MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DrewADesign | 2025-05-24 00:04:09+00:00
> Imagine if they had bought out an old strip mall, church, etc. and converted it into a makerspace, an art studio, a shelter, a daycare, etc.

This art project was in response to real estate developers taking the sspaces that they already had in old warehouses and knocking them down to build this mall. If you're interested in getting more information about what they actually did and why instead of what you assume they did and why, you should watch the movie. The worst that's going to happen is it's going to confirm every superficial assumption you're making about them.
by goalieca | 2025-05-24 00:07:05+00:00
There’s solutions looking for problems right now and big tech companies who are investing hundreds of billions and now having to sell it. Everyone is demanding AI being used to boost productivity.

It’s ironic though. VB6 macros in excel was a major productivity win. Point and click forms an MBA could whip up in 20 minutes. Software development libraries used to be much faster to develop for with far less boiler plate.
Unbundling ChatGPT in Waves
by chany2 | 2025-05-24 00:07:29+00:00
SaaS is Unbundling ChatGPT in waves

Here is the 1st wave:

Unbundling Excel

First Wave Excel Use-Cases → SaaS Companies

Invoices: FreshBooks and Jobber replaced the classic invoice template in Excel, making billing easier for freelancers and SMBs.

CRM: Salesforce and HubSpot turned basic contact tracking spreadsheets into super powerful sales and relationship management platforms.

Project Management: Asana and Monday .com came from Gantt charts and task lists in Excel to project management tools.

Unbundling ChatGPT

First Wave ChatGPT Use-Cases → SaaS Companies

Customer Support: Intercom Fin and Gorgias took the basic Q&A chatbot use-case from ChatGPT and packaged it into a 24/7, always-on, AI-customer support.

Content Creation: Jasper and Copy .ai wrapped around ChatGPT’s content-writing capability into dedicated features to create blogs, email writing, and marketing copy.

Data Analysis: Humata and Glean use AI to analyze documents and summarize trends, replacing manual data review.

The 2nd wave:

Second Wave Excel Examples

Industry-specific SaaS: Sandbox (childcare management), Swept (janitorial services), and Little Hotelier (boutique hotel scheduling) are examples of SaaS that go far beyond basic spreadsheets and into tailored features for niche markets.

No-Code / Low-Code Platforms: Airtable and Coda let people build interactive databases and apps, something Excel users never dream of doing.

Second Wave ChatGPT Examples

Industry-specific Copilots: AI “copilots” for legal, healthcare, finance, and construction that answer questions, handle compliance, and automate routine operational workflows.

AI Chief of Staff: AI that reads every document, data point, update, and conversation across an organization, then delegates tasks and keeps everyone aligned from the top down.

AI Voicemail & Communication: AI tools that handle, transcribe, summarize, and respond to voicemails and calls.
by bradain | 2025-05-24 00:07:40+00:00
Emacs isn't really a follower of the unix philosophy since it's more a hold-over from the world of lisp machines.

Emacs also eschews the "everything is a file" philosophy of unix (programs in emacs are just lisp functions) and the idea of storing / transmitting data as plain text, instead using lisp data structures to do that.

Lisp itself is kind of antithetical to the unix philosophy too when compared with C. Lisp is presents an extremely simple, totally consistent core that is extremely difficult to implement efficient compilers for. C on the other hand was designed from the outset with the goal of being easy to write compilers for. Requirements for having function prototypes ahead of uses, having all variables declared at the top of a function, etc were done to make it easier to implement. Almost a perfect example of worse is better, really.

Check out the unix hater's handbook if you haven't, that sums up pretty nicely the world that emacs hails from.
by gjm11 | 2025-05-24 00:07:58+00:00
My sense is that they're pretty comparably famous. I think MacIntyre gets a bit of extra press from people who like him for basically religious reasons (e.g., the OP's author bio begins by saying he's "the Honorary Professor for the Renewal of Catholic Intellectual Life at the Word on Fire Institute"). But I'd guess that most academic philosophers have heard of MacIntyre and could name at least one of his books.

I do agree that it seems very weird to call Rorty "largely forgotten".

(One pair of data points, from the person whose knowledge of such things I know best, namely myself. I am not a philosopher in any sense beyond that of having a bunch of books on philosophy. If you asked me out of the blue to name a book by MacIntyre, I would definitely remember "After Virtue", might remember "Whose Justice? Which Rationality?", and would not be able to think of any more. I could give you a crappy one-or-two-sentence summary of what AV is about (which would e.g. largely fail to distinguish his ideas about ethics from Anscombe's) but couldn't tell you much more about his work. If you asked me out of the blue to name a book by Rorty, I probably wouldn't be able to but would probably recognize a couple of his. I could tell you I thought he did important work in the general area of epistemology but not more than that. So to me MacIntyre is a bit more famous than Rorty. But my sense is that that's a bit unrepresentative among not-really-philosophers, and probably quite a lot unrepresentative among actual philosophers.)
by landl0rd | 2025-05-24 00:08:06+00:00
No, it's fine for governments to fix externalities. I just believe they should do it at low levels.

I don't support Alberta meddling in local politics. I don't support the US federal or state governments doing this. If cities or neighborhoods want to come together and say "we want a blue community in this red state" or vice versa that's a just form of self-governance.

I actually believe this is how we make democracy work better. It has scale problems but remains the least-bad form of government so we should work to design systems that make it function well.

Letting people self-assort to live with others with their values under rules that reflect those within reason is good.
by georgemcbay | 2025-05-24 00:08:37+00:00
I'm more bemused than burnt out... kinda surprised the hype around it doesn't get called out more often by developers.

LLMs as coding assistants are undeniably time saving devices, especially when working in languages/libraries/platforms/frameworks you aren't already very familiar with, or when needing to generate something very boilerplatey as a one-off.

I am not calling the technology useless by any stretch of the imagination, but its still just so wildly overhyped right now.

It is a pretty common occurrence these days for me to have a blog post open from some "AI industry thought leader" talking about how all developers will be out of work in a year while at the same time I have a Gemini window open and I'm just watching it absolutely flail on relatively simple things like generating a database query or a regex (that is novel and not something that's scattered all over its training set like a simple email validator).

And Gemini 2.5 is, IMO, the best of the models when it comes to programming assistance (having replaced Claude 3.5 which was IMO previously the best), at least for the areas I touch (lots of kotlin/KMP/Android/etc).

As goofy as Gemini sometimes gets it is far less frustrating than asking Claude 4 a question and watching it write out a whole ass answer but then correct itself like 7 times before finally coming to a shitty answer that is worse than 2 of the ones it wiped out while blowing through most of its context window on its loop of indecisiveness.

And relatedly... color me completely unsurprised that this thread got dumpstered off the front page so quickly. Gotta keep pretending like the singularity is going to happen next week.

:D
by Xmd5a | 2025-05-24 00:09:17+00:00
The meter wasn't invented during the French Revolution, it evolved from ancient measurement systems based on the golden ratio.

Traditional body measurements (thumb, palm, span, foot, cubit) follow a Fibonacci-like progression where each unit ≈ φ times the previous one. If we consider the Egyptian cubit as π/6 meters (which matches historical measurements), here's a possible insight:

Draw a circle with diameter 1 meter. Remove 1/6 of the perimeter (π/6), subtract the diameter (1), and you get ≈1.618 – essentially φ. This geometric construction lets you build an entire measurement system using just a stick and basic geometry. Once you have any two consecutive units, you can generate the entire sequence by addition (palm + span = foot) or subtraction (span – palm = thumb's breadth).

In the pre-metric French system, a span was exactly 20cm. When you scale 0.2 × φ² you get π/6 with 4-digit precision. But here's what's interesting: using our geometric approximation φ ≈ 5π/6 – 1, the equation 0.2 × φ² = π/6 works out *exactly*. The "approximation error" in φ perfectly cancels out due to φ² = φ + 1, making 0.2 × (5π/6 - 1 + 1) = π/6.

Here's another "coincidence": Multiple 17th-century scientists (Mersenne, Huygens, Wilkins) proposed defining a universal unit as the length of a pendulum with a half-period of 1 second. Tito Livio Burattini, inspired by his travels in Egypt, formalized this in his "Misura Universale" (1675), measuring this pendulum length at 0.9939 meters - essentially our modern meter.

The "revolutionary" meter system was really just formalizing measurement relationships that builders had been using for millennia. The French didn't invent it - they just gave ancient φ-based measurements a decimal makeover.
by saghm | 2025-05-24 00:09:45+00:00
That sort of estimation feels a lot easier to me than the "golf balls in a baseball stadium one" that was mentioned by the parent because it's dealing with quantities I can recall having heard before like "how many streets are there in Manhattan" rather than measurements that personally would never stick in my head like "how wide is a golf ball". I'm not sure why, but I've always been awful at making even rough estimates of units. If you gave me the diameter of a golf ball and the dimensions of the stadium, I could do some basic calculations, but even though I physically know about how large a golf ball is, I couldn't tell you whether it's more likely that its diameter is 0.5 or 1.5" (and not having looked it up, I would believe you if you told me it wasn't even within that range)! This gets worse with units I can't visualize (like weight), and when the sizes get larger than I can easy relate to; if you asked me questions like how much a car weighs or how long the Brooklyn Bridge is, I'm doubtful I'd even be within a factor of 2 more often than not.

I'm probably taking this more seriously than it was intended above, but the idea that this is some sort of proxy for "thinking" or "intelligence" feels off to me; doing the math given the size of something might be thinking or intelligence, but knowing roughly "how big" something is seems more like intuition.
by cardanome | 2025-05-24 00:11:01+00:00
Management at my company is prioritizing AI and genuinely believes adding random AI features into our products will add tremendous value. My pleas that we should maybe talk to customers to determine what they need has have not been heard.

I am having a lot of fun learning about generative AI. It is just a bit thankless because I know the stuff I am building will be dead on arrival. So, I will not get any praise regardless on how well I do my job, maybe even get blamed.

But hey, after all the junior devs have been starved because no one wants to hire them, I will make bank once the next AI winter comes and companies desperately look for people who can actually code.

If you have your own company you can just weather it out and invest in good talent. Really a good position to be in.
by Hilift | 2025-05-24 00:11:35+00:00
Shipbuilding is strategic, but it's unglamorous and projects go wildly over budget. This is why the UK has so few ships in rotation now. In the US shipbuilding is anemic, particularly submarines. The "AUKUS" project was really an attempt at life support.

The work is really hot (or cold), dust and noise everywhere. Most people don't tolerate it for long. Recently a major contractor was caught for skipping required procedures for welds.

The USS Columbia was authorized in 2016, I haven't seen it or the new steam turbine that it is supposed to have. Grumman was awarded the turbine contract in 2014, it was supposed to be delivered in 2021, and it still isn't ready. They had to prepare a huge report to Congress. Each Columbia boat is estimated to cost $15.2 billion.

Trump keeps complaining about getting manufacturing back and we can't even build ships that are fully funded + incentive bonuses.

https://news.usni.org/2024/10/31/hii-fewer-than-2-dozen-ship...

https://news.usni.org/2024/04/10/late-turbines-have-major-im...

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R41129
by landl0rd | 2025-05-24 00:11:47+00:00
Well-put thank you. I think the end state that makes this not a slippery slope is that there are certain practicalities that make some responsibilities impractical beyond a certain scale. Where it is correct in its maximalist form though is that we should relegate the most possible freedom to the individual.

I hope more people can embrace this way of thinking. It's not really partisan. If anything it lets people operate more democratically where voices and engagement mean more. It lets people live how they want in communities with shared values. It lets us run many different policy experiments across many different places to develop better policies.
by orthecreedence | 2025-05-24 00:12:10+00:00
Going outside and playing with other kids is "diverse" because it's unstructured time. What do you do with the time? It's up to you to decide. Do you build a fort? Egg cars? Sell plants? It's an activity that requires some amount of creativity, and it's outside the normal zone of operation (home/school/etc). The only reason I could see this as a negative is if you wish your children to grow up as cogs and automatons who are unable to think for themselves and find their own place within social structures.

As far as getting a job, I have to say it benefited me quite a bit. I was already tinkering at home (I've been programming since I was 8) but getting a job before I left home did many things for me. I got to see how things are for a lot of people in the world around me. Some people need this shitty job. I was lucky enough to be able to do it because my parents mandated it, not because I needed to make ends meet. That gave me an enormous amount of perspective and humility. "This is how things could be for you." It gave me the drive to want to do better than working in fast food, and it gave me compassion for the people who are in that situation. Compassion that, to be frank, a lot of people I've met who have not done customer service or shitty jobs lack quite a bit. Secondly, I had to get that job myself. My parents didn't pull strings, they made me go out into the world, do applications, "sell" myself, etc. It was a growth experience. The world isn't going to bend to your whim, you are going to have to do things you don't like, and you are going to have to compromise.

TL;DR: playing outside: independence + creativity. Job: independence + compromise + humility + compassion.

None of that you learn by doing homework.
by MeIam | 2025-05-24 00:12:15+00:00
This is oil talking and how does oil talk? Via oil companies. Americans own a lot of oil in Alberta. Americans are Astroturfing. They do it at home and abroad and that is how Citizen United produced corporate personhood in USA.

If Alberta wants to separate and it's native people/aboriginals who own much of the land, don't go along, are they going to go to war?
by owenversteeg | 2025-05-24 00:13:11+00:00
Like other people here, I have my quibbles with the exact math. But the general premise is true: yes, you can live in rural poverty for cheap. The problem is the vibes. A hundred years ago, you would have a community, a place in society, and all of your family and friends nearby. In 2025, the only actual local job the author of the piece can come up with is at a gas station.

Top ten occupations, 1920: Farmers, farm laborers, clerks, salespeople, servants (bellboys, butlers, cooks), textile workers, machinists, carpenters, and teachers. All of those jobs, even the less respected ones, had infinitely more societal respect than the common jobs hiring in rural America today - such as stocking shelves at Walmart or working at a gas station. You could be a simple farm laborer and have a wife and kids and a place in society. Today, though, a young man working at a Walmart or a gas station will struggle to attract a stable partner or the respect of the world around him.
by HappMacDonald | 2025-05-24 00:13:16+00:00
I'd direct you to the 3 blue 1 brown presentation on this topic, but in a nutshell the semantic space for an embedding can become much richer than the initial token mapping due to previous context.. but only during the course of predicting the next token.

Once that's done, all rich nuance achieved during the last token-prediction step is lost, and then rebuilt from scratch again on the next token-prediction step (oftentimes taking a new direction due to the new token, and often more powerfully any changes at the tail of the context window such as lost tokens, messages, re-arrangement due to summarizing, etc).

So if you say "red ball" somewhere in the context window, then during each prediction step that will expand into a semantic embedding that neither matches "red" nor "ball", but that richer information will not be "remembered" between steps, but rebuilt from scratch every time.
by Macha | 2025-05-24 00:13:22+00:00
People have been predicting micropayments replacing ads (with differing technology implementations) for decades at this point and it's never come to fruition, so is unlikely to be taken seriously now either.

Tying it to cryptocurrency just seems like it's even less likely to get your regular Joe to onboard to this scheme, so I can see why it's never gained wider interest.
by Veserv | 2025-05-24 00:14:24+00:00
I presented a conditional calculation using numbers contextually-relevant to a forum run by a company that funds US tech startups.

IF you are such a company, THEN you only need very minor productivity improvements to justify such a price difference. IF you are such a company, THEN such costs are well within the cost of doing business. IF you are NOT then you are free to apply your own numbers to your situation.

However, the overwhelming majority of companies that fall into the applicable category outright refuse to even consider the possibility of a 8 k$ capital expense on software development tooling out of the absolutely foolish belief that such expenditure CAN NOT be justified as such a cost could not possibly be recouped in benefits or out of the absolutely foolish belief that a product that costs 100$ must be 100x better than a product that costs 1$ to be justified, and thus a product that costs money must be infinitely better than a product that is free to be justified.

It is absolutely management incompetence for US employers to just shut down upon hearing about a 8 k$ capital expenditure instead of doing a proper cost-benefit analysis to determine if such expenditures would be justified.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-05-24 00:14:55+00:00
I’m enjoying the AI wave immensely because somehow we get to TRY everything that actually matters (the new models and assistants and such) immediately from our own laptops. It’s way more fun than VR or blockchain or mobile at least for me. And it’s not all hype, it works really well in some domains, it’s better than Google for many queries, and I closed three PRs today raised by Copilot Agent (rather than suffer the back and forth I took one over halfway through but the other two were one-shots of simple but annoying maintenance tasks).
by keybored | 2025-05-24 00:15:37+00:00
Blogger says it’s better to be positive than negative. Could that be the case? Is it really so? Yes. And further. Thinking good thoughts is better than thinking bad thoughts about yourself or others. It’s also better to give meaningful feedback on projects. Than not meaningful feedback.

“This is a message that a lot of people need to hear,” says blogger.

Here’s some memes from 2012 to now.
by adrianwaj | 2025-05-24 00:16:21+00:00
The top comment right now on /bestcomments was from 7 days ago. It's like some comments only "arrive" onto that series of pages when they get enough votes.

I would just have a timeline of all comments that become best. It could be sorted by how new they are to any thread since being submitted to it, or, how new they are to actually becoming classified as a best comment. Former: "freshest best comments" Latter: "newest best comments"

To make it really nice, show each comment, and be able to close it from viewing and then remember the state between sessions. That way people can go through each comment and they don't have to read it twice - they've already closed it after having read it. A bit like an RSS reader. Or the person could even delete read or ignored comments. Wait maybe an alternative to all this is to provide 2 rss feeds of previous timelines: new/fresh.

!!
by alephnerd | 2025-05-24 00:16:23+00:00
This!

Until you've visited an actual shipyard, you won't realize how much it sucks as a workplace

There's a reason the moment Japan became a developed country, shipbuilding left for South Korea, and then when SK became developed, it left for China. Now it's leaving for Philippines (Japan), Indonesia (SK), India (SK, UAE), and Vietnam (SK, UAE) after the Korean and Japanese players got pushed out of China.
Show HN: GremlinGPT – Local Self-Evolving AI (No Cloud, No APIs, Just Autonomy)
by GremlinGPT | 2025-05-24 00:17:09+00:00
GremlinGPT is a fully offline, self-evolving AI agent that learns, scrapes, mutates, and retrains itself — no cloud, no APIs, no dependencies.

v1.0.2 just released: - FSM-based autonomous task runner (interrupts, retries, state memory) - DOM scraper with local memory integration (ChromaDB) - Auto-boot daemon for 3:30AM cold-start intelligence runs - NLP outputs tagged for recursive feedback

Upcoming in v1.0.3: - Transformer core trained from scratch (MiniLM baseline, no HuggingFace) - Self-refactoring agent logic - Real autonomous memory graph with pseudonymous IDs

Repo: https://github.com/statikfintechllc/AscendAI Looking for contributors and early users who care about truly local AI.
by 000ooo000 | 2025-05-24 00:19:02+00:00
I hate hearing about it because it triggers some anxiety about my role (SE) changing to the point where it's not something I have any interest in. Producing software in the corporate world is absolutely soul draining; endless meetings, direction from fools, overheads like mandatory compliance/learning, all of the rituals that come and go because someone with authority read some garbage on LinkedIn. Besides pay, the only redeeming quality of the job is that for some part of the day, I get to just be inside my head, working on problems and coming up with solutions. Sometimes a few of us team up and we figure things out together. The software is the fun and rewarding bit.

If AI lives up to its hype, which is a whole other subject, then I expect to see the two things I like about my job vanishing quickly - the pay, and the problem solving.
by pmarreck | 2025-05-24 00:19:58+00:00
I will defer to your many decades of life experience.

I just noticed that in my 53 year existence, only by the past 10 years, a morning workout (which I didn't do prior to that) was figuratively and literally eye-opening, not just physically but mentally.

Specifically, it was the Orangetheory workout.

And I regretted not discovering it sooner, and mainly I blame people who didn't emphasize not just the physical but the mental boost