MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bmacho | 2025-05-24 18:53:13+00:00
Article is from 2012, compare [0] and [1].

The pdf got replaced for some reason (bug, sensitive information in the meta or idk), but the article seems to have stayed the same, except the date.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2590v1.pdf

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/0if_/https://arxiv.org/pdf/1201....
by TYMorningCoffee | 2025-05-24 18:53:22+00:00
Some setups can run devstral small locally. Have you tried?

Also have you tried any other open weight models as the architect?

Third, as far as I understood, devstral was made with open hands so it might perform better there than aider out of the box.

Finally, I'm looking for local llm only setups for apple silicon 32gb and was considering devstral with open hands.
by twodave | 2025-05-24 18:54:14+00:00
I think I agree with the central point here. I think the key phrase is “internal consistency”. This is also very true of programming. It’s difficult to build good software without having a handle on the subject matter (and/or a domain expert to get feedback from).

But often writing is also a process of discovery. Maybe you are trying to write something that hasn’t been written about before. This is like building software without a spec. You can still write well and be irrelevant, just as one can build great software upon bad assumptions and fail to sell it. This doesn’t make it bad writing in its own right, but it also may not be very useful to anyone. In my opinion both software and prose should be produced for a purpose.

Thus, if there’s no meaning to it, writing, like software, falls pretty flat.
by deadbabe | 2025-05-24 18:54:14+00:00
We never valued the human element in the work that surrounds us. Do you care that the software engineer who produced the CRUD app you use everyday had a “craftsman mentality” toward code? Do you care about the hours a digital artist spent to render some CGI just right in a commercial? Do you appreciate the time a human took to write some local news article?

Probably not, you probably didn’t even notice, and now it’s over. It’s too late to care. These things will soon be replaced with cheaper AI pipelines and much of what we consume or read digitally will be proudly AI generated or at best only merely suspected of being AI generated. Did you know that soon you’ll even be able to install browser plugins that will automatically pay you to have AI insert ads into comments you write on popular websites? It’s true, and people will do it, because it’s an easy way to make money.

Reversing this AI trend means everyone should just do things the hard way, and that’s just not going to happen. If no one cares about how you do your work (and they really don’t give a fuck) you might as well use AI to do it.
by pempem | 2025-05-24 18:55:10+00:00
I think the OP comment re: AI's value as a tool comes down this this:

Does what it says: When you swing a hammer and make contact, it provides greater and more focused force than your body at that same velocity. People who sell hammers make this claim and sometimes show you that the hammer can even pull out nails really well. The claims about what AI can do are noisy, incorrect and proffered by people who - I imagine OP thinks and would agree - know better. Essentially they are saying "Hammers are amazing. Swing them around everywhere"

Right to repair: Means an opportunity to understand the guts of a thing and fix it to do what you want. You cannot really do this to AI. You can prompt differently but it can be unclear why you're not getting what you want
by beloch | 2025-05-24 18:56:39+00:00
We may need laws that treat these cameras as something like a wiretap. They can be there streaming their data to data stores, but accessing that data would require warrants that are limited in scope. The data could be used for answering specific, legally justifiable questions, not for everyday surveillance and profiling.

e.g. It would be valid to use these cameras to answer who was at a crime scene, when, and where did they go that day. It would not be valid to reconstruct a web of everyday associations stretching back months for someone just because an officer didn't like the way they look.
by mindcrime | 2025-05-24 18:56:39+00:00
> Call me optimistic or whatever, but isn't that the best case scenario?

Fair enough. I should have said "worst case, in the context of the system (as it is today) where a job is the primary way we have of gaining income to support ourselves (food, housing, clothing, etc)".

So yeah, if the day comes when nobody has jobs AND we can work out a social/economic system that doesn't leave people destitute and starving in the streets, then it could be the "best case". I'm just not sure how we get there, at the moment.
by sandreas | 2025-05-24 18:56:47+00:00
Awesome tool, thanks for sharing. One feature I would love to see on renaming tools is the following:

-A - Sample of the of the ACTUAL file name -B - Sample of the desired filename

e.g.

f2 -A 001.pdf -B 001_renamed.pdf

and this would automatically determine that every file with this "pattern" (001) should get the renamed prefix, so:

001.pdf => 001_renamed.pdf 002.pdf => 002_renamed.pdf ...

Sounds weird, but there once was a tool written in dotnet that used machine learning techniques to achieve exactly this and it worked like a charm. Unfortunately I lost the reference and never found it again.

Most important: Worked locally and did not send the filenames to chatGPT ;)
by benreesman | 2025-05-24 18:56:48+00:00
You get different models, configurations, system prompts (and DAN-descended stuff is like DMCA now, unaccountable blacklist for even trying in some cases), you get control vectors and modern variants with more invasive dynamic weight biasing. The expert/friend/coworker drop down doesn't have all the entries in it: there's a button to make Claude code write files full of "in production code we'd do the calculation" mocks and then write a commit message about all the passing tests (with a byline!), but some ops guy pushes that button in the rare event the PID controller or whatever can't cope.

These are hooked up to control theory algorithms based on aggregate and regional KV and prompt cache load. This is true of both fixed and per-token billing. The agent will often be an asset at 4am but a liability at 2pm.

You get experiment segmented always, you get behavior scoped multi-armed badit rotated into and out of multiple segment categories (an experiment universe will typically have not less than 10000 segments, each engineer will need maybe 2 or 3 and maybe hundreds of arms per project/feature, so that's a lot of universes).

At this stage of the consumer internet cycle its about unit economics and regulatory capture and stock manipulation via hype rollercoaster. and make no mistake about what kind of companies these are: they have research programs with heavy short-run applications in mind and a few enclaves where they do AlphaFold or something. I'm sure they created an environment Carmack would tolerate at least for a while, but I gibe it a year or two we saw that movie at Oculus and Bosworth is a pretty good guy, he's like Jesus compared to the new boss.

In this extended analogy about users, owners, lenders, borrowers and hammers, I'd be asking what is the hammer and who is the nail.
by gwern | 2025-05-24 18:56:58+00:00
Crazy how often it backfires, too. I wasted 15 minutes a few weeks ago checking a user report that a PDF I hosted was missing exactly half its pages. Eventually, after walking it through my workflow step by step and it not breaking, I realized that it was simply the PDF viewer hiding the horizontal scrollbar which told you that it was a two-page layout. We had both fallen for it. Thanks, GNOME et al! (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

(This also illustrates the fallacy with the sibling comment blandly asserting that scrollbars should 'simply be hidden when not necessary'.)
by smcin | 2025-05-24 18:58:00+00:00
His blog post announcing it: https://www.danvk.org/2025/04/23/boggle-solved.html

FT article: https://archive.ph/siaAO

His blog: https://www.danvk.org/blog.html

> Driven “by the thrill of discovery”, Vanderkam has searched for this board, essentially alone, since 2004. He would scrape together computing time on Google’s hardware for heavy Boggle computation, all along documenting his efforts on his blog.

> “As far as I can tell, I’m the only person who is actually interested in this problem,” Vanderkam said.
by i_am_jl | 2025-05-24 18:59:56+00:00
VR motorsport is fantastic. With a good wheel, pedals, and a rig to mount them on the immersion is intense, and the depth perception adds so much to the experience.

It's not perfect. The FOV on lower-end/older headsets leave a lot to be desired, you can't use button boxes/controls since you can't see your hands, and doing any sort of long race gets exhausting.
by mindcrime | 2025-05-24 19:00:21+00:00
Yeah, that's sort of what I was getting at when I said

> it really leads one to wonder what kind of economic system(s) we'll have

It's not clear how a future economy works if nobody has a job. If nobody has a job, how do they acquire food, shelter, clothes, etc? And if people don't have money to buy "stuff" then what need is there for factories to produce "stuff", or stores to sell "stuff" and so on? So does economic output just drop to zero? Or near zero?

Of course there are proposals around UBI and what-not and maybe one or more of those is the answer (if all of this comes to pass in the first place). But it seems to me that there are still a lot of questions to answer.
by derekp7 | 2025-05-24 19:01:13+00:00
And,even if customers are slower, having 20 self checkout kiosks is still faster than 3 cashiers.

My biggest gripe with self checkout is if I make a mistake, they call it theft. I haven't been trained and certified on the register, so I can't accept the potential for getting a criminal record due to a scanning error. Example: Walmart will successfully "beep" when scanning, but will display "system busy" on the screen, and the scanned items don't show up on the receipt.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-24 19:02:39+00:00
The Culture dives into this concept with the idea of hegemonizing swarms, and Bolstrom touches on this with optimizing singletons.

Humans are amazing min/maxers, we create vast, and at least temporarily productive mono cultures. At the same time a scarily large portion of humanity will burn and destroy something of beauty if it brings them one cent of profit.

Myself I believe technology and eventually AI were our fate once we became intelligence optimizers.
by FjordWarden | 2025-05-24 19:02:49+00:00
Yes, this is what Effect-TS is doing for JavaScript, minus the syntactic sugar, but I don't know if this is a good idea in the end. It reminds me of the Spring framework, DI is also a form of AE, but it spreads like cancer through the code. The other day I was watching this talk[1] from EffectDays on how to use effects on the frontend and the entire talk was a dude showing boilerplate that did nothing. I think that AE is a beguiling idea, it lets you express imperative code in a functional language, but in a language like JS the added work of wrapping everything in a function feel like a step down from writing the simples JS you can imagine. Just as a counter example, there is also canvasmotion[2] which also uses coroutines to express scenarios for 2D graphics and this feels like it is making something hard easier.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_jp87gxILE [2] https://motioncanvas.io/
by jtwaleson | 2025-05-24 19:04:04+00:00
Shameless plug for those who like rotary phones: I converted mine into a fully functional bluetooth headset, including dialing phone numbers with the rotary dial. The HN post didn't do well but it got featured on hackaday.

https://hackaday.com/2024/10/31/bakelite-to-the-future-a-195...

https://blog.waleson.com/2024/10/bakelite-to-future-1950s-ro...

Creating an alt mode for a bluetooth rotary numpad shouldn't be difficult ;) Now if I could only find some time.
by vladms | 2025-05-24 19:04:12+00:00
Let's not ignore though that there are some people with some control. These systems do not appear because of a small conspiracy but because a lot of people think they are OK and don't bother to understand the issues and organize to fight them.

I know an ex-policemen that is a good man but hated working in the police because the "public" was aggressive and were challenging them constantly (would not name the country or specific stories). From their point of view "automatization" would make police job safer and easier, and convincing them of the contrary has few chances.

The more "not-connected" is the society (with people not having a friend that is "a policeman", "a firefighter", "a teacher", etc), the more problems we will have no matter the technology...
by 037 | 2025-05-24 19:04:33+00:00
Very interesting, I’ll definitely give it a try!

Another approach I recently discovered is an old but beautiful Unix-style tool for renaming files: vidir - edit a directory in your text editor. It’s part of the moreutils suite [1].

You get the list of filenames in your editor – edit them as you like, save, exit, and it renames the files. It uses whatever editor is set in your $EDITOR env var, so it doesn’t have to be vi/vim.

You can also pipe in a list of files, e.g. `find . -type f | vidir -`, to edit just the files you want - and you can even change paths (add, rename, remove directories) in the editor to move files around easily.

To try it quickly on macOS: `brew install moreutils`

[1] https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/
by duskwuff | 2025-05-24 19:05:14+00:00
> Will people who condition themselves too well to tolerate VR entertainment also break their vestibular system, such as making themselves less likely to be able to recover from a sudden imbalance, or not automatically protect against a fall?

The sense I get from the article is that "VR balance" isn't essentially different from or opposed to ordinary balance; it's just a greater test of one's balance than one ordinarily encounters in daily life. People who have trained their balance - like figure skaters - find VR less of a challenge; performing exercises which improve one's balance - like the "flamingo stance" described in the article - makes VR experiences easier.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-05-24 19:05:27+00:00
From the Chrome store:

This extension adds a new option to your browser’s right-click menu: "Open link anonymously via Webfuse." It also adds a quick-access button next to links on major search engines for fast, private browsing. When selected, the link is opened in a Virtual Web Session — a secure, sandboxed environment hosted on remote infrastructure.

I like the idea and the following is more feedback than complaint.

With little detail about Webfuse, it comes off as some unknown entity and that seems unfortunate. Beyond that, the overall description raises more questions (for me) than it answers.

This is what I wondered when I read the description:

What even is Webfuse? Is the extension always inactive unless a user triggers an action? Does the extension do anything that isn't explicitly detailed in the description?

Regarding the rest of the description:

Whose infra are the sandboxes sitting on? What is logged? What is the policy for those logs? Are new sandboxes created for each opened link? What happens to a sandbox when a page is exited? Is it reused? Does any of it persist? For how long? Are former sandboxes scrubbed or just deleted?

I looked a bit and found the product pages for Webfuse - which were a lot more substantive than I expected. I think chatter about Websense (in the ext desc), would lend some legitimacy and cachet to the extension.

That said, I don't know what Google does/doesn't allow on an extension page. However, if you can better associate Webfuse with the extension and chat-up that this is a free Webfuse service, I believe it'd make the ext feel less unknown.

Regarding my other questions, those are things that I'd want to know. I believe they're things that security-aware folks want to know (and they seems to be your audience). Putting NetSec meat in easy reach might instantly generate good vibes.
by 6stringmerc | 2025-05-24 19:05:56+00:00
Oh Mr. Graham again. I’m not a fan. I tried to read along, I really did, and then I came upon this sentence:

“But not without method acting.”

This is one of the most terribly written sentences in the English language I’ve seen since getting out of jail in January. It violates every reasonable convention regarding communication. It is terrible and please take note that a person who put this sentence out into the wild, without intentional comedy, is a fucking terrible writer.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-05-24 19:06:53+00:00
This is the same conceit for rapid application development and just do the prototype in production.

It just has a lot more legs to it with llms.

I'm glad you're having fun.

But the world doesn't run on prototype code. Maybe llms will help being the quality of code in the last 20 years collectively up a notch.

In other words, it would be great if llms took all that "just good enough code" we wrote in the last 2 to 3 decades and made it actually good code.

I strongly suspect this is not going to be the case. Instead, the world will be absolutely tsunamied by an avalanche of not even quite good enough code
Show HN: Can AI Help Designers Ideate Better? We Spent 5 Wks Finding Out
by viclotana23 | 2025-05-24 19:06:56+00:00
We set out to answer a simple but deep question: Can AI actually practically help product designers improve during the discovery and ideation phase of the design process?

So we spent 5 weeks running an experiment.

We mapped every tool we use for discovery: Mobbin, Dribbble, Pinterest, Twitter, Behance We broke down typical design thinking and brainstorming workflows We reviewed every prototyping or idea-capturing tool we’ve used Then we tried building lightweight AI workflows with various LLM tools and frameworks

Result: Yes. Used well, AI can significantly improve design thinking — especially for junior/mid-level designers — by offering faster idea generation, design critiques, and creative merges.

Out of that research, we built Moonchild: A discovery-stage design ideation tool that:

Generates thoughtful UI concepts from minimal prompts Allows asking design questions and getting structured critique Merges styles, flows, and interaction patterns from multiple directions Outputs great Figma-ready screens and UX flows, fast Try it (private beta): https://moonchild.ai Use code 'hackernews' for early access.

Would love feedback — especially from product designers, PMs, and UX folks doing early-stage work.
by ianbutler | 2025-05-24 19:07:00+00:00
We’ve been working on a system that increases signal to noise dramatically for finding bugs, we’ve at the same time been thoroughly benchmarking the entire popular software agents space for this

We’ve found a wide range of results and we have a conference talk coming up soon where we’ll be releasing everything publicly so stay tuned for that itll be pretty illuminating on the state of the space

Edit: confusing wording
by porridgeraisin | 2025-05-24 19:07:19+00:00
Really nice, wow.

Honestly I don't see myself remembering and using the variables features(which gives the exiftool feature others here are raving about) but it's already insanely good without that. Love the ability to refine your selection with further -f flags. Also the ability to rename while create nested paths is so good.

Suggestion, having an "up"[1] mode where you can see the dry run output in a live updating thing when you are adding further -fs and -rs.

[1] https://github.com/akavel/up
by matiasrsantos | 2025-05-24 19:07:51+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m the solo founder of NovaSupplier — a B2B sourcing platform that connects global brands with verified European manufacturers.

Brands use it to skip trade fairs, endless email threads, and agency markups. Suppliers get a digital storefront and receive direct quote requests.

I built this because I realized how outdated and fragmented sourcing still is in Europe — especially for factories that produce amazing products but struggle to get discovered online.

The platform is live and has started gaining some initial traction on both sides of the marketplace. Right now I’m focused on onboarding high-quality suppliers and matching them with relevant brand demand.

https://www.novasupplier.com

Would love feedback — on the product, the idea, or how I could improve supplier onboarding or distribution.

Thanks! Matias
by serjester | 2025-05-24 19:10:13+00:00
There's the interesting question here - has embedding performance reached saturation? In practice, most people are pulling in 25 to 100 candidates and reranking the results. Does it really matter if a model is 1 - 3% better on pulling in the top 10 when it's probably going to be captured in the top 50? I think at this point the real frontier is making these models as small as possible to minimize hosting costs.
by dreamcompiler | 2025-05-24 19:10:51+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.

In my case I was talking about 500 mg tablets which are commonly branded in the US as "Extra Strength Tylenol."

The point I was trying to make is that the deadly dose divided by the therapeutic dose for acetaminophen can be as small as 7. This is a much smaller ratio than for most other common over-the-counter drugs. There's not much room for error with acetaminophen.
Show HN: I'm making students stay in flow state when writing
by esbenischeap | 2025-05-24 19:11:33+00:00
I'm a student myself, and I'll admit that I use tools like ChatGPT. Everybody does, that's just how it works now.

I use it, but I would never submit anything 100% coming from a chatbot. I always check it through, rewrite, and get frustrated that it takes that much work and time to make it sound like me. It ends with me almost having written the entire thing.

Some of my most used prompts has got to be: "Use less fancy words" and "It sounds too much like AI"

I know AI can be used in a better way, so I'm making a tool to assist you during writing, instead of writing entirely for you.

The idea is, while you type, the document gives you sentence recommendations in real-time. When you write more, the AI gets more context to come up with better suggestions.

This helps you to stay in a flow state, and avoid stopping all the time to figure out how to say something.

I've made a landingpage that hopefully explains it as well. If you like the idea or want to show some support, you can join the waitlist for free.