MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shiomiru | 2025-06-17 08:58:05+00:00
> terminal browsers are hobby projects because

...those pesky GUI users want pixel-precision :P

Surely it's a hobby project. You have to have very specific tastes to browse in the terminal in 2025.

> using external binaries for protocols feels like sidestepping the real engineering

You could easily move all protocols to the main binary. The reason for the current arrangement is that this way, you can e.g. replace the HTTP handler with curl-impersonate, or add custom protocols like magnet (etc.) See the bonus directory in the sources for inspiration.

> tied to niche image formats like sixel/kitty which barely anyone supports.

Sixel & Kitty are the only image formats anybody supports. The alternatives are ASCII art (fun, but too pixelated) & hacking images onto the terminal thru the display server (is that still a terminal-based app?) But I'm happy to discuss further, I find the issue fascinating :)

> mac

The macOS issue is largely a function of the only person working on this not having a mac. If you do, you can help solving it by debugging it yourself & posting the results: https://todo.sr.ht/~bptato/chawan/63
by Yeri | 2025-06-17 08:58:48+00:00
SMS is definitely not free. You may have a bundle that includes X (or unlimited) amount of SMS, but there are plenty of subscriptions out there (maybe not in the US) that charge by the SMS, or come with bundles of only having, say, 50 free SMS per month.

In all fairness, no one uses SMS, and no one uses iMessage (outside of the US maybe?).

WhatsApp is omnipresent in Singapore. For example, every business, every support channel, every delivery company uses WhatsApp. WhatsApp QR codes are everywhere (similar to QQ/wechat in CN).

Most iPhone users I know in Singapore never even set up their iMessage (which is also only available on iOS and is a total pain to get to work if you're dabbling in various sim cards, as is very common in SEA). So yes, there's a very good reason WhatsApp is very popular in some parts of the world (similar to BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) until quite recently in Indonesia). It's become too big to fail and took over a very very big portion of (private/business) communication in many parts of the world. And it 100% needs more regulation.
by hcta | 2025-06-17 08:59:20+00:00
> We recruited a total of 54 participants for Sessions 1, 2, 3, and 18 participants among them completed session 4.

> We used electroencephalography (EEG) to record participants' brain activity in order to assess their cognitive engagement and cognitive load

> We performed scoring with the help from the human teachers and an AI judge (a specially built AI agent)

Next up: your brain on psych studies
by wickedsight | 2025-06-17 09:00:00+00:00
> I go to raves, I take very modest amounts of LSD (100 maybe 150 micrograms), and the whole experience turns into very spiritual session where I dance with my entire being and let myself disolve into the Great Void.

Cool. And good for you, but this has honestly ruined 'raves' for me.

I'm a huge fan of different types of electronic music and really, really enjoy it. The music itself is a spiritual experience and allows me to 'disolve into the Great Void'. But these days when I go to a festival or something, I'm surrounded by people I can't share this feeling/experience with, since everyone seems to be on some type of drug and either in their own world (X, LSD, etc) or think the world is in them (coke).

I recently prematurely left an artist I was really looking forward to because of exactly this. It was incredibly disappointing, though not surprising.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-06-17 09:00:24+00:00
From TFA:

"Meta’s ad business is “in as strong a position now as it’s ever been,” said Brian Wieser, an analyst and founder of the consulting firm Madison and Wall. The company’s share of the global digital ad business is around 15 percent, he said. Last year, almost all of Meta’s $164 billion in revenue came from advertising."

TL;dr: Advertising business injects more advertising.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-06-17 09:00:24+00:00
NASA's scientific research is incredible. Almost everyone here is narrowly focusing on NASA's manned missions, but the scientific side of NASA is doing amazingly.

The James Webb Space Telescope has performed beyond expectations, and is making fundamental discoveries about the history of the Universe and the properties of planets outside our Solar System. NASA has had a string of highly successful scientific missions.

Yet the Trump administration is proposing to completely gut NASA's science funding. If these cuts go through, there basically will be no new NASA scientific missions. It's game over for astrophysics and planetary science in the US.
by gneissguise | 2025-06-17 09:00:57+00:00
Excellent question. This is more a modern chunky pixel framebuffer, not planar.

The spirit of the project, however, was to emulate the tricks that bitplanes made famous. The plasma and flag effects, for example, don't move any pixels; they just cycle the color palette's offset against a static pattern, which is a direct software simulation of that classic Amiga hardware hack.
by kypro | 2025-06-17 09:01:15+00:00
The idea that LLMs can only spew out text they've been trained on is a fundamental miss-understanding of how modern backprop training algorithms work. A lot of work goes into refining training algorithms to preventing overfitting of the training data.

Generalisation is something that neural nets are pretty damn good at, and given the complexity of modern LLMs the idea that they cannot generalise the fairly basic logical rules and patterns found in code such that they're able provide answers to inputs unseen in the training data is quite an extreme position.
by vidarh | 2025-06-17 09:01:30+00:00
> Not true at all, in fact this sort of thing used to happen all the time 10 years ago, code reading APIs and generating clients...

Where is this template based code generator that can read my code, understand it, and generate a full client including a CLI, that include knowing how to format the data, and implement the required protocols?

I'm 30 years of development, I've seen nothing like it.

> I think you are missing the point as well, that's still review, that's still being on the hook.

I don't know if you're being intentionally obtuse, or what, but while, yes, you're on the hook for the final deliverable, you're not on the hook for fixing a specific instance of code, because you can just throw it away and have the AI do it all over.

The point you seem intent on missing is that the cost of throwing out the work of another developer is high, while the cost of throwing out the work of an AI assistant is next to nothing, and so where you need to carefully review a co-workers code because throwing it away and starting over from scratch is rarely an option, with AI generated code you can do that at the slightest whiff of an issue.

> Words like "skim" and "kill" are the problem here, not a solution. They point to a broken process that looks like its working...until it doesn't.

No, they are not a problem at all. They point to a difference in opportunity cost. If the rate at which you kill code is too high, it's a problem irrespective of source. But the point is that this rate can be much higher for AI code than for co-workers before it becomes a problem, because the cost of starting over is orders of magnitude different, and this allows for a very different way of treating code.

> Well, you just have to sort of hope it works and when it doesn't

No, I don't "hope it works" - I have tests.
by whiplash451 | 2025-06-17 09:01:45+00:00
At this point, you could have governments finance this piece of infrastructure.

This would cost $350M/year to Europe [1] -- which is a drop of the ocean in their budget -- in exchange for control of information.

Sounds like a no-brainer to me.

[1] assuming the initial business model of whatsapp was cash neutral, which I think it was
by jajko | 2025-06-17 09:02:34+00:00
Set and setting can make or break the experience. Alone and -> introspection or in the crowd who will drag you along them? Looking around at patterns emerging or resting with eyes firmly closed letting your mind wander far and high? What kind of soothing music is in the background? And so on.

For me and my several mushroom trips in the past (cca 1 standard dose, nothing over that but mixed with lemon which should shorten the trip while making it way more intense) all above made it extremely pleasant, very powerful with lasting effects, and also at the end of each very spiritual (while not changing me being agnostic, rather just confirming it).

Once took a milder dose without lemon, and just sat in one of Amsterdam's parcs looking around - felt almost nothing compared to other trips, and dealing with reality, traffic, cyclists etc made it less than pleasant.
by mjburgess | 2025-06-17 09:03:10+00:00
The next stage of this issue is: how do you explain something you didn't write?

The LLM-optimist view at the moment, which takes on board the need to review LLMs, assumes that this review capability will exist. I cannot review LLM output on areas outside of my expertise. I cannot develop the expertise I need if I use an LLM in-the-large.

I first encountered this issue ~year-ago when using an LLM to prototype a programming language compiler (a field I knew quite well anyway) -- but realised that very large decisions about the language were being forced by LLM implementation.

Then, over the last three weeks, I've had to refresh my expertise in some areas of statistics and realised much of my note taking with LLMs has completely undermined this process -- the effective actions have been, in follow on, traditional methods: reading books, watching lectures, taking notes. The LLM is only a small time saver, "in the small" once I'm an expert. It's absolutely disabling as a route back to expertise.
by jstummbillig | 2025-06-17 09:03:52+00:00
I see it as more of a calibration, revolving around understanding what an AI is inherently not able to do – decide what YOU want – and stopping to be weird about that. If you chose to stop being involved in a process and mold it, then your relationship to that process and the outcome will necessarily change. Why would we be surprised by that?

As soon as we stop treating AI like mind readers things will level out.
by somenameforme | 2025-06-17 09:03:52+00:00
Regardless of the definition, you do exist. Which naturally leads to the question of why you exist. If you write a program to add a couple of numbers, it seems absurd to imagine some entity magically poofs into existence, imagines itself carrying out such, and then poofs back out of existence. I find it no less absurd to imagine the same even if it happens to be 10^100 instructions.

So why do you perceive yourself, and if you aren't you, then who are you? These sort of thoughts eliminated any notion of nihilism from me and gradually pushed me towards a simulation hypothesis. Of course that's just religion for an agnostic, because it doesn't even answer anything - if you die only to 'wake up' and discover it was all just a simulation, you're still back right where you started.

The search for natural explanations feels unsatisfactory because it will always come back to a question of what created that. For instance what if you think the matter for a big bang was quantum mechanically poofed into existence then what led to the creation of quantum mechanics, the void of which emerged, or so on endlessly. You basically have to do a whole bunch of hand waving and assumptions to the point that it starts to rapidly feel like religion for an atheist.
by metalman | 2025-06-17 09:04:05+00:00
not that big a deal, but you do have to register and have basic security, ammonium nitrate is by todays standards just one step up from black powder, and if it's a proper company with mechanical and chemical engineers signing off then it's literaly just paper work.All in all industrial type experimenting involves avoiding exuberant exothermic reactions and dramatic kinetic events, with or without an electrical component, just about everyone involved has a story, and there are plenty of injuries and fatalities. One of the hard parts of bootstraping any industrial process is having people who have the knowledge and experience to train people in how to do things and not get hurt, it's not "saftey" as much as survival skills.
by HenryBemis | 2025-06-17 09:04:15+00:00
The below comment does not contribute to the discussion, it can be perceived as a negative one, and I should probably not make it. But these are my true feelings towards everyone who uses anything-Facebook/Meta:

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha and then after I catch my breath, a bit more hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Seriously, who expected anything different? Like.. in which universe does anything think "Facebook/Meta is going to do the right thing"(?)
by brucehoult | 2025-06-17 09:04:49+00:00
SiFive, the leading RISC-V IP vendor, with cores available (at the moment) up to around Cortex-X2 level, has been taping out chips from Chisel since 2016.

Their first chip, a 32 bit microcontroller, ran at 320 MHz on TSC 180nm, while the comparable Arm Cortex-M4 was typically limited to 180 MHz on the same process node.

The EIC7700X, using SiFive P550 cores, given nice solid Core 2 Quad (or Raspbery Pi 4) performance.

SiFive's X280 cores are being used in rad-hard Microchip chips for NASA.

This is not exactly "academic" or "hobby".
by pointlessone | 2025-06-17 09:05:01+00:00
How is this different to the standard WebComponents then?

I mean, web components are JS with HTML in them and you have all the power of JS to manage state and functionality. In case of zjs you have HTML with JS in it and you get an entry point callback to set up your instance (and another to clean it up).

BTW, the API is a little awkward (`exports.onConnect = function () { /.../ }`) and easy to mix up with the standard syntax (`export function onConnect() { /.../ }`) which you can't actually use here.

In either case you have to include a script into your page to make the component work. But also when you have many different components in case of regular webcomponents you use a somewhat readable markup:

<x-counter start-at="100"></x-counter> <x-counter start-at="200"></x-counter> <x-whatever></x-whatever>

With zjs you have to use the same tag for everything:

<zjs-component remote-src='counter-obj.zjsc' start-at='100'></zjs-component> <zjs-component remote-src='counter-obj.zjsc' start-at='200'></zjs-component> <zjs-component remote-src='whatever-obj.zjsc'></zjs-component>

To me this looks not unlike the primordial div soup. And on top of it it's 1 more request as compared to regular webcomponents.

The point is if HTML inclusion is not the main feature, but rather the per-instance state then regular WebComponents seem like a better solution if only for being a standard. When a reader sees a WebComponent they immediately know what they're dealing with. zjs appears to solve the same problem but differently, yet uses WebComponint API itself.
by bmacho | 2025-06-17 09:05:01+00:00
> But after my kids were born I noticed something: my kids loved my voice, they listened to every sentence I made, they laughed at my quirky jokes I made and they loved when I sang to them or I brought them to the park or to the nursery and when I sat them on my neck. My wife took all that from me though, so now I need to fight to get my kids back.

> But the moral of the story is: dullness is a matter of perspective.

Meh. Kids (or dogs) don't know better, they are just little love machines with literally 0 knowledge outside of you. That doesn't mean that dullness is a perspective, or they wouldn't benefit from it if you were just smarter, better, more interesting.
by davidgerard | 2025-06-17 09:05:08+00:00
Ed and I basically agree that this shit is shit. People whine about his tone in direct proportion to how many directly useful worked-out numbers he provides. I also agree strongly with his declaration that he will never forgive them for what they've done to the computer. I'm a techie and he's a non-techie, but, y'know, he's not wrong at all.
by saluki | 2025-06-17 09:05:33+00:00
Definitely ...

If anything engineers are doing more with AI and aren't limited to just APIs.

They are building more of the UI/UX, Design, Front/Back + API instead of less and meeting/building product's vision.

Supported by Devops.

Every layer of the process will be enhanced by AI so everyone is doing more that our previous process.

I wouldn't limit any layer, enable everyone and every team to do more and be more productive.
by latexr | 2025-06-17 09:05:59+00:00
I don’t buy that justification, most people have never and will never spare a thought for “software ownership”. I’d bet the truth is closer to “people don’t see games as software, but as entertainment. Paying for them is no different to paying to go to the movies, buy a song on iTunes, use Spotify, or Netflix”.

Apps (“software”) and games are fundamentally different in the public’s perception. Look at the App Store, it has two different tabs for games and Apple is even making a separate app for them.
by kibibu | 2025-06-17 09:06:01+00:00
> It is still done, but if no one actually reads it, why not automate generation.

There's a reason the real-estate industry has been able to go all-in on using AI to write property listings with almost no consumer kickback (except when those listings include hallucinated schools).

We're already used to treating them with skepticism, and nobody takes them at face value.
by palata | 2025-06-17 09:06:22+00:00
I don't get this. Everyone is used to juggling between multiple apps, many of which allow to send messages. People are fine talking over Discord AND WhatsApp AND three others, but somehow "it's unbearable to add Signal". And it's not exactly "yet another app", it's pretty much a clone of WhatsApp. So if everybody moved to Signal, we could just get rid of WhatsApp. Which gets us to your second point:

> And I don't want to go to signal because it's only marginally better. It's still American and still a walled garden (no third party apps allowed, no federation). It's a slightly less smelly walled garden.

This, to me, is downright irrational. "Less smelly" is better, especially if it takes zero effort (you don't even need to create an account with a password, it just sends you an SMS).

If there was a non-American alternative to Signal, surely I would go for it. But there isn't. In the meantime, Signal is by far the best alternative to WhatsApp in terms of privacy.

Not to mention that there is actually a valid reason to not allow third party apps (spoiler: security). Last time I heard a fork of Signal making the news, it was pretty bad.
by gneissguise | 2025-06-17 09:06:28+00:00
If anyone is interested in doing algorithmic art while learning Clojure/ClojureScript then I highly recommend checking out the Quil library:

https://landofquil.clojureverse.org/

http://quil.info/

https://github.com/quil/quil

Just lean into the declarative lisp style and immutable data and make some beautiful art to share with others!
by fhd2 | 2025-06-17 09:07:27+00:00
Certainly a relatively tight feedback loop, but not too tight. Syntax errors are very tight, but non negotiable: Fix it now.

Test failures are more explicit, you run tests when you want to and deal with the results.

Code review often has a horrible feedback loop - often days after you last thought about it. I think LLMs can help tighten this. But it can't be clippy, it can't interrupt you with things that _may_ be problems. You have to be able to stay in the flow.

For most things that make programmers faster, I think deterministic tooling is absolutely key, so you can trust it rather blindly. I think LLMs _can_ be really helpful for helping you understand what you changed and why, and what you may have missed.

Just some random ideas. LLMs are amazing. Incorporating them well is amazingly difficult. What tooling we have now (agentic and all that) feels like early tech demos to me.
by davidgerard | 2025-06-17 09:07:32+00:00
The canonical post length at Pivot to AI is 250 words and the canonical video length is 4 minutes, though I go over way often these days.

> are people skepticizing tech... recreationally?

As recreations go, it'd be a socially productive one! But do you seriously not understand that Ed is writing this stuff because he means it?
by tialaramex | 2025-06-17 09:08:01+00:00
I was pleasantly surprised one evening, out with friends, as for some reason the entire group decided they ought to mutually verify on Signal. I'm not certain that "Very drunk people" are the best possible to perform the verification step in Signal, but it's certainly true that you'd have to be a very determined and skilled imposter to show up to somebody's birthday, drink and smoke for several hours in that company and then go through this elaborate verification ritual.

Over time such verification "decays". People buy a new phone, that sort of thing, but it was a healthy boost in one inexplicable moment.
by HenryBemis | 2025-06-17 09:08:04+00:00
The fun fact is that those people have 100+ apps on their phones, which run in the background, draining their batteries, tracking the sh*t out of them, never actually use them (get value out of them) and they think zero about their privacy (probably use gmail or the sorts). Someone asked me to install Viber and it had 30 pages of advertisers/data brokers. I won't share a bowl of poop with them (WhatsApp, Viber, etc.) "Meet them where they are" doesn't work if they are in a pool of privacy-poop.
by poulpy123 | 2025-06-17 09:08:14+00:00
always nice to see something written in nim. In my very novice eyes, it is the most interesting language that is situated between C/C++ and python. It's a pity it never took off. The productivity of its users compared to the userbase size always made me think I'm right even if I'm far to be knowledgeable enough on the topic
by vincnetas | 2025-06-17 09:09:57+00:00
From my experience, nor MDMA nor shrums do the work for you. They only help you get there. So if you just pop the pill sit back and wait for things to happen, then it's not going to work. These things amplify your inner state (emotions, feelings, thoughts) thats why set and setting is of most importance. And here is where a good trip sitter also can come in handy.
by Aaron2222 | 2025-06-17 09:10:49+00:00
Came here to say the same thing. BIC Cristals are quite uncommon in my (also NZ) experience, but the BIC Clics are everywhere.

EDIT: Apparently also referred to as the BIC M10. Not to be confused with the BIC Clic Stic they apparently sell in the US.

Images for reference:

- https://i.redd.it/j0yd36jxfr5e1.jpeg

- https://imgur.com/lLPyqqF

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A6xZLNzBYE&t=531s
by freehorse | 2025-06-17 09:11:22+00:00
Yes. They use 800nm wavelength which is near infrared.

I don't think this can give a structural image, but not sure what this can be used whatsover. It is probably more comparable to fmri because the technique, applied on short source-detector paths, is usually showing fluctuations in oxygenation levels in the cortex, as proxy of brain activity, but in contrast to fmri it could not go deeper into subcortical structures of the brain.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-06-17 09:12:23+00:00
How is that an outrageous figure?

You need people for mission operations, to calibrate the data, and to do science with the data. You need access to the Deep Space Network. Beyond that, there is outreach.

This can easily come to several million dollars a year. It's a tiny fraction of what we pay on completely meaningless stuff. More is spent on the average US Congressional race every two years, and there are 435 of those. Surely we can spend this much to keep one of humanity's most distant spacecraft working.