MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by reify | 2025-06-17 09:34:55+00:00
I use quite a few of the fossify apps.

love the calculator. with length, area, volume, mass, temperature and time calculations.

the gallery app. I like the renaming and proper deleting. easily remove exif metadata

non intrusive calender. I use it to set up my plant watering schedule.

messages, clear and easy to use

voice recorder, again simple and easy to use

All with absolutely minimal permissions..

NO ADS, no tracking, no data collecting
by bayindirh | 2025-06-17 09:35:26+00:00
If physical exercise builds muscle mass, mental work and exercise builds more connections in your brain.

Like everything, not using something causes that thing to atrophy. IOW, if you depend on something too much, you'll grow dependency on it, because that part of your body doesn't do the work that much anymore.

Brain is an interconnected jungle. Improvement in any ability will improve other, adjacent abilities. You need to think faster to type faster. If you can't think faster, you'll stagnate, for example.

Also, human body always tries to optimize itself to reduce its energy consumption. If you get a chemical from outside, it'll not produce it anymore, assuming the supply will be there. Brain will reduce its connections in some region if that function is augmented by something else.

Same for skill atrophies. If you lose one skill, you lose the connections in your brain, and that'll degrade adjacent skills, too. As a result, skill atrophy is brain atrophy in the long run.
by alias_neo | 2025-06-17 09:35:49+00:00
It's scenario 1. My children are still young, pre-school and reception so no such groups have come up yet. The odd parent that wanted to contact me has installed Signal or sent me SMS (RCS). For anything else, my wife is still on WhatsApp so she relays messages if/when they come up.

EDIT: re: Work, my colleagues are all on Signal, we have lots of Signal groups to communicate.
by rwmj | 2025-06-17 09:36:16+00:00
Another difference if your junior will, over time, learn, and you'll also get a sense of whether you can trust them. If after a while they aren't learning and you can't trust them, you get rid of them. GenAI doesn't gain knowledge in the same way, and you're always going to have the same level of trust in it (which in my experience is limited).

Also if my junior argued back and was wrong repeatedly, that's be bad. Lucky that has never happened with AIs ...
by johannes1234321 | 2025-06-17 09:36:52+00:00
It's extremely hard to compete in a commodity market where a large corp can do a free product to drive competition away.

Gmail's promise of 1GB free storage was an incredible offer at those times, where many people used "paid" mailers. Paid as part of the Internet subscription with a worse Webmailer and less storage than Google provided.

It is especially complicated with Mail, where Anti-Spam measures make operating an own server work (on one side for filtering incoming mail, on the other side to prevent being blocked for spamming)
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-17 09:37:26+00:00
> We all benefit from digital (and physical) accessibility.

If only. The problem is that businesses on the web directly benefit from things being not accessible.

Attention economy makes money on friction. Your typical website is a maze the user is supposed to get a little lost in, to maximize time they're exposed to product offering, and/or third-party ads, and/or tracking. Cutting curbs just tells them where to go and lets them do it with less effort, so they cut through the maze faster, and business loses money.
by hansmayer | 2025-06-17 09:37:30+00:00
It's all already there. When you converse with a junior-engineer about their latest and greatest idea (over a chat platform), and they start giving you real-time responses which are a page long and structured into bullet points...it's not even that they are using chatgpt to avoid thinking, it is the fact that they think either no-one will notice, or that this is how grown-ups actually converse with each other, is terrifying.
by codedokode | 2025-06-17 09:37:41+00:00
WhatsApp cannot even be used from desktop without a smartphone. I think they took "mobile-first" approach too literally.

But to be fair, competitors like Telegram also do not allow registering an account from desktop app, only from a smartphone. This seems to be the new trend: you cannot sign up for Gmail and Vk without a smartphone too: for Gmail, you need to scan the QR code, and for Vk you need to install a mobile app.
by thrance | 2025-06-17 09:39:35+00:00
I can only find references to this in very conservative medias, used to lying and creating narratives out of thin air all the time. So don't get on your high horses. Those same "journals" are perfectly fine with Trump's unprecedented wave of censorship and state violence.

You should probably read 1984 again, Orwell wasn't concerned by "trigger warnings". He was afraid of an authoritarian force creating and maintaining an alternate reality they can change on a whim, to manufacture consent for whatever they want to do. Like how Trump said he would be "the most peaceful president ever" but now screams about how Tehran should be evacuated, to presumably level it to the ground. Or how he said he would take care of the economy, utterly destroyed it and now claims it's doing better than ever.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-17 09:39:35+00:00
It's worse than not worth it, it's defeating some of the main ways they make money.

Misunderstanding this point leads to endless surprise in this topic. No, companies don't just "don't care" for some unfathomable reason. They don't want it in the first place; they begrudgingly make concessions to accessibility due to cultural and regulatory pressure.

The same things that let the disabled people participate, also help regular users escape the very traps and tricks businesses on-line use to make money. Now, supporting the former group may be a rounding error on the balance sheet, but enabling the latter to defeat monetization efforts, not so much.
by zacksiri | 2025-06-17 09:40:28+00:00
LLMs are relatively new technology. I think it's important to recognize the tool for what it is and how it works for you. Everyone is going to get different usage from these tools.

What I personally find is. It's great for helping me solve mundane things. For example I'm recently working on an agentic system and I'm using LLMs to help me generate elasticsearch mappings.

There is no part of me that enjoy making json mappings, it's not fun nor does it engage my curiosity as a programmer, I'm also not going to learn much from generating elasticsearch mappings over and over again. For problems like this, I'm happy to just let the LLM do the job. I throw some json at it and I've got a prompt that's good enough that it will spit out results deterministically and reliably.

However if I'm exploring / coding something new, I may try letting the LLM generate something. Most of the time though in these cases I end up hitting 'Reject All' after I've seen what the LLM produces, then I go about it in my own way, because I can do better.

It all really depends on what the problem you are trying to solve. I think for mundane tasks LLMs are just wonderful and helps get out of the way.

If I put myself into the shoes of a beginner programmer LLMs are amazing. There is so much I could learn from them. Ultimately what I find is LLMs will help lower the barrier of entry to programming but does not mitigate the need to learn to read / understand / reason about the code. Beginners will be able to go much further on their own before seeking out help.

If you are more experienced you will probably also get some benefits but ultimately you'd probably want to do it your own way since there is no way LLMs will replace experienced programmer (not yet anyway).

I don't think it's wise to completely dismiss LLMs in your workflow, at the same time I would not rely on it 100% either, any code generated needs to be reviewed and understood like the post mentioned.
by dmos62 | 2025-06-17 09:41:16+00:00
Might be true for some, but I had a long series of bad experiences when I was a teenager (tension and paranoia), was convinced that it wasn't for me, and only in my 30s I started having very profound and positive experiences. Now I only experiment alone, in a non-distracted, aware, self-reflective manner, as if it were a meditation aide.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-17 09:41:46+00:00
These are great and humanistic sentiments, until you have to talk price. When price comes into the equation, the approach of specialized accessibility software seems to work much better in a lot of cases.

Consider a rosy hypothetical: A SaaS under truly great, enlightened leadership. The team lead knows that it would take only one two week sprint, for one focused developer, to go the last mile and make it truly accessible for all. The fully loaded cost of those developer-hours, in a very optimistic scenario, is $1000, and optically closer to $4-8000 for a US based team.

First, do those extra steps towards accessibility even break even? Second, if so, are they truly the revenue maximizing move for what that dev can do with that 2-week sprint? Sometimes, rarely, they are. In practice I suspect market research would show the opposite. This is before we add in all of the usual fog of war around how long things really take to build, whether the leadership is really as enlightened as they seem, etc.

Consider an alternative model where one company specializes in creating high quality accessibility-enhancing software. This software aims to work as a compatibility layer across most to all of the other programs a user is likely to use; perhaps they use frequent in-memory screenshots and detailed image analysis to help blind users understand what's going on. Or perhaps it's as simple as a FOSS dev focusing on making sure every terminal program they can run works well with their screen reader.

There are a plethora of benefits to this model, not least that you aren't imposing a heavy tax on everyone else for a really small customer base. This is also very specialized, customer-facing work. If there is anywhere in software you would want dedicated frontend or UI/UX expertise it would probably be the guy designing the screen reader compatibility layer.

I point to the popular extension Dark Reader as an example of this paradigm; it does a wonderful job on most websites, is easy to disable on websites where it doesn't, and doesn't cost the website runner anything to use.

Some might take issue with this for aesthetic reasons. It feels kludgy to suggest someone run a whole third interface layer just to use the same software you and I use right out of the box. I think this aesthetic violation is misplaced in this case - the factors at play suggest to me that this work would benefit heavily from specialization. Indeed, that seems to be what has happened in practice; making the web accessible in 2025 is much easier than it was in 2000, because third parties have stepped up and improved the situation dramatically enough that hooking into accessibility layers "merely" requires things like writing semantically correct HTML.

Now imagine if a Dark Reader existed, that could reliably insert all the finer details into the page which are obvious from a screen grab of the page, but non-obvious to the web designer - that would clearly be a much better approach for the majority of businesses.
by freehorse | 2025-06-17 09:42:18+00:00
This uses near-infrared light, building on current techniques of using near-infrared light in shorter source/detector paths to measure fluctuations of oxygenated/deoxygenated haemoglobin on the cortex of the brain as a proxy of brain activity. The standard technique is called functional near-infrared spectroscopy, and is similar to fMRI but can only look into superficial brain tissue and not subcortical brain structures like fMRI, with the advantage that it is cheaper, easier, and essentially portable.

In standard fNIRS, a light source and a detector forming a channel have to be ~2-3cm apart. The light leaves the source, goes into the scalp in a banana shape due to refraction, and reaches the detector. The idea is that due to differential absorption of different wavelengths by oxygenated and deoxygenated haemoglobin, you can send 2 wavelengths and solving a 2x2 system gives you the fluctuations in oxygenated and deoxygenated haemoglobin in the tissue the light transversed. This is a proxy of brain activation in that area. If the neurons fire a lot, they consume more oxygen and the brain then sends more oxygen there, this is called Brain-oxygenation level depedent (BOLD) response. If the path length is too short, the light cannot get refracted deep enough to reach the cortex, so you do not measure brain. If it is longer, too much light is absorbed on the way and less signal reaches the detector. The researchers here try to detect light with source/detector diametrically opposite on the scalp, and they show they can. However, it is not clear what kind of application this can have. It was done under very restrictive conditions (subjects very light-skinned, no hair, 30 minutes recording). Moreover, an advantage of standard fNIRS is the high spatial specificity, and it is not clear how to actually translate the light intensity data in their case to brain activation (and probably it is going to be very noisy) as the light transverses all the head.

In any case, they are experimenting with a novel technique, more like a PoC that they can at least detect photons but nothing more than that, and we are probably far away from any potential applications, if any is even come out of this. But it could also lead to applications we cannot actually imagine right now. As for applying this to measure brain activity in the way current fNIRS and fMRI do, I am skeptical.
by edouardcourty | 2025-06-17 09:43:18+00:00
I released a Symfony bundle aiming to ease the development of Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers using Symfony.

If you've never heard of MCP before, it is the new big thing in the AI revolution.

To make it simple, Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful, but they do not have access to the outside world: they cannot navigate on the Internet, browse their host machine’s file system, access an external database…

However, these LLMs can be enhanced with capacities, which are called tools.

These tools are not built into the LLM. They’re provided by you, the developer. The way it works is the Agent (An app using an LLM to function) is given, in addition to the prompt, a list of external tools which can be used to fulfill the user’s need.

The LLM then decides if it’s able to fulfill the request on its own (like craft a piece of text) or if it needs to use a tool that matches its needs in the provided list.

The Model Context Protocol defines a way of communicating between what could be called “agents” (Clients) and external apps (Servers).

This bundle allows for easy integration of MCP capabilities into any existing Symfony project.

Read more on the GitHub page : https://github.com/EdouardCourty/mcp-server-bundle

Feel free to comment my work, I'll be happy to discuss with the community
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-06-17 09:44:18+00:00
The only viable approach I can think of is to completely rewrite everything from scratch. It's a huge undertaking, but I honestly think it's less work than getting the existing software infrastructure to work accessibly. Even heroic efforts like AccessKit just aren't heroic enough.

We've got a few decent speech synths, but information about how things should be read out isn't passed through to them. That's handled by a screen reader program… except screen readers can't represent half the semantics they should, so people regularly bypass them, which leads to (a) UI inconsistency; and (b) the systems being useless if you need something other than a screen reader. AI scraper bots are the straw that broke the camel's back, so virtually no (current) website is accessible via a basic web browser any longer. UI customisability was low in the Windows 95 days, but we've managed to go backwards from there.

We might as well go the whole way, and design something that's actually usable, then put together case-by-case compatibility layers. Here's how we translate Home Office Design System HTML, here's how we translate Stacks Design System HTML, here's how we translate MediaWiki HTML, here's how we translate Wordpress Gutenberg HTML, here's how we translate Moodle HTML… here's how we represent the OpenDocument content model for reading and writing, here's how we represent the SVG content model for reading and writing, here's how we represent a login flow…
by alias_neo | 2025-06-17 09:44:25+00:00
I disagree wholeheartedly that it's "only marginally better". It's not Meta, and that's a huge improvement.

A European alternative would be excellent (I'm in the UK), but no such thing exists, that said, Signal's server and clients are open-source and can be self-hosted, or even deployed at scale by a European government/entity if they so wish.

I work in the "secure comms" space, and I have reviewed every line of code in the open-source server (as of the revision I last worked on), and built products on it, and though I can't prove they run the same code they publish, I'm "happy enough" with what I see that I'd use it over anything owned by Meta any day.

In an ideal world, I'd host it myself for everyone I communicate with to use, but without federation that's not a possibility, so given a choice between Signal and WhatsApp, the decision is hands-down Signal.
by mjburgess | 2025-06-17 09:44:48+00:00
More charitably, it's a person yet to feel the disabling phase of using an LLM.

If he's a security researcher, then I'd imagine much of his LLM use is outside his area of expertise. He's probably not using it to replace his security research.

I think the revulsion to LLMs by experts is during that phase when its clearly mentally disabling you.
by lvncelot | 2025-06-17 09:45:43+00:00
Ha, that brings me back trying to make Fabric.js somehow usable for a 3D viewport at a startup I was working at a while ago. (We used esm.js instead of WASM for the 3d engine, to give you an idea)

It was a lot of wrangling and unexpected behavior, and we ultimately ended up implementing a more traditional 3d gizmo - though the application was also really only meant to be used at a desktop with a mouse instead of also supporting touch controls.
by bonoboTP | 2025-06-17 09:46:29+00:00
> I believe that one of the most underappreciated skills in business is the ability to string a coherent narrative together. I attend many meetings with extremely-talented engineers who are incapable of presenting their arguments in a manner that others (both technical and non-technical) can follow them.

Yes, but the arguments they need to present are not necessarily the ones they used to convince themselves, or their own reasoning history that made them arrive at their proposal. Usually that is an overly boring graph search like "we could do X but that would require Y which has disadvantage Z that theoretically could be salvaged by W, but we've seen W fail in project Q and especially Y would make such a failure more likely due to reason T, so Y isn't viable and therefore X is not a good choice even if some people argue that Y isn't a strict requirement, but actually it is if we think in a timeline of several years and blabla" especially if the decision makers have no time and no understanding of what the words X, Y, Z, W, Q, T etc. truly mean. Especially if the true reason also involves some kind of unspeakable office politics like wanting to push the tools developed by a particular team as opposed to another or wanting to use some tech for CV reasons.

The narrative to be crafted has to be tailored for the point of view of the decision maker. How can you make your proposal look attractive relative to their incentives, their career goals, how will it make them look good and avoid risks of trouble or bad optics. Is it faster? Is it allowing them to use sexy buzzwords? Does it line up nicely with the corporate slogan this quarter? For these you have to understand their context as well. People rarely announce these things, and a clueless engineer can step over people's toes, who will not squarely explain the real reason for their pushback, they will make up some nonsense, and the clueless guy will think the other person is just too dumb to follow the reasoning.

It's not simply about language use skills, as in wordsmithing, it's also strategizing and putting yourself in other people's shoes, trying to understand social dynamics and how it interacts with the detailed technical aspects.
by elpocko | 2025-06-17 09:46:40+00:00
I've been thinking about making a fantasy computer/console that uses an emulated 65C02 CPU, maybe a bit simplified -- every instruction only taking 1 cycle, for example. You could use all existing tools for the 6502, like the amazing 64tass, and there's an interesting high level language called prog8 (https://github.com/irmen/prog8) that's relatively easy to use. Not sure if there's any interest for something like that.
by redhale | 2025-06-17 09:46:42+00:00
This line by the author, in response to one of the comments, betrays the core of the article imo:

> The quality of the code these tools produce is not the problem.

So even if an AI could produce code of a quality equal to or surpassing the author's own code quality, they would still be uninterested in using it.

To each their own, but it's hard for me to accept an argument that such an AI would provide no benefit, even if one put priority on maintaining high quality standards. I take the point that the human author is ultimately responsible, but still.
by reify | 2025-06-17 09:47:08+00:00
I do feel for you folks acrosss the pond.

This phone is going to be a $500 pile of shite, cheap components. very expensive monthy data costs.

Plus, I just read that the network is going to be a virtual phone network. I think this means that this is a virtual layer on top of your main phone companies, if the network gets busy, you poor folks with your very expensive monthly contracts will come in second best.

A very big con.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-17 09:47:18+00:00
The DRM is still completely broken. What they're doing is using some watermarking technology to match the video with a particular device and then ban the device. But then the pirates just buy a device, rip thousands of hours of video using it and then post them all together. Each device can get them everything in the entire catalog that they want because they don't have to post any of it until they've coped all of it and banning the device after the fact is too late. They can even sell the device before the key is banned (or to anyone who won't notice/care) and use the money to buy another one, and then the company is only banning the keys of innocent people who might have been paying customers.

And even that is assuming there is no way to remove the watermark, which there always is because multiple copies of the same video can't each be uniquely identifying without revealing what's different about them.

Meanwhile the inconvenience to paying customers is real when their stuff doesn't work, and every customer who pirates your stuff because the paid offering doesn't work for them is an actual lost sale.

It really does seem like the DRM vendors are taking them for a ride.