MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-18 08:06:23+00:00
Productivity levels don't matter! UBI isn't just a more generous welfare scheme, with conditions on who gets it and where the rich lose wealth because it's being transferred to the poor. UBI says everyone can receive wealth unconditionally. In other words, that it would be possible for 100% of the population to stop working and still receive a spendable income that buys some meaningful standard of living.

UBI taken literally is a demand for an economic perpetual motion machine: it's not merely hard, it's an impossibility.

That's why if you apply even a little bit of pressure to UBI arguments they collapse and a mass retreat to the bailey begins, e.g.

• In reality most people would work even if they didn't have to. Doesn't matter: the claim is still wrong, and hoping people don't call your bluff is no strategy.

• People in high tax brackets will pay more into the scheme than they take out. Doesn't matter: if some people lose wealth net it's not a UBI as by definition they wouldn't be receiving an income (wealth has to come in to be an income).

• The near future will be a hard sci-fi scenario in which self-repairing robots and AI do every imaginable job both now and into the future. In other words: UBI is a utopian fantasy from a children's book, not something governments should be wasting time and money trying to implement. Arguably, people who propose UBI should be seen as very dangerous, given the long history of utopians who became tyrants when their dreams hit the rocks of reality.

There are no real-world scenarios in which UBI makes sense as a concept, sorry. It's just /r/antiwork rebranded.
by arghwhat | 2025-06-18 08:07:12+00:00
1. Display servers are highly security sensitive and cannot be shipped in good faith unless they are well maintained. The only high-profile X server still around, xorg, is entirely unmaintained outside its Xwayland support, and no one is willing to step up.

Volunteers own their own life and time within it and have no obligation to pick up arbitrary projects and tasks. The primary way to make people do something no one volunteers for is to hire them and pay them for it, but no one is interested in that either.

(One person did famously, and very vocally, volunteer and do a lot of work, but unfortunately almost all of it had to be reverted recently after it was found to break everything.)

2. Wayland and X does, for and enduser, coexist through Xwayland. You just no longer run a "native" X11 display server that controls hardware directly. Most Wayland servers afford Xwayland some slight additional controls for just the X11 windows, allowing applications to work seamlessly, so everything is fine.

And no, the "most" qualifier is no issue at all as applications relying on such control also only worked with some X11 window managers.
by culturestate | 2025-06-18 08:07:44+00:00
Confusingly, there are two different MPEGs in this context.

MPEG the standards group is organized by ISO and IEC, along with JPEG.

The one you’re thinking of - MPEG LA, the licensing company - is a patent pool (which has since been subsumed by a different one[1]) that’s unaffiliated with MPEG the standards group.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via-LA
by isaacremuant | 2025-06-18 08:07:52+00:00
Tool rots your brain alarmism, news at 11.

The claim "My geo spatial skills are attrophied due to use of Google maps" and yet I can use Google maps once to quickly find a good path, and go back next time without using. I can judge when the suggestions seem awkward and adjust.

Tools augment skills and you can use them for speedier success if you know what you're doing.

The people who need hand-held alarmism are mediocre.
by Surac | 2025-06-18 08:08:12+00:00
So you say younger programmer have not the required coding kung fu to cope with c code? I hope you are wrong. The perspective to have rust like things on everydays devices realy frightens me. C is like a Lingua franca for computers. Nearly any hardware near person can READ it. I am one of this Boomers and i am not able to propper READ rust code, because the syntax is so academic. The fact that more and more code is written in rust, lessens the amount of people that can read programs
by swyx | 2025-06-18 08:08:30+00:00
> All Scrappy apps are multiplayer, like a Google Doc is. You can even edit them while they are being used by someone else!

ok where is the scrappy backend? what data do you see? where do i make an account? i wish that this was more transparent/discussed since obviously this software is not entirely local?

> LLMs are getting better and better, and while they are far from able to make a full-fledged app without a lot of help from a software engineer, they can make small apps pretty reliably.

mildly disagree. llm generated apps tend to look better + i dont have to learn or stick to your preset primitives. even nontechnical people run into this pretty quickly

otherwise, nice labor of love. good going OP.
by semko | 2025-06-18 08:08:44+00:00
No Subscription, No Ads, No Account, just bring your own API Key (OpenAi, Gemini) - Kalory AI is a no-nonsense calorie tracker that uses AI to log meals from photos or text descriptions. Bring your own OpenAI or Gemini API key for full control over your data (and cost (apprx. $1-2/month)) - no accounts, no subscriptions, no ads. Features a local food database for offline use, multi-language support, and editable meal logs. Data stays on your device, with zero collection by us. Built for simplicity and privacy. Thoughts or feedback?
by M95D | 2025-06-18 08:09:10+00:00
> take a sample of their saliva, run it through a very expensive machine for a few days and decode the results with a supercomputer

You are probably thinking about PCR [0].

The PCR thermocycler is now a very very cheap machine (~ 200$). You could even build one at home. All the other things you need are also cheap. The reaction takes a couple of hours at most and the results are read with an ordinary chemical stain for DNA, possibly an electrophoresis machine and an ordinary computer flatbed scanner, if you want to get fancy. There's no need for a supercomputer - a 486 could do it (and they did, back then).

But you don't even need PCR. There's a very simple Barr Test [1] that you can perform with a glass slide, a chemical stain and a microscope. Result ready in less than an hour.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction

[1] https://labpedia.net/barr-bodies-detection-and-drumstick/
by AugustoCAS | 2025-06-18 08:09:16+00:00
Something that I find amusing in the Java community is that a good number of senior developers, with anything from 5-20 years of experience, who do 'tdd' have never heard of the concept of test doubles and religiously think that a class must be tested in complete isolation mocking everything else.

The saddest one I saw was a team trying to do functional programming (with Spring). The tech lead was a bit flummoxed when I asked why mocks are not used in functional languages and continued to think that 'mocking functions' is the correct way to do TDD.
Show HN: Struggling with Marketing? Try UGC with My App
by dezinSF | 2025-06-18 08:10:02+00:00
User-generated content is one of the most effective ways to market a product — but let’s be honest, not everyone feels confident in front of a camera. At least I am not.

Stumbling over your words, forgetting your lines, or sounding unnatural can make recording a painful process. Especially as a non native English speaker this can be frustrating ‘:)

That’s why I built Rheto – a lightweight but powerful teleprompter app for creators, indie devs, and solo founders who want to record better content without the stress.

Why Rheto?:

* 3 Teleprompter Modes: Choose between a simple teleprompter, audio recording, or full video recording with script overlay. * Flexible Script Input: Write scripts directly in the app or import them from PDF files. * Creator-Focused Learning: The built-in Rheto Academy offers tips and content strategies to improve your delivery. * Highly Customizable UI: Adjust text size, colors, and more – so the experience fits your workflow and style.

Rheto uses Apple’s native speech recognition to sync the script flow with your voice – so it scrolls as you speak. No clunky remotes or constant tapping.

It’s available now on the App Store for iPhone & iPad. There's a free plan to try it out – no login required.

It’s my third App and I hope I finally land a good product market fit.

Also I was wondering if the name in the App Store could be ASO Optimized (Rheto: Smart Teleprompter). Happy to hear your thoughts, feedback, or suggestions! :-)
by empiko | 2025-06-18 08:10:02+00:00
I wonder to what extent this is caused by the writing style LLMs have. They just love beating around the bush, repeat themselves, use fillers, etc. I often find it hard to find the signal in the noise, but I guess that it is inevitable with the way they work. I can easily imagine my brain shutting down when I have to parse this sort of output.
by Terr_ | 2025-06-18 08:10:57+00:00
> The abacus, the calculator and the book don't randomly get stuff wrong in 15% of cases though.

Yeah, you'd think that a profession that talks about stuff like "NP-Hard" and "unit tests" would be more sensitive to the distinction between (A) the work of providing a result versus (B) the amount of work necessary to verify it.
by mleroy | 2025-06-18 08:11:19+00:00
The vision of unifying Copilot/Cursor/Roo/Cline/etc. under a common configuration and best-practice layer is compelling, and I like the direction toward reusable templates and memory.

That said, I think the project might be aiming a bit too directly at the highest level of complexity — the full integration of vibe-driven rules across assistants — without first grounding things in foundational concepts. Personally, I’d love to see a clearer breakdown of stages, such as:

1. Formal concepts of LLM-driven project management, akin to how we reason about conventional PM tools/processes.

2. Abstractions and interfaces to build structured rules/prompts (in the broad sense) that can be versioned, composed, and reasoned about.

3. Configuration management to deploy/adapt those rules across specific environments (LLMs, IDEs, agents).

Laying that groundwork could make the ambitious cross-assistant unification feel more achievable and less brittle.

Still, kudos — I think we need more of this kind of experimentation and discussion in the open.
by LeonM | 2025-06-18 08:11:40+00:00
> See also Toyota.

Toyota's founder is Kiichiro Toyoda (with a 'd'), and the company was originally named Toyoda, named after the founder. It was later changed to Toyota because it looked better in Katakana script (8 brush strokes, which is a lucky number), and it had a better meaning in Japanese. Apparently Toyoda is a farmer's name, and the company did not want to be associated with farming.

Similarly, Mazda comes from it's founder's name Matsuda, but was changed to Mazda when the first wheeled vehicles were produced (Mazda-Go). The official claim from Mazda is that it was named after Ahura Mazda, a God, but it is widely speculated that the name change was done to make it more appealing for international markets. I don't speak Japanese, but I have seen several videos on social media where the Japanese still pronounce Mazda as Matsuda.
by motorest | 2025-06-18 08:11:49+00:00
> Otherwise the best she can do is "not get in the way".

Playing devil's advocate, policy can be set by inertia (i.e., no one is fired for buying IBM). So a government loyalist can have the motivation to implement a policy change that breaks away from conservative biases towards how a problem is solved. You already see how the criticism is that things weren't done as they were always done, aka "Don't touch it to not break it". The problem with this approach is that conservative approaches are not inherently safer: their primary value is to serve as scapegoat and create responsibility voids. See for example how some critics attack how nuclear was not singled out as baseline, when under this scenario nuclear would be by design the first system being pulled from the network.

Spain is being criticized for implementing a policy to shift the country's energy supply away from fossil+nuclear and towards renewables. Naturally there will be growing pains. Attacking the regulator based on shifts in policy only underline that the attacks are political, thus complaining that the top stop was handed to a politician actually justifies the move as clearly the position is responsible for managing the political side of the policy shift.
by Letstalk123 | 2025-06-18 08:11:56+00:00
I was tired of how social media turned us into dopamine-addicted spectators instead of participants. So I built Mindfuse: an audio-only platform where two strangers have anonymous 1:1 conversations.

No usernames, no likes, no followers. Just real humans talking.

The goal? Bring back unfiltered global dialogue—people from different cultures learning from each other without bias, without echo chambers. It's free, simple, and surprisingly deep.

Would love your feedback, ideas, or just to hear if this scratches an itch you’ve felt too.
by suninsight | 2025-06-18 08:13:18+00:00
As someone who works for a company having a real Agent in production, (not a workflow), I cannot disagree more than the very first statement here: Use Agent Frameworks like Langraph. We did exactly that, and had to throw everything away just a month down the line. Then we built everything from scratch and now our system scales pretty well.

To be fair, I think there might be a space for using Agent Frameworks, but the Agent space is too early for a good enough framework to emerge. The semi contrarian though, which I hold to a certain extent, is that the Agent space is moving so fast that a good enough framework might NEVER emerge.
by plufz | 2025-06-18 08:13:22+00:00
I totally agree that the environmental cost SHOULD be pushed towards the creators, but as long as that doesn't happen, is the moral thing as a consumer to just carry on using it? This is not a rhetorical question.

Transporting something with a car using fossil fuel usually uses less energy than if a human did the same thing by hand, that doesnt mean fossil fuel is environmentally friendly. LLM:s does not decrease the population even if it can do human tasks. If the LLM is used for the good of humanity it is probably a win, but I mean obviously a lot of the use of AI is not.

I use LLM:s as well, I'm just saying, I dont think it is a totally strange question to ponder over the energy use of different use cases with LLM:s.
by illiac786 | 2025-06-18 08:14:09+00:00
Considering that this platform exists since what, over 10 years, I think the EU gave them a fair amount of time to get their shit together. By now, it's clear they won't or do not want to, hence EU stepping in.

I hate over-regulation, especially made by people that have no clue about the market they are regulating, but as you said, I think in this case it's more than warranted.
by rcxdude | 2025-06-18 08:14:35+00:00
The main issue is GNOME, really. They are keen to pare down the functionality offered to users and app developers, and so will block standardization of extensions that try to bring wayland up to feature parity, and even if they do get standardised, they will refuse to implement it. Which basically means many developers and users don't want to play ball with wayland at all, and the network effects are fairly strong (devs will not bother with the effort of making something work as best it can on wayland if users still happy to use X11, and users won't switch to wayland if their apps don't work or work less well).

(Why does GNOME still matter? They've got the most developer resources of basically any group in the linux desktop space, and a large part of the market share because they're the default on a few of the larger distros)
by mjg59 | 2025-06-18 08:15:03+00:00
Pretty much! My ISP was founded by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Rucker and is somewhat cheap and delightful and happily routes me a good amount of IPv6, and every 48 hours or so it RAs me an entirely different range even though I still have validity on the lease for the old one and everything breaks, so I've had to turn IPv6 off entirely (I sent dumps of the relevant lease traffic to support, they said they'd look into it, and then the ticket auto closed after being inactive for two years). I spent a while trying to make things work with IPv6 but the combination of it being broken at my end and also there still being enough people I want to provide access to who don't have it means it just wasn't a good option.
by eximius | 2025-06-18 08:15:41+00:00
And better yet, follow the tangential advice and use high fidelity fakes (I usually don't quite go all the way to verified fakes/contract tests, but they're a good idea if you have the time).

Real object where practical, fakes otherwise, mocks only as required for exceptional circumstances.

Works great in interconnected monorepos where you can provide high fidelity fakes of your services for other integrating teams to use in their tests. Often our service fakes are literally just the real service wrapped with an injected fake DB/store.
by Arnt | 2025-06-18 08:16:03+00:00
I hope the poster will learn about transactions at some point. Postgres even lets you alter the schema within a transaction.

What I learned, once upon a time, is that with a database, you shouldn't delete data you want to keep. If you want to keep something, you use SQL's fine UPDATE to update it, you don't delete it. Databases work best if you tell them to do what you want them to do, as a single transaction.
by perihelions | 2025-06-18 08:16:05+00:00
> "my guess is that it's an expander cycle"

It could simply be pressure-fed. No turbopump at all—just a helium tank.

You have a preference for assuming sophistication, but this is a one-off inexpensive test article with trivial performance needs. My guess is that they'd made the simplest engineering choices possible at every turn.
by javierbg95 | 2025-06-18 08:16:10+00:00
Quoting is actually extremely important. There's a big difference between making a certain claim a) because [1] performed an experiment that confirms it and [2] and [3] reproduced it and b) because the magic machine told me so.

This is still true whether or not the claim is true/accurate or not, as it allows for actual relevant and constructive critique of the work.
by bmacho | 2025-06-18 08:16:40+00:00
> > "Here's a rich native toolkit so all the new software will look and work and theme consistently"-- a well-known and directly user-facing friction point, so how did they miss that?

> The problem is that application toolkits are a step above window managers and compositors. That's really an application developers choice, not a desktop's choice. Developers want to use Electron, and there's nothing we can do about that.

OTOH most toolkits are themeable on global and application level. It is certainly possible for a working group to provide consistent themes for applications. E.g. my favorite theme is Adwaita dark[0] from ~Ubuntu 14, and it is possible to tell gtk/qt/tk/fltk/.. to look like this on a global level, and if some applications look bad due to icons or something, then fix them. It's just nobody is doing that.

And I agree, I don't see how could've been this a killer application for Wayland, this should be accomplished with distributing config files, and not somewhere near the display protocol.

[0] : https://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu+adwaita+dark&udm=2
by Yizahi | 2025-06-18 08:17:07+00:00
What a clown show. But I'm not surprised, USA intel is now controlled by the religious sect member, who also vocally supports Putin's war.

The easy control question to this news is this - did Iran had multiple uranium enrichment centrifuges or not? If yes, then Iran was obviously actively developing A-bomb and was close to it by any possible metric. If no, then Israel with its famed intelligence agency has now started an open war for nothing and bombed empty (no centrifuges, remember) bunkers and facilities.

To me it is pretty clear who is lying and who is right.
by DidYaWipe | 2025-06-18 08:17:33+00:00
Mmmm, thanks. I don't remember finding plug-in-related stuff under there. But I'll take a look tomorrow.

If that's supposed to be a puzzle piece, it's a disgrace. Just another symbol of Microsoft's abject design bankruptcy. They had far better icons than that at 16 x 16 pixels 30 years ago.
by BoorishBears | 2025-06-18 08:17:46+00:00
On one hand, I've found that it reduces acute fatigue, but on the other I've found there's also an inflection point where it can encourage more fatigue over longer time horizons if you're not careful.

In the past I'd often reach a point like an unexpected error or looking at some docs would act like a "speed bump" and let me breath, and typically from there I'd acknowledge how tired I am, and stop for the moment.

With AI those speed bumps still exist, but there's sometimes just a bit of extra momentum that keeps me from slowing down enough to have that moment of reflection on how exhausted I am.

And the AI doesn't even have to be right for that to happen: sometimes just reading a suggestion that's specific to the current situation can trigger your own train of thought that's hard to reign back in.
by wiseowise | 2025-06-18 08:17:53+00:00
Yes. Because none of this bullshit matters. I’ve heard this mantra for 20 years now.

Smug face: “weeeell, how can you say you’re a real programmer if you use a compiler? You need write raw assembly”, “how can you call yourself reeeeal programmer if you don’t know your computer down to every register?”, “real programmurs do not use SO/Google” and all the rest of the crap. It is all nerds trying to make themselves feel good by inflating their ego with trivia that is not interesting to anyone.

Well, what do you know? I’m still in business, despite relying a lot on Google/SO, and still create solutions that fix real human problems.

If AI can make 9 to 5 more bearable for majority of people and provide value in terms less cognitive load, let’s fucking go then.
Ask HN: You have $35,000 how do you invest it?
by asim | 2025-06-18 08:18:03+00:00
It's an arbitrary number, but large enough to be meaningful. But here's the deal, you can't say you'll put it in an index fund, you can't say you'll put it in stocks, you can't say it'll go into crypto, you can't say it'll go into startups, you can't go on holiday, you can't pay off your debts, you can't renovate your home, pay your rent or mortgage. You can't put it in treasuries or a high interest rate savings account. Essentially you have to take this money and grow it by some other means. What do you do with it? How do you invest it?

Go!
by T4iga | 2025-06-18 08:20:12+00:00
While the results are not unexpected i think the conclusion is questionable. Of course the recall for something you did not write will be lower, but to conclude from it, that this will impeded overall learning is in my opinion far fetched.

I think what we are seeing is that learning and education has not adapted to these new tools yet. Producing a string of words that counts as an essay has become easier. If this frees up a students time to do more sports or work on their science project that's a huge net positive even if for the essay it is net negative. The essay does not exist in a school vacuum.

The thing students might not understand is: their reduced recall will make them worse at the exam ... Well they will hopefully draw their own conclusion after first their failed exam.

I think the quantitative study is important but I think this qualitative interpretation is missing the point. Recall->Learning is a pretty terrible way to define learning. Reproducing is the lowest step on the ladder to mastery