MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-19 04:54:22+00:00
The K6-2 was a trooper.

I had one of those for what seemed like an eternity.

At first, right out of the gate: I overclocked it from 300MHz to 350MHz just to see what would happen. It worked perfectly without further adjustment (and the next step did not), so I left it right there at 350MHz. For the price, at that time, it kept up great compared to what my peers had going on.

As the years ticked by and it was getting long in the tooth, it stayed around -- but it shifted roles.

I think the last thing it was doing for me was running a $25 SoundBlaster Live! 5.1's EMU10k1 DSP chip under Windows, using the kX audio drivers.

kX let a person use that DSP chip for what it was -- an audio-oriented DSP with some audio-centric IO. With kX, a person could drop basic DSP blocks into the GUI and wire them together arbitrarily, and also wire them into the real world.

I used it as a parametric EQ and active crossover for the stereo in my home office -- unless I was also using it as a bass preamp, in a different mode. Low-latency real-time software DSP was mostly a non-starter at that time, but these functions and routings were all done within the EMU10k1 and end-to-end latency was low enough to play a bass guitar through.

Of course: It still required a computer to run it, and I had a new family at that time and things like the electric bill were very important to me. So I underclocked and undervolted the K6-2 for passive cooling, booted Windows from a CompactFlash card (what spinning HDD?), and hacked the power supply fan to just-barely turn and rotate air over the heatsinks.

It went from a relatively high-cost past-performer to a rather silent low-power rig that I'd remote into over the LAN to wiggle DSP settings on that only had one moving part.

Neat chips, the K6-2 and EMU10k1 were.

Fun times.

(And to bring it all back 'round: We'd be in a different place right now if things like the K6-2 had been more popular than they were. I don't know if it'd be better or worse, but it'd sure be different.)
by scuff3d | 2025-12-19 04:57:01+00:00
You've left out an absolutely massive swath between "low level systems" and "crud app". There a lot more to the industry then just those two things.

And as productivity rises, the complexity and ambition of the projects tackeled will continue to rise.

The way we do the work might change, but things aren't going to look as different as people think.
by heavyset_go | 2025-12-19 04:57:06+00:00
The absolute reactionary response to anything Mozilla does is quite the something to watch, I've never seen another company held to the same standards.

If you read the Mozilla and Firefox related threads over the past week, you'd think Mozilla was the scourge of the internet, worse than DoubleClick in their heyday and worse than Google's hobbling of Chrome.

That said, the AI options for Firefox are opt-in. If you don't want them, don't use them. You are correct in that this is where software is heading, and AI integration is what users will expect going forward.
by Keployio | 2025-12-19 04:57:55+00:00
API Automation Testing is the process of validating APIs automatically to ensure they function correctly, return accurate responses, and handle errors reliably.

It focuses on the backend logic layer and helps teams detect issues early, improve test coverage, and speed up release cycles.

Key benefits of API Automation Testing: - Faster execution compared to UI testing - Early bug detection in backend services - Reliable and repeatable test results - Easy integration with CI/CD pipelines - Improved software quality and stability

Modern teams increasingly combine API automation with AI-driven tools to reduce manual effort and enhance test accuracy.
by poemxo | 2025-12-19 04:59:38+00:00
Really cool article, I liked these details that weren't exactly related to the thesis:

- the mysterious disappearance of Exo

- Jeff wants something like SMB Direct but for the Mac. Wait what? SMB Direct is a thing, wha?? I always thought networked storage was untrustworthy.

- A single M3 Ultra is fast for inference

- A framework desktop ai max 395 is only $2100

Now I have some more rabbit holes to jump down.
by nospice | 2025-12-19 05:04:23+00:00
I'm surprised you can do this with a relatively modest corpus of text (compared to the petabytes you can vacuum up from modern books, Wikipedia, and random websites). But if it works, that's actually fantastic, because it lets you answer some interesting questions about LLMs being able to make new discoveries or transcend the training set in other ways. Forget relativity: can an LLM trained on this data notice any inconsistencies in its scientific knowledge, devise experiments that challenge them, and then interpret the results? Can it intuit about the halting problem? Theorize about the structure of the atom?...

Of course, if it fails, the counterpoint will be "you just need more training data", but still - I would love to play with this.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-12-19 05:04:40+00:00
Developing land is not cheap, but that’s not a good reason for government to make it more expensive.

If archeology surveys are in the public interest, then they should be funded by the public at large through property taxes of all homeowners and land owners, rather than just a handful who will live in a specific new building.

If the public at large is unwilling to stomach an increase in property taxes to pay for archeology surveys, then that is a pricing signal that public does not actually value those surveys at all. (except in so far as they make the construction of additional housing, more difficult and more expensive, which was probably the point all along.)
Show HN: I Built UTMKit to Save Time on Popups Specifically UTM Triggered Popup
by matanblay | 2025-12-19 05:06:58+00:00
Hello, I’ve created a new website called UTMKit. The idea came from a simple need: I wanted to show a popup to users coming from Instagram. But building it manually took too much time. Every new UTM meant more code, more testing, and another production update.

So I built UTMKit a faster way to create UTM-based popups, without the hassle.
by cookiengineer | 2025-12-19 05:12:57+00:00
The things I could find on justice.gov and other official websites, maybe there's more in the web archive?

- https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/google-forfeits-500-...

- https://www.congress.gov/110/plaws/publ425/PLAW-110publ425.p...

- https://www.fda.gov/drugs/prescription-drug-advertising/pres...

edit: Oh it was very likely the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act that was the legal basis for the crackdown. But that's a very old law from the pre-internet age.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Food,_Drug,_and_Cosmet...

edit 2: Might not have been clear for the younger generation, but there was a huge wave of addicted patients that got treated with Oxycodone (or OxyContin) subscriptions at the time.

I think that might have been the actual cause for the crackdown on those online advertisements, but I might be wrong about that.
by listenallyall | 2025-12-19 05:13:48+00:00
> If I want to understand what happens, then I can open my frontend app and see "Hello <b>{{name}}</b>".

> In HTMX, the logic is spread

I disagree... with React, by definition, the logic is spread. Persistent data, and usually, business logic, is in some data store accessible via the app backend. And then a totally different entity, the front-end, renders that data (often implementing additional business logic) and manages state (which is often not yet recorded in the data store until various updates can be performed).

HTMX helps keep everything aligned. All the rendering logic is right there along with the data and the business logic. If I'm looking for a renderer, not only is it easy to find the template that produced "Hello <b>{{name}}</b>" but it is also easy to find the source of {{name}}. Which also makes it easy to alter {{name}}, say, from Smith, John to Mr. John Smith - because the data store and business logic are right there, it is low effort to switch the order and to begin including the salutation.

Your "front-end" is still all in one place, except it's on the server, and typically rendered via templates instead of React components. But the templates can often access native objects (including their properties and functions) instead of solely relying on JSON objects.

This comment is already long but regarding data tables... yea, highly dynamic pure data-based UI's such as charts and tables aren't HTMX's forte. But even then there are ways... the data- attribute is very useful, and since you are already using JS to handle sorting, filtering, re-ordering, showing tooltips, etc, it's very possible to render valid HTML fragments that can be properly rendered via that same JS (or contain data which can be).
by mjd | 2025-12-19 05:13:52+00:00
“By default, deleted values are overwritten with NULL bytes (0x00). This is a safety feature since not doing so would leave 'deleted' entries intact inside the datastructure until they are overwritten by other values. If the user wishes to maximize performance at the cost of leaking deleted data, LITE3_ZERO_MEM_DELETED should be disabled.”
by robomartin | 2025-12-19 05:13:52+00:00
Yes, of course. This depends on the kind of product. If the inventory is comingled you don't really know what you are getting and from whom.

Context: My wife was selling products through Amazon about ten year ago, so we know quite a bit about the reality of being an Amazon seller. It should come as no surprise that she got out of there as soon as possible. Between the mafia-like competition you can encounter and Amazon's almost complete lack of interest in driving quality and honesty of their sellers, it just was not worth the pain and aggravation.
by alwillis | 2025-12-19 05:14:17+00:00
>> "In my mind, they're hardly making any money compared to how much they're spending"

> everyone seems to assume this, but its not like its a company run by dummies, or has dummy investors.

It has nothing to do with their management or investors being "dummies" but the numbers are the numbers.

OpenAI has data center rental costs approaching $620 billion, which is expected to rise to $1.4 trillion by 2033.

Annualized revenue is expected to be "only" $20 billion this year.

$1.4 trillion is 70x current revenue.

So unless they execute their strategy perfectly, hit all of their projections and hoping that neither the stock market or economy collapses, making a profit in the foreseeable future is highly unlikely.

[1]: "OpenAI's AI money pit looks much deeper than we thought. Here's my opinion on why this matters" - https://diginomica.com/openais-ai-money-pit-much-deeper-we-t...
by cryptonector | 2025-12-19 05:14:57+00:00
The press release following the bombing of Hiroshima specifically stated which method of refining Uranium was used. The U.S. spent a great deal of time, effort, and money on researching and testing four different enrichment systems. Just that one detail saved the Soviets 3/4s of a sizeable chunk of the A-bomb effort. Sometimes you don't need to leak much detail to give away a great deal.
by csomar | 2025-12-19 05:15:06+00:00
If you don't need React, you probably don't need a framework anyway. The reason I use React is to create components that can exist on their own (and can be constructed/visualized on a StoryBook) and these components will then play nice with other React components. And then use JSX to make reasoning about the code simple. That's not what htmx is.

> htmx is a library that allows you to access modern browser features directly from HTML, rather than using javascript.

From React website:

> React lets you build user interfaces out of individual pieces called components. Create your own React components like Thumbnail, LikeButton, and Video. Then combine them into entire screens, pages, and apps.

Apples and Oranges.
by fy20 | 2025-12-19 05:16:12+00:00
I had a friend who used to work as a QA for an ANPR parking system. He said that they had to investigate an issue where the car with 11111 kept appearing in the system as unpaid, but at different places across the network at the same time.

The issue turned out to be drain covers in the field of the view of the cameras, which the system was detecting belonged to car 11111.
by justinclift | 2025-12-19 05:17:20+00:00
Relatedly, I tend to think of translations somewhat similar to a lossy system like those used in (say) image compression.

ie a compressed jpg of an image can retain quite a lot of the detail of the original, but it can introduce its own artifacts and lose some of the details

For things where the overall shape and picture is all that's required, that's fine. For things where the fine details matter, it's less fine.

Translations seem to be similar in that regard.
by ETH_start | 2025-12-19 05:18:02+00:00
Since the 1970s, large construction projects have been layered with several major regulatory regimes that didn’t exist when most affordable infrastructure was built. In the U.S., NEPA (1970) dramatically expanded pre-construction environmental review and litigation risk, causing planning timelines to extend by years. Around the same time, OSHA began rapidly increasing the degree to which workplace processes were regimented, which permanently increased labor-hours and limited on-site automation.

For nuclear specifically, this was compounded by post-Three Mile Island regulatory response. This increased the tendency to use bespoke designs, i.e. discouraged standardization, which prevented automation and the benefits of learning curves. That's why Baumol-style cost dynamics took over.

This same pattern shows up in subways and bridges. It’s not that 'big things can’t be built cheaply anymore", it’s that we changed the rules under which big things are built.
by czhu12 | 2025-12-19 05:21:00+00:00
I was one of those students initially but then came to appreciate the beauty in the science and nature of computation. I always tell people that computer science is not about programming -- its about studying the dynamics of problems in nature.

Unfortunately, I realized this a little late, and it wasn't until towards the end of my final year when I started appreciating these courses. I long for a day I can return to studying these topics.
by cyberrock | 2025-12-19 05:21:11+00:00
AMD is selling close to 10% of what Radeon* used to sell 15 years ago and yet it's all nVidia's fault: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/amd-grabs-a-share...

Edit: I meant ATI but I guess AMD bought ATI in 2006! I thought that happened in the 2010s for some reason.
by rixed | 2025-12-19 05:21:41+00:00
So it's not really a serialization format, it's a compact, modifiable untyped tree, that one can therefore send to another machine with the same architecture. Or deserialise into native language specific data structures.

Don't get me wrong, I find this type of data structures interesting and useful, but it's misleading to call it "serialization", unless my understanding is wrong.
by D-Machine | 2025-12-19 05:24:03+00:00
> Outside of disciplines that use LaTeX, the ability of authors to do typesetting is pretty limited.

Since this is obviously true, and yet since most journals (with some exceptions) demand you follow tedious formatting requirements or highly restrictive templates, this suggests, in fact, that journals are outsourcing the vast majority of their typesetting and formatting to submitters, and doing only the bare minimum themselves.
by somenameforme | 2025-12-19 05:25:39+00:00
A practical issue is the sort of books being banned. Your first link offer examples of one side trying to ban Of Mice and Men, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Dr. Seuss, with the other side trying to ban many books along the lines of Gender Queer. [1] That link is to the book - which is animated, and quite NSFW.

There are a bizarrely large number similar book as Gender Queer being published, which creates the numeric discrepancy. The irony is that if there was an equal but opposite to that book about straight sex, sexuality, associated kinks, and so forth - then I think both liberals and conservatives would probably be all for keeping it away from schools. It's solely focused on sexuality, is quite crude, illustrated, targeted towards young children, and there's no moral beyond the most surface level writing which is about coming to terms with one's sexuality.

And obviously coming to terms with one's sexuality is very important, but I really don't think books like that are doing much to aid in that - especially when it's targeted at an age demographic that's still going to be extremely confused, and even moreso in a day and age when being different, if only for the sake of being different, is highly desirable. And given the nature of social media and the internet, decisions made today may stay with you for the rest of your life.

So for instance about 30% of Gen Z now declare themselves LGBT. [2] We seem to have entered into an equal but opposite problem of the past when those of deviant sexuality pretended to be straight to fit into societal expectations. And in many ways this modern twist is an even more damaging form of the problem from a variety of perspectives - fertility, STDs, stuff staying with you for the rest of your life, and so on. Let alone extreme cases where e.g. somebody engages in transition surgery or 1-way chemically induced changes which they end up later regretting.

[1] - https://archive.org/details/gender-queer-a-memoir-by-maia-ko...

[2] - https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/nearly-30-gen-z-adu...
by kjellsbells | 2025-12-19 05:26:31+00:00
Maybe, but imagine you are some EU commissioner, your choices look like this:

1. Fund a home grown alternative. Spend millions of Euros all the while fighting off a barrage of complaints that EUWord doesnt do things, costs too much, is burning taxes and productivity, etc.

2. Spend a nominal sum, but kick the project into the long grass, and hope that the US retreats from its stance back to the norm. "Maybe Word will be ok in 2027 after midterms, right? or 2029? Maybe I stick my fingers in my ears and tough it out"

2. is realistically what most politicians would do. Making tough, really difficult decisions is not something they like to do.
Building ScrapeForge in public starting tomorrow
by Vishwas-Batra | 2025-12-19 05:27:38+00:00
Hi everyone,

I am Vishwas, a full stack software developer, building ScrapeForge in public, starting tomorrow

ScrapeForge is an industrial-grade data scraping and analysis platform. I’ll be sharing daily updates on technical decisions, trade-offs, mistakes, and lessons learned while building it from scratch.

Day 1 starts tomorrow. Feedback is welcome.
by mkleczek | 2025-12-19 05:28:11+00:00
> I don’t see how this is true.

There is a Bitcoin seller B, a thieve T and a victim V.

T proposes to buy Bitcoin from B. T offers a new iPhone for a very low price to unsuspecting V. V agrees to buy it. B gives T account details and transaction reference so that T can transfer money to B's account. T gives these details to V. V transfers the money. B transfers Bitcoin to T. T disappears.

If only transaction reference contained information that the transfer is about buying Bitcoin, V would have never paid the money.

The scheme was quite common in UK because banks did not like Bitcoin so Bitcoin sellers and buyers avoided referencing it in bank transfers.
by ghurtado | 2025-12-19 05:29:37+00:00
> It would be interesting to see how hard it would be to walk these models towards general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Definitely. Even more interesting could be seeing them fall into the same trappings of quackery, and come up with things like over the counter lobotomies and colloidal silver.

On a totally different note, this could be very valuable for writing period accurate books and screenplays, games, etc ...
by heavyset_go | 2025-12-19 05:31:43+00:00
I don't like it, but ChatGPT is a product that nearly a billion people are using. It's broken into popular culture. My mom, who has trouble sending an email, uses it. She found it on her own.

More importantly, generative AI is incredibly popular with younger cohorts. They will grow up to be your customer base if they aren't already. Their expectations are being set now.

Again, I don't like it, but that's the reality.
by cyberax | 2025-12-19 05:32:02+00:00
> Lol as if you can't just look up the transit commission's budget. (Annual budget) ÷ (average daily ridership × 12 months per year) = $180 per month per rider at most (since the pool of riders is larger than the daily average).

The farebox recovery rate for NYC is 20%, which is higher than usual, actually. So you can just multiply the price by 5 for a rough estimate.

Or you can do it your way, the 2023 operating budget for MTA was $19.379B and the annual ridership was 1.15B (2023). It works out to about the same: ~$17 per trip or ~$500 per month. Figures are from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Transportation_Au...

Also, WTF are your car numbers? The average total expense for _new_ cars in the US is about $1000 per month ( https://www.way.com/blog/the-real-cost-of-car-ownership-in-t... ), and for used cars it's about $600.

But wait, there's more! This is not an honest comparison. Not at all. It completely misses the capital spending on transit. Just one mile of tunnel in Manhattan now costs more than 1500 miles of 6-lane freeway! Unfortunately, there is no easy way to estimate the total capital expense wasted on public transit.

So the _real_ numbers for transit and cars are not even close. And not in the favor of transit.

> Good. More apartments means cheaper rent.

Nope. More apartments mean more _expensive_ rent. This is an ironclad law of real real estate.

The ONLY way to reduce the housing costs is to decrease the city population.

> The cost of living is high because rent is expensive, obviously.

Yup. And the rent is high because...?

> You're just saying stuff now. Only 40% of jobs are located downtown in my city, and compared to the other cities I saw when I was poking around for this data, that's high.

The problem is the continuing enshittification. Look at the dynamics, check the average pay in areas that don't have direct access to the city cores and the average pay in Downtowns. The gap is exploding.
by anon7000 | 2025-12-19 05:33:53+00:00
Exactly. The free market has very little recourse when companies basically all start doing the same thing, and more or less don’t tell you about it. You certainly don’t see “takes a screenshot of your TV every 2s and uploads it for us to analyze” plastered all over the boxes! I guess the idea is the consumer will be omniscient and that a company will come along offering a privacy protecting alternative… but those incentives just doooo not work!

Seriously, totally deranged to think the “free market” is capable of protecting humans against widespread nefarious behavior from colluding actors with vast amounts of money and power.
by kobi_kadosh | 2025-12-19 05:35:32+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m sharing a small open-source project I’ve been working on called Caro.

Caro is a local-first shell companion: you describe intent in plain language, it suggests a shell command, and you decide whether to run it. Nothing executes automatically.

Why: shell commands are optimized for brevity and repetition, not recall. If you’re not in the terminal all day, muscle memory fades. I still forget find/tar/etc., and context-switching breaks flow.

Notes up front:

• Very alpha, active development, not production-ready • Local inference by default (offline; air-gapped friendly) • Works in existing terminals (not a new emulator) • Rust-based, multi-backend • No telemetry/data collection • Not a “main agent” — intentionally a focused sub-agent

Safety is handled in software, not just prompts: • Rule-based checks before execution • Clear surfacing of risk for destructive commands • Explicit user confirmation every time

I’m especially interested in feedback on guardrails and rules.

Repo + details: https://github.com/wildcard/caro

If this seems useful (or flawed), I’d love critiques and ideas—issues/discussions are welcome.

Thanks. Kobi and Kyaro <3