MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by paulhebert | 2025-09-15 23:07:24+00:00
Sure, but Svelte and Vue have had these compilation features built-in for ages without all that money flowing in.

The react team resisted these features because they went against their “it’s just a library” philosophy. They’re only copying them now because of how obviously useful they are in the other frameworks.

useEffect, useMemo, useCallback etc. add a ton of complexity and make it easy to write buggy code. I used to work at an agency so I’ve done projects with React/Svelte/Vue/Lit/Stencil/Angular/etc. I found the React projects had lots more performance issues, confusing bugs, etc. than Vue or Svelte.

I agree with the article. React is popular because it was groundbreaking and now is the default, but it’s far from the best
by hamdingers | 2025-09-15 23:08:49+00:00
Disastrous is an oversimplification you can only make if you don't understand the broader context. Grid stability is more important than some homeowners saving some money, it turns out those extra kWh being dumped onto the grid were literally costing the operator money to deal with. Those costs got passed on to _other_ consumers because of the sweetheart deal.

Residential solar installs are way down, that's correct, residential isn't the only venue for solar, and within residential storage capacity is skyrocketing and it's already having a measurable effect on the early evening peak. Lower peaks means less capacity needs to be built just to handle a few hours. This is good.

The unequivocally negative impact I don't have an answer for is the job losses for solar installers.
by jedberg | 2025-09-15 23:11:23+00:00
> or better yet, have aggregators like HN add a badge if it's likely AI generated

How could you possibly tell? I've been playing around with AI detectors, putting in known all-human samples, known all-AI samples, and mixed samples.

The only thing it's gotten right is not marking a human sample as 100% AI (but it marked one of the AI samples as 100% human).

Having such a mark would be a witch-hunt for sure.
by mgh95 | 2025-09-15 23:11:45+00:00
Yeah but the problem then becomes you are in a knife fight with google. Welcome to margin compression on already thin margins and high capex. Its not a like they buy commodity hardware that is cheap, or have the depth of talent like Google to do ASICs + DC management.

Once OpenAI turns to ads, I think it's an indicator they are out of ideas.
by firesteelrain | 2025-09-15 23:12:56+00:00
https://traquito.github.io/

https://www.zachtek.com/product-page/wspr-tx-pico-transmitte...

Solar cells are polycrystalline. You can buy them on AliExpress (very brittle - takes practice soldering them)

I didn’t use the Traquito Solar truss. Too hard to solder. I used a foam dinner plate and solar tabbing wire
by nntwozz | 2025-09-15 23:14:28+00:00
I have collected a long list of these types of settings over the years, for example disable font smoothing:

defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

It used to be a checkbox, now there's only this command.

Eventually that will be gone too, and none will be the wiser except the old who remember the good old days.

I'm starting to think these settings are left there by rogue engineers who fight against the oppression while staying under the radar. It's like a secret cabal that works to maintain sanity while the plebs are left to suffer at the mercy of their own ignorance.
by dwattttt | 2025-09-15 23:16:04+00:00
This is a presentation problem, or possibly a lack of tooling problem.

A binary format with a tool that renders it to text works the same as a text format; if the rendering is lossless, you could even consume the text format rather than the binary.

A "text" format is built to be understandable, but that's not a requirement; you could write a text format that isn't descriptive, and you'd have just as much trouble understanding what 'A' means as you would understanding what 'C0' means for a binary format.

Undocumented formats are a pain, whether they're in text or binary.
by pcl | 2025-09-15 23:16:39+00:00
In the industry, that’s known as face (or facial) detection, which is a different problem than face recognition.

Face recognition means computing which individual from some other database of people a particular face belongs to.

There’s also face tracking — detecting a face in an image and then tracking the same face across subsequent images. Which is often implemented by using a face recognition approach, but without any predefined catalog of people — you just dynamically fill up your face database as faces appear in the image sequence / video source.
by dylan604 | 2025-09-15 23:17:17+00:00
Yes, I stipulate your point, but people are not looking for better encodes at the same bit rate. They are only looking for not worse quality at much lower bit rate. One project I was working on had a hard file size limitation, and switching to h.265 was able to get the size under the limit. At one point, I was told to make it smaller by X MBs. The image wasn't even being looked at with each change. This is why I make the distinction the way that I did.
by scrollaway | 2025-09-15 23:17:22+00:00
I wrote websites in the jquery era. I wrote web apps back then. Gaming tools, databases, tons of dynamic stuff.

When I used react for the first time I cried with “where has this been all my life? It would have saved me years of work”.

Whenever I see claims like yours I always have hardcore doubts. React may not have “enabled” new things just like ai coding doesn’t “enable” new things … as long as you consider time to be in infinite supply. If you care about getting shit done, there is no comparison.
by rootusrootus | 2025-09-15 23:20:22+00:00
This isn't debate club, you can figure out sources yourself. The guy spoke groyper lingo, dressed like a groyper, posed for pictures like a groyper. It is not unreasonable to use duck typing.

Does this mean he IS a groyper? Ha, of course not, it is just anecdotal evidence pointing in that direction. But your argument is that because law enforcement says he has a transgender roommate or partner, he can't possibly be a groyper. Uh, sure. Okay.
by taeric | 2025-09-15 23:20:27+00:00
I'm not entirely clear what the argument being made is. Simple tools are simple, sure.

But there is an awful lot of complexity in otherwise simple things. Just look at hand tools and see the difference between a power drill and a power driver. And realize that asking which one is simpler is a bit of a red herring. Even better, try and guess which one was created first.

I think, often times, people mistake the results of something from the tools that went into it. Such that it can be tempting to think that simple looking creations were made with simple tools. As often, the opposite is the case. It takes complicated tools to build something that looks simple.

Maybe the argument was that you put more effort and work into what you are building than you do that which you use to build it? I think that is largely fair.

That is actually somewhat in focus when discussing a pen versus the "penzilla." For one, building a pen is a surprisingly difficult thing to do. Especially at scale. For two, people rarely want to have a pen for the sake of owning a pen. Instead, you want to write something.
by LAC-Tech | 2025-09-15 23:21:19+00:00
A front end web framework with global state management should be a last resort for a website. Coming out of the gate with it is just ridiculous IMO. Most peoples websites are just not that complex.

There's like an escalation ladder in my mind:

- just write HTML

- statically generate the HTML

- dynamically generate the HTML

- dynamically generate the HTML at a smaller granularity (HTMX et all)

- augment your HTML with custom web components that have client side behaviour.

Only if you've exhausted that should you bother with something like React. And even then SolidJS does a much better job of it than react itself does.

So yeah, I am just not seeing it. Former (and perhaps future!) React.JS dev btw.
by sobiolite | 2025-09-15 23:22:33+00:00
I've noticed the same when looking at old Georgian and Victorian maps of London. You get these surprisingly sharp edges between urban and rural. You often have streets lined with quite grand buildings and nothing but fields behind them. It's quite strange when you're used to modern cities that gradually peter out into suburbs.

My guess is it's because at this point the population of cities was growing quickly, but the large scale migration of farm laborers into them hadn't begun in earnest yet. So most of the housing being built at the edges was intended for the expanding merchant classes, who wanted something a bit more impressive, and who also had live in servants. The Georgian terraces of London are typically three or four storeys, with the top storey being rooms with low-ceilings where the servants lived.
by akomtu | 2025-09-15 23:23:04+00:00
It plays the same role as feelings to common folk. In other words, most people out there live for feelings: they seek good tastes, smells, comfort and so on. That's their purpose in life. More sophisticated folks collect art or watch opera for the same reason. Brain-heavy individuals enjoy well arranged complexity instead, it provides the sense of mental comfort. All of this stems from our ability to perceive harmony, although in all these examples our ability is glued to lowly things of this world.
by Diggsey | 2025-09-15 23:23:20+00:00
Within a crate graph, for any given major version of a crate (eg. D v1) only a single minor version can exist. So if B depends on D v1.x, and C depends on D v2.x, then two versions of D will exist. If B depends on Dv1.2 and C depends on Dv1.3, then only Dv1.3 will exist.

I'm over-simplifying a few things here:

1. Semver has special treatment of 0.x versions. For these crates the minor version depends like the major version and the patch version behaves like the minor version. So technically you could have v0.1 and v0.2 of a crate in the same crate graph.

2. I'm assuming all dependencies are specified "the default way", ie. as just a number. When a dependency looks like "1.3", cargo actually treats this as "^1.3", ie. the version must be at least 1.3, but can be any semver compatible version (eg. 1.4). When you specify an exact dependency like "=1.3" instead, the rules above still apply (you still can't have 1.3 and 1.4 in the same crate graph) but cargo will error if no version can be found that satisfies all constraints, instead of just picking a version that's compatible with all dependents.
by ggm | 2025-09-15 23:23:52+00:00
When you're 6 procedure calls deep in a model you started from some abstraction on the problem which has hit "well ACKchewally.." variances from the model, it's high cost to go back to top and invent the top level abstraction again, to be only 5 levels deep when you hit the next one.

Putting a late stage "yea I know, but this one time..." hack in, is logistically simpler.

TL;DR we're not addicted to complexity, we're addicted to the abstraction we started with, even when it turns out not to be as good as we thought.
by chubs | 2025-09-15 23:24:41+00:00
I have a bee in my bonnet about this software complexity issue. Perhaps it takes large amounts of humility to accept that your job is fairly mundane, and only needs simple code to get the job done? I mean: who wants to turn spanners on a Toyota when you can imagine you're working for NASA, and introduce fascinating new paradigms to your work, that ultimately add complexity. I suspect that's why i've joined so many teams that have tied themselves up in knots of un-grok-able indirection. Another theory I have is that people encounter bad code, and misdiagnose it, identifying the (wrong) solution as needing a big complex architecture.
by Sanzig | 2025-09-15 23:24:56+00:00
Not really. Radiation shielding has diminishing returns with thickness as the relationship is logarithmic. A few millimeters of aluminum cuts down most of your ionizing dose by orders of magnitude over unshielded, but doing appreciably better requires impractically thick shields.

And that only helps with ionizing dose, which is already not really a problem in LEO. The issue is more high energy particles like cosmic rays, which cause single event effects (SEEs) - things like random bit flips in RAM or CPU registers, or transistor latchup that can cause destructive shorts to ground if not mitigated. These are impractical to shield against, unless you want to fly a few feet of lead. So instead we mitigate them (ECC memory, watchdog timers, latchup supervisor circuits that can quickly power cycle a system to clear a latchup before it can cause damage, etc).

If you want to get an idea of how much shielding is effective in a particular orbit, you can use ESA's SPENVIS software (online, free): https://www.spenvis.oma.be/. Despite being free, it's the tool of choice for initial radiation studies for many space missions worldwide.
by westurner | 2025-09-15 23:24:58+00:00
I also doubt that all vectors are Orthogonal and/or Independent.

Re: distance metrics and curvilinear spaces and skew coordinates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41873650 :

> How does the distance metric vary with feature order?

> Do algorithmic outputs diverge or converge given variance in sequence order of all orthogonal axes? Does it matter which order the dimensions are stated in; is the output sensitive to feature order, but does it converge regardless? [...]

>> Are the [features] described with high-dimensional spaces really all 90° geometrically orthogonal?

> If the features are not statistically independent, I don't think it's likely that they're truly orthogonal; which might not affect the utility of a distance metric that assumes that they are all orthogonal

Which statistical models disclaim that their output is insignificant if used with non-independent features? Naieve Bayes, Linear Regression and Logistic Regression, LDA, PCA, and linear models in general are unreliable with non-independent features.

What are some of the hazards of L1 Lasso and L2 Ridge regularization? What are some of the worst cases with outliers? What does regularization do if applied to non-independent and/or non-orthogonal and/or non-linear data?

Impressive but probably insufficient because [non-orthogonality] cannot be so compressed.

There is also the standing question of whether there can be simultaneous encoding in a fundamental gbit.
by bombcar | 2025-09-15 23:25:05+00:00
If you have multiple ways to do something on a computer/phone, some relatively large percentage of people will fumble around until they figure out a way to do it - and then do it that way forever.

So if someone accidentally triggered Launchpad and realized they could see their apps, they might use that forever (not knowing you can put your Applications folder in your Dock and use it as a start menu lol).
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-09-15 23:25:37+00:00
I tried to create an art piece sorta like this once. Video cameras in two separate places in the world, hooked up to a monitor. Made to look like a mirror, only you realize you're looking into a completely different place. So if you and someone else walk up to it, it's like you in another dimension. I was told I couldn't bring it to a regional burning man event because "it violates consent" (because they didn't consent to being filmed). Despite their being no storage or recording whatsoever and it only being a live feed to another identical event. The organizers just couldn't come to grips with the discomfort they felt that there are cameras capturing your image. We definitely need more of these projects so people don't keep their heads in the sand.
by gbraad | 2025-09-15 23:25:53+00:00
Weird take: rather the opposite in my team. We look for the simpler solutions due to maintenance burden. Also, we actually deal with very complex tech; virtualization. Our whole premise is to create tooling for convenience, which therefore involves abstractions.

Some complexity in that case is needed, but its aim is to provide a cleaner/simpler access, which is often opinionated, limited to the purpose we have: deployment of development tools for containers.

If you want to experiment, show off as the article implies, start a hobby project.

Edit: removed some fat-fingered typos when I wrote this on a phone
by FearNotDaniel | 2025-09-15 23:26:36+00:00
Plenty of Chinese takeaways, and a good few “Indian” establishments (takeaway/delivery only, no restaurant) have operated in the same way, without chains or brand names, for decades, at least all over the UK. Many great quality, many poor, but that was part of the fun of moving to a new area, figuring out the good ones from all the menus that got shoved through the letterbox.

Before that, of course, the fish and chip shop is an ancient institution, though they rarely delivered.
by llm_nerd | 2025-09-15 23:27:23+00:00
Are the faces even of audience members? Seems...gimmicky. The faces don't seem to react at all, and all are making almost AI movements. Many look artificial.

And it isn't identifying the people or anything. It's putting some meaningless adjective like "Resourceful" below them.

Have seen this headline a few times and thought it was actually novel and demonstrative of some face database or something, but instead it's just a surveillance gimmick. Put a bunch of generative AI face loops with bounding boxes and adjectives.
by quickthrowman | 2025-09-15 23:27:33+00:00
> Just look at hand tools and see the difference between a power drill and a power driver. And realize that asking which one is simpler is a bit of a red herring. Even better, try and guess which one was created first.

I would assume the power drill was created first if you include human powered drills, screws came much later than pretty much every other kind of simple machine, and until machine tools were invented, screws as fasteners didn’t really exist outside of specialized applications. They were used for presses and applying force.

John Henry was competing against a steam powered rock drill in the folk tale about him.

If you define power tools as tools driven by electric motors, I would still guess that the drill came before the driver, as rivets seem to be more popular in the steam engine to electric transition period than bolts or screws were.

Slightly confusing things is the fact that a modern drill is almost always a driver too, unless it’s a specific kind of drill like a hammer drill or core drill. Confusing things even more, there are drill bits that are meant to be used with an impact driver, a tool that is used to tighten or loosen fasteners.

As for which is simpler, drill vs (impact) driver, it’s hard to say. A drill has a clutch, and an impact driver has a spring mechanism that applies rotational force when the motor is at its limit. I’d say both are fairly complex, the impact driver is probably a bit more complex than a drill.

I’m curious about the development and history of power tools but it can be difficult to find information about it.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-09-15 23:27:43+00:00
The author calls for using the right tool for the job, the lists some speedup features of other frameworks, as though "fast at doing X" is all that could possibly matter. I think this obsession with speed above all else (even forgetting that any other concern could exist) is a case of a really common dysfunction in software development, one that leads to ruin and bankruptcy, and one that successful companies built their empires on their ability to avoid.
by zahlman | 2025-09-15 23:28:17+00:00
Some might feel compelled here to point out that Cox has social media accounts.

I would like to urge anyone with this idea to reconsider. Such a gotcha does not prove what you think it does. Cox is clearly attempting to resist the negative effects he attributes to social media, and I imagine that government officials are required to hold them anyway (if only so that they can be "verified" and impostors don't get to steal the stage).

Cox's current pinned tweet states that

> Disagreement is part of democracy. Violence must never be.

and quotes Kirk saying

> What we as a culture have to get back to, is being able to have reasonable agreement where violence is not an option.

To me this seems laudable.
by runako | 2025-09-15 23:28:38+00:00
In addition to the headline, this bill would also criminalize such popular movies as Hairspray, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Tootsie, for which Dustin Hoffman won a Golden Globe. (And quite obviously a fair bit of music videos and general entertainment industry content would also become illegal.)

>> The bill also includes a section that takes aim at transgender individuals by prohibiting material "that includes a disconnection between biology and gender by an individual of 1 biological sex imitating, depicting, or representing himself or herself to be of the other biological sex."
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-15 23:29:58+00:00
Why do some folks love assuming walking backwards to the past is the only reasonable path?

> The simple alternative is just around the corner: sprinkle vanilla JavaScript where it’s needed and don’t build your identity around a framework. That mindset is hard to swallow, though (especially when companies have spent millions convincing developers their stack is the only way forward).

Having grown up doing webdev at its emergence, those were not glorious years.

Even as a solo developer or part of a small team, it was hard as hell to have a perfect mental image of the app at all times, to understand all the combinatorial possibilities of what state your app is in now and what state you want to head to next.

Trying to forever update retained state is hard as hell, full of incredible opportunity for memory leaks, and created some super weird behaviors.

Even more so, "just write the basic code" doesn't scale. It's not a system that an org can follow. Folks will come and go, each going totally different directions. I don't know how to stress how immature and insane this sounds.

But folks love trashing that which is popular. To declare oneself the only sane mind amid a sea of madness.

I really do hope we see some post-React eras dawn, see more, that this isn't it, on and on. But I respect like hell the switch from a retained mode form of webdev to an immediate mode one. It doesn't just skip by so many really bad failure modes, it's often far far faster than the poor incomplete hacked out vanilla.js solution your org ended up with. I want us to change to move to not be stuck here. But to see where we are as unnecessary complexity, to invent fantastic degrading tales about the weak souls of men for getting us here: this is truly the behavior imo of lowlifes, of those spreading propoganda to spread the thinnest false confidence of hatred and disdain against the world.

Things are complex and that's ok. We are learning. The way out in onwards not idolizing a concocted naive pastoralized past.
by dekhn | 2025-09-15 23:31:03+00:00
For one approach to compressing FASTQ (which is a series 3 distinct lines), we broke the distinct lines each into their own streams and then compressed each stream independently. That way the coder for the header line, sequence line, and error line could learn the model of that specific line type and get slightly better compression (not unlike a columnar format, although in this case, we simply combined "blocks" of streams together with a record separator.

I'm still pretty amazed that periodic newlines hurt compression ratios so much, given the compressor can use both a huffman coding and a lookback dictionary.

The best rule in sequence data storage is to store as little of it as possible.
by alskdu9 | 2025-09-15 23:31:31+00:00
The guy proposing it is a Christian Nationalist who also wants to ban birth control and have the state teach 6th graders how to use guns. [1]

This is first bill I've seen target (erotic) ASMR. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Schriver

[2] https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2025-2026/billintro...