MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrandish | 2025-07-30 00:14:35+00:00
Yes, the Mac somehow surviving the 90s computer apocalypse is an interesting counterpoint but I think the Mac is an exceptional case. Apple started from a much stronger financial, installed base and brand position than Commodore, Atari et al and even then they only barely managed to survive. A key reason is that most key Mac software applications like desktop publishing were far more amenable to emulation on a PPC than Amiga's gaming, graphics, animation and real-time video software. In a similar conversation a few months ago another HN poster observed:

> The Macintosh line managed to transition to PowerPC, but they did so via software emulation. That would've been highly problematic for the kind of software (games and early multimedia - not DTP, which was the Macintosh domain) where the Amiga and Atari ST were at their strongest. Other m68k machines in common use included, e.g. Sun and NeXT workstations which would've been running highly portable code without 'tight' performance requirements. (source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43728024)

To which I responded: This is an excellent point and one I hadn't fully appreciated until reading your comment. Most of the popular 68K software on Macs (such as DTP) was more amenable, or at least tolerant, of running under emulation. Even the popular games on Mac like Myst weren't as real-time critical as popular Amiga and Atari ST games which tended more toward arcade style and sometimes even accurate arcade ports. While I'm sure there were arcade style games for color 68K Macs, they weren't the majority. Also, because the Mac didn't have so many tightly integrated custom co-processors, my sense is that Mac 68K software wasn't as tightly hardware coupled and counting on specific timing interactions. A fair amount of Amiga software would read and write directly to hardware registers instead of using OS calls and even if it only used OS routines, it could still be highly dependent on precise behavior. Once again, we see that aspects which had made the Amiga and Atari ST great in the 80s, made it harder to navigate the transitions necessary to survive the 90s.

It would be interesting to have modern emulator authors compare notes about the software libraries between these platforms. While I'm sure Mac emulator authors still found a lot of 'misbehaving' Mac apps to deal with, my sense is the Amiga software library was bonkers to support in emulation. The WinUAE Amiga emulator has long had a precisely cycle-accurate mode which is less performant but simply necessary in many cases. And as mature as WinUAE is, the team is still discovering edge cases where 40 year-old games and graphics apps have never been emulated correctly.
by jajuuka | 2025-07-30 00:15:03+00:00
Appeals are not safety nets for false positives. Making online support require a login is extremely common. However there are other methods of communication to get support. Support not calling you back is not a story. Come on now.

Having a bad support experience is not being "beaten down". Talk about hyperbolic. If this is a systemic issue, that could be a story. But why isn't my grandmother's bad experience at Costco story? My friend had to call his ISP to sort a billing mistake. Is that a story now too?
by perching_aix | 2025-07-30 00:15:11+00:00
I really did not mean it as a personal attack, as unbelievable as that may be, apologies if it came across that way.

> I can't flag that outrageous personal attack and no one else has.

Why wouldn't you be able to flag it? And there's no flagged counter, it's not possible for ordinary users to tell how many times a post has been flagged; you cannot know that no one has flagged it, only that it is yet to reach the threshold.

> it's not the target's fault for perceiving it that way.

Where did I say or suggest that it was? If I thought that, what would I be apologizing for?

> If you're saying something negative about someone then that's a personal attack.

I disagree: if someone has negative traits or behavioral patterns that are externally observable, people should not be at fault for observing them and confronting the person about it.

In my view, and I believe in most everyone's view, personal attacks (personal insults) are attacks (expressions that incite) that use the other party's real, perceived, or claimed-perceived personal attributes as but a delivery vehicle for insult. They're the exact opposite of a genuine critique of someone's character or behavior in this sense, which is a thing I recognize as existing, valid, and distinct from this.

And so when I said I didn't mean those to be personal attacks, that's why I did so; it was me clarifying that I wasn't abusing personal critique to deliver an insult (nor do I think I actually delivered any), I legitimately just meant to offer a critique. Clearly it didn't land that way, and so for that I apologize. This is in contrast with "You seem to be struggling with the whole fallacy thing by the way", which I 100% meant as a personal insult, and was unsurprisingly moderated out for it. I did mean it, I do agree with it, but it was absolutely a vehicle for delivering an insult first, and everything else second.

It really does seem like we just disagree every step of the way.
by loloquwowndueo | 2025-07-30 00:16:08+00:00
Wait until you waste days down a hallucination-induced LLM rabbit hole.

> most of us would have never gotten by with literally just a library catalog and encyclopedia.

I meant the opposite, perhaps I phrased it poorly. Back in the day we would get by and learn new shit by looking for books on the topic and reading them (they have useful indices and tables of contents to zero in on what you need and not have to read the entire book). An encyclopedia was (is? Wikipedia anyone?) a good way to get an overview of a topic and the basics before diving into a more specialized book.
by no_wizard | 2025-07-30 00:16:45+00:00
I use them and stay up to date reasonably. I have used NotebookLM, I have access to advanced models through my employer and personally, and I have done alot of research on LLMs and using them effectively.

They simply have limitations, especially on deep pointed subject matters where you want depth not breadth, and honestly I'm not sure why these limitations exist but I'm not working directly on these systems.

Talk to Gemini or ChatGPT about mental health things, thats a good example of what I'm talking about. As recently as two weeks ago my colleagues found that even when heavily tuned, they still managed to become 'pro suicide' if given certain lines of questioning.
by archon810 | 2025-07-30 00:17:28+00:00
I was recently researching and repairing an older machine with a 2020 Intel Gen 9 CPU and a certain socket motherboard, and AI made it so much easier and pleasant to find information and present answers about various generations and sockets and compatibility, I felt like I didn't deserve this kind of tool. LLMs are not great for some things, but amazing for others.
by lsuresh | 2025-07-30 00:17:31+00:00
USENIX and their conferences were the absolute best to publish with. You as a researcher focus on submitting papers and/or being part of the PC. They help organize the whole conference instead of depending on an army of volunteers (you won't see "general chairs" and "local chairs" unlike with ACM). And all papers were open access without even needing a login: you literally just click the PDF from the conference website.
by AsmodiusVI | 2025-07-30 00:17:38+00:00
And engineers never are the cause of mistakes? There can't possibly be any data to back up that major outages are more often caused by leadership. I've been in SIEs simply because someone pushed a network outage to a switch network. Statements like these only go to show how much we have to learn, humble ourselves, and stop blaming others all the time.
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-30 00:19:27+00:00
I have a portable external monitor with two USB C ports. It can get power and video from one USB port.

I can plug it up to my iPhone 16 Pro Max using the same standard USB cord. With a phone, it can only power the display up to 50% brightness by itself. If I plug power into the second USB C port, it will show the display up to 100% and charge my phone.

https://imgur.com/a/6g1QOkT

Having USB C also means I can use a standard USB C to HDMI cord for TVs and use the same cord for my computer. Not to mention all of the other standard USB protocols like audio, mass storage, Ethernet, etc. that just work.
by const_cast | 2025-07-30 00:20:01+00:00
Linux runs on everything that upstreamed it's drivers, and then almost everything that didn't. By just reverse engineering and guessing.

And, a lot of this firmware is extremely buggy too. Have you see ACPI tables in laptops? But, they work under Linux. They shouldn't, but they do.

What doesn't work is the intersection of closed-source firmware and extremely eccentric or evil firmware. I think a lot of Android parts manufactures don't want to upstream their stuff because it's extremely bad and probably filled to the brim to vulnerabilities.

But, Intel upstreams everything, and so does AMD - and it's only improved their firmware quality.
by karaterobot | 2025-07-30 00:21:33+00:00
What are some subjects that ChatGPT has given only shallow instruction on?

I'll tell you that I recently found it the best resource on the web for teaching me about the 30 Years War. I was reading a collection of primary source documents, and was able to interview ChatGPT about them.

Last week I used it to learn how to create and use Lehmer codes, and its explanation was perfect, and much easier to understand than, for example, Wikipedia.

I ask it about truck repair stuff all the time, and it is also great at that.

I don't think it's great at literary analysis, but for factual stuff it has only ever blown away my expectations at how useful it is.
by Spivak | 2025-07-30 00:21:53+00:00
Can't really say I agree after being quite pleased with Biden's admin—would have been more than happy with the sequel. I clearly don't see the same thing you see in this guy but at least someone is happy and optimistic about it. A center left Democrat reaching across the isle so hard it pissed off her own base and with a platform of not rocking the boat sounds way better than whatever this mess is.
by itsmechase | 2025-07-30 00:22:17+00:00
Hey everyone,

Looking for feedback!

I recently launched a podcast where I interview the best founders and VCs, asking them questions from a founder's perspective. The goal for the podcast is to give early stage founders an edge in building their company.

If you are an early stage founder, I would LOVE your feedback on any of the first three episodes. Specifically, what did you like/what did you not like/what can I do differently?

Thank you in advance to anyone who takes the time to give it a listen! I hope it's a worthwhile investment of your time.

(This is my first Hacker News post, so hopefully I did this right lol)
by const_cast | 2025-07-30 00:23:30+00:00
Popularity =/= quality.

That being said, obviously the Librem phone is missing functionality.

Most computer users are goo goo ga ga level users. Most people in the US use iMessage, for example.

It's not the best messenger, not even close. It's not the most ubiquitous either - doesn't even break top 5 globally. Doesn't have the most features. Not the fastest. Not the most secure. Not the easiest to use.

They just use it because it's already installed and right there. That is how deep their understanding and comprehension can go.
by icedchai | 2025-07-30 00:23:42+00:00
It's been well over 10 years since I worked with, almost 15. I remember issues with keeping multiple devices in sync, syncing them back up when a user comes back online, especially with multiuser chats. I understand that is probably better now, with carbons and archiving XEPs.

In general, it felt like, XMPP has too many "optional" features. The core protocol is tiny, but everything you need and want to make it useful is optional.
by maxsilver | 2025-07-30 00:24:09+00:00
> people don't just wake up and decide one day to be irrationally evil with no reason, if you believe that then you are a fool

The problem with this, is that people sometimes really do, objectively, wake up and device to be irrationally evil. It’s not every day, and it’s not every single person — but it does happen routinely.

If you haven’t experienced this wrath yourself, I envy you. But for millions of people, this is their actual, 100% honest truthful lived reality. You can’t rationalize people out of their hate, because most people have no rational basis for their hate.

(see pretty much all racism, sexism, transphobia, etc)
by filoleg | 2025-07-30 00:24:13+00:00
> How are you supposed to spot errors if you don't know the material?

By noticing that something is not adding up at a certain point. If you rely on an incorrect answer, further material will clash with it eventually one way or another in a lot of areas, as things are typically built one on top of another (assuming we are talking more about math/cs/sciences/music theory/etc., and not something like history).

At that point, it means that either the teacher (whether it is a human or ai) made a mistake or you are misunderstanding something. In either scenario, the most correct move is to try clarifying it with the teacher (and check other sources of knowledge on the topic afterwards to make sure, in case things are still not adding up).
by lotharcable | 2025-07-30 00:25:03+00:00
The proper way is to have a idea of what it normally is before you need to troubleshoot issues.

What is a 'good load' depends on the application and how it works. Some servers something close to 0 is a good thing. Other servers a 10 or lower means something is seriously wrong.

Of course if you don't know what is a 'good' number or you are trying to optimize a application and looking for bottlenecks then it is time to reach for different tools.
by taurath | 2025-07-30 00:25:24+00:00
Its pretty awfully telling the state of things that this is a Product - not an expansion of base capability. You can do this with any LLM with simple bounds on the prompts.

> Under the hood, study mode is powered by custom system instructions we’ve written in collaboration with teachers, scientists, and pedagogy experts to reflect a core set of behaviors that support deeper learning including: encouraging active participation, managing cognitive load, proactively developing metacognition and self reflection, fostering curiosity, and providing actionable and supportive feedback.

I'm calling bullshit, show me the experts, I want to see that any qualified humans actually participated in this. I think they did their "collaboration" in ChatGPT which spit out this list.
by chrsw | 2025-07-30 00:26:11+00:00
> The ability to say "I don't know" is not a high bar.

For you and I, it's not. But for these LLMs, maybe it's not that easy? They get their inputs, crunch their numbers, and come out with a confidence score. If they come up with an answer they're 99% confident in, by some stochastic stumbling through their weights, what are they supposed to do?

I agree it's a problem that these systems are more likely to give poor, incorrect, or even obviously contradictory answers than say "I don't know". But for me, that's part of the risk of using these systems and that's why you need to be careful how you use them.
Show HN: Empromptu.ai – No code, AI app builder with RAG, model, evals etc.
by anaempromptu | 2025-07-30 00:27:01+00:00
Hey HN! We're Empromptu.ai, an AI app builder that builds AI apps (RAG, models, evals all built in every app) Demo: https://app.storylane.io/share/rtneodkf5i1l

We started Empromptu after burning through thousands of credits on AI builders and hitting the same problem: cool looking prototypes or demos that break with real users.

The issue wasn't the building process, it was accuracy. Most AI applications plateau at 60%~ reliability, which is fine for prototypes but it's unusable in production. We realized these tools aren't really "AI app builders", they're website builders that happen to use AI.

We wanted to solve the hardest problem first: making AI applications actually work reliably.

Our approach centers on what we call dynamic optimization. Instead of cramming every possible scenario into one massive prompt (which confuses LLMs), our system adapts contextually. A travel chatbot automatically knows to mention LAX for Los Angeles vs. Pearson for Toronto. This consistently delivers 90%~ accuracy versus the industry standard 60%~.

But accuracy alone wasn't enough because we also needed to solve the builder gap:

- Simple builders (Lovable, Bolt): Create static websites, not AI applications

- Complex ML tools: Require dedicated teams most startups don't have (Arize, Voxel51) - we've also heard from both technical and non-technical founders that they found these tools very complex

- What's missing: Tools that build applications where AI is embedded functionality

So we built AI agents with optimization built-in. Users just type what they want to build and our agents handle the full development pipeline: creating applications with embedded models, RAG and intelligent processing. You can deploy to your own infrastructure via Netlify, GitHub or download it directly since you can run it locally.

The result: Startups, solo hackers and enterprises can build AI apps or AI features without hiring a dedicated ML team.

Waitlist: https://empromptu.ai

We'd love feedback from the HN community — esp. if you've hit similar accuracy problems or thoughts on the technical approach.
by deadbabe | 2025-07-30 00:27:36+00:00
I think it casts a reasonable doubt on the simple theory that wide spread use of pesticide somehow killed off enough bugs that we no longer have them hitting our windshields. If bug populations were dwindling you wouldn’t encounter them in the wild this way.

It’s more likely I think that most successful reproduction for the past century has increasingly been done by bugs who avoid flying over roads. There could be many reasons why they do this. Perhaps some sense the vast asphalt plain and prefer to stay in greener areas. Temperatures above roads in full sun are much hotter than above grass. Turbulence encountered by cars may encourage some bugs to seek calmer airspaces.

It’s not so simple as “pesticides”.
by stmw | 2025-07-30 00:27:36+00:00
Strategically this doesn't make a lot of sense to me (password management is a natural adjacent product to their core offering), but I am sure they had lots of data that showed it wasn't succeeding. Having been involved in password managemetn before, what I have learned is that it is surprisingly difficult to continue to maintain as both browsers and websites change, the mobile situation is very difficult and it's just one of those software projects that seems simple.. but isn't. So if there is not a big attach rate, it makes sense for Dropbox to drop it.
by chpatrick | 2025-07-30 00:28:47+00:00
> Pattern matching has a definition in this field, it does mean specific things.

Such as?

> They’re fundamentally wholly understandable systems that work on a consistent level in terms of the how they do what they do (that is separate from the actual produced output)

Multi billion parameter models are definitely not wholly understandable and I don't think any AI researcher would claim otherwise. We can train them but we don't know how they work any more than we understand how the training data was made.

> I think reasoning, as any layman would use the term, is not accurate to what these systems do.

Based on what?
by harel | 2025-07-30 00:29:34+00:00
I carry my laptop with me all the time when I go on holiday, when I travel with my family etc. I have too many obligations to leave it behind. Many times I carry it for nothing, but sometimes it's needed. If I could have a dev environment on my phone with access to all my projects, and I could transform that phone to a full "computer", I'll be travelling about 1.1kg lighter.
by wonderwonder | 2025-07-30 00:29:52+00:00
I hear exactly what you are saying. I voted for Biden and Clinton before. The country went insane from 2020 thru 24 and the concealing of Biden’s decline was atrocious. For me the left just went to far. I have 2 white heterosexual sons and I could not vote for a party that declared them an enemy. Everything else was downstream of that for me. Ill vote for the bad guy before I vote for that. Trump has actually surprised me, delivering on many of the issues I voted for him on. If I have to endure his grift and other flaws its a price I’ll pay. I voted against what the Dems offered.

I completely understand and empathize with why some people are upset or even dismayed at what he’s doing though; i just think it’s necessary.
by teleforce | 2025-07-30 00:30:56+00:00
LLM foremost killer application is what I called context searching whereby it utilized RAG and other techniques to reduce hallucinations and provide relevant results in which arguably ChatGPT is one of the pioneers.

LLM second killer application is for studying for a particular course or subject in which OpenAI ChatGPT is also now providing the service. Probably not the pioneer but most probably one of the significant providers upon this announcement. If in the near future GenAI study assistant can adopt and adapt 3 Blue One Brown approaches for more visualization, animation and interactive learning it will be more intuitive and engaging.

Please check this excellent LLM-RAG AI-driven course assistant at UIUC for an example of university course [1]. It provide citations and references mainly for the course notes so the students can verify the answers and further study the course materials.

[1] AI-driven chat assistant for ECE 120 course at UIUC (only 1 comment by the website creator):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41431164
by radpanda | 2025-07-30 00:31:05+00:00
> Famously, while creating the model kit for the 1976 Porsche 934 Turbo RSR, Tamiya-san sent his designers to Porsche’s Zuffenhausen factory several times to get the measurements and details just right. However, despite repeated trips there were still doubts about the kit’s accuracy. So Tamiya bought a Porsche 911 and completely disassembled it to get every detail correct.

I don’t know anything about Japanese tax law but if an American did this I’d assume they were just trying to get a sweet tax deduction on a new Porsche. “Oh sure, that was 100% a business expense”.
by kirb | 2025-07-30 00:31:18+00:00
On the Pro tier, it’s a fixed monthly price with fixed quota per 5 hour window.

That said, every time I’ve tried it, it’s spent ages writing code that barely works, where it keeps writing over-engineered workarounds to obvious errors. Eventually, it gives up and decides broken is good enough, and returns to the prompt. So you still have a point…
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-07-30 00:31:42+00:00
Based on your example, basically any answer would be "I don't know 100%".

You could ask me as a human basically any question, and I'd have answers for most things I have experience with.

But if you held a gun to head and said "are you sure???" I'd obviously answer "well damn, no I'm not THAT sure".
by const_cast | 2025-07-30 00:31:47+00:00
Well of course 1-1 teaching is more productive. That's like saying having a personal mechanic is better than taking your car to the local chain on a Saturday. Yeah, duh.

However, what remains to be seen is if 1-1 with an LLM reaches that productivity.

Humans, and especially kids, are weird. They're picky, they're self-sabotaging, and they're short-sighted.

From what I've seen from kids, they will absolutely destroy their own education in the name of fucking around. Presumably, you didn't let that happen. Will an LLM? We're already reaching the breaking point with teachers - a lot of parents just say "I don't care" when confronted with the fact their kid is illiterate.