MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Ten Dollar Adventure, an interactive kids' book on entrepreneurship
by dskhatri | 2025-07-01 14:17:16+00:00
TLDR: I authored and developed an interactive fiction book introducing kids to entrepreneurship and money management. There are digital (Web Book, Audiobook) and physical (Paperback, Hardcover) formats. Read an entire storyline/adventure of the Web Book, no login required here: https://tendollaradventure.com/sample/

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I authored and developed an interactive children's book about entrepreneurship and money management. The journey started with Twinery, the open-source tool for making interactive fiction, discovered right here on HN. The tool kindled memories of reading CYOA style books when I was a kid, and I thought the format would be awesome for writing a story my kids could follow along, incorporating play money to learn about transactions as they occurred in the story.

Twinery is a fantastic tool, and I used it to layout the story map. I really wanted to write the content of the story in Emacs and Org Mode however. Thankfully, Twinery provided the ability to write custom Story Formats that defined how a story was exported. I wrote a Story Format called Twiorg that would export the Twinery file to an Org file and then a Org export backend (ox-twee) to do the reverse. With these tools, I could go back and forth between Emacs and Twinery for authoring the story.

The project snowballed and I ended up with the book in digital and physical book formats. The Web Book is created using another Org export backend.

Ten Dollar Adventure: https://tendollaradventure.com Sample the Web Book (one complete storyline/adventure): https://tendollaradventure.com/sample/

I developed another nifty feature that lets readers of the physical book access an online dashboard of achievements anonymously using secret "magic words" in lieu of requiring personal information. I couldn't muster the effort to write a special org export backend for the physical books unfortunately and used a commercial editor to format these.

Twiorg: https://github.com/danishec/twiorg

ox-twee: https://github.com/danishec/ox-twee

Previous HN post on writing the transaction logic using an LLM in Emacs: https://blog.tendollaradventure.com/automating-story-logic-w...

Twinery 2: https://twinery.org/, and discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32788965
by codeulike | 2025-07-01 14:17:19+00:00
If you look at the stuff Turing was writing in the 1950s its fascinating because he really saw the potential of what computation was going to be able to do. There was a paradigm shift in thinking about possibilities here that he grasped in the very early days.

https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/sources/t_a...

It would be amazing to go and fetch Turing with a time machine and bring him to our time. Show him an iPhone, his face on the UK £50 note, and Wikipedia's list of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_openly_LGBTQ_heads_of_...
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-01 14:17:25+00:00
No, the world is not either smartphone or no-smarthone, it's not binary. The correct alternative is not having anti consumer vendor lock-in practices in smartphones.

We had PWA even before we had locked in app-stores but then Apple saw the dollar signs of locking people and app devs in their graded and gave up on PWA and doubled down on draconian lock-in.
by zacksiri | 2025-07-01 14:18:46+00:00
Based on my testing the larger the model the better it is at handling larger context.

I tested with 8B model, 14B model and 32B model.

I wanted it to create structured json, and the context was quite large like 60k tokens.

the 8B model failed miserably despite supporting 128k context, the 14b did better the 32B one almost got everything correct. However when jumping to a really large model like grok-3-mini it got it all perfect.

The 8B, 14B, 32B models I tried were Qwen 3. All the models I tested I disabled thinking.

Now for my agent workflows I use small models for most workflow (it works quite nicely) and only use larger models when the problem is harder.
by wongarsu | 2025-07-01 14:18:54+00:00
As a Startup I absolutely want to get crawled. If people ask ChatGPT "Who is $CompanyName" I want it to give a good answer that reflects our main USPs and talking points.

A lot of classic SEO content also makes great AI fodder. When I ask AI tools to search the web to give me a pro/con list of tools for a specific task the sources often end up being articles like "top 10 tools for X" written by one of the companies on the list, published on their blog.

Same goes for big companies, tourist boards, and anyone else who publishes to convince the world of their point of view rather than to get ad clicks
by thfuran | 2025-07-01 14:18:58+00:00
I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that we shouldn't allow that sort of contract at all, but it should be considered fraudulent to call it selling or what the customer does buying. If you're only offering limited right of use subject to conditions and restrictions, then you're offering something else entirely. And the limitations should be required to be clearly conveyed before money is exchanged.
by SamuelAdams | 2025-07-01 14:19:59+00:00
I tried Wifi7 at my home, but most of the benefits are lost when physical walls are in the way. Therefore I think WiFi 7 is more for commercial applications.

TSA can check your heart rate / breathing rate elevating during your walk through security.

Casinos can see your heart spike before placing a bet. If the system is digital maybe that can be synced to always deal a loss hand.
by DonnyV | 2025-07-01 14:20:12+00:00
This is coming from the US. They're just using Germany as their proxy to go after China. This whole mess with tying ourselves to Israel has revealed a lot of the countries that just act like proxies for US policies.

When its coming from the US, that means its coming from the corporations that control the US. So this is actually coming from US companies doing AI trying to minimize China's AI.
by rpdillon | 2025-07-01 14:20:19+00:00
> The problem is, when the option exists it opens up an attack vector that I need to defend against, as it will surely be exploited by malware at some point, downloading an app when you visit some scam site, and boom you're now infected.

This is completely fabricated. I've been using Android for more than 15 years, and this has never happened, ever. Nothing even close to it. To be clear, you're advocating to take away people's freedom to install software of their choosing in order to mitigate a hypothetical security problem. It's not a good trade.
by harry2quinn | 2025-07-01 14:20:32+00:00
This feels like a pattern of grammarly becoming a holdco / following the Salesforce playbook. Find companies with - solid but not breakout growth (and probably slowing) - a loyal cult following - raised at too high a valuation in the peak era - talented teams - still founder led by strong product thinkers

Salesforce did this with Quip, Slack, etc.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-01 14:20:58+00:00
Perhaps many people here live in tech bubbles, or only really interact with other tech folks, online, in person, whatever. People in tech are relatively grounded about LLMs. Relatively being key here.

On the ground in normal people society, I have seen that people just treat AI as the new fountain of answers and aren't even aware of LLM's tendency to just confidently state whatever it conjures up. In my non-tech day to day life, I have yet to see someone not immediately reference AI overview when searching something. It gets a lot of hostility in tech circles, but in real life? People seem to love it.
by JimDabell | 2025-07-01 14:21:26+00:00
> it's their ability to provide more up to date information, ingest specific sources, so it is definitely a competitive advantage to have up to date information

My point is that you wouldn’t expect any one of them to be so much better than the others at crawling that it would give them an advantage. It’s just overhead. They all have to do it, but it doesn’t put any of them ahead.

> for a website owner there is zero value of having their content indexed by AI bots. Zilch.

Earning money is not the only reason to have a website. Some people just want to distribute information.
by pjmorris | 2025-07-01 14:22:24+00:00
> Does C, or Java, 'make no sense' because it 'ignores lower level cognition'?

It makes sense in context, but that context includes the machine on which the compiled code runs. Without the underlying machine, there's no real purpose for C or Java. I'm open to the idea that 'lower level cognition' may be as relevant to language as the machine is to C or Java.
by vel0city | 2025-07-01 14:22:30+00:00
Apologies for misreading your other comment.

> The math is clear: in series, the system reliability cannot be greater than any single part.

We both agree with this statement. The system reliability cannot be greater than any single part. In a traditional ICE, there are multiple systems which are radically less reliable than a hybrid with an e-CVT, while generally untrue of the reverse. So, with "the system reliability cannot be greater than any single part", and we can see there are parts of one system that are less reliable, which system is then logically the less reliable one? Not looking at cost at the moment, just reliability.

That is purely talking about e-CVTs and reliability of specific designs, and not necessarily reliability of all hybrids. In the end, the reliability of "a hybrid" can vary wildly. Is it a pure series hybrid we're talking about? A series-parallel e-CVT? A different kind of series-parallel? A parallel? A parallel hybrid is an example of a hybrid that probably does have worse reliability overall, as you still have all the complexity of a traditional ICE but then adding additional systems adding further complication. You're not trading away the complexity of the traditional ICE in this setup, just adding to it. All different reliability metrics on just the basic design concepts, not even then thinking about differences in reliability in manufacturing and what not across different car makers. Some car manufacturers tend to have more mistakes in actually producing things, and a good design might not actually hit planned reliability if they're not actually making the things right.

On top of that, when comparing TCO you'll see differences based on production volumes of that car. A hybrid that was only a compliance car trim level sold in only California in low volumes for a couple of model years with a bespoke battery is probably stupid expensive ($3000+) for a replacement battery after a decade. A hybrid that was mass market with many hundreds of thousands produced with long generations will have tons of used/remanufactured/aftermarket batteries on the market and might only cost $800. A lot of hybrids from the past tend to fall into the first category and not the second and were made as parallel drivetrains with notable exceptions being things like the Prius which routinely is listed as one of the lowest TCO cars out there.

Just asking for a TCO comparison of "a hybrid" compared to "a traditional ICE" is massively oversimplifying and misunderstanding the complexity of that question. Theoretically, one couldn't even say "what is the TCO of a traditional ICE vehicle?" Are we talking an F-250 Superduty or a Kia Rio or a Ferrari F40? Ignoring purchase price, each of these have radically different operating costs per mile. Which vehicle are we talking about?

This is why my original comment started off with "Depending on the drive trains being compared..." I'm not saying every hybrid will always be more reliable than every traditional ICE. It depends on which cars you're comparing.
by jadbox | 2025-07-01 14:23:05+00:00
I actually made a CLI tool recently that uses Puppeteer to render the page including JS, summarizes key info and actions, and enables simple form filling all from a CLI menu. I built it for my own use-cases (checking and paying power bills from CLI), but I'd love to get feedback on the core concept: https://github.com/jadbox/solomonagent
by MildlySerious | 2025-07-01 14:23:15+00:00
You could cut the emissions of the top 1% in half, or reduce the emissions of the bottom 4 billion to 0. Same result.

Which do you believe is likely the lower hanging fruit, has a higher return per dollar spent and is likely to be more ethical and less invasive?

So yeah. I care about per capita emissions on the grounds that things need to change fast, and adjusting the lifestyle of a few million is radically easier than wiping half the planet off the emissions map.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-01 14:23:30+00:00
They spend a lot of text describing the fact that it wouldn’t be possible without Frontier, so I think they are aware of the cost. The whole ecosystem of little, easy to apply for compute credit grants, and then larger grants (like the one they mention applying for at the end) is part of the solution to that problem. It doesn’t seem like ignorance, but rather a choice to emphasize in the writing that they are part of the solution.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-01 14:23:40+00:00
I admit to mystification myself at the work out in here for what feels like a pretty rare use case!

With 3.5mm stereo jacks gone, I do think there are some folks who use USB audio a lot now! But it also feels like it's gotta be a pretty small crowd! This sure feels like a long long way to go to give these select few a battery life boost! It'd be interesting to know how big the impact is, to at least weigh this long effort.

Like you, would love to know if there's anything cute folks have done for offloading Bluetooth! my gut says there are vastly vastly vastly more Bluetooth users.
by gen6acd60af | 2025-07-01 14:25:06+00:00
Sorry, I should have clarified (I would normally agree with you here).

I found a GitHub repo for "ESP32-CSI-Tool" that seems related to Wi-Fi Sensing, but zero references to "FreqSense" in the Wi-Fi/RF context.

The only FreqSense I found is an obscure academic paper on speech recognition that doesn't involve any form of hardware.
by devmor | 2025-07-01 14:25:14+00:00
> I don't trust the government and its often very low quality workers to properly dispense a chemical with tight toxicity tolerances.

I have never particularly heard anyone regard civil engineers as "low quality workers" - but you don't have to trust. Water fluoridation levels can be measured for about $20 with a mail in kit, or you could even get a specialized interferometer for a couple hundred. It should be noted that we already measure these levels in municipal water facilities though.

> Especially when it's purpose is basically to benifit people whom don't have the desire to take care of themselves. Why do I have to be exposed to something unwillingly because other people are lazy?

The primary benefit of water fluoridation is the dental health of developing children and the destitute poor.

I don't really want to get into an ideological argument on hacker news, suffice to say "you should care about other people because that is how a society functions." Case in point, fluoride in my water would make my medication stop working. I still support it in the water I can't even drink without filtering because it's a net benefit to society that ultimately impacts me positively in numerous ways.
by jfengel | 2025-07-01 14:26:38+00:00
Breed and size are less predictive of danger than level of training. An 8 pound Chihuahua can do serious damage if it's badly trained. A properly trained Rottweiler is absolutely bomb-proof. It's certainly capable of more damage, but it won't.

Pit bulls are no more dangerous than any other breed. They have a bad reputation because they are popular among dog-fighters, but pit bulls (and pit mixes) make excellent pets -- so long as they are trained. And they're easier to deal with than many working breeds, who quickly become dangerously anxious if you don't give them a job. (Pits, by contrast, are mostly couch potatoes.)

All of that said... most dogs do not belong in public, at least in the US. (Some other countries have a longer tradition of dogs in public, and they routinely train their dogs to behave well.) That is even more important in enclosed spaces, where neither you nor the dog can put distance between you if there is a problem.

The upshot: find a training class, and take it. The class isn't training your dog; it's training you. You have to take it seriously and do the homework. The dog is not a machine to be programmed by somebody else.
by wongarsu | 2025-07-01 14:26:39+00:00
Google's advantage is mostly in historical books. Google Books has a great collection going back to the 1500s.

For modern works anyone can just add Z-Library and Anna's Archive. Meta got caught, but I doubt they were the only ones (in fact ElutherAI famously included the pirated Books3 dataset in their openly published dataset for GPT-Net and GPT-J and nothing really bad happened)
by albumen | 2025-07-01 14:26:53+00:00
Counter example: yesterday I took the train and ferry from london to dublin. Trains are a great way to meet new people, especially if you're sitting facing each other. Person opposite me was interested in the maths book my son was reading. Turns out he's an interrailing applied maths student from Scandinavia. We had a great chat for hours and exchanged numbers. My faith in humanity is not dead yet.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-07-01 14:27:02+00:00
Similar thing for me with Spanish and English. I consume both basically equally. I don't need audio or text translations for either, but Google insists on translating the english titles to Spanish completely ruining the entire meaning of what it is. Strangely I often get things in Portuguese for some reason even though I've never set a device to Portuguese, I just happen to have been to Brazil and Portugal.

I wish I could just say please never translate either of these languages, and while some apps have this many are very hostile.

I also have a weird setup where all my personal devices are in Spanish but my work devices and accounts are in English. It causes a strange mixup where I never really know what language I'm going to be served but its wrong more often than not.
by 1718627440 | 2025-07-01 14:27:06+00:00
> A single message often needs to be in several different folders simultaneously.

Citation needed. This has never occurred to me.

> And when the thread is spread across many folders, there needs to be a way to see the whole thread.

Already possible, at least in Thunderbird.

> Labels are a fundamental feature [...] and neither IMAP nor POP can handle them gracefully.

IMAP has user-defined labels, whats wrong with them?

An underrated feature of IMAP is that you can attach notes to mails.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-01 14:27:29+00:00
Of note, it appears this patent is expiring elsewhere, including the largest markets in the world.

> The situation may not stop at Canada’s borders. “These issues are not unique to Canada. Similar waves of generic filings are expected or already underway in other countries where semaglutide patents are expiring, such as China, India, and Brazil,” explained Shape.
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-01 14:27:41+00:00
The definition of elite people seem to be using doesn't depend on wages. It's not a synonym for well paid.

There's no requirement to test if your ideas work if you're an academic. The funding pays for papers to get published, and that's all that's checked. To publish a paper you might need to at least pretend to test your ideas, maybe, but only in some of the better fields and journals. Nobody will check if you actually did test them though, so just making data up is a perfectly viable strategy. Worst case, you might get caught ten years from now if some random independent chooses to investigate and manages to go viral on social media. In very extreme cases you might get fired, but that won't stop you immediately getting another job doing exactly the same thing at another university (c.f. Brian Wansink).

But those are in the best, most scientific fields. In others you can just write papers all day that say all kinds of things, never test or even predict anything, and still have a successful career. That's how you get papers like the famous "feminist glaciology" paper [1], or thousands of COVID papers that present model outputs but never validate if the results matched reality, or thousands of string theory papers that don't make any predictions.

None of these problems will stop academics from being cited by journalists in high profile news outlets as if their ideas are already validated, nor being consulted by powerful politicians who then transcribe their policy demands into law, nor having their claims be automatically taken as gospel on forums like HN. If their ideas do become law and then cause a disaster, nothing will happen to them and they won't even suffer loss of reputation. For example, Einstein was a big supporter of Soviet-style planned economies, as were many academics of his era. That was a disastrous idea, and his supporting it - as late as 1949 no less - should have harmed his reputation for being a genius. But nobody remembers this today.

In these respects, they are the very epitome of what it means to be elite.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0309132515623368
by bell-cot | 2025-07-01 14:27:53+00:00
While "Against Water" is right in the title, the article is enough about Dutch national disasters and identity that it really should have included the Hongerwinter - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_famine_of_1944%E2%80%931...

(Wikipedia's "Legacy" section is all about the health effects - but the Hongerwinter, like the major floods, also had huge and enduring effects on Dutch national culture and policy.)
by benreesman | 2025-07-01 14:28:10+00:00
With modern high-quality datasets and the plummeting H100 rental costs it is 100% a feasible undertaking for an individual to train a model with performance far closer to gpt-4-1106-preview than to gpt-2, in fact its difficult to train a model that performs as badly as gpt-2 without carefully selecting for datasets like OpenWebText with the explicit purpose of replicating runs of historical interest: modern datasets will do better than that by default.

GPT-4 is a 1.75 terraweight MoE (the rumor has it) and that's probably pushing it for an individual's discretionary budget unless they're very well off, but you don't need to match that exactly to learn how these things fundamentally work.

I think you underestimate how far the technology has come. torch.distributed works out of the box now, deepspeed and other strategies that are both data and model parallel are weekend projects to spin up on an 8xH100 SXM2 interconnected cluster that you can rent from Lambda Labs, HuggingFace has extreme quality curated datasets (the fineweb family I was alluding to from Karpathy's open stuff is stellar).

In just about any version of this you come to understand how tokenizers work (which makes a whole class of failure modes go from baffling to intuitive), how models behave and get evaled after pretraining, after instruct training / SFT rounds, how convergence does and doesn't happen, how tool use and other special tokens get used (and why they are abundant).

And no, doing all that doesn't make Opus 4 completely obvious in all aspects. But its about 1000x more effective as a learning technique than doing prompt engineer astrology. Opus 4 is still a bit mysterious if you don't work at a frontier lab, there's very interesting stuff going on there and I'm squarely speculating how some of that works if I make claims about it.

Models that look and act a lot like GPT-4 while having dramatically lower parameter counts are just completely understood in open source now. The more advanced ones require resources of a startup rather than an individual, but you don't need to eval the same as 1106 to take all the mystery out of how it works.

The "holy shit" models are like 3-4 generations old now.