MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adamwk | 2025-06-09 18:46:12+00:00
I’m confused, that is how it works. If a developer increases their target version to say iOS 18, a user running iOS 16 would be able to download the last app version that supported it, even after factory resets. If the third party developer dropped support for APIs or whatever to break that version, it’d be broken regardless to whether or not you had the app downloaded already.
by 827a | 2025-06-09 18:46:19+00:00
It feels like I'm talking with an LLM that's losing a coherent view of its context window right now. Because here's the conversation up to this point:

1. "LLMs are smart they have intelligence that is some significant portion of the breadth of human cognition."

2. Me: "ALUs are also smart, maybe that's not a good word to use."

3. "But LLMs can write essays."

4. Me: "But they can't do basic math, so clearly there's different definitions of the word 'smart'"

5. "Yeah that's because they're vibe-solving math. Teenagers also operate on vibes."

What are you even talking about?? Its like you're an AI programmed to instantly attack any suggestion that LLMs have limitations.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-06-09 18:46:26+00:00
The biggest problem with Metro is how little effort was put into properly adapting it to desktops. It tried to handle everything from smartphones to tablets to non-touch PCs with 27” monitors with the same UI. It’s an understatement to say that it was awkward to use with a keyboard and mouse, because it almost acted like those forms of input ceased to exist.

If Apple makes the right platform-specific affordances (which they have a much better chance of doing) I think it can work.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-09 18:46:31+00:00
Well... I'm torn here.

There is a magic in understanding.

There is a different magic in being able to use something that you don't understand. Libraries are an instance of this. (For that matter, so is driving a car.)

The problem with LLMs is that you don't understand, and the stuff that it gives you that you don't understand isn't solid. (Yeah, not all libraries are solid, either. LLMs give you stuff that is less solid than that.) So LLMs give you a taste of the magic, but not much of the substance.
by zahlman | 2025-06-09 18:46:40+00:00
> The author here compares 1k tokens (as an estimate for an average LLM single query response) to 1k web search queries. How is this not a factor of 1000 error?

The author compares 1k uses of the LLM - resulting in an estimated 1M output tokens, and the prices are quoted per 1M tokens - to 1k uses of the search engine (the prices for which are directly quoted per 1k uses).
by microtonal | 2025-06-09 18:47:00+00:00
It's so refreshing to get a tech event in 2025 where design is a huge focus and not just duck taping another LLM to everything.

I don't want to make this an Apple vs. Google comment (Mac user since 2007, iPhone user since 2009), but Google spend a good chunk of time on their Material Design 3 Expressive redesign at the Android event a few weeks ago.
by w-hn | 2025-06-09 18:47:10+00:00
Huh, this reminds me of the Photos app. Apple completely broke iOS Photos in the last update.

I really hope apps like Ente can step up and get better and native, offer desktop backup + sync both as well. But then there's always the chance that Apple will just find a way to shut them down. or reject their updates, just like they did in the past.

Anyway, I guess we'll have to wait and see what else they manage to screw up with this "move."
Show HN: I got tired of saving and forgetting - built this
by barnabas-szoke | 2025-06-09 18:47:31+00:00
I used to save articles all the time - tabs, bookmarks, even Notion databases, but I rarely went back to read or apply them. It felt productive, but I was forgetting almost everything I saved.

None of the tools I tried really helped me use the content, they were great at storing, but not at turning information into something I could recall or apply later.

So I built something small to fix that. It combines a reading queue with lightweight organization and an AI assistant that lets you query your saved content like a searchable knowledge base.

You can:

- Tag and organize links into workspaces and folders

- Track progress (Unread -> In Progress -> Done)

- Promote key items into searchable "knowledge bases"

- Ask the assistant questions about your saved content

It’s very early, launched the free beta last week. Right now I’m trying to talk to people who’ve had the same problem and see if this actually helps.
by lenerdenator | 2025-06-09 18:47:42+00:00
I like that there's support for locally-run models on Xcode.

I wish I thought that the Game Porting Toolkit 3 would make a difference, but I think Apple's going to have to incentivize game studios to use it. And they should; the Apple Silicon is good enough to run a lot of games.

... when are they going to have the courage to release MacOS Bakersfield? C'mon. Do it. You're gonna tell me California's all zingers? Nah. We know better.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-06-09 18:47:55+00:00
Sure but for a startup/new business with little to no existing product, that is a massive amount. Especially as any software that is abandoned (ex: due to a pivot, etc) forfeits the amortised deductions that contributed to it.

The only businesses this hurts are small or young businesses that have yet to develop an established product and reliably revenue stream.

For them in the best case scenario they make so little that they can't even deduct but otherwise this means taxes being paid pulling away from the runway that a young business has before it builds up a stable income stream.
by snyy | 2025-06-09 18:47:56+00:00
Great questions!

Chunking fundamentals remain the same whether you're doing traditional semantic search or agentic retrieval. The key difference lies in the retrieval strategy, not the chunking approach itself.

For quality agentic retrieval, you still need to create a knowledge base by chunking documents, generating embeddings, and storing them in a vector database. You can add organizational structure here—like creating separate collections for different document categories (Physics papers, Biology papers, etc.)—though the importance of this organization depends on the size and diversity of your source data.

The agent then operates exactly as you described: it queries the vector database, retrieves relevant chunks, and synthesizes them into a coherent response. The chunking strategy should still optimize for semantic coherence and appropriate context window usage.

Regarding your concern about large DB records: you're absolutely right. Even individual research papers often exceed context windows, so you'd still need to chunk them into smaller, semantically meaningful pieces (perhaps by section, abstract, methodology, etc.). The agent can then retrieve and combine multiple chunks from the same paper or across papers as needed.

The main advantage of agentic retrieval is that the agent can make multiple queries, refine its search strategy, and iteratively build context—but it still relies on well-chunked, embedded content in the underlying vector database.
by afavour | 2025-06-09 18:48:05+00:00
> if LLMs are improving developer performance so drastically

IMO the jury is out on how much they are.

> why are none of these gains being used to get back towards native app development?

because the different platforms are still radically different in a way an LLM can't easily and simply paper over. How do I specify a UI in a way that an LLM can competently implement it in HTML, SwiftUI and whatever Windows is using these days?
by rdtsc | 2025-06-09 18:48:17+00:00
The deconstruction trick is a bit like whataboutism. It sort of works on a shallow level but it's a cheap shot. You can say "this is just a collections of bites and matrix multiplications". If it's humans -- "it's just simple neurons firing and hormones". Even if it's some object: "what's the big deal, it's just bunch of molecules and atoms".
by YossarianFrPrez | 2025-06-09 18:48:32+00:00
From what I can understand, instead of funding various causes via "matching donations" QF is proposal for a funding body to do something like 'match in proportion to a blend of the donation amount with the number of people donating to the cause.' The point seems to be to smooth out any undue influence any one philanthropist or individual funder has and make the funding of public goods quasi-democratic.

However, compare these two problems: a) not enough people who can afford to do so engage in philanthropy, and b) philanthropic funding isn't quasi-democratically distributed. I have to imagine that (a) is a much, much bigger issue than (b).

I guess one could argue that because there isn't an analog of "a market" for public goods (c.f. "The Use of Knowledge in Society") somehow we aren't funding the important public goods "efficiently"? And maybe we should think about this more? Yet it's not clear that efficiency (in the economic sense) should be the goal or even applies. This is because markets are great at distilling people's the preferences for fungible goods they want to buy and fungible services they want to use when faced with multiple options for procuring some of each. But a) the vast majority of people don't have that same type of preference for which public goods should be funded, and b) public goods typically aren't fungible. (I.e., funding one scientist gives you a very different research output from funding another in the same subfield.)
by 9d | 2025-06-09 18:48:38+00:00
> Too many people create new tools, tech, etc. without really stopping to take a moment and think or have a discussion on what the absolute worst case applications of their creation will be

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." -Jeffrey L. Goldblum when ILM showed him an early screening of Jurassic Park.

> In many such cases the creators sleep easy at night with the justification that it's not THEIR fault people are misusing their platforms, they provided a neutral tool and are absolved of all responsibility.

The age old question of gun control.
by amluto | 2025-06-09 18:48:41+00:00
I've also written search code like this. It's trivial, at least at the scale of installed apps and such on a single computer.

AI makes it strictly worse. I do not want intelligence. I want to type, for example, "saf" and have Safari appear immediately, in the same place, every time, without popping into a different place as I'm trying to click it because a slower search process decided to displace the result. No "temperature", no randomness, no fancy crap.
by dist-epoch | 2025-06-09 18:49:28+00:00
Author in this article:

> Our only recourse as a field is the same as with naturopathy: scientific studies by impartial researchers. That takes time, which means we have a responsibility to hold off as research plays out, much like we do with promising drugs

Author in another article:

> Most of the hype is bullshit. AI is already full of grifters, cons, and snake oil salesmen, and it’s only going to get worse.

https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/

So I assume he has science research at hand to back up his claim that AI is full of grifters, cons, ... and that it will get worse.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-09 18:49:36+00:00
I see it the other way around. Freakin' Microsoft proved you could integrate a full desktop with a tablet interface and it worked just fine. Customers didn't care: most of them asked "who moved my cheese?" the other question was "do I have to stow my Surface when the plane is landing?"

For what the iPad Pro costs, Apple should have brought the Mac UI to it 5 years ago, but Apple wants you to travel with a Macbook and an iPad and a Phone whereas one sleek device could replace them all.
by colonCapitalDee | 2025-06-09 18:49:47+00:00
I'm not going to wait for some scientist to tell me whether AI is useful or not. I'm going to use it myself and form my own opinion, I'm going to look at other people using it and listen to their opinions, and I'm going to follow scientific consensus once it forms. Sure, my opinion may be wrong. But that's the price you pay for having an opinion.

I also have to point out that the author's maligning of the now famous Cloudflare experiment is totally misguided.

"There are no controls or alternate experiments" -- there are tons and tons of implementations of the OAuth spec done without AI.

"We also have to take their (Cloudflare’s) word for it that this is actually code of an equal quality to what they’d get by another method." -- we do not. It was developed publicly in Github for a reason.

No, this was not a highly controlled lab experiment. It does not settle the issue once and for all. But it is an excellent case study, and a strong piece of evidence that AI is actually useful, and discarding it based on bad vibes is just dumb. You could discard it for other reasons! Perhaps after a more thorough review, we will discover that the implementation was actually full of bugs. That would be a strong piece of evidence that AI is less useful than we thought. Or maybe you concede that AI was useful in this specific instance, but still think that for development where there isn't a clearly defined spec AI is much less useful. Or maybe AI was only useful because the engineer guiding it was highly skilled, and anything a highly skilled engineer works on is likely to be pretty good. But just throwing the whole thing out because it doesn't meet your personal definition of scientific rigor is not useful.

I do hear where the author is coming from on the psychological dangers of AI, but the author's preferred solution of "simply do not use it" is not what I'm going to do. It would be more useful if instead of fearmongering, the author gave concrete examples of the psychological dangers of AI. A controlled experiment would be best of course, but I'd take a Cloudflare style case study too. And if that evidence can not be provided, then perhaps the psychological danger of AI is overstated?
by simonw | 2025-06-09 18:49:55+00:00
If we assume that LLMs will make the software ecosystem worse rather than better, I think we have two options:

1. Attempt to prevent LLMs from being used to write software. I can't begin to imagine how that would work at this point.

2. Figure out things we can do to try and ensure that the software ecosystem gets better rather than worse given the existence of these new tools.

I'm ready to invest my efforts in 2, personally.
by RankingMember | 2025-06-09 18:49:57+00:00
> Rather than make them automatons that simply do his will he wanted them to love him of their own will the same he loves them. You can understand his first command as "do this because you love me and trust that I have your best interest in mind".

So he doesn't want automatons, but he does want unquestioning loyalty and trust? Is this not simply a distinction without a difference?

If someone we knew in our lives behaved like this with their children, we'd rightfully question what trauma occurred to make them this way. To create and then cast away those he created who did not act as he wished is the behavior of a control freak, not a loving god.
by schmichael | 2025-06-09 18:50:31+00:00
> Writing forces you

I agree entirely with you except for the word "forces." Writing can cause synthesis. It should. It should be graded to encourage that...

...but all of that is a whole lot of work for everyone involved: student and teacher alike.

And that kind of synthesis is in no way unique to essays! All of the other mediums I mention can make synthesis more readily apparent then paragraphs of (often very low quality) prose. A clever meme lampooning the "mere merchant" status of the Medici family could demonstrate a level of understanding that would take paragraphs of prose to convey.
by jecel | 2025-06-09 18:50:42+00:00
The Alto created the image from a display list, like the Atari 800 or the Amiga. So you could have a wider rectangle on most of the screen for pictures and a narrower rectangle at the bottom for displaying status. It was not up to showing overlapping windows. Nearly all applications just set things to one rectangle, having a frame buffer in practice. This was the case for Smalltalk, which is where Bill saw the overlapping windows. One problem is that filling up the whole screen (606x808) used up half of the memory and slowed down user code, so Smalltalk-72 reduced this to 512x684 to get back some memory and performance.

The Smalltalk-76 MVC user interface that the Apple people saw only ever updated the topmost window which, by definition, was not clipped by any other window. If you brought some other window to the front it would only then be updated. But since nothing ran in the background it was easy to get the wrong impression that the partially visible windows were being handled.

Bill's solution had two parts: one was regions, as several other people have explained. It allowed drawing to a background window even while clipping to any overlapping windows that are closer. But the second was PICTs, where applications did not directly draw to their windows but instead created a structure (could be a file) with a list of drawing commands which was then passed to the operating system for the actual drawing. You could do something like "open PICT, fill background with grey pattern, draw white oval, draw black rectangle, close PICT". Now if the window was moved the OS could recalculate all the regions of the new configuration and re-execute all the PICTs to update any newly exposed areas. If the application chose to instead draw its own pixels (a game, for example) then the OS would insert a warning into the app's event queue that it should fix its window contents.

In parallel with Bill's work (perhaps a little before it) we had Rob Pike's Blit terminal (commercially released in 1982) which added windows to Unix machines. It had the equivalent of regions (less compact, however) but used a per window buffer so the terminal would have where to copy newly exposed pixels from.
by buzer | 2025-06-09 18:50:46+00:00
Wouldn't "in connection" make this actually extremely broad? For example I doubt C-level executives have 0 connection to software development during the year. They likely make official or unofficial feature requests or give feedback. And if we really push that definition, if the software collected telemetry automatically from the user interactions and this data was then used to improve the software, wouldn't just using the software be connected with the development of the said software?
by mlmonge | 2025-06-09 18:51:07+00:00
Even worse, IMHO... Are those who argue that LLMs an become sentient--I've seen this banter in other threads here on HN, in fact. As far as I understand it, sentience is a property organic to beings that can do more than just reason. These beings can contemplate on their existence, courageously seek & genuinely value relationship and worship their creator. And yes, I'm describing HUMANS. In spite of all the science fiction that wondrously describes otherwise, machines/programs will not ever evolve to develop humanity. Am I right? I'll get off my soapbox now... just a pet peeve that I had to vent once again on the heels of said "literal anthropomorphosists"
by achileas | 2025-06-09 18:51:16+00:00
That doesn't negate what OP was saying at all, the better support in Python isn't for "running ML/AI code" but in things like agent frameworks, observability tools, SDKs, etc. None of which directly run AI code but are still helpful/necessary and for the most part better represented (and supported) in the Python world, although that seems like it's slowly changing.
by rowanseymour | 2025-06-09 18:51:18+00:00
I have not had great experiences interacting directly with LLMs except when asking for a snippet of code that is generic and commonly done. Now with GitHub Copilot (you need a Pro Plus I think) I'm creating an issues, assigning to Copilot, and then having a back and forth on the PR with Copilot until it's right. Exactly as I would with a junior dev and honestly it's the first time I've felt like AI could make a noticeable difference to my productivity.
by paxys | 2025-06-09 18:51:23+00:00
The fact that they haven't done it in 15 years should be an indication that they don't intend to do it at all. Remember that in the same time period Apple rebuilt every Macbook from scratch from the chipset up. Neither the hardware nor software is a barrier to them merging the two platforms. It's that the ecosystems are fundamentally incompatible. A true "professional" device needs to offer the user full control, and Apple isn't giving up this control on an i-Device. The 30% cut is simply too lucrative.
by zahlman | 2025-06-09 18:51:23+00:00
I haven't meaningfully studied those things either (i.e. beyond occasionally looking some things up out of curiousity - and for that matter, I've often come across the practice of philosophy in the wild and walked away thinking 'what a lot of vacuous rubbish') and yet the differences are so clear to me that I keep wondering how others can fail to discern them.
by csdreamer7 | 2025-06-09 18:51:29+00:00
> Well this isn't very long in terms of overhauling safety-critical systems that have many decades worth of processes and infrastructure built up around them, is it?

Do you actually know if 6 years is enough time? If so, provide info.

As for myself, I do not know. I do know once it was reported they were on floppy disks; they finished moving off it in 3 years. If wasn't for the media report I doubt it would happen. Once again, different systems, but likely public embarrassment motivated the move more than anything else.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/26/479588478...
by xyst | 2025-06-09 18:51:31+00:00
I would appreciate some transparency. I have seen fictional/theoretical scenarios around this simplified to the following:

"You have $1M in engineering expenses annually. So now instead of deducting $1M per year. Now you can only deduct $200K in that tax year. And then amortize it over 5 years"

But we all know this isn’t a vacuum. The US tax code is massive, corporate tax reduced over decades.

You are telling me this single paragraph in the US tax code is directly causing massive layoffs? Or is this single paragraph in the US tax code used as a scapegoat to initiate layoffs and then used to pump P&L and thus still approve C-level executive bonuses?

These big companies have access to massive accounting firms and they can’t work their fucking magic on a single paragraph of text? I call bullshit on big tech.
Building an Audit Readiness Platform for Startups – Would Love Your Feedback
by dillonatkinson5 | 2025-06-09 18:51:33+00:00
I’m working on a platform designed to help startups and pre-IPO companies proactively assess their financial audit readiness. Many early-stage companies struggle with identifying gaps in their controls and risk areas before the actual audit, which often leads to costly last-minute fixes and delays in fundraising or going public. Our tool aims to provide an easy, affordable way to pinpoint these issues early and guide teams through the preparation process.

If you’re a founder, finance leader, or auditor who’s dealt with audit headaches at a startup, I’d love to hear your thoughts — what challenges did you face, and what features would be most helpful?

Thanks in advance for your insights!
by ericb | 2025-06-09 18:51:50+00:00
I re-compress my thoughts during editing. That's how I write normally. First, a long draft, then a short one. Saving writing time on the long draft is helpful.

Slop is slop, whether a human or AI wrote it--I don't want to read it. Great is great. Period. If a human or AI writes something great, I want to read it.

Assuming AI writing will remain slop is a bold assumption, even if it holds true for the next 24 hours.

“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

- Mark Twain