MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yesiamyourdad | 2026-02-01 18:21:52+00:00
I saw this about 20 years ago in an exhibition at the Denver Library. I'd wondered how they really knew who the real people behind the characters were, it turns out that Kerouac didn't change any names at first so it's right in the manuscript.

I'd heard about it from a friend in the mid-80s, this friend was an aspiring writer and he mentioned OTR but then was musing about his new word processor typewriter, saying that he felt like the need to physically change pages added breaks to his writing process and he was worried that with the basically infinite page on the word processor it would be too easy to write crap. I wish I had a way to look this guy up and get his take on writing today.
by mmooss | 2026-02-01 18:21:56+00:00
> If not your genes, what else would determine why you have eyes in about the same place in your head as every other human?

Theoretically, it could be second or much higher order effects that result from genes. It could be a combination of complex factors - the environment in the womb, nutrition, behavior by the mother, etc. - that eventually trace back to DNA.

Also, is it literally true that DNA is the only thing that's consistent (in these respects) between all generations of Homo sapiens?
by bigyabai | 2026-02-01 18:22:45+00:00
> Why do governments do so?

The answer is in the article, you just have to read it:

San Francisco tested out a generic $630 wire mesh trash can but chose the Slim Silhouette because it found the Silhouette’s opening, with a snorkel design, was better at preventing rummaging and its stainless steel body was easier to maintain.

The eye-popping price of these modern trash cans has little to do with permitting and red tape, like stories of $1.7m public toilets. Thoughtful designs are more expensive, and many cities believe it’s necessary to pay the premium.
by rapjr9 | 2026-02-01 18:23:18+00:00
So what is happening right now with rare earths used for military purposes? My reading says it will take 5-10 years to build processing facilities without which the raw ore is useless. Has the US stopped building missiles and fighter jets? They seem to still be selling them to other countries, but it is unclear if they can actually deliver anything until many years from now, or even restock their own supplies. Maybe the military has a small stockpile of some of the REE's? It's also not clear how the UK, EU, and Australia are going to stockpile REE's if they don't have the capability to process the ore. Is the West's supply of weapons going to run out soon as they use up what they have and can't build more? This seems pertinent both to attacking Iran and the war in Ukraine.
by tingling168 | 2026-02-01 18:23:32+00:00
I can only speak for myself but I have no interest in watching historical movies, so your project has no relevance or value to me.

Could it be that either your target audience is small and/or has little overlap with the Hacker News audience?

Try posting it in a more relevant community. You might generate more interest from people who are actually interested in historical movies vs people interested in technology.

I know you're proud and want to showcase all the technological work you put into it but IMHO that's not what is valuable about this project.

Good luck :)
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-01 18:23:39+00:00
The interesting thing about the "test and build" kind of work that this "wolf" was working on is that this is team-oriented behavior that people in teams usually think the team won't let them do. It takes a kind of rugged individualism for somebody to buck the team to do this teamwork!

On the other hand, my belief is that the main responsibility of engineering management is to be sure that stupid little details like build and test are taken care of. When they hear that "my build takes too long" or "I can't figure out how to write tests for X" they should take it as seriously as "I have cancer". If your "team" can't give a new programmer a checklist (or coaching) that gets them up and running quickly, it isn't really a team!

Instead of this, most engineering managers are doing something else which might seem to have to value their managers but from my viewpoint of a developer is a complete waste of time. If instead of telling developers to suck it up about little annoyances they took responsibility for clearing them away they could 2x or 3x the whole team and not waste time chasing hypothetical 10x developers.
by mmooss | 2026-02-01 18:24:44+00:00
> Morphology is determined by the combination of genes, chemical signals, original cell machinery, and apparently electrical signals. But we never believed that genes determined morphology alone, eg, we know that chemical signals can cause anomalies.

For the consistent parts - eyes may be different colors but are overwhelmingly consistent - what else could be the ultimate cause but DNA? For example, if those chemical signals, cell machinary, and electrical signals produce the same results billions of times over 200,000 years, then they must function the same overall. How does that happen if the chemical signals, cell machinary, and electrical signals aren't determined, even if indirectly, by DNA?
by fvdessen | 2026-02-01 18:25:36+00:00
I for one found this event really sad. It's like the OSS community has rejected the past 5 years of software and technological changes and now choses to live in a retro computing bubble.

We're in 2026, hardware is made in dark factories in shenzhen in fully automated assembly lines by the million of units. Software is written using LLMs hosted in gigantic datacenters. Millions of people are now writing their own software with vibe coding platforms from their phones

What is the FOSDEM community's answer to the real concerns that these changes pose ? Let's hand solder raspberry pis ! let's self host LLMS from 2 years ago on FreeBSD ! Look, i can run wasn linux on this risc-v cpu !

These takes are completely out of touch with reality, no wonder that nobody younger than 40 was attending the conference. The next generation is doing something else and rightly so.
by thomasfortes | 2026-02-01 18:25:47+00:00
Yes, you can and I know just enough of cars to not be scammed by people, but not to know how the whole engine works, and I also don't think that you should learn everything that you can learn, there's no time for that, that's why I made the bird view comment.

My argument is that when you have at least a basic knowledge of how things work (be it as a musician, a mechanical engineer or a scientist) you are in a much better place to know what you want/need.

That said, smart and motivated people thrive if they are given the conditions to thrive, and I believe that physical interfaces have way less friction than digital interfaces, turning a knob is way less work than clicking a bunch of menus to set up a slider.

If I were to summarize what I think about AI it would be something like "Let it help you. Do not let it think for you"

My issue is not with people using AI as a tool, bit with people delegating anything that would demand any kind of effort to AI
by jonjacky | 2026-02-01 18:25:50+00:00
I followed the original post to the project at

https://historical-moviemap.inneuro.ai/

It's a fascinating idea and the web site looks very nice. BUT it isn't clear
how to use it. How do I see what the movies are? The page shows a world map covered with numbered spots. I thought the spots might be links to information about the movie set at that time/place, but clicking the spot just magnifies the map and replaces the numbered spot with more numbered spots. Oh wait, I tried it again and now information about movies pops up. Why didn't it work before?

I think people might have looked at the page, tried to use it, got frustrated, and left.

The page needs some explanation of how to use it. Besides the spots
what is the meaning of the slider at the top? It might be some kind of timeline but what does it do?

Also, the HN crowd might not be the best audience for this. Have you tried announcing this project in forums about movies, or history? (I don't know where these might be, but surely they exist).

To appeal to HN readers, you might add more about the technology that runs the site, how you built the site, etc. That could be the text in the Show HN post or could be linked to the page itself.

Congratulations on getting this far, and good luck!
by jrm4 | 2026-02-01 18:27:41+00:00
As a college instructor, one issue I find fascinating is the idea that I'm supposed to care strongly about this.

I do not. This is your problem, companies. Now, I am aware that I have to give out grades and so I walk through the motions of doing this to the extent expected. But my goal is to instruct and teach all students to the best of my abilities to try to get them all to be as educated/useful to society as possible. Sure, you can have my little assessment at the end if you like, but I work for the students, not for the companies.
Show HN: Subtitle Finder – Find perfectly synced subtitles for your video files
by lord5et | 2026-02-01 18:28:02+00:00
I built this after getting frustrated with subtitle sites returning dozens of results with no way to know which one matches my file.

The tool identifies your specific video release and matches it against subtitle databases to find ones with correct timing. Works with just a filename or by analyzing the file directly.

Tech stack: node, angular

Feedback welcome, especially on the matching accuracy.
by its_ubuntu | 2026-02-01 18:28:54+00:00
While I agree with what you're saying, keep in mind the real reason Nouveau "sucks" is because there is no way (on my card at least) for the open source drivers to control the GPU clock speed, so the card is always in low speed mode. That's Nvidia's fault. The GTX7xx cards can be clocked to normal speed and work fine. But I do agree that Nvidia closed source drivers have been pretty much trouble free for me as well. The problem here is Linus Torvalds and the GPL, not Nvidia.
by eimrine | 2026-02-01 18:29:22+00:00
You created this topic after 1 hour which is nothing. I can easily read all pages of "new" until HN stops giving me the "next" link. Your project might be good but I neither interested in the history topic nor movies so didn't click. If your project would be about Lisp and unnoticed, I recommend you to send once more, because sometimes the publication which goes to the main is made from second or third attempt in a row.

From my experience the best content here is blogposts because they let me to discover great blogs. Also some whitepapers from any time work great for me. Probably you need to publish your work in some history community where folks have their favorite historic period and want to learn History from your website as a starting point.
by mxmilkiib | 2026-02-01 18:29:26+00:00
I wonder where where LiteStep is at

used it (and sometimes SharpE) for a number of years until about idk 20y ago

http://litestep.net

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

https://reddit.com/r/LiteStep/comments/1fjnj9y/litestep_revi...

https://sharpe.sourceforge.net
by pm215 | 2026-02-01 18:31:25+00:00
I wasn't arguing that getting LLMs to do this is necessarily bad -- I just think it really is different from having in the past been able to ask other humans for help, and so that past experience isn't a reliable guide to whether we might find we have problems with unexpected effects of this new technology.

If you are concerned about possible harms in "outsourcing thinking and writing" (whether to an LLM or another human) then I think that the frequency and completeness with which you do that outsourcing matters a lot.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2026-02-01 18:31:32+00:00
The person authoring the Post-Open License (discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783500), a paid shared source license in all but name, is the fellow they chose to interview about Gates' letter? How ... ironic. The reasoning behind POL and shared source licenses is exactly the same as Gates' letter: developers deserve to get paid for their efforts instead of having their code shared without compensation. Both are a thunderous, ringing endorsement of Gates' argument, not libre software and the Four Freedoms.
by miduil | 2026-02-01 18:31:36+00:00
Platform was dying for years before it was finally financially interoperable, before that they've lost over a year worth of contents due to some corrupted hardware. I can't exactly remember for sure that this happened during a migration, but the corruption of the main database was the main cause to lose that data.

In the end, there was just not enough money to justify keeping it alive.
by kohlschuetter | 2026-02-01 18:32:40+00:00
The new low-power Realtek chipsets will definitely push 10 GbE forward because the chipset won't be much more expensive to integrate and run than the 2.5Gbps packages.

It all comes down to performance per Watt, the availability of cheap switching gear, and the actual utility in an office / home environment.

For 10 Gbps, cabling can be an issue. Existing "RJ45"-style Cat 6 cables could still work, but maybe not all of them.

Higher speeds will most likely demand a switch to fiber (for anything longer than a few meters) or Twinax DAC (for inter-device connects). Since Wifi already provides higher speeds, one may be inclined to upgrade just for that (because at some point, Wireless becomes Wired, too).

That change comes with the complexity of running new cabling, fiber splicing, worrying about different connectors (SFP+, SFP28, SFP56, QSFP28, ...), incompatible transceiver certifications, vendor lock-in, etc. Not a problem in the datacenter, but try to explain this to a layman.

Lastly, without a faster pipe to the Internet, what can you do other than NAS and AI? The computers will still get faster chips but most folks won't be able to make use of the bandwidth because they're still stuck on 1Gbps Internet or less.

But that will change. Swiss Init7 has shown that 25GBps Internet at home is not only feasible but also affordable, and China seems to be adding lots of 10G, and fiber in general.

Fun times ahead.
by positron26 | 2026-02-01 18:32:46+00:00
The trend is global and inherent to online psychological coupling and self-selection bias. The longer we go without healthy information spaces, the more the population will regress.

There does however seem to be a "free/libre" vs open source rift along the Atlantic ridge, and it is being wedged apart by the US government flirting with a return to isolationism mixed with bullying and self-enforced credible threat geopolitics.

It is really counter-productive for Europeans to think American OSS people are monolithic with US tech giants and the US federal government. Nonetheless, pluralism is good, and innovation will win, so I suppose it's just another hairpin in the game.
by jrm4 | 2026-02-01 18:33:40+00:00
College instructor here. One thing I'm seeing here that's kind of funny is how badly so many of you are misunderstanding the value of "friction."

You see a policy, and your clever brains come up with a way to get around it, "proving" that the new methodology is not perfect and therefore not valuable.

So wrong. Come on people, think about it -- to an extent ALL WE DO is "friction." Any shift towards difficulty can be gained, but also nearly all of the time it provides a valuable differentiator in terms of motivation, etc.
by tedchs | 2026-02-01 18:33:49+00:00
I was excited about this idea, but based on the writing patterns and vague stories I'm pretty sure these writeups are mostly AI slop. For example, this is classic ChatGPT phrasing:

> The growth I’d been celebrating wasn’t real growth—it was just a spike of first-time buyers who never came back.

If I'm wrong, and these were actually written by a human, I'd love a chance to stand corrected and apologize.
by b00ty4breakfast | 2026-02-01 18:34:06+00:00
I'm not saying that the other systems, by which I assume you mean the various marxist political projects, are good (and we won't even get into how many of those alternatives were actually not-capitalism) but I think to dismiss the "body count" of capitalism while simultaneously ascribing all deaths under those alternative systems as the direct result of {otherSystem} is extremely disingenuous. Doubly so given that modern first-world capitalism often outsources the human cost of it's milieu to the third world so that middle-class suburbanites don't have to see real price of their mass-produced lifestyles.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-01 18:34:45+00:00
Stockpiles have existed for years, and Japan+SK began building an ExChina REE supply chain in the 2011-17 era that most other countries are piggybacking on.

> UK, EU, and Australia are going to stockpile REE's if they don't have the capability to process the ore

They do. The issue has been price. They only began working on building an ExChina supply chain 2019 onwards, and this current G7+ announcement is part of that larger strategy that officially began under Biden but has been cooking for years.
by notpushkin | 2026-02-01 18:35:04+00:00
It gets tricky when you have a TSV inside Markdown. I don’t think I’ve ever seen tabs used for indentation in Markdown in the wild, though it probably does work.

We could, however, make the Tab key insert spaces if the cursor is in the beginning of a line, and a literal \t if it’s in the middle. This way, you can write a TSV table pretty much anywhere you want.
by coldtea | 2026-02-01 18:35:43+00:00
>I don't think this is a great metric of literacy

That's like saying drinking water is not a great metric of hydration.

>For one not all books are exactly high quality, and now more than ever there's a plethora of non-book written content available to us.

Yes, I'm pretty sure those 50%+ of people who "didn't read a single book" did it to avoid all the less than high quality books, or because they were busy consuming high quality non-book written content online.
by WalterBright | 2026-02-01 18:36:15+00:00
The Saturn V was simply a scaled up V2. The critical components were all there:

1. boundary layer cooling

2. pre-heating fuel and cooling the nozzle by pushing the fuel through tubes in the nozzle

3. baffles to prevent pogo-ing

4. turbo fuel pumps

5. supersonic airframe

6. guidance system (although primitive)

The V2 was an ineffective military weapon that did little damage - because its guidance system was too primitive to be able to hit a target. Hitler also poured enormous resources into the V2 program, shifted away from producing weapons that were effective.
by Someone | 2026-02-01 18:36:36+00:00
> Rules:

> MUST

> Support up to 100 tags

> Represent tags as strings

That doesn’t require the strings that represent the tags to be the tag strings, So, one can bend the rules by representing tags by single-character strings or, alternatively, by using fixed strings of length 0 through 99, and then doing the tag comparisons only on the first character of each string or, alternatively, the length of the string (if obtaining that is fast)

Especially when tags have large common prefixes, that could speed up things tremendously.

In languages that support string interning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_interning), I suspect that also could be used to bend the rules.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-01 18:36:40+00:00
My old PDP11/73 (now in a museum) had two RX02, never had an RX01. Surprisingly fast! It also had two RL02s and a couple of RD54s in.

Building an RT11 system disk onto an RL02 off another RL02 made the downstairs neighbours complain quite a lot, even though the floor slab in my flat was about 40cm thick concrete. They didn't muck about with these 1960s tower blocks but it was no match for a pair of pint glass sized head actuators and a pair of washing machine motors.
by matt-p | 2026-02-01 18:36:46+00:00
We have 400Gbe which is certainly faster than USB.. but;

On consumer devices, I think part of the issue is that we’re still wedded to four-pair twisted copper as the physical medium. That worked well for Gigabit Ethernet, but once you push to 5 or 10 Gb/s it becomes inherently expensive. Twisted pair is simply a poor medium at those data rates, so you end up needing a large amount of complex silicon to compensate for attenuation, crosstalk, and noise.

That's doable but the double whammy is that most people use the network for 'internet' and 1G is simply more than enough, 10G therefore becomes quite niche so there's no enormous volume to overcome the inherent issues at low cost.
by ffsm8 | 2026-02-01 18:36:58+00:00
Uh, that's not my experience at all.

Sure you can say e.g "this property wasnt set in this request while being processed by this service managed by this team", but why it wasn't set will inevitably need multiple teams, each doing in-depth analysis how such as state could've been caused because they always inevitably become distributed monoliths - the former is being provided by the instrumentation, but the latter isn't (and even the former is not perfect, as not all frameworks/languages have equal support)
by fragmede | 2026-02-01 18:36:58+00:00
The failure mode isn't as a tech company CEO. As you point out, if you're the CEO, you have the luxury of defining yourself unavailable as CEO whenever the hell you please. If the website is down out if business hours and you haven't made it someone else's problem that you're paying for it to stay up, it can just be down. No, the issue is as a father/mother/husband/wife/son/daughter to someone's you love dearly enough to consider them family, biological or otherwise.

It's rather dramatic, but the phone call/conversation I could never forgive myself for missing, is the last words of a loved one before they die, whether due to car crash or some other calamity (9/11). Or missing the opportunity to take the very next flight out to see them before they pass. You are free to treat your family, biological or chosen, as you see fit, I just know there are some phone calls I'd rather be woken up in the middle of the night for than miss. Reaching me via cellphone is more direct than trying to find whatever hotel I'm at since I'm on the road as CEO and talking to customers and vendors in person on the road as CEO, so calling my house phone doesn't help.