MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ygjb | 2025-07-17 17:02:01+00:00
The question you are asking opens up a whole other field of questions. The amount of AI and robotics "in the field" is only going to increase. As that increase comes do we want to continue to build for a human capabilities and limitations, or do we want to build for machine capabilities and limitations.

I think the ethical approach is to build for human capabilities and limitations. We have already seen what happens when we allow business to optimize for the lowest common denominator, and that is why we have regulations that emphasize accessibility. If we allow or encourage businesses to build robots that lack human capabilities and limitations that operate in the real world alongside humans, then even if those robots are assistive in nature (either a prosthetic robot hand, or a full blown humanoid robotic assistant), we will displace or redefine what humans are capable of, and diminish the role of and respect for human beings in our society.
by sooperserieous | 2025-07-17 17:02:18+00:00
As one might expect there are exceptions to this, I apparently happened to be in one of those orgs for 5 years. It was very outward-focused so not as tightly tied to the internal way of life, and was greedily dismembered by the empire-builders when that particular VP suddenly 'retired'. Occasionally we'd get an internal transfer that didn't quite gel with us. Every time I hear about that 'real' internal culture I am thankful I missed out on the bulk of it...
by bicx | 2025-07-17 17:02:37+00:00
I'm 38 years old and other than a couple years of moderate weightlifting with friends in my early 20s, I have never regularly exercised.

This year, I was able to change that. Funny enough, I read "Shoe Dog" for the business story, but finished the book with an interest in running. I think it was just the enthusiasm and lifestyle of running that was pervasive throughout the book. However, I've attempted to get into running before, and it only lasted a couple weeks.

This time, I tried again, but as an old-ass man, my motivations have changed. I just want consistency. I don't have a vision of winning any races, doing 20-mile trail runs, or other big ambitions. I just want to not die of a heart attack when I'm 45. I want to be in generally decent shape.

Laugh if you want, but as a complete novice, ChatGPT set me up with some cushy running shoes (Brooks Glycerins) and a basic goal: run for 30 minutes and try to keep my heart rate between 130 and 160bpm. This is more of maintaining a metric rather than trying to hit a lofty goal. From day one, you can achieve this success metric. It means your getting some moderate cardio. I bought a chest-strap heart rate monitor and linked it to a free app (Heart Graph) on my phone.

I'm now 8 weeks in, and I'm dedicated to the habit more than any goal. I feel a lot better, and by avoiding over-exertion and frustration from too lofty of a goal, I'm able to stay consistent without feeling miserable. I'm able to enjoy the "runner's high" without the cramps and misery that I endured in past attempts.
by singpolyma3 | 2025-07-17 17:02:42+00:00
The problem is that the bar for "commercial failure" is too low. I not only would pay more for a qwerty device but I have multiple times and I've delayed purchases of a device when no qwerty option was available. And I know there are thousands of people like me.

But there aren't hundreds of millions of people like me. And the bar for "success" is selling that many units so it gets considered a "failure"
by colechristensen | 2025-07-17 17:02:44+00:00
Que Office Space: "What would you say... ya do here?"

Not just programming languages, all sorts of tech product websites really fail to answer the two essential questions "What the heck do you do and what does it cost?" while having lots of fancy words and pictures.

Even Cloudflare. Imagine you're one of the 10,000 people to discover what Cloudflare does today[1]. Can you go to their website and get an answer? Absolutely not. "We make websites, apps, and networks faster and more secure. Our developer platform is the best place to build modern apps and deliver AI initiatives." above the fold on their front page. If you don't already know what Cloudflare does, does this mean anything at all? Not in the slightest.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/
by didibear | 2025-07-17 17:03:02+00:00
I believe perfs of previous versions are worse because providers reallocate resources to newer versions. Also because of training data cut-off to previous years. This is what happened between claude sonnet 3.5 and 3.7.

Personally I only use Claude/Anthropic and ignore other providers because I understand it the more. It's smart enough, I rarely need the latest greatest.
by freedomben | 2025-07-17 17:03:11+00:00
Indeed, I despise SEO spammy sites and block them aggressively in Kagi, but I see many sites on there that do have good content, often paired with good SEO and lots of ads. I have blocked sites that have good content due to invasive ads before so I'm not one to cast stones, but I wouldn't blindly use this list as you're likely going to be cutting out some potentially good sources.
by UncleEntity | 2025-07-17 17:03:24+00:00
> In other words, a UPB parser is actually configuration for an interpreter VM, which executes Protobuf messages as its bytecode.

This is kind of confusing, the VM is runtime crafted to parse a single protobuf message type and only this message type? The Second Futamura Projection, I suppose...

Or the VM is designed specifically around generic protobuf messages and it can parse any random message but only if it's a protobuf message?

I've been working on the design of a similar system but for general binary parsing (think bison/yacc for binary data) and hadn't even considered doing data over specialized VM vs. bytecode+data over general VM. Honestly, since it's designed around 'maximum laziness' (it just parses/verifies and creates metadata over the input so you only pay for decoding bytes you actually use) and I/O overhead is way greater than the VM dispatching trying this out is probably one of those "premature optimization is the root of all evil" cases but intriguing none the less.
by BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 | 2025-07-17 17:03:25+00:00
I spent several years with DCF, Document Composition Facility, and markup languages - including one of my own. At Xerox I worked on software to enable DCF output on Xerox printers.

Much preferred Optima to the sans serif fonts.

Printer and screen resolution have a large effect on the appearance of fonts. Low resolution favors sans serif, but Garamond was pretty good on earlier IBM laser printers.
by zekardd | 2025-07-17 17:03:33+00:00
AI-powered storybook generator that creates fully personalized stories—starring your child as the hero. Whether it’s space adventures, magical kingdoms, or time-traveling quests, the stories are unique, beautifully illustrated, and ready in seconds. We call it Storybook Bot, and it's live now at MyStoryFairyTale.com.
by jlokier | 2025-07-17 17:04:54+00:00
With 1000s of bots per month and 10,000 hits on an ecommerce site, with product images, that's a lot of data transfer, and a lot of compute if your site has badly designed or no caching, rendering all the same page components millions of times over. But...

Part of the problem is all those companies who use AWS "standard practice" services, who assume the cost of bandwidth is just what AWS charges, and compute-per-page is just what it is, and don't even optimise those (e.g. S3/EC2/Lambda instead of CloudFront).

I've just compared AWS egress charge against the best I can trivially get at Hetzner (small cloud VMs for bulk serving https cache).

You get an astonishing 392x(!) more HTTPS egress from Hetzner for the same price, or equivalently 392x cheaper for the same amount.

You can comfortably serve 100+ TB/month that way. With 10,000 pages times 1000 bots per month, that gives you 10MB per page, which is more than almost any eCommerce site uses, when you factor that bots (other than very badly coded bots) won't fetch the common resources (JS etc.) repeatedly for each page, only the unique elements (e.g. HTML and per-product images).
by ta8645 | 2025-07-17 17:05:03+00:00
Your pronouncement goes against evidence cited in the article:

"people have reported positive experiences with chatbots for mental health support. In an earlier study, researchers from King's College and Harvard Medical School interviewed 19 participants who used generative AI chatbots for mental health and found reports of high engagement and positive impacts, including improved relationships and healing from trauma"

And that is about the present, not even what may come in the future. Not all therapy is life and death, and there are already signs that it's a good thing, at least in some limited domains.
by NHQ | 2025-07-17 17:05:20+00:00
That would be 2025 logic, but at the time it was not "big textile", it was universal control over industrialization. As if big textile is any different than big oil, all the same owners today as in 1800, owning everything and protecting that claim to rights.

The point however is not that of protecting copyright, but that copyright protection was invented to usurp technology which was not truly invented. This is how controlling history controls the present, for if all roads lead back to "we invented this and own it" then all roads forwards must pay that toll. If the narrative were not true, then the premise could not hold.
by 0_____0 | 2025-07-17 17:05:26+00:00
People have been making end effectors using hobby servos for ages. These servomotors are designed for use in an RC aircraft, they're light, cheap, and expendable.

Industrial needs care not about weight, care less about cost, and care a great deal about capability, repeatability, and reliability.

This is a cool project for a hobbyist but it's not meant to be a serious industrial machine.

Edit: what is with this thread? Lots of very generic positive comments here but not much thinking about what this is actually useful for.
by gus_massa | 2025-07-17 17:06:08+00:00
My problem is thoothpaste. One week I buy one in every visit to the supermarket and then I realize I have too many and stop buying. Untill there is no thoothpaste!

Is it possi ble to add a decay factor, like 1 per 2 weeks, so I can log 4 of them and get an alert on the 7th week (1 before it's predicted to be zero?)

Anyway, I tried with a shared Scheet and as the GP says, it's difficult to keep reality and the log in sync.
by rorylaitila | 2025-07-17 17:07:49+00:00
Yeah I agree with this. My mind is type-oriented, but they are not a panacea. The biggest issue arises when the existing type is too wide/narrow or askew of the requirements. It can be difficult to morph the program into the new necessary types while maintaining backwards compatibility and not confusing the codebase. For this reason, I like gradual typing the most. Start with wide permissive types, narrow where I can.

I feel the allure of over typing most in typescript, because it is so flexible to make really complicated types. I see the mistakes most often when JS libraries move from JS to TS. They go overboard with the typing. The code becomes gibberish.
by Yenrabbit | 2025-07-17 17:07:55+00:00
This is going to be my go-to reference for 'how should I get started with electronics' - getting to see various capabilities (sense things, move motors, flash LEDs) without having to purchase parts while not knowing what you don't know is fantastic. Props for pushing through all the projects - I look forward to seeing what you make with these new skills :)
by prophesi | 2025-07-17 17:08:09+00:00
These days it's often the sites in the results themselves that are either ads or highly SEO-optimized low value sites. You can manage a blacklist and a list of sites to promote/demote in the search results. And manage different "lenses" to have different buckets of blacklist/promote/demote settings tailored for what you're researching. And can also be used for their Kagi Assistant when you allow it to perform web searches.

edit: This is detailed in the article, but leaving this here for those like me who first jump to the HN comments
by dekhn | 2025-07-17 17:08:14+00:00
I have really mixed opinions on whether I want to support the Arduino folks with my money. When I use tools like PlatformIO and the ESP32 ecosystem with FreeRTOS, I begin to wonder if we can evolve away from Arduino, or treat it as some sort of legacy backwards API while porting all the drivers to FreeRTOS with platform-specific details.
by anentropic | 2025-07-17 17:08:32+00:00
I don't think it should need Starlark or a restricted syntax.

You just want some Python code that builds up a representation of the state machine, e.g. via decorating functions the same way that Celery, Dask, Airflow, Dagster et al have done for years.

Then you have some other command to take that representation and generate the actual Step Functions JSON from it (and then deploy it etc).

But the missing piece is that those other tools also explicitly give you a Python execution environment, so the function you're decorating is usually the 'task' function you want to run remotely.

Whereas Step Functions doesn't provide compute itself, it mostly just gives you a way to execute AWS API calls. But the non control flow tasks in my Step Functions end up mostly being Lambda invoke steps to run my Python code.

I'm currently authoring Step Functions via CDK. It is clunky AF.

What it needs is some moderately opinionated layer on top.

Someone at AWS did have a bit of an attempt here: https://aws-step-functions-data-science-sdk.readthedocs.io/e... but I'd really like to see something that goes further and smooths away a lot of the finickety JSON input arg/response wrangling. Also the local testing story (for Step Functions generally) is pretty meh.
by zcw100 | 2025-07-17 17:08:55+00:00
Some of the most valuable companies in the world right now are remnants of the dot com crash, Facebook (Meta), Google, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. By this logic the "AI companies" will go bust and coalesce into a few winners who will go on to become the worlds first multi trillion dollar companies and dominate the economic landscape for the next couple of decades.
by everforward | 2025-07-17 17:09:14+00:00
The IRS agreed not to build software like that in exchange for private companies providing that software for free to people making under a certain Adjusted Gross Income limit: https://www.irs.gov/filing/irs-free-file-do-your-taxes-for-f...

I think they dropped that agreement in like 2019, but I haven't been following.

Intuit spends a lot of money lobbying here, I suspect because they make a lot of money off getting people who qualify for free tax filing to pay for it by either tricking them or making scary statements about getting audited and fined for screwing up a 1040EZ.
by testfrequency | 2025-07-17 17:09:16+00:00
Can someone who uses both Kagi and Perplexity Pro tell me how they compare or decide which to use?

I committed to Perplexity so I can have access to most models I care about easily, deep research, and better online search. I’m happy with Perplexity, but I’ve been Kagi curious for years and now I’m even less sure how I’d approach using it.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-07-17 17:09:18+00:00
> Why can't I log in, see what information employers and banks and whatnot have submitted about my income, add any pertinent information about deductions or additional income, appeal any inaccurate information, then click 'request refund' or 'pay dues', select which bank account to use from the information they already have, and be done?

This is exactly how it works here in The Netherlands.
by vel0city | 2025-07-17 17:11:02+00:00
The point is:

> Even the US Vice President alluded to this happening

gives zero additional weight to the credibility of the claim. He's someone who has openly acknowledged about lying for political gain.

"If I have to create stories...then that's what I'm going to do."

He directly says he will lie to you and make up stories to drive his political agenda. He's not even trying to suggest he's representing reality; he's making up stories, telling fiction.

If any news organization openly admits they're going to continue to just write blatant lies to push their agenda, would you continue trusting that source?

I do agree, free speech is far less protected in many European countries than it is in the US. I don't doubt there are plenty of crazy stories of someone getting arrested for their speech in some places in Europe. But JD Vance telling me any specific story about it and I don't see much else making the same claims, my default is to assume it's probably untrue, because he told me he will lie to me. Why would I trust his statements?
by jjcm | 2025-07-17 17:11:44+00:00
For me the most interesting example on this page is the sticker gif halfway down the page.

Up until now, chatbots haven't really affected the real world for me†. This feels like one of the first moments where LLMs will start affecting the physical world. I type a prompt and something shows up at my doorstep. I wonder how much of the world economy will be driven by LLM-based orders in the next 10 years.

† yes I'm aware self driving cars and other ML related things are everywhere around us and that much of the architecture is shared, but I don't perceive these as LLMs.
by xorcist | 2025-07-17 17:11:48+00:00
> main drivers of the climate change alarm industry

This is clearly dog whistle langauge and not intended to be taken literally, but it is starting to be a common trope and it makes me very curious as to how this industry operates? What's their main source of income, who benefits from it, and how? And what is the supposed goal of it?

Raising the alarm about a conceieved threat could be a way to raise money for more research, which might indirectly benefit those scientists. But we haven't really seen a corresponding massive increase in scientists employed, and even if we did, they would have to find some way to leak money through publicly funded research to their own private enterprises because so far no one has suggested that we pay scientific researchers too much. The way to combat that would be to demand more transparency from universities, but they're already pretty good about that.

It also doesn't match very well what those scientists are actually saying. Which is mostly that the basic science is indisputable since the past century and more research is not required but action. Had the climate scientists been siphoning public money through alarmists schemes, wouldn't they rather say that things are very dire but "don't touch! We need much more expensive research before we can give any concrete advice"?
by MisterTea | 2025-07-17 17:12:09+00:00
> I know it's meme tier and horrible when a guy who watched some videos tells the tradesmen how to do their jobs, but unfortunately I often end up being right and prove them wrong.

Normalization of deviance is becoming common place. There's a lot to unpack here but there is a severe lack of professionalism, responsibility, genuine knowledge, and experience. Now its just a bunch of greedy man children who live by "fake it till you make it" and use every dirty trick to intimidate and mislead the client. Once they secure the job they barely show up to the the job site because they ran off to play with their golf clubs, sports cars and yachts or whatever while a crew of cheap unskilled labor shits all over the job site. And if you call out these morons and challenge them they get angry and defensive because they're the experts and you're a dumb client. Infuriating hubris.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-17 17:12:26+00:00
This is the boring truth for health and fitness: It’s very easy to be top quintile in health and fitness by putting in very little effort. The only requirement is that you do it mostly consistently for a lot of years.

The people cycling between fad diets or doing bouts of extreme Crossift every several years until they get injured or lose motivation have a much harder time with health and fitness, despite putting a lot more pain and effort in during their bursts of activity.

One of my high school friends was always a little overweight and out of shape. Later he thinned out and got into decent shape. Everyone asked him what his secret was, but most people were disappointed with his answer: He said he stopped buying junk food and drink when he went grocery shopping and he started walking a little bit every day.

Everyone assumed he was on some intense diet or getting sweaty at the gym 4X per week. Instead, he was just consistent with good but low effort choices.

EDIT: This was pre-Ozempic. I’m sure today everyone would assume GLP-1 drugs.
by bartvk | 2025-07-17 17:12:28+00:00
Yadea, the manufacturer from the article, also has shown a motorcycle. It's called the Kemper and supposedly should be available in Europe, according to this article from a British importer (dated March 2025). The trouble is, I can't find any tests on YouTube except from Brazil.

These sodium batteries look awesome, extremely fast charging which is important in scooters and motorcycles because it's not like a car where you can just put your seat back. I'm very curious when we're going to get it.

https://www.buckcitybiker.co.uk/post/yadea-kemper-a-top-tier...
by lumbroso | 2025-07-17 17:13:21+00:00
Glad the little political wink landed with at least one reader!

You’re right: Stripping away all ambient context is both a bug and a feature. It lets us rebuild “senses” one at a time—clean interfaces instead of the tangled wiring in our own heads.

Pauses are the first step, but I’m eager to experiment with other low‑bandwidth signals:

• where the user is (desk vs. train) • weather/mood cues (“rainy Sunday coding”) • typing vs. speech (and maybe sentiment from voice) • upcoming calendar deadlines

If you could give an LLM just one extra sense, what would you pick—and why?
by chrash | 2025-07-17 17:13:44+00:00
> also it is amazing to me that shells still exist in more-or-less the same form. dear god can I just get a terminal that runs something like Python directly?

i’ve been maining `nushell` for about 1.5 years now, and it’s basically this. a real programming language that is designed as a command runner and output parser. i have a ton of scripts that parse output from common commands like `git` and facilitate a ton of shell-based workflows: https://github.com/covercash2/dotfiles/tree/main/nuenv
by dehrmann | 2025-07-17 17:13:49+00:00
It is doing, but it's doing one thing: reading. Encouraging kids to read makes sense for building literacy and encouraging imagination, but there's a point where enough is enough, reading the 6th installment of Harry Potter is for entertainment, and they're better off riding a bike, building something, and making friends.

It's the same for adults. We blindly praise reading, but much of it belongs on the shelf at an airport bookstore, it's not particularly challenging or informing, and it might as well be video games or TV.
by jjk166 | 2025-07-17 17:13:51+00:00
Everyone is self taught. School can lead you to water, but it can't make you drink. Every piece of understanding in your head came from your own learning efforts, whether that be trial and error, reading a book, listening to a lecture, spending too much time on stack overflow, or typically all of the above. School provides structure which helps with discipline, which is a serious obstacle for many people's learning efforts, especially when they are young, as well as exposure to concepts that one may not find easily without both curiosity and good research skills. But ultimately school is never more than a foundation to build off of in one's lifelong pursuit of learning. The difference between high and low performance engineers is often entirely based on how much effort they put into continuing to grow.