MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Four computational processes embedded in traditional mosaic
by G_S | 2025-11-03 14:54:12+00:00
Hi HN,

I worked with Françoise Lombaers, a mosaic artisan who's spent twenty years restoring heritage pieces, to explore what happens when algorithms meet traditional craft constraints. We've been asking what happens when you try to implement algorithms with the constraints of traditional mosaic: square tiles only, never cut. It's not about making mosaics look "digital", it's about exploring how to create organic movement with square tiles and code.

We translated four different processes: - Mycelium networks (fungal growth patterns) - Prim-Jarník (minimum spanning trees) - Conway's Game of Life - Wave propagation

Process video: https://vimeo.com/1106384939 Individual Prim-Jarník piece: https://guillaumeslizewicz.com/studio/tesselles/

I am a designer and not a computer scientist, so this has been about understanding and taming the algorithms, then seeing what they become when embedded in tesserae.
by Spunkie | 2025-11-03 14:54:18+00:00
> Haha, what "people"?

I mean most people and business treat google as a "trust partner".

You should see the sideways looks I get from people when they find out I backup all our gmail to another service and don't allow employees to use Google SSO logins for sites. Just encase googles 'fraud' bots randomly shut down our workspace. I don't want the entire business to ground to a halt because we can't login to any sites.
by tim333 | 2025-11-03 14:54:44+00:00
Couple of issues - "a single economic pillar is fragile". I don't think anyone is suggesting shutting the US economy and just doing AI.

"largest bubble we have seen in human history" - the sums involved are not the largest - the railway bubble was larger as percent of GDP. Also it's not even clear it is that much of a bubble - the AI may come through and produce more value than the sums invested. If you can double the workforce by matching humans with AI/robots how much is that worth?
by Galanwe | 2025-11-03 14:54:45+00:00
> There's no "trick" involved

Well we can argue on the meaning of trick I guess.

Share buybacks are essentially a way to achieve the same effect as dividends, but in a non-obvious way, which has the benefit of avoiding taxation. That's a "trick" in my book, but I guess terminology doesn't matter that much.

> They'll still pay tax on it when they sell it.

Not but it's not _equivalent_. The tax paid on capital gains is not the same as the withholding tax. And paying tax _after_ compounding is not the same as paying it _before_.

Share buybacks are _effectively_ a trick to circumvent withholding tax for investors not willing to divest.
by bluGill | 2025-11-03 14:55:27+00:00
The deb and rpm files are not from the application either. Someone outside the application took the application and built the deb/rpm for the distro. FreeBSD just calls their packages "ports", but the concept is otherwise the same, just download the package. FreeBSD is better that most distros as is works to rebuild some middle library yourself with non-default options and then have a leaf application binary depend on it (assuming of course that they are compatible, if your non-default option breaks the application it won't work)
by muzani | 2025-11-03 14:55:31+00:00
I've been taking algae supplements lately. It tastes like fish food because it is fish food.

Apparently, it was a source of cheap protein during wars, but didn't provide enough nutrients and tastes like pond scum. It ended up in the supplement sector because it was easier to get approved as it over food. Soylent Green was inspired by it.

I hope it does go back into the fish food sector - it's cheap and nutritious but tastes worse than soy.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-11-03 14:55:44+00:00
Yes, I fully support people's desire to work 20% less hours, if they're willing to take a corresponding 20% cut to total compensation (note that's not the same as a 20% pay cut; benefits are often really expensive).

Right now there are some cultural barriers to this. Many employers aren't willing to be that flexible, and I think that's a shame. I'd love to see 32-hour or even 24-hour workweeks become more normalized as possible options on the job market. There are also probably some legal barriers to this, with a lot of employment laws counting 40 hours as "full time" but I'm not sure how significant a factor that is.
by engcoach | 2025-11-03 14:55:45+00:00
Correct, and this is the latest in a serious of decisions made by Türkiye which imperil NATO's collective defense.

Rare earths are vital for military equipment. This action is coming from a country that NATO has trusted with its best technology and they continue to flirt with both Russia and China, NATO's primary threats.

Do you see how my comment is about the impact on NATO's ability to wage war? What if Türkiye begins sharing military secrets with China? They are working with China on the mine referenced in the article. They are not trustworthy.
by whizzter | 2025-11-03 14:56:04+00:00
Wasm is used in a lot of nooks and crannies, apart from games, Figma already uses it in the core and Wasm-GC has just started to become viable so we will se a lot of server-side languages get better web support.

Using Wasm as an end-all system was never the main intention even if we're heading that way now thanks to all the work people has put in.

I'd say that it's probably used where it's made sense so far.
by smokel | 2025-11-03 14:56:04+00:00
> First, let’s establish our benchmark: job postings dropped 8% in 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. Indeed reported a 7.3% year-over-year decline for US jobs recently, so this was a good sanity check, and told me that my data most likely was comprehensive.

Doesn't this also suggest that the job market is in such an unusual state, that any further analysis makes little or no sense?
by api | 2025-11-03 14:56:10+00:00
Over time it would gradually remove CO2 since not all of it goes back, but stuff like this isn't even a rounding error compared to the amount of CO2 we'd need to remove.

Planting billions and billions of trees would pull a lot more, but still would only make a small dent. Greening large desert regions with large scale water and local climate engineering projects, ocean seeding, etc. would also pull more but still only make a dent.
by jcranmer | 2025-11-03 14:56:30+00:00
It's really hard to read this comment as anything other than "don't worry about the genocidal policy of the US with regards to the natives, for they were a violent people."

Indeed, it's actually an example of problem I lamented: the disinterest in covering Native American history post-founding of the US. The last of major conflicts between different Native American tribes took place around the 1850s, the lingering effects of the Lakota being pushed onto the Plains [1]. From that point on, all of the main conflicts are between the US and the various Native American tribes for a variety of reasons, although mainly "the US wants your land and isn't going to take 'no' for an answer."

[1] If you want to analyze the broader historical context, you of course have to ask "why did the Lakota move onto the Plains?" and following that thread of logic leads you to the first cause being "the English settled on the eastern coast."
by dralley | 2025-11-03 14:56:30+00:00
You're conflating two different things. The purpose of rewriting it is not to change the license. The purpose of rewriting it is to provide a modernized alternative with some benefits from the choice of language -- and the choice of license is incidental.

Kinda like how the purpose of creating LLVM was to create a more extensible compiler framework, not to create a permissively licensed compiler. As it happens the license of LLVM has not really led to the proprietary hellscape that some people suggested it would, and in any case the technical benefits vastly outweigh the drawbacks. Companies like Apple that do have proprietary compilers based on LLVM are difficult to describe as "freeloaders" in practice because they contribute so much back to the project.
by bpodgursky | 2025-11-03 14:56:42+00:00
Türkiye is a highly effective arms manufacturer and is pretty aligned with NATO most of the time. They've been one of the more surprisingly strong supporters of Ukraine. They shot down a Russian jet a few years ago just to emphasize FAFO.

Yes they have their specific regional interests they will emphasize even when they offend NATO sensibilities, like giving Armenia the finger in their war with Azerbaijan, but that is not a major cost compared to what they give the US and EU strategically.
by TulioKBR | 2025-11-03 14:56:44+00:00
Exactly. Thank you for understanding that—the distinction is important.

I'm Brazilian, English isn't my native language. And honestly, I'm still learning how to interact properly on HN.

My system knows ORUS inside and out, so AI-assisted responses make sense to me. But you're right: the problem is the effort.

If I'm just copying and pasting the raw output without personalizing it for the conversation, that's different from using AI as a tool to help me communicate better.

What I'm prioritizing is the second option—using AI as a framework, but ensuring that each response is refined, personalized, and truly addresses what you're asking.

Not just unfiltered automated responses.

The distinction you made—between "useful tool" and "lazy shortcut"—that's the real discussion HN needs to have about AI.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-03 14:56:58+00:00
Eventually you run out of IDs, and as a Sybil attack you're gonna get slowed down.

(remote identity proofing and fraud mitigation is a component of my work in finance)

https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3-Implementation-Resources/63A...

https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3-Implementation-Resources/63A...
by bArray | 2025-11-03 14:57:12+00:00
Same here [1], I chose MathML as it worked out of the box in some browsers at the time. For browsers not supporting MathML I also have this ~80kB (~12kB compressed) library for converting it [2]. I tested your equation:

\def\d{\mathrm{d}} \oint_C \vec{B}\circ \d\vec{l} = \mu_0 \left( I_{\text{enc}} + \varepsilon_0 \frac{\d}{\d t} \int_S {\vec{E} \circ \hat{n}}\; \d a \right)

It could not do the definition, so it ended up being:

$$\oint_C \vec{B}\circ \mathrm{d}\vec{l} = \mu_0 \left( I_{\text{enc}} + \varepsilon_0 \frac{\mathrm{d}}{\mathrm{d} t} \int_S {\vec{E} \circ \hat{n}}\; \mathrm{d} a \right)$$

I did previously also load the LaTeX equation font, but I decided it used a lot of resource for little gain in the end.

I was also looking at your recent blog [3], and one thing that I like about mine is that the code you see is what is run to produce the output [4]. I am in the middle of making the code interactive too, so that you can re-compile it within the web page and run different parameters to produce different outputs.

[1] https://coffeespace.org.uk/projects/mathml-render.html

[2] https://github.com/pshihn/math-ml

[3] https://sathomas.me/blog/robuststats/

[4] https://coffeespace.org.uk/projects/wavefront-algorithm.html
by rchaud | 2025-11-03 14:57:27+00:00
Meta has $43 billion in cash and cash equivalents as of December 2024 [0]. What is the reason for not using part of those reserves, and issuing debt instead, costing them hundreds of millions in fees to investment banks and bondholders?

Also, if they are issuing bonds to the public, does that mean that private lenders aren't lending any more?

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/META/balance-sheet/
by Ray20 | 2025-11-03 14:57:28+00:00
You sound like an out-of-touch elitist. Do you really not understand all this? Just out of curiosity, what do you and your parents do for a living?

> why not lower the average work week hours accordingly?

Because workers can get more money this way.

> this could be translated back to lowering the average work load of workers.

Yeah, but workers want more money, not a lower load.

> it just means that there is enough money to be earned

More money means more agents trying to earn them, which means more competition, which mean less profit.
by roryirvine | 2025-11-03 14:57:46+00:00
The hidden cost there is that the risk of complying with the legislation remained entirely with you. Even the best specialist research LLM still might easily have hallucinated or made some other sort of error which resulted in it giving you confusing or incorrect advice - and you would have been the one held liable for following it.

Whereas with real legal advice, your lawyer will carry Professional Indemnity Insurance which will cover any costs incurred if they make a mistake when advising you.

As you say, it's a reasonable trade-off for you to have made when the alternative was sifting through the legislation in your own spare time. But it's not actually worth very much, and you might just as well have used a general model to carry out the same task and the outcome would likely have been much the same.

So it's not particularly clear that the benefits of these niche-specific models or specialised fine-tunes are worth the additional costs.

(Caveat: things might change in the future, especially if advancements in the general models really are beginning to plateau.)
by liampulles | 2025-11-03 14:57:51+00:00
I'm a senior South African software developer (let my add my perspective here).

In terms of hours worked per week, I have rarely worked more than 40 hours per week (and I mean by that that I'm contracted for 40 hours and rarely work overtime). I know people who work more than that, and sometimes much more than that, which is a function of their skills and what kind of job they can secure (as well as their appetite for overtime), but I'd say my situation is fairly normal for people with ze skills. I also worked at a company which did 32 hour work weeks (which they did as a perk to retain people, not because they were forced to).

Software dev skills are quite scarce here, and South African devs are already cheap enough that it is difficult to try and offshore that work (although I know a few SA companies which have contracted companies in India for work). I also know many SA devs who have emmigrated to other countries which themselves have scarce software developers, but where the salaries and "standard of living" is perhaps better.
by chaostheory | 2025-11-03 14:58:03+00:00
Sure, but what people leave out is that it’s mostly C and assembly. That just isn’t realistic anymore if you want a better developer experience that leads to faster feature rollout, better security, and better stabilty.

This is like when people reminisce about the performance of windows 95 and its apps while forgetting about getting a blue screen of death every other hour.
by piltdownman | 2025-11-03 14:58:15+00:00
The problem is farming seafood in its contemporary best-practice manner which is focused on output rather than maintaining a sustainable ecology.

All other issues - be it wild-caught marine-animal ingredients being eroded as a finite input, or simply killing off all-around it due to the increased prevalence of sea lice and industrial activity - are a product of the practices, not the concept.

The problem is exacerbated in a grotesque feedback loop as well as the sea lice can transfer from farms and reduce the health and survival of wild salmon and trout in particular - leading to chemical treatments and other practices which result in everything from algae bloom to facilitating invasive species to straight-forward pollution.
by righthand | 2025-11-03 14:58:49+00:00
It’s kind of nuts this even has to be explained. I had a coworker I’ve been trying to teach good application design and React state is the first “crap bucket” he always reaches for. I had to explain to him, “when we put values in the Url we don’t need to use state, because everything is already stored right?” “Uhhh sure fine go ahead and change it.”

But what bugs me about it is that this isn’t even that novel or intelligent of a realization. If you’ve used a web browser you’ve seen the url change. Connecting that with putting values in the url shouldn’t be such a huge leap. This was for a simple search page.

How do I stop this sort of brain dead unrealized thinking?
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-11-03 14:59:03+00:00
But how do you know an input is adversarial? There are other issues: verdicts are arbitrary, the false positive rate means you'd need manual review of all the rejects (unless you wanted to reject something like 5% of genuine research), you need the appeals process to exist and you can't automate that, so bad actors can still flood your bureaucracy even if you do implement an automated review process…
by kokau | 2025-11-03 14:59:08+00:00
Hi HN, I’m a solo founder building Brandolia, an AI tool that creates a complete brand identity in minutes.

Instead of only generating a logo, it builds the entire branding system:

Logo

Color palette

Typography

Slogan & brand messaging

Social media kit

New: AI-generated landing pages

New: AI business cards

I built this because early-stage founders and indie makers often spend days/weeks creating a brand or pay high agency fees — and many never launch because of it.

Pricing: $12.99/month Current traction: 2,000+ users, 50 paying

Would love feedback from the HN community, especially on UX, positioning, and whether a tool like this fits real startup workflows.

Link: https://brandolia.io

Happy to answer questions and share the technical stack if useful.
by dylan604 | 2025-11-03 15:00:04+00:00
> When using AI, you become a software engineer.

No. You do not. It may make you a developer, at best. I don't even call my self a software engineer, because I'm not. I'm a self taught coder that has spent 25+ years gaining experience, but I've never graduated from a school with any kind on engineering degree. I started CSE way back in the 90s, but stopped because life got in the way.

Maybe you're joking, but you just know people actually feel this way. They have no idea the difference of a coder and an SWE, and flippant comments don't help
by 6510 | 2025-11-03 15:00:35+00:00
If you look at the revenue, number of employees and cost of living in the area it isn't so hard to calculate a sensible salary.

The weird thing in the west are these MBA types who feel they must force down labor cost even if it makes no difference for the company. I've seen lots of truly absurd examples of it. My favorite are the giant factories full of state of the art machinery and near perfect automation. 90+% of the employees are gone but the business logic still instructs to squeeze them. Like trying to squeeze wine from rocks.

If LLM's live up to optimistic speculation you can "soon" have a single employee run a large complicated software project with a low bus factor. Someone somewhere will think it is their job to make sure the dev costs the absolute minimum and works day and night. To spend $100 to squeeze $1 extra out of them is a job well done.
by saghm | 2025-11-03 15:00:39+00:00
It's funny, almost every conversation I have about the fact that I work as a software engineer with new people I meet nowadays seems to include them asking if I'm worried about AI stealing my job. Maybe it's something that people ask everyone nowadays regardless of what industry they work in, but at least as far as I can tell, the type of work I do doesn't seem in any apparent danger of being replaced by AI any time soon.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-03 15:01:10+00:00
I'm sure that's part of it, which is why it's nice to see Hugging Face sharing this, but still it obviously reflects the reality that large LLMs are difficult to train for whatever reasons (maybe more than just gradient issues - I haven't read that HF doc yet).

For simpler nets, like ResNet, it may just be that modern initialization and training recipes avoid most gradient issues, even though they are otherwise potentially still there.
by pmarreck | 2025-11-03 15:01:44+00:00
Yeah, Apple has been its own worst enemy here. Neither Jobs nor Cook are interested in gaming, so backwards compatibility for games was never a priority.

Linux has always cared about both software preservation and gaming, so it deserves to be the long-term "home" of gaming IMHO, as hacky as it is.

I just wish there was something, anything that could compete with Apple Silicon though :/
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-11-03 15:02:07+00:00
>allegedly beaten and stabbed in the rectum with a sharp object

the fact that no one is willing to call this what it is, which is sexual assault of a detainee, shows me how much I can trust the result of this process

Edit: any of the downvotes are welcome to explain how putting a knife up someone's ass isn't sexual assault. But you won't, because you're all cowards and bots.
by lukan | 2025-11-03 15:02:08+00:00
"when they offend NATO sensibilities, like giving Armenia the finger in their war"

Or when they support islamists in Syria against the kurds and annect illegally parts of it. Who cares about those things nowdays anyway.

But if we want NATO to not just be a military force, but something something freedom and human rights, maybe we should care more about it.
by 8cvor6j844qw_d6 | 2025-11-03 15:02:21+00:00
I noticed Windows's start menu only updates certain tracked files (e.g., remove deleted files) on a normal shutdown + start, and not on a restart.

Which is odd because I was under the impression a restart is the only "true" shutdown due to fastboot behavior.

I didn't look too much into it and chalked it up to a quirk of Windows start menu behavior in tracking recent files.
by StableAlkyne | 2025-11-03 15:02:27+00:00
Probably because just easier to catch a predatory fish than a land predator

Throw a line in the pond, whatever bites will bite. Clean it and you've got dinner.

Versus with hunting, historically (and even now) if you miss your shot or don't hit a part that immediately takes it down, now you've got an angry wolf/bear/moose bearing down on you. Wolf is also probably too close to dog for most cultures.

Nowadays you can get meat from bear/moose/whatever, but there isn't much of a culinary tradition associated with them. So the only people out for them are the curious or macho types
by bArray | 2025-11-03 15:02:38+00:00
> Just compare comparable products.

> So yaaay compare it with source hut ...

I'm not saying that sourcehut is the same in any way, but I want the difference between GitHub and sourcehut to be the difference between NextCloud and alternative.

> Nextcloud is an old product that inherit from Owncloud developed in php since 2010.

Tough situation to be in, I don't envy it.

> It has extensibility at its core through the thousands of extensions available.

Sure, but I think for some limited use cases, something better could be imagined.
by apwheele | 2025-11-03 15:02:39+00:00
This is very obnoxious when transferring documents from Gemini to google docs (and not just math, tables/code sections are often not transferred correctly as well).

I have a javascript hack from the dev console where I can at least print the chat to PDF, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2025/08/28/deep-research-and-open... (that at least worked 2 months ago)
by jillesvangurp | 2025-11-03 15:02:53+00:00
I've been getting lots of value out of AI coding tools; especially in the last few months. My assessment is that this will lead to more work to do, not less. It's not a zero sum game. More of what I do is baby sitting AIs. But together we do more than me with my team before. It will reflect in my hiring decisions as well. I want people that can do this responsibly (are able to tell good from bad code, are able to think for themselves, are able to get stuff done).

My observation so far is that micromanaging AIs still sucks
by freefaler | 2025-11-03 15:02:58+00:00
Wow, that's a lot. Our local installation zero cache request (to not suffer their slooooow cloud):

82 / 86 requests 1,694 kB / 1,754 kB transferred 6,220 kB / 6,281 kB resources Finish: 11.73 s DOMContentLoaded: 1.07 s Load: 1.26 s