MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Flux159 | 2025-11-08 04:39:00+00:00
Was able to sign up for the Max plan & start using it via opencode. It does a way better job than Qwen3 Coder in my opinion. Still extremely fast, but in less than 1 hour I was able to use 7M input tokens, so with a single agent running I would be able easily to pass that 120M daily token limit. The speed difference between Claude Code is significant though - to the point where I'm not waiting for generation most of the time, I'm waiting for my tests to run.

For reference, each new request needs to send all previous messages - tool calls force new requests too. So it's essentially cumulative when you're chatting with an agent - my opencode agent's context window is only 50% used at 72k tokens, but Cerebra's tracking online shows that I've used 1M input tokens and 10k output tokens already.
Show HN: Vididoo – Browser Powered Media Editing
by bilater | 2025-11-08 04:40:31+00:00
I revamped an old project I had done in Web Assembly (WASM) with the Media Bunny library, a JavaScript library for reading, writing, and converting video and audio files directly in the browser. Media operations are way faster and more performant.

You can now easily perform operations like cut, merge, resize, and compress videos, extract or replace audio, blend tracks, add watermarks, control speed, crop, apply grayscale, and convert images to video, all running smoothly right in your browser.
by jodrellblank | 2025-11-08 04:40:38+00:00
> so about 0.5kwh

It takes 1.16 Watt-hours to raise a litre of water by a degree. Say 85Wh for 15C room temp to 100C boiling. Assuming your large meal for three is 3 litres, that's 255Wh to get the water boiling. There's energy loss from battery through inverter, through induction. Loss in the pot losing heat to the air. This doesn't count keeping it simmering, or heating the other ingredients.

I don't have any idea if that's very good, to be only twice the theoretical minumum, or quite a room for improvement - have you ever experimented with a 'pot cosy' to insulate the pot and stop radiated heat loss so you can keep it simmering with less power input, or turning the heat off once it's boiling to let pasta or rice cook in the residual heat, or anything?
by chamomeal | 2025-11-08 04:41:42+00:00
I don’t know any ruby but I dabbled in elixir and I gotta ask: why do you prefer parenthesis-less function calls?

I like when parens/brackets are reliable wrappers for chunks of code. Like being able to ‘vi{‘ in vim to select a function body. Or ‘%’ to jump to the matching paren.

Do you find the language more readable without it? Less visual noise?
by iambvk | 2025-11-08 04:43:55+00:00
My favorite monospace font is "Ubuntu Mono" for ages.

As an engineer, I like to see -- for the lack of better word -- some taste instead of characters being too formal and too symmetric. Ubuntu and Ubuntu-Mono satisfy this to a good extent without being too much, like in comic sans.

The closest font with similar taste, which I found recently is Mononoki
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-11-08 04:44:08+00:00
My kids (6 and 8) are pretty well raised I'd say, but they do have access to a Playstation and a PC, with clear rules and time limits for use. They are good at making friends and don't do trouble in school, and they also have healthy interests other than playing video games. This is because we actively raise them so they can learn to adjust their needs and interact with others, not because we limit their screen time. The problem today is that many parents seemingly does not raise their kids well, maybe because they don't spend enough time together, perhaps because the parents themselves spend their time scrolling reels.

I myself grew up with a desktop computer from around age 7 and it shaped me early on in a positive way to be curious. Computers were also a central part of my social life. There are many positive things that kids can get out of computers, so I find the comparison with alcohol to be hyperbolic.
by exmadscientist | 2025-11-08 04:44:18+00:00
I don't like this tutorial. It purports to teach you "what everything on the PCB fundamentally does, and what every single component on your PCB is actually for!" but it gets the reasoning for a lot of stuff wrong, sometimes badly wrong. I think every single instance of a component with a numerical value picks the value with a misleading or even completely wrong justification. Even if the tutorial gets to an OK schematic in the end, it shouldn't be teaching shoddy reasoning.

(And the author doesn't seem to understand decoupling capacitors, but most people don't understand decoupling capacitors, including most datasheet authors, so that doesn't surprise me.)

Also, KiCad's "solutions" for BOMs are hilariously, absurdly terrible. But that helps me earn a living, so I can't complain too much....
by jandrewrogers | 2025-11-08 04:44:21+00:00
One of the things I like about Zig is that it pretty explicitly recognizes all the weird edge cases that exist in low-level systems code. A rather large cross-section of languages kind of pretend these cases don’t exist because addressing it would violate the aesthetic they are trying to achieve with the language. Nonetheless, these are real cases because low-level hardware and system behavior doesn’t care about aesthetics as might be expressed in a programming language.

Even C++ didn’t fully repent from this sin until around C++17. I appreciate the non-begrudging acceptance of this reality in Zig.
by econ | 2025-11-08 04:44:43+00:00
The backend could be just...

if( is_numeric($_GET['current']) ){ file_put_contents( 'current.txt',$_GET['current']); }

Then could post it it when the clock advances by a second, shortly before the slide advances on the main screen. Aggressively poll it on the clients to figure out how many ms after the whole second to poll.

All the screens would advance simultaneously which would impress the developers.

If someone in the audience has a question they can press a button to have their face and audio streamed to the big screen. Modified by LLM of course, or it would be pointless to have.
by elzbardico | 2025-11-08 04:45:42+00:00
50 dollars month cerebras code plan, first with qwen-420, now with glm, is my secret weapon.

Stalin used to say that in war "quantity has a quality all its own". And I think that in terms of coding agents, speed is quality all its own too.

Maybe not for blind vibe coding, but if you are a developer, and is able to understand the code the agent generates and change it, the fast feedback of fast inference is a game changer. I don't care if claude is better than GLM 4.6, fast iteractions are king for me now.

It is like moving from DSL to gigabit fiber FTTH
by dmix | 2025-11-08 04:46:25+00:00
> Nowadays the language (when it is as slow as Ruby) is most likely to be the problem.

These days the main issue why web apps are slow or fragile is because they are huge React apps that do way too much in the browser than they need too. The response time from the server is rarely the issue unless you're doing heavy analytics. High end React shops do some crazy optimization to try to compensate for this fact. Linear is the only one I've seen do it well with JS.
by tredre3 | 2025-11-08 04:46:46+00:00
It's entirely possible that a cold pre-wash helps avoid staining! But that's not what I'm complaining about.

TC made specific claims about the benefits of a hot pre-wash. Instead of countering those, the blog's author decided to ignore them and build his own strawman to attack.

The author should have refuted the specific claims, or acknowledged them before moving to the drawbacks.
by ineedasername | 2025-11-08 04:46:56+00:00
You don't seem aware that the "EU", in 1980, didn't exist, nor did you do the sums on the ages of the population in school by the time it did exist to realize that yes, by typical textbook replacement timelines in schools, something like the existence of the EU is unlikely to have been in the textbooks during the school days of most people over the age of 30.
by jayd16 | 2025-11-08 04:47:40+00:00
That doesn't really sound like an invalid analogy, you just don't need the same fire code for all structures but there are still fire codes that apply to building sheds.

I'm not sure what your point is. Like, ok, you came up with a structure that doesn't need a lot of structural engineering but clearly others do. So what are you trying to say?
by nsoonhui | 2025-11-08 04:48:40+00:00
I feel that demographic collapse is the single biggest crisis facing the developed world now. In this regard US is actually doing better than East Asia countries and Europe, but still, the trend is unmistakable -- modern, affluent states are commiting voluntarily suicide because their citizens are not too willing in giving birth.

All the climate change problems, wars, pandemics and natural disasters won't devastate human simply because we been through all those and we recovered. But demographic collapse because of high living standard? It's uncharted territory here and I am really, really worry.
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-11-08 04:48:51+00:00
Good synopsis! I enjoyed my time doing some compiler-type work in the past, but there are so few job openings that it can feel quite cramped after awhile, especially without great experience/credentials.

Definitely worth some self-study, however, if only for the healing effect of being exposed to a domain where the culture is largely one of quality instead of...everything except that. :)
by ta20240528 | 2025-11-08 04:49:39+00:00
No, I'm saying their/our societies are broken. Wrong values, wrong incentives w.r.t. to the skills required to build modern, well-maintained cities with roads, schools, hospitals, etc. when compared to similar peers in e.g. Asia.

Of course they are intellectually capable of laying asphalt, but they end up spending it on salaries, ridiculously enriching small elites, etc. Its not unique to Africa, but its certainly endemic here.

And not all of the citizens like it like this - hence the massive diaspora. Which is why I used the word "failed", not "dumb".

But thanks for taking my comment in the best possible interpretation - perhaps you should refresh yourself with the HN guidelines if these kinds of serious conversations distress you.

Footnote: I se you say you are from Ghana. Well Ghana and Singapore become independent at about the same time. Both got to run their country themselves. Only one decided it was important for their families and grandchildren to pour said asphalt.
by elzbardico | 2025-11-08 04:49:41+00:00
Yeah, but the US have this perennial luck too. I am generation X, I was raised first with the idea that japan would overcome the US, then it was the EU. and yet, the US always reinvented itself/got lucky/played dirty.

Empires are fucking resilient creations. The news of US hegemony demise are vastly exagerated.
by jibal | 2025-11-08 04:49:47+00:00
I don't think Zig--which certainly is innovative in a number of ways--benefits from this sort of thing. Up front is a claim that it's "totally new way to write programs", but zero support is offered, and almost nothing else "meta" said about the language, other than a couple of sentences in the conclusion that are likewise inaccurate hype. I've programmed in many languages including Zig and it definitely is not a new way of programming. It imposes disciplines that are different from those of other languages, but the same is true of other languages.

The final paragraph says "This is all quite surprising" -- why so? "and let one think that many advantages previously found only in interpreted languages are gradually migrating to compiled languages in order to offer more performance" -- sure, but Zig is hardly the first ... D and Nim both have interpreters built into the compiler that allow extensive comptime computation--both of those languages have far more metalanguage facilities than Zig, in addition to many other language features that Zig lacks--which is not necessarily a fault, as it aims for a certain kind of simplicity and close-to-the-metal performance ... although both D and Nim are highly performant (both have optional garbage collection, though Nim is more advanced in making GC-free programming approachable). One thing you can say about Zig though--it compiles like a bat out of hell.

P.S. Another thing about Zig worth mentioning that came up in some comments is cross compilation. I don't think people understand how Zig is different and what an engineering feat it is (Andrew has a writeup somewhere of how it's done--it's shocking):

If you install Zig, you can now generate executables for virtually any target with just a command line argument specifying the target, regardless of what machine you installed it on. Nothing else does that--cross compilation generally requires recompiling the compiler and library to target a different architecture. Zig comes with precompiled libraries for a huge number of targets.

I noticed a comment where someone said they love Zig but they've never programmed in it--they use it to cross-compile their Nim programs. (The Nim compiler has a C code backend, and Zig has a C compiler built in, so Nim inherits instant arbitrary cross-compilation to any target via Zig).
by indolering | 2025-11-08 04:50:46+00:00
Then why don't manufacturers recommend this? Why don't dishwashers in Europe (which have access to higher voltages) run the prewash hotter?

It's because, as outlined in the linked article, hot water makes the problem of staining plastic worse. So they try to mechanically remove it before the main wash. Note that in the original video, the main wash heat temperature wasn't impacted by preheating the prewash.
by dmix | 2025-11-08 04:51:30+00:00
I'm worried LLMs will make people ignore what's already there and auto generate useless functions instead of using what's there in Ruby/Rails. I've been using Rails for almost 20yrs (on and off) and I can't count the number of times I did something only to find out it was either natively supported in a recent version... or at least a new best practice in modern Rails.

You find the same thing with JS to an even higher degree, but there's always 10 options in NPM and they all need to be updated every year otherwise the other 20+ packages you depend on can't be upgraded. There's a stark contrast in maintenance overhead and DX between frontend and server side.

Even the rails JS libraries are very stable. Hotwire's Stimulus hasn't had a release since 2023 and it always works just fine. https://github.com/hotwired/stimulus/releases
by exmadscientist | 2025-11-08 04:51:59+00:00
It depends on a lot of factors. (The main one is actually your water hardness. Around here, the water is soft straight out of the tap, so that helps me a lot.)

I get the best results with Cascade Platinum paks, so I buy those. I have had inferior results with other detergents. (Kroger has a clone of the Platinum packs. I think it's pretty good as well, but I don't remember.) So I don't buy those any more, I buy the one that I know will work.

It is not a surprise that the paks work well. There are several ingredients that "like" to be formulated as powders, and several ingredients that "like" to be formulated as liquids. The paks can contain both. This is not possible for pure powders or gels, so that lets paks have more different cleaners in them. (I don't know what's going on with gels. I've never personally had good luck with gels.)
by echelon | 2025-11-08 04:53:23+00:00
VLC was a big deal in the 2000s if you wanted to watch torrented anime. Operating systems didn't come with players with broad codec support and it was a legitimate nightmare to figure out what fly by night codec worked with whatever the bootleggers cobbled together to encode the video of the week.

These days, operating systems already have rock solid video players with far less clunky UI.

On Linux, video is already sublime thanks to ffmpeg and the dozens of available frontends.

It feels like wrestling with 1998 in trying to use VLC these days. It's got a real WinAmp feel to it.

But the real elephant in the room is that the lionshare of video is now being delivered by major media platforms like YouTube.
GitChat – Branch AI chats on a canvas like Miro meets ChatGPT and Notion
by saurabh_io | 2025-11-08 04:55:04+00:00
I've been building GitChat as a side project to solve fragmented brainstorming in AI chats (linear threads bury ideas).

So I wanted a non-linear space to visually connect thoughts.

It's an AI chat app where you branch conversations across a dynamic canvas: pin websites, docs, images, and reference them in any thread for seamless collaboration.

Think Miro's visual boards + ChatGPT's smarts + Notion's organization.

Supports multiple AI modes (OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google, and more) Early beta, so expect rough edges; no mobile yet.

Feedback welcome! Requires an invite code to get your account activated though. Lmk if you need one!
by defrost | 2025-11-08 04:55:38+00:00
That's a pretty damning response, sure.

The evidence, at least the evidence that I found cited as evidence, appears less damning.

Perhaps there is more damning evidence.

What I found was on the order of the degree of cross copying and similar themes, etc. found in many pools of young writers going back through literary history.

Rona Wang, whom I've never previously heard of, clearly used similar passages from her peers in a literary group and was called out for it after receiving awards.

I would raise two questions, A) was this a truly significant degree of actual plagarism, and 2) did any of her peers in this group use passages from any of Tona's work ?

On the third hand, Kate Bush was a remarkable singer / song writer / performer. Almost utterly unique and completely unlike any contempory.

That's ... highly unusual.

The majority of writers, performers, singers, et al. emerge from pools that differ from their prior generations, but pools none the less that are filled with similarity.

The arc of careers of those that rise from such origins is really the defining part of many creators.
by pols45 | 2025-11-08 04:56:42+00:00
People have been thinking about this stuff for a long time. Here's a partial compilation of the answers - https://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-181 click sessions - lecture 12 for utility oriented story - but I would recommend going through the whole series, cause depending on life situations you get thrown into, it will help to see what other stories people have told themselves that have helped them flourish.
by dmix | 2025-11-08 04:59:15+00:00
Years ago I remember complaining on HN that VLC didn't support remembering the position of the video you've already partially watched, when multiple other video players supported it.

The only reply was someone saying you should contribute to the open source project yourself to fix it instead of complaining. I don't know anything about coding a multi-platform video player so I wasn't much use but not long after they released a version supporting it and I felt bad for complaining.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-11-08 04:59:30+00:00
tesseract does well for me...

const std = @import("std"); const expect = std.testing.expect; const Point = struct {x: i32, y: i32}; test "anonymous struct literal" { const pt: Point = .{ .x = 13, .y = 67, }; try expect(pt.x == 13); try expect(pt.y == 67);

The trick is to preprocess the image a little bit like so:

ocr () { magick - -monochrome -negate - | tesseract stdin stdout 2> /dev/null }
by indolering | 2025-11-08 04:59:38+00:00
> You focus on a very specific type of soil that Technology Connection didn't even mention, and isn't even relevant for a typical wash.

But that's a primary issue with TC's tests: it doesn't consider corner cases like this or water hardness. Consumers want it to "just work" and are not going to use a specific settings based on the contents of their dinner.

Sure, it helps the prewash remove fats. But if the main wash and the rinse aid get rid of all that regardless, then it doesn't really matter.
by BluSyn | 2025-11-08 04:59:54+00:00
Unsecured government loan to a successful company to fund acceleration and growth is a "handout".

A "bailout" is what happened in 2009, in the sense the banks would literally have collapsed without it (and they probably should have).

OpenAI is not going to collapse without these loans. Huge difference.

Also for the record, not rationalizing, because I'm not in favor of either handouts or bailouts.
by marshray | 2025-11-08 05:01:25+00:00
The thing approved by the patent office is 100% specific to a mechanism using two "moving" "elongated strips" to encode a sequence of frequency changes. It doesn't explain how they are kept synchronized, or provide a way to recover from loss of sync. Perhaps torpedoes were a case where an initial synchronization would work long enough.

As said before, the idea of coordinated frequency hopping was already known at the time.
by divmain | 2025-11-08 05:01:26+00:00
I have been an AI-coding skeptic for some time. I always acknowledged LLMs as useful for solving specific problems and making certain things possible that weren't possible before. But I've not been surprised to see AI fail to live up to the hype. And I never had a personally magical moment - an experience that shifted my perspective à la the peak end rule.

I've been using GLM 4.6 on Cerebras for the last week or so, since they began the transition, and I've been blown away.

I'm not a vibe coder; when I use AI coding tools, they're in the hot path. They save me time when whipping up a bash script and I can't remember the exact syntax, or for finding easily falsifiable answers that would otherwise take me a few minutes of reading. But, even though GLM 4.6 is not as smart as Sonnet 4.5, it is smart enough. And because it is so fast on Cerebras, I genuinely feel that it augments my own ability and productivity; the raw speed has considerably shifted the tipping point of time-savings for me.

YMMV, of course. I'm very precise with the instructions I provide. And I'm constantly interleaving my own design choices into the process - I usually have a very clear idea in my mind of what the end result should look like - so, in the end, the code ends up how I would have written it without AI. But building happens much faster.

No affiliation with Cerebras, just a happy customer. Just upgraded to the $200/mo plan - and I'll admit that I was one that scoffed when folks jumped on the original $200/mo Claude plan. I think this particular way of working with LLMs just fits well with how I think and work.
by Arainach | 2025-11-08 05:01:27+00:00
> modern, affluent states are commiting voluntarily suicide because their citizens are not too willing in giving birth

Phrase things with the blame assigned accordingly. Your phrasing blames people for not becoming parents. A more accurate phrasing is '....because their wealthy elites are so greedy they make having children unaffordable'

"Demographic collapse" is because people can't afford rent, can't afford food, can't afford healthcare - childbirth is ABSURDLY expensive in the US, can't afford childcare, and so many other things.

Why is that? Because of greed. More and more of everything is swallowed up by private equity and corporate management who have no empathy, no flexibility, only a demand for eternal growth. The human piece is irrelevant and actively undesirable. Far simpler to just pay for some GPUs and write articles blaming ordinary people for having no more options.
by MrJohz | 2025-11-08 05:03:14+00:00
I believe it's possible in theory - Koka has a whole "functional but in-place" set of compiler optimisations that essentially translate functional algorithms into imperative ones. But I think that's also possible in Koka in part because of its ownership rules that track where objects are created and freed, so might also not be feasible for OCaml.