MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NobodyNada | 2025-07-31 04:18:40+00:00
My eyes seem to navigate by paragraph more so than by line. It's hard to try to overanalyze how I read, but I think "corners" of a paragraph are landmarks that I latch onto, and when I reach the end of a line of text I don't scan back along the the line horizontally back to the left, I "jump" back, using the boundaries of the paragraph to estimate the start of the next line, and continue reading from there.

This means that I have a difficult time reading text with very large paragraphs. If a paragraph goes on for 10+ lines, I'll start to lose my place at the end of most lines. This is infuriating and drastically impairs my ability to read and comprehend the text.

It's interesting to me that you mention preferring a ragged right over justification, because I literally do not notice the difference. This suggests to me that we read in different ways -- perhaps you focus on the shape and boundaries of a line more than the shape of a paragraph. This makes intuitive sense to me as to why you would prefer narrower columns.

I don't think that I'm "right" for preferring wider columns or that you or anyone else are "wrong" for preferring narrower columns. I think it's just how my brain learned to process text.

I have pretty strong opinions on what's too wide of a column and what's too narrow of a column, so I won't fullscreen a browser window on anything larger than a laptop. Rather, I'll set it for a size that's comfortable for me. If some web designer decides "actually, your preferred text width is wrong, use mine instead" then I'm gonna be pretty annoyed, and I think rightfully so, because what those studies say is "optimal" for the average person is nigh unreadable for me. (Daring Fireball is the worst offender I can think of off the top of my head. I also find desktop Wikipedia's default view pretty hard to read, but the toggleable "wide" mode is excellent).
by efitz | 2025-07-31 04:18:48+00:00
And if you have some kind of special case or something, the LLM will usually comment it when it writes it, but you can also just tell it to do so.

The docs don’t rot because you can throw them away and have the LLM recreate them at any time. And they’re not for you, they’re for the agent.

It’s a completely different mindset.
by anovikov | 2025-07-31 04:19:38+00:00
One company we worked for, lost two or free good US developers (lost because post-acquisition earnout period ended for them and they never intended to stay for longer, as i understood), and hired a Vietnamese company. Then they realised it wasn't going well and hired us (Cyprus+Ukraine) company to fix. Then they had to lay off almost all of the remaining US team and nearly went out of business. Not sure which one of the contractors ruined them :D but in any case it didn't go well - they'd better stick with US people.

As an outsourcer with 25-year experience, i think outsourcing is always a bad idea and even desire to turn to it says that something in the company is seriously rotten and it will probably head south pretty soon anyway. It just doesn't work because objectively incentives for outsourcer - whether individual contractor or a company - in fact individual contractor is a lot worse, unlike normally believed - are fundamentally misaligned with those of the client. For a full-time employee with job security and stocks, they can be more or less aligned.
by whs | 2025-07-31 04:19:58+00:00
Seems that Google intend it to be that way - https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/capabilities/function-calli... . I suppose they are saying that the model is good enough that if you put the tool call format in prompt it should be able to handle any formats.

I use PetrosStav/gemma3-tools and it seems that it only works half of the time - the rest the model call the tool but it doesn't get properly parsed by Ollama.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-07-31 04:21:08+00:00
For a small company, a limited TAM isn't a problem (and honestly is probably an advantage) if the overall market is big. Datacenters as a whole are a ~$30B market per year. The last thing you want as a small company is a bunch of different customers pulling you in different directions. By limiting your TAM, you limit the number of problems you need to solve for a few years, and if everything goes well and you start outgrowing your TAM, you can expand later.
by spauldo | 2025-07-31 04:22:11+00:00
I often wonder how things would have turned out if the Open Group had placed Motif and CDE under the MIT license back in the late 90s.

I've always been a fan of the X resource database, and I think it's a shame it never carried over to QT or GTK+. We'd have much better tools for working with it, and the theming possibilities have only ever been matched by Enlightenment. I remember Netscape let you set pixmap backgrounds for every UI element.
by rendall | 2025-07-31 04:22:18+00:00
Are you familiar with the concept of ad hominem? It a logical fallacy in which one does not refute an argument directly - e.g. that if there were mass starvation, we would see groups of skinny starving people, and not singular children with genetic disorders that make them skinny - but rather one argues against the person making the argument (e.g the person making the argument is "random" and not a news source).

No. Do not "have faith" in media. The media gets things wrong constantly. Worse, it prioritizes narrative consistency and consensus over factual truth or ambiguity.
by zerkten | 2025-07-31 04:22:20+00:00
>> It was crazy just how fast it was exploited.

People underestimate the speed, but also the number of pivots that advanced attackers will make. Sure, these kinds of problems are easy to exploit, but with major organizations that employ reasonable defenses, the attackers will pivot through 50+ exploits/machines/layers to get to the target(s). This can take place over weeks or months.
by gizmo686 | 2025-07-31 04:22:33+00:00
How many projects have actually had productive contributers join out of an abstract desire to contribute.

Whenever I've contributed to outside projects, my motivation had been to avoid needing to maintain a fork. And whenever projects I'm a main on have had outside contributers, they very clearly had clear objectives they wanted the project to meet.

The much more important instructions for new developers is how to contribute guidance. Along with generally good documentation and design so they can actually make the changes they want to make.
by protocolture | 2025-07-31 04:23:21+00:00
Suddenly?

Australia used to have energy for protesting this sort of shit, but its all spent.

We used to have a pretty decently funded anti internet censorship lobby. It died in the 2010s.

Since then its just been hit after hit after hit. Any minute justification is seized upon to wind up internet freedoms.

Former PM Turncoat said “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,” That was 2017. And so far its been a bipartisan position.

The truth is that industry used to also oppose censorship. But its been completely captured. Every time one of these censorship proposals come through, Ausnog gets the usual "Should we act this time?" emails, and nothing comes of it.

Its over. Freedom of Communication is dead in this country, instead of our politicians.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-07-31 04:23:31+00:00
Your opinion of the UN, as one person of billions, is noted, and your sharing it is appreciated. That said, their credibility exceeds yours, so your judgement of them is a bit moot.

Now, if you have no more answer to the conundrum than repeating over and over, violate international law, commit crimes against humanity, then you are unserious.
by eastbound | 2025-07-31 04:25:07+00:00
It’s not just software rental. Every online shop or service is turning towards revenue extraction by targeted pricing: Services that look at your IRS records or other public clues, and hop, you train travel, Amazon listing, car repairs are billed higher, exactly at your purchasing power.

Yesterday there was an article saying an AI is used to infer the “right pricing for you”, and suspected it used variables such as your skin color, gender, job and location, probably discriminatory but mangled in a big AI engine.

In fact, I’d sell a REST API for adaptive pricing to mum & pop shops if I had time.
by im3w1l | 2025-07-31 04:26:30+00:00
I think a logic language is not a great fit, because it deals in absolute truths. Whereas news and non-fiction articles are more someone said something and they are usually reliable except in this particular domain where they can be a bit biased sometimes. Also the people they interviewed may have misremembered. Etc etc.

You could argue that all such things could in principle be modelled in logical formulas but... it would be way more complicated than the stated model.

On the other hand it's also unclear what the logical model actually adds. Usually logical formulas are used because they can be manipulated, and inferences can be drawn. But drawing logical inferences from sorta-kinda true statements can quickly become muddy and lead to false conclusions if you don't take into account the uncertainty of the statements.
by lifeformed | 2025-07-31 04:28:01+00:00
This assumes software is a thing you build once and seal it off when it's finished.

What happens when you need to modify large portions of it? Fix security issues? Scale it up 20x? You can throw more tokens at it and grow it into a monstrous hulk. What if performance degrades due to its sheer weight?

I know humans aren't perfect and are capable of writing really bad unmaintainable code too, but this is just embracing that more. This feels like going further down the same route of how we ended up with 10MB websites that take many seconds to load. But yeah it will probably win over the market.
by 9rx | 2025-07-31 04:29:19+00:00
> there is no type of farming that will beat t bills? none?

There is no type of farming that beats t-bills today if you buy the land today. There is a saying in farming: "Buying farmland never makes sense the day you buy it." The land you bought 50 years ago is looking pretty damn good now, though. The economic bet farmers not cashing out (or buying in) are making is that trend will continue.
by jchw | 2025-07-31 04:29:38+00:00
It's a bit tangential, but thinking of Neko, I miss the old trend of little gimmicks like this. I remember for Windows, there were all kinds of weird widgets and toys on the desktop. I've got an old version of Windows XP Plus pack that has these weird desktop dancers that you can have dance to music awkwardly, for some reason. There were also Microsoft's own desktop agents, I assume developed for Microsoft Office for Clippit originally, but also used in XP (Rover in Search) and of course, BonziBuddy. I recall a program called Shimeji as well, though I don't know much about the origin of it; video game and anime fans would post custom Shimeji characters to places like deviantArt. And speaking of Neko, Japan really seem to take well to the desktop mascot concept. If you look around, you can find official Desktop Accessory software sold for various video game and anime franchises that were popular in the 1990s and 2000s, like Konami's Tokimeki Memorial or Broccoli's Galaxy Angel, which would do various things like add mascots to the desktop or even system dialogs, provide custom icons you could replace Windows ones with, or add things like voice clips, screen savers, or desktop backgrounds to use. But, that's almost all Windows stuff. As far as UNIX and Linux go, the X port of Neko is in fact, the only thing I actually do remember exists. (I presume the original Neko program was the root inspiration for most of the other mascot-style programs that followed.) I guess when I used Linux as a kid, I just didn't really care enough to waste time on such trivial, childish things... And on a serious note, while I kind of get why these sorts of things fell out of favor, it did add some whimsy and variety to the experience of using a computer. It would be kind of neat to see a resurgence of that sort of thing. Doesn't have to specifically be desktop mascots or pets, either; there was a gold mine of gimmicky software in the 90s and 2000s.

Likewise, the gradual decline of the screensaver has been somewhat of a bummer. On one hand, yeah, the relevance of screensavers has fallen off so much that I hardly noticed when they were gone... but again, it added some fun to computing. Hard not to miss it a little.
by freeourdays | 2025-07-31 04:30:05+00:00
I have no intention of letting it slowly turn into junk; I’m working hard to make it better. The site’s purpose is to gather the tiniest needs and faintest voices from every corner of each community, hoping to spark inspiration so someone might step up and meet those needs. There’s no guarantee anyone actually will—that part is for everyone to judge on their own.
by mchiang | 2025-07-31 04:31:19+00:00
We work closely with majority of research labs / model creates directly. Most of the times we will support models on release day. There are sometimes where the release window for major models are fairly close - and we just have to elect to support models where we believe will better support a majority of users.

Nothing out of spite, and purely limited by the amount of effort required to support these models.

We are hopeful too -- where users can technically add models to Ollama directly. Although there is definitely some learning curve.
by magicalhippo | 2025-07-31 04:31:34+00:00
I think when .Net 10 is released it's a good time to give it a whirl.

New in the upcoming release[1] will be the ability to run C# files as if they were scripts[2], ie without an explicit build step. Should lower the barrier to just fooling around.

I also like how they've gone away from the "everything must be an object" style ala Java, and allow top-level statements so it reads more like C/C++. It's just sugar, but for smaller programs that really makes a difference IMHO.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44699174

[2]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-run-...
by coder543 | 2025-07-31 04:31:40+00:00
GLM 4.5 has a new/modified architecture. From what I understand, MLX was really one of the only frameworks that had support for it as of yesterday. LM Studio supports MLX as one backend. Everyone else was/is still developing support for it.

Ollama has the new 235B and 30B Qwen3 models from this week, so it’s not as if they have done nothing for a month.
by brianpan | 2025-07-31 04:32:07+00:00
I really like the recent HN post "Enough AI copilots, we need AI HUDs" (geoffreylitt).

I don't think it's stretching the airplane analogy to say: just because you can run the autopilot doesn't mean you are qualified to fly a plane and doing so might be irresponsible. Vibe coding (or vibe whatever with AI) too often overlooks the experience and expertise needed to do the thing.

See also the Tea app hacks.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705445
by fastball | 2025-07-31 04:32:32+00:00
Don't know what you're on about. I use Figma to design UI/UX all the time and have found great value in the RTC features. In fact like you say, I was using Sketch before (and tried Framer for a while), but Figma's collaborative features have been invaluable and so we use it for everything.

Jumping from "I don't need the features this popular software provides" to "Figma is one of the worst evils of capitalism" is a ridiculous leap.
by alfalfasprout | 2025-07-31 04:35:32+00:00
it's funny, I feel like I'm the opposite and it's why I truly hate working with stuff like claude code that constantly wants to jump into implementation. I want to be in the driver's seat fully and think about how to do something thoroughly before doing it. I want the LLM to be, at most, my assistant. Taking on the task of being a rubber duck, doing some quick research for me, etc.

It's definitely possible to adapt these tools to be more useful in that sense... but it definitely feels counter to what the hype bros are trying to push out.
by stephenr | 2025-07-31 04:37:03+00:00
I use the terms "LLM" or "AI" (as in, "I used an LLM/AI to write a <insert task> helper") as a quick hint to ignore articles/links/etc in the same way I've previously use the terms "You won't believe what happened next" or "they hate this one trick" to avoid spam bait article links, or "shocked face overlay" to avoid bullshit YouTube videos.

So, thankyou for that AI techbros. Keep telling us loudly and proudly that you're using "AI" to write your slop, it makes it much easier to know what to avoid when skimming titles.
by gotten09 | 2025-07-31 04:38:00+00:00
this is pretty awesome, on the cloud env though I got the error: Error: AIProviderError: AI provider failed to generate text. Timeout while downloading https://playmatic-screenshots.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com

Also the task I gave it this was the result:

I was unable to retrieve any live fare data because both airline sites became unworkable in the remote session (xxxx selectors would not stay open; xxxxsearch could not be completed before the session ended). Below is a blank comparison table you can fill in once you gather the prices manually:

is that the current state of best in class computer use agents? or is more of a we need to modify it until it is good for our use case?

trying to provide helpful feedback and honest curiosity, this is awesome work
by QuiDortDine | 2025-07-31 04:38:10+00:00
I see that you're not alone in your position clearly, but still, this is such a strange take to me. Do people not seriously not see, nay, instinctively understand the ontological difference between the difference between using code someone no longer understands and deploying code no one ever understood?

I'm not saying the code should be up to any specific standards, just that someone should know what's going on.
by lmm | 2025-07-31 04:38:50+00:00
> An unreadable 100K loc program backed by 50K tests, guaranteeing behavior to the client requirements. Cost: $50K of API tokens

As my team has spent the past several months trying to explain to upper management, you can't guarantee that the program does what the client wanted just by adding more tests.

If the AIs ever become capable of reliably producing what the client wanted, they will win. But I'm not convinced they will. They might be able to produce what the client asked for, but programmers have known for decades that that's pretty much useless.
by imilev | 2025-07-31 04:39:30+00:00
So in order to keep the diagram up-to-date with commits we use the git difference of python files. An agent is tasked to firstly evaluate if the change is big enough to trigger a full clean analysis. If the change is not big enough we start doing the same thing component by component recursively and update only components which are affected by the new change.

But comparing the control-flow-graph probably makes more sense for a big refactor commits, as it might blow the context. However so far we haven't seen this be an issue.

Curious to hear what was your approach when building diagram represnetation!
by pjmlp | 2025-07-31 04:39:51+00:00
Yeah, and then at BUILD 2025 session, he ended up explaining how they had to rewrite all the data structures, due to the less capable type system from Go versus Typescript.

So the gain isn't as much as what is being sold.

Meanwhile Azure has no issues using AI based translation to port C++ projects into Rust, which they could have done in a similar way to port into C#.

Also, Go has a less capable tooling as C# for WebAssembly, due to Blazor efforts, the team has invested quite a lot into it.

It remains questionable what will they do for the in browser playgrounds and editors use cases.
by j45 | 2025-07-31 04:39:56+00:00
I think welcoming another stream of users, in addition to develoeprs is a good idea.

Lots of people trying to being, and many with Ollama, and helping to create beginners is never a bad thing with tech.

Many things can be for both developers and end-users. Developers can use the API directly, end users, have more choices.
by ggm | 2025-07-31 04:41:47+00:00
It should be borne in mind that the target of this polemic is the BBC. The actual facts of issues regarding aide distribution in Gaza are a casualty of war, the spectator could have chosen almost any vehicle to hang this story on.

I don't personally believe the GHF are either independent, or capable, but that isn't the point: The BBC of course should keep an open mind about it, and I find this kind of editorial intervention abhorrent. But, I also find the spectator a rag I wouldn't use to wipe my bum with, so there's a bit of a conflict in my heart.
by julik | 2025-07-31 04:42:39+00:00
I love the series (and the "wat?" talk, of course - somewhat less the whole TypeScript desiderata of Ok, computer).

And yes, it is nicer to avoid expensive tests if you can help it. It has been my experience, however, that if you can use a slightly-more integrated test - which touches more parts of the system - you are likely to find more regressions and much quicker than if you subscribe to the notion of "testing one function with collaborators all around". It is academically very appealing, and your tests will be quite fast indeed - but they will be much harder to read and understand, and are always one "and_call_original" away from being useless.

As to decoupling from a framework in an ecosystem where, realistically, there is only one framework - and where, realistically, there are no deployment targets except for that framework - I don't believe this to be useful, sorry.

Yes, you can deploy your code into a cloud function (both AWS and GCP do Ruby cloud functions and you can get quite a bit of mileage out of it) but this is not an architecture you are likely to plan for - or need - until quite, quite late into the growth of a codebase. And even then - those runtimes have different constraints, so you may want to build a module which is accessible both from Rails and from such a cloud function.

What I don't like is the conversation of "you must decouple to decouple", which is not a way to advocate for something at all.
by magicalhippo | 2025-07-31 04:43:04+00:00
> I’ve been kicking around the idea of something like Lean (maybe even just Lean?) to rewrite news and other non-fiction articles, treating statements as theorems that need to be proven.

I found I got much better at writing non-fiction after having math at uni. I would help proof-read essays and other hand-ins by my SO and sister, and apply similar rigor as you mention. Stuff like "you show C follows from B here, but you haven't actually given an argument for why B follows A, so you can't then claim C follows from A".

It's tempting to say that with LLMs this seems like a plausible task to turn it into a program, but the hallucination issue puts a damper on that scheme.
by theaihomegirl | 2025-07-31 04:44:16+00:00
I loved building alongside some talented and creative people this past weekend!

I created FanFunnels by the AI Homegirl. Outside Lands artists can instantly generate a QR code that they'll put on display during their set that allows fans to get a free exclusive from the artist, such as a free song. In exchange, the fans give their email and snap a picture real quick. It takes less than 30 seconds - the fan gets a song, the artist gets the fan's direct info + organic UGC content, and FanFunnels automatically sends out their free song, instantly nurturing the fan.

This solves the problem of artists not being able to capture their fans data (often due to privacy policies that venues and ticketing platforms have), easily collect and organize fan photos, and do it all on one simple platform (FanFunnels) in minutes.