MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A tool to help you understand and discuss Meditations (Marcus Aurelius)
by huttiepant | 2025-07-30 22:56:23+00:00
Genuine question I try and grapple with quite a bit, do you think apps can be used to help people think critically? Now AI can do most of my thinking (and probably does too much sadly), I’m trying to find ways to stay sharp.

I built this tool for myself to help me understand Meditations more, and to find other people to discuss the big ideas in the book with (my social status dropped pretty quickly when I tried to discuss Meditations at a party). Pretty simply, it’s end of chapter prompts and questions where the responses can be openly discussed.

I started just using ChatGPT to generate these questions but I found they never got beyond a superficial level. So I ended up finding some extremely helpful philosophy professors who have studied the book and they helped me think differently and crafter better prompts and questions.

I’d love to discuss it with anyone that had an interest in reading philosophy books (Meditations and others). I think more of the ideas in these books need to be discussed.

p.s. If you add your details today to join the waitlist, you’ll be automatically approved and get access to the app. Sorry that you have to use an email to sign up for it but I’m happy to delete any details if you shoot me an email after signing up.

p.p.s. I launched something similar previously which was a single-player version of this. I've changed it to add discussion and various other things (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43571867)
by matheusmoreira | 2025-07-30 22:56:40+00:00
The real dictators are these unelected judges. I've had actual lawyers tell me "judges = gods" to my face. It's just how things are in this shithole. Attempts to protest them resulted in thousands of arrests and 15+ years of imprisonment. People routinely get less jail time for cold blooded murder. And they're the supreme court so there's no possible recourse against them.

So I'm glad some foreign power outside their jurisdiction is doing something about it regardless of their reasons.
by simonw | 2025-07-30 22:56:54+00:00
All good software is in a constant state of maintenance - users figure out new things they want to do so requirements are constantly changing.

A running joke we had at my startup years ago was "... and after we ship this feature we'll be finished and we will never have to write another line of code again!"

Good software is built with future changes in mind - that's why I care so much about things like automated test suites and documentation and code maintainability.

Letting LLMs generate black box garbage code sounds like a terrible idea to me. The idea that LLMs will get so good at coding that we won't mind is pure science fiction - writing code is only one part of the craft of delivering useful software.
by tim333 | 2025-07-30 22:57:12+00:00
Just to take the other side of most of the comments here, I mostly agree with Zuck. Superintelligence is on it's way and we will probably all have access in the same way we call all access ChatGPT and the like. I'm not sure how the "intersection of technology and how people live" will go but it's not a bad thing to work on. I'm not sure Meta is the one do to it though - glad to have other people working on it too.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-30 22:58:07+00:00
Don’t call it gaming. Gaming is good and has nothing to do with gambling. What is your point?

Ok look. If you put poison in food, it ceases to be food. It’s just poison at that point. Calling it food or even poisoned food is only an attempt to besmirch the good name of food. Food is always good for you. Any food that’s not good for you by definition isn’t food and no one can mistake it for food and any attempt at calling it food is just dishonest. Even having a discussion about food safety is nothing but a slippery slope to ban food they don’t like. Food is good.
by Kwpolska | 2025-07-30 22:58:21+00:00
Many Windows Server admin tools (such as Server Manager or Virtual Machine Connection) and MMC snap-ins (e.g. Event Viewer, Hyper-V Manager) are written in .NET Framework 4. PowerShell is .NET Framework 4. Everyone’s favorite bloated IDE (Visual Studio) is .NET Framework 4 as well.

In the Office land, Excel’s Power Query is .NET Framework 4.

Adopting the modern .NET is probably harder due to its lifecycle.
by hapticmonkey | 2025-07-30 22:59:52+00:00
It's pretty clear to me that Youtube shoving endless low quality content towards kids is their intended business model. It's what drives the most engagement. It's why they don't let you permanently disable YouTube Shorts. It's why they don't let you block channels easily any more. Or dislike videos. They're AB testing themselves into a low quality slop firehose.

There's some truly great content on the platform, some of it even for kids. But it gets drowned out by mountains of algorithmic slop.

I have stopped giving my kid access to Youtube. instead I set up my own media server, filled it with pirated TV shows and Movies I can curate, and give them access to that on the TV and iPad in their allowed screen times.
by derefr | 2025-07-30 23:00:52+00:00
> And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii.

I mean, we could totally have done that. There's nothing stopping you from delivering an experience like modern Amazon or Facebook or whatever in server-rendered HTML4. CSS3 and React get you fancy graphics and animations, and fast, no-repaint page transitions, but that's pretty much all they get you; we had everything else 25 years ago in MSIE6.

You could have built a dynamically-computed product listing grid + shopping cart, or a dynamically-computed network-propagated news feed with multimedia post types + attached comment threads (save for video, which would have been impractical back then), on top of Perl CGI-bin scripts — or if you liked, a custom Apache module in C.

And, in fact, some people did! There existed web services even in 1998 that did [various fragments of] these things! Most of them built in ASP or ColdFusion, mind you, and so limited to a very specific stack; but still, it was happening!

It was just that the results were all incredibly jank, with no UX polish... but not because UX polish would have been impossible with the tools available at the time. (As I said, HTML4 was quite capable!)

Rather, it was because all the professional HCI people were still mostly focused on native apps (with the few rare corporate UX vanguards "doing web stuff", working on siloed enterprise products like the MSDN docs); while the new and growing body of art-school "web design" types were all instead being trained mainly on the application of vertically-integrated design tools (ActiveX, Flash, maybe web layout via Photoshop 9-way slice export).
by bluGill | 2025-07-30 23:01:03+00:00
The other possibility is they have had the land for a long time and it is paid for. Payments on 80 acres of land will pay for some really nice tractors. The rational economic actor will still be going for used tractors on 80 acres, but humans are not rational. Larger farms a new tractor makes sense for various reasons.

Don't forget tax deductions. There is a reason the week between Christmas and New Year is a big on for tractor sales - your accountant suggests you want to get the down payment out now and off your books. As an accountant to explain it (I don't fully understand this)
by bberenberg | 2025-07-30 23:01:05+00:00
I build all kinds of “useless” stuff. Recently I did a LoungeBuddy clone[0]. Prior to that I made a bunch of other things you can see at [1]. I toss things on domains I happen to own if it makes sense. Sometimes they live on a path of an existing domain. If I don’t need the thing anymore I recycle the domain for something else. I’m fortunate enough that I can afford to pay this tax on my entertainment.

[0] https://www.tacavo.com/ [1] https://abrega.com
by Areibman | 2025-07-30 23:01:20+00:00
I've been keeping a rolling list of LLMOps/AI agent observability products funded by YC. What problems does Lucidic solve that the others do not?

https://hegel-ai.com https://www.vellum.ai/ https://www.parea.ai http://baserun.ai https://www.traceloop.com https://www.trychatter.ai https://talc.ai https://langfuse.com https://humanloop.com https://uptrain.ai https://athina.ai https://relari.ai https://phospho.ai https://github.com/BerriAI/bettertest https://www.getzep.com https://hamming.ai https://github.com/DAGWorks-Inc/burr https://www.lmnr.ai https://keywordsai.co https://www.thefoundryai.com https://www.usesynth.ai https://www.vocera.ai https://coval.ai https://andonlabs.com https://lucidic.ai https://roark.ai https://dawn.so/ https://www.atla-ai.com https://www.hud.so https://www.thellmdatacompany.com/ https://casco.com https://www.confident-ai.com
by littlestymaar | 2025-07-30 23:01:26+00:00
You're forgetting all the unsuccessful attacks where the attacker is simply swallowed back by a faster pace of the racers left behind by the attack.

I can see situation advantage for a very strong, title contending, competitor, but honestly that sounds too niche to be really useful.

Also:

> That’s why it’s rare that people ride away from others on a climb without an attack to break the draft.

Did you watch Tour de France the past few years? Even without attacking, Pogacar was simply too fast to follow in the mountains for everyone but Vingegaard, so there's only one guy who could have gained something and it's two times champion Vingegaard. Talk about a niche.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-07-30 23:01:35+00:00
I am familiar with grep-mode and have used that and macro recording for years. I've been using emacs for 20 years. grep-mode (these days I use rg) just brings up all the matches which lets me use a macro that I recorded. That's not the same as telling Claude Code to just make the change. Macros aren't table stakes but find-replace across projects is table stakes in pretty much any post-emacs/vim code editor (and both emacs and vimlikes obviously have plenty of support for this.)
by code_runner | 2025-07-30 23:02:29+00:00
I’m also surprised at the progress but don’t quite share the “AI is doing a good job” perspective.

It’s fine. Some things it’s awful at. The more you know about what you’re asking for the worse the result in my opinion.

That said a lot of my complaints are out of date apis being referenced and other little nuisances. If ai is writing the code, why did we even need an ergonomic api update in the first place. Maybe apis stabilize and ai just goes nuts.
by simonw | 2025-07-30 23:02:40+00:00
"I don't agree with this, my code quality is much better now. But you have to stay on the LLM's ass in terms of guidance and review it all (this is a given)."

Sounds to me like you're not vibe coding, you're coding. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/
by WD-42 | 2025-07-30 23:02:52+00:00
I would not default to assuming it was his competitors, that sounds like scapegoating to deflect responsibility. What most likely happened is his site was scanned by one of the increasingly sophisticated exploit crawlers (anyone who runs an internet facing site and can view traffic knows what I'm talking about). His site got flagged as vulnerable, the hacker found out it was built like swiss cheese and had fun with it.
by t0lo | 2025-07-30 23:03:52+00:00
I wish it wasn't the case but have you seen how emotionally retarded (correct use of the word) this generation of children is? Compare it to even 20 years before. We wouldn't need to do this if more parents actually did their job. By the nature of the social media monoculture it's harder than ever to shield kids from anti intellectualism. Each school basically has the same culture- good and the bad.
by NobodyNada | 2025-07-30 23:04:52+00:00
A narrow column of text can make it easier to read individual sentences, but it does so by sacrificing vertical space, which makes it harder to skim a page for relevant content and makes it easier for me to lose track of my place since I can't see as much context, images, and headings on screen all at once. I also find it much harder to read text when the paragraphs form monotonous blocks spanning 10 lines of text rather than being irregularly shaped and covering 3-5 lines. I find Wikipedia articles much harder to read in "standard" mode compared to "wide" mode for this reason.

Different people process visual information differently, and people reading articles have different goals, different eyesight, and different hardware setups. And we already have a way for users to tell a website how wide they want its content to be: resizing their browser window. I set the width of my browser window based on how wide I want pages to be; and web designers who ignore this preference and impose unreadable narrow columns because they read about the "optimal" column width in some study or another infuriate me to no end. Optimal is not the same for everyone, and pretending otherwise is the antithesis of accessibility.
by tcwd | 2025-07-30 23:05:12+00:00
For the WebArena result, we actually used a mixture of models checking each other's work and evaluating in real time. We found the verifications to be really effective in producing accurate results. Feel free to take a look at our architectural blog post to learn more in detail: https://blog.withmeka.com/introducing-meka-an-open-source-fr...

Unfortunately, we didn't try it out with open source models, but you are welcome to pull the repo and try with any model that has good visual grounding! (I heard UI-TARS and the latest Qwen visual model are quite good)
by anon84873628 | 2025-07-30 23:05:18+00:00
You're skipping over the whole "manifest destiny" bit, where the remaining natives were systematically hunted down and destroyed. Trail of Tears ring any bells?

And note this was perpetrated by The United States, not the "American colonists". This was happening in the 1800s, a good 300 years after the initial disease front came through.

If the United States had respected the native populations the American West would look very different today. Compare with current Central and South America for example (which were certainly still victims of both disease and genocide, but it was less thorough due to differences in colonizers and geography).
by bitshiftfaced | 2025-07-30 23:05:19+00:00
Calorie restriction, logging your calories and eating a deficit everyday, actually works for many people who can't figure out how else to lose weight. It also teaches you about how to eat healthy: portion sizes, how caloric each food is, how snacking impacts your total, etc.

> Fat won't make you fat

I had always understood this as true, but it's more complicated than that. The body converts calories from fat into fat much more efficiently than carbs, and protein is the least efficient.
by netsharc | 2025-07-30 23:05:27+00:00
Makers of machinima used video games and the control of their characters to make long-running successful series, e.g. Red vs. Blue with Halo. But the writing was still done by humans. Using AI to control 3D characters seem feasible enough, but can AI do compelling plots, or great humor?

Then again, since Idiocracy is a documentary, there's probably enough audience for utterly dumb unfunny humor.
by shkkmo | 2025-07-30 23:05:29+00:00
> I agree, it's too niche a product

I don't think it is that niche. I think lots of people would take advantage of it not just for their kids, but themselves.

The problem is that it is a feature that makes YouTube less "sticky" and thus there is economic incentive against implementing it due to lack of competition in that area. (Their competitors also want to maximize stickiness.)
by dfabulich | 2025-07-30 23:05:44+00:00
Vibe code may be "disposable," but isn't "legacy code" if it has automated tests that the product owner can read and understand.

There are approximately two definitions of "legacy" code that I'm familiar with. One is: "valuable code that you're afraid to change." This definition is subjective. I might be afraid to change code that you're unafraid to change, especially if it's code that you wrote (because you remember, at least vaguely, how your code is "supposed" to work).

Another definition of "legacy" is attributed to Michael Feathers: "Legacy code is simply code without tests." The definitions overlap because code without tests is definitely scary to change, because it's very hard to be sure whether or not you've broken it, or even understood it in the first place.

When vibe-coding with an LLM that generates automated tests, (as they mostly all do nowadays), it's not legacy code. The tests both specify and ensure correct behavior.

Automated tests are particularly useful for vibe coding, because they help prevent LLMs from hallucinating answers. (This is also why type checkers are so helpful for LLMs.)

Once the code has tests, you can pretty much let the LLMs change anything they want, including refactoring the architecture. LLMs are extremely good at refactoring code with automated tests, in the sense that they'll puke out some hallucinated, hilariously wrong answer, and then refine their answer automatically until it passes the tests. (Just like I did when I was a junior engineer.)

But watch out, because sometimes the LLMs try to delete tests that are hard to pass. If vibe-coding means reading no code, not even the tests, then, yeah, you're gonna have a bad time. But if it means "only reading the tests and not reading the application code," then vibe coding works pretty well, actually.

What the new systems give you (and especially junior engineers/PMs) is disposable code with automated tests, ensuring that that you can dispose of the code and regenerate it (aka refactor it) and add features with confidence.

That's the very opposite of "legacy code."
by Tenemo | 2025-07-30 23:05:56+00:00
There is, I'm a long-time user of ReVanced-patched YouTube. Comes with all sorts of plugins, tweaks and knobs.

In the options, there's a Shorts section, a couple example options: "Hide Shorts in home feed", "Hide Shorts in search results", "Hide Shorts in subscription feed". I do not see any Shorts, ever.

Not only that, apart from not having ads, Revanced YT also has customizable SponsorBlock integration, which skips ads/sponsors in the actual video (community-based feedback).

Instructions on how to install it (no root required) can be found on the revanced subreddit, beware fake sites in the search results, go straight to Reddit or Discord. Highly recommend!
by voxleone | 2025-07-30 23:06:19+00:00
Fair point — I don't think gravitational redshift was completely ignored, but perhaps it was ruled out early and not discussed in the public-facing article. In most astrophysical observations, especially with JWST, cosmological redshift and AGN mechanisms usually dominate the interpretation, but I agree: when something challenges conventional thinking, even “obvious” effects deserve a clear mention or elimination.
by modeless | 2025-07-30 23:06:37+00:00
Why is everyone saying this doesn't exist? It's right there on the linked page! It's called "Approved Content Only" and I assure you that it exists, it's a real feature, it works just like you want, I use it myself, my kids watch Primitive Technology and Smarter Every Day and they can't watch videos I don't whitelist.

It does have a few issues. It's not reliable in showing everything you allow, sometimes things are missing for no reason, other times it will prevent you from whitelisting a video because it contains product placement (why does Google get to decide that for me? I'm an adult and can choose what level of product placement is acceptable for my kids). But it is a true whitelist mode and won't show other videos, just as requested.
by ElCapitanMarkla | 2025-07-30 23:06:37+00:00
Hmmm I'll check it out, I last looked into this about a year ago. I'm pretty sure it still allowed a bunch of crap through that I didn't want them to have access to.

edit: Oh neat they do have a parental approval mode in there now. Last time I was in here they only let you set an age range for the content that you wanted. It still seems a bit weird though, I can select a channel from the list they are presenting me but I can't search for some arbitrary channel to unlock. I'll have another look tonight though
by AIPedant | 2025-07-30 23:07:36+00:00
I am still reading the paper, but it is worth noting that this is not an LLM! It is closer to something like AlphaGo, trained only on ARC, Sudoku and mazes. I am skeptical that you could add a bunch of science facts and programming examples without degrading the performance on ARC / etc - frankly it’s completely unclear to me how you would make this architecture into a chatbot, period, but I haven’t thought about it very much.

Comparing the maze/Sudoku results to LLMs rather than maze/Sudoku-specific AIs strikes me as blatantly dishonest. “1k Sudoku training examples” is also dishonest, they generate about a million of them with permutations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44701264 (see also https://github.com/sapientinc/HRM/blob/main/dataset/build_su... And they seem to have deleted the Sudoku training data! Or maybe they made it private. It used to be here: https://github.com/imone and according to the Git history[1] they moved it here https://github.com/sapientinc but I cannot find it. Might be an innocent mistake; I suspect they got called out for lying about “1000 samples” and are hiding their tracks.

[1] https://github.com/sapientinc/HRM/commit/171e2fcde636bcb7e6c...
by bluGill | 2025-07-30 23:07:44+00:00
Doesn't really matter - in the real world everybody is tailgating. Drivers need to maintain 3 seconds (GP was using 2 seconds which safety experts have not declared too little) between cars for safety reasons. However drivers are instead maintaining more like .5 seconds between cars. As such nearly every city needs about 5 times as many lanes as they currently have when people finally start demanding "just one more lane"! 5 times - that puts Huston level freeways in Des Moines.

If you maintain the proper following distance at maximum capacity when there is an issue you can momentarily drop to 1 second (while braking) and then expand back to normal and there is no effect on traffic.
Show HN: I use AI to send myself personalized weekly recaps from my saved links
by quinto_quarto | 2025-07-30 23:08:00+00:00
Sharing something that I’ve been working on:

I made a save-later app for all my bookmarks. I save links throughout the week and, every Sunday morning, the app sends me a personalized recap with: -patterns and themes that connect my week to my broader interests -a nudge toward links I saved but never revisited -one reflective question to help me decide what else might be worth exploring

I was inspired by older read-later apps like Instapaper. I wanted to make something minimalist, so it’s just a simple feed of your links (with tags and annotations linked to each link) and it is set up to ingest all kinds of content, not just text. I also did want it to be bloated as the full-fat AI stuff you see recently. So this is a simpler and more proactive take on the concept of a bookmarking app.

Imagine if Pocket and Spotify Wrapped had a baby.

I also personally enjoy using the chat to find links across subjects and sources with context, like “Show me the 5 links on travel i’ve returned to the most” or “all recipes with porcini mushrooms” or “show me everything on Topic X i’ve made the most notes on.”

I’ve posted about this on HN before, always had great feedback. Happy to answer any questions. (I’m not technical, I'm a writer/ filmmaker.)