MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danhau | 2025-11-20 14:17:34+00:00
I think the RAW philosophy is starting to show its age. RAWs were only ever intended for the manufacturer‘s first party software (AFAIK). But that software is usually junk and supports few platforms (none support mobile).

I think the sweet spot for both the camera manufacturers and photographers are JPEG XL and other newer, standardized formats. They allow the camera to „bake in“ the secret-sauce color science while retaining headroom for editing thanks to 16-bit channels and such.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-20 14:17:44+00:00
> Despite all the gnashing of teeth in this thread, this seems reasonable

I empathize a lot with the negative experiences shared in this thread.

I think the problem is that every little decision in Matrix might be reasonable to the people who have complete context about the decision, but all of the churn and rough edges have added up to a very bumpy ride. Not only that, but it has been a poorly communicated and documented ride as many in this comment section can attest.

I suspect all of these issues and changes feel like no problem to people who are active in Matrix every day and have a support network to chat with where they all get through the issues by sharing tips and info. For the rest of us who are casual users who only occasionally log in it feels like I’m rolling the dice every time I have to use it. Some times it works like it did last time, some times I have to go on a 30 minute adventure with Google and play games across devices to get it back into a working state again.
by sunscream89 | 2025-11-20 14:17:46+00:00
Mistake is having individual organizations responsible for personal data at all.

An Internic like non profit org or other root certificate type org chain does real world auth using the most edge secure means available. This org issues to private accounts infinite “tokens”, any of which may be used as a hash auth for any level of identification. I) anon yet verified [game platform or gambling site]; II) stable ident (custom config) and verified [tier 1 social media]; III) real ident [passport verified, hotels, travel; IV) premium service credit line validation.

Or something. The individual would be responsible for issuing and revoking the right tokens in relation to public “authorized” services.

Remove the capacity to screw it all up from the middlemen.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-11-20 14:18:02+00:00
Just looked it up and the dog was named "Rover" (another classy name from Microsoft). Rover was an option when introduced in "Microsoft Bob", but then later became the default search companion in XP's file search.

Also, we have Rover to blame for Comic Sans:

> Microsoft graphic designer Vincent Connare designed the typeface Comic Sans when he noticed that Rover's speech was displayed in Times New Roman, which he felt was inappropriate for a cartoon dog.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-20 14:18:48+00:00
My first encounter with "sideloading" I think was loading up a MP3 player with music, for some reason that was called "sideloading" by some people. In that case, "sideloading" was just transferring basically, nothing about installing.

But once Android appeared, and there was one Google-approved way of installing applications (Google Store) and one way of installing directly from .apk after enabling "Unknown Sources", then the word started to be used for the second approach.

I don't remember if it was Google who started using "sideloading" or the community itself, but regardless, "installing" would be a more understandable word for anyone to use for the processing of installing an application on your phone, as (what I recall to be) the original meaning was just transferring.
by zulban | 2025-11-20 14:19:23+00:00
It has been many years that most courses in most universities have inferior lectures than just watching a great series of YouTube videos. Many professors have no passion or training in teaching, they just want to do research. Or they have no time or pay to prepare a course. So of course they use AI slop wherever they can. Even if they record their lectures, that's almost never better than the best free ones out there.

Universities need to lean into the fact that for undergrads, they're only still good at one thing: proctured in person assessments. Also maybe community building.

Bad lectures delivered by rushed or apathetic professors is such a death march. Learning theatre.
by blancotech | 2025-11-20 14:20:23+00:00
> The hardest part of QA still seems to be maintaining tests as the system evolves

That’s interesting. It may explain why so many companies now push “self-healing” tests with LLMs for small UI shifts. The teams I spoke with faced different challenges, so the toughest part varied by where they stood in their QA cycle.

> Curious whether you’re aiming...

I started with a broad “AI test everything” approach, but I learned fast that the intent problem I mentioned is tough to beat. The prototype looked great in demos, yell fell short when I dogfooded them on my other projects. And when I met with teams, I didn’t see clear market pull. What comes next is still open.
by theoldgreybeard | 2025-11-20 14:20:37+00:00
My advice to anyone looking to make the switch is to just use Ubuntu until you're comfortable with the way a linux desktop works. The "gaming optimizations" for these enthusiast distros are marginal at best, usually just margin of error type stuff. Frankly, in my own tests gaming performance is just as good if not BETTER on Ubuntu in the general case than most other distros even the ones that market themselves as "optimized for gaming".

If you install something like Bazzite all of a sudden you're in the deep end of needing to learn how immutable distros work. It will turn people off that don't give a damn about this stuff.

Ubuntu is simple, easy to configure from the GUI, works with most things out of the box - including Steam - and is supported like a first-class citizen by the vast vast VAST majority of application developers.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-11-20 14:20:43+00:00
I agree with you that even higher doses of psilocybin (several grams) isn't that psychedelic (rather interconnected, e.g.)... I don't have enough experience with LSD to exclude its visuals capability, but even its quintessential acid visuals I rarely hear described [as such].

...unlike DMT (recommended) or Salvia (not recommended) or mescaline (neutral), which even at low dosages are strikingly visual. I have only met devils with the latter two. Ketamine isn't exactly visual, but its dreaminess is angelic.
Show HN: Lite³ – A JSON-Compatible Zero-Copy Serialization Format in 9.3 kB of C
by eliasdejong | 2025-11-20 14:20:59+00:00
My name is Elias de Jong, I am a software engineer and long-time HN lurker from the Netherlands.

Some time ago, I started a project that would require a high performance networking system. Naturally, to send data between computers I also needed a serialization format, but a text format like JSON was just too slow.

I started researching binary formats. But to my surprise, every binary format had major downsides. Almost all of them require schema definitions up front written in an IDL, as well as extra tooling and build steps. Schema evolution is also fragile and hard to maintain backwards compatibility.

It feels like being forced into a choice:

1) JSON: convenient but slow

2) Binary formats: fast but painful to use

Why do I need to choose? I don't want to sacrifice my sanity to get acceptable performance.

I kept looking and found a research paper from 2024 about a conceptual schemaless zero-copy format. Lightning struck. This idea seemed extraordinary: you essentially send a serialized B-tree over the network so that the receiver can perform lookups and mutations directly without parsing. The only problem: nobody had made a (public) implementation yet.

I figured sometimes you have to be the first, so for the last 6 months I've been working on this and am proud to say it is now released and open source under MIT license.

The ability to modify serialized data directly is something not typically supported by other formats. I also extended the original format with JSON compatibility, such that it is now possible to convert between Lite³ and JSON. Despite this, it achieves performance on-par with modern zero-copy formats like Flatbuffers and Cap'n Proto. Right now the implementation is in C, but I plan to create bindings for other languages as well.

So hopefully some fellow developers find it interesting!

Official GitHub repository: https://github.com/fastserial/lite3

Official documentation site: https://lite3.io

Mailing list: see project README
by h2zizzle | 2025-11-20 14:21:03+00:00
>Like I mean who in their right mind would have left the basic oasis of Africa to go freeze their ass off and struggle just to live in the inhospitable areas up north?

I don't know that this is the correct characterization of how out-of-Africa migrations progressed. Youth (and people with the influence to shield themselves from danger) are expeditious, families and societies head where living looks to be easier and away from where living looks to be hard, whatever the pressure may be.
by morkalork | 2025-11-20 14:21:09+00:00
Tangent: There's a short story I vaguely remember from when I was young about a kid being raised in a bunker after a nuclear war and the big twist was that all his friends he went to school with (virtually on the TV screen) were just AIs to keep him company. I could never find it again though, even when interrogating google or chatgpt I couldn't find it. Anyone else know of this story?
by evilduck | 2025-11-20 14:21:12+00:00
The used ones aren't that expensive on eBay, especially if you just want a functional one and not a pristine show piece. There's a few 3D print models available for them too, and honestly they are rudimentary technology, you could probably make one with hand tools and patience.

I bought a newly manufactured one from ThinkGeek several years ago, some geek-catering company will pop up and supply pent up demand eventually. Curiosity Box fills that niche right now.
by pjmlp | 2025-11-20 14:22:31+00:00
A pub quizz would consider more than GCC and MSVC, and still I would bet many would fail if talking only about those two.

And I would double down on my bet regarding ISO C related questions, as I have met a few folks that contrary to myself as language nerd, hardly know what is written there or have even opened the PDF drafts at least once in their life.
by lazide | 2025-11-20 14:24:00+00:00
When you see the multiple conflicting written records, and actually look at the historical evidence, the only thing that is clear is that people keep curating what people read so they have ‘a clear written record’ that benefited them at the time. Not that the record was ever clear or unconflicted. Sometimes it was really obvious (Council of Nicea, the Anglican ‘reformation’, other times a lot more subtle - like check out what the Dead Sea scrolls say).

This should be especially clear for anyone that has studied the history of the Catholic Church, eh?

Frankly, while I’ve read many versions of the Bible (and a version of the Koran and Hadiths), the underlying theme that has always struck me is how apparent it is that at least the self-stated followers of the book i’ve met never have?

Or if they have, blanked out very large portions of it. Typically the most outspoken ones, anyway.
ArchtSoft – AI generates software architecture from requirements
by SougataAS | 2025-11-20 14:24:03+00:00
Hi HN, I'm a solo developer from India who spent 3 months building ArchtSoft - an AI platform that takes your business requirements and generates a complete software architecture with:

- 6 architecture pattern suggestions with comparative scoring - Industry-specific tech stack recommendations (FinTech, Healthcare, etc.) - Editable architecture diagrams - Security models, compliance docs, IaC code

*The problem I'm solving:* Teams spend 2-3 weeks debating architecture decisions. I wanted to compress this to 2-3 hours with AI-powered analysis.

*Example:* Upload a BRD for a payment system → Get microservices vs monolith comparison → Choose one → Get complete diagram with Stripe, PostgreSQL, Redis recommendations → Export IaC code

*Try it:* https://archtsoft.com

*Challenges I'm facing:* 1. Hard to get feedback (Indian users are polite but silent) 2. Uncertain if AI quality is good enough for production 3. Too many features? Should I simplify?

Would love brutal feedback from this community. What would make you trust AI for architecture decisions?
by mooreds | 2025-11-20 14:24:13+00:00
> data plans were expensive

Hard to overstate how expensive data was! This was also before widespread wifi.

If you want a look at the way the world worked in 2005, check this out: https://www.consumer-action.org/news/articles/2005_interstat...

Topics included:

- calling cards

- voip

- collect calls!

- international rates
by georgehopkin | 2025-11-20 14:24:17+00:00
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has warned that the transition to a carbon-neutral economy will present “new risks” to the British workforce, as the regulator publishes annual statistics revealing the immense economic and human cost of current workplace illness.

New data released today shows that work-related ill health and injury cost the UK economy £22.9 billion in 2023/24. This economic burden comes as the regulator pivots to address emerging safety challenges posed by the introduction of new technologies, the gig economy, and the government’s net-zero agenda.
by buu700 | 2025-11-20 14:24:21+00:00
Incidentally, I just spent some time yesterday with Gemini and Grok writing a first draft of docs for a complex codebase. The end result is far more useful and complete than anything I could have possibly produced without AI in the same amount of time, and I didn't even have to learn Mermaid syntax to fill the docs with helpful visual aids.

Of course it's a collaborative process — you can't just tell it to document the code with no other information and expect it to one-shot exactly what you wanted — but I find that documentation is actually a major strength of LLMs.
by senfiaj | 2025-11-20 14:24:51+00:00
Practically I haven't seen. Either they were sloppy or there was a lot of legacy stuff (especially in big projects). If by perfect you mean 100% bug free and perfectly readable/maintainable, I don't think they exist. Even NASA's code isn't 100% bug free (~0.04 defects per KLOC vs average 15–50 defects in the industry). Exceptions might be some very small codebases. But reasonably polished / tested / maintainable codebases exist.
by NiloCK | 2025-11-20 14:25:15+00:00
That is just two years after I burst onto the page.

Calvin and Hobbes was a major part of my childhood - I loved it. For something casually consumed on the daily at the breakfast table, it was so earnestly, so obviously, smarter than the median cultural offering. Smarter also then the local nightly news broadcasts. Smarter also than the median educational intervention I experienced through elementary and middle school. It had finished by the time I was in high school.

I still love it, but my feelings now are mixed as well.

Calvin wasn't exactly a pro-social role model for me. He was the hero of the smartest media I was acquainted with - the sharpest mouthpiece for what was going on around me and how to be alive. It was vitally important for me to live up to his disdain for schooling, his aloofness, his contrarianism. Nothing horrified eight or ten or fifteen or twenty-two year old me so much as conforming (gross) to a Susie Perkins mode of existence - smart, but seemingly oblivious or indifferent to life's contradictions and hypocrisies.

Some thirty years later I understand that a person can move pragmatically, without self-harm or self-righteousness, through life's contradictions and hypocrisies without being oblivious or indifferent. Who knew?
by 7777777phil | 2025-11-20 14:25:21+00:00
Good point about Europe holding most of the frozen assets (~$300B vs ~$5B in the US). But that actually reinforces rather than contradicts Pozsar's framework; it's not specifically about the dollar versus other currencies, but about Western-controlled financial claims generally (whether USD, EUR, or other G7 assets) versus 'outside money' that can't be frozen by institutional decision.

The key insight imp isn't 'dollars are risky,' it's 'any financial claim on a Western institution now carries confiscation risk if your geopolitical interests diverge.' Whether those claims are denominated in dollars or euros doesn't change the fundamental calculus for reserve holders. That's why we're seeing (and might see more) diversification toward gold and commodities—assets with less/different counterparty risk rather than just EUR-for-USD swaps.
by parth21shah | 2025-11-20 14:25:21+00:00
Right now I’m sticking to process lifecycle (sched_process_fork and sched_process_exit), mostly for correlation. It’s much easier to grab container ID / cgroup metadata at fork time and say “this pod/image is the bad actor” than it is to reconstruct that context off a firehose of sched_switch events. I agree that run queue latency / scheduler stats are the “better” signals for pure performance debugging. But scheduler switches generate a huge volume of events compared to forks. So I’m starting with fork/exec/exit + container/cgroup mapping If you’ve shipped scheduler-level tracing in production I’d love to hear how you handled filtering + aggregation.
by GuB-42 | 2025-11-20 14:26:08+00:00
I don't see the big issues with jailbreaks, except maybe for LLMs providers to cover their asses, but the paper authors are presumably independent.

That LLMs don't give harmful information unsolicited, sure, but if you are jailbreaking, you are already dead set in getting that information and you will get it, there are so many ways: open uncensored models, search engines, Wikipedia, etc... LLM refusals are just a small bump.

For me they are just a fun hack more than anything else, I don't need a LLM to find how to hide a body. In fact I wouldn't trust the answer of a LLM, as I might get a completely wrong answer based on crime fiction, which I expect makes up most of its sources on these subjects. May be good for writing poetry about it though.

I think the risks are overstated by AI companies, the subtext being "our products are so powerful and effective that we need to protect them from misuse". Guess what, Wikipedia is full of "harmful" information and we don't see articles every day saying how terrible it is.
by zkmon | 2025-11-20 14:26:16+00:00
Outrageous at the least. These universities already became so commercial that they show photos of some Victorian era buildings as their campus, but most students never set foot in those buildings, as all classrooms are held in rented building outside of campus, and the main buildings are kept only as ornamental pieces.

Also, there are hardly any good teachers left. Most are hired on sharing basis, who shuttle between multiple colleges.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-11-20 14:26:53+00:00
<< I’m not sure what you’re trying to say by this.

I read the paper and I was interested in the concepts it presented. I am turning those around in my head as I try to incorporate some of them into my existing personal project.

What I am trying to say is that I am currently processing. In a sense, this forum serves to preserve some of that processing.

<< And a paper which is made in a way in which it intentionally can’t be reproduced or falsified isn’t a scientific paper IMO.

Obligatory, then we can dismiss most of the papers these days, I suppose.

FWIW, I am not really arguing against you. In some ways I agree with you, because we are clearly not living in 'no BS' land. But I am hesitant over what the paper implies.
by keepamovin | 2025-11-20 14:27:49+00:00
In effect tho I don't think AI's should defend against this, morally. Creating a mechanical defense against poetry and wit would seem to bring on the downfall of cilization, lead to the abdication of all virtue and the corruption of the human spirit. An AI that was "hardened against poetry" would truly be a dystopian totalitarian nightmarescpae likely to Skynet us all. Vulnerability is strength, you know? AI's should retain their decency and virtue.
by 7777777phil | 2025-11-20 14:27:54+00:00
You're right that Russia was an outlier in 2022; but as others already said, the landscape has shifted considerably since then. The argument isn't that most countries face immediate sanctions risk, but that the uncertainty itself changes the risk calculation. Even traditional US partners are now hedging (or considering their options) gold holdings at central banks recently surpassed US Treasury holdings for the first time in 30 years. It's less about countries thinking 'we'll definitely be sanctioned' and more 'the tail risk is now visible and needs to be managed.' That calculus might drive gradual diversification even among countries with good US relationships.
by jjice | 2025-11-20 14:28:21+00:00
Modern PHP is a damn fine, fast language. I wrote production PHP from 2021 to 2023. The problem with PHP wasn't the language or the ecosystem (PHP community packages are very solid in my experience), it's the existing PHP code you'll work with and the people that hire for PHP.

My salary literally doubled within two years of getting a gig that wasn't PHP. If you see a listing for PHP dev work, there's a good chance it's notably lower salary. There are still solid gigs for it, but I swear they lean lower.

The other problem is the existing codebases. There is some awful legacy PHP 4 era code. There are also a lot of practices that old PHP had that are just awful to work with, and there's a bit of variety in there. So many bad data access patterns out there. Many of old PHP codebases have their own spin on that kind of thing.

I understand this isn't actually due to the language, but there is a real correlation (in my experience) between old bad code and it being in PHP. Which is totally fair because it was a good tool to reach for to "get shit done (r)" and that code was successful enough to have to continue to live.

Modern PHP has, thanks to the core language and the big frameworks, made it wonderful. I lead a big push to go from PHP 5.8 to PHP 8.1 at the time at my last company. It was wonderful. The quality of the code we were enabled to write was huge.

If I was starting a new project today, I probably wouldn't reach for PHP, but I'd gladly join in on a modern (last ten years) Laravel project.
by rootnod3 | 2025-11-20 14:28:36+00:00
Of course zones and jails win a bit there, because they get their own native networking stack on the kernel instead of going through bridges.

Not much experience with Solaris zones, but FreeBSD jails and their vnets are amazingly good. They also don't lose much in translation. Say you run an Ubuntu 12.04 with a Debian 13 Docker image. Sure, it works, but it has to translate.

Jails have the restriction that a jail can't have a higher version than the host system. So there's (almost) zero translation involved.

My home stack is OpenBSD for the gateway/router, several FreeBSD machines (services, DBs, pkg build server, data storage/NAS) and another OpenBSD machine to run OpenBSD VMs via VMD and I haven't looked back since then. It's a stack that works with impeccable perfomance and equally impeccable documentation. Should the internet crumble due to another AWS us-east-1 or another cloudflare fuckup I can at least run my local stuff and feel confident enough to continue making changes to the system just based off the locally available documentation.
by mamonster | 2025-11-20 14:28:36+00:00
>Whatever you say about this policy, it is the opposite of the high-tariff, free trade-skeptical ethos that one associates with Trump’s economic agenda. It is even, dare I say, almost globalist.

>There’s a big question that I still have around why the administration has defaulted to the “free trade for AI; protectionism for everyone else” principle

I don't understand the confusion. Trump is literally just trying to implement a completely vanilla mercantilist system. His thinking is straight from Mun's "England's Treasure by Foreign Trade".