MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by selcuka | 2025-06-08 14:16:15+00:00
It's an argument against the original argument:

> you're at the mercy of the AI companies

You are not at the mercy of anyone. There are capable, open models that are self-hostable. For example, JetBrains IDEs come with a free local model [1] that runs on your CPU, which is exactly "buy once, use forever". If you want a bit more oomph a consumer level Nvidia GPU or Apple Silicon is sufficient.

> outsourcing your core competency to third party

I don't think my core competency is remembering obscure syntax, or being able to perform repetitive tasks. But if that's true, then I'm screwed anyway. My employer can simply pay an AI company 100 bucks a month and fire me. My own resistance against using LLMs won't change anything. The only logical thing to do would be to accept that my core competency is no longer valuable, and find another core competency.

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/junie/
by spacedcowboy | 2025-06-08 14:16:46+00:00
This is not the case for me and mine. We had the best insurance money could buy, and a hospital still decided to prioritise money over patient need, which put my wife into a coma and ruined her (and my, for that matter) life.

I’ve posted elsewhere in the thread if you want more details (just look for the fucking long comments) but bottom line: money über alles is not the way to run a health service, IMHO.
by snarf21 | 2025-06-08 14:17:35+00:00
I agree. In the end, we trade our time for money and our money for (different) time.

There also gets a point where some of these things become "penny wise and pound foolish". I'm reminded of the people who spend 20 minutes driving across town to save $0.20 a gallon on gas. Which even in an empty 15 gallon tank, is a savings of only $3.00. Net cost benefit analysis says they would be better off working an a fast food restaurant or something for a higher trade-off of money per hours.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-06-08 14:18:09+00:00
Rich customer here is not like 1% rich, but everyone above a min. wage job rich. If you remove them from the public system ridership drops signficantly and the scale required to support it erodes. It also becomes much easier to get concensus to reduce funding, accelerating the process.

The argument here is more like Canada's public/private healthcare: anyone able to will opt out of the public side. If you don't keep the funding for it in place it will be comparably worse. I would expect it is much easier to cut funding to public transit with less riders, which this will definitely cause.
by hubavka | 2025-06-08 14:19:23+00:00
I built NakaPay to make it dead simple for businesses to accept Bitcoin Lightning payments. After seeing how complex existing solutions were, I wanted to create something that any developer could integrate in minutes.

*What it does:* NakaPay provides a simple REST API and open-source Node.js SDK for integrating Lightning payments into any application. Businesses get instant Bitcoin payments with fees under 1%, and customers can pay with any Lightning wallet.

*Key technical features:* - RESTful API with webhook notifications for payment events - Open-source Node.js SDK (npm install @nakapay/sdk) - LNURL-auth for passwordless authentication - Real-time payment status updates via webhooks - Built-in invoice generation and QR codes - Full transaction history and analytics dashboard

*Tech stack:* - Frontend: Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS - Backend: Node.js, Express, PostgreSQL - Lightning: LND node integration - Infrastructure: Vercel, Docker

*Why I built it:* I've been in the Bitcoin space for a while and noticed that while Lightning Network solved the speed and fee problems of Bitcoin payments, the integration complexity was still a huge barrier for businesses. Existing solutions either required deep Lightning knowledge or came with hefty monthly fees.

NakaPay is my attempt to bridge this gap - making Lightning payments as easy to integrate as Stripe, but with the benefits of Bitcoin.

*Current status:* - Launched June 1, 2025 - Processing test payments successfully - Looking for early adopters and feedback

I'd love to get feedback from the HN community, especially on: 1. The API design and developer experience 2. Security considerations I might have missed 3. Additional features that would make this more useful

Happy to answer any questions about the implementation, Lightning Network integration, or the business model (transaction-based pricing, no monthly fees).
by IshKebab | 2025-06-08 14:20:28+00:00
Trams can be removed too. Bristol used to have trams. I doubt it is alone.

I definitely feel like trams are a weird technical solution to a policy/perception problem. On a technical level I don't think there's that much to recommend them over buses with bus lanes. It's just that governments never put bus lanes the whole way like you are forced to do with a tram.
Show HN: WhisperBuddy, Privacy-first AI-transcription app built after my layoff
by nghialuong | 2025-06-08 14:20:36+00:00
I was laid off recently and, instead of looking for another job right away, I decided to build something I always wanted: a transcription tool that respects user privacy.

Existing transcription tools often require internet connectivity, send your private audio to cloud servers, or lock you into monthly subscriptions. I wanted something different—so I built WhisperBuddy, a privacy-first AI transcription app that runs entirely on your machine.

WhisperBuddy uses OpenAI’s Whisper model (see: https://github.com/openai/whisper). While the model may not always deliver the absolute best accuracy, it provides solid performance and, most importantly, 100% privacy—no audio ever leaves your device.

I optimized the app for local performance and usability, and I’m eager to hear feedback from the community.

Thanks for checking it out!
by _m_p | 2025-06-08 14:21:25+00:00
> Also, because of the expensive infrastructure that can only be used by trams, there’s a permanence there that prevents future politicians from ripping it out to put more cars on for a quick political win with drivers.

This is definitively not true. It's something people said about the Washington, DC streetcar and it turns out they are about to remove the streetcar in order to replace it with buses:

https://www.railwaygazette.com/light-rail-and-tram/dc-street...
by mrkeen | 2025-06-08 14:23:01+00:00
I've read a few postmortems about STM. I have to take them with a grain of salt because I usually read those reports right after doing a bunch of STM programming, and right before doing a bunch more STM programming. Reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

Here it is in 2006 featuring the same Tim from your article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tve57vilywc

I didn't start using it in anger till 2013-2014 maybe? But I don't recall any major differences between what the video shows and how it works in 2025.

Anyway, postmortems usually boil down to two issues:

1) That's not how programmers usually do it

2) We couldn't pull it off

The most obvious explanation for 1 is 2. I, too, would be disappointed by the low-adoption rates of my new technology if I hadn't built it or released it to users.

But the article has some gems:

Transactions unfortunately do not address one other issue, which turns out to be the most fundamental of all: sharing. Indeed, TM is insufficient – indeed, even dangerous – on its own because it makes it very easy to share data and access it from multiple threads;

I cannot read this charitably. This is the only reason for, not a damning reason against. It's like doing research & development on condoms, and then realising it's a hopeless failure because they might be used for dangerous activities like sex.

I already mentioned a great virtue of transactions is their ability to nest. But I neglected to say how this works. And in fact when we began, we only recognized one form of nesting. You’re in one atomic block and then enter into another one. What happens if that inner transaction commits or rolls back, before the fate of the outer transaction is known

You nest transactional statements, not the calls to atomic. The happy-path for an atomic is that it will commit; it should be obvious a priori that something that commits cannot be in the codepath that can be rolled back.

Then that same intern’s casual statement pointing out an Earth-shattering flaw that would threaten the kind of TM we (and most of the industry at the time) were building. ... An update in-place system will allow that transaction to freely change the state of x. Of course, it will roll back here, because isItOwned changed to true. But by then it is too late: the other thread using x outside of a transaction will see constantly changing state – torn reads even – and who knows what will happen from there. A known flaw in any weakly atomic, update in-place TM. If this example appears contrived, it’s not. It shows up in many circumstances.

I agree that it's not contrived. It's in the problem-space of application writers. It's not a problem caused by introducing STM. We want an STM system to allow safe access to isItOwned & x, because it's a PITA to try to do this with locks.
by ben_w | 2025-06-08 14:24:13+00:00
> It is also for the beneficiaries because price comes into the equation and the longer it takes, the more expensive it will be.

> We are currently paying the early-Uber prices at the moment but it's likely not sustainable (or not enough) and we'll see price hikes as soon as vendor locking is sufficiently set in.

Not so, there are many open-weights models close to the Pareto frontier* just waiting for cheaper RAM. Low-end models I can already run on my laptop.

We only get lock-in if some vendor manages to create an architecture which is both significantly better and secret. Secret not merely against employees moving around and sharing ideas or anonymously leaking things — the labs are known to use AI as part of the model development, while the models themselves are already observed to attempt to leak their own weights in various circumstances.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_front
by kcoddington | 2025-06-08 14:26:31+00:00
While I don't disagree with this approach, it only works for some digital tasks. AI won't clean my house or exercise my body or engage in obligatory social interactions. In these cases, just getting it done by shutting off your brain is often the best way to get it going.

Also, it's not all or nothing. You can decide to engage more in the task as it's ongoing, which could contribute to higher quality output. The hard part is usually starting.
by Levitating | 2025-06-08 14:27:30+00:00
> Real homelessness is born out of desperation and lack of alternatives.

There's no single cause or experience for being homeless. There's no "real homelessness" either.

You might be interested to read "20-25% of all 'homeless' actually have housing" by Kevin Dahlgren.

https://truthonthestreets.substack.com/p/20-25-of-all-homele...
by nghialuong | 2025-06-08 14:28:34+00:00
Hi HN! I'm nghialuong, 12 years in tech. Built this native macOS transcription app because existing solutions send your audio to the cloud, and I value privacy.

I'm torn on direction: Should I stick to privacy-first and never compromise, or add optional cloud transcription (like Whisper API) for better accuracy while keeping local as default?

The tradeoff is clear - local means decent accuracy, cloud means better results but breaks the privacy promise.

What matters more to potential users: peace of mind that audio stays on-device, or best possible transcription quality? Is there a sustainable market for privacy-focused tools, or do most people prioritize accuracy over privacy?

Would love your thoughts on this positioning dilemma.
by kjellsbells | 2025-06-08 14:29:27+00:00
Buses are considerably faster than walking, no? Eg 8 to 9mph or about 13kph in London on average[0].

I also observe that this is an average speed, which night be useful for statistical summarization but is not as useful as knowing whether the portion of the route that you want to take is in the faster part or the slower part of the data readings.

For example, if I took a bus from Aldwych up Holborn to Euston I might expect that the first mile would indeed be walking pace but the second mile I would be zipping along. It's important as a bus rider to not let the slow parts color your perception of the whole ride.

[0] https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-do...
by constantcrying | 2025-06-08 14:30:50+00:00
Yes. Precisely that they are orthogonal means that they are suitable.

If you are familiar with the Fourier series, the same principle can be applied to approximating with polynomials.

In both cases the crucial point is that you can form an orthogonal subspace, onto which you can project the function to be approximated.

For polynomials it is this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynomial_chaos
by JdeBP | 2025-06-08 14:31:31+00:00
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44217164 . Coventry actually does, right now, run quite an extensive network of electric regular buses, not only out of Pool Meadow but also the ones that circle the Trinity Street/Burges loop. And they had to divert them to build the demonstrator track for this.
by yojo | 2025-06-08 14:31:56+00:00
I have friends that do pretty disparate things (e.g. education consulting, grant writing, solar project planning, etc). They all use LLMs in aspects of their jobs; tasks like rewording emails for tone, extracting themes from brainstorming sessions, rough drafting project plans, etc.

None of them are doing the equivalent of “vibe-coding”, but they use LLMs to get 20-50% done, then take over from there.

Apple likes to deliver products that are polished. Right now the user needs to do the polishing with LLM output. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful today
by WillAdams | 2025-06-08 14:32:40+00:00
I think you win the internet today --- I missed that discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44118159

(this discussion seems to have aged out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44040642 )

and it's almost exactly what I want (just needs to be a stand-alone desktop app, and have tools for arc and Bézier curve (so that a user could extend arc into a circle, and I assume line into a rectangle) --- if it added Flash-like deforming line-drawing (see Wick Editor for an implementation) that would be icing on the cake.

Thanks!
by motorest | 2025-06-08 14:33:03+00:00
> My point was that one should never expect a politician to admit that, (...)

That's the problem with your false dichotomy: Trump already admitted tarrifs create economic problems.

https://fortune.com/2025/02/02/trump-tariffs-americans-some-...

Trump blaming predecessors for the problems created by his tarrifs policy goes way beyond your run-of-the-mill predecessor blaming. Trump is simultaneously warning his tarrifs policy will cause economic damage and that the economic damage created by his policies were caused by someone else.
by skrebbel | 2025-06-08 14:34:19+00:00
I vouched and upvoted your comment to counter the many downvotes. Like other respondents, I strongly disagree with your conclusion that "neither side can claim to be the innocent victim", but I think the rest is valid context. The reason many Hutus were so easily swayed was because they were afraid of Tutsis effectively doing the same to them, and there was historical precedent of just that.

This is exactly the same story as why Croatians were trying to de-Serb their villages and vice versa. Fear of what the other would do made them do the same, first (or even worse). See also the comment about "Accusation in a mirror" further up.

People often have the idea that the Rwandan genocide was some people spontaneously rising up and killing their neighbours with farming equipment because someone on the radio told them to. You're right that it was more complicated than that.

Still doesn't mean murder victims aren't victims though. They totally are, and they can't be blamed for actions done by other people vaguely similar to them.
by avsteele | 2025-06-08 14:36:02+00:00
People are drawing erroneous conclusions from this.

My read of this is that the paper demonstrates that given a particular model (and the problems examined with it) that giving more thought tokens does not help on problems above a certain complexity. It does not say anything about the capabilities of future, larger, models to handle more complex tasks. (NB: humans trend similarly)

My concern is that people are extrapolating from this to conclusions about LLM's generally, and this is not warranted

The only part about this i find even surprising is he abstract's conclusion (1): that 'thinking' can lead to worse outcomes for certain simple problem. (again though, maybe you can say humans are the same here. You can overthink things)
by tw04 | 2025-06-08 14:36:09+00:00
Their governments fund the upgrades instead of running around claiming their flight agencies are full of corruption and inefficiency with no basis in reality.

https://www.navcanada.ca/en/news/news-releases/nav-canada-an...

https://apnews.com/article/faa-firings-trump-doge-safety-air...
by whywhywhywhy | 2025-06-08 14:36:40+00:00
Starfield also specifically didn’t understand what makes a space version of an exploration RPG interesting. They couldn’t ship ground to space flight so they convinced themselves it wasn’t interesting and replaced it with cutscenes and fast travel.

The whole excitement of games like Elite, Space Engineers etc is the seamless takeoff to landing between long planetary distances.

In a space themed game the journey is the story not so much the smaller interpersonal interactions at the destinations, those things are the reasons for the journey.

Modern Bethesda didn’t understand what they were making.
by joshuaissac | 2025-06-08 14:36:45+00:00
> How did they survive without their funding before they got it?

They were initially Netscape, a commercial company, so they had money from their customers.

After the browser code base was handed over from Netscape/AOL to the Mozilla Foundation in 2003, they got donations from AOL, IBM, Red Hat, etc. which kept them going for a few more years.

The Mozilla Foundation signed the deal with Google two years later, in 2005.

In short, they survived first on commercial revenues and then from donations, neither of which are substantial now.
by runako | 2025-06-08 14:37:29+00:00
Quick statistics I pulled[1]:

In the US, 170 million people use TikTok. TikTok's US revenue reached $10 billion in 2024. US adult users spend an average of 53.8 minutes per day on TikTok. In 2024, TikTok was downloaded 875.67 million times.

(This data is going to include estimates. I am not going to quibble about the estimates, but whichever credible data source you choose will support the position that TikTok is not a niche outlet only used by a small segment of Americans.

Also, this data does not explore the number of Americans who earn a living by posting to the platform. Not interested in a values discussion about this, but banning the platform would suddenly cut off some Americans' income.)

Not a direct comparison, but CBS generally pulls ~5 million viewers during prime time programming. It's entirely likely that more people watch TikTok regularly than watch any TV network. For better or worse, TikTok is a very popular media outlet in the US.

This is "targeted" in the sense that it's targeted at essentially half of Americans and "tech" in the sense that every media uses tech.

1 - https://backlinko.com/tiktok-users
by summarity | 2025-06-08 14:37:29+00:00
I found the same in my personal work. I have o3 chats (as in OAI's Chat interface) that are so large they crash the site, yet o3 still responds without hallucination and can debug across 5k+ LOC. I've used it for DSP code, to debug a subtle error in a 800+LOC Nim macro that sat in a 4k+ LOC module (it found the bug), work on compute shaders for audio analysis, work on optimizing graphics programs and other algorithms. Once I "vibe coded" (I hate that term) a fun demo using a color management lib I wrote, which encoded the tape state for a brainfuck interpreter in the deltaE differences between adjacent cells. Using the same prompts replayed in Claude chat and others doesn't even get close. It's spooky.

Yet when I use the Codex CLI, or agent mode in any IDE it feels like o3 regresses to below GPT-3.5 performance. All recent agent-mode models seem completely overfitted to tool calling. The most laughable attempt is Mistral's devstral-small - allegedly the #1 agent model, but going outside of scenarios you'd encounter in SWEbench & co it completely falls apart.

I notice this at work as well, the more tools you give any model (reasoning or not), the more confused it gets. But the alternative is to stuff massive context into the prompts, and that has no ROI. There's a fine line to be walked here, but no one is even close it yet.
by skrebbel | 2025-06-08 14:38:42+00:00
I didn't defend that claim, I agree that it's ridiculous.

I was responding to this accusation, which I think is also ridiculous:

> I am baffled by the number of people on this website, who I assume have rudimentary reading comprehension, getting confused [..]

It's hard to admit publicly that you're confused by something. It's easy to call people who do so idiots, "ha! i did understand it so you must be stupid!". You didn't use those kinds of words but you did imply it and I didn't think it was good style.
by selcuka | 2025-06-08 14:39:23+00:00
> It can be actually good if you do "structured procrastination"

This is actually what John Perry, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Stanford calls it. There is even an essay (and a whole website) called "Structured Procrastination" [1]:

> Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.

[1] https://www.structuredprocrastination.com/
by JdeBP | 2025-06-08 14:39:39+00:00
It's not smaller than most of the buses that run in the existing Stagecoach and National Express fleets that go around and to and from Coventry, which seat approximately 30 people on a single-decker with standing room for about 10 more (in the best case, with no push-chairs, trolleys, or wheelchairs).
by rikafurude21 | 2025-06-08 14:39:45+00:00
Apple, with all the compute and talent anyone could ask for, did not manage to create a frontier LLM model and was forced to bite the bullet and include GPT in their coveted walled garden in order to keep up and not be left behind in our current AI-Hype-(bubble) mania. I suspect this hurts their ego greatly and thats why they feel compelled to "talk trash". Saltiness wont get them anywhere though. I hope they manage to pull through. It would be a shame if they also went where Microsoft currently is.
by ta988 | 2025-06-08 14:39:47+00:00
Yeah PARA is the new hype in knowledge management, those come and go (Zettelkasten, atomic notes...) I don't find PARA particularly useful. Using links and tags with no directories at all work much better for me. But I think that's the nice thing (and also the curse) of all of those you can spend your time biie shedding with the different versions of yourself in time instead of using it for your life.