MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ctrlc-root | 2025-04-25 10:44:05+00:00
Not the parent but I'll reply for myself. I have a Librem 5 as my personal phone which I take with me when I go places and use as my daily driver. I also have a Pixel running GrapheneOS with work and personal profiles for the few times I need to run an Android application but it more or less permanently stays at my desk. The Android applications I have on that phone are banking (required to use Zelle at my bank) and management applications for various devices (ex: managing settings on my bluetooth headphones). I don't need to use those often and when I do it can wait until I'm back at my desk where my GrapheneOS phone lives.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-04-25 10:44:17+00:00
> You're assuming the people are able to move out of the restrictive areas and find work in the less restrictive areas.

No, I'm not assuming that. It's an awful thing that many people do not have flexibility in where they live. That's made more awful by restrictions on building that make it difficult for people to live affordably in many places.

You asked for an intermediate solution; the intermediate solution is "do what we can, where we can, while working towards the full solution".

> Is it really a supple provlem, though? [...] It seems more like housing is getting greedy and doesn't care how many leave the city.

The ability for housing to charge higher prices is a supply problem. There's much more demand than supply, so if someone can't pay the asked rent, the next person coming along will; as long as that demand is higher than the supply, price controls can't solve the problem. For the most part (ignoring some additional perverse incentives we should also address, which sometimes lead people to leave rental properties empty for a long time), if that wasn't happening, the rents would go down until there's a tenant willing to pay them. If it's possible for people to raise rents massively and still have tenants, build more houses until that's no longer possible.

(There are other ways to "solve" the problem, but they aren't desirable ones. If the local job market collapses, demand will go down massively, and there will no longer be a supply shortage, so rents will go down (or get converted to sales, and sale prices will go down). That's not a positive outcome for a location, or for the people in it. I mention this only because there can be other markets, other than housing, where "decrease demand" may be desirable rather than "increase supply".)

There are additional depths of complexity here, in that the market for sales and the market for rents interact in a variety of ways, as well as the job market in various locations and the market for sales/rentals. "build more" is still the answer to a lot of those problems, but I still want to acknowledge the additional complexity.
by qwertox | 2025-04-25 10:44:27+00:00
I have a text editor which has really good integrated FTP support. I use that one for devices like Raspberry Pi Zero or others where the monster of vscode-server can't run on.

That one has no AI nor any kind of intellisense, so there I need to type the Python code "by hand". Whenever I do this, I'm surprised of how well I'm doing and feel that I'm even better at it than in pre GH Copilot times. Yet it still takes a lot of time to get something done compared to the help AI provides.
by atoav | 2025-04-25 10:44:37+00:00
My impression is similar. LLMs are a godsend for those willing to learn, as they can usually answer extremely specific questions well enough to at least send you into the right general direction.

But if you're so insecure about yourself that you invest more energy into faking it than other people do in actually doing it this, this is probably a one-way street to never actually be able to do anything yourself.
by adidoit | 2025-04-25 10:45:07+00:00
I really like the article. I see this challenge coming to every domain soon

Preventing Critical Thinking atrophying is a problem I've been obsessed with for the past 6 months. I think it's one of the fundamental challenges of our times.

There's a bunch of literature like Bainbridge's "Ironies of Automations" [1] that show what a mistake relying on automation so much can be. It leads to not just skill atrophy but failure as the human's skill to intervene when needed is lost when they stop doing the more banal tasks (hence the irony)

I've launched a company to begin to address this [2]

My hypothesis is we need more AI coaches that purposefully bring us challenging questions and add friction - thats exactly what I'm trying to build for Critical Thinking in Business

Unlike more verifiable domains, business is a good 'arena' for critical thinking because there isn't a right answer, however there are certainly many wrong or illogical answers. The idea is to have AI that debates you for a few min a day, on real topics (open questions) that it recommends, and give you feedback on various elements of critical thinking

My sense is a vast majority of people will NOT use this (because it's so much easier to just swipe tiktoks) but there are people (like me and perhaps the author) who are waking up to the need to consciously improve critical thinking.

I'm curious what people are looking for in something that helps you get better at Critical Thinking every day?

[1] https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica... [2] https://www.socratify.com/
by deze333 | 2025-04-25 10:46:44+00:00
It's fast enough to make running an app feel like running a native app – faster start time, less memory used, less power hungry, more responsive UI – compared to browser based cross-platform apps.

One can say it achieves maximum user interaction speed.

For most critical calculations, one can easily integrate C++/C libraries – at the source code level – which Swift can compile, link and call directly.

Or drop down to unsafe features of Swift and achieve speeds comparable to C++. But that's not really needed in most of real life use cases. Convenience is what really matters when it comes to Swift.
by genewitch | 2025-04-25 10:46:47+00:00
Top K and repetition penalty and the other main knob I forget the name of are partially to blame here, I think. I can test it tomorrow with this exact prompt and fiddling those values.

That pattern, not the words, is in there a lot. That riddle was posted everywhere online, in email chains, etc. I think if you let it choose from more than the top 40 and let it "stutter" with repetitions it might realize the riddle is a non-sequitur (is that the right term?)

And the third knob is not temperature, although I'd try turning that up first just to check. Yes, up.
by bsaul | 2025-04-25 10:47:16+00:00
it is, but it definitely added some weight to the language. At least i think so, i'm not a PL expert.

My recent point of comparison is rust, which feels like a much much smaller language, despite sharing a lot of the philosophy (struct + trait, which is very similar to what swift recommends to use nowadays, and limit the use of class).
by jvanderbot | 2025-04-25 10:47:34+00:00
As someone who grew up reading encyclopedias, LLMs are the most interesting invention ever. If Wikipedia had released the first chat AI we'd be heralding a new age of knowledge and democratic access and human achievement.

It just so happens unimaginative programmers built the first iteration so they decided to automate their own jobs. And here we are, programmers, worrying about the dangers of it all not one bit aware of the irony.
Show HN: FlowTracks – A goal-based time tracker focused on consistency
by d_zhiganov | 2025-04-25 10:47:35+00:00
Hi HN,

I made FlowTracks – a time tracker that shows how consistent you really are.

I’ve tried a bunch of productivity tools: Pomodoro timers, TODO apps, time logs. They helped me focus or stay organized short-term — but none of them gave me a clear picture of how consistent I was over time.

I wanted to know:

- Which days I drift off

- Whether I was improving week over week

- When exactly my focus dropped during the day

So I built FlowTracks.

Originally it was just a tool for myself. But after using it daily for a few months, I realized it might help others too — so I put up a landing page and decided to share it.

What it does:

- Goal-based time tracking (e.g., “learn German 1h/day”)

- Track time via timer or log it manually

- Reports showing daily/weekly/monthly focus patterns

- Focus breakdown: when you stopped or fell off track

Would love to hear what you think or how you’d improve it! Thanks!
by GuB-42 | 2025-04-25 10:48:00+00:00
Discord too. Most of my friends are on Discord, we have group chats and private servers. Many communities use Discord as their primary online hub too.

It is concerning. Discord has been slowly enshittifying for the last couple of years: ads (ex: "quests"), app bugs, etc... There is no export option and even public servers are not accessible to search engines and archives.
by Aeolun | 2025-04-25 10:48:44+00:00
We’ve probably compensated by ease of information dissemination. We’ve pretty much reached the peak of that now, so the only thing we can do is dumb shit down further?

Maybe someone can write one of those AI apocalypse novels in which the AI doesn’t go off the rails at all but is instead integrated into the humans such that they become living drones anyhow.
by bombcar | 2025-04-25 10:50:59+00:00
I used to lose Internet access every spring when the snow would melt - a good time to see what I could still do without it.

Answer is usually: Jellyfin, iTunes (local music), and various PDFs and kiwix.

Surprisingly large amounts of software and even the OS slow to a crawl if they can't contact the Internet (but think they should be able to). Annoying.
by casenmgreen | 2025-04-25 10:51:04+00:00
> Twitter can't spam hate posts in real time? They're literally an AI company.

I would expect they have a certain capacity and the flow of posts is very, very, very great.

Also, I would imagine a delay of some sort anyway - people would notice if a post immediately received hundred of one line generic "I hate this" replies. In this case, the hate posts began after 12 hours.

> is it really surprising that a generic "I support Zelensky" post would get poor engagement?

I may be wrong, but as I understand it, what you've described here is not what was described by the author.

As I understand it : one guy, two accounts, both long term, one BSky, one Twitter, same content. Approx same and large number of followers. On BSky, the test post has immediate, large-scale and positive response. On Twitter, this and this only post suppressed for IIRC 12 hours, then a massive number of hate-bot posts and then post made visible.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-25 10:51:21+00:00
Let's think about how an abstraction can be useful, and then redundant.

Logarithms allow us to simplify a hard problem (multiplying large numbers), into a simpler problem (addition), but the abstraction results in an approximation. It's a good enough approximation for lots of situations, but it's a map, not the territory. You could also solve division, which means you could take decent stabs at powers and roots and voila, once you made that good enough and a bit faster, an engineering and scientific revolution can take place. Marvelous.

For centuries people produced log tables - some so frustratingly inaccurate that Charles Babbage thought of a machine to automate their calculation - and we had slide rules and we made progress.

And then a descendant of Babbage's machine arrived - the calculator, or computer - and we didn't need the abstraction any more. We could quickly type 35325 x 948572 and far faster than any log table lookup, be confident that the answer was exactly 33,508,305,900. And a new revolution is born.

This is the path we're on. You don't need to know how multiplication by hand works in order to be able to do multiplication - you use the tool available to you. For a while we had a tool that helped (roughly), and then we got a better tool thanks to that tool. And we might be about to get a better tool again where instead of doing the maths, the tool can use more impressive models of physics and engineering to help us build things.

The metaphor I often use is that these tools don't replace people, they just give them better tools. There will always be a place for being able to work from fundamentals, but most people don't need those fundamentals - you don't need to understand the foundations of how calculus was invented to use it, the same way you don't need to build a toaster from scratch to have breakfast, or how to build your car from base materials to get to the mountains at the weekend.
by beezlebroxxxxxx | 2025-04-25 10:52:16+00:00
There is skill atrophy, and there is also a certain kind of entitlement. I see it in a lot of new grads and students that are very reliant on LLM and "GPT" in particular. They think merely presenting something that looks like a solution, without actually understanding it or why it might or might not be applicable, entitles them to the claim of understanding and, furthermore, a job.

When engineers simply parrot GPT answers I lose respect for them, but I also just wonder "why are you even employed here?"

I'm not some managerial bootlicker desperate for layoffs to "cull the weaklings", but I do start to wonder "what do you actually bring to this job aside from the abilities of a typist?", especially when the whole reason they are getting paid as much as they are as an engineer, for example, is their skills and knowledge. But if that's all really GPT's skills and knowledge and "reasoning", then there just remains a certain entitlement as justifcation.
by hyperpape | 2025-04-25 10:52:56+00:00
I'm completely unsure whether to respond "it was stable, he was running a release version of Fedora" or "there's no such thing as stable under Linux".

The insanity is that the Kernel, Fedora and GCC are so badly coordinated that the beta of the compiler breaks the Kernel build (this is not a beta, this is a pre-alpha in a reasonable universe...is the Kernel a critical user of GCC? Apparently not), and a major distro packages that beta version of the compiler.

To borrow a phrase from Reddit: "everybody sucks here" (even Cook, who looks the best of everyone here, seems either oblivious or defeated about how clownshoes it is that released versions of major linux distros can't build the Kernel. The solution of "don't update to release versions" is crap).

(Writing this from a Linux machine, which I will continue using, but also sort of despise).
by martindochamp | 2025-04-25 10:53:08+00:00
Hi there!

If you’re building stuff, you know how it goes: I built an AI fitness app and was really proud of it until nobody downloaded it. I started asking myself if my app was broken or if I was just shouting into the abyss.

That’s when it hit me: distribution is king. A mediocre product with great reach can outperform a killer product stuck at ground zero. So I built Plyzr, a distribution tool that helps solopreneurs and content creators understand what works.

With Plyzr, you can:

- Generate Reels and TikToks from proven templates

- Schedule posts across all your accounts in one click

- Track views, clicks, sales, and orders in one place Get your video stats updated multiple times a day to see which posts are driving views and conversions in real time

I also launched "The Trenches", a gamified squad competition designed to make promotion feel less like a chore and more like a game night. You join a squad, rack up points for every new view, and compete with other squads to hit your first million views.

Winners get AI credits and some personal glory.

You can try it with a 7-day free trial at https://www.plyzr.com and let me know what you think.

I build tools to improve people’s lives, so your feedback is invaluable. Plyzr’s already saving me 10 hours a week on content distribution, and the real-time analytics have given me the momentum to finally see my work reach the right audience.

If you have questions or recommendations, hit me up on X (@martincondet). Can’t wait to hear your thoughts!
by whatnow37373 | 2025-04-25 10:53:16+00:00
He was not wrong. We forget stuff all the time and in huge quantities. I can't even remember my own phone number half of the time.

Those guys could recite substantial portions of the Homeric epics. It's just that there is more to intelligence than rote memorization. That's the good news.

The bad news is that this amorphous "more" was "critical thinking" and we are starting to outsource it.
by ohgr | 2025-04-25 10:53:23+00:00
I'm specialising myself in doing what AI can't, which is cleaning up disasters, some of which were caused by AI so far. I haven't let anything atrophy other than my enthusiasm which is fixed by money fairly quickly.

Well it's a little unfair to blame AI itself, but the overconfidence in it and lack of understanding and default human behaviour plus AI is quite destructive in a lot of places.

There is a market already (!)
by qwertox | 2025-04-25 10:53:49+00:00
There are things which are just "musician things". An AI just can't replace it.

Like the performance of "Hania Rani live at Invalides in Paris, France for Cercle" [0]

This is what makes a musician.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5oZ80Daduc&t=2145s
by cube2222 | 2025-04-25 10:56:07+00:00
> It's just boosting people's intention.

This.

It will in a sense just further boost inequality between people who want to do things, and folks who just want to coast without putting in the effort. The latter will be able to coast even more, and will learn even less. The former will be able to learn / do things much more effectively and productively.

Since good LLMs with reasoning are here, I've learned so many things I otherwise wouldn't have bothered with - because I'm able to always get an explanation in exactly the format that I like, on exactly the level of complexity I need, etc. It brings me so much joy.

Not just professional things either (though those too of course) - random "daily science trivia" like asking how exactly sugar preserves food, with both a high-level intuition and low-level molecular details. Sure, I could've learned that if I wanted too before, but this is something I just got interested in for a moment and had like 3 minutes of headspace to dedicate to, and in those 3 minutes I'm actually able to get an LLM to give me an excellent tailor-suited explanation. This also made me notice that I've been having such short moments of random curiosity constantly, and previously they mostly just went unanswered - now each of them can be satisfied.
by dataflow | 2025-04-25 10:56:41+00:00
> That the annotation applies to variables and not types is surely an oversight or mistake right?

I don't think so. It doesn't make sense on the type. Otherwise, what should happen here?

char s[1]; char (__nonstring ns)[1]; // (I guess this would be the syntax?) s[0] = '1'; ns[0] = '\0'; char* p1 = s; // Should this be legal? char* p2 = ns; // Should this be legal? char* __nonstring p3 = s; // Should this be legal? char* __nonstring p4 = ns; // Should this be legal? foo(s, ns, p1, p2, p3, p4); // Which ones can foo() assume to be NUL-terminated? // Which ones can foo() assume to NOT be NUL-terminated??

By putting it in the type you're not just affecting the initialization, you're establishing an invariant throughout the lifetime of the object... which you cannot enforce in any desirable way here. That would be equivalent to laying a minefield throughout your code.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-25 10:56:50+00:00
Especially when C advocates tend to ignore the history of systems programming languages predating the language by a decade, because the authors decided it was cooler to do their own thing, notice a similar pattern to other languages?

> Although we entertained occasional thoughts about implementing one of the major languages of the time like Fortran, PL/I, or Algol 68, such a project seemed hopelessly large for our resources: much simpler and smaller tools were called for. All these languages influenced our work, but it was more fun to do things on our own.

-- https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/chist...

And using Pascal as counter example gets tiresome, not only it wasn't designed for systems programming, most of its dialects did fix those issues including its revised report (ISO Extended Pascal), by 1978 Niklaus Wirth had created Modula-2, based on Mesa (Xerox PARC replacement for their use of BCPL), both of which never had problem with string lengths.
by tialaramex | 2025-04-25 10:56:56+00:00
It doesn't apply to trademarks either but it's convenient to insist that trademark "enforcement" is required if you're either a trademark lawyer looking for more clients or you're an aggressive litigant and you want an excuse so people will forget you're a monster.

Oh the Disney corporation had to sue the village primary school because their play used a trademarked name for a folk tale everybody knows about... it's not that they are monsters who care only about money and power, they were forced to secure undisclosed damages and make children cry by some principle of law which definitely exists. Mmm sure.

The last time I pointed this out on HN somebody responded with LLM generated nonsense "citing" non-existent US legal cases which they argued somehow prove I'm wrong.
by awongh | 2025-04-25 10:57:49+00:00
We as in, it's not a social cooperation thing, many people's individual moral ethics make it so they themselves would be uncomfortable with the idea of not working to earn a living. Currently, society as a whole generally believes that it's each individual person's prerogative to find paying work and most people don't really examine this belief. There's nothing to cooperate on yet.
by rolandog | 2025-04-25 10:57:52+00:00
I partially agree with what you just posted, but — walking along your train of thought, I take a bit of issue with the following paragraph (sliced for emphasis):

> So there seems to be a bit of a trend for people to build flashcard-type tools at the moment, [...] so it's impossible to build a stable business in this space.

I am of the radical idea that lots of things should not be for-profit businesses (doesn't mean that it can't be profitable — just not exorbitantly so), and that economist's mistaken goal of exponential growth expectations is criminally separated from the sigmoid limits to reality.

So, therefore, while I agree that EdTech is a bunch of fads, I think the fact that EdTech is a thing is wrong.

And I agree with your main point that we should be chasing accumulation and refinement of knowledge, and not doing some sort of spring-cleaning every 10 years.
by Aeolun | 2025-04-25 10:58:31+00:00
> “if the AI service goes down, does our development grind to a halt?”

This is already true, and will remain true even if you succeed at not losing any of your own skill. I know some people say different, but for me the speedup in my dev process by collaborating with AI is real.

I think ultimately our job as a senior will be half instructing the juniors on manual programming, and half on instructing the AI, then as AI capabilities increase, they’ll slowly shift to 100% human instruction, because the AI can work by itself, and only has to be properly verified.

I’m not looking forward to that day…
Show HN: FaynoSync Self-Hosted API for Automatic App Updates
by ku9n | 2025-04-25 10:59:06+00:00
faynoSync is a lightweight, open-source API server that gives you full control over application updates. Whether it’s desktop software, mobile apps, browser extensions, or custom binaries for metrics or monitoring — faynoSync helps you deliver updates easily, securely, and reliably.

No external dependencies. Just pure control.