MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alnwlsn | 2025-10-30 20:53:11+00:00
Reminds me of when I first started learning computers, there was a version of Windows 3.11 that fit on a single 1.4M floppy. Some of them fit even more stuff by uncompressing the floppy into a ramdisk.

You could even make your own, starting with the file manager from Windows 3.1 and some files from a Windows 95 CD (the installer for 95 ran a stripped down 3.1)
by whoooboyy | 2025-10-30 20:53:24+00:00
Median rent value in Seattle is $2300/month if you are looking for a one bedroom, a little cheaper if you are looking at a studio. Minimum wage here is $21/hr. The first quartile for rent is $1600.

Assuming you work full time, you are making $3360 a month, less taxes.

That means that even if you get the bottom 25% of rents, over half your take home pay goes to rent. Then we need health care, food, taxes, transportation, clothing, etc.

Not a lot of savings easily available there.
by wryoak | 2025-10-30 20:53:31+00:00
Oh no! I’d been noticing an unusual amount of em dash discussion recently, but hadn’t investigated why. In college my professors would accuse me of plagiarizing my essays because I wrote so much more competently than I spoke. Now I’m going to be accused of employing AI for one of the few practices I find too enjoyable ever to source to an LLM. Oh well.
by lawrencechen | 2025-10-30 20:53:40+00:00
Public repos shouldn't require being signed in.

Just tested these example links in incognito and seemed to work?

https://0github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux/pull/666

https://0github.com/stack-auth/stack-auth/pull/988

https://0github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/pull/12995

https://0github.com/simonw/datasette/pull/2548

> you've disabled logging issues on the repo

Sorry, wasn't aware. Turning it on right now. EDIT: https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux/issues seems to be fine?
by fennec-posix | 2025-10-30 20:53:54+00:00
"It appears that human speech occupies a distinct time-frequency space. Some speculate that speech evolved to fill a time-frequency space that wasn’t yet occupied by other existing sounds."

I found this quite interesting, as I have noticed that I can detect voices in high-noise environments. E.g. HF Radio where noise is almost a constant if you don't use a digital mode.
by ceejayoz | 2025-10-30 20:53:56+00:00
I am responding to your claim.

4.5AUs is as close as 0.2AUs from an interstellar standpoint. Both are equally likely, just as every Powerball number is equally likely. Any object of this nature we can spot is going to be quite close with our current detection technology.

Again, your argument is effectively like arguing that 04 24 49 60 65 01 cannot possibly be yesterday's winning Powerball numbers, because it's a 1:300M chance. The game must be rigged!

Now, if the next couple interstellar objects we detect also do a similarly close pass on Jupiter and Mars, there'll be something worth wondering about.

(Similarly, if tomorrow's Powerball numbers are 04 24 49 60 65 02, I'll have questions!)
by zdragnar | 2025-10-30 20:54:08+00:00
Back when I was on some medication to help me sleep, it came with the side effect of having vivid dreams... and if I didn't fall asleep fast enough after taking it, I'd get hallucinations while my eyes were closed. I knew I wasn't seeing what I thought I was seeing, but I wasn't really in control of the imagery. In one case, I thought there was a suit of armor standing over me and mumbling. In another, I was laying in bed, but I was seeing the living room from a few feet outside of my bedroom.

My - and what I presume is "normal" - mental imagery isn't any different than those hallucinations, with the exception of I am willing what I imagine, and therefore control what I "see" in my mind. The colors, contours, lighting, shading, and so on are all like what you would see with your eyes, though the actual level of detail is less.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-10-30 20:54:36+00:00
Gemini is better than GPT5 variants for large context. Also, agents tend to be bad at gathering an optimal context set. The best approach is to intelligently select from the codebase to generate a "covering set" of everything touched in the PR, make a bundle, and fire it off at Gemini as a one shot. Because of caching, you can even fire off multiple queries to Gemini instructing it to evaluate the PR from different perspectives for cheap.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-10-30 20:54:54+00:00
> In my opinion, what changed was customer sentiment. 15 years ago, in the halcyon early days of the iPhone, paying $5/month for a SaaS or $10 for a novelty app was exciting.

I don't know anybody who found paying a monthly fee exicing. On the other hand, I know people who found $10 for a novelty app perfectly reasonable. But these people to my knowledge have not changed in their stances here. In other words: I see no change in customer sentiment.
by tolerance | 2025-10-30 20:54:59+00:00
Some people have more vivid imaginations than others and a vivid imagination entails more than just noodling and doodling well. Evidently.

People vary in their capacity to reason with things. People who “see” things with their eyes closed probably don’t believe that they are physically seeing them (i.e., with their actual eyeballs). People who can’t...probably can; they just expect to actually see what it is that they're thinking about.

This is a sensitive subject. At its core it beckons forth for questions of spiritual import.

Is society fit to address something as abstract as this problem in an age where “Chatbot psychosis” is becoming a thing?
by whytevuhuni | 2025-10-30 20:55:15+00:00
> would you therefore conclude that using vim/emacs leads to garbage software?

I cannot conclude that "it leads to garbage software", but I can definitely conclude that "it has ever led to garbage software" at least once, and in some "shape or form".

> Claiming vim/emacs leads to or directly contributes to "quality software" is the same

This (or the alluded opposite) was not the original claim. The original claim was the total impossibility of vim/emacs to have ever led to quality software, in any shape or form. That is the only claim being contested here.
by bccdee | 2025-10-30 20:56:06+00:00
One of the big benefits of CQRS is that everything becomes asynchronous, and you can handle write-heavy data with stream processing. Implementing distributed locks across your stream processing system is... unpleasant to contemplate.

If you really need locks, that generally locks you out of this kind of architecture, which makes the CQRS value proposition much flimsier.
by secabeen | 2025-10-30 20:56:32+00:00
Pricing in most businesses has little relation to the cost of developing and making the product. Most businesses price relative to the value that their product delivers to the customer. If there is robust competition, then the price is often driven down towards the cost, but it's not driven by the cost. In Adobe's case, they see that there is an entire industry of creative people using their products as their primary tool(s). Those employees are often paid well, with salaries from 50k-100k per year as common. Is it not reasonable (from Adobe's perspective) that employers pay 1/50th of the employee's salary for their primary and most useful tool? No one complains when the plumber requires a work truck and thousands of dollars worth of tools.
by pyrolistical | 2025-10-30 20:56:48+00:00
Oh boy. Example 7 is a bit of a mindfuck. You get the returned string in both in await and cancel.

Feels like this violates zig “no hidden control flow” principle. I kinda see how it doesn’t. But it sure feels like a violation. But I also don’t see how they can retain the spirit of the principle with async code.
by FredPret | 2025-10-30 20:57:07+00:00
Criticizing individuals because they're part of a bloodline / ethnicity is:

- the exact opposite of criticizing individuals; you're really just going after the group

- the definition of prejudice

- the foundation of most (all?) giant human catastrophes like the Holocaust, the various communist land reforms, the crusades, and all sorts of horrible events

I'm a conservative, but I have to say this idea of not being prejudiced is really something great that liberalism brought to the table over the past 100-200 years. I'm gobsmacked to see people rejecting this idea.
by lelandbatey | 2025-10-30 20:57:10+00:00
People want package managers to do that for them. As much as I think it's often a mistake (if your stuff requires more than expanding archives different folders to install, then somewhere in the stack something has gone quite wrong), I will concede that because we live in an imperfect world, other folks will want the possibility to "just run the thing automatically to get it done." I hope we can get to a world where such hooks are no longer required one day.
by tylertreat | 2025-10-30 20:57:12+00:00
You're right that Meals You Love integrates with Instacart and Kroger for ordering meal plan groceries but it's not primarily a grocery funnel and this has no impact on meal plan construction. Really these are just value-add integrations IMO. For our family, the real value is actually providing a means for us to save our favorite recipes and get AI-recommended recipes peppered in. The grocery ordering is secondary, though quite useful for us.

The second big value prop for us has actually been the new "Quick Bites" feature which generates recipes based on ingredients you have on hand (either tracked in your pantry in the app or simply input manually). For instance, we'll often have some ingredients we want to use up but need suggestions on what to make. In this case, there's no grocery integration at all since we're using entirely stuff we already have.

Good question on the meal calendar. You CAN share meal plans (as well as recipes), though there isn't a calendar as such beyond the weekly meal plan view.

Preferences are primarily handled via the AI (uses Gemini on the backend) and this is the primary driver in how recipes are constructed and recommended.
by CWuestefeld | 2025-10-30 20:57:22+00:00
However they have a gentleman’s agreement to not do that.

Trying to remember back to Snowden, I think I recall that not only DON'T they have such an agreement, but the intelligence folks consider this a feature. The US government is Constitutionally forbidden from reading "US persons" communications, but our Constitution has no such restriction on third parties. So if those third parties do the spying for us, and then tell our intelligence folks about it, everybody wins. Well, except for the people.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-10-30 20:57:42+00:00
> Google can kick ass in AI all day, but soon Gemini is going to be saying shit like, "it sounds like your air conditioner is broken, maybe you should call Clearwater HVAC - they're the best!"

That is the nightmare scenario. The puzzle for me is why you apparently think it just a trap for Google. All of the pure AI companies are burning cash. That is going to stop. Either they go broke, or they do something with ads.

There is a third option I guess, and that is they create something that is useful enough to be worth paying for. It won't be just an LLM, but as far as I can tell they are all just fine tuning LLM's. We already know what the limits of an LLM are, as we are already there.

All except Google that is, who are building AI's for all sorts of things, such as protein folding, weather prediction and driving cars. LLM's were their invention, created by them for doing translation and OCR. And unlike everyone else, they aren't dependent on NVidia as they use their own internally developed hardware. Surely there is no argument about Google being the world's power house of AI?? Most of these efforts will be experiments Google is infamous for abandoning. But it's seems likely one or two will become the youtubes of AI.

I can't see anything remotely comparable from the other AI companies. It's difficult to see how this doesn't end with Google completely dominating the space, and all these LLM companies going broke.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-10-30 20:57:56+00:00
Most people are extraordinarily dim to the point that they have zero introspective capacity. For instance, if they had more than a third grade vocabulary, would they be using the word "see" to describe this talent they think they have? I seriously suspect that if you could somehow educate everyone up to some minimal level, this disparity would disappear entirely.

Anyone over the age of 40 or so grew up with the meme bouncing around (globally?) that people think "in language" to the point that one of askreddit's favorite questions til a few years ago was "people who grew up speaking another language, do you still think in X" or some variant. It was a plot point of a Clint Eastwood movie with a stolen telepathic Russian fighter jet.

It's not that you have aphantasia so much that everyone else imagines they have X-Men superpowers.
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-30 20:58:11+00:00
Really? Ordinary synchronous code calls an I/O routine which returns. Asynchronous code calls an I/O routine and then gets called back. That’s a fundamental difference and you can only square it by making the synchronous code look like asynchronous code (callback gets called right away) or asynchronous code look like synchronous code (something like async python which breaks up a subroutine into multiple subroutines and has an event loop manage who calls who.
by brewdad | 2025-10-30 20:58:23+00:00
My in-laws live near but outside of a community that has been vacation homes for the 0.5% for over a century. Those homes never go "on the market". The owners will quietly put the word out and a year later someone new is spending a month of their summer there.

It used to be industrial powerhouse families. Today, it is more likely to be a hedge fund manager.
by theobreuerweil | 2025-10-30 20:58:24+00:00
It’s very possible that things were always this way, you’re right. My own perception is that politics has become more divisive and less respectful in my own lifetime, and I happen to think that social media makes this worse, but that’s admittedly just an opinion.

To the emotional statement: I think I’d get a reaction if rather than saying “I don’t think Go is a good language” I said something like “Go is objectively the worst programming language ever devised”. I get your point but if you feel emotional about something then say so - IMO the parent comment did much more than that.
by groby_b | 2025-10-30 20:58:32+00:00
> At 17 you should still be thinking about investing in education

I mean, sure, in a perfect world you can postpone retirement savings. But if we're doing perfect world, you shouldn't have to think about "investing in education", your government should have the basic cognitive skills that would let it recognize that they should invest in education - ROI is pretty spectacular.

Realistically, both, because... otherwise you just pick how screwed you'll be later in life.
by Teknoman117 | 2025-10-30 20:58:34+00:00
One of my friends got a Pimoroni InkyFrame and was trying to figure out what to do with it. Ended up learning a substantial amount about how dithering works to convert images into the 7 colors the eInk display can produce. It just sits there playing the original Shrek at 1 minute per frame over and over again XD.

When he messed up the color conversion "Green Farquaad" was a recurring meme in our group chat.
by t43562 | 2025-10-30 20:59:01+00:00
I do think some module writers get overexcited about using some dynamic features and it can be hard to understand what's going on. On the other hand....

Dynamic languages let you do a lot of things with meta classes and monkey-patching that allow you to use a library without needing to build your own special version of it. With some C or C++ library that did something bad (like the logging one you mentioned) there's nothing for it but to rebuild it. With Python you may well be able to monkey patch it and live to fight another day.

It is great when you're dealing with 3rd party things that you either don't have the source code for or where you cannot get them to accept a patch.
by pbasista | 2025-10-30 20:59:02+00:00
> Can the EU sign treaties that are binding on all member countries?

That depends on the topic of the treaty.

The EU member countries have delegated their decision making powers on certain limited number of topics to the EU institutions, like The EU Commission, The EU Council or possibly others. One such topic is the trade. As a result, all EU countries share the same trade policy.

For other topics, where there is no such delegation in place, everything needs to be ratified by every member country individually.

I am unsure into which category this particular treaty falls.
Ask HN: Why didn't Google shake down ISPs?
by h2zizzle | 2025-10-30 20:59:51+00:00
I saw a YouTube video (thumbnail) for a video essay about why all of Facebook's side projects have failed. I asked myself what I would do in Zuck's (or FAANG leader's) shoes; what kind of product would I make, if I had those kinds of resources? What is important to me today that technology could fix? Well, the most painful thing of late has been how bad search has become. So, I guess we're now in Google's shoes, instead. How do you avoid Doctorow's Curse in bringing any service that's supposed to be as frictionless as search? You can't force people to make accounts and pay. You can't support it with ads. You can't go to governments and ask them to pay. ...But what about ISPs? They're kind of the perfect middlemen in that (as common carriers, ostensibly) the government can't get involved in censorship, and as giant corporations with a de facto cartel monopoly, customers have no choice but to go through them. And you, as a dominant, quasi-utility c. 2012, can dictate (fair-ish) terms and protect your bread-and-butter (people who want to use your service, ISP machinations be damned).

You even have precedent. Apple shook down AT&T and turned itself into America's dominant phone manufacturer. They used the threat of releasing the insanely popular iPhone with a competitor network to dictate terms, and then eventually released a phone compatible with Verizon's network anyway.

Or look at cable networks in the 90s or 2000s, going directly to consumers to force the hands of providers.

So, consumers see slightly higher internet bills. Who cares? Better than the ad hell and AI-biased neutering we currently face.

Did they just not think it could get this bad? Or was the goal just always to make us the product?
by exasperaited | 2025-10-30 21:00:07+00:00
For fuck’s sake. Talk to a lawyer. Pick a newspaper if you can’t trust a regulator. Find a journalist who you think can cope with the nuance. Find two from philosophically opposed publications with different owners, maybe in different jurisdictions. Make them share it. Talk to them on Signal.

Don’t let techbros with a snazzy website template do a middle-man act on whistleblowing. Christ. These people just want a cut of the settlement.

I mean, this idea is profoundly dangerous. Every link in a whistleblowing chain increases the risk of someone being threatened, ruined or worse — hospitalised, defenestrated, family threatened -- before they can talk.

If you are going to blow the whistle, be paranoid as fuck. Ask the journalists to describe what assurances they get from their editor and publisher. Ask them to put you in touch with someone who blew the whistle to them and who can safely talk, so you can find out how they handled it. Ask them if they've ever had to help someone get the hell out of Dodge. Don't trust anyone to broker this stuff but yourself.
by comprev | 2025-10-30 21:00:59+00:00
I can _remember_ the properties of an apple - approximate size, weight (my hand does not instantly drop to the floor due to its weight), etc.

I can't _imagine_ an apple in my hand if you defined the colour, size or weight (for example, purple, 50cm diameter and 100Kg).

In my mind I am recalling a _memory_ of holding an apple in my hand - not imagining the one according to your specifications.

One example I can give is being tasked with rearranging desks in an office. I can't for the life of me _imagine_ what the desks would look like ahead of physically moving them into place.

I can make an educated guess based on their length/width but certainly not "picture" how they would look arranged without physically moving them.

It's like my brain BSODs when computing the image!

The same applies to people - I can only recall a memory of someone - not imagine them sitting on a bench in front of me. I might remember a memory of the person on _a_ bench but certainly not the one in front of me.
by fastasucan | 2025-10-30 21:01:16+00:00
>tbh this has been a sticking point for me too with uv (though I use it for everything now). I just want to start of a repl with a bunch of stuff installed so I can try out a bunch of stuff.

I hope the people behind UV or someone else adress this. A repl/notebook thing that is running on a .venv preinstalled with stuff defined in some config file.
by ajross | 2025-10-30 21:01:17+00:00
It really depends on what you're doing. But yes, if you want to develop in "The NPM Style" where you suck down tiny things to do little pieces of what you need (and those things suck down tiny things, ad infinitum) then you're naturally exposed to the security risks inherent with depending on an unaudited soup of tiny things.

You don't get secure things for free, you have to pay for that by doing things like "import and audit software yourself" or even "write simple utilities from scratch" on occasion.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-10-30 21:01:27+00:00
I appreciate your frank oppenness to feedback! I'd like to give you some, but first I want to call out that (1) I'm certainly no expert and (2) you may have been voluntold to make a powerpoint on material that isn't well-fit for powerpoint.

My feedback:

- I think you could improve by being more excited / exciting (the Death By Powerpoint slide deck says "passionate"). Personally, I try to mitigate this problem by drinking coffee shortly before I'm expected to be engaging. It is a drug, and for me it works.

- You could also draw the main impactful points out of the background info. The presentation you give here has a lot of deep technical detail, which is certainly of interest for the correct audience, but I think generally fits poorly in a powerpoint presentation. I think you'd generally want to focus on more high-level performance characteristics, or particularly interesting details. Perhaps a 3-4 page document would be better for this sort of deep technical material. Or maybe the level of detail is actually perfect, and I'm just not the correct audience.

I really love your response here. You seem like a great person, I think your coworkers are lucky to have you.
by palata | 2025-10-30 21:01:50+00:00
> You came out swinging. You can't throw out punches and expect to not have one thrown back.

I was not throwing punches. One can be 25 years old now and never have lived in a world without smartphones or social media.

> But pretending that software was ever finished

I'm not saying it was perfect (or bug-free). I'm saying that when you shipped, in many situations there was no way to patch the bugs. And even when there was a way, it was painful. So when you shipped, it was finished, as in "fully functional". Doesn't mean there wasn't any bad software or that good software did not have bug. But the teams shipping a product had to finish it before.

Nowadays, the norm is to ship unfinished software, with the expectation that there will be plenty of bugs, and those that are deemed worth fixing will be fixed.

And I do believe that it became like that precisely because it's easy to send patches. It's now economically viable to ship bad software, because people are used to having to wait for bugfixes. I'm guessing that back then, people would not have bought twice from the same company if the first time had ended up with unusable software.

> if we're going to stop it.

There is no stopping it. The quality of software is going down because it's economically viable, and I don't see that changing anytime soon (especially with LLMs).