MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xg15 | 2025-06-09 18:34:56+00:00
> that I don't entirely understand

That's the bigger issue in the whole LLM hype that irks me. The tacit assumption that actually understanding things is now obsolete, as long as the LLM delivers results. And if it doesn't we can always do yet another finetuning or try yet another magic prompt incantation to try and get it back on track. And that this is somehow progress.

It feels like going back to pre-enlightenment times and collecting half-rationalized magic spells instead of having a solid theoretical framework that let's you reason about your systems.
by tptacek | 2025-06-09 18:35:53+00:00
I really like working with LLMs but one thing I've noticed is that the obvious transformation of "extract this functionality into a helper function and then apply that throughout the codebase" is one I really actually enjoy doing myself; replacing 15 lines of boilerplate-y code in a couple dozen places with a single helper call is _really_ satisfying; it's like my ASMR.
by stego-tech | 2025-06-09 18:35:53+00:00
It’s a double taxation thing. If the employer is paying taxes abroad (as in, a net positive payment to that country’s tax collection agency), then we should absolutely give them the IRS break on labor here; if they’re not paying taxes abroad, then they’re taxed on said labor here.

The idea is to reduce offshoring as a means of dodging tax liability for multinational firms. If they want the tax cut here, they gotta pay up everywhere else they do business.
by ndriscoll | 2025-06-09 18:37:06+00:00
You do, however, have $160k worth of software that is generating ~$16k/mo in revenue (or more since you presumably did not make that $200k evenly spread out across year 1 while you were developing the software), so in year 2 you could halt further development, use a loan to get through the 2 months it takes to make the money to pay your taxes, and then make $176k profit. Then you pay your taxes on year 2 and walk away with $152k in the bank along with $120k worth of software asset.

(Of course an asset that generates $200k/year is actually worth far more than $200k, so in that case 20% depreciation seems even more absurd)
by wahern | 2025-06-09 18:37:16+00:00
The Inca had wheels, they just didn't use them for much. There are Incan toys with wheels, for example. AFAIU the consensus opinion is that carting wheels never took hold in pre-Columbian America because of a lack of draft animals.

The Inca used spindles for spinning thread, which apparently was sufficient for their needs. And the wheelbarrow is, interestingly (TIL), a relatively recent Old World invention, with the earliest depictions from 2nd century AD China. Even the chariot didn't arrive in the Old World until the early 2nd millennia BC. And the chariot wasn't invented by the Egyptians or Chinese, but by peoples in the Eurasian Steppe. (Who probably not coincidentally were some of the first to domestic horses? More primitive wheeled carts were much older but also contemporaneous with emergence of other domesticated draft animals like oxen, I think. Smaller animals can draft, but the utility is severely diminished beyond very favorable terrain.)
by chakintosh | 2025-06-09 18:37:31+00:00
Some 15 years ago, A friend of mine said to me "mark my words, Apple will eventually merge OSX with iOS on the iPad". And with every passing keynote since then, it seemed Apple's been inching towards that prophecy, and today, the iPad has become practically a MacBook Air with a touch screen. Unless you were a video editor, programmer who needs resources to compile or a 3D artist, I don't see how you'd need anything other than an iPad.
by stego-tech | 2025-06-09 18:37:59+00:00
If we’re being honest, every country should want to preserve high paying jobs for its citizens. Citizens that get paid well have more spending money, which drives domestic economic growth, which creates more jobs…you get the idea.

Outsourcing and exploitative visas are a negative feedback loop that shrinks the actual economy vis a vis stagnant or decreasing wages and higher employment precarity. To have a healthy domestic economy, domestic employment must be prioritized.
by downrightmike | 2025-06-09 18:38:37+00:00
Glass is just flat Aqua without the style. Instead of a breath of fresh air, they are repeating the mistakes of dull and boring for the office that was mac os9 and under. Aqua was the break-away hit that defined Mac. Glass is like they want to make it nice, but management won't let them. Rehash of past glory.
by alistairSH | 2025-06-09 18:39:14+00:00
Possibly dumb question... For a medium/large company, is this really a big deal? Their payroll is relatively stable year-over-year, so after a few years, it all evens out (very roughly). Or am I missing something?

IE, is this really an anti-competition law, designed to protect entrenched tech industry players and prevent up-starts from, well, starting?
by captainmuon | 2025-06-09 18:39:22+00:00
It's just a shader, so maybe not in pure CSS, but you could probably achive something like that in WebGL.

About "only Apple can achive that": It would be pretty simple for MS to do something like this in Windows. DirectComposition (or whatever it is called nowadays) could set the appropriate shader when drawing windows. You cannot do it as a normal user, because you can only pick from a select set of backdrop shaders (but if some hacker wants a challenge, you could inject the code into dwm.exe to do so :-)).
by ryandrake | 2025-06-09 18:39:36+00:00
I'm not an educator, so I honestly have no idea. The world has permanently changed though... we can't put the toothpaste back into the tube. Any student, with a few bucks and a few keystrokes, can instantly solve written homework assignments and generate an any-number-of-words essay about any topic. Something needs to change in the education process, but who knows what it will end up looking like?
by ultimafan | 2025-06-09 18:39:56+00:00
That was a very interesting read, thanks for linking it!

I think the unfortunate reality of human innovation is that too many people consider that technological progress is always good for progresses sake. 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 and how difficult it'd be to curtail that kind of behavior. Instead any potential (before creation) and actual (when it's released) human suffering is hand waved away as growing pains necessary for science to progress. Like those websites that search for people's online profiles based on image inputs sold by their creators as being used to find long lost friends or relatives when everyone really knows it's going to be swamped by people using it to doxx or stalk their victims, or AI photo generation models for "personal use" being used to deep fake nudes to embarrass and put down others. 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. All the while they are making money or raking in clout fed by the real pain of real people.

If everyone took the time to weigh the impact of what they're doing even half as diligently as that above article (doesn't even have to be from a religious perspective) the world would be a lot brighter for it.
by joshwaller7 | 2025-06-09 18:39:59+00:00
I personally don't, but I run a tool called ForumScout and you could literally just spin up a listener for whatever news-related keyword you want to track and it will add all mentions to your feed.

And you can add an 'AI filter' where you can explain to the AI what posts you want/don't want and it will check every single post and make sure it matches your criteria before adding it.

So for example if you want to track mentions of "Trump", your AI filter could say "Only show me posts discussing his economic policies. Avoid any mention of his family or personal life", and that's what you'd get.

I guess it would be useful if you want some very specific stuff, but plain old news aggregators work just fine for me :)
by beloch | 2025-06-09 18:41:31+00:00
Welcome to the struggle physicists have faced since the development of quantum physics. Words take on specific mathematical and physical meanings within the jargon of the field and are used very precisely there, but lead to utterly unhinged new-age BS when taken out of context (e.g. "What the Bleep do we know?" [1])

You need to be very aware of your audience and careful about the words you use. Unfortunately, some of them will be taken out of context.

[1]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399877/
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-09 18:41:34+00:00
Microsoft was more progressive on this in the Windows 8 era but its customers didn't care. Back then I was going to Hackathons with a $30 Fire tablet and a $5 plastic clip and a $15 mouse and $20 keyboard, I'd remote desktop into a server so in terms of power I had a three-axle dump truck and they had Honda Civics but in terms of looks my tablet was the Civic and Macbooks and gaming laptops looked like the dump truck.

I think the main impact of the "two-in-one" was that the stewardesses on planes had to change their announcements to clarify if you had to stow your Surface tablet on landing. I couldn't get why everybody thought that they had to get a $250 case and keyboard combo for their tablet instead of just using Bluetooth which would let you choose many different keyboards and mice at different price points.

I got sick and tired of "silly boomer, don't you know a phone and a computer are totally different things" because video game emulation proved long ago that Turing complete is Turing complete.
by 9d | 2025-06-09 18:41:41+00:00
> The downside of course is that each step of the loop is not allowed to hold the CPU for arbitrary amounts of time, and must explicitly yield for long-running tasks.

Seems to me that a bigger downside is that the more apps you have open, the slower each one will become. I don't remember ever having more than like 10 open, but I've definitely had 30 tabs open, so if they're each separate procs then wouldn't that slow each one down by 30x? I guess if the whole computer is fast enough that's fine, but intense processes like video renderers would slow down noticably, even if not fast, even if just going from 1sec to 30sec. But in any case this is a really, really clever shortcut for the general case to get a whole operating system working, which is no small feat, and really exciting!
by vouaobrasil | 2025-06-09 18:41:41+00:00
I think the question of whether LLMs are useful for software engineering is not the right question at all.

The better question should be whether long-term LLM use in software will make the overall software landscape better or worse. For example, LLM use could theoretically allow "better" software engineering by reducing bugs, making coding complex interfaces easier --- but in the long run, that could also increase complexity, making the overall user experience worse because everything is going to be rebuilt on more complex software/hardware infrastructures.

And, the top 10% of coder use of LLMs could also make their software better but make 90% of the bottom-end worse due to shoddy coding. Is that an acceptable trade-off?

The problem is, if we only look at one variable, or "software engineering efficiency" measured in some operational way, we ignore the grander effects on the ecosystem, which I think will be primarily negative due to the bottom 90% effect (what people actually use will be nightmarish, even if a few large programs can be improved).
by cantina_recruit | 2025-06-09 18:42:03+00:00
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Ask HN: Has Apple lost its way?
by Zufriedenheit | 2025-06-09 18:42:15+00:00
I use a Mac and iPhone and appreciate the clean experience. But i just watched the WWDC and felt like the whole thing could be summed up in a 5 min video. They have so much talent and resources and all they come up with is slightly redesigning the icons every couple years. And now it seems they started to re-implement the mac UI on iPad again, i literally though that was a joke when i first saw it.
by whiteboardr | 2025-06-09 18:43:22+00:00
It’s terrible and an unsolvable “problem” that many have tried before and there’s no way of getting this right.

Transparent UI components always add noise by nature, especially glass that is intended to be realistic - see all the refractions shown in the keynote.

Aqua was also playful and suggested the same feel but never got in the way of clarity and was beautifully implemented almost feeling revolutionary at the time.

What is on point for VR use cases where this is taken from, unfortunately ruins a desktop or handheld experience.

A massive loss of precision, focus and a big step backwards.
by const_cast | 2025-06-09 18:43:31+00:00
While there is a risk of missing the forest for the trees, I also think that most diets fail because they're too perfect. You don't need to be perfectly healthy, and you don't need to eat 100% whole foods.

When we get into this sort of mindset that we need to be attentive of absolutely everything we eat then we develop a sort of adversarial relationship with food, and for most people that's just not sustainable. The difference between a successful diet that works and one that doesn't could be diet soda. Sounds stupid, but if you're miserable then your diet isn't going to last. Making better decisions is an improvement, and is MUCH better than dropping the pursuit all together.

There's plenty of people who are very healthy and they eat ice cream, drink soda some times, maybe have cheesecake occasionally. That's part of life, and for a lot of people that's one of the parts of life that makes it worth living. Conversely, there's a lot of people who try something like Keto and then eventually fail and fall into an even worse relationship with food then they had when they started.
by kylehotchkiss | 2025-06-09 18:43:34+00:00
I really dig apple's work. 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. Design is expensive and it's clear they've invested a massive amount of resources into liquid glass. It's not perfect, but I think they'll iron out some of the contrast bugs.

Agreed with other commenters that crappy electron apps will look increasingly out of place (... slack ...). Too bad LLM's coding efficiencies haven't been used to try to get us back to native UIs from electron yet. Companies would rather pocket the savings.
by triceratops | 2025-06-09 18:43:49+00:00
> if they’re not paying taxes abroad, then they’re taxed on said labor here.

Ah I see. You mean if the effective tax rate for a worker in some country is 20% but the effective rate in the US would have been 30% they have to pay the difference in the US? Interesting idea but if the salaries overseas are much lower, how much revenue will that extra 10% raise anyway? More likely the worker would fall into a lower US tax bracket.

I wouldn't mind seeing something like that for corporate profits actually.
Journal likely coming to macOS 26 and iPadOS 26
by rz2k | 2025-06-09 18:44:16+00:00
According to the graphics for macOS 26 Tahoe and for iPad OS 26 the Journal icon is featured. https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/09/wwdc-2025-live-coverage/ see 11:25am and 11:06am

I never used this app because typing on an iPhone is not ideal, nor is the iPhone multitasking required to collect media from other apps. However, today's WWDC Keynote showed the Journal icon in the banner page for both iPad OS and for macOS.
by jodrellblank | 2025-06-09 18:44:21+00:00
I'm fine with you calling sliced bread a luxury because it reminds you of how nice your life is compared to 'nasty, brutish and short'. What I wouldn't be fine with is you reading a car advert on HN talking about luxury climate control and posting "How dare you use the word 'luxury', luxury was solved with sliced bread, now you're moving the goal posts and it's not fair!".

And then you posting that again when reading about a luxury hotel, and posting that again when reading about a luxury cruise, and posting it again when reading about a luxury concierge service, and constantly reminding everyone that "luxury was solved with sliced bread and that's all anyone ever wanted from luxury and when people in Biblical times dreamed of an afterlife of luxury with no work and no suffering, what they actually wanted was sliced bread and don't you dare suggest that luxury ever meant otherwise".
by anigbrowl | 2025-06-09 18:44:41+00:00
DOGE isn't an agency, a fact which has been extensively publicly discussed. They don't have a Congressional mandate or any of the institutional infrastructure (inspectors general, well-defined rules and procedures etc.) that qould qualify them as an agency. 'Waste fraud and abuse' is a collection of emotionally activating buzzwords with which to score rhetorical points, not an objective standard of the sort employed in auditing.

I am sure you can think of situations where arbitrary and capricious decisions are made and sold to the public or staff at a business in the name of 'security' or 'economic necessity' or whatever, and that these terms are designed to limit discussion and establishment of consensus by creating a false sense of urgency. We should be cautious about letting unknown persons inspect our wallets just because they insist its urgent without clearly specifying how or why.

Here's an example (from the last century) of such rhetorical techniques being proposed specifically for their effectiveness in swaying opinion rather than developing policy: https://users.wfu.edu/zulick/454/gopac.html
by username332211 | 2025-06-09 18:44:43+00:00
Ukraine is inflicting massively disproportionate losses. Meanwhile, Ukraine does very aggressive conscription while Russia mostly deploys volunteers and only resorted to reservists in 2022 in an emergency. It doesn't really add up, does it.

And the collapse of the Russian economy will happen any day now for the past 3 years.

After 20 years of being told the military leadership of the western world had COIN all figured out, you're going to have to give people something more than a prayer that the enemy's economy will collapse all of a sudden. Proud ignorance of the basic facts of the field or of the enemy won't procure much public support any more.
by FearNotDaniel | 2025-06-09 18:44:48+00:00
As someone who’s been learning German for the past 10 years or so, I’m surprised I never noticed before what is the literal meaning of “umlaut”, I guess I just internalised it as a concept.

The prefix “um-“ usually modifies a verb to indicate changing around in some way. So while “ziehen” means to pull or to draw, “umziehen” means both changing your clothes and moving house. If “lauten” means to make a sound, then “umlauten”, of course, means to make a different sound, or to change the sound around. German is Lego. You can stick the pieces together to make new words, and pull them apart to figure out what they mean.
by chermi | 2025-06-09 18:44:49+00:00
Thanks, this is the closest thing to making sense. But it still doesn't make sense.

Like you said, this is a pretty weird characterization of software. I guess it would make sense to lawmakers who have no idea how it works. Combine that with the fact the lobbyists pushing this are 99% representing big tech and you start to get a picture of how this happens.

Warning- brain dump not directly related to topic, read at your own risk. Lol @ software never wearing out. I wonder how that works with something like Microsoft windows licenses(as opposed to something like 365 which has new "features" every year)? I'm actually asking, how do you amortize an "asset" that you are admitting only lasts a year? I know SaaS on consumer side is categorized as opex.

Does this capital-asset view of software have any effect on the attractiveness of SaaS going forward? I know we were talking about the development side of things not the consumption side, but it seems like this capital/asset perspective conflicts with the reality of how software is often sold. SaaS is partially justified as the cost of 'maintaining' the software (in addition to support and new features). The fact that maintenance is required belies the perspective that it's a capital asset. Coming full circle, this must require the vendor/developer demarcate programmer effort between feature vs. maintenance & support. If anyone has a sythensis of all of this or reference it would be appreciated
by processing | 2025-06-09 18:44:56+00:00
I built a lightweight grassroots advocacy tool for this.

It figures out who your reps are and sends them a pre-filled note based on what matters to you (you can edit/customize it before it sends). Includes a call script too if you're up for calling...

https://secure.legisletter.org/campaign/cmbpf5js80000l70d5fn...
by jchw | 2025-06-09 18:45:02+00:00
Oh that is a good point, I have heard of some free expression debate going on around the Israel/Palestine conflict lately.

I think the reason those don't come to mind is because even though they really do regard the interpretation of free speech law, they don't actually feel like they're about expression. When it comes to the Israel/Palestine conflict though, even the opinion that it isn't really about free expression might be controversial, so clearly it is.
by dmix | 2025-06-09 18:45:15+00:00
I figured out why I don't like the icons

https://www.lux.camera/content/images/size/w2400/2025/05/Mai...

zoomed out they look blurry and unrefined, but when viewed zoomed in and large (like how a designer probably created them) they look kinda nice. Too bad they will all be small on iphone.
by captainmuon | 2025-06-09 18:45:24+00:00
We have these brilliant high resolution displays, and these powerful, energy efficient GPUs that are always running and compositing frames like a game engine 120 times a second.

It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!

We can make things look convincingly like glass, or metal, or even materials that don't exist in reality. One reason for flat design is because it was the lowest common denominator and easy for devs to implement. If Apple makes it easy to implement this liquid glass stuff - Rectangle().background(.glass) or something - then it's going to be really successful.
by foota | 2025-06-09 18:45:37+00:00
I've rea confidential proposals for chips with very high available memory bandwidth, but otherwise reduced performance compared to a standard general purpose CPU.

Something somewhere between a CPU and a GPU, that could handle many parallel streams, but at lower throughput than a CPU, and with very high memory bandwidth for tasks that need to be done against main memory. The niche here is for things like serialization and compression that need lots of bandwidth, can't be done efficiently on the GPU (not parallel), and waste precious time on the CPU.
by ericmay | 2025-06-09 18:46:08+00:00
"Not true" according to who? They sure seemed serious to me.

I think you are having difficulty separating your personal opinion of those folks with assessing what they believed and how they acted. You can make the same argument about the rioters in Los Angelas today [1].

"Those who value XYZ wouldn't take ABC action"

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5340553-los-angeles...