MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hinkley | 2025-06-20 17:50:47+00:00
> it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore

It is if you stay niche. It’s called market gardening. It will never equal farm automation for employment or revenue, but it’s a thing you can do as long as not too many people do it. The same happened to woodworking, and manufacturing. What you see are shops that can remanufacture parts that have either aged out of the manufacturer’s warehouse or where the material is the expensive part and reworking it is cheaper and almost as fast as ordering a new one.

The consumer base of these is smaller, so the supply has to be smaller as well, but not zero.
by ceejayoz | 2025-06-20 17:51:21+00:00
Affirmative evidence:

A small truck pays $14.40/day. A large truck $21.60/day. That $20ish in fees is distributed across the entire cargo of the truck; I'm sure we agree that the average truck carries more than, say, $20 worth of goods. NYC minimum wage for the driver/delivery person is $16.50/hour.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/conges...

"average traffic speeds inside the zone increased by 15 percent"

15% faster between stops seems highly likely to save that driver an hour or so in their day. Probably some gas, engine wear and tear, etc. too.

And if your delivery truck gets into an accident, that's additional cost.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/jun/...

"Perhaps the most dramatic transformation has occurred outside the toll zone. In Queens, traffic crashes in Astoria and Long Island City have fallen by 27%, with injuries down 31.4%. The reason, Schwartz says, is geographical."

This, of course, all ignores other improvements that are tough to measure. We've seen lower car crash injury rates - what's the per-capita benefit from that? What's the per-capita benefit of less asthma? What's the per-capita benefit of less road noise? (We have concrete evidence that these things are harmful! https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240621-how-traffic-nois...)

> go with the usual models for taxation that work for everything else

What are these magical models of taxation economists have wide consensus on? To my knowledge, tax policy remains a contentious field.
by kevmo314 | 2025-06-20 17:51:22+00:00
> are often erroneously cited as analogous to efficiency gains

Sure, I can believe that, but...

> doing anything of value for their own self-preservation

Even your own comment relies on some metric of value.

I agree that profit motives are not an ideal metric of value but as your comment suggests, we as a species do rely on some metric of value. I'm not infuriated until there's a better metric.
by onemoresoop | 2025-06-20 17:51:24+00:00
Cool, now you'll have to charge your glasses every day? I really hope this won't become the norm where all people will literally be strapped to their devices 24/7 minus sleep time. Oh well, we sortof live in this world, everybody's scrolling through their feeds already on their smart phones already. The technology is cool though, too bad it's used to extract all our attention.
by exe34 | 2025-06-20 17:51:55+00:00
You'd have to pick something that fits:

> come up with something truly novel, not related to anything it's ever seen before?

I've never heard of a human coming up with something that's not related to anything they've ever seen before. There is no concept in science that I know of that just popped into existence in somebody's head. Everyone credits those who came before.
by krainboltgreene | 2025-06-20 17:52:07+00:00
> There's a massive amount of not-yet-built software that can improve peoples' lives, even in teeny tiny ways. Like 99.999% of what should exist, doesn't.

We agree on this completely, however you and I know there are plenty of people without jobs in the world who could be employed to do this work. You are spending your finite amount of time on earth working with services that are trying to squeeze the job market (they've said this openly) rather than spending it increasing the welfare of workers by giving them work.

> Automation is disruptive to peoples' lives.

You know the difference between automation and the goals of these companies. You know that they don't want to make looms that increase the productivity of workers, they want to replace the worker so they never have to pay wages again.
by deadbabe | 2025-06-20 17:53:40+00:00
I have perfect vision I have no interest in wearing fake glasses all day.

And mobile phones aren’t going anywhere because mobile computing has peaked: there are no use cases that require a device with a different form factor, it’s just a matter of lifestyle preference.

If we’re abandoning screen based devices, I’d rather have a small 2000s style flip phone with all the latest tech and LLM features built in, than something like glasses, which clash too much with fashion choices. Bonus if the battery life is insane.
by absurdo | 2025-06-20 17:54:01+00:00
I was wondering when buffering was going to be a thing. I’ve been seeing it on YT and figured it’s the Adblock wars getting heated up.

The next step is to scrape the videos, strip the ads, store them on a torrent magnet and serve that instead. Yes it would have to be from a shady RU or CN or NK or IN site. I’m fine with that.
by SoftTalker | 2025-06-20 17:54:35+00:00
I think this is basically hitting the nail on the head. My town has closed a lot of street parking in the downtown, and as a result I rarely do shopping or dining there now because I don't want to park in a garage 3-4 blocks away when I used to be able to park on the same block if not right in front of the business. In other words, I had no other reason to be downtown, so making it inconvenient is going to make me less likely to go there.

But I'm sure there are people who are downtown anyway (work there, etc.) and who now don't want to walk back to the garage to get their car and drive somewhere for lunch, so they just walk to someplace close by.

So businesses probably lose some old customers, and gain some new. It might be a net positive for them.
Show HN: Vpuna AI Search – A semantic search platform
by vpuna | 2025-06-20 17:54:38+00:00
Dear HN Community, I am a long time fan and first-time contributor. I just launched a developer focused semantic search platform and wanted to share it with the community.

The idea is simple: upload structured or unstructured documents, select the fields you want to index and tag as metadata, and instantly get a clean search API you can use in your own app.

Here is what it currently supports:

- Manage your own tenants and projects

- Upload .json and .txt files (support for .pdf, .docx, .xlsx, .yml, etc. coming soon)

- Expose 3 APIs: search, upload document (embeddings), and delete document

- Manage your own API keys

- Uses CPU based sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2 for embeddings ( support for other local and online models are coming soon)

LLM summarization and Model Context Protocol (MCP) support are on the roadmap

Why I built it: In my consulting work, I kept seeing client wanting to move beyond basic keyword search and integrate semantic search with optional summarization. Most existing tools are either too expensive, too restrictive, or require custom layers (like custom Python servers for pre processing queries and embeddings). I wanted something API first, developer friendly, and easy to self host or use out of the box.

This is the first release, and I would love your feedback. Would you use this? What is missing for your use case?

Here is the README with all the links https://github.com/vpuna/vpuna-ai-search

Thank you for your time.
by WalterBright | 2025-06-20 17:54:56+00:00
The workers did reap the benefits. The Law of Supply and Demand ensures it. 1.1% of the US labor force works at minimum wage jobs.

When wages are raised by the government, job losses happen. 16,000 to 36,000 people lost their jobs when California raised the minimum wage for fast food workers.

> Do you really think capitalists would choose to shorten the working day with no loss of pay as productivity increases?

During WW2, production needed to increase, so hours were increased to 60 hour weeks. The labor force, very patriotic, was all for this. Production increased for a few weeks, and then fell below what was produced in a 40 hour week. Companies wanting to maximize profits are aware of this effect.

Also, if you track employee total compensation (not just wages) against productivity increases, the two lines form the same curve. The reason for this is the Law of Supply and Demand pushes those two lines together. The more productive a worker is, the more they get paid, as such workers are more in demand.
by jsaltzman20 | 2025-06-20 17:55:09+00:00
Over half of Y Combinator's latest cohort are building agentic AI solutions. What does this signal about the next wave of AI?

De-risking AI development is the top priority 11 companies are focused on making AI-generated code safer through testing, QA, and guardrails. These new tools will accelerate the growth of more reliable AI software development. Translation: "vibe coding" is getting enterprise-ready.

Web agents are getting specialized Moving beyond general-purpose browsing to high-value applications; from legacy system integration to automated testing. Agents capable of accessing and browsing the web can access more data and information than what is typically available in a company’s systems. This helps provide more context to agentic systems, improving decision-making, and ultimately autonomy.

Backend automation is the new frontier While most of the first generation of AI agents have focused on customer-facing tasks, this cohort is targeting back-office operations; accounting, CRM, system implementations. Currently, these companies focus on narrowly defined, specialized backend workflows. Expanding into more end-to-end workflows will require greater trust in agentic AI applications.

Regulated industries are no longer off-limits 19% of the agentic AI companies in YC's spring cohort are targeting healthcare and financial services. With 32% of vertical AI companies already actively deploying solutions, compliance barriers are falling faster than expected.

YC's bets on agentic AI are a leading indicator of where the sector is heading. For investors, acquirers, and operators this is a direct lens into the hottest opportunities and the competitive landscape.
by WillAdams | 2025-06-20 17:56:03+00:00
I mentioned my alternative (literati.sty) elsethread --- it's rough around the edges, and a bit awkward to set up for a new project or to add support for a file (two files need to edited to keep in synch) and it doesn't automate line numbering fully, but it's the best option thus far for how I work.

All of which shows why there are so many Literate Programming solutions/implementations --- it's a fairly simple problem (though I'm a lame programmer, so had to get help on tex.stackexchange) and it's easy to roll a solution to scratch a particular itch.
by stego-tech | 2025-06-20 17:56:17+00:00
> The part that is always skipped when making the clothing analogy is that for most of human history good clothes were a luxury.

Literally what OP discusses in their text, right in the first part. Go RTFA.

> and they would cater pretty much exclusively to kings and the 0.1% of the time

Oh yeah, I totally remember reading about how people in pre-modern civilizations were almost always semi-clad or fully nude due to the expense of clothing.

Oh, wait, no I don't, because people still bought clothing and wore it regularly. They just also had economies around mending clothing, updating it, tailoring it, altering it, reusing and recycling it. Rather than building an economic system of destruction for the sake of a handful of profiteers, it was an economy of artisans who provided a staple resource at reasonable rates and quality to support themselves. Because clothing was often tailor-made rather than ready-to-wear, people took care of it - and themselves - for longer periods of time. Techniques were used to keep articles sturdy for longer, rather than disposable machine stitches that fall apart in a washing machine.

Experts and artisans are not "gatekeepers", they are skilled craftspeople worthy of respect and deserving of compensation for their skills. To demand anyone be able to do anything of any complexity is to demand a complete elimination of anything that differentiates humans from one another, to create a homogenous mass of genetics with no incentive to grow and evolve.

Nobody is "gatekeeping" software developers, or Doctors, or plumbers, or weavers, or artists. Those all take skill, and people with a suitable level of skill can easily pass good credentials checks and tests.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-06-20 17:56:22+00:00
> in the end I, as the end user, only want one specific thing written to disk at a time

so you're in some sort of text editor, and you think that's all you want written to disk at a time.

but meanwhile, you've got a messaging app running somewhere, and messages are coming in, and you'd like to have a local copy of those for performance reasons, so they're being written to disk.

you've got an RSS reader running, which just found out about a new posting somewhere; it's going to write it to disk so it can tell you about it at any time.

your media control panel - you just adjusted that because the piece of music you're listening to is a bit loud, and you expect it to remember the current setting the next time you restart, which means ... write to disk. and the music player itself - that's going to write to disk so that it knows where you were in the playlist next time.

and so on and so forth.

the idea of a computer being a device on which you run one program at a time vanished before MS-DOS even existed.
by testfrequency | 2025-06-20 17:57:24+00:00
Cute spyware.

This is exactly why regardless of how breakthrough Meta makes their wearables, it will never reach full market potential as their brand will always be known as a privacy nightmare. Apple is going to win here if they can get the price right.

VR I think most people can rationalize it as these headsets are used in very controlled states, like at home on the couch or living room - but for Meta to convince people to use this in their every day life..hard sell.
by ranger_danger | 2025-06-20 17:57:29+00:00
I'm surprised they don't just inject the ads directly into the video stream, I think that would solve their issue overnight (not that I want any ads personally). You could also rate-limit it to the playback speed to prevent pre-downloading the stream easily. But now that everything uses HLS/DASH, it's easy to inject different content right in the middle of the stream without re-encoding anything.
by brudgers | 2025-06-20 17:57:31+00:00
If the app is useful, nobody cares.

If it isn’t useful, it doesn’t matter.

Sure some developers have strong opinions about this…and if you are selling to developers those opinions matter (most commonly, a job interview ).

But apps are gonna be shit for other reasons and the attraction of native-or-not is that fixing those reasons are much harder. Even when you choose to use theory to make GUI choice to add to complexity of development).

Or to put it another way, the simplest thing that might work means you stay working instead of thinking (thinking != working). Good luck.
by _345 | 2025-06-20 17:57:53+00:00
IIRC i stopped using this because it takes way too long to toggle on/off and another crucial mistake they make is that YouTube acts like its chrome incognito where you want full privacy and an anonymous browsing experience, I do not want that, I still want to be able to see my own history like my last few search bar queries, I just dont want NEW entries added when in incognito mode. essentially i want read only mode
by Viliam1234 | 2025-06-20 17:57:56+00:00
I am surprised that the highest upvoted comment (but also many other comments here) describes almost the opposite of the rationality community as I know it.

Now of course I don't claim to know every rationalist all over the planet, so maybe you met a different kind than I did. Or maybe this is just an internet stereotype, based on presumed similarity to other groups (such as Mensa) that most people are more familiar with.

For starters, it seems inevitable in discussions like this, that someone will mention "rationalism vs empiricism" as the One True Meaning of the word "rationalist". Because, apparently, each word has exactly one meaning over the entire history... and people at Wikipedia are foolish for having created a disambiguation page for this word. You don't have to worry; the idea of reasoning about things from the first principles is completely unrelated to the rationality community.

In my experience, rationality community was the first place where I met intelligent people willing to admit that they didn't know something, or even to put a probability estimate on their beliefs. That's something I don't see often even on HN, which is one of the smartest places on internet. Somewhere else in this thread, people are mocking Scott Alexander for predicting something with probability 30%, because that thing didn't happen. Well, yes, that's the point; probability 30% literally means that the thing is more likely to not happen than to happen. That doesn't mean we should ignore it, though. If the weather forecast predicts 30% probability of rain, I will take an umbrella, while still believing that no rain is more likely than rain. Is that foolish?

You complain about lack of humility and lack of acknowledgment that someone doesn't fully understand something. Well, how would you rate your own comment, from this perspective? How would Hacker News audience rate it? Oh, I don't have to guess, because it is already the highest rated comment in this thread. What does that prove? Should I now forever remember you as "the guy who was wrong" and HN as "the community that upvoted the guy who was wrong"? Or should I shrug and say "people make mistakes all the time... in best case, they are able to admit the mistake and learn"? Which is a healthier approach? Would I or my community get similar courtesy in a similar situation?
by echelon | 2025-06-20 17:57:57+00:00
There is no work from Miyazaki that should be more relevant to us on HN than Shuna no Tabi (シュナの旅, Shuna's Journey).

It was published during Nausicaa's run and has similar themes to Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke. It's certainly more brutal.

It reads like Cormac McCarthy's "The Road", and the themes are incredibly prescient for the world we're about to be living in [1]. It has direct relevance to everyone on HN.

https://archive.org/details/shuna-no-tabi-complete-translate...

It's a hidden gem and often overlooked.

Spoiler: [1]

.

.

.

[1] rot13(Vg'f onfrq ba n Gvorgna sbyxgnyr, ohg Zvlnmnxv'f nqncgngvba zvtug qrcvpg yvsr nsgre NV. Nsgre gur ebobgf gnxr bire naq jr'er yrsg nf n sreny fcrpvrf. Gur oehgnyvgl bs pvivyvmngvbany pbyyncfr nf gur ebobgf pbagvahr gb uneirfg hf naq bhe jbeyq. Ubj jr'er yrsg gb fpencr ol naq qrny jvgu gur pehrygl bs bhefryirf.)

https://rot13.com/
by koakuma-chan | 2025-06-20 17:58:16+00:00
It's unclear how it was supposed to work in the first place as there is no basis upon which I can decide who to vote for given a number of strangers I don't know anything about. I also know next to nothing about history, politics, economy, law, et cetera. Candidates usually promise things that are easy to understand of course, but as we've seen time and time again there is no consequences for not following through.
by abirch | 2025-06-20 17:59:03+00:00
"The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified version of the ordinary GNU GPL version 3. It has one added requirement: if you run a modified program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to the modified version running there."

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html

This means that if this company is successful and sells me 1 license, in theory I can request the source code and spin up Dr Evil's voice 1 billion clones and not pay licenses for those.

With other forms of GPL you only have to release the source code if you release the software to the user.
by goosedragons | 2025-06-20 17:59:14+00:00
But it's still sprawl. Yes, there's cities that can still sprawl more, but building sprawl is not the same thing as building a new city. You're just building a place for people to sleep while they work somewhere else.

You have to build something self sustaining and that requires jobs in the new city. You can't just have a connection to an existing city. You need an industry or institution or something there to attract workers and the workers to support those workers.
by johnea | 2025-06-20 17:59:25+00:00
"Cannabis scientists"? Who needs 'em...

Grow a plant, Smoke it, Enjoy...

All of the extracts, derivatives, and edibles ARE the problem. Stop concentrating the "active ingredients", and use a minimally selected variety of the plant.

As usual, all the effort going into making a shit ton of money for some rich asshole are f_cking up the original item for everyone else.

NOTE: maybe you're also familiar with a similar course of events on this thing called "the internet"?
by karel-3d | 2025-06-20 17:59:30+00:00
Sure but the question was "would user of modern macOS recognise Tiger" and he mostly would. Also user of Tiger could go to latest macOS without problems...

I mostly agree with criticisms of modern macOS, especially how it moves randomly closer to iOS, but one thing I disagree is the new Settings. It's still ugly as sin, but it's overall easier to use because everything is uniform (not each panel being its own special snowflake), and MUCH easy to search for. I used to hate it at first, but I got used to it.

But yeah macOS is obviously second fiddle now.
by boogieknite | 2025-06-20 17:59:36+00:00
this comment implies the real "other shoe" for which im waiting to drop.

im ok with nothing. if software dev is nearly completely automated to the point there are effectively no dev jobs then there is a much more important economic condition to address

im a basic state-school student who learned the memorable bit about Keynes regarding automating labor which still hasnt come to pass. at the time i kind of found it unbelievable we continue to work so much when then point of automation is working less, but i was a college slacker so any excuse to avoid work seemed like a good point to me.

to conclude this preamble: i have a sinking sense of momentum and my circles of midwit friends stare at each other like deer in the headlights with no idea on whats next after jobs dry up

my question: are there movements to prepare the society for the impending mass automation and layoffs? people still seem to want jobs, because society demands it, but are there movements by significant political or idea leaders to finally get off the work treadmill and go toward a Keynes-style chill out? i dont know where to start and any direction is appreciated

* i understand ai layoffs is a media scapegoat for the real issues with taxable R&D and interest rates. mass automation of jobs and real workforce replacement by ai is probably on a timescale 2x to 5x of the 10 year runway im expecting
by stego-tech | 2025-06-20 18:00:22+00:00
> I'm not infuriated until there's a better metric.

That attitude is the equivalent of a frog in a boiling pot going, "I won't leave until you have a better idea of where to go."

Value is - and always will be - subjective. Whenever society forms a centralized definition of value, it is immediately gamed and exploited by those who seek profit and power. Currency and profit are extreme forms of Goodhart's Law, the civilizational equivalent to "Tickets Closed" or "Lines of Code Written" KPIs.

To demand objective measure of subjectivity is to fight a fool's battle.