MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I made an app to create personalized stories for children in 5 minutes
by xcanchal | 2025-05-20 15:27:35+00:00
Create tailored stories for children in three simple steps and in less than 5 minutes. Describe main character and optional secondary characters. Choose or type a story theme and pick your favorite illustration style. Generate the story texts, the cover and pages illustrations and get a downloadable PDF right away!

Ideal for parents or to make an special gift!
by variadix | 2025-05-20 15:27:40+00:00
National security is the obvious reason. That includes the ability to switch to a wartime economy, which requires low-tech manufacturing and resource extraction to not be reliant (and thus vulnerable) on imports from potential adversaries. Maintaining a talent pipeline is also important, we’re not going to be able to produce enough high skill machinists quickly enough when we need them because that takes time.

Manufacturing capital is primarily the value of onshoring manufacturing, the labor itself may not be particularly valuable at present, but the ability to repurpose it quickly is valuable. It would take the US much longer to build up the kind of manufacturing infrastructure and capital required to be self-sufficient than it will take China to build up the talent infrastructure and intellectual capital required to replace the US. China has no shortage of intelligent and driven people.

Advanced manufacturing (mainly thinking of semiconductors but there are other areas) is increasing in value with AI development, and has been increasingly valuable with prior digitization. It was a mistake for prior (pre-CHIPS) US administrations to not subsidize it.

There are other good reasons: not everyone in society can be upskilled. You need jobs for the lower and middle class that afford them decent lives. Only having high skill high education jobs and low skill low education jobs leaves people in the middle with limited opportunities for economic mobility.
by FilosofumRex | 2025-05-20 15:27:41+00:00
> Why would you not if you don't incur in external debt doing so?

you described economic Neoliberalism since 1968, in a nutshell. However, its most important consequence - impoverishment of the low-income and very low-income native population and its inevitable supplementation by emigrants, is destabilizing the very nations who championed it.

Secondarily, militarism (NATO, Israel, Taiwan, Korea, etc.) needed to maintain the pecking order is under great strain and requires considerable counterproductive expenditures (Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Serbia, etc.) just as the native populations age rapidly.

Thirdly, de-dollarization has its own dynamics and is driven by politically motivated economic sanctions enforced by high seas naval interdictions, Russian asset seizures, Chinese exclusionary trade rules, & global criminal gangs like the Kushner's crime family extortion of Qatar in 2017. Rise of BRICs+(25 countries waitlisted), Alt-SWIFT payment systems (BRICS Pay, CIPS) are supplementing USD, the very foundation of the Neoliberal economics.
by tsumnia | 2025-05-20 15:28:00+00:00
A really good paper I read last year from 1996 helped me grasp some of what is going only: Brave.Net.World [1]. In short, when the Internet first started to grow, the information that was presented on it was controlled by an elitist group with either the financial support or genuine interest in hosting the material. As the Internet became more widespread that information became "democratized", or more differing opinions were able to get supported with the Internet.

As we move on to LLMs becoming the primary source of information, we're currently experiencing a similar behavior. People are critical about what kind of information is getting supported, but only those with the money or knowledge of methods (coders building more tech-oriented agents) are supporting LLM growth. It won't become democratized until someone produces a consumer-grade model that fits our own world views.

And that last part is giving a lot of people a significant number of headaches, but its the truth. LLMs' conversational method is what I prefer to the ad-driven / recommendation engine hellscape of modern Internet. But the counterpoint to that is people won't use LLMs if they can't use it how they want (similar to Right to Repair pushes).

Will the LLM lie to you? Sure, but Pepsi commercials promise a happy, peaceful life. Doesn't that make an advertisement a lie too? If you mean lie on a grander world view scale, I get the concerns but remember my initial claim - "people won't use LLMs if the can't use it how they want". Those are prebaked opinions they already have about the world and the majority of LLM use cases aren't meant to challenge them but support them.

[1] https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/eb045517...
Show HN: A Poor Man's Apple Intelligence
by nathan-barry | 2025-05-20 15:28:31+00:00
I built a poor man’s Apple Intelligence. Send messages, emails, call people, create/read reminders, calendar events, alarms, contacts, and more through Claude!

Apple previously took down an ad (More Personalized Siri [1]) when the Siri AI update was delayed. One thing this project allows is Claude can now do the exact same example shown in the ad successfully.

The project uses Apple shortcuts to give Claude the ability to text, call, email, read/create calendar events, alarms, reminders, etc. It works by allowing Claude to pass in text into the shortcuts app (ex `echo "func_name, arg1, arg2, arg3" > shortcuts run shortcut`) which is then parsed within the shortcut.

It has one large shortcut consisting of a list of if statements that run if the action matches with the function name and uses the arguments to complete the action. Some actions (like listContacts or listPastCalendarEvents) print to stdout which Claude can use as context for future actions. One can easily add new actions to the shortcut as well.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2025/03/10/apple-pulls-iphone-16-a...
by dr_kiszonka | 2025-05-20 15:28:32+00:00
I would put your text under "Welcome to 90s.dev." If possible, I would further simplify it. I took a stab at it below but I am no marketer (or a game maker),

90s.dev simplifies making games and tooling for game creators via:

- an expressive API around a 320×180 web canvas,

- built-in sharing capabilities,

- an innovative GUI.

Each bullet would link to a relevant part of the documentation. I think you also need a page with examples.
by wenc | 2025-05-20 15:29:29+00:00
Many types of data don’t. Disconnected spaces like integer spaces don’t sit on a manifold (they are lattices). Spiky noisy fragmented data don’t sit on a (smooth) manifold.

In fact not all ML models treat data as manifolds. Nearest neighbors, decision trees don’t require the manifold assumption and actually work better without it.
by aristofun | 2025-05-20 15:30:42+00:00
I see 2 parts that contribute:

1. Failed expectations - hackers tend to dream big and they felt like we're that close to AGI. Then they faced the reality of a "dumb" (yet very advanced) auto-complete. It's very good, but not as good as they wanted it.

2. Too much posts all over the internet from people who has zero idea about how LLMs work and their actual pros/cons and limitations. Those posts cause natural compensating force.

I don't see a fear of losing job as a serious tendency (only in junior developers and wannabes).

It's the opposite - senior devs secretly waited for something that would off load a big part of the stress and dumb work of their shoulders, but it happened only occasionally and in a limited form (see point 1 above)
by JCattheATM | 2025-05-20 15:31:01+00:00
> TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome): the observation that many people hate Trump so much that they lose the capability of rational thought and either just shut their brain down when talking about anything related to Trump, or want to do the opposite of what Trump wants

This isn't a real thing, it's just something his zealots throw at critics to dismiss them.
by Lichtso | 2025-05-20 15:31:09+00:00
Made me realize that most of the games I really enjoyed have their own custom engines (made for a single game or franchise): Starbound, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Factorio, RollerCoaster Tycoon, Empire Earth, The Sims, Project Zomboid ...

Only exception might be Portal, but even that is using an in-house solution mostly for developed for one franchise.

Like with most things: If you are new and have to learn everything or if you actually need to pump titles out you should prefer quantity over quality and the major game engines are the way to go. But, if you really want to polish something it will require a long long time and then investing in engine development can pay off. The trap is starting with the later if you haven't made a few dozen games yet and never shipped anything. Then it will stay that way.
by obloz | 2025-05-20 15:31:10+00:00
If you look, there's a lot of articles and books about "anti-whiteness" and a crusade to both claim a "white race" doesn't exist and that it's also enslaving others. If you live in a segregated area, race relations from blacks to white people have significantly declined. Everyone's radicalized. Add to this the widespread promotion of violent crime statistics and innocent people being attacked and murdered. Unequal justice by juries etc.

Scott just quoted a study saying black people didn't want to be around white people. Whether or not you agree with the above, it doesn't change the reality. Obscuring the history of the Arab slave trade, whites being enslaved, Africans selling Africans into slavery, and dozens of other historical deceptions, have backfired and permanently divided people.
by pokerpricey1 | 2025-05-20 15:31:11+00:00
commenting as a beginner here so take this with a grain of salt. but i’ve been running into the same thing. it feels like context sharing is the deeper problem, especially once multiple agents are involved or when you want memory over time. but i spend so muchg time pasting the same prompts etc and it's not like the marketplaces of 'good' prompts have muhc, the amount of time i spend finding those prompts is roughly equal to or greater than me doing it myself over until i get a good llm resp
by leoedin | 2025-05-20 15:31:12+00:00
Yeah this. In the UK we have a real problem with completely unearned authority given to people who went to prestigious private schools.

I've seen it a few times. Otherwise shrewd colleagues interpreting the combination of accent and manner learned in elite schools as a sign of intelligence. A technical test tends to pierce the veil.

LLMs give that same power to any written voice!
by lostmsu | 2025-05-20 15:31:22+00:00
I would argue that is more reasoning than you do in the specific instances of SotA LLMs. Because you are demonstrating a rather simple logical mistake by claiming "T is in NTG => T is not in R" when you have no information about relationship between NTG and R sets.

But I wasn't even talking about reasoning. I specifically said "demonstration".
by gitremote | 2025-05-20 15:31:34+00:00
> I feel like your comment sums up many life lessons. It's also the reason I stopped believing in extreme leftism as I matured. I think as young idealists we think "Surely if we just gave the government a lot more tax money, they'd solve the problems we all say we care about" and "Surely if you just give freely to whomever says they're in need, they won't cheat the system!"

As an older leftist, what you describe looks more like the liberal (centrist) view. Actual leftists think the current system is broken. Cops are not acting in good faith using tax payer money, so we should defund the police departments to some degree and divert those funds to social programs to help the vulnerable. Politicians and Congress people (including Democrats) in office are not acting in good faith and should be barred from trading individual stocks to prevent insider trading.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-20 15:31:54+00:00
Hypothetically yes, but the lack of social safety net means most of that hypothetical purchasing power expansion in China is moot.

China has a medical debt problem [0], education pricing problem [1], and private sector capital crunch [2] similar to that of the US. This makes it much more difficult for the median household to spend in China because there is an incentive to keep saving.

In isolation an $8,000 EV looks cheap to us earning a salary in the West, but that is still 1.7x the median household income (so half of all Chinese households have even less money to spend). For half of Chinese households, that's the equivalent of your median American household purchasing a Maserati. And healthcare costs can reach the $8k-15k price point in China for critical operations.

The reality is, the median Chinese household is significantly underpaid compared to their peers in Thailand [3] or Malaysia [4] - either incomes have to rise to allow Chinese consumers to consume as well as cover health+education spending, or the central and provincial governments will have to dramatically expand social services in order to cover rising costs.

The Chinese consumer cannot replace the American consumer without an expanded social safety net giving some breathing room to spend instead of saving.

[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/4d892cd4-e7ef-446d-85c4-93262a7a3...

[1] - https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/high-cost-educat...

[2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-18/china-pri...

[3] - https://www.nso.go.th/nsoweb/storage/survey_detail/2023/2023...

[4] - https://open.dosm.gov.my/dashboard/household-income-expendit...
by soulofmischief | 2025-05-20 15:32:20+00:00
Propositions are just predictions, they all come with some level of uncertainty even if we ignore that uncertainty for practical purposes.

Any validation of a theory is inherently statistical, as you must sample your environment with some level of precision across spacetime, and that level of precision correlates to the known accuracy of hypotheses. In other words, we can create axiomatic systems of logic, but ultimately any attempt to compare them to reality involves empirical sampling.

Unlike classical physics, our current understanding of quantum physics essentially allows for anything to be "possible" at large enough spacetime scales, even if it is never actually "probable". For example, quantum tunneling, where a quantum system might suddenly overcome an energy barrier despite lacking the required energy.

Every day when I walk outside my door and step onto the ground, I am operating on a belief that gravity will work the same way every time, that I won't suddenly pass through the Earth's crust or float into the sky. We often take such things for granted, as axiomatic, but ultimately all of our reasoning is based on statistical correlations. There is the ever-minute possibility that gravity suddenly stops working as expected.

> if the spider is in boxA, then it is not everywhere else

We can't even physically prove that. There's always some level of uncertainty which introduces probability into your reasoning. It's just convenient for us to say, "it's exceedingly unlikely in the entire age of the universe that a macroscopic spider will tunnel from Box A to Box B", and apply non-probabilistic heuristics.

It doesn't remove the probability, we just don't bother to consider it when making decisions because the energy required for accounting for such improbabilities outweighs the energy saved by not accounting for them.

As mentioned in my comment, there's also the possibility that universal axioms may be recoverable as fixed points in a reasoning manifold, or in some other transformation. If you view these probabilities as attractors on some surface, fixed points may represent "axioms" that are true or false under any contextual transformation.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-20 15:33:12+00:00
The US spends $1T on education. It is extremely difficult to justify spending more when the US already spends far more per student than other developed countries. Same with infrastructure and healthcare. Without accountability for where that money went it would be foolish to throw even more money at it.

Also, in the US, infrastructure, education, and healthcare is primarily the responsibility of individual States, so it really needs to be measured on a per State basis. For some of these things, some States deliver high quality at low cost and other States deliver low quality with an order of magnitude higher spending for the same thing. The correlation between spending and results is surprisingly weak. Competency and focus seems to play a greater role.
by mikemerrill | 2025-05-20 15:33:20+00:00
Agreed that it's not the best way to use agents right now (they still need supervision) but I think in the coming year(s) we'll reach a point where they'll be good enough to run on their own (see Codex).

If you're interested in working on this, we love to see new contributors in the Discord https://discord.gg/6xWPKhGDbA
by Fire-Dragon-DoL | 2025-05-20 15:33:29+00:00
20/year maybe, 5/month very rarely. At 5/month on my personal credit card there are so many tools out there that there is usually something, in a different space, that I could spend on. I don't want to be eaten alive by subscriptions, so I made a budget and I'm at limit for subscriptions.

Obviously I would be better off trying to reduce my grocery costs instead (spend way more), but personal subscription translates in my brain to "I should be using this almost every day" and that is rarely the case for these tools. Exceptions are YNAB, Logseq, raindrop
by maeil | 2025-05-20 15:33:30+00:00
> Also, the often-mentioned US-EU trade deficit is not that big if you count in services. Which I think should be done in the 21st century. Large parts of the US economy are focused on digital high-value services, and they are "exported" worldwide.

This is why, in case of reciprocal tarriffs on physical goods, the US ends up the big winner - they don't apply to digital services, which are a huge part of US exports.

Now the world had slowly been catching onto this fact that they'd been getting absolutely rinsed by the FAANGs who have gotten their populace addicted to their opium and made trillions off of them without contributing anything meaningful back. For the first time, we were seeing digital services taxes - a decade overdue. Brazil now has one in place - great on them. The EU was also planning one, but then the tarriffs came, and suddenly voices are saying they might abandon it. If the current US gov was any other US gov, the obvious conclusion would be that they're using tarriffs as a pawn to prevent the rise of digital service taxes.

Obviously, in the current timeline this wasn't the main reason. But there's no way Mark, Satya, Jeff and Tim haven't been whispering into big leader's ear just how "unfair" these DSTs are.
by pier25 | 2025-05-20 15:34:07+00:00
> KV is dead

Yeah this is a terrible move. Companies aren't relying on KV precisely because it's in beta not because it was a bad idea. I use Cloudflare Workers KV a lot and I'm not interested in durable objects. I was really interested in Deno KV until now.

Plus the optics of announcing a product and abandoning it are not good. Ryan is a great technical guy but these decisions don't look good from a strategic perspective.
by ch4s3 | 2025-05-20 15:34:17+00:00
Every language in contact with other languages borrows words. Many of the French words in English come from Gaulish, for example bard. In tun there are also many Celtic words from before the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain that are preserved. The Franks themselves who later influenced English were Germanic people moving into a formerly Roman-Celtic region who adopted a kind of Latin. Further confusing this, the Anglo-Saxons spoke a language that that was carrying some words from West Baltic languages like the word for awl.

The idea that there are pure languages, is ridiculous.
by orwin | 2025-05-20 15:34:27+00:00
It really depends on the weather and what I'm doing. When I'm sailing in summer (windsurf/wingfoil), I can shower thrice in a day, easily (I have a 20 minute bike ride with my board and sail). When I'm sailing in a cruiser, probably two showers a week, sometimes none depending on our travel time. Per month statistics are impossible for me, but over a year, probably a bit over 300 times.
by frollogaston | 2025-05-20 15:34:38+00:00
But it wasn't my opinion at the time, and I didn't hear from those people. I was in middle school, kids were commonly frustrated syncing their homework to/from a flash drive, family members wanted to sync photos, and everyone wanted something like this.

Before Dropbox, the closest thing we had was "the dropbox," a default network-shared write-only folder on Mac. Of course you could port-forward to a computer at home that never sleeps, but I knew that wasn't a common solution. I started using Dropbox the same month it came out.
by franktankbank | 2025-05-20 15:35:15+00:00
Thanks for the response. I'm curious what percent of stuff that would normally end up on train ends up as spillover onto trucks. Any idea? I think stuff is quite finetuned already and there may only be an extra few percent of capacity in trucks. I agree, in a lot of cases it might work to just bite the bullet and wait or try a different apparatus. However the stuff on the trains typically is not slackable. That is, you aren't transporting computers and sofas via rail.
Show HN: I made a no-code and AI platform to create serious games
by jidefr | 2025-05-20 15:35:18+00:00
For 2 years, I had clients that needed serious games and created such games from scratch for each projects.

I got tired, so I decided to make a platform to be able to create gamified experiences with no-code and also using AI.

With Ludiz, you can either create a game from scratch, using an easy to use editor, add steps, use many game blocks such as MCQ, Sort, Puzzle, Fill-in-the-blanks...

Or you can use AI by describing the game you want to create and it will create the game for you.

AI creation was a bit of a challenge because I needed to generate a long JSON object respecting a complex schema, and OpenAI schema support is kind of restricted.

So I had to break this process into many steps, and carefully make the schema respect the OpenAI restrictions.

After you created a game, you can publish it to your users and collect statistics to see who has the best score, was the fastest...

Creating this platform took me a lot of time, and some big french clients agreed to test it while it was still in early stage. This allowed me to get their feedback and polish the product.

Now they are happy customers and use the platform everyday !
by danans | 2025-05-20 15:35:24+00:00
By assets I mean things that are durable and can be held and used for long periods of time, some times spanning generations. Yes, land is the ultimate example.

In a more general sense it can also be systems of law (and consistency of adherence and enforcement) that provide the stability and infrastructure for the trade of goods and services. There is a reason that famines are associated with wars: trade in food collapses when stability disappears.
by atonse | 2025-05-20 15:35:25+00:00
Yup I have said for the past year to anyone that'll listen, that the concept of hourly (white collar) work will go away.

And there's no better example of hourly work than lawyers.

Personally, I've always disliked the model of billing by the hour because it incentivizes the wrong things, but it is easier to get clients to justify these costs (because they're used to thinking in that framework).

I'd rather take on the risk and find ways to do more efficient work. It's actually FUN to do things that way. And nowadays, this is where AI can benefit in that framework the most.

But I know I'm probably in the minority.