MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kristjank | 2025-04-23 19:31:28+00:00
I tread carefully with anyone that by default augments their (however utilitarian or conventionally bland) messages with language models passing them as their own. Prompting the agent to be as concise as you are, or as extensive, takes just as much time in the former case, and lacks the underlying specificity of your experience/knowledge in the latter.

If these were some magically private models that have insight into my past technical explanations or the specifics of my work, this would be a much easier bargain to accept, but usually, nothing that has been written in an email by Gemini could not have been conceived of by a secretary in the 1970s. It lacks control over the expression of your thoughts. It's impersonal, it separates you from expressing your thoughts clearly, and it separates your recipient from having a chance to understand you the person thinking instead of you the construct that generated a response based on your past data and a short prompt. And also, I don't trust some misandric f*ck not to sell my data before piping it into my dataset.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: when messaging personally, summarizing short messages is unnecessary, expanding on short messages generates little more than semantic noise, and everything in between those use cases is a spectrum deceived by the lack of specificity that agents usually present. Changing the underlying vague notions of context is not only a strangely contortionist way of making a square peg fit an umbrella-shaped hole, it pushes around the boundaries of information transfer in a way that is vaguely stylistic, but devoid of any meaning, removed fluff or added value.
by johnea | 2025-04-23 19:31:44+00:00
I worked on a demonstration prototype for the "wireless cab", a handheld remote that allowed control of various features of a Lionel layout. This was used as part of a demo in convincing the previous ownership to allow the purchase of Lionel in the 1990s.

After working directly with Neil Young, to understand his vision for this demo, I was amazed by his attention to detail, and determination to make as many aspects of the layout as possible, perform to scale.

This performance to scale was not just in the size of the components, but in every aspect of their real time performance.

He wanted the trains to accelerate at scale, where appropriate produce little puffs of steam at scale, and produce sounds at scale, as well as have the sounds occur at the exact correct times, in synchronization with the motion of the trains. He even had a project where he traveled to locations to find the real versions of specific engine models, to record their actual sounds and it's timing, and then work to integrate these recorded features into the scale model Lionel engines.

It was really a fun project! and regarding working with Neil Young, I was amazed at the level of detail in his technical vision and specifications. He's commissioned a lot of custom electronic projects over the decades, and his experience in working with EEs and S/W engineers was apparent.
by Moru | 2025-04-23 19:31:45+00:00
People do it out of spite. We have similar problems with the white population hating the Sami similar to what USA has had with Indians. There were cases just outside of Umeå close to the winter rally where some raindeers were killed. [0]

The drivers feel that the Sami puts the reindeer on the road to be in the way and cash in on the money they get for the killed raindeers. (Secret tip: It's not enough to be worth it to watch your domestic animals die in your hands or be forced to finnish them off yourself because the owner are forced to take care of the dead animals.)

[0] https://swedenherald.com/article/three-reindeer-killed-linke...
by OJFord | 2025-04-23 19:31:48+00:00
Yeah, I got it, but it might take a Brit or German! Unfortunately there are dismissive third-party comments like that sometimes, and seeing it grey (at the time) I almost voted down myself too, just then thought I recognised your username and double-checked.

One other thought actually - if you can still edit the title, you might get more attention from 'Show HN: The Danglepoise', since then people will know the author is around for discussion. Just anecdotally I would guess Show HNs tend to have more engagement/votes on average.

Anyway, nice project :)
by genewitch | 2025-04-23 19:32:15+00:00
i am fairly certain i have an AMD geode device and while it is tiny (4x3x1.5 inches), it certainly isn't low power, compared to a rapsberry pi or an intel quark.

also those vortex86 are pricey, around the same price as a NUC, at least for the daughtercards, and none really looked "general purpose" although i guess a daughtercard with a computer on it was not unprecedented. apple and amiga both had such. i think apple even did apple on apple before anyone else considered if this was a good idea
by rdj | 2025-04-23 19:33:16+00:00
A caveat being and mentioned in the article, that sailors didn't have access to the safe water of lakes and streams, thus beer. And as someone mentions below, it's safer to drink low alcohol beer than months old (untreated) water. I can see why people jump to the conclusion that beer was safer than water...and it makes for good cocktail hour small talk.
by asadotzler | 2025-04-23 19:33:18+00:00
Good means fit for purpose and a product your CEO pitched from the cover of Vanity Fair magazine and devoted half of his massive store real estate and staff to making successful that sells only about 350K units in the first year and projected to sell only about 150K units in its second year because even the huge number of in-store demos couldn't convince people to put PCs on their faces, is clearly not fit for purpose. If it was truly the future of PCs today as Tim Cook told us, it would not have flopped but the form factor and resulting ergonomics make it useful for little more than novelty experiences for a few nerds with more cash than most.
by cortesoft | 2025-04-23 19:33:34+00:00
The annoying one for me right now is Windows 11.

Every few restarts, it is showing a pop up that shows the wallpaper that was chosen and a “learn more” button… the pop up can’t be moved, can’t be closed, and stays on top no matter what.

It took me a few minutes before I finally gave up and clicked on the “learn more” button, which of course opened Edge (even though edge isn’t my default browser), which of course prompted me to switch to using edge as my default browser, which I had to decline and close edge again.

And now I have repeated this dance a number of times on restarts. No, I don’t want to learn more about the wallpaper, and I don’t want to use Edge!
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-23 19:33:55+00:00
When I was young, I voraciously consumed media just like today. I watched TV, listened to radio, purchased vinyl and CDs like there was no tomorrow.

Over a few decades starting in 2000, I stopped purchasing music entirely. I also stopped listening to the radio, and in 2015 I got rid of my last TV. (Sometimes when you're in public, you can't avoid these.) And things seemed alright.

But I have come full circle and developed a complete addiction to YouTube that satiates all these desires in one service. Why own music when I can stream anything on demand? Why own a TV or disc player when all movies I want to see are likewise available?

So I pay for Premium. I could live without YouTube, but I would flounder in abject boredom. My music entertainment would be severely limited, like what was available in PD or Creative Commons, and that's rather grim. If YouTube were completely unavailable to me, in terms of any music or video, I would indeed struggle to fill those gaps, because it really fills out my days.

Thankfully, with Premium I am not nagged by ads and the UI generally cooperates. The ads were really wearing me down, because the more you use it, the more you're subjected to. Unfortunately, YouTube as a platform is not oriented to "watching what I want when I want it" but to discovering new content and suggesting "stuff I might like", so I still do fight to stay on the rails of what I truly enjoy.

Android, on the other hand, has become a holy terror. Every time I try to do something with my life, whether it's banking or finance or health care or shopping, Android is getting in my way and hindering my sanity. I cannot accomplish a simple thing without Android distracting me, frustrating me, and making me forget what I was trying to do. How many times have I unlocked my phone, fiddled, and then locked it again, only to discover that I didn't get anything done? That typically didn't happen with Microsoft or Windows, because indeed MS... was... primarily a B2B provider, and home users enjoyed similar deference to let us be productive without getting in our face. Unfortunately, that is all converging on Consumerist Advertising Hell.
by spmcl | 2025-04-23 19:34:23+00:00
I did this a few months ago to make a Christmas ornament. There are some rough edges with the process, but for hobby 3D printing, current LLMs with OpenSCAD is a game-changer. I hadn't touched my 3D printer for years until this project.

https://seanmcloughl.in/3d-modeling-with-llms-as-a-cad-luddi...
by alexpotato | 2025-04-23 19:35:20+00:00
Regarding emails and "artificial intelligence":

Many years ago I worked as a SRE for hedge fund. Our alerting system was primarily email based and I had little to no control over the volume and quality of the email alerts.

I ended up writing a quick python + Win32 OLE script to:

- tokenize the email subject (basically split on space or colon)

- see if the email had an "IMPORTANT" email category label (applied by me manually)

- if "yes", use the tokens to update the weights using a simple naive Bayesian approach

- if "no", use the weights to predict if it was important or not

This worked about 95% of the time.

I actually tried using tokens in the body but realized that the subject alone was fine.

I now find it fascinating that people are using LLMs to do essentially the same thing. I find it even more fascinating that large organizations are basically "tacking on" (as the OP author suggests) these LLMs with little to no thought about how it improves user experience.
by Leherenn | 2025-04-23 19:35:46+00:00
My only issue with defensive codding is that often it doesn't play nice with code coverage requirements. I've been in situations where I would like to add defensive coding just in case, but then the PR doesn't pass the coverage checks. The best is when you can ensure via th compiler (e.g. via the type system) that a case is impossible, but C++ (in my case) isn't perfect for this.
by saalweachter | 2025-04-23 19:36:10+00:00
So here's where this all feels a bit "build me a better horse" to me.

You're telling an AI agent to communicate specific information on your behalf to specific people. "Tell my boss I can't come in today", "Talk to comcast about the double billing".

That's not abstracted away enough.

"My daughter's sick, rearrange my schedule." Let the agent handle rebooking appointments and figuring out who to notify and how. Let their agent figure out how to convey that information to them. "Comcast double-billed me." Resolve the situation. Communicate with Comcast, get it fixed, if they don't get it fixed, communicate with the bank or the lawyer.

If we're going to have AI agents, they should be AI agents, not AI chatbots playing a game of telephone over email with other people and AI chatbots.
by dredmorbius | 2025-04-23 19:36:17+00:00
The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson, 1965:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action>

<https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=63B1D140FD13A03F15BF842...>

Very strongly recommended. I'd stumbled across this in my uni days, and its power and insight were obvious even to naive me then. It's since emerged as a classic of economics.

PaulHoule is also a fan: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43775531>
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-04-23 19:36:36+00:00
Prior to 2016 I had no such thing, nor did pretty much anyone I know on the left. I disagreed with, for example, Romney, but I didn't pathologically fear or mistrust him. Bush was a war criminal, but what president hasn't been since WW2?

This started with Obama. The audacity of a black man to be president had so many people I thought were reasonable saying, with no hint of Jest, that he was the Antichrist. Suddenly mustard flavors and suit colors were signs of the apocalypse. And ever since then the left have been "the enemy within" meant to be rooted out.

Trump, of course, spent his time amplifying this message. And his campaign and presidency is what drove the left into pathological fear.

Conservative racism poisoned the blood of our nation yet again.
Show HN: Nowrite.fun – If you stop typing, your text disappears
by vseplet | 2025-04-23 19:36:41+00:00
Hey HN,

I built a small experimental writing tool called nowrite.fun.

The concept is brutally simple: You set a timer (e.g. 5 minutes), start writing — and if you stop typing, your text vanishes. No drafts, no recovery, no forgiveness.

Inspired by apps like Write or Die, but rebuilt from scratch with a lightweight stack: Deno + TypeScript, XState, anime.js, and canvas-confetti. Hosted on Deno Deploy.

It’s a tool for short, focused writing sprints — a tweet, a blog paragraph, a newsletter blurb. Keep typing → you win. Hesitate → it’s gone.

It’s minimal, a bit stressful, and surprisingly motivating.

I also posted it on Product Hunt to see if this kind of weird, borderline masochistic UX resonates with anyone: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/no-write If you find it fun or useful, I’d really appreciate an upvote!

Would love your thoughts, feature ideas, or performance roasts.

Try it here: https://nowrite.fun
by alganet | 2025-04-23 19:36:44+00:00
I made a simple question. You evaded it (wanting to be left alone).

We are not in an argument. We are in a social interaction that leads you to slowly lean towards agreeing with me. There is no escape.

There is no answer you can give. If you agree that people should have the right to be left alone, then you were wrong. If you don't agree, then you volunteer. If you agree but don't volunteer, you are tyrannical (you want rights for you but not for others). If you just leave, that signals you want to be left alone.

We are not in an argument.
by kristjank | 2025-04-23 19:37:55+00:00
I have also experienced this in the specific domain of well-learned idiots finding pseudo-explanations for why a technical choice should be taken, despite not knowing anything about the topic.

I have witnessed a colleague look up a component datasheet on ChatGPT and repeating whatever it told him (despite the points that it made weren't related to our use case). The knowledge monopoly in about 10 years when the old-guard programming crowd finally retires and/or unfortunately dies will be in the hands of people that will know what they don't know and be able to fill the gaps using appropriate information sources (including language models). The rest will probably resemble Idiocracy on a spectrum from frustrating to hilarious.
by reverendsteveii | 2025-04-23 19:38:25+00:00
Non-profits often aren't looking to avoid making as much money as possible, but that's not actually written into their mandate. What's written into their mandate is that they can't pay out money beyond expenses as profits to owners. They can still have a surplus after cost, they can still re-invest that surplus (often in the form of c-suite salaries "to attract the best and brightest talent at that level"), they just can't pay it out in profits to owners. There's also the fact that non-profits are often rather strapped overall and when they see a dark pattern they're motivated by fear of failure to exploit it.
by kaycebasques | 2025-04-23 19:38:58+00:00
If you're sold on MCP, what was your "wow" moment? I've read the docs and tinkered a bit but it was a decidedly "meh" experience personally. It seems very similar to ChatGPT Plugins, and that was a flop. I don't really like the fuzzy nature of the architecture, where I never know what server will be invoked. And I have to manually opt-in to each server I want to use? To be unexpectedly useful, it seems like I would have to opt-in to tens or hundreds of servers. Yet I've heard that clients start to struggle once you have more than 20 servers plugged in...? Please excuse any fundamental errors I've repeated here, if any...
by asadotzler | 2025-04-23 19:39:47+00:00
Apple sold ~17M iPhones in its first 2 years, ~20M Apple Watches in the same timeframe, and ~370K Vision Pros in its first year from a production run of ~500K. No further Vision Pro v1 production is planned, with remaining units allocated for second-year (2025) demand.

Vision Pro is an absolute flop compared to even the "everyone said it would fail the first year" products that went on to success. 500K units across 2 years when the presumed Watch sold 20M in the same timeframe and fanboys are still telling us "you're saying the same thing about AVP as you did iPhone and Watch when they first came out." Maybe so, but Vision Pro is orders of magnitude worse off out of the gate than those other products and Apple's already moved the top AVP talent to Siri, spectacles, and other projects so it's pretty clear Apple agrees it's not going to be a success.
by cortesoft | 2025-04-23 19:40:20+00:00
This is the classic result of the problem with democracy and “concentrated benefits and disperse costs”. Legal gambling is a HUGE money making opportunity for casinos, and for most voters it is just a minor negative. Of course, utility wise, the minor cost times the number of voters is much higher than the concentrated benefit, but the concentration makes it worth it for casinos to keep fighting for legalization. The cost of fighting for it is less than the benefit when it is legalized.

Now that it is legalized, though, there is no one who has a concentrated enough cost to fight for its reversal. It is more rational to just suffer the small cost of gambling instead of fighting hard for its repeal.

So as you say, they only have to win the fight once, and it is won forever, and society is slightly worse off.

This is the exact same reason Intuit keeps winning the tax battle… it matters more to them than anyone else, even though it makes it a little bit worse for everyone.
by jerf | 2025-04-23 19:40:25+00:00
The "front page of HN" has not scaled like the rest of the computing hardware has scaled. The smallest VM you can get serving static content will yawn at the full power of an HN surge. Unless you have a very 200x-era bandwidth limit, or you're trying to be on the front page of HN with a 250MB web page (which does happen), it's not anything to be concerned about anymore.
by mystified5016 | 2025-04-23 19:41:50+00:00
That's... really not how this works. As a person designing lithium management circuits, you typically have a very small delta-V for top-off charging. We're talking ~0.1V. Once full, the charge circuit disconnects. If the battery is under load or self-discharges below your dV, charging starts back up usually at a very low current. Top-off is also totally optional, it's just a common feature.

Additionally, only the cheapest of cheap garbage phones would behave the way you imply. Charge controllers are readily available from TI et al with battery bypass. When the battery is full, the system runs on external power exclusively, except for the top-off charge.

It's really a pretty standard feature. You can get controllers with and without this, but you'd have to be either extremely cheap or extremely dumb to not use a controller with battery bypass in an application like a phone.

Based on my own testing, my pixel 8 will run on USB. No current fluctuations that would indicate battery cycling, just a constant draw. My previous Samsung also behaves this way.

You're right that cycling the battery this way is bad for them, that's why competent engineers don't.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-04-23 19:41:56+00:00
Exactly. To be a useful assistant, it has to be more proactive than they're currently able to be.

Someone posted here about an AI assistant he wrote that sounded really cool. But when I looked at it, he had written a bunch of scripts that fetched things like his daily calendar appointments and the weather forecast, fed them to an AI to be worded in a particular way, and then emailed the results to him. So his scripts were doing all the work except wording the messages differently. That's a neat toy, but it's not really an assistant.

An assistant could be told, "Here's a calendar. Track my appointments, enter new ones I tell you about, and remind me of upcoming ones." I can script all that, but then I don't need the AI. I'm trying to figure out how to leverage AI to do something actually new in that area, and not having much luck yet.
by fnordlord | 2025-04-23 19:42:03+00:00
I don't agree entirely. They are different types of problems but I think they all can benefit from people who are good at solving technical problems.

Going to Mars isn't a problem or a solution to a current problem. It's just a thing that hasn't been done. I think starvation and disease could use some help from technical people. And considering the damage done by technical people with regard to inequality and authoritarianism, I would hope technical people could also contribute towards fixing the issues. Inevitable mortality is arguably a problem because if solved, would generate a whole other level of problems.

But yeah, political solutions would be amazing and technology is not the answer to everything. At least, that's how I see it.
by nayuki | 2025-04-23 19:42:07+00:00
Any sane language would design a list iterator to follow the order of the list. No, the difference is when you're iterating over orderless hash-based sets or maps/dictionaries. Many languages choose to leave the iteration order undefined. I think Python did that up to a point, but afterward they defined dictionaries (but not sets) to be iterated over in the order that keys were added. Also, some languages intentionally randomize the order per program run, to avoid things like users intentionally stuffing hash tables with colliding keys.
by wood_spirit | 2025-04-23 19:42:56+00:00
I set up a friend’s prolific blog with a very similar approach many years ago using pelican and pushing to a git server vps where a tiny custom python wevserver serves whatever is in git.

Only friend has struggled to get pelican and git etc set up on a new laptop. And tbh I am lost - and horrified - at the latest windows. Not keen on being tech support and working out why python command hangs etc.

And my custom vps setup doesn’t do tls. And I don’t want to try.

So I’m wondering if there are any alternatives? Is there a web frontend for blogging straight to ghpages, for example?
by jerf | 2025-04-23 19:43:02+00:00
And you built a static site generator.

Or at least, you will have as you realize things like you only wanted to do that on certain categories or whathaveyou.

You can in principle just write HTML with no script support, but it itself becomes an exercise in conspicuous asceticism. It is not unreasonable to want things like "the last 5 posts" on every page on a blog, or an RSS feed, or any number of other very basic, simple things that are impractical with an editor and raw HTML.
by ipaddr | 2025-04-23 19:43:29+00:00
There are different agenda. Some want to make money or power upending the existing process. Making production cheaper.

There are people who want this want to make things currently unavailable to them. Taboo topics like casting your sister's best friend in your own x-rated movie.

There are groups who want to restrict this technology to match their worldview. All ai-movies must have a diverse cast or must be Christian friendly.

Not sure how this will play out.