MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dxs | 2025-09-05 19:16:36+00:00
"This is the story of one of the greatest innovators of our time. He had the ability to envision new products consumers didn't even know they wanted. He would go on to build a multi-billion dollar technology company fueled by innovation. He was domineering, he drove his employees hard, and he rarely listened to other people's opinions. He was known to wear the same clothes every day. He was obsessed by design, and his products were beautiful, sleek and iconic. He was not only a great innovator, he was a great marketer. He would turn new product demonstrations into dramatic showcases that attracted endless publicity. He believed that a successful company should be composed of managers and dreamers, and it was the responsibility of the former to protect the latter. He wasn't afraid to fail. But his board of directors wasn't as forgiving, and in a palace coup, eventually ousted him from the company he founded. His name was Edwin Land. He invented the instant camera and founded the Polaroid Corporation. And he was Steve Jobs' hero."
by pdonis | 2025-09-05 19:16:38+00:00
> My point was that free market is kinda like unstable isotope, it can't exist for any significant length of time and will decay into a government.

If this is true, I think we're screwed.

I don't think it's actually true, but it is true that in our current world, the number of people who understand the downsides of government and are willing to truly support a free market is miniscule, not even rounding error in the overall numbers.

> Competition can't work in the free market.

You're forgetting that in a free market, all transactions are voluntary. And in a society where that had been true for a long time, and people upheld that principle and acted accordingly, institutions would evolve that are very different from our current ones. David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom is a book length attempt to imagine what such a society would be like, in some detail. It would not be at all like what you would get if you took our current society and just eliminated the government. Of course that's a stupid idea, because our society has evolved for a long time under the assumption that it has a government, and its institutions have evolved accordingly.

> The instant external control ceases to exist, the most shrewd and smart players would start employing all kinds of currently illegal shit.

To paraphrase David Friedman in a similar context, unfortunately this sentence remains true if you take out the first seven words.

You're describing what happens now, in our current world, which has "external control" up the wazoo--just external control that does what the most shrewd and smart players want it to do. Google, Amazon, Walmart, etc. have all done "all kinds of currently illegal shit", and paid no real price for it. True, they've also made a lot of shit that should be illegal, technically legal, by buying the laws and regulations that favor them. But they've also broken the law, straight up, numerous times, and the government never makes them pay the proper price. They always get away with what for them amounts to a tiny slap on the wrist.

And the situation now is worse than it would be in a free market, because in a free market, at least no one would believe that there was some magical "external control" that would somehow protect them. They would know that it was up to them to simply refuse transactions whose long term cost outweighed whatever short term gain was being dangled in front of them. In our current world, people still believe, even with all the evidence to the contrary, that the government can somehow protect them from all the "currently illegal shit" that the big players get up to. And that "protection" simply isn't there. Government always ends up being just another tool that the big players use to get what they want at the expense of everybody else--and it's an easier tool to use than trying to do it in a true free market would be.

Again, it might be that humans are simply incapable of doing the things that a free market requires at scale. And if that's true, I think we're screwed. In any case, it's not a problem that is solved by having a government.
by tastyface | 2025-09-05 19:17:02+00:00
Moral neutrality is one thing. It may be disappointing (but not unexpected) for the CEO of your favorite company to wine and dine the leader of an unsavory political party. But... this person is currently all over the news for being best friends with one of the most prolific pedophiles in America, as well as trying desperately to suppress the release of documents where he and prominent members of his circle may be implicated. This meeting is not just morally neutral, not just immoral, but utterly depraved.
by phkahler | 2025-09-05 19:17:47+00:00
>> This animation explains how Product Intelligence (Linear’s feature) works. We could have used a static asset, but the animated version helps the user understand what this feature does, straight in the initial viewport of the page.

That might be the designers intent, but that's not what it does for me at all. First, the animation shown is on some weird 3D angle which is not part of any sane UI. Why is that? Not to convey anything about the actual experience of the app shown. That 3d look certainly does not "help the user understand what this feature does"

The fade-in of the animation seems to draw me in to that area of the page which I assume is the intent. The 3D perspective helps me understand that the text in that box is not part of the page I'm reading, but a view of something else - their product. But it doesn't really help me to understand the product.
by ajs1998 | 2025-09-05 19:17:53+00:00
I want a browser to let me do more things, not fewer. I barely trust myself to press the right buttons on a page, I certainly don't trust an AI to buy shit for me. I don't have a million tabs open because I close them when I'm done, and I don't pretend to be good at multitasking.

AI browser integration offers no value to me. I find GitHub Copilot and similar coding agents to be useful only because they can index the codebase and documentation faster than I can. There is no analogous problem AI can solve for me in the browser unless websites dramatically change how they interact with requests from AI.

I like Zen. I'm sticking with Zen.
by akerl_ | 2025-09-05 19:18:40+00:00
So, I'm of two thoughts here:

1. As parallel commenters have pointed out, no. Plenty of open source developers exist who aren't interested in getting paid for their open source projects. You can tell this because some open source projects sell support or have donation links or outright sell their open source software and some do not. This line of thinking seems to come out of some utopian theoretical world where open source developers shouldn't sell their software because that makes them sell-outs but users are expected to pay them anyways.

2. I do love the idea of large companies paying for open source software they use because it tends to set up all kinds of good incentives for the long term health of software projects. That said, paying open source projects tends to be comically difficult. Large companies are optimized for negotiating enterprise software agreements with a counterparty that is primed to engage in that process. They often don't have a smooth way to like, just feed money into a Donate form, or make a really big Github or Patreon Sponsorship, etc. So even people in large companies that really want to give money to open source devs struggle to do so.
by PhantomHour | 2025-09-05 19:18:46+00:00
The entire idea of "Oh they'll leave" is ridiculous, an empty threat from billionaires who are afraid of regulation.

The EU has 450M (+80M for UK & similar non-eu countries that are likely to follow the EU on such regulations) population to the US' 350M.

The moment the likes of Google, or Meta, or Microsoft, or whomever else leave the EU, they immediately create a market gap. A market gap that will then in short order be filled with a European company that, because of the population sizes, has a notable comparative advantage to the US tech company.

+ As much as HN's readership loathes to admit it, regulations like this are "Good, Actually". Google's monopolist practices are bad for both advertisers and services showing ads. Any would-be competitor that arises from Google leaving the market would, by virtue of being forced by law to not be so shitty, be the better option. (And yes, this does also apply to pretty much all of the other big tech regulations as well.)

Like, c'mon. "Monopolies bad" is capitalism 101. Even the US' regulators thought Google was going too far.
by impossiblefork | 2025-09-05 19:18:52+00:00
I don't think this decision is wrong, I'm from the EU, and I think companies like Google have too much power anyway, but I don't like the ability of the commission to enforce things.

Here in Sweden we have a legal tradition where the government doesn't have power over the enforcement of the laws-- parliament can make any law it likes, and it can be anything, but enforcement and the courts are isolated from the politicians.

I really don't like that the commission can make up rules, or fine people etc. It's a bad system. It should be done by an impartial regular, or prosecutor or a court. This kind of system opens up the commission to political blackmail and threats from powerful states, it opens up for corruption, it opens up for uneven enforcement, and there's just no reason to have the system this way.

You could easily imagine a world where Google was a big US government darling and where they put their weight on the commission and got an outcome that isn't in accordance with law, but with the right system, one more like the Swedish system, that won't be possible.
by owenversteeg | 2025-09-05 19:18:52+00:00
This guy is quite interesting, because he starts from scratch without reading or experience, so you end up with a really wonky machine, but it's wonky in unusual ways that really make you think. Like the sibling comment says, it's obvious he hasn't read the Gingery books. This sounds like I'm throwing shit, but I'm not - it's actually how I work a lot of the time. Making a mistake gives you a deeper understanding of the issue than you would typically get from doing things the right way. For example, he overheated the gravers while sharpening them, which made them soft, and now he gets to learn about annealing and temper. And indeed, in the comments, he gets:

>Just for future reference on making gravers, you were correct that you do not want to get the pre-hardened steel red hot or it will lose its heat treatment. However you have to go much further than that and not allow it to heat above the desired temper temperature. For instance if it was previously tempered to a straw (yellowish brown) color but then while grinding it the steel turns blue, that means you have reduced the temper to a lower hardness. So you need to keep the steel cool and never let the temperature go beyond the desired temper temperature. You can think of it this way, hardening the steel makes it as hard as it can get (but too brittle to be good for much), then tempering reduces the hardness but makes it stronger, and this effect continues the hotter you temper it.

n.b. this sort of thing is absolutely endemic in the world of 3D printing, which is why most videos are fairly useless to learn from, but the comments are invaluable.
by mmcnl | 2025-09-05 19:18:53+00:00
I personally use Windows + WSL2 and for work use macOS. I prefer Windows + WSL2 by a longshot. It just "works". macOS never "just works" for me. Colima is fine but requires a static memory allocation for the VM, it doesn't have the level of polish that WSL2 has. Brew is awful compared to apt (which you get with WSL2 because it's just Linux).

And then there's the windowing system of macOS that feels like it's straight from the 90s. "System tray" icons that accumulate over time and are distracting, awful window management with clunky animations, the near useless dock (clicking on VS Code shows all my 6 IDEs, why?). Windows and Linux are much modern in that regard.

The Mac hardware is amazing, well worth its price, but the OS feels like it's from a decade ago.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-09-05 19:18:56+00:00
>I suspect in normal use the ball would bounce off the page, avoiding smears.

>Plastic is pretty soft and gummy when you get down to it.

I don't think most people could break the typewriter ball with their bare hands, either by pulling or compressing ("squishing"). Just tried this with my least-favorite font — 275lb blue-collar electrician can't break it (barely any deflection).

Not sure what the plastic's composition is, but it is absolutely RIGID (as it must be). The thing can fly letters onto the page (I can do sustained 80wpm, with bursts into 100+ — thing could go twice my output rate on a clear-headed day, mechanically).

Selectrics are just absolutely modern marvels (still)!

>engineering resin

The ball's plastic is harder than cured JB-Weld™ (standard 2-part mixture).
by jimjimwii | 2025-09-05 19:19:00+00:00
My anecdote: I've been using rootless podman on Ubuntu in production environments in multiple organizations (both startup and enterprise) for years without encountering a single issue related to podman itself.

I'm sure what you wrote here is true but i cant fathom how. Maybe its a rh specific issue? (Like how ubuntu breaks rootless bwrap by default)
by nradov | 2025-09-05 19:19:08+00:00
I believe you that there are literal Nazis on X, just as there are on every social media platform (and society in general). I despise Nazis but again I literally never see them on my feed so I find it hard to believe that this is a major problem or that the platform is boosting that content. If you're seeing a lot of Nazi content then you're probably following the wrong type of accounts.
by genezeta | 2025-09-05 19:19:25+00:00
I don't know why the sibling comment is dead (edit: was). I mean, it is a valid concern, if one doesn't know.

So, for slickytail and anyone who has the same question:

The code is actually compressed into a binary blob. You can see it if you just look at the source of https://0b5vr.com/0mix/0mix.html

A small script loads the blob and uncompresses it before running it through eval:

fetch("#").then(t=>t.blob()).then(t=>new Response(t.slice(156).stream().pipeThrough(new DecompressionStream("deflate"))).text()).then(eval)

This is a common approach in browser demos and what is counted as "less than 64Kb" is that final html. A similar technique compresses it into a PNG.
by asdff | 2025-09-05 19:19:33+00:00
Ebike would be nicer at that point. Battery takes far less time to charge over 110v. You can simply hot swap a charged battery. No insurance or registration requirements. Far lower base cost. Far lower maintenance costs. About the same range. Probably similar cargo volume compared to a cargo ebike. Just need a rain coat and rain pants and you are probably set for most conditions. Call an uber when you actually need to transport 4 people and you'd come out well ahead.

The big secret with bike commuting is that in urban setting on surface streets, its actually the fastest way to get around short of a motorcycle or helicopter. Yes, much faster than cars, thanks to lane splitting.
by simoncion | 2025-09-05 19:19:41+00:00
> ...every time I look at how to use Caltrain from SFO I give up and rent a car instead.

Why? Last I checked, it's

* Depart SFO via BART * Get off BART at the first stop, Millbrae * Exit BART and enter Caltrain

Is there some complication I'm missing (other than the fact that neither BART nor Caltrain are 24/7 services)?
by mike_d | 2025-09-05 19:19:44+00:00
The Bay Area is crippled by people who live comfortably within biking distance of Whole Foods, Zeitgeist, and their Apple shuttle bus stop. These people can't fathom why anyone would want to drive a dirty car and blight the city with roads.

It costs almost a billion dollars to build a mile of BART, due to political corruption 65% of all MUNI service lines are to/from Chinatown, we keep the "iconic" cable car lines going even though they have the highest rate of accidents per mile and per vehicle in the country.

We just need to double or triple down on roads and let things like Waymo and Uber save us from ourselves.

Bikebrains rant about things like "induced demand" without actually understanding that building additional infrastructure simply serves pent up demand. They point to things like the Katy Freeway which was expanded to 26 lanes but "traffic got worse" - ignoring the fact that travel speeds increased by 60% for almost a decade until Houston's population ballooned to what it is today.
by bithive123 | 2025-09-05 19:19:44+00:00
I don't know if the author is right or wrong; I've never dealt with protobufs professionally. But I recently implemented them for a hobby project and it was kind of a game-changer.

At some stage with every ESP or Arduino project, I want to send and receive data, i.e. telemetry and control messages. A lot of people use ad-hoc protocols or HTTP/JSON, but I decided to try the nanopb library. I ended up with a relatively neat solution that just uses UDP packets. For my purposes a single packet has plenty of space, and I can easily extend this approach in the future. I know I'm not the first person to do this but I'll probably keep using protobufs until something better comes along, because the ecosystem exists and I can focus on the stuff I consider to be fun.
by bighead1 | 2025-09-05 19:20:08+00:00
This comment reminds me of a simple `esp32` project I saw recently that lets you send your LLM requests via SMS. It basically offloads everything. Particularly useful when you don't have a decent data connection, but can still send SMS.

edit: found it https://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/1n7r3vl/a_textbot_...
by b_e_n_t_o_n | 2025-09-05 19:20:20+00:00
I feel like the opposite is true - we don't need type systems because our programs are complex, our programs are complex because we use powerful type systems. The code I write in Typescript is usually more complex than what I would have written in Go or JS.

That being said, clearly there is a ton of value in automatically verifying interfaces are implemented correctly. Even dynamic languages like Clojure have Spec. I think that's a good balance.
by kace91 | 2025-09-05 19:20:38+00:00
Sorry if this is off topic, I have a language-related question:

Over the last year I’ve seen people on the internet using “unserious” as an adjective to criticize people. Is it just an expression that became common, a frequent literal translation from another native language…?

Not at all judging, I am not a native speaker and I never saw the word used that way before, but this is the kind of question that’s pretty much impossible to get an answer for without a direct question.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-09-05 19:20:47+00:00
Okay, what percent of content is poison like this? Way less than 1%? If AI is so smart maybe it can figure out what content in a training set is jibberish and what isn't.

Anyway, a big problem people have isn't "AI bad", it's "AI crawlers bad", because they eat up a huge chunk of your bandwidth by behaving badly for content you intend to serve to humans.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-09-05 19:20:52+00:00
Most schools do things like teach a multitude of languages and communication skills that would be useful for encoding harmful intent. Yet, most bullying happens using the native tongue and simplistic messaging. Rare is the student who is bullied via poetry and the five paragraph essay. Rarer yet is the student bullied via Morse code. I would be willing to bet that no child ever has been bullied in a classroom using secret Morse code. Mostly because Morse code cannot be tapped out. Contrary to the movies, you need to know when the tap ends to decode it, so knocking or tapping is not a reliable way to send a message.

Narrowing kids educational resources and knowledge in an attempt to stop bullying is a fools errand.
by horsawlarway | 2025-09-05 19:21:12+00:00
I don't think Japan after WW2 is the right comparison here.

My understanding is that generally they expected a MUCH more severe set of penalties and occupation after losing - especially given the unconditional surrender, and instead got a stable and functional provisional government for the next 7 years.

---

Basically - Japanese sentiment is not a parallel to this. That time:

1. Japan started hostilities with a surprise attack

2. Lost, complete with unconditional surrender

3. Was then occupied by a government that was more stable, left much of the existing civilian infrastructure in place, and forgave many key figures (not the least of which was the emperor)

4. Then that government helped them roll out "new deal" style social reforms.

That is absolutely, utterly at odds with the current situation. There - the Allied powers were relatively graceful, culturally aware, and interested in a stable, functional government.

Here - We're insulting our friends, from a position where there's no moral high ground to stand on. Personally, I don't think they'll forget so quickly, and I think things will get much worse if the US continues down this path.

Can we rebuild those relationships? Sure, seems likely on a long enough timespan, but it takes a hell of a lot more effort to get it back than it does to throw away.
by nonethewiser | 2025-09-05 19:21:32+00:00
Im not necessarily saying its extortion. Im saying his observation is why the EU could extort Google for a lot more than $3B. My wording was unclear so I tried editing my original comment but apparently it was removed.

Why forfeit $20B in revenue in exchange for NOT having to pay $3B? I think that's an astute observation by the original commenter.
by yencabulator | 2025-09-05 19:21:44+00:00
I'm thinking less censorship and more understanding of when starting to think about something is appropriate, how to build a healthy worldview, and how to communicate about uncomfortable things. Like, A Song of Ice and Fire is a great world with captivating storytelling where some nasty things happen, and its characters can sometimes be "bad people", and that's part of the story! It's fine that books also portray things that are not just happy endings. GRRM is a good enough writer to make that improve the story.

(The author of Dragonriders of Pern, unfortunately, is not a good enough writer that her addition of certain topics into the books could be said to improve the books. I'll leave you with <https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Tent_Peg_Statement>. It's still a fun series, even if the author is not someone I'd invite for dinner!)
by rchaud | 2025-09-05 19:22:18+00:00
That goodwill is almost entirely due to the US' need to rebuild the Japanese economy rapidly to counter threats from China, North Korea and the Soviet Union. That happened through favourable trade deals and mass outsourcing of automotive and electronics jobs and diverting capital away from domestic military as per the US-written constitution of Japan.

Western and Japanese companies alike started moving production outside Japan once wages started eating into profit margins. Today, underemployment is common in Japan and the low birth rate is one of several symptoms of the economic stagnation that began in the early '90s. Populist governments won't be far behind.
by ryukoposting | 2025-09-05 19:22:37+00:00
Protobuf's original sin was failing to distinguish zero/false from undefined/unset/nil. Confusion around the semantics of a zero value are the root of most proto-related bugs I've come across. At the same time, that very characteristic of protobuf makes its on-wire form really efficient in a lot of cases.

Nearly every other complaint is solved by wrapping things in messages (sorry, product types). Don't get the enum limitation on map keys, that complaint is fair.

Protobuf eliminates truckloads of stupid serialization/deserialization code that, in my embedded world, almost always has to be hand-written otherwise. If there was a tool that automatically spat out matching C, Kotlin, and Swift parsers from CDDL, I'd certainly give it a shot.