MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bsenftner | 2025-07-07 11:07:48+00:00
This is the disconnect, no where do I say use them to make apps, in fact I am strongly opposed to their use for automation, they create Rube Goldberg Machines. But they are great advisors, not coders, but critics of code and sounding boards for strategy, that one when writes their own code to perform the logic they constructed in their head. It is possible and helpful to include LLMs within the decision support roles that software provides for users, but not the decision roles, include LLMs as information resources for the people making decisions, but not as the agents of decision.

But all of that is an aside from the essential nature of using them, which far too many use them to think for them, in place of their thinking, and that is also a subtle aspect of LLMs - using them to think for you damages your own ability to critically think. That's why understanding them is so important, so one does not anthropomorphize them to trust them, which is a dangerous behavior. They are idiot savants, and get that much trust: nearly none.

I also do not believe that LLMs are even remotely capable of anything close to what software engineers do. That's why I am a strong advocate of not using them to write code. Use them to help one understand, but know that the "understanding" that they can offer is of limited scope. That's their weakness: they can't encompass scope. Detailed nuance they get, but two detailed nuances in a single phenomenon and they only focus on one and drop the surrounding environment. They are idiots drawn to shiny complexity, with savant-like abilities. They are closer to a demonic toy for programmers than anything else we have..
by raxxorraxor | 2025-07-07 11:08:08+00:00
What do you mean reasonable? I know that some Apple users tend to outsource "possibilities" to their favorite company, but I would obviously want an AI to not be affected by the political bitching du jours.

Not that getting the latest trash talk is the main vocation of pretrained AIs anyway.

The only risk here is that some third grade journalist of a third grade newspaper writes another article about how outrageous some generated AI statement is. An article that should be completely ignored instead of it leading to more censorship.

And Apple flinches here, so in the end it means it cannot provide a sensible general model. It would be affected by their censorship.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-07 11:08:27+00:00
> In fact, I'm inclined to think that there are actually two different sounds in English as well; "witch" and "Charlie" don't feel the same in my mouth.

There aren't.

> I think there are other romanizations where the 'q' sound is represented "tch".

Well, maybe; there are a large number of romanizations of Mandarin. But there are no significant romanizations where that is true. It's q in pinyin, ch' in Wade-Giles, and ts' or k' in postal romanization.

> How else would you describe the difference between "qu" and "ju", or "chou" and "zhou"? The only difference I can feel is when your vocal cords turn on.

You could read my other comment in the thread. qu and chou are aspirated; ju and zhou aren't. Your vocal cords don't turn on at different points for those syllables. Mandarin Chinese doesn't use voicing contrasts.

> I think we're using different definitions of "voiced". Other voiced / unvoiced pairs in English include g/k, b/p, v/f, z/s. See [1] for an "official" example of "voiced" being used the way I'm using it.

Yes, I know what voicing is. You don't seem to know what consonants are used in Mandarin.

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese_phonology#Con... .
by jillesvangurp | 2025-07-07 11:09:38+00:00
Even when governments interfere, people will still invest in grid independence, resilience, or just access to cheaper rates. Domestic solar makes sense only because the grid is unreasonably expensive for a lot of people.

Base load is one of those terms that gets wielded without putting numbers on it. It's kind of meaningless without numbers. How many gw of it is needed? Is it whatever we have? Or far less than that? Considering that most countries have been actively removing lots of base load in the form of coal plants and have seen a lot of growth in renewables, you could make the point that whatever that number is, it's far less than it used to be. For the simple reason that a lot of it disappeared without creating a lot of instability.

Coal plants don't have much of a future. Gas plants are more flexible but seem to be increasingly used for reserve power rather than for base load and of course they compete with batteries for that. And the less they are utilized, the less profitable they get. Neither is attractive from an investment point of view.
EVM-UI – visual tool to interact with EVM-based smart contracts
by magnusgraviti | 2025-07-07 11:09:45+00:00
Hey HN!

We've built https://evm-ui.com, a free tool that allows you to interact with smart contracts visually.

It started as an internal project while building Web3 apps for clients — we needed something more flexible and lightweight than Remix or Etherscan's UI.

Unlike Etherscan or Polygonscan, you don't need to verify and open-source your smart contract to get a working UI. Paste the ABI (or load it from a template) and proceed.

With EVM-UI, you can

- Import contracts by address + ABI, or paste ABIs directly

- Read/write functions with auto-generated UI (supports all Solidity types, including arrays)

- Execute actions with smart inputs (dropdowns, min/max helpers, etc.)

- Switch between EVM chains, testnets, or local RPCs within one workspace

- Use developer tools (Keccak256, ABI encoder/decoder, address utils)

- Share environments with your team and your client

We'd love to receive your feedback, ideas, or constructive criticism.

P.S. We're aware that signup emails may go to spam - fixing that now.
by bugtodiffer | 2025-07-07 11:09:47+00:00
It is matching strings instead of actually blocking things. That's how sandboxes were implemented when I was a kid.

E.g. --allow-net --deny-net=1.1.1.1

You cannot fetch "http://1.1.1.1" but any domain that resolves to 1.1.1.1 is a bypass...

It's crap security
by turboponyy | 2025-07-07 11:09:53+00:00
> It turns out that there’s a way to test this experimentally. Do a double blind experiment, just like in science. If you can tell which monitor is 240hz more than randomly, then it matters. Ditto for the pointer updates.

You can easily tell - easily. There is a reason why monitors go 500Hz and beyond now.

I consider 240 FPS at 240Hz to be choppy. I can tell the difference between ~200 FPS and framerates of 300 FPS and beyond at 240Hz - telling the difference between 120Hz and 240Hz would be absolutely trivial.
by qn9n | 2025-07-07 11:10:46+00:00
The post does explain in quite a lot of detail, the user was running `claude` or [Claude Code](https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/overview) an Agentic editor that runs in the terminal. You can run it within a project and provide prompts and context to it, the LLM will read through these things, perform searches if it sees necessary (and you allow it) then it will prompt you with edits or tool usages (cli commands or file edits) that you can approve, deny or suggest edits/changes.
by the_third_wave | 2025-07-07 11:11:26+00:00
Repair your current device? If that is really not possible get a "smart" one and dumb it down - don't allow any network access or - if it insists on being connected or you want to get some use out of its "smart" functions - put it on a separate network which has no access to the internet. Of and when I'm "forced" to get a new "smart" piece of equipment this is what I do if I can not change the firmware on the thing to something under my own control. I never let any "smart" device access the internet because of a host of reasons ranging from security and privacy to the risks of the thing "upgrading" itself without my approval.
by gruturo | 2025-07-07 11:12:26+00:00
There's a giant pile of software - decades worth of it, literally - which was already written and released, much of it now unmaintained and/or closed source, where the effort you cite is not a possibility.

By all means anything released in 2025 doesn't have that excuse - but I can't fault the authors of 15+ years old programs for not having a crystal ball and accounting for something which didn't exist at the time. Intel releasing something which behaves so poorly in that scenario is.... not really 100% fine in my eye. Maybe a big warning sticker on the box (performs poorly with pre-2024 software) would be justified. Thankfully workarounds exist.

P.S. At least I would have expected them to work more closely with OS vendors and ensure their schedulers mitigate the problem, but nope, doesn't look like they did.
by bell-cot | 2025-07-07 11:13:34+00:00
> [...] a human drives Taxibot to a plane and hooks it up to its front wheel and internal systems. A pilot aboard the plane then takes over operation of Taxibot and – using the same controls used to steer the plane under jet power – drives close to the runway. Taxibot’s driver doesn’t have anything to do until the pilot disengages.

> At that moment, Taxibot drives away, and the Airbus pilot fires up their plane’s engines.

Sounds like it's being touted as lowering the carbon emissions, noise, and maintenance costs.

I'd be more concerned with the ground traffic control and safety issues. Lots more vehicles in motion on the ground. And yet another system, to further divide pilots' attention at a critical time.

Plus, at least in the US, staffing levels in control towers are dangerously low. The article mentions that the Taxibots have been rolled out at New York's JFK airport.
by spwa4 | 2025-07-07 11:14:22+00:00
> So, we need to get rid of this two class insurance system, and then make sure we have enough supply of doctors and specialists so that the waits are not 3 months.

Germany has reduced funding for training doctors. So clearly the opposite is true.

> For example, in Germany, where I live, there are also long waitlists for therapists or specialists in general. But not if you have a high income, then you can get private insurance and get an appointment literally the next day.

And the German government wants to (or is implementing policies to) achieve the opposite and further reduce access to medical specialists of any kind. Both by taking away funding and taking away spots for education. So they're BOTH taking away access to medical care now, and creating a situation where access to medical specialists will keep reducing for at least the next 7 years. Minimum.
by saagarjha | 2025-07-07 11:14:23+00:00
Posting interview questions on Hacker News is so funny. Regardless of what the question is half the people will tell you that it's an interviewer ego trip that has no relevance to the real world while the other half will explain how interviews are actually a total waste of time and how carpenters do it right (obviously, without actually consulting how carpenters do their interviews). If the question has anything in it that's not an array then it's called "Leetcode" and clearly FAANG-engineer biased. If it has any other form then it's too confusing and too contrived. Of course, the end result of this discussion is that the author is a horrible employee at a horrible workplace and nobody should ever want to work with them. Thank god that 'randomuser123 was able to figure out that they were telling on themselves and explaining that if they were in this interview they'd stand up and tell the interviewer how their entire architecture was wrong and they should be ashamed for even asking the question instead of changing the world around them. And then everyone claps.
by FeepingCreature | 2025-07-07 11:14:47+00:00
(Not the parent)

It doesn't have a name, but I have repeatedly noticed arguments of the form "X cannot have Y, because <explains in detail the mechanism that makes X have Y>". I wanna call it "fallacy of reduction" maybe: the idea that because a trait can be explained with a process, that this proves the trait absent.

(Ie. in this case, "LLMs cannot think, because they just predict tokens." Yes, inasmuch as they think, they do so by predicting tokens. You have to actually show why predicting tokens is insufficient to produce thought.)
by latexr | 2025-07-07 11:16:29+00:00
> Perhaps a few mentally unhinged people do.

I think it’s more than a few and it’s still rising, and therein lies the issue.

Which is why it is paramount to talk about this now, when we may still turn the tide. LLMs can be useful, but it’s important to have the right mental model, understanding, expectations, and attitude towards them.
by perihelions | 2025-07-07 11:16:32+00:00
Burning of methane (natural gas) produces oxides of nitrogen (NOx) (several types), which are a major driver of smog. See, as a starting point,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOx

While natural gas is cleaner than coal in some obvious ways (i.e., no particulate solids), it has a specific problem with NOx, because of the super high temperatures inside internal-combustion gas turbines. The upside is higher thermodynamic efficiency (highest of any thermal source); the downside is, this.
Hacker News is my digital home – why I left X but stayed here
by FerkiHN | 2025-07-07 11:17:04+00:00
I discovered Hacker News about five years ago. At first — I didn’t get it. The UI felt weird. Clicking my profile would sometimes log me out. Nothing made sense. So I closed the tab and moved on.

But something brought me back. And with time, I realized:

HN is not about design. It’s about signal over noise.

I’ve tried posting on Twitter (or X, whatever it’s called now). The result? 12 views, no reactions, zero engagement. Just a void.

Hacker News is different. It’s like a quiet corner of the internet where people still think, not just react. Here, I shared my projects, joined discussions, and felt something real: No likes. No follower counts. Just humans and ideas.

I recently posted about a notes app I made in C with a GUI for Windows. Only 67 KB in size. Simple, fast, and it just works. And people here actually cared. They asked, they replied, they shared their views.

That’s rare online.

So I just wanted to say — thank you. Thanks to everyone who keeps HN alive. Thanks for the culture. For the sanity.

I hope Hacker News lives forever. Because if places like this disappear, we’ll lose something truly important.

(Also, I go by Ferki, in case you’ve seen my posts around)
by MrGilbert | 2025-07-07 11:17:18+00:00
Most. As of 2025, this does not apply to the dishwasher from Bosch as discussed in this blog article: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/i-wont-connect-my-dis...

There is functionality hidden in the app, so that the manufacturer can save a dime and a half on some buttons. Unfortunately, this line has already been crossed.

The functionality that is hidden: Rinse, Machine Care (self-cleaning), HalfLoad, Eco and Delay start.
by marapuru | 2025-07-07 11:17:22+00:00
Apparently it's a common business practice. Spotify (even though I can't find any proof) seems to have build their software and business on pirated music. There is some more in this Article [0].

https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...

Funky quote:

> Rumors that early versions of Spotify used ‘pirate’ MP3s have been floating around the Internet for years. People who had access to the service in the beginning later reported downloading tracks that contained ‘Scene’ labeling, tags, and formats, which are the tell-tale signs that content hadn’t been obtained officially.
by Freak_NL | 2025-07-07 11:17:38+00:00
Is this so hard in your locale? When I browse the top three recommended washing machines on a popular Dutch appliances seller, only the third (Samsung) actually has some app functionality. The other two (Bosch, AEG) are just normal washing machines.

(The division there is currently 64 with app, 43 without. The models without appear to score higher in the reviews.)
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-07-07 11:17:38+00:00
I think part of why time blindness / chronic lateness gets such visceral responses is that the behavior is a broken promise generator. The impact feels very personal.

Continuing with the walking stick metaphor...it'd be like if the person with the walking stick was frequently committing to go jogging, hiking, etc with others. They know the activity might be beyond their capabilities, but they keep saying they'll go on the difficult hiking trail or whatever. This impacts the plan for everyone else.

Saying you'll be somewhere at a particular time is a commitment to someone else. If you're making commitments and frequently breaking them, people will react badly to that.

Having had a number of chronically late people pass through my life, I've often heard "be there in a second", "I'm on my way", "5 minutes, max" and similar phrases once the person is late. What I rarely hear is proactive acknowledgement and ownership of the issue.

The commitments you make as a chronically late person need to include your chronic lateness as a factor, just as the mobility limited person should take their limitations into account before signing up for the group hike.
by CJefferson | 2025-07-07 11:17:46+00:00
The problem is getting the new users onboarded. Telling people to use 'npm' doesn't help if you don't have npm installed.

How do I install npm? The npm webpage tells me to go and install nvm. At that tells me to use curl | sh .

So using npm for a new user is still requiring a curl | sh, just in a different place.
by grafmax | 2025-07-07 11:18:05+00:00
> The real question is can they do a better job than no therapist. That's the option people face.

Right, we don’t turn this around and collectively choose socialized medicine. Instead we appraise our choices as atomized consumers: do I choose an LLM therapist or no therapist? This being the latest step of our march into cyberpunk dystopia.
by pdimitar | 2025-07-07 11:18:18+00:00
I don't disagree with what you are saying but that ship has sailed decades ago.

Nobody in the tech area did anything meaningful to keep them at bay, like make a fully free search engine where it's prohibited by an actual law in an actual country to introduce ads or move data out of the data center, etc.

We were all too happy to just get the freebies. The bill comes due, always, though. And a bill is coming for several years now, on many different fronts.

Where are the truly P2P, end-to-end encrypted and decentralized mainstream internet services? Everyone is in Telegram or Whatsapp, some are in Signal. Every company chat is either in Slack or Teams. To have a custom email you need to convince Google and Microsoft not to mark your emails as spam... imagine that.

Again, the ship has sailed, long long time ago. Nobody did anything [powerful / meaningful] to stop it.
by lproven | 2025-07-07 11:18:20+00:00
If you are happy with the ribbon UI, then you are fine.

Personally, I can't stand it. So I use either Word 97, which has everything I need and a nicely minimal UI, and uses the same file formats as Office into the 21st century, or Word 2003.

Example (old) screenshot:

https://imgur.com/gallery/word-97-word-2003-under-wine-on-ub...

Note that in 97 I've turned off everything. No ribbon, no ruler, no toolbars, just menus and scroll bars, and I normally turn off the horizontal scrollbar too.

In Word 2003 I've left some of the clutter turned on so you can see the difference: the ruler and one toolbar.

Word 97 can't handle big portrait screens, for instance.
by jayd16 | 2025-07-07 11:18:24+00:00
In a technical or managerial role your core skills are most important. An online game has "boring" login/account services and web pages, customer service portals, internal tools etc etc, that are very similar to any other web company.

A person with no game experience might be able to break in by simply taking a title demotion for a bit and be competitive.
by entropi | 2025-07-07 11:18:29+00:00
I think an even more important question is this: "do we trust Sam Altman (and other people of his ilk) enough to give the same level of personal knowledge I give to my therapist?".

E.g. if you ever give a hint about not feeling confident with your body, it could easily take this information and nudge you towards certain medical products. Or it could take it one step further, and nudge towards more consuming more sugar and certain medical products at the same time, seeing that it moves the needle even more optimally.

We all know the monetization pressure will come very soon. Do we really advocate for giving this kind of power to these kinds of people?
by disastronaut | 2025-07-07 11:18:55+00:00
Maytag commercial makes old-school washers + dryers with no PCBs. The control boards are through-hole components only and a schematic is included inside the panels. https://www.maytagcommerciallaundry.com/mclstorefront/mcl/en...

Samsung sells commercial monitors that are just TVs without all the smart crap. You can even opt out of a wifi card

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1828914-REG/samsung_q...

I'm not aware of any lists, and the market is thin, but they're out there.
by IgorPartola | 2025-07-07 11:20:31+00:00
It’s a blog, not a news aggregator. Front page is a little different than others but it also just lists blog posts. Once you skim those, scroll to the button that says Older Posts and that will bring you to the next page.

Being a blog it also has RSS which you can use to consume it in the reader of your choice.

They feature projects done by people from across the web so they refer to people’s names using square brackets e.g. [josvdwest]. Each post has comments which I find to be quite thoughtful.

There is also https://hackaday.io/ which is a repository of hardware projects. In very simplified terms it’s like a cross between Facebook and GitHub for your side project that involves custom hardware. People post the details and their progress. It ranges from half baked attempts that were abandoned early on to some really amazing and unique things. When people complain that the old web is dead, this is the antidote: just clever people creating and collaborating on cool shit.
by msgodel | 2025-07-07 11:20:31+00:00
Methane has no Nitrogen in it. All of that would have to come from the air. It's famously very very hard to react Nitrogen that way, I'd be surprised if gas turbines produced it in noticeable quantities.

EDIT: didn't see your edit until now. Heh it shouldn't be too hard to scrub out if it were really a problem. That seems like a better way to handle it than this weird exemption process that seems to be in place now.
by snickerer | 2025-07-07 11:20:43+00:00
This is already mostly done.

Participate in the development of Reticulum. Install the app Sideband on your Smartphone or other device.

Sideband is a chat app that uses LXMF. LXMF is a messaging protocol based on Reticulum. Reticulum is a full network stack that is decentralized and transport layer agnostic.

What we need for your vision is LoRa modems integrated in our phones.

Or just a bluetooth mesh interface for Reticulum. That is a great idea. Develop that, and you have exactly what you described.

To be more specific: Reticulum's main program is the daemon rnsd. It uses so called interfaces and can route between them (WiFi, LoRa, other radio services...). Implement a new interface type that uses the technology called 'bluetooth mesh' and your vision is done.
by smartmic | 2025-07-07 11:21:09+00:00
If you mean the financial power to pay for such power plants, then I agree. But the technical capabilities to quickly provide stationary or mobile power plants can be purchased from a few large, international companies; noteworthy suppliers can be found in the USA, Europe and Asia. And they will build it for you in almost any country in the world, as I said, provided you pay accordingly. Of course, the delivery time of turbines is often a bottleneck, but this applies more to the very large ones than the smaller ones that should actually be installed here (and it also applies equally to all manufacturers).