MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jsnell | 2025-11-11 22:10:03+00:00
> How are you getting ffmpeg to process a stream or file type different from the one you’re expecting?

... That is how ffmpeg works? With default settings it auto-detects the input codec from the bitstream, and the output codec from the extension. You have to go out of your way to force the input codec and disable the auto-detection, and I don't think most software using ffmpeg as a backend would force the user to manually do it, because users can't be trusted to know those details.
by EnthusiastGuy | 2025-11-11 22:10:03+00:00
I’m happy to announce the full open-sourcing of Continuum 93 - a project born out of a desire to create a "fantasy" 24-bit virtual computer with a focus on simplicity and powerful, somewhat constrained development.

C93 is an emulator/platform that models a machine whose hardware never existed, combining the nostalgic constraints of 8-bit systems (like the ZX Spectrum) with modern Quality-of-Life features for game and application development.

The Technical Core I built C93 from the ground up to be a unique challenge and a powerful tool: • Virtual Architecture: C93 operates on a 24-bit virtual machine with a custom Assembly language and a large, flat 16MB address space. • The Register Banks: A core feature is the set of 256 switchable register banks. This eliminates the constant need for pushing/popping registers in subroutines, making low-level Assembly programming cleaner and faster. • Graphics: Features a fixed 480:270 resolution, but with modern layered control -offering 8 independent video layers that can be manipulated for complex effects, sprites, and UI overlays. • Audio: Includes an integrated JSFXR-based sound generator for crafting unique, retro-style music and effects. The project is already stable, complete with a compiler, logging system, and a dedicated network debugger. There’s also a minimalist OS and a small library of demos running on the platform.

Why Open Source? (it's about scale) I am open-sourcing the project now precisely because of its stability with an invitation to the community to help realize the next ambitious phase of C93: 1. Compiler Development: Aiming to expand accessibility. The next major effort will be developing higher-level language compilers (targeting Assembly) to lower the barrier of entry for new developers while preserving the performance integrity. 2. Hardware Porting: While C93 is highly optimized, community input on porting the emulator to new, low-power hardware (like various single-board computers) will be critical for achieving true ubiquity. 3. Core Tooling: The platform requires community expertise to design and implement sophisticated creator tools (like optimized sprite editors, advanced debugging features, and improved music creation interfaces).

The Future Vision (Ubiquity and Creation) Ultimately, C93 is not just an emulator; it is a vision for a creator-centric virtual console ecosystem. I believe simplicity and constraints breed creativity. The goal is to create a seamless, accessible environment where many developers can prototype and publish games faster than ever before, using a unique "retro-future" aesthetic and experience across almost any hardware.

I invite you to read the documentation, explore the source code and join the discussion!

Itch: https://enthusiastguy.itch.io/continuum93 (use this to check out the documentation) GitHub repo: https://github.com/EnthusiastGuy/Continuum-93 Discord channel: https://discord.gg/6AYkhnzxD9
by CBLT | 2025-11-11 22:11:22+00:00
I'm there right now at my current job. It's always the same engineer, and they always get a pass because (for some reason) they don't have to do design reviews for anything they do, but they go concern-troll everyone else's designs.

Last week, after 3 near-misses that would have brought down our service for hours if not days from a corner this engineer cut, I chaired a meeting to decide how we were going to improve this particular component. This engineer got invited, and spent thr entire allocated meeting time spreading FUD about all the options we gathered. Management decided on inaction.
by kentonv | 2025-11-11 22:12:50+00:00
Honestly, I kind of think that ffmpeg should just document that it's not secure and that you're expected to run it in a sandbox if you plan to use it on possibly-malicious input. All the big cloud users and browsers are doing this already, so it would hardly even change anything.

ffmpeg is complaining that security bugs are such a drag that it's driving people away from their hobby/passion projects. Well, if fixing security bugs isn't your passion, why not just say that? Say it's not your priority, and if someone else wants it to be a priority, they can write the patches. Problem solved?
by piffey | 2025-11-11 22:13:14+00:00
Doesn't always work. I've got old Agfa negatives I developed from my grandpa in Korea in the 50s. Developed them after finding them in his attic maybe 10 years ago now. They sat between two panes of glass for 5 years with volumes of books on top, not a single change toward flat. I finally gave up and just put them in the archival sleeves and in the binder with the curve.
by almosthere | 2025-11-11 22:13:25+00:00
> “If you were to lower interchange fees, you probably have to also lower rewards,” Joanna Stavins, principal economist and policy advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston told CNN last month. That’s because “rewards are financed by interchange fees.”

Yeah, the only money Visa/MC make is from fees. I think we ought to take away her business and economic degrees - she's just trying to keep her piece of the pie by literally being a mouthpiece that's "independent". I'm sure they have industry insiders everywhere to make sure things happen they way they "need" to.
by walletdrainer | 2025-11-11 22:13:42+00:00
Well, after all it’s HN and this is the kind of content that attracts much of the users. I’d certainly be more careful with that wording on a website that caters to a very different audience, but it’s not long ago when indiehackers posts of people “bragging” about their successes were consistently at the top of the front page.

Not convinced I misread the room, especially considering the upvotes.
by jsnell | 2025-11-11 22:14:30+00:00
It's a codec that is enabled by default at least on major Linux distributions, and that will be processed by ffmpeg without any extra flags. Anyone playing an untrusted video file without explictly overriding the codec autodetection is vulnerable.

The format being obscure and having no real usage doesn't help when it's the attackers creating the files. The obscure formats are exposing just as much attack surface as the common ones.

> Pretty crazy that ffmpeg supports the codec in the first place, IMHO.

Yes.
by KaiserPro | 2025-11-11 22:14:44+00:00
I bought some time on a hasselblad medium format scanner (took fucking ages)

The results are good, as you'd expect. However can I tell the difference between that and me putting the negatives on a decent softbox and using a fancy camera to take a picture? yes, but not by much.

I think the main issue is film registration, that is getting the film to be flat and "co-planar" to the lens so the whole frame is sharp.

My negatives are slightly warped, so they really need a frame to make sure they are perfectly flat. But for instagram, they are close enough.

However scanning more than a few pictures is a massive pain in the arse. If I was scanning film regularly, then this is what I'd want, and its cheaper than the competition.

Assuming that its actually any good, I haven't seen any scans yet.
by Izkata | 2025-11-11 22:15:00+00:00
> SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t like that. It evolved too fast, so the realistic goal shifted from elimination to control.

That's not what happened here though. These vaccines never stopped transmission, they suppressed symptoms and people just hoped/assumed they stopped transmission.

In late 2020 this was an open question people were talking about, because in development and safety testing they never even looked at transmission, only symptoms. Pfizer's announcement in particular was very careful to distinguish SARS-CoV-2 from COVID-19, intentionally not saying anything about infection/transmission. So they were being rolled out before we had any answers there. It became clear only a couple months later - well before any major "new variants" - that people were still getting infected at the same rates as before vaccination.
by vinceguidry | 2025-11-11 22:15:20+00:00
This article made me laugh and cry at the same time. I've spent so much time in my career trying to make things nice and seamless only to see my own team members throw out my careful work for something newer, shinier, and shittier. I was on a team that used Bazel. Like two devs took the time to figure out how it worked, everybody else just either worked around it or complained endlessly about it.

I am now thoroughly convinced that software engineers, if there is currently no snake whispering in their ear to throw away the paradise garden they're been handed on high, will find a way to do it anyway. Coders will, to the last, prefer self-inflicted misery over the heaven they've been gifted for free.

And if you don't believe me, let me tell you we already have a fully-vertically integrated tool stack, a whole family of them. It's called Smalltalk, it's been around since the 70s, and modern variants of course exist. You can build stuff in it today, and thoroughly enjoy your computing life as a result.

The second you turn your head though, your fellow teammates will conspire to replatform onto Go or Rust or NodeJS or GitHub Actions and make everything miserable again.

Don't buy the nonsense that vertical integration is hard. It's not. You just hire really sharp folks, get them excited about the idea, and they do all the hard integration work, then you release it to the community and let them build on it. Rails was like this back in the 2010s, there was this golden age where everything just worked. Then all of a sudden javascript took over the web world like cancer and the web stopped being fun.

It's not that it's hard, what it is is brittle. A vertically-integrated stack, by its very nature, cannot survive forces that jostle it in the horizontal direction. And coders are too afraid of falling behind that they end up fetishizing any new idea that comes along, no matter how daft. Javascript on the server?!?! Your solution to js's, let's call them problems, is gradual typing? That snake's never gonna run out of ears to whisper in, lemme tell ya.

Integrated toolsets can, have, and are still being done. You can use them now. But you don't want it. Even if you do, nobody you work with will trust it or keep it after you leave. And so companies have no motive anymore to sell them to you. Microsoft themselves stopped trying after 2019.
by pinko | 2025-11-11 22:15:40+00:00
I see this all the time when asking Claude or ChapGPT to produce a single-page two-column PDF summarizing the conclusions of our chat. Literally 99% of the time I get a multi-page unpredictably-formatted mess, even after gently asking over and over for specific fixes to the formatting mistake/s.

And as you say, they cheerfully assert that they've done the job, for real this time, every time.
by lucideer | 2025-11-11 22:16:31+00:00
MA-1s are inner lined with a 100% cotton/wool mix. The outer is nylon because synthetic fabrics are generally good for waterproofing (waterproofing is always a trade-off of quality over function) & also just because bombers are generally nylon, but a big part of their construction is using quality non-synthetic fabrics wherever they can to ensure overall quality.
by gorgoiler | 2025-11-11 22:16:49+00:00
I think I see what you mean. It’s the difference between having an image showing the shape and texture of each film grain, and an image which looks like what I saw in the camera and which isn’t going to be any sharper. The former has value but the latter was always good enough for me and, surprisingly, rather low in resolution compared to subsequent DSLRs and mirrorless cameras I bought in the 2010s.

Ilford Delta 400 pushed two stops to 1600 ASA in a 1970s Asahi Pentax SP1000 was always going to produce… artistic results, requiring as much imagination as acuity to appreciate the subject. (Read: see past the blur.)
by sbuttgereit | 2025-11-11 22:18:19+00:00
The one that I can share is at: https://github.com/MuseSystems/musebms

A few things to keep in mind. This is a "labor of love" personal project... sure a large one... but that's what it is. Another thing to consider is that I go off standard Elixir practices in a number of different ways and for reasons™; in this sense the project isn't representative of what a typical Elixir project looks like.

When I say that things take longer for me to initially code, I'm not including "self-inflicted" time dealing with novel issues which arise from taking a less common path... which does have its own time cost. In my previous comment I'm only really thinking of the typical aspects of Elixir development time.

Finally, I do need to emphasize: for me the cost is worth it. Once I get to maintaining that now-developed code or doing refactors, so long as I'm not throwing away everything and starting from scratch, the development time for me is rather less than I have with code of similar complexity developed in other languages. All personal experience... but there you have it.
by strictnein | 2025-11-11 22:18:45+00:00
Yep, lots of ways that we restrict speech. Criminal speech is not protected. Business speech is also not protected. Telling Eastasia about our new spy plane is also not protected.

Saying stupid, abhorrent, wrong, etc things online is, thankfully, protected. If you don't think that it should be, just imagine the person you dislike politically the most being the one who decides what should be allowed and what shouldn't.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
by makeitdouble | 2025-11-11 22:19:00+00:00
> style nitpicks

Other commenter point at auto-formating, but I think companies not using any are pretty rare, hitting that very issue in several companies is highly improbable.

We're probably down to function/variable naming, ternal operators, return types, this kind of thing ?

Someone who can't bother looking around and adapt their style to the surrounding code sounds like a problem to me. What is seen as pendantic and nitpicky can have pretty large impact on readability and go against others' assumptions.
by spwa4 | 2025-11-11 22:19:04+00:00
You want increased growth? Governments currently are forced to limit their spending to 103% of their budget. This will, essentially by definition, being (much) less than inflation, reduce money in circulation.

Increase that to, oh, say 105%, and it'll turn around fast. And debt, which is more or less the single leftover untaxed source of income for the EU's rich, will lose value far faster. This will then immediately make it much harder for the EU's countries to lend, which will therefore immediately achieve exactly what conservatives claim they want.
by chemotaxis | 2025-11-11 22:19:06+00:00
> You cross us? We nuke you.

It's a nice theory, but it works only if every act of war is clearly an act of total war and there's a responsible party to nuke. Who were we supposed to nuke after 9/11? Who do we nuke if the next big North Korean hack takes out Microsoft instead of Sony? Or if it disrupts the US power grid for a week? Who do we nuke if Russia props up the regime in Iran and Iran props up a terror group that attacks our close ally?

That's the thing: nuclear wars appear to have a good track record of preventing conventional war in the mold of "we show up at your border with tanks". But it doesn't prevent the kinds of conflicts in which nuking another country might not be a defensible reaction.
by rahen | 2025-11-11 22:20:03+00:00
Author here. They call it a FORTRAN IV compiler but it uses some F66 extensions, such as proper types and functions, although it lacks some of the nicer constructs of F66 like If/Then/Else, which would have been handy.

Regarding floating point, I realized the code actually works fine without an FPU, so I assume it uses soft-float. There's no switch to enable the FP11 opcodes, maybe that was in their F77 compiler.

It's indeed rough and spartan, but using a 64KB optimizing compiler requiring just 8KB of memory was a refreshing change for me.
by cyberax | 2025-11-11 22:20:08+00:00
Model 3/Y can immediately get better with a few tweaks that won't cost Tesla a lot:

1. Enable Android Auto/CarPlay. This literally requires no additional hardware.

2. V2G (vehicle-to-grid) support. Again, zero car-side hardware changes, just software updates to allow the reverse current flow.

3. Vehicle-to-load and 120V outlets. This requires just some cheap hardware changes.

4. Steering wheel stalks and ultrasonic parking sensors. FFS.

5. Add a driver-side display (instead of a useless passenger mid-seat screen). This is the only expensive change.

If they do this, their cars can suddenly become so much more attractive.
by palmotea | 2025-11-11 22:20:27+00:00
> The institutions under attack are universities, data repositories, libraries, archives, statistical agencies that have earned their legitimacy through decades of transparency and authentication of verifiable information.

To be absolutely fair: a lot of these institutions also lost legitimacy by aligning themselves with one major political faction and alienating the other. Politics is more than elections and legislative debates, and that was a major political blunder on the part of those institutions. Some of the stuff Trump's done (like to the BLS) is egregious, but the universities have spent so long being outspoken bastions of the left that they should have realized the right would someday be in power decide to send the money they'd been getting elsewhere.

Infrastructure should aim to be bland, try to stay on the lagging end of controversies, and aim for universal support. Trying to use it to win some controversy just makes it vulnerable.
by aeonfox | 2025-11-11 22:20:28+00:00
Shouldn't entire cities of skyscrapers with no inhabitants never be built then?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underoccupied_developments_in_...

China tends to build things they don't use or are under utilised due to weird incentives at the province and national level. This include coal power plants.

> In 2020 over 40% of plants were estimated to be running at a net loss and new plants may become stranded assets. In 2021 some plants were reported close to bankruptcy due to being forbidden to raise electricity prices in line with high coal prices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_China

Beyond trying to artificially inflate their productivity figures, another possible explanation for their weird stockpiling is that these resources could be used in a war time. Nuclear winter? Just turn the coal power stations back on.
by walletdrainer | 2025-11-11 22:20:36+00:00
Occasionally I read the local subreddit /r/monaco, and see posts like “how much should my weekly food budget be?” with no further information included.

In a place where “normal” genuinely ranges between a couple of euros at McDonald’s and 500+ euros a day in fancy restaurants (easily 1000+ if you drink wine) it always feels like a particularly outrageous question.

There are many places in the world where that’s not a very unreasonable question, but this certainly isn’t it.
by sibeliuss | 2025-11-11 22:20:38+00:00
Yes, exactly. In many cases you don't exactly need to involve the whole group but without a decider things stall out. And suddenly getting a decision about something looks like "collaboration", and gets struck down by the great confusion which is this authors take. It's a lack of decision making, simply put.

Articles like this are quite poisonous, because they take language and mutate it for purposes that aren't quite sincere, and then next thing you know something necessary and good is worthless.
by koito17 | 2025-11-11 22:20:41+00:00
In the case of Japanese, there is 午前・午後 for 12-hour time. e.g. 午後９時に着く (arrive at 9 P.M.). If it's obvious from context, then only the hour is said. e.g. in「明日３時にね」, the flow of the conversation disambiguates the hour (it's also unlikely the speaker means 3 A.M.)

There are also other ways to convey 12-hour time. e.g. 朝６時に起きる (wake up at 6 A.M. / wake up at 6 in the morning).
by skydhash | 2025-11-11 22:21:01+00:00
I read the whole thing and at first glance, it seems like a whole NIH list of wishes. We already have alternatives to the terminal, but the article have no mentions of them:

- Emacs (inherited from lisp machines?). A VM which is powered by lisp. The latter make it easy to redefine function, and commands are just annotated functions. As for output, we have the buffer, which can be displayed in windows, which are arranged in a tiling manner in a frame. And you can have several frames. As the buffer in a window as the same grid like basis as the terminal emulator, we can use cli as is, including like a terminal emulator (vterm, eat, ansi-term,...). You can eschew the terminal flow and use the REPL flow instead (shell-mode, eshell,...). There's support for graphics, but not a full 2d context.

- Acme: Kinda similar to emacs, but the whole thing is mostly about interactive text. Meaning any text can be a command. We also have the tiling/and stacking windows things that displays those texts.

I would add Smalltalk to that, but it's more of an IDE than a full computing environment. But to extend it to the latter would still be a lower effort than what is described in the article.
by baranul | 2025-11-11 22:21:04+00:00
I appreciate you taking the time to give examples in D. People are often under the mistaken impression that Zig's compile time is revolutionary, from how it is excessively hyped, but are failing to realize that many other languages have similar or users can get similar results by doing things differently, because languages have different philosophies and design strategies.

For example, the creator of Odin, has stated in the past he rather come up with optimal solutions without metaprogramming, despite enthusiasts trying to pressure him to add such features into that language.
by toast0 | 2025-11-11 22:21:57+00:00
That's part of it yeah. But, at least in my experience, that tells me you pushed code (to disk) and didn't load it. You could probably just notify at 4 am every day if erlang:modified_modules() /= []; assuming you don't typically do operations overnight. No big deal if you're doing emergency fixes at 4 am, you'll get an extra notification, but you're probably knee deep in notifications, what's one more per node?

But, that's not enough to tell you that the code on disk doesn't match what it's supposed to be. You'd need to have some infrastructure that keeps track of that too. But if you package your code, your package system probably has a check, which you can probably also run at 4 am.
by perlgeek | 2025-11-11 22:22:16+00:00
One reason for collaboration is to raise the bus factor.

For small to medium-sized applications, it's not hard to get a single good developer to crank out feature after feature... but they're the only one that understands any of it. Then that single developer is hit by the proverbial bus (or Corona, or retires, or resigns, or whatever...) and you have important software without any maintainer.

That might be OK for some startups where the expectation is that the code will be thrown away and replaced by something better pretty quickly, but for slower organizations, that's often a nightmare scenario.
by KaiserPro | 2025-11-11 22:22:28+00:00
One of the things that good managers/leaders do is not "make decisions", ie do it this way, but increase the number of decisions that can be made autonomously.

THat could be giving guidance; The product is aimed at x, which means that feature y will need to happen before feature z

Or a framework; We choose to prioritise small throwaway prototypes vs ground up intensive planning

or just taking away decision dimensions: buy this software in and concentrate on this other thing