MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by latexr | 2025-06-26 13:14:49+00:00
> I am reminded of a meme about musicians. Not well enough to find it

You only need to search for “loops goat skin”. You’re butchering the quote and its meaning quite a bit. The widely circulated version is:

> I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.

It’s not about “real musicians”¹ but a personal reflection on dependencies and abstractions and the nature of creative work and remixing. Your interpretation of it is backwards.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
by appsDev | 2025-06-26 13:15:15+00:00
Hello HN Community!

I just launched an app to make the caps lock key actually useful! It turns your caps lock key into a trigger for a stopwatch in your menu bar.

The app does not need Accessibility or Input Monitoring permission.

The inspiration came from personal difficulty. I use a stopwatch to track how much work I get done each day. This means I turn the stopwatch on whenever I am being productive, and have to toggle it dozens of times a day.

I tried several stopwatch apps, and even made one myself, but having to navigate to the menu bar each time to start / stop was frustrating when toggling so many times a day.

A couple months ago I saw a video talking about reconfiguring the caps lock key on windows to become useful, but macOS has limited customization options. This led to the idea for this app.

It has taken me several attempts to get it to work - including tons of failed approaches as well. Sometimes it would work in Xcode but not in production, but I finally got it to work reliably now!

The app is paid since it took me a lot of time to find the right approach to make it work, but if someone really needs a promo code please let me know and I will provide one in the comments.

Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/caps-lock-focus-stopwatch/id67...

Thanks for reading! (and if you have any other ideas with this concept you would want to see made feel free to share in the comments!) :)
by ndyg | 2025-06-26 13:15:16+00:00
A basic use case, to tie it back to the topic :)

When I'm working on a remote machine, it's nice to be able to easily pass things back and forth between it and my local laptop. I start a stream on the remote server and use `dumbpipe` to make the stream available on my local laptop.

```

# remote

xs serve ./store --expose :3001 ; dumbpipe listen-tcp --host 127.0.0.1:3001

# local

dumbpipe connect-tcp --addr 127.0.0.1:3001 <ticket>

$env.XS_ADDR ":3001" ; .cat

```

I can then do things like:

```

# local

cat local.file | .append local.file

# remote

.head local.file | .cas

```

Or register a local handler for the topic "pasteboard" that puts the contents on my local clipboard. Then, from the remote machine, I can run: `"foo" | .append pasteboard`
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-06-26 13:15:20+00:00
Thanks for your comment! You really nailed as to what sort of discussion I wanted I guess.

I agree so much with the enshittifcation but like, I never understand why atleast open source projects need VC funding/ if they really want to earn money, might as well bootstrap it and try to get some Business customers for support etc.

But if you are saying that to get business customers, I need vc funding, then I guess it forces some enshittifcation.

I am okay with having a SaaS solution but what I truly don't understand is why we need vc funding.

I truly love developers wanting to earn money with open source. I appreciate them because they are essentially giving us gifts and being altruistic and I want to live in a world where people who can, do support them. But I am not okay with is some corporation now deciding the direction to go for open source (and that corporation doesn't care about the craft or the community, they want money.. they want returns since its just a number to them really) and that force of direction really alienates communities and just forks appear and just tbh it becomes messy.

I am more than curious as to why enterprises want VC funded OSS products. Yes you rely on them for a longer amount of time, but it also increases the chances of rugpull quite significantly imo. I don't think that one should just get VC funding just because entreprises like it. Should they?

Maybe I am so alienated with startup culture but I just want anything I build to not burn piles of cash that I need to rely on someone else, and I'd rather be profitable from (day one?) with my own bootstraped company / basically being a indie hacker like you I suppose. I get why some companies need VC funding and they become startups but I don't think that literally everything should be startup I am not sure.
by johnisgood | 2025-06-26 13:15:21+00:00
Opioid-induced constipation is easy to counteract, however, with the right form of magnesium, and/or laxatives. There are herbs that you could drink as a tea, too, for constipation.

If you ask me whether I choose pain or constipation, well, I am pretty sure you know the answer.

This constipation goes away once you stop, and everything depends on the dose and the frequency and duration of taking it.
by akrauss | 2025-06-26 13:16:30+00:00
There is one feature in Claude Code which is often overlooked and I haven't seen it in any of the other agentic tools: There is a tool called "sub-agent", which creates a fresh context windows in which the model can independently work on a clearly defined sub-task. This effectively turns Claude Code from a single-agent model to a hierarchical multi-agent model (I am not sure if the hierarchy goes to depths >2).

I wonder if it is a concious decision not to include this (I imagine it opens a lot of possibilities of going crazy, but it also seems to be the source of a great amount of Claud Code's power). I would very much like to play with this if it appears in gemini-cli

Next step would be the possibility to define custom prompts, toolsets and contexts for specific re-occuring tasks, and these appearing as tools to the main agent. Example for such a thing: create_new_page. The prompt could describe the steps one needs to create the page. Then the main agent could simply delegate this as a well-defined task, without cluttering its own context with the operational details.
by alganet | 2025-06-26 13:17:00+00:00
Ice Ice Baby getting the bass riff of Under Pressure is sampling. Making a cover is covering. Milli Vanilli is another completely different situation.

I am sorry, none of your points are made. Makes no sense.

The LLM work sounds dumb, and the suggestion that it made "a qr code generator" is disingenuous. The LLM barely did a frontend for it. Barely.

Regarding the "free" price, read the comment I replied on again:

> Built with Aider and either Sonnet 3.5 or Gemini 2.5 Pro

Paid tools.

It sounds like the author payed for `npm install`, and thinks he's on top of things and being smart.
by sanex | 2025-06-26 13:17:28+00:00
I'm interested in doing something like this as well. Build a pergola with a solar roof instead of just a metal one from Costco. I've seen a few videos online doing a similar sized system with like a Jackert or Anker Solix. Realistically with 2-3 harbor freight panels they're only enough to power like your home office. A fridge will burn through the battery pretty fast. I do believe you can have them do input and output straight into your wall outlet and you don't have to plug right the appliances into the battery/inverter.
by linguistbreaker | 2025-06-26 13:17:28+00:00
Mindfulness and building the habit of letting go - let thoughts pass by like clouds, or landscape passing from a train. You notice the thought, but do not dwell on it.

The initial stage of dwelling gives thoughts footholds and reinforces them without evaluation of their validity. If a thought is worthwhile, you'll come back to it because it will stand out in the landscape of thoughts that went by.

Adopt of mindset of letting thought flow over and through you rather than catching each one and dwelling on it. When thoughts are shallow and numerous, this is like brainstorming.
by acedTrex | 2025-06-26 13:18:48+00:00
Yep, I have come to really dislike LLMs for documentation as it just reads wrong to me and I find so often misses the point entirely. There is so much nuance tied up in documentation and much of it is in what is NOT said as much as what is said.

The LLMs struggle with both but REALLY struggle with figuring out what NOT to say.
by strogonoff | 2025-06-26 13:18:49+00:00
I have a few sociophilosophical quibbles about the impact of this, but to focus on a practical part:

> by that point anyone else can reproduce your OS for whatever the cost of tokens is without ever touching your code.

Do you think that the cost of tokens will remain low enough once these companies for now operating at loss have to be profitable, and it really is going to be “anyone else”? Or, would it be limited to “big tech” or select few corporations who can pay a non-trivial amount of money to them?

Do you think it would mean they essentially sell GPL’ed code for proprietary use? Would it not affect FOSS, which has been till now partially powered by the promise to contributors that their (often voluntary) work would remain for public benefit?

Do you think someone would create and make public (and gather so much contributor effort) something on the scale Linux, if they knew that it would be open to be scraped by an intermediary who can sell it at whatever price they choose to set to companies that then are free to call it their own and repackage commercially without contributing back, providing their source or crediting the original authors in any way?
by weeznerps | 2025-06-26 13:19:06+00:00
This is one of the absolute dumbest things I have ever read. People want their problems solved without waiting months for an appointment and spending an insane amount of money, case closed. The fact that this market exists is an indictment of the current system.

The paternalism of medicine is infuriating. Doctors have been, for the most part, annoying gatekeepers of medication I already know I want or need. Way more medications should be over the counter.
by vanderZwan | 2025-06-26 13:19:20+00:00
I am guessing that they're implying that a VM effectively loaded the "hard drive" that Windows uses into a RAM-disk, so one would be comparing loading dlls and whatnot from RAM vs loading it from spinning rust.

I'm not sure how true that is, because in the Windows XP days most of us wouldn't have had enough RAM to spare to do that.
by kevin_thibedeau | 2025-06-26 13:20:09+00:00
We may see a boom in crime as functional illiteracy rates climb, which is already correlated with criminal behavior. A generation that is weaned on having a computer do everything by voice command and gaining passive knowledge exclusively through videos will have more living on the margins who can't function well in a society that needs some base level of competence in understanding and interpreting text.
by ddoolin | 2025-06-26 13:20:30+00:00
I recently read a book called "Don't Believe Everything You Think" by Joseph Nguyen which tackles this problem directly through a bit of mindfulness and eastern philosophy. In the book, he starts by distinguishing between "thoughts" and "thinking" and outlines how/why he believes the latter ultimately leads to most self-inflicted human suffering.

He has some techniques in the book for trying to break the cycle of rumination, but ultimately it comes down to willpower and repetition. As someone going through/coming out of serious depression for the past month, even if I'm able to stop my own rumination, if its severe or overwhelming enough, it will likely come back very soon if not immediately. I think time and healthy distractions are great complements.
by zzzeek | 2025-06-26 13:21:30+00:00
as a lifelong depressive, the "sticky thinking" issue is the main reason why practices like mindfulness meditation are essential. Though MM I've been able to isolate what it actually "feels" like to resist letting a "sticky" thought go, what's behind that resistance, and what it "feels" like to let it go anyway, which is to say, it feels awkward. A good kind of awkward because you realize you're teaching your neurons a new skill they haven't done before. Call it "thought hygiene" and consider it like any other skill like writing or riding a bike.

I also observe that the primary thing an SSRI does for me is that it makes thoughts much less sticky, to the point of forgetfulness.
by whatevsmate | 2025-06-26 13:21:35+00:00
Close your eyes. Imagine a black tunnel that you are floating through. Every time a thought pops up, paint it black in that tunnel and then float on past it. That includes the thoughts "this tunnel is black" or anything related to your current experience. Just paint it over and float on again.

I self-taught this method at a young age and have picked up a few other "quiet mind" techniques over the years that do similar-ish things. The principle, from my pov, is to basically sit with it and proactively teach your brain to stfu, one thought at a time.
by lxgr | 2025-06-26 13:21:40+00:00
> LLMs make it very difficult to make an immediate snap judgement about the quality [...]

That's the core of the issue. It's time to say goodbye to heuristics like "the blog post is written in eloquent, grammatical English, hence the point its author is trying to make must be true" or "the code is idiomatic and following all code styles, hence it must be modeling the world with high fidelity".

Maybe that's not the worst thing in the world. I feel like it often made people complacent.
by latexr | 2025-06-26 13:22:11+00:00
> To be clear: this isn't an endorsement of using models for serious Open Source libraries. This was an experiment to see how far I could get with minimal manual effort, and to unstick myself from an annoying blocker. The result is good enough for my immediate use case and I also felt good enough to publish it to PyPI in case someone else has the same problem.

By their own admission, this is just kind of OK. They don’t even know how good or bad it is, just that it kind of solved an immediate problem. That’s not how you create sustainable and reliable software. Which is OK, sometimes you just need to crap something out to do a quick job, but that doesn’t really feel like what your parent comment is talking about.
by kgxohxkhclhc | 2025-06-26 13:22:13+00:00
docker and podman expect to extract images to disk, then use fancy features like overlayfs, which doesn't work on network filesystems -- and in hpc, most filesystems users can write to persistently are network filesystems.

apptainer images are straight filesystem images with no overlayfs or storage driver magic happening -- just a straight loop mount of a disk image.

this means your container images can now live on your network filesystem.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-26 13:22:19+00:00
Fertility rate is a problem for the future, that you can also solve via better polices and incentives if you want to, meanwhile dying or being enslaved in a war is a problem for right now that you can't escape via policies.

Which one you think is worse?

Also, most wealthy industrialized western nations have the same fertility issues, some are only compensating by huge legal and ilegal immigration which can be causing bigger domestic economic and societal issues than being involved in a war abroad. The west and its values, as we used to know it, is also dying.
by Reubachi | 2025-06-26 13:23:03+00:00
Your linked video is interesting, but I fail to see how this at all differentiates/promotes drone usage versus artillery, indirect fire.

Your video shows something that an artillery corps could accomplish just as easily and not at all be prone to EW.

Granted, moving indirect fire is probably more expensive than a single fpv drone dropping a thermite bomb, but at scale indirect fire is far cheaper, more effective, and critically not prone to EW.
by incomingpain | 2025-06-26 13:23:41+00:00
Very well studied; pretty much the decline of california right now; and city of detroit as examples where this happens.

A great example was Sweden who implemented a "financial transaction tax" of ~2% which was insane. Stockholm exchange dropped well over 60%, about 50% of which moved to London UK. Liquidity in stockholm essentially went to 0, which means no more retirees.

A shocking amount of businesses fled sweden and they had to repeal their own tax because it was essentially crippling their entire country. It was so bad that the government was forced to greatly deregulate the financial markets to attract businesses back. In the end they killed their own stock market and it had to be sold to a private entity. 10 years after their idiotic tax did they even start to see recovery.

Better yet, this recovery was mostly dotcom bubble stocks that eventually popped only years later further setting back stockholm. Recovery was probably about 2005? Luckily they were significantly impacted by the financial crisis.

tldr: a 2% tax on millionaires caused so many to flee that even after repealing, 20 years of damage continued.
by miningape | 2025-06-26 13:24:10+00:00
For very specific examples you can look towards the EU's decades long stance on immigration which resulted in the refugee crisis since (and before) 2015, as well as countless integration and immigration issues (cf Sweden, France, Italy, etc.).

The socialist and left wing coalition have consistently voted against measures to improve border security and tighten the restrictions for people wanting to enter [1]. As people have become increasingly frustrated with these policies they've increasingly voted in right wing and conservative parties (in comparison to the ruling parties) [2].

We can also look towards the UK where socialist politics have been a mainstay since the 90s, to the point where now the Prime Minister (Kier Starmer, Labour) is a self-proclaimed socialist [3]. This is of course directly tied to the waves of mass migration under Tony Blair (Labour) which also resulted in the Socialist Party splitting from Labour because he wasn't "radical enough" [4].

[1] https://theconversation.com/what-are-the-eus-new-migration-r...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/understanding-europes-tur...

[3] https://www.vice.com/en/article/keir-starmer-i-still-see-mys...

[4] https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/94799/27-04-2022/...
by lormayna | 2025-06-26 13:24:39+00:00
Yes. In the past I was working in a F500, one of the world leaders in energy services. They introduced VR to implement remote assistance and support for very remote places (like offshore platforms, oilfield in the middle of nowhere or in risky countries). A local operator will wear the VR and then a service engineer from HQ can drive him on diagnostic and troubleshooting. The service is immediate, as the engineer will not spend time on flight and they can save a lot of money. They also use the platform for training, saving time for the learners and avoiding to deploying huge and complex machineries just for training.

I saw it couple of time in action, it's really impressive.
by yourmayday | 2025-06-26 13:24:54+00:00
I've been working on TreeLM to solve some frustrations I've encountered with traditional chat interfaces for language models. Here's what it does:

Visual Conversation Management

- Conversations are displayed on a canvas UI (think Figma/Miro for chat)

- Each message chunk gets auto-summarized with editable titles

- Conversation flow is connected with arrows, making it easy to trace discussion threads

- Branch off from any point in the conversation without losing context

Context Control

- Click any node to focus only on that conversation branch's context

- No more scrolling through irrelevant past messages

- Reduces token usage by loading only relevant context

- Perfect for exploring multiple ideas from a single starting point

Multi-Model Support

- Switch between different LLMs (GPT-4, Claude, etc.) within the same conversation

- Compare responses from multiple models side-by-side

- Pay-per-use instead of multiple subscriptions

- Choose the right model for each specific question

Why I Built This

Traditional linear chat interfaces become unwieldy fast. You lose track of different discussion threads, waste tokens on irrelevant context, and can't easily explore alternative paths without disrupting your main conversation. The "edit message" approach just throws away valuable conversation history.

I'm using this for research, creative projects, and learning new topics where I need to explore multiple angles simultaneously. The visual interface has been particularly helpful for understanding how my thoughts develop over time.

Would love to hear if others have faced similar frustrations and how you currently manage complex LLM conversations.
by megaman821 | 2025-06-26 13:25:02+00:00
I agree, a solar pergula would be good and hardly noticeable.

A fidge is only going to use 1.5-2kWh per day. A medium sized pergola would give you more power than that. Since you aren't opening and closing the fridge in the middle of the night, a 1 kWh battery would keep it running all day on normal days.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-06-26 13:25:14+00:00
So I, running Windows, using PowerShell, already knowing CUA shortcuts, generally familiar with Acrobat and its features, having to eventually use the mouse and keyboard anyway to navigate a JS-heavy insurance website, additionally have to:

1. Install sh/bash to get `for`, or convert your 'handy one liner' to PowerShell, and verify it works

2. Install ImageMagick, then ask an LLM to tell me what to do

2.5 And somehow LLMs don't present `convert`, but `pdftoppm`, or worse, both, and give me one giant essay, without my pre-configuring the system prompt to be concise and not overly wordy and avoid meta-sentences like 'if you want more help let me know';

3. Then navigate to my website anyway, and upload everything.

So no, point not made for you. With my existing environment and existing knowledge, it took me two minutes to get the work done. Even the slightest search would have brought me above that measure. There is a local minimum for a certain n at which discoverable GUIs absolutely excel over CLIs.
by acedTrex | 2025-06-26 13:25:55+00:00
> Maybe that's not the worst thing in the world. I feel like it often made people complacent.

For sure, in some ways perhaps reverting to a low trust environment might improve quality in that it now forces harsher/more in depth reviews.

That however doesn't make the requirement less exhausting for people previously relying heavily on those markers to speed things up.

Will be very interesting to see how the industry standardizes around this. Right now it's a bit of the wild west. Maybe people in ten years will look back at this post and think "what do you mean you judged people based on the code itself that's ridiculous"
by supertrope | 2025-06-26 13:26:06+00:00
Spread FUD. I'm being serious. There's a subset of the population that avoids computer, Internet, or app usage due to data breaches and privacy violations. If this snowball of people mistrusting tech gets big enough companies will adapt by proudly labeling their products "No AI" like how food is labeled "non-GMO" or "gluten free."
by mishoo | 2025-06-26 13:26:34+00:00
I can see what happens there in JSCL.. I took a look at

(disassemble (lambda () (loop for i below (expt 10 8) count t)))

Seems TAGBODY is compiled into a while(true) which sets an exception handler on each iteration. (and then, LOOP macroexpands into a TAGBODY). I don't think there's a better way to do it, BTW — JS is simply not a friendly compilation target. But `try` on each iteration is quite costly, that's most probably the bottleneck here.