MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by layer8 | 2025-05-24 21:23:26+00:00
Yeah, I think “what does this icon depict” is a little beside the point, also considering the mIRC screenshot. BUT, what is important is for icons to be easily re-cognizable by shape AND color, and modern low-contrast monochrome icons fail that, being designed to look as uniform as possible. In the Outlook screenshot, the fact that the labels have the same color as the icons also doesn’t help. Furthermore, the label text size there emphasizes the larger-sized icons, although the text is more informative.
by Ancapistani | 2025-05-24 21:23:51+00:00
It is. He was on the AI Daily Brief (podcast) yesterday talking about it.

He's writing about it because the universe keeps trying to get him involved in it (from his perspective). People were literally using his photo as a reply to the tweet where Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding": https://x.com/Yuchenj_UW/status/1886193454730137763
by johnea | 2025-05-24 21:23:54+00:00
> Doesn't it feel wrong to the author to snoop through that private information? And publishing it in a news article definitely crosses a line.

Well of course, only Amazon should have this info 8-/

This whole thing is truly disturbing.

And the millennial expectation that "OF COURSE the monopolistic corps should know everything", is by far the most disturbing part of all.

When in the next decade or two, people find themselves truly and irreversibly f_cked by corporate over-dominance, it will largely be their own fault...
by OtomotO | 2025-05-24 21:25:30+00:00
These discussions (in the comments) tend to become this "to write everything yourself or not" discussions which are extreme in nature and very binary. While reality is way more nuanced.

Why do you add a dependency? Because you need a certain functionality.

The alternative to adding this dependency is to write the code yourself.

That is totally feasible for a lot of dependencies.

That is totally infeasible for a lot of dependencies.

It's a trade off, as always. The fact is, that most of us, who do this for a living, need to ensure that our software runs and continues to run and may be adapted in a timely manner, when new requests come in from the client/owner.

Using dependencies or not using depdencencies isn't gonna change that.

Now, granted, some ecosystems are a bit extreme on the "let's add a dependency for this 1 line of code."

On the other hand: should I really roll my own crypto? (Jk)

Should I really write those 5000 lines of well tested code myself, just because I can? And because MAYBE it's not touched in a month from now?

Every (later executed) line I add to the project, be it one written by myself or an external dependency, becomes part of the code. So I have to be able to maintain it. Might be easier if I write it myself. Might be way more difficult and time consuming if I write it myself...

I have so many tasks to do and while I enjoy coding, I have to make my top priority a working system.

So should I mindlessly add dependencies? Of course not!

Should I just reinvent the whole world? Of course not! (Unless the client absolutely wants me to. And pays me to do it)
by Mofpofjis | 2025-05-24 21:25:31+00:00
Evidence to the contrary (anecdotal, admittedly):

- https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books/is... -- "The most recent freely available draft of C17/C18 used to be c17_updated_proposed_fdis.pdf, but it's no longer available directly and you need to use Wayback Machine to download it."

- I used to work for a multinational software company whose bread-and-butter was C. The company had indeed purchased a catalog of standards, but that catalog didn't include ISO C. When I formally proposed just that, they rejected it (and kind of made me feel uncomfortable about my proposal, to boot).
by zzo38computer | 2025-05-24 21:25:52+00:00
I think they make valid points (they really do describe the problems with many modern UI that I see, and that many older ones are much better), but they did miss a few things, such as:

- Having keyboard commands is helpful.

- Good documentation is very helpful; a program is understandable if it is documented.

- Some of the difficulty seems to be due to the programming environments and libraries that are used for making these programs; due to badly designed UI libraries and programming environments, the result will also be bad. However, this is not the only thing that can cause these problems.

- On a computer it should also be helpful that the operator is able to make other external programs and can interact with them too, with your software. Command-line programs, user configuration settings, API, etc, can also be helpful in doing this.
by fralle | 2025-05-24 21:27:00+00:00
I got tired of manually copying and pasting code when asking ChatGPT/Claude for help, so I built an extension that right-clicks to copy files/folders as properly formatted Markdown with syntax highlighting.

Select files in Explorer and right-click to copy the code as markdown. It works with tabs (specific tab or all open tabs) and the command palette (active tab or open tabs).

Would love to hear any feedback or feature suggestions. Or just criticism of the code, I want to make this better in any way I can.

There are a bunch of other extensions that do this as well, but they didn't really fit my criteria or were somewhat clunky to use.

GitHub: https://github.com/Fralleee/copy-code-context
by Manuel_D | 2025-05-24 21:27:30+00:00
The study found that that female applicants have 2x the positive vote rate as identically qualified male applicants when applying for faculty STEM positions (the study investigated other fields too). I'm not sure how this isn't evidence of bias.

If I create identically qualified black and white applicants and the latter are reviewed positively at 2x the rate as the former is not not evidence of racial bias?
by layer8 | 2025-05-24 21:28:10+00:00
> Having keyboard commands is helpful.

Not just having keyboard commands, but using standard ways to make them discoverable, such as by tooltips, menu item annotations, and underlined characters in labels.

Another aspect in today’s UIs is that they often introduce latency in operations (due to network communication, among other things) while not buffering keystrokes accordingly, which makes it borderline impossible to press memorized sequences of keyboard shortcuts in quick succession, because you always have to double-check that the application is in the right state to receive the next keyboard shortcut. That goes against developing muscle memory for frequently performed operations, and forces a conscious back and forth and constant ascertaining that the command was correctly received by the application, instead of being able to blindly trust it and thereby reduce cognitive overhead.
by cortesoft | 2025-05-24 21:29:40+00:00
Well, then the system could flag you because it doesn't know who you are. Someone walks out of a building with a gait that doesn't match the gait of anyone known to have entered the building. It would follow the person to the next building and the next, until it figures out who they are via the process of elimination (or if it see you go back to your normal gait). Then, the system would note (and store forever) that you have multiple gaits, and would never fall for the trick again.
by twobitshifter | 2025-05-24 21:31:57+00:00
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03...

https://wips.plug.it/cips/notizie.virgilio.it/cms/2024/07/hu...

https://c.ndtvimg.com/2024-08/t928vnkg_-tesla-cybertruck_625...
by ranger207 | 2025-05-24 21:32:28+00:00
Unfortunately almost all VR games in my experience feel more like tech demos than full games. Even Half Life Alyx felt like a demo mechanically to me, but I had a good amount of VR experience before I played it. The only couple of VR-native games I've played that feel like full games are VTOL VR, a flight sim designed from the ground up for VR including buttons to press and switches to flip, and Pavlov, a shooter. Otherwise, many of the best games are VR-additional that can be played flat as well, like Elite: Dangerous, DCS, or the racing games.
by agoose77 | 2025-05-24 21:32:54+00:00
I don't disagree with the general vibe here, but a few points:

- It's hard to compare Omicron vs delta because of the number of confounding variables - population heterogeneity, vaccine + infection induced immunity, etc. - Severe strains with latency periods are invulnerable to symptom recognition. I don't think the asymptomatic period for the COVID variants varied as much in the lower bound as it did the upper bound. The point being -- behavioural changes are much more likely to be general caution (i.e. limiting contacts, spacing social events in time, etc.) than responsive (I feel unwell).
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-05-24 21:33:38+00:00
What you're missing is that people with a sexuality (or some other identity) different from yours exist in the world and don't need to hide themselves.

Your discomfort or offense makes you think that someone encountering a word means that it was "marketed" to them as opposed to that concept simply existing in society, where others will encounter it. Because identities other than yours can exist equally openly to yours. Without their acceptance needing to be justified to you.

The piece of the puzzle you're missing is that a child understanding what homosexuality is (for example) is equally mundane as their learning what heterosexuality is. The world is not going back to these other identities hiding themselves, so you can either accept it or spend the rest of your life uncomfortable about it. You have free will.
by ranger207 | 2025-05-24 21:34:41+00:00
My experience with VR motion sickness was that it mostly went away after a couple dozen hours. Occasionally it'll come back for me when I try a new experience, but it's usually gone after another hour or so. Not an insignificant amount of time of course, but if you're designing an experience for existing VR users, I think you can safely assume most of your users have their VR legs at this point
by tombert | 2025-05-24 21:34:52+00:00
I agree that you can reach a few million without becoming too evil. Hell, having a decent-paying desk job and putting a good chunk of money into VOO (or something equivalent) has historically been a relatively surefire way of doing that if you're willing to wait a few decades.

I honestly am not entirely convinced that billionaires should be allowed to exist, I kind of think we should start taxing like crazy when personal wealth gets above a certain number. If you're not happy with a billion dollars, you're not going to be happy with a trillion dollars, or a quadrillion, or a quintillion. I think after a certain amount of wealth, your interests aren't really aligned with what's good for society, because the only appeal at that point is seeing a number get bigger. It's not like you're "saving up for something" when you get to that much wealth.
by lurk2 | 2025-05-24 21:36:12+00:00
> Instead, due to culture war side taking, they hobble themselves to be ever dependent on the petro-extraction and refinement industries.

The majority of the content I see in this space is overwhelmingly supportive of rolling your own grid. The point isn’t to reject electrification as a technology, but to reduce or eliminate reliance upon the electrical grid. A lot of homesteaders operate wood boilers for heat simply because it’s cheaper, but the truck-driving redneck you’re envisioning lost faith in industrial society a long time ago.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-05-24 21:37:11+00:00
Late I am, but this reminded me of someone else here posting about https://usebottles.com

( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44025837 )

Seems to be based on very polished https://www.winehq.org , so no full VM, but maybe it's less 'heavy'?
by jurschreuder | 2025-05-24 21:37:24+00:00
Only 10% of the energy used to make windmills is in the steel part. 90% is in the concrete foot.

I love the wooden windmills please keep building them, but they look very expensive and labor intensive to make and reducing the energy it takes to make them is actually pretty easy.

Although I don't know why you'd want to reduce it on windmills specifically and not focus on low hanging fruit first.

Seems a bit randomly linked on the "energy transition" node, even though windmill production is not really high on the "energy wasters" list.
by mrlongroots | 2025-05-24 21:37:34+00:00
I think there's two aspects around LLM usage:

1. Having workflows to be able to provide meaningful context quickly. Very helpful.

2. Arbitrary incantations.

I think No. 2 may provide some random amounts of value with one model and not the other, but as a practitioner you shouldn't need to worry about it long-term. Patterns models pay attention to will change over time, especially as they become more capable. No. 1 is where the value is at.

As my example as a systems grad student, I find it a lot more useful to maintain a project wiki with LLMs in the picture. It makes coordinating with human collaborators easier too, and I just copy paste the entire wiki before beginning a conversation. Any time I have a back-and-forth with an LLM about some design discussions that I want archived, I ask them to emit markdown which I then copy paste into the wiki. It's not perfectly organized but it keeps the key bits there and makes generating papers etc. that much easier.
by _heimdall | 2025-05-24 21:39:27+00:00
There are definitely more rural areas, that just depends on where you draw the line on what is considered "rural".

This area is unincorporated and the nearest towns all have a few thousand people or less.

When we moved here I was actually surprised that we had a hospital in one of those small towns. Its part of a larger network that and the city an hour away has a big training hospital and med school, I assume that's why there's a smaller hospital in our area.

For reference, our only "grocery stores" withing 45 minutes are Walmarts and Dollar Generals.
by dang | 2025-05-24 21:39:28+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

After 20 years, the globally optimal Boggle board - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43774702 - April 2025 (23 comments)

How did that spend only 6 hours on HN's frontpage? I'm gonna email danvk right now
by MrDrMcCoy | 2025-05-24 21:39:56+00:00
Hard disagree. Many great people throughout history didn't complete the great works they were remembered for until they were in their 50s or 60s. Some even kept doing cool stuff well into their 90s. If we can keep our health and faculties that long and beyond, civilization will continue advancing and providing a higher quality of life all around. We lose so much experience and hindsight with every death. That experience could, for example, be used to make larger populations sustainable.
by echelon | 2025-05-24 21:41:41+00:00
> reads like so much pretentious claptrap

Somewhere out there, there's an LLM that reads exactly like us pretentious HN commentators. All at once cynical, obstinate, and dogmatic. Full of the same "old man yells at cloud" energy that only a jaded engineer could have. After years of scar tissue, overzealous managers, non-technical stakeholders, meddling management, being the dumping ground for other teams, mile-high mountains of Jira tickets.

Techno-curmudgeonism is just one more flavor that the LLMs will replicate with ease.
by saluki | 2025-05-24 21:42:09+00:00
If you've been there a while and have some latitude start a 'Labs' initiative.

I've been doing this at every company I work at. Ask for 10% or 20% time to spend building prototypes to leverage technology to solve problems that provide a huge value to your org.

Compile a list of problems and look for the lowest lift and highest value to org.

Build one and if it's a success you'll get full buy in.

You can pick the stack you want to work with and integrate with ServiceNow as needed. Not familiar with service now but there are always things you can do with multiple stacks/services that provide value to the org.

Maybe this will scratch your itch and possibly open up a new position/group you could develop inside and run.
by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe | 2025-05-24 21:42:57+00:00
> It's not possible to state an absolute toxic dose in milligrams for everybody because it depends on things like your body mass, the preexisting condition of your liver, whether other liver-damaging drugs are on board, etc

Well yes it is possible to define an absolute toxic dose. 100 grams is an absolute toxic dose of acetaminophen in humans, 8294 tablets is not a dose.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-05-24 21:43:13+00:00
I find Paul Graham's writing style to be a bit off. I think he is too overly reductive and simplistic in his use of language and imprecise in his choice of words, and I genuinely don't understand the praise for his writing. You should read his work because these are the thoughts of a highly influential VC, not because they are gems of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Sometimes a longer, more nuanced word has all the right connotations, and sometimes a more complex sentence carries the perfect rhetorical structure. Paul Graham's writing seems to ignore (or perhaps purposely eschew) such details.
by k310 | 2025-05-24 21:43:23+00:00
Context:

Tabloid: The Clickbait Headline Programming Language (tabloid.vercel.app) 245 points by benaubin on Sept 24, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 37 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24578749

Refers to:

https://tabloid.vercel.app/
by PhoenixStormJr | 2025-05-24 21:43:23+00:00
You can install Pip packages WAY faster now on Google Colab, with a little hack I just discovered! No Pip, no requirements.txt, no dependencies, JUST UNZIP THE FILE AND RUN!

(Yes, this IS legal, some hacks are legal.)

https://github.com/PhoenixStormJr/ultra-fast-colab-setup-no-...
by alasarmas | 2025-05-24 21:45:55+00:00
So, this may be different in the UK, but in the US a large majority of travel occurs in private cars, so omnipresence of ALPRs is close to collecting data on everybody and knowing what everybody is doing at all times.

One might assume from a game-theoretical perspective that this is no different from living in a village where essentially everyone knows everyone’s business, and the knowledge that that knowledge is mutual prevents people from acting badly with the information that they have. However, in the situation where a small minority of people have knowledge about everyone else, and not vice versa, this can give that minority unearned power over everyone else.

In practice, it doesn’t feel great. I hope this answered your question.
by the_af | 2025-05-24 21:46:12+00:00
Agreed.

I remember a few years back, here on HN everyone was obsessed with diets and supplements and optimizing their nutrients.

I remember telling someone that eating is also a cultural and pleasurable activity, that it's not just about nutrients, and that it's not always meant to be optimized.

It wasn't well received.

Thankfully these days that kind of posts are much less common here. That particular fad seems to have lost its appeal.
by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe | 2025-05-24 21:47:18+00:00
There are almost no situations were taking the recommended dosage of acetaminophen is harmful. It's either useless (won't help for a skin rash for example) or has positive effects.

There absolutely ARE situations where ibuprofen should not be used (kidney, infections, others), even at the usual dosage.

Hence I believe that it's a terrible idea to write on the internet "they can be staggered or taken together" as if they had a simimar safety profile
by threeseed | 2025-05-24 21:47:50+00:00
It's amusing to me how people keep trying to apply engineering principles to an inherently unstable and unpredictable system in order to get a feeling of control.

Those prompts should be renamed as hints. Because that's all they are. Every LLM today ignores prompts if they conflict with its sole overarching goal: to give you an answer no matter whether it's true or not.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-05-24 21:49:58+00:00
A tree structure of ideas naturally fits into a linear essay of text, so I don't understand this. The opening paragraphs of a section of text are a broad theme on which subsequent paragraphs expand. Paragraphs also carry a similar structure in their sentences, and every great essay builds large trees of logical ideas within a linear rhetorical structure. A footnote as an expansion is a crutch: either the text of the footnote is important enough to appear on the page, in which case you should generally find a way to put it in the prose, or it is not, in which case you should omit it entirely.

The only truly good use of expository footnotes is to expand on things that the reader might be interested in (and point to further reading), but are orthogonal to the main argument of the essay. They are not for expansion of the tree of logical arguments present in the body of the essay.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-05-24 21:51:30+00:00
Laplace is typical use of inference statistics to built an estimator. I don’t really understand your point about parallel universe here. It’s absolutely not necessary for any of the sampling to make sense. Every time you try to measure anything, you are indeed taking a sample of the set of measures you could have gotten given the tools you are using.

I fear you operate under the illusion that frequentist statistics are somehow limited to hypothesis testing. It is absolutely not the case.
by djhn | 2025-05-24 21:51:57+00:00
What kind of design work is AI even capable of? I’m not saying the output isn’t occasionally very impressive (as a toy), I’m saying it’s utterly useless in practice.

Coming up with a spec or design system? I’m not sure what an AI-generated design could possibly be based on and how it would get the necessary inputs from stakeholders other than… in the form of a spec, formulated by someone collating those requirements.

Creating assets based on a spec or design system? Again, I have yet to see any output that can stay internally consistent. Frontend code might even work, despite being a mishmash of half a dozen flavours of react with two or three different vintages of tailwind. But good luck with native code or anything beyond basic CRUD forms.

I recently tried to get claude and gemini to scaffold a tailwind component library from a pretty comprehensive design document. It felt like getting a roomba to swim across a lake.
Show HN: Created a brain entrainment app – didn't expect growth
by Boxfreshpidge | 2025-05-24 21:52:37+00:00
I used to work as an audio engineer and have been meditating for ~17 years. A few years back I started digging into brainwave entrainment — reading older research, patent filings, and papers (like those from the Monroe Institute), and experimenting with tone layering and sound design.

What started as a personal experiment and a way to learn iOS dev ended up becoming a full brainwave entrainment app, now live on the App Store. I released it last year after a few friends tried it and wanted their own version. It now gets several thousand users a month.

I know it's a saturated market but as I said it was only ever meant for me, but I do feel its pretty powerful app and sound wise it seems to work very well!

All the sound is generated and processed within the app — nothing is streamed. I built a flexible engine that lets each preset go through a full audio chain: compression, EQ shaping, stereo field manipulation, Haas effect, binaural panning, and reverb modulation.

So the app is incredibly flexible to attach more complex sounds in the future.

I am pretty happy with it. Please let me know what you think and if you have any cool info regarding Brain entrainment

You can get 1month free with ZENMODE30 - just click redeem on the paywall (bottom left)
by nssnsjsjsjs | 2025-05-24 21:53:59+00:00
What is wrong with having someone edit and review? It is just feedback. If the writing itself is an assignment editing is normal. If the writing is part of another process maybe not.

For fly.io I can see the appeal of unedited content as it can be rougher (as in breaks style guides and whatnot) and I like that roughness in blogs. E.g. you might get a British idiom come through or a more conversational style.