MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by qdotme | 2025-12-03 12:38:06+00:00
Essentially, yes, they haven’t done deep software. Netflix probably comes closest amongst FAANG.

Google, Meta, Amazon do “shallow and broad” software. They are quite fast at capturing new markets swiftly, they frequently repackage OpenSource core and add the large amount of business logic to make it work, but essentially follow the market cycles - they hire and layoff on a few year cycle, and the people who work there typically also will jump around industries due to both transferable skills and relatively competitive competitors.

NVDA is roughly in the same bucket as HFT vendors. They retain talent on a 5-10y timescales. They build software stacks that range from complex kernel drivers and hardware simulators all the way to optimizing compilers and acceleration libraries.

This means they can build more integrated, more optimal and more coherent solutions. Just like Tesla can build a more integrated vehicle than Ford.
by egeozcan | 2025-12-03 12:39:29+00:00
Also

> More importantly, Actions is created by monkeys ...

vs

> Most importantly, Actions has inexcusable bugs ...

I commend the author for correcting their mistakes. However, IMHO, an acknowledgement instead of just a silent edit would have been better.

Anyway, each to their own, and I'm happy for the Zig community.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-03 12:39:51+00:00
It is grossly incorrect because it does not "produce oxygen from Martian soil".

This is extremely misleading, because on Mars Martian soil is abundant, while water is very scarce, so the title makes the reader believe that this cyanobacterium solves easily the production of oxygen.

It does not help at all for oxygen production. If you have water, then it is easy to produce hydrogen by electrolysis, using solar energy. Getting water on Mars is the hard problem.

There are chances that such cyanobacteria will be used on Mars, but for producing protein and other useful organic substances, with oxygen only as a byproduct.

However I believe that at least for the more distant future there is a better alternative to the use of cyanobacteria: the capture of solar energy by artificial means, coupled with the synthesis of some simple organic substance, e.g. glycerol or glycine, which can then be used to feed a culture of fungi located underground, which can then produce proteins and all the other complex substances needed for human food. There already are genetically modified fungi that can produce whey protein or chicken egg white protein suitable for human consumption.

This variant is better because photovoltaic cells have better efficiency for capturing solar energy and without environmental constraints, while genetically modified fungi can produce proteins of better quality than cyanobacteria and also any other complex organic substances that will be needed.
by sunnyday_002 | 2025-12-03 12:40:08+00:00
> My issue with Github CI is that it doesn't run your code in a container.

Is this not what you want?

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/write-workflows/c...

> You just have github-runner-1 user and you need to manually check out repository, do your build and clean up after you're done with it. Very dirty and unpredictable. That's for self-hosted runner.

Yeah checking out everytime is a slight papercut I guess, but I guess it gives you control as sometimes you don't need to checkout anything or want a shallow/full clone. I guess if it checked out for you then their would be other papercuts.

I use their runners so never need to do any cleanup and get a fresh slate everytime.
by swores | 2025-12-03 12:40:42+00:00
Glad to have helped!

I just noticed it randomly many years ago, I don't remember the occasion but I guess I was scrolling trying to find a page in history lazily and noticed it at the bottom.

It's an example that sums up feature discoverability (well, lack of) on iPhones - there are so many things like this, that are really useful to know if you find out about them but the only way to find out is luck or having a friend tell you. Occasionally the official Apple "Tips" app has useful stuff, but not much.

I actually have a thing in my family Signal chat of every few weeks sharing a new random iPhone tip, as I'm by far the nerdiest in the group. Maybe I should collate them all into a "hard to discover Tips" blog and share on HN...
by LatteLazy | 2025-12-03 12:41:18+00:00
1. Sounds like exactly when early investors and insiders would want to cash in and when retail investors who “have heard of the company and like the product” will buy without a lot of financial analysis.

2. A 300bn IPO can mean actually raising n 300bn by selling 100% of the company. But it could also mean seeing 1% for 3bn right? Which seems like a trivial amount for the market to absorb no?
by neilalexander | 2025-12-03 12:41:23+00:00
You know what else will be braindead in your nice world? The child who runs out in front of a car after a rigid tight-angled metal corner drives into their skull. These regulations aren't about blame or "drivers/pedestrians/cyclists should be more aware!", they're about reducing or avoiding as much harm as possible when things don't go to plan and an accident happens.
by Dumblydorr | 2025-12-03 12:41:44+00:00
Yeah the reflexive anti-PM anti-management stance posted above is typical here and of devs in general.

In theory, some engineers think they are perfectly capable of doing all the PMs work and all their own.

If they’ve never worked with a truly good PM, that’s a shame, they’d likely get more work done in a more timely fashion. I’ve worked with around 10 different PMs, the best kept stuff on track and aided with collaboration, reqs management, soft skills, handling tough customers, etc. they free up devs to do more dev work and less other work.
by HendrikHensen | 2025-12-03 12:42:22+00:00
You're right, it looks like these days you have to fill in an email address. Though any random thing can be filled in. They will send a verification code, and on the next screen you can either fill it in or click Skip in top right. Then in the preferences, it can be removed from the account. A bit annoying for sure, but still not valid email address needed.

But it is true that at any time they could make using an email address or phone number mandatory, and then creating an Advent of Code account will be gated behind that.
by DivingForGold | 2025-12-03 12:42:23+00:00
Yes.

Registered as a micro entity, filed patent myself, as the least expensive patent attorney I could find was like $5K down just to "start" to be involved. Ultimately, the patent application was denied. The legal costs could not justify the means. An assessment of the practical marketability of the product must be made first objectively, preferably by others, rather than the creator who is likely too subjective.
by vintermann | 2025-12-03 12:42:34+00:00
Regular handwriting there are many.

Historical handwriting, Gemini 3 is the only one which gave a decent result on a 19th century minutes from a town court in Northern Norway (Danish gothic handwriting with bleed through). I'm not 100% sure it's correct, but that's because it's so dang hard to read it to verify it. At least I see it gets many names, dates and locations right.

I've been waiting a long time for this.
by captainbland | 2025-12-03 12:42:52+00:00
Nvidia is already in the TPU race aren't they? This is exactly what the tensor cores on their current products are supposed to do, but they're just more heterogeneous GPU based architectures and exist with CUDA cores etc. on the same die. I think it should be within their capability to make a device which devotes an even higher ratio of transistors to tensor processing.
by FrankWilhoit | 2025-12-03 12:43:05+00:00
The steam engine "ended work". We have spent the ensuing 250 years pretending -- bitterly, ferociously pretending -- that that just didn't happen. That pretence caused all the wars and revolutions of the 19th and 20th Centuries; it killed hundreds of millions and immiserated all the survivors. And here we go again.
by swores | 2025-12-03 12:43:09+00:00
They never intended to show anything to the right of the doorframe on TV, so there's a random sign on the wall and a big hole in the wall (which makes sense if you are a camera crew wanting to film a sitcom in the apartment, that doesn't make so much sense in the fictional world that anyone would have a big rectangle cut out of the wall between their apartment and the hallway).
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-03 12:43:19+00:00
You have clearly never sat in the cab of a semi let alone a tank.

The pass side blind spot is massive, even in a day cab with no trailer attached. You can hide an entire minivan in there. Even something like a modern F550 is worlds better.

This isn't to say that modern pickups don't have huge blind spots, they very obviously do, only that your comparison is hyperbolic and unserious.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-03 12:43:28+00:00
> As far as anybody can tell, mathematics is way older than literature.

That depends what you mean by "literature". If you want it to be written down, then it's very recent because writing is very recent.

But it would be normal to consider cultural products to be literature regardless of whether they're written down. Writing is a medium of transmission. You wouldn't study the epic of Gilgamesh because it's written down. You study it to see what the Sumerians thought about the topics it covers, or to see which god some iconography that you found represents, or... anything that it might plausibly tell you. But the fact that it was written down is only the reason you can study it, not the reason you want to.
by MrDrDr | 2025-12-03 12:43:47+00:00
I think this would be extremely valuable: “We need to focus far more energy on understanding and explaining the basic mental infrastructure of mathematics—with consequently less energy on the most recent results.” I’ve long thought that more of us could devout time to serious maths problems if they were written in a language we all understood.

A little off topic perhaps, but out of curiosity - how many of us here have an interest in recreational mathematics? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recreational_mathematics]
by ajitsing | 2025-12-03 12:43:58+00:00
Key points covered: - How SSE works over plain HTTP (no protocol upgrade needed) - The EventSource API's built-in auto-reconnect with Last-Event-ID - Real implementations: Node.js server, scaling with Redis Pub/Sub - Common pitfalls: proxy buffering, connection limits, memory leaks - When to choose SSE vs WebSockets vs Long Polling

The auto-reconnection feature is the killer - browser automatically resends Last-Event-ID header so your server can resume the stream without missing events. No manual implementation needed.

Working code examples included. Happy to answer questions about production deployments.
by rich_sasha | 2025-12-03 12:44:20+00:00
This may be a good approach, but it departs a little from "it's just a file with ACID semantics, abuse it all you like". If you have multiple reader/writer processes then, if I read your post correctly, you'd need a gatekeeper process that batches the writes. And it needs, I suppose, to support more than query+data. I remember running a transaction that inserts the data, queries last inserted rowid and returns that to the user. It's not super straightforward to implement via a separate process.

But in any case, by the time you do that, you need a monitored (hand-rolled) service and at least some of the allure of a db-in-a-file goes away.

Again I'm not being mean about SQLite, it's a great piece of technology. Just sharing my war stories with others who may want to push it hard one day too.
by trollbridge | 2025-12-03 12:44:24+00:00
Where I presently live in the U.S., the fuel taxes and registration fees pay both for the roads and produce excess revenue used to pay for public transit.

Larger vehicles use more fuel; they’re more often diesels which attract a higher tax; and they pay increased registration fees and tolls.

Total tax on diesel fuel is about 71¢ a gallon (about .16€/L). When they fill up their F-350s, which get around 12mpg (20L/100km), they’re paying $21 in road tax, or about 6¢ per mile (.3€/km).

In larger cities, there are often even more tolls/fees like in NYC which are raised whenever they need more money to pay for public transit.
by bdbdbdb | 2025-12-03 12:44:39+00:00
Why lie? Just say I built this thing and want people to see it. Creating fake posts saying you "found" it just make me mistrust both you and the app.

BTW if anyone is looking for an AI image enhancement, I actually found a tool for that called upscayl, which runs locally and does the same thing I assume this does under the hood which is just esrgan.

I have no affiliation to upscayl but I like that it runs locally and doesn't send your photos somewhere mysterious
by qsort | 2025-12-03 12:44:42+00:00
> I always code with the mindset “the compiler is smarter than me.”

Like with people in general, it depends on what compiler/interpreter we're talking about, I'll freely grant that clang is smarter than me, but CPython for sure isn't. :)

More generally, canonicalization goes very far, but no farther than language semantics allows. Not even the notorious "sufficiently smart compiler" with infinite time can figure out what you don't tell it.
by IsTom | 2025-12-03 12:44:53+00:00
> Humans everywhere seem wired to favour simple integer-ratio rhythms

That's what people write in the sheet music, but reality is more complicated than that. Notably in swung rhythms ratios are blurry (and dependent on BPM) and specific performers in band will play different ratios at the same time (e.g. drummer will play straighter, soloist will swing more).
by blibble | 2025-12-03 12:46:09+00:00
> The main thing I like about Github's PRs is that it's a system I'm already familiar with and have a login/account for. It's tedious going to contribute to a project to find I have to sign up for and learn another system.

codeberg supports logging in with GitHub accounts, and the PR interface is exactly the same

you have nothing new to learn!
by rglullis | 2025-12-03 12:46:24+00:00
> when you can just plug their OpenAI-compatible API URL into existing tools?

Only the self-hosting diehards will bother with that. Those that want to compete with Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex et caterva will have to provide the whole package and do it a price point that is competitive even with low volumes - which is hard to do because the big LLM providers are all subsidizing their offerings.
by filleduchaos | 2025-12-03 12:46:39+00:00
Not sure what countries are supposed to have to do with anything but if that's where we're taking it, America is full of people who think all sorts of nonsense that is barely rooted in reality. I don't really see how the opinion of a public that revels in ignorance and is easily led by the nose (and I'm aware that this applies on both sides of the Atlantic) is supposed to be relevant to an engineering discussion.

I guess at least you didn't bother trying to argue that Google is a bastion of high quality products
by bayindirh | 2025-12-03 12:46:46+00:00
Whitelisting single IP (preferably a static one) sounds plausible.

Kubernetes for personal infrastructure is akin to getting an aircraft carrier for fishing trips.

For simple systems snapshots and backups are good enough. If you're managing a thousand machine fleet, then things are of course different.

I manage both so, I don't yearn to use big-stack-software on my small hosts. :D
by edgineer | 2025-12-03 12:47:09+00:00
There's some neat math that shows how one could send (radio) signals which are undetectable to an observer. Last I read, the research was in specific, purely theoretical scenarios but the idea is that you could send bit impulses which stay within the noise floor. Transmit with a power less than R^2 (in discrete time and ignoring triangulation and you have to pre-coordinate the timing of the transmissions with your partner via pre-shared one time pad and use plenty of error correction) the enemy observer cannot prove that someone is sending signals at all.

Maybe no such techniques could ever apply to the internet, but I'm not sure it's proven impossible. You would need a well defined threat model but if you can show that your enemy is working with noisy data and strictly in the digital space, I don't see why statistical de-anonymization couldn't be foiled.
by sureglymop | 2025-12-03 12:47:54+00:00
With this one I instead wondered: If there are 4 functions doing exactly the same thing, couldn't the compiler also only generate the code for one of them?

E.g. if in `main` you called two different add functions, couldn't it optimize one of them away completely?

It probably shouldn't do that if you create a dynamic library that needs a symbol table but for an ELF binary it could, no? Why doesn't it do that?
by adrian_b | 2025-12-03 12:50:00+00:00
Both titles are very misleading, because neither "oxygen is produced from Martian soil" nor "Martian dust is turned into oxygen".

As I have said, the oxygen comes only from water, which is missing on Mars, unlike the abundant Martian soil or Martian dust.

So the "microbe" does not solve the problem of oxygen production, which is obtaining water. With water, making oxygen by electrolysis is trivial and a problem solved long ago.

The cyanobacterium can make various useful organic substances, like proteins and vitamins. The fact that it also makes some oxygen is a minor additional advantage.

Even if such cyanobacteria will be grown on Mars, most of the oxygen will be made by electrolysis anyway, because the efficiency from solar light to free oxygen is much better and the photovoltaic cells continue to function in a much wider range of temperatures.
by marigovsignals | 2025-12-03 12:50:40+00:00
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by kunley | 2025-12-03 12:51:20+00:00
The issue with Github is that they never denied feeding ai with private repositories. Gitlab, on the contrary, issued an official statement that they don't.

EDIT: here is one statement from Gitlab https://forum.gitlab.com/t/can-i-opt-out-from-my-code-being-...

I thinl I also saw another one
by avidthinker | 2025-12-03 12:51:42+00:00
I think that's a little unfair, as there's only a single digression about Fibonacci numbers (a very interesting one, IMO). The section is clearly indicated as skippable and can be quickly skipped by using the tree on the right.

Since my exposition is constructive in nature, the proofs and other remarks are an integral part of the article, not digressions.
Bio-Mimetic Legislative Engine
by Mycobacterium | 2025-12-03 12:51:44+00:00
I would be deeply grateful if someone could spare a moment to critique this theoretical model. I assure you this is a serious proposition grounded in mathematical logic, not a flight of fancy.

https://gist.github.com/w4pp4qrjm7-hash/c67a121d7afc3f9f75e670d8520666ae
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-03 12:51:53+00:00
Tanks are famously dangerous to be anywhere other than directly in front of. The angular front blind spot isn't terrible, but from the front corners on back they're massive hazards to the point where infantry gets trained on it so they don't get run over.

Speaking or fun over, whoever made that illustration should be run over by a tank. Fix the size of the goddamn kid or fix the distance and change the size of the kid. Having both variables move serves to only add confusion and annoyance.
by Libidinalecon | 2025-12-03 12:52:57+00:00
I forget anyone takes 4'33" seriously.

Imagine a chef making a dish of just an empty plate. It is just stupid. Even the biggest food hipsters wouldn't fall for something that stupid.

At some point one should have listened to enough music in their life to call 4'33" out for the bullshit that it is.
by trollbridge | 2025-12-03 12:53:04+00:00
Private roads are actually pretty common, found in older suburban development and in rural areas. I live off of one that is about 300m long.

They are unpopular since they effectively require a very small private association to maintain them. They really hurt property values (one reason I bought my place at a bargain price). Most jurisdictions try to prevent creating them because they lead to disputes between neighbours, or poorly maintained private roads become a problem when an emergency vehicle needs to get down one.

The budget for local roads is also quite small, since they don’t carry much truck traffic. My township of 5,000 people or so has 3 part time guys who maintain the roads and a few pickup trucks and a dump truck for hauling the asphalt. That’s it.

The most expensive part of road maintenance is replacing bridges.
by segfaultex | 2025-12-03 12:53:14+00:00
Yeah, I don't want to be uncharitable, but I've noticed that a lot of stem fields make heavy use of esoteric language and syntax, and I suspect they do so as a means of gatekeeping.

I understand that some degree of formalism is required to enable the sharing of knowledge amongst people across a variety of languages, but sometimes I'll read a white paper and think "wow, this could be written a LOT more simply".

Statistics is a major culprit of this.
by Someone | 2025-12-03 12:53:25+00:00
> I’ve long thought that more of us could devout time to serious maths problems if they were written in a language we all understood.

That assumes it’s the language that makes it hard to understand serious math problems. That’s partially true (and the reason why mathematicians keep inventing new language), but IMO the complexity of truly understanding large parts of mathematics is intrinsic, not dependent on terminology.

Yes, you can say “A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors” in terms that more people know of, but it would take many pages, and that would make it hard to understand, too.
by 8organicbits | 2025-12-03 12:53:56+00:00
The outages break `git push`. I'm not a fan of the AI adoption within the UI, and the side bars when browsing code usually get in the way. Using GitHub as a dumb git backend isn't a great option either, look at the Linux kernels PRs, it's almost all spam. Why on earth can't PRs be disabled?

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclose...