MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dmos62 | 2025-08-18 10:01:59+00:00
Someone might find this interesting. Viking is a term for Scandivanians in a specific time-period, and it's also a term for pirates from the wider North European area in that specific period, because, interestingly, it wasn't only the Scandinavians that raided, but people living East of the Baltic sea raided the Western Baltic too. In other words, Vikings were getting Vikinged by non-Vikings, thus making them Vikings too. To be less tongue in cheek, there were a lot of similarities between the Western and Eastern Baltic cultures: both pagan, both had runes and somesuch, built similar ships, so as to say they had more in common than the raiding.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-18 10:02:35+00:00
ASCII is a 7-bit encoding. That’s it.

Honestly I’m not even convinced it’s entirely fair to call code page 437 a superset of ASCII, with how it repurposes the control codes 0x01–0x1F and 0x7F. (Superset of printable ASCII, definitely. It just feels not quite right to call it a superset of ASCII as a whole, though it is generally considered so.)

(And I can’t find any references to code page 437 being called “IBM PC ASCII”.)
by maxsilver | 2025-08-18 10:03:13+00:00
Both Roo and Continue support local modals (via LM Studio). For Continue, you add a fake account (type in literally anything) and then click 'edit' -- it will take you to the settings JSON, and you can type in LM Studio as your source.

The main problem I'm seeing, is that a lot of the tooling doesn't work as well "agentically" with the models. (Most of these tools say something like 'works best with Claude, tested with Claude, good luck with any local models'). The local models via LM Studio already works really well for pure chat, but occasionally trip up semi-regularly on basic things, like writing files or running commands -- stuff that say, GitHub Copilot has mostly already polished.

But those are basically just bugs in tooling that will likely get fixed. The local-only setup is behind the current commercial market -- but not much behind.

I strongly agree with the commenter above, if the commercial models and tooling slow down at any point, the free/open models and tooling will absolutely catch up -- I'd guess within 9 months or so.
by lelanthran | 2025-08-18 10:03:59+00:00
I was surprised at the result, and even more surprised when I read that one of the authors who did the test got 4 out of 5 wrong, and rated 2 of the AI stories highly.

Looking at my notes, I got one wrong (story 5, dunno what the "name" was supposed to be, assumed that the "name" is something widely-known in culture that brings about the end times, a something that I didn't know about, and so marked it as Human because of a supposed reference to a shared cultural knowledge), and all the AI written stories I rated at either 1 or two points, with the lowest Human-written story getting 3 and the highest getting 5 (Story 1).

It makes me wonder if we are over-estimating the skill an author has when reading based on their demonstrated skill when writing.

IOW, according to my notes/performance, the AI stories were easy to spot and correlated with low scores anyway, while the author(s), who actually produced high-rated stuff for me, rated my low-rated stuff as high.
by reactordev | 2025-08-18 10:04:33+00:00
Netscape had a JavaScript debugger, IE had a debugger as well. What firebug did was pull the inspector, debugger, console, and everything together in a really nice dev experience. The goal posts were moved far back and the major browsers hurriedly released their “dev tools” to counter FireBug. Chrome being the first after, followed shortly by Safari (who already had an inspector). It would take MS another 6 years to do the same for IE8.
by adrianobbe | 2025-08-18 10:04:49+00:00
I have 200 followers on twitter and get barely any like/comments on my posts so X is not my main distribution. Reddit gets decent views but I don't think I get many PAID users from it anyways.

I think honestly 80% of my users come from my domain name giving me a huge SEO boost. I knew people who need my product would search "AEO Check" or "AEO Checker" hence I named my domain aeochecker.ai, a week after I published my site i was already ranking top 5 in this keyword (also because it was very low competition)
by SiempreViernes | 2025-08-18 10:05:07+00:00
Read their parsing statement in context:

> Markdown is that it's easy to read, and its second-biggest advantage is that it's easy to write. How easy it is to parse doesn't matter

After saying MD is "easy to read" the meaning of "parsing" is clearly limited to automated parsing by non-humans, and the only reasonable reading is "provided the markup is easy to read for humans, the difficulty in constructing an automated parser is irrelevant".
by panphora | 2025-08-18 10:06:33+00:00
There's two approaches Hyperclay takes.

1. Hosted: You get a bunch of "HTML Apps" that persist themselves by calling their own /save endpoint. We grab the HTML and overwrite their-app-name.html, making a backup/version along the way. (Each user can edit their own app only, but they can also enable signups so that other people can fork their app. We also have plans to allow them to ship optional updates to forked apps.)

2. Local: You download the open-source Hyperclay Local [0] and you can have your own personal, local HTML apps that also call the /save endpoint and make backups. You're also open to extracting the core code from this to host your own personally malleable apps on your own server (just implement some kind of auth)

[0] https://hyperclay.com/hyperclay-local
by __alexs | 2025-08-18 10:07:00+00:00
> From a strictly scientific standpoint, wouldn't it be interesting to properly understand why and how it works?

Personally I think it would be, but I think people who actually engage in using traditional medicine couldn't care less how it works beyond making it sound even more magical and spooky.

> From a purely practical standpoint, who cares about any of that if not only it works, but is also better and healthier than what you might get prescribed at the doctor's?*

I don't think most people engaged in traditional medicine care about it actually being healthier, again because they are first and foremost interested in the ritual and cultural aspects rather than the effectiveness of the active ingredients.

My reason for believing this is that people consistently ignore evidence that their favourite magical plant does nothing. And that even when there is evidence to support it, they frequently ignore all findings about effective doses and treatment plans in favour of doing the "natural" thing like making into tea or putting it in orifices you aren't meant to put plants in.
by lukan | 2025-08-18 10:07:07+00:00
Not necessarily, as placebo is working on the mind. And it works differently depending on the context, what the person knows, experience and expects. It is apparently quite complicated. So in this case it is even possible, that the original cause was not bacteria, but a virus, so the antibiotics only helping as placebo, while actually disturbing the body, preventing the immune system from developing immunity.

Or it was a specific bacteria, where the body finally developed immunity from and it was just coincidence that he took homeopathy before. Impossible to tell with the given information.
by immibis | 2025-08-18 10:07:34+00:00
I don't know anything about init7 but there was a talk at WHY2025 about XS4ALL in the Netherlands, and the reasons they let it become corporate boiled down to "we didn't understand how vicious capitalism was and we let the corporation win" (although they still don't realize that, and phrase it more like "there was a difference of values")
by immibis | 2025-08-18 10:07:49+00:00
You aren't supposed to be a LIR unless you're serious about reselling RIPE services. You're supposed to get services through some other LIR instead, similar to the relationship between domain registries and registrars. There are many, including several in the hacker community that would be happy to register you for no additional fee beyond the RIPE fee (the 50€/year for registration, not the 2000€/year for being an LIR).
by camgunz | 2025-08-18 10:08:03+00:00
The core problem TFA describes isn't complexity, capitalism, or bots. It's the lack of trust. People are fine w/ a few big players (or even one big player) as long as you can trust them, but we don't trust the players anymore: Google, Mastercard, our governments, etc. We think they're all corrupt, and broadly we're right [0].

Blockchain's answer is "OK we give up on trust", but humans can't live that way--or at least strongly don't want to. Successful markets, courts, schools, workplaces, all arise out of a culture of trust and accountability, not the other way around. Unless we hold these institutions accountable they will inevitably decay; our markets will become lemon markets; our courts will become kangaroo courts; our schools will become insipid daycares; our workplaces will become surveillance salt mines. There is no technology that allows us to abdicate our duty to justice and to each other.

There's this episode of Star Trek: TNG [1] where the crew rescues some 20th century humans. One's a blowhard who keeps using ship-wide communications to make random demands, so Picard finally marches down to the guy's quarters to explain that comms are for ship business only. The guy is like "well if they're so important why don't they require an executive key?", to which Picard replies "we're aboard a starship so that is not necessary, we're all capable of exercising self-discipline".

There is no tech, no bureaucracy, no system of rules and regulations that can save a culture unwilling to save itself, whose answer to "what is acceptable to do" is "anything that isn't explicitly illegal, and sometimes explicitly illegal stuff depending on how much money you have". If we spent 1/100 of the effort on community building as we did zk-snarks or whatever the fuck, we simply wouldn't have these problems. Or as the kids say I guess, touch grass.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JcQxfhcg2Q

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQYbKT_rMg
by account42 | 2025-08-18 10:09:57+00:00
> It was a pain to clean though, as the blades were exceedingly sharp. Someone would cut their fingers about once a week on those things.

Much better than the various food cutting tools available to consumers which (apart from knives) are always exceedingly dull IME to the point of being useless. An the weird shapes make them impossible to sharpen yourself.
by metalman | 2025-08-18 10:10:03+00:00
what is evident from a quick glance is the methodology bieng developed to categorise and display all,ALL!, the data in a cohearant and humanly manageble fashion, or at least a start, as my guess is that there is more variability in certain regions of our genomes, that will prove to have specific functionality in individuals, but the ability to test that is still unavailible, so this exploration will continue to provide oportunity for new work and ideas into the forseeable future:ie a very good field to get into if someone does not want to ever get bored
by inferiorhuman | 2025-08-18 10:10:33+00:00
the Pilbara easily matches Arizona temperatures

That's a bit apples to oranges. Pilbara is sparsely populated, Arizona's had much larger urban centers since the 70s. Karratha (the largest city in Pilbara) has a population of about 17,000. Phoenix? About 1.6 million. Phoenix also sees hotter summers with daily average max temps around 45 versus 35 or lower for Karratha. A couple years ago Phoenix saw daily highs of over 43 for a month straight.

Arizona also famously prohibits collecting rain water. It's an unforgiving environment, and while there were people who lived there in pre-Columbian times they didn't do so in large cities.
by zweifuss | 2025-08-18 10:11:06+00:00
I haven't read that. But the search for immortality is ancient. It's in the Gilgamesh epic; Emperor Qin Shi Huang searched for it, as did many others looking for the Philosopher's Stone. Of the current wealthy researching immortality, I know quite a few without googling: Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman.
by sgraphics8 | 2025-08-18 10:12:10+00:00
Fair point - feedback should mainly come from real customers. But with so many AI-built and solo projects, most launches never reach that audience and just sink. it isn't meant to replace customer input but give makers a baseline of thoughtful peer reviews so they can iterate instead of getting demotivated by silence.

Isn't that better than just a registry (PH, Uneed and 100 others) that takes money and does very little?
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-18 10:12:17+00:00
I don’t see how either of those exhibits demonstrate your point.

I believe various research has shown that humans and machines parse natural language in rather similar ways. Garden-path sentences <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence> are a fun demonstration of how human sentence parsing involves speculation and backtracking.

Polish notation is easy for both to parse; humans only struggle because they’re not so familiar with it.

(By adulthood, human processing biases extremely heavily toward the familiar. Computer parsing has to be implemented from scratch, so there’s not so much concept of familiarity, though libraries can encapsulate elements of parsing.)
by stoltzmann | 2025-08-18 10:12:41+00:00
>rotating through a few VPNs can easily get you a few thousand different IPs

It's not uncommon to ban all addresses coming from a datacenter, which will stop the majority of VPNs. That leaves significantly fewer addresses from residential VPNs.

>IP bans means that you potentially nuke hundreds of people: between CGNAT & people playing on shared phone connections, a single IP can be allocated many times

Yep. That's collateral damage. A good server would have an appeals process to handle those cases.
by nedt | 2025-08-18 10:12:54+00:00
If the app is as elegant as the website I have to pass. The menubar is hidden at the start - and also when you scroll back up. FAQ and Github Stars menu items are overlapping, so you could be clicking the wrong one. The icon looks like a light/dark theme switcher, but is not. Actually there is no light theme at all on the webpage, which depending on your environment can make it hard to read. I'm assuming the app is the same. Looks like I'm too old or not the target audience or both.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-18 10:13:01+00:00
It's not the same. An internalised conversation doesn't have the same effect.

And I have good experiences with the LLM for this purpose. It's probably my prompt and RAG that I provided with a lot of my personal stuff but even the uncensored model I use is always supportive and often comes up with interesting takes / practical suggestions.

I don't rely on it for advice but for talking to when real friends aren't around and there's something urgent I'm worried about it's really good.
by kokau | 2025-08-18 10:13:24+00:00
As indie makers we’re told: “Ship fast.” But I kept stalling at the branding stage — no logo, no palette, no fonts → my MVPs always looked unfinished.

So I built Brandolia.io. In 30 seconds, it generates: Logo Color palette Font pairing Slogan & mini brand story Exportable PDF brand kit

Now anyone can launch with a professional look from day 1.

Pricing: €3.90 per kit or a freelancer subscription for unlimited identities.

Indie Hackers, would you rather pay per kit or go with a subscription for unlimited tries?
by quantummagic | 2025-08-18 10:13:46+00:00
The OP expressed confusion about why the show didn't feature Sophie Wilson. But it isn't surprising that Roger Wilson, would be used in such a historical context. There's no shame in acknowledging that during that period of time, you went by a different name, and no reasonable argument that everyone else should pretend it happened differently, either.

If there was a docu-drama about my early days, I would expect them to use my birth name, rather than my married name. Unless the events happened after my marriage.
by alwahi | 2025-08-18 10:14:07+00:00
okay, I am not a systems level programmer but I am currently learning c with the aim of doing some gpgpu programming using Cuda etc., what is a tile level gpu kernel programming language? and how is it different from something like cuda?

I know i can ask a llm or search on google, but i was hoping someone in the community could explain it in a way i could understand.
by tpoacher | 2025-08-18 10:14:11+00:00
Markdown is ubiquitous because it is easy for humans to read and write AND enough humans used it to make it so.

The second part is more important than the first. There could be far better systems which not enough humans used to make ubiquitous. And as far as we know, markdown could be one of the worse ones, but became ubiquitous because it became ubiquitous.

cf: MS Windows.
by account42 | 2025-08-18 10:16:21+00:00
> I don't know what TSA logic is. Oil absolutely gets gooey and disgusting if left for a few days.

That's an issue when there is enough of it to affect the final meal, not if there are microscopic amounts left on the surface of the pan. Just wiping a pan down is enough if you use it regularly.

Rancid oil is also not going to give you food poisoning like the guy that started this subthread claimed was happening.
by throwaway346434 | 2025-08-18 10:16:35+00:00
Politely, I disagree. It means you are in a context where the risk aversion is high, everyone keeps their head down.

Done right, you can be a disruptor, for what are very benign or proven changes outside of the false ecosystem you are in.

I recommend these changes are on the level of "we will allow users to configure a most used external tool on a core object, using a URI template" - the shock, awe, destruction is everyone realizing something is a web app and you could just... If you wanted... Use basic HTML to make lives better.

Your opponents are then arguing against how the web works, and you have won the framing with every employee that has ever done something basic with a browser.

You might find this level of "innovation" silly, but it's also representative of working in the last few tiers of a distribution curve - the enterprise adopters lagging behind the late adopters.
by accidentallfact | 2025-08-18 10:16:57+00:00
Both have the selective attention filter. Autistic people also have another, dimensionality reduction filter.

So in autistic people it goes (raw sensory data) --> [dimensionality reduction] --> (latent space of abstract features) --> [selective attention] --> (higher thinking)

While for neurotypical people it goes (raw sensory data) --> [selective attention] --> (higher thinking).
by KoolKat23 | 2025-08-18 10:17:11+00:00
This is pedantry. What's the purpose, is it to keep humans "special"?

As I say it is inferred, it is not something hardcoded. It is a byproduct. If you want to take a step back and look at the whole model from start to finish fine, that's safety alignment, they're talking unforseen/unplanned output. It's in alignment great. And is descriptive of the output words used by the model.

Language is a tool used to communicate. We all know what distressed means and can understand what it means in this context, without a need for new highfalutin jargon, that only those "in the know" understand.
by suddenlybananas | 2025-08-18 10:18:08+00:00
Yorkshire was settled by many Scandinavians at this point, who could have easily served as Varangians before settling in Yorkshire. Harald Hardrada, for example, served many years in the Varagian guard before reclaiming the throne of Norway and then invading England (he was of course, defeated at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire).

Many Anglo-Saxons also served as Varangians as well! Particularly after the Norman conquest however.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-18 10:18:16+00:00
Oh dear lord, as someone who is all in for decentralization, it actually makes me worry what crypto has become / was..

Here is an article that I created just in this response right now, I am sorry that y'all would have to click on it and see but I don't want to clutter hackernews comments with a really really long paragraph

https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to...

Most of it is just written in first draft ofc but I have been thinking to write something along these lines for a long time. It drives me absolutely nuts how bitcoin was meant to be "digital gold" and we truly have digital gold on blockchain (paxg) but nobody seems to care that much about it. I feel insane thinking about it.

Anyways, I hope you guys have a great day, maybe give what I wrote a read and we can discuss it in this comments. I might upload it as a standalone hn post if people find it interesting but my goal right now was to vent of all the anger that I have so its definitely not structured rightly but still. anyways, have a good day.
by munksbeer | 2025-08-18 10:18:24+00:00
I hope you understand that every single work-around you see popping up is a result of your support of censorship and verification policy. *Your* support is going to push children onto more dangerous sites and expose their private browsing data to honeypots as they seek ways around this.

If my children were older, I would immediately be educating them on the dangers of this policy and of the dangers of seeking ways around it.

I confess, as I type this, I have a lot of anger at the dangers you're putting children into.
by juleska | 2025-08-18 10:18:26+00:00
I've worked in technology for 20 years, and at least 15 of those have been inside large enterprises. In my experience, technological innovation is almost nonexistent in these environments. Most people in enterprise IT are not deeply connected to technology itself — many come from unrelated areas, grew into roles without genuine interest in the craft, or were absorbed into the system through inertia. The result is a cycle of delays, low standards of software development, and a near-total disregard for quality and maintainability.

On top of that, the consultancy model dominates: endless "transformative" projects, pitched with buzzwords, costing upwards of $300,000 per month for an "agile squad" — usually 5–6 junior or mid-level developers rebranded as "senior." Value delivery is irrelevant because another part of the enterprise machine is dedicated to "protecting" budgets, ensuring they don't shrink year over year, and inflating headcount so managers can parade the size of their teams.

This creates the elephant-in-the-room effect: organizations that are slow, rigid, and performative rather than adaptive. In more than one company I've worked at, it was rare to find someone on a technology team who could even write a simple SQL query. But they were experts in "agility," microservices, and "scalability" — all while serving theie super systems/projetcs with a super number of 8 daily users and a mess of integrations with SAP, Salesforce, or whatever the enterprise flavor of the month happened to be.

With that I can say, it's frustrating, it's messy,full of political interactions, but it pays the bills, but it's still shit, maybe you decorate it a little here or there, but in the end it's just decorated shit.
by bondarchuk | 2025-08-18 10:18:46+00:00
I think what you are missing is the concept of generalization. It is obviously not possible to literally recall the entire training dataset, since the model itself is much smaller than the data. So instead of memorizing all answers to all questions in the training data, which would take up too much space, the predictor learns a more general algorithm that it can execute to answer many different questions of a certain type. This takes up much less space, but still allows it to predict the answers to the questions of that type in the training data with reasonable accuracy. As you can see it's still a predictor, only under the hood it does something more complex than matching questions to definitions. Now the thing is that if it's done right, the algorithm it has learned will generalize even to questions that are not in the training data. But it's nevertheless still a next-token-predictor.