MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zehaeva | 2025-12-03 14:11:37+00:00
What he's talking about is that the CGI in B5 was filmed in 4:3 and not in 16:9 like the rest of the show. When they did the "high res" releases they had to make the choice of doing everything in 16:9 or in 4:3.

In 4:3 it looks good and like the original airing show, in 16:9 any non-digital/composite shot looks freaking fantastic. But once you get to any digital or composite shot it takes a nose dive in quality.
by eska | 2025-12-03 14:11:37+00:00
HDDs also have a spinning medium and a read head , so the optimization is similar to optical media like CDs.

Let’s say you have UI textures that you always need, common player models and textures, the battle music, but world geometry and monsters change per stage. Create an archive file (pak, wad, …) for each stage, duplicating UI, player and battle music assets into each archive. This makes it so that you fully utilize HDD pages (some small config file won’t fill 4kb filesystem pages or even the smaller disk sectors). All the data of one stage will be read into disk cache in one fell swoop as well.

On optical media like CDs one would even put some data closer to the middle or on the outer edge of the disc because the reading speed is different due to the linear velocity.

This is an optimization for bandwidth at the cost of size (which often wasn’t a problem because the medium wasn’t filled anyway)
by gwbas1c | 2025-12-03 14:11:48+00:00
> This is the entire point of copyright.

That was never the point.

Copyright was invented with the printing press. What was happening was that authors couldn't get compensated, because everyone with a printing press was re-printing their works. It never gave the author control over where their books were ultimately sold; just who could copy it.

Related: This is why the Bible became so popular and well-known. Printers could re-print the Bible because it wasn't protected by copyright.
by WreckVenom | 2025-12-03 14:12:41+00:00
I am not interested. I've heard many of these arguments before and I made up my mind years ago.

I know very well that commuting by bicycle in urban areas is often better. I often was quicker through the traffic on my bike than anything else. However it doesn't mean it is better for society. People have different wants and/or needs.

Cycling isn't for everyone and it has some significant downsides. e.g.

- I've been injured as a result of a hit and run and I as a result I have a permanent weakness in my right shoulder.

- I've had my bicycles stolen and/or vandalised.

- I've had to endure very harsh conditions to get home e.g Once I was so cold I thought I was going to threw up, I had appropriate clothing on but I was a little ill and that and the cold almost caused me to faint (I was ~25 at the time).

As for public transport. I generally dislike public transport. In the UK the public transport is often late, crowded, dirty (sometimes extremely dirty), potentially dangerous (I've been assaulted and have been witness to them). I spent a good 15 years using public transport and passing my driving license and getting a car was a godsend.

> He's not a recreational cyclist (light road bike, lycra - sports/racing), he's a utility cyclist (big heavy upright bike, regular clothes - take kids to school, commute, do grocery runs).

There is no problem with recreational cyclists as they do it because they enjoy it. I am one.

I have an issue with many of the political/activist cyclists that are very obnoxious about their dislike of cars. I don't want anything to do with them.

I also don't like "utility cyclists", because it makes it sound like cycling is a chore when it is quite enjoyable, cheap and relatively safe activity that almost anyone can enjoy.
by dryark | 2025-12-03 14:12:50+00:00
Great questions — and you’re absolutely right that Latin vs. CJK is effectively two different universes in terms of reconstruction.

1. Latin vs. CJK differences Latin glyphs are structurally simple: limited stroke vocabulary, mostly predictable modulation, and relatively low topological variation. Once you can recover outlines and stroke junctions accurately, mapping to Unicode is almost trivial.

That can be done with standard OCR methods for Latin.

CJK is the opposite. Each character is effectively a miniature blueprint with dozens of micro-decisions: stroke order, brush pressure artifacts, serif style, shape proportion, and even regional typographic conventions. Treating it like Latin “but bigger” doesn’t work. So the workflow for CJK has extra normalization steps and more constraints, especially when reconstructing consistent glyph families rather than one-offs.

From a simple perspective, CJK has many characters with disconnected pieces that are still part of the same character.

2. How we match scans to Unicode entities We don’t rely on conventional OCR at all. OCR engines are optimized for reading text, not recovering the underlying design intent. Our process is closer to forensic glyph analysis — reconstructing stable structural signatures, then mapping those signatures to references.

This ends up being a hybrid: • deterministic structural matching • limited supervised correction when ambiguity exists • and zero reliance on any off-the-shelf OCR models

It’s not “OCR first, match later.” It’s “reconstruct the letterpress structure, then Unicode becomes a lookup.” OCR quality literally doesn’t limit us because OCR isn’t part of the critical path.

3. What determines coverage Coverage is defined by what we can physically access and reconstruct cleanly. For Latin, coverage is straightforward. For CJK, coverage is shaped by: • typeface completeness in the source material • the consistency of impression depth • survivability of fine strokes in early printings • and the practical question of how many thousand characters the original font designer actually cut

There’s no need for the entire Unicode set per book. The historical font only ever covered a finite subset. It is unfortunate that every book doesn't use every glyph, but not catastrophic because we can source many public domain books from the same era and eventually find enough characters matching the style.

In short: Latin is an engineering challenge. CJK is an archaeological one. OCR is not a bottleneck because we don’t use it. Coverage follows the historical material, not Unicode completeness.
by kragen | 2025-12-03 14:13:29+00:00
It's possible that "it took several years and a small team of programmers to re-write the entire game in C++" because ⓐ those programmers were not as good as he was, and/or ⓑ they had to duplicate the behavior of an existing program exactly, rather than enjoying Bob Ross's happy little accidents, as long as the game was fun.

I'm pretty sure most programmers who are comfortable in both C++ and assembly language can add working functionality to a program faster in C++ than in assembly. Of course, certain C++ libraries will eliminate that advantage, but choosing to use those libraries isn't essentially different from many other bad decisions you might make about how to write a large program.
by fithisux | 2025-12-03 14:14:08+00:00
Mathematics is hard when there is not much time invested in processing the core idea.

For example, Dvoretzky-Rogers theorem in isolation is hard to understand.

While more applications of it appear While more generalizations of it appear While more alternative proofs of it appear

it gets more clear. So, it takes time for something to become digestible, but the effort spent gives the real insights.

Last but not least is the presentation of this theorem. Some authors are cryptic, others refactor the proof in discrete steps or find similarities with other proofs.

Yes it is hard but part of the work of the mathematician is to make it easier for the others.

Exactly like in code. There is a lower bound in hardness, but this is not an excuse to keep it harder than that.
by ryukoposting | 2025-12-03 14:14:11+00:00
> AI impersonations of Dagoth Ur are remarkably accurate even though Dagoth Ur has only a few sentences of dialogue

If there are only a few sentences of dialogue, how can you know it's "accurate?" "Plausible" is the more appropriate word here. The AI is filling in the blanks left by a limited sample set.

I'd imagine that's why it "works well" - you don't have a complete reference point to compare to. Ex: in your mind, what does Dagoth Ur sound like when he says "awww what a cute puppy!" Now, what does the AI sound like? Is there any reason to say one interpretation is more correct than the other?
by speed_spread | 2025-12-03 14:14:17+00:00
So now there will be Kotlin DSL, Groovy DSL and declarative DSL, spread out over up to five files in the project root. Gradle is like C++, trying to climb out of it's complexity hole by digging deeper every new version.

The problem with Gradle is that it never had a clear philosophy to begin with. It's trying to be everything to everybody, changes best practices every year and has enough features that the project at hand could entirely be built out of Gradle scripts itself.

And oh, it still requires an update to run everytime a new JDK is released even though the SDK is the most backward compatible thing ever written.
by witheredspirit | 2025-12-03 14:14:34+00:00
Have you verified your numbers? With some basic searching I found that the amount of cars registered in the EU seems to be comparable (if not slightly more than) than the USA, while the total length of public roads in the USA is about 10% more than that one of the EU. Keep in mind that in the EU you have a lot of European routes which can stretch vast amount of distances over several countries, similar to the US' interstate system. The biggest factor I can think of is the lack of sidewalks and bike lanes in the US on many roads, additionally there's a disregard of bicyclists by car users, which negatively encourages these two to be as prevalent on the roads as compared to in the EU, since everyone is incentivized to just get a car anyway.
by nerdjon | 2025-12-03 14:14:41+00:00
High cost to who though. We see the same thing when it comes to RAM and CPU usage, the developer is not the one paying for the hardware and many gamers have shown that they will spend money on hardware to play a game they want.

Sure they may loose some sales but I have never seen many numbers on how much it really impacted sales.

Also on the disk side, I can't say I have ever looked at how much space is required for a game before buying it. If I need to clear out some stuff I will. Especially with it not being uncommon for a game to be in the 100gb realm already.

That all being said, I am actually surprised by the 11% using mechanical hard drives. I figured that NVME would be a lower percentage and many are using SSD's... but I figured the percent with machines capable of running modern games in the first place with mechanical drives would be far lower.

I do wonder how long it will be until we see games just saying they are not compatible with mechanical drives.
by mattlondon | 2025-12-03 14:14:42+00:00
Pretty special? They were making guns and selling computation tools to the Nazis for a bunch of those years.

I think they trade now mostly on legacy maintenance contracts (e.g. for mainframes) for e.g. banks who are terrified of rocking their technology-stack-boat, and selling off-shore consultants (which is at SIGNIFICANT risk of disruption - why would you pay IBM squillions to do some contract IT work, when we have AI code agents? Probably why the CEO is out doing interviews saying you cant trust AI to be around forever)

I have not really seen anything from IBM that signals they are anything other than just milking their legacy - what have they done that is new or innovative in the past say 10 or 20 years?

I was a former IBMer 15 odd years ago and it was obvious then that it was a total dinosaur on a downward spiral, and a place where innovation happened somewhere else.
by matthewaveryusa | 2025-12-03 14:15:47+00:00
Honestly, I don't. I go through phases. I have a tampermonkey script that blank-screens sites and that's been very effective. Reddit is a tough one because there's a ton of useful information on there, but once you're on it it's easy to start scrolling. You could be extreme and get a device just for work, perhaps with google voice and wifi only to save on a membership fee

Here's my script: https://gist.github.com/matthewaveryusa/8257de0083abdecc612c...
by ah979 | 2025-12-03 14:16:07+00:00
CN! Nice to cross paths!

You're right that it's sobering to see how it's changed so much in the last 5 years. And yeah, it's not just the juniors that have to think about this but those in their cushy jobs that get hit with layoffs out of the blue, too. I don't say that to illicit fear; I say that to illicit action. We don't live in the same world anymore where you can rest on your laurels, unfortunately.

You've always been so good at all this, though! You help others, get curious about where you can add value to their situations, people know what you're about, and you exude authenticity. Poster child for what I'm trying to tell people to do to take action. :D
by locallost | 2025-12-03 14:16:08+00:00
I am a huge proponent of renewables, but you cannot compare their capacity in GW with other energy sources because their output is variable and not always maximal. To realistically get 100GW in solar you would need at least 500GW of panels.

On the other hand, I think we will not actually need 100GW of new installations because capacity can be acquired by reducing current usage by making it more efficient. The term negawatt comes to mind. A lot of people are still in the stone age when it comes to this even though it was demonstrated quite effectively by reduced gas use in the US after the oil crisis in the 70s. Which basically recovered to the pre crisis levels only recently.

High gas prices caused people to use less and favor efficiency. The same thing will happen with electricity and we'll get more capacity. Let the market work.
by infecto | 2025-12-03 14:16:21+00:00
Hmm I don’t think any of the revisions are about being PC but rather not making juvenile comments. Linus has definitely made a lot of harsh inflammatory comments to others, I don’t think it’s the right thing to do and shows his character but at the same time for me at least it comes across as a smart pompous jerk who says things in the wrong way but at least usually has some kernel of a point.

The Zig comments come off has highly immature, maybe because they are comments made to unknown people, calling folks losers or monkeys just crosses some line to me. Telling someone to stfu is not great but calling groups of people monkeys feels worse.
by hypeatei | 2025-12-03 14:16:29+00:00
I think the solution is to pay them more, create very strict laws around insider trading, and enforce those laws vigorously.

I don't know if that's realistic or not as the electorate has already shown they don't care enough to vote their representatives out for doing it and it's unlikely that current members would restrict their earnings. I guess it's good that we know about it, at least.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-03 14:16:51+00:00
It's interesting that Amazon don't appear interested in acquiring Anthropic, which would have seemed like somewhat of a natural fit given that they are already partnered, Anthropic have apparently optimized (or at least adapted) for Trainium, and Amazon don't have their own frontier model.

It seems that Amazon are playing this much like Microsoft - seeing themselves are more of a cloud provider, happy to serve anyone's models, and perhaps only putting a moderate effort into building their own models (which they'll be happy to serve to those who want that capability/price point).

I don't see the pure "AI" plays like OpenAI and Anthropic able to survive as independent companies when they are competing against the likes of Google, and with Microsoft and Amazon happy to serve whatever future model comes along.
by fleabitdev | 2025-12-03 14:16:57+00:00
Back of the envelope, in the two years since the game was released, this single bug has wasted at least US$10,000,000 of hardware resources. That's a conservative estimate (20% of people who own the game keep it installed, the marginal cost of wasted SSD storage in a gaming PC is US$2.50 per TB per month, the install base grew linearly over time), so the true number is probably several times higher.

In other words, the game studio externalised an eight-figure hardware cost onto their users, to avoid a five-to-six-figure engineering cost on their side.

Data duplication can't just be banned by Steam, because it's a legitimate optimisation in some cases. The only safeguard against this sort of waste is a company culture which values software quality. I'm glad the developers fixed this bug, but it should never have been released to users in the first place.
by akramachamarei | 2025-12-03 14:16:59+00:00
It's not clear if this is meant to be a serious thought experiment, but nonetheless I would ask why you equate expenses ($6.8T) with revenue ($4.9T)? I suppose it might not make a big difference, but it's a strange decision (within an already very weird thought experiment.) Also not sure why you picked top 10% wealth, since the previous comment was about billionaires. The top 10% of net worth starts with low millionaires so... goodbye every single employer, I assume.
by vitorsr | 2025-12-03 14:17:31+00:00
Out of those, only Morisawa's BIZ UD, Sandoll's IBM Plex and Adobe's Noto families are of outstanding quality.

Motoya is also a reputable foundry. FONTDASU also, I guess. And Google's Zen.

But those are all text faces! The only display families are a few freebies from Fontworks which do not cover a lot of design range.

So, yes, hardly 2000.
by ricardobeat | 2025-12-03 14:17:39+00:00
Yeah, normal sized ones. There are a few in the street out front, but they dont invade the sidewalk as much, and fit in a standard parking spot.

As I said, I rarely see Sprinters, might be an Amsterdam thing due to how hard it is to drive and park them here. Ford Transit / VW Transporter / MB Vito / Renault Trafic are far more common. It doesn't seem like much, but an extra 20cm width + 1m length make a massive difference in overall size and driveability.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-12-03 14:18:01+00:00
Yep, it's a decent analogy: Giving up actual (user) control for the sake of having 1 controller. There's a type of person that finds it convenient. And another type that finds it a sloppy piss-poor interface that isn't showing off any decent engineering or design. At some point, many technologists started to fall into the first category? It's one thing to tolerate a bad situation due to lack of alternatives, but very different to slip into thinking that it must be the pinnacle of engineering excellence.

Around now some wit usually asks if the luddites also want to build circuits from scratch or allocate memory manually? Whatever, you can use a garbage collector! Point is that good technologists will typically give up control tactically, not as a pure reflex, and usually to predictable subsystems that are reliable, are well-understood, have clear boundaries and tolerances.
by ben_w | 2025-12-03 14:18:08+00:00
> But the difference is, all humans are capable of it, whether or not they have the tools to exercise that capability in any given situation.

When they don't have the tools to exercise that capability, it's a distinction without any practical impact.

> Where "it" is "recognizing they made a mistake in real time and learning from it on their own"

"Learn" I agree. But as an immediate output, weirdly not always: they can sometimes recognise they made a mistake and correct it.
by tsoukase | 2025-12-03 14:18:12+00:00
To me it seems that large US tech companies had a start-up behaviour until the last years (massive hiring, ambitious goals and VC money). This fades away relatively fast now and they cash out their investments.

Another reason might be the low potential of the new generation of graduates (see lower math scores and possibly IQ). They might have interviewed some and are disappointed and unwilling to hire from this pool.

Last but not least comes the current trend to substitute humans by LLMs.
by Kirby64 | 2025-12-03 14:18:39+00:00
> At the end of the day, investing in an ETF for 10 years isn't going to move the needle much. but catching the right crypto wave will have a larger impact on their life.

Buying the right lotto tickets will have a larger impact too, but that’s called gambling, not investing. As someone who has just invested in ETFs, 10 years has been plenty to more than double my investment. It moves the needle substantially.
by pier25 | 2025-12-03 14:18:53+00:00
> Deno fixes both of those problems with a proper permission model and a standard library

Bun has a better standard library than Deno. You get a DB driver, S3 client, etc which on Deno are all third party deps. It was the main reason I got interested in Bun. The speed is nice though during dev. Everything feels instant.
by kaoD | 2025-12-03 14:19:05+00:00
My personal theory is that (notation+terms of art) is incredibly information dense even if inscrutable to outsiders.

What you wish for is more akin to coding like this:

declaring a function whose name is "max" and its arguments are "x" (of type number) and "y" (of type number) that returns a number: statement: if a is greater than b, the function returns a statement: the function returns b

But programmers don't bat an eye at {}[](),.!&^| (and I just realized I used the term "function" which outsiders might wish was replaced by simpler terminology!)

// This is more readable if you're "in the know" // even if it looks like a jumbled mess to outsiders fn max(a: num, b: num): num => a > b ? a : b

Math uses terms of art like "group", "field", "modulo" and "multiplicative inverse"; and notation like "∑"; because they are short and communicate very specific (and common) things, many of which are implicit and we probably wouldn't even notice.

In other words: we're not the target audience.

Note that this is not only a matter of conciseness. See Ken Iverson's (of APL/J fame) "Notation as a Tool of Thought": https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.p...
by quitit | 2025-12-03 14:19:12+00:00
>How do we really know that?

As the Devils advocate, the burden is upon you to propose a viable alternative.

Merely asking "what if it's not that" is called sowing doubt, a practice that aims to undermine trust in established information.

Suggest a viable reason for any of the below figures, and then others can chime in with their criticisms of your rationale.

USA car fatalities over the last 15 years:

- 30% increase in road deaths

- 80% increase in pedestrian fatalities by car

- 50% increase in cyclist fatalities by car
by mattlondon | 2025-12-03 14:19:16+00:00
Take this "sober" analysis with a big pinch of salt.

IBM have totally missed the AI boat, and a large chunk of their revenue comes from selling expensive consultants to clients who do not have the expertise to do IT work themselves - this business model is at a high risk of being disrupted by those clients just using AI agents instead of paying $2-5000/day for a team of 20 barely-qualified new-grads in some far-off country.

IBM have an incentive to try and pour water on the AI fire to try and sustain their business.