most likely actually.
by nowittyusername | 2025-09-27 13:41:18+00:00
Hi folks, I made a research tools that allows you to perform deterministic inference on any local large language model. This way you can test any variable changes and see for yourself the affects those changes have on the output of the LLM's response. It also allows you to perform automated reasoning benchmarking of a local language model of your choice, this way you can measure the perplexity drop of any quantized model or differences between reasoning capabilities of models or sampling parameters. It also has a fully automated way of converging on the best sampling parameters for a given model when it comes to reasoning capabilities. I made 2 videos for the project so you can see what its about at a glance the main guide is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyE5BrUut2o, the instillation video is here https://youtu.be/FJpmD3b2aps and the repo is here https://github.com/manfrom83/Sample-Forge. If you have more questions id be glad to answer them here. Cheers.
by throwaway_7274 | 2025-09-27 13:41:20+00:00
It's night and day.

I'm a PhD student currently writing my thesis in Typst. On paper this is an absurdly risky decision: it's a new technology without a huge user-base, it's not totally stable yet, etc. But I tried Typst and I had no choice. It was obviously the right thing to do, even though I'm going to have to make a pixel-perfect clone of my university's LaTeX template.

I've been using LaTeX for over ten years and I still wouldn't say that I "know" TeX in any meaningful way. I was not only productive but proficient in Typst in a day or two. If there isn't a package for something that I need (and, surprisingly often, there are packages for what I need, and excellent ones!), I find that I can just do it myself. Quickly. Things that never would have been possible for me with LaTeX are within easy reach. In ways I'd be happy to talk about if anyone's curious, it's been a huge enabler of my productivity as a researcher. I owe this tool so much.

Interestingly, I spend far, far less time yak-shaving in Typst than in TeX, since I can just Do The Thing That I Want. I'm actually focusing on writing instead of figuring out why package A conflicts with package B, and then how to install a different version of just a single package to override one of them, and then... [this sort of thing doesn't/can't happen in Typst; it's a real programming language with real modules] I could go on and on about the (relative) quality of the ergonomics and devex: fast compilation times, as others have said, but so much more than that. Try it out. Just try it out.

I should also say that it's not perfect. There are some funky design decisions for sure. There are some missing features, like including pdfs as images in your document (that one's on its way, I believe). Critically, the quality of the typesetting is maybe... 95% as good as TeX, which is perfect every time. Sometimes things don't kern quite right, and you have to adjust them by hand. It's a work in progress. I'm optimistic that it will achieve parity on that front.
by motbus3 | 2025-09-27 13:41:52+00:00
It is happening already. Some insurance companies in my country wants to demand DNA testing and to withold that information for indeterminate time and to be able to sell that info.

Thankfully, although not even close to EU data protection there is some and this was deemed irregular for now.

Attention for the word "irregular". They will take maybe few more years to turn it onto regular. It is not illegal which is bonkers.
by Kye | 2025-09-27 13:42:30+00:00
The social graph, at least in Bluesky's own collection[0], is made up of the sum of follow records in individual repositories on PDSes. Anyone can enumerate them.

[0] A collection is basically an app's particular set of records stored in a user's PDS repository. Here's an example using the Bluesky CTO's follow records: https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:ragtjsm2j2vknwkz3zp4oxrd/app....

These are summed up by Bluesky's app server (app view) and then used to fill out following lists in apps that connect to that server through its API.

A fact checking or web of trust tool could pull these records down and use it for exactly this purpose. It could even weight by who they repost, for example.
by kibwen | 2025-09-27 13:42:50+00:00
This is cope. Functionally nobody remembers enough high school chemistry to remember what a redox reaction is, let alone associate that with Rust, and such a naming convention is hardly worthy of the petulant dismissal expressed by the original comment.

And while we're on the topic, more Rust projects on the HN front page that don't mention Rust in the past day were Typst and the Cloudflare thing. Turns out, there's just a ton of good Rust projects out there, to the surprise of clueless HN commenters.
by dpflan | 2025-09-27 13:43:21+00:00
Here is the WSJ opinion piece: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/is-gen-z-unemployable-288d2ec9

Here is a LinkedIn post by one of the researchers, Suzy Welch at NYU: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/suzywelch_opinion-is-gen-z-un...

Pair these results of this research with the impact of AI on entry-level jobs, and it does certainly questions about the future.

Also, add in this observational piece by Hunter S. Thompson, written after 9/11 for more color about Gen Z's world: https://www.espn.com/page2/s/thompson/010918.html

"""

We are At War now, according to President Bush, and I take him at his word. He also says this War might last for "a very long time."

Generals and military scholars will tell you that eight or 10 years is actually not such a long time in the span of human history -- which is no doubt true -- but history also tells us that 10 years of martial law and a war-time economy are going to feel like a Lifetime to people who are in their twenties today. The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed.

That is extremely heavy news, and it will take a while for it to sink in. The 22 babies born in New York City while the World Trade Center burned will never know what they missed. The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now. The party's over, folks. The time has come for loyal Americans to Sacrifice. ... Sacrifice. ... Sacrifice. That is the new buzz-word in Washington. But what it means is not entirely clear.

"""

- HST
by xpe | 2025-09-27 13:44:14+00:00
Indeed front-end development in software can be painful. Much of the cruft can be attributed to computing's byzantine history of incremental experimentation. You might take some comfort in knowing that the biological analogue is vastly more complicated: the transformation of genotype to phenotype. Trying to figure out the evolutionary pressures and various mutational accidents that drove particular biological changes feels way harder than trying to figure out WTF Project X was thinking when they decided to pivot from being a social network for dog walkers to a low-latency query planner for a database no one has heard of.
by Theodores | 2025-09-27 13:44:21+00:00
It is interesting how the market for high end audio has changed with the demise of physical media. I don't associate these high end audio brands with the home, however I do associate them with the options on expensive cars.

For the average person with a big TV and standard issue sound bar, an expensive home audio setup has limited appeal. What they have is good enough. However, in the automotive market it is a very different game. For starters, if you have to pay a five or six figure sum for your vehicle, where you are already in the game of specifying options, that expensive audio option isn't that expensive when compared to all of the other 'necessary' options, so you might as well tick the box.

With high end cars, resale value matters. If you have the base specification then this isn't going to fare too well in the second hand market. With some options you are never going to get your money back, but some are 'mandatory', particularly if they are bundled. It seems to me that this is the lucrative niche for high end audio, not the home or other markets. Plus you can sell someone a ridiculous amount of speakers, for example 22 of them, whereas, in the home, nobody has 22 speakers in their living room.
by blurbleblurble | 2025-09-27 13:44:22+00:00
^ Found the bot!

(Just teasin')

But in seriousness, yes people may have been feeling genuinely nostalgic, the point is that bots were used to play up peoples' nostalgia, to turn it into fear, moral outrage and finally "victory against a woke enemy", a deep sense of oxytocin and loyalty.
by paulgerhardt | 2025-09-27 13:44:24+00:00
Impressive work for a solo effort.

Would love to see less front loading on the registration side - I fell off onboarding because I couldn’t get through the 12(!) page questionnaire.

The value proposition is clear, just let me use the app. Notes (my current solution for this) doesn’t make me read summaries of other people’s research every time I open the app :-)
by jeffrallen | 2025-09-27 13:45:00+00:00
This is hands down the worst Old New Thing he ever wrote. He either is, or at least should be, ashamed of the poor engineering his colleagues are doing, and trying weakly to defend them.

Monkeying with critical sections is hard. Monkeying with them due to performance and memory optimization while maintaining correctness is incredibly hard. If they'd done a good job of it, no one would have noticed, and Raymond would have had a cool story to tell. Instead we got this.

Sigh, Microsoft, what's happening over there?
by roryirvine | 2025-09-27 13:46:02+00:00
That's fair! And, yes, he seemed to enjoy rushing into every flamewar he could find back then.

It's one of the reasons this current tweet is so surprising - he's moaning about "drama and politics", "negative useful work", and "shit-stirrers" "who are more annoying to work with than [their] contributions justify", but doesn't seem to realise that all of those complaints could have been made more strongly still about ESR himself, especially when he was in his pomp.