MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-07 06:58:27+00:00
Viki is a platform to watch Asian TV with subtitles in various languages. Their policy on subtitles is, users are free to provide subtitles. Viki won't provide any itself. Their obligation begins and ends with making the video file available.

Each show is subtitled by a team of volunteers. (Generally one team per sub language.)

I watched 大江大河 ("Like a Flowing River"; the English name seems to have no particular relation to the Chinese name) on Viki. But between that series and the sequel (大江大河2), Viki lost the license to stream it.

So now both series are on YouTube, provided by some other party. Viki's subtitles are permissively licensed, so season 1 is up there still using the Viki subtitles.

Viki never got to show season 2, and the new publisher had to provide those subtitles itself. Unfortunately, they tend to be unintelligible gibberish. I was eventually able to watch season 2 after I found a set of fansubs on reddit.

I've noticed that Netflix and Amazon Prime now offer Korean dramas, and it made me wonder if that had something to do with Viki's struggles. But this wasn't even a Korean show.

On the topic of crunchyroll, they could fix their subtitle problems while spending less money by just moving to Viki's system.
by flohofwoe | 2025-10-07 06:58:45+00:00
As far as I'm aware, any SPIRV isn't directly fed into the Vulkan backend, it's more like "WebGPU SPIRV => internal IR => validation => Vulkan SPIRV".

Also I wouldn't rule out that some browser vendors will accept SPIRV as WebGPU shader input as a non-standard extension one day (disclaimer: talking out of my ass here since I'm not on any of the WebGPU implementation teams). The WebGPU API is prepared for accepting different types of shader inputs (that's how the native implementations accept SPIRV instead of WGSL). I bet that this would solve exactly zero problems though ;)

> DirectX accepts SPIR-V nowadays

That doesn't mean much since SPIRV has different incompatible flavours, e.g. you can't feed a GL SPIRV blob into Vulkan, or a Vulkan SPIRV blob into D3D (does D3D actually already accept SPIRV or is this still in the 'planning stage'?)
by shiomiru | 2025-10-07 06:59:05+00:00
> The point is they are not even compliment to their "own" spec. They are part of whatwg.

I think web devs have too much faith in the "standard"; the WHATWG specifies anything supported by two implementations, and with Google controlling Mozilla that already feels somewhat unfair...

> Write a page on chrome, works 90% on Firefox. But will likely works 10% on safari.

Disregarding the issue that you're writing pages that only 90% work on anything but Chrome... do you have any examples of Safari misbehaving?
by inbx0 | 2025-10-07 06:59:12+00:00
Ehh what. I would give some merit to arguments like "no one should use lodash in 2025 because you can do most of it with built-ins nowadays" or maybe because it doesn't tree-shake well or maybe even because it doesn't seem to have much active development now.

But stating matter-of-factly that no one should use it because some of its well-documented functions are mutating ones and not functional-style, and should instead use one particular FP library out of the many out there, is not very cool.
by flohofwoe | 2025-10-07 07:00:11+00:00
The native WebGPU implementations accept SPIRV as input, but (AFAIK) it's still taken apart, validated, and translated into the backend-specific shader bytecode formats (AFAIK even for the Vulkan backends the SPIRV isn't simply passed through - at least in Dawn/Tint, not sure about wgpu.rs)
by 0rdinal | 2025-10-07 07:01:06+00:00
Their reputation is irrelevant, at least whilst they maintain an OS monopoly. Enterprise customers don't care because all the issues you described are not present on Enterprise editions. The vast majority of users want a machine that "just works".

I would never use a machine running Windows 11 S mode whilst a good chunk of the home PC market would likely not notice a difference.
by cirrrrrrus | 2025-10-07 07:01:22+00:00
I regularly pack for my wife and two toddlers (1 and 3yo) in a 40L + additional 10L bags. It is very hard, means adults also have to surrender even more items to make room for books, toys and nappies, but it is not impossible. The reasons that made us do this is we wanted to only travel by train (europe based).

It’s a highly freeing exercise that is hard but doable. Only works for vacations (a day to a month) though.
by dannyobrien | 2025-10-07 07:01:24+00:00
Well, yes. Marxists also try to identify and solve these coordination problems, and their analysis is fundamentally one of class analysis. My claim isn't that they aren't pursuing the answers to these problems: it's that there attempts to do so have notoriously failed. Which is fine: these are not easy problems. The best models for successful coordination, as you've described, all have negative externalities.

The point though, is that you really can stream off a laptop: we had BitTorrent; we have WebTorrent. We've built peer-to-peer infrastructure that works. In the last 25 years we have built great collective works with minimal capital outlay -- so minimal that we saw an explosion of capital investments because the returns to low capital were so high. Heck, you're using one of those low-capital, capital-adjacent artifacts right now.

In the class of problems, scaling up peer-to-peer collective action is (I would suggest) difficult, but not as difficult as it would have been to coordinate peer production in the 19th century. We've just barely begun to explore their potential.
by Vipsy | 2025-10-07 07:02:04+00:00
The saddest part is, Windows 11's MS account lock-in feels like the logical next step for an OS designed by committees and PMs playing metrics games. The user-hostile design isn't isolated––it's just another symptom of a company where stock price and engagement numbers trump every other concern. What I miss is the era when engineers seemed to have more say, and features existed because they were actually useful. At this point, moves like this are basically an advertisement for Linux and Mac. Every time MS doubles-down, the free and open alternatives get that much more appealing.
by lxgr | 2025-10-07 07:02:37+00:00
You're equating occasional dropouts (which can happen for all kinds of reasons even in bent-pipe topologies) with the absence of inter-satellite links. That makes no sense.

The empirical way to test for the existence of ISLs would be to go to the middle of an ocean, safely out of reach of any ground station, and see what happens. If you get a connection, that can only be due to ISLs.

It seems like your actual complaints are with network/routing stability, and you're drawing invalid conclusions from there.
by holameraj | 2025-10-07 07:02:44+00:00
Yesterday I got an acquisition offer of $2k for a SaaS I launched the same day.

As a developer it is tempting to take the quick cash. But after looking into the product and seeing the potential I realized it is worth taking the risk and building further.

The tool solves a real problem for developers. APIs and webhooks fail silently and most monitoring tools are too heavy or noisy. I believe it can grow if approached the right way.

The product is called Pagemon and you can check it out here: https://www.pagemon.space

I am sharing this because if you have ever faced the same choice quick payout versus long-term potential I would like to hear your thoughts.

If you are a developer struggling with API failures I would love to give early access and get feedback on the product.
by defrost | 2025-10-07 07:03:01+00:00
As @blahlabs notes in peer comment sand batteries / heating buried dirt works better than heating water for seasonal power storage and smoothing.

In simple terms there's better efficiency and ease of use from having a higher delta (temperature difference) and dirt / sand / salts heated to 600C are significantly hotter than water at 100C.

Once water turns to steam drama and expenses climb.
by Certhas | 2025-10-07 07:03:13+00:00
I haven't kept track of numba in recent years. But there is a clear path to translate more and more scikit-learn to mojo, bypassing the python interpreter entirely. And then things become much more composable in a way that numba can't be.

We are heavily leaning on Julia, and to my mind Mojo is a major threat to the long term development of the Julia community. If people dissatisfied with Python+C(++)-Silos end up writing Mojo instead of Julia it will become even harder to grow the ecosystem and community.

That said, for now Julia has a number of big strengths for scientific work that don't seem to be in the focus of the Mojo devs...
by hypfer | 2025-10-07 07:03:29+00:00
One of the questions you as a maintainer have to ask yourself when coming across some PR, Issue or similar is "Does this Person want to help, or are they interested in obtaining the identity of a 'helping person'".

This blog post existing points at the latter.

Depending on how you run your project, you might want to play along with that story regardless, to extract some value and make the whole thing a two-way transaction instead of a one-way one. That however requires there to be some significant value to be extracted or else you end up with a net negative.

It is however also possible to reject transactionality entirely.

___

What is interesting in this case specifically, is that the author did manage to extract value eventually. If not by being the savior of lodash, then by becoming the victim of lodash.

This might be another detail hinting at why whoever maintains lodash might've decided to react with a block and nothing else.

Further receipts for this read of the situation include the immense clout-to-effort ratio of the PR just adding a new GitHub action that "adds more security" and the Blogpost itself opening with the actual mission statement of "improving the ecosystem".
by alganet | 2025-10-07 07:05:12+00:00
> For example, a significant amount of fibre optic capacity was built in the 1990s during the telecoms bubble, which remained unlit for years

Also, a lot of AOL CDs were printed, which remained useless forever.

I'm having trouble thinking what physical assets could remain from the AI hype, if any. What does it mean when people make this fibre comparison?

I think they mean GPU supply chains. But there's a problem there: These are already leftovers from the crypto hype. You can't sit on GPU tech and leave it "unlit for years". Either you use it right now, or it becomes obsolete very quickly.

Maybe they're talking about these outrageous energy solutions (re-activation of nuclear powerplants, etc)? But that hasn't actually took off yet, it makes no sense.
by Slartie | 2025-10-07 07:05:23+00:00
> A balcony solar panel will yield even less than that because it's not positioned optimally.

Non-optimal positioning is already included in your "Measured (not projected) yield in Germany". Because that is the difference between a projected yield (under optimal conditions) and actual measurements of actual panels, which are practically never optimally placed.

> Then you won't consume all that it produces because you're at work during the day and there are no appliances running except the fridge maybe.

That is relevant for an economic calculation, but it is entirely irrelevant if you want to determine the point after which the panel breaks even regarding the energy used for its production vs. the energy produced by it. In that case, every single kWh counts, whether the owner of the panel economically profits from it or whether he or she just donates it to the grid without compensation.

And clearly, we are discussing the energy break-even here, as indicated by "The usual estimate to produce a PV panel is 600-1000 kWh per 1sqm."

> However from the physics/ecology perspective they make no sense at all and many of the panels installed today will never recoup the electricity used to produce them, making them a net-negative impact for the environment.

As I've demonstrated with concrete calculations, that you seemingly accept as valid as you perform the same calculations with roughly the same numbers, the EROI of solar panels even in Germany over their lifespan is clearly in the positive range. Maybe they "only" recoup 3x or 5x their investment, and not 20x, but they are a net positive regardless. Any number above 1x is.

In addition to this, as I've described in another posting here (https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=45490555) there's the psychological side of things, where cheap and easily profitable balcony panels for everyone are a gateway drug for "normal people" to get actively involved in the field of renewable energy and must not be underestimated in their ability to open the minds of people for other, more efficient actions to get closer to a carbon-neutral energy economy. Since those activities tend to be heavily inhibited by broad refusal that's often not based on factual arguments, but simply on inertia in people's minds ("we've always done it the other way") and a certain lazyness to actively grapple with new technologies and developments, this effect is at least as important as the actual impact on the energy grid. Just like on the stock market, the raw numbers are only half of the story. Psychology is the other half.
by bilekas | 2025-10-07 07:06:22+00:00
> In fact, terraform exposes the complexity of AWS, since with terraform you need to hook everything up manually.

Clearly you've never had to deal with deploying large systems on AWS because if your account even has provisioning permissions, whish is usually a huge security risk in enterprise environments, the chances of you messing something up are all on your familiarity with Aws console. And if you get something wrong you're stranded without any kind of rollback. Terraform gives you rollback ability as well as validation against your requirements.
by andrewflnr | 2025-10-07 07:06:44+00:00
It answers your question pretty comprehensively, actually. Not my fault if you can't connect the dots.

Sure, there are still questions. But the questions for all the other explanations of the Moon's origin at even bigger. You can be skeptical, but until you have a better theory that accounts for all the evidence, you don't get to dismiss it as "science fiction". Not if you want to be taken seriously anyway.

Here's a life pro tip: The correct guideline for a theory is "as simple as possible and no simpler. The real world is complicated. Complicated things happen all the time.
by cess11 | 2025-10-07 07:06:58+00:00
I work from home and use a VPN service to get a bunch of IP:s I can easily switch between.

Recently a SaaS supplier blocked my IP because I was logging in programmatically every thirty seconds to collect data on batch processing in a customer project, basically two HTTP requests to get an access key and then the data, and I was lazy so I just put those in a script and dumped the second response to a log file and put that in a scheduler. Turned out that another customer of the SaaS supplier somehow could see the traffic on my customer's SaaS instance and panicked because in their mind it was obviously the russians attacking or something, and when they brought this to the supplier they also panicked.

So to keep doing this I had to move over to checking whether the previous access key was still valid and reuse it if so, as well as moving my 'location' to another country. Apparently this is fine but logging in two times a minute is not. It also happens that I need to do research on network services and cloud environments, where having the ability to just hit a couple of terminal incantations to switch 'where' I am helps out quite a bit sometimes.
by Ferret7446 | 2025-10-07 07:07:54+00:00
> doctors themselves want less competition

Which is entirely rational. A medical degree is expensive and doctors want a return on their investment. In that sense, doctors are very similar to real estate investors (and to a certain extent labor unions); they all want a return on investment (don't we all!) at the detriment of society. Because damn, competition kinda sucks compared to coasting along, especially as you get older.
by Vipsy | 2025-10-07 07:08:47+00:00
The WPT score is a flawed metric (encoding tests are overweighted), but it's one of the few objective yardsticks we have. What matters more is that Ladybird is finding spec ambiguities by implementing from scratch rather than cargo-culting Chrome's behavior.

The real test isn't passing 90%—it's whether they can keep pace as the web platform adds new APIs faster than any independent team can implement them. Browser engine development has become a regulatory moat, and breaking it requires either massive funding or accepting permanent incompatibility with the "modern web."

Still rooting for them. Browser monoculture is worse than metric gaming.
by KsassPeuk | 2025-10-07 07:09:01+00:00
Well, Frama-C is maintained thanks to public funding (Europe/France) and industrial users who use it for actual certification of systems. For example, Thales (Common Criteria EAL7), Airbus (DO-178C), EDF (ISO 60880). I don't know what you mean by professional tool if this is not professional ;)
by Vipsy | 2025-10-07 07:09:32+00:00
The WPT score is a flawed metric (encoding tests are overweighted), but it's one of the few objective yardsticks we have. What matters more is that Ladybird is finding spec ambiguities by implementing from scratch rather than cargo-culting Chrome's behavior. The real test isn't passing 90%—it's whether they can keep pace as the web platform adds new APIs faster than any independent team can implement them. Browser engine development has become a regulatory moat, and breaking it requires either massive funding or accepting permanent incompatibility with the "modern web." Still rooting for them. Browser monoculture is worse than metric gaming.
by bob1029 | 2025-10-07 07:09:45+00:00
> But the fast workflow enables me to focus on the insanity that is the foolish endeavor of simulating the world, instead of getting sidetracked on making 3D and UI actually work in Go, or intoxicating my brain with Unity

I'm glad the author found something that works for them. That said, if the author's goal was to publish a game with intention of turning a profit, this attitude can be very counterproductive. It does work out really well in some cases, but more often than not it results in failure. The distribution looks like a bathtub curve - either your concept is so simple that a DIY thing can work (Minecraft) or you have the other thing (Elden Ring).

The most challenging parts of game dev happen in places like photoshop, blender, audacity and blank sheet of paper. Turning the art integration tool into your primary obsession is a fantastic way to slide on all of these other value drivers. For example, populating a game with premade assets from the store is no longer a viable commercial solution when your audience has seen hundreds of prior arrangements of the same.

If the game is a hobby or other not-for-profit venture, then all of the advice in this article is fantastic. I started my game dev journey doing everything in the web as well. It is still a very compelling platform target. The thing that really gets me thinking is that despite my ability to create flawless webGL builds out of unity is the fact that I don't bother anymore. The need kind of went away once it became clear that layers like Proton on Linux would actually cover my ass.
by metalman | 2025-10-07 07:10:16+00:00
solar is bieng deployed very quickly in many parts of the world, and at wildly different scales. Sodium batteries and high density capacitors and a long list of other chemical,heat and mechanical, energy storage and conversion technologies are maturing quickly. Anybody or any country that is lagging will get out competed in a world where fossil fuels costs can only rise. Hydrogen is complicated by it's physical properties, of bieng so tiny and light, that containing it during storage and transfer is still very difficult and expensive. Liquid solid, and gasious, Hydrocarbon fuels are tied to large ,complicated and expensive industrial operations, with feed stocks that require huge field operations, that NOBODY wants. Solar just sits there, a "solar spill" is just another sunny day.Realy realy hard to compete.
by invaliduser | 2025-10-07 07:10:42+00:00
Happened in France too. It was put in place in the late 70s, and ended in 2020. Called the «numerus clausus» (closed number, in latin) and it restricted the number of medicine students allowed in the country every year.

The number of students fell by 50% between 1980 and the mid 90s: 8500 new students/year in 1972, 3500 in 1993.

Of course, now the number of doctors in France is far from enough for an aging population, in every specialty and it will take at least a decade to improve. It's not uncommon to have 1-year waitlists for ophthalmology appointments, and several weeks or even months for dermatology.
by mixedbit | 2025-10-07 07:11:42+00:00
Right, there is a reason why print magazines use columns even for long multi-page articles. With long lines, readers tend to get lost when navigating from the end of one line to the start of the next line, and the reading experience suffers. You can help this somehow by increasing spacing between the lines, but the general recommendation is to have 45-75 characters per line.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-07 07:11:44+00:00
> The most interesting part of that is that population typically sides with the doctors, not the government, for some reason.

I wish.

In my country, the government blames everything on doctors despite displaying truly sovietic levels of corruption and inefficiency. Doctors working for the government in poor areas might not even be provided with a functioning sink to wash their hands with, yet society still expects them to provide the highest standard of care.

Entire media campaigns have been launched against the "mercenary" doctors who put profit over the well being of the poor patients. Now doctors manning ERs routinely suffer physical violence. 15 minute waits are enough to provoke literal vandalism in the ERs. I know of one case where murder charges were pressed against a couple of stable flu patients who after sitting around for less than 15 minutes decided they had waited enough due to the laziness of the doctors, invaded restricted areas of the hospital, vandalized them and disrupted a team managing a myocardial infarction, obviously leading to the patient's death.
by Tor3 | 2025-10-07 07:11:53+00:00
At least in Europe, if CR has licensed a show or a season, then nobody else can license the same show or season. There's always exactly one place to watch one particular show or season. So, no competition - licensing goes to one, and only one place. Likewise, if Netflix has licensed something then CR isn't getting that license (e.g. Komi Can't Communicate - it's on Netflix, therefore not available on CR)