MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-09-07 23:28:31+00:00
>That's not a real definition, that's a placeholder for

Blah blah blah blahblah. If you can give me a definition even as poor as the one I gave for dark matter, that's all we're asking for. We don't need an explanation of the mechanism, we only need a way to measure the phenomenon. But you can't even do that.
by shoo | 2025-09-07 23:29:23+00:00
Not a theoretical physics / pure math example, but Yann Collett is a example of someone who had a day job as a project manager, and did programming as one hobby, and ended up developing the LZ4 & ZStandard compression algorithms. Yann first started looking at compression algorithms after developing a game for the HP 48S graphics calculator, but it was a large 50kb game and would take too long to download.

there's a great interview here:

https://corecursive.com/data-compression-yann-collet/#pickin...

Part of what helped Yann was finding a niche community of people with the same interest, developing new compression algorithms, where he could be part of that community:

> I was not alone and that’s very important I think. But more importantly, I think it gave me a frame of reference. I could compare, I could get evaluated. And so there was a sense of belonging to a tribe of peers and I think it matters because it’s difficult to sustain such a long effort, multi years effort with no such contacts at all.

> Every once in a while someone would come and say, “Hey, I invented this.” And some people would test it and would say, oh, it’s good or it’s great or it’s not. And there would be no shortage of people who like me are interested in data compression and would test the program. Oh, that’s a perfect ground.

Part of Yann's success in contributing something novel was having a different goal to most people

> I think it’s fair to say that in the data compression community, most searcher were interested in data compression, really best ratio. And speed, yes, as a side effect. Let’s make it not too bad. That really comes second. And my mind was refocused on I want great speed and without sacrificing speed, I want to get better compression ratio. So it really changed the perspective of what matters. And it doesn’t take too long before I got something competitive and at some point also by chance I have an algorithm which seems to be the fastest around. So that’s LZ4.

I think there's a lot of overlap with brudgers comment about fields being shared human endeavors, undertaken by communities. You need to figure out how to be part of the relevant community. For a field like theoretical physics, the cost of admission is probably grad school in theoretical physics.
by kragen | 2025-09-07 23:30:14+00:00
Yeah, I share your assessment that it's not unmanageable.

But it does add friction. I suspect that there are only two real solutions:

- program source code that isn't a linear document but instead can be viewed in multiple different ways: by operation or by operand type, for example. Then you would use the view that best suits the modification you were doing at the time. Smalltalk, for example, does support browsing either all the implementors of a method selector or all the methods of a class. (But in both cases you normally only see one method at a time.)

- Alternating levels of hierarchy. Maybe if you have 63 operations on 63 types, you could arrange it so that you can add a 64th operation or a 64th type by editing only 8 places instead of 63.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-09-07 23:30:20+00:00
China has mobile ordering to the next level. Every McDonald’s has a set of two sided lockers, you just scan your order QR code and the locker your order is in opens…no human contact what so ever.

In the USA, McDonald’s app is pretty bad compared to Starbucks at least. Nowhere near where it is in China (well, if you do the wechat plugin). I find it isn’t worth the trouble and will just use the kiosk for the rare times I still go there.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-09-07 23:30:42+00:00
The tradeoff here is not being able to use a universal set of tooling to interact with source files. Anything but text makes grep, diff, sed, and version control less effective. You end up locked into specialized tools, formats, or IDE extensions, while the Unix philosophy thrives on composability with plain text.

There's a scissor that cuts through the formatting debate: If initial space width was configurable in their editor of choice, would those who prefer tabs have any other arguments?
by sneak | 2025-09-07 23:30:53+00:00
glibc does not have a stable api on the timescales we are speaking about it here, and neither do any of the GUIs on linux. you are sort of moving the goalposts here.

you cannot take a compiled gui app for linux from 20 years ago and run it on a modern system and have it work. on windows it will work just fine.

not to bring out that old trope, but windows is an OS (and desktop environment) - linux is a kernel. you know what they meant, and your rebuttal isn’t one.

also, GP clearly said ABI and you jumped to API - one is much harder than the other.
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-09-07 23:31:47+00:00
Thinking is slippery as a concept, but feelings are what they’re usually after, and these can be remarkably deterministic by other than mental processes. The study of Israeli judges was debunked, but I think we all have experienced this at some level.

The NPR show This American Life had a segment years ago on the mind, “Life is a Coin with One Side.”[1] Producer David Kestenbaum provided his take, including that quantum effects can inject randomness but do not provide a complete explanation for thinking process or free will. He recounted the story of a friend who engaged in repetitive behaviors after a concussion, as an illustration that the mind is a machine, which like AI has wonderful emergent capabilities.

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/662/where-there-is-a-will/a...
by crazygringo | 2025-09-07 23:31:51+00:00
> outweighs a poorly designed storage layer, poorly designed column formats, and a terrible SQL implementation

You're going to have to expand on that, because I have no idea what you're talking about, nor does anyone else here seem to.

It's a relational database meant primarily for a single user. It's SQL. It works as expected. It's performant. It's astonishingly reliable.

The only obviously questionable design decision I'm aware of is for columns to be able to mix types, but that's more "differently designed" rather than "poorly designed", and it's actually fantastic for automatically saving space on small integers. And maybe the fact ALTER TABLE is limited, but there are workarounds and it's not like you'll be doing that much in production anyways.

What are your specific problems with it?
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-09-07 23:31:54+00:00
> 'industry standard best practices' win over a well designed bespoke solution every time, developers are just expected to write a little glue at most

Sometimes for good reason. "Well designed bespoke solutions" often turn out to be badly designed reinventions of the wheel. Industry standard best practices sometimes prevent problems that you yet know you will run into.

And sometimes they just are massively overdesigned overkill. There is a real art to knowing which is which.
by modeless | 2025-09-07 23:32:30+00:00
The frequencies that walkie-talkies use are available for walkie-talkie use. Sure, it might need another antenna, but so do features like mmWave, UWB, and Satellite SOS, and I guarantee a genuine walkie-talkie feature would see more usage than those. iPhones already contain antennas for dozens of bands including 600 MHz. I don't see it being infeasible to add ~465 MHz band support.
by accrual | 2025-09-07 23:32:40+00:00
Definitely, I agree. My comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek, I don't need new earbuds or chargers these days. 1 Amp x 5 Volts = 5 Watts isn't enough for modern phones these days, we need USB-C adapters with various outputs like 22.5W, etc.

Personally I'm OK with Apple dropping the extras. They were nice but now I have a box of old Apple chargers and stuff that I don't need, and I think that is what they were trying to limit.
AI SDRs do not solve the cold outreach problem
by TigerSolo | 2025-09-07 23:33:00+00:00
I think that AI SDRs like throxy or Artisan actually do not solve the cold outreach problem which is that customers do not like cold emails, cold calls or cold LinkedIn DMs.

Imagine being stuck in traffic, is the solution automating the driving so that you don't waste your time or is it building a helicopter so that you don't have to wait in traffic in the first place?
by andrewinardeer | 2025-09-07 23:33:05+00:00
I am of the opinion that it wasn't critical infra, but it was at least unique infra. Similar to LinkedIn, which MS acquired. It wasn't that LI was critical it was because it was unique.

And since the acquisition, they have built it out to be critical. Similar to what META did with Instagram. Instagram wasn't critical when META purchased it, but now it is the cornerstone of any business's online presence as it has been built out.
by reaperducer | 2025-09-07 23:34:11+00:00
Every McDonald’s has a set of two sided lockers, you just scan your order QR code and the locker your order is in opens…no human contact what so ever.

Little Caesar's had this in the States at least as far back as 2016, when I first ran across it.

I wonder if you still order a pizza from the Hut by texting a pizza emoji?
by stephenlindauer | 2025-09-07 23:34:35+00:00
Different folks have different levels of acceptable risk. I generally agree, and won’t install an app for every single one-time purchase, but I eat a lot of Taco Bell. The app makes sense for me. Many other companies also have web interfaces so you don’t NEED to install an app. (Many restaurants/bars that have a Qr Code on the table act this way.)
by banashark | 2025-09-07 23:34:38+00:00
Interesting read. I’ve often wondered why the projection we see needs to be the same as the stored artifact. Even something like a git diff should be viewable via a projection of the source IR.

With things like treesitter and the like, I sometimes daydream about what an efficient and effective HCI for an AST or IR would look like.

Things like f#s ordered compilation often make code reviews more simple for me, but that’s because a piece of the intermediate form (dependency order) is exposed to me as a first class item. I find it much more simple to reason about compared to small changes in code with more lax ordering requirements, where I often find myself jumping up and down and back and forth in a diff and all the related interfaces and abstract classes and implementations to understand what effect the delta is having on the program as a whole.
by seabass-labrax | 2025-09-07 23:34:49+00:00
They had to take the cumulative risk of getting caught though - one well-targeted burglary to take a designer handbag or diamond necklace would earn that thief as much as the indiscriminate 'stealing nwallin's gym clothes' thief would make in a year, as long as they had the network to sell the contraband on without incriminating themselves.
My Vercel v0 weekend: A working app, a happy friend, and a $50 bill
by ryado | 2025-09-07 23:35:51+00:00
I'm an experienced backend engineer; frontend has always been my bottleneck. I've been experimenting with AI tools to bridge this gap, and my recent experience with Vercel v0 was notable.

Fueled by a desire to impress a friend (and some alcohol) last weekend, I built a feature-rich internal app for his business; ~ think a feature-rich time tracker with auth, roles, export, etc. To keep the momentum going, I bypassed the rate limits and spent about $50 on a Pro sub and credits over two days. The result: a working MVP delivered and in use by Monday.

The speed was incredible, not just code generation, but the entire dev-to-deploy cycle. v0 instantly solved the "blank canvas" problem for me.

The sober question now is: was that the best use of $50? The backend I could have built in a similar timeframe, so the value was entirely in accelerating the UI/design for me.

I'm trying to assess the landscape of tools for developers like me. My research so far:

Claude: Intrigued, but pricing is unclear.

Copilot: I use it daily at work for backend, but it feels weak for generating complex, well-designed UI components.

v0 vs. Bolt: v0 felt miles ahead for the initial UI generation.

My question for HN:

For a developer whose main weakness is frontend design, is there anything that truly matches v0's 0-to-1 speed right now? Or is it in a class of its own, and the ~$50 cost for an MVP is simply the new price of admission for this kind of leverage in my case?

I think v0 is an amazing product, but I'm pragmatic about tools. I’ve just learned to treat companies the same way they treat customers: always squeeze the juice, move on when the value drops.

Curious to hear what workflows others have found effective.
by ytch | 2025-09-07 23:36:32+00:00
Another advantage of Intel GPU is vGPU SR-IOV, while consumer video cards of NVIDIA and AMD didn't support it. But even the integrated GPU of N100, N97 support it[1],

Therefore I can install Proxmox VE and run multiple VMs, assigning a vGPU to each of them a for video transcoding (IPCam NVR), AI and other applications.

https://github.com/Upinel/PVE-Intel-vGPU
by ryado | 2025-09-07 23:36:57+00:00
Author here. This really boils down to an ROI question.

On one hand, a $50 cash outlay for a validated MVP that's in the hands of users within 48 hours seems like an incredibly good deal from a business perspective.

On the other, my engineering brain is asking if 90% of the same result could be achieved for $10 (a Copilot sub) and just a few more hours of effort.

I'm especially interested to hear from others who build side projects or MVPs: *How do you evaluate the cost of these 'pay-per-generation' AI tools versus traditional flat-rate subscriptions in your budget?*
by grg0 | 2025-09-07 23:37:55+00:00
That is the real question to me. Surely ramping production of gas cars at the expense of a slower adoption of EV technology is a step backwards in the global market? Regardless of what you think of the EV regulations, isn't the underlying problem that local car manufacturers are simply not competitive?

EU car manufacturers have the same conundrum too as far as I know.
by seabass-labrax | 2025-09-07 23:38:24+00:00
I wouldn't personally trust the Economist with this kind of thing, at least not compared to publications by technically-minded experts that have been shared elsewhere on this thread, such as the Register. The phone-snatching is real, but the effectiveness of this theft in creating usable spare parts, or of the efficacy Apple's software in reducing said theft, is much harder to determine.
by giveita | 2025-09-07 23:39:27+00:00
One difference with AI is that you make a dependency on private corporations for a forever changing tool.

A calculator from 1970 works the same as the one on your phone. A typewriter from 1930 has the same layout roughly as your laptop. The AI you use today will change in 30-90 days time and be different. In addition just 5-10 companies in the world can create AI that you use for work vs. decent competition in regular computer space with a FOSS operating system and kernel available.

Local AI is possible but not in the same league. To boot these tools are VC subsidised with no profitability plan. You are the product again.
by behnamoh | 2025-09-07 23:39:38+00:00
Hyundai is notorious for shitty dealers and service, to the point that people hesitate to purchase from their luxury brand, Genesis, to avoid these dealers. Meanwhile, I've heard of Koreans who confirm that the company's branches in Korea have much better dealers. Something seems off, then. Could it be the corporate greed and lousy US regulations that have allowed Hyundai to keep their shady tactics for decades in America?
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-09-07 23:41:15+00:00
There’s a StarBucks near me that takes about 3-4 minutes per car at the drive thru. Frequently there would be 3-6 cars in line. Yes, people literally wait 15-20 minutes in line before they can even order, much less get their order.

Sure, maybe they’re just inefficient and shouldn’t be rewarded. However the people there are indeed working feverishly (and paid poorly).

Going inside and ordering isn’t any faster.

I’d put this in the “famously bad experience” category.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-09-07 23:42:27+00:00
>On the other, my engineering brain is asking if 90% of the same result could be achieved for $10 (a Copilot sub) and just a few more hours of effort.

my engineering brain is asking:

does "few more hours of effort" mean 2 more hours of effort?

If so do you get paid less than $20 per hour?

If few more hours of effort means more than 2 how many more hours of effort do you think it would have to be for it to be ridiculous for making that effort?
by iq19zero | 2025-09-07 23:43:25+00:00
GPUs have taken us far, but they’re still not good at a core class of problems: reasoning, association, and optimization. These show up everywhere — multi-object tracking, data association, graph labeling, scheduling, Max-Cut — and they don’t parallelize well on GPU architectures.

We’re working on a different approach: a Resonant Phase Computer. Instead of crunching digital instructions, it uses coupled oscillators that naturally settle into low-energy states of the problem you encode. You load the problem into physics, let it evolve, and read out the synchronized phases as solutions.

Where we’re at today: • We’ve simulated systems from 64–512 nodes, showing 2–3× lower latency and energy compared to GPU baselines, with comparable or better solution quality. • We’ve released methods and CSVs publicly for transparency (Benchmarks page). • We’re now taking pre-orders to fund and deliver the first DevKits (resonantcomputer.com): small USB-C/Thunderbolt boards that researchers and developers can plug into a laptop or workstation.

Why this matters: • For AI/ML, it accelerates the reasoning layer GPUs can’t. • For robotics, it could cut decision latency in half, improving safety and responsiveness. • For optimization at scale, it’s a room-temperature alternative to quantum annealing.

We haven’t built hardware yet — this is about proving the architecture and getting early users on board. We’re looking for feedback from the HN community: skepticism, prior art, interest, or partners who want to experiment once hardware ships.

Benchmarks: https://www.resonantcomputer.com/benchmarks Pre-orders: https://www.resonantcomputer.com/
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-07 23:43:40+00:00
They're not gonna un-learn the expertise that results in nearly every fuel molecule combining with oxygen and turning into marketable power and fuel economy numbers. That just makes no sense.

Where they'll save money is chasing edge cases like cold start in certain ambient conditions, during shift points and whatnot. Most people don't really appreciate how much effort goes into emissions compliance in those sorts of transient conditions.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-09-07 23:44:00+00:00
And they’ve lost. Everyone and their cousin uses Electron editors while showing up to FOSDEM on their MacBooks to discuss kernel development.

It’s already long over. We’re just starting to notice. The EFF is baffled - why do they yell in a void now, when just a decade ago they stopped SOPA/PIPA with dramatic effect?

The free internet and the communities that support it have lost their voice and their cultural support. Interesting. It couldn’t possibly be because they stepped beyond common sense and became an echo chamber amongst themselves… right?

(There are many things popular on HN, heresy to question, that even I as a participant emphatically do not support, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I’ve learned hinting at these views gets downvotes and bad faith feedback… so it’s hard to cry at the growing irrelevance. It’s deserved.)
by akst | 2025-09-07 23:44:32+00:00
I would love more outlets for creative coding, I feel like neocities is a bit like that. That said there isn't really a scene or real sense of community (AFAIK). I mean someone liked something I uploaded once, but I never interacted with them again.

Cohost had fun vibes like that as well, but I guess it's no longer with us. Same with Glitch, but admittedly I didn't use it in the last few years, but it was my go to option for hosting a snippet of unserious HTML. "HTML in the park" does seem like one fun IRL outlet for this kind of thing, I found out my city has one and I want to go to it.

Admittedly none of these were really demo scenes or places where creative coding was exclusively fostered, but creative coding and demo-like-scenes communities probably exist but are more likely some obscure discord server.
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-09-07 23:44:37+00:00
I realise this and also implemented it properly here before: https://github.com/steelcake/io2/blob/fd8b3d13621256a25637e3...

Just opted to use fixed 512 byte alignment in this library since all decent SSDs I have encountered so far are ok with 512 byte file alignment and 64 byte memory alignment.

This makes the code a bit simpler both in terms of the allocator and the file operations.
by lordnacho | 2025-09-07 23:44:56+00:00
Aren't most projects these days written in a mix of languages, most of them text? You'd have to get them to change to use the same tools we currently use, or else you'd have to use special tools. The beauty of the modern stack is the base tools are near universal.

If you want everyone to see their own preference of format, either write a script or get AI to format it for you.
by Jordan-117 | 2025-09-07 23:44:58+00:00
It really is great. When I was still on Reddit, I made regular use of the "Tip of My Tongue" sub to track down obscure stuff I half-remembered from years ago. It mostly worked, but there were a few stubborn cases that went unsolved, even after pouring every ounce of my Google Fu into the endeavor. I recently took the text of these unsolved posts and submitted them to Deep Research -- and within an hour, it had cracked four of them, and put me on track to find a fifth myself. Even if the reasoning part isn't entirely up to par, there's still something really powerful about being able to rapidly digest dozens of search results and pull out relevant information based on a loose description. And now I can have that kind of search power on demand in just a few minutes, without having to deal with Reddit's spambots and post filters and hordes of users who don't read the question or follow the sub's basic rules.
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-09-07 23:46:22+00:00
Yeah, seems like fio might be mixing them up or it is just faster than the zig code.

Fio seems to interpret `16g` as 16GiB so it creates a 16GiB ~= 17.2GB file. But not sure if it is reading/writing the whole thing.

It seems like the max performance of the SSD is 7GB/s in spec so it is kind of confusing.
by sneak | 2025-09-07 23:46:27+00:00
Most people are, because they don’t realize that when all transactions must be done without privacy and only at the pleasure of the state, the free society that you have come to take for granted will cease to exist.

I did a talk about this very topic at the CCC some years ago:

https://media.ccc.de/v/cccamp11-4591-financing_the_revolutio...
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-07 23:46:40+00:00
> There is a real art to knowing which is which.

Absolutely, but that “art” is really important, and also, fairly rare.

Many folks just jam in any dependency that is a first hit in a search, with more than 50 GH stars, and a shiny Web site.

One “red flag” phrase that I’ve learned is “That’s a solved problem!”. When I hear that, I know I should be skeptical of the prescribed “solution.”

That said, there’s stuff that definitely should be delegated to better-qualified folks. One example, that I was just working on[0], is Webauthn stuff.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/addendum-a-server-setup/