MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anonymous908213 | 2025-12-05 12:27:35+00:00
That's quite a misattribution of success. The Russian empire was politically stable throughout the industrial revolution era, and yet lagged behind other great powers substantially. The Soviet revolution, of course, ushered in a famously politically unstable era with regular, massive purges. Meanwhile, there are many relatively politically stable countries that never managed to become especially industrialised over a period of many decades even up to the modern day, for example Mexico.

There's also a difference between "any country can rapidly develop", and what the USSR did, reaching a superpower status only two countries in the world achieved. For example, the USSR produced 80,000 T-34 medium tanks to the US's 50,000 Sherman tanks and Germany's 8500 PzIV tanks, and it was superior to both. That is a ridiculous feat, and it happened in the middle of a massive invasion that forced the relocation of huge swathes of industry to boot. The USSR was also the first to most space achievements, and it was second to develop nuclear weapons. The USSR did not just catch up to "any industrialised nation", it surpassed them all completely other than the US.
by dev_l1x_be | 2025-12-05 12:28:07+00:00
It is a pattern. If you make it beneficial to declare some status (there is a fine distinction between conditions that a person was born with vs just declaring something) more people are going to declare that. This happened in my country when we introduced preferential treatment for certain minorities and there was a huge uptick in people declaring being part of that minority group. This was for claiming a university benefit.
by ahartmetz | 2025-12-05 12:28:34+00:00
"Modern CMake" is more about scoping all properties to the targets that they belong to (including stuff like what you also need to link against if you link against target foo) than about language features. The CMake language hasn't changed much except correcting some early weirdness about "if" and the addition of generator expressions, which are fortunately not often needed.
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-12-05 12:28:40+00:00
In the last couple years we've seen the internet version of "Vietnam war being televised made it unpopular at home".

After Vietnam, it was easier for journalists to embed with the terrorist groups than it was to embed with US forces, as the US learned that people seeing how the sausage is made immediately cuts the support for said sausage making.

Massive political weight was thrown behind getting control of TikTok because of the sheer amount of reporting from Gaza. Politicians are still trying to tell people that they're essentially wrong for forming their views on actual images of violence they're seeing.

The world at large was shown the brutality against the people of Gaza, and the plot was lost at home.

If the "enemies" aren't shown, it's easy to go along with "good guys" and "bad guys", but when you see 100s of children missing limbs, mourning their family members, and begging on to not be killed over the course of a few months, suddenly the fairy tale that allows some countries to brutalize others falls apart.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-05 12:28:44+00:00
> Combination Will Offer More Choice and Greater Value for Consumers, Create More Opportunities for the Creative Community and Generate Shareholder Value

No doubt about the last part, but how does merging two giants create "More Choice"? I know corporate double-speak is already out of control and I know they're writing whatever they can do avoid regulators who surely are looking into the acquisition, but surely these executives cannot believe acquisitions lead to more choice, right?
by xrd | 2025-12-05 12:29:00+00:00
I went to a concert last night and wore a T-shirt I made that said "Fuck Warner Bros." The band was j*Davey. Warner Bros signed them over fifteen years ago and then shoved them into a box. The show last night, fortunately for me, was only about 300 people, but it should have been 10,000. Prince was a fan. They birthed an entire category of LA artists like Thursday Thundercat, Syd, Flying Lotus (those artists say that in their Instagram). They loved my T-shirt when we met after the show.

I got really emotional when I saw them again for the first time in twenty years. They are just amazing, and it is so shocking they couldn't make it work in the industry.

But Spotify seems even worse. It feels like the parasites are even worse now, and they turn around and invest in military startups.

What's the alternative? This band sold out of merch last night, is that enough for them to survive, or dare I dream, thrive in the world of today?

If you are in LA, go see them next week on the 12th. They are releasing a new album and if the world makes sense their next show will be 10,000 people.
by pfdietz | 2025-12-05 12:29:22+00:00
Nor can you count on Common Lisp to have TCO. People who are new to CL and treat it like Scheme run into this constantly. Basically never recur down a list, since the list could be long.

This problem also shows up in cases where TCO is not possible. For example, suppose we have a syntax tree for some program and need to traverse the tree. Nodes that represent lists of things might have a long list of children, and in a sufficiently large program recursing down that list can blow out the stack. Just recurse on list elements, which one can reasonably assume don't nest too deeply.
by SanderSita | 2025-12-05 12:30:00+00:00
Hey everyone,

Every time I asked ChatGPT for advice, I got generic answers because the model didn’t know the full product, my market, or my roadmap. SaaSminder solves that by letting you feed in all the details of your SaaS once, then getting targeted, actionable recommendations every time you chat.

I built SaaSminder, the AI assistant that remembers the context of the SaaS you’re building.

I’m keeping it completely free for now until i know where this project goes next.

Check it out at saasminder.com

Cheers!
by oersted | 2025-12-05 12:30:09+00:00
The last Stranger Things series, of all things, is probably the single most expensive media production in history. More expensive than Marvel films, than both Avatars, than all of Games of Thrones, than Rings of Power per episode…

It even dwarfs the budgets of the biggest games ever and is roughly on the level of the upcoming GTA 6.

It’s completely mad! For a quaint small-scale mild-horror story set in the 80s. I get that it’s popular, but it would have been just as popular with 1/10 of the budget.

Exact numbers are often unknown, so I may be wrong for some of the examples above, but it’s in that order of magnitude.

But I agree that Netflix feels cheap. The Rings of Power felt remarkably cheap too. But it’s a lot more about the writing and the artistic merit than about actual production quality.
by Joker_vD | 2025-12-05 12:30:11+00:00
> it "just requires" you to flawlessly uphold memory access invariants manually across all possible concurrent states of your program.

Which, for certain kinds of programs, is trivially simple for e.g. "set value once during early initialization, then only read it". No, it's not thread-local. And even for "okay, maybe atomically update it once in a blue moon from one specific place in code" scenario is pretty easy to do locklessly.
by conartist6 | 2025-12-05 12:30:22+00:00
You would think they would care about the fact that their brand is being torched but I guess they figure they're too big to need to care.

Their new philosophy is "the user is too stupid to even think for themselves LOL." It's not just their rhetoric, it's every single choice they've made screaming out their new priorities of which user respect is both last and least
by jmclnx | 2025-12-05 12:30:43+00:00
Excel is where it is due to a kind of mild bait and switch. In the DOS and OS/2 days before Windows 95, Microsoft told Lotus and other software companies OS2 was the future, not windows. So Lotus when all in on OS/2 with its spreadsheet.

Then came 1995, M/S released windows 95 and at the same time they had a full software suit running on W95. It took Lotus a while to get a W95 version out. I think the same happened to Word Perfect.

So here we are, too bad Libreoffice was unable to do the same with Linux. But now people are so entrenched I doubt they will only change if forced.

Also, years ago IBM tried to get people on LibreOffice and off M/S, it failed miserably. Many Orgs. in Europe is trying now, I hope they succeed.

BTW I wonder if we are heading down the same path with github ? I hope not but seems we could be.
by torginus | 2025-12-05 12:31:19+00:00
All great achievements were result of economic planning.

The moon landing (and the necessary R&D and buildup) wasn't based on market-based economic incentives.

There are multiple examples of advanced high-tech economies built up with the help of central planning married to market forces - basically every East Asian country followed this blueprint.

The USSR was a much more powerful economy than it capitalist successor, even though it wasn't run especially effectively.

City supported housing initiatives produce with extensive public planning and infrastructure investments produce much better results than for-profit developers building the least amount of stuff for the most amount of money.

There are 3 main methods of economic control: profit motive, central planning, and intrinsic incentives. Purist approaches that rely on just one or reject the other tend to have bad outcomes.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-05 12:31:42+00:00
However, one of the things you see (if you read enough of them) in accident investigation reports for regulated industries is a recurring pattern

1. Accident happens 2. Investigators conclude Accident would not happen if people did X. Recommend regulator requires that people do X, citing previous such recommendations each iteration 3. Regulator declined this recommendation, arguing it's too expensive to do X, or people already do X, or even (hilariously) both 4. Go to 1.

Too often, what happens is that eventually

5. Extremely Famous Accident Happens, e.g. killing loved celebrity Space Cowboy 6. Investigators conclude Accident would not happen if people did X, remind regulator that they have previously recommended requiring X 7. Press finally reads dozens of previous reports and so News Story says: Regulator killed Space Cowboy! 8. Regulator decides actually they always meant to require X after all
by pcurve | 2025-12-05 12:31:48+00:00
Not sure how many of you have WBD shares with its rather tumultuous past (spin off from ATT, the Bill Hwang mess), but if you've picked up shares on the cheap in the past few years sub $10, congratulations.

"Under the terms of the agreement, each WBD shareholder will receive $23.25 in cash and $4.501 in shares of Netflix common stock for each share of WBD common stock outstanding at the closing of the transaction. "
by ahartmetz | 2025-12-05 12:31:58+00:00
If you can mostly stick to the declarative way, it's still a benefit. No Turing-complete language completely prevents you from writing "bad" code. "You are not completely prevented from doing things that are hard to understand" is a bad argument. "You are encouraged to do things that are hard to understand" is a good one (looking at you, Perl).
by tlb | 2025-12-05 12:32:17+00:00
Yes, they transfer money from poorly informed people to well-informed people. That's the point. That's how they reward well-informed people for the service of making good predictions so everyone can be slightly better informed.

The fact that outcomes are lopsided are evidence that it's not gambling. In pure gambling, everyone gets the same expectation of gains. In a test of any particular skill, you expect a Pareto distribution of outcomes.
by throw0101a | 2025-12-05 12:32:20+00:00
> In reality, though, why are there so many fact-checking organizations? Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth?

Perhaps there's so much lying being spread on modern social media that one organization would be end up drowning in work:

> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.[1][2]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
by crabmusket | 2025-12-05 12:32:21+00:00
Half my team switched to JJ this year, and I do find stacking PRs to be much more pleasant now. We had previously tried out Graphite but it didn't really stick.

I wrote up a little way to use JJ's revsets to make it easy to push an entire stack of branches in one command:

https://crabmusket.net/2025/jj-bough-a-useful-alias-for-stac...
by oblio | 2025-12-05 12:33:04+00:00
GPUs used to cost 20% of what they cost know and Intel and AMD make perfectly serviceable GPUs for most PCs. NVIDIA top of the line GPUs won't suddenly be plugged in to lowly laptops.

Yes, lots of companies will buy them for cheap, but these AI beasts also have OpEx costs. Not every alternative use is worth the money and there are 0 guarantees that the alternative costs cover the gap. NVIDIA sell 80% of GPUs for AI now.

I think people don't realize just how big this bubble is.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-05 12:33:24+00:00
If the poster just wants sci fi (and especially if that doesn’t include sci fi horror without space ships) I could see them only getting one or two good movies per year.

Me, I’d need two or three more lifetimes to get through my probably-good list of movies and tv, just for single watches… but I’m up for just about any genre.
Show HN: Guide – A Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Inspired To-Do App
by 4mitkumar | 2025-12-05 12:33:26+00:00
Hi HN, this is a repost from last Saturday, in case it was burried. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46096146

But essentially, a single file, totally offline, free To-Do list app with opinionated workflows.

Such as

- Can only pick 3 tasks at max at a time - Helps build momentum by suggesting smallest next step - Acknowledges and helps with emotional states - Generates progress reports

Customizable by users.
by wiz21c | 2025-12-05 12:34:21+00:00
I'm 53, started at 10. At that time, being able to edit a line of code without re-typing it completely was "cool" :-) Then, on apple 2, we had GPLE (global program line editor) then Assembler toolkit which had an editor. Then I moved to PC. First I used GWBasic (it had an editor) then Turbo Pascal, then multi-edit, then emacs, then Visual Studio, then Eclipse, then Word (became a manager :-)), then back to emacs and VSCode (coding again!) and a bit of Kate.
by aeonik | 2025-12-05 12:35:24+00:00
While technically true, you have censored and suppressed the truth.

Almost all ice has mineral impurities in it, and is therefore a mineral. Therefore water is actually lava (molten ice) and should be referred to as such.

Your depiction of ice being merely "frozen water" as a fact, and not emphasizing it's equality with lava is classist and clearly agenda driven. /s
by mdotmertens | 2025-12-05 12:35:35+00:00
As someone who has recently begun exploring physical media, I find this quite disappointing. The volume on 4K Blu-Rays is often low, prices are high, and Netflix isn't doing much to support physical media.

When you're just unwinding in front of a 65-inch screen, you might not notice the quality loss from compression. However, if you're actively watching on a 110-inch projector with an excellent sound system, every little detail becomes clear.

And that doesn't even address the most frustrating part: owning less and less.

I mean, no one needs to become a physical distributor, but it's disheartening that we lack consumer-friendly ownership of entertainment media when it comes to movies. I would love to see something like Bandcamp, but specifically for studios to release their movies to.
by pyrale | 2025-12-05 12:35:46+00:00
> Why is that?

Well, if I'm very motivated, I might write a letter to my MP once or twice in my life. I could do more, but I simply have other stuff to do with my life, including my own work.

A corporation, on the other hand, may hire people to pester my MP eight hours a day. These people may have enough money to treat my MP to a lunch, etc. And when my MP stops being elected, that corporation may offer them a job.

Why isn't really an enigma here.
Show HN: Nana Banana – An AI Image Generation Platform with Multiple Top Models
by harperhuang | 2025-12-05 12:35:46+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Nana Banana (https://nana-banana.org), a platform that integrates multiple AI image generation models.

Why I Built This

I found that each AI image generation model has its own strengths—Google Gemini excels at multilingual text rendering, FLUX is great for photorealistic styles. But you need to manage multiple accounts. So I built this platform to bring them together, accessible with a single account.

Key Features

1. Integrates Google Gemini, FLUX, Seedream, Qwen, and more 2. Supports text-to-image and image-to-image 3. Two-step AI workflow: Generate → Edit & Refine

Tech Stack

Next.js 15, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, better-auth

Feedback

Still in early stage. Feel free to try it out and let me know what you think.
by kypro | 2025-12-05 12:35:55+00:00
> They have blameless post mortems, but maybe "We actually do make mistakes so this practice is not good" wasn't a lesson anybody wanted to hear.

Or they could say, "we want to continue to prioritise speed of security rollouts over stability, and despite our best efforts, we do make mistakes, so sometimes we expect things will blow up".

I guess it depends what you're optimising for... If the rollout speed of security patches is the priority then maybe increased downtime is a price worth paying (in their eyes anyway)... I don't agree with that, but at least it's an honest position to take.

That said, if this was to address the React CVE then it was hardly a speedy patch anyway... You'd think they could have afforded to stagger the rollout over a few hours at least.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-05 12:36:01+00:00
There's certainly something to be said for the social aspect. I just wish theaters would catch up with the tech.

Only something like 20-40% of theaters are 4k, and less than 1% do HDR. 4k is really important when the image is that large, and the missing HDR changes the entire vibe of some films.
by weird-eye-issue | 2025-12-05 12:36:34+00:00
I'd really prefer better quality over quantity. Everything just feels like slop now and I find myself mostly only enjoying older movies. I find it's incredibly rare when I can actually find something half decent that's new on Netflix.

Edit: Btw I find Max is like a better quality version of Netflix. But after a while I have the same problem there too. I find myself just watching something on YouTube instead most times
by veunes | 2025-12-05 12:36:47+00:00
Yeah, using an API aggregator to run a 7B model is economically strange if you have even a consumer GPU. OpenRouter captures the cream of complex requests (Claude 3.5, o1) that you can't run at home. But even for local hosting, medium models are starting to displace small ones because quantization lets you run them on accessible hardware, and the quality boost there is massive. So the "Medium is the new Small" trend likely holds true for the self-hosted segment as well.
by walletdrainer | 2025-12-05 12:37:06+00:00
> but that assumption flies out the window when the vehicles are so large you can't even see a kid walking or biking to school

Is this even true with current models? Surely they have a plenty of cameras and will automatically detect children on the way.

Does there exist any evidence to suggest that these cars are particularly dangerous when driven on European roads? Just because traffic in the US is unsafe, does not inherently mean that these cars will be terribly dangerous in Europe.
by bayindirh | 2025-12-05 12:37:30+00:00
I believe that's a bit of a shallow/narrow take.

Yes, copyleft exists as a response to copyright, but it builds something completely different with respect to what copyright promises. While copyright protects creators, copyleft protects users. This part is generally widely misunderstood.

Deregulation to prevent regulatory capture is not a mechanism that works when there's money and a significant power imbalance. Media companies can always put barriers to the consumption of their products through contracts and other mechanisms. Signing a contract not to copy the thing you get to see can get out of hand in very grim ways. Consumers are very weak compared to the companies providing the content, because of the desirability of the content alone, even if you ignore all the monetary imbalance.

Moreover, copyleft doesn't only prevent that kind of exploitation; it actively protects the user by making it impossible to close the thing you get. Copyleft protects all the users of the thing in question. When the issue is viewed in the context of the software, it not only allows the code to propagate indefinitely but also allows it to be properly preserved for the long run.

Leaving things free-for-all again not only fails to protect the user but also profits the bigger companies, since they have the power to hoard, remix, refine, and sell this work, which they get for free. So, it only carries water to the big companies' water wheels. Moreover, even permissive licenses depend on the notion of copyright to attribute the artifact to its original creator.

Otherwise, even permissively licensed artifacts can be embedded in the works of larger companies and not credited, allowing companies to slightly derive the things they got for free and sell them to consumers on their own terms, without any guardrails.

So abolishing copyright not only will further un-democratize things, but it'll make crediting the creators of the building blocks the companies use to erect their empires impossible.

This is why I will always share my work under strong copyleft or non-commercial/share-alike (and no-derivatives, where it makes sense) licenses.

In short, I'm terribly sorry to tell you that you didn't convince me about abolishing copyright at all. The only thing you achieved was to think further on my stance, fill the mental gaps I found in my train of thought, and fill them appropriately with more copyleft support. Also, it looks like my decision not to share my photos anymore is getting more concrete.
by roenxi | 2025-12-05 12:37:42+00:00
Also, are they not capable of buying seeds from reputable sources in Kenya? I assume there is some sort of farmer seed-shop in most places which has been around for more than a year, known to be reputable. If they buy below-market priced seeds then those are going to be dodgy. That is why they are below market price. These people are poor not stupid. It'd be like my buying a cheap Rolex from a street vendor - I might buy it, I might not but I'm not going to be confused if it turns out to be a fake. It isn't hard to find a reputable seller of something and if you go to the unreputable sellers the reason it is cheap is because it might be bad quality. Don't go to a community seed store that lets in random seeds if the quality matters.

I assumed that there was unwritten context where some seed vendor with genetically enhanced seeds was corrupting the legal process to try and protect their IP.
by haritha-j | 2025-12-05 12:39:39+00:00
This is true. I mainly live in a country with unlimited, fast internet but also spend some time in a country with limited and slower internet. But even when i have fast internet, downloading 70 gigs when I just want to play a game for an hour is very disruptive. I think a lot of this download and replace vs efficiently patch argument is predicated on the premise that the update itself was necessary. In many cases such as Forza horizon, I've noticed that the update is just to push a bunch of paywalled content / advertisements for new paywalled content that most people won't even play. I miss the days when I bought the DVD and that was the whole game.