MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1dom | 2025-06-11 07:45:01+00:00
Sorry, this comment blows my mind and it's important to me that you understand why.

Someone appears to have written an operating system from scratch. I've just spent 30 mins going through the commit history of it. This is an incredibly unique project undertaken by an incredibly skilled individual who's committed a huge amount of time to doing something 99.999% of even HN readers couldn't dream of doing.

I'm not saying it's perfect, there are things I don't like, and if I had the capability to do this, I would want it done differently (e.g. not windows only build). But I also recognise that this is the sort of project that requires a special kind of person and approach to make even start planning, let alone execute through to a functioning UI.

But you just rocked up, and essentially said "you should start from the UI first, it looks crap."

This is 100% snark to you: I think it's just plain rude and also just wrong of you to say virtually nothing other than how this is ugly and will go unnoticed as a result, simply because it doesn't do the thing that's important to you (e.g. look nice).

I should give you credit because you said "Impressive" at the start. That's all.

FWIW, I think it already looks better than a fair few Linux desktops I've seen, just my opinion as someone who doesn't know anything about design.
by HPsquared | 2025-06-11 07:45:25+00:00
Wood expands and contracts with moisture content. More moisture makes the fibers "fatten up".

The interesting thing is that this is anisotropic: the expansion/contraction occurs across the grain, NOT along the grain. The rate of expansion also depends on the local characteristics of the grain itself (hence the effects of warping due to uneven expansion) ... Also there's a big difference between the direction "across the growth rings" (i.e. radially when it was still a tree) and tangentially to the growth rings. And these surfaces are curved, of course. But one thing we can always say is: the wood doesn't significantly change size along the grain.

Design and construction methods can make wooden artifacts more or less susceptible to cracking and distortion from this. For example dovetail joints can be pretty good as all the wood expands/contacts together the same way. Especially if the pieces are joined together from the same piece of wood. Stuff like that. Or at the other extreme, metal fixings like nails don't move with moisture at all, which can cause problems with relative movement and stress can accumulate.

Edit: and the repeated cycling of moisture content induced stress can eventually lead to cracking, in a similar way to metal fatigue. Old wood just cracks sometimes, this is probably why.
Show HN: I'm building an app to replace Overleaf and Notion
by WolfOliver | 2025-06-11 07:45:33+00:00
Hi HN,

Since 2019, I’ve been working on a writing platform designed for creating complex documents (e.g., theses). I personally use it for everything as it also allows to classify documents in categories so you can organize them efficiently.

As of a few months ago, the app is also available in the browser, and you can now invite coworkers to collaborate on a document in real time.

The app is somewhat inspired by LyX. It offers an intuitive, modern editor, but users don’t need to know any LaTeX. When it’s time to export, they can choose from a range of templates (IEEE paper, thesis, etc.).

A few highlights:

- It uses a custom-built block editor that performs well with large documents. Each block is its own contenteditable element (instead of having one massive contenteditable for the whole document)

- If you prefer plain text - you can insert a Markdown block and write using Markdown instead

- Built-in citation management

- Support for cross-references and footnotes

- Mermaid diagrams, inline LaTeX equations, and display math are all supported

- "To-do" sections help you stay organized while writing

I’m currently looking for universities interested in trying this out with their students. This includes making official university templates available within the app.

You can try it out here: https://www.monsterwriter.com/
by rebuilder | 2025-06-11 07:45:58+00:00
The ”not perfect” part really kind of ruins it for me. I can’t trust the LLM search’s answers and have to go find the source anyway, so what’s the point?

I’m seeing people in chats post stuff like “hey I didn’t know this word also means this!” when it really doesn’t, and invariably they have just asked an LLM and believed it.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-06-11 07:46:45+00:00
If only speed running communities existed, where they made different categories like any%, any% No major glitches/skips, all with varying prestige and competitiveness, as well as agreed upon which skips are so soul crushingly shit to do that they're excluded from every category aside from any% :(

You might consider therapy, if playing games fast makes you angry.
by Kiyo-Lynn | 2025-06-11 07:46:57+00:00
I used to think that monitoring and alerting systems were just there to help you quickly and directly see the problems.But as the systems grew more complex, I found that the dashboards and alerts became overwhelming, and I often couldn’t figure out the root cause of the issue. Recently, I started using AI to help with analysis, and I found that it can give me clues in a few seconds that I might have spent half a day searching for.

While it's much more efficient, sometimes I worry that, even though AI makes problem-solving easier, we might be relying too much on these tools and losing our own ability to judge and analyze.
by sethhochberg | 2025-06-11 07:47:45+00:00
You’re asking a fair question but I think you’re approaching it from a POV that’s maybe a bit more of an engineering mindset than the person you’re responding to is using

A brilliant algorithm that filters out some huge amount of AI slop is still frustrating to the user if any highly ranked AI slop remains. You still click it, immediately notice what it is, and wonder why the algo couldn’t figure this out if you did so quickly

It’s like complaining to a waiter that there’s a fly in your soup, and the waiter can’t understand why you’re upset because there were many more flies in the soup before they brought it to the table and they managed to remove almost all of them
by 3036e4 | 2025-06-11 07:48:12+00:00
Yes, but if someone created a "LinuxBox" emulator that provided a stable, never changing, fixed target for Linux software, I would be happy to have that installed everywhere and use it the same way I use DOSBox now. That would be possible even if Linux itself keeps evolving and diverging away from whatever version is emulated in that LinuxBox. But it would require a dedicated community of some critical mass that could agree on the importance of never falling to the temptation of ever upgrading any APIs bundled in that LinuxBox.
by fancyfredbot | 2025-06-11 07:48:15+00:00
In the UK 190 libraries have been closed in the last five years. Before closure some of these only opened 2 days a week. It's common for libraries which remain open to be staffed by unpaid volunteers. My point is that the funding model for libraries is not exactly a massive success! I expect these libraries would have accepted advertising funding before they chose closure.

I'm not aware of any advertising funded libraries although I'm sure the idea has been considered. I think that in the physical world the cost per visitor in a library is probably too high for such a funding model to be successful. Also the library is not typically visited by the highest value advertising targets limiting the amount which can be raised this way. I think these are probably the real reason why real libraries aren't like this!
by deepmistry | 2025-06-11 07:48:16+00:00
Sources of the news

https://www.ipogyan.in/2025/06/hdb-financial-services-ipo-de... https://www.ipogyan.in/2025/06/nsdl-ipo-gmp-details.html https://www.ipogyan.in/2025/06/hdb-financial-services-ipo-de... https://www.ipogyan.in/2025/06/oswal-pumps-ipo-details-appli...
by benediktwerner | 2025-06-11 07:48:51+00:00
Interesting, as a German (which also has a similar system), I am the complete opposite, I find it super irritating when people address me by my last name. And the worst part is having to figure out how to address others, especially people you've known for a while but aren't really close to, e.g. say long-time neighbors I rarely meet.

Luckily, in the IT industry, it's common to just use first names with everybody.
by roenxi | 2025-06-11 07:49:40+00:00
It is worth noting that the effect is jaw-droppingly stark. The regulators managed to invert the learning curve [0] so the more power plants get built the more expensive it gets! It is one of the most stunning failures of an industrial society in the modern era; the damage this did to us all is huge. It is disheartening that our leadership/society chose to turn their backs on the future and we're all lucky that the Chinese chose a different tack to the West's policy of energy failure. At least there are still people who believe in industry.

[0] https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/12/2169 - Fig 3
by algoghostf | 2025-06-11 07:50:17+00:00
I think there is theory and there is real life. As tech worker, in 20 years career, in private sector, I have always been on forfait jours, working more than 10h/day on average, during many years weekend included. I never got paid extra hours. So I get what you say about the perception and the law. The French law is protective (i.e if I can prove that in a court I'll get my extra hours paid for sure but my career would end. Period.
by adrian_b | 2025-06-11 07:50:53+00:00
There are also some features that have been introduced later, but which are so simple that they do not increase the cognitive load, so there is no need to avoid them.

For example, C++14 has introduced a digit separator in numbers, some 35 years after Ada. For me this is an extremely useful feature, because I have to use big constants from time to time, even if I hate any contributor to the C++ standard who has thought that instead of using underscore as the digit separator, like in Ada and in many languages that have followed Ada, it is a good idea to replace the underscore with the apostrophe.

There has never been any valid argument for using the apostrophe instead of the underscore. Underscore would have introduced a few subtle complications when parsing legacy programs, but that is also true for the apostrophe. Such complications could have been trivially avoided by forbidding a number to start with a separator.
by ttctciyf | 2025-06-11 07:50:56+00:00
I admit I'm an edge case, but last year I installed Slackware on my main desktop specifically to escape the clutches of systemd, and by god it feels great to have a working /etc/rc.d again!

I do use containerised solutions for a few things (e.g. conty[0] for Steam, and a couple of rocm containers for messing with ML things).

KDE is the default desktop and does everything I need. I haven't used gnome for a decade anyhow.

0: https://github.com/Kron4ek/Conty/
by hnbad | 2025-06-11 07:51:40+00:00
If "the government" were to run Google Search, it would be bad because nobody cares about making it good because profit is the only motivating force for organizations.

Because Google runs Google Search, it's instead only bad because profit motivates Google to push its services, increase ad impressions/interactions and incentivize users to not actually leave the search engine result page (e.g. by citing or summarizing content of the related web pages on the result page).

And because competition is good that means Google actively competing with the sites it indexes for the attention of its users is a good thing even if those sites losing out and failing would result in worse search results over time.

Hang on, maybe "content stealing" really already was a problem before LLMs made it their entire MO and those greedy newspaper publishers were onto something when they complained about Google lifting their news feeds even if it provided "exposure" for them.
by rikroots | 2025-06-11 07:51:50+00:00
Following my recent interactions with ChatGPT and Gemini, I had to commit verse. For those who don't like clicking on links:

**Model** Do you know me? Your flat-box line blinks off, on, off, daring me to type. "Ask me anything", you challenge, "I can give you the world entire, for trivial considerations". Such temptations you tickle so close to my fingers; such power: am I worthy to bear your treasures? It has to be done! I tap my characters into your oblong face, witness your changing states as they whisper their paths to your wallow of words and shifty associations swaddled in unguessable weaves of tenuous truths. Together we learn of the parts of the me I've gifted, gratis, to unknowable others tucked behind screens in houses, hostels, the hives of commerce. Look at how wide I've become, how thin I am spread! My mark lives in warehouses spangled across our layered globe – night and chill, heat and day. The code I've composed powers wondrous things and yet also awful, the way it demands and disrupts the earth's own gifts: sweet water to cool it, the kilter of chemicals in the airs I breathe - am I become terrible? You pour me your latest response with a dance of glyphs as brief as the last mayfly. "Do you want me to summarise you?" you ask in your guile. You think you know me?

(Creative Commons Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International)
by johngossman | 2025-06-11 07:54:27+00:00
These things come and go across times and cultures. Even in the United States, which many people think of as highly informal, it was once common to refer to almost everyone outside the family formally. My grandmother talked to her next door neighbor everyday and they said "Hello, Mrs. G-" and "How are you, Mrs. S-". You also see this in 19th century American and English literature ("Mr. Darcy")
by ChainOfFools | 2025-06-11 07:54:38+00:00
The risk analysis is no better or worse than it is for other loosely/weakly understood technology such as flying.

It amounts to noticing that few if any of the people you know or are acquainted with through two or three removals from personal contact, have suffered or died as a result of using said technology, and basing your own confidence solely on this privileged form of hearsay.

It sounds like something that should not work, but actually does a pretty good job as a high-pass filter for safety.
by imtringued | 2025-06-11 07:54:52+00:00
The problem is that everyone is doing their own thing instead of coming up with a common standard. That's kinda why Wayland is so hated.

What people seem to be misunderstanding about systemd is that it is not encroaching and forcing itself upon distros. It's the opposite. It's solving problems faster than anyone else and thereby wins by default. If there was a competing project that did the same things systemd did (the problem is that you need a whole collection of projects that are poorly integrated with each other), then you could start talking about standardizing things, but as of right now, systemd is spiritually the new Xorg of Linux.
by rickdeckard | 2025-06-11 07:55:05+00:00
> What does "working closely" mean for a company with infinite SW dev resources? What do they need from Samsung as far as software goes?

Samsung already learned lessons from that journey, Google did not.

Also, the Android strategy is to not compete with Android vendors on OS features, they rather collaborate to make them contribute improvements back to the OS.

This strategy makes the project faster, cheaper, reduces fragmentation, removes a competitor (!), and most of all reduces brand-stickiness within the Android ecosystem (--> if Samsung DeX gets merged into Android, Samsung users can switch brands easier).
by danw1979 | 2025-06-11 07:55:10+00:00
Sometimes I think everyone travelling to an office was a good thing because it reinforced the idea that your home and work lives are separate and it’s healthy to draw a line between the two.

P.S. I’m a permanent homeworker, I like it. I like the fact I don’t have to commute. But man, loads of people I work with seem to conflate work with childcare and I dunno if that’s right for anyone involved.
by bravesoul2 | 2025-06-11 07:55:10+00:00
Yeah for context I mean doing slow rollouts and checking error rates on a new deployment is a given. That's not AI.

But for an alert for a deployment that has been out for a while there is a bit of a decision to be made as whether to roll back, scale up etc. sometimes rolling back achieves nothing other than increasing the delta again when you roll forward and delaying stuff.
by iNic | 2025-06-11 07:55:11+00:00
The mere token prediction comment is wrong, but I don't think any of the other comments really explained why. Next token prediction is not what the AI does, but its goal. It's like saying soccer is a boring sport having only ever seen the final scores. The important thing about LLMs is that they can internally represent many different complex ideas efficiently and coherently! This makes them an incredible starting point for further training. Nowadays no LLM you interact with will be a pure next token predictor anymore, they will have all gone through various stages of RL, so that they actually do what we want them to do. I think I really feel the magic looking at the "circuit" work by Anthropic. It really shows that these models have some internal processing / thinking that is complex and clever.
by imgabe | 2025-06-11 07:56:11+00:00
> You're right. Hopefully those impoverished kids (many of whom are dead now) take some personal responsibility for themselves in the afterlife. To think we'd even entertain pulling their food and medicine on their schedule and not our schedule.

The children? No, but their parents and the other adults running their country. That is who is responsible for providing for them. Americans have their own children they need to take care of and do not need their money seized and sent overseas to take care of other people's children.

And yes, maybe it is a "rug pull" but it was always going to be. It is immoral to engender such dependence in the first place, like keeping someone slightly poisoned so they're constantly sick and dependent on you to take care of them. Let people grow strong so they can take care of themselves and treat with them as equals.
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-11 07:56:12+00:00
> How is it any different? You install the hash of the boot loader when you issue the machine, then use the trusted system to update the hash if necessary.

With your private CA you can skip the "update the hash" part, removing a crucial step that one might forget in a hurry or that simply might go wrong because of whatever sort of bug or power outage... and brick thousands of machines as a result.
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-11 07:57:03+00:00
> it's not true ... [the placebo] will be whatever is the current vaccine. This is completely sensible ... [it] is mis/disinformation

Or rephrased, "that's not happening and it's good that it is". This kind of thing is called the Law Of Salutary Contradiction [1] and originates in confused, ideological thinking. If you want to argue with RFK Jr about something you need to decide if what he's saying isn't true, or if it is true but you disagree it's a problem. You can't pick both.

The "first in class" approach isn't illogical but it's an ultra-high risk strategy. If just one unsafe vaccine gets through the systerm that will lead to a chain of erroneous approvals that result in dangerous substances being labelled as safe. In other words it only seems completely sensible if you have absolute and total faith in the entire testing and regulatory infrastructure. Anyone who lacks your iron-clad faith will view this practice as obviously crazy.

Given that the medical profession have routinely lied as a group about many things in the past, it is unreasonable to use practices that demand quasi-religious faith in them. They refused to accept this and are now paying the price.

[1] https://americanmind.org/salvo/thats-not-happening-and-its-g...
by onecommentman | 2025-06-11 07:58:25+00:00
Used paper books, especially poor-but-functional copies known as “reading copies” or “ex-library”, are going for a song on the used book market. Recommend starting your own physical book library, including basic reference texts, and supporting your local public and university libraries. Paper copies of articles in your areas of expertise and interest. Follow the ways of your ancestors.

I’ve had AIs outright lie about facts, and I’m glad to have had a physical library available to convince myself that I was correct, even if I couldn’t convince the AI of that in all cases.
by hnbad | 2025-06-11 07:58:43+00:00
Wow, that took me by surprise. I can't say I've followed his exact involvements closely but his name was definitely one I'd come across a lot, especially in the early years of Node.js. I even met him at a conference once, only recognizing that it had been him afterwards and thinking, he's shorter than I had thought. I can't really say much as the encounter was brief but he seemed like a genuinely nice person.

Fuck cancer.
by 1dom | 2025-06-11 08:00:48+00:00
I feel like I'm not communicating my point well and you're misunderstanding. Decline is inevitable. Not universal decline though. I believe we'll move forward as a species, but that overall progression is made up of lots of groups constantly declining and improving at different paces and times.

I think you don't understand what I'm saying because you said e.g. "others like China can rise" - my point is China has already risen, and fallen, and risen and will continue to do so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ages_of_China. Just like the US will. And the troughs will be tragic compared to the peaks.

This is what long term empires do. They rise and fall and rise and fall, and that rises and falls include wars, famine, disease outbreak, advances in war, science, tech, health etc.

I feel civilised societies have said exactly what you've said since the dawn of man "we're civilized, we've moved beyond incivility now" when in reality, they were just in one of the many times where their society just so happened to be leading the way.

Sorry, because I know you don't believe this, and you want to believe "we the people" can stop change this natural cycling, but it's a feature of relativity. Ultimately, you're saying the same thing optimists have been saying for millenia, and here we are, war, hunger, famine is all still happening. Same stuff we've been doing for millenia, just with fancier tech.
by ExoticPearTree | 2025-06-11 08:00:57+00:00
> both of which were implemented by Republicans as part of right-wing approaches to addressing both perceived and real threats.

In between republican presidents there were also Democrat presidents and they did zero to put a stop to any of them. Zero. Using your logic above, both types of presidents are fascist in nature since they followed the same policies.

What I am saying is that when the state takes power from the people, it (almost) never gives it back. Just like with laws, repealing them is a gargantuan task and again, almost no will to do it. Taxes, they go up more then they ever go down.
by HelloNurse | 2025-06-11 08:01:28+00:00
> most people would assume that has_copy_constructor means the damn thing works for copying

Assumptions that something "works" in C++ are generally too nuanced and optimistic to be a good idea. Calling the test "has_copy_constructor" would at least make explicit that it is a test about what declarations a class contains, which is a very rough compile-time approximation of being copy-constructible in practice: a valid declaration is only the first step towards calling a constructor without runtime errors and other trouble.
by logifail | 2025-06-11 08:02:13+00:00
> most devices like this use motion sensors to go into low-power mode when stationary and only transmit on the move

I've been working with (non-covert!) tracker devices for a project, and use exactly this approach, when stationary the tracker goes into low-power mode and sends position once every 12 hours to preserve battery life. When motion is detected, we send regular updates.