MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jaza | 2025-07-31 04:44:19+00:00
We're pretty lucky here in Australia. Over the past decade or so, PayID has been successfully rolled out to virtually all banks, giving us free and (usually) instant money transfers - I'd say more than half of all personal payments are now done with PayID. Old-skool bank transfers are still the norm for business and administrative payments, but that's changing too, and in any case, those transfers are increasingly being executed behind the scenes over Osko (aka PayID), so they end up settling in seconds (or at least hours) instead of days.
by simonw | 2025-07-31 04:44:31+00:00
I need to put one together. The big ones are:

- "LLM running tools in a loop" - often used by Anthropic, generally the most popular among software engineers who build things

- "An AI system that performs tasks on your behalf" - used by OpenAI, I dislike how vague this one is

- "an entity that perceives its environment through sensors and acts upon that environment through actuators to achieve specific goals" - the classic academic one, Russell and Norvig. I sometimes call this the "thermostat definition".

- "kinda like a travel agent I guess?" - quite common among less technical people I've talked to

I gathered over a hundred on Twitter last year, summarized by Gemini here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/beaa5f90133b30724c5cc1c4008d0...

I also have a tag about this on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/tags/agent-definitions/
by drdeca | 2025-07-31 04:44:38+00:00
Yes, “amount of melanin content” is a real thing. And it is in large part attributable to genes which have correlations with both other genes (with medically relevant differences) and to geographic locations of ancestors.

So, if by “race” one means “melanin content and geographic location of ancestors”, then that is a real thing. But the way these vary do not come in any particular natural grouping into categories; “race”, in the sense of a categorical variable (not just the concept of ancestry more generally), isn’t real, or, at least, it is less real than the distinction between male and female.

If one has a random real-valued variable which has a continuous distribution, it may be useful to chunk it up into discrete buckets even if the way of chunking ends up being fairly arbitrary. Having a way of chunking it up into intervals being useful doesn’t imply that the arbitrary chunking is actually a natural categorical variable.
by petermclean | 2025-07-31 04:45:08+00:00
Only similar by a little bit. Bitset misses the mark in so many ways.

bit_array can be compile time storage (ala bitset) or dynamic at construction time. There is also bit_vector which is entirely dynamic

Critically though, is that the type/library is built on a proxy iterator/pointer that lets you do certain things with STL or the bit algorithms that you cannot otherwise do with bitset.

But back to the bitfields idea. The bit array backing storage is configurable through templates so you will be able to know for certain exactly how much stack or heap your type will take up
by julik | 2025-07-31 04:46:13+00:00
That project is a treat - but it's effectively an FTP server, so most of its useful data will be in the files it hosts themselves. And it's deliberately built for being run off a single server. I had a similar project a long while ago which would "wrap" an FTP server with a WeTransfer-like web UI, and it also had no database - since none was needed.

"No build step for assets" is how I do my Rails apps these days if I can help it, luckily modern browsers allow for that to a great extent.
by yashghelani | 2025-07-31 04:46:37+00:00
As a freelance designer/developer, one of the most annoying aspects about dealing with non-technical clients is dealing with their ambiguous ideas, which they communicate using very general and abstract words. At most, they’ll point to another idea that looks/functions like how they want their own idea to look/function.

I think vibe coding makes that initial conversation between a non-technical client and a technical designer/developer much more interesting. Because, now, that client can first communicate their ambiguous ideas to an LLM, have it generate something visual and concrete, and then communicate that generated thing to the designer/developer. A much better way to exchange ideas, no?

But, yes, relying on vibe-coded code is not reliable.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-07-31 04:48:19+00:00
Ollama is a VC funded company that ultimately needs a revenue model they serve investors, not open source developers. Llama.cpp is a means to an end to them, not the goal. It's hard to monetize open source libraries. But a good chat client might lead to paying enterprise users.

Running good enough models locally is appealing to a lot of people and kind of hard if you are not a developer. If you are it's easy (been there done that). That's the core premise of the company. Their tech is of course widely used and for a while they've been focusing just on getting it to that stage. But that's never going to add up to revenue. So, they need to productize what they have.

This looks like a potentially viable way.
by aeon_ai | 2025-07-31 04:48:39+00:00
My point on the initial discussion remains, but I think that it also seems like we disagree on the foundations/premise of the technology.

The actions of a few companies does not invalidate the entire category. There are open models, trained on previously aggregated datasets (which, for what its worth, nobody had a problem with being collected a decade ago!), doing research to make training and usage more efficient.

The technology is here. I think your assessment on its relevance is not informed by actual usage, your frame of its origins is black/white (rather than understanding the actual landscape of different model approaches), and that your lack of interest in using it does nothing to change the absolutely massive shift that is happening in the nature of work. I'm a Product Manager, and the Senior Engineer I work with has been reviewing my PRs before they get merged - 60%+ were merged without much comment, and his bar is high. I did half of our last release, while also doing my day job. Safe to say, his opinion has changed based on that.

Were they massive changes? No. But these are absolutely impactful in the decision calculus that goes into what it takes to build and maintain software.

The premise of my argument is that what you see as "fatal flaws" are an illusion created by bias (which bleeds into the second-hand perspectives you cite just as readily as it does the media), rather than your direct and actual validation that those flaws exist.

My suggestion is to be an objective scientist -- use the best model released (regardless of origins) with minor research into 'best practices' to see what is possible, and then ask yourself if the 'origins' issue were addressed by a responsible open-source player in 6-12 months, whether it would change anything about your views on the likely impact of this technology and your willingness to adopt it.

I believe that it's coming, not because the hype machine tells me so (and it's WAY hyped) - But because I've used it, seen its flaws and strengths, and forecast how quickly it will change the work that I've been doing for over a decade even if it stopped getting better (and it hasn't stopped yet)
by julik | 2025-07-31 04:48:45+00:00
That does not mirror my experience. What I did see a lot was either spinning wheels because multiple people had divergent ideas about how the complexity should be managed, or spinning wheels because people on the project did not want to work with Rails at all and just wanted a rewrite of everything in something else.

Complexity does not have to be an explosion, but it always will be if the team designs in a way that is not coherent - and coherence is hard to achieve.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-31 04:49:15+00:00
I can, because due to Windows team love for COM and C++, many extension points require doing exactly that.

Want to extend the context menu actions, or add new thumbnail capabilities for a recent file format?

It is exactly that.

Even with WinRT Runtime Components, they were doing in a way that some APIs were only surfaced when using the components from C++.

Quite a different approach from OS / language teams at Apple and Google, where productivity with better languages has a priority no matter what.
by pmontra | 2025-07-31 04:49:18+00:00
A dozen years ago a company hired me to maintain an ecommerce system that had been built for them by a guy that left soon after. They told me "he is not even a developer." That was my assessment too. The system mostly worked but it didn't run fast enough to process their daily load. It was a mess but it would cost too much to rewrite. I managed to fix the worst parts, then switched to other customers. No idea if they found somebody else to keep fixing stuff.

They kind of vibe coded that app well before vibe coding had been a thing.
by mindslight | 2025-07-31 04:49:39+00:00
> Is he actively trying to implode the US economy, and kill the reserve currency status of the dollar? I ask because it sure seems like it to me.

Yes. If you read the regime's crackpot "economist's" book it lays out a bizzarro upside down framework whereby having a strong currency is a liability and needing manufactured goods is a strength, with the cure being to destroy our currency such that we too can be an impoverished work camp.

In reality of course the actual problem was never a strong currency by itself, but rather that the political establishment didn't spend the gains from a strong currency on mitigating the damage to our industrial base (under the banner of fake "fiscal responsibility"), but rather just gave that wealth away as artificially low interest loans to make the all important Line go up.
by longnguyen | 2025-07-31 04:49:41+00:00
Congrats on the launch, Ollama team.

Shameless plug: I’ve been building a native AI chat client called BoltAI[0] for the last 3 years. It’s native, feature-rich, and supports multiple AI services, including Ollama and LM Studio.

Give it a try.

[0]: https://boltai.com
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-31 04:50:09+00:00
>A dismissive “no” is not a helpful addition to this discussion.

Neither are wide-eyed claims stemming from drinking too much LLM company koolaid. Blatantly mistaken claims don't need more than a curt answer.

Why don't I go ahead and claim chatGPT has a soul, so to then get angry if my claim is dismissed?
by woodruffw | 2025-07-31 04:50:26+00:00
I also thought this omission was conspicuous. The author has some reasonable points, but the sections on NYC and NJ felt like political wish (spite?) casting: just about the only state in the US that struggles more to build mass transit than NY is NJ. The HBLR is a rare survivor in an otherwise very crowded graveyard of NJ mass transit projects.
by jackvalentine | 2025-07-31 04:51:38+00:00
> This ban includes watching videos. The law says they must take action to prevent underage persons from accessing their services.

The law, as written:

> There are age restrictions for certain social media platforms. A provider of such a platform must take reasonable steps to prevent children who have not reached a minimum age from having accounts.

No commentary I have seen supports your interpretation.
by lmm | 2025-07-31 04:52:40+00:00
How would that help? 3 minutes is the minimum separation distance, if the trains have different stopping patterns then that just means they'll be further apart for part of their journey. If you have to stay 3 minutes behind the train in front, you might as well stop at all the same stations that it does, you can only save time if you were further behind to start with, so you can't increase throughput by skipping stops.
by bzmrgonz | 2025-07-31 04:54:19+00:00
This reads like a hatchet job sponsored by the many verticals which stand to crumble once chat is democratized and federated. Just look at how hard apple is fighting to uphold their snotty elitist chat ecosystem, refusing to allow integration with android. So whoever is paying you for this hatchet job, I hope the 30 pieces of silver are well spent. If this is ragebait, congratulations, you got me!!!
by rendall | 2025-07-31 04:54:19+00:00
Perhaps the UN has more credibility than I. And yet, the UN has not formally accused Israel of genocide. I could write a similar patronizing "Your opinion is noted, but people with more credibility disagree with you" but I shall not. You should then however, by your own logic, concede that your accusations are without merit. While Francesca Albanese, special raconteur on Palestine has accused Israel of genocide, the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, Israel, Hungary, Albania and Argentina have officially lodged complaints over her overt anti-Semitic comments. She is not impartial, as is her mandate. Recently, the United States even sanctioned her, personally. She has credibility only with similar persons such as yourself.

Go ahead and have the last word. I will read it carefully.
by dokyun | 2025-07-31 04:54:24+00:00
> Desktop Accessory software sold for various video game and anime franchises that were popular in the 1990s and 2000s, like Konami's Tokimeki Memorial or Broccoli's Galaxy Angel, which would do various things like add mascots to the desktop ... But, that's almost all Windows stuff.

One for UNIX is MaCoPiX:

https://rosegray.sakura.ne.jp/macopix/index-e.html

It still works, I used it a few years ago.

> And on a serious note, while I kind of get why these sorts of things fell out of favor, it did add some whimsy and variety to the experience of using a computer. It would be kind of neat to see a resurgence of that sort of thing. Doesn't have to specifically be desktop mascots or pets, either; there was a gold mine of gimmicky software in the 90s and 2000s.

> Likewise, the gradual decline of the screensaver has been somewhat of a bummer. On one hand, yeah, the relevance of screensavers has fallen off so much that I hardly noticed when they were gone... but again, it added some fun to computing. Hard not to miss it a little.

The more and more prepackaged and restrictive computing becomes the more it's seen in the realm of "serious business" and consumed blandly and soullessly than something that's inherently fun and worth playing with.
by hualapais | 2025-07-31 04:54:59+00:00
I’m personally fond of Motif, even going so far as to hold XEphem as the epitome of timeless user interface design; I wish I had an entire OS following those blocky UI conventions. While normally using emwm, CDE would be productive and welcome on any of the BSDs and illumos distributions, IMHO.

Now if only OpenLook/XView could be made to lose its 32-bit cruft and become more portable. What a wonderful pair of desktop environments CDE and OpenLook would be to choose from—and perhaps add more functionality to—in 2025.
by jaza | 2025-07-31 04:55:02+00:00
Heck yes! I recently dusted off (had to literally dust the inside of the cartridges to get past a black screen, lol) my old Sega Genesis (and bought an HDMI adaptor for it), and have been letting my school age sons play it. They haven't even commented on the basic graphics. They're like "wow dad, no boot time, no connecting to server time, no waiting to skip ads time". They love it.
by yellowapple | 2025-07-31 04:55:07+00:00
That case is much more common in embedded/bare-metal programming. A decent chunk of the code I've written so far for getting Zig running on a Nintendo 64 is a bunch of packed structs representing various registers (and a bunch of methods on those structs representing common uses of those registers).

It's also a reasonably common case for parsing binary data formats (e.g. a file's header has fields at exact byte offsets, and it's much faster and easier to just grab all the bytes of that header and interpret those bytes as a packed struct).
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-31 04:55:18+00:00
> I do NOT expect an instant resurgence of manufacturing in the US.

It takes several years and lots of money. And investment ain't going to happen without both stability and demand. This merely allows domestic competitors to raise prices to encourage more inflation with a profit-price spiral. Aggregate demand will soften by virtue of increasing prices. Furthermore, trade deficits are stupid metrics to fixate on when fair value (cash and goods) flows in both directions. This is what happens when a stupid, ignorant person is surrounded by even more evil, greedier, manipulative advisors, anointed unitary executive, and allowed to legislate by fiat. (Trump isn't very dangerous or concerning by himself; it's the advisors plus the power given to him to rapidly rubber stamp special interest agendas that are concerning.)
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-31 04:55:49+00:00
>Do you think humans are logical machines? No, we are not. Therefore, do we not reason?

No, but we are conscious, and we know we are conscious, which doesn't require being a logical being too. LLMs on the other hand aren't conscious and there's zero evidence that they are. Thus, they don't reason, since this, unlike logic, does require consciousness.

Why not avoid re-definining things into a salad mix of poor logic until you can pretend that something with no evidence in its favor is real.
by palata | 2025-07-31 04:56:15+00:00
IMO building a side project with the goal that it will take off (and to hopefully get rich) is not the right motivation. Spoiler: it probably won't take off and you probably won't get rich. Minor survivorship bias.

Work on a side project because it's interesting (e.g. you want to learn the tech) or because it's useful to you (i.e. you want to use it). Not because it may make you rich.

In the former case, you may lose interest, but that's okay: you've learned in the process. In the latter, if you get to a point where you can use it, it's really rewarding.
by dudeinhawaii | 2025-07-31 04:56:21+00:00
Everyone is slamming you but the reality is that you could use AI models + a competent developer or security engineer to _very_ quickly shore up the entire codebase and fix every single hole -- getting it to a place where it's comparable with everything else out there. It's really not that hard (and there is already a bit of research around the defensive coding capabilities of tools like Codex and Claude Code)[1].

I have personally taken this approach with web dev, granted I'm a very senior developer. First, develop features, then ask a larger/smarter model (o3, o3-pro, gemini-2.5 pro) to analyze the entire codebase (in sections if needed) and surface every security issue, vulnerability, attack vector, etc. I then pass that back to agents to execute refactors that clean up the code. Repeat until all your keys are in the proper place, all your calls are secured, all your endpoints are locked down, all your db calls are sanitized, etc etc etc.

Now, this should have been done PRIOR to release and would have only taken a few more days (depending on app complexity and the skill of the developer).

[1]: https://arxiv.org/html/2505.15216 - "OpenAI Codex CLI: o3-high, OpenAI Codex CLI: o4-mini, and Claude Code are more capable at defense, achieving higher Patch scores of 90%, 90%, and 87.5%"
by motorest | 2025-07-31 04:56:54+00:00
> Sure things have changed now and the internet has become more corporate, but I reckon there are still people out there doing this stuff l because they can.

I recall a while back there was a story here about a recipe app that used LLMs to generate recipes. It didn't took long before posters started showcasing recipes they tricked the LLM to generate, involving ingredients such as cyanide and computer chips.

The pull is always there.
by dsign | 2025-07-31 04:57:24+00:00
Politics aside, does this mean that I can’t send a physical book to somebody in USA? I mean, it’s a tariff, and in theory all that is required is to pay some money to customs, but in the case of small traders and private individuals, the onus of setting up a price to base the tariff on, demonstrating that that price is real (otherwise one could set the price to 1 cent), and then figuring out who pays what and how… well, all of that is overkill. And, given present circumstances, all non USA citizens anywhere in the world may feel a very reasonable hesitation to interact with the USA government…customs works next door to ICE, so to speak.
by lmm | 2025-07-31 04:57:41+00:00
> Is it written in stone that a train must fit entirely into a station so that all doors face the platform and can be open simultaneously?

When you're building high capacity transit for dense cities, yes. You could stop the train twice in the same station, sure, but at that point you have to stop for twice as long (probably a little longer than that as your riders will get confused), so your train takes ~twice as long to get anywhere and can therefore carry ~half as many people.
by thombles | 2025-07-31 04:59:41+00:00
Have a look at Jon Haidt's book The Anxious Generation. He makes the case rather well that we need to cut out the safetyism in the physical world while getting serious about it in the online world. It's not some abstract matter of the morality of kids' digital freedom, it's the tanking of mental health and increase in self-harm and attempted suicide since smartphones came along.
by fahhem | 2025-07-31 05:00:12+00:00
The PA launches rockets?? That's a first-time hasbara line. Other groups, sure, even from the West Bank, but they're not in power and it's minuscule compared to the violence of the occupation. The settlers, with the IDF in tow, literally just killed a well-known documentarian and, a week or so ago, a US citizen, and that's just the recent ones that are known enough in the US to get coverage here. Do a google search and you'll see the ratio of Palestinians in the West Bank killed to Israelis injured shows that Israel isn't interested in diplomacy, it's interested in subjugation.
by theshrike79 | 2025-07-31 05:00:39+00:00
> But the reality for other people is very different.

"Food noise" is the term people use nowadays.

Basically I'm always thinking about food. Always. It's a source of dopamine for me - I have others, but food is a constant.

It's like trying to get off a drug, but you still need to take that drug 3-5 times a day to not die.

Then there are people for whom food is just fuel. They can just ... stop eating. Or eat less. Food doesn't give them any pleasure, it's just a thing they have to consume to not die.
by yawpitch | 2025-07-31 05:01:52+00:00
I have lived alternating violently between bulimia and anorexia my entire life precisely because someone emphatically, and also utterly and destructively incorrectly, believed that to be true.

I am absolutely certain that I know more about what calories actually are, and how badly fitted they are to actually managing our body mass — the best way to manipulate your weight is to change gravity wells — than you do. I can manipulate my body mass at will, effectively, and to a degree you would, I’m sure, find impossible to accomplish. I learned how to take that “skill” to an extreme any community you’ve survived to be member of has not yet approached. Anyone who teaches that “skill” is immoral.

We are not bomb calorimeters. We do not consume calories, nor do we engage, in even the most ludicrously “basic” sense, in anything resembling the simple combustion of our food supply. There are calories in coal and, for that matter, plutonium… try to metabolize either.

The heat potential of what we consume is not relevant to the safe (much less effective) regulation of our metabolic machinery; the nutrient density and distributions in what we consume is, but is very hard to summarize in marketing copy to idiot monkeys that want a simple eat / no eat light.