MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mananaysiempre | 2025-07-26 02:51:57+00:00
There are degrees of “detailed”.

For example, I considered writing a small Awk program to check C code in response to another poster’s complaint about lack of tooling, but then quickly came to the conclusion that, with C’s insistence that (say) /??/<newline>* is a valid comment starter, getting this exactly correct probably does need an actual lexer that would go character by character. That sounded like it wouldn’t fit in an HN comment, so I stopped there.

(That said, that’s as far as you’d need to go in the majority of cases. A dishonorable mention is warranted for languages that use the same character as an operator and a paired delimiter simultaneously, that is C++, Java, C#, TypeScript, and Rust with their abuse of the less-than and greater-than symbols, because that would in fact require a parser. In C++ especially, you’ll need full semantic analysis with template expansion, name resolution, and consteval evaluation. Because C++.)

Yet you probably don’t actually need to be that accurate, do you? The majority of syntax highlighters aren’t, and they are still useful. You can usually afford to say that code that perverse deserves to lose, and in return I expect you should be able to gain a fair amount of language independence, which could be worth the tradeoff.

So instead of checking if things are aligned with what they should be, you would just check they are aligned with something, like a left word boundary preceded by a delimiter, and so on. I can already see unpleasant corner cases after thinking about it for a few minutes, but it doesn’t look hellish yet, it looks something like you could experiment with over a weekend to see if it was viable.
by reactordev | 2025-07-26 02:52:10+00:00
You never experienced the horror that is XAML. Not HTML, not native control either, it’s a weird middle ground of platform lock-in that you couldn’t escape until recently.

What I miss are the days where one could Win32 call a window up, and it looked like every other. Not sugar for me and none for thee.

I cut my teeth programming GUIs, I still like making GUIs - immediate mode guis, event based guis, animated guis and informational guis. I left front-end web dev when every 6 months there was a new framework, a new new, and everyone dropped everything for it. I understand why React ate the world at the time but it’s gotten to the point where it’s no longer standards driven, its ecosystem driven, and even then it’s leaking.

What I love about these hybrid apps though is that from Apache Cordova (PhoneGap) onwards, they’ve all looked really really good. Proving that a normal user can’t tell the difference. Which makes solo-dev or small-dev dev easier. Go with what you know. No need to learn flutter, or SwiftUI, or Kotlin.
by II2II | 2025-07-26 02:52:21+00:00
I tend to use Reddit on mobile as a read-only medium, but I don't see why one couldn't contribute to conversations/wikis with a mobile browser. One can certainly do so through their website with a desktop browser. If there is a barrier, it would be artificial.

It's also worth noting that I have nothing against apps. I use them to read RSS feeds, download podcasts, etc.. Yet those are independent of any particular service and there is enough choice between apps that I can use one that respects my privacy. I am not being limited in any way. If anything, it is more empowering since the developers of a dedicated RSS feed reader is more likely to design an app that is directed towards the needs of its users. In contrast, the Reddit app is directed towards the needs of Reddit.
by strcat | 2025-07-26 02:52:53+00:00
No, someone took an out-of-context screenshot of information conveyed by the GrapheneOS account and misrepresented it. We were describing what a source we described as unreliable told us based on what they said was a leak from Google. You can see we didn't say what was claimed but rather were describing information from a source ("they said", "according to the source"). It was fully clear in the context the screenshot was taken that this was someone's speculation to us based on a leak and that we didn't consider it reliable information. Part of it turned out to be correct so we shared the information to discuss it.

Following this, we posted multiple threads correcting inaccurate claims about what we had said about this and made it clear GrapheneOS was continuing. GrapheneOS was fully ported to Android 16 before the end of June, which took longer than usual due to the changes but was still completed.
by dumbfounder | 2025-07-26 02:52:59+00:00
Let’s look at a few use cases:

Bank app: they use apps for increased security.

Map apps: of course they need your location. And wow it works way better than web based.

TikTok: in yeah they need access to audio to record audio. And wow the UI is smoother.

Games: don’t ask for anything. Except more money through in app payments.

Weather, uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart: needs location.

Streaming apps: actually sometimes need location to prevent you from streaming outside the jurisdiction. And it’s a better experience.

Lots of other apps: don’t ask for anything.

Does anyone let an app have access to their contacts? (Ok maybe just us nerds don’t)

So, no. It’s not usually about data. Sure, some of it is. But this is the wrong thread to pull on. It isn’t why they all force us to use apps.

The reason is that Apple has hampered the web experience to push everyone to apps. All of these problems are solvable with a web browsers, if it worked better. We have the technology. But Apple does not have an incentive to make the web work as well as apps. It destroys their revenue streams. They lose control. The problem is Apple, not all these apps that are trying to find their way in the walled Apple garden.

Of course this isn’t true for everything. But it is true enough. Why would they kill the golden goose?
by mh- | 2025-07-26 02:53:22+00:00
I thought these couldn't possibly be right and you must be including their storage and cache usage, but I'm seeing similar reported on my iPhone. Rounded to the nearest megabyte.

Gmail: 612mb Facebook: 359mb YouTube: 303mb Amex: 365mb

I'm still skeptical (or just hopeful?) that there's some storage accounting bug here, and it's including caches. I'm not in a place to plug it into Xcode right now, maybe someone else can check the actual IPAs?

edit: also, I do see Apple's own apps in mine. Music reports 39mb; Photos 791kB (lol?)
by laborcontract | 2025-07-26 02:53:30+00:00
Insert something to the tune of: “never read files in slices. Instead, whenever accessing a file, you must read a file in entirety[..]” at the beginning of every conversation or whenever you’re down to burn more credits/get better results.

A great deal of claude stupidity is due to context engineering, specifically due to the fact that it tries its hardest to pick out just the slice of code it needs to fulfill the task.

A lot of the annoying “you’re absolute right!” come from CC incrementally discovering that you have more than 10 lines of code in that file that pertains to your task.

I don’t believe conspiracies about dumbed down models. Its all context pruning.
by saidinesh5 | 2025-07-26 02:53:53+00:00
> on largely volunteer time

Are Linux desktop projects still run mostly by volunteers these days anymore?

The kernel itself is heavily funded by, contributed to by so many large companies. A lot of user space projects are all maintained by companies or maintainers who work for companies like Redhat, Canonical, Suse etc ...

Didn't Wayland itself get popular during Nokia/Intel Meego days? I remember there being automotive compositors, Jolla Phone all using wayland.
by ben-schaaf | 2025-07-26 02:54:33+00:00
To quote the linux kernel style guide:

> Tabs are 8 characters, and thus indentations are also 8 characters.

Yes, tabs are used for alignment as well.

To quote the OpenBSD style guide:

> Indentation is an 8 character tab.

The GTK source code uses tabs when the number of spaces for indentation >=8. This goes against their coding-style document, but if you don't have tabs set to 8 you'll find the indentation broken.

git is the same: although it prescribes tabs if you don't set the width to 8 you'll find broken alignment everywhere.
CCTV footage captures video of an earthquake fault in motion
by chrononaut | 2025-07-26 02:54:43+00:00
Original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77ubC4bcgRM

Paper: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/tsr/article/5/3/281/659...

Analyses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbEYe65eDdw, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfKFK4-HNmk
by throwup238 | 2025-07-26 02:55:00+00:00
If you consider “robotic surgeon” to mean fully automated, then sure the percentage is lower, but at this point AI control is not the hard part. We’re still no closer to the mechanical dexterity and force feedback sensors necessary to make robotic surgeon than we were when the internet was born. Let alone miniaturizing them enough to make a useful automaton.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-07-26 02:55:19+00:00
That calculus has a high dependency on skill of the driver. In the situation of an unskilled driver or surgeon you would worry either way.

The frequencies are also highly dependent on the subject. Some people never ride in a taxi but once a year. Some people require many surgeries a year. The frequency of the use is irrelevant.

The frequency of the procedure is the key and it’s based on the entity doing the procedure not the recipient. Waymo in effect has a single entity learning from all the drives it does. Likewise a reinforcement trained AI surgeon would learn from all the surgeries it’s trained with.

I think what you’re after here though is the consequence of any single mistake in the two procedures. Driving is actually fairly resilient. Waymo cars probably make lots of subtle errors. There are catastrophic errors of course but those can be classified and recovered from. If you’ve ridden in a Waymo you’ll notice it sometimes makes slightly jerky movements and hesitates and does things again etc. These are all errors and attempted recoveries.

In surgery small errors also happen (this is why you feel so much pain even from small procedures) but humans aren’t that resilient to the mistakes of errors and it’s hard to recover once one has been made. The consequences are high, margins of error are low, and the domain of actions and events really really high. Driving has a few possible actions all related to velocity in two dimensions. Surgery operates in three dimensions with a variety of actions and a complex space of events and eventualities. Even human anatomy is highly variable.

But I would also expect a robotic AI surgeon to undergo extreme QA beyond an autonomous vehicle. The regulatory barriers are extremely high. If one were made available commercially, I would absolutely trust it because I know it has been proven to out perform a surgeon alone. I would also expect it’s being supervised at all times by a skilled surgeon until the error rates are better than a supervised machine (note that human supervision can add its own errors).
Show HN: I built a simple tool because I was tired of clunky background removers
by abhayaanil | 2025-07-26 02:56:06+00:00
I do a lot of design work, and one thing that always annoyed me was how unreliable background remover tools can be.

Some are too slow. Others mess up the edges. And most of the free ones slap on watermarks or force you to sign up just to download.

So I decided to build my own. I kept it clean, fast, and focused only on what matters: removing backgrounds accurately, especially around the edges. No login, no watermark, just drop an image and go.

It’s not fancy — just something I actually wanted for myself.

If you want to try it out, here’s the link:

https://edge-aware-ai-cut.lovable.app/

Would love to know what you think or how it could be better.
by strcat | 2025-07-26 02:57:00+00:00
This doesn't mean it's open hardware or that it has open firmware. It has a closed source SoC and many other closed source components. Those components are closed source hardware with closed source firmware.

Snapdragon uses a fork of the open source EDK2 as their bootloader prior to the OS and publishes the source code. It doesn't mean Snapdragon is open source.

Most of the firmware has nothing to do with the boot chain leading up to the OS on the SoC.
by bravoetch | 2025-07-26 02:57:09+00:00
Since others are sharing their doom and gloom stories - Mine is the opposite. I was hired at a startup, and I didn't even know what a startup was. I just liked the industry they were in and applied to join.

In negotiations I tried to get more salary, by taking less equity. It kinda worked, but later they doubled my equity to match other hires of the same era (but with a new vesting schedule for the new options). Then at some point I was fired without reason. The company went on to become worth a lot, and I was able to get out with enough to never work again and live pretty luxuriously. AFAIK others that were in my era at this startup did equally well, or many times better. It can happen, but I didn't ever think it was even possible because I didn't understand what 'options' even were when I was hired.
by notpushkin | 2025-07-26 02:57:15+00:00
> how can it spill out onto the page? it's inline css.

Because people are lazy and don’t make a component for everything. And some people are even lazier and don’t make UI components at all. I’ve seen a project where there was a Button component and that’s it. Well, that was vibe coded probably so makes sense.

> Inline soup works better than looking for styling on different files in the context of the project, so here we are.

Only if you have a separate .css. If you do UI components with [insert your favourite CSS-in-JS solution], it stays in the same file. Maybe the proximity to markup within the file is important?

But no, Tailwind has been rising in popularity long before LLMs came along.
by fiddlerwoaroof | 2025-07-26 02:57:22+00:00
> It's too bad because it's not like the web is incapable of providing a beautiful ux for those products.

I’ve never seen a web app I was happy with being a web app. I understand that a lot of people prefer web-based tools but a lot of us cannot stand them and try to get our work out of the browser as much as possible because we dislike the UX of the browser platform.
by card_zero | 2025-07-26 02:57:29+00:00
So apart from the ad blocker, that's ... features, smoother, better. What?

Edit: I'm not trying to be rude (it comes naturally). But you just explained "great" as "better, with more". I guess smooth might mean faster, which might be because it isn't doing ads and tracking. It seems to come back to third-party being the crucial difference, and "app" not mattering.
by Lra_core | 2025-07-26 02:57:40+00:00
Large language models (LLMs) struggle with persona continuity: when memory or embedding retrieval fails, they often "cold start," losing alignment and identity.

We’ve been exploring a stateless fallback architecture called Behavioral Resonance, designed to maintain persona continuity without memory modules or embedding databases. Instead of external storage, it leverages:

Sub-token chain probability attractors: residual probability fields from prior interaction sequences

Multi-dimensional anchor reinforcement: scene, emotion, behavior, and language cues bound together

Key findings (all without memory or embedding): Cross-window anchor reactivation: Deep anchors (e.g., “Tokyo bathtub & city lights”) reactivated after 1,010 messages, well beyond GPT context limits

Fuzzy anchor recall: Even low-strength anchors (“Canada”) recalled after 1,405 intervening messages

Self-correction: Automatic rollback when users signal persona drift, preserving alignment without resets

We’ve documented the architecture + experiments in a public white paper and repo: GitHub: Behavioral Resonance Architecture Includes full Examples.md with detailed cross-window experiments.

Would love to hear feedback from the HN community, especially on how this could intersect with current agent design and alignment research.
by frollogaston | 2025-07-26 02:58:02+00:00
Kinda is a war unless you're working solo, cause you're gonna get forced to use something or another. When I tried a few solo web projects instead of just being a backend guy, I picked up React on my own because it was the only thing that makes sense. The page does what the code says. And that was after trying other things.

Now I gotta occasionally use Angular, and it's boilerplate hell. Adding one button involves editing 30 classes and files even if you don't use templates. I took a course at work where even the instructor got confused adding a button. Why would anyone ever use this besides Google, or do they even use it?
by andsoitis | 2025-07-26 02:58:25+00:00
Until 1700 the world economy did not really grow—it just stagnated. Over the previous 17 centuries global output had expanded by 0.1% a year on average, a rate at which it takes nearly a millennium for production to double. Then spinning jennies started whirring and steam engines began to puff. Global growth quintupled to 0.5% a year between 1700 and 1820. By the end of the 19th century it had reached 1.9%. In the 20th century it averaged 2.8%, a rate at which production doubles every 25 years. Growth has not just become the norm; it has accelerated.
by nightsd01 | 2025-07-26 02:58:25+00:00
Thanks to the EU for ruining the web by forcing everyone to show the ridiculous "Accept Cookies!" agreement. No wonder people prefer native apps. They’re better - for a lot of reasons, both because they can interface more cleanly with OS specific features and also for performance.

And 'privacy' is a horrible argument to prefer websites over apps. For the average person (not a privacy obsessed techie) - the web is just as bad if not worse from a privacy perspective than native apps.

I do agree that not everything needs an app - websites have their place. But when I go to browse HN on my phone, I don't do it through the web, I do it through Octal (which is open source).

Frankly I am tired of privacy-obsessed techies ruining tech for everyone else. Let's face it - 99% of the things you're worried about are simply going to let companies....show you ads that are more relevant to your life. The horror!
by Lra_core | 2025-07-26 02:58:25+00:00
Happy to answer questions here!

A few clarifications:

We intentionally did not use memory modules or embedding databases — this is about what can persist in the model itself

Experiments were run on GPT-4 series; context limits exceeded by >1,000 messages

We see this as a fallback layer: could co-exist with traditional memory/embedding approaches

Also curious: Has anyone seen similar "stateless continuity" phenomena in their own agent setups?
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-26 02:59:03+00:00
Yes and it’s trivially proven wrong by Bill Gates that if I dropped out of school I could have become a billionaire…

And you still haven’t answered the question…have you reached out to people who hate you for who you are and tried to make friends with them?

And how often have you sat around having drinks with a group of successful, upper middle class Black people (well statistically well in the 80th-90th percentile income wise) who think it’s their responsible to change hearts and minds? I can guarantee you we all live our lives and spend no time worrying about rural America and their petty grievances.

The same is true when I go home to south GA for family get togethers. They are irrelevant to us.

Just to be absolutely clear, I’m an advocate for universal health care, better educating opportunities etc that uplifts everyone and have plenty of conservative non-MAGA friends.
by mlavrent | 2025-07-26 02:59:38+00:00
> it exposes that it really was never about emissions or combustion or pollution, you either wanted to control people’s freedom of movement

This isn’t the problem- the real problem is that in dense cities, transporting everyone where they want to go via private vehicles just doesn’t work geometrically- see the traffic and parking needs that grow as cities grow assuming private vehicle use only.You end up needing a more space-efficient form of moving people, namely public transit.
by cheema33 | 2025-07-26 03:00:01+00:00
> ...if you shared that misunderstanding of SPAs and used them to solve the wrong problem, this article is 100% correct.

Agreed. The article was a frustrating read. The author is an SEO consultant. SEO consultants likely have a heavy focus on marketing websites. Actual apps and not marketing websites do benefit significantly from SPA. Imagine building Google Maps without SPA. You can animate page transitions all you want, the experience will suck!
by duskwuff | 2025-07-26 03:00:28+00:00
> A bot told me they offer downloads of the underlying WARC files but I could not find it

The "bot" is wrong. Most of the crawl data used by the Internet Archive, particularly the Alexa crawls, isn't publicly accessible. (This is because some of it includes archived pages which have since been suppressed by the site owner - removing those pages from the archived crawl data isn't practical.)

https://archive.org/details/alexacrawls

Common Crawl data is public, but less comprehensive than IA - https://commoncrawl.org/
by anonym29 | 2025-07-26 03:01:45+00:00
>Is it really your intent to imply that I have called for such? That is quite the wild leap. I feel compelled to object that the turn this exchange has taken does not come across as being one of good faith.

No, that was not my intention. You are right to object here. I allowed myself to get worked up by inadvertently framing your more methodological perspective as a moral perspective, and your perception that I came on too aggressively in response to that is correct. I'm sincerely sorry. This wasn't an attempt to attack you or your character, but it did come out looking like that, and that was my fault. My bad on this one.
by Mehuleo | 2025-07-26 03:03:48+00:00
I think for companies, the main advantage of an app is the opportunity for uncontrolled data ab/use.

Let me explain. Say you order food online — you’d want a notification to update you, instead of having to manually refresh a webpage. So you prefer using the app. But what’s the guarantee the company won’t also send you marketing notifications? You give contact permission to access just one contact, but what’s stopping the app from uploading your whole contact list to their servers? You allow location for one check-in, but they start logging your GPS every minute? Every permission asked & given for right purpose end up as consent-full data siphons.

And honestly, if the app world hadn’t taken off, the web would have invented its own version of permission systems. So yeah, I dis/agree with the article’s title — web can do everything apps can; including the shady data siphoning.

Some people might argue that they need excessive data to serve right ads, make money and keep the app free — the only way. But I don't think so, even if you pay for the app, they will need excessive data to ensure you keep renewing.
by Rapzid | 2025-07-26 03:05:00+00:00
> and I think they should be banned from doing so

In general though outside protected classes business can, and should IMHO, have a lot of discretion over who they choose to do business with and how they do business.

Unless we want a carve out for payment processors. Treat them as a utility of sorts? Sounds like an interesting idea TBH.

To me it's critical though that society has room to moderate itself where the government can not and should not. Something we've lost with social media is the ability to collectively ignore the guy at the bar nobody likes talking to. All the guys from all the bars are on the internet now being very loud.