MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kragen | 2025-07-05 19:12:15+00:00
I can assure you that both my leg and desk lamps are perfectly real examples. There is a common kind of desk lamp that is even fairly mechanically similar to a human leg, with a knee , tension springs, and a ball-and-socket joint to permit free repositioning in multiple degrees of freedom, and about the same size. But the different design processes involved have resulted in very different designs, and a major reason for that is precisely the use of standardized parts in the desk lamp, but not in my leg, which results precisely from the kind of specialization we have been talking about. I don't see how much less vague I could have been. Are you being sarcastic?
by cyberpunk | 2025-07-05 19:12:53+00:00
It sounds like parent commentator is giving it tasks and trying to make it come up with logic. It’s bad at this. Use it as a translator, i knock out the interface or write some logic in pseudocode and then get it to translate it to code, review it, generate tests and bam half an hour or more of coding has been done in a few minutes. all the logic is mine, but i don’t have to remember if that function takes &foo or foo, or the right magic ioreader i need or whatever…

whenever i try to get it to do my work for me, it ends badly.

it can be my syntax gimp tho sure.
by madaxe_again | 2025-07-05 19:13:00+00:00
Similar mechanisms exist in the U.K. - entrepreneur’s relief/BADR allows you to pay a flat 10% on the full or partial sale of a business you founded, up to £1M - was £10M until 2020. You can of course do similar shenanigans with family to use their allowances too.

You can also of course emigrate to Portugal under the NHR scheme and between the fifth and seventh year sell whatever you fancy and not be liable for CGT anywhere.
by joe_the_user | 2025-07-05 19:13:49+00:00
These thing aren't talked about much. But think the proper way to discuss is that "social status" exists among groups of rough peers and "social position" better describes someone's privileges of wealth, education and employment relative to society as a whole.

Just as an example, a whole lot of dysfunctional dynamics happening lately seem to involve billionaires jockeying for status with other billionaires.

Edit: I'd recommend Paul Fussel's book Class since it involves discussion of these two dynamics.
by phil9909 | 2025-07-05 19:15:00+00:00
Power Shell is not a terminal, it is a shell (hence the name). Yes, you are using Power Shell in a terminal window, but that is a different program. And it is called a terminal emulator because what we now call a terminal or terminal window is in fact a software emulation of a hardware terminal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_terminal

Edit: To make it a bit clearer: You can access your shell of choice (Bash, Fish, Power Shell, Cmd, ...) in different terminal emulators (Windows Console, GNOME Terminal, Visual Studio Code, Kitty, Forceterm, ...). The drawing of the characters to the screen, scrolling, menus and other UI parts are handeled by the terminal, but the actual logic (processing the commands you type) is done by the shell. The shell decides WHAT to display and the terminal emulator decides HOW it is displayed.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-07-05 19:15:04+00:00
Agreed. Nearly all of the arguments I see about this (again, from people who are relatively extremely well off) boil down to "but it's not easy!" Well, you got me there, but it often isn't nearly as hard as people make it out to be, it's just they have locked themselves in to a particular lifestyle and change is difficult.
by fragmede | 2025-07-05 19:15:27+00:00
It depends on how far behind you believe the model-available LLMs are. If I can buy, say, $10k worth of hardware and run a sufficiently equivalent LLM at home for the cost of that plus electricity, and amortize that over say 5 years to get $2k/yr plus electricity, and say you use it 40 hours a week for 50 weeks, for 2000 hours, gets you $1/hr plus electricity. That electrical cost will vary depending on location, but let's just handwave $1/hr (which should be high). So $2/hr vs ChatGPT's $0.11/hr if you pay $20/month and use it 174 hours per month.

Feel free to challenge these numbers, but it's a starting place. What's not accounted for is the cost of training (compute time, but also employee and everything else), which needs to be amortized over the length of time a model is used, so ChatGPT's costs rise significantly, but they do have the advantage that hardware is shared across multiple users.
by kragen | 2025-07-05 19:15:54+00:00
I hope your social anxiety problems improve, but I can assure you I don't share them, as you have assumed I do. It sounds like you also might not understand what the word "liquidity" means in a financial context.

What "cuts" me is not people uttering uncomfortable truths but people confidently spewing total bullshit with evidently no concern for its truth-value or even verisimilitude. It's even worse when it seems to be motivated by partisan struggle, as in this case. Both confident bullshit and partisan struggle are enormously corrosive to the collective epistemic endeavor.
by seanwilson | 2025-07-05 19:16:13+00:00
This feels pretty primitive, but you can write a startup script for each specific project e.g. say one called `project123` where when you run it from the terminal, it switches to your project directory, starts Docker, runs the local dev startup command, opens your IDE, pulls from Git, opens the GitHub page of issues assigned to you, open a browser pointing to your localhost server etc. and whatever common stuff you need to do each day.

Add some scripting at the start to close windows/programs that might be sticking around from other projects, and now you can switch between projects with a lot less friction.

I always try to automate this because you get situations where you e.g. want to quickly fix a typo in a project, run tests, and push a commit, but because you fumbled on some dev step you forgot to do, you burn 15 mins figuring out why the dev environment won't start.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-07-05 19:17:10+00:00
From my research the whole Alvea thing was an Effective Alturism cooked up project that only lasted 3 years and made no money, and then now they are at Astera which seems to be some rich persons plaground where they throw money at researchers to do “stuff”. What that stuff is, I don’t know.

The real moral of this story is you should get rich eccentric friends from the Ivy League elite who throw money at you to do AGI. Like you really think this company of like 40 people is going to crack AGI?

Man I should cross the moat and get some rich friends.
by datameta | 2025-07-05 19:17:15+00:00
Define "good edge compute" in a way that doesn't have expectations set by server-based inference. I don't mean this to sound like a loaded request - we simply can't expect to perform the same operations at the same latency as cloud-based models.

These are two entirely separate paradigms. In many instances it is quite literally impossible to depend on models reachable by RF like in an ultra-low power forest mesh scenario for example.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-05 19:17:20+00:00
If you cheat using an "agent" using an "MCP server", it's still rm -rf on the host, but in a form that AI startups will sell to you.

MCPs are generally a little smarter than exposing all data on the system to the service they're using, but you can tell the chatbot to work around those kinds of limitations.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-07-05 19:17:31+00:00
Have you read the EU cookie legislation? It actually requires you to not lie to users about what your cookies are for. Whatever the reason for a message like this, you can't blame EU legislation.

ePrivacy and GDPR compliance are cheap. Trying to rules-lawyer them to keep illegal business models going, while dodging regulatory scrutiny, is expensive.
by g42gregory | 2025-07-05 19:18:01+00:00
Don't forget QSBS benefits for investors. The exclusion limit is 10x invstment. If you invested $20 million (in a startup valued under $50 million), you could exclude up to $200 million in capital gains. It has to be a person, not a corporation who invests. I believe this would apply to the VCs, since you are getting money from a partnership fund. I could be wrong though.
by benreesman | 2025-07-05 19:18:23+00:00
That's an excerpt the CoT from an actual discussion about doing serious monospace typography in a way that translates to OLED displays in a way that some of the better monospace foundry fonts don't (e.g. the Berekley Mono I love and am running now). You have to dig for the part where it says "such and such sophisticated question", that's not a standard part of the interaction and I can see that my message would be better received without the non sequitur about stupid restaurants that I wish I had never wasted time and money at and certainly don't care if you do.

I'm not trying to establish my credentials in typography to you, or any other reader, I'm demonstrating that the models have an internal dialog where they will write `for (const auto int& i : idxs)` because they know it's expected of them, an knocking them out of that mode is how you get the next tier of results.

There is almost certainly engagement drift in the alignment, there is a robust faction of my former colleagues from e.g. FB/IG who only know how to "number go up" one way, and they seem to be winning the political battle around "alignment".

But if my primary motivation was to be flattered instead of hounded endlessly by people with thin skins and unremarkable takes, I wouldn't be here for 18 years now, would I?
by citizenpaul | 2025-07-05 19:18:34+00:00
You completely ignored my argument. If all the product does is give you razor thin better returns than an average low cost retirement. The money you put in would need to be there for several years at miniumum. The company apparently cannot guarantee they will be in business which means you as a customer are assuming huge risk with little potential return value, in something you are supposed to be minimizing risk as a top priority.

If you want to take on risk there are much better risk return ratios for your retirement money.
by chrisweekly | 2025-07-05 19:18:49+00:00
> "we have gone further than other projects down the path towards production-ready local-first applications based on CRDTs"

This seems like a bold claim, but IMHO Ink & Switch have earned their solid reputation and it wouldn't surprise me if it's true. I agree w/ their analysis and am philosophically aligned w/ their user-centric worldview. So who's going to build "Firebase for CRDTs"?
by trollbridge | 2025-07-05 19:20:01+00:00
The headline is a bit clickbait-y. If your business turns a profit, it’s quite challenging to not legally pay taxes on the profits. Not to mention taxes owed on a salary you pay yourself.

If your business just has losses, I suppose it’s true you can eventually find someone else to sell to who apparently wants to spend a lot of money to buy your money-losing business?
by bee_rider | 2025-07-05 19:20:30+00:00
Writing reviews isn’t, like, a test or anything. You don’t get graded on it. So I think it is wrong to think of this tool as cheating.

They are professional researchers and doing the reviews is part of their professional obligation to their research community. If people are using LLMs to do reviews fast-and-shitty, they are shirking their responsibility to their community. If they use the tools to do reviews fast-and-well, they’ve satisfied the requirement.

I don’t get it, really. You can just say no if you don’t want to do a review. Why do a bad job of it?
by layer8 | 2025-07-05 19:21:01+00:00
Meanwhile:

> Paris officials say they have taken several measures to ensure swimmers can safely enjoy the long-anticipated reopening, including daily water pollution testing and implementing a swim test for bathers. The water quality is "exceptional", said Marc Guillaume, the prefect for the Ile-de-France region that includes Paris. "We are monitoring two bacteria, E. coli and enterococci, and for one we are ten times below the thresholds and for the other more than 25 times below," he said.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-07-05 19:21:21+00:00
OK, I'll bite. Are you a single parent? If so, I agree, but I think most single parents aren't worried about downsizing - they're worried about how to both work and raise their kids at the same time.

If you are in a situation with two parents making a professional level salary, which I suspect is the case given you stated paying $2k/kid/month for child care, well frankly you should STFU. In those cases, that is simply a choice you are making. There are certainly other options (which millions of people do because they don't have a choice), so you're not garnering much sympathy pleading poverty because you have to pay for your children's daycare.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-07-05 19:21:30+00:00
I think you missed the most important thing, more than any of those, if there is no service, then the service cannot delete or deny access to your data.

And related, if there is no service, then the service cannot fail to secure your data.

No possibility of a billing or login error, where you lose access to your stuff because they just think your're not current or valid when you are.

No possibility of losing access because the internet is down or your current location is geo blocked etc.

No possibility of your account being killed because they scanned the data and decided it contained child porn or pirated movies or software or cad files to make guns or hate speech etc.

Those overlap with free and privacy but the seperate point is not the money or the privacy but the fact that someone else can kill your stuff at any time without warning or recourse.

And someone else can lose your stuff, either directly by having their own servers broken into, or indirectly, by your login credentials getting leaked on your end.
by rollcat | 2025-07-05 19:21:36+00:00
> Launching a game like [...] Starcraft 2

They can't even keep the lights on for SC2.

We [the community] have been designing our own balance patches for the past five years; and our own ladder maps since +/- day 1 - all Blizzard was to do since 2020 was to press the "deploy" button, and they f-ed it up several times anyway.

The news of the year so far is that someone has been exploiting a remote hole to upload some seriously disturbing stuff to the arcade (custom maps/mods) section. So of course rather than fixing the hole, Blizzard has cut off uploads.

So we can't test the balance changes.

Three weeks left until EWC, a __$700.000__ tournament, by the way.

Theoretically SC2 could become like Brood War, with balance changes happening purely through map design. Except we can't upload maps either.
by tmtvl | 2025-07-05 19:22:45+00:00
I'm gonna predict biotech. Implanted chips that let you interact with LLMs directly with your brain. Chips that allow you to pay for stuff by waving your hand at a sensor. Fully hands-free videoconferencing on the go. As with blockchain and current LLMs, not something I fancy spending any time with, but people will call it the next step towards some kind of tech utopia.
by atonse | 2025-07-05 19:23:19+00:00
This isn't a power bank, but the EcoFlow River makes for a great mobile battery pack for many uses (like camping, road trips, etc) but also qualifies for a UPS (which means it has to be able to switch over to battery power with certain milliseconds.. that part i'm not sure, but the professional UPSs switch over in < 10ms. I think EcoFlow is < 30ms but I'm not 100% sure).

I've had the River Pro for a few months and it's worked perfectly for that use case. And UnRaid supports it as of a couple months ago.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-05 19:24:21+00:00
I've been building those since 1999.

One of the weird anomalies I've been following is that people consistently overestimate how hard scraping is, in fact the horrible difficulties that people have developing GUI applications work in favor of scraping because, even though your boss is afraid that the target site is going to change and you're going to have to maintain your scraper, the boss of the guy who maintains that site is afraid that projects to make changes to it will get bogged down and besides if they change anything it will tank their SEO.

I am amazed at the poor judgement that scraper developers seem to have. At work I work on a project where you can go to

https://our.site/item/39349109

and get really nice structured JSON and you can even add one to that number and get another valid URL. Instead people use something that downloads our React application without a cache and probably scrapes the DOM produced by it to make something like the JSON they could get just by asking.

Now... Web crawlers are totally vibe codable and people aren't intimidated anymore and are discovering just how easy it is. To be fair, in 2025 it should be possible to extract facts out of unstructured text with LLMs (at great expense) but most you can get structured data out of most web sites with CSS selectors.

I've frequently had the experience of, "I could use an API that gives me 80% of what I want with a really low rate limit if I debug their buggy OAuth implementation" vs "I can change three lines from my Flickr scraper I wrote in 2009 and it just works"

What's bothering me though is that those Cloudflare nag screens that used to be performative are really starting to screw up my crawlers [1]... and the people who are slow on the draw are waking up to the dangers of web crawlers 25 years after the cool kids did. So it is getting a lot harder, which is too bad, because Cloudflare is really locking in the Google monopoly and slamming the door in front of those trying to escape the enshittification economy.

[1] could tell you what I am doing about it but then I'd have to kill you
by danjl | 2025-07-05 19:24:36+00:00
Where do you check their subscription in order to cut off the service when they stop paying? One of the nice bits about local first is that there's no need for logins. Do you install security software in your local first app, which, typically, includes the code in a format that's fairly easy to bypass? Pirating desktop software was a big issue for companies. Are we going back to that horrible world?
by nextos | 2025-07-05 19:25:24+00:00
One of the benefits of EU regulations is that they have brought some order to the dumping of raw sewage into rivers and seas. But there is still a lot of work to do.

Local authorities from lots of EU regions generally avoid measuring water quality after rainy days because raw sewage is still often dumped under those conditions.

Even in Basel, where the Rheine is really clean, authorities sometimes advise not to swim.
by pglevy | 2025-07-05 19:25:56+00:00
That's fair. It depends on the goal. I'm not trying to change careers. And I didn't get that sense from original poster. I'm mostly interested in prototyping or addressing niche productivity issues. But I feel I learn quite a bit from seeing what the LLM does and asking follow up questions or looking things up. I've been around software dev a lot so that helps with knowing what to ask sometimes. My main point is if someone is interested in building software, they should start building as soon as possible. Don't feel you have learn everything first.
by mbreese | 2025-07-05 19:26:10+00:00
As I understand it, the restriction of LLMs has nothing to do with getting poor quality/AI reviews. Like you said, you’re not really getting graded on it. Instead, the restriction is in place to limit the possibility of an unpublished paper getting “remembered” by an LLM. You don’t want to have an unpublished work getting added as a fact to a model accidentally (mainly to protect the novelty of the authors work, not the purity of the LLM).
by charcircuit | 2025-07-05 19:27:37+00:00
I'm talking about the developer having to worry about scaling and not the software. This article is about how the author got a sudden influx of traffic and did not have to worry about scaling anything to support it. That influx of traffic was to his website and then to the various distribution channels of his app. There is a reality that his website would fall over from the traffic and he would have to worry about scaling it, but in this reality he is paying someone else to handle scaling it for him.

If it wasn't local first software and he paid someone else for the backend, he also wouldn't have to worry about scaling the backend. My comment is pointing out that the dichotomy isn't between local first and non local first software, but between self hosting and not self hosting.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-05 19:27:52+00:00
The kind of people who automate away their job won't care if papers accidentally make it through the review process and they won't care enough to stop this. For them, the process is working.

Lazy fraudsters don't pose much of a challenge. If the scientific process works even a little bit, this is just a stupid gimmick, like hiding a Monty Python quote in the metadata.
by danjl | 2025-07-05 19:28:06+00:00
Subscription models are associated with SaaS because you're selling a service. The service is typically storing your data or providing capabilities on the back end. With a local first app, the company is not paying for back-end resources, so there's a mismatch between the expectations of customers who are actually providing the resources on their own computer, and the desires of the company to make money.
by ashton314 | 2025-07-05 19:28:27+00:00
> Inserting the hidden prompt was inappropriate, as it encourages positive reviews even though the use of AI in the review process is prohibited.

I think this is a totally ethical thing for a paper writer to do. Include an LLM honeypot. If your reviews come back and it seems like they’ve triggered the honeypot, blow the whistle loudly and scuttle that “reviewer’s” credibility. Every good, earnest researcher wants good, honest feedback on their papers—otherwise the peer-review system collapses.

I’m not saying peer-review isn’t without flaws; but it’s infinitely better than a rubber-stamping bot.
by miohtama | 2025-07-05 19:29:08+00:00
Sweden is the country where

- They want to block VPNs https://bestreviews.net/sweden-the-next-country-to-ban-vpn-s...

- Their MEPs want to crack down end to end encrypted chats https://mullvad.net/en/blog/the-european-commission-does-not...

- They want to backdoor chats https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/signal-exit-swede...
by wuschel | 2025-07-05 19:29:55+00:00
Could someone with strong background in this area perhaps shine a light on this?

Is this essentially the EU empowering its constituent nation states to deeply compromise security practices? Or is this just basic capability building for mass communication surveillance?

There is little a private man can do against state actors. Of course, I could operate my encrypted backups with my antique Raspberry Pi in a Faraday cage. But … really?

Also, how does this not backfire when taking account third accounts?
by p_j_w | 2025-07-05 19:30:06+00:00
HN’s moderation system (posts with lots of flagged comments get derated) seems to really easy to game. Don’t like a story? Have bots post a bunch of inflammatory comments likely to get flagged and it will go away. There’s no way the people who run the site don’t know this, so I don’t know how to possibly make the case that they are actually okay with it.
by mr_toad | 2025-07-05 19:31:59+00:00
> heart attack and had to be revived from arrest

Worth pointing out that heart attacks and cardiac arrest are not the same. A heart attack (myocardial infarction) is insufficient supply of blood to the heart, which causes damage. Cardiac arrest is when the heart stops completely (and is much more serious).

Heart attacks can cause cardiac arrest (especially if not treated), but the most common outcome is not immediate death. With proper treatment maybe 95% of MCI patients will survive. The prognosis for cardiac arrest is much worse - ~90% of patients experiencing a cardiac arrest will not survive, even if temporarily revived.