MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by everforward | 2025-11-12 15:48:18+00:00
This seems incredibly unlikely. They all want clients to have accurate time, because it underpins things like sessions and TLS certs. It would also almost certainly be trivial to proxy back to regular NTP.

Even if the NTP pool somehow died, all it takes to make your own Stratum 1 NTP service is a GPS chip. An old phone probably makes a great small-scale NTP server, or an ESP32 with a GPS chip attached. 20 years ago it would have required exotic parts, but they're mundane, cheap and omnipresent these days.
by mi-c-hn | 2025-11-12 15:48:39+00:00
I kept losing time jumping between GitHub repos, AWS Console, Datadog, and internal docs. Each context switch took ~1-5 mins of searching.

So I built ToolJump: you write JavaScript code that defines how your tools relate to each other, and a browser extension surfaces those links directly in the tools.

Example: viewing a Lambda in AWS Console shows links to the source repo, logs, and docs. Or viewing a GitHub repo shows links to prod/staging URLs and infrastructure. Imagine offering a consistent view and know-how to your whole tech org.

ToolJump is open source and: - Fully programmable (JavaScript), encode your tribal knowledge as needed - Can consume existing data (YAML, Backstage catalogs, service catalogs) - Open source, no SaaS, you can host it yourself - Git-tracked configuration (reviewable, versioned) - Works across AWS Console, GitHub and any other tools

Built this for myself, but curious if others have this problem.

YT: https://youtu.be/6X2dpxCxCfA
by Tabular-Iceberg | 2025-11-12 15:48:44+00:00
Cinepak was one such codec and that could be arbitrarily seeked and copied just fine, even in the early 90s, if the player was competently implemented. It's just a matter of computing from the nearest keyframe.

What really happened was that the feature was first paywalled as QuickTime Pro, then removed altogether, in typical enshittification fashion. It had nothing to do with the technical limitations of any of the codecs.
by jasomill | 2025-11-12 15:49:06+00:00
I've used libqpdf extensively from C++/CLI with excellent results, but since C++/CLI is deprecated-ish and Windows-only, I wouldn't disagree with PDF being a pain point, and if I get the time, a cross-platform open source .NET wrapper for libqpdf is at the top of my list of potential projects.

libqpdf also intentionally limits its scope to PDF structure, so doesn't address nontrivial content creation or manipulation (page content handling is pretty much limited to compressing/decompressing and parsing/unparsing the content stream).
by naikrovek | 2025-11-12 15:49:09+00:00
> 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.

That's still text. Even PowerShell passes objects between commands.

Plan9 did this correctly. A terminal was just a window which could run graphical applications or textual applications. Locally or remotely. It all worked. You create a window, you get a shell with a text prompt. You can do text stuff all day long. But maybe you want that window to be a file manager, now? Launch vdir, and now that same window is home to a graphical file browser. close that and remote into another plan9 machine. launch doom. it runs. it all just works, and it all works smoothly.

And the entire source code for that OS could fit into one person's brain.

It is a very simple OS, appears (to my layman eye) to have sandboxing between all applications by default (via per-process namespaces) making it very easy to keep one application off of your network while allowing others to talk via network as much as they want, for example.
by whizzter | 2025-11-12 15:49:37+00:00
Sure, legacy applications won't be easy to move over but Microsoft has been quite consistent in working towards making microservice applications easy to build and run with AOT by moving more and more components over to using source-generators and promoting minimal-API's.

Their target is probably not entirely greenfield projects (although I wouldn't mind it myself), but rather those with existing investments that start new projects that still want to share some parts.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-12 15:49:38+00:00
For me personally? Yeah, I care about build quality, webcam, speakers, etc. Which is mostly why I still use a macbook.

But for bulk purchases the business is buying for the average office worker, no, none of those things matter. The only thing that matters is RAM, CPU, and does it have a 3/5 year warranty (whatever the lifecycle of the device is). Otherwise, it's spending 8 hours a day hooked up to a docking station, lid closed, and users use headsets for meetings.

That's largely why it's so hard to find/buy a non-mac laptop with equivalent price to performance & build quality. They largely aren't made for individuals who are choosing their own hardware.
by iso1631 | 2025-11-12 15:49:44+00:00
ISO 8601 only allows timezones as offsets, not as locations.

If it allowed "Africa/Cairo" instead of "+0200" that would be fine.

> they could hypothetically (if you want to be literal-minded about it) change the law to make DST happen on absolutely any day of the year or not at all.

That's the whole point - that's why you store future date/times with the location, not the offset, and not in UTC
by yatopifo | 2025-11-12 15:49:53+00:00
I think there are two reasons. First, with AI, you get see intermediate successes and, in theory, can derive profit from them. ChatGPT may not be profitable right now but in the longer run, users will be paying whatever they have to pay for it because they are addicted to using it. So it makes sense to try and get as many users as you can into your ecosystem as early as possible even if that means losses. With fusion, you won't see profitability for a very very long time.

The second reason is by how much it's going to be better in the end. Fusion has to compete with hydro, nuclear, solar and wind. It makes exactly the same energy, so the upside is already capped unlike with AI which brings something disruptive.
by vintagedave | 2025-11-12 15:50:07+00:00
I hadn't heard of the philosopher's chair before, but I laughed :) Yes, I think those views were one-sided (OpenAI Bad) without thinking through other viewpoints.

IMO we can have multiple views over multiple companies and actions. And the sort of discussions I value here on HN are ones where people share insight, thought, show some amount of deeper thinking. I wanted to challenge for that with my comment.

_If_ we agree the NYT even has a reason to examine chats -- and I think even that should be where the conversation is -- I agree that there should be other ways to achieve it without violating privacy.
by aatd86 | 2025-11-12 15:50:19+00:00
The predicate gets tested every time we do type checking? It is part of the type identity. And it is a dependent type. Just like an array type is a dependent type, the actual array type depending on the length value argument.

edit: I think I am starting to understand. In the implementations that are currently existing, Singleton types may be abstracted. My point is exactly to unabstract them so that the value is part of their identity.

And only then we can deal with only types i.e. everything from the same Universe.
by jlarocco | 2025-11-12 15:50:25+00:00
> Unfortunately, in my experience, there's often a lot of barriers within companies to upstream. Reasons can be everything from compliance, processes, you name it... It's unfortunate.

I sympathize and understand those issues for small companies, but after a certain size those excuses stop being convincing.

Especially for a software company like Google who runs dozens of open source projects, employs an army of lawyers to monitor compliance, and surely has to deal with those issues on a daily basis anyway.

At some point there needs to be pushback. Companies get a huge amount of value from hobbiest open source projects, and eventually they need to start helping out or be told to go away.
by pomarie | 2025-11-12 15:50:28+00:00
Good q! So it depends.

Some teams are using Claude or similar models in GitHub Actions, which automatically review PRs. The rules are basically natural language encoded in a YAML file that's committed in the codebase. Pretty lightweight to get started.

Other teams upgrade to dedicated tools like cubic. We have a feature where you can encode your rules either in our UI, or we're releasing a feature where you can write them directly in your codebase. We'll check them on every PR and leave comments when something violates a constraint.

The in-codebase approach is nice because the rules live next to the code they're protecting, so they evolve naturally as your system changes.
by titzer | 2025-11-12 15:50:30+00:00
> use it in line at the post office

If it were a powerful, useful device that I could load my own software onto and make programmable without jumping through a bunch of hoops, instead of the ad-laden crapware that resulted from primarily two megacorps duking it out over how to best extort billions from app developers and users for their own benefit, then sure, I'd agree.

But phones aren't awesome little PCs, they're zombifying the majority of the public. They also, incidentally, are insidious little snitches busy at work trying to monetize every single thing about our daily lives.
by cootsnuck | 2025-11-12 15:50:53+00:00
Weirdly enough I'm having to install some window film on a new office space I just got. The windows are large so I'm going to have to splice pieces together. I looked up how the pros do it and it's exactly what you're saying. You overlap the pieces half an inch, cut the overlapped sections, wet it and smooth it out, and then later go over it with some clear nail polish.
by johnisgood | 2025-11-12 15:50:56+00:00
I completely disagree.

I would not know English or anything about computers, and my childhood would have been quite sad were there such a retarded ban[1]. I do not care about WhatsApp and Instagram, but online games and apps with chat functions? Come on now. "Allegedly" is the keyword.

At any rate, see Roblox and Discord. Do something with those platforms first. :)

[1] I was around 12 years old when I met an older guy IRL who I have met in an online game initially. Can you imagine the safety? :D He showed me his laptop on which he had a Linux distro installed, and the rest is history.
by mrweasel | 2025-11-12 15:52:16+00:00
Our CTO: If you add stickers to your laptop you need to keep it for four years, rather than two.

We sell back our laptop to the company we get them from, they refurb them and give us a nice discount on the new model. Most vinyl stickers leave a mark on MacBooks that can't come off, hurting the resell value a lot. Some have protecting covers on their laptop and the stickers go on that instead.
by modeless | 2025-11-12 15:52:17+00:00
The best world model research I know of today is Dreamer 4: https://danijar.com/project/dreamer4/. Here is an interesting interview with the author: https://www.talkrl.com/episodes/danijar-hafner-on-dreamer-v4

Training on 2,500 hours of prerecorded video of people playing Minecraft, they produce a neural net world model of Minecraft. It is basically a learned Minecraft simulator. You can actually play Minecraft in it, in real time.

They then train a neural net agent to play Minecraft and achieve specific goals all the way up to obtaining diamonds. But the agent never plays the real game of Minecraft during training. It only plays in the world model. The agent is trained in its own imagination. Of course this is why it is called Dreamer.

The advantage of this is that once you have a world model, no extra real data is required to train agents. The only input to the system is a relatively small dataset of prerecorded video of people playing Minecraft, and the output is an agent that can achieve specific goals in the world. Traditionally this would require many orders of magnitude more real data to achieve, and the real data would need to be focused on the specific goals you want the agent to achieve. World models are a great way to cheaply amplify a small amount of undifferentiated real data into a large amount of goal-directed synthetic data.

Now, Minecraft itself is already a world model that is cheap to run, so a learned world model of Minecraft may not seem that useful. Minecraft is just a testbed. World models are very appealing for domains where it is expensive to gather real data, like robotics. I recommend listening to the interview above if you want to know more.

World models can also be useful in and of themselves, as games that you can play, or to generate videos. But I think their most important application will be in training agents.
by gdulli | 2025-11-12 15:52:45+00:00
People are unsophisticated and see how convincing LLM output looks on the surface. They think it's already intelligent, or that intelligence is just around the corner. Or that its ability to displace labor, if not intelligence, is imminent.

If consumption of slop turns out to be a novelty that goes away and enough time goes by without a leap to truly useful intelligence, the AI investment will go down.
by jeingham | 2025-11-12 15:52:56+00:00
I'm an OFG, born in 1952 (...an okay boomer...) hit the job market in 1971, bad but there were always openings for machinists. Tough craft with a long learning curve but they paid reasonably well in my view, at the time at least. Long story short, TL;DR, evolving myself into a CAD CAM CNC stabilized my career long term. I know there are nuances and differences here with you programmers and the AI revolution but I think you all will be best served embracing it fully or find another path.BTW, the only reason I'm reading HN
by pkroll | 2025-11-12 15:52:58+00:00
It's likely that I'm seeing this from my deep into ComfyUI bubble. My impression was that AUTOMATIC1111 and Forge and the like, were fading as ComfyUI was the "what people ended up on" no matter which AI generation framework they started with. But I don't know that there are any real stats on usage of these programs, so it's entirely possible that AUTOMATIC1111/Forge/InvokeAI are being used by more people than ComfyUI.
Show HN: Where is "mass replacement"? Toy to estimate AI exposure in your org
by robkop | 2025-11-12 15:52:59+00:00
TLDR: I've been trying to figure out if AI is actually replacing anyone, I've built an interactive model for you to play with, keen for feedback (is it accurate on your org?)

I've been troubled in understanding if AI is really impacting the job market. I've heard "AI mass replacement" for the past 3 years but... I still haven't seen anything?

So, sounds like an interesting gap for a side project to investigate

Main goals were to answer:

Suppose AI replacement is here, where should I look to see it in my company? And, if we can predict exposure across companies, which industries & countries will be hit first? and the hardest?

I got surprisingly good estimates by gluing together org chart data from financial reports (+ news stories + job ads) with Anthropic's Economic Index data (click "Help me understand" on the site for a nice visual). Then running that across 1,000+ companies also gave a pretty comparable view x-country/x-industry.

I've left it open so you can run whatever company/ industry you want - which then gets added to the overall dataset. It'll also draw up the org chart and overlay all the at risk roles for you - let me know if you see any gaps

Site: https://automationrisk.app Code (MIT): github.com/R0bk/automation-risk

P.S. I threw $150 into anthropic credits you can play with - unfortunately don't have unlimited - if you want to sponsor some runs, ping me
by Emma_Goldman | 2025-11-12 15:53:16+00:00
Is cacao production unsustainable? It seems the problem is the oligopolistic and exploitative price setting architecture for cacao. Pay farmers more, and supply will increase.

One of the alt-chocolate alternatives mentioned here involve palm oil, one of the most environmentally destructive ingredients on the planet.

I don't think beyond meat is an example to follow. It is ultra-processed fake food ruinous of health, and rightly - at least in the UK - now has an aura of ill-health surrounding it. Better to just make yourself a burger with healthy whole foods, like lentils, mushrooms, chickpeas.
by sambyte | 2025-11-12 15:53:17+00:00
I built Hotspot to solve a problem I constantly saw: showing real, measurable progress against tech debt and knowledge risk in large codebases. It's a CLI tool written in Go that analyzes Git history to rank files/folders by custom metrics (Hot, Risk, Stale, Complexity).

Since the early versions, the tool has matured significantly. The biggest win has been a major performance optimization: analysis is now dramatically faster on large repos because it uses pre-aggregated commit data, eliminating thousands of individual `git log` calls per file. Additionally, I further improved the timeseries analysis with more comprehensive logic for greater accuracy in risk evolution tracking.

Key features in v1.3.3 focus on giving engineers better data: 1. *Metrics Transparency & Export*: `hotspot metrics` prints the exact weighted formulas used for scoring and now exports to CSV/JSON. The weights are fully configurable via YAML, letting you define risk metrics tailored to your company's standards. 2. *Trend Analysis*: `hotspot timeseries` tracks a file's score over time, helping you pinpoint when a file became a burden. *This includes owner tracking to audit knowledge shifts.* 3. *Release Auditing (Bus Factor Check)*: `hotspot compare` measures the risk delta between two Git refs and *shows the top 2 owners contributing to that change*, letting you catch escalating complexity and Bus Factor liabilities before merging.

I'd genuinely appreciate feedback on the weighted scoring model and its performance on real-world repos. *If you run it against a large repository, what kind of organizational risk blind spots did it uncover?*
by devsda | 2025-11-12 15:53:25+00:00
Ads, I can tolerate occasional ones but not signing in to YT or premium has a biggest benefit of all, no more creepy tracking and ads based on Google search keywords, no more shitty recommendations.

I can open a private window, clear cookies, clear app data or advertising id and have fresh slate that is not tainted by previous videos.

PS: While at Alphabet, if you ever run into the person who made the call to enable automatic AI translations on YT videos with no way to change language on mobile, please whack them on the head on behalf of us countless frustrated users.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-11-12 15:53:49+00:00
To some degree I think that our widely used formal languages may just be insufficient and could be improved to better describe change.

But ultimately I agree with you that this entire societal process is just categorically different. It's simply not a description or definition of something, and therefore the question of how formal it can be doesn't really make sense.

Formalisms are tools for a specific but limited purpose. I think we need those tools. Trying to replace them with something fuzzy makes no sense to me either.
by BoredPositron | 2025-11-12 15:54:11+00:00
I don't see any evidence of a general chip shortage in your link either. That they are down in stock because of unprecedented demand after a downturn in the last 3 years in consumer demands of consumer products is something completely different than being down because of production capacity. They reduced production in 2023 and 2024. It's exactly what I wrote in my previous comment.
by wlesieutre | 2025-11-12 15:54:31+00:00
My fun fact on the laptop logos is that the PowerBook G4 is when they flipped it to being right-side-up for other people looking at the computer while you're using it.

On the PowerBook G3 and prior, the logo was facing toward you when you're looking at your own computer closed on the desk. Once you open it, it was upside down for anyone else looking at you.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-12 15:54:33+00:00
Some of it is because how people interact with and use tech has changed.

Mobile users have completely outpaced laptop/desktop users, and mobile users don't think in terms of files and text, so to them copy & paste is less important. The mythical "average user" moves arbitrary text and data around using screenshots and screen recordings instead of text and files.

Yes, it's incredibly inefficient, but I think it's evolved that day because selecting text is a real pain on a small touch screen, and companies have been trying to abstract away any concept of a filesystem for a long time.

So you or I might care and be bothered that we can't copy & paste something from UI chrome or content in a "web app" but the average person won't care, they'll just take a screenshot.
by bwfan123 | 2025-11-12 15:55:01+00:00
Nice commentary and I enjoyed the poetic turn of phrase. I had to respond to it with my own thoughts if only to bookmark it for myself.

> how many people are continually ready to mistake language for thought

This is a fundamental illusion - where, rote memory and names and words get mistaken for understanding. This was wonderfully illustrated here [1]. Few really grok what understanding actually is. This is an unfortunate by-product of our education system.

> Are they all P-zombies or just obedience-conditioned into emulating ones?!?!?

Brilliant way to state the fundamental human condition. ie, we are all zombies conditioned to imitate rather than understand. Social media amplifies the zombification, and now LLMs do that too.

> Starting with the sophomoric questions of the optimist who mistakes the possible for the viable

This is the fundamental tension between operationalized meaning and imagination. A grokking soul gathers mists from the cosmic chaos and creates meaning and operationalizes it for its own benefit and then continually adapts it.

> it's amazing if sad that they cracked it by more data and not by more model

I was speaking to experts in the sciences (chemistry). They were shocked that the underlying architecture is brute force. They expected a compact information-compressed theory which is able to model independent of data. The problem with brute-force approaches are that they dont scale, and dont capture the essences which are embodied in theories.

> The physical limits of human language as information processing device have been hit at some point in the XX century

2000 years back when humans realized that formalism was needed to operationalize meaning, and natural language was too vague to capture and communicate it. Because the world model that natural language captures encompasses "everything" whereas for making it "useful" requires to limit it via formalism.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2483976
by mholt | 2025-11-12 15:55:41+00:00
Thanks for the mention!

Indeed, big fan of the idea of Perkeep, and its authors (I learned a lot about writing network code in Go from reading from Brad Fitzpatrick's contributions.)

Where Perkeep uses a super cool blob server design that abstracts the underlying storage, Timelinize keeps things simpler by just using regular files on disk and a sqlite DB for the index (and to contain small text items, so as not to litter your file system).

Perkeep's storage architecture is probably more well thought-out. Timelinize's is still developing, but I think in principle I prefer to keep it simple.

I'm also hoping that, with time, Timelinize will be more accessible to a broader, less-technical audience.