MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rbanffy | 2025-11-12 14:24:01+00:00
> Why does the successor to the terminal need to be text oriented at all?

Terminals are not "text oriented". They are based on a bidirectional stream of tokens - that can be interpreted as text, or anything else.

That simplicity allows for Unix-style composition. If you make the output something different, then the receiving program will need to be able to parse it. The Amiga OS had some interesting ideas with different data types as system extensions - you'd receive "an image" instead of a JPEG file and you could ask the system to parse it for you. In any case, that's still forcing the receiving program to know what it's receiving.

One way to add some level of complexity is to add JSON output to programs. Then you can push them trough `jq` instead of `grep`, `sed`, or `awk`. Or push it through another tool to make a nice table.

> it’s all legacy invented for a world that is no longer relevant.

I hear that since the Lisa was introduced. Character streams are a pretty common thing today. They are also very useful thanks to their simplicity. Much like Unix, it's an example of the "worse is better" principle. It's simpler, dumber, and, because of that, its uses have evolved over decades with almost no change to the underlying plumbing required - the same tools that worked over serial lines, then multiplexed X.25 channels, then telnet, now work under SSH streams. Apps on both sides only need to know about the token stream.
by bluGill | 2025-11-12 14:24:10+00:00
Industry standards were done back then because customers demanded it. When a large customer (big company or government) says that you have to support a standard you support it, and if you don't like it you make the standard better. Even then everyone wanted their own version that wasn't standard because nobody wants you to be able to buy from competition. In turn, sometimes competition reversed engineered you - suddenly you realized you couldn't upgrade anymore unless you were compatible with the competition because customers were expecting compatibility with someone who only partially understands what you did: a few standards were written just so they could explain why this field that was always zero was going to change to a 1 with the next upgrade.
by jasode | 2025-11-12 14:24:11+00:00
>I don't understand why most people don't just torrent? [...] It's actually more convenient than streaming services.

I think your technical sophistication means you're somewhat out-of-touch with what "most" people do.

Most normal people watch Netflix/HBO/etc on smartphones/tablets, or stream devices like Amazon Fire Stick, Google Chromecast puck, Apple TV cube, or the "smart tv app" built-in with their Samsung or LG tv. All of those "mainstream devices used by most" don't make it easy to access torrenting sites or files. Sure, one could hypothetically sideload a torrenting app on a Google Chromecast but now you're beyond the demographic of "most people" because you have extra complexity of also adding some USB storage to save the torrent or point to a local network share.

The type of situations that makes "torrenting more convenient" are people watching everything on a laptop or have a dedicated HTPC media server hooked up to their tv.

I'm technically savvy and it was not easy to sideload Kodi player onto Amazon Fire Stick to legitimately play DVD ISOs. It required a lot of google searches to finally figure it out. (E.g. after realizing VLC app for Fire Stick doesn't work, and then finally stumbling across a "developer setting", and then getting the SMB network path correct, and so on...) Thinking that most people could just torrent is being unrealistic.
by constantcrying | 2025-11-12 14:25:13+00:00
>It is not made from quality materials ( Nylon (14%), Polyester (85%), Polyurethane (1%))

Polyamids like Nylon are some of the highest quality and most durable fabrics in the world, with some of the best material characteristics fabrics can have.

Given the constraints of the product and looking at it from an engineering standpoint, these are the materials you want for a product like this. Flexible, durable and resistant to weather. I do not see what other materials you would use to achieve a better quality product.

That said, it is of course a stupid fashion accessories. The world is full of them.
by FormFollowsFunc | 2025-11-12 14:25:27+00:00
I agree it’s very difficult to debug them. I sometimes rewrite my shaders in Vex and debug them in that. It’s a shader language that runs on the CPU in Houdini. You can output a value at each pixel which is useful for values outside the range of 0 to 1 or you can use printf(). I’m still looking for something that will transpile shaders into JavaScript.
by rsynnott | 2025-11-12 14:25:30+00:00
I'm quite surprised that they went for what looks like a high-speed catamaran, as these are historically fairly energy-expensive. They used to be commonly used for the Ireland-Britain routes, say, but were largely withdrawn as fuel got expensive; they just got too expensive to operate vs conventional craft.

EDIT: Ah. It looks like it actually won't be very high speed in normal operation; 25 knots.
by re-thc | 2025-11-12 14:25:31+00:00
> the argument can be made that Deepseek is a state sponsored needle looking to pop another states bubble

Who says they don't make money? Same with open source software that offer a hosted version.

> If Deepseek is free it undermines the value of LLMs, so the value of these US companies is mainly speculation/FOMO over AGI

Freemium, open source and other models all exist. Does it undermine the value of e.g. Salesforce?
by yoz-y | 2025-11-12 14:25:45+00:00
> Constant internet connection permitted that.

On a technical level yes. But unless you are selling expensive hardware widgets it can be hard to justify constant upkeep cost of servers without a recurring revenue.

That said I too lived through hosting on premises web services that we later pushed to cloud due to the hassle of maintenance. Self hosting is great when you have a dedicated team to keep it running.
by jdelman | 2025-11-12 14:26:10+00:00
> I had never even heard of an uncut developed roll of film before

That's how film is developed. Someone at a lab has to cut it.

> who is honestly shooting that much 135 film

How about a film lab? A place where "uncut developed film" is extremely common.

>it's worth 1600 Euros to buy a faster scanner for it

Price is 999 euro.

> pros who still shoot film would use a larger format

Some do, some don't. It depends on the project. I'm a little surprised by your comment looking at your history. You say you're a retired professional photographer and you've never heard of "uncut developed film" before? If you're retired in 2025, you must have been working when all photography was on film. You never developed a roll of film before?
by andrewla | 2025-11-12 14:26:22+00:00
> Of course

This is what I was taught once upon a time -- that scientists acknowledged she could sign "food" and "thank you" and such, but is this language?

But this doesn't hold up. Nobody but her handler could interpret the signing even for basic gestures. Identical signs were often interpreted differently depending on the context. Similarly, unrelated gestures were given the same translation, also in context.

No reason to suspect any malfeasance or anything; the interpreter (as in the telepathy tapes and FC) is most likely acting in good faith and just unaware how much weight they are giving to their own mental model of the subject.
by woodruffw | 2025-11-12 14:26:24+00:00
My understanding from adjacent threads in this discussion is that Google does in fact make significant upstream contributions to FFmpeg. Per policy those are often made with personal emails, but multiple people have said that Google’s investment in FFmpeg’s security and codec support have been significant.

(But also, while this is great, it doesn’t make an expectation of a patch with a security report reasonable! Most security reports don’t come with patches.)
by dylan604 | 2025-11-12 14:26:29+00:00
I don’t think journaling is the same thing though as hoarding pics/videos. Even if you never go back and read through old hand written journals, just the physical process of writing has mental effects that pics/videos do not. There’s also a bit of therapeutic results from slowing down and putting thought to paper. So to me the only similarity is that you might not ever look at it again, that does not make them the same at all
by bspammer | 2025-11-12 14:26:32+00:00
> Once your YouTube video collection grows, it becomes hard to search and find a specific video. That's where Tube Archivist comes in: By indexing your video collection with metadata from YouTube, you can organize, search and enjoy your archived YouTube videos without hassle offline through a convenient web interface.

If you don't want the indexing and the pretty frontend that's fine, but there's a reason software like Plex is popular.
by goku12 | 2025-11-12 14:26:44+00:00
Just one question. I see all these 3rd party clients solving the problem separately. Isn't it easier for everyone to build a unified decoder backend that exposes a stable and consistent interface for all the frontends? That way, it will get more attention and each modification will have to be done only once.

Since JS is the big issue here, the backend itself could be written in JS, TS or something else that compiles to WASM. That way, the decoder doesn't have to be split between two separate codebase. Deno also allows the bundle to be optionally compiled into a native executable that can run without having to install Deno separately.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-12 14:27:25+00:00
> It’s not that far fetched.

That's what I'm disagreeing with. Your scenario is far-fetched. This isn't between two comparably plausible scenarios. You can look at current objective trends of desktop/laptop sales and see they're not moving such that they're going to meaningfully disappear to the extent where a popular site like YouTube would remove support. It's absolutely far-fetched. I'm not "spiking" any conversation, I'm simply completely disagreeing based on current actual trends.
by throw0101d | 2025-11-12 14:27:28+00:00
> While most areas would be perfectly fine at 80mhz. Maybe routers could run their own speed test and self configure to the right bandwidth.

The Wifi Alliance may wish to provide guidance on this, at least for the residential space. Some ideas:

* have the router/AP do a speed test (at boot; regularly), and if the connect is ≤X Mbps then the wider channels won't help anything;

* do a sweep of the band (boot up; intervals), and if ≥Y% (50?) of it already in use, default to narrower channel.

Either/both of these would be done on a default "Auto-choose" setting, with allowable manual override.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-11-12 14:28:06+00:00
>> And there is literally no reason for any of these choices

I'm a manager now but definitely held a variation on this "people are idiots" view when an IC and younger. Question: are all your coworkers idiots? No? then why would all the work done before you be the product of idiots?

I found it really valuable to approach scenarios where the initial response is "how could this possibly happen?" as a cultural anthropology question. It turns out there were many rational decisions made, most that I would have gone along with that brought us to what we see today. My coworkers are actually really good, some of them who manifested what we see today are amazing. Many are crafting code, making thousands of microdecisions without perfect information or 100% clarity across a large organization, reacting to changing markets and directions, client needs, shifting priorities, executive decisions, technology changes... the list goes on.

This is all my way of saying there might be many reasons for any of these choices, and you'll help your own cause - and happinness - if you step back from your zealotry and take an empathetic approach that's less binary.
by UK-Al05 | 2025-11-12 14:28:31+00:00
The problem is thats how a lot of .net shop operate. I say this as .net developer.

.NET gets selected because a lot of non tech companies need to do software things, and they pick the stack fits in with their current WinTel stack. The main concerns is having replaceable talent to reliably do x. They're not trying to innovate. They are often doing something like sending out insurance quotes by email. They do this by having strict processes, and having developers stay in their lane. Expect rigid scrum, using dependencies only supported by Microsoft etc, Locked down Dev machines with visual studio only, ask for microsoft dev certs, and expect pre-approved enterprise design patterns up the wazoo. They don't want innovative developers, they want you to fit into the pre existing framework designed by an architect. Your skills can die in such an environment.

There are companies that use .NET that aren't like this, but you have to go out your way to find them.
by npteljes | 2025-11-12 14:28:36+00:00
I look at my pictures regularly. They are on my phone, mostly I scroll back 1-3 months to refresh my memory, and I often go further back to check on how living things were around me, and to what my general surrounding looked like. I also like to look at game screenshots from time to time. Funny to see how I lived life back then.

The Memories feature sounds cool. I have something a bit similar on my Nextcloud, "On this day", that shows an image dated on the same day in previous years, and clicking it brings up more pictures from its general time. I love it! So many memories.
by chownie | 2025-11-12 14:28:36+00:00
Right, and neither politeness nor gratuitous praise are even remotely similar to being edgy. These words have meanings, you have been using at least one of them incorrectly, that is the point I'm trying to make.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/edgy

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/edgy
by easyThrowaway | 2025-11-12 14:28:40+00:00
Shitty performance and questionable quality from several manufactures killed netbooks, unfortunately.

I don't see Apple moving in that direction. Especially after the lackluster sales of the iPhone mini and the iPhone Air compared to the Pro and Pro Max line.

Their core audience for the most part isn't particularly interested in getting a cheaper and/or features limited version of their baseline devices.

Maybe they could just drop the "Air" moniker from the current lineup, It's not like there's that much difference, cooling aside, from the Macbook Pro line.
by matt_s | 2025-11-12 14:28:56+00:00
I think this is the key thought process for purchasers of software/SaaS. For comparison, an average daily meal expense of $30/person for business travel exceeds the pricing of a lot of SaaS offerings. SaaS is so simple and the cost level doesn't require RFPs, lawyers and accountants. It would have to be really compelling and niche to warrant custom install software these days (to OP, many retail POS systems are old school textUI too).

In the pre-SaaS times, a software business would have to somehow guess/calculate the lifetime value of a customer and bake that into the price of the software when it was buy once. Custom software also was often charged in $/seat, required IT people to do updates and that style of software often requires sales people and convincing CxO's to do purchases. SaaS can just be a CC swipe and expense report.
by mehulashah | 2025-11-12 14:29:03+00:00
Certainly research has made it into product with the help of the innovators that created the research. The dial is turned further here where the research ideas have yet to be tried and vetted. The research begins in the startup. Even in the dotcom era, the research prototypes were vetted in the conferences and journals before taking the risk to build production systems. This is no longer the case. The experiments have yet to be run.
by rbanffy | 2025-11-12 14:30:14+00:00
I have a distaste for the verboseness of PowerShell, but I also have concerns with the attempt to bake in complex objects into the pipeline. When you do that, programs up and down the stream need to be aware of that - and that makes it brittle.

One key aspect of the Unix way is that the stream is of bytes (often interpreted as characters) with little to no hint as to what's inside it. This way, tools like `grep` and `awk` can be generic and work on anything while others such as `jq` can specialize and work only on a specific data format, and can do more sophisticated manipulation because of that.
by stillworks | 2025-11-12 14:30:41+00:00
I think better to put that someone extra further up in the pipeline who knows how to prompt the LLM correctly so that it doesn't generate the fluff to begin with.

Or get software engineers to produce domain specific tooling rather than the domain relying on generic tooling which lead to such mistakes (although this is speculation.. but still to me it seems like the author of that article was using the vanilla ChatGPT client)

/s I am now thinking of setting up an "AI Consultancy" which will be able to provide both these resources to those seeking such services. I mean, why have only one of those when both are available.
by bogwog | 2025-11-12 14:30:49+00:00
> To satisfy the unfocused and mistaken rage of the peanut gallery online?

That's only one possible benefit.

Another could be to gain leverage on big tech companies via dual licensing. If Google, Amazon, etc want to continue using FFmpeg without forking, they could do so by paying for the old LGPL license. It would likely be cheaper than maintaining a fork. They'd also have to release their changes anyways due to LGPL if they ever ship it client side.

So the incentive to contribute rather than fork would remain, and the only difference is that they have to pay a licensing fee.

Ofc this is probably just a fantasy. Relicensing FFmpeg like this probably isn't easy or possible.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-11-12 14:30:49+00:00
Yann was largely extremely wrong about LLMs. He’s the one that coined the term “stochastic parrot” for which we now know LLMs are more than stochastic parrots. Knowing stubborn idiots like him he will still find an angle to prevent him from admitting how wrong he was.

He’s not completely wrong in the sense that hallucinations aren’t completely solved but hallucinations definitely are becoming less and less to the point where AI can de a daily driver for even coders.
by pton_xd | 2025-11-12 14:31:02+00:00
> People may well have a fuzzy idea of how their credit card works, but how it really works is formally defined by financial institutions.

> Our probabilistic, fuzzy concepts are often simply a misconception.

How eg a credit card works today is defined by financial institutions. How it might work tomorrow is defined by politics, incentives, and human action. It's not clear how to model those with formal language.

I think most systems we interact with are fuzzy because they are in a continual state of change due to the aforementioned human society factors.
by masfoobar | 2025-11-12 14:31:57+00:00
My last comment, which you referenced... focused not just on C# or .NET.. but the focus of "you need Microsoft" in general.. this includes Windows, SQL Server, etc.

Again, my comment is focusing on someone on the outside looking in.. and WHY people end up making decisions away from C# in favour of (something like) Go.

I am aware of deploying to Linux containers, etc.
by dredmorbius | 2025-11-12 14:32:02+00:00
True.

But there's the approach the Economist takes. For many decades, it's relied on a three-legged revenue model: subscriptions, advertising, and bespoke consulting and research through the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). My understanding is that revenues are split roughly evenly amongst these, and that they tend to even out cash-flow throughout economic cycles (advertising is famously pro-cyclical, subscriptions and analysis somewhat less so).

To that extent, the graphs and maps the Economist actually does include in its articles (as well as many of its "special reports") are both teasers and loss-leader marketing for EIU services. I believe that many of the special reports arise out of EIU research.

<https://www.eiu.com/n/>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economist_Intelligence_Unit>
Show HN: PixExact – text/image-to-image with exact pixel sizes (up to 4096px)
by wismoy | 2025-11-12 14:32:20+00:00
I built a small text-to-image and image-to-image tool that lets you set exact pixel dimensions (width and height), not just aspect ratios. You can generate outputs up to 4096px on either side.

Motivation: my friends and I kept needing precise sizes (e.g., YouTube thumbnails at 1280×720). Most generators only offer 16:9, so we had to resize afterward, which can soften details. PixExact creates the target size directly.

What’s different: - Specify exact width and height in pixels (up to 4096px each) - Works for both text-to-image and image-to-image - Aimed at thumbnail and social graphics workflows where exact sizes matter

It’s an early build and I’d love feedback: - Are there other sizes or presets you want (e.g., social platforms)? - Any UX rough edges? - Would an API or batch mode be useful?

I made this and will be in the comments to answer questions.
by mikkupikku | 2025-11-12 14:32:23+00:00
Ironically, Gabe is more famous than the rest of whoever you're talking about, not because he seeks fame but just because he generally does right by his customers and makes himself accessible. Telling gamers to email him with questions, concerns, comments, anything, and then actually responding. Even though he's apparently spending most of his time hanging out on yachts, people love him because he makes an effort to be tuned in to what his customers want. If you do that, you'll be famous in a better way than what you can get from reality TV.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-11-12 14:32:41+00:00
Car models get maybe refreshed annually, bigger changes a couple of times a decade, if that. Vehicle fleets are often aging out with these timelines.

So if we either stretch the fleet management analogy to 50 years, or software applications only lasted 3-5 years maybe it IS fair to say the both have either a lot (former) or very little (later) inconsistnency?
by fragmede | 2025-11-12 14:32:55+00:00
Thanks for calling me out. You're right, it wasn't 3M. (Why do I feel like an LLM writing that. Anyway...)

Yeah so 3M got kinda fucked, Honeywell got a little bit fucked, but it was the med/small timers that got turbo fucked, but they're smaller names that noone recognizes unless we're on similar rabbit hole adventures. Places like Patriot Medical Devices or Cleveland Veteran Business Solutions are descriptive names vs, say, HomTex or Halcyon Shades, but names aside, some people, in true American fashion, saw a problem, built a company, and then a factory. Hired employees, and then had to fire them all and fold, because globalization. Meanwhile Jared Kushner walks free.
by Fnoord | 2025-11-12 14:33:30+00:00
But why so many stickers? Why so many tattoos? Why not pick one you very much like and agree with? Less noise. More signal. Less is more.

I don't like many of the ones mentioned on this website but here are some minimalist examples [1] [2] [3] [4] and an exception I do like a bit because of the custom shape [5]. [1] is more like a skin.

[1] https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/20250221_00333...

[2] https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/laptop_cover.j...

[3] https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/IMG_1259.jpg

[4] https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/IMG_5753.JPG

[5] https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/54917193947_1f...