MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-24 06:37:23+00:00
I don't know of a single person who has switched to a smaller phone after having a bigger one (though also don't know anyone who bought a phablet, so maybe that's too big). As people moved most of their computer use to phones, bigger phones where you can see more of the web on your page, while still fitting in your pocket or purse, have won decidedly.

By and large, the only people who want small phones are those that still do most of their computing and media consumption on a PC or laptop. And that's becoming much, much rarer (and gaming doesn't really count here - lots of gamers have a separate stream or something on their phones while playing).
by timewizard | 2025-06-24 06:38:43+00:00
> Related to System Restore points is the Recall feature which uses AI in its functions. “It captures your screen every few seconds and knows what you are doing. Recall understands everything, including people you talk to, files you share, and more.

Corporate America has become a relentless cretinous stalker.

> It's a feature that’s not present in Windows 10, so is a key way to encourage users to move to the latest OS.

Worse still they think their victims enjoy the harassment they receive.
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-24 06:39:21+00:00
Windows used to allow way more than 10 days of restore points. When enabled, it'll fill up the storage quota assigned to restore points and delete the oldest one(s) when making a new one in low space scenarios. It has done that for ages now. I believe Windows will use 10% of the drive (max) for system restore points, though often I've seen that number lower by itself (I think when the disk is running out of free space? I don't know the mechanism that reduces the percentage).

Windows now doesn't let you restore restore points from over two months ago. That used to be longer, but they seem to have restricted the maximum retention time for some reason. I'm curious why, but I doubt they just arbitrarily decided to lower the retention time for shits and giggles.
by mynti | 2025-06-24 06:39:31+00:00
i think the difference is that now someone with no coding knowledge could start describing software and make the agent build that software iteratively. so for example a mechanical engineer wants to build some simulation tool. you still need to define those requirements and understand what you want to do but the work could be (and this is the big if still, if agents become good enough for this sort of work) done by the agent not a humand programmer. i do not see that happening at the moment but still this does change the dynamic. you are right in that it is not a silver bullet and a lot of the complexity is impossible to get rid of. but i wonder if for a lot of use cases there will not be a software engineer in the loop. for bigger systems, for sure, but for a lot of smaller business software?
by forty | 2025-06-24 06:39:42+00:00
Yes, people often get that wrong, it's not modular or upgradable, it's repairable, which is already great.

IMO we are far past the point when we should have decided smartphone hardware is good enough, and stop having people upgrade over and over. But I guess capitalism needs to be fed and everything is made to make sure that never happens (including making sure everyone thinks we do need better hardware)
by freekh | 2025-06-24 06:40:48+00:00
> It's entirely possible that we do become obsolete for a wide variety of programming domains. That's simply a reality…

It is not a reality since it has not happen. In the real world it has not happened.

There is no reason to believe that the current rate of progress will continue. Intelligence is not like the weaving machines. A software engineer is not a human calculator.
by robogator | 2025-06-24 06:42:04+00:00
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by globular-toast | 2025-06-24 06:42:51+00:00
I said you don't have to think about venvs any more. It's great that we have a standard way to implement them, but this is only necessary in the first place because of the way Python is. Now we have a tool that enforces a workflow that creates virtualenvs without you having to know about them and therefore not screwing them up with ad hoc pip installs etc.
by iamqhsin | 2025-06-24 06:44:25+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m a solo founder building tools to grow startups without ads or cold email.

I realized I kept wasting time on outreach that didn’t convert: writing emails, scraping leads, guessing what people want.

So I built QuickGen AI for 2 reasons:

1. Auto-create AI lead magnets that actually convert 2. Help indie builders grow lists fast with high-intent leads

I used this method myself and collected 8,000 leads at a 10% conversion rate.

Hope this is useful for anyone trying to grow something from scratch. Would love your feedback!

Luna
by mylesp | 2025-06-24 06:45:10+00:00
This whole article reads like it was written by someone with no ability to step back for a second and think of other much easier solutions. They just go all in on the first thing they think of even when it is not effective at all.

Just increase the increment size, or if you really want 1c increments you could precompute every 5c or so and then just do linear interpolation between them.
by close04 | 2025-06-24 06:45:47+00:00
> Because that was what Windows did

Windows Me. Why bring up an operating model from 24 years ago if people got used to a different one now, with SR on by default?

60 days compared to the old 10-90 days doesn't sound too bad for most users, especially if it used to be "mostly 10 days". Probably every installer now creates a restore point quickly reaching the disk quota (used to be 10%).

Not sure why it's not configurable though. After all, it's local storage on my machine and my OS. So based on this alone a decision to enforce any deletion policy that the user can't control is MS being MS again.
by toast0 | 2025-06-24 06:46:01+00:00
I don't think this has worked well in quite some time. Maybe not ever in open source land.

IMHO, widespread use of Xlib lead people to believe that X was much more synchronous than it is, and discouraged people from using networking, and then a lot of stuff that could be possible didn't get made. xcb is a much better way to interact with X, but it may have arrived too late.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-06-24 06:47:44+00:00
> for a lot of smaller business software?

Small businesses often understand domain less, not more, because they cannot invest as much as big businesses in building expertise. They may achieve something within that limited understanding, but the outcome will limit their growth. Of course, AI can help with discovery, but it may overcomplicate things. Product discovery is an art of figuring out what to do without doing too much or not enough, which AI has not mastered yet.
AI: Artificial Intelligence or Actual Improv?
by snappr021 | 2025-06-24 06:48:42+00:00
You know, it’s funny…

We built machines to answer our questions faster than ever before. But somehow — the more we ask, the less we know.

You ask ChatGPT a question today… it answers. You ask the same question tomorrow… and it goes,

“Well actually…”

And now you’re like: “Wait… was I wrong yesterday? Or is the machine gaslighting me in HD?”

⸻

Imagine This…

Imagine if Google Maps gave you a different route to the same place every time — and sometimes took you through a swamp with no signal.

You: “Where’s the hospital?” GPT: “Left at regret, right past confusion, and if you hit despair, you’ve gone too far.”

⸻

The Real Problem?

It’s not just a mistake.

It’s not a typo.

It’s an architecture built without accountability.

No memory. No obligation. No “Hey, I already told you that — let me stick to it.”

This thing is freestyling your future.

⸻

Hallucination isn’t a bug.

It’s a feature… of a black box with a multiply by Math.random() instruction for every response.

And the real kicker? We call this “intelligence.”

No, man. This is false confidence without consequence. This is your cousin who thinks they know everything because they watched one YouTube video.

⸻

What’s Missing? • Verbatim memory. • Version control. • A basic sense of “Don’t change the code that worked unless asked.”

Imagine if a lawyer gave you a contract… Then handed you a new version an hour later and said:

“Same thing. But this one has a little spice. I added jazz hands.”

⸻

The Ask:

We don’t need smarter lies. We need honest consistency. Because in law, in code, in medicine, and in truth itself…

Getting it wrong faster isn’t progress. It’s malpractice at scale.

⸻

Final Note:

So… OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta… whoever’s listening.

If your AI gives me a different answer every time I ask the same question?

That’s not intelligence.

That’s improv.

And nobody asked for a different fork of a stage play when they typed in a math problem.

And it is marketed as a corporate tool.

Has more soulless error ever been introduced in less time?
by sashimi-houdini | 2025-06-24 06:49:06+00:00
I also like Dan Luu's take (starting with a Joel Spolsky quote)

“Find the dependencies — and eliminate them.” When you're working on a really, really good team with great programmers, everybody else's code, frankly, is bug-infested garbage, and nobody else knows how to ship on time.

We had a similar attitude, although I'd say that we were a bit more humble. We didn't think that everyone else was producing garbage but, we also didn't assume that we couldn't produce something comparable to what we could buy for a tenth of the cost. From talking to folks at some competitors, there was a pretty big cultural difference between how we operated and how they operated. It simply didn't occur to them that they didn't have to buy into the standard American business logic that you should focus on your core competencies, that you can think through whether or not it makes sense to do something in-house on the merits of the particular thing instead of outsourcing your thinking to a pithy saying.[0]

[0] https://danluu.com/nothing-works/
by crvdgc | 2025-06-24 06:50:29+00:00
I think the crux is that specification has been neglected since even before AI.

Stakeholders (client, managers) have been "vibe coding" all along. They send some vague descriptions and someone magically gives back a solution. Does the solution completely work? No one knows. It kinda works, but no one knows for sure.

Most of the time, it's actually the programmers' understanding of the domain that fills out the details (we all know what a correct form submission webpage looks like).

Now the other end has become AI, it remains to be seen whether this can be replicated.
by kelnos | 2025-06-24 06:50:42+00:00
> The court is requiring OpenAI to maintain records it would have not maintained otherwise.

Not quite. The court is requiring OpenAPI to maintain records longer than it would otherwise retain them. It's not making them maintain records that they never would have created in the first place (like if a customer of theirs has a zero-retention agreement in place).

Legal holds are a thing; you're not going to successfully argue against them on 4A grounds. This might seem like an overly broad legal hold, though, but I'm not sure if there are any rules that prevent that sort of thing.
by mrweasel | 2025-06-24 06:50:44+00:00
FaceID does have two flaws in my mind.

1) I frequently unlock my phone while it's laying flat on the desk a good distance from my face. The camera can't see me, and certainly not well enough to identify me.

2) I don't believe that you can add a second FaceID. Currently I have a few fingers added to my TouchID, including my wifes index finger, allowing her to unlock my phone.
by soulofmischief | 2025-06-24 06:51:11+00:00
> Are you saying that AI does have an inherent idea of what it's doing or is doing more than that?

No. I stated that OP cannot make that kind of blanket, non-temporally constrained statements about artificial intelligence.

> We're in an informal discussion forum. I don't think the bar we're looking for is some rigorous deductive proof

We're in a technology-oriented discussion forum, the minimum bar to any claim should be that it is supported by evidence, otherwise it should be presented as what it is: opinion.

> this just seems like navel-gazing over semantics.

In my opinion, conversation is much easier when we can agree that words should mean something. Imprecise language matched with an authoritative tone can mislead an audience. This topic in particular is rife with imprecise and uninformed arguments, and so we should take more care to use our words correctly, not less.

Furthermore, my argument goes beyond semantics, as it also deals with the importance of constraints when making broad, unbacked claims.
by squarefoot | 2025-06-24 06:54:05+00:00
All phones eventually become obsolete, but their guts could be used in so many ways. I'd love for example if someone made an enclosure acting also as multi port docking station so that old phones with unlocked bootloader (Fairphone being one of them) could be reflashed with a different operating system then used as mini PCs, media players, IoT wall terminals with bigger screens or other uses. Seeing all that perfectly good electronics going into landfills because planned obsolescence says so just irritates me. Can we do that at least for unlocked ones? Framework did something similar for their laptop mainboards, minus the docking station.function as they already have more ports than a phone. Any chances that this could be doable with Fairphone hardware?
by _dain_ | 2025-06-24 06:54:45+00:00
It's cool that you got it working in time for the demo, but I think your reasoning is unsound.

>I remembered this from my engineering days at the College of Engineering, Trivandrum. It’s called the Normal Distribution, or Gaussian distribution. It’s based on the idea that data near the mean (the average) is more frequent than data far from the mean.

There are a lot of non-normal distributions where that's the case. The normal distribution is a specific thing that arises from summing together lots of small random variables.

It's not a good model of people moving sliders on a UI: a person's decision to set the value to e.g. 0.8 is really one discrete thing, not a sum of a bunch of independent micro-decisions. There's no physical/statistical law preventing someone from grabbing the slider and thrusting all the way to the left or the right, and in fact people do this all the time on UIs. The client can move the slider however he pleases ...

So I think you just got lucky that the client didn't do that. Don't rely on it not happening in the future!

(You could also imagine fitting a normal distribution to user behaviour, but it turns out the standard deviation is just really large. That would be technically defensible but also useless for your situation, since there would be substantial probability at the min/max values of the finite range. It would be close to uniform.)

(Also, who's to say the mean is in the middle of the slider range?)

Anyway I'm curious what the ML model was doing that took 15 seconds. Are you sure there's no way to speed it up?
by globular-toast | 2025-06-24 06:54:55+00:00
A mechanical engineer has a job to do. They can't all spend their time yak shaving with an AI agent building software that they then use to do their actual job. The whole point of building software is it's more efficient to build it once then use it many times. Why would a "someone with no coding knowledge" do this when someone with coding knowledge could do it?
Show HN: Dprms – A Digital Patient Record System for Underserved Clinics
by Indrojit_Banik | 2025-06-24 06:56:03+00:00
Hey HN

I'm building DPRMS – an open source digital patient record management system designed to help small clinics and rural healthcare workers in South Asia go paperless without needing any tech expertise.

Key Features: - QR-based access to patient records - Offline-first architecture for remote clinics - Simple pharmacy integration and health history tracking - Lightweight and mobile-friendly interface

GitHub: https://github.com/IndrojitBanik/dprms-showcase Waitlist: https://tally.so/r/w5grpv

I’d love feedback, suggestions, or even collaborators!
by josephg | 2025-06-24 06:56:04+00:00
> Much of that can be fixed with shooting raw and editing in Lightroom, which is the same process you'd use for a bigger camera. .. As for printing, it matters how it's being viewed. You're looking at it up close, which is the physical equivalent of pixel peeping and relatively rare.

The photos were printed and displayed in a gallery. I didn't need to pull out a magnifying glass to notice which images were a bit blurry. It was obvious at a glance. The images in question were worse. There was one beautiful B&W image of a Meerkat, and you could see each strand of hair on his belly. Another image was a lion's face - and the hairs were all a little blurry. I think the photographer cropped in on the image past the usable resolution of their camera. I'm sure it looked fine on a phone, but it didn't make a great print. Shooting raw and editing in lightroom can't replace missing pixels.

Quality doesn't matter until it does. And then it really matters!

The thing I really hate about the photos I get from my phone is the over processing that the software applies to the images. Some part of my brain intuitively understands focal planes and how lights interact with the colour of objects. My phone produces images which just don't look right. They're in an uncanny valley where they don't quite make sense to my brain. Looking at them stresses me out a little.

Maybe its worth trying my phone with RAW images, so I can turn all that crap off.

> people seem to think "DSLRs" are the higher quality competitors to phone cameras, but they aren't particularly high quality as far as these things go.

It really depends on the camera and the photographer, and what kind of quality you're going for. DSLRs can make use of larger lenses. As a result, you get natural depth-of-field as a consequence of the optics. If you're using an old digital camera, there's a good chance the sensor isn't as modern as the sensor in your phone. So you might get worse low-light performance and worse autofocus. But the depth of field is impossible to recreate optically using the tiny lenses on a phone. Phones can simulate DoF using computational tricks, but it never looks quite right. A person's face will be in focus and some of their hair out of focus. Its weird.

My dad took some photos of me when I was a kid some ~30 years ago on his old SLR film camera. They're stunning photos. Those photos are much more beautiful than the photos he takes now on his iphone.

And yeah - I'd love to put some vintage glass on my mirrorless camera. Aah its an expensive hobby!
by dns_snek | 2025-06-24 06:56:16+00:00
This might be a minority experience but I used to use the Pixel 4a with the reader on the back and now the Pixel 8a with reader inside the display and I find the fingerprint reader of the 8a marginally faster and much more reliable. From an UX perspective I also find it slightly more practical on the front so I can unlock the phone without picking it up.
by godelski | 2025-06-24 06:57:13+00:00
This was annoying, but it is less annoying than my experience with FaceID[0]. Sure, there's no perfect solution, but it isn't like we all have to use the exact same solution for everything, right? There's more than one phone out there...

I do hope we have a mutual understanding that we're talking about something subjective. Something that isn't the best option for everyone. FaceID, fingerprint, or whatever. There's no one size fits all...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44362879
by Springtime | 2025-06-24 06:59:08+00:00
I also find fully rendered/colored emojis distracting even in repo readmes because I feel they give off a casual chat messaging vibe, since before colored emojis became part of Unicode proper they were exclusively used for chat messengers.

There's a Unicode sequence that tries to use a monochrome glyph instead if it's supported which I prefer as it's more in keeping with the rest of the text (though an issue with some of those variants is legibility at small sizes/PPI).
by p1dda | 2025-06-24 06:59:43+00:00
pg 132 "2.1 The characteristics of the first large oscillation (12:03) indicate that it is a phenomenon generated within the Iberian Peninsula. It is an atypical oscillation, with a frequency of 0.6 Hz, and its origin has been correlated with the operation of a facility. In addition, the system operator has identified an atypical behavior in an installation in the wind farm."

Could this have been a deliberate attempt to crash the grid?
by Aromasin | 2025-06-24 07:00:43+00:00
Part of why Lattice Semi has been so successful in recent years is they've broken the paradigm slightly in that their FPGAs are much most cost-effective, while still coming with all of the things we expect of FPGAs. Lots of high-speed IO, half decent software, and a pretty broad IP portfolio. Something like the Certus-NX comes in at ~$5 at the 17k LUT count, and Avant only ~$550 at the 600k LUT mark. That's almost a 1/4 or more of what the equivalent Xilinx or Altera device goes for. There's very little licensing cost too, which make them really appealing. I see them going into so many designs now because they can scale. You'd have to be making 100Ks+ of boards to justify the ASIC expense when there's a commodity product like it.