MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eek2121 | 2025-10-06 22:17:45+00:00
I think the issue that you overlook is that you assume this group of individuals is trustworthy.

I'm not saying they aren't, but there are a LOT of conflicting opinions about what happened, why it happened, and who was right/wrong.

This it what tends to happen when money gets involved in a project without a clear structure/business plan/guarantees put in place. People just did whatever and made assumptions, and now suddenly the whole community is rocking and rolling thanks to the actions/view points of a select few.
by kragen | 2025-10-06 22:18:45+00:00
It's exciting to see that a new Hofstadter book is out!

With respect to bringing beauty into the world in dark times, it's always worth remembering Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 60, "Leningrad", composed in Leningrad during its 900-day siege by the Nazis, and first performed there later that year, with some of the musicians fainting from starvation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOkBEqtGUI8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._7_(Shostakovich)

— ⁂ —

In case there are other Hofstadter letterform fans here, last year I tracked down the "gridfonts" repository his research group had put together as part of their work on "letter spirit" last millennium, at https://wayback.archive-it.org/219/20060606215909/http://www.... There were 287 gridfonts in it. I reverse-engineered the file format (before finding the Scheme code that decoded it), hacked together a Python 3 script http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/gridfontparse.py to convert it to PostScript, and produced this PDF with all the gridfonts: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/all-gridfonts.pdf

I think I may have been the first person to see some of these fonts in 20 years. But, apparently, there were hundreds more. I have a vague memory that maybe they were lost in a disk crash.

Letterforms aren't copyrightable under US law, where the file in question was initially published, but outline font files are because they are "computer programs". Gridfont letters are 56-bit bitmaps indicating which segments are turned on or off, which to me are obviously not computer programs. Nobody that I know of has ever litigated over letterforms like these:

font : benzene right creator : doug create date : Tue Feb 19 15:39:48 EST 1991 last edit : feb 24 94 a 058002400B0000 b 04824B00090000 c 04800100090000

so I don't think their copyright status has ever been decided. So, if you decide to use these in your product logo or something, there's no guarantee you won't lose a lawsuit to Hofstadter (or his estate, or Indiana University). Don't say I didn't warn you.

That said, that wasn't the motivation for creating them, so I think the risk is fairly small.
by xp84 | 2025-10-06 22:18:59+00:00
Given that (I think?) the "OK/Cancel" dialog of the original Mac is one of those 'foundational' UI conventions that was copied pretty directly by every GUI that came after it, I am very curious if our world wouldn't be full of "Do It" buttons if this episode hadn't taken place. Even the Start Menu could have been called the "Do" menu in that alternate universe.
by threecheese | 2025-10-06 22:19:15+00:00
OK, now:

> Free Speech > We’re facing a constitutional crisis as Donald Trump works to consolidate his power, carry out personal vendettas and ravage the federal government in illegal ways.

I sincerely don’t know how to read this; either Paramount/CBS is worried about their public perception wrt kowtowing to government pressure, or right-wing media is buying legitimacy via branding, or this is a personal “squash your enemies” favor between billionaires.
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-06 22:19:21+00:00
There are multiple branches they are exploring. This is a more structured one. But they also work on Agents that load the website and produce clicks to do the task. Also, this requires hand design, but they also work on generating the gui just-in-time, based on context.

They also have this new design gui for visual programming of agents, with boxes and arrows.

It's going to be a hybrid of all these. Obviously the more explicit work done for interoperability, the easier it is, but the gaps can be bridged with the common sense of the AI at the expense of more time and compute. It's like, a self driving car can detect red lights and speed limit signs via cameras but if there are structured signals in smart infrastructure, then it's simpler and better.

But it's always interesting to see this dance between unstructured and structured. Apparently any time one gets big, the other is needed. When theres tons of structured code, we want AI common sense to cut through it because even if it's structured, it's messy and too complicated. So we generate the code. Now if we have natural language code generators we want to impose structure onto how they work, which we express in markup languages, then small scripts, then large scripts that are too complex and have too much boilerplate so we need AI to generate it from natural language etc etc
by terrelln | 2025-10-06 22:19:22+00:00
Do you happen to have a pointer to a good open source dataset to look at?

Naively and knowing little about CRAM, I would expect that OpenZL would beat Zstd handily out of the box, but need additional capabilities to match the performance of CRAM, since genomics hasn't been a focus as of yet. But it would be interesting to see how much we need to add is generic to all compression (but useful for genomics), vs. techniques that are specific only to genomics.

We're planning on setting up a blog on our website to highlight use cases of OpenZL. I'd love to make a post about this.
by pwg | 2025-10-06 22:19:23+00:00
> that draws product designers to keep reaching for that horrible UX pattern

Because in almost every GUI library, they are the default built-in "alert" setup that can be used. Almost any other alert system other than a "popup" has to be coded, and the designers and coders take the easy way out and just use the "built in popup widget" already in the library.
by phatskat | 2025-10-06 22:19:47+00:00
> Probably for the best...

Quite. One of my first gigs was at a large real-estate aggregator. The people were great but the highest levels of the company did

- A pet “adoption” site, in quotes because to my knowledge the pets weren’t real and it was a subscription service with no means of cancellation outside of a voicemail box - A kind of Craigslist-esque site for selling home improvement services that was wildly vulnerable to XSS - I discovered that during an unannounced client demo when my own manager had said “you guys try to break it” - We were a PHP shop from the beginning. One day, engineering gets pulled into a meeting room and told that they’ve been developing 2.0 in an office downtown, with a separate team, in ColdFusion. They fired the lead engineer on the spot and most of us left or got fired shortly thereafter. They did offer to train us in CF, but the bad blood was too thick for my taste.

All that is to say, if I ever get wind of the owner or CEO being involved anywhere that I’m working, I’ll probably be walking.
by tumnus | 2025-10-06 22:20:04+00:00
What a sad reply to a useful site! The all-capsness of "NO national parks, NO..." etc. presumes that this specific list of designations are necessary for a hike to have value. If you had only remembered the Appalachian Trail, maybe your perspective would have shifted. And as others have pointed out, hiking in CT (and really all of New England) is quite varied, beautiful and accessible . Perhaps you should come try it sometime, it may change your view!
by chambored | 2025-10-06 22:20:47+00:00
I’ve been using devenv for about 6 months now. I’ve started new projects with it and migrated old ones to use it as well. I’ve also set up my org’s repositories with it. Onboarding devs to projects is simple. All everyone needs on their local machine is git, nix, and devenv. Bonus points for using it with direnv for automatic shell activation when you enter a directory. Direnv allows for IDE integrations as well for project dependencies.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-10-06 22:20:57+00:00
Yes, you'd like to try to benefit from some of the run up, but the numbers of the dot-com boom are worth considering. The NASDAQ increase in 5 years preceding the crash was 600%, then the index lost 80% in the crash, so if you'd held through all of that you would have been left with 0.2 (100%-80%) x 7.0 (100% + 600%) of your original investment = 1.4 (140%), so you'd have been up 40% overall (OK for 5 years, but not amazing).

However, say you got onboard late and were "only" up 300% before the crash, then post-crash you'd have been left with 0.2 x 4.0 = 0.8 (80%), so you'd have ended up having lost 20% of your original investment, and of course the later you got onboard the worst off you'd have been.
by mikhmha | 2025-10-06 22:22:27+00:00
I am currently doing this! Working on an MMO game server implemented in Elixir. It works AMAZING and you get so much extra observability and reliability features for FREE.

I don't know why its not more popular. Before I started the project, some people said that BeamVM would not cut it for performance. But this was not true. For many types of games, we are not doing expensive computation on each tick. Rather its just checking rules for interactions between clients and some quick AABB + visibility checks.
by eek2121 | 2025-10-06 22:22:30+00:00
hard disagree. For a project like this, all members should be paid a fair, but not "get rich" sum. There are companies out there that pay EVERYONE the same salary, all the way from CEO to janitor. Mysteriously, those companies don't have folks trying to hijack things, because nobody benefits.

It's almost like removing money from the equation stops all the nasty stuff that happens inside organizations. Who'd have thought?
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-10-06 22:24:46+00:00
Because - and I hate the fact that it’s this way - they need to ensure there is a salary gate for other positions at a similar level.

Part of the challenge of organizational management is making decisions structurally bound to prevent negotiations for every single possible response.

“Well Mike didn’t have a degree, so why not me?” Would become the next big thing

The “Simple” answer is, don’t have dumb gates for hiring and have your managers actually behave like leaders who have a personal stake in the success of their business and hires.

Other than rare, personality driven cases, this approach isn’t even available as a concept for people who get into business for money or power - primarily because “the market” doesn’t reward training people, because the last century has shown that people with money don’t want to take the risk
by WalterBright | 2025-10-06 22:24:46+00:00
In my experience, people who are self-taught or who learned by experience tend to have odd gaps in their knowledge.

For example, the Shazam app. I knew right away it must be using Fourier analysis. But if one was self-taught, one might have never understood what the point of FA was, or even have been aware of its existence, and instead used kludgy, inept methods.

For a personal example, I was once given the job of taking the graphic display on a CRT and mapping it onto a printer page. The addressing was different, the axes were different, the pixels/per inch were different. I knew what the tool was - a transformation matrix. Had it ginned up in an hour and it worked first try.

A co-worker was completely baffled at this. He didn't know what a transformation matrix was, and likely would have otherwise spent a couple weeks on the problem and done a crappy job.

I.e. one doesn't know what one doesn't know. The advantage of an accredited degree program is the curriculum is selected by people who know what you need to know, and the order in which information is best presented.
by latexr | 2025-10-06 22:25:47+00:00
Thank you for providing sources. Though you’re focused solely on money, which I think is a pretty poor measure for how “better off” one is (and was my original criticism of the article). Especially when you’re ignoring the percentage of people living in poverty and massive income inequality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentag...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_in...

Furthermore, making more money can be offset by having to spend more money for basic things like healthcare.

I’d say happiness is a much better indicator of how “better off” one is than how much money one earns. The happiness index takes a much broader view with several indicators (of which GPD per capita is but one).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report#Interna...

You’re entitled to valuing different things. But the whole point of my original comment is that I find the focus on money over people to not be something to celebrate. Clearly you (and the author) disagree.

> High-skill professionals, entrepreneurs, specialized trades, creative workers, young people, immigrants...

Despite the ellipsis, that doesn’t really answer the question. Those definitions are so vague, they could all together describe a single person.

> immigrants

Are you really arguing, with the current state of the USA, that immigrants are “better off”? I’m somehow doubt the ones who are being grabbed and sent to jail without due process every day would agree with you.

> If you make nebulous complaints

It’s not “nebulous”. Read the article. It’s in context.

> so expect that kind of rebuttal

If you think someone made a bad argument, do better. That’s what the HN guidelines explicitly ask of us. Responding with a bad answer because you think that’s what someone did does not benefit the discussion.

Again, if your objective with a discussion is to “win”, there are other forums better suited for that.
by anonym29 | 2025-10-06 22:25:49+00:00
Unless it's selling the data back to my own government, I'd rather a foreign commercial VPN provider have that information rather than my own domestic ISP or my own domestic government.

My government can do parallel construction, can send teams of armed gunmen to my house, and otherwise find far more methods to persecute me than the intelligence services of Russia or China can.

Being innocent of any kind of crime does not necessarily remove one from the crosshairs of law enforcement organizations, particularly the FBI, who have an extensive, well-documented history of violating citizens' constitutional rights, conducting partisan witch hunts against political opponents, being a lawless menace to civil rights activists, anti-war activists, gay rights activists, both pro-abortion and anti-abortion activists, and is probably busy right now planning on being a menace to trans inclusivity activists.

There is no such thing as a friendly government, but I'd much rather have my data in the hands of a government 10,000 miles away than in the hands of my own government. My own government hunts, injures, stalks, harasses, socially ostracizes, and even kills my fellow citizens far more than any foreign government ever has.
by cubefox | 2025-10-06 22:25:49+00:00
> This article has a somewhat alarmist tone, but isn't this just Starlink working as intended?

The unexpected accumulation of metals in the stratosphere, discussed in the article, is clearly not intended.

> It seems much better for an old non-functional Starlink satellite to burn up in the atmosphere instead of continuing in an uncontrolled orbit. I believe most burn-ups are controlled intentional deorbits.

This is irrelevant to metals like aluminium accumulating in the stratosphere.
by zevon | 2025-10-06 22:26:17+00:00
Well, I happen to use a phone without Google's or Apple's services in my personal life. And if I were to go out for something the authorities would not agree with, I most certainly would not carry any phone, smartwatch or whatever while doing so. Maybe an iPod Classic or something to listen to some tunes while I get myself a bloody nose at the Fight Club, collect rich people's body fat from beauty clinics to blow up capitalism or whatever else I might get up to on a quiet evening out.

Seriously though, if I understand you correctly, you want people to be critical of stuff like location sharing and whatnot but your way there somehow involves to normalize said whatnot completely. I don't really follow.
by Arathorn | 2025-10-06 22:26:33+00:00
> matrix was initiated by/inside amdocs.

it was initiated very much by me & the UC team while inside Amdocs.

> it (given that it was amdocs) was meant to be sold to telecoms to compete with OTT offerings

in the 5-10 year horizon, yes. And indeed eventually (as Element) we have ended up with a bunch of telco customers. However, this was not the immediate goal at the time - it's not like Matrix was created to improve EBIT for Amdocs UC; it was a long-term R&D play.

> Later when Amdocs saw that it's a no go they span you outside and later cut the funding.

It was the opposite. Amdocs saw that Matrix had legs - e.g. Ericsson started selling Matrix-based solutions (stuff like https://matrix.org/blog/2016/11/23/when-ericsson-discovered-...) - but also saw that it didn't fit inside Amdocs. The whole idea of Matrix is to be an open standard for everyone, just like XMPP or SIP or HTTP. For it to succeed, it obviously couldn't live inside Amdocs.

So, they agreed to both cut funding and span us out; we then raised funding independently and set up The Matrix.org Foundation as non-profit to look after Matrix for everyone, and separately set up Element as for-profit to fund our work on Matrix. It's not exactly been a smooth journey (see https://youtu.be/lkCKhP1jxdk?t=363 for my FOSDEM talk trying to explain the route so far), but I can confidently say that Matrix was not borne out of trying to scratch an immediate business itch for Amdocs, but instead a longer-term experiment in building something better for everyone (including Amdocs).

But what do I know :D
by ForOldHack | 2025-10-06 22:27:05+00:00
"your credit card terminal might be the gateway to your entire customer database."

That is not the way it works now. The standard is 4 levels of encryption, most have 8. Multiple sign-offs for every single code change.

Your credit card terminal is a gateway to the signtors transaction database, last transaction, balance, current transaction. Every single code path is mapped out meticulously, at least on the most popular ones, and crypto keys are not padded like the very cheap ones.
by bluelightning2k | 2025-10-06 22:27:07+00:00
I follow things pretty closely, and I was genuinely unsure if GPT5-pro was a real thing or just equivalent to setting GPT-5 to high reasoning.

Does the fact it's entering the API confirm that it's a fully separate thing which is not widely benchmarked, and which was not part of the GPT-5 stream?

This particular thing has not been well communicated AFAICT.
by mikhmha | 2025-10-06 22:27:33+00:00
In the case of Call of Duty: Black Ops 1. Thee matchmaking + leaderboards system was implemented by DemonWare (3rd party) in Erlang.

Erlang actually has good enough performance for many types of multiplayer games. Though you are correct that it may not cut it for fast paced twitch shooters. Well...I'm not exactly sure about that. You can offload lots of expensive physics computations to NIF's. In my game the most expensive computation is AI path-finding. Though this never occurs on the main simulation tick. Other processes run this on their own time.
by IanCal | 2025-10-06 22:27:47+00:00
I have not advocated for anything. At best you could say I advocated for talking to a professional, and I do. I certainly didn’t say it would help them (try reading all the words).

> Your perception that you have been helped is not coming from the drug, it's coming from the conditioning before you got to the point of trying it.

I’ve had lots of things that were supposed to help and didn’t. I was told this may or may not help and is the first thing that has made a real difference in decades. Other than taking stimulants before and finding it weird it made me very calm.

I do not live in your country and do not see any prescription drug adverts.
by Liquix | 2025-10-06 22:27:55+00:00
very interesting read, it seems like management/engineering/vendors were all willing to get on the same page to hit the frame budget. especially the bit about profiling every line of game code into an appropriate bucket - sounds like a lot of work which paid off handsomely.

If you just make a list of “performance tweaks” you might learn about in, say, a game dev blog post on the internet, and execute them without considering your application’s specific needs and considerations, you might hurt performance more than you help it.

nice.
by unethical_ban | 2025-10-06 22:28:07+00:00
I'm wrapping a trip through Europe and I only packed black tshirts and a flannel button-up "for color".

Black is timeless, hides stains and sweat, easily layers of you want to buy something to add to it, matches multiple colors of trouser/jean/shoe.

I vow on my next trip to pack fewer jeans (2 pair vs. 4), more socks (4-6 thin pair vs 3), fewer overshirts (1 vs 3, maybe a second that is "classy").

I value having boots along with running shoes.

I'm a 2 bag traveller. Even with my bloated clothing budget, shoes and toiletries volume, I was able to fit it all in a 46L carry-on backpack + a normal backpack, with a satchel rolled up for use on daily walks.
by terrelln | 2025-10-06 22:28:55+00:00
We left it out of the paper because it is an implementation detail that is absolutely going to change as we evolve the format. This is the function that actually does it [0], but there really isn't anything special here. There are some bit-packing tricks to save some bits, but nothing crazy.

Down the line, we expect to improve this representation to shrink it further, which is important for small data. And to allow to move this representation, or parts of it, into a dictionary, for tiny data.

[0] https://github.com/facebook/openzl/blob/d1f05d0aa7b8d80627e5...
by bityard | 2025-10-06 22:29:42+00:00
It is insanely hard to build basic things in the US anymore, even if there is a market, even if the market will pay your prices, even if you have the capital to start, and even if you can hire reliable workers. And those are all HUGE ifs.

The biggest problem is that the base underlying our manufacturing capability has almost completely evaporated. You need tool and die companies to build parts for your manufacturing machines, but almost none are left. There are only a few plastic injection manufacturing companies left, and they are either fully booked or on the path to shutting down. (No, you can't 3D print products for the mass market, it's way too slow and expensive.) Young people think of trades and manufacturing jobs as fall-backs that only drop-outs who couldn't hack college get into. You will make many times more money as a salescritter convincing people to buy things they don't need than using decades of engineering experience to build the things they do.

It's a popular misconception that China's manufacturing advantage is cheaper labor. This was _maybe_ true for a while, their advantage right now is that they have all the things mentioned above: they have the tool and die shops, they have the supply chains, and they have workforce. They can go from product idea to shipping in a week. I do not celebrate the Chinese government for much, but making sure they had a robust manufacturing base from top to bottom was the biggest and most important thing they have ever done. The US government let ours wither and die. Which has made our economy remarkably fragile and essentially decimated the whole idea of a blue-collar middle class.

Destin from Smarter Every Day encountered all of this when he tried to make a better grill brush using only a handful of parts and _still_ did not manage to make the whole thing using only US-originated parts. It's a fascinating window into how hard it is to make anything at all here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY