MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gosub100 | 2025-07-17 18:15:42+00:00
Just in the first week of switching back, I turned off ipv6 DHCP on my router. I left ipv4 unchanged. ( The reason is that I want to switch to ipv6 someday and I want to run my own v6 DHCP and dns). 24 hours later, my fedora Linux host name changed from "fedora" to a uuid!

This somehow wiped my Google chromium profile, lost its sync and dropped all my saved passwords! I know that chromium hasn't had sync since '21 but I swear it worked for a few days and then disappeared. It's like a Mandela effect moment because I don't know how I lost it. I know I didn't import bookmarks, but I did import a passwords csv.

The other thing that made it hard was I tried to simultaneously switch to Wayland and sway. But also wanted to use Nvidia drivers and have cuda ready (for a project I haven't even started). I got sway up and running but it's a PITA and all the fonts and stuff look weird.

I've actually been using Linux almost full time since 2005, but turning 40 and slowing down a bit has made the switch back to Linux way harder than I expected!
by renewiltord | 2025-07-17 18:16:37+00:00
Man, that is really a story. I do remember tabs. They were this revolution in browsing. You could look at two things so easily. "Open in New Tab".

I love to "folks these days" so I shall. Folks these days don't know what a revolution Firefox was. Before that there were no "web standards" or anything. You had IE6 compatible and Netscape compatible and this and that. Linux web browsers would struggle to render pages. They came up with these ACID tests and these standards.

And Firefox was crazy back then. People now would lose their shit over the "lack of consent". People were talking about how they'd install Firefox and give it the IE logo so their parents would use it and everyone would talk up its leanness and this and that.

You couldn't get Netflix on Linux. It needed Silverlight to enforce DRM. These days the web is the platform. The complexity in the runtime and every application runs on Linux. Man, I never could have guessed 20 years ago that this would happen.

For me the fastest I've seen mind-blowing technology go from sci-fi to banal is LLMs. When TalkToTransformer first allowed you to do it there was this completion model that seemed insane. Like magic. Now, everyone I know uses an LLM for all sorts of things. It's so integrated into life. Wild.
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-17 18:16:43+00:00
> It's very hard for me to imagine the current level of agents serving a useful purpose in my personal life. If I ask this to plan a date night with my wife this weekend, it needs to consult my calendar to pick the best night, pick a bar and restaurant we like (how would it know?), book a babysitter (can it learn who we use and text them on my behalf?), etc. This is a lot of stuff it has to get right, and it requires a lot of trust!

This would be my ideal "vision" for agents, for personal use, and why I'm so disappointed in Apple's AI flop because this is basically what they promised at last year's WWDC. I even tried out a Pixel 9 pro for a while with Gemini and Google was no further ahead on this level of integration either.

But like you said, trust is definitely going to be a barrier to this level of agent behavior. LLMs still get too much wrong, and are too confident in their wrong answers. They are so frequently wrong to the point where even if it could, I wouldn't want it to take all of those actions autonomously out of fear for what it might actually say when it messages people, who it might add to the calendar invites, etc.
by xorcist | 2025-07-17 18:16:55+00:00
That's a real issue with several real life examples, but not really related to the issue of climate change or climate alarmism, is it?

There's been plenty of extended circles around political interests that has lined their pockets in matters of alcohol and drug prevention, abuse prevention and health care, but very few people seem to be taking the local step to actually, alcohol are good for you and anyone that says otherwise should be labelled alcohol alarmists. It's pretty unique to climate research.

I seem to remember that there were was a enormous backlash against CFC bans, and lots of talk about how it would lead to the spread of preventable illness and economic disaster, but it never reached nearly the same levels of anti scientific discourse as we see today.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-07-17 18:16:59+00:00
By my observation IQ correlates to anxiety disorders so often people with high IQs tend adopt risk adverse behaviors to minimize that anxiety and that undermines opportunities for success. People with really high IQs tend to end up on the spectrum and regularly burnout. Extremely gifted youngsters tend to end up with similar and often pretty severe health problems. So while I do agree that in general past success is a good indicator for future success and IQ is not the be all and end all, I would suggest that many high IQ people can be properly medicated to lead much more productive lives than currently do. And this difference would explain much of the residual lack of expected success.
by dingnuts | 2025-07-17 18:17:37+00:00
The critics of the current AI buzz certainly have been drawing comparisons to self driving cars as LLMs inch along with their logarithmic curve of improvement that's been clear since the GPT-2 days.

Whenever someone tells me how these models are going to make white collar professions obsolete in five years, I remind them that the people making these predictions 1) said we'd have self driving cars "in a few years" back in 2015 and 2) the predictions about white collar professions started in 2022 so five years from when?
by bijant | 2025-07-17 18:17:41+00:00
THIS is the main problem. I was listening the whole time for them to announce a way to run it locally or at least proxy through your local devices. Alas the Deepseek R1 distillation experience they went through (a bit like when Steve Jobs was fuming at Google for getting Android to market so quickly) made them wary of showing to many intermediate results, tricks etc. Even in the very beginning Operator v1 was unable to access many sites that blocked data-center IPs and while I went through the effort of patching in a hacky proxy-setup to be able to actually test real world performance they later locked it down even further without improving performance at all. Even when its working, its basically useless and its not working now and only getting worse. Either they make some kinda deal with eastdakota(which he is probably too savvy to agree to)or they can basically forget about doing web browsing directly from their servers.Considering, that all non web applications of "computer use" greatly benefit from local files and software (which you already have the license for!)the whole concept appears to be on the road to failure. Having their remote computer use agent perform most stuff via CLI is actually really funny when you remember that computer use advocates used to claim the whole point was NOT to rely on "outdated" pre-gui interfaces.
by daxfohl | 2025-07-17 18:18:19+00:00
Admittedly there can be some survivorship bias in the stories one hears about, but anecdotally I know several people who have taken time off from their careers and zero have regretted it. On the converse side, I know lots of people who never took time off but wish they had. (I also know plenty of people who never took time off because "time off" isn't in their DNA, but they're not the ones who are considering the option).

Yeah there's a danger that this tech recession is "permanent" somehow, but I took mine in the midst of the dotcom crash and by the time I came back (three years later), the economy had recovered. I think tech will always come back. And if it doesn't, then maybe getting out early and having time to reflect will allow you a head start on whatever your next pivot is.
by conductr | 2025-07-17 18:19:23+00:00
I think you're assuming my inbox activity looks like yours, and based on your comment I can assure you it does not.

Work only, I get 300+ per day. They're all valid and most of them go unread, especially the long ones. I also am in meetings most of the day, so email is not my highest priority. I scan and respond where essential, or often CC someone that I can delegate an action/decision to. Like I said, if things get urgent and I've not responded - people can find me other ways.

If email was as much as a priority to me as you want it to be, you're right, I probably wouldn't have time to respond here. I also wouldn't have time to use the restroom or sleep.

To flip the script, why are you composing full page emails? How much time does that take? Are you allergic to the phone? Do you want an answer? Do you want it timely? So on... as the sender in async communication, it's poor taste to jam wall of text infront of someone and have any expectation of when it will be read or acted on (same as the guy in the grocery store mentioned in this thread). The only exception is perhaps if it's from a superior and your job is to prioritize their communications - which of course I do, do that when I scan my inbox. There are people I always read and respond to, the vast majority of people sending me emails are not in that list.
by amriksohata | 2025-07-17 18:20:13+00:00
People say that if 16 year olds can work, pay tax, and join the army, they should be allowed to vote, but that argument doesn’t really hold up.

First off, the UK has one of the most generous tax free allowances in the world, you don’t pay tax on anything under £12,570. Most 16 year olds working part time or on low wages aren’t paying any tax at all, so the whole “no taxation without representation” thing doesn’t really apply here.

And let’s be honest, most 16 year olds aren’t working anyway. They’re still in school or college, not out earning or dealing with adult responsibilities.

Some people say teens are too immature to vote. Personally, I think it’s more about naivety. At 16, you’re still figuring out who you are, let alone understanding politics or economics. If someone like KSI ran for office, half of them would probably vote him in as Chancellor just for the memes.

You learn a lot of tough lessons on the way to adulthood. At 16, you’ve got zero life experience, no bills, no mortgage, no kids, and probably no full time job. So when it comes to voting, they’re more likely to be swayed by TikTok trends or what their mates think, rather than actual policies or ideology.

And let’s be real, Labour knows this. Just look at the voting intention by age

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1379439/uk-election-poll...

However it will back fire because many that age will split the vote to Greens, Lib Dems and maybe even Corbynites.

Next question that courts might ask in cases are, if a 16 year old criminal gets away with more as they are counted as a juvenile, but is considered old enough to choose the lawmakers, does the same adult laws now apply to them? If they are not perceived as mature enough to be considered as an adult criminal, then why is it different for voting?
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-07-17 18:20:31+00:00
To be fair, make is kind of weird in some ways that make it a pain to use if you're not used to it. Even just the stupid tab-only indentation is annoying. That said, it's ubiquitous and that wins over almost anything else in my opinion. Of course, you may take that with a grain of salt since I also write virtually all of my scripts in POSIX sh...
by torginus | 2025-07-17 18:20:59+00:00
I'll get into hot water with this, but I still think LLMs do not think like humans do - as in the code is not a result of a trying to recreate a correct thought process in a programming language, but some sort of statistically most likely string that matches the input requirements,

I used to have a non-technical manager like this - he'd watch out for the words I (and other engineers) said and in what context, and would repeat them back mostly in accurate word contexts. He sounded remarkably like he knew what he was talking about, but would occasionally make a baffling mistake - like mixing up CDN and CSS.

LLMs are like this, I often see Cursor with Claude making the same kind of strange mistake, only to catch itself in the act, and fix the code (but what happens when it doesn't)
by bbor | 2025-07-17 18:21:48+00:00
Awesome post, love Kagi and learned some new things. One small gripe tho: publishing a "block list" and implying its for SEO sites, but then including sites like Facebook, Medium, WebMD, NyPost, Quora, TikTok, etc. is just goofy. "SEO" to me means "overly-long articles on niche topics that provide bad info just to sell ads", not "news sites I don't like"!
by louthy | 2025-07-17 18:22:08+00:00
> The reactive ingredient is passion, not the learning modality.

As a self-taught programmer I agree with this. I started teaching myself on 8 bit computers in the mid-80s and didn't go to university. By the time I got my first full-time programming job, at the age of 19, I'd already been programming for 9 years. By the time most people are leaving university I was already nearly 15 years into my programming journey. It's hard to ignore that kind of passion and drive.

I'm now four decades in and love it in the same way I did at the start. I'm a maker, I like making. I keep reading the papers and am constantly interested in where this thing is going ... and I write a lot of code!

However, I don't like the premise that self-taught engineers lack foundational concepts just because they didn't go the academic route. I think many of us find the academic aspects just as interesting -- it really depends on the field you're in I think. For sure, we don't normally have the time to do a deep dive of something, but by the time you're decades in you've probably got just as many if not more 'foundational chops' than someone who spent a few years at school.

Anecdotally, as someone who's hired and fired plenty over the years, I think there is something to the Self-Taught Engineers Outperform theory. But I think it's purely that they spend much more time doing. They do more in work and they do more in their free time. The passion brute-forces the learning.
by whycome | 2025-07-17 18:22:24+00:00
I wasn't trolling. It was just an attempt to highlight something. this is a conversation about habit building. Do you think that pizza hut was doing this because of their love of reading? Is eating pizza regularly the good habit to build? Is using food as a reward a good habit? It's not good to associate eating foods with that elation that a child gets when they "win the prize" -- that's how people have issues later when their brain associates the two states.
by Crash0v3rid3 | 2025-07-17 18:22:40+00:00
The "Google Alert" comment feels unnecessarily dismissive of a legitimate user concern.

The core issue for many, myself included, is not about asking a search engine to make "geopolitical judgments" in its search rankings. Rather, it's a question of corporate ethics in selecting business partners. The decision of which companies to partner with and fund is inherently separate from the algorithm that ranks search results.
by lukan | 2025-07-17 18:23:01+00:00
But you don't sanction the country directly, but any company that may or may not support the war in Ukraine.

To me that seems incredibly unfair to normal russian people(who still exists) while still buying oil from saudi arabia for example. Ask Kashoggi about it. Or any of those other poor bastards that got rid of without anyone caring about them.

In general, collective punishment is maybe not the way to improve the world I think. But targeted action or boycott.
by lumbroso | 2025-07-17 18:23:28+00:00
Thank you so much for sharing your customizations and conversations, it is really fascinating and generous!

In both of your conversations, there is only one depth of interaction. Is that typical for your conversations? Do you have examples where you iterate?

I think your meta-cognitive take on the model is excellent:

"One part of this in comparison with the linked in post is that I try to avoid delegating choices or judgement to it in the first place. It is an information source and reference librarian (that needs to be double checked - I like that it links its sources now)."

The only thing I would add is that, as a reference librarian, it can surface template decision-making patterns.

But I think it's more like that cognitive trick where you assign outcomes to the sides of a coin, and you flip it, and see how you brain reacts — it's not because you're going to use the coin to make the decision, but you're going to use the coin to induce information from your brain using System 1.
by bbor | 2025-07-17 18:23:39+00:00
As far as I use it, it's much less AI-forward, providing more of a straightforward search experience. They are adding AI tools, but it's definitely an addition rather than the core of the UX.

I happen to prefer that and just rely on Claude to run its own searches via API, but I haven't used Perplexity so can't compare them directly. Hope that's helpful!
by BobaFloutist | 2025-07-17 18:23:57+00:00
Try "Meatless Monday" is a much more effective message than animal welfare, since it offers a reasonable path that doesn't require changing everything all at once, and doesn't tie your past actions to guilt.

People are highly motivated to push back against animal welfare arguments because it makes them feel like bad people. "You can easily make things better by just abstaining once a week" doesn't challenge their identities nearly as much.
by lumbroso | 2025-07-17 18:25:06+00:00
Without engaging in the whole "anthropomorphizing" debate in this post, I'll say I reject the framing, for many reasons I'd be happy to discuss.

At the same time I understand what you mean and I agree that no, this does not give any LLM any sense of anything, in the same way that we conceive it. But it provides them context with take for granted in service of further customizing their outputs.

Your "calendar" is nice, thanks for sharing. :)
by pants2 | 2025-07-17 18:25:14+00:00
I was buying plenty of stuff through Amazon before they blocked Operator. Now I sometimes buy through other sites that allow it.

The most useful for me was: "here's a picture of a thing I need a new one of, find the best deal and order it for me. Check coupon websites to make sure any relevant discounts are applied."

To be honest, if Amazon continues to block "Agent Mode" and Walmart or another competitor allows it, I will be canceling Prime and moving to that competitor.
by yassineKhazzan | 2025-07-17 18:25:38+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve been building LLMLayer.ai, a web search API specifically designed for AI agents and RAG systems. It combines powerful capabilities with developer-friendly pricing, making advanced search and retrieval accessible without compromising quality.

Key highlights include:

Flexible integration with 15+ AI models

Optimized performance for AI agents and RAG

Significant cost savings compared to traditional APIs

I’d appreciate your feedback—feel free to give it a try and let me know your thoughts!
by al_borland | 2025-07-17 18:25:51+00:00
I had a similar experience. When using DDG my results were never very good and I’d always end up using !g to throw the search to Google. With Kagi, when I checked other engines it would come up empty as well. On more than one occasion I was on an outage call at work where there were many people using Google to find an answer (for hours), and I joined and did a quick search in Kagi and found the answer.
by bbor | 2025-07-17 18:25:59+00:00
How much money do you spend per year that you wouldn't otherwise due to brand advertisements? Answer: you'll insist it's 0, but it's impossible to know.

How much money do you spend per year that you wouldn't otherwise due to clicking one of the first few links and paying more for some service, often without realizing it's an ad? Again, the answer is that it's impossible to say.

Google is commonly said to own a "money-printing machine" on here. How can they print all that money without extracting any from you?
by Waipix | 2025-07-17 18:25:59+00:00
Most small businesses don’t need more staff. They need automation. We installed an AI assistant in a family-owned bakery in Graz. In 90 days:

+2x online orders

-48% manual responses

-25% operational costs

This is just one of dozens of local Austrian use cases. Stop thinking AI is for Silicon Valley only. We build and deploy lean AI workflows in under 7 days.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-07-17 18:26:13+00:00
Okay, but the experts saying self driving cars were 50 years out in 2015 were wrong too. Lots of people were there for those speeches, and yet, even the most cynical take on Waymo, Cruise and Zoox’s limitations would concede that the vehicles are autonomous most of the time in a technologically important way.

There’s more to this than “predictions are hard.” There are very powerful incentives to eliminate driving and bloated administrative workforces. This is why we don’t have flying cars: lack of demand. But for “not driving?” Nobody wants to drive!
by zamadatix | 2025-07-17 18:26:20+00:00
62k of base64 of a random stock image from Pexel https://pastebin.com/raw/tU5D1kuT, you can try it here https://base64.guru/tools/data-url-to-image

Proper SPAM and user/content management is an inevitable need for public chat. E.g. what makes HN chat readable and full of legal content is not comment length limit but all of the other more complex systems enabling efficient moderation.
by vel0city | 2025-07-17 18:26:32+00:00
Lots of cities have building codes for multifamily residential that requires independent ventilation for each unit to reduce cross contamination, or requires zones and duct work that prevents such mixture of air.

This generally isn't true in commercial office buildings, which are more along the lines of what you're talking about. But often tenants themselves don't even directly control their temperature at will; it is managed by property management.
Ask HN: I built a Wordle-like game that uses your photos and offline AI
by ud0 | 2025-07-17 18:26:32+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on a game idea inspired by Wordle, but with a unique twist: it uses your own photos to generate guessing words. Here’s how it works: the app picks a random picture from your gallery. It uses a small language model (SLM), running entirely on your phone, to identify a word from the image. The chosen word could describe an object, the mood, or any notable feature in the picture. You then try to guess the word, just like Wordle.

The app is entirely offline, private, and doesn’t require internet access. I’ve always been fascinated by the possibilities of small language models on devices, and I have more ideas I’d like to explore in the future.

I currently have a rough prototype ready, but developing this further is quite time-consuming as I also have a full-time job. Before investing more time into refining it, I’d love to know if this concept sounds appealing and if using your own gallery photos is something you’d find engaging.

Thanks in advance for your insights!

See screenshots here https://imgur.com/a/Rwsv7Kf
by lukan | 2025-07-17 18:26:51+00:00
"I do not accept simply doing nothing."

You can also donate to the Ukrainian army directly. Or to amnesty international. Or a tons of other options instead of collective punishment. What is the ordinary russian against the war supposed to do? They don't even have a real option of leaving the country as most other states don't want them because they are russian.

In my opinion this helps Putin in his propaganda that the west just hates russia.