MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cpressland | 2025-04-26 12:43:39+00:00
I am a huge fan of the Commodore 64 and have built my own using modern replacement components and new-old stock with help from other retro computer fans in the office.

But the Commodore 64x and Commodore OS don’t mirror the spirit of 8bit micros. Hardware hacking, direct access to the CPU etc. The Commander X16 is probably the only true “modern” hackable computer in my opinion.

I just hope future generations can experience the power of completely open hardware and as a species we don’t “forget” how computers actually work.
by kace91 | 2025-04-26 12:44:01+00:00
It’s not only lack of dependence, but also lack of idleness.

Most of my friend interactions would come from things like having a moment with nothing to do in the bus, realizing I have no particular plans this weekend and reaching out to a couple friends to see if they’re available.

Now those moments are instantly drowned by opening instagram before a thought bubbles up. And when the weekend eventually comes and there’s no plan, Netflix is just a button press away.

We need moments of boredom and reflection to push us into action, the attention economy is robbing us from that.

I’d even say the increase in anxiety related symptoms is due to this lack of idleness. The mind feels as if it’s super busy moving from active task to active task when in reality there were hours of just defaulting to reels.
by joegibbs | 2025-04-26 12:44:39+00:00
It could be $98/hour but you're splitting that up between multiple users. You don't run the instance entirely for an hour, you run it for a few seconds 20-50 times in the hour. If you had Claude spitting out tokens for an hour straight you'd run up a crazy bill.

It would be uneconomical to run Llama 3 14B on a bunch of A100s unless you're actually going to be using all that throughput. You can run Llama 3 8B locally no problem at all on regular consumer hardware with good speeds.
by Taek | 2025-04-26 12:44:49+00:00
I don't find walking to be boring at all! Especially when I'm working on something new, I will walk as many as 10 miles a day while thinking through all of the design corners.

Even when I'm not working, I like taking long walks to think about family, friends, video games, etc.

Its a great way to get into your head without the distraction of a phone or feed or forced message.
by scarab92 | 2025-04-26 12:45:02+00:00
I think their comment is fair.

Wikipedias policies to promote neutrality are often counter productive.

Because neutrality is hard to define, what these policies actually do is progressively raise the effort required to keep or remove a particular point of view. Unfortunately, requiring more effort also means substituting the point of view of knowledgeable but time poor and inexperienced contributors, with the point of view of time rich chronic contributors and admins. The result is that instead of neutrality, you actually select for the strongest held points of view of a small ingroup of chronic users. The viewpoint diversity of such users is extremely low, which is why you’ll notice all controversial topics tend to lean a certain way.
by prhn | 2025-04-26 12:45:15+00:00
I'm not sure what caused this, but I think the expectations of modern friendship have become unrealistic.

Maybe it's movies and TV, where a "close friend" is more or less a non judgemental therapist that will throw down in a fight for you.

What is a close friend? Before we can start asking people if they have any we should probably agree on a definition. If you use the Hollywood standard, then probably none of us have close friends.

In my experience, most friends come and go. That's OK. People change. Circumstances change. One person is always putting in more effort than the other. Some friends will always be aloof. Some friends will pretend they are independent and don't need friendship "like everyone else does," but they're generally full of it. Some friends will seem clingy.

Just roll with it.

The other challenge is finding people, especially as you get older. I've posted this before, but as you get older you really need to seek out established communities. Sports, trivia nights, things of that nature. Something where you can hop in and immediately meet 5+ people. Then you need to show up, over and over. That's how friendships form.

At that point, it's on you. People are out there and in my experience they are excited to meet new folks.

We can write a huge dissertation on why we think The Friendship Recession has happened, but it's quite simple. Inertia is human nature. It takes effort to learn something new and join a community where people are practicing that thing. It takes vulnerability and effort. It's kinda scary.

It's a lot harder than turning on YouTube or flipping through TikTok. And most people understandably don't want to do hard things, especially after the stresses of work and life.
by swores | 2025-04-26 12:45:54+00:00
Which version of GPT? I've found that 4o has actually been quite good at this lately, rarely hallucinating links any more.

Just two days ago, I gave it a list of a dozen article titles from a newspaper website (The Guardian), asked it to look up their URLs and give me a list, and to summarise each article for me, and it made no mistakes at all.

Maybe your task was more complicated to do in some way, maybe you're not paying for ChatGPT and are on a less able model, or maybe it's a question of learning how to prompt, I don't know, I just know that for me it's gone from "assume sources cited are bullshit" to "verify each one still, but they're usually correct".
by rvz | 2025-04-26 12:46:08+00:00
That isn't the reason nor is that a convincing argument to not enforce anti-trust laws against a particular company. So one is allowed to have a monopoly in government software and the rest are not?

Reducing competition is one of the goals of a monopolist and anti-trust laws applies to all, no exceptions.

Don't you think there are other companies competing against Microsoft for government contracts like Amazon, Google or even Palantir that includes software?

Also, Apple isn't some "upstart" either.
by haswell | 2025-04-26 12:46:13+00:00
Two ways I’ve made walks less boring:

- I started carrying a camera

- I started using the Merlin Bird ID app

Photography has made me realize how much I was previously ignoring. There’s so much to see, and even when walking the same route over and over, there’s an astounding amount of change over time. Often little things.

The Bird ID app made me realize just how many unique birds were making up the sounds I was hearing. As I learned to distinguish between them, I found myself fascinated in a way that I’d never been before.

Walks became almost meditative over time, and the sights and sounds a kind of salve for my often tired brain.

I often feel like I can think more clearly when walking as well, and thought processes kind of just sort themselves out as I go.

I highly recommend making walks more than just a way to move your body. They can be much more, and getting the benefits of movement almost feels like a happy side effect.
by crabbone | 2025-04-26 12:46:14+00:00
Recently I read some lectures from Jacob Bronowski. If you never heard about him, he was sort of a predecessor of personalities like Bill Nye or Neil Tyson: he wrote books that popularize science, gave simplified introduction to philosophical and scientific topics etc.

He advocated (very naively, as it appears today) for science as a human endeavor that has no reason for falsification. His justification was that scientists have nothing to lose from being proved wrong, and, as an example, he gave some University dean who published some works that were shown to be completely wrong in a course of few decades, but still retained his position in a university (because his approach was valid and he never attempted to manipulate the truth, he just made an honest error).

But, the more I think about how did we come to this, in many human activities it is often the case that whoever undertook such activities relied on their own wealth and not being incentivized to commercialize their discoveries. It was the aristocrats or monks or some other occupation that made their life affordable, and boring enough for them to look for challenge in art or science. Once science became professional, it started to be incentivized in the same way any other vocation is: make more of it--be paid more; make more immediately useful things--be paid more.

I don't know if we should return to the lords and monks system :) But I'm also doubtful that we can make good progress by pulling the levers on financial incentives of commercializing science.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-04-26 12:46:37+00:00
Lindell's lawyer claimed that somehow the preliminary copy (before human editing) got submitted to the court - that they actually did the work to fix it, but then slipped up in submitting it.

I could see that, especially with sloppy lawyers in the first place. Or, I could see it being a convenient "the dog ate my homework" excuse.
by LiamPowell | 2025-04-26 12:47:29+00:00
The only thing FreeCAD has going for it is that it's free, everything else about it is far behind the serious commercial tools.

> Ideally I'd like to see some sort of editing graph where you can see intermediate steps and pick visually parts to operate on for the next step - all underpinned by a concise textual representation that can be versioned.

This is exactly how most[1] commercial 3D CAD packages have worked for at least the last 30 years, they've done it longer than Git or SVN have existed. Specifically everything is represented as a list of operations (sketches, extrusions, chamfers, etc.) and you can freely go back and edit any step, or you can click on any part of a model and see exactly what step was used to generate it.

Some CAD packages will let you see a textual representation, but it's only really useful for scripting when they do. The versioning tools that are built in to any CAD package are far better than trying to work with text.

[1]: Excluding the more obscure CAD packages like Creo that do things differently to fit in to a specific niche.
by whatever1 | 2025-04-26 12:47:50+00:00
Why do they keep releasing these products if they don’t plan to support the users? Users are left frustrated, they are producing ewaste and ultimately hurting the Google brand.

Nothing will compare to ads in terms of margins. It makes no sense for Google to work on anything else, because eventually some VP will see compare the margins across business lines, and the decision is obvious. Chop everything that does not sell ads.
by Biganon | 2025-04-26 12:48:23+00:00
There's one thing I honestly don't understand about this post and the comments here.

NOWHERE does the author, or the people commenting here, mention the reason why such a book might be deemed "offensive". Of course it's easy to repell the criticism if you don't address the reasons in it ! But to me, it feels weird and classist to make a book about shitty places in a country. Aren't they often simply... poor ? Is it OK to laugh at the lower class ? The "shavs" ?

I don't know much about the UK but I feel like such a book in France would cause an uproar. Of course concrete suburbs are ugly as fuck ! Of course small towns in northern France, hit by unemployment, are often quite sad and grey and depressing ! But is it okay for people who don't live there to publish a book saying "lol look at how these people live" ? Sounds like the definition of punching down, to me.
by redleader55 | 2025-04-26 12:48:31+00:00
> head of a powerful corporation that almost controls our minds.

I find this line of thinking disingenuous. No one is forcing anyone to participate in social media. At the same time, no one is responsible for others participating in social media. So what makes the CEO of Facebook so evil?

My theory is that he's dislikeable as a person, regardless of what his company is making money from.
by Juliate | 2025-04-26 12:48:40+00:00
> If something returns value for shareholders (and monopolies do) then a CEO must do it. This is how the whole system is supposed to work.

Disagree. Shareholders are not the all and everything of a company. Neither they, neither the company exist in a void.

> Of course, there's no reason that capitalism must to work this way, but

How is that not a contradiction with the above?
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-26 12:48:56+00:00
> Of course, many people prefer to invest in extra big and luxurious houses/cars/vacations/restaurants/alcohol/coffee/etc out and I would even throw in educations with low ROI, rather than broad market index funds.

The problem is, index funds have no inherent value, they (just like all stocks and other financial derivatives/instruments) are effectively a paper with one or another form of "IOU" written on it. Economic crashes, wars, tariffs, morons in politics, whatever, there are tons of ways massive amounts of value can be straight up destroyed in a matter of days.

A house however? As long as it's reasonably well built, come what may, you still have a roof over your head. No one's gonna come and kick you out of it. And that's inherent value.
Show HN: Gemini Document Processor – Generate Th Summaries from PDF/ePub with AI
by kidpeterpan | 2025-04-26 12:50:12+00:00
Hello HN! I'd like to share Gemini Document Processor, an open-source tool I've developed.

This tool uses Google's Gemini AI (their latest API) to create high-quality Thai language summaries from PDF and EPUB files. Key features include:

- Support for both PDF and EPUB files - Intelligent chunking for efficient Gemini API processing - Automatic image extraction from documents - Direct integration with Obsidian (export directly to vault) - Smart retry system when errors occur (switches models/increases timeouts) - Real-time progress tracking via web interface

I built this tool because I needed to read many English documents and wanted detailed summaries in Thai.

If you frequently read long documents or want to build a knowledge base from multiple sources, this tool could save you significant time.

The output is a well-formatted Markdown file with images and metadata, ideal for storing in Obsidian, Notion, or other PKM systems.

Try it by cloning the repo and running it with Python (requires a Google Gemini API key).

Feedback, suggestions, and contributions are very welcome!
by WillAdams | 2025-04-26 12:50:59+00:00
For folks interested in the code see:

http://literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf

(the source re-written as a Literate Program by Dr. Donald Knuth)

Wish I still had the teletype prints of when I played it on an HP 3000 minicomputer at a local college --- did finally finish the game using a port to Windows.

My wife quite enjoyed _Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet_ which is one of the references from Wikipedia and covers the backstory in great detail.
by akerl_ | 2025-04-26 12:51:28+00:00
The Nest Thermostats listed here are falling back to "Honeywell local thermostat" functionality.

They will still work for turning the dial locally to control the temp. They just won't be IoT connected.

The 3rd gen Nest thermostat was released in 2015. The 2nd gen and 1st gen were released in 2012 and 2011 respectively. A decade lifespan for a device that gives me metrics on my climate control and lets me tune it from my phone is pretty solid in my book.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-04-26 12:52:51+00:00
Meh. As someone who's in the opposite situation (familiar with France and not with the UK), I get the feeling that what you're saying applies here, too.

It's funny you should talk about farmers. Yes, politicians say they'll move mountains for them. Yet, in practice, farmers are still barely making ends meet. And we also have the EU on top, which is run by bureaucrats even more removed from the actual "bas peuple". Just look at the whole situation with the Mercosur treaty.

Politicians keep yapping about how ICE cars are the devil and should be banned. After all, you can take a bike or ride the metro, right? It's not like anybody lives outside Paris or its close "satellites". It's very easy when you don't even have an idea how much a ticket costs, since you're carted around by police escort on the people's dime.

We've also had a push for "decentralization", with all kinds of hilariously bad results.

I don't know about Portsmouth nor Blackpool, but I ride around France a fair bit, and outside the biggest cities, many small towns have empty, run-down centers, with mayors fighting to get stores and whatnot back. But people simply move out for lack of jobs.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-26 12:54:51+00:00
> As mentioned, there is autoscaling

Why would you autoscale more computation to wait for the database. Let’s be clear here. The database is the thing doing MORE computations. It makes more sense to autoscale the thing carrying out the task.

It makes zero sense to autoscale the thing simply waiting for the task. The only thing where I see this making sense is if your database already has massive compute resources allocated to it and your server has so little resources it can’t wait on the database. In that case autoscaling cpus on the requester side makes sense but this is rare. It’s so rare it’s minuscule that you’ll have more than 10k concurrent connections.

>But you also create clearer language/runtime independent code encapsulation.

I don’t understand why a folder isn’t clear? Why must it be an entirely new repo and a new deploy process and an entirely new allocation of cpus to wait for the database? Guys. You want to organize your code? Consider folders. Don’t use new repos. Don’t use new deploy processes. Infrastructure exists to scale not to organize code. Adding new infrastructure makes code complexity, organization and accessibility worse while increasing scalability. Don’t use infra to organize code. Use infrastructure to scale performance. That’s a rule of thumb. There are exceptions but those exceptions are rare af.

You want other services to touch this function? You can then make it an http route as well: So the server can trigger a coroutine in the handler OR the handler itself (which is also a coroutine) is the database call that reacts to other services calling the http route. Same effect as a lambda.

>It's a little bit like the difference between writing a monolithic piece of software and writing a bunch of command-line utilities and scripting them together using the shell.

Highly disagree. Imagine one of those command line utilities is “ls”. This overreliance on lambdas is akin to adding new Computers to the cluster in order to call ls.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-04-26 12:54:58+00:00
Some of the prominent people on the right have tried to ignore the law, to not let the law modify their behavior, fighting off lawsuit after lawsuit, and adverse ruling after adverse ruling. If you're going to do that, you have to file a lot of motions. That seems to drive an emphasis on volume rather than quality of motions in reply. At least, that's my perspective as an outside observer.
by rvz | 2025-04-26 12:55:38+00:00
> Last I checked Zuckerberg is doing precisely what Thiel taught him to and has done it with preternatural skill.

...and the teachings from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs' mentorship.

> This is the standard for how you’re expected to act as a technology “leader” - which the majority of VC backed unicorn goal founders (like every FAANG founder) have been executing since day zero.

Except knowing how to deal with the time when anti-trust regulators are knocking on your door.

The stark difference between why Microsoft isn't being broken up vs Meta Platforms.
by mmcwilliams | 2025-04-26 12:56:08+00:00
I think it's easy to understand why people are overestimating the accuracy and performance of LLM-based output: it's currently being touted as the replacement for human labor in a large number of fields. Outside of software development there are fewer optimistic skeptics and much less nuanced takes on the tech.

Casually scrolling through TechCrunch I see over $1B in very recent investments into legal-focused startups alone. You can't push the messaging that the technology to replace humans is here and expect people will also know intrinsically that they need to do the work of checking the output. It runs counter to the massive public rollout of these products which have a simple pitch: we are going to replace the work of human employees.
by k310 | 2025-04-26 12:56:12+00:00
Why the deliberate atrocities?

I read an article that starts with this proposition [1]

> The real question, however, is not how America lost its way. We know the mechanics of it. It lost its way in large measure because Donald Trump, a Pied Piper of malice, led it astray, though one can’t lay all of that or even most of it on Trump. The American people, nearly half of those who voted, in their infinite wisdom empowered Trump to do so. They were looking for a Trump, yearning for a Trump, to do so.

> They wanted a Trump to destroy the nation. They hoped he would destroy the nation both by sowing chaos and discord and by supervising a demolition of our institutions and values. So the real question we should be asking is why so many of our fellow Americans desired this, and what deep proclivities Trump drew upon to prompt the nation, at least a good part of it, to self-immolate. What does Trump give them?

Having read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as a young person, this is reminiscent of a fascist playbook.

Except that it seems that social media are in effect creating a culture of resentment, projection of weakness and failure onto others and driving it for profit with unfiltered echo chambers.

The cause and effect seems to be playing to a vengeful base in order to keep legislators in line until their branch and the judicial branch are rendered impotent.

Exploring the parallels with Nazi Germany, the amassing of data was paramount.

> DOGE is building a master database for immigration enforcement, sources say [2]

Further,

> TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TEXTED COLLEGE PROFESSORS’ PERSONAL PHONES TO ASK IF THEY’RE JEWISH [3]

> The school later told staff it had provided the Trump administration with personal contact information for faculty members.

> The messages, sent to most Barnard professors’ personal cellphones, asked them to complete a voluntary survey about their employment.

> “Please select all that apply,” said the second question in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, survey.

> The choices followed: (including) “I am Jewish”; “I am Israeli”; “I have shared Jewish/Israeli ancestry”; “I practice Judaism”; and “Other.”

Data?

IBM provided Germany with tabulating equipment to manage "undesirables" [4] [5]

The notion of cultural supremacy resonates with some in Silicon Valley, land of big and targeted data.

'Reboot' Revealed: Elon Musk's CEO-Dictator Playbook [6]

Silicon Valley Whistleblowers Warn Elon Musk 'Hijacking' Republicans to Control Entire US Government [7]

PDF of their letter. [8] 630K

[1] https://whowhatwhy.org/culture/the-agonizing-work-of-art-tha...

[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-building-master-database-imm...

[3] https://theintercept.com/2025/04/23/trump-eeoc-barnard-colum...

[4] https://allthatsinteresting.com/ibm-nazis-ww2/3

[5] https://allthatsinteresting.com/ibm-nazis-ww2

[6] https://www.thenerdreich.com/reboot-elon-musk-ceo-dictator-d...

[7] https://bylinetimes.com/2025/02/07/silicon-valley-whistleblo...

[8] https://america2.news/content/files/2025/02/Musk-NRx-Memo-Fe...
by poincaredisk | 2025-04-26 12:56:25+00:00
Is it? How does it help with radicalization? If anything it makes it worse, since people on the extreme political spectrum will always try harder than the regulars, while companies care only about that sweet, sweet money that comes from being bland and attracting the masses.

Don't get me wrong, I care deeply about privacy and want a decentralized works, but it comes with its own cans of worms.