MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-07-31 07:50:33+00:00
There are rhetorical tricks which rely on this to be persuasive. You can say "Thing X is happening, so we should do Thing Y", and people will nod.

If you're sneaky about it it will read like a logical conclusion when in fact X and Y are only loosely related contextually, and there is no logical chain at all.

A standard political trick is to blame X on something emotive and irrelevant, and offer Y as a false solution which distracts from the real causes of the problem.

This is used so often it's become a core driver of policy across multiple domains.

Although it's very effective, it's a crude way to use this. There are more subtle ways - like using X to insinuate criticism of a target when Y is already self-evident.

Point being, a lot of persuasive non-fiction, especially in politics, law, religion, and marketing, uses tricks like these. And many others.

They work because they work in the domain of narrative logic - persuading through stories and parables with embedded emotional triggers and credible-sounding but fake explanations, where the bar of "That sounds plausible" is very low.

LLMs already know some of this. You can ask ChatGPT to make any text more persuasive, and it will give you some ideas. You can also ask it to read a text, pull out the rhetorical tricks, and find the logical flaws.

It won't do as good a job as someone who uses rhetoric for a living. But it will do a far better job than the average reader, who is completely unaware of rhetoric.
by b800h | 2025-07-31 07:51:23+00:00
Stop medicalising everything. These people don't have sufficient motivation to finish the things they've started. Yes, their hobby might be learning things. That's actually a pretty good hobby. Are they kidding themselves sometimes, do they lack self-knowledge, yep. This is just a slice of humanity, and giving it a label that helps people to sell amphetamines doesn't really do anyone any good. Teaching morals and self-discipline does.
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-07-31 07:52:41+00:00
I think it'd be more interesting to map out entire trees of arguments about a topic. Start with something big, like "is there a God," then come up with all of the arguments for or against, then come up with all of the arguments against those arguments, then the counters to those arguments. Really explore it as a sort of debate space. Then bring in citations not as backing but for historical context: "Plato made this argument in such and such." The idea wouldn't be so much to decide a winner as to prevent us from going around in circles by making a map.
by wideserg | 2025-07-31 07:53:45+00:00
Problem: Creating visual documentation for SharePoint/software takes hours: manual screenshots, formatting, updates.

Solution: A Chrome extension that: Records clicks/inputs while you work Auto-captures contextual screenshots Exports to perfectly formatted HTML (paste into SharePoint) or Google Docs

Key Tech: All processing local (zero data upload) Rich HTML export preserves styling/images Customizable hotkeys (e.g., Ctrl+R to record)

Use Cases: IT teams building SharePoint SOPs HR creating onboarding portals Educators making tutorial docs

Why Share?: We cut internal doc time by 90% at our startup. Open to feedback!
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-31 07:53:46+00:00
In a lot of train systems this exists in the form of fast / stop trains, the fast trains only do the bigger train stations, the stop trains stop at every station, servicing smaller stops.

As for short trains on long platforms, this is pretty common in NL where the bigger train stations can support both very long international trains and shorter local trains on the same platform; a train can switch to a center track halfway on the platform.

I don't think it would really work for a subway system; people expect it to be hop on, hop off. In some places the stops (or people's final destinations) are so close together they can choose to get on/off earlier/later, but this system makes that less viable. You'd have more people shuffling through train stations trying to figure out which train to get or whether they need to wait for the next one, also putting extra load on staff for confused not-locals. And finally, you'd need extra rails or tunnels so that a train can pass another.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-07-31 07:54:09+00:00
Huh. I was going to question whether that was even possible, but apparently https://github.com/marchaesen/vcxsrv , http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/ , and https://x.cygwin.com/ are all based on Xorg, so I guess if you wanted you could likely get Xlibre to build for Windows. But... Why? CDE isn't really something that makes sense nested inside another system, and AFAIK modern Windows is pretty hostile to replacing DWM (or wherever their GUI is these days).
by riedel | 2025-07-31 07:55:28+00:00
Also scoring on the ADHD spectrum and having a pure knowledge worker job, I have to say, that knowledge work is actually not reliant on attention at all. One can get productive and not fired in many ways. Working in research is IMHO a nice niche for a neurodiverse community. I would say: a fitting job is all you need.

As a side note: I have actually a lot of attention (so it is not scarce at all) but not always at the thing that just needs to get done atm.
by jq-r | 2025-07-31 07:57:03+00:00
Slashdot looked a lot like HN with high information density. It was fast and easy to read all the comments. Then a redesign happened because of web 2.0 or "mobile-first" hype and most of the comments got hidden/collapsed by default, sorted almost randomly etc. So a new user would come there and say "wtf this is a dead conversation" or would have to click too many times to get to the full conversation. So new user would leave, and so would the old ones because the page was so hard to use. It just lost users and that was that. All because of the redesign which they never wanted to revert. Sad really because I still think it had/has the best comment moderation by far.
by rightbyte | 2025-07-31 07:57:09+00:00
For every big tech dystopic platform going all wack there is some "the old greeks complained about kids these days" going my way.

Social media need to go. It is bad for us. I don't support a ban but at least the ban indicates there is some sort of room for counterculture. I think only a cultural mindset change works and it cam't be top down.
by b800h | 2025-07-31 07:59:24+00:00
I felt the same when I discovered I was a Gemini. Come on - someone has created a category which describes a group of people in a fairly self-consistent way. Of course a large number of people will spot it and say: "Finally! The agency lies outside of me! My struggles are no longer my fault!"

But they never were in the first place, and being in a category doesn't change your responsibility to do the best with what you've got.

At least star signs don't medicalise you.

There are plenty of other ways of characterising this - Ayurvedic medicine or the Humours - in fact, those are so effective that they've been taken by business coaches and turned into "colour personality types". And they describe the same thing.

You have a deficiency of phlegm and black bile. Ask ChatGPT about how to treat it, and it'll essentially suggest a permanent dopamine fast.
by iamarsibragimov | 2025-07-31 08:00:43+00:00
Just applied to the new AWS Startups: Building with Llama program. It’s a 6-month initiative by AWS and Meta to help startups build with open-source LLMs.

What’s in it: - $200K in AWS credits - Deep-dive support for Llama fine-tuning - Infra help: latency, scaling, optimization - 1:1 expert sessions with AWS & Meta engineers - Community of AI-first startups

Still a lot of friction in getting LLMs into production reliably — especially when optimizing for speed and cost. This looks like a serious push to help with that.

Applications close August 8.
by graemep | 2025-07-31 08:02:24+00:00
> The limited supply is because natural resources (especially oil) are now competed for by a much larger percentage of the world (ie. higher demand).

Prices are higher because of high demand - i.e. inflation.

> There are certain fixed or constrained resources (land, etc) that more people are competing for today than ever before

That has been true for all of human history. Population has been growing.

What has also been true is that technological advances have easily kept ahead of this for all of human history.

> The world population has doubled (or more) since the glory days of the USA, if nothing else.

The world population is also a lot more productive.
by crocowhile | 2025-07-31 08:02:42+00:00
Just going through that myself. My son's Microsoft account was hacked, we contactes customer service and all they did was acknowledge the account was compromised, close it indefinitely asking us to buy the game again, and locked my account as the family manager. Fortunately I am a Linux guy and the last Microsoft thing I've touched was windows xp some 20 years ago. But imagine thinking this is acceptable?!

I guess they still suffer from monopoly syndrome. The EU should get them again.
by rowanG077 | 2025-07-31 08:02:53+00:00
You are essentially saying any creator that has ever done sponsored content becomes a creator non-grata. I somewhat disagree with that. Sponsored content is a perverse incentive but it's also important to understand that creators can pick and choose for what they make sponsored content. So if you have an ethical creator can create sponsored content of a product they agree is actually that good. Well now the question is "How can you tell". And I don't think you generally can. Some people are really good at lying. In the end it's really about do you trust this creator or not. Which is what's it's about regardless if they took a sponsorship or not.
by nosianu | 2025-07-31 08:02:58+00:00
> most of these things can happen for poorly documented large codebase.

Documentation does not help beyond a point. Nobody reads the documentation repeatedly, which would be needed.

When you keep working on a project, and you need a new function, you would need to check or remember every single time that such a function already exists or might exist somewhere. You may have found it when you read the docs months ago, but since you had no need for that function at the time your brain just dismissed it and tossed that knowledge out.

For example, I had a well-documented utils/ folder with just a few useful modules, but they kept getting reimplemented by various programmers. I did not fault them, they would have had to remember every single time they needed some utility to first check that folder. All while keeping up that diligence forever, and while working on a number of projects. It is just too hard. Most of the time you would not find what you need, so most of the time that extra check would be a waste. Even the most diligent person would at some point reimplement something that already exists, no matter how well-documented it is. It's about that extra search step itself.

The closer you want 100% perfection you get exponentially increasing effort. So we have some duplication, not a big deal. Overall architectural quality is more important than squeezing out those last not really important few percent of perfection.
by uludag | 2025-07-31 08:03:42+00:00
Great article. "To be reliably able to focus on something, you need to be intuitively, emotionally invested in the outcome." This rings 100% true for me. I've succumbed to a sort of fatalism though, where I'm not confident at all I can control what I'm emotionally invested in and that they just arise out of the situations I find myself in along with seemingly random thoughts from the brain.
by Too | 2025-07-31 08:04:31+00:00
In other threads, the voice of HN tells us to consider equity in a startup as worthless and only ever count on base salary.

Here we instead hear that equity is as important as the air we breathe.

Yes, 200k is not life changing but at least it’s not pretending to be, like many other inflated equity schemes that never vest. It’s just an honest decent salary, better than what you can find in many places of the world.
Show HN: VibeTree – Parallel Claude coding with Git worktrees
by vibudhi | 2025-07-31 08:05:51+00:00
I built this to improve my own workflow, but friends convinced me to share it.

VibeTree is a cross-platform desktop app that helps you: - Work on multiple features in the same repo without switching branches - Spin up isolated Claude AI sessions per feature using Git worktrees - Get a dedicated terminal and Claude CLI instance per worktree - Keep sessions persistent – Claude runs uninterrupted even when you switch tabs
by shivasaxena | 2025-07-31 08:06:45+00:00
Thanks for your comment and for sharing your experience.

> Having been at a company that tried this: The number of poorly-behaved or outright abusive clients is a huge problem. Having a client become popular with a small group of people and then receive some update that turned it into a DDoS machine because someone made a mistake in a loop or forgot to sleep after an error was a frequent occurrence.

Ok, but this could be easily solved by having rate limits on api?

> The secondary problem is that when it breaks, the customers blame the company providing the service, not the team providing the client. The volume of support requests due to third party clients became unbearable.

I would say this is subjective/arguable in general.
by omnimus | 2025-07-31 08:06:53+00:00
Well the problem with Adobe is that some of the really crucial tools are essentialy abandoned.

InDesing for example is used for every printed book, magazine, packaging, poster… ever. Industry standard with insane amount of users.

Yet InDesign basically didn’t change since CS6. It got some mostly minor features but that is like 12 years of nothing. The app also got more unstable and only thing they work on is making their fileformat incompatible with prior versions.

That means paying 50+ usd month for licensing a software that hates you but you are required to have it. Perfect monopoly capture.
by daft_pink | 2025-07-31 08:07:56+00:00
I switched, because I find the way they force you into one drive rather obnoxious. I tried a bunch and settled on WPSOffice, because it worked the best, but it still ended up being annoying and I just switched back and put up with it.

I've had pretty good luck with replacing Windows with MacOS, Acrobat with PDFExpert, Outlook with Superhuman, Google with Kagi and never looked back, but Microsoft Office works quickly, is smooth, works across many platforms. The other solutions are clunky in many different ways and I've tried a bunch of them.

I actually have licenses from work, my wife has licenses from school, I have a personal family license for my family. I was literally paying to use WPSOffice on top of it and it just doesn't work as well. Something about the way the interfaces just aren't as responsive in terms of cell sizes just makes everything super clunky in everything from Numbers to WPSOffice
by isaacremuant | 2025-07-31 08:09:04+00:00
> Artificial intelligence has supercharged the spread of misinformation on social media platforms such as YouTube, said Adam Marre, chief information security officer at cyber security firm Arctic Wolf.

There's no bigger purveyor of "misinformation" than the Australian government. An authoritarian disgusting pool of corruption and hypocritical righteousness.

But people get what they deserve, having pushed for authoritarianism all along to combat speech that scared them on covid policies and more
by imtringued | 2025-07-31 08:09:48+00:00
You're trying to treat the symptom of the symptom of the symptom.

There are extremely popular movements that claim to stand for their members, but in reality just induce massive paranoia and fear.

It is extremely popular to accuse people of being the worst possible based on little to zero information or to actively twist the values and principles of the "opponent" into their opposites.

I can find the same mental health degrading content you claim is widespread on social media in the form of books, except the difference is someone spent months of their life writing hundreds of pages about it, which personally scares me more than someone dumping their 10 minute hot takes behind a pseudonym.
Trump Administration Pushes for Clear Crypto Rules in New Report
by AbdulHype | 2025-07-31 08:09:55+00:00
The Trump White House has finally released its much-anticipated crypto policy report, aiming to bring clarity and structure to how digital assets are regulated in the U.S. Key takeaways include defining which crypto assets are securities versus commodities and recommending shared oversight between the SEC and CFTC. The report emphasizes the need for a rational regulatory framework to make America a global leader in digital assets while protecting investors and supporting innovation.

It also supports easing banking regulations to allow institutions to custody crypto, while stablecoins are highlighted as essential tools for preserving U.S. dollar dominance. The group reaffirmed its stance against a central bank digital currency (CBDC), instead urging Congress to pass the Anti-Surveillance State Act. On taxes, the report recommends tailored legislation to address the unique nature of crypto, including staking.

In short, the Trump administration is advocating a clearer, more innovation-friendly path for crypto in the U.S., with an emphasis on competitiveness, oversight, and financial sovereignty.
by londons_explore | 2025-07-31 08:10:02+00:00
Almost all countries have taxes and regulations on electricity (grid maintenance isn't free!), however at AI datacenter scale it makes sense to build the power plant on the same site as the datacenter, therefore avoiding those electricity taxes.

So wherever you build, you'll most likely be building the same wattage of power station as you do datacenter.

Lots of other resources can be shared too - for example shared cooling systems
by jillesvangurp | 2025-07-31 08:10:12+00:00
There are plenty driverless trains in operations. Some have been running for decades. For example Toulouse in France has a metro without drivers since 1993. I was there a decade or so ago and sat in the front of the train on a bench in the front of the train staring out into the tunnel. Because there isn't a driver compartment. Really cool. They have some fences on the platform that align with the train doors for safety. The train lines up, people get in/out and it drives to the next station. Some airports have similar systems. This stuff has been possible for quite some time.

These days, you should be designing for autonomous operation for new infrastructure. Much easier when you design from the ground up. Not doing that could be an expensive mistake.
by muzani | 2025-07-31 08:10:59+00:00
"But a month later, looking back, I’d have no real memory or context for that commit."

This is the exact same feeling I got when I was coding things before AI. There's a meme we had at the office where someone runs git blame on the shitty code and realizes they wrote it. We tried to have people do tech talks about the hardest things they had to build, but most people don't even remember it after 6 months.

I think when people are in flow, they act possessed. It's not even muscle memory forgetting. They make the same mistake. They add a line that fixes Bug A but causes Bug B. They then remove the line causing Bug B, and Bug A regresses. Then they'll scratch their heads wondering why Bug A is still there.

I have the opposite experience with vibe coding. I know where the models are. I know what's in the DB, the tables, every migration, even though I focus on FE. I can tell AI where the files are, before it loads the first prompt.

I know when it's creating memory leaks, whereas I usually miss my own leaks because I'm in the code and forget obvious things like destroying a thread or coroutines running in the wrong space.
by SlowTao | 2025-07-31 08:11:00+00:00
I think a key point of it is that those in power know that if there is bipartisan support, they can ignore all protests.

All the campaigns I was involved in for well over a decade achieved absolutely nothing because of this. It is worse than that now, seeing the screws slowly get tightened on peaceful protests makes this even worse. They cant just ignore it but actively suppress it and get away with it.

A few years back I wrote an essay about the passing of Ted Kaczynski, it was never published as they said to be a topic you do not touch. However my conclusion was that I fear the "children of Ted", those that end up being so silenced, end up radicalized by their own oppression that violence becomes their only answer. I suspect we are only a decade or two away from this on a lot of issues.
by eagleal | 2025-07-31 08:11:29+00:00
> Sketch was the market leader in ui design tools. Before that, it was photoshop

No before the current iteration there was Fireworks, then the smaller web apps for wireframe prototyping (Balsamiq, etc).

Professional Designers used inDesign for bigger portals or complex and vast UIs. Or AI for the prototypes.

Photoshop lacked good vector tools and comprehensive styling of corpus.
by dqv | 2025-07-31 08:12:05+00:00
> Yeah, that's not "a world" it's just the USA.

"In a world" is a figure of speech which acknowledges the non-universality of the statement being made. And no it is not "just the USA". Canada and Mexico are similarly slow to adopt real-time payments.

It is wild to tell someone "don't assume" when your entire comment relies on your own incorrect assumption about what someone meant.
by camgunz | 2025-07-31 08:12:49+00:00
> However, a global tag registry can still potentially be useful in that, given CBOR encoded data with a tag that my decoder doesn't support, it may be easier for a human to infer the intended meaning.

Yeah if MP is conservative and CBOR is progressive, I'm slightly less conservative than MP: I'd support UUIDs and bignums. But again, they'd have to be very optional, like in the "we're only reserving these tags, not in any way mandating support" sense.
by rich_sasha | 2025-07-31 08:12:55+00:00
The West Bank settlement is a clear sign of bad faith, because the only credible chance of peaceful coexistence, the Oslo Accords, earmarked the West Bank exclusively for Palestinians, or more strictly, their state. Sure, I would be delighted if either side of the border Jews and Arabs lived peacefully alongside. But that is not what is happening there.

Settlers, aided by army and militias of unknown status (armed settlers? reservists? real army?) expropriate Palestinian land, destroy their property, threaten and shoot locals. The area, which was supposed to be a core of a Palestinian state, is criss-crossed with Jewish-only roads, settlements, farms, military checkpoints or closed military areas. The settlers enjoy rights their Palestinian neighbours don't have. This is not about some kind of "Palestine for Palestinians" chauvinism, this is a systematic eradication of a people in what was supposed to be reserved land.

Israel simply cannot with a straight face claim that it wanted a peaceful coexistence when it was de facto policy from the get go to make the two state solution impossible.

As for aid... it is not that Israel is somehow being forced to feed its enemies. There are plenty of organisations trying to send the aid in, and Israel is actively stopping them. Israel kicked out reputable aid organisations, with decades of experience in delivering aid even surrounded by hostile warlords, replaced them with some no-name military contractors, and now regularly shoots people queuing for the little food there is. More people have now been shot queing for food than have died on 7th Oct.

I don't think many people are confused as to what Hamas is. Some, sure, are, but most see it as an awful terrorist organisation. Criticism of Israel doesn't stem from people thinking Hamas is good, but from Israel acting murderously in bad faith, in ways incompatible with peaceful goals, while demanding unlimited patience and sympathy from the world.