MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Daub | 2025-10-19 00:19:58+00:00
As a traditional and digital painter, there is one unique feature that is easy to overlook: the colors are selectable as true pigments.

Painters don't categorize colors using standard terms: red, blue, green etc. Rather they categorize according to pigment. Different pigments (i.e. chemical base to the paint) have different properties.

For example, a Prussian blue appears almost black when applied thickly, but is very chromatic when applied thinly. In contrast, a cobalt blue is pretty much the same however it is applied.

ASAIK, this is the only app that supports this feature out the box.

The digital painting toolset has been pretty much in stasis for years, but this app offers node based brushes! I am very intrigued. Downloading it now.
by enriquto | 2025-10-19 00:20:12+00:00
Oh, this is one of my favorite (and sad!) dramas in free software.

Five years later the main llvm developer proposed [0] to integrate it into gcc.

Unfortunately, this critical message was missed by a mail mishap on Stallman's part; and he publicly regretted both his errors (missing the message and not accepting the offer), ten years later [1].

The drama was discussed in realtime here in HN [2].

[0] https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9028738
by int_19h | 2025-10-19 00:20:17+00:00
> Before that, the most commonly copied keystrokes in programmer's editors were the freaking Wordstar ones e.g. in all the Borland products.

Borland switched to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access shortcuts in the last few versions of their TUI - Ctrl+Ins, Shift+Ins, Shift+Del for clipboard, for example. Since Windows also supported them (and still does!) this actually made for a nice common system between Turbo Vision TUI apps and actual GUI in Windows.
by michaelcampbell | 2025-10-19 00:23:44+00:00
> When I used floppy disks routinely, their lifespan was a matter of months if they were used regularly.

Your experience is very different from mine. I used floppies with favorite games and such on them for at least 3 years pretty regularly when I was in high school/early uni in the mid 80's. And I can't remember EVER actually having disk errors in school with homework and such on them. Possibly I did, but I'd think losing that critical piece of homework would have stuck with me.
by EliMdoza | 2025-10-19 00:24:55+00:00
been using both for many years now, have never ran into issues or even been able to tell any difference in speed, let alone 10x

what I notice unfortunatly, is that I often miss search results with rg becuase I forget I need to pass the additional -i flag. this has shaped my perception of rg - extra focus on performance, sub-optimal ux
by llbbdd | 2025-10-19 00:27:19+00:00
Sure, and I'd be the first to admit I'm not aware of the intricate details wrt how LLMs are trained and refined, it's not my area. My original comment here was in disagreement of the relatively simple dismissal of the idea that the construction of humanity hasn't been an incremental zig-zag process and that I don't see any reason that a "real" intelligence couldn't follow the same path under our direction. I see a lot of philosophical conversation around this on HN disguised as endless deep discussions about the technicals, which amuses me because it feels like we're in the very early days there, and I think we can circle the drain defining intelligence until we all die.
by int_19h | 2025-10-19 00:28:45+00:00
An inventory management app was one of my first paid software engineering projects. Sometime in early 00s I had to rewrite it for Windows because the ancient DOS codebase had a bunch of issues running on then-modern Windows versions. I sat down with the users and watched how they were using the DOS version, including the common patterns of keyboard navigation, and then meticulously recreated them in the WinForms version.

For example, much of the time would be spend in a search dialog where you had a textbox on top and a grid with items right below. In the TUI version, all navigation was with arrow keys, and pressing down arrow in the textbox would move the focus to the first item on the grid. Similarly, if you used up arrow to scroll through the items in the grid all the way to the top, another press would move the cursor to the textbox. This was not the standard focus behavior for Windows apps, but it was very simple to wire up, and the users were quite happy with the new WinForms version in the end.
by JoelMcCracken | 2025-10-19 00:29:11+00:00
There are practical limits on global type inference; eg, sometimes writing Haskell youll be not sure what’s going on with some code that won’t typecheck, and the way to deal is break it down piece be piece, add type annotations, until you see where your mental model is failing.

This only gets harder with more type inference, as the actual issue may be far away from where the type error occurs.

This is why in haskell it is considered best practice to add type annotations to all top level definitions, at the very least.
by throwaway173738 | 2025-10-19 00:30:23+00:00
That’s my entire experience in embedded. Everything I get from other companies basically looks like an internship project right down to the pointer arguments with unspecified bounds on the function calls. One of the companies we bought hardware from keeps representing things are working when they only work on devices in the lab. Almost nobody in the space produces anything professional and everything uses Yocto even for two person projects where Multistrap would be more productive.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-10-19 00:31:56+00:00
As has been previously pointed out, the 2001 and 2012 quantum factorisation records may be easily matched with a dog trained to bark three times [33]. We verified this by taking a recently-calibrated reference dog, Scribble, depicted in Figure 6, and having him bark three times, thus simultaneously factorising both 15 and 21. This process wasn’t as simple as it first appeared because Scribble is very well behaved and almost never barks. Having him perform the quantum factorisation required having his owner play with him with a ball in order to encourage him to bark. It was a special performance just for this publication, because he understands the importance of evidence-based science.

I look forward to more dog-based science.
by emeril | 2025-10-19 00:32:33+00:00
maybe see "Won-Taek Choe" - he's a legit smart hearing specialist ENT on UES

that said, prob nothing to do other than wait and hope for the best really

when i had tinnitus following an ear infection years ago, it lasted several months and gradually went away but I always had at least white noise around me and some people say "notch" therapy can be helpful...
by XorNot | 2025-10-19 00:32:35+00:00
> We don't build airplanes by mimicking birds.

We don't build airplanes by having them flap wings, but we do build planes which are considerably more aerodynamically efficient then a bird. i.e. we considerably exceed the underlying performance metric governed by the physics.

Which is my point: an AI need not work anything like a human, but it seems obvious that model training taking months of time to incorporate new information fundamentally cannot be close to AGI since even far simpler creatures can learn and retain information on much shorter timescales.

I'd give the notion more credence if we plausibly had say, a model with a context window which could hold a day of information, and then do could train overnight on that such that it would incorporate that context window into the next day of activity.
by lixtra | 2025-10-19 00:33:25+00:00
Somehow this code lacks the magic I‘m used from rails:

class BooksController < ApplicationController def show @book = Book.find(params[:id]) add_breadcrumb("Home", path: root_path) add_breadcrumb("Books", path: books_path) add_breadcrumb(@book.title) end end

Only the title is specific to the show method. Home should be set by the application controller and Books by the books controller code.
by tejtm | 2025-10-19 00:34:32+00:00
decimal place issues... I hope.

there are ten mm in a cm

456cm == 4560mm

there are 24.5 mm per inch (it is the law).

4550mm / 25.4 = 179.527 inches

or about 14.9 feet

which is about 5 yards

which is 20% of a 'murican football field if that helps
by _heimdall | 2025-10-19 00:35:11+00:00
The source of 27 million slaves today is outdated. More importantly, the source paper referenced by the BBC here doesn't show any source for such a number, the closest it comes is to reference two specific examples of slavery, Sudanese slaves captured by paramilitary or government forces and sex slaves in Mumbai. Both examples are listed with estimates topping 90,000 enslaved.

In no way am I saying slavery is no longer a problem, one slave is too many. I chose not to go after the parent comment's claim that slavery has ended because that wasn't the important to the point I was raising.
by Asymi | 2025-10-19 00:37:55+00:00
Ah that sounds very cool, so instead of having some deterministic mapping, you could just specify the requirements and have a test, the agent would iterate until it passes all tests - so you wouldn't actually need to maintain a codebase to translate from your language spec to cloud providers APIs. This is a cool way of thinking about it and I guess I'm still stuck in 2015! Going to give this a try and see how far it can go.
by laughing_man | 2025-10-19 00:38:45+00:00
This really doesn't make sense. Cars have intrinsic value - they can take you from point A to point B. If that's not why people buy them then they're a luxury good, like a Prada bag, so it's kind of silly to talk about resale value.

It's more likely EVs have poor resale value because the batter is the car, from a value perspective. Once the car reaches a certain age, if the battery needs to be replaced the car is essentially worthless. This is also true of ICE cars, but not to the same extent.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-10-19 00:41:07+00:00
I feel like etcd is one of the few use cases where Intel Optane would actually make sense. I build and run several bare metal clusters with over 10k nodes and etcd is by and large the biggest pain for us. Sometimes an etcd node just randomly stops accepting any proposals which halts the entire cluster until you can remove the bad etcd node.

From what I remember, GKE has implemented an etcd shim on top of spanner as a way to get around the scalability issues, but unfortunately for the rest of us who do not have spanner there aren’t any great options.

I feel like at a fundamental level that pod affinity, antiaffinity, and topology spreads are not compatible with very large clusters due to the complexity explosion in large clusters.

Another thing to consider is that the larger a cluster becomes, the larger the blast radius is. I have had clusters of 10k nodes spectacularly fail due to code bugs within k8s. Sharding total compute capacity compute capacity into multiple isolated k8s clusters reduces the likelihood that a software bug is going to take down everything as you can carefully upgrade only a single cell at a time with bake periods between each cell.
by kcplate | 2025-10-19 00:42:04+00:00
You can complain about my writing not being civil when you stop the outright (apparently intentional) lying about what I have said. I posted a statement made by the mayor. I have an interpretation of it which results in an opinion. The PBS affiliate had an interpretation of it. The other commenter had an interpretation and opinion of it. You have an interpretation and opinion of it.

Just because people don’t agree with you doesn’t mean they are lying. Just because someone is critical of a mayor that you believe is beyond criticism doesn’t mean that the mayor can’t be criticized.
by Asymi | 2025-10-19 00:42:07+00:00
Good question, I like the idea JohnaBenton suggested of farming off the mappings to an agent. As I understand it, you'd have a meta agent that consumes the spec and then an agent for each cloud that translates the spec.

A while back I thought that infra can be represented as a graph (a node is a think and a link is a relationship between things) so was leaning to having some kind of internal representation in a graph DB instead of a state file - but in the agentic age, I actually don't know if this even makes sense.
by ProjectArcturis | 2025-10-19 00:42:32+00:00
It seems to me that if a puzzle has gone unsolved for 35 years despite many very skilled people trying hard to solve it... It is not actually a good puzzle?

Like, here - here's a code that no one will ever solve: ITIWKSMNDIWKD WJSIKWMWMSONQ

Turn that into a sculpture and put it outside the CIA.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-19 00:46:16+00:00
It wouldn’t matter what you used you would have the same problems - it would become a sausage fest where if you aren’t over 6 tall, you wouldn’t get any matches.

Dating apps are 60-80% men from my brief cursory research.

Before someone thinks I’m an incel, I’ve never used a dating app and have been married for 15 years.
by Real_S | 2025-10-19 00:46:36+00:00
Take a look at Monadic DNA:

https://monadicdna.com/

They are building Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) and Multiparty Computation (MPC) tools for genetic data. Your data format may need to be modified. They currently focus on the SNP results from places like Ancestry.

Some HN posts from their CEO:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vishakh82
by Unearned5161 | 2025-10-19 00:47:19+00:00
A bit wild to say the prices have been "similar" for the last 20 years and then cite a source that not only shows a coefficient of variation of 28% on regular prices but one that goes to 31% when you "adjust for inflation".

If your salary had a coefficient of variation above 20% I don't think you'd be saying "I make similar amounts year to year".

What part of this graph of global energy consumption [1] do you envision PV storming oil and nat gas out of? Notice how we never transitioned from anything in the past on a global scale, sure, coal tapered here in the US, but thats because we have nice oil fields to play with. Developing countries and co are trying to get the same that we got in our boom, i.e we're far from "maturing" away from any energy source as a globe.

There's also the thermodynamic note of energy density and temporal coverage, i.e oil and oil derivatives are non-fungible for a bulk of their uses, see planes, ships, and mining. That last one conviniently being the gatekeeper to most of our ideals of renewable energy sources.

1. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
by gldrk | 2025-10-19 00:48:09+00:00
Windows NT has a native console API that every non-Cygwin program used until a few years ago, when Microsoft finally implemented terminal emulation. See, for example, https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/e7c765fe5997daa845222351e114.... It’s just that there is little interest in TUIs from Windows users.
by klodolph | 2025-10-19 00:48:58+00:00
So, having been around a lot of different communication methods, I think email lists aren’t ideal, but for serious projects they’re better than all the alternatives.

Chat has a way of getting completely lost. All your knowledge that goes into chat either goes into somebody’s head or it just disappears into the ether. This includes Slack, Discord, Teams, etc. Useful as a secondary channel but serious projects need something more permanent.

Bug tracking systems just don’t support the kind of conversations you want to have about things. They’re focused on bugs and features. Searchability is excellent, but there are a lot of conversations which just end up not happening at all. Things like questions.

That brings us back to mailing lists. IMO… the way you fix it is by having redundancies on both sides of the list. People sending messages to the mailing list should send followup messages. You should also have multiple people reading the list, so if one person misses a message, maybe another gets it.

Mailing lists are not perfect, just better than the alternatives, for serious projects.

(I also think forums are good.)
by lucyjojo | 2025-10-19 00:51:13+00:00
just an anecdote, but i've seen (in the last few years) more and more "move abroad, where and how" kind of youtube videos in the black american community, with sometimes some kind of consultancy service attached.

it's definitely not big numbers but it is starting to get in the common black zeitgeist i guess. to some extent.

lots of little channels like this popping up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8HplzpcXoE

i semi-expect one big channel to come out of in the next 4-5 years, and you might start to see some kind of real traction at that point.
by elcritch | 2025-10-19 00:53:02+00:00
It’s not just ordinary bread. It looks to be prosphora, or communion bread [1]. In Eastern Orthodox churches communion bread is leavened and it is prepared by hand often by laity [2].

I find it beautiful that such a small but sacred action still looks to be done the same way 1300 years later.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosphora 2: https://www.stdemetriosmi.org/parish-resources/prosphora-bak...
by hypeatei | 2025-10-19 00:53:14+00:00
You understand the Pentagon is like its own city, right? There are various chain restaurants within it. Officers aren't walking the halls discussing top secret war plans -- that's for the Signal group chat.

Joking aside, for discussing classified information, there are dedicated areas called SCIFs[0]. Journalists aren't allowed into those areas.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_compartmented_inform...
by weavejester | 2025-10-19 00:53:24+00:00
I was being glib, so let me expand on what I said a little.

By 'constraint' I mean something the language disallows or at least discourages. Constraints in software development are generally intended to eliminate certain classes of errors. Static typing, immutability, variable scoping, automatic memory management and encapsulation are all examples of constraints, and represent control that the language takes away from the developer (or at least hides behind 'unsafe' APIs).

By 'expressiveness' I mean a rough measurement of how concisely a language can implement functionality. I'm not talking code golf here; I mean more the size of the AST than the actual number of bytes in the source files.

Adding constraints to a language does not necessarily reduce its overall expressiveness, but static typing is one of those constraints that typically does have a negative effect on language expressiveness. Some will argue that static typing is worth it regardless, or that this isn't an inherent problem with static typing, but one that stems from inadequate compilers.
by prisenco | 2025-10-19 00:53:53+00:00
To clarify, I don't mean big P Politics, I mean political in the sense that each node is owned and operated separately, which means there are competing interests and a need to coordinate between them that extends beyond the technical. Extrapolated to N potential nodes creates a lot of conflicting incentives and perspectives that have to be managed. And if the network ever becomes concentrated in a handful of nodes or even one of them which is not unlikely, then we're effectively back at square one.

| if you don't like the way Zuckerberg and Musk run things, too bad

It's important to note we're optimizing for different things. When I say third-order social effects, it means the way that engagement algorithms and virality combine with massive scale to create a broadly negative effect on society. This comes in the form of addiction, how constant upward social comparison can lead to depression and burnout, or how in extreme situations, society's worst tendencies can be amplified into terrible results with Myanmar being the worst case scenario.

You assume centralization means total monopolization, which neither Twitter or Facebook or Reddit or anyone has been able to do. You may lose access to a specific audience, but nobody has a right to an audience. You can always put up a website, blog, write for an op-ed position at your local newspaper, hold a sign in a public square, etc. The mere existence of a centralized system with moderation is not a threat to freedom of speech.

Federation is a little bit more resilient but accounts can be blacklisted, and whole nodes can be blacklisted because of the behavior of a handful of accounts. And unfortunately, that little bit of resilience amplifies the problem of spam and bots, which for the average user is much bigger of a concern than losing their account. Not to mention privacy concerns, which is self-evident why an open system is more difficult than a closed one.

I'll concede that "worse" was poor wording, but intractable certainly wasn't. These problems become much more difficult to solve in a federated system.

However, most advocates of federation aren't interested in solving the same problems as I am, so that's where the dissonance comes from.
by nextaccountic | 2025-10-19 00:54:41+00:00
Stallman's version of free is free to the end user. He cares more about whether the end user will have access to the source code and means to modify their software to remove any anti-feature, and less about whatever freedoms the developers of said software would want (such as, the freedom to close the source and distribute only binaries)

Ultimately Stallman was against a kind of digital feudalism, where whoever developed software had power over those that didn't
by _heimdall | 2025-10-19 00:56:29+00:00
Well that would depend heavily on how you define slavery.

Most people probably consider slavery something that can only be imposed on another human. I'd be in the minority considering animals raised in industrial farms and meat operations to be enslaved. I'd be in an even smaller minority to consider that plants raised in commercial fields may be enslaved, there is at least the possibility that plants may experience the world around them and their existence in it more than we give them credit for.

I don't know that I'd say we enslaved oil, I'd say we enslaved nature more broadly.
by everfrustrated | 2025-10-19 00:56:49+00:00
Sort of. 1 vcpu on x86 = 1 hyperthead not 1 core so yes you can't do uninterrupted work without some CPU "stolen".

However that's not due to aws overhead or oversubscription but x86 architecture. For production workloads 2 vcpu should be minimum recommendation.

On ARM where 1 vcpu = 1 core it is more straightforward.
by zmmmmm | 2025-10-19 00:57:55+00:00
I'm curious how much trained in bias damages in-context performance.

It's one thing to rely explicitly on the training data - then you are truly screwed and there isn't much to be done about it - in some sense, the model isn't working right if it does anything other than reflect accurately what is in the training data. But if I provide unbiased information in the context, how much does trained in bias affect evaluation of that specific information?

For example, if I provide it a table of people, their racial background and then their income levels, and I ask it to evaluate whether the white people earn more than the black people - are its error going to lean in the direction of the trained-in bias (eg: telling me white people earn more even though it may not be true in my context data)?

In some sense, relying on model knowledge is fraught with so many issues aside from bias, that I'm not so concerned about it unless it contaminates the performance on the data in the context window.
by alganet | 2025-10-19 00:59:28+00:00
I see.

Why not have the LLM generate the whole thing? I mean, just prompt it to manage the cloud for you. Use some markdowns to keep the things that work, discard the things that don't, and keep doing trial and error until it works for your scenario.

You just need to find a reusable unit for those markdowns. Something simple and easy that can be composed and would allow an easier time doing the trial and error stuff.