MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-12-23 19:06:08+00:00
The .308 footgun with software contracting stems from a misunderstanding of what we pay software developers for. The model under which contracting seems like the right move is "we pay software developers because we want a unit of software", like how you pay a carpenter to build you some custom cabinets. If the union of "things you have a very particular opinion about, and can specify coherently" and "things you don't care about" completely cover a project, contracting works great for that purpose.

But most of the time you don't want "a unit of software", you want some amorphous blob of product and business wants and needs, continuously changing at the whims of business, businessmen, and customers. In this context, sure, you're paying your developers to solve problems, but moreover you're paying them to store the institutional knowledge of how your particular system is built. Code is much easier to write than to read, because writing code involves applying a mental model that fits your understanding of the world onto the application, whereas reading code requires you to try and recreate someone else's alien mental model. In the situation of in-house products and business automation, at some point your senior developers become more valuable for their understanding of your codebase than their code output productivity.

The context of "I want this particular thing fixed in a popular open source codebase that there are existing people with expertise in", contracting makes a ton of sense, because you aren't the sole buyer of that expertise.
by dpifke | 2025-12-23 19:06:25+00:00
This seems similar to the "Is Github Down?" submission problem, where the submitter simply links to github.com.

That's a poor submission, because by the time most people click on it, Github will no longer be down.

There might be an interesting discussion to be had about outages at Github, but the better submission would be an article or blog post about the outage, not just a link to the site and a three-word title.

If someone wants to write an article or blog post about this news broadcast, which links to "hard facts and analysis not available through popular channels," that seems like it might be a worthwhile submission. But just a link to the broadcast by itself is not leading to interesting or on-topic conversation—the top comment right now is an ad hominem attack against Larry Ellison, without any supporting facts or analysis that he had anything to do with this story at all.
by jodrellblank | 2025-12-23 19:06:34+00:00
Thinks: this video[1] is the processed feed from the Huygens space probe landing on Saturn's moon Titan circa 2005. Relayed through the Cassini probe orbiting Saturn, 880 million miles from the Sun. At a total mission cost of 3.25 billion dollars. This is the sensor data, altitude, speed, spin, ultra violet, and hundreds of photos. (Read the description for what the audio is encoding, it's neat!)

Look at the end of the video, the photometry data count stops at "7996 kbytes received"(!)

> "Turns out, 40Mbps video streams don’t appreciate 200ms+ network latency. Who knew. “Just lower the bitrate,” you say. Great idea. Now it’s 10Mbps of blocky garbage"

Who could do anything useful with 10Mbps. :/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Huygens_descent.ogv
by idiotsecant | 2025-12-23 19:07:04+00:00
I suspect the effect of AI will be a sort of eternal September, but for software. It's a phase change in how a lot of software will be written and used. There are a lot of applications right now for software where crappy software that mostly gets the job done in a specific way is Good Enough. There's going to be a lot of software written by LLMs that maybe barely compiles and doesn't handle edge cases and has weird behavior but gets a small, specific job done. This is a good thing, since maybe the previous alternative was doing something manually, or not at all.

There will still be major, fundamental, foundational software work for serious engineers to do, but we have to admit that most software needed in the world is not that.
by vkou | 2025-12-23 19:07:07+00:00
They did, through both bankruptcies.

They came out squeaky clean in 2001, keeping all their shares. (Major shout-out to the State of California for bailing them out, and shouldering all the subsequent liabilities from that adventure.)

The second one diluted them by 22%, by creating and giving new stock to the people who won lawsuits against the firm. The stock's up by more than 22% since the impact of the fires on the company was realized...

If they were zeroed out after either bankruptcy, I wouldn't be kvetching, but here we are...
by tantalor | 2025-12-23 19:07:31+00:00
> I don't think this is the best summary of either the FTC's mandate from congress nor the antitrust laws in the US.

Okay well I basically copy/pasted from ftc.gov:

The FTC’s Bureau of Competition enforces the nation's antitrust laws, which form the foundation of our free market economy. The antitrust laws promote the interests of consumers; they support unfettered markets and result in lower prices and more choices.

https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/bureaus-offices/bureau-competi...

The Bureau of Competition is committed to preventing mergers and acquisitions that are likely to reduce competition and lead to higher prices, lower quality goods or services, or less innovation

https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/merger-review
by Jakob | 2025-12-23 19:07:37+00:00
Yes, this is unfortunately still the way and was very common back when iOS Safari did not allow embedded video.

For a fast start of the video, reverse the implementation: instead of downgrading from Websockets to polling when connection fails, you should upgrade from polling to Websockets when the network allows.

Socket.io was one of the first libraries that did that switching and had it wrong first, too. Learned the enterprise network behaviour and they switched the implementation.
by dwoldrich | 2025-12-23 19:07:50+00:00
> It's all political corruption, eliminating the regulators for Musk's empire, cover it up with lies about other things.

I just don't see the world this way, and I don't think my being argumentative about it is healthy for either of us.

> deep information bubble

The same could be said for you. You've left very little room for nuance.

I am not a direct investor in any of his businesses, and my opinions are my own. Musk was and is the largest military contractor, bought and paid for. He's a genius marketer, autistic, and gets his hands dirty on projects technically. He's not an idiot and he is socially awkward. I believe whatever big projects Musk starts are at the urging and partly the direction of the US military.

It seems clear (to me) that Musk is crushing it in most of his businesses. It's clear (to me) that the on again, off again relationship he has with the Trump administration was just pro wrestling kayfabe. It is impossible for me to impute motives to Musk, he says pro-human things and he works (potentially) very anti-human projects. I am apprehensive about everything he has his paws in.
by jt2190 | 2025-12-23 19:08:04+00:00
Very interesting. I would have intuitively hand-waved the variability of each laborer’s output for those as “within a tolerable amount of time, most of the time” but I see your point that at the busiest times an order for a single, more complex item could cause a significant slowdown in the whole pipeline, especially, as you point out, there is a limited number of staff and workstations.
by vbezhenar | 2025-12-23 19:08:09+00:00
My idea is to use Markdown over HTTP(S). It's relatively easy to implement Markdown renderer, compared to HTML renderer. It's possible to browse that kind of website with HTML browser with very simple wrapper either on client or server side, so it's backwards compatible. It's rich enough for a lot of websites with actually useful content.

Now I know that Markdown generally can include HTML tags, so probably it should be somewhat restricted.

It could allow to implement second web in a compatible way with simple browsers.
by codyklimdev | 2025-12-23 19:08:21+00:00
I like programming as a craft, but the kinds of coding I do for fun and the kinds of coding I do for profit look very, very different. So, for my work programming I use AI a lot more than I do in my own time.

After all, my work (for the moment) is just about pushing features to keep the PMs happy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-23 19:08:57+00:00
Don't forget the very right wing fake "free speech" insistence, where speech you agree with is free and speech that criticizes your failures is "An attack".

Or the huge cohort who insist that Joe Rogan talking to another guy about how it's not that big a deal that the very existence of gay people is yet again under attack is "Two people having a calm debate of their difference in beliefs" despite that not being true.

There are tons of people on HN that would have done better to spend more time in English class learning about persuasive writing and the pillars of rhetoric and media literacy and all that "critical thinking" they claim school didn't teach them and are currently angry when people rightly call out their poorly supported arguments, and they don't actually seem to know what an "argument" even is.

It's so frustrating their faux "debate" beliefs. It's worse than a decade ago when they thought "debate" was screaming at your ideological opponents a hundred outright false claims that can't be countered in a reasonable time frame.

Nevermind that we HAD calm debate about most of this shit decades ago. But these people only believe a "debate" happened when their beliefs are validated. Otherwise it's "canceling" that thing they still scream about despite doing it all the time.

Also the idea that we should have "calm debate" about the government sending you to another country's prison without trial is insane when that was specifically one of the exact reasons the founding fathers decided to start shooting people over. Thomas Jefferson would not be calm in his rhetoric.
Show HN: ScanOS – normalizing visual inputs into persistent LLM memory
by JohannesGlaser | 2025-12-23 19:09:18+00:00
I built a small ingestion layer that turns visual inputs (screenshots, photos, exports) into structured, machine-readable memory for LLM assistants.

Instead of treating each image as a one-off prompt, scanOS normalizes recurring visual inputs into the same schema over time — even when the source formats differ. The goal is to accumulate state from visual data, not just extract text.

It’s not an OCR tool and doesn’t rely on embeddings, RAG, or fine-tuning. The output is either human-readable text or explicit machine-readable JSON that can be stored, inspected, and reused as part of a file-based memory system.

scanOS is part of a larger file-based architecture I’m using daily, but this module stands on its own.

Code + docs: https://github.com/johannes42x/scanOS
by zahlman | 2025-12-23 19:09:18+00:00
The distinction you are trying to make is nonsensical in Python's object model. Types are inherently callable, and calling them constructs (i.e. instantiates) the type (normally; this can be overridden, by design). There is also no type->kind->category hierarchy; `type` itself is an object, which is its own type.

When you're at a level of theory where terms like "type constructor" are natural, it's unreasonable to expect any of it to be applicable to Python. This is why the Haskell people speak of dynamically-typed languages in the Python mold as "untyped" regardless of their attitude towards implicit casts.

And I love it, and have been using it for decades, and write beautiful things where the annotations hardly ever seem worth the effort — perhaps for documentation, but not for a static checker. Then I look at other, newer Pythonistas trying to figure out how to write complex generic type expressions (and sacrificing backwards compatibility as they keep up with the churn of Python figuring out how to offer useful annotation syntax) and deal with covariance vs contravariance etc. and I just smile.
by prewett | 2025-12-23 19:09:26+00:00
I don't think it has anything to do with Python. I had plenty of 'if' errors in C++ caused by indenting the second line and not putting braces around it prior to Python. They were always painful to debug. I finally just _always_ put a brace around an 'if' block, regardless of whether it is one line or many, and I've never had that problem again. I think the problem is that C lets you omit the brace for one line; it should always require a brace.

Python executes like it reads, which seems like a positive feature to me. Makes errors like C's two-line if block impossible.
by fjfaase | 2025-12-23 19:09:36+00:00
I understand that you mean that SectorLisp is taken as the 'seed' that we have to trust that it is not malicious (or secretly executes a malicious program if its finds it). In the live-bootstrap project it is 'hex0' that is the seed, a simple program that converts hexadecimal character (by pairs) into bytes.
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-23 19:10:45+00:00
As well as the points already raised by others, I'd like to make the point that we should be encouraging people to prompt LLMs themselves rather than just accepting the outputs of others. As a social norm, this will make society more robust to misinformation and deception, as it will result in fewer people trusting outputs without knowing how the LLM was actually prompted.

This probably doesn't really matter in this context, but I think it's a general best practice worth reinforcing whenever possible.
by jayd16 | 2025-12-23 19:11:01+00:00
So they replaced a TCP connection with no congestion control with a sycnronous poll of an endpoint which is inherently congestion controlled.

I wonder if they just tried restarting the stream at a lower bitrate once it got too delayed.

The talk about how the images looks more crisp at a lower FPS is just tuning that I guess they didn't bother with.
by dang | 2025-12-23 19:11:10+00:00
That's inevitable, because consistency is impossible: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... How to interpret the inconsistency is a different question, of course. I'm curious what you see that seems most discrepant to you?

The closest I can give to an account of "how things work in reality" is the 80,000+ moderation comments I've posted over the last 10+ years: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang&type=comment&dateRange.... You're free to decide it's all lies, of course, but if you (or anyone) randomly scroll back through that feed, I doubt you'll find much that's miles apart from the rules as they are written. As a matter of fact I'd be surprised if you found anything that could be fairly be described that way, because trying to apply the rules as they are written is a matter of integrity for us. If it weren't, we'd change the rules until it were.
by indigo945 | 2025-12-23 19:11:47+00:00
I said "a GC", that is, "a garbage collector". Even if you consider reference counting as technically being garbage collection, purely reference counted systems do not have a distinct entity that can be identified as "a" garbage collector. So I'm technically correct here even in face of this pedantry.

Not that I think it's a reasonable approach to language to be pedantic on this. RC being GC is, of course, true from an analytic approach to language: a garbage collection system is defined as a system that collects and frees objects that are unreachable and thus dead; a reference counting pointer collects and frees objects that are unreachable and thus dead; therefore, reference counting is garbage collection.

One problem with this is the vagueness: now, the use of a call stack is garbage collection; after all, returning from a function collects and frees the objects in the stack frame. Leaking memory all over the place and expecting the operation system to clean up when you call `exit()` likewise is "garbage collection".

But more importantly, it's just not how anyone understands the word. You understood perfectly well what I meant when I said "you would be hard-pressed to find a modern AA game that does not already use a GC"; in other words, you yourself don't even understand the word differently. You merely feel an ethical imperative to understand the word differently, and when you failed to do so, used my comment as a stand-in to work through the emotions caused by your own inability to live up to this unfulfilled ethic.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-23 19:11:49+00:00
It would be great if more GPU competition would enter the field instead of less. The current duopoly is pretty boring and stagnant, with prices high and each company sorta-kinda doing the same thing and milking their market.

I'm kind of nostalgic for the Golden Age of graphics chip manufacturers 25 years ago, where we still had NVIDIA and ATI, but also 3DFX, S3, Matrox, PowerVR, and even smaller players, all doing their own thing and there were so many options.
by pron | 2025-12-23 19:11:53+00:00
> Perhaps we can start with something "dumber" like Rust or any typed program. If you want to write something correct, or you care about correctness, you should not be using dynamic languages. The most useful and used type of test is type checking.

Lean or TLA+ are to Rust/Java/Haskell's type systems what algebraic topology and non-linear PDEs are to "one potato, two potatoes". The level of "correctness" achievable with such simple type systems is so negligible in comparison to the things you can express and prove in rich formal mathematics languages that they barely leave an impression (they do make some grunt work easier, but if we're talking about a world where a machine can do the more complicated things, a little more grunt work doesn't matter).
by SilverElfin | 2025-12-23 19:12:13+00:00
The recent defense bill is evidence of this. Who has access to these contracts and massive spending increases? Is it any random startup that is building a good product? Nope. It’s the incumbent companies that are big donors and the various defense tech companies from the Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale ecosystem, who are ideologically aligned to the administration and support them vocally. Same with the new ICE and border agency funding. They’re tripling these agencies budgets. Who’s getting contracts to hire thousands of new agents or to build software profiling the millions they want to deport in 2026? Their friends like Palantir probably.
by estearum | 2025-12-23 19:13:17+00:00
Of course it would make the US less appealing, which means the immigrants with the most optionality of where to go (like researchers, engineers, and high value contributors in general) are disproportionately likely to seek other destinations.

It would have the least deterrent force on those who are already criminal and otherwise lawless or desperate.

Back to your claim about this being an "effective" immigration policy: no it's not.
by TehCorwiz | 2025-12-23 19:13:17+00:00
If they do it'll likely be part of an industry wide push to kill off the home-built PC market. It's no secret that MS and others want the kind of ecosystem Apple has and governments want more backdoor access to tech. And which mfg wouldn't want to eliminate partial upgrades/repairs. Imagine that the only PC you could buy one day has everything tightly integrated with no user serviceable or replaceable parts without a high-end soldering lab. Now, since it's impractical to build your own they can raise the price to purchase one above reach of most people and the PC market succeeds in their rental PC aspirations.
by ajross | 2025-12-23 19:13:17+00:00
Your prior seems to be that the Trump administration is operating in good faith and that they would naturally be predisposed to allow the merger, being free market republicans and all.

That's not the accusation at hand. The contention is that the Trump administration is threatening to block the merger (corruptly, in opposition to their republican proclivities) unless the news arm of the merged company is operated in a partisan way.

And the evidence for that is that Ellison walked in, threw out CBS News's pre-existing leadership, and brought in a reasonably-well-known-but-still-not-celebrity-enough-to-be-independent partisan republican voice to run it. And now that she's there, she's clearly operating the news room in a partisan way.

Seems like a pretty convincing theory to me.
by Alive-in-2025 | 2025-12-23 19:14:46+00:00
Sorry I'm not understanding, are you saying that once we had the ACA that kind of drained the enthusiasm and interest from those who care about everyone having decent healthcare? I'm sure are some people who thought the problem was fixed after we had ACA. Obviously we don't because first of all it wasn't cheap or ubiquitous enough, and now vast numbers of people are going to be priced out of it.

I think this problem is very related to Fox News types convincing people to vote against their best interests. Immigrants, minorities keep voting for people like Trump and the Republicans to support them. It's the same deal with somehow people getting convinced that federal government healthcare is really bad for them and they're better just being out there with no healthcare, somehow
by delusional | 2025-12-23 19:14:46+00:00
> Valve is practically singlehandedly dragging the Linux ecosystem forward in areas that nobody else wanted to touch.

I'm loving what valve has been doing, and their willingness to shove money into projects that have long been under invested in, BUT. Please don't forget all the volunteers that have developed these systems for years before valve decided to step up. All of this is only possible because a ton of different people spent decades slowly building a project, that for most of it's lifetime seemed like a dead end idea.

Wine as a software package is nothing short of miraculous. It has been monumentally expensive to build, but is provided to everyone to freely use as they wish.

Nobody, and I do mean NOBODY would have funded a project that spent 20 years struggling to run office and photoshop. Valve took it across the finish line into commercially useful project, but they could not have done that without the decade+ of work before that.
by 0x0funky | 2025-12-23 19:15:20+00:00
I built this because Meta’s SAM-Audio (Segment Anything for Audio) is a breakthrough for interactive sound separation, but the original implementation is quite heavy, often requiring 30GB+ VRAM due to the default loading of Vision Encoders and Rankers.

The Problem:
Beyond the VRAM barrier, the Windows installation is a "dependency hell" due to mismatched FFmpeg and TorchCodec DLLs.

My Approach (The "Lite Mode"):

· Memory Trimming: I modified the model initialization to strip the Vision Encoder and various rerankers for pure audio tasks. This brings the footprint down to ~6GB VRAM for the Small model (bfloat16).

· Automated Setup: Bundled a install.bat that pins compatible versions of PyTorch and FFmpeg to ensure it works on Windows 11 immediately.

· Architecture: Built with a Next.js (Tailwind v4) frontend and a FastAPI/Celery backend to provide a modern interface over the CLI.

Everything is open-source (MIT). I hope this makes professional-grade audio separation accessible to those with consumer-grade hardware like the RTX 3060/4060.

I'm curious to hear from anyone testing this on different GPU architectures!
by simonw | 2025-12-23 19:15:29+00:00
Forget about the AI bit. Do you think it's interesting that MicroQuickJS can be used from Python via FFI or as a compiled module, and can also be compiled to WebAssembly and called from Node.js and Deno and from Pyodide running in a browser?

... and that it provides a useful sandbox in that you can robustly limit both the memory and time allowed, including limiting expensive regular expression evaluation?

I included the AI bit because it would have been dishonest not to disclose how I used AI to figure this all out.