MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tombert | 2025-12-09 05:34:24+00:00
> CDs... are more fraglie.

CDs can be scratched more easily, obviously, and ruin them, but if you kept the production CD in good shape they will last a long time.

About three years ago, I decided to buy one of those "random 100 CDs" on eBay, just to see what kind of weird stuff I would get. A few of the CDs in there were pressed in 1984, and they ripped just fine onto my 2022 laptop into FLAC and I listen to the FLAC files regularly. As far as I can tell there were no checksum errors or skips or anything like that.

Burned CDs and DVDs do not have that luxury, especially cheap ones. My dad found out that a lot of his home movies that he had archived on burnt DVDs were literally starting to rot away. Fortunately in his case he had the habit of burning like twenty copies of each of his collections, so I don't think he actually lost anything, and I was able to show him how to extract images from it, but I consider ourselves lucky.

> I've always liked the faint airy sound of tape silence in a weird way.

Me too! Honestly there's something kind of charming about being forced to hear the artifacts of the actual medium that carries the sound. The light hiss has a certain "purity" to it, for want of a better word. It's also why I like watching movies from the 1960s-1970s; they couldn't make everything completely silent, so there was always a small hiss. It makes movies like Straw Dogs much more unnerving.

> The really cool thing about tapes are the same cool thing that playing an MP3 locally has:

Yeah, and CDs as well. For reasons that I am equal parts surprised about and grateful for, CDs never had any DRM; I can take an exact copy of my CD to my computer, copy it to all my devices, stream it with Jellyfin, remix it with Acid or SoundForge, or pretty much anything else I can think of. Given that CDs still sound excellent, I think you could make an argument that it's objectively the best audio media that ever got widespread adoption.
by RandyOrion | 2025-12-09 05:34:32+00:00
> From their project page:

> We analyze over 1,100 deep neural networks—including 500 Mistral-7B LoRAs and 500 Vision Transformers. We provide the first large-scale empirical evidence that networks systematically converge to shared, low-dimensional spectral subspaces, regardless of initialization, task, or domain.

I instantly thought of muon optimizer which provides high-rank gradient updates and Kimi-k2 which is trained using muon, and see no related references.

The 'universal' in the title is not that universal.
by lucid-dev | 2025-12-09 05:34:48+00:00
Pretty funny if you ask me. Maybe we can start to realize now: "The common universal subspace between human individuals makes it easier for all of them to do 'novel' tasks so long as their ego and personality doesn't inhibit that basic capacity."

And that: "Defining 'novel' as 'not something that you've said before even though your using all the same words, concepts, linguistic tools, etc., doesn't actually make it 'novel'"

Point being, yeah duh, what's the difference between what any of these models are doing anyway? It would be far more surprising if they discovered a *different* or highly-unique subspace for each one!

Someone gives you a magic lamp and the genie comes out and says "what do you wish for"?

That's still the question. The question was never "why do all the genies seem to be able to give you whatever you want?"
by exographicskip | 2025-12-09 05:34:55+00:00
I used to love Netflix when they started out as DVD mailers. Except when the postal service shattered "Fear and Loathing" pushing its viewing out by days. At one point was renting three movies at a time!

So much better than Blockbuster or Hollywood Video. Was able to see an exponential amount of foreign films, documentaries, and indie films that weren't popular enough to stock in brick and mortar shops. For less money.

Think Netflix jumped the shark well over a decade ago. Remember they had star ratings and good recommendations that weren't heavily monetized outside of keeping you on the platform itself.

Another merger isn't going to roll back the clock.
by lynn123456 | 2025-12-09 05:35:31+00:00
AutoMusic is a powerful AI song maker that lets anyone create original, royalty-free music online in just seconds. With no need for musical training, users can start with simple text, full lyrics, or even a mood description, and AutoMusic instantly transforms those ideas into complete songs with melody, vocals, harmony, and beats. Beyond instant generation, creators can edit and fine-tune tracks, extend them with new verses, reimagine songs in different genres, or upload their own audio for AI-powered remixes. AutoMusic also provides advanced tools like vocal removal and stem separation, giving users clean instrumentals, karaoke tracks, and MIDI files for professional editing. Whether you’re experimenting for fun, producing content for social media, or working on professional projects, AutoMusic gives you an easy, creative, and reliable way to make music with AI.
by tsurba | 2025-12-09 05:36:00+00:00
Many discriminative models converge to same representation space up to a linear transformation. Makes sense that a linear transformation (like PCA) would be able to undo that transformation.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.00810

Without properly reading the linked article, if thats all this is, not a particularly new result. Nevertheless this direction of proofs is imo at the core of understanding neural nets.
by throw234234234 | 2025-12-09 05:36:53+00:00
Amazing how much investment has mostly gone to eliminate one job category; ironically what was meant to be the job of the future "learn to code". To be honest on current trajectory I'm always amazed how many SWE's think it is "enabling" or will be anything else other than this in the long term. I personally don't recommend anyone into this field anymore, especially when big money sees this as the next disruption to invest in and has bet in the opposite direction investment/market wise. Amazing what was just a chatbot 3 years ago will do to a large amount of people w.r.t unemployment and potential poverty; didn't appreciate it at the time.

Life/fate does have a sense of irony it seems. I wouldn't be surprised if it is just the "creative" industries that die; and normal jobs that provide little value today still survive in some form - they weren't judged on value delivered and still existed after all.
by Arainach | 2025-12-09 05:37:06+00:00
For brand new projects? Perhaps. For working with existing projects in large code bases? Still not living up to the hype. Still sick of explaining to leadership that they're not magic and "agentic" isn't magic either. Still sick of everyone not realizing that if you made coding 300% faster (which AI hasn't) that doesn't help when coding is less than half the hours of my week. Still sick of the "productivity gains" being subsidized by burning out competent code reviewers calling bullshit on things that don't work or will cause problems down the road.
by sroerick | 2025-12-09 05:37:08+00:00
Looks like BSV is about 7TB and grows at about 4GB a day. I have no clue what those guys are up to these days. This may be unweildy for a home PC but really is still pretty trivial for a data center.

500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube per minute which is... If my napkin math is right, about a petabyte a day.
by Nursie | 2025-12-09 05:37:36+00:00
Other than the bluetooth capability - are modern walkmans as good as they were at the peak of portable tape use?

I had one of these in black - https://walkman.land/panasonic/rq-s30

Gorgeous little machine, not much bigger than a cassette in its box, all metal. It felt about as well designed and built as apple stuff does now. It wasn't long after that we got minidiscs (and we know how that went), and then mp3 players conquered the world.
by charcircuit | 2025-12-09 05:38:29+00:00
I do not want to work with people who are obnoxious, mentally unstable, love stirring drama, self centered, controlling, etc.

These attributes can make it hard to work with others, or waste time that could have been spent actually building a good product for end users. Of course people are not robots, they have emotions and attitudes that are variable so some people will exhibit these qualities some of the time, but I believe it's important to build a culture that can withstand these rather than amplify them.
by labcomputer | 2025-12-09 05:38:46+00:00
There already exist purpose-built chargers for electric ships. See, for example, https://www.stemmann.com/en/products/charging_systems/ferryc...

To support a 48 hour recharge of the battery hypothesized upthread, you would only need to scale up this system by about 10x. Or attach 10 along the length of the ship. Or some combination of those options.

This is a non-problem.

Edit: Excuse me, but I misread the brochure. The existing system need be only scaled up by a factor of 2.5x to recharge a container ship in 48 hours.
by rickydroll | 2025-12-09 05:39:19+00:00
It's not just that they may cost more, but constraints on the alternatives may render them unsuitable.Maybe your fruit will rot, maybe your hotspot use consume your data allocation, maybe your generator only produces enough power to keep the refrigerator/freezer running and the house heat on, or maybe the ambulance can't get you to the hospital in time.

There's a saying in real-time systems out a late answer is the same as a wrong answer. In this situation, a solution that does not satisfy all the constraints is the same as no solution.
by autoexec | 2025-12-09 05:39:30+00:00
I'll gladly take the opportunity to avoid directly supporting a racist/bigot, or anyone who seeks to silence/oppress/murder entire groups of people for simply existing. I don't care if they're selling me an application, or a laptop, or a car, or a cheeseburger. The internet, and the world, are a lot more interesting and exciting when you get a lot of different people from different backgrounds participating. Genius and innovation can come from anywhere. Morally and practically I think we're better off being inclusive.

I may not know who on the internet is a dog, but I'm glad those dogs are out there and if somebody is a proud supporter of puppy genocide I'd rather not encourage/enable their misguided crusade so that does factor into my choices.

It isn't something that can always be avoided, or even something that needs to be avoided entirely 100% of the time (I still read Lovecraft for example) but I do think it's worth some consideration.
by themafia | 2025-12-09 05:39:36+00:00
> Back then, me and other old-timers were answering about 4,000 new-hire questions a month.

> Then in December, Claude finally got good enough to answer some of those questions for us.

What getting high on your own supply actually looks like. These are not the types of questions most people have or need answered. It's unique to the hiring process and the nascent status of the technology. It seems insane to stretch this logic to literally any other arena.

On top of that horses were initially replaced with _stationary_ gasoline engines. Horses:Cars is an invalid view into the historical scenario.
by junon | 2025-12-09 05:40:07+00:00
I'll give this a try but at first glance through the guides it appears to be missing a way to ergonomically output specific states. I haven't run it yet but I'm guessing it logs everything that happens which will get verbose unless asked for.

A while back there was a rewrite language that was posted (white on black theme site) that was similar but more geared towards coding problems and less on lit programming. I don't remember the name but it was equally as interesting. If anyone recalls what it was it'd be greatly appreciated.

Anyway if the creator is lurking here, examples demonstrating more practical, real world problems (even if still somewhat small) would go a long way.
by hberg | 2025-12-09 05:42:04+00:00
Thanks for sharing your work. I'm not sure I have a particular use for it at the moment, but it's well executed.

One point of (hopefully) constructive feedback is that it wasn't obvious from my first interaction with the temporary doc that I was able to create checklists and bullet points. Once I saw that those are possible, I quickly guessed the keystrokes, but it might be helpful to add some graphical guidance.
by anigbrowl | 2025-12-09 05:42:59+00:00
I largely agree. Plato leveled somewhat similar criticisms at the early use of the written word millenia ago. I think what's fundamentally different with internet communication is the timed nature of the medium, conveying a sense of pseudo-urgency that necessitates disagreements be input in a timely fashion, and that failure to do so will imply correctness or at least tacit agreement.

Incidentally, I find your comment significantly more substantive and thoughtful than Weinstein's.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-09 05:43:03+00:00
Yes, Pix.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/pix/

This is yet another problem with Khronos APIs, expecting each vendor comes up with a debugger, some do, some don't.

At least nowadays there is RenderDoc.

On the Web after a decade, it is still pixel debugging, or trying to reproduce the bug on a native APIs, because why bother with such devtools.
by imroot | 2025-12-09 05:44:28+00:00
I've always said that in the back of my mind, the most successful grocery store would be the 'walls' of the store -- bakery, deli, produce, meats, floral, cheeses, dairy and having a little selection of store brands in the middle where consumers can pick up (and vendors can pay a premium for endcap space, because they're the only non-branded products out there), with the rest of the SKU's behind the walls of the grocery store in a fulfillment only model.

Kroger should have pulled a Wal-Mart and turned to their shrink-heavy stores in urban centers to online fulfillment only -- basically only their delivery drivers can retrieve items for an order, and everything's shopped by an associate (Look south of the MicroCenter in Dallas if you want to see what one looks like: it still has the Murphy USA in the parking lot and is basically an unbranded walmart building with 'driver' and 'associate' entrances -- and then deployed the robotics there: less retail space, more online/fulfillment capacity (have humans grab produce and custom sliced/packed items, robots pick the dry goods), and while you lose some cashier jobs, you'll probably have net improvement in terms of time waiting to be picked.
by al_borland | 2025-12-09 05:45:41+00:00
As someone who grew up with cassette tapes, I don’t anticipate this fad lasting too long. They were very inconvenient. With most technology I see resistance from people not wanting to move on. I don’t remember seeing that with cassettes. The only downside of CDs was that you couldn’t record from the radio and Napster eventually solved that better than radio ever did.

Minidisc is the format I have some nostalgia for. It never blew up, but it felt like the best of both worlds. You could record from the radio like a digital cassette tapes, and even trim out the DJ and reorder tracks… and give them names. You could also buy them like a CD. From a digital file you could use a TOSlink cable to get a great quality recording at home. And the later ones even played MP3s directly. It could really do it all.
by aidenn0 | 2025-12-09 05:46:17+00:00
The most interesting thing about this article was the Bow Wow Wow song linked. It's a song about music piracy (including a usage of the word "pirate") from 1980, including this stanza:

It used to break my heart when I went in your shop

And you said my records were out of stock

So I don't buy records in your shop

Now I tape them all 'cause I'm 'Top Of The Pops'
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-12-09 05:47:02+00:00
Well that took a surprising turn. (1) Friendly dunking on someone named todepond. (2) Interesting ideas about xhtml... looks like I'm going to learn something here. (3) Ideological conflict.

Is there a backstory here? Or is this just random venting?

Anyways, I reject the idea that loose programming is more "tolerant" in any sociological manner.
by FlyingSnake | 2025-12-09 05:47:03+00:00
Kindles are amazing devices for hacking and turning into cute little dashboards. The kindle modding community is wonderful and full of people experimenting with it. If you have an old kindle, give it a new lease!

Shameless plug: I wrote about my experience here

https://samkhawase.com/blog/hacking-kindle/

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43822251
by gldrk | 2025-12-09 05:47:18+00:00
>You can make your HTML as malformed as you like and the web-browser will do its best to display the page for you. I love the todepond website, but the source-code makes me break out in a cold sweat. Yet it renders just fine.

It renders just fine because it is syntactically valid HTML. HTML is not and is not supposed to be XML. It is originally an SGML application described by its Document Type Definition and SGML Declaration (https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/HTML4.decl). HTML uses and has always used many SGML features not found in XML, such as tag inference (<html><title> becomes <html><head><title>, <p><p> becomes <p></p><p>). Some of these, like SHORTTAG, were never even implemented in browsers. These days HTML is defined by the WHATWG ‘living standard’, which largely just restates the SGML DTD rules in plain language.

(Okay, https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.todepond.... shows a few minor errors, bet you couldn’t spot them.)

This is independent of the fact that browsers do try their best to render objectively broken markup, usually by ignoring the broken parts. In principle they could do the same with XHTML, but someone decided it would be ‘helpful’ to show the parser’s diagnostic output instead, and the rest is history.
by Keegs12 | 2025-12-09 05:48:22+00:00
Location: Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.

Remote: Yes, open to remote, hybrid or in office.

Willing to relocate: Yes.

Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript, React, HTML, CSS/SASS, MYSQL, Firebase, Azure, C, Python, Node, Express, Storybook/Chromatic, Pub/Sub, NoSQL, Material UI, Next, Tailwind.

Resume/CV: https://github.com/Keegs12/resume/tree/main https://www.linkedin.com/in/keegan-bond/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keegan-bond/

Email: keeganbond123@gmail.com

I have a YOE working as a Founding Software Engineer at the startup company mfg.parts. I was the Frontend team lead developing the vast majority of our web application. I also have 0.5 YOE working with the company Acadium as a Full stack engineer Intern. If your looking for a young eager junior engineer with startup experience, reach out!

I’m also open to contributing on an internship or volunteer basis, especially for young startups in exchange for experience, equity, or a mix of both. If your team could use an extra set of hands, I’m happy to chat
by heavyset_go | 2025-12-09 05:48:44+00:00
> It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so?

It's a symbol, it could be a 7-pointed star and people would associate it with Save.

Even when you knew what a floppy disk was, why would you push that button? You haven't seen a floppy in years, don't have a floppy drive and don't want to create a floppy disk.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-09 05:49:08+00:00
RTO rationalization wank for consumption by the elites bosses who want to sell a narrative that Ass In Seat Mentality and monitored control of serfs in a distraction-oriented environment maximizing "collaboration" is The Only True (Scotsman) Way.

Using KLOC as a KPI falls into the trap Goodhart's law and of PHB mentality.
by hansvm | 2025-12-09 05:49:13+00:00
> number of chars minimum not the goal

For my tastes this is excessive (especially since the formatting is non-existent), but you do pay a cost for longer variable names. There's only so much you can grok when reading a passage, and long names hinder any higher-level understanding of what that passage actually does, requiring you to resort to carefully thinking about the problem rather than any shortcuts and insights your powerful visual cortex might provide.
by curiosity42 | 2025-12-09 05:49:40+00:00
The only way (95%+) companies selling to enterprises survive are if they get bought by a bigger platform and the sales force of the bigger platform just has to sell an extra line item. If you want to make money, track companies that have sales and marketing expenses same order / same / higher than revenue and then create a synthetic index of these companies (they need to have sold something like $1BN in license in aggregate over time - maintenance stream and you confirm that the pig can be sold somehow) . most will be eventually sold at a premium to their traded price.
by flurie | 2025-12-09 05:51:12+00:00
There are a few broad reasons this can happen. One possibility is that they want to know if the treatment causes suicidal ideation, and the effect is often small enough that people more likely to report those symptoms independent of the treatment confound the result. Another is that they don't want to have to deal with the safety protocols that come with screening in participants who have reported any history of suicidality. Another still is that higher likelihood of an active mental health crisis means that it's harder for study coordinators to determine if participants have provided informed consent.

Sometimes studies are specifically for treatment-resistant depression, and I expect those studies are more likely to screen in participants with a history of suicidality, so I would recommend keeping an eye out for those if you would like to participate in clinical trials.
by csallen | 2025-12-09 05:51:25+00:00
> Imagine the Brooklyn bridge design committee saying "requiring exactly 1 inch plate is intolerance!!

The Brooklyn bridge is a singular piece of infrastructure that millions depend on. I think it makes for a bad analogy.

A better analogy would be something more like websites, where people can tinker and create and contribute without much consequence. For example, the local community garden's board saying, "Requiring a precise and strictly uniform planting layout and soil composition is intolerance!" Well... that'd be quite reasonable?
by moosedev | 2025-12-09 05:51:31+00:00
> CDs never had any DRM

Oh, but they did, and quite infamously :D

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

https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/11/5549-2/

https://www.networkworld.com/article/715376/network-security...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240779158_Lessons_f...
by masklinn | 2025-12-09 05:52:08+00:00
> The only downside of CDs was that you couldn’t record from the radio and Napster eventually solved that better than radio ever did.

This was far from the only drawback with CDs especially early on, at least in mobile applications: the media (and thus player) is bulky, cases are fragile (in part through increased leverage), it has low resilience to physical damage, and before memory prices hit low enough for significant buffering the slightest g forces would lead to skips.

MDs were real progress on that front. Shame it was quite expensive and the digital models were hobbled by horrendous software. And obviously flash-based pmps then smartphones are their lunch entirely.
by thn-gap | 2025-12-09 05:52:44+00:00
The real test would have been to use some software that the author uses frequently, and see if there's any decrease in speed when removing all the icons. I'm pretty sure, even when not pleasant, they work as heavy visual cues to find the item quicker.

Icons are also very useful if you're trying to use software in a language that you're learning, becoming the common language bridge.