MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by roryirvine | 2025-07-17 16:52:53+00:00
The hobbled N770 with broken BT tethering and a CPU that appears to have been selected primarily to be just a little too underpowered to run a full SIP client. The never-ending uncertainty over the pivot to Meego. The "two bald men fighting over a comb" war between UIQ and Hildon. The cycles of cancellation / un-cancellation / re-cancellation affecting both S80 and S90.

As an outsider, it seemed utterly clear at the time that the Maemo devices should have been the focus... but I realise how difficult a wrench that would have been for those who had sunk so much time and effort into Symbian.

Elop was right about the burning platform, but it was far too late by that stage.
by EA-3167 | 2025-07-17 16:52:56+00:00
Wait until you hear about the EU! https://e360.yale.edu/digest/europe-russia-ukraine-war-natur...

Hell, a Spanish company just violated export sanctions and sold a machine used to make artillery barrels to Russia, and the Spanish government just shrugged. I'm not sure why Kagi has to be squeaky clean down to the last dollar when our own governments don't even have to meaningfully enforce their own sanctions.
by lapcat | 2025-07-17 16:53:09+00:00
> I would wager you are not the norm among the exclusively self-taught crowd

What is the norm?

> the self-taught people I interview

That's another small and unrepresentative group, possibly much smaller than self-taught developers who visit HN. In total, how many self-taught people have you interviewed? Either way, there's selection bias.

> a few self-taught people that are going to stand out, but they are the visible part of the iceberg, and if you advise someone to go self-taught, most likely they'll end up underperforming compared to someone who's gone to university.

That's kind of the point, though. Who would advise someone to go self-taught? That would be strange advice. There's definitely survivorship bias in self-taught engineers who have managed to make it in the tech industry, which is exactly why you should pay attention to them: they've successfully overcome the odds and obstacles. The % of self-taught who get to that point is likely much smaller than the % of university-taught. As you say, "being self-taught is harder."
by barbazoo | 2025-07-17 16:53:10+00:00
> When I first switched, I would often click the button to run the search on google for queries that weren't immediately giving me what I wanted

Same, I found it took a while to adjust my searching too. Kagi is much more sensitive to spelling things wrong. Google gets around that by only using the search query as an inspiration but that also introduces a lot of fuzziness in the result IMO. With Kagi, you get as much out of it as you put in is what it feels like to me. It's slightly harder to find things sometimes, sure, but at least we're using a product instead of being the product and that adds enough value for me for this to be the better deal overall.
by teitoklien | 2025-07-17 16:53:12+00:00
you’re courses you speak of.

you’ll need it for consoling if most people dont wake up and realise that the masses are slowly losing all of their freedoms from both the extreme left and extreme right in democracies globally.

Democratic backsliding is a fact that’s happening in all major countries. No media literacy course will save us all from it, if we don’t call out these issues and make it unpopular to do these things by governments.
by J_McQuade | 2025-07-17 16:53:43+00:00
Having used Scala and TypeScript a lot for work over the last ~5 years, I think I'm going to say static typing. It's lunacy. Computers mostly don't work in types, my brain usually doesn't work in types, and only a small subset of the problems I work on really work in types.

The amount of modern languages that think they can solve everything in the type system boggles my mind.
by rglullis | 2025-07-17 16:53:57+00:00
> people can engage with technology for all kinds of reasons — curiosity, aesthetics, nostalgia, minimalism, fun

Fine! The same thing could be said about retrocomputing enthusiasts. If that's only a hobby, go on and be merry. But don't go around acting like this hobby is an actual, practical solution to the problems of the modern web.

This whole thread started because I asked "you are looking for a way to get rid of the annoying issues of the modern www. What is the solution that solves this with the least amount of work?", and you and 3 other people are insisting that alternative A is the best one, but as the conversation went on you are resorting to "I don't owe you a manifesto to justify it".

Well, guess what? If you are willing to make the extraordinary claim that developing a whole protocol and applications to replace HTTP browsers is better than taking 5 minutes to install any decent browser, then yes, you kind do owe a reasonable explanation, and "I use it because I enjoy it" is. not. that.
by raydev | 2025-07-17 16:54:06+00:00
> much of this effect is an error, or at least a far-less-than-ideal effort

No, the vast majority of people use their phones as video viewers, increasingly so after the rise of TikTok. I have family members in their 30s who don't have laptops or TVs, all media is consumed through their phone, and for most kids/teens across the world it is their primary video consumption device.

The average person is trying to maximize screen size relative to portability. And the market is everyone on earth. That's it.
by Charlieholtz | 2025-07-17 16:54:59+00:00
Ah yeah! Which IDE do you use?

> It'd be great to change the default branch used for creating new workspaces. Yeah you can actually change this now! If you click the repo name you can make changes to the "setup script". If you added `git checkout -b "branch name"` it would run that on every new workspace instance.
by mossTechnician | 2025-07-17 16:55:05+00:00
Kagi is still partnered with Yandex[0], but they removed a list of sources they used. When asked if the list could be restored, Vladimir Prelovac replied "Is there any particular reason you are asking for this? More context will help us better understand the need."[1]

[0]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...

[1]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/252-show-source-of-results/49
by jwr | 2025-07-17 16:55:28+00:00
This kind of whataboutism is what leads to the current sad state of the world. One can look at any moral choice issue, say "but what about… [insert something here]" and then proceed to ignore it and do nothing.

I choose to take moral stands. Yes, it might be insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but I still choose to do so.

Having read the (rather disappointing) responses: all of them create some sort of artificial construct and result in doing nothing. I cannot do nothing.
by beezlebroxxxxxx | 2025-07-17 16:55:46+00:00
It looks like he was using a very long and rather narrow kayak. Those are easier to tip. I once used a friend's friend's sprint kayak. I've never tipped a kayak, but it was very easy to tip the sprint kayak. Any waves and that thing was almost unusable.

Most recreational kayaks are, like you suggest, almost idiot proof and can only be tipped if you're really trying.
by fiddlerwoaroof | 2025-07-17 16:55:57+00:00
I knew .git can be a normal file because of worktrees. But most of the weird states have to do with the working tree not the repository. Even rebasing isn’t weird as far as the file formats go: it just is replaying commits on top of a new base commit. Since my goal was basically to implement enough of git to serve files from a git repository as a website, the actual task was fairly small.
by tiagod | 2025-07-17 16:56:00+00:00
I took a look at the linked block list[0]. There's a lot of junk in it, but I'm also seeing a lot of sites that have, in my opinion, pretty decent content.

My approach with Kagi is just to block SEO spam when it shows up in my results, but I don't think good SEO means it's a bad site with no useful results.

[0] https://paste.flamedfury.com/flamedfury-kagi-block-list
by gtani | 2025-07-17 16:56:07+00:00
No idea about any of these channels but there are some on YT that give good global macro coverage:

- Vix, IV vs realized/historical

- option flows

- market makers gex, skews, (1st 3 probably best src of edge)

- /NQ and /ES trading volume,

- bond yld curve, credit spreads, how much prim dealers hold after long auctions, PBC holdings

- metals

- geopolitical: Europe / middle East / China/ South America

- energy

- currency

- commodity prompt spreads, contangos
by proee | 2025-07-17 16:56:08+00:00
This is actually a very sad comment to read. My childhood was spent buying up every Forrest Mims circuit book I could find at my local Radio Shack, and then trying to figure out which circuits I could bring to life given a very limited amount of components I could source.

I'm not sure what it would take to make these kits more exciting, because I find them ABSOLUTELY AMAZING.

I could rattle off 100 cool projects to make with these dev kits, especially coupled with a 3d printer.
by wavemode | 2025-07-17 16:56:21+00:00
Well, that's obviously because the people using the software aren't the customers. The customers are the ones signing the checks.

I actually think it's the right approach for a tech business - your main landing pages should market towards the buyers and then you can have more technical documentation pages for the users. As an example from your comment: https://tailscale.com/kb/1151/what-is-tailscale
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-07-17 16:56:40+00:00
This part stood out to me too.

I got into spearfishing years ago, and I knew I wanted to see under water and eat fish, but wasn't really prepared for how hard it is and how common it is not to eat fish.

Like the author, despite numerous failures, bad choices, and sometimes suffering very cold British Columbia ocean temperatures, I kept showing up. My dives went from 7 or 8 metres to 10, to 15, to 20, and sometimes deeper. My breath hold went from a panicked 30 seconds to 2 minutes.

Initially when I saw a legal fish I'd take it every chance I got, because I could be certain I wouldn't find another. These days when I get in the water, due to that sort of immersive calibration, I find a lot more fish. Ironically, I don't shoot any of them despite being so much more capable of it now.

The ocean is such a complex, powerful, and simultaneously soothing yet deeply engaging environment. It gets incredibly cold, and it works with such incredible force that you constantly have to operate on its terms rather than your own. The qualia of the medium and your surroundings is so rich, it almost feels like a part of you. The same as a tool in your hand becomes an extension of you, the ocean becomes one as well, yet completely out of your control. It's really beautiful.

Kayaking is similar in how you're largely at the whim of this incredible body of water. Your success depends so much on how you read it, understand it, and respond to it accordingly.

I think humans are meant to be deeply engaged in environments like this. The easier we make it, the less we need to care about our environments (such as with this 21°, still, quiet room I'm in), the less engaged and stimulated we are, then the less we're challenged to adapt and endure in ways we probably should.
by sophacles | 2025-07-17 16:56:52+00:00
the definition of self-taught: having knowledge or skills acquired by one's own efforts without formal instruction

I think you're engaging in some weird goal-post moving. The phrase exists to highlight the difference between "i had someone else tell me all the things I should know and let them give me that knowledge" (e.g. college or a boot camp) and "i went out and found resources and did experiments so that I could learn what to do without that guidance". It is not "i discovered everything for myself by first assuming some principles and then rebuilding the whole field for myself".
by zero_k | 2025-07-17 16:57:25+00:00
I'm also with Sparkasse and it's the worst. Their digital systems and their technical understanding is the bottom of the barrel. On the other hand, the "most digital bank" in Germany, N26, a so called "neobank" has laughable security [1]. It's a huge mess over here. I used to also bank in Singapore, the difference is night and day. Fun story: Sparkasse has an integration with a stock brokerage, and the stock charts are PNGs generated at the backend. It's literally 1995-level HTML usage, One can only laugh.

[1] https://archive.org/details/33C3-Shut_Up_and_Take_My_Money
by spoonsort | 2025-07-17 16:58:16+00:00
Well said. The company is actually more focused on earth moving, but the same arguments you make apply there, if not even more. Earth moving is a very exhausting job that most would be glad to have automated. A little known fact is that you actually get boiled no matter what machinery you use in there on the black dirt mid day, and it's not totally safe; your machine could roll over if you aren't at the height of your awareness.
by SaberTail | 2025-07-17 16:58:35+00:00
Currently, domain specific languages written in YAML. I see these everywhere, from configuring individual utilities to managing giant architectural stacks. People get in their heads that YAML is more easily written and read than code, and so instead of just writing the code to do something, users have to deal with a bunch of YAML.

The drawbacks of YAML have been well-documented[1]. And I think it's worse now in the LLM era. If I have a system that's controlled via scripts, an LLM is going to be good at modifying those scripts. Some random YAML DSL? The LLMs have seen far fewer examples, and so they're going to have a harder time writing and modifying things. There's also good tooling for linting and checking and testing scripts to ensure LLM output is correct. The tooling for YAML itself is more limited, even before getting into whatever application-specific esoteric things the dev threw in.

[1] https://noyaml.com/
by tracker1 | 2025-07-17 16:58:55+00:00
I'm all for cutting the military spending to less than half... that said, it's still much smaller than entitlement spending at this point... there needs to be a lot of effort to reduce fraud and increase competition in medical/pharma space. Why there aren't licensing and dual sourcing requirements for medications is beyond me. Let alone allowing commercials that nowhere else in the world allows.
by Chief_Searcha | 2025-07-17 16:59:11+00:00
Thank you, I appreciate it. For local pages I do have that planned, it will take a bit of time to make a native local index due to many problems such as businesses closing and not reporting it. This is one area that Google has such a strong advantage - user submitted content - and one I would need to find a way to automate. I have various plans and maybe one of them would work. The other option is to outsource it to an API, at least to buy time.
by itake | 2025-07-17 16:59:14+00:00
While I run a home VPN, I think using it exclusively runs into issues:

- frequently capture portals only permit access for 1-2hr. Your internet get cut off, then you have to realize its not a temporary issue, but portal issue, then you close the vpn, try to find the captive portal, and re-auth.

- latency is too high for my home vpn when I travel in asia
by giraffe_lady | 2025-07-17 16:59:16+00:00
I've come to believe through experience that hindley milner and its derivatives are the sweet spot. I shouldn't have to tell the compiler the types, and I shouldn't be attempting to implement business solutions in the type system. It should just know what is already there and tell me it when it can't reconcile that with what I'm adding, because that indicates a problem with my reasoning. The constraints this places on the language semantics end up being neutral-to-positive as well.
by o140445 | 2025-07-17 16:59:20+00:00
For anyone playing "Steal a Brainrot" on Roblox:

We just launched a new fan-made wiki at https://stealabrainrotwiki.com/ It includes: - Brainrot types & collection list - How to play the game & tips - Memes, jokes, and brainrot community stuff

Still early, but feel free to help us build it together!
by piotraleksander | 2025-07-17 16:59:23+00:00
Inspired by interactive blog posts: https://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/potluck/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43773813

I’m building a publishing stack for “vibe blogging”, think Bolt.new x Substack. It consists of:

Authoring - users write Markdown, LLM turns it into interactive MDX post

Sandboxing - MDX with generated widgets is rendered in e2b sandbox

Pipelines - generation & publishing (sanitization, etc) pipelines run on Inngest (their docs won me over Temporal)

Distribution - via subdomain/paid custom domain. Stripped version of the post for repurpose as a newsletter (Inngest Workflows)

I’d love feedback on:

1. Does it make sense to go mobile first and focus on ‘interactive micro-blogging’ (Twitter with widgets)?

2. I consider launching in price sensitive, but creator-rich markets like India, Brazil and Mexico to build momentum. Anybody has experience with that?

All thoughts welcome!
by EA-3167 | 2025-07-17 16:59:27+00:00
Happily the state of the world isn't the result of recognizing the state of the world, and attempting to avoid hypocrisy. Instead the world is a complex system that defies easy discussions on social media, motivated by overly simplistic and selectively applied moralism.

For example I'm able to compare the impact on the world of Google, AdSense, etc... and Kagi's partial reliance on Yandex. Something tells me that's going to be taken as another case of "whataboutism" rather than realism.
by fhd2 | 2025-07-17 16:59:28+00:00
Other people's AI generated code. They don't understand it, it's over engineered, it looks right at first glance but turns out to be full of subtle bugs. At least that's pretty much universally been my experience.

What could be done about it? Hard to tell. I think actually productive use cases of generative AI for software development exist, I spend a lot of time with Claude every day. But I don't generate code, examples maybe, mostly I use it as a first (but not only) tool for research.

I think a lot of tooling could be built around generative AI providing reviews for human code, rather than it generating code for humans to review.

I'm pretty confident we'll get to a good place with a set of good practices and good tooling. But right now, it's pretty terrible, and my only solution at the moment is to not work with anyone who AI generates code. Luckily I'm in a position to enforce that, not everybody is.
by nullc | 2025-07-17 17:00:07+00:00
> A human may also possess malevolent tendencies that a silicon intelligence lacks.

Sure but we're _generally_ more guarded against "Pastor is just a perv that wants to see me nude" then we are against "Chatbot wants to turn me into the unibomber because it was trained on fictional narrative arcs and it makes its decisions by a literal random number generator, and I just rolled a critical fail".
by jolmg | 2025-07-17 17:00:13+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?

There's no reason why you can't set Python to be your shell. Here you go:

sudo usermod -s /usr/bin/python $USER su $USER

You'll likely find that it's not that great as a shell language. Shell languages are made to be primarily used interactively. With Python, you'll have a lot of extra syntax to type all the time. They're also made to glue other programs together. I don't think you'll find it as convenient to use the output of one program as the input of another in Python. Job control will also not be as convenient.
by kenjackson | 2025-07-17 17:00:32+00:00
There are things we can do that are externally valuable, and often that work is hard, but not necessarily so.

There is also stuff that is hard, but really has no value to anyone else in the world. I've found I do get enjoyment just in doing things that are hard, and often serve no purpose. For example, I learned how to solve the Rubik's Cube one day. Another time I learned to juggle. I learned to play the piano (OK, not really, I learned enough to learn like five pretty easy songs).

There is something that makes it more enjoyable to do something hard (for me) where if I accomplish it or not has no bearing on the world (even amongst my small circle -- except now they have to watch me solve the Cube in five minutes).

There is one challenge I will take on next -- to start a paragraph without the word "There".
by atoav | 2025-07-17 17:00:52+00:00
The thing is a lot of what looks like a natural talent from the outside is also just learning on the inside. I won my provinces swimming competition without ever having swum in a competition before against swimmers who were all in a club. Reason: I grew up near a lake and was there every day during my whole childhood.

The thing is that people with "talent" are often just people who did what you're trying to do for fun their whole lifes. So talent then is just code for: "had a natural preference for doing it and both the means and time to do it".
by pengaru | 2025-07-17 17:01:02+00:00
I'm the same way. Removing glasses is an excellent hack, but it also means I'm not making eye contact as I'm just looking at the person's general direction.

Earlier in my career during interviews I'd always tell the interviewer "I'm listening, keep talking, I just need to look at the floor or wall to concentrate or I get too distracted by your animated-ness" and this was in the days before autism entered the zeitgeist. Nobody cared or thought it was particularly odd as far as I could tell. We were accustomed to nerds who sat alone thinking at computers most of the time being quirky, and appreciated the need to concentrate (private offices with doors that close!).

But as I get older it's become more necessary to look at something else while listening to anyone tell me anything I intend to grok. And I'm pretty certain ~everyone now assumes I'm autistic because of it. Never been diagnosed as such.

My interpretation and internal modeling of things is highly visual and genuine visual input is a sort of noise that interferes with my mental reconstruction of what I'm hearing. I have no idea if that overlaps with autism.
by chainwax | 2025-07-17 17:01:17+00:00
I does indeed bundle it's runtime into the executable, but this is not dissimilar from Go bundling it's gc into every executable.

Granted a compiled hello world Go program will be <2mb while a similar compiled Deno program will be more like 70. I imagine many usecases may not have a storage constraint though, and in that case why not?
by lumbroso | 2025-07-17 17:01:21+00:00
Great question! Injecting a raw epoch each turn can work for tiny chats, but a tool call solves four practical problems:

1. *Hands‑free integration*: ChatGPT, Claude, etc. don’t let you auto‑append text, so you have to manually do it. Here, a server call happens behind the scenes—no copy‑paste or browser hacks.

2. *Math & reliability*: LLMs core models are provably not able to do math (without external tools), this is a theoretical limitation that will not change. The server not only returns now() but also time_difference(), time_since(), etc., so the model gets ready‑made numbers instead of trying to subtract 1710692400‑1710688800 itself.

3. *Extensibility*: Time is just one "sense." The same MCP pattern can stream location, weather, typing‑vs‑dictation mode, even heart‑rate. Each stays a compact function call instead of raw blobs stuffed into the prompt.

So the tool isn’t about fancy code—it’s about giving the model a live, scalable, low‑friction sensor instead of a manual sticky note.