MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tomhow | 2025-07-14 06:32:10+00:00
I hear you. The problem is it's just the way the world is at the moment, and HN is part of the world.

We don't like the kinds of things that are posted in these threads, and we try to minimize how much day-to-day political rage fodder gets front page space. At the same time, we have to recognize that these are issues that people care a lot about, and if people find that HN is a better place to have these discussions than elsewhere, then maybe we're offering something worthwhile by having these discussions here when they're about major developments.

But the guidelines still apply and if people are attacking others and engaging in political/ideological battle, you can help us by flagging comments or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com to let us know about the worst stuff you see.

We certainly wouldn't want HN to be like this forever (it's no fun to moderate, that's for sure). We'll keep doing what we can to move things in the right direction.
by scrapheap | 2025-07-14 06:32:26+00:00
Starting with a program in memory would require that program to have been in ROM and then loaded into RAM on boot, but space in ROM was at a premium back in those days. However machines of that era did the next best thing, they provided some of the best computer manuals ever which focused on the use of BASIC and had plenty of examples for people to type in and play with.

Also the magazines back then had listings that you could type in (and usually then debug). They even had columns where you could write in with your problems and one of their "Experts" would provide some help or advice in a future issue. Yes you did have to wait a couple of months to see your answer in print, but seeing other people's solutions to other people's problems really helped.
by rleigh | 2025-07-14 06:33:18+00:00
It's more than generous. You can run it with much less resource utilisation than this. It only needs a few tens of kilobytes of flash (and you can cut it right back if you drop bits you don't need in the library code). 32 KiB is in the ballpark of what you need. As for RAM, the amount you need depends upon what your application requires, but it can be as little as 4-8 KiB, with needs growing as you add more library code and application logic and data.

If you compare this with what MicroPython uses, its requirements are well over an order of magnitude larger.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-14 06:33:51+00:00
>Somebody at BYD had an insight - the E-Axle.

A lot of similar innovations ~20 years ago at German and Italian companies like Siemens VDO or Magneti Marelli. The issue is none of them were ever put into mass production, they were just left to rot on shelves while the Chinese out innovated them. It's the exact same story how Kodak invented the digital camera but shelved it to keep its film business alive till Canon and Nikon out innovated them.

>It's an impressive success of long-term planning.

China and CCP really shined at this, contrary to western expectations who thought it would be another USSR 2.0 waiting for it to collapse under state mismanagement and have them sweep in and buy the nation's assets at a discount. Then in a twist of irony, the opposite happened as China turned out to be better at maneuvering capitalism than the inventors of capitalists.

While the western business leaders only plan for next quarter and western politicians only plan for next election, all of which leads to short sighted greed driven "get rich quick while you still can then pull the ladder from under you" decisions on all fronts, leaving the future generations to pick up the tab and try to fix the past mistakes, all of which bogs down development, China moves at lightning speed.
by rixed | 2025-07-14 06:33:55+00:00
I don't know what impress me the most: that you run every single day for 10 years, or that you manage to have a data point for each of those. Not a single day did you forget your phone/watch/wtv? Not a single data loss? Not a single account hijaking/locked out/revoken token? Do you have your personnal SRE team?
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-07-14 06:36:23+00:00
It felt as if they were trying to torpedo their own success in EVs. Even BMW managed to make an ugly car, their EV i3.

Funny thing is, the rest of the industry has now caught up to this particular ugliness, so as it turns out it was futuristic. I really disliked the look of the Nissan Leaf ten years ago, but I now own one and whilst I don't love it's stylings, it's not stand-out-in-the-crowd ugly like it used to be - not because it's changed, but all the other cars have caught up (to the ugly, unfortunately).

I just wonder whether they made them look like 'normal' cars back then would they have sold better?
by bravetraveler | 2025-07-14 06:36:30+00:00
It's not a great line to blur for either side of the business, IMO. Property issues all the way down with power imbalance for flavor. For brevity I'll gloss over the security/liability concerns for BYOD/them...

Here's my anecdote: had to prove I didn't use what was their hardware to create something I released for free. I lost more in frustration alone than that saved. Nevermind the postage.

Time and place matters, as always.

They can provide what they want to monitor. Now: I'll buy a discount device, I won't offer my own.

Quadruple for phones. Say the business wants to call outside of work. It can afford differential, payment for that device, and the plan to connect it. I'll still choose when it's on, human after all.
by beckthompson | 2025-07-14 06:36:56+00:00
haha I remember taking my quantum mechanics class. I thought I finally had "finished" old physics and was finally doing "newer" stuff.

In the library there were some old physics books, looked at one that was like 70 years old and it was covering the stuff we learned that quarter... Guess I have a LONG way to go until I learn "new" things xD
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-14 06:38:40+00:00
> I say this as someone who’s uncle was a rally driver: it’s niche.

Funny enough, mine too. That’s a hell of a coincidence for something that’s “niche” ;)

I don’t think you know half as much about this motorsport than you think you do. That or you have a really distorted opinion of what constitutes as “niche”

It’s multimillion dollar industry for starters.

Car manufacturers specifically make models for professional rally circuits.

There’s video games sponsorships and all sorts.

We aren’t talking about Redbull Soapbox racing here. It’s up there with other popular forms of motorsports like NASCAR.

Granted Rally isn’t as big as F1. But F1s success doesn’t automatically make another sport niche either.

Anything that is a multi-million dollar industry is clearly well beyond the realm of “niche”.

Skiing is another massive industry. It’s definitely well beyond what any normal person would define as “niche”.

You have more of an argument with bobsled but it still gets its spectators come the Winter Olympics. So even if it were niche, it’s still evidence to my point regarding spectators of timed events.

> If we wanted to talk within a sport: cycling has time trialling and road racing. I can tell you the difference in spectator numbers is stark. Like, time trialling has 0 spectators and road racing gets plenty. I love it but it’s really not that interesting to watch compared to road racing

I don’t know enough about cycling to comment on TT vs road racing but plenty of other sports have a mixture of TT and head to head racing and still see high numbers of spectators for the TTs. So I suspect there’s other variables at play in cycling to explain the lower turnout. Possibly because spectators are low to begin with and TT are such early stages that people would prefer to see the final stages instead, which are not TTs?
by const_cast | 2025-07-14 06:38:43+00:00
6 hours per application, plus another hundred hours of leetcode practice.

Because, let's be real, not a lot of us are writing leetcode type solutions in our shitty web devs jobs where we center a div. So we need to practice, and more importantly, memorize. Companies don't want a solution, they don't even want a good solution, they want one particular solution. That requires memorization.
by ankit219 | 2025-07-14 06:39:48+00:00
I can see Gary's point here. He got some stick for this on x, but Gary seems to be right here. One curious thing about this is how both sides have vacated their original positions: scaling people were all about scaling and now they do talk about RL as the next scaling curve but code tool call is an accepted paradigm. Symbolic group was more about symbols first and learning later (marcus himself in 2001 - structured representations are the only route to systematicity).

Code Interpreter + o3 is neurosymbolic AI. The architecture is very similar to a cognitive science flowchart (perception net -> symbolic scratch pad -> controller loop). How we got there is through gradient descent and not brittle expert written rules.
by ianpurton | 2025-07-14 06:40:29+00:00
I don't work at Open AI but I use Codex as I imagine most people there do to.

I actually use it from the web app not the cli. So far I've run over 100 codex sessions a great percentage of which I turned in to pull requests.

I kick off codex for 1 or more tasks and then review the code later. So they run in the background while I do other things. Occasionally I need to re-prompt if I don't like the results.

If I like the code I create a PR and test it locally. I would say 90% of my PR's are AI generated (with human in the loop).

Since using codex, I very rarely create hand written PR's.
by patrickhogan1 | 2025-07-14 06:40:31+00:00
We need to move past these debates or we’ll slip further behind. China is repeating Japan’s trajectory: early products may have been rough, but Toyota grew into an innovation powerhouse. No one questions the Prius’s impact today.

At some point, we need to stop talking about what we did in high school 10 years ago and start figuring out how to make everything we interact with better by tapping into the collective intelligence of 8 billion people.
by ffsm8 | 2025-07-14 06:41:24+00:00
You hear this argument all the time, and I'm sure there is substance to it... But I cannot help but feel that it's misconstruing reality a little.

I think the issue isn't running the established companies in the ground - EVs aren't really that complicated for new brands to bootstrap if China stopped their subventions... It's where these cars are being produced, and that's already China for almost everything, or am I wrong there?

Seriously, if China wanted to ruin these companies it could just pass a legislation that makes production for $established_brand impossible, and that company would be hard pressed for years to get production up and running - and I sincerely doubt they would have enough runway to get through that.
by SkiFire13 | 2025-07-14 06:41:59+00:00
I believe Zig's new I/O is neither colored nor not colored, instead the design is orthogonal to that. You won't be able to make code magically async by just swapping the implementation of Io, instead you'll need some kind of runtime that allows functions to wait without blocking OS threads. Depending on how this is implemented (if it's possible at all) you'll have colored functions or not.
by ropable | 2025-07-14 06:43:10+00:00
While I don't disagree that "team no days off" is probably not the ideal way to promote long-term health, I'd assert that most of the adult population in first-world countries are far more at risk from a lack of sufficient physical activity than from overtraining. Not dismissing your own experience (it sounds pretty bad) and I assume from context that you worked yourself into that hole, but we need to be encouraging people to be doing more physical activity rather than less.
by tomhow | 2025-07-14 06:44:00+00:00
This is a pointless topic to keep talking about. It just comes down to how you define "founder", and the answer is "it depends". It's uncontroversial that he wasn't there at the very very beginning. It's also uncontroversial that he was involved early and it wasn't doing well until he took control. Outside that it's just a battle of definitions and egos, both of which are very boring.
by jack_h | 2025-07-14 06:44:01+00:00
If five companies competing is anti-competitive, then how many competitors does it take to suddenly become competitive and why? What is the significance of this larger-than-five number? Is it the same across industries? How do you derive it?

This seems to rest on the mistaken belief that a corollary of monopolies being bad is that more competition is always better than less competition. If everyone was a competitor in the restaurant food delivery market we'd all starve to death as no one would be growing food. An efficient economy wouldn't waste resources competing over less important things like restaurant food delivery over something more beneficial.
by kennywinker | 2025-07-14 06:44:10+00:00
> In interviews and in online forums, women who took the drug as young girls or initiated a daughter’s treatment described harsh side effects that have been well-documented in adults.

Learning about adverse side effects by talking about their experiences is LITERALLY what you’re advocating for a ban on. I’d say by any basic morality you’re not allowed to cite that as evidence if you want it banned.
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-14 06:44:56+00:00
Put a cap on company size. No organisation can be worth more than (say) a few hundred million. You can still make big and complex things but it'll have to be several small(er) companies working in concert, which is already kind of how massive companies work internally anyway. Less efficient, maybe, but I am not entirely convinced that huge companies hoovering up any attempt at competition leads to efficiencies in the long run. And the more value that can be extracted by smaller players, the more that ends up in the hands of humans rather than pooling R the top. Maybe have a credit for capital outlay so building and operating a factory is better than building a financial war chest, and a credit for non-executive salaries so paying your workers increases your company's headroom.
by shahzaibmushtaq | 2025-07-14 06:45:21+00:00
You collected and logged all 3653 days of data through a device or manually by typing/saving it where initially (excel sheet) after each new run?

The details are astonishing.

Can you tell how you managed all of this so gracefully? Were you working on this idea from day 1? When did you buy this domain?

You even saved and displayed a few dozen live map coordinates as well from 2016 onwards.
by AuryGlenz | 2025-07-14 06:47:56+00:00
Huh. I’m at a healthy weight but I’m taking retatrutide for IBS and it’s working wonders. Very low dose, though. I originally tried it with semaglutide before the weight loss craze kicked off and the first few days of the week were worse and the latter half of the week was better, so that didn’t make sense for me to stay on.
by vineyardmike | 2025-07-14 06:50:14+00:00
> When they post in public, they are not, in their minds, giving people permission to cyberstalk them and build out a profile.

Everyone I know has dove into the social histories of new dates, friends, coworkers, etc. I simply cannot believe that the "normal public" doesn't recognize that their behavior, which they discuss with friends, can be replicated by others.
by bob1029 | 2025-07-14 06:51:18+00:00
Very impressive work.

I've been on an unbroken rowing streak (Concept2) since December last year. Half hour per day mandatory, no rest days. Typical distance rowed is 6.5-8km. There are days where I "take it easy" but I still force a minimum distance of 6.5km regardless of how long it takes. My rationale for using the C2 is the lower impact and the fact that it resides inside a climate controlled building. These factors help reduce the possibility of excuse making.

I found that taking even one day off is all it takes to throw my discipline into a death spiral. Making it a required thing no matter what changes the psychology and game theory. It has become entirely a background concern after day 90 or so. There are days where I have to row and then do hours of yard work. The first two weeks of Texas summer almost got to me. But, this too has become a background concern. I can wake up, row 30 minutes, landscape for 2 hours, and then write code or post on HN until the sun goes down. No naps, stimulants or motivational speeches required.
by kennywinker | 2025-07-14 06:52:44+00:00
The explanation is there, if you want to see it.

Puberty blockers are a huge step. Not one taken lightly. Kids who are unsure, by and large don’t take that step.

I injured my wrist a few years back. Doctors offered me pt or surgery + pt. They clearly advised me that given the low severity of my injury, surgery would likely improve some things while causing other impacts. I declined the surgery.

This is how most medical choices are made. Doctor advises, patient listens and choses best option. For patients who are also minors - their parents are also involved. Every day a parent and child choose between consequences of the intervention and consequences of non intervention. The only difference with trans kids is apparently you and the gov want a say in the choice. It’s not your body, nor your kid. It’s none of your business.
by maxglute | 2025-07-14 06:53:21+00:00
At end of the day, Chinese companies still have to compete with each other which drives price down (so much so that CCP recently stepping in to try to make it less cut throat). Granted strategic industries like auto that eventually coalesce into oligopolies might coordinate / collude to set prices better, but IMO PRC manufacturing is too big for that - 20 country sized provinces trying to build their own champions. What we have seen is PRC companies start climbing value chain, i.e. anker going from entry to premium tier, but every step along the way some other Chinese company comes along and fills out the low end.
Show HN: legacy-use – add REST APIs to legacy software with computer-use
by schuon | 2025-07-14 06:53:36+00:00
Hello HN! Sebastian here from Schub.

We just open-sourced a new project I've been working on, called legacy-use, and I’d love to get your thoughts.

At Schub, we’ve been building agents that automate legacy Windows software (healthcare systems, finance tools, EHRs), the kind of stuff that’s mission-critical but hasn’t changed since Windows XP. These apps have zero APIs and usually require humans clicking around all day.

So we built legacy-use, an agentic API layer for any desktop app. Well, technically any software. Legacy-use lets AI agents control GUI-based software by emulating mouse and keyboard input, with full visual feedback. Just like UIPath, but more error tolerant. It builds on Anthropic’s Computer Use and extends its’ capabilities to old legacy tools on Windows / Linux / whatever systems.

How it works:

- We build the infrastructure to connect to legacy systems (like RDP / VNC + VPNs) and handle the queing - We execute prompts to the target systems and handle all the logging / monitoring - We allow the agent to extract data and expose it as a REST API. - We build in guardrails, so if something goes astray a human operator can be called in

We’ve already seen some pretty fun real-world uses:

- A medical provider automated 30% of their admin work using GPT + legacy-use - An accounting firm hooked it into a 2009 finance app and now generates compliance reports fully hands-off

What excites me: so much of our GDP generating industry relies on legacy software to run their business. And that’s not about to change any time soon as this software is so targeted to their use-case. So for them to profit from the automations that the agentic revolution will bring about, they need to open up their legacy systems. That’s my vision: allow access to any existing IT system so companies can participate in the agentic revolution.

Here’s the repo: https://github.com/legacy-use/legacy-use

Would love your feedback and I'm super happy to chat if you want to pioneer a use case. If you’ve got some old internal apps you’ve been dying to automate, happy to help you wire up your first flow.

Let’s bring legacy software into the agentic era.

— Sebastian
by Nicell | 2025-07-14 06:53:37+00:00
Neat idea. I see why the fluency feature is off by default. It constantly rewords things, adds random quotations, or does something pretty silly https://imgur.com/oVSWmtN

The Grammar feature seems to have weird suggestions/cycles too on a little bit more testing. Curious to see how this improves. A local only, one-time-purchase grammarly alternative is appealing!
Ask HN: Using AI/LLM APIs makes me want to give up. What am I doing wrong?
by moomoo11 | 2025-07-14 06:53:53+00:00
I'm trying to automate a few manual processes we have right now, but I still can't get over this hump. What am I doing wrong?

I am using these AI APIs for actual processing type work, and I am left defeated and somewhat angry if I'm being honest. These AI companies sell us some galaxy-brain vision of automation, but actually using their services is a disappointing experience.

1. The results are never consistent. "Please ensure you extract ALL items" -> [Item1, Item2, Item3, "literally a comment // ...remaining items"] WHAT THE F$#K!! Sometimes it gives me a full list of all items, and sometimes it does that BS. I provided a tool, and half of the time it just grabs the first 3 and maybe it will grab the very last one too (ignoring everything in the middle).

2. Because the results are not reliable, I have to do more post-processing. About 60% of the time, even after post, I have to reject because they don't meet my confidence threshold.

3. The APIs are poorly supported by the vendors.

- iOS has some insane behavior where file extensions are sometimes .jpg or .JPG, etc. OpenAI's API, for example, will return Bad Request because the extension was not ".jpg" so now I have to add more code to ensure that when the user uploads files, I rename the file.

- The docs will say it supports a list of file formats, but then rejects the request because it was not .PDF even though the purpose was "assistants" (which the docs say can handle images). No problem, I'll just convert..

- Dealing with files coming from other sources (G Drive, etc.) where the extension is missing but the MIME type is present.. Again, bad request.

4. We went from "AGI any day now" in 2024, to "_A_rtificial _S_uper _I_ntelligence any day now" today. Can we just relax? Did I fall for a marketing trap?

I think LLMs are great for applications like in Cursor, or for customer support, where it doesn't need to give "perfect" responses because a human operator will prompt it further. How many times have you had to deal with stupid output from Cursor (I'm a power user, I deal with this daily). RAG is a cool application, and there's no real need for correctness or exactness there, IMO. I've got hundreds of my notes that I've fed which I reference sometimes. I get different answers each time, but I don't need them to be perfect.

:q!
by serial_dev | 2025-07-14 06:54:41+00:00
While I didn't run this much, I used to run 50 km / 30 miles a week. My "cardio" was good, but I didn't lose weight because all the running made me 1. extremely hungry 2. too tired to cook a proper meal, 3. have a convenient excuse to eat bad...

"How could I not eat a second donut, I just ran 15k!"

I was not "feeling fit", though, I believe I had low T, and I stayed relatively fat, which is not great for your organs, liver values, heart, etc.

So even if you are able to run 50K a week, you may still be somewhat unhealthy due to poor diet and other factors, and some of them can be improved by losing weight...
by senectus1 | 2025-07-14 06:56:35+00:00
not to mention their vertically integrated factory they're building.. https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1jnv3...

3200 acres... the whole damn thing is vertically integrated. they make everything for their cars in the one giant factory.

Amazing stuff... BYD is destined to be bigger than toyota ever was