MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tenebrisalietum | 2025-07-16 14:50:29+00:00
If you have a child, but don't have a house, you'll probably stay with your parents. They probably would rather you have your own house so they can have privacy and such.

A lot of the "multiple generations of families under one roof" type thinking are only practical if you have a large property, which was more common and much cheaper before the industrial revolution, tract housing, high rise apartments, and $2000/mo. rent for 500 square feet. Even if you think it's OK for 3 generations and 20 children to live in a 500 square foot apartment, most others don't want that.

When you have people with more money than they could possibly spend in their entire lives who wouldn't have to work a day in their life if they didn't want to, telling you that people need to start having babies and oh, also they need to work 80 hours a week and "sacrifice" to pay for them as well, lol no thanks.
by reconnecting | 2025-07-16 14:50:37+00:00
I was digging a little bit further.

Norton Commander released its blue interface in 1986 (1), when Borland Pascal didn't have released something that had similarities with Norton Commander one year later in 1987, it was Borland Pascal 4.0 (2). And here is Pascal 3.0 for comparison (3).

UPD:

But now I'm not sure that it was NC first. Here is PathMinder (4) from 1984 and IBM FileCommand (5) 1983.

(1) https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/1x-6e0aba060e5238...

(2) https://dosdays.co.uk/media/borland/Turbo%20Pascal/tp4_compi...

(3) https://dosdays.co.uk/media/borland/Turbo%20Pascal/tp302_edi...

(4) https://www.smoliva.blog/img/cc-pathminder.png

(5) https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/IBM%20FileCommand...
by jacobr1 | 2025-07-16 14:51:04+00:00
It depends on the problem domain you have and the way you prompt things. Basically the reasoning is better, in cases where using the same model to critique itself in multiple turns would be better.

With code, for example, if a single shot without reasoning would have hallucinating a package or not conformed to the rest of the project style. Then you ask the llm check. Then ask it to revise itself to fix the issue. If the base model can do that - then turning on reasoning, basically allows it to self check for the self-correctable features.

When generating content, you can ask it to consider or produce intermediate deliverables like summaries of input documents that it then synthesizes into the whole. With reasoning on, it can do the intermediate steps and then use that.

The main advantage is that the system is autonomously figuring out a bunch of intermediate steps and working through it. Again no better than it probably could do with some guidance on multiple interactions - but that itself is a big productivity benefit. The second gen (or really 1.5 gen) reasoning models also seem to have been trained on enough reasoning traces that they are starting to know about additional factors to consider so the reasoning loop is tighter.
by ActorNightly | 2025-07-16 14:51:11+00:00
Windows 11 only sucks if you get the Home version. If you get the Pro version you can disable all the annoyances. New things pop up here and there with each update every few years (recently asking to connect my phone so I can see notifications), but those can be disabled easily.

It does suck resources so using it on Laptops is not ideal, but for desktop its by far the best, mostly because of WSL2 integration, which is mature enough to not only run graphical linux apps, but also supports CUDA.

For Laptops, honestly, Linux Mint with I3wm is the way to go. Once you get used to I3, its hard to go back standard display managers with icons and menus.
by freedomben | 2025-07-16 14:51:56+00:00
> "what value is added to the world by having text that looks like it might have been written by Shakespeare but really wasn't"

This is an easy question to answer for anyone like myself who actually enjoys reading Shakespeare. Once you've read all that is available, it would be amazing to have more. Whether it was written by Shakespeare himself or AI, is irrelevant once the AI gets to the point where it can do the same thing. It's obviously not there yet, and maybe it never can be, but if it is, that would be a huge value add to the world.

Think about it in other ways. Would you like to have a 4th season of Star Trek the original series, or more seasons of TNG or DS9 or Voyager or Enterprise? I sure would! Maybe it doesn't add any value to the world in your opinion, but part of the value I get out of the world is entertainment and enjoying great stories. It definitely adds value to me, and I'm technically in the world, so even if it's only a trivial amount in the grand scheme of things, it is still adding value.

On the subject of scientific advancement, there are surely mountains of discoveries just waiting for us in the data we've already collected, but as humans we're not capable of fully recognizing Long difficult patterns, especially when there are many variables involved. However, AI is getting very good at that. We Don't necessarily need AI to conduct original research and studies, but we can absolutely use it to comb through data and look for things we may have missed. The reasoning models are also getting pretty good and will surely get much better with time, and will be able to crunch through long chains of data looking for patterns. Working in tandem with a human scientist, there is potential even now. As AI gets more capable of being agentic, I think that will only increase.

The people who worship AI are in my opinion misguided at best, but that doesn't mean that AI is a nothing burger
by codingdave | 2025-07-16 14:52:22+00:00
It is important to note that he was on state-owned land. Utah has always been stingy about access to the land it owns. The federally owned land is in Utah is far more prevalent and wide open for recreation, as is much of the city and county-owned land around Utah. But the state of Utah has always considered their land to be a monetization target, not free recreation.
by shermantanktop | 2025-07-16 14:52:29+00:00
There’s no free lunch. The rabbit hole is only worth going down if the benefits are worth the operational pain. I view this as a building block, not a checkbox feature that magically just works all the time.

For someone who has these requirements out of the gate, another datastore might be better. But if someone is already deeply tied to Postgres and perhaps doing their own half assed version of this, this option could be great.
by chermi | 2025-07-16 14:52:31+00:00
Did you actually read into the consumer protection stuff he's talking about? IIRC, he's talking about the consumer finance protection bureau "debanking" people for crypto stuff without them actually breaking any laws and without CFPB citing any laws/making the law clear. His contention was that it was extralegal, and it sounded pretty shitty to me.
Ask HN: How do you justify recovery and continuity prep to the business-side
by thyristan | 2025-07-16 14:53:15+00:00
A question I've been wrangling for quite some time, and where a recent discussion here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44579902) pushed me over the edge to finally ask you all:

Consensus is (seems to me) that recovering after various catastrophes (destroyed server, destroyed server room, destroyed site, deleted data, ransomware-infected network, ...) needs to be prepared for, tested, exercised, trained. However, preparations and especially tests like trying to set up your whole IT from scratch are expensive, time- and resource-consuming.

How do I convince non-IT people in our company, especially of the bean-counting kind, that this is important? Sending them scary news articles doesn't seem to do the trick. Can I put this in numbers? Is there are sensible dollar amount to spend on such things? Are there statistics one can use, how often catastrophes happen, how long they will take to fix, what they usually cost? Other ideas?
by orbital-decay | 2025-07-16 14:53:23+00:00
Claiming the exposure doesn't work is probably the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. The reality is that awareness is a major factor, that was literally the main way of the power takeover in Russia (see e.g. Suponev, Ernst, Gusinsky, and Listyev). Russian government is really careful about doing things slowly and getting away with everything people let them get away with, and stopping dehumanization and letting people hearing voices is really important. Even if people right now disagree or think of it as propaganda (which it usually is, I hope nobody has any illusions about that), just existence of something in the background is enough to set up something else in the future. The time for the change will inevitably come like it always does, and the question then will become "what Ukrainian media did all this time, and where the hell they were". Turns out they may have not existed at all as well - out of sight, out of mind.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-16 14:53:29+00:00
Not really, for example in the OpenGL era there was this urban myth that game consoles used OpenGL, this was never really the case.

Nintendo after graduating to devkits where C and C++ could be used like N64, had OpenGL inspired APIs, which isn't really the same. Although there was some GLSL like shader support.

They only started supporting Khronos APIs with the Switch, and even then, if you want the full power of the Switch, NVN is the way to go.

Playstation always had proprietary APIs, they did a small stint OpenGL ES 1.0 + Cg, which had very little to no uptake among developers, and they dropped it from the devkits.

Sega only had proprietary APIs, and there was a small collaboration with Microsoft for DirectX, which only a few studios took advantage of.

XBox naturally has always been about DirectX.

Go watch GDC Vault programming track to see how many developers you will find complaining about writing middleware for their game engines, if any at all, versus how many talks about taking the advantage of every little low level detail of hardware architecture.
by nancyminusone | 2025-07-16 14:54:09+00:00
1. Suppose you have a chart of the total past and future history of human population.

2. Cover up the chart so only the data from the past to present day is visible.

3. Note that most humans in that subset exist near or at the present. You are one of these people today, it should make sense for you to be born in one of the densest parts of the graph.

4. Now uncover the graph. If there are trillions of humans in the future, it seems almost impossibly unlikely that you would born in a part of the graph with "so few" humans as today, and not in the far future.

Therefore, you must conclude that the actual graph rapidly drops to zero in the near future. QED.

This "doomsday argument" is a pretty shit one, but not worse than others I've seen arguing the opposite.
by Nullabillity | 2025-07-16 14:54:15+00:00
That's true, but switching between all these 10ft UIs (Kodi, Steam for local games, Steam Link because its streaming client seems to be a lot less buggy than Steam's built-in one, browser for the stuff not covered above) is still kind of a mess.

If anything, things seem to have regressed slightly, since Steam removed the one good 10ft browser I'm aware of during the Steam Deck rollout.
by janfoeh | 2025-07-16 14:54:31+00:00
It does not, and that is fine. That ship sailed a decade ago.

What they could do is something the other guys are institutionally unable or unwilling to do: build a proper user agent for power users. Radically transparent, trustworthy and extendable up the wazoo. With footguns and everything.

That gives you a comfortable moat, a raison d'être and a stock of rabid, technically inclined fans which spread the word for you to their friends, family and coworkers the next time Google tightens the thumbscrews again.

Basically: repeat what happened the last time when it was Firefox vs. IE, twenty years ago.
by CapricornNoble | 2025-07-16 14:54:33+00:00
> Or my average is not a daily or monthly, do it again for the last 1 year. 2 years.

That would make even less sense. The thread I linked has the appropriate data going back to April 2024. We can toss that into a spreadsheet or LLM to get the total Russian gains in the past year, as you requested.

ChatGPT calculates total Russian territorial control change at ~6000km^2. So are you now saying the Russians actually have 6 million casualties? Again, please support assertion. The only number that doesn't make sense here is your "Russians are taking 1000 casualties per square kilometer".

> Can you also calculare for us how many years until Ruzzia reaches Kyiv and how many casualties ?

It's been on my list of "Things to Do" for a while. I want to whip up a Rust library to run TNDM/QJM calculations on the Russo-Ukrainian War. For now, I will only state that rates of advance in warfare are non-linear. Past a certain point of weakness, collapse is rapid. I think Operation Bagration is a good case to examine in detail, as many of the frontline German divisions had REALLY thin manning. The Ukrainian frontline is manned at something like ~40% strength, and with a large number of old and infirm conscripts. They are relying heavily on drones to keep the Russians from locally massing combat power. I'm not sure where the breakpoint is in Ukrainian manpower past which their brigades will shatter.

But just pulling an estimate out of my butt: 2 years and an additional 500,000 Russian non-recoverable losses. shrug
by awuji | 2025-07-16 14:54:48+00:00
You can already run a large LLM (like sonnet 3.5) locally on CPU with 128GB of ram which is <300 USD, but can be offset by swap space. Obviously, response speed is going to be slower, but I can't imagine people will pay much more than 20 USD for waiting 30-60 seconds longer for a response.

And obviously consumer hardware is already being more optimized for running models locally.
Show HN: An MCP server that gives LLMs temporal awareness and time calculation
by lumbroso | 2025-07-16 14:55:31+00:00
This is an open‑source Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that gives any LLM a sense of the passage of time.

Most MCP demos wire LLMs to external data stores. That’s useful, but MCP is also a chance to give models perception — extra senses beyond the prompt text.

Six functions (`current_datetime`, `time_difference`, `timestamp_context`, etc.) give Claude/GPT real temporal awareness: It can spot pauses, reason about rhythms, and even label a chat’s “three‑act structure”. Runs locally in <60 s (Python) or via a hosted demo.

If time works, what else could we surface? - Location / movement (GPS, speed, “I’m on a train”) - Weather (rainy evening vs clear morning) - Device state (battery low, poor bandwidth) - Ambient modality (user is dictating on mobile vs typing at desk) - Calendar context (meeting starts in 5 min) - Biometric cues (heart‑rate spikes while coding)

Curious what other signals people think would unlock better collaboration.

Full back story: https://medium.com/@jeremie.lumbroso/teaching-ai-the-signifi...

Happy to discuss MCP patterns, tool discovery, or future “senses”. Feedback and PRs welcome!
by dmix | 2025-07-16 14:55:41+00:00
Planning a trip is one of the best usecases for not being phone-only. If it was jut "open app and buy ticket" then it'd be fine, but most trips involve a lot of moving parts that need to be in sync.

Comparing multiple different websites, copying and pasting information to share, looking up locations, etc. All way easier with a mouse, keyboard, and large tabbed browser windows.

Even Airbnb is better on desktop, since it very easily resets your search queries on the mobile app, because state is managed differently vs browser you can leave 10 different spots or multiple queries open in different tabs, which is common issue in mobile apps. And tab switching on mobile browsers is very slow.
by yuliyp | 2025-07-16 14:55:43+00:00
Think "hardware groups with next generation experimental hardware". Facebook runs their own data centers, including designing their own servers. How do you verify that the servers actually perform well? One natural choice was to put them to work as web servers. Given its size, there was a lot of tooling there to be able to measure very precisely what the throughput of a web server was, so things like "How many of these new servers should we order" could be answered, in addition to the "does the rack catch fire" questions.

One example of a source of tension that such standards were trying to deal with here was in a group trying to run web servers on machines with SSDs that were way too small: obviously for the bean counter saving a bunch of money on the SSDs was nice, but for the team trying to make sure the disk can fit all the code and logs on it, it was less nice.
by jacobr1 | 2025-07-16 14:56:20+00:00
> You can't formally prove that some gene sequence is responsible for trait X etc.

Maybe not formally in some kind of mathematical sense. But you certainly could have simulation models of protein synthesis, and maybe even higher order simulation of tissues and organs. You could also let the ai scientist verify the experimental hypothesis by giving access to robotic lab processes. In fact it seems we are going down both fronts right now.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-16 14:56:29+00:00
> Yet they are doing fine.

Are they? What's the current status of their retirement accounts? What are their plans for funding their kids' educations? Do they own their own homes?

There's a difference between being able to survive and living a good life. The reason the more financially literate and educated people put off having kids is because they care about their own futures and the futures of their kids. They know they can't work forever and they know that the current political environment is one of removing and undoing every single social safety net out there. Meaning, a mistake today very well could mean homelessness/eating cat food/etc or ultimately starving to death.

My father-in-law is 72 and still needs to work to pay the bills. He can't retire. That's the future for the less financially and intellectually equipped parents and their kids in the current political climate.
by sjw987 | 2025-07-16 14:56:30+00:00
In the UK, more often than not, when a couple has more than 2 children they are often part of a certain demographic. The idea of this demographic and its culture becoming over-represented is not popular amongst a large portion of the population, regardless of what societal wide effects that may have.

In addition and in general, paying people to have kids is not a good solution. More often than not, it leads to less educated, less capable people becoming baby mills and ruining the rest of society with their poorly raised children. 2 children is fine. It's almost replacement level.
Show HN: Newsplash – Personalized AI news digests without clickbait
by snowcon | 2025-07-16 14:56:34+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m the founder of Newsplash, a lightweight AI-powered news platform that delivers personalized, fact-based daily digests—no clickbait, no paywalled fluff.

⸻

Why I built it:

I found myself spending too much time sifting through sensationalist headlines and repetitive stories across major aggregators. Newsplash is my attempt to solve that: a tool that gives users a fast, trustworthy summary of the news that matters most to them—without the noise.

⸻

How it works: • ~500 articles pulled daily via NewsAPI • Deduplicated and cleaned with a readability parser • Summarized using GPT-4o (≈90–120 tokens per article) • Each user gets a unique daily digest based on topic preferences and feedback (likes/dislikes) • A built-in GPT chat tool allows users to ask contextual questions like: “Why does this matter for Nvidia’s stock?”

⸻

Stack overview: • Edge Functions: Deno (Supabase) for fetch, deduplication, and summarization • Database: Supabase Postgres for articles, preferences, digests • Frontend: React + Next.js (web), React Native + Expo (iOS) • AI: GPT-4o mini for summarization + article Q&A • Reranking: Simple cosine similarity on user feedback vectors

⸻

What’s live: • Web app with personalized digests • Feedback loop (like/dislike) that re-trains per user • Article-level AI Q&A • Free model

⸻

Next up: • Expanding digest customization (custom categories, source filters, articles per category) • Premium/ subscription product

⸻

I’d love your thoughts on: • Privacy/security best practices around everything. I don’t have a coding background so I have no idea • Ideas for building trust and transparency into AI summarization

Thanks for checking it out — Connor
by jajko | 2025-07-16 14:56:36+00:00
You want to hear empty phrases like typical 'thoughts and prayers' that help absolutely nothing and are overused to the point of losing any value, just so that writer feels for 5s better about themselves? Internet is chock full of those from all those me-participating-too people.

What I wrote is unfortunately true, and brutal. Don't think I didn't cry for those babies who never stood the chance, both ours and other's. But eventually you have to get up, the only other alternative to this is far worse. So I did, and so did my wife, and all the other parents affected. Life goes on and doesn't care about your personal woes.

We live in extremely safe times compared to how things looked even 150 years ago, 40-50% of kids didn't survive to age 5 and deaths during even normal pregnancies were very common. Go read a bit about that if you feel like I talk extreme or are an outlier.
by WillAdams | 2025-07-16 14:56:44+00:00
I don't see how rate-limiting one's access to knowledge to video speeds due to illiteracy, and removing the ability to take/read useful/usable notes could be helpful.

When I was in college, I was volunteered to take notes for a student who had a disability which precluded their taking notes in Art History class, so I would fax my notes to the secretary's office from my Newton MessagePad, which notes included sketches of each of the slides (many of which were not in the textbook) as well as page references to the textbook (since I brought mine in to class and followed along in it during the lectures) --- turns out the notes were shared with the everyone else taking the class in the dorm, resulting in a marked improvement in GPA and a lowered failure rate --- until the textbook was changed from Janson to Gardner a couple of years later.
by pdabbadabba | 2025-07-16 14:56:49+00:00
So your position is that a VC will invest $2B in a startup on vibes alone without having any idea what they're building, because it is not literally their money? That seems like a significantly stronger and less plausible claim than mine, which his merely that a prospective $2B investor has access to more information about the company's plans than we do and that their investment is at least some indication that there is a real product in the pipeline.
by b450 | 2025-07-16 14:56:59+00:00
It's amusing to consider how much of a Rorschach test this article must be. But it's a great point, even if it arms us to abusively write off unwelcome ideas as scams. As the author points out, Pascal's reasoning is easily applied to an infinity of conceivable catastrophes - alien invasions, etc. That Pascal specifically applied his argument to the possibility of punishment by a biblical God was due to the psychological salience of that possibility in Pascal's culture - a truly balanced application of his fallacious reasoning would be completely paralyzing.