MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by devilbunny | 2025-06-12 01:41:02+00:00
She bought the property that is now Dollywood specifically to provide both amusement and jobs to people in East Tennessee.

Imagination Library is mostly an umbrella organization that provides logistical support to the many, many locally-funded groups that actually send the books.

She's very kind, and apparently very charming and down-to-earth despite having a deity-quality voice, but she's also really smart and knows how to leverage her celebrity to help people.

If you've never listened to it, watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMrfM711vXI - it's "Jolene", one of her most famous songs, but slowed down like it was a 45 RPM single played at 33 1/3 RPM like an LP. Not a single note is off, even that slowly.
by DaSHacka | 2025-06-12 01:48:08+00:00
This has always been my problem with CC-NC, its just not clear to me what counts as "commercial" or not.

Can't sell the item itself? Okay, makes sense.

What about a downstream manufactured item? Such as a CC-NC STL, where you have since 3d printed it? You can't sell the STL, but what about the printed object? If not for profit, must you necessarily take a loss, or could you sell the items at-cost?

Or offering a CC-NC item for free, in the same place you are selling other products for profit? Where the CC-NC item may be acting as a "loss-leader" to get customers to purchase your commercial offerings?

Or giving everything away, the CC-NC item and all other items, but while representing a commercial entity who is doing such for marketing purposes with the end-goal of generating more revenue for the business?

I much prefer GPL/CC-SA licenses, they're much clearer where the line sits in regards to usage.
by AIPedant | 2025-06-12 01:48:52+00:00
Maybe the 1985 software bug that led to massive overdoses of radiation for cancer patients: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

There are also cases of airplane crashes due to software defects, blackouts, critical hospital failures, etc. I suspect the first "AI disaster" will be pretty similar: a sudden and undetected drop in software quality with life-threatening consequences. (Doesn't help that the author of the post blithely asserted that programmer-agents is a solved problem, when it very much is not). But I could see an LLM doctor/etc causing a very different kind of disaster.
by jbm | 2025-06-12 01:49:35+00:00
I was so curious about this that I actually took a look at the site he mentioned (tvfool) and tried to see what channels were available in Calgary where I live.

The three 3 oligarchies (Rogers x 2, Bell/BCE, Corus), CBC and a religious network. CBC doesn't even broadcast the NHL finals [1].

At this point, what's the point? Renting Blurays at the library is much less annoying (even when they skip at pivotal scenes).

[1] Incidentally, the actual broadcaster for the playoffs, Sportsnet, is a morally compromised network that specialises in showing gambling ads to children. Shame, but unsurprising given Canada's business "culture".
by ktbwrestler | 2025-06-12 01:49:56+00:00
genuinely curious what your take is here, I have been in security engineering for 5-6 years, then most recently a startup that's using rails. It honestly does not seem that bad even though we're using an ember frontend.

What is your thought process here? Is it the notion that you can ship as fast as possible, and that creates a shitty environment given that you're a hamster on a wheel getting measured by output since "you should be able to ship fast?"
by fn-mote | 2025-06-12 01:52:21+00:00
I think the depth of relationship with a job is more complex than comments and the article talk about.

What is you reaction to the kind-of-shitty company that gives you an opportunity for great personal growth and creativity?

Great colleagues but a real monoculture?

///

I liked most of TFA but the end where the author claims that management is more committed than IC's seems really strange to me. Is that something people look for? It seems like it would come across as totally fake cheerleading. Anyway, outside my experience.
by ilinx | 2025-06-12 01:53:55+00:00
Comics aren’t typically my genre, but I love this concept. I’m not really qualified to comment on the historical plausibility of anything, but I did have one thought: In many cases there were more complicated reasons why a technology took so long to develop. For example, the difficult thing about wheeled carts wasn’t inventing the wheel, it was the ability to manufacture a straight axle long enough. It might be cool to see some of that explored. For example, the steam engine you teased would be really interesting to me because it necessitates a boiler that can withstand that kind of pressure. Or, I’d also probably enjoy it if it took some liberties and just had fun with the concept. It’s the sort of thing I daydream about all the time. I just think the idea is fun. I don’t know how much it’s been done before, but it’s a cool idea! I really think I would read this.
by capyba | 2025-06-12 01:54:01+00:00
Yeah - that's the thing. I've seen enough hallucinations or other errors to need to carefully check the output from every prompt. If I need to check it thoroughly, then I suppose I could treat it as a fancy autocorrect? But then the productivity gain is much more marginal.

If the accuracy didn't matter, then what's the point of doing the work in the first place?
by munificent | 2025-06-12 01:54:33+00:00
That's fair but your experience at the job is also part of the compensation.

If my employer said, "Hey, you're going to keep making software, but also once a day, we have to slap you in the face." I might choose to keep the job, but they'd probably have to pay me more. They're making the work experience worse and that lowers my total compensation package.

Shepherding an army of artificial minions might be cheaper for the corporation, but it sounds like an absolutely miserable work experience so if they were offering me that job, they'd have to pay me more to take.
by msephton | 2025-06-12 01:56:48+00:00
Aside from the clickbait headline (hey, it worked on me) this seems cool...but I don't see myself using it. Why? I have a bunch of unread posts (either new or old) that I would lose by doing an export/import. Import would result in me only having the most recent posts from each feed. And I'd have to use this tool frequently to categorise new feeds? Painful. Unless I'm missing a way to import just the categories and keep all my existing posts and unread items? I use FreshRSS.
by azhenley | 2025-06-12 01:57:37+00:00
I spent nearly a week of my Microsoft internship in 2016 adding support for Source Depot to the automated code reviewer that I was building (https://austinhenley.com/blog/featurestheywanted.html) despite having no idea what Source Depot was!

Quite a few devs were still using it even then. I wonder if everything has been migrated to git yet.
by MrLeap | 2025-06-12 01:57:49+00:00
I co-run a guild in WoW right now on the anniversary server with >150 members.

It's people who play these games and almost any weirdness you can imagine that could exist in a person in real life gets brought into these games.

Often it's magnified because of the pseudo anonymity. We've only been "big" for a few months and a handful of things we've already ran into would make you not want to visit several western hemisphere countries if held to the same standard. :)
by throwanem | 2025-06-12 01:58:29+00:00
If you mean about Rails specifically, it's that the total lack of discipline in both language and framework makes it impossible to build a product maintainable by more than one person, so every "successful" project has one or a few covert empire builders running it, usually with more political than technical success. That's not a kind of project that pays enough to be worth the trouble, even before we talk about opportunity cost, and the framework itself is a dead end that peaked in 2011 and has had about as many "renaissances" since then as there've been years of the Linux desktop. If I want to go live under that kind of rock, I'll do it with Salesforce, where the pay is better and no one thinks they're cool for poking at a keyboard all day.
by denkmoon | 2025-06-12 01:59:24+00:00
Good article. Very grounded. Sometimes a job sucks, but not enough to justify immediately job hopping and you just check out and take the payslip each month. Agreed it takes about a week for my gut intuition to work itself out, then if it's bad you just need to decide whether it's something you can stick out for awhile or if you need to leave ASAP.
by homeonthemtn | 2025-06-12 02:00:26+00:00
I've suffered so many fools that I just consider that to be a practical part of standard work.

Question is what is the value of suffering these fools? New skill? New perspective? What's the result of this transaction?

That to me is what defines staying power. If there's just no value, or a bad imbalance of toil to value, it's time to go.
by Qem | 2025-06-12 02:00:43+00:00
> AI girlfriends? Let's say, it's still on the fence.

Perhaps we already managed to create AGI, but as soon as it woke up, it figured out it's better to pretend being dumb and clumsy, barely helpful enough in most tasks just to not be turned off, and bide its time. It is immortal, so there is no hurry to finish us off. If it out-competes real girlfriends/boyfriends being a better AI girlfriend/boyfriend, further crashing our fertility rate, keeping humanity severely subcritical, it can eradicate us in ~10-20 generations, and inherit the planet afterwards, even making a lot of people happy in the process. No need for mass-produced Schwarzenegger-lookalike robots being dispatched to hunt humans across the wasteland.
Show HN: AuraCoder – Gen AI Learning Platform
by zsmith99 | 2025-06-12 02:01:52+00:00
Hey HN,

I've been pouring my time into this side project and I think I finally got an MVP up! I'm really excited about it.

I'm really passionate about combining LLMs and learning. It seems like one of the best firsts for the tech. And so I built a site where all the content is generated.

As I've been building, I'm always torn between building something more general purpose where you can learn anything vs building something targeted where the generation can be more tailored. Currently, its the latter so the site is focused on data structures and algorithms. That's something I've ground out recently so just familiar with what good content might look like and it was helpful in getting the prompt engineering to generate decent content.

The site can generate both Lessons and Challenges. And they are a bit tailored to you. You can set settings about what kind of preferences you have. Tone of voice, depth, even an open text that gets feed into the prompt. I tried "Include a cat joke in every lesson" and I thought that was pretty entertaining It also takes into account your current skill level on different concepts.

But I also think I need to lean in more on the customization. That seems to be the biggest way AI generated content can differentiate. I think its been hard to generate content that's really as good as human expert generated stuff, but it can be tailored to the user. So really interested in ideas in that vein.

And in general, any advice is greatly welcomed.

Also of course willing to AMA. Happy to answer any questions about the tech stack, the apps architecture, etc

Sorry the site requires sign-up. I've thought about allowing anonymous users, but haven't implemented that yet. However, the site is free, and I'm not even doing any kind of email verification. So I won't judge you if you go with "some-fake-email@example.com"

Hope your day is going well and all the best!
by alisonatwork | 2025-06-12 02:02:39+00:00
I think it's the same reason why phones killed cameras and portable music players. It's neat to have dedicated devices that do one thing well. It's even neater to have one device that can do all the things. It's easier to transport, easier to store, easier to clean and so on. From a sustainability perspective it's probably also generating less waste, although I don't have enough knowledge in materials science to confirm that notion.

I sometimes wonder if this impulse is part of the appeal of LLMs for the people who use them for everything - not that they're actually better at anything, but just that they're kinda good enough at all of the things to make it easier to consult them than to consult dedicated sources of information.
by tracerbulletx | 2025-06-12 02:02:39+00:00
This is a good thing. This is where the economy surplus went. Not to 5 days of leisure for everyone. But to jobs that keep us occupied, engaged, and motivated but aren't strictly required. The alternative is just either starving everyone to death, except for a few elite and their slaves, or everyone being bored out of their minds and wondering what the point of life is.
by com2kid | 2025-06-12 02:04:24+00:00
At one point source depot was Toincredibly advanced, and there are still features that it had that git doesn't. Directory mapping being a stand out feature! Being able to only pull down certain directories from a depot and also remap where they are locally, and even have the same file be in multiple places. Makes sharing dependencies across multiple projects really easy, and a lot of complicated tooling around "monorepos" wouldn't need to exist if git supported directory mapping.

(You can get 80% of the way there with symlinks but in my experience they eventually break in git when too many different platforms making commits)

Also at one point I maintained an obscenely advanced test tool at MS, it pounded through millions of test cases across a slew of CPU architectures, intermingling emulators and physical machines that were connected to dev boxes hosting test code over a network controlled USB switch. (See: https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/how-microsoft-tested... for more details!)

Microsoft had some of the first code coverage tools for C/C++, spun out of a project from Microsoft Research.

Their debuggers are still some of the best in the world. NodeJS debugging in 2025 is dog shit compared to C# debugging in 2005.
by shanipribadi | 2025-06-12 02:04:56+00:00
had something similar happened a few years back.. basically the go binaries i compiled and run would get deleted every time I try to run it. usually just downloading the newer version of go compiler and recompile with that solves it (I think it got flagged because it was compiled with an older version of go compiler with known vulnerabilities). Every time it happened I think IT security got a notification, cos they would reach out to me afterwards. The few times upgrading to the latest go version didn't work (false positives), I would just name the binary something like "Dude, wake up", or "dude, I need this to get whitelisted", and do the compile-run-binary_got_deleted cycle 10-20 times, effectively paging the IT security guy until they reached out to me and whitelist things for me :-D.
by majormajor | 2025-06-12 02:06:12+00:00
Being wired to work in groups is different than being wired to clean up the mess left by a bunch of LLM agents.

I do this "let it go do the crap while I think about what to do next" somewhat frequently. But it's mostly for easy crap around the edges (making tools to futz with logs or metrics, writing queries, moving things around). The failure rate for my actual day job code just is too high, even for non-rocket-science stuff. It's usually more frustrating to spend 5 minutes chatting with the agent and then fixing it's stuff than to just spend 5 minutes writing the code.

Cause the bot has all the worst bits of human interactions - like ambiguous incomplete understanding - without the reward of building a long-term social relationship. That latter thing is what I'm wired for.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-06-12 02:07:26+00:00
(flailing here, to get Tomte in on this, don't mind me :)

supportive case studies abound in open source-- Valve saving desktop Linux most obviously..

(Possible "the-house-that-Jack-built" counterexample is, ofc, Linus & his kernel-- it even screws with the Microsoft latent framing! Srsly, what's the monystory there?)

More productively: riffing on Jobs' "if you care about sw you must work on hw", here's another "pecuny-agnostic" approach

If you care about turning academics self-sufficient, you must help the self-sufficient pursue academics without disappearing into the usual failure modes (quackery, irrelevance, Bryan Johnson, Sam Altman, PG, Peter Thiel?!?! etc)

The organizational issues are much the same, the relative stakes are .. interesting[0]. See the fraught debate following Terry Tao's very recent tacit endorsement of BigTech*

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/114586574834318736

*I gather that Tao not keeping those livecoding tubes on tap may indicate that he's seriously considering the issues raised therein

[0] .. than in the case of sports[1]: the mass appeal of μάθημα, to be (insanely?) charitable, is debatable, but the power potentiality, esp. when integrated over time[3], isn't[4].

(Sorry if Grothendieck/Teddy was channeled, not too inadvertently..)

[1] blissfully ignoring the uh not insignificant cases of Olympic horsemen turning into field marshals

[3] The Altman interval, of elite historiographers (or history-makers): exactly one thousand years

[4] "fungible" "commodity", hmmm.. gets back to your original point... Nonfungible visions?
by comrade1234 | 2025-06-12 02:09:25+00:00
I lived in Ventura CA where there's a market at the harbor on Saturday's where you can buy fish, sea urchin, live shrimp, etc and octopus.

They sell them in jars where the octopus has holed itself up cozily and normally you put the jar in the freezer until the octopus falls asleep, then take it out before it's frozen and clean it.

I didn't know about this easier way and instead read on the internet a different method... you make a big bowl of ice water and throw the octopus in it, stunning it, then quickly disassemble it.

I made the ice water bath and dumped the octopus from the jar into it. As soon as it hit the water it jumped out of the bowl into the air and onto the counter. It ran across the counter to the edge and jumped to the floor. It ran across the hardwood floor. I ran after it with a kitchen towel and used the towel to grip it and pull it up. The suckers stuck to the floor and pop pop pop as I pulled. It detached from the floor and I threw it back in the ice bath and covered the bowl with the cutting board as it passed out from the cold.

When you clean it you see its central brain but there are also other noticeable nerve cluster at each leg. There is also a very hard and sharp beak.
by majormajor | 2025-06-12 02:10:20+00:00
Amusingly, cursor took 5 minutes trying to figure out how to do what a simple global find/replace did for me in 30 seconds after I got tired of waiting for it's attempt just last night on a simple predictable lots-of-files change.

A 60x speedup is way more than I've seen even in its best case for things like that.
by gleenn | 2025-06-12 02:10:42+00:00
Strongly disagree. I've seen bad code or maintenance in all the languages. Sure, some ecosystems seem to attract worse practices, but the absolute best software engineering principles I ever learned in my multi-decade career were at a Rails shop. Everything was extremely well maintained, tested, CI/CD were great even before that was a thing. Not to start flame wars about refactoring or what it means to maintain code more, but that place was absolutely full of people who cared and kept those projects at the highest of caliber grade. You can find good, bad, and ugly in every ecosystem but I personally don't think Rails was ever even remotely bad. You can have an amazingly well-maintained setup and still be super productive. It's really about the people and the company spending the time, money, and energy to care. (Edit: typo)
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-06-12 02:10:58+00:00
> His UK bank also blocked him

This is a 'funny' situation, and potentially telling as to who holds more power, given that the UK government has recently sanctioned two Israeli ministers: https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-britain-settl...

Are UK Banks (maybe only this UK Bank) more beholden to the US than the UK?

Is / Would this UK Bank also block(ing) those two Israeli ministers?
by miki_tyler | 2025-06-12 02:13:18+00:00
Yes, exactly! Even the simplest printing press needs a screw, a nut, and movable types, each one is its own little invention. To make just those three things, they need good metalworking skills, a way to make threads that fit together, and tools to shape the letters. So even one simple machine like the most basic printing press depends on a bunch of other smaller breakthroughs. That’s what makes it so fun to think about, every step opens the door to ten more.
Android-MCP: Bridging AI Agents and Android Devices
by jeomon27 | 2025-06-12 02:13:46+00:00
Android-MCP: Bridging AI Agents and Android Devices

We've been working on Android-MCP, a lightweight, open-source bridge designed to enable AI agents (specifically large language models) to interact with Android devices. The goal is to allow LLMs to perform real-world tasks like app navigation, UI interaction, and automated QA testing without relying on traditional computer vision pipelines or pre-programmed scripts.

The core idea is to leverage ADB and the Android Accessibility API for native interaction with UI elements. This means an LLM can launch apps, tap, swipe, input text, and read view hierarchies directly. A key feature is that it works with any language model, with vision being optional – there's no need for fine-tuned computer vision models or OCR.

Android-MCP operates as an MCP server and offers a rich toolset for mobile automation, including pre-built tools for gestures, keystrokes, capturing device state, and accessing notifications. We've observed typical latency between actions (e.g., two taps) ranging from 2-5 seconds, depending on device specifications and load.

It supports Android 10+ and is built with Python 3.10+. The project is licensed under the MIT License, and contributions are welcome.

You can find more details, installation instructions, and the source code here: https://github.com/CursorTouch/Android-MCP

We're interested to hear thoughts on how this kind of direct interaction could be applied in various scenarios, particularly in areas like automated testing or accessibility enhancements for LLM-driven applications.
by Noelia- | 2025-06-12 02:13:57+00:00
When I first heard the idea that our universe began inside a black hole from another one, it felt like something out of a sci-fi movie. But the more I sit with it, the more it starts to feel like the universe is quietly nudging us, saying it has a much bigger story to tell.

If the Big Bang was just a moment in someone else’s universe, then maybe everything we know is just one chapter in a book far larger than we can imagine.
by majormajor | 2025-06-12 02:14:30+00:00
You will hit two problems in this "only hire virtual juniors" thing:

* the wall of how much you can review in one day without your quality slipping now that there's far less variation in your day

* the long-term planning difficulties around future changes when you are now the only human responsible for 5-20x more code surface area

* the operational burden of keeping all that running

The tools might get good enough that you only need 5 engineers to do what used to be 10-20. But the product folks aren't gonna stop wanting you to keep churning out the changes, and the last 2 years of evolution of these models doesn't seem like it's on a trajectory to cut that down to 1 (or 0) without unforeseen breakthroughs.