MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by insane_dreamer | 2025-06-17 16:16:52+00:00
I agree there have not been any permanent trials (wouldn't be a trial, then). However, we were discussing whether "it works" or not, in terms of the impact on society (i.e., "nobody will work anymore!", etc.), not how it would be paid for, which is an important but separate question.

Raising taxes is only one mechanism. There's also reduced spending (the defense budget is now approaching $1T).

Its seems there are two opposite arguments taking place: 1) AI will eventually displace a very large number of jobs and there are no ideas emerging as to what new industries will appear to provide jobs for the displaced (and that is because the new industry would have to be something that AI is incapable of doing cost-effectively, and we only need so many barbers), and 2) people who are capable of working but do not work should not be receiving compensation from the government.

I honestly don't know if UBI is the solution (I prefer means-tested BI rather than UBI but I concede that means-tested is problematic). But there had better be a solution, because 1) above is inevitable (probably not in the next 5 years, but in the next 25 years, certainly).
by Ajedi32 | 2025-06-17 16:17:16+00:00
> Not everything needs to be 'efficient' sometimes things should be 'just' or 'humane' rather than 'efficient'

You ignored the second part of my paragraph. It's far easier to be humane when operating in an efficient system than an inefficient one.

Even a multi-billion dollar datacenter can and will go unused if the price of water to cool it gets high enough. If keeping that datacenter running is somehow so important to larger society that it's actually more efficient to airlift in water from across the country to supply coolant than to shut down the datacenter (extremely doubtful), then that's exactly what should happen, and it's exactly what the market will make happen unless you interfere.

If unstable market prices result in temporary, unacceptably inhumane conditions for other people, then the most efficient solution is certainly going to be to work within the market-based system to help those people (e.g. subsidize the cost of water to residential homes until prices stabilize), not to override the system and prevent that (apparently extremely valuable) datacenter from being constructed in the first place.

> > NYC's congestion pricing

> That isn't a market, that is a tax.

People are freely choosing to exchange their money in return for a service. That's a market. Not a perfectly free market since NYC roads are a local monopoly, but closer to that ideal than the previous system of "free roads".

> Look, markets are great, but I don't get this quasi-religious adherence to one mechanism amongst many as the be-all-end-all of solutions.

Markets are more than just great, they've proven themselves time and time again to be nearly unbeatable in their ability to create wealth and allocate resources efficiently.

Markets are based on the collective decisions of millions of people taking billions of factors into account to create the most efficient outcome for everyone. None of us have any hope of beating that with our own naive takes on what "seems best". Anytime we interfere we're making everyone poorer in the service of whatever other goal we're trying to achieve, so we better be darned sure it's worth it.
by GreenGames | 2025-06-17 16:17:25+00:00
Hi there, Alessandro and Francesco here. We just launched an experimental feature in C/ua called App-Use. It lets you create virtual desktops scoped to specific apps (e.g., "Safari and Notes only") to give your agents focused, lightweight control without full-screen access.

Use cases:

- Run multiple agents in parallel with isolated app views

- Automate your iPhone using the iPhone Mirroring app

- Improve agent task precision and reduce VLM distractions

Works only on macOS (Sequoia+) and requires experiments=["app-use"]. No extra processes, just clever compositing.

More details: https://www.trycua.com/blog/app-use

Feedback and experiments welcome!
by sfn42 | 2025-06-17 16:17:48+00:00
I'm not the person you asked but I agree with them. Superstition is stupid - we don't know so let's make stuff up. There is effectively a 100% chance you're wrong. I don't know what difference if any there is between superstition and mysticism.

We know what we can observe. We know about gravity and astronomy and subatomic particles and how they interact etc, we know a lot of stuff. There's also a lot of stuff we don't know, and as far as I'm concerned we should try to figure those things out but until such time as we think we have figured them out we should leave them alone. The way to even attempt to know things is science, and if you can't use science to prove or at least support something then you're almost certainly wrong.

To me it's that simple. I don't believe in things, I either know or I don't care. Was the big bang just a spontaneous event that happened for no reason? Did some sentient being trigger it? I don't know, I can't know, there's nothing more to talk or think about. I do not respect people who pretend to know because i know they can't know. And the reason I know they can't know is because the people who believe in this type of crap typically know less about any given scientific topic than I do, which isn't a particularly high bar. If you don't even bother to learn the things we know then I don't know why you're speculating about stuff we'll probably never know.

Also none of this crap even makes any sense. The bible has more plot holes than a sieve. It doesn't explain anything, it just defers to "god works in mysterious ways". Not to mention that the god described in the bible seems like an absolute tit. Killing and torturing people for nothing, even killing a man's family and ruining his life just to win a bet. The people who believe in this crap are either indoctrinated from a young age, otherwise forced into it, or just plain stupid. I can't rationalize it any other way. They tried to indoctrinate me and it almost kind of worked in my mid teens, I really wanted to believe just to fit in with my friends but I just couldn't get past all the nonsense.

I vividly remember being on a church camp for our confirmation, the camp leaders told us their stories of how they found their faith and one guy stood up on the stage and said he was in a bad financial situation so he prayed to God for help and the next day a man he'd never met knocked on his door and gave him a briefcase with exactly as much money as he needed.

That was a pretty defined moment where I went "yeah these people are completely full of shit". I was 15 and ever since then it's only become clearer to me that religion and superstition is complete crap. There's prizes put there, James Randi offered a million dollars to anyone who can prove supernatural ability in a scientific setting, like psychics or mediums or any other quacks like that. it was first offered in 1964 and stood until 2015, in that time over a thousand people tried it and none succeeded. To me that's proof enough. If you make supernatural claims you're a quack and if you believe in them you're gullible and that's all there is to it.
by rvnx | 2025-06-17 16:17:54+00:00
We now have realistic simulators like: http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/ -> (it's free and open-source: https://github.com/orbitersim/orbiter )

so now the main problem is building the hardware, there are a lot of solutions for the software part.

Before there were no general-purpose simulators, and barely usable computers (2 MHz computer with 2 KB of memory...), so all you could do was hardcoding the path and use rather constrained algorithms.
by semiquaver | 2025-06-17 16:19:22+00:00
> Its about being able to answer questions thats not in its training data.

This happens all the time via RAG. The model “knows” certain things via its weights, but it can also inject much more concrete post-training data into its context window via RAG (e.g. web searches for documentation), from which it can usefully answer questions about information that may be “not in its training data”.
by 7402 | 2025-06-17 16:20:10+00:00
I'll add one thing to this. If you do follow this route, find a new job and give notice to your company, be prepared for them to suddenly wake up, tell you they'll fix everything, make a counter-offer, and urge you to stay.

This doesn't always happen, but it has happened often enough to me, so you might think about the possibility in advance and what you would do.

For myself, I have NEVER taken the counter-offer and stayed. When I have had a bad manager, I regarded that as a failure of my manager's manager as well. I didn't think the situation would instantly be fixed, miraculously, if they did fire my boss or move me to a new position in the same company. But that is just my experience. It would be good if others who have had a different and successful experience staying would speak up too, so you can get the full picture of possible outcomes.
by bunderbunder | 2025-06-17 16:20:26+00:00
I haven't read it in 10 years, but this used to be pretty explicitly spelled out in Twitter's privacy policy, in plain language, in a way that I really appreciated. (Not that anyone ever reads the privacy policy.)

But it really does make sense. Nothing you publicly tweet can ever be private, nor is there any real way you can reliably take it back. Because as soon as the tweet's been transferred to someone else's device, they now have every bit as much control over that content as they do over any other content that makes it onto their device.

I'm a pretty pro-privacy person, to the point where I generally avoid social media sites. But this was also my policy back when I administered an oldschool Web forum: once it's posted, it's out of your control. Period. That's really the only policy for a public forum that makes any sense at all. If that's scary to you then maybe the things you're posting should be, y'know, kept private instead of being broadcast to the entire world.

tl;dr: group chats are actually pretty cool.
by JohnFen | 2025-06-17 16:20:28+00:00
> And honestly why are we just accepting that these organizations

I suspect that's what people who remind others not to trust these services are thinking, and that's why the reminder. If you rely on these services, you are accepting exactly those bad things. We can equally decide not to accept them by not using the services or, at the very least, by considering them unreliable and acting accordingly (such as not allowing important data to exist solely in them).
by Zak | 2025-06-17 16:20:52+00:00
It's possible to use Android as bundled with a Pixel device without a Google account, but it's a hassle because you can't use Play Store. You can use Aurora Store as an anonymous client, F-Droid for open source apps, APKs from download sites, or the like if you're so inclined, but all of those add significant effort or unreliability.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-17 16:20:57+00:00
Also psychology and politics kept people from following the easy path.

The Space Shuttle was wrong in so many ways, not least that it was a "pickup truck" as opposed to a dedicated manned vehicle (with appropriate safety features) or a dedicated cargo vehicle. Because they couldn't do unmanned tests they were stuck with the barely reusable thermal tiles and couldn't replace them with something easier to reuse (or safer!)

Attempts at second generation reusable vehicles failed because rather than "solving reuse" they were all about single-stage to orbit (SSTO) [2] and aerospike engines and exotic composite materials that burned up the money/complexity/risk/technology budgets.

There was a report that came out towards the end of the SDI [3] phase that pointed out the path that SpaceX followed with Dragon 9 where you could make rather ordinary rockets and reuse the first stage but expend the second because the first stage is most of the expense. They thought psychology and politics would preclude that and that people would be seduced by SSTO, aerospikes, composites, etc.

Funny though out of all the design studies NASA did for the Shuttle and for heavy lift vehicles inspired by the O'Neill colony idea, there was a sketch of a "fly back booster" based on the Saturn V that would have basically been "Super Heavy" that was considered in 1979 that, retrospectively, could have given us Starship by 1990 or so. But no, we were committed to the Space Shuttle because boy the Soviet Union was intimidated by our willingness and ability to spend on senseless boondoggles!

[1] The first few times the shuttle went up they were afraid the tiles would get damaged and something like the Columbia accident would happen, they made some minor changes to get them to stick better and stopped worrying, at least in public. It took 100 launches for a failure mode than affects 1% of launches to actually happen.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-stage-to-orbit

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative (which would have required much cheaper launch)
Show HN: RM2000 Tape Recorder, an audio sampler for macOS
by marcelox86 | 2025-06-17 16:20:59+00:00
RM2000 Tape Recorder makes it stupid simple to grab audio samples and organize them: just record the sample, give it a title (and maybe some tags), and it is saved neatly into a directory of your choosing.

I'm a huge datahoarder and have always appreciated tools / services like PureRef and Are.na which help me make sense of everything I collect. Those services concern themselves with images and video - I wondered, why can't the same be done with music and audiofiles?

I actually got the inspiration for the filenaming scheme from the Emacs Denote package - every sample is saved in the format of title--tag1--tag2.mp3. Emacs Denote does something similar, for example an identifier--title--keywords.org .

I chose this method as any file browser with fuzzy search can search through samples, i.e. - the Ableton file browser. Just search up some of the tags, and a title, and you'll be able to find your sample.

I wanted this app to look good, as well (and is why I spent so much time making it!) The app is made with a mix of SwiftUI and AppKit, while the assets were rendered in Sketch

I appreciate your time and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. If you do download it, and find suggestions / bugs, please let me know!

Cheers
by martin_a | 2025-06-17 16:21:15+00:00
> How in the world do people store images / photos nowadays?

Well, as JPEGs? Why not? Quality is just fine if you don't touch the quality slider in Photoshop or other software.

For "more" there's still lossless camera RAW formats and large image formats like PSD and whatnot.

JPEG is just fine.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-06-17 16:21:32+00:00
Text requires effort to translate, and might not fit well for some languages and some UIs. So managers don't want to pay for translations & thus want only icons, and designers don't want to make UIs that work for wildly different label widths. This is not unique to hamburger menus, but it does mean that "just replace it with the word 'Menu'" will be rejected.

Hamburger menus are annoying because they add a click. They can save some screen space on small devices by allowing most of the top area which would be covered by a menu bar to be clear, with only a single button in the corner. This is pretty useless on larger displays (laptops, desktops, etc.) but makes sense on phones, and sometimes on smaller tablets.

Hiding options happens even with traditional menus. Do you change application settings under Edit->Preferences, or is it File->Settings, or Tools->Options, or something else? Or worse, do you change some things in Edit->Preferences, others in Tools->Options, and yet more in File->Settings?

Hamburger menus aren't always bad design, but they often allow hiding bad design by making the UX worse. Attempting to unify UI across wildly different interface types (desktops, laptops, tablets, & phones) inevitably leads to bad design & bad UX. Keeping a common color scheme or overall style is fine, but the interaction patterns of the different input schemes (keyboard & mouse, keyboard & touchpad, touchscreen) are different enough that UIs need to vary between device types for a good UX.
by reaperducer | 2025-06-17 16:22:45+00:00
How much is x willing to exponentially sacrifice to satisfy the long tail of y?

Part of the problem is the acceptance of the term "long tail" as normal. It is not. It is a method of marginalizing people.

These are not numbers, these are people. Just because someone is on an older phone or a slower connection does not make them any less of a human being than someone on a new phone with the latest, fastest connection.

You either serve, or you don't. If your business model requires you to ignore 20% of potential customers because they're not on the latest tech, then your business model is broken and you shouldn't be in business.

The whole reason companies are allowed to incorporate is to give them certain legal and financial benefits in exchange for providing benefits (economic and other) to society. If your company can't hold up its end of the bargain, then please do go out of business.
by brulard | 2025-06-17 16:22:59+00:00
If a prisoner costs $50k a year, and "if" he would work a job where he would make $50k a year and if he didn't receive a dime from it, does it look to you like a free labor? He merely makes up for what he costs the system, not taking into consideration the likely damage that he has done that made him end up in prison in the first place. And I don't expect prisoners to have anywhere close to $50k salary jobs.
by barbazoo | 2025-06-17 16:23:12+00:00
That's the way.

> I'd love to just go over to Signal fully but then I couldn't talk to family, friends, and probably couldn't even book a haircut or pay my taxes (my accountant messages me on WhatsApp)

Comments like these make me think it's probably more a problem of inertia. Of course they can still talk to family (visit/call/email/sms/fax/mail,...), and of course they can still do their taxes, they might just have to get a different accountant that does business outside of WhatsApp. This all would take more energy than living in this beautifully convenient platform that Meta set up for them.
by anonbanker | 2025-06-17 16:24:24+00:00
I'm grateful for the author for showing me SimpleX-Chat[0]. I'm an avid Matrix user, but communication tools that weren't birthed from a political hivemind are important tools to support, especially when you're being told that the opposite is true. In this case, the communication tool seems to be grounded in interesting ideas that preserve privacy more than Matrix seems to be capable of doing.

0. https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat?tab=readme-ov-f...
by palata | 2025-06-17 16:24:52+00:00
I understand that WhatsApp may be necessary to talk to businesses (because Signal didn't develop that, and I honestly don't think they should).

But what would prevent people from using WhatsApp to talk to businesses and Signal to talk to friends? I have been using multiple channels with friends forever: phone call, mail, email, MSN Messenger, Facebook, IRC, ICQ, WhatsApp, Threema, Signal, Slack, Discord, Matrix, ... What sucks is when I can't reach a friend. But I never saw it as a problem that I had too many choices to talk to them :-).

I don't really understand this "It has to have 100% of the market" stance. I don't want monopolies, I don't really understand why someone would say "this monopoly sucks, but I really want a monopoly so I won't ever change unless it is for a better monopoly".
by haswell | 2025-06-17 16:24:57+00:00
"Ego death" is really not the death of ego, but the death of the belief that ego is is at the center of all things, and is somehow a thing that actually exists in the way we tend to believe it exists before examining it more closely.

> Maybe if we didn't call it "death", it wouldn't sound so scary, or mysterious, or interesting, or even useful.

I tend to agree. I think there's a strong stigma and association people hold when they hear these words, that are unrelated to the actual phenomena itself.

> Guess it'd be kind of hard to build religions around that though.

This reveals some of the associations you seem to have with the concept. I'm not religious, have taken on no metaphysical beliefs, and consider myself somewhere between agnostic and atheist.

There is nothing at all religious about ego death, even if many religions and people who talk about such things are doing so from a clearly religious context. It's this religious association that kept me away from exploring the ideas for many years.

It wasn't until I had directly experienced a taste of what that phrase means that I took it seriously. My worldview remains as irreligious as ever.

In retrospect, avoiding it because of this association seems as ill-advised as avoiding science because of its origins and associations with the Catholic Church.
by epistasis | 2025-06-17 16:25:21+00:00
There was a random smattering of songs from my library on my device, but not according to anything I regularly listened to.

I couldn't be bothered to spend time manually selecting stuff to download back then. It was offensive to even ask that spend 30 minutes manually correcting a completely unnecessary mistake on their part. And this was during a really really bad time in interface, with the flat ui idiocy all the rage, and when people were abandoning all UI standards that gave any affordances at all.

If I'm going to go and correct Apple's mistake, I may as well switch to another vendor and do it. Which is what I did. I'm now on Spotify to this day, even though it has many of the problems as Appple Music. At least Spotify had fewer bugs at the time, and they hadn't deleted music off my device.

Good riddance and I'll never go back to Apple Music.
by huxley | 2025-06-17 16:25:47+00:00
Not necessarily, you don’t need to know the answer, the fabulation might:

* give an error

* return the wrong result

* not be internally consistent with the rest of the content

* be logically impossible

* be factually impossible

* have basic errors

It is entirely possible (and quite common) to know something is wrong without knowing what a right answer is.
by xpe | 2025-06-17 16:25:50+00:00
> Dunno. I think you're being pedantic about a point that is clearly incorrect.

If I was incorrect about a positive (factual) claim, that's fine, I'm happy to learn. However, if we disagree on normative claims (values), that is not about "correctness".

For context, I can't readily think of a time when someone here on HN used the word "pedantic" in a kind way. It seems like the most-socially acceptable form of insult here. It isn't something you say out of respect. Your tone seems angry and combative rather than trying to understand. From my point of view, this is sad and counterproductive. To hoist up a level, this is part of my main point above -- I want there to be a kind of discussion here that is productive: both substantively and in terms of mutual respect.

> the history of Pentagon-funded R&D is absolutely filled with wild success stories and with embarrassing disasters...

I don't disagree. I'm not sure why you think I would. Perhaps you were misunderstanding?

Just to give some context -- which you probably know -- but it will help give us some shared grounding ... DARPA funded TCP/IP by way of the ARPANET, and DARPA gets its funding from the Pentagon. Still, the Pentagon's R&D funding (around $140B) is hugely different in character and scope from DARPA's funding ($4B). Compare (i) a broad Pentagon contract to get access to OpenAI's services with (ii) DARPA's funding for ARPANET. I don't see this as an interesting or relevant comparison: the Pentagon isn't driving fundamental research in (i). There are much better comparison points, such as the Pentagon's contracts with AWS or Azure.