MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-11-08 01:26:43+00:00
> I’ve heard the same story about Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and of course, Steve Jobs…

Is this supposed to be a positive point? Gates has exploited numerous legal maneuvers to create yes, a gigantic software company, and one of the absolute largest blights on tech as an industry. Name a Microsoft product that doesn't suck ass. Elon Musk hasn't done a fucking thing, he got lucky with PayPal, bought and booted the founders of Tesla, and has been coasting on it ever since. And since he fired his PR team his public image has gone to shit and all of his companies, save Space X and only because of generous Government contracts, are going down the drain.

> Being an “asshole” is very strongly correlated with the ability to build the best or biggest company in your field.

No, being an asshole is what one can get away with once one has struck it rich in tech. For all the shit talking I would do about Jobs, and do it I will, he is the only one on this list who did it in the direction you're talking about, where he was the asshole first, who THEN built a ridiculously successful business. Gates was a nepo baby who got access to computers at an incredibly young age when that was borderline unheard of. Musk would've never left his mothers basement if not for his father's wealth.

> It’s like girls in dating. They say they want a sensitive guy, but end up getting married to the jock with the big muscles.

Ah, you're also in your mother's basement I see.

> There’s this particularly western notion that no, no, no, millions of years of evolutionary advantage and game theory just doesn’t apply

We haven't been meaningfully part of evolution, survival of the fittest, since the first of our ancestors picked up a rock and tied it to a stick, and leapt to the top of the foodchain. We are by virtue of social networking and tool usage, apex predators. Nothing has been a threat to us in the "nature" way for thousands of years and nobody thinks otherwise apart from weird alpha-male guys who follow incredibly shit nature "science" to justify their unhinged anti-social behavior.
by phire | 2025-11-08 01:27:15+00:00
If the goal is simply to make social media unprofitable, you can just be really brutal and require that all users from a language region visiting a website (or using an App) must be delivered the exact same set of ads.

The fact that most advertisers would flock to promoting on smaller special websites/apps (equivalent to your gardening magazine), is exactly the side-effect we want. The shift in spending will hopefully lead to the current "massive social media platform" model will dying out, and boosting smaller independent platforms.
by kazinator | 2025-11-08 01:27:53+00:00
Fixed issue with "Active Drafts/Unresolved" pane:

https://YOUR.GERRIT.HOST.HERE/dashboard/?title=What%27s+Up?&Active+Drafts/Unresolved=(((uploader:me+or+owner:me)+and+has:unresolved)+or+has:draft)+status:open+-age:3w&Active%20Outgoing=(uploader:me+or+owner:me)+status:open+-age:3w+-is:wip&Active%20Incoming+%28cc+or+reviewer%29=%28reviewer:me+or+cc:me%29+(-uploader:me+and+-owner:me)+-age:3w+status:open&WIP=(owner:me+or+uploader:me)+is:wip+status:open&Recently%20Merged=(owner:me+or+uploader:me)+status:merged+limit:5&Inactive+Outgoing=(owner:me+or+uploader:me)+status:open+age:3w+-is:wip+limit:5&Inactive+Incoming=(reviewer:me+or+cc:me)+(-uploader:me+and+-owner:me)+status:open+age:3w+limit:5

The original search restricts to commits for which you are the uploader or owner. This is wrong because it won't find unpublished drafts you've left on other people's reviews. Only the "has:unresolved" condition must be confined to items owned by you or where you are the most recent uploader.
by ndesaulniers | 2025-11-08 01:28:18+00:00
If folks are interested in compilers and looking for where to get started, we're always looking for new contributors:

Building the Linux kernel with LLVM: https://github.com/ClangBuiltLinux/linux/issues

LLVM itself: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20s...
by robotresearcher | 2025-11-08 01:28:19+00:00
> Probably the most incredible virtue of Zig compiler is its ability to compile C code. This associated with the ability to cross-compile code to be run in another architecture, different than the machine where it is was originally compiled, is already something quite different and unique.

Isn't cross compilation very, very ordinary? Inline C is cool, like C has inline ASM (for the target arch). But cross-compiling? If you built a phone app on your computer you did that as a matter of course, and there are many other common use cases.
by suzzer99 | 2025-11-08 01:29:20+00:00
This happened to me when Amazon KDP's fraud prevention AI hallucinated that my Kindle version was plagiarizing my paperback (yes, it's the same book). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40992654

Unfortunately, I'm not sure a human ever really looked at my case, or was strongly disincentivized to go against the AI. I got nothing but bland, contentless denials of my appeals that got vaguer each time. And I was never able to go viral, so I'm banned from KDP for life for complete nonsense.
by zahlman | 2025-11-08 01:30:12+00:00
"STL" is not an abbreviation for "standard library". It doesn't even correctly refer to the C++ standard library; that's a misnomer. There was only one STL, and it was third-party; saying "Python's STL" makes barely any more sense than saying "Python's Boost".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Template_Library
Show HN: Hacker Reader – A clean, open-source Hacker News client for iOS
by danielcspaiva | 2025-11-08 01:30:13+00:00
Hey everyone,

I've just published my first app to the App Store. And it is (yet another) Hacker News Client.

The app is built with Expo/React Native, making the most of native iOS features like liquid glass, native tabs, link previews and context menus. (Android version coming soon).

There is no paywall, no monetization, and no crazy features for now. I just wanted it to be pleasant and native to use. You can also log in with your HN account so you can comment an upvote.

I hope you like it, and any feedback is much appreciated!

Links:

- GitHub: https://github.com/danielcspaiva/hacker-reader - Website: https://hackerreadder.app/ - My blog: https://dcsp.dev/
by mwcampbell | 2025-11-08 01:30:19+00:00
> there is no capital or material cost to push back against complexity

On a thread about software bloat and inefficiency, @josephg once speculated about an alternate universe where Moore's Law stopped decades ago. I've kept thinking about that. Unfortunately, I kept coming up with counterfactuals where important things like accessibility weren't as advanced or (relatively) widespread as they are in this world.
by 9rx | 2025-11-08 01:30:27+00:00
> When there are performance issues, 95% of the times they come from the database, not the language.

DHH used to say that it didn't matter if Rails was slow because the database was I/O bound anyway. But that was a long time ago. Times have changed considerably. Most especially because DHH now promotes using SQLite, which completely takes the worst I/O offender right out of the picture. Nowadays the language (when it is as slow as Ruby) is most likely to be the problem.
by estimator7292 | 2025-11-08 01:30:32+00:00
I always immediately hid "don't recommend channel" on auto-dubbed videos without even opening them. Maybe a flood of negative impressions on all of non-English YouTube will draw some attention. Maybe not. It doesn't matter.

YouTube is also applying "AI enhancement" to videos. Several people have had their videos replaced with a mangled version that flashes bright rapid flickering static through the background. It's a genuine epilepsy danger and the channel owner has no control. If they complain to YouTube the video sometimes is silently replaced with the original (until the bots get to it again). Otherwise they can only repeatedly re-upload the video.

It's insane how desperate all of tech is to quintuple down on the sunk cost of AI
by chermi | 2025-11-08 01:31:28+00:00
Lost me at "The main theme of biology in twentieth-century is an attempt to reduce biological phenomena to the behavior of molecules". Maybe the theme of biophysics in the 80s-2000s, but certainly not all of biology. Evolution? The central dogma? The cell + DNA+ evolution is what I'd put as the main themes. At least toward the end of century in biophysics the ideas of emergence and hierarchy can be found in any biology or biophysics textbook.

Having done it myself, I really hate the apparently irresistible pull to set up a straw man of your field in the abstract/intro then saying your minor results resolve it. I guess it's part of science now, but I wish it could at least be confined to job talks(1).

Continuing "We argue here that "hierarchy" is a critical level of biological organization". Welcome to the club. Again, any biology/biophysics textbook worth its salt from the 90s on (conservatively) would include probably by page 50 a picture/discussion of the multiple scales involved and probably even mention hierarchical organization explicitly.

It's just hard to take seriously. What is he actually trying to prove/show? Searching Google scholar Im prematurely concluding he applied existing clustering methods (clustering was very sexy in statistical physics right around 2010) and found some modularity across scales. You couldn't throw a rock 10 feet in a physics/biophysics department around that time without finding someone doing some clustering study to show some modular/hierarchical structure in some biological or otherwise "complex" system (trade networks in his case).

Bah I think I'm just in a bad mood lol don't mind me.

Edit- I just noticed he threw in spontaneous. I don't understand what that adds to the description besides making it sound more complicated.

(1) Which reminds me of one job talk I sat in (physics department) where the speaker tried to pass off levinthal's "paradox" of protein folding as unresolved until he graced the field with his brilliance. Maybe he thought no one in the department knew anything about proteins? I was almost impressed by the boldness.
by bubblelicious | 2025-11-08 01:34:39+00:00
What’s the controversy, unless people are straw manning or pulling from some bad personal experience?

If you are not leveraging the best existing tools for your job (and understanding their limitations) then your output will be lower than it should be and company leadership should care about that.

Claude reduces my delivery time at my job like 50%, not to mention things that get done that would never have been attempted before. LLMs do an excellent job seeding literature reviews and summarizing papers. Would be a pretty bad move for someone in my position to not use AI, and would be pretty unreasonable of leadership not to recognize this.
by thatcat | 2025-11-08 01:35:12+00:00
To clarify I'm not suggesting owners of what.cd started spotify just some elite members. I happened to join what.cd before Spotify came out and the tracker was shut down. Initially spotify overlapped with what.cds comprehensive library of rare high quality audio significantly and as they moved out of grey market, over the first year or so, some were removed after complaints or contracts were signed with artists. Then what.cd servers were seized for copyright infingement and other trackers tried to replace it. To download that much data from their platform you'd need to have shared a significant amount yourself for years. They probably used pirate bay and other less comprehensive libraries as well, but the high quality lossless audio that you paid for was likely from what.cd. This was discussed on those tracker forums and irc during that time.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-11-08 01:35:44+00:00
a one-year extension of expiring ACA tax credits

Of note, there are millions of us who've been without healthcare, at least as long as the ACA has been in place. ACA policies coast more than we could afford. A decade ago, a usable ACA policy would have cost more than my total earnings.

I bring this up to note that ACA beneficiaries have never, ever given a crap about us. Perhaps they will if our challenges become theirs.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-11-08 01:37:55+00:00
> Her accomplishments are impressive and well deserved

what exactly are those even? that she went to MIT? from her linkedin she's at some blockchain startup (for only 4 months) doing "compiler work" - i put it in quotes because these jobs actually happen to be a dime-a-dozen and the only thing you have to do to get them is pass standard filters (LC, pedigree, etc.).
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-11-08 01:38:29+00:00
The OTP offers a flat/simple architecture, and most people are puzzled the first time they see a Phoenix channels demonstration.

I think it is hilarious people assume 3NF or 4NF db schema can save them from bad design. Yet, many have tried to make SQL scale efficiently (with some obvious caveats) =3

https://www.cockroachlabs.com/
by DrewADesign | 2025-11-08 01:38:52+00:00
> Sure for basic, dead CRUD

From a technical perspective, this is the overwhelming majority of what makes the Net happen. BEAM is great for that and many other things, like extremely reliable communication streams.

Use the right tool for the job. Rust sucks for high-level systems automation but that doesn’t make it any less useful than bash. It’s all about about use cases and Elixir fits many common use cases nicely, while providing some nice-to-haves that people often ask for in other common web dev environments.
by ziggrat | 2025-11-08 01:40:21+00:00
Location: Bengaluru, India

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, JS, ML, Data Science, R, Gen AI

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1St5vqCbM5WKCT0Qah5XQCKy82xE...

Email: webmakin@gmail.com
by pixodaros | 2025-11-08 01:42:19+00:00
You didn't have to punish athletes to make them wear Nike and Adidas shoes, because they were obviously better than plain sneakers. You didn't have to punish graphic artists to make them use tablets because they are so convenient for digital art. But a lot of bosses are convinced that if their staff don't find these tools useful for their tasks, its the line workers who are wrong.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-11-08 01:42:26+00:00
Its also because people don't trust companies to not spy on them, even when they say they aren't, even when you paid them not to. They still will. So if I see a offer for to pay $100 more for a vacuum that won't spy on me, I think - yeah right, you're going to spy on me AND get any extra hundred bucks.
by vunderba | 2025-11-08 01:43:25+00:00
Wow, yeah, that's bizarre. It's a TypeScript project. It turns out it has to do with some of the dictionary files that I'm using, which use a peculiar format involving lots of semicolons, which is incorrectly detecting the entire file as being Roff. Since the dictionary files are by far the largest files in the repo, it's skewing GH's language detection. Adding a gitattribute to exclude them from language detection fixed the issue.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-11-08 01:47:39+00:00
this is like 5 different questions all across the landscape - what exactly do you think answers will do for you?

> How often do hardware optimizations get created for lower level optimization of LLMs and Tensor physics?

LLMs? all the time? "tensor physics" (whatever that is) never

> How reconfigurable are TPUs?

very? as reconfigurable as any other programmable device?

> Are there any standardized feature flags for TPUs yet?

have no idea what a feature flag is in this context nor why they would be standardized (there's only one manufacturer/vendor/supplier of TPUs).

> Is TOPS/Whr a good efficiency metric for TPUs and for LLM model hosting operations?

i don't see why it wouldn't be? you're just asking is (stuff done)/(energy consumed) a good measure of efficiency to which the answer is yes?
by brucehoult | 2025-11-08 01:47:56+00:00
The feature I want is multimethods -- function overloading based on the runtime (not compile time) type of all the arguments.

Programming with it is magical, and its a huge drag to go back to languages without it. Just so much better than common OOP that depends only on the type of one special argument (self, this etc).

Common Lisp has had it forever, and Dylan transferred that to a language with more conventional syntax -- but is very near to dead now, certainly hasn't snowballed.

On the other hand Julia does it very well and seems to be gaining a lot of traction as a very high performance but very expressive and safe language.
by roncesvalles | 2025-11-08 01:48:34+00:00
But the stakes are much higher.

On a side note, I will use this thread to air out my biggest pet peeve - air travel isn't in fact safer than car travel. Well, it is, per mile, but that's cheating because planes travel so fast. Obviously a 3 hour commercial flight is safer than 40 hours of driving. But cars are still safer per journey.

So, if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, your car ride wasn't actually more dangerous than your flight as the saying goes. The only road-based transportion more dangerous than a plane is the bicycle.
by echelon | 2025-11-08 01:49:03+00:00
> All these excuses for a blatant case of cheating

The man just died and it's as if you're trying to pry the Nobel Prize from him.

Franklin didn't know what she had. If she did, she would have been working on it.

In a moment of supreme clarity, the universe revealed itself. Watson and Crick knew immediately the photo would cut down their search space from alternative structures. They still had work to do, because the Angstrom length data is not a model by itself. It just constrained the geometry for the bonds and electrochemistry.
by fleventynine | 2025-11-08 01:49:55+00:00
> This means there's no target too small for the language, including embedded systems. It also means it's a good choice if you want to create a system that maximizes performance by, for example, preventing heap allocations altogether.

I don't think there's is any significant different here between zig, C and Rust for bare-metal code size. I can get the compiler to generate the same tiny machine code in any of these languages.
by zahlman | 2025-11-08 01:50:22+00:00
> Unlike simple averages or betting odds, DeepShot uses Exponentially Weighted Moving Averages (EWMA) to capture recent form and momentum

This is a lot of buzzwords to describe what I'm pretty sure is either very standard analysis technique in the field, or else known to be problematic for some reason or other.

> highlighting the key statistical differences between teams so you can see why the model favors one side

This is effectively just debug output and similarly doesn't need to be puffed up like that.

> or just curious whether an algorithm can outsmart Vegas

If it could, why are you here advertising the project rather than doing so yourself?
by nradov | 2025-11-08 01:50:24+00:00
It's always hilarious to see ignorant developers on HN claiming that real world engineering problems are easy to solve based on zero actual knowledge or experience. This kind of comment is really peak HN.

An autopilot for airplanes is only "easy" until something goes wrong. For example, one failure mode for autopilots is that if the aircraft gets progressively more and more out of trim the autopilot will automatically compensate until it hits its design limit. Then it suddenly disengages, leaving the human pilots in manual control of a nearly uncontrollable aircraft. If you talk to an actual flight control engineer they can give you plenty more examples of why building a safe autopilot is quite hard.
by viraptor | 2025-11-08 01:50:52+00:00
Completely different things. Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead. Comparing their risk is a complete apples and oranges situation.

Than again, ATC needs to deal with people talking on the radio, so the current system has a really long way to go to be completely automated.
by WorldMaker | 2025-11-08 01:51:21+00:00
`document.createElement` performance has come a long way in the last few years. The HTML "string" parser is incredibly well optimized in every browser, but the performance difference between smash a string into `innerHtml` and `document.createElement` approaches has shrunk a lot, especially in the time since React started doing so much VDOM work to avoid both tools as much as possible.

The difference shrinks even further with `<template>`/HtmlTemplateElement, its secondary/content `document`s for `document.createElement` and `document.importNode` being faster for cloning+adoption of a `template.contents` into the main document than string parsing.

I've got work-in-progress branch in a library of mine using JSX to build HtmlTemplateElements directly with `document.createElement` and right now `document.createElement` is the least of my performance concerns and there is no reason to build strings instead of elements.

(ETA: There are of course reasons to serialize elements to strings for SSR, but that's handy enough to do with a DOM emulator like JSDOM rather than need both an elements path and a string path.)
by halosghost | 2025-11-08 01:52:46+00:00
Just to say, I actually disagree entirely. I do not believe press releases are, almost ever, valuable. Papers are just a format (with some writing style conventions that tend to follow the given field-of-study); they may be intimidating for many, but the hacker spirit and ethos is to dive in and tackle it, and that will pay far more dividends for everyone reading it than to consume more advertising. :)

All the best,

-HG
by noremotefornow | 2025-11-08 01:53:08+00:00
Binge on tools -> all of the latest AI tools, try them out, read all of their docs, make throwaway proofs of concept; use the time now to get hype on the technology and absorb as much as you can.

That being said - perhaps disconnecting fully from technology may be refreshing. Could work on some other routines like learning certain recipes that may support more sustainable hardworking lifestyle once it resumes.
by dcassett | 2025-11-08 01:54:13+00:00
Have used VLC for at least 20 years. Recently I upgraded an old Dell 9400 laptop that dates from around 2006 to Debian Bookworm (the end of the line for the 32-bit machines). It has a nice 1600x1200 display, but the Nvidia Graphics (Geforce Go 7900 GS) is poorly supported and mpv now requires --hwdec=no, making 720p videos barely playable. VLC now uses a fraction of the CPU as mpv does for video, which makes even 1080p videos playable. For some reason VLC chokes at the beginning of every video (tries to play before everything is ready), but by pausing the video and backing up to time zero it plays perfectly. All of this to say that VLC has saved the day as it frequently has over the years.
by rurban | 2025-11-08 01:54:58+00:00
No. My company went with a so called better ISP because doing AI means transporting tons of image data up and down. But their peering was horrible. I couldn't update Ubuntu at all compared to fibre Vodafone at home. Took hours. Transporting the harddisc home and back was faster.

We complained a couple of times with traceroutes showing their nonsense routes, and eventually it got a bit better. But not as fast as Vodafone still