MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by folyred | 2025-07-07 15:28:10+00:00
Hi HN, I’m the cofounder responsible for both frontend and backend development at Keepmind.

Building Keepmind was a challenging but rewarding journey — making sure the AI-generated flashcards load quickly, the spaced repetition scheduler runs smoothly, and the user interface stays intuitive took a lot of iteration.

We wanted to create a seamless experience where users can turn any notes or articles into quizzes without hassle, with fast sync and privacy controls baked in.

For those of you who have built or used learning tools, I’d be curious what technical challenges or features you think are most important — performance, UI/UX, data privacy, or something else?

Happy to chat about the tech stack, performance optimization, or anything else!
by RugnirViking | 2025-07-07 15:28:19+00:00
I disagree that ancient work was uninteresting. If you've ever looked at truly old architecture, walls, carvings etc you can see that people really took pride in their work, adding things that absolutely weren't just pure utility. In my mind that's the sign of someone that considers their work interesting.

But in general, in the past there was much less specialization. That means each individual was responsible for a lot more stuff, and likely had a lot more varied work day. The apprentice blacksmith didn't just hammer out nail after nail all day with no breaks. They made all sorts of tools, cutlery, horseshoes. But they also carried water, operated bellows, went to fetch coke etc, sometimes even spending days without actually hammering metal at all - freeing up mental energy and separation to be able to enjoy it when they actually got to do it.

Similarly, farm laborers had massively varied lives. Their daily tasks of a given week or month would look totally different depending on the season, with winter essentially being time off to go fix or make other stuff because you can't do much more than wait to make plants grow faster

People might make the criticism and say "oh but that was only for rich people/government" etc, but look at for example old street lights, bollards etc. Old works tend to be

Specialization allows us to curse ourselves with efficiency, and a curse it is indeed. Now if you're good at hammering nails, nails are all you'll get, morning to night, and rewarded the shittier and cheaper and faster you make your nails, sucking all incentive to do any more than the minimum
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-07-07 15:28:22+00:00
These anthropomorphizations are best described as metaphors when used by people to describe LLMs in common or loose speech. We already use anthropomorphic metaphors when talking about computers. LLMs, like all computation, are a matter of simulation; LLMs can appear to be conversing without actually conversing. What distinguishes the real thing from the simulation is the cause of the appearance of an effect. Problems occur when people forget these words are being used metaphorically, as if they were univocal.

Of course, LLMs are multimodal and used to simulate all sorts of things, not just conversation. So there are many possible metaphors we can use, and these metaphors don't necessarily align with the abstractions you might use to talk about LLMs accurately. This is like the difference between "synthesizes text" (abstraction) and "speaks" (metaphor), or "synthesizes images" (abstraction) and "paints" (metaphor). You can use "speaks" or "paints" to talk about the abstractions, of course.
by Ciantic | 2025-07-07 15:28:48+00:00
It works surprisingly well when used in npm compatiblity mode, a lot like Bun is used.

Running `deno install` in a directory with package.json will create a leaner version of node_modules, running `deno task something` will run scripts defined in `package.json`.

Deno way of doing things is a bit problematic, as I too find it is often a timesink where things don't work, then if you have to escape back to node/npm it becomes a bigger hassle. Using Deno with package.json is easier.
by netcan | 2025-07-07 15:28:53+00:00
>ceramics don't turn into pebbles.

Much of the middle east, Greece, etc have many large sites with weathered pottery shards in the shape of pebbles, because pottery shards are flat-ish. Millions of ceramic rocks.

In the presence of water... you will find the round, flat ones with a perfect "pebbles shape."

This is extremely common where I live. I have an aquarium full of them.

The "thing about pottery" is that many cultures made (and broke) a lot of it.

Its very obvious in the stratography when a pottery making culture moves in. There will be shards in every handful of earth.

Occasional pottery use, like figurines or beads.. are not like that. They're only really found "in situ," graves or something.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-07 15:29:01+00:00
From the article:

> The sudden rise of headphone wearing pedestrians - spurred by Sony’s lightweight headsets (17% the weight of others)

Funny to see this trend has completely reversed. People wear more and more huge behemoths of headphones again. Not that I mind that but I find it an interesting development.

The article also goes on about beepers/pagers. I didn't know these were also demonised. I really miss mine in fact, it was great to be reachable while not constantly sending my location to 2000 "trusted partners". Unfortunately here in Spain there is no longer even a single pager network in operation.

A dumbphone only gets part of the way, as the operator still knows pretty well where I'm hanging out. As does the government.
by cmenge | 2025-07-07 15:30:04+00:00
I see your point. Let me clarify what I'm trying to say:

- I consider LLMs a pro user tool, requiring some finesse / experience to get useful outputs

- Using an LLM _directly_ for something very high-relevance (legal, taxes, health) is a very risky move unless you are a highly experienced pro user

- There might be a risk in people carelessly using LLMs for these purposes and I agree. But it's no different than bad self-help books incorrect legal advice you found on the net or read in a book or in a newspaper

But the article is trying to be scientific and show that LLMs aren't useful for therapy and they claim to have a particularly useful prompt for that. I strongly disagree with that, they use a substandard LLM with a very low quality prompt that isn't nearly set up for the task.

I built a similar application where I use an orchestrator and a responder. You normally want the orchestrator to flag anything self-harm. You can (and probably should) also use the built-in safety checkers of e.g. Gemini.

It's very difficult to get a therapy solution right, yes, but I feel people just throwing random stuff into an LLM without even the absolute basics of prompt engineering aren't trying to be scientific, they are prejudiced and they're also not considering what the alternatives are (in many cases, none).

To be clear, I'm not saying that any LLM can currently compete with a professional therapist but I am criticizing the lackluster attempt.
by jimbob21 | 2025-07-07 15:30:34+00:00
They clearly were being digitized, but I think its a more philosophical discussion that we're only banging our heads against for the first time to say whether or not it is fair use.

Simply, if the models can think then it is no different than a person reading many books and building something new from their learnings. Digitization is just memory. If the models cannot think then it is meaningless digital regurgitation and plagiarism, not to mention breach of copyright.

The quotes "consistent with copyright's purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress." and "Like any reader aspiring to be a writer" say, from what I can tell, that the judge has legally ruled the model can think as a human does, and therefore has the legal protections afforded to "creatives."
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-07 15:30:36+00:00
People in cities have a need to distance themselves. It's not a village where you can know everyone. We have a strong innate need to limit our social circles.

Before the walkman there was the newspaper as a tool for isolation. Besides, who says it is desirable that a stranger can strike up a conversation with me at any time?

The people that want this are overhelmingly living in villages anyway where they can do their thing.
by giantrobot | 2025-07-07 15:30:51+00:00
There are multiple types of licenses for therapists and fairly strict regulations about even calling yourself a therapist. Trained therapists only have so many levers they can pull with someone so their advice can sometimes boil down to yoga or mindfulness, it's not the answer most want to give but it's what a patient's situation allows inside the framework of the rest of their life.

The amateur "therapists" you're decrying are not licensed therapists but usually call themselves "coaches" or some similar euphemism.

Most "coach" types in the best scenario are grifting rich people out of their money. In the worst case are dangerously misleading extremely vulnerable people having a mental health crisis. They have no formal training or certification.

LLM "therapists" are the functional equivalent to "coaches". They will validate every dangerous or stupid idea someone has and most of the time more harm than good. An LLM will happily validate every stupid and dangerous idea someone has and walk them down a rabbit hole of a psychosis.
by metalman | 2025-07-07 15:31:02+00:00
the "Hymm's of Innana" are more than a bit interesting, as it shows(clearly) that Innana was the original riot girl goddess who gets whatever she wants...daddy made the universe and none of the "rules" apply to her, well except, that she does get pensive when her latest boy toy wanders. Not that suddenly catesrophic things dont then happen to said boy, previously praised for bieng "like a young bull". Especialy interesting are the number of occasions where she breaks into songs of praise for her "galla"......... quite clear that the tavern culture of the times was much like our own
by immibis | 2025-07-07 15:31:08+00:00
I think they want to run reliable networks. They might be legally required to run reliable networks. Obviously, spotty coverage in some places can't be avoided, but designing their network for exclusively spotty coverage might not be a good idea.

Remember that network operators plan their frequency allocations so that base stations on the same frequency don't also overlap in space. How would you ensure this with random femtocells? The frequency allocation plan for a femtocell relies on it having a very small area of coverage and being far away from others, so that it doesn't matter if they all use the same frequency.

Cell networks aren't plug-and-play YOLO networks like wifi - they're properly engineered stuff.

Now, they could absolutely form a contract with a customer to put a proper base station in their apartment window - according to the locations and frequencies that best fulfill the needs of the network. Not just "buy one of these and plug it in for a discount" but "we'll pay you ten times over to let us fill a corner of your apartment with big metal boxes, and enter for maintenance with 24 hours notice". Evidently this is a lot of hassle compared to getting permission to put them on roofs, so they don't do it.

I assume this Althea network does something similar but with a reversed order of operations: first someone sets up a network repeater, then someone at Althea HQ figures out how much value they're providing to the network. If it's fully automated, it would run into the same problems as Helium, like people creating fake nodes to carry fake traffic (if nothing else, getting a discount on their real traffic by pretending it passed through 100 of their own nodes before reaching someone else's node).
by ralferoo | 2025-07-07 15:31:45+00:00
There are several counter arguments here.

Most people with an engineering degree are probably in a relationship, so they don't need to buy a house on a single salary.

There are plenty of houses for sale below the average price, just as there are plenty above.

Buying isn't necessarily the best option anyway. House price returns in the UK are somewhat below stock market returns, so as a pure investment it doesn't make sense. Unfortunately, we have the narrative in the UK that we should aspire to own houses, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily correct!
by snoman | 2025-07-07 15:32:13+00:00
The question isn’t whether there exists a function that can translate one language to another. If they’re Turing complete, it’s certainly the case that the same software CAN be written in different languages. The question is whether or not it would produce idiomatic code in the target language and whether or not you/the developer would recognize it as (not) idiomatic when it did.

You can’t tell me that precisely the same paradigms, mechanics, patterns and practices will be used to develop software in both Java/Spring and Ruby/Rails, for example. The way you need to (be able to) think about how you write the software using those two languages will be non-trivially different.
by Lalabadie | 2025-07-07 15:32:34+00:00
I'm seeing lots of opinions from people in different roles who wish Figma would serve them, but I agree with the author.

Assuming Figma is meant to serve the design process, it tries to stretch far into implementation territory, but does it at the expense of the exploratory phase. Everything Figma adds either screams MAKE IT READY FOR DEV or GET ALL YOUR MANAGERS A FIGMA SEAT™. Those are not concerns for the early exploration and research stage. If Figma is one of the first tools I boot up in my design process, I'm immediately running into a conflict of priorities.

I put it in contrast with old-school Photoshop UI work (younger devs: yeah, it was pretty much the one option, plus the only thing taught at design schools). Photoshop was great at the exploratory phase. I would sketch ideas with my Wacom tablet and eventually translate hand-drawn wireframes to actual mockups. I still miss that workflow, it was great. The tradeoff then was that "final" documents were static, fixed dimensions documents that usually left technical issues to be discovered later during the dev stage.

Photoshop shaped the design process just as much as Figma does now. That's what the readily available tool does to someone using it regularly.
by andrewingram | 2025-07-07 15:32:41+00:00
Ditto.

To me, one of the dirtiest words in dev <> designer interaction is "handoff". There's always a point in the lifecycle of any design tool where they start talking about it -- even if they quietly disagree with it in principle. My impression is that it normally happens when they're trying to acquire customers who (unfortunately) practice such dysfunctional team dynamics.

As a developer who designs, I've always found myself jumping between code and visual design tools; but rarely based on the current stage of the project and more often based on what kind of thinking I want to do. If I want to engage with the constraints I more often do it in code, if I want to explore tangents, I open up the design tool.
by codingdave | 2025-07-07 15:32:46+00:00
I would not pay anything for a tool to fix this because you can handle it yourself with logging, budgets, and various alerts. The people who are willing to pay for this would likely only pay for it for a few months, until they learn AWS enough to protect themselves from it on their own.

So while the road you are looking down has some validity, it is also a high-churn product idea that only holds value for people who are brand new to AWS. I'd be hesitant to dedicate much time to such a narrow market.
by wsh | 2025-07-07 15:33:26+00:00
Interesting. The left side of the slide at 15:43 in the video is definitely from page 27 of Symbol Sourcebook, but the detail of the ⌘ symbol doesn’t seem to be: not only could I not find the symbol, but also its caption (“FEATURE”) is set in Helvetica rather than Univers as used in the book.
by bediger4000 | 2025-07-07 15:33:29+00:00
The Register, a venerable, trusted, Internet news outlet, does not offer any evidence that "cyber security" is behind the data feed cutoff. Since the data feed has been in place for years, and the presence of the feed was extended when some pushback happened, I believe we can conclude that "cyber security" concerns were not behind cutting off the feed. If such concerns truly existed, the data feed would stop and stay stopped until the concerns were addressed. More lies from the current administration.
by wildzzz | 2025-07-07 15:33:40+00:00
Mesh networks are somewhat inefficient but there are some ways to make it better. Nodes would hold onto a short routing table of their neighbors. Depending on the activity of the network, you need to limit the number of hops a message is allowed to travel. A busy network allows only a couple hops whereas a very inactive network can handle a lot more. The message has (at least) a recipient, the payload, and a number of allowed hops. When a message is sent, nodes compare the recipient node to their list of neighbors, if the recipient is known, the message is forwarded on with the number of allowed hops set to zero. If the recipient isn't known, the message is passed to the neighbors and the number of allowed hops in the metadata is decreased by one. Those neighbors keep forwarding on the message and decreasing the number of allowed hops until it hits zero. One final transmission could be allowed when the counter hits zero on the chance that the recipient is within range but has not associated with its neighbors (helpful for a highly mobile network of nodes). As the nodes pass on the message, they include their name in the metadata to build a routing table that the recipient can now use to quickly reply directly to the original sender. This routing table can be kept in memory so that it can be reused later for any more messages nodes want to send each other. However, mesh networks are often mobile so this adhoc routing table and the list of known neighbors needs a time-to-live to ensure nodes don't waste time sending messages to a recipient that is no longer there. The TTL would be set based on whether a node is mobile or static.

Having nodes know their neighbors isn't necessarily required. It can help build a more efficient network where nodes know their neighbors and their neighbors' neighbors which can allow for a shorter number of allowed hops. If a node knows the route to get to a recipient, it can continue passing the message even if the hop counter is at zero. For example, a node in a rural area would require a couple hops to reach the edge of the city where the message is immediately passed using a known route even if the allowed hop count has run out.

But you can also build a totally blind network where nodes just pass a message until the counter hits zero. A blind network may be helpful in a contested environment where you can't trust any nodes with information beyond its own view.

If the information isn't critical, then you can hide the network even further by not requiring ACK messages from the recipient and not building a route trace in the metadata. This prevents a bad node from collecting network information.
Show HN: I built VT, a privacy-first AI chat app with local storage and BYOK
by vinhnx | 2025-07-07 15:34:04+00:00
I built VT (https://vtchat.io.vn), an open-source AI chat app that runs entirely in your browser, putting privacy first. All your chat data stays on your device, stored in IndexedDB. Nothing is ever sent to a server.

The main idea is to let you use the latest and most powerful AI models like GPT-4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Claude 4 without sacrificing your privacy. You can plug in your own API keys (BYOK) and chat directly with these models. There are also 9 free models available without needing a key.

Beyond simple chat, VT includes an intelligent tool router that can automatically use tools like document parsing and web search to answer complex queries. This allows the models to work with your private documents or fetch up-to-date information from the web, all while maintaining the local-first architecture.

The project is built with Next.js 14 and TypeScript, and the source is available on GitHub (https://github.com/vinhnx/vtchat) under the MIT license.

I'm looking for feedback from the HN community on the architecture and features. Thanks for checking it out.
by immibis | 2025-07-07 15:35:06+00:00
This is the same problem as bootstrapping a cryptocurrency. There are various ways, none very good. You could mine it with proof of work. You could distribute it widely to important figures, such as operators of big relays (as long as the internet stays up, there are going to be people sending messages inter-city through the internet instead of by plane). Perhaps you give half to big relay operators and half to their currently connected clients, that would incentivize people to get on the network early and try it out.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-07 15:35:34+00:00
Yes, I also agree with the dead reply here, I also use my headphones to avoid beggars and street fundraisers. They are incredibly persistent here. Sometimes they even block my path. Which risks causing me getting physical of course, I don't mean violent but I would push them aside if they don't let me pass. And the fundraisers are no longer happy with a couple bucks (they could just carry a payment terminal), no you have to give all your personal details and sign up for a recurring support plan. No way I will ever do that.

And the beggars, I really don't carry money anymore.

But having headphones in really helps avoid these people. I can see them looking at me, seeing my headphones and subconsciously eliminating me from their list of targets.

I'm not even really into music but I usually listen to nature sounds and have the noise cancelling on full blast. It also helps reduce stress and fatigue from overly loud city noises like big diesel buses, assholes that have to honk constantly when traffic is stuck, etc. I still hear them of course but it doesn't feel that heavy.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-07 15:35:39+00:00
> I seem to remember you'd need dedicated industrial cooling for the 14700k.

Those CPUs run hot, but it got exaggerated a lot online. It’s not hard to handle their heat with a good air cooler (even some of the $50 units like the Peerless Assassin) or a run of the mill closed loop water cooler.

There are a lot of old notions in the gaming community that you need to keep CPUs under arbitrary temperature thresholds or that any throttling is bad. Modern CPUs and GPUs run themselves deep into the performance curves and slight throttling is barely noticeable.
by Lendal | 2025-07-07 15:36:02+00:00
To summarize the article, when a language has a single creator, (in this case, the person who runs the first major printing press in France,) that person has immense power to make significant changes to the language when needed. On the other hand if the language has multiple collaborators each with some influence to make changes to the language, such changes tend to be much more conservative ones.
by adamgordonbell | 2025-07-07 15:36:30+00:00
It's a good question. But only complicated answers are possible. A puppy and crow and a raccoon all have intelligence but certainly can't all pass the ARC challenge.

I think the charitable interpretation is that, if intelligence is made up of many skills, and AIs are super human at some, like image recognition.

And that therefore, future efforts need to be on the areas where AIs are significantly less skilled. And also, since they are good at memorizing things, knowledge questions are the wrong direction and anything most humans could solve but that AIs can not, especially if as generic as pattern matching, should be an important target.