MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-07-06 11:18:47+00:00
What is an “organic will of the people” anyway?

Democratic societies always involve years of media and other manipulation to plow and seed the minds of the general public with presumptions, associations, spin, appeals to emotion, and so on. The will is a product of belief, and if beliefs are saturated with such stuff, the so-called “will of the people” - a terrifying and tyrannical concept even at face value - is a product of what people have been led to believe by tyrannical and powerful interests. Add to that that most people are utterly unqualified to participate politically, both because they lack the knowledge and reasoning skill, and because of their lack of virtue, acting out of undisciplined fear or appetite. And sadly, much of these disqualifying flaws also characterize our political leadership!

Our political progression follows the decadence described in Plato’s Republic - the decline into timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and finally tyranny - to the letter.

In so-called democratic societies, the association of monarchy and aristocracy with tyranny is unthinking and reflexive, but it is not rational. This is a conditioned prejudice that is ignorant of history. And partly it comes from a hyperliberalism that substitutes a live-and-let-live attitude, situated within a context of objective morality and norms and laws drawn from it, with a pathological, relativizing revolution that seethes at the very idea of moral limits, views them as “tyrannical”, and thus seeks to overthrow them. This necessarily leads to tyranny, as morality is the only protection against tyranny; when the authority of objective truth and good are destroyed, power fills the vacuum. We become psychologically and spiritually conquered. The paradox of such “anarchy” is that it is exactly the condition under which “might makes right” can flourish.
by hagbard_c | 2025-07-06 11:18:51+00:00
I paid about that amount once for an ex-lease server which has been in use since 2017. A DL 380 G7 (24 threads, 128 GB) giving me all the freedom I want. A large solar array on a barn roof gives us negative energy bills so power use is a non-issue. If you have the space for the hardware and the possibility to offset power use using solar or just dirt-cheap electricity this might be a solution for you as well. There's plenty of off-lease hardware on the market which can run for many years without problems - in the intervening 8 years I have replaced one power supply (€20), that's it.
by icedchai | 2025-07-06 11:18:55+00:00
68040’s weren’t really available in quantity when the IIfx was released. NextStations were closer to the end of 1990. Plus their 68040 Unix workstations felt DOA because all of NeXT’s competitors had moved to RISC. Sun had Sparc, DEC and SGI were on MIPS, IBM had POWER, HP had PA.
by VWWHFSfQ | 2025-07-06 11:19:28+00:00
> it takes thousands of years in a minimally interrupted state for such diversity to come about in nature

The article says it only took 30 years to kill off all the big cod by only allowing the generically-smaller cod to escape and continue breeding. Now that all the eastern cod are protected, maybe it will only take 30 years for the gene pool to return to normal size distribution.
by neom | 2025-07-06 11:20:19+00:00
fwiw and not to diminish your point, semi trucks in Canada are rarely heard, they mostly drive along our massive highways, they are generally not allowed in cities, and you can drive from one end of Canada to the other (east <> west) on Highway 1 without entering cities/big towns, the most populated area you have to drive through is at the Ontario/Manitoba border. (Source, I've driven Canada fully, end to end e->w)
by janwas | 2025-07-06 11:20:44+00:00
I know dzaima is aware, but for all the other posters who might not be, our Highway library provides all these missing instructions, via emulation if required.

I do not understand why folks are still making do with direct use of intrinsics or compiler builtins. Having a library centralize workarounds (such an an MSAN compiler change which hit us last week) seems like an obvious win.
by aredox | 2025-07-06 11:22:31+00:00
It am not calling for a "political" assassination. The problem with him is not that we disagree on policy matters. It is that he is an idiot and that he will kill millions of people at random out of sheer stupidity. I am calling to kill him because as an idiot, he can't be "convinced" to do otherwise. There is no debate nor discussion nor negociation possible.
by IshKebab | 2025-07-06 11:22:35+00:00
Yeah literally every new tech like this has literally everyone investing in it and trying lots of silly ideas. The web, mobile apps, cryptocurrencies, doesn't mean they are fundamentally useless (though cryptocurrencies have yet to make anything successful beyond Bitcoin).

I bet if you go back to the printing press, telegraph, telephone, etc. you will find people saying "it's only a bubble!".
by KaiserPro | 2025-07-06 11:22:37+00:00
So this article is a whole load of misconceptions all the way down.

It whitters on about the dollar supply being inflationary, then talks about gold standards.

THe whole point of abandoning the gold standard is to stop deflationary shocks.

But.

THe very act of creating stable coins is inflationary, as it increases the dollar supply[1]. The only difference is that (unless the "genius" act changes that) when a convertible coin crashes, there's no bailout mechanism.

[1] When someone buys a stable coin, they give the "banker" a $1 in exchange for a thing that is "worth" a dollar. The "banker" can, if they are careful, then re-spend that dollar. The token can be exchanged for goods/services worth $1. thus the money can be spent twice.

Of course this is also how investment banks work.

TLDR stable coins are not gold standard, and never were.
by coldpie | 2025-07-06 11:23:26+00:00
George Hotz has spent his career[1] being a "useful idiot" for a series of hypercapitalist techbros, including Zuckerberg in the 2010s and Musk as recently as 2022, so it's somewhat notable that the scales may be falling from his eyes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz
by audunw | 2025-07-06 11:23:29+00:00
It’s a lot easier to engineer an EV truck to handle steep gradients without overloading. We see from real examples that EV trucks are by default much more capable of driving fast uphill.

One part of this is the batteries. When you have the amount of batteries needed to drive a truck for a reasonable distance, you automatically get a high amount of power output as well. The power is distributed over many cells, so no overload there.

EV motors are significantly smaller than their ICE counterparts, they’re relatively cheap, don’t require significant maintenance and they generate much less waste heat for a given power output. Adding more motors+inverters to handle the required power is not over engineering in the case of an EV truck, it’s just good engineering. I suppose it’s even necessary to some degree, to deal with the lack of a multi speed gear box

As mentioned in the other comment, the problem is often overheating in brakes. This is also less of an issue with EVs. You can distribute the energy dissipation to the motors/batteries and the brake pads, so the heat load is less concentrated. Energy sent to the batteries is absorbed as energy stored, with very little waste heat.
by LeafItAlone | 2025-07-06 11:23:44+00:00
I generally avoid George’s non-technical posts because they are… let’s say uninspired.

But here is one that actually makes sense. Of course the self-reflection with who he otherwise praises and spends his time with will never set in, but at least others may take the time to look inward and do something differently.

Something has to change. Even HN seems to have had an increase in sentiment like this in the past few years. Maybe I’m just noticing it more myself. Maybe it’s not just the existence of the Grape, but rather where it came from.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-06 11:23:49+00:00
Both lane assist and backup cameras are mandatory safety systems for new cars in the EU. Same goes for things like tired driver detection and other stuff that was considered opulent luxury ten years ago.

With the land tanks we call SUVs today, I can imagine it wasn't hard for politicians to decide that mirrors are no longer enough to navigate a car backwards.

Still, you don't need touch screens. Lane assist can be a little indicator on a dashboard with a toggle somewhere if you want to turn it off, it doesn't need a menu. A backup camera can be a screen tucked away in the dash that's off unless you've put your car in reverse. We may need processing to happen somewhere, but it doesn't need to happen in a media console with a touch screen.
by capyba | 2025-07-06 11:25:01+00:00
I agree with the general gist of this piece, but the awkward flow of the writing style makes me wonder if it itself was written by AI…

There are open source or affordable, paid alternatives for everything the author mentioned. However, there are many places where you must use these things due to social pressure, lock-in with a service provider (health insurance co, perhaps), and yes unfortunately I see some of these things as soon or now unavoidable.

Another commenter mentioned that ChatGPT is one of the most popular websites on the internet and therefore users clearly do want this. I can easily think of two points that refute that: 1. The internet has shown us time and time again that popularity doesn’t indicate willingness to pay (which paid social networks had strong popularity…?) 2. There are many extremely popular websites that users wouldn’t want to be woven throughout the rest of their personal and professional digital lives
by cloogshicer | 2025-07-06 11:25:52+00:00
I think what people really mean when they say "This can't be tested" is:

"The cost of writing these tests outweighs the benefit", which often is a valid argument, especially if you have to do major refactors that make the system overall more difficult to understand.

I do not agree with test zealots that argue that a more testable system is always also easier to understand, my experience has been the opposite.

Of course there are cases where this is still worth the trade-off, but it requires careful consideration.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-07-06 11:25:57+00:00
"Alvea started in late 2021 as a moonshot to rapidly develop and deploy a room temperature-stable DNA vaccine candidate against the Omicron wave of COVID-19, and we soon became the fastest startup to take a new drug from founding to a Phase 1 clinical trial. However, we decided to discontinue our lead candidate during the follow-up period of the trial as the case for large-scale impact weakened amidst the evolving pandemic landscape."

To be honest Alvea doesn't sound like a crazy idea on paper. Reducing lead times on new drugs is a really good idea that seems like it is bottlenecked more by bureaucratic concerns.

A company which focused on that as its sole mission could be really profitable, if they could sell their professional services to a group that already had plenty of in house expertise on actually creating the drugs. My very low resolution guess is that they slipped up when they actually tried to make the drug themselves. That may have been a requirement to get funding from the US government at the time, I don't know.
Show HN: MangaCraft – AI audit tool for Webtoon creators
by Ibrasama | 2025-07-06 11:26:19+00:00
Hi HN

I’ve been building *MangaCraft*, a lightweight AI-based tool that helps Webtoon creators improve their content strategy.

Here's what it does: - You enter the link to your Webtoon (Canvas, Tapas, GlobalComix, etc.) - It scrapes public data like views, likes, episodes, tags, and publishing frequency - Then it uses OpenAI to generate: - Suggested hashtags - Title improvements - Engagement strategy ideas - SEO and publishing tips

You receive a downloadable PDF report and can follow your series' progress in a dashboard.

Built entirely using no-code + AI tools: OpenAI, Browse.AI, Google Sheets, Zapier, and more.

I'm sharing this to get early feedback before launching. Would this be useful to creators or indie publishers?

Let me know what you think. I'm solo-building from Cameroon and want to make tools that help creators go global.

Thanks for reading!
by hulitu | 2025-07-06 11:26:43+00:00
> I find it hard to believe it's cheaper to have all the cameras, chips, and other digital affordances rather than a small number of analog buttons and functions.

You should check how SW and HW are tested in the car.

A typical SW test is: Requirement: SW must drive a motor if voltage reaches 5 V. A typical SW test is: Increase the voltage to 5 V, see that the motor moves.

Now what happenes at 20 V is left as an exercise for the user.
by zkmon | 2025-07-06 11:27:42+00:00
Oh, same thing is happening with the regular TV and almost any media that needs attention. Every single channel is shit. News channels are just curated selection of horror stories from all around the globe. Ads are competing be weirder and weirder. Every single channel wants to grab your attention by dishing out concentrated weirdest stuff. I'm terrified to switch on TV.
by zbentley | 2025-07-06 11:28:19+00:00
Sure, a choice to opt out technically exists. But that common argument ignores two things:

First, the massive asymmetry of power involved in making people choose opting in (again and again, to greater and greater degrees).

Second, the fact that unrelated penalties—severe ones—are attached to choosing to opt out, by people and systems who want to discourage this behavior. It’s not like saying “choosing to not eat means you might be hungry”. That’s an intrinsic consequence; it has to happen. It’s not even like “choosing not to eat again and again means you might stunt your growth.” That’s intrinsic too, whether or not it’s intuitive.

No, the penalties we’ve attached to opting out are more like “choosing not to eat means you might go hungry, and also the people with hammers that specifically go after people that don’t eat will break your fingers.”
by grafmax | 2025-07-06 11:29:25+00:00
Several companies investing in AI Have made commitments to renewable and clean energy. However at most half of this increased energy demand is expected to come from renewables through 2030 and fossil fuels will continue to be heavily utilized for the massive data center build outs occurring beyond that, according to the International Energy Agency’s April 2025 report. Nuclear energy has long build outs of 10+ years. For the forseeable future the AI industry will continue to contribute to climate change, at a point in history where immediate drastic action is needed to mitigate the impending climate catastrophe.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-06 11:30:32+00:00
The 3D view is a marketing gimmick and maybe something to show off to your passengers. You've for a massive screen, so you can't just leave it empty, the owners would realize it's a gimmick.

In practice many drivers seem to be dealing fine with the touch screen because they've stopped paying attention to the road, trusting their car to keep distance and pay attention for them. Plus, most of the touch screen controls aren't strictly necessary while driving, they mostly control luxury features that you could set up after pulling over.
by immibis | 2025-07-06 11:32:13+00:00
Don't ask me how a criminal operation holds together without either someone defecting and getting everyone killed, or someone killing someone else because they thought they were defecting. Presuming that it does, in fact, somehow maintain cohesion, I think they're all aware the submarine stuff is risky.

They're earning however many tens of millions of dollars per successful shipment and it's way higher than what it actually cost them to produce. And I'd guess they send perhaps ten to fifty shipments per year. Having 50% shrinkage is balanced by a 9999% profit margin.

This one, if it truly had no drugs in it, might have been a test run (risk-reducing).
by cs702 | 2025-07-06 11:32:25+00:00
Not sure I agree with all of the OP's opinions. I prefer a clean, calm, uncluttered user interface over a noisy, busy, cluttered one. In the OP's example with maps, I'd rather see a full-screen map, instead of a map that is always partially covered by a bunch of big buttons, obfuscating my view. Please let me see the map. Yes, fill the entire screen with it.

Gradually, over decades, society has evolved a "shared language of touch-screen actions" for controlling touch-screen devices. Many actions are familiar to everyone here: tap to hide/show controls, press and hold to bring contextual menus, pinch with two fingers to zoom out, etc.

It's OK for UI designers to assume familiarity with this common language to keep UIs clean, calm, and uncluttered. I like it.
by xg15 | 2025-07-06 11:33:00+00:00
On the risk of sounding like a grandpa, but there used to be a pretty effective "division of labor" for this in UIs:

(1) The "fast" path: Provide toolbars, keyboard shortcuts and context menus for quick access to the most important features. This path is for users who already have the "knowledge in the head" and just want to get there quickly, so speed takes priority over discoverability.

(2) The "main" path: Provide an exhaustive list of all features in the "title bar"/"top of the screen" menus and the settings dialogues. This path is mainly for users who don't have the "knowledge in the head" and need a consistent, predictable way to discover the application's features. But it's also a general-purpose way to provide "knowledge in the world" for anyone who needs it, which may also include power users. Therefore, for this path, discoverability and consistency is more important than speed.

Crucially, the "main" features are a superset of the "quick" features. This means, every "quick-access" feature actually has at least two different ways to activate it, either through 1 or through 2.

This sounds redundant, but makes perfect sense if it allows peoples to first use the feature through 2 and then later switch to 1 when they are more confident.

My impression is that increasingly, UIs drop 2 and only provide 1, changing the "fast" into the "main" path. Then suddenly "discoverability" becomes a factor of its own that needs to be implemented separately for each feature - and in the eyes of designers seems to become an unliked todo-list bullet point like "accessibility".

Usually then, it's implemented as an afterthought: Either through random one-time "new feature" popups (if it popped up at an inappropriate time and you just closed it to continue with what you wanted to to, or if you want to reopen it later - well, sucks to be you) - or through unordered "everything" menus that just contain a dump of all features in an unordered list, but are themselves hidden behind some obscure shortcut or invisible button.
by lproven | 2025-07-06 11:33:18+00:00
Outliners, in general.

The single most powerful tool available for a long-form writer (in any (human) language.) Equally useful for fact, fiction, academia, documentation, anything. Technologically simple, was done well on MS-DOS in a few hundred kB of code and data.

Maps very well onto HTML, XML, etc. As such, maps onto AsciiDoc etc.

But forgotten. Almost no modern versions and what exist are almost unbelievably primitive, far far below the capabilities of the mid-1980s -- for example, Emacs OrgMode or LogSeq. Almost too braindead to use.

I keep copies of 20-30Y old MS Word binaries around on my 64-bit Linux boxes, just for this.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-06 11:33:59+00:00
When this happens, how do you determine who gets the karma? Is it right and just and logical for OP to get karma for submitting a URL that HN readers didn't visit after being updated by mods, or for OP to get karma previously for a URL that was deemed lacking with regards to the guidelines? It seems like they should get one or the other, but not both.

Just some food for thought. The reason I mention it, is that a person who has been commented upon by me previously for using scripts submitted this before OP, and if precedent holds, they should get the karma, not OP. But they have been commented upon by mods for having used scripts, but somehow haven't been banned for doing so, because dang has supposedly interacted with them/spoken with them, as if that could justify botting. But I digress.

To wit:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44449650
by meheleventyone | 2025-07-06 11:35:18+00:00
No I’m talking about the distribution of games. With physical media that’s all fine because once the license expires they stop making new copies. People that own a copy are fine. With digital distribution once you’ve EOL’d a product you still need to make it available right? Otherwise how do people that have paid for it get it? But that means you can’t distribute elements you no longer have the license to.
by TMEHpodcast | 2025-07-06 11:35:55+00:00
You’re correct. Newton wasn’t proposing a mechanism or deeper cause for gravity; he just described its effects. Einstein did add a “why” of sorts, with general relativity, he reframed gravity not as a force but as the curvature of spacetime caused by mass and energy. That’s closer to a mechanism, but even there we might ask: why does mass curve spacetime? And we don’t have a deeper answer to that.
Show HN: Why Are SaaS Boilerplates Still This Expensive? So I Built My Own
by Shreyan19 | 2025-07-06 11:37:38+00:00
I've been building indie SaaS products for a while now, and one thing kept bugging me:

Why are SaaS boilerplates so damn expensive — and still so incomplete?

$199 for boilerplates that don’t even include payments?

Some don’t have auth wired in properly.

Others are bloated with stuff I end up ripping out.

So instead of buying another overpriced "starter kit," I built my own: https://www.saasrocket.pro

It's called SaaSRocket. It’s not revolutionary — it's just actually complete:

Supabase (auth + DB)

Resend (transactional emails)

Lemon Squeezy (Stripe alt payments)

Cloudinary (blogs/media uploads)

Dashboard layout with SEO + unit tests

I priced it at $49, because boilerplates shouldn’t feel like buying a car. It’s meant for solo founders and indie hackers, especially in lower-income regions.

I’m curious — is there a reason most devs just tolerate overpriced boilerplates?

What would your ideal boilerplate look like? What would it cost? What’s the one feature you always end up adding manually?

Open to brutal feedback — I’m using this to build my next SaaS myself.

– Shreyan X: @ShreyanRants
by DebtDeflation | 2025-07-06 11:40:12+00:00
It's not just about smaller models. I recently bought a Macbook M4 Max with 128GB RAM. You can run surprisingly large models locally with unified memory (albeit somewhat slowly). And now AMD has brought that capability to the X86 world with Strix. But I agree that how long Google, Meta, Alibaba, etc. will continue to release open weight models is a big question. It's obviously just a catch-up strategy aimed at the moats of OpenAI and Anthropic, once they catch up the incentive disappears.
by em500 | 2025-07-06 11:40:44+00:00
> The Unix "small programs that do one thing well" philosophy is often ignored, unfortunately. Emacs might be the single biggest offender of it, though I suppose it's to be expected since "GNU's Not Unix"...

It's not because of GNU (which is a Unix workalike), but because Emacs originated on ITS and Genera Lisp Machines, which were truely very non-UNIXy environments.