MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by libraryatnight | 2025-06-11 06:00:29+00:00
The only time, for me, this is true, is when it's empty and I have very few items. If there's a line, I'd rather wait for the cashier. Self-checkout seems to get clogged up with people waiting for the supervising human the busier it is, so to have a human or two (one ringing one bagging) when I've got a cart and there's a line, is advantageous.

I'm also pretty anti-social and actually prefer the robotic banter of quickly checking out with a person to the anxious nightmare of just trying to buy something real quick and now waiting because the machine hates life more than me.

Oh and many of the folks doing the bagging at some of the stores are disabled, and I dunno - I hope we're taking care of people in those jobs.
by ars | 2025-06-11 06:02:38+00:00
It's time for that meme to die, cities are not subsidizing everything around them.

Cities would die without those "areas around them", because those are the places where food is grown and stuff is made. Adjusting prices for food via taxation is something the government does all the time, but if it didn't food prices would just go up, and cities would pay the same amount, just via a different path.

You might need less "stuff" to build things denser, but we've long passed the time when the main cost is "stuff". Labor is what matters, and building in a city takes much more labor.

In the real world non-cities are cheaper in every way, and that includes roads and utilities - and this despite needing more road and pipes.
by fsckboy | 2025-06-11 06:03:44+00:00
>In MS-DOS, you can type a command like "cd.." to move up a level, and it will work fine. In Linux, it will not; you need to type "cd ..". The different is the space in between. Similar examples abound; in MS-DOS, you can type "dir/p", without a space between the command and its switch. This is a big deal, even if it might not seem like it.

you can add those commands (as functions) to linux, but it would be a boneheaded thing to do.

cd.. () { cd .. }

and it does not work universally on DOS, only on builtins
by torginus | 2025-06-11 06:04:40+00:00
Once again, the article is lampshading the naive fallacy that if a classifier gets a large percentage of the input distribution right, that classifier is good. Basic literature about designing these classifiers recognizes these fallacies, and knows how to correct for them.

And part of that correction lies in the fact that different domains place different costs on false positives and false negatives.

He describes different scenarios and the apparent contradiction is resolved by weighing the consequences of getting things wrong. The futurist can do whatever, since nobody nothing happens if he gets things wrong or right. In the case with real stakes, where getting things wrong has an immense cost, you just have to accept you will cry wolf a lot of the time.

In the doctor scenario, let's say the doctor is highly skilled, and can tell that if a patient has a certain set of symptoms, he's 99% likely to have cancer. Thing is, only 1 people in 1000 actually do, which means even this amazing doctor will tell 9 healthy people for every sick person that they have cancer. Is the doctor bad at their job? No, he's excellent - the inconvenience caused to these people is dwarfed by letting a sick person go undiagnosed.

If a factory is making Happy Meal toys, and they determined that 1 out of 1000 they produce is faulty, should they invest in a similar screening process? No, the cost of the process, and the cost of handling false positives is way costlier than the minor problem of a child getting a broken toy once in a while.

Same numbers, different common sense actions.
by gnabgib | 2025-06-11 06:04:41+00:00
Hope you didn't use your multitude of accounts to upvote this

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Pierewsa

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ron_87

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=normantio

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=marcelobaeb

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=wafremret

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Albert_Arin

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Marat_Tokyo

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Marat_1975

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Vagat
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2025-06-11 06:07:19+00:00
>Deporting them is democracy, this is a country for the of the people, by the people, for the people

I doubt if it ever really was true to the fullest extent ever. I do think that America did it better that most other counties on earth, but my view is that ‘Democracy’ as is generally practiced is a form of oligarchy, a sophisticated one at that, where common people have the illusion of choosing the laws and leaders they like. In a ‘democracy’ consent is manufactured (words borrowed from Noam Chomsky).
by mcny | 2025-06-11 06:07:43+00:00
Android 12 made it possible to have unattended updates possible on fdroid. I sincerely will not recommend an Android version less than 12 at this point.

At some point, we will have something similar on a newer version of Android that we will want and that we can't have with an older version. I don't know what it is yet but i am sure there will be something at some point.

https://f-droid.org/2024/02/01/twif.html
by rybosome | 2025-06-11 06:08:04+00:00
Haven’t tried it personally, as this was a use case where a classic SFT was effective for what we wanted and none of us had done LoRa before.

Really interested in the idea though! The dream is that you have your big, general base model, then a bunch of LoRa weights for each task you’ve tuned on, where you can load/unload just the changed weights and swap the models out super fast on the fly for different tasks.
by libraryatnight | 2025-06-11 06:08:22+00:00
For years one of my favorite experiences (amusing given your username) was being on calls for incidents where they get the dev on for X thing and an exec goes "I thought we got rid of that" and a bunch of people sheepishly explain it wasn't really retired... it was repurposed as an API. I especially loved it when the "retirement" of the broken thing was the execs big achievement. (The comedic nuance often being the thing could have been retired for real, but they demanded a timeline that necessitated the "fake" retirement)

It still happens but it's not a favorite experience anymore. It's just a source of loathing for MBA culture.
by 7bit | 2025-06-11 06:09:24+00:00
> to be responsible for the results

I used to think the same way. But life taught me that responsibility is a fairy tale only for the bottom 90% — a story told to keep them obedient, hardworking, and self-blaming. Meanwhile, the top 10% rewrite the rules, avoid accountability, and externalize blame when things go wrong. And if you’re not in that elite circle, you either pay the price for their mistakes — or you’re told there’s just nothing you can do about it.
by BrenBarn | 2025-06-11 06:09:27+00:00
This is another article that, for me, sort of walks right by the answers without realizing it. As I was reading, I was thinking "does this person really not think AI is going to be flooded with ads soon enough?" Then they asked the LLM that, and it basically said yes, and then the response. . . to go "Hmmm, I wonder if that will happen"? Yes, of course it's going to happen. Imagine if this was 20 years ago wondering whether ads would infect search engines or the web would be flooded with sites which are ads masquerading as actual content. Why would we believe anything different of AI? The only way it won't happen is if we decide we don't want it, instead of accepting it as inevitable.

And well, the article is ostensibly about AI, but then at the end:

> The investors aren’t just doing this to be nice. Someone is going to expect returns on this huge gamble at some point. > ... > The LLM providers aren’t librarians providing a public service. They’re businesses that have to find a way to earn a ridiculous amount of money for a huge number of big investors, and capitalism does not have builtin morals.

Those are the things that need to change. They have nothing to do with AI. AI is a symptom of a broken socioeconomic system that allows a small (not "huge" in the scheme of things) number of people to "gamble" and then attempt to rig the table so their gamble succeeds.

AI is a cute bunny rabbit and our runaway-inequality-based socioeconomic system is the vat of toxic waste that turned that innocent little bunny into a ravening mutant. Yes, it's bad and needs to be killed, but we'll just be overrun by a million more like it if we don't find a way to lock away that toxic waste.
by duskwuff | 2025-06-11 06:10:48+00:00
This set of symbols has some interesting properties which allow for this solution:

func symbolHash(c byte) byte { x := (c - 1) >> 5 y := int(c) + 0x1b150000>>(x<<3) return byte(y & 31) }

But this doesn't generalize - it depends on the input consisting of a couple runs of consecutive characters which can be made continuous. (Extra credit: why is "c-1" necessary?)
by ljf | 2025-06-11 06:11:11+00:00
Very true, and this is what caught my father's bowel cancer and saved his life.

That said, for someone with increased risk, nothing compares to a colonoscopy - at it does a better job of catching things early, before you start getting blood in your poo.

But if you are at a standard risk, doing a fobt every couple-few years is hugely important. Ask your doctor now!
by 3036e4 | 2025-06-11 06:11:44+00:00
The single best thing about DOS in 2025 is that it is the base for the best virtual machine, DOSBox. If something runs in DOSBox it will always run. DOS software can not rot. No APIs change. And DOSBox has been ported to almost every platform, including browsers and phones.

Of course it would be nice to also see that kind of stability in modern systems, but since that seems to be impossible for no good reasons the next best thing is to run applications in a dead OS like DOS that has good emulators.
Show HN: Perspt – fast, immersive terminal CLI to chat with AI models
by vikrantrathore | 2025-06-11 06:12:03+00:00
Hi HN,

We built Perspt (short for *Personal Spectrum Pertaining Thoughts*) while learning Rust. It quickly evolved from an experiment into a useful CLI tool to test various AI models and services quickly. We find it useful and thought it will be of some interest in this community.

What you can do with Perspt: • Chat with any model (internally we use genai Crate): supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq, Cohere, xAI, DeepSeek, Ollama, and more. • Streamed markdown responses in a responsive interface—scrollable, crash-safe, with intuitive keybindings (built using Ratatui). • Start instantly: Perspt auto-detects your LLM provider based on environment variables—no config or signup required. • Export conversations to share later with the /save command. • Includes in-depth docs and a “Perspt Book” explaining the UI architecture and Rust patterns.

You can download prebuilt binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows from the GitHub releases page.

export OPENAI_API_KEY="sk-…" perspt

We are sharing this because writing a real-world app while learning Rust helped us more than tutorials, and hope Perspt can be useful to others.

You can find it here: https://github.com/eonseed/perspt

We’d appreciate any feedback, feature ideas, or bug reports. Thanks for checking it out.

— Vikrant & Ronak
by rramadass | 2025-06-11 06:14:43+00:00
> I think this semantic has been the same the whole time

Yes; When you provide any of the "standard" ctors the compiler goes hands off leaving it entirely up to you to do the calls to any of the base ctors.

The article was just Raymond being surprised since as somebody else has already pointed out the api name is a bit of a misnomer.
by niemandhier | 2025-06-11 06:15:21+00:00
All I want is to go to the site of my favorite newspapers and see stuff that matters.

Instead I get things like this:

“Modern fathers have failed”

“Man need to ditch the dadbod”

“Equality means only man should be drafted”

They have tons of great and deeply investigated content, but they throw engagement bait into your face. In the end I use a search engine to extract a relevant subset of articles.
by dragochat | 2025-06-11 06:15:35+00:00
> Everything has beginning and end

Most things of real interest do not tbh. The point should be to learn how to play infinite games. Sure, there's hard-to-impossible prices to pay, and/or to force others into paying. But what if it can be made to work, won't any price be worth it for that... ?

The epicenter is where the fun is at, even if the price might be sacrificing things of value for your average population and some unquantifiable measure of fluff like national-identity or whatever people imagine it's real nowadays.

I'm an unashamed globalist, but would rather have a "world village" with the US (despite that US being maybe quite different from what most gen-pop wants) at its heart :P Imagine all the people...
by 4ggr0 | 2025-06-11 06:15:40+00:00
I know that CECOT is not nearly as bad as concentration camps, but at the same time it's not like Trump refrains from sending people off to camps, based on loose accusations.

What I'm trying to say, or I guess repeat after you, is that fascism doesn't have to be Hitlerian to be fascism. Or in other words, at this point it's too late anyways.

We absolutely should start comparing and measuring now, because at the point where the comparisons match 100%, too much damage will have been done.

If I was religious I'd probably pray for the US, as I'm not I'm just shaking my head in astonishment.
Show HN: ESP32 Dashboard with e-paper display and custom widgets
by mechadwarf | 2025-06-11 06:15:43+00:00
I built a simple dashboard that runs on an ESP32 with a small e-paper display. It shows custom widgets like date/time, weather, personal website views, and also fetches Pi-hole status from Raspberry Pi via API to show if it's active and blocking queries. Useful as a mini network monitor or desk gadget. Full details are available on GitHub and my blog. Feedback and contributors are welcome.
by billforsternz | 2025-06-11 06:16:27+00:00
One thing I can do really easily with DOS but can never remember how to do on Linux is find a file somewhere in the filesystem.

dir/s filename

I know there are many ways to do the same thing in Linux, but they are all more complicated and because I am getting old and don't use the command line much anyway, none of them have stuck in my mind.

In general I can use dir more effectively than ls. I know this means I'm a bad person.
by cess11 | 2025-06-11 06:16:37+00:00
"There's a very strong financial incentive for ad-powered search engines to keep SEO spam out of search results"

No. Shitty results keep people exposed to ads for longer, on average.

'A publicly run search engine would not have those incentives and would be at if anything graver risk of a "tragedy of the commons" type scenario where the engine is overtaken with spam.'

You might be pleasantly surprised by the main work of the 2009 Nobel prize winner in economics, Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons.
by 3036e4 | 2025-06-11 06:16:39+00:00
One fun feature in DOS COMMAND.COM (I am not sure if this works in Windows shells as well?) is that you can type DIR.BAT instead of DIR *.BAT, for any file extension. Not sure how easy it would be to do that in most Linux shells? I can't think of a way to do it in bash, but maybe there is some place to hook in something like that?
by ghssds | 2025-06-11 06:16:48+00:00
On another of this guy's articles:

> Windows XP is not real Non-NT-based versions of Windows can be booted in real mode, which is the opposite of what Windows used to call 386 enhanced mode. In real mode, programs actually run in your computer's real memory space, instead of having virtual memory spaces (or "virtual machines" as Java programmers like to call them) allocated for them. While virtual mode, protected mode, or whatever you want to call it is useful for everyday multitasking, it's simply absurd to create a commercial operating system that doesn't allow software to directly interface with hardware. Try changing your interrupt vectors or PIT timing in Windows XP. Simple tasks like these, which could be easily done in real mode, become impossible with Windows XP. [0]

In this article:

> Protected mode is a kludge to prevent people from hurting themselves when they don't know what their software is doing.

It seems the author doesn't have a firm grasp of what are real and protected modes and even what an operating system does.

[0] http://webarchive.me/geocities/SiliconValley/2072/whyxpbad.h...
by anshumankmr | 2025-06-11 06:16:49+00:00
GPT4-Turbo had some major "laziness" problems, like really major ones. I posted about this a year back.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39985596#39987726

I am not saying they haven't improved the laziness problem, but it does happen anecdotally. I even got similar sort of "lazy" responses for something I am building with gemini-2.5-flash.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-11 06:18:12+00:00
> Unsurprisingly, this scared the crap out of the fossil fuel industry in the US and countries like Russia that are net exporters of fossil fuels, so they've spent decades lobbying to bind nuclear plant construction up in red tape to prevent them being built and funding anti-nuclear propaganda.

This is frankly nonsense, and my hope is that this nonsense is coming from a person too young to remember the real, valid fears from disasters like 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.

Yes, I fully understand that over the long term coal plants cause many more deaths, and of course climate change is an order of magnitude worse, eventually. The issue is that human fears aren't based so much on "the long term" or "eventualities". When nuclear power plants failed, they had the unfortunate side effect of making hundreds or thousands of square miles uninhabitable for generations. The fact that societies demand heavy regulation for something that can fail so spectacularly isn't some underhanded conspiracy.

Just look at France, the country with probably the most successful wide-scale deployment of nuclear. They are rightfully proud of their nuclear industry there, but they are not a huge country (significantly smaller than Texas), and thus understand the importance of regulation to prevent any disasters. Electricity there is relatively cheap compared to the rest of Western Europe but still considerably higher than the US average.
by oaththrowaway | 2025-06-11 06:18:25+00:00
Just went through the process recently...

Luckily Urgent Care was able to go from ultrasound to CT scan in 1 day. The long wait time has come from the insurance honestly.

Had to go to a different hospital because the original one I went to has to get an approval from United before getting it done (other hospital 2 blocks away doesn't have that same requirement??)

I got referred to a dedicated cancer center and then guess what, I have to call United and ask them to approve it - but I can't get an appointment to do that for 2 weeks.

Ended up doing all the legwork on my own and was able to get a consultation done within a week. Now I'm having to do biopsies, PET scan, ect. Depending on the result I might be able to get it removed next week!

But the pain has become so severe I can't eat, sleep, even lay down without extreme discomfort. I can't imagine waiting around on the insurance to walk me through it.

Funny enough, United sent us a letter in the mail asking if I really wanted to get that original CT scan! Like no, I'd rather not know I have a 7" tumor in my abdomen. Simply a joke of an industry
by shmerl | 2025-06-11 06:18:30+00:00
Policing by some corpo isn't better than policing by the government. The basis of why overreaching policing is bad doesn't depend on it. Compare DRM to someone installing surveillance in your house to preemptively "stop any potential crimes" ... namely, by you. Are you going to be OK with that just because it's some corpo doing it and not the government?

You get the point of why the above is wrong. DRM is wrong exactly for the same reason. The ethical problem with DRM is that it invades your digital privacy based on presumption of guilt.

Whether users care or don't care doesn't really affect the concept. A lot of things in digital space are less tangible for people to care becasue they are clueless, which doesn't mean these things aren't as dangerous and damaging when abused.

And those are fundamental problems, before we even get to bad consequences that you mentioned, like DRM damaging digital preservation, losing access to your purchases and so on, which are bad too, but not on the level the above is bad.

So to sum it up, DRM is always anti user in many senses.
by Mashimo | 2025-06-11 06:18:53+00:00
Oh wow, I work in with Hospital software and we have APIs for referrals (from general practitioner). Thank god.

What we currently are looking at is scheduling of staff, because somehow that involves different software (dr. vs nurse), and the staff builds a spreadsheet, and then enter it into other software. Totally whack how much time and effort they spend on that.
by jofzar | 2025-06-11 06:18:58+00:00
You’re absolutely right that AI-generated text can be good—sometimes even great. But the reason people care about preserving or identifying pre-AI content isn’t always about hating AI. It's more about context and trust.

Think of it like knowing the origin of food. Factory-produced food can be nutritious, but some people want organic or local because it reflects a different process, value system, or authenticity. Similarly, pre-AI content often carries a sense of human intention, struggle, or cultural imprint that people feel connected to in a different way.

It’s not necessarily a “psychological need” rooted in fear—it can be about preserving human context in a world where that’s becoming harder to spot. For researchers, historians, or even just curious readers, knowing that something was created without AI helps them understand what it reflects: a human moment, not a machine-generated pattern.

It’s not always about quality—it’s about provenance.

Edit: For those that can't tell this is obviously just copy and pasted from chatgpt response.
by zzo38computer | 2025-06-11 06:19:08+00:00
This is a benefit of DOS (and other older systems which can also be emulated). This is a benefit which applies even if you are not using a DOS system. This is why I had sometimes suggested making programs for older systems, that it would then have this benefit whether or not you actually have those older systems.

(I am not sure that it is actually the "single best thing about DOS", but it is a good benefit anyways.)
Show HN: Threadbase – Observability platform for debugging LLM memory
by parser1 | 2025-06-11 06:20:26+00:00
Hi HN – After months of working with LLM agents, I kept running into the same problem: debugging AI memory is a nightmare.

So I built Threadbase — a lightweight memory versioning and debugging platform for AI agents. Think of it like Git meets Datadog, but for tracking every memory injection, state change, and trace in an LLM session.

It lets you:

- See how memory evolves across prompts - Compare memory diffs per request - Track injected vs. final memory states - Debug hallucinations by replaying sessions step by step

Threadbase is a developer-first memory intelligence tracing layer for LLM-powered applications

SDK: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@threadbase/js
by kubb | 2025-06-11 06:20:38+00:00
The Democrats have similar incentives (see Biden’s admin’s actions, esp. deportation numbers), but they don’t use the anti immigrant rhetoric and don’t do the ICE raids for show because they also have the progressive, moderate and educated voters, and possibly also have scruples.

They sometimes say that they want less illegal and more legal immigration.

Biden’s dementia isn’t an explanation here, that’s really mostly just political ammo.