MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by latexr | 2025-07-11 11:52:39+00:00
That’s far from exclusive to interior design. Any designer in every discipline will be familiar with that notion, regardless of it being interior design, industrial design, graphic design, …

“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible” — Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (1988)
by rudasn | 2025-07-11 11:54:08+00:00
I have two!

One is a webapp I wrote almost 20 years ago for my dad and it's still being used today. It runs on IIS and built with asp classic and vanilla html/css/js (no frameworks back then). They use it to track orders and invoices to suppliers/vendors and ensure what they receive is what they ordered.

The other, an electron-type app that saves people hundreds of hours per month by letting them bypass some bad UIs and interact with external services directly. It's been running for 6 years, only had to make very few updates, and it's the one thing I don't need monitoring for - not only it's been quite stable, I get called immediately if it breaks (eg when external services change their endpoints).
by bbbboris | 2025-07-11 11:54:29+00:00
Built a small tool last night to help product managers, including myself, when things feel stuck or unclear.

The Product Arcana is a set of cards, each with a short prompt designed to shift perspective, unblock thinking, or challenge assumptions. Less about process, more about reflection.

You can:

- Draw 1 card for a quick nudge

- Draw 3 cards for a deeper self-check

Feedback welcome, open to card suggestions too.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-11 11:54:38+00:00
Yeah it reads like one to file away if I ever end up doing a lot of technical documentation. In this case, it's a guide that is aimed at an army of people (dozens? Hundreds? I don't even know, Red Hat has 19.000 employees) writing documentation as their day job. That is, I wouldn't be at all surprised if just the number of people writing documentation for RH is more than the number of engineers we have at my current employer (one of the major energy companies in the Netherlands).
by speleding | 2025-07-11 11:54:48+00:00
Congrats. A word of warning: I scaled my SaaS site to $1M in AAR in a few years, but then a lot of competition appeared and a decade later it's still at only $1.5M. I have a good time running it and I can live comfortably while feeding my team, but with my initial success I had hoped it would go up further faster. So keep those expectation low, the next million may not come as easily as the first.
Ask HN: Where would you sell a side project?
by BrunoBernardino | 2025-07-11 11:55:20+00:00
If you were to sell a small side project that has no revenue but gets some organic traffic (around 400 monthly page views, 150 unique — it's been live for ~7 months), where would you do it? I need to focus on something else that's actually making money but don't want to just drop this other project I'd been working on.

Thanks!
by mattashii | 2025-07-11 11:55:35+00:00
> Yet emerging markets move incredibly fast, and the goal is to discover those trenches and occupy them.

Well, only if you make it a goal to occupy all the trenches. The EU has realized that it does not want all possible trenches occupied. For example: There is a lot of market share to be had in waste disposal by dumping it in the rivers and oceans. Regulation generally prohibits this, because we don't want our rivers and oceans full of waste.

Capitalist market self-regulation wouldn't have done this without external pressure (regulation, litigation, etc.) because the capitalist market would externalize all costs if it would increase profits.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-11 11:56:29+00:00
Same in spoken word; I don't know if this is a regional (western European, expat-English) thing, but a lot of people will interspers their spoken sentences with "basically" and "actually" a lot. It's gratuitous and more of a verbal tic than something that adds to their sentence.

But maybe I'm overthinking it too much. I prefer reading.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-07-11 11:56:33+00:00
That's not true. It's a nationalist myth in Israel that was thoroughly debunked by none other than Israeli historians 40 years ago.

Palestinians overwhelmingly fled because:

* They were forced to at gunpoint by Zionist/Israeli forces, as at Ramle, Lod and many other places.

* Their towns came under direct attack by Zionist forces, as at Haifa and many other places.

* They feared for their lives, especially after Zionist massacres of Arab civilians at places like Deir Yassin became known.

This has been documented in great detail by Israeli historians for each Palestinian town.

For example, much of the population of Gaza comes from Palestinian towns that used to exist in what is now southern Israel. They were driven out and their towns were largely razed by Zionist forces in Operation Barak. Zionist forces had explicit orders to clear out the Arab population, which is what they did with extreme ruthlessness (including atrocities that are too horrible to describe on HN, but which you can read about in histories of the operation).
by librasteve | 2025-07-11 11:56:36+00:00
Thanks for the link … great read and yes very tricky.

I have started hacking a bit on a Contact::Name text parser in raku Grammars if anyone would like to check it out - contributions are very welcome! https://raku.land/zef:librasteve/Contact

Why Raku?

- the easy built in Grammar syntax means that coders can work quickly to build structured parse trees that can deal with all the textual nuance (unicode, language, rtl, pluggable sub-grammars…) - the consistent ecosystem provides for class / roles as first class packages in their own right, so we can have a shared standardized tree of real word objects we want to parse out of text such as LLM responses
by WillAdams | 2025-07-11 11:56:52+00:00
Safe is a function of training and guards and competence when using a tool and above all an awareness of the forces involved and how to position oneself so that should something go wrong, one will not be in the line of movement of potential projectiles. This means that the first thing one must ask oneself when walking up to a tool is, "Am I well-rested, and sufficiently clear-headed and well-versed in this operation that I will be able to focus on using this tool safely?"

Sawstop wouldn't have a business model if tablesaw accidents were tried by a jury of shop teachers whose awareness of this is brought into focus by a career of explaining how to safely use power tools (see my post elsethread).
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-11 11:57:37+00:00
How is Tesla an example of your point? It’s the biggest EV manufacturer owned by one of the world’s richest men.

Perhaps the problem here isn’t that smaller brands don’t exist, it’s that if we give examples of smaller brands then you’ll argue

“Never heard of them. Thus proof that the EU is holding them back”

And if we mention household names then you’d argue

“Those aren’t small companies”

You’ve basically crafted an impossible to satisfy condition. A question that would be equally impossible for you to satisfy with US firms as it is for EU firms.

———

By the way, there’s quite a few car manufacturers that are small listed here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufactu...

A few of them are relatively big names despite their small company size, for example Noble Automotive.
by daitangio | 2025-07-11 11:57:44+00:00
I wrapped together a simple yet powerful queue system:

https://github.com/daitangio/pque

I evaluated Listen/notify but it seems to loose messages if no one is listening, so its use case seems pretty limited to me (my 2 cents).

Anyway, If you need to scale, I suggest an ad hoc queue server like rabbitmq.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-11 11:58:30+00:00
> Apple is a company with limited means, only bringing in the GDP of a small country

For reference, in 2023, Apple produced a little less than Romania or Hong Kong, and a little more than Egypt or the Czech Republic.

Hong Kong is small (though not a lot smaller than the Czech Republic); Egypt is big.

--- edit ---

I accidentally compared Apple's revenue in 2023 to the IMF forecast of GDP for 2025. For 2023: Apple produced very slightly more than Hong Kong or Nigeria, and a little less than Malaysia or Iran.

Nigeria is even bigger than Egypt. It still produced less than Hong Kong.
by ajross | 2025-07-11 11:58:30+00:00
Just buy more RAM and you get that for free. Really I guess that's my sense of patches like this in general: while sure, filesystem research has a long and storied history and it's a very hard problem in general that attracts some of the smartest people in the field to do genius-tier work...

Does it really matter in the modern world where a vanilla two-socket rack unit has a terabyte of DRAM? Everything at scale happens in RAM these days. Everything. Replicating across datacenters gets you all the reliability you need, with none of the fussing about storage latency and block device I/O strategy.
Ask HN: What's blocking your AI agents from moving beyond proof-of-concept?
by ns-148 | 2025-07-11 11:58:39+00:00
We’ve been working on decision automation tech that’s mostly been used in enterprise for building systems that behave like domain experts. Think models based on structured logic and knowledge, which can be queried to provide decisions that are auditable and explainable. Recently, we’ve started wondering whether this could help with a different kind of problem: getting LLM-based agents into production.

From what we’ve seen (and experienced ourselves), it’s relatively easy to get an agent prototype working with tools like LangChain, AutoGen, or CrewAI, but much harder to move that into something reliable and trustworthy enough for real use.

Some of the issues we’ve felt:

-Agents making different decisions from the same input

-Opaque reasoning that’s hard to debug or trust

-Tool use that works in demos but fails under edge cases

-Hallucinated or incomplete decisions that don’t stand up in production

-Limited ability to gather missing info before acting

It’s got us thinking: if an agent could collate data, then call a tool (our system) with a bespoke symbolic model (that you created) that could reason, ask follow-up questions (for an AI agent or human to answer) and provides results that are deterministic, explainable, and repeatable, would that help bridge the gap to production? Would this be more trustworthy?

We’re trying to understand whether this kind of approach would actually be useful in real-world agent implementations, and if so, for what kinds of decisions or workflows.

Would really appreciate hearing from anyone who’s been working on agent-based systems:

-What have you built?

-Have you shipped anything to production?

-What’s been hardest about that process?

-Where do you think determinism, consistency, or explainability would matter most?

Not selling anything, as we’d have lots of work to do to make the product more developer friendly anyway, just want to know whether the idea has legs and to learn from people building agents.

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to share.
by salawat | 2025-07-11 11:59:00+00:00
You seem dense and fairly committed to not seeing the fact that we've pretty much tapped the developable wilds, and set bars so high in terms of barriers of economic entry you can't just plop out a kid and rely on opportunity existing anymore. My grandmother was one of 13 children reared on a farm. Each of them could meaningfully contribute to the operation of the farm back then in ways that would be non-starters today, and for a myriad of good reasons. There was a smaller population to carry, higher attrition rates, more and deadlier wars, and many other factors.

Also, ffs, it's called resource crunch and wealth centralization, and I'm not entirely convinced we aren't staring down the smoldering barrel of some serious shit Stateside over the next decade.
by diggan | 2025-07-11 12:00:29+00:00
> I can't work out what the best ratio of soldiers/workers in.

In the beginning I tried out a bunch of ratios and never found any strategy that seemed to have worked. Now I just leave it on default for entire runs, won a handful of times in free-for-all, seems to work out OK for most cases.

In the first ~1 minute or so I keep 1K soldiers "at home" at all times, and whenever it goes above, I send them out in the "non-taken land", so basically medium-sized expansions until there is no land left. Then start attacking bots in the order of the money they have available, and once there is no bots left, start attacking humans.
by matkoniecz | 2025-07-11 12:00:31+00:00
> Patient outcome and contentedness compared to others with similar indications.

and how you would achieve it? "similar indications" would be coming from doctor that you are trying to rate

rating "contentedness" gets you doctors prescribing useless medications to keep patients happy

expert surgeons have often bad survival rates as they get complicated cases, and trying to rate how complicated cases are to compare two experts would be nightmare as bad as rating doctors - so you only replace one hard problem with another as hard problem
by hammyhavoc | 2025-07-11 12:00:33+00:00
Uh, no you can't.

> I think this for me is the most worrying: "You can see that for AI Allowed tasks, developers spent less time researching and writing code".

A Kindle is exactly the kind of device you would research and educate yourself via and the quantity of books has nothing to do with the reading of them or contents thereof. Terrible comparison.
Ask HN: AI as a solution to the declining population problem in many countries?
by amichail | 2025-07-11 12:01:13+00:00
One way to increase population is to simply pay adults raising children enough so that they don’t need traditional jobs.

Since AI is already replacing many jobs, the reduction in people participating in the traditional job market may not be a problem.

So, do you think AI could help solve the declining population problem in this way?
by mrjay42 | 2025-07-11 12:01:39+00:00
Just came here to say: I've started to read the paper (thanks to the downloadable PDF, the web version is not accessible apparently for me)

Starting at page 8 (total) or page 6 (as written in the footer), there's horrible graphs, even if you zoom in, they're all blurry and partially unreadable

I'm legit surprised we let research articles be published with poorly designed graphs using poor definition/resolution :')

#justRanting
by fuzzfactor | 2025-07-11 12:02:29+00:00
People used to think the biggest risk was brain damage from some frequent users holding a cellphone up to their ear so much. The source of the radio frequencies being so close to the brain and everything. People from all walks of life were skeptical, whether they were very advanced about high-frequency radio signals or not.

Nobody does that any more, instead it's usually the two-handed "Facebook pose" hunched over a touchphone which is not nearly as close to their ear very often at all. That should theoretically be safer for the brain from a proximity standpoint, but then the potentially negative effect on an erect posture became obvious to many people, as the under-recognized downside.

I guess people should be more suspicious when it comes to thinking processes.
by latexr | 2025-07-11 12:02:48+00:00
> This reads silly for another reason: websites don't... introduce things. Website owners might.

That feels overly pedantic, and is incorrect. “Introduce” means “bring a subject to the attention of (someone) for the first time”. It doesn’t need to be done by a person.

It’s perfectly acceptable to say, for example, “The Shining introduced me to the horror movie genre”. That doesn’t leave room for doubt that you mean The Shining was your first horror movie. It would’ve been silly to say “Stanley Kubrick introduced me to the horror movie genre” just because you watched one of his movies.
by belter | 2025-07-11 12:03:27+00:00
Some context:

"How a software glitch at the UK Post Office ruined lives" - 2024 | 331 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39010070

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
by mrjay42 | 2025-07-11 12:04:03+00:00
Ok, I'm replying to my own comment to keep ranting

I was scrolling through the paper...and at page 24 (total) or 22 (footer) -> there's another graph.

I CHALLENGE anyone with a human brain to understand that graph

My initial comment WASN'T in that mood, but now I am gonna say it: this hasn't been peer reviewed. There's NO WAY an article with such graphs passes peer reviewing.
by diggan | 2025-07-11 12:04:16+00:00
> You ask very specific questions where not a lot of documentation is available and inevetably even o3 ends up being pretty useless.

You have any example questions where o3 failed to be helpful?

I use it pretty similarly to you, only resorting to it to unblock myself basically, otherwise I'm mostly the one doing the actual work, LLMs help with specific functions or specific blockers, or exploring new "spaces". But almost all the times I've gotten stuck, o3 (and o3-pro mode) managed to unstuck me, once I've figured out the right way to ask the question, even when my own searching and reading didn't help.
by hammyhavoc | 2025-07-11 12:04:43+00:00
That they're complete dogshit in capability, reliability, consistency and vulnerable to malicious prompt fiddling. Wholly inappropriate for production, and for what most people are using them for, there's infinitely better solutions than LLMs.

With the amount of fucking around required trying to correct an LLM, you may as well just write the code to do your task properly.
by zahlman | 2025-07-11 12:05:27+00:00
This tweet appears to be taking the original material out of context to misrepresent it:

> Rewrite the attention kernel to be persistent. This gives better performance at low-contexts. However, fp16 at large context has suffered a bit due to a ptxas instruction scheduling issue in the softmax partition. fp8 is ~100 tflops faster when the kernel name has "cutlass" in it.

The charitable reading is that, on certain kernels, using fp8 rather than fp16 values gives better performance. (Although I can't even see how the numbers relate to a "~100 tflops faster" claim in any respect, nor does it even list any kernel names or suggest a control kernel!) But this is being presented as if someone has uncovered evidence of cheating on benchmarks.
by ben_w | 2025-07-11 12:05:27+00:00
> Do you even know what FORTH is

Yes

> and who Charles Moore is?

He is the Baron Moore of Etchingham, former editor of The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, and The Sunday Telegraph; he still writes for all three. He is known for his authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, published in three volumes (2013, 2016 and 2019). Under the government of Boris Johnson, Moore was given a peerage in July 2020, thus becoming a member of the House of Lords.

> It's not that I'm getting high and mighty (at least not the latter), it's that you're intentionally performatively getting low and ignorant. You're perpetrating a textbook example of sealioning

Here's the thing, I actually read the original Wondermark comic when it was fresh.

It's a metaphor for racism, with a racist living in a world with sentient talking sealions, who says they don't like sealions, gets overheard by a sealion, and that sealion tries to force them to justify themselves. The sealion in that was also a dick about it because this was styled as them being in the house of the racist, but on the internet the equivalent is "replying", not "trespassing in someone's own home".

I also find it amusing that a comic whose art style is cutting up and copy-pasting victorian copperplate art is the go-to reference of someone complaining that AI is, what, too low-brow?

And the fact that I can say all this is because I am actually able to perform analysis of the things I consume and do not limit myself to simply parroting clichés as if this constitutes rhetorical skill.

Also, but not only.

> Did you or did you not read what the LLOOOOMM simulation of Hunter S Thompson had to say directly to and about you, in response to your posts?

Says the guy who clearly didn't read my sim of Thompson being critical of your use of a LLM rather than your own brain to make your point.

But yes, I did. It illuminated nothing — was this the point?

I already know *that* you like these authors and did not need to see an AI-generated rant to know this. I do not know *why* you like them, or which specific critical aspects of the real thing appeals to you over the fake. Nor even have you once suggested why they're the bar to pass (and worse, made it increasingly ambiguous if you meant it as a high bar or a low bar). The AI may as well have said "because they are somewhat famous" for all it added.

Now, I can (and have) done this kind of analysis with LLM-mimicry of authors that I do actually enjoy, so apparently unlike you I can say things like "Half the Douglas Adams style jokes miss the point as hard as Ford Prefect choosing his own name".
by Brendinooo | 2025-07-11 12:05:33+00:00
The article brushed aside devs being terrible at estimates, but I dunno.

I'm a frontend guy, been using Claude Code for a couple of weeks now. It's been able to speed up some boilerplate, it's sped up a lot of "naming is hard" conversations I like to have (but my coworkers probably don't, lol), it's enabled me to do a lot more stuff in my most recent project.

But for a task or two I suspect that it has slowed me down. If I'm unable to articulate the problem well enough and the problem is hard enough you can go in circles for awhile. And I think the nature of "the right answer is just around the corner" makes it hard to timebox or find a specific point where you say "yup, time to ditch this and do it the old-fashioned way". There is a bit of a slot-machine effect here.
by anovikov | 2025-07-11 12:05:59+00:00
Why bother with families at all? Just introduce a market-based wage for having a kid, paid till the age of 18, inflation adjusted, but set at new every year based on supply and demand (say decide you need TFR of 2.1 and that's it). Poor women will quickly fulfill the demand. They are not at all fussy about kids. It won't be too expensive. A woman can have 6-8 kids biologically, if half of the 20% most poorest will do it, it will fill the gap between real and desired TFR.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-11 12:06:04+00:00
Sounds like victim blaming to me; who are you to decide what is healthy or fair for someone else, or what words are offensive or harmless?

Because I can guarantee there's words that would make you upset if they were used against you. I mean this thread is because someone had an emotional response to "inclusive language", they zoomed right in on it and ignored every other aspect of the thing, even calling for the whole section to be removed.

How is that different? I don't understand why people get so upset about inclusive language. Those people are unreasonable, and need to adjust their outlook. It is neither healthy for them, nor fair to others, to take such great offense at harmless words.
by MatthiasPortzel | 2025-07-11 12:06:30+00:00
It's easy to assume that Apple is where it is today because of Jobs. But when you look back, there are actually a number of key decisions made by Tim Cook since Job's death that led Apple here.

Cook has plenty of leadership vision. He's led Apple into the VR space with Vision Pro, and has pushed into services/content (Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness+), and wearables (Beats acquisition, Apple Watch, AirPods). He's defined Apple as a company that cares about privacy, and it's because of him that Apple is so stubbornly fighting regulation in the EU and US.

If anything, you could criticize Cook for being too ambitious, if you thought that his attention to these areas came at the expense of iPhone & Mac quality.