MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-12-15 08:36:21+00:00
do you have stats on moving of dirt with buckets vs. moving with wheelbarrows? Or is this just an assumption you are making? I think probably an assumption because how often do people move piles of dirt without wheelbarrows nowadays so where would you actually have your data from?

In my anecdotal experience moving piles of dirt manually (for large piles of dirt) it is generally the digging up of the dirt that takes the most effort, if I had to move it with buckets or a wheelbarrow I would still expect that to be the case.

I would furthermore expect that there are some functions at work in modelling the moving of large piles of dirt using manual labor.

Your model may make sense with a small pile of dirt but I don't think you will find 1 remains and 2 go, at best 1 goes and you take a bit longer to move the pile.

Also, this is just my observations of having had large piles of dirt to move with manual labor (including wheelbarrows and several of those) As you scale up the amount of people you could drop by adding wheelbarrows goes down, because again the main problem is the digging. The wheelbarrows becomes a thing you trade off diggers on running. You will want to have more wheelbarrows that wheelbarrow users so that diggers can fill wheelbarrows while the users are running the already filled wheelbarrows to where the dirt is being dumped.

At this point then you would probably want to drop the wheelbarrow analogy and go to a backhoe and a truck, but then all of the various observations of the other flaws in the wheelbarrow argument become apparent, such as the factories to build backhoes and trucks, the training for backhoe operator etc. All leading to a relatively strong argument that existence of backhoes and trucks are a boost to the environment, potential job creator and those jobs will be more skilled jobs leading to higher wages in the economy.
by bonesss | 2025-12-15 08:38:25+00:00
Amazon didn’t pay zero taxes, robbing the commons. Amazon engaged in trade and investment, taxed on all sides and at multiple points in the exchange of goods and services. Then Amazon invested their profits into further tax-creating transactions, reducing their tax burden that year.

When Amazon stopped investing and started extracting those profits everyone paid taxes on that giant money pile that wouldn’t exist without the investment. Every Amazon worker, CEO included, paid taxes all along. Amazon’s service providers and partners did. Amazon now does too, and the tax coffers have won big.

Taxation offsets from investments should be broadened (to individuals), not shamed.
by alin23 | 2025-12-15 08:38:52+00:00
Author here, I also bought a dehydrator to keep my finished spoons at 70C (158F) for 10 hours to speed up the curing of the tung oil. It really works wonders!

I prefer to keep the original color of the wood I sell, so lower temperatures are better for me, but I like the look of toasted wood as well.

My problem with just oil is that the finish is very matte, hence the wax and resin complication I'm going through in the article. But matte is also a look that people look for so there's no problem in that, it's just my personal preference and style that's different.
Show HN: Find the Right Game Engine – Godot, Unity, Unreal, and More
by neotanp | 2025-12-15 08:39:26+00:00
Hey everyone! I’ve been working on something I hope can help fellow developers: gameenginehub.com. It’s a simple site to help you figure out which game engine to choose for your next project. Whether you’re considering Godot, Unity, or Unreal, we’ve got you covered with comparisons, news, and guides.

Why I Built This Site Choosing the right game engine can be a huge headache. Should you go with Unity, which is super popular and great for 2D and 3D games? Or is Unreal the better choice if you need powerful graphics and are aiming for something big? Maybe you’ve heard about Godot—the open-source engine that’s getting a lot of buzz lately.

It’s hard to decide, right? I’ve been there too. So I decided to create GameEngineHub as a place to make the process easier.

What You’ll Find on the Site -Engine Comparisons: We break down Godot, Unity, Unreal, and other popular engines to help you figure out what’s best for your project. -News & Updates: Stay updated on the latest trends and changes in the world of game engines. -Guides & Tutorials: Learn how to get started with each engine and dive deeper into what makes them tick. -Community Feedback: I’m always looking for feedback from other developers. How do you rate these engines? What’s your experience with Godot, Unity, Unreal, or any other game engines? Share your ratings and reviews to help others make a better choice!

The Story Behind It I built this site because, when I was starting out, I found it hard to find clear, straightforward comparisons of the different game engines. There are so many factors to consider—performance, platform support, ease of use—and it can get overwhelming quickly. So, I decided to put everything I’ve learned into one place. GameEngineHub is here to give you quick, reliable info so you can make a more informed decision about which game engine to use.

I’d Love Your Thoughts I’m still working on improving the site and making it better. If you have any feedback, suggestions, or thoughts, please feel free to share! What’s missing? What would help you the most? Let me know!

Check it out at gameenginehub.com
by merelysounds | 2025-12-15 08:40:19+00:00
Nonoverse: an iOS logic puzzle game (nonograms!), I’m working on adding a new batch of levels. I’m considering a garden theme for extra cosy vibes, but I’m still in the planning stage and drawing assets right now (in inkscape, no AI).

https://lab174.com/nonoverse

Also PolyGen, an app for “low poly” wallpapers - I’ve sent an update with bug fixes for latest devices and iOS versions; it’s currently being reviewed, when you read this it might be live.

https://lab174.com/polygen
by culebron21 | 2025-12-15 08:40:29+00:00
Read this from HN in 2011, was interesting. But I take Feynman's conclusions with the grain of salt, and most comments here are near conspiracy theories. Here's why.

Education in the older epoch that his informers mention, was much smaller in scale. Brazil's illiteracy was at ~65% in 1930, at just <50% by 1960, if I remember correctly. So both common schools and secondary education (college/university) were expanding at the time. And that's the reason.

If you expand education, quality inevitably drops. The lower social strata that are reached by education won't get as good teachers as earlier. You may be able to write good schoolbooks, like mathematicians in the USSR did, but there's still last mile problem, the teacher. Most teachers are not bright enthusiasts, often times they're underpaid and burnt out after ages of teaching. The few enthusiasts and visionaries, are exceptions -- at least this is what I read from one recent study -- and their recipies aren't reproducible.

From what I've read, better universities usually have less students per teacher. This way a teacher can engage better and actually care what the student does. This requires more money poured in the system and less corruption.

(For non-Western countries, money shouldn't be a big problem, they're spending smaller share of GDP on education. But modern beliefs tell that everything should be "efficient", and governments don't want to spend more, instead they insist they need to "digitize" education, and then somehow it will make breakthroughs.)

But also, if you want to play god and pour money from the education ministry into schools or colleges/unis, these streams may actually never reach the file and rank teachers.

Last note: elite school/uni material won't work in lower level ones. I taught in the university where some graduation projects were published in journals for young researchers, and teachers were publishing in not top ranking, but high ranking serious ones. Some courses included work on good older papers (in English, a foreign language).

There, you could easily dismiss students who just want a grade and a degree as noise.

But take a city further from the capitals -- even in good college students will struggle and not able to process it. Not because further on the periphery people are dumber -- simply because most brightest students went to the best unis in the capitals.

In the elites, it's easy to argue to shrink education to keep only the bright guys, like in the XIX century. Well, it doesn't work this way -- you need to educate lots of people to find more bright ones.

So, who, what and how will teach those less bright guys? A big open question to me.
by mattkrause | 2025-12-15 08:40:45+00:00
We certainly had questions like that as part of bigger assessments and they were pretty reasonable.

However, some of the teachers at my school also had short pop-quizzes meant to ensure that everyone kept up with the reading. These were usually just some details from the assigned chapters and, IMO, often veered into minutia. One really was about the color of something and I don’t remember it being particularly plot-relevant or symbolic, even if it was mentioned a few times.

It wasn’t a huge part of one’s grade, but I distinctly remember being frustrated that these quizzes effectively penalized me for “getting into” the book and reading ahead.
by Stratoscope | 2025-12-15 08:40:57+00:00
> In the scifi-whodunnit The Barbie Murders the concept of changing your body without too much trouble is used by a cult of people who all look exactly the same — lack of genitalia (i.e., 'Barbie'-like) included.

Did you see the Barbie movie? I bet you will enjoy it.

There is a scene where Ken and Barbie are rollerblading in Venice Beach, and some rude people are harassing them. They each announce, "I don't have a ..." (You can fill in the blank.)

And without giving too much away, there is another scene near the end that involves... Birkenstocks!
by mrweasel | 2025-12-15 08:41:21+00:00
At first I was going to disagree, because having the compute built into the TV makes some sense, but thinking about it made me change my mind.

A modern TV has a lifetime of 15 - 20 years I think. E.g. my in-laws have a Sony TV, from around 2012 - 2013. It's not 4K obviously, but the picture is beautiful, the sound perfectly fills their small living room, it's a great TV. Even considering that Sony did skimp on the compute in that TV from the start, there's no way that they could have put in hardware that would future proof it until 2030 or beyond. Nor could they reasonably charge enough to cover software updates for that long. It makes much more sense to have a replaceable external unit.
by patrickk | 2025-12-15 08:41:45+00:00
Word to the wise: installing Valetudo can be a nerve wracking task even for the tech savvy. On my model, a Dreame L10s Ultra (there’s about three similarly named models and only this exact one is valetudo compatible, and isn’t sold any more) you are strongly recommended to use a custom pcb and to use Debian to run the commands, and not in a VM. If something goes wrong you can permanently brick your device. I ran into all kinds of esoteric sounding errors, and I half gave up and one point since I was burning valuable free time on evenings and weekends to get it done (busy family with small kids and stressful job). The robot sat unused for several months but I eventually got it done. I’m glad I did it but it was an ordeal.
by giolekva | 2025-12-15 08:43:09+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/@dodo-oss/videos (no homepage yet)

I've building PaaS focused on development environments. I think there are so many things to be improved all throughout the development process:

1. starting from creating new ones

2. forking existing one (like one would do with the git repo) to experiment with new ideas or debug the issue in an isolated environment

3. being config defined and reproducible

4. hybrid by default - run as much or as little one desires on their personal machine while keeping rest of the env (db, storage, ...) in the cloud

5. easy to share: expose services (HTTP/TCP/UDP) on public or private networks

6. have any number of AI agents with specific goals be part of the dev env
by alin23 | 2025-12-15 08:43:19+00:00
Author here, it's not that it's not possible, it's just annoying to do. Indeed, two-component hardwax oils are close to perfect (although the resulting polymer is not ideal), but having to do the precise pouring and mixing, and trying to smear that thick blend onto the wood, hundreds and hundreds of times, is not something I want to do.

I want to enjoy the process of making the wooden utensil as much as I want to see the end result, hence my excuse to play with random metallic driers and resins.
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-15 08:43:46+00:00
>Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too.

Roborock didn't win because of doing marketing, they won by being technically superior and word of mouth, in spite of lack of marketing, at least in the west.

Same how Japanese cars beat US made cars in the 1980s even though US cars had the most amount of advertising in the media. Even Steve Jobs said in the 90s that US brands have the best marketing and win all meaningless "awards by industry critics", but if you ask consumers which products are best, they all say the Japanese ones.

Chinese products are now the new Japanese. I still have no idea why westerners assumed "Chinese can't innovate, they can only replicate".
by sayamqazi | 2025-12-15 08:44:00+00:00
"Wake me up when we see swaths of companies AI-coding internal Jira".

This shouldnt be the goal. The goal should be to build an AI that can tell you what is done and what needs to be done i.e. replace jira with natural interactions. An AI that can "see" and "understand" your project. An AI that can see it, understand it, build it and modify it. I know this is not happening for the next few decades or so.
by D-Machine | 2025-12-15 08:44:09+00:00
See for example the AlphaFold2 presentation linked here: https://predictioncenter.org/casp14/doc/presentations/2020_1.... Some samples that point out where most of the innovations are NOT just "huck a transformer at it":

====

Physical insights are built into the network structure, not just a process around it

- End-to-end system directly producing a structure instead of inter-residue distances

- Inductive biases reflect our knowledge of protein physics and geometry

- The positions of residues in the sequence are de-emphasized

- Instead residues that are close in the folded protein need to communicate

- The network iteratively learns a graph of which residues are close, while reasoning over this implicit graph as it is being built

What went badly:

- Manual work required to get a very high-quality Orf8 prediction

- Genetics search works much better on full sequences than individual domains

- Final relaxation required to remove stereochemical violations

What went well

- Building the full pipeline as a single end-to-end deep learning system

- Building physical and geometric notions into the architecture instead of a search process

- Models that predict their own accuracy can be used for model-ranking

- Using model uncertainty as a signal to improve our methods (e.g. training new models to eliminate problems with long chains)

====

Also you can read the papers, e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1923-7 (available if you search the title on Google Scholar; also https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2_reference...). There is actual, real good science, physics, and engineering going on here, as compared to e.g. LLMs or computer vision models that are just trained on the internet, and where all the engineering is focused on managing finicky training and compute costs. AlphaFold requires all this and more.

EDIT: Basically, the article makes it sound like deep models just allowed scientists to sidestep all the complicated physics and etc and just magically solve the problem, and while this is arguably somewhat correct for computer vision and much of NLP, this is the exact opposite of the truth for AlphaFold.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-15 08:44:37+00:00
> It took me no more than 2 hours to put those together. We didn't renew our TeamRetro

Okay, so two hours with an LLM vs maybe 2.5 days without an LLM in the best-case scenario (i.e. LLMs gave you a 10x boost. I would expect it to be less than that though, like maybe a 2x boost) - it sounds like it was always pretty cheap to replace the SaaS, but the business didn't do it.

TBH, the arguments were never "It would take too long to do ourselves", it was always "but then we'd have to maintain it ourselves".

The place I am consulting at now just moved (i.e. a month ago) from their in-house built ticketing system ($0/m as it had not needed maintenance for over a year) to Jira (~$2k/m).

In this specific case, it was literally 0 hours to avoid paying the SaaS, and they still moved, because they wanted some modern features (billing for time on support calls, etc) and figured that rather than update their in-house system to add support hours costing (a day, at most) they may as well move to a system that already had it.

(Joke's on them though - the Jira solution for support hours costing is not near the level of granularity they need, even with multiple paid plugins).

Once again, companies aren't using SaaS because it's cheaper or quicker; they could already quickly replace their SaaS with in-house.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-15 08:44:45+00:00
> How are you supposed to use that [...]?

It's often the case that we know where a substring we want starts and ends, so this operation makes sense - because we know there's a valid substring this won't panic. For example if we know there's a literal colon at bytes 17 and 39 in our string foo, foo[18..39] is the UTF-8 text from bytes 18 to 38 inclusive, representing the string between those colons.

One source of confusion here, is not realising that UTF-8 is a self-synchronising encoding. There are a lot of tricks that are correct and fast with UTF-8 but would be a disaster in the other multi-byte encodings or if (which is never the case in Rust) this isn't actually a UTF-8 string.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-15 08:44:55+00:00
> Break that down further and you'll see it's blue cities in those red states that have the highest illiteracy rates.

Not true; in both red and blue states, its rural (usually relatively redder for the state) areas that have the highest illiteracy rates.

> Same with crime.

OTOH, with crime its true that higher population density areas (which also tend to be bluer) tend to have higher aggregate crime rates (though some important categories of crime, notably firearms homicides, reverse this.) But the fact that general crime rates do that has been recognized not merely longer than the current ideological divide between the US major parties, but longer than the existence of electoral democracy; the driving factor being density => opportunity => crime. Opportunity scales with dyadic interactions which scale asymptotically with n² (n=density). It's also worth noting that areas within states don't have the kind of Constitutional sovereignty against states that states do against the federal government; with no equivalent of the 10th Amendment protection that states have against federal encroachment. They don't generally have the power define serious crimes, or define punishment for serious crimes (they may have the power to define and punish infractions and misdemeanors), define correctional and rehabilitation policies that apply to serious offenders, etc. All those things are done at the state level. They also have very limited (because of state law) control of public health (mental and physical) policy, taxation levels and distribution, etc. So even if it was policy and not population density driving the difference in crime rates, the local areas aren't the ones in control of most of the potentially-relevant polices, the states are.
by jmstfv | 2025-12-15 08:45:00+00:00
I've been working on the same business since 2021:

https://notionbackups.com

The first business I started never gained traction, so I sold it in 2021 (which was a completely different time compared to now).

Notion had announced that they'd launch a beta version of their API, so while waiting for the early access, I built a landing page, login/signup, and all other plumbing for the web app.

It was a rather underwhelming launch (both for the API and my business), but I gained my first customer within a month.

Honestly, it's been a slog running this business (Notion's API is surprisingly hard to work with, so it seemed that I was stuck for months on end), so knowing what I know now, I'd probably have started a different business. My burnout didn't help either.

Claude has been incredibly helpful these last few months in solving esoteric undocumented edge cases that were plaguing the codebase for years.

I have a healthy MRR/growth rate right now and the biggest product in the niche, so I'm grateful for that.
by zkmon | 2025-12-15 08:45:57+00:00
If nature did so well for billions of years, why are we taking over it's job now? Did it ask for your help?

Anytime some talks about large numbers - some galaxy is billions of kilometers away, there are trillions of atoms in universe, trillions of possible combinations for a problem etc - it appears to me that you talking about some problem that doesn't fall into your job description.
by joegibbs | 2025-12-15 08:46:13+00:00
Yeah absolutely, and they shouldn't be taxed extra specifically for using a new technology. If people need a UBI they should be paid it off the back of all taxes (which should rise if automation is successful), not a specific automation tax. Saving jobs sounds good and it's an easy win but you end up with a stagnant economy where people are paid sinecures to do make-work, which is doubly harmful since the company has to pay extra for the employee, who is also deprived of being able to do some other job that would be useful to the economy.
by tete | 2025-12-15 08:47:08+00:00
> They already have, significantly, around 25-35% in developed economies

The thing is companies and even self-employed individuals of a certain wealth level know how to "(ab)use" it. From illegal but trivial and hard to detect tax evasion to financing personal lifestyle by having the company pay for certain luxuries (cars, computers, furniture, etc.).

If you have the wealth to have a dedicated office that dedicated office can be your man cave if you justify it with having all sorts of amenities for customers. And good luck to whoever checks taxes to find out how exactly things are used/not used.

All of that usually means that companies, company owners and high ranking managers get away with not paying taxes for a lot of things that everyone else does simply because they don't have a say within these companies.

And all of that is before you go to the tax advisor.

I am sorry, but if you do hard honest work the chances of you getting rich are beyond slim. Even worse when you do something that actually benefits society.
by thelifeofrishi | 2025-12-15 08:47:57+00:00
i’m working on Canva like app for automated image/pdf/video via API, also connects with n8n, zapier, make, airtable, pipedream etc.

it’s https://orshot.com

it’s being used by agencies and teams to automate pdf invoice/reports, instagram/tiktok/pinterest posts etc.

basically design a template, autofill the layers with your data from anywhere and generate visual content for marketing at scale