MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by khuey | 2025-06-12 03:04:47+00:00
I was also there for the memory usage side of things.

B2G management was driven by a mix of "the web is the platform" ideology[0] and a willingness to promise whatever carriers and OEMs wanted to close a distribution deal regardless of whether it was feasible or made any sense.

My own personal "this project is hopelessly doomed" moment was roughly 48 hours before the 1.4 code freeze when I was contacted by a colleague asking how feature X was coming along. Feature X was needed to fix Bug Y, and Bug Y was in the critical bug list for the code freeze. But it turned out the B2G project managers had decided to manually track their critical bug list outside of Bugzilla, and didn't make any effort to track the transitive dependencies of those bugs, or notify anyone that they should be working on these. "ngmi" hadn't been popularized yet but that was very much my feeling at that moment. Active development ceased by the end of the year.

[0] which I think could have panned out at least technically, given sufficient resources, time, etc
by Kiyo-Lynn | 2025-06-12 03:05:01+00:00
These days when I write code, I usually let the AI generate a first draft and then I go in and fix it. The AI does not always get it right, but it helps lay out a lot of the repetitive and boring parts so I can focus on the logic and details. Before, building a small tool might take me an entire evening. Now I can get about 70 to 80 percent done in an hour, and then just spend time debugging and fine-tuning. I still need to understand all the code in the end, but the overall efficiency has definitely improved a lot.
by calrain | 2025-06-12 03:06:19+00:00
I find that I pick companies to work with when my goals and their goals align.

I visualize this alignment like two boats travelling on the ocean together, with a rope that runs between them, connecting them.

When the alignment is strong, the tension on the rope is low, and it's a great place to work at.

But over time, the direction of either party can change, and it results in a better alignment, or a drift from each other that starts to put the rope under increasing tension.

It's possible that the tension on the rope is good, and your trajectory will adjust. But due to the size of the company it's unlikely your small boat can adjust the heading of the company, but you might succeed, if you try.

The key is to know when the rope is about to break, and then disconnect from that company and start the process again with another company, aligned in your direction.
by rmah | 2025-06-12 03:08:44+00:00
One of the key components of metal movable type printing presses is an appropriate ink. The concept of using a press to print on paper was well known for 100's of years across the world from China to Europe. Movable type had even been invented earlier, often using wood or ceramics instead of lead. Getting the ink right to work with metal type was not simple and recipes used by various printers were considered trade secrets (though obviously leaked as printing spread widely and rapidly).

Many inventions are like this. They seem simple in hindsight, but at the time, required putting together tools, techniques, materials and insight from multiple sources. There's an old BBC TV show called "Connections" that explores the origins of many modern technology and the often strange paths that led us there. For example, without people loving perfume, internal combustion engines might have taken decades longer to have been developed.
by labster | 2025-06-12 03:08:52+00:00
This may come as a surprise to you, but there were many settlements in America before Europeans ever showed up.

No other British settlements in the hemisphere, though. Failed expeditions did end up in other nations colonies, but this was never pleasant for either side. But they would have had to go hundreds of kilometers by sea to find other Europeans, without a proper ship and on meager supplies. Joining the natives was the best way to survive… but which natives?
by hliyan | 2025-06-12 03:11:45+00:00
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

That said, I've been on HN for over 10 years. There does seem to be a slight increase in low quality / low effort comments as of late. That's probably a function of moderation than anything else. The average number of comments on posts have been growing steadily, and I suspect it's getting harder to moderate.
by pepa65 | 2025-06-12 03:12:16+00:00
To add to that: I keep trying out other new, interesting or high-profile distros, and whenever they use KDE Plasma (esp. on older HW) it is a grating experience, especially because it's slow. And after you log in, you have to wait again with an animation before your desktop shows up. On my son's desktop, I just replaced it with MATE, and now it's instantly available right after login. SO much nicer!
by kenrick95 | 2025-06-12 03:12:34+00:00
Thanks for the feedback and trying them out. Having a 'bucket list' of activities (without exact times) is definitely on my horizon to implement next. The 'region' to select is mainly used for map so I can scope down to that region only, but I do see some need to specify several regions as it could be a common case for travel in Europe/Schengen area
by rickcarlino | 2025-06-12 03:13:15+00:00
I used fine-tuning back in the day because GPT 3.5 struggled with the concept of determining if two sentences were equivalent or not. This was for grading language learning drills. It was a single skill for a specific task and I had lots of example data from thousands of spaced repetition quiz sessions. The base model struggled with the vague concept of “close enough” equivalence. Since that time, the state of the art has advanced to the point that I don’t need it anymore. I could probably do it to save some money but I’m pretty happy with GPT 4.1.
by bigiain | 2025-06-12 03:13:16+00:00
I don't think it's enshittification in the sense that Doctorow coined the word.

I don't see YCombinator as having gone down a path of "create something to attract users, then they degrade that to for their "business customers", and finally degrade it further for users and business customers to maximize profits for YCombinator."

It was obvious (to anybody who put even the slightest thought into it) that Hacker News was always, from the very beginning, a way for YC to have access to "hackers" that they could feed into their startup accelerator and venture capital business. And I don't see any sign of that having changed, and certainly not in a way that's made it worse for users of HN. It is what it's always been. They've never tried to hide that.

What I do think has changed is me. And the "community" here over the years.

I'm way way less interested in GenAI and the LLM frenzy than most submitters (and I think commenters) here.

But that's not a new thing, I was never interested in NFTs or crypto/blockchain either. And not just the tech hype topics, I skip over things that just don't interest me at all, like Kubernetes or retro computing or language advocacy/wars.

I also have a (quite possibly wrong) view that as HN's user base has grown, there's a lower percentage of people here for the "hacker" discussions - which I define as the interesting technical stuff, whether computer related or not - and a higher percentage of people here for the latest tech fad or who are just here for the money, and hoping to get noticed by YC or founders, instead of being here out of pure intellectual curiosity.

I look at the https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders list, and I'd guess I recognise probably 1/3rd of the top 50 usernames there. (I have been here a while, since 2009.) I rarely notice those usernames these days, either because they've significantly slowed down in commenting, or perhaps because these days they're commenting in threads I don't open.

I 100% believe that for me, there was a higher signal to noise ratio for both discussions I'm interested in and discussions with people I recognise and respect, than there was 10 or 15 years ago. But I'm still here.
Show HN: Read any book frictionlessly with AI-powered hierarchical navigation
by kanodiaashu | 2025-06-12 03:13:46+00:00
Hey HN! I built ProRead to solve the problem of getting stalled by walls of text in books or losing the big picture while reading.

Key features: • Start from a bird's-eye view, then zoom into any level of detail • Interactive knowledge maps show how concepts connect • Seamlessly navigate between chapter summaries and original text • Ask questions in context with AI assistance • High-quality text-to-speech for any book, any level of summary • Upload any EPUB and start reading immediately

We have 9 curated classics (Wealth of Nations, Crime and Punishment, etc.) ready to explore, plus you can bring your own books.

The idea came from cobbling through a workflow on books with LLMs until I decided to build it out! Would love your feedback!

Try it at https://proread.ai/book
by arh68 | 2025-06-12 03:13:51+00:00
> one clear, sharp picture. Better than cable. Here's the reason. OTA broadcasts must meet a legally defined broadcast quality: they're all at the top quality that HD can provide

I wonder about this part. I think it's probably still true for the "main" station, like full 1080i for 9-1, but the "extra" stations like -2, -3 ... -6 are usually noticeably compressed.

From my limited understanding, all the extras are sharing the same bandwidth, and more channels = more ads, so it's more like 1080i + 5x 480i. Some channels will look 1080i on both -1 and -2, then maybe 720i on -3.

I don't live near an ATSC 3.0 station, but it would be cool to get 4K/2160p. Soon ... (naturally, I'm curious)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_3.0

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ATSC_3.0_television_st...
by gbraad | 2025-06-12 03:15:20+00:00
The A4000T looked too much like a commodity machine (cost-cutting measure?). It felt very different from the rest of the Amiga line-up. Especially, as the A3000T looked more like a Unix workstation and did not have the baydoor. I did see them advertised in CU Amiga, but they were too expensive. It was aimed at the higher-end due to the inclusion of an internal SCSI interface, and plenty of space to have VideoToaster and disks installed. However, most A4000s I worked on/seen, were all the regular desktop case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_4000T states the following about the case:

""" The case itself was a re-purposed PC case which is evidenced by the presence of the Turbo button whose function in A4000T was to disable the internal speaker """

https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=31 states:

""" The A4000T from Commodore only saw a limited production of machines (estimated at 100-200) before they went bust in 1994, most machines never made it to the market but ended at third party developers and the local Commodore companies. A recent BBoAH study (2013), indicates that the number machines still existing is VERY low (only a handfull of named owners has been found so far).

In an email from 1996 send from Peter Kittel to a german A4000T user, Peter wrote "that only ~35 Machines got deliverd WORKING to customers, ~35 where NOT working. All in all only ~70 machines left Commodore for customers." That would explain why it is so hard to find somebody owning such a machine. For this reason the Commodore Amiga 4000T is considered the rarest commercial available home computers ever made. """
by hliyan | 2025-06-12 03:16:05+00:00
I'm with you on forum quality. But in a broader, societal context, smart people being apolitical is one of the ways in which unintelligent people come to dominate politics. Democratic political discourse is slow, inefficient and frustrating. But that is part of the process. The alternative is to such conflict is to let one person or a political homogenous group make the decisions.
by MrLeap | 2025-06-12 03:16:25+00:00
> that's a skill issue and not a fundamental property

This made me laugh.

You seem like you may know something I've been curious about.

I'm a shader author these days, haven't been a data scientist for a while, so it's going to distort my vocab.

Say you've got a trained neural network living in a 512x512 structured buffer. It's doing great, but you get a new video card with more memory so you can afford to migrate it to a 1024x1024. Is the state of the art way to retrain with the same data but bigger initial parameters, or are there other methods that smear the old weights over a larger space to get a leg up? Anything like this accelerate training time?

... can you up sample a language model like you can lowres anime profile pictures? I wonder what the made up words would be like.
by fastball | 2025-06-12 03:18:35+00:00
G2.5P might've updated, but that's not the model I noticed a difference. o3 seemed noticeably dumber in isolation, not just compared to G2.5P.

But yes, perhaps the answer is that about a week ago I started asking subconsciously harder questions, and G2.5P handled them better because it had just been improved, while o3 had not so it seemed worse. Or perhaps G2.5P has always had more capacity than o3, and I wasn't asking hard enough questions to notice a difference before.
by theideaofcoffee | 2025-06-12 03:19:40+00:00
I was around there quite a while after Cray himself passed away, but even then, people who were part of the OG Cray Research, even a single-digit handful that started at Control Data and followed all of the acquisitions that spent their life at that institution, still spoke about him with absolute reverence.

Until they moved offices, his portrait hung in one of the main conference rooms in the St Paul office and I could tell his ghost had a profound effect, to visitors and employees alike. I am supremely envious of you having been able to speak with him, was one of the few people in tech that I looked up to back then.

The original Chippewa facility (1050 Lowater) is something else. Room after room of systems in various states of completion, test fixtures, pallet after pallet of CPUs and ram, in the time of the massively-parallel systems, and all other parts of the machines themselves ready for assembly. Test equipment dotting every corner during bringup of parts of a new architecture. One room held customer engineering and replicas of legacy systems still chugging away in case a high-profile customer needed assistance. I believe it was an X1 reserved for a petroleum company. And yes, being able to walk around and actually touch a $150 million system running pre-delivery acceptance tests that would have been shipped out a few weeks later and installed at a customer site was unreal, not to mention having committed software that would have been running on that same system. Just a place like no other and I don't think it will ever be duplicated.

I still kick myself for leaving and wasting untold amounts of time at shitty, mind-numbing, software startups that went nowhere and had comparatively zero, inching toward negative, impact on anything in the world.
by itsericktorres | 2025-06-12 03:21:09+00:00
Hey HN! I built an open-source Python library that lets AI agents control mobile apps like humans do—tap buttons, scroll feeds, fill forms, you name it. Its heavily inspired by browser-use

Here's a quick demo https://x.com/itsericktorres/status/1932996729458110482

From our experience testing mobile workflows or automate repetitive app tasks has always been a pain. You either write brittle UI automation scripts or do everything manually. And after testing out browser-use and seeing all the cool things people were building for web without the pains of normal automation I decided I wanted to build something like it but for mobile

So I built App Use around Appium with a dead-simple Python interface. You just describe the task in plain English, point it at your app, and the agent uses computer vision to navigate the UI:

agent = Agent( task="Order some tacos from the nearest restaurant", llm=ChatOpenAI(model="gpt-4o"), app=app # iOS/Android app config ) await agent.run()

The agent takes screenshots, analyzes the UI, and performs actions step-by-step while explaining what it's doing. We've tested it on everything from shopping apps to social media—it can handle complex multi-step flows like creating accounts, making purchases, or posting content.

What makes it different from existing mobile automation tools: Natural language tasks instead of writing XPath selectors Works with any LLM (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc.) Vision-based navigation so it adapts when UIs change Memory system to remember app states and user preferences Cross-platform (iOS + Android) with the same API

All the things you love about browser-use but for mobile

Current limitations: it's as smart as the LLM you give it, can be slow on complex tasks, and occasionally gets confused by unusual UI patterns. But for most common mobile workflows, it works surprisingly well.

Install with: pip install app-use

You'll also need Appium running and your device/emulator connected. The setup takes about 5 minutes if you're familiar with mobile development. I've curious what use cases this unlocks for you! Some ideas I've been thinking this could be used for:

QA teams automating regression tests across app updates Vibe Debugging tools Data collection from apps that don't have APIs Automating tasks on mobile first apps (stuff browser-use wouldn't be able to do)

The whole thing is open source at https://github.com/itsericktorres/app-use. I'd love feedback, especially if you've struggled with mobile app automation before or have ideas for making this more robust.

Let me know what you guys think! And if you have any questions!
by sour-taste | 2025-06-12 03:21:09+00:00
This isn't at all a rebuttal of the post, more a different perspective. I started a new job while basically deeply depressed. It colored all my opinions of the company and my coworkers. As I'm coming out of that through a combination of medication and intensive CBT I'm realizing that a lot of the negativity I felt towards my job was the result of the depression. As things improve I'm realizing that the job is mostly neutral but my impression of it was colored by my mental health struggles. This isn't at all to say not to take the authors advice, just take care of yourself and be aware of the possibility that you may be distorting reality if there's any chance you're depressed
by Saigonautica | 2025-06-12 03:21:55+00:00
I agree wholeheartedly!

I like to use the TM1640 and RGB LEDs. It's cheap, works well, requires a minimum of external components, and can convey a fair amount of information. It can also drive a 16x8 LED matrix if I do want something screen-like.

Usually I'll control it with a Wi-Fi MCU like the ESP8266 or Pi Pico W. Total component cost, including board, sits around 5$ each with a minimum quantity of 5.
by jmmv | 2025-06-12 03:22:15+00:00
Huh, I didn't know about Maximite, and reading their intro to the Colour Maximite 2 at https://geoffg.net/maximite.html... well, I feel like I read their minds years later and I'm trying to recreate the same thing.

One difference I can sense is in the interpreter. In the case of the EndBOX, I'm creating a computer to run EndBASIC on, but EndBASIC has already existed for 5 years and is multiplatform: you can write a program and have it run in your browser via WASM, in the desktop version of the interpreter, or now in this new small form factor format. In the case of Micromite, it sounds like MMBasic is specifically designed for this machine.

Which brings me to something I have been thinking about recently: I think BASIC is the least interesting aspect to the EndBOX and the thing that might hurt the concept the most (because BASIC is old, limited, legacy, who cares about it, blah blah blah). I'm starting to think that the more interesting parts of this project are what I have built to take a Rust app that uses some APIs to talk to a "generic graphical console" or to "the hardware", and have that exact same app run on the web, on the desktop, and now natively on a small computer. And for the later case, I think the pipeline I developed to take the app and generate a full SD card disk image with a trivial command to run it in a standalone manner is interesting too. Stay tuned for a follow up blog post as I elaborate on these ideas...
by EMM_386 | 2025-06-12 03:23:13+00:00
These type of 'theories' I dislike only because they don't get to the root of the problem.

It is the same for 'multiverse' where that is used to explain literally anything 'it's like that in this universe but not the others'.

Sure, we can get creative and explain the Anthropic Principle by mentioning the multiverse.

But none of this answers how something comes from nothing.

Not the vacuum of space and its 'quantum foam' where particles jump in from nowhere.

Because that's not 'nothing'.

One of these nothings ... such as level 9. No possibilities.

https://closertotruth.com/news/levels-of-nothing-by-robert-l...
by fastball | 2025-06-12 03:23:48+00:00
The weights are indeed open (both accessible and licensing-wise): you don't need to put that in square quotes. Training code is not. You can fine-tune the weights yourself with your own training code. Saying that isn't open is like saying ffmpeg isn't open because it doesn't do everything I need it to do and I have to wrap it with own code to achieve my goals.
by narratives1 | 2025-06-12 03:23:53+00:00
All the reasons they cite are no where near the main reason for the collapse in birth rates.

Look at charts of birth rates in any country. Easy enough to google.

Look at the decline and when it declines.

There was a decline due to the global recession, yes. This pales in comparison to the decline that came precipitously decades earlier.

It’s: birth control and family planning.

Look at birth rates in: the US, the UK, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea…now overlay it with when birth control became widely legal and family planning initiatives took off.

Look at countries that continue to have high birth rates and how they treat birth control/family planning.

Look at communities that continue to have high birth rates: the poor, the religious, the Amish.

Even today, something like 50% of births in the US are unintended or mistimed. Imagine what the birth rate would be with even MORE access to birth control.

Fact is: humans procreate by and large unintentionally. It’s enough to evolve a desire for sex, and the babies follow. When you introduce technology that severs this connection, you expose the shortcuts nature took all along.

If we want to fix this in the short term, it’s not clear how to do it. We can’t uninvent birth control, and heavily restricting it would be very unpopular and likely impossible. Baby stipends don’t seem to cut it.

In the long run, this fixes itself. Cultures, sociological conditions, genetics that result in more children will proliferate and the others will die out.

The future is either babies in incubators, or it’s Mormon. Maybe both.
by bigbuppo | 2025-06-12 03:24:04+00:00
The worst part about Word is that it has been feature complete since Office 97, except they've made the UI worse each and every version since then. I wish I could get excited about a new version of Office or WordPerfect, but neither Microsoft or Corel has figured out how to innovate in the past three decades. And no, slapping """AI""" in there isn't the solution. There are so many possibities but they just sort of do nothing with it now that they make a few billion a month on Microsoft 365 subscriptions.