MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by travisgriggs | 2025-06-14 06:38:52+00:00
> Flat design emerged when users had internalized touch interactions and no longer needed heavy visual scaffolding.

Huh. I always took the move, which I seem to recall as being led by the Google Material folks, as a strategic move to kneecap Apple's huge graphics advantage on iPhones. Apple's hardware could actually execute aesthetically pleasing "real world" things on screen (shadows, blurs, etc). Whereas the ragtag hoard of Android devices, had only a few devices that could draw pretty things, and at large power consumption. It seemed a genius move that suddenly a gestalt of "uh, let's all just work with squares of color, ya know, like construction paper" emerged out of Google as "the new cool." It was marketed well, and the "eye candy space" had saturated, so Apple was forced to "catch up" after holding out for a few years.
by empiko | 2025-06-14 06:40:17+00:00
I like to observe how organization affects how a company operates. As soon as you create a department, that department will start to generate reasons why it should remain being a department, as a sort of self preservation instinct. If you establish a design department, they will start planning complete redesigns sooner or later -- they need to have something going on to justify their existence. When I see this type of redesign, I can't help but wonder whether it is something that was cooked so that the design department can have a place at the table.

As a tangent, HR departments are very often affected by this as well. As soon as you have large enough HR, they will start generating ideas about how to waste other teams time. They have to justify their existence by organizing some events, trainings, activities, even if they actively harm the bottom line.
by sleepychu | 2025-06-14 06:40:53+00:00
Is it? I remain unconvinced AI will replace Devs in the foreseeable but I don't think this article is passing comment one way or the other.

The way I read it TFA is claiming that the Devs who built the Natascha AI suite did solid work.

Contrary to prior reporting there really was an LLM based product at Builder in addition to their earlier business of a large pool of contractors cranking out apps on demand.
by kolinko | 2025-06-14 06:40:57+00:00
I don't know about Australia, but in Poland, on Easter and Christmass, I can easily believe there would be no single bakery open in the whole country.

Also, it was before google maps, so they couldn't just google nearest open bakeries. It might as well have been "nearest open bakery they were aware of". Funny how modern tech made the terms "closest open" and "closest known open" virtually the same.
by mattigames | 2025-06-14 06:41:23+00:00
Like we put money in fixing homelessness, which affects mostly men right? Like we put money in suicide prevention which affects mostly men in every single country in the world? Feminism portrays a heavily distorted view of the world, such movement helped fix fundamental problems like women's voting rights, but it has a tendency for overcorrection and overestimating the number of problems caused by "the patriarchy" that are actually caused by "humans are shitty sometimes about some major issues"
by rwmj | 2025-06-14 06:45:37+00:00
I've worked in this sector (not at a university specifically, but a scientific lab in the UK). There are going to be two main issues here.

First off, many researchers from other institutions come on site and they'll be downloading and using whatever software they are used to with no controls whatsoever. These scientists basically act independently of the institution, in some cases not even having the same line management and being paid by someone else.

Secondly they get site licenses for a lot of what would normally be extremely expensive software (think CAD packages, EDA) for very low prices because of their educational status. If I was to guess, some of this uses Oracle Java. They won't have good tracking around what software is or was used where.

This all gives them an open-ended liability if Oracle come knocking, as apparently they did, so they'll be keen to remove "legal uncertainty" by paying the Danegeld.
by skissane | 2025-06-14 06:48:38+00:00
Right, I think we are in agreement - a pure Russian constructivist approach which only permits computable functions cannot prove the reals are countable. However, I still am sceptical it can prove they are uncountable-if you limit yourself to computable constructions, you can’t actually computably construct a Cantor diagonal, so his argument fails just like it does in NFU.

The (un)countability of the reals is known to be independent of NFU-it is consistent both with the reals being countable and them being uncountable. There are two different axioms which it is standard to add to NFU to decide this-AxCount≤ which implies the reals are countable and AxCount≥ which implies the reals are uncountable.

I guess I was suggesting that in the same way, an additional axiom could be added to computable set theory which renders the reals countable or uncountable. If an additional axiom asserting the countability of the reals involves the existence of a function from the naturals to functions over the naturals, that would obviously be introducing an uncomputable function-but for that to produce an inconsistency, it would need to enable Cantor’s argument-and, given your “ComposeFunc” in the computable universe is already restricted to only operating over computable functions, it is reasonable to limit its application to computable functions in an extension, which would mean the addition of this uncomputable function would still not permit Cantor’s argument
by delusional | 2025-06-14 06:48:44+00:00
I love the idea of a dense foliage of companies that offset the licensing practice of Oracle. It's such and odd and unexpected occurrence, yet I can't think of any other way to eat oracle's lunch.

You're basically betting on Oracle being evil, Corporations still buying their product, and those same corporations being surprised when Oracle screws them over. That seems like a sure thing to me.
by keiferski | 2025-06-14 06:53:10+00:00
What YC company would you consider innovative and groundbreaking - at the stage when they were small enough to be in YC?

Even the massive successes were still essentially novel takes on existing ideas, when they were in YC: Airbnb as Couchsurfing variant; Dropbox as file sharing service with a better UI; Stripe as PayPal but not terrible. Etc.

I wouldn’t really expect the average company at this stage to be groundbreaking.
by t0mas88 | 2025-06-14 06:53:25+00:00
Not really for most small airports. The plane is in the $ 200 per hour range, so a 1 hour out and 1 hour back flight is $ 400 in rental and fuel. The landing fee is more like $10-20 and often free if you buy fuel there.

Only big airports with mandatory ground handling are expensive to land at.
by perching_aix | 2025-06-14 06:54:35+00:00
They can, but won't necessarily. If you use a managed service, they likely will, due to batched inference. Otherwise, it's simply a matter of configuring the seed to a fixed value and the temperature to 0.

At least that's what I did, and then as long as the prompts were exactly the same, the responses remained exactly the same too. Tested with a quantized gemma3 using ollama, I'd say that's modern enough (barely a month or so old). Maybe lowering the temp is not even necessary as long as you keep the seed stickied, didn't test that.
by Zaylan | 2025-06-14 06:54:47+00:00
Early on, there were people who gave me their time and trust even when I had nothing. That made a big difference in my life.

Now I try to give back in my own way. I focus on doing my work well and being there when someone needs to talk. These aren’t big things, but over time I think they matter. Sometimes just being present and willing to listen means more than we realize.
by jakebasile | 2025-06-14 06:54:49+00:00
> Later on he says that never dealing with insurance is one of the perks of being a doctor in the military.

Despite not being anything close to an MD, a social media app I use has determined that I am. I get recruiting ads from the Navy that says this, in effect: "Don't worry about malpractice or insurance, just your patient". It's a pretty good sales pitch, I imagine.
by fnord77 | 2025-06-14 06:55:25+00:00
a Cessna engine costs maybe $30,000 to overhaul (every 1800 hours or so)

a Gulstream G650 engine costs maybe $4,500,000 to overhaul every 10,000 hours. Times 2.

a Cessna 172 sips about 8 gallons per hour.

A G650 guzzles about 500 gallons of fuel per hour

jet fuel is a little cheaper than avgas though
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-06-14 06:55:59+00:00
Hey, author here. The one time I go straight to bed after posting on hackernews is the one time I get a bunch of comments hahaha.

Yes you can add support for integers in various ways where termination is still guaranteed. The simplest trick is to distinguish predicates (like pred(X, 42)) from constraints (like X > 7). Predicates have facts, constraints do not. When checking that every variable in the head of a rule appears in the body, add the condition that it appears in a predicate in the body.

So if you have a predicate like age(X:symbol, Y:int), you can use its facts to limit the set of integers under consideration. Then, if you write:

age(X, A), A + 1 >= 18.

You'd get everyone that becomes an adult next year. Fancier solutions are also possible, for example by employing techniques from finite domain constraint solving.
by Joeri | 2025-06-14 06:56:46+00:00
I think microsoft made a valiant effort with windows phone. They kept it in the market for years and iterated, they threw big budgets after it, they made deals with app developers to bring over their apps.

You can point to missteps like resetting the hardware and app ecosystem with the wp 7 to 8 transition and again with 8 to 10, or that wp 10 was rushed and had major quality problems, but ultimately none of that mattered.

What killed windows phone was the iron law that app developers just weren’t willing to invest the effort to support a third mobile platform and iOS and Android had already taken the lead. They could have added android app support and almost did, but then what was the point of windows phone? It was in its time the superior mobile OS, but without the apps that just didn’t matter.

This is what makes apple’s current disdain for app developers so insulting. They owe their platform success to developers that chose and continue to choose to build for their platform, and they reward that choice with disrespect.
by teruakohatu | 2025-06-14 06:58:50+00:00
> For coding, this has started to happen and it's in full swing, what about other domains?

There needs to be a moat. I see all these startups with a moat that is no bigger obstacle than a puddle.

A local (geographically to myself) pre-LLM (Convolutional Neural Network) company invested in a huge moat, building a large training set of human labeled data ... I knew the moment I saw an LLM that could ingest image that their moat had evaporated in an instant. A lot of the technical staff either left or lost their jobs but the company appears to be limping on hoping for an exit.

If a startup depends on a secret prompt and a few MCP servers, they have no moat.

I think the next wave of AI-based SaaS (rather than pure AI API providers) will be companies like the Legal IDE (Tritium [1]), recently featured on the homepage. Tools that innovate and use AI, but would still be innovate even without it.

[1] I have no affiliation whatsoever. I just liked the demo and the concept.
by IhusanAdam | 2025-06-14 06:59:47+00:00
Hi HN,

We built LandscapioAI because getting a realistic budget for even a small backyard redesign still involves (a) paying a designer $1–3 k or (b) guesstimating from Pinterest photos and hoping Home Depot pricing is close. Both are bad for DIYers and for pros quoting jobs.

What it does Upload a photo (or use satellite view).

Pick style + rough budget.

In ~60 s you get:

an image-to-image redesign (before/after)

a line-item material + labour budget with upper / lower bounds (we target ±15 % accuracy)

a contractor-ready PDF brief (zones, materials, plant list, sqft & cubic-yard calcs)

How it works Vision stack – Veo 3 for the render; Segment-Anything for yard boundaries; a small ControlNet for consistent hard-scape outlines.

Cost engine – LLM (Mixtral 8x22B, fine-tuned) that pulls region-specific price data from our internal crawler (250 U.S. zip codes so far) and checks against RSMeans public feeds.

Latency / cost – Avg cold start 71 s on a single A10 GPU; warm 24 s. Each render + estimate costs us $0.07.

Front end – Next.js + tRPC; everything behind Cloudflare → S3-signed URLs for assets.

Data we store – Input images (expire after 14 days), anonymised cost queries, and opt-in e-mails. No geolocation stored past the session.

Why ±15 % matters Contractors typically pad bids by 20–30 % because customers have no baseline. Even if our output is imperfect, it narrows the expectation gap enough that both sides waste less time on re-quotes.

What’s free vs paid Free plan: 3 designs + 5 revisions per day, standard-res images.

Paid starts at $9/week (hi-res, unlimited, priority GPU queue).

Open questions / things we’re iterating Extending the cost dataset outside the U.S. (any sources for EU wholesale pricing would help).

Adding slope/topography handling — right now we assume flat ground.

Local-first processing for privacy-sensitive enterprise pilots (garden-center chains).

Would love feedback on:

data-quality / accuracy scepticism (we expect it!)

architectural bottlenecks you see

whether the UX gets out of your way fast enough

Thanks for taking a look — will be here all day to answer questions.
by b0a04gl | 2025-06-14 07:02:05+00:00
i tried writing a tiny logic engine once after reading the SICP chapter and yeah, the syntax part was easy to mimic but the actual backtracking logic hit me harder than expected. what helped was thinking of it less like solving and more like building a lazy search tree. once that clicked, i stopped trying to force control flow and just let the tree expand. one thing i didn’t see many mention handling stateful part or side effects blows up fast. even printing during backtracking messes the whole thing. most tutorials avoid that part completely
by kriro | 2025-06-14 07:04:43+00:00
This strikes me as very odd. First of all, what's in it for the execs. Surely pay is worse so there must be some insider benefit. Or can they hold both positions? That just screams conflict of interest.

Secondly, why execs instead of people with actual technical skills. Surely military execs are already better prepared at managing military than some tech execs.

Lastly, as a non-U.S. citizen the optics seem horrible to me. Fire generals/people who served "the normal way" and bring in tech execs...that's gotta piss of just about anyone who ever served as a storyline or am I totally off base here?
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-06-14 07:05:15+00:00
I mention the intuition in passing (you have an object graph with complex bidirectional and derived relationships). Any example that would truly show the benefit would be too big to show on a blog post. Treat it like the world's smartest database, that's the key.

Another example would be something like an Entity Component System. The moment it starts getting complex (i.e., you have fancy queries and joins), then you're actually implementing a really shitty relational programming engine, and you might as well just implement Datalog instead at that point and reap the benefits.

Other kinds of search problems are probably better tackled by constraint programming instead.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-06-14 07:07:13+00:00
Experiments are repeated if someone else is looking to expand on the work actually... it's just that if it doesn't work, no one wants to go to the effort of publishing that since it's a lot of effort and there'll be politics with the original author and there's the possibility that it was just a "push it through to satisfy the metrics" paper that every researcher "allows" every other researcher purely out of sympathy and there's the review process and deadlines and rebuttals and more deadlines and...

I suppose if you only value this entire end to end process then the experiment is not being repeated at all, but yeah, most things just get discarded when they don't work.
by goku12 | 2025-06-14 07:09:17+00:00
There's no question that diseases like endometriosis and breast cancer needs to go. The medical research community is very self-critical about anti-female biases and there are numerous papers and articles about it. And that's good. If endometriosis is not getting the attention it deserves, then push for it by all means. Men don't really understand it for obvious reasons. But it isn't a big task to get their support by creating awareness. Articles like this is a step in that direction.

But can we please avoid dragging men through the mud in matters they have no awareness or influence on? Why must a top-level comment about endometriosis, a disease that affects only women, implicate men in anyway? What makes you feel that men are fine with watching their female kin (or any women) suffer from any of those? Why would men like me even be reading this article if we aren't open to the experience of the others? Let's consider the fact that prostrate and testicular cancers don't receive anywhere near as much attention as breast and ovarian cancer. So the top comment is rhetorical and objectively false. Imagine if a man you know gets prostrate cancer and someone comments that there would be better treatment for it affected women too. How would you feel?

I hate saying this here on the comment section about an important medical condition. Can we discuss women's issues objectively without looking for ways to blame men somehow? Why such hostility against men? I see this far too often and on far too many random topics - it's disheartening and depressing. Look at the way the discussion thread progressed. The top comment that mentions men unfavorably and unreasonably is upvoted and defended, while the opposing views are passionately argued against and even flagged. This is actually a recurring and unhealthy pattern on HN. Expressing male perspective is an easy way to get flagged - even if no hostility is intended (mods please note). Is this how we're going to achieve awareness on gender-specific issues and gender parity?
by eru | 2025-06-14 07:09:59+00:00
> Or does using Go ruin everything again?

Go isn't the only language ecosystem that likes to make statically linked binaries. Rust, OCaml and Haskell etc also prefer this.

Or am I missing something?

I think dynamic linking is mainly popular in the C (and perhaps C++) world? And I guess for commonly interpreted languages like Python, more or less.
by 112233 | 2025-06-14 07:11:20+00:00
Not only that, I have observed people reversing the flow and claiming everything is AI because it uses similar maths. E.g. I saw a guy with "AI degree" argue at lenght that weather forecast models are AI because the numerical solver works similarly to the gradient descent.

This may seem inconsequential and pretentious at first, but it feels like a "land grab" by the AI-adjacent people, trying to claim authority over anything that numerically minimizes differetiable function value.
by int_19h | 2025-06-14 07:13:02+00:00
Win7 had translucency, and it looked way better than Win8+. Vista looked meh because it overdid it initially, but Win7 dialed it down (mostly with "frosted glass" effect) in most places to where it didn't impede contrast, and added various ways to highlight text in places where it was directly overlaid over glass.

Judging from the demos, Apple's version is even more translucent than Vista, so I have no doubt that it'll be bad.
by shakna | 2025-06-14 07:13:08+00:00
Don't worry, we are susceptible to many pain conditions. Some of which are worse, and some of which women can get, too.

And of these more painful conditions the research is... Just as lacking. I do get the desperation for... Something. Anything.

Actually Covid saw the biggest research boost - my own is seen as a good control for long covid. A number of autoimmune conditions got similar increased interest. Right up until a political group decided covid research was a nice target.

(I've been in pain for 2/3rds of my life. Pain generally described as exceeding childbirth. There is never a lull. There is no treatment that works.)
by xelxebar | 2025-06-14 07:13:16+00:00
Ooo. Very cool. You just set off a storm of interesting connections for me. Assuming some ergodic process for distributing wealth then the asymptotic expectation for wealth inequality reduces to looking at random integer partitions.

Blah blah, jargon. Mostly thinking out loud here.

Basically, you're making the astute observation that the majority of configurations fill all wealth brackets... I think? The maxentropy distribution involves maximizing over products of combinations, and I'm just gut feeling at the moment.

How does this jibe with the supposedly empirical observation that wealth tends to follow a Pareto distribution?

Very cool. Thanks for kicking off the this conceptual avalanche!
by ncruces | 2025-06-14 07:15:50+00:00
I implemented these in my attempt to SIMD optimize Wasm/WASI libc.

https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3/tree/main/sqlite3/libc

For known haystack lengths, and large needles, I found it useful to augment the approach with Quick Search.

https://igm.univ-mlv.fr/~lecroq/string/node19.html
by calrain | 2025-06-14 07:16:48+00:00
I wonder if this is linked to the reason that so many people become nauseous with 3D glasses.

When we see 3d movements that don't correlate with what our inner ears, the response is that our body assumes something is wrong, we have ingested a toxin, and a nausea / vomit response is created.

There is something visually jarring about this Liquid Glass UI, and it's possible it's related to movements not correlating with an internal frame of reference.
by DidYaWipe | 2025-06-14 07:17:15+00:00
Yep. This is another semi-fawning, apologistic article full of made-up assertions.

It ignores the fact that there has been a welcome step back from the derelict wasteland of "flat design" that users have endured for far too long. Flat design is often cited as a reaction to absurd levels of skeuomorphism, which Apple certainly WAS a leader in. Remember the "felt" surfaces of Game Center, the "paint" upon which was inexplicably a control? And the "leather" binding of Notes?

Then there's this: "In AR, visual affordances work differently. A button that casts realistic shadows and responds to virtual lighting feels more "real" when floating in your living room than a flat, colored rectangle."

That makes it a SHITTY control, which will get lost in the visual noise of the real environment. This UI sucks for the same reason that sports-stats graphics that are tracked onto real surfaces in TV coverage suck: They don't stand out. It's that simple.

So after years of "flat" design where nothing was demarcated as a control and users were apparently supposed to click on every pixel and every character on the screen in a hunt for hidden goodies, this article celebrates Apple's plan to create the same problem in AR using OVERLY-decorated controls.

Not to mention the stupidity of crippling computer, tablet, and phone UI for the sake of a "VR" UI. This isn't just dumb from a practical standpoint, but from a technical one as well. There's no reason that the control library can't be rendered differently on different devices. So, if this (admittedly poorly-substantiated opinion piece) is right about the motivation behind Apple's exhumation of the "transparent" UI fad that died 20 years ago, we can only lament the end of desktop usability... which Windows flushed vigorously with Microsoft's brain-dead attempt to dumb its UI down for touchscreens years ago.