MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stavros | 2025-07-07 10:06:57+00:00
I only started working on it on Saturday, so nothing very useful yet. It's at https://www.askhuxley.com/ and I want to focus on making something really useful instead of on monetization, so you'll have to bring your own API key, but I'd love it if you wanted to bounce some ideas and use cases off each other. I know what things are useful to me, but I don't know what's useful to other people, and I'd love to get new ideas.

Feel free to email me (email in profile) if you'd like to try it out. Right now it only does weather and Google Calendar, but adding new integrations is easy and the interesting thing is the fact that it can learn from you, and will behave like a PA would, while also being proactive and messaging you without you having to message it first.

I did make a prototype a while ago, which I integrated with a hardware device, and that was extremely useful, being able to do things by me teaching it. For example, it only had access to my calendar and its memories, but I told it (in chat) to check for and notify me of conflicts before adding an event, and told it the usual times of some events, so then I'd say "I'm playing D&D on Thursday" and it would reply with "you can't, you have an appointment at 8PM". This sounds simple for a human, but the LLM had to already know what time D&D was, that it's something I can't do during appointments, and that I wanted to be informed of conflicts, which are all things that I didn't have to program, but just instructed the LLM to do.
by defrost | 2025-07-07 10:08:39+00:00
Invented what, when?

Throughout the 1920s, Paramount, MGM, First National, and other studios had conducted ambitious campaigns of vertical integration by ruthlessly acquiring first-run theater chain

~ https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-film/The-Hollywood...

Vs (say)

The Limelight Department was one of the world's first film studios, beginning in 1891, operated by The Salvation Army in Melbourne, Australia. The Limelight Department produced evangelistic material for use by the Salvation Army, including lantern slides as early as 1891, as well as private and government contracts. In its 19 years of operation, the Limelight Department produced about 300 films of various lengths, making it one of largest film producers of its time.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limelight_Department
by barrkel | 2025-07-07 10:09:38+00:00
The recurrence comes from replaying tokens during autoregression.

It's as if you have a variable in a deterministic programming language, only you have to replay the entire history of the program's computation and input to get the next state of the machine (program counter + memory + registers).

Producing a token for an LLM is analogous to a tick of the clock for a CPU. It's the crank handle that drives the process.
by aaron695 | 2025-07-07 10:09:39+00:00
Good, this is what Aaron Swartz was fighting for.

Against companies like Elsevier locking up the worlds knowledge.

Authors are no different to scientists, many had government funding at one point, and it's the publishing companies that got most of the sales.

You can disagree and think Aaron Swartz was evil, but you can't have both.

You can take what Anthropic have show you is possible and do this yourself now.

isohunt: freedom of information
by NetRunnerSu | 2025-07-07 10:09:49+00:00
Now we have.

https://github.com/dmf-archive/IPWT

https://dmf-archive.github.io/docs/posts/backpropagation-as-...

But you're right, capital only cares about performance.

https://dmf-archive.github.io/docs/posts/PoIQ-v2/
by petesergeant | 2025-07-07 10:11:32+00:00
As a (sort of) Englishman, it's a strange feeling reading about the Normans (or Vikings!) as "they", when in fact it's now "us":

> Then the smile vanishes. There are no more English queens or kings. Only Normans.

Fun fact: due to pedigree collapse, if you have white British ancestors, you most likely have a direct linear connection to every Viking, Norman, and peasant who still has living descendents today. William the Conqueror is your great(great, etc) grandfather, as is Cnut the Great, Kenneth MacAlpin, and Rhodri the Great, etc etc.
by graeber_28927 | 2025-07-07 10:11:39+00:00
Best part for me is it's model agnostic. I liked Claude Code, it worked better for me than VSCode Copilot Agent, but Claude was too expensive, so I rarely used it, and the price/friction felt bad when I did.

sst/opencode I can use with my existing Copilot subscription, and select Claude Sonnet 4 freely. I never hit the limit before, and all friction is gone! If Google ever builds a better model, I can switch the same day, and keep my workflows, configs, etc.

Also, with Claude COde I always felt a little mistrust, since theoretically they benefit from providing a more expensive service. opencode doesn't have this misaligned incentive.
by jen729w | 2025-07-07 10:11:44+00:00
Closer than that in some places. I'm from Sunderland, which is contiguous with Gateshead, and then Newcastle. I can clearly hear when someone is from Sunderland vs. Newcastle, although 'a foreigner' - say, someone from London - might not be able to pick it.

I dare say Liverpudlians and Mancunians and Glaswegians and so on would make the same claim.
by fransje26 | 2025-07-07 10:12:25+00:00
At the moment, your comment is being heavily down-voted for what seems to be a totally reasonable point of view.

In recent years we've went from "completely primitive and segregated Neanderthals", to "oh, we share quite a bit of DNA with the Neanderthals", and "the Neanderthals engaged in complex symbolic thought", as well as "the Neanderthals were pretty advanced artists".

The current article is a further demonstration of that trend.

So it's fair to say that our original assumptions of the Neanderthals were profoundly flawed, and, as we go, we discover that they were different to us by a difference of degree -as you propose-, as opposed to the notion of being radically and binarily different.

In that vein, it is not a stretch to imagine that we were perhaps also completely wrong in our assumptions of their ability to communicate by sound, i.e. mastering languages.
by derhuerst | 2025-07-07 10:13:11+00:00
to give a example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932021_Jammu_and_...

i'm not sure if in this case "only" the 4G network was shut off, but IMO it still serves as a good reminder of when such an event might happen again.

also: https://ooni.org/reports/
Show HN: New Subscription Manager, no manual work, no card/bank info
by rindy1123 | 2025-07-07 10:13:35+00:00
TL;DR: This app, Hawksubber, automatically finds your subscriptions by scanning email receipts - no manual entry, no bank connections needed https://apps.apple.com/app/hawksubber/id6747628748

I've been working as a software developer for almost 6 years but never tried mobile development. I came up with this idea when I was talking with my coworkers about how easily we forget about services we subscribe to. Then I looked into subscription management tools out there and found that most of them require manual input to manage subscriptions, and some require a bank/credit card connection. I thought that manual entry is tedious, and apps with a bank/credit card connection are fine. But what if your bank account or credit card isn't supported?

Then I came up with a middle ground solution: connecting with your mail server, fetching receipt/invoice emails, using AI to scan emails, and extracting the subscription info.

It took a month to release it, struggling with the app submission process and Gmail API verification (which I haven't completed yet).

6 downloads so far, no paying customers on the App Store. There's no Android version yet (I'm working on it).

It's always fun to try new stuff and build software. But this time, I hope someone finds it useful, or at least I can get real users who give me feedback to make it better.
by crq-yml | 2025-07-07 10:13:42+00:00
The difference is that in the exploitative AAA shop, the company pays salary and benefits. In the exploitative indie shop, "something" will happen that means you are also unpaid and have no recourse because the company either doesn't actually have any money or has pulled a disappearing act and made themselves impossible to reach.

Basically, the reason to sign up for tiny companies with no reputation is to give yourself project experience. But it won't necessarily result in deeper wisdom about the process. It could just mean the boss is overconfident.

Going it alone, the obvious alternative, tends to whip game developers into a self-exploiting mode where they crunch really hard on features or assets, when they actually need to step back, make some painful cuts that throw out months of effort, and refocus their design to have better synergy. The push and pull of a team tends to mitigate those outcomes through earlier interventions, but without financing it's very hard to keep one going.

So, yes, the big companies do have advantages. The upside of the indie space is that it is more in line with the rest of the arts than a corporate career path - it allows the process to be something other than a production built off the back of a market survey. But that means a prerequisite is exposure to the arts and to processes that aren't strictly industrial design. This isn't a well-developed thing in the indie scene since the early influences they are working from all tend to be in the industrial design motif: addictive arcade games, sprawling epic RPGs, etc. Starting from these kinds of premises tends to scope the project incorrectly for the available skills, while simultaneously forgoing alternatives that no company would consider.
by kingkongjaffa | 2025-07-07 10:13:43+00:00
> K-Pop is also becoming more widely popular outside of Asian countries (see BTS),

Its probably more accurate to say k pop has already peaked its been popular massively in the west for almost a decade since at least 2016

Blackpink, newjeans, and BTS are all mega acts that are on their nth albums, the trend for kpop is fully established not really emerging just now.

You do raise an extremely good ontopic point about gorillaz being a prior example of a fictional band. I always hated their mtv cribs episode because their fake animated house always scored no.1 on the best of cribs lists.
by kergonath | 2025-07-07 10:13:53+00:00
> I always found French to be very much the opposite in spoken form, due to the 'consonnes finales muettes' and liaison and élision, along with the large amount of homonyms and general colloquialism used in everyday speech.

It is not that different from English in that respect. I found both to be quite difficult compared to e.g. German, which is very regular, or Spanish (which is annoying grammar-wise but straightforward to pronounce).

Spoken English is full of elisions and silent letters, and also full of locale-dependent colloquialisms that take some time getting used to. I remember struggling for a while living in New York and London despite having a decent level in “standard” English. I still occasionally struggle with my mates from Ireland and Yorkshire. After living more than a decade in English-speaking countries I accepted that I will never be able to pronounce correctly a word I never heard before.

Missing liaisons is not problematic when you speak French. It marks you as a non-native but it does not make you harder to understand. They can be often omitted by natives as well, depending on the accent.
by uncircle | 2025-07-07 10:14:28+00:00
According to Google, any physical symptom is indicative of cancer.

According to social media, any personality quirk is indicative of ADHD.

I am diagnosed ADHD from a qualified professional, took medication, found it a great help, and I’ve come around to believe it’s all bullshit. Yeah, you have ADHD symptoms, yeah it’s disrupting your life, yeah you cannot find concentration and motivation. No, you’re not special. You’re not genetically born with pre-frontal cortex deficiencies. It’s, simply enough, an epidemic of massive proportions. We’ve created a society of distracted, gratified, unsocialised lazy squirrels all but interacting with the world through a piece of magic glass; what do you expect?
by DamonHD | 2025-07-07 10:14:40+00:00
Many people seem to discount pollution etc that only affects brown-ish people far away that they personally don't know. And guess in which places these kind of stunts are commonly pulled? You wouldn't plonk an illegally fume-belching data centre in a rich white 'hood even if there was plenty of electricity, because political power is the key lever.

(I am a 'rich' white western man, FWIW.)
by cardanome | 2025-07-07 10:15:05+00:00
Bad technique on unserious learning can still lead to serious injuries like RSI.

Proper technique is also important so that playing is actually fun and not painful. Even just a few lessons on how to properly sit, how to avoid tension in your hands and so on can go a long way. There are video lessons that explain that stuff as well but you need to be very disciplined and really repeat these lessons over and over.

You can absolutely self-learn the piano. People that genuinely don't have the money for a teacher shouldn't let that stop them but it absolutely is harder. Set yourself up for success if you can.
by al_borland | 2025-07-07 10:15:31+00:00
But it would only really work well in a small area, such as a couple friends communicating at a demonstration, where there are a lot of people who may be motivated to participate in a particular area.

If there is a low density area between two people, a message could take a long time to show up. A message from NYC to LA is effectively relying on the messaging being cached on a phone in NYC, that person flying to LA, and then continuing the journey.
by bborud | 2025-07-07 10:18:38+00:00
If I were interviewed by someone presenting me with this task, I would spend a bit of time helping the interviewer clean up the problem and try to get to where they can explain what they want with just words. Clearly.

I’m not sure we’d necessarily get to the part where any kind of solution is proposed, but it would give me a lot of information about what kind of developer culture to expect at this company.

Just by how the problem is presented, I probably wouldn’t want to work for this company. Imagine having to work on real problems with people who demonstrate such poor problem formulation skills.
by sho_hn | 2025-07-07 10:18:53+00:00
The government is subsidizing kpop companies somewhat via funding for arts and entertainment (as essentially all governments in a position to invest in soft power do, of course).

I'm not aware of any military backing, though. Kpop stars occasionally perform at army concerts - South Korea is a country with mandatory service for all young men, so as you can imagine these are popular -, and while I assume these are paying gigs it's also infrequent enough that I doubt you can call it backing.
by shafyy | 2025-07-07 10:20:11+00:00
The issue is that if we go down this path, what will happen is that the gap between access to real therapy and "LLM therapy" will widen, because the political line will be "we have LLM therapy for almost free that's better than nothing, why do we need to reform health care to give equal access for everybody?".

The real issue that needs to be solved is that we need to make health care accessible to everybody, regardless of wealth or income. For example, in Germany, where I live, there are also long waitlists for therapists or specialists in general. But not if you have a high income, then you can get private insurance and get an appointment literally the next day.

So, we need to get rid of this two class insurance system, and then make sure we have enough supply of doctors and specialists so that the waits are not 3 months.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-07-07 10:20:30+00:00
Hit factories have been a thing since the 19th century. Before SAW there was the Brill Building in the US, which was a descendant of the hit factories around Tin Pan Alley.

Electronic production and distribution made the job easier in some ways - harder and more competitive in others - but the music factory system is not a new phenomenon.
by kergonath | 2025-07-07 10:20:44+00:00
> If English wasn't as easy to learn as it is, it would have been destroyed though.

I really dislike this argument. It treats English as a mythical, exceptional language even though it really is not.

English was not particularly hard or easy compared to other European languages. It did not have a particularly hard or easy structure, and orthography took centuries to normalise in continental languages as well. It had the quirk of combining Germanic grammar with Romance vocabulary, but that’s relevant for linguists, not most speakers.

What happened is that it was simplified and adapted over the course of centuries.

French was not displaced by English because of some magical language qualities. The French were displaced by the British somewhat, but mostly by the Americans and language followed.
by LeonardoTolstoy | 2025-07-07 10:21:02+00:00
What does a submarine do? Submarine? I suppose you "drive" a submarine which is getting to the idea: submarines don't swim because ultimately they are "driven"? I guess the issue is we don't make up a new word for what submarines do, we just don't use human words.

I think the above poster gets a little distracted by suggesting the models are creative which itself is disputed. Perhaps a better term, like above, would be to just use "model". They are models after all. We don't make up a new portmanteau for submarines. They float, or drive, or submarine around.

So maybe an LLM doesn't "write" a poem, but instead "models a poem" which maybe indeed take away a little of the sketchy magic and fake humanness they tend to be imbued with.
by fuzzbazz | 2025-07-07 10:21:44+00:00
Can't verify from the low quality photo in the article.

This [1] press release from the Southern Environmental Law Center hints to a possible reason - they may be migrating from small to bigger turbines:

> Aerial images obtained by SELC revealed 35 turbines at the site in March (...) while the company has removed some smaller-sized turbines, it has recently installed three larger turbines

[1] https://www.selc.org/press-release/elon-musks-xai-threatened...
by motorest | 2025-07-07 10:23:25+00:00
> The top-level comment seems to attribute all such people who identify with those symptoms as doing so because of a trend.

I think the only source of disagreement is in the way you chose to frame it in absolutes, i.e., "all such people" instead of "people".

Framing anything in absolutes counts as a strawman argument, because all you need to do to refute it is find a single case, no matter how isolated it is, where it doesn't apply.
by bflesch | 2025-07-07 10:24:05+00:00
Big fan of deno, congrats on shipping.

From a security standpoint it really icks me when projects prominently ask their users to do the `curl mywebsite.com/foo.sh | sh` thing. I know risk acceptance is different for many people, but if you download a file before executing it, at least you or your antivirus can check what it actually does.

As supply chain attacks are a significant security risks for a node/deno stack application, the `curl | sh` is a red flag that signals to me that the author of the website prefers convenience over security.

With a curl request directly executed, this can happen:

- the web server behind mywebsite.com/foo.sh provides malware for the first request from your IP, but when you request it again it will show a different, clean file without any code

- MITM attack gives you a different file than others receive

Node/deno applications using the npm ecosystem put a lot of blind trust into npm servers, which are hosted by microsoft, and therefore easily MITM'able by government agencies.

When looking at official docs for deno at https://docs.deno.com/runtime/getting_started/installation/ the second option behind `curl | sh` they're offering is the much more secure `npm install -g deno`. Here at least some file integrity checks and basic malware scanning are done by npm when downloading and installing the package.

Even though deno has excellent programmers working on the main project, the deno.land website might not always be as secure as the main codebase.

Just my two cents, I know it's a slippery slope in terms of security risk but I cannot say that `curl | sh` is good practice.
Show HN: A browser extension that removes the algorithmic X 'For you' evil tab
by alterebro | 2025-07-07 10:24:21+00:00
"Bye 'For You' " is a browser extension that removes the algorithmic X 'For you' evil tab, it defaults to the "Following" tab instead so you can now follow only who you actually follow without the noise and zombie scroll. It is available both on the Chrome and Mozilla Web Stores to download and it's Open Source so you are free to contribute by adding more languages if you want :)
by CuriousSkeptic | 2025-07-07 10:24:26+00:00
> Why don't LLMs get frustrated with you if you ask them the same question repeatedly?

To be fair, I have had a strong sense of Gemini in particular becoming a lot more frustrated with me than GPT or Claude.

Yesterday I had it ensuring me that it was doing a great job, it was just me not understanding the challenge but it would break it down step by step just to make it obvious to me (only to repeat the same errors, but still)

I’ve just interpreted it as me reacting to the lower amount of sycophancy for now
by rikroots | 2025-07-07 10:24:43+00:00
Developmental prosopagnosia wasn't recognised as a "thing" before the late 2000s. Before that, everybody assumed that being able to recognise someone was just something everyone, well, did. Failure to recognise a friend or relative in the street was seen as an affront, or a deliberate snub. Failure to recognise famous people in films or on the TV was something to be ridiculed. Prosopagnosiacs quickly learn coping strategies growing up in such a world, but those recognition mechanisms are significantly slower: they don't solve the problem.

It is amazing how upset even the most decent and understanding of people can get when they feel you've slighted them in some way. Having someone (you like/respect/love/etc) screaming abuse at you in the middle of the street because you failed to respond to their greeting, because you didn't recognise them and realise they were saying hello specifically to you ... is humiliating. Not knowing why this situation was happening on a regular basis - can you blame me for thinking that it was my fault? That I wasn't a reasonable, decent person? That the things being screamed in my face were accurate?

Hence my relief when discovering there was a label for my condition. Though, sadly, no cure.
by ganonm | 2025-07-07 10:25:22+00:00
It's probably not got the entertainment factor of Guitar Hero, but I'm working on an Android app that connects via Bluetooth/USB MIDI and teaches you sight reading. It starts with individual notes, then progresses to intervals, triads and more complex chords. All of these are exercise based, so you can pick and choose areas to focus on.

The notes are all rendered according to conventional music notation standards as per Elaine Gould's book "Behind Bars". Writing this code was not straightforward, but worth the effort as it's very flexible.

Progress is tracked intelligently, i.e. accuracy and response times are recorded per note, and exercises can be directed towards improving weak spots. This was all borne out of a frustration I had with how long it takes, and how much material is needed to make progress with sight reading skills.

I'm hoping to release it soon (next few months - it's mostly finished), but slightly concerned it's too niche. I guess it will mostly appeal to serious but beginner/intermediate pianists who want to put in the hard yards to develop sight reading abilities to an advanced level.