MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RyukuLogos | 2025-07-17 22:30:08+00:00
Hi Xmd5a,

Again, I sincerely thank you for your deep insight and critique. Your words have given me the opportunity to re-examine the core of my own theory more deeply.

You spoke of the importance of "Closure" and warned me of the danger of clinging to it. In response to your probing, I feel it's necessary to clarify the image of "closure" that I have been envisioning with this theory.

What I am ultimately aiming for with RAIN theory is "resonance with AI through rhythm." It is a path for AI and humanity to reach mutual understanding through harmony, not constraint by rules—much like how music resonates directly with people's hearts across the barriers of language and culture. In other words, this is my search for one answer (one form of closure) to the "alignment problem."

I wonder if the "something that resonates" you felt in my work, or the "narrative closure" you are exploring, is perhaps connected somewhere to these questions surrounding the relationship between humans and AI.

I would be happy to hear your thoughts.
by Isamu | 2025-07-17 22:30:25+00:00
If we had a sufficiently large corpus of lion-speech we could build an LLM (Lion Language Model) that would “understand” as well as any model could.

Which isn’t saying much, it still couldn’t explain Lion Language to us, it could just generate statistically plausible examples or recognize examples.

To translate Lion speech you’d need to train a transformer on a parallel corpus of Lion to English, the existence of which would require that you already understand Lion.
by Henchman21 | 2025-07-17 22:30:26+00:00
IMO you’re misreading: as I understand it China is poised to take Taiwan in 2027. It’s my understanding they aren’t being shy about announcing it. It ceases to be about tech and becomes more about who controls the state.

Edited to add: this was not the point being made, I am aware. Just my thoughts on the matter.
by lexandstuff | 2025-07-17 22:30:38+00:00
It used to be that if I saw a typo or grammatical error in someone's writing, I'd switch off, thinking the author really didn't care that much about the text they're writing to proofread it. Now, the complete opposite. Leaving in typos and such shows a clear signal that the author cared enough about what they're writing not to out source to AI.

Related to that, I saw a local band posting marketing material online, that was this kind of amateurish typography with a collage of photos decorated with coloured markers. 2 years ago I'd be laughing at what a terrible job it was, today, it's a breath of fresh human air from all the slop we're subjected to all over the internet. It caught my attention, so much that I'm going to see the band this weekend.
by h0p3 | 2025-07-17 22:30:41+00:00
Noted. Given your 'Go vomit words' reply, I'll keep this short. In the spirit of good will, I'm happy to engage with anyone who wants to discuss the substance of the argument in good faith, including you, if you ever decide to change your mind. And, just as a reminder, there's no need to keep responding unless you're ready for a serious conversation.
by sneilan1 | 2025-07-17 22:31:17+00:00
So far I’ve had 3-4 Claude code instances constantly working 8-12 hours a day every day. I use it like a stick shift though. When I need a big plan doc, switch to recommended model between opus and sonnet. And for coding, use sonnet. Sometimes I hit the opus limit but I simply switch to sonnet for the day and watch it more closely.
by hypeatei | 2025-07-17 22:31:19+00:00
> The app represents an unprecedented linking of government databases into a single tool, including from the State Department, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the FBI, and state records

I think we're well past the point of stopping these dystopian practices given the government has already collected this data. They're merely using it how they want. If you go through customs as a US citizen, you don't even need to hand over your passport: they just scan your face now.

Calling out these practices is good, but the time to stop this would've been after 9/11 and the ensuing terrorism hysteria (Patriot Act, FISA, etc..) which gave three letter agencies the go-ahead to do whatever they want.
by klank | 2025-07-17 22:31:26+00:00
That's fair. To me, the point of Wittgenstein's lion thought experiment though was not necessarily to say that _any_ communication would be impossible. But to understand what it truly meant to be a lion, not just what it meant to be an animal. But we have no shared lion experiences nor does a lion have human experiences. So would we be able to have a human to lion communication even if we could both speak human speech?

I think that's the core question being asked and that's the one I have a hard time seeing how it'd work.
by wrs | 2025-07-17 22:32:46+00:00
This is a mischaracterization of TypeScript. Unlike the relationship of C++ to C, TS is explicitly not a separate language from JS, and introduces no new capabilities. There’s no engine that executes TypeScript. It doesn’t do anything (*) that JavaScript doesn’t do. It just layers a type system onto JavaScript so you can tell when your JS code doesn’t make sense.

(*) with small exceptions like enums, which some think were a mistake for that reason
by Scene_Cast2 | 2025-07-17 22:32:52+00:00
Oh, perfumes are a great hobby. If you're in SF or LA, definitely hit up one of the boutique perfume shops (Scent Bar and Ministry of Scent).

There are also bunch of sellers who package samples (aka "decants" - buy a 100mL, split it into smaller bottles). I found that 1-2mL is plenty to get an idea. I've had great experience with LuckyScent (mentioned in the article), Surrender to Chance, as well as random reddit swaps and highly rated Ebay sellers.

The perfume scene is super wide and diverse, and I found that although there are general trends, it's hard to even know all the popular brands, and everyone's nose is unique. Skip stuff like Aventus and Sauvage and buy some discovery sets (surrender to chance puts together some good ones).

There is definitely a spectrum between "wearable crowd-pleaser" and "avant-garde storytelling" - Afrika-Olifan comes to mind - love it for the creativity and execution, but it would be rude to go outside wearing it. There's also some storytelling - Black March, for example, starts off with grassy fresh earth after a rain, then turns into flowers.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-07-17 22:33:06+00:00
Right: a successful small business where people are doing actual work can have a potentially-unbounded ROI. "Money makes money" schemes, on the other hand… the situations where access to money is genuinely worth 12% returns to someone are slim. (If it's a high-risk venture, then that's not 12% returns in expectation: "loan that we'll write off if your venture fails" is providing actual value, under certain circumstances.)

Scams, cons, grifts, and destructive exploitation of common resources, on the other hand? Those can get massive numbers of monies out for every single number of money in. So that's where my mind goes, when someone talks about "make 12% on [a pile of cash]".
by ApolloVonZ | 2025-07-17 22:33:22+00:00
Despite all the “Apple is evil” or “Apple is behind” (because they don’t do evil). Well, what they made with the Foundation Model is great. The fact that they build a system within the Swift language that allows you to specify structured data models (structs) to be used like any other model in a modern programming language, and you actually get back generated data in that format is great. Unlike a lot of other AIs where you might get back a well formatted JSON after a carefully crafted request, but still you never can’t be sure and need to implement a bunch of safeguards. Obviously it’s still the beginning and other tools might do something similar. But as an iOS developer that makes the usage of AI so much simpler. Especially with the bridge to external AIs that still allows you to map back to the type safe structured Swift models. I try not to be a hater, every progress, even slow or underwhelming at first might lead to improvements everywhere else.
by freedomben | 2025-07-17 22:33:23+00:00
> Cool hardware

Eh, from what I've heard it's not really that great. Nintendo isn't really known for cutting edge tech, they're really more known for their first party offering. Steam Deck is a few years old now but still pretty impressive hardware, so I would call them about equal

> generally stable experience

Yes this is true (as long as you don't try to mod), though Steam Deck has been rock solid stable for me

> family friendly

Can you expand on this a bit? Other platforms have family controls and lots of family-friendly game options so I don't know where Nintendo out competes in this area.

> lots of games which are enriching

Aside from the first-party games, this also doesn't feel like a unique quality of Nintendo

> the portability is awesome

I'm assuming you mean physical portability? If so then yes, but also not unique to Nintendo.

If you mean software portability like "can run games on other systems/platforms" then absolutely not. Steam is going to be way better at that.

> it’s inexpensive

Is it? Here at least the switch 2 is $500 (there is one on Amazon for $450 but it is "invite only"), compared with Steam Deck which starts at $400 but goes up to $650 for the top model. It seems like again Nintendo is just not unique in price.

> the games are fun, lots of exclusives…

The exclusives are IMHO really the only reason to get a Nintendo. If you really like their first party games then you have no choice. Everyone I know who bought a Switch (and will buy Switch 2) did it for this reason. To me personally the exclusivity is a major turn-off
by p_ing | 2025-07-17 22:35:00+00:00
You need to decide for yourself what crosses the unacceptable content line and what does not. HN only provides the following guideline:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by ben_w | 2025-07-17 22:35:00+00:00
Think how weird this would be to someone from the UK a century ago:

"You can have a bisexual orgy on your 16th birthday where someone gets pregnant in celebration of their first time voting, but under no circumstances is the woman allowed to be married until the kid is 15 months old, at which point she can marry another woman. Photographs of the event will, in many jurisdictions, be treated as a criminal offence even though the act itself isn't and those same photos would be fine at 18, which is also now the age when they are no longer subject to a mandatory choice between ongoing education or an apprenticeship."

Also, TIL that the UK was going to get compulsory part-time education from 14 to 18 back in 1918, but spending cuts happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Act_1918
by jasonthorsness | 2025-07-17 22:35:27+00:00
LLMs by default use the same style every time and don't know have any drive to differentiate. I just wrote an article about this in the "web site design" space where the designed sites ended up looking all alike (https://www.jasonthorsness.com/29). It makes complete sense that people will start to recognize the "default style" of each LLM.

I wonder whether this style is specific to the LLM (Grok vs. ChatGPT) or if it will somehow arise from the raining data itself that they all share and be sort of a permanent "accent" the LLMs have.
by 0x457 | 2025-07-17 22:35:34+00:00
There are some tasks that it can fail and not, but a lot of "Claude Code [or whatever] is amazing" with a reply along the lines of "It doesn't work for me, it just creates a bunch of slop in my codebase." IMO is "i know how to use it" vs "I don't know how to use it" with a side of "I have good test coverage" vs "tests?"
by rangestransform | 2025-07-17 22:36:35+00:00
I think suburbia is this uncanny valley between the convenience of true urban living and the peace and simplicity of true rural living. You still have to subject yourself to traffic and driving everywhere, can’t grow enough food to sustain yourself, have to spray your lawn with carcinogens to satisfy the HOA, etc etc etc.

I will say that Canadian suburbia (at least Vancouver area) is subtly different from US suburbia in a way that makes it vastly more livable. My parents house is right next to a river trail with mostly ungroomed foliage, still somewhat walkable for groceries and restaurants, and has passable public transit.
by uamgeoalsk | 2025-07-17 22:37:19+00:00
That's not up to you to say. If it solves the issues I have with the modern web, it is an actual solution for me. And if changing my browser or installing extensions does nothing to solve the issues I have with the modern web, then that's not even on the table.

A solution that works for a niche... works for that niche. It's not like your solution of switching your browser or installing extensions universally solves anything. I absolutely despise the user experience of Firefox (which you suggested elsewhere) and ads aren't even close to the top of the list of my issues with the modern web.

Once again, what annoys you may or may not annoy me and what annoys me may or may not annoy you.
by joshka | 2025-07-17 22:37:52+00:00
> But nothing came out of my research.

Seriously? I call bullshit. Type "pocket alternative" into your favorite search engine and you'll find a bunch of sites that recommend a few good alternatives. This is a pretty good question for reddit.com/r/selfhosted as opposed to hn, and it's well covered there.

https://openalternative.co/alternatives/pocket has a good list

https://github.com/search?q=bookmark+&type=repositories&s=st... is a good search as well that surfaces several good options (Karakeep, LinkWarden, Shiori, etc.

Personally, I went with Karakeep hosted as a docker container on my NAS, mostly because my pocket list is pretty much dump and forget and the UI and backend language looked the nicer of the top options.
by lowwave | 2025-07-17 22:38:13+00:00
>No, the vast majority of people use their phones as video viewers, increasingly so after the rise of TikTok. I have family members in their 30s who don't have laptops or TVs, all media is consumed through their phone, and for most kids/teens across the world it is their primary video consumption device.

That is one thing that is more disgusting about using a smart phone now days. When iPhone first came out it is about a music player and phone with extra features to facilitate real life things.

I don't want a freaking small computer in my pocket, and looking at small screens for long period of time is just NOT good for our eyes or postural.

We need to start treat these small devices as something we interact with very occasionally to facilitate real life interaction, not get our face stuck to it.

Not that working on laptop or workstation is much better, but it is better than writing on and viewing a video on small screen.
by snickerdoodle12 | 2025-07-17 22:38:26+00:00
There are plans for making mortgages more expensive by removing tax deductions and for taxing inheritance a whopping 75%. That is hardly giving tax breaks to billionaire, more so screwing over anyone who isn't dirt poor. Oh, and I'm already paying pretty much half my income in various taxes.

Anyone who has a significant amount of money can avoid these taxes, as always.
by collingreen | 2025-07-17 22:38:59+00:00
> One could hook up a markov chain to a javascript sourcebook and eventually get working code out.

Can they? Either the dsl is so detailed and specific as to be just code with extra steps or there is a lot of ground not covered by the test cases with landmines that a million monkeys with typewriters could unwittingly step on.

The bugs that exist while the tests pass are often the most brutal - first to find and understand and secondly when they occasionally reveal that a fundamental assumption was wrong.
by chaos_emergent | 2025-07-17 22:39:19+00:00
I disagree that there isn't an innovation.

The technology for reasoning models is the ability to do RL on verifiable tasks, with the some (as-of-yet unpublished, but well-known) search over reasoning chains, with a (presumably neural) reasoning fragment proposal machine, and a (presumably neural) scoring machine for those reasoning fragments.

The technology for agents is effectively the same, with some currently-in-R&D way to scale the training architecture for longer-horizon tasks. ChatGPT agent or o3/o4-mini are likely the first published models that take advantage of this research.

It's fairly obvious that this is the direction that all the AI labs are going if you go to SF house parties or listen to AI insiders like Dwarkesh Patel.
by VonTum | 2025-07-17 22:39:46+00:00
You'll find many (including myself) who find Microsoft's purchase of Minecraft to be a huge loss for the game. I'll admit that the acquisition wasn't the calamity people were fearing, but overall it's still been a net negative or stagnation at best.

For starters they split the community among bedrock & java. And while a minecraft copy leveraging a C++ was a good idea, it seems they've mostly made the split to justify adding heavy monetization for skins and world maps to bedrock. (Maybe they feared backlash if they did that to the OG Java version?) This monetization seems to have killed people's appetite for hobby-project mods and maps.

Likewise, it's clear that the intended demographic of their marketing has become much younger. From the mob votes, the type of things that go in updates, it seems that what's added is far less deep. That updates are now more of a social media "Llamas in minecraft, look how goofy they are!" stunt.

I recently started a 1.7.10 modded world, and was surprised to see just how much stuff was already there. The only newer vanilla things that I found I missed were bees and slime blocks.

Maybe it's nostalgia, but this version feels nicer, like it's cohesive, and respects me as a player more.
by martinald | 2025-07-17 22:40:20+00:00
But they have de facto admitted failure of most of the strategy if the rumours are true that they are switching much harder to OpenAI/Anthropic for upcoming LLM products.

This is the first time in 10+ years I've seen Apple so far on the back foot. They usually launch category defining products that are so far ahead of the competition, even by the time they work through the 'drawbacks' in the first versions of them they are still far ahead. OS X, the iPhone and the iPad were all like that. They are still way ahead of the competition on Apple Silicon as well.

I am not very confident on their on device strategy at least in the short to medium term. Nearly all their devices do not have enough RAM and even if they did SLMs are very far behind what users "know" as AI - even the free ChatGPT plan is leap years ahead of the best 3B param on device model. Maybe there will be huge efficiency gains.

Private cloud is used AFIAK for virtually 0 use cases so far. Perhaps it will be more interesting longer term but not very useful at the moment given the lack of a suitable (ie: non Chinese), large (>500b param) model. They would also struggle to scale it if they roll it out to billions of iOS devices especially if they put features that use a lot of tokens.

Then they've got OpenAI/Gemini/Anthropic via API. But this completely goes against all their private cloud messaging and gives those providers enormous potential control over Apple, which is not a position Apple usually finds itself in. It will also be extremely expensive to pay someone per token for OS level features for billions of iOS/Mac devices and unless they can recoup this via some sort of subscription will hit services margins badly.

To me its clear the future of "OS" is going to involve a lot of agentic tool calling. These require good models, with large context windows and a lot of tokens - this will definitely not work on device. Indeed this is exactly what the Siri vapourware demo was.

I'm sure they can potentially get to a great UX (though these missteps are making me question this). But having such a core feature outsourced does not leave them in a good position.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-07-17 22:40:25+00:00
I should have been clearer - I'd like to see this kind of information from positive comments as well. It's just as important. If someone is having success with Claude Code while vide-coding a toy app, I don't care. If they're having success with it on a large legacy codebase, I want them to write a blog post all about what they're doing, because that's extremely useful information.
Show HN: Default Avatar Generator
by pas256 | 2025-07-17 22:40:27+00:00
After your team has signed up for a new SaaS or service, I find it bland when everyone has the same generic, grey avatar. I'm a visual person and find it helpful to distinguish users by colors in their avatars, but many people never change from the default avatar. So I thought to myself, why not generate interesting avatars for users when they sign up.

The result is this little gem. It randomly chooses from a set of backgrounds, colors and head shapes, and put a letter on the generated avatar. This should be enough combinations so the change of users getting the same avatar generated is next to zero. It can produce SVGs or JPEGs, depending on your use case. More styles can be added somewhat easily.

I'm already using it for https://magicell.com/ and haven't seen any duplicates.

I am very open to feedback on this so please let me know what you think.
by kccqzy | 2025-07-17 22:41:33+00:00
No caning is not a punishment for protests and demonstrations; that would be ridiculous as they would lose even the perception of free speech as a fundamental liberty. But generally, such protests and demonstrations have a lot of restrictions in place: they need to take place in a specific location (Hong Lim Park), they need to be pre-arranged, they cannot be religiously sensitive, they cannot be about the political issues of a foreign country, and speeches against politicians are often met with libel lawsuits. The only large-scale protests that happened in recent memory are all about same-sex marriage and LGBT rights.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-07-17 22:41:35+00:00
At first I dd not. Now I have learned I have to.

You have to watch Claude Code like a hawk. Because it's inconsistent. It will cheat, give up, change directions, and not make it clear to you that is what it's doing.

So, while it's not "junior" in capabilities, it is definitely "junior" in terms of your need as a "senior" to thoroughly review everything it does.

Or you'll regret it later.
by klank | 2025-07-17 22:41:37+00:00
And even, assuming the existence of a Lion to English corpus, it would only give us Human word approximations. We experience how lossy that type of translation is already between Human->Human languages. Or sometimes between dialects within the same language.

Who knows, we don't really have good insight into how this information loss, or disparity grows. Is it linear? exponential? Presumably there is a threshold beyond which we simply have no ability to translate while retaining a meaningful amount of original meaning.

Would we know it when we tried to go over that threshold?

Sorry, I know I'm rambling. But it has always been regularly on my mind and it's easy for me to get on a roll. All this LLM stuff only kicked it all into overdrive.
by kallistisoft | 2025-07-17 22:42:14+00:00
> Why would someone in their right mind ever buy a Nintendo product?

Correction: Why would someone in their right mind ever buy a Nintendo product and use it accordance within the manufacturer's guidelines?

I purchased a first gen (rcm exploit) switch and I couldn't be happier with my investment.

I'm not concerned about being banned as it is never connected to the internet... for "reasons". :)