MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by omnimus | 2025-10-04 15:55:17+00:00
I would agree that immutable atomic linux desktop is the future. I would go broader than Bazzite and say you can pick from whole range of similar flavors that might fit you a bit better https://universal-blue.org/ for example https://getaurora.dev/en is KDE.

It's worth saying that one advantage of atomic linux is that you can easily switch between the flavors.
by zahlman | 2025-10-04 15:55:20+00:00
> What do you do today to resolve a dependency conflict when an intermediate library has a just-so dependency tree?

When an installer resolves dependency conflicts, the project code isn't running. The installer is free to discover new constraints on the fly, and to backtrack. It is in effect all being done "statically", in the sense of being ahead of the time that any other system cares about it being complete and correct.

Python `import` statements on the other hand execute during the program's runtime, at arbitrary separation, with other code intervening.

> This feature says nothing about the automatic installation of libraries.

It doesn't have to. The runtime problems still occur.

I guess I'll have to reproduce the basic problem description from memory again. If you have modules A and B in your project that require conflicting versions of C, you need a way to load both at runtime. But the standard import mechanism already hard-codes the assumptions that i) imports are cached in a key-value store; ii) the values are singleton and client code absolutely may rely on this for correctness; iii) "C" is enough information for lookup. And the ecosystem is further built around the assumption that iv) this system is documented and stable and can be interacted with in many clever ways for metaprogramming. Changing any of this would be incredibly disruptive.

> This feature is absolutely not about supporting multiple simultaneous versions of a library at runtime.

You say that, but you aren't the one who proposed it. And https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45467350 says explicitly:

> and support having multiple simultaneous versions of any Python library installed.

Which would really be the only reason for the feature. For the cases where a single version of the third-party code satisfies the entire codebase, the existing packaging mechanisms all work fine. (Plus they properly distinguish between import names and distribution names.)
by bwfan123 | 2025-10-04 15:55:28+00:00
this. Was highlighted by Sutton in a recent podcast rather starkly.

LLMs are a great tool. But, the real world is far too nuanced to be captured in text and tokens. So, LLMs will be a great productivity boosting tool like a calculator or a spreadsheet. Expecting it to do more is science fiction.
by vinnymac | 2025-10-04 15:55:30+00:00
I used to run my own business when I was a child, and made a lot of money from it. Paid my way through school with my earnings. There was no sales or marketing, and all I did was product and engineering, and at no point was I politicking. So no, it's possible (albeit difficult) to not be part of the meat grinder, I have done it.
by saberience | 2025-10-04 15:56:05+00:00
Yes but why did ChatGPT work on math Olympiad problems? Because it got a prompt giving it the instruction and context etc.

Why did GPT5 help Terence Tao solve a math problem, because he gave it a prompt and the context etc.

None of these models are useful without a human prompting them and giving it tasks, goals, context etc, they don't operate independently, they don't get ideas of work to be done, they don't operate over long time horizons, they can't accept long term goals and sub-divide those goals into sub goals, and sub tasks etc.

They are useless without humans telling them what to do.
by yalogin | 2025-10-04 15:56:08+00:00
The telecom bubble built infrastructure for something that didn’t exist, they built anticipating the need for high didn’t come in time.

The gpu bubble is different. Nvidia is actually selling gpus in spades. So it’s not comparable to the telecom bubble. Now the question remains how many more gpus can they sell? That depends on the kind of services that are built and how their adoption takes off. So now is it a bubble or just frothy at the top? There is definitely going to be a pull back and some adjustment, but I cannot say how bad it is
by zwnow | 2025-10-04 15:57:48+00:00
8 years, wow. Try 30 and actually growing up in this country. School is letting people down, rent prices are exploding. Public transportation is a complete joke (https://youtu.be/0rb9CfOvojk?si=1S258ynDJZkGZdoT)

Sorry, but with how rich Germany is I can and should expect more from this country.
by verdverm | 2025-10-04 15:58:09+00:00
> then change it to vile stuff

There is a hash that is stored with the record, and a real permalink is called a "strongRef". Dan did not mention this in his permalink section, hopefully he reads this and adds some more words to his post. You normally store a strongRef and can then detect when a record content no longer matches what you expect. Bluesky does not support edits specifically for the reason you mention, adversarial edits, i.e. the social part is hard, the technical not so much.

I wrote up some experiments with record editing and permalink I did:

permalinks: https://verdverm.com/blog/permalinks-and-editing-on-whitewin...

editing: https://verdverm.com/blog/adding-record-editing-with-history...

> How are things like upvotes tracked?

You crawl the network to look for pointers and do something like: https://jazco.dev/2024/04/20/roaring-bitmaps/

> And how is moderation/spam even handled?

It's way cooler than any other system out there: https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...

People are talking of turning both labelers and feedgens into DAGs (i.e. how do we combine each and use set operations to make interesting combinations)

> can fake their own data

Fake can be seen subjectively here, if it's my data and I can put anything I want in there, what is fake about it?

If it's about changes, the CID hash is how we know if a record has been altered
by wredcoll | 2025-10-04 15:59:03+00:00
It's all pretty solid except for the part about OO.

Inheritance almost never works in "the real world" but I find being able to tie functions to the data they're expected to work on to be pretty helpful.

It's sort of like typing, really, functionX can only take FooBar variables vs making methodX on class FooBar.

Like everything else you can "do it wrong" and you shouldn't be a slave to any particular software ideology.
by alphazard | 2025-10-04 15:59:16+00:00
I remain fascinated that we can have whole communities of people like r/unixporn building many user experiences that look great, but the two biggest linux desktop environments (KDE and GNOME) look like fingerpainting compared to macOS.

Clearly there are people who know how to write the software that makes the user interfaces, and clearly there are people good at designing beautiful interfaces, and all of it is FOSS for anyone to copy or build on, but for whatever reason no one can manage to put these two together, such that the big DE's look as good as macOS by default.
by estearum | 2025-10-04 16:00:01+00:00
> Of course artists want to make a living and have their art be appreciated, so they expect pieces to be sold

"they want their to be appreciated, so they expect pieces to be sold" is a clever trick but one is not related to the other. One could want their art to be appreciated and never sell it, but virtually no one would see this art for a variety of reasons including the fact that marketability increases visibility and that there is very, very little amateur art that is worth looking at, much less promoting to a larger audience.

It seems you agree that in fact art (that anyone sees) is overwhelmingly made to be sold.

I didn't say anything about their "main motivation" and neither you nor I (nor even the artist, frankly) could say much about what someone's main motivation is.

What we can say is that nearly all of the art anyone sees was in fact made to be sold, which is the specific claim that I made.
by prngl | 2025-10-04 16:00:12+00:00
I’m sorry, I did not intend to accuse you of being part of the evangelical community. Your article only prompted the thought I shared.

On the technical point, I think I do disagree, but open to changing my mind. What would be better? I’m working on an async runtime currently, written in C, and I’m using several intrusive doubly linked lists because of their properties I mentioned.
by acdha | 2025-10-04 16:00:32+00:00
> AI increases everyone’s knowledge and ultimately productivity. It’s on every person the learn to leverage it. The dynamics don’t need to change, we just move faster and smarter

This is incomplete in key ways: it only increases knowledge if people practice information literacy and validate AI claims, which we know is an unevenly-distributed skill. Similarly, by making it easier to create disinformation and pollute public sources of information, it can make people less knowledgeable at the same time they believe they are more informed. Neither of those problems are new, of course, but they’re moving from artisanal to industrial scale.

Another area where this is begging questions is around resource allocation. The best AI models and integrations cost money and the ability to leverage them requires you to have an opportunity to acquire skills and use them to make a living. The more successfully businesses are able to remove or deprofessionalize jobs, the smaller the pool will be of people who can afford to build skills, compete with those businesses, or contribute to open source software. Twenty years ago, professional translators made a modest white collar income; when AI ate those jobs, the workers didn’t “learn to leverage” AI, they had to find new jobs in different fields and anyone who didn’t have the financial reserves to do that might’ve ended up in a retail job questioning whether it’s even possible to re-enter the professional class. That’s great for people like Bezos until nobody can afford to buy things, but it’s worse for society since it accelerates the process of centralizing money and power.

Open source in particular seems likely to struggle here: with programmers facing financial downturns, fewer people have time to contribute and if AI is being trained on your code, you’re increasingly going to ask whether it’s in your best interests to literally train your replacement.
by GWBullshit | 2025-10-04 16:00:38+00:00
Speaking of Drake equations, you should (1) see the other comment here with this account name (2) check out the top Pirate Bay rip of Dark City (which predated that other movie) and turn on the English subtitles and count the number of times the characters look at or make gestures pointing to certain alignments of the text in the subtitles and, if you're true "hackers", try to figure out the encrypted messages in the text alignments that the characters are looking at/pointing to at key moments – and then when/if you figure out what the encrypted messages mean, try to figure out how the director worked together backwards so that they could have a script that aligns a certain way using subtitles and then make the scenes so that the actors are looking/pointing to key spots at just the right time.

If you appreciate technical things, you'd be in for a treat.
Show HN: WhyTorch – visual explainer for PyTorch Functions
by kukanani | 2025-10-04 16:01:03+00:00
Announcing WhyTorch, an open source website I built to explain PyTorch functions. It makes tricky functions like torch.gather and torch.scatter more intuitive by showing element-level relationships between inputs and outputs.

For any function, you can click elements in the result to see where they came from, or elements in the inputs to see how they contribute to the result to see exactly how it contributes to the result. Visually tracing tensor operations clarifies indexing, slicing, and broadcasting in ways reading that the docs can't.

Would love feedback on which PyTorch functions people most want visualized next.
by tamimio | 2025-10-04 16:02:05+00:00
This is usually in big corps, so if you like working in these hellholes, then proceed with all these shenanigans. I worked there before and it's not really good for engineering, let alone engineers' mindset, because in addition to the actual technical stress, now you have to deal with all this bs from people who do nothing all day but these games. Small companies are the best for me, and I remember one time in a small company they hired a manager from a corp. In a year, he managed to fuck up everything, 4 engineers left including myself, and turned the work culture into rules and policies instead of adults working with each other towards a common goal.
by pants2 | 2025-10-04 16:02:09+00:00
So you wouldn't know what the three numbers are ahead of time, you'd have to be using a real time face replacement model (or I guess live-switching between pre-rendered clips) and somehow convince the app that you're the iPhone selfie cam.

But at that point you might as well just use WAN 2.2 Animate and forget about Sora.
by kelipso | 2025-10-04 16:03:13+00:00
> What is disconcerting is that this proposed action from the US drug regulator does not accurately represent the spectrum of research findings, nor the consensus among researchers. That consensus must be expressed with nuance, because of the uncertainty that always exists in scientific research. By making definitive statements such as “Don’t take Tylenol” and “Fight like hell not to take it”, Trump risks weaponizing that uncertainty to the detriment of public health.

It funny how even something like this is a political statement. For example, if someone questions some left-aligned dogma and says “uncertainty that always exists in scientific research”, it’s not acceptable, but when it’s some right-aligned thing, then please, repeat that statement as many times as possible.
by nr378 | 2025-10-04 16:03:18+00:00
> Remind me again why we need investors to fund bad ideas?

Early stage investors generally fund a portfolio of multiple ideas, where each idea faces great uncertainty - some investments will do tremendously well, some won't. Invstors don't need every investment to do well due to the assymmetry of outcomes (a bad investment can at worst go down 100%, a good investment can go up 10,000%, paying off many bad investments).

> The whole premise of western capitalism is that investors can better align with the needs of the society and the current technological reality.

This is not the premise of capitalism, it's the justification for it - it's generally believed that capitalism leads to better outcomes over time than communism, but that doesn't mean capitalism has 0 wasteage or results in 0 bad decisions.
by tialaramex | 2025-10-04 16:03:54+00:00
1. I guess by "let rebinding" you mean shadowing. Clippy has lints for shadowing which are default off, you might find that some patterns of shadowing which are legal in Rust are too often problematic in your software and so you should tell Clippy to warn you about them or even deny them by default.

For example you might decide to warn for clippy::shadow_unrelated which says if I have a variable named "goose" and then later in the function I just make another variable that's not obviously derived from the first variable but it is called "goose" anyway, warn me I did that.

2. I don't see any advantage of "largely compatible" error handling over anyhow, maybe you could be more explicit about what you want here or give an example.

3. What you're claiming for Zig here is a semantic check. This could exist but be fallible (it can't be infallible because Rice's Theorem), but I suspect the reality is that it's not a semantic check and you've misattributed your experience since I don't see any such check in Zig. Maybe an example would clarify.
by the_af | 2025-10-04 16:04:05+00:00
Agreed. This is well studied in software engineering though, I think I've read papers from the 70s/80s addressing this about risk mitigation: what is the impact of the risk if it materializes vs how likely it is to materialize?

When people argue about the rigor of software engineering (i.e. "is it really engineering?") they often forget an important part: we are doomed to repeat mistakes or reinvent the wheel because nobody ever reads the existing research, nobody learns from the past, we're always blogging about the trendy latest thing withour asking ourselves "maybe someone in the 70s already explored this and drew valuable lessons?".
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-10-04 16:04:52+00:00
By society, he means the oligarchy will get more power and control.

Yeah, sure some side benefits to people. AI is still a nuclear weapon against labor in the capital - labor (haves - haves not), and will start pushing wealth inequality to the Egyptian pharoah.

The only good news for plebians is that virtual reality entertainment means you just need a little closet to live in.

Overall, this just leads up to further demographic decline, which as an environmental malthusian I would welcome in the initial stages to get us down from our current level, but I also suspect it would turn into an economic downward spiral, especially with AI, where the oligarchs have such total authoritarian control and monopoly on resources that humanity basically stops having kids at all.
by m3047 | 2025-10-04 16:04:57+00:00
> What gets them in trouble is the clever hacking, not a fundamental moral flaw.

I think you've got that backwards. Crims gonna crim. A clever hacker will evaluate ALL the risks, whereas a moral flaw blinds people to risks. Doesn't mean somebody can't have both attributes.

I quite literally stole an education, and there's a college transcript to prove it. I was a clever hacker, and I worked hard; I was aided and abetted by the college administration, inducted into the Masters candidate ghetto as an honorary member. When they made it a felony I quit that path, and following Hunter S. Thompson's advice [0] I went into business so that I could continue learning "on the job". (Nowadays they call it "OPT". Served today with a very thin glaze of sarcasm.)

During that tenure I met people who wrote theses for a living, who appreciated my industriousness and offered to admit me to their fold. I drank with foreigners ("muslims") who wanted information I might have or be able to obtain; I suggested that they get their home countries to forge documents and and then get admitted as students.

I've quit jobs after an appropriate "honeymoon period" when I still hadn't been furnished documentation demonstrating that we had customers' permission to be doing what we were doing. I've quit jobs when government compliance was considered a game rather than a minimum standard of performance. [1]

I pass government background checks just fine; no reason I shouldn't. I get the "dgaf" attitude, but I strongly suggest getting it in writing. Doing things off the books is a cancer; and it's contagious, like that 10,000 year old dog cancer which now moves from host to host.

[0] "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

[1] If you need somebody who takes risk assessment seriously, we should talk.
by redsparrow | 2025-10-04 16:05:06+00:00
I had a great experience using Kaitai in a previous job. We were decoding proprietary binary messages from Teltonika OBD GPS trackers. The online editor, https://ide.kaitai.io/, is really nice for developing and testing your definition. You can store multiple binary files in local-storage and you get a nice detailed look at the data and how your definition is parsing it.
by prinny_ | 2025-10-04 16:05:14+00:00
I am a FE developer and I believe that we collectively have a loser's mentality when dealing with CSS.

In my mind, SCSS + CSS modules + maybe a processor tool is an rock solid and modern set of tech that produces excellent results and most importantly moves styling off the main thread. It makes sense to use it, but we don't. FE interviews even for senior+ roles are JS/React/system design questions. Nothing about CSS and I get it. Why interview for something you don't use internally?

I recently read something that stuck with me, which was about micro front ends but I think applies in more cases than this: "it doesn't solve a technical problem but an organizational one".

There was an excellent reddit discussion on the pros and cons of tailwind and it boiled down to "it's really hard to enforce CSS guidelines for teams of multiple people". Tech leads didn't want to monitor how 10 or 20 or 50+ different FE developers wrote CSS and opted for tailwind so that everyone wrote the same, even if that meant multiple inline classes pasted on each element. I find this reluctance to enforcing guidelines weird, considering at $WORK we have multiple confluence pages and internal documents about React and Javascript guidelines and I have seen similar documents in previous work places. Would it be really different to apply the same mental paradigm for CSS?

Of course, all this is under the hindsight knowledge that HTML and CSS have evolved in recent years to be truly powerful and versatile. I get the technical decision to go all in on JSS and React 5 years ago. I don't now.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-04 16:05:29+00:00
> Your web apps could truly one day be generated frame by frame by a video model. Really. The amount of compute we’ll need will be staggering.

We've technically been able to play board games by entering our moves into our telephones, sending them to a CPU to be combined, then printing out a new board on paper to conform to the new board state. We do not do this because it would be stupid. We can not depend on people starting to do this saving the paper, printer, and ink industries. Some things are not done because they are worthless.
by verdverm | 2025-10-04 16:05:34+00:00
> So is the protocol sort of like a big public kafka topic?

yes, at least the firehose is that, and anyone can subscribe or run their own

https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

> to make sure you don't miss updates

Yes, the firehose and jetstreams have a cursor, though with limited time window depending on the instance. (1-3h -> 72h)

If you want the entire history you do what's called a backfill
by bwfan123 | 2025-10-04 16:05:41+00:00
I worked at a startup during the telecom boom. Then, startups were getting acquired by the likes of Cisco before the startup had a deployed product. And, back then, IPOs were the only form of liquidity event and engineers were locked up for 6 months. The lucky ones had their startups go IPO or get acquired with enough time to spare to get out before the ensuing bust. After the bust, funding dried up and most startups folded including the one I worked at. There was wipeout and desolation for a few years. Subsequently, green shoots started appearing in the form of a new wave of tech companies.
by scheeseman486 | 2025-10-04 16:05:51+00:00
No, that's something from the bubble you're in. Most people don't care about privacy (which is not to say that I don't or that it's not important). Mass video surveillance by the state is creepy, but CCTV is everywhere. Everyone carries around a tracking device in their pocket, whenever a phone is in someone's hands it could be recording. The fears you have are already realized and people have shrugged their shoulders.

That's not to say that some changes etiquette won't develop, but think about it this way: no one asks someone else to put their phone away in private residences during conversations because it has a camera on it, but they might because they want the other person's full attention.
by dotnet00 | 2025-10-04 16:06:02+00:00
PhDs are probably the leanest degree for a research school to support.

They don't attend classes after ~2 years, mostly operate independently besides consulting with their advisor, don't take anywhere near a professor's salary, teach or TA classes, act as lab technicians, and bring in money through grants.

The costs are mostly upfront in the form of providing the necessary research facilities to attract research-oriented faculty and students, and the administrative staff needed to ensure compliance with grant terms.