MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-10-18 08:34:40+00:00
> "why should we care?"

I'm not the one claiming that a calculator thinks. The burden of proof lies on those that do. Claims require evidence and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I don't think anyone is saying that the calculator isn't a useful tool. But certainly we should push back when people are claiming it understands math and can replace all mathematicians.

> If we're to persuade anyone, we'll need to articulate a case for why understanding matters

This is a more than fair point. Though I have not found it to be convincing when I've tried.

I'll say that a major motivating reason of why I went into physics in the first place is because I found that a deep understanding was a far more efficient way of learning how to do things. I started as an engineer and even went into engineering after my degree. Physics made me a better engineer, and I think a better engineer than had I stayed in engineering. Understanding gave me the ability to not just take building blocks and put them together, but to innovate. Being able to see things at a deeper level allowed me to come to solutions I otherwise could not have. Using math to describe things allowed me to iterate faster (just like how we use simulations). Understanding what the math meant allowed me to solve the problems where the equations no longer applied. It allowed me to know where the equations no longer applied. It told me how to find and derive new ones.

I often found that engineers took an approach of physical testing first, because "the math only gets you so far." But that was just a misunderstanding of how far their math took them. It could do more, just they hadn't been taught that. So maybe I had to take a few days working things out on pen and paper, but that was a cheaper and more robust solution than using the same time to test and iterate.

Understanding is a superpower. Problems can be solved without understanding. A mechanic can fix an engine without knowing how it works. But they will certainly be able to fix more problems if they do. The reason to understand is because we want things to work. The problem is, the world isn't so simple that every problem is the same or very similar to another. A calculator is a great tool. It'll solve calculations all day. Much faster than me, with higher accuracy, but it'll never come up with an equation on its own. That isn't to call it useless, but I need to know this if I want to get things done. The more I understand what my calculator can and can't do, the better I can use that tool.

Understanding things, and the pursuit to understand more is what has brought humans to where they are today. I do not understand why this is even such a point of contention. Maybe the pursuit of physics didn't build a computer, but it is without a doubt what laid the foundation. We never could have done this had we not thought to understand lightning. We would have never been able to tame it like we have. Understanding allows us to experiment with what we cannot touch. It does not mean a complete understanding nor does it mean perfection, but it is more than just knowledge.
by bluescrn | 2025-10-18 08:35:31+00:00
There's also a whole lot of people without the option of charging at home, especially here in the UK (relying on on-street parking or living in flats)

Green tech is great if you're upper-middle class with a nice big detached home, plenty of space to install solar, a heat pump, and EV charger. But a large percentage of people just don't have a 'compatible home' even if they had the cash available to invest in such tech.
by sim7c00 | 2025-10-18 08:36:34+00:00
sad story but i have to say using it to try and pull away kids from their parents simply because the parents are of a certain belief or lack certain intelligence or schooling seems a very slippery slope. Ofc the UK is happy to jump on, slide down and get injured at the bottom of slippery slopes, but yeah... you cant force people to conform with your ideas and beliefs even if they are 'scientifically sound'.
Show HN: I Built Videoyards to create professional demos videos
by Yaramsa-Gautham | 2025-10-18 08:37:06+00:00
So, I built Videoyards Extension which is a screen recording tool helps founders and indie creators to create professional screen recording videos or product demos of their SaaS or apps. It's basically like screen studio alternative for like windows... (This is currently stable for windows OS, chrome, brave, edge browsers and for mac, linux users it will be coming soon..)

Here are the results after 6-weeks (1&half month ) since launch:- - 6000+ visitors - 200+ users signups - 150+ videos are exported - 13 total paid users - USD 705 in total revenue - 112 install on my chrome extension - 4-Five star review on my chrome extension - My extension got featured by chrome

It took me 8 months to build this application and now after seeing the responses, feedback I feel so happy that I've finally built something that people actually need.... This is still int he beta version, I'm constantly improving from the feedbacks and user requests...
by herbst | 2025-10-18 08:37:35+00:00
Switzerland is a rich third world country. The US is basically the definition what first world is supposed to mean and as we all can tell "first world" never said anything about riches, stability or even sanity.

It's not "starting to hurt" America lost any trust that was left after the last orange man debacle a few years ago, within just a few weeks. There is no coming back. America is very deep in the shit when the majority of the world doesn't want to play with them anymore.
by bob1029 | 2025-10-18 08:37:52+00:00
These cameras are a big part of why I recently moved. They're a canary for something deeper.

The area I was in was like the Korean DMZ with regard to flock cameras. I had one at the only entrance to my neighborhood. A trip to the grocery store would put me in their database 12 times at last count.

I still have to worry about the standardized fleet of cameras at Home Depot and a few other retailers, but it's not nearly as bad out here. Location is a big part of the dystopia. It is not evenly distributed. Fighting back at the municipal and HOA level can make a massive difference. Some areas seem hopeless though. You're better off finding something that already mostly works and trying hard to keep it that way.

The general fear level of the local population seems to be the biggest factor in all of this. I went from a place where people would do the quadruple check car lock routine when walking into the grocery store, to a place where many leave their unlocked vehicles idling in the parking lot. I don't even think about locking my doors at home now. It almost feels silly to do it around here. It's amazing the difference that ~65 miles can make.
by earthnail | 2025-10-18 08:40:09+00:00
I finally started migrating our app from Heroku to Hetzner. Started by moving Postgres, and boy, what a difference in performance. I pay 1/5th of what I previously paid, and performance is through the roof. Like, as if we had rewritten our Rails app in Rust (metaphorically speaking). I know that in theory you get much more from managed postgres than a simple self-managed server, but I have pgbouncer and Wal-G set up, and it really seems like it's not that hard to manage that instance. Most of all, we were really hitting performance limits on Heroku, not theoretical "what if the server goes down" but real ones that users could tell every day.

Will move the app server itself next (basic Rails). Really wish I had done the move earlier. Hetzner is like cheating for indie devs.
by sothatsit | 2025-10-18 08:40:57+00:00
I don't think he is saying agents are not useful at all, just that they are not anywhere near the capability of human software developers. Karpathy later says he used agents to write the Rust translation of algorithms he wrote in Python. He also explicitly says that agents can be useful for writing boilerplate or for code that can be very commonly found online. So I don't think he is saying they are not useful at all. Instead, he is just holding agents to a higher standard of working on a novel new codebase, and saying they don't pass that bar.

Tbh I think people underestimate how much software development work is just writing boilerplate or common patterns though. A very large percentage of the web development work I do is just writing CRUD boilerplate, and agents are great at it. I also find them invaluable for searching through large codebases, and for basic code review, but I see these use-cases discussed less even though they're a big part of what I find useful from agents.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-18 08:41:08+00:00
Worth remembering the context: Republican politicians, after campaigning on "mass deportations", have voted to spend more tax-dollars on ICE than other federal law enforcement like FBI, ATF, DEA, U.S. Marshals Service, and Bureau of Prisons combined.

Flush with that cash and directed by Stephen Miller, they will absolutely be spying on citizens, legal permanent residents, and legal visitors.

After all, just a few months in and they're already searching public social media for posts that hurt the administration's feelings, engaging in unconstitutional persecution of law-abiding people.
by wafflemaker | 2025-10-18 08:41:17+00:00
Disclaimer: never owned a car, no driving licence. Also talking about Norway with generally good charger infrastructure.

Was on a road trip last summer, around Norway, in VW id.Buzz. Charging time of 5min vs 20min doesn't matter. When you're on that long trip, you need time to eat, go to bathroom, walk a little so your legs/back doesn't hurt. In the whole trip there was maybe one forced trip to a shop, because we had time to burn (the only charger was too slow and needed a whole hour to charge).

OTOH have a friend with first gen Leaf and his max charging speed is pretty slow. He additionally can't charge at home and this makes the slow charging time a little off a nuisance.
by tim333 | 2025-10-18 08:41:30+00:00
>Either way, anyone engaged ... needs to ... read up on those Melanesian cargo cults.

So I had a look at Wikipedia and the cargo cults are not really as advertised:

>The first documented cargo cults were religious movements that foretold followers would imminently receive an abundance of (often Western) food and goods (the "cargo") brought by their ancestors.

>Cargo cults have a wide diversity of beliefs and practices, but typically (though not universally) include: charismatic prophet figures foretelling a coming cataclysm or utopia...

So we are talking a religion rather than mixing up correlation and causation.

The 'AI bubble' seems much more like the dot com bubble or 'railway mania' than a religious thing.
by tablatom | 2025-10-18 08:41:49+00:00
This. I believe it’s the most important question in the world right now. I’ve been thinking long and hard about this from an entirely practical perspective and have surprised myself that the answer seems to be our capacity to love. The idea is easily dismissed as romantic but when I say I’m being practical I really mean it. I’m writing about it here https://giftcommunity.substack.com/
by NoiseBert69 | 2025-10-18 08:42:15+00:00
Behringer evolved from a "cheap unusable shit" to very solid gear and a company that listens to their users.

If you want to enter the market you must beat their stuff price/quality wise. That's not easy in 2025.

The entire audio/venue biz is heavily driven by mouth-to-mouth propaganda and personal networks. A friend of mine knows Uli Behringer personally - if one of his mixing console hangs itself during a concert you know who's getting a very angry call at 1:00 o'clock. If people stop losing trust in your stuff nobody will buy the rotten product (or worse entire product series) anymore.

It's the same for the video production scene. It will make you very rich if your product is very good - if it blocks a production or even worse destroys a recording you'll be beaten out of the market with fists. And the people will track your records down if you change your legal name if you are trying to back in.

The scene loves and hates with a lot of passion. And they have a memory like elephants and never forgive.
by crote | 2025-10-18 08:42:26+00:00
> every major technology wave has needed a similar level of push, hype, and momentum to reach mass adoption

People were standing in line for the first iPhone. Gmail had a waiting list. Tesla sold EVs far faster than they could make them.

On the other hand, I now literally have AI icons blinking in several apps, begging to be used. This isn't a regular marketing push of a brand-new product, it is companies desperately trying to justify their billions of dollars of sunk costs by bolting AI onto their existing products.
by viktorcode | 2025-10-18 08:43:13+00:00
Nothing was wrong, it's just the general perception of customers has shifted.

The internet was full of comments very similar to what you can read here, lacking specific details and objective critical analysis, all saying how behind the times and inconvenient current Apple UIs were. How bad skeuomorphic approach is in general. How not modern it is.

And then it changed with iOS 7. The reaction was exactly what it is now.
by EdwardDiego | 2025-10-18 08:43:33+00:00
> People worry that not being seen as mindless, uncritical AI cheerleaders will be a career-limiting move in the current environment of enforced conformity within tech

Yes. I am seeing this right now, but it's not just enough to join the chanting around the altar, you've got to be seen enthusiastically using AI as much as possible and it's turned the contributions of some of the most productive high level developers in my company into... ...well, slop.

I'm dealing with a bug from one such right now, where they wrote code that used my library, and it's not working for them, and they lack the understanding of their code to fix it, and the reason it's a bug I'm working on? Cursor couldn't fix it for them, and they lack the mental model to do so, because it's hard to mentally model code you didn't write.

I'm sure there's an inevitable "well, your company/colleague is doing it wrong then" critique incoming. And I agree.

But given that "doing it right" is often being defined as "using it as much as possible" by business leaders across the industry, then we get these paradoxical outcomes where doing so reduces productivity, but no-one is ready to admit that.

You've got to be AI-first, or AI-native, at least if you want the investors to stay invested.

I've never experienced such a collective adherence to tech hype (but probably only because my company couldn't figure out how to jam a blockchain and/or NFT in previously). Not even during the days when everyone was serverless, or "cloud-first" / "cloud-native".

It's wild.

TL;DR - we've always as an industry used appropriate tools for appropriate problems, right now it feels like so many of us are throwing AI slop at walls and seeing what sticks.
by NoiseBert69 | 2025-10-18 08:44:25+00:00
XLR with Neutrik Plugs + high quality cables is crazy robust.

You can tow a car with it and then use it to work a festival with Tier 1 bands afterwards without any problems. Most likely it will work even better than before.

Also differential signal nature by design is the standard - It's like CAN. This kills 99% of non-wanted signals coming from the wire physically.
by anonzzzies | 2025-10-18 08:45:17+00:00
All modern show hn / hn 2025 batch SaaS sites also look exactly alike, and people say often 'i really like your design! What design? Its just every framer.com template and the dashboard like every SaaS starter out there. Fine with me, I like uniformity but let's not act as if now is different than 2013.
by pilif | 2025-10-18 08:46:29+00:00
One thing that’s not quite clear to me is how safe it is to generate v7 uuids on the client.

That’s one of the nice properties of v4 uuids: you can make up a primary key of a new entity directly on the client and the database can use it directly. Sure: there is tiny collision risk, but it’s so small, you can get away with mostly ignoring it

With v7 however, such a large chunk of the uuid is based on the time, so I’m not sure whether it’s still safe to ignore collisions in any application, especially when you consider client’s clocks to probably be very inaccurate.

Am I overthinking things here?
by mjg59 | 2025-10-18 08:46:55+00:00
In 2000 my neighbour built a small network using two Orinoco Gold cards - an ad-hoc[1] network between his laptop (A Sony with a Neomagic chipset, I don't remember the precise model but it was beautiful) and the desktop in his room, and this was

(a) utterly magical (b) his father was the son of someone very high up in one of the Scottish banks and so this was affordable for him and clearly outside the range of normal people

In 2001 I bought a set of Prism 2 based cards that let me run HostAP (https://hostap.epitest.fi/) and was able to build my own network that didn't rely on ad-hoc mode and so everything was better but the speed at which all of this changed was incredible - we went from infrastructure being out of the reach of normal humans to it being a small reach, and by 2005 we were in the territory of all laptops having it by default. It was an incredible phase shift.

[1] ad hoc was a way for wifi cards to talk to each other without there being an access point, and there was a period where operating systems would show ac-hoc devices as if they were access points, and Windows would remember the last ad-hoc network you'd joined and would advertise that if nothing else was available, and this led to "Free Internet Access" being something that would show up because it was an ad-hoc network someone else advertised and obviously you'd join that and then if you had no internet your laptop would broadcast it and someone else would join it and look the internet was actually genuinely worse in the past please stop assuming everything was better
by ivape | 2025-10-18 08:47:35+00:00
I was just thinking the other day that AMD can match Nvidia pound for pound on the raw hardware specs, and if they don’t just yet, they get pretty close. If AI is a bubble, then AMD should not catch up. If there isn’t a bubble, then there is no choice but to learn to use whatever is out there and AMD is truly set to be another trillion dollar company. The 10% stake OpenAI took is going to look like a Google buying YouTube moment in the long run.

And it’s worth noting, AMD has always matched up with Nvidia hardware wise for decades, plus or minus. They are an interesting company in that they took on both Nvidia and Intel, and is still continuing to do so.
by peter_d_sherman | 2025-10-18 08:48:35+00:00
If I am understanding you correctly, you are stating that a given shell, specifically a subshell -- may not in some cases see the same shell variables as other shells...

That is true.

Subshells may not in some cases see the same shell variables as in other shells.

I'm not contesting this.

But let's suppose that we have not a shell variable, but a socket...

A socket that any program can open -- and retrieve a web page from...

For the simplicity of thought, let's say that the data for that web page is always static.

It always returns the same web page; the same data for that web page...

So now my question to you:

Can that socket, which can be opened by any program, mimic a global variable?

?

Why or why not?

?

Or perhaps an even simpler question...

Let's suppose that there's a file on filesystem... globally accessible to be read and written to by all programs...

Can that file's presence mimic a global variable?

?

Why or why not?

?
by reify | 2025-10-18 08:51:14+00:00
I'm old and the white backgrounds hurt my eyes.

I used to be forever pressing the F5 key to reduce the screen brightness.

my favourite background reading colour is: #24273a

I found this on the wonderful HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36342085

I LIKE THIS ONE. no orange header.

# ORIGINAL:

news.ycombinator.com##body:style(background: black) news.ycombinator.com##td:style(color: #fafafa !important) news.ycombinator.com##table:style(background-color: #24273a) news.ycombinator.com##div.toptext:style(color: #fafafa) news.ycombinator.com##div.c00:style(color: #fafafa !important) news.ycombinator.com##a:style(color: #ffa000 !important) news.ycombinator.com##span#karma:style(color: #faa000 !important) news.ycombinator.com##span.pagetop:style(color: #fafafa ! important) news.ycombinator.com##textarea:style(color: #fafafa !important; background: inherit; ) news.ycombinator.com###hnmain:style(background: #24273a !important)

I adapt this for other sites I regularly visit.

This them for firefrox helps, though I only use librewolf.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/catppuccin-ma...
by noir_lord | 2025-10-18 08:51:34+00:00
Depends on the CPU - X3D's really don't need it, the X's can if you want to uncap the power limits.

I put a 420mm AIO on a 7950X3D (because I was originally getting a 7950X but the X3D went on sale) - the fans barely come on most of the time and the absolute hottest I've ever got it was 77C during the soak in test (stress-ng on 32 cores for a few hours).

If I was building another on say the 9800X3D I'd go back to air - the AIO's only have a five year warranty so you need to replace them fairly often vs air where you just blast the dust off.

If you are running a CPU that can routinely site over 200W under heavy load the AIO's can make sense.
by simianparrot | 2025-10-18 08:53:08+00:00
Here's how I've been explaining this to non-tech people recently, including the CEO where I work: Language is all about compressing concepts and sharing them, and it's lossy.

You can use a thousand words to describe the taste of chocolate, but it will never transmit the actual taste. You can write a book about how to drive a car, but it will only at best prepare that person for what to practice when they start driving, it won't make them proficient at driving a car without experiencing it themselves, physically.

Language isn't enough. It never will be.
by fsh | 2025-10-18 08:53:10+00:00
Yes, there is a limit called "quantum projection noise" that determines how much frequency stability one can achieve with a single-atom clock [1]. With N independent atoms, this limit gets smaller by 1/sqrt(N), but with N entangled atoms one can achieve a 1/N scaling. This is the ultimate limit (Heisenberg limit).

[1] https://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevA.47.35...
by hnlmorg | 2025-10-18 08:54:08+00:00
We understood what the GP was thinking in terms of ads. The objection is that any form of advertisement, regardless of how tasteful it might be presented, is the polar opposite of the intended purpose of tranquil windows into nature.

People like these kinds of live streams because it offers a relaxing form of escapism. Dumping even a static ad only serves to add distraction from that atmosphere and thus undermines the very point of having the live stream open in the first place.
by NoiseBert69 | 2025-10-18 08:55:10+00:00
We tested Wifi-7 in our lab due to planned migrations. It's a huge quality mess right now.

Either MLO doesn't work correctly or the drivers of the Modems (we tested Intel, Mediatek, Qualcomm, etc.) hit the shitter.

For my private stuff I stick to Wifi-6 and wait until Wifi-8 arrives. Finally having "friendly coordinated handovers" between APs is one of the biggest wins for me.
by jeswin | 2025-10-18 08:55:27+00:00
In this review, Hardware Canucks tested [1] the M4 Pro (3nm 2nd gen) and the 395+ (4nm) at 50w and found the performance being somewhat comparable. The differences can be explained away by 3nm vs 4nm.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7HUud7IvAo