MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jajko | 2025-08-31 16:57:43+00:00
You can replace almost whole body and its still you as the mind. But once you replace brain then its just a copy, you can't literally move biolectrical complex that makes us into silicon in any possible way. And brains age like the rest of the body, telomeres issue applies too.

The best possible outcome would be watching your digital copy having digital life, while you yourself wither away regardless. More akin to having a child than oneself preservation. Not really something special, having physical children still beats this.
by gruez | 2025-08-31 16:57:51+00:00
>- IoT sensors are a thing, whether the "average person" needs them or not. Think remote weather stations, car counting cameras, GPS trackers...

Something tells me that your average municipal government or enterprise isn't going to want a hodgepodge fleet of phones as IOT sensors. Most of the applications you describe don't even need to the phone to be reprogrammed. There's a dozen apps that allow your phone to be repurposed as cameras or GPS trackers today, what's holding back their adoption?

>- "Smart thermostats" exist, surely you could just copy whatever they're doing with ease. And let's not limit ourselves to DIY here.

Yeah but how much is this custom hardware going to cost, especially when you don't have economies of scale? You can get a sleek looking smart thermostat for $150-200. Most people will take that over a tangled mess of wires that a DIY solution is going to look like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ahmed_Mohamed_Clock_by_Ir...

>- Every block of flats I've been in here has had an intercom system, some even have video transmission. Sounds like a job for old phone hardware, no?

So you're going to be gluing a phone next to your door? Sounds like a great way to lose an old phone.

>And just to repeat, I don't want regular people to start making these things out of old phones en masse, I want businesses to have that opportunity. You're arguing against a strawman.

No, you're arguing against a strawman. If you read my initial comment you'd see it states in no uncertain terms that I'm skeptical of the argument that it'll meaningfully reduce e-waste, not that there's going to be exactly zero people repurposing their phones.
by timr | 2025-08-31 16:57:54+00:00
Funny that you mentioned Aduhelm, because Prasad has many, many videos blasting the FDA for approving that mess.

> The whole right-wing hysteria is so ridiculous especially considering the real profit-seeking-grift that happened with Aduhelm, for instance, was primarily opposed by and investigated by Democrats.

This is just revisionist history. Aduhelm was rubber-stamped by Peter Marks' CBER, under Biden:

https://www.statnews.com/2021/06/22/documents-reveal-fda-unp...

(Marks started at the FDA under Obama, BTW.)

Outside reviewers had recommended rejecting the drug as early as November 2020. The FDA's own statisticians agreed.
by anonymousab | 2025-08-31 16:58:03+00:00
> goveenment paranoia

This is just what you'd expect any government that is either competent or greedy to be doing, given the technologies at play.

Calling it "thought crime" is, of course, a bit glib. But things like "we want to monitor the communications of every pro Palestinian university student so we can take proactive disruptive actions" are very real and not so hidden desires and sentiments of modern Western governments.
by bobajeff | 2025-08-31 16:59:16+00:00
Some things to advocate for to counter the direction we've been going in.

1. Termination of WIPO Copyright Treaty (prerequisite for #2)

2. Repeal of DMCA. (primarily because of Section 1201)

3. Enact and enforce, Right to ownership, Right to repair laws.

4. Enforce antitrust laws. / Break up monopolies.
by machinemusic | 2025-08-31 16:59:20+00:00
Technical details for those interested:

The Neuron framework handles the orchestration complexity - it's designed around biological neural principles for resilient reasoning and arbitration between agents. This lets the agents maintain distinct personalities while still having coherent debates.

The hardest part was training "personalities" that would actually disagree. Early versions had all agents converging on the same picks. I ended up training each LoRA on different analyst archetypes (contrarian, stats-heavy, narrative-focused, etc.) with curated datasets for each.

For voice streaming, ElevenLabs has great emotion but latency issues, so I mix in OpenAI TTS for snappier responses. Currently building a queueing system to pre-generate common debate segments.

Cost breakdown: ~$0.02 for model inference, ~$0.02 for TTS per debate. At scale this could get expensive, but caching common player comparisons helps a lot. The streaming angle has been interesting - we're going live on Twitch/YouTube during NFL games starting Sept 5. The idea is to have the agents debate in real-time as games unfold, which creates a natural funnel to the product.

Happy to answer questions about the multi-agent orchestration, LoRA training process, or the business side of fantasy sports tools.
by sunshowers | 2025-08-31 16:59:41+00:00
I used to work on Sapling and Mercurial while at Facebook. I've been using Jujutsu full time for the last two years.

Jujutsu is in a sense the final form of that style of VCS, which I characterize as making commits first-class rather than branches, and providing powerful tools for managing long queues of stacked changes (git rebase -i is nice but has many limitations that don't exist in Jujutsu).

I go into some more detail in my testimonial, the first one at https://jj-vcs.github.io/jj/latest/testimonials/#what-the-us....
by bonoboTP | 2025-08-31 16:59:43+00:00
I think you are using different concepts of "feel good". "Feeling good" doesn't exclude adversity or resistance. But it should be resistance where you have reasonable grip on it, with some traction, and it's aiming towards something that you value. Neither trivial, nor so hard that you have no way of getting traction with it, being stuck on zero progress.

Happiness is basically equivalent to feeling steady (even if slow) progress in response to one's own effort towards valued goals.
Launch HN: VibeFlow (YC S25) – Web app generator with visual, editable workflows
by alepeak | 2025-08-31 17:00:19+00:00
Hi HN! We’re Alessia and Elia, the founders of VibeFlow (https://vibeflow.ai). VibeFlow lets semi-technical people (i.e. people with some technical skill but who are not professional programmers) build full-stack web apps from natural language prompts, while making the underlying business logic clear and editable as a visual workflow. Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CwWd3-b1JI.

The problem we’re trying to solve: today, people who want to build apps without coding often have to stitch together multiple tools, e.g. using Lovable for the frontend, n8n for workflows, and Supabase for the database. That creates data silos and leaves builders with fragile apps that break in production, don’t scale, and aren’t safe. We saw YouTube tutorials teaching people how to duct-tape these together just to get a functional app running. As engineers building no-code tools, we realized that people wanted the power of AI-generated UIs but also the ability to see and control their backend workflows and data.

Our solution is to generate the whole app at once, and represent it as a visual workflow. Users describe what they want in English (“I need a chat widget with an AI agent”) and VibeFlow generates both the interface and the logic. That logic shows up as a workflow graph they can edit visually or by giving new instructions.

We use Convex (https://www.convex.dev/) as backend. The generation of the backend code is fully deterministic, we map workflow graphs to code templates. This makes deployments predictable and avoids the hallucinated, black-box code you often get from AI.

Workflow representation: the logic is a directed graph where each node can be customized. We currently support CRUD operations and agent components. Any changes to the graph compiles directly back into code, so you always own the underlying logic.

Frontend: generated via AI and directly linked to workflow outputs, so it always stays in sync with the business logic. Changes to the frontend can be made through a chat interface.

Semi-technical builders can create maintainable apps (not opaque “magic”), and technical folks can still inspect the code and architecture. Compared to Bubble/Webflow, the interface is simpler; compared to Zapier, the workflows have an output code; and compared to AI coding assistants, you get an automatic backend plugged in with no black-box.

You can try it here: https://app.vibeflow.ai/. The demo video is https://youtu.be/-CwWd3-b1JI We'd love to hear from the HN community, whether you're a builder who's struggled with stitching tools together, a developer who's seen the pain points in no-code platforms, or someone curious about where AI-powered app generation is heading - we're eager for your thoughts!
by justsomehnguy | 2025-08-31 17:00:48+00:00
Meanwhile, in the real world:

- We now provide a completely free certs for a malicious web-sites

- Degraded encryption value so much it's not even indicated anymore (remember the green bar for EV?)

- Pavlov-trained everyone to dumb-click through 'this page is not secure' warnings

- SNI exists and even without it anything not on CDN is blocked very easily
by sippeangelo | 2025-08-31 17:01:10+00:00
Meanwhile in Sweden:

Public healthcare queues for ADHD diagnosis range from 1 to 2 years. At the end of the process, many end up with a "You clearly have ADHD, but there are others that have way more issues than you, so therefore we can not provide you with a diagnosis nor medication". They prioritize diagnosing people who struggle enough with their economy or have children that they are unable to take care of.

I went the the private route, paying out of pocket to hopefully sidetrack the long queues. Sweden is very strict on diagnosis criteria and subscribes to the WHO standard. My result is "You very clearly have symptoms of ADHD, but you fail on the 'must have been present before 12 years of age' criteria". This is a ridiculous criteria when diagnosing ADHD in adults, with either parents who have passed on, or are in a mindset of "No, you were just lazy".

My only option is "beat it through willpower alone", which is hilarious when you have a massive dopamine deficiency with an executive function disorder.

Either that, or get medication off the black market, which is likely just sourced from some poor student who has to sell theirs off to make ends meet, due to Sweden's insane stance on drugs.
by jnmatsynadia | 2025-08-31 17:01:20+00:00
As the person in question I feel compelled to answer to this: first of all my apologies if I managed to piss you off, certainly didn't mean to!

It looks like you got frustrated by my refusing to give figures of performance for JetStream: I always say in meetings that because there are too many factors that affect greatly JetStream performance (especially compared to Core NATS which mostly just depends on the network I/O) I can not just give any number as that would likely not accurately reflect (better or worse!) the number that you would actually see in your own usage. And that rather you should use the built-in `nats bench` tool to measure the performance for yourself for your kind of traffic requirements and usage patterns, in your target deployment environment and HA requirements.

On top of that, the performance of the software itself is still evolving as we release new versions that improve things and introduce new features (e.g. JetStream publication batches, batched direct gets) that greatly improve some performance numbers.

I assure you that I just don't want to give anyone some number and then you try it for yourself and you can't match those numbers, nothing more! We literally want you to measure the performance for youself rather than to give you some large number. And that's also why the docs don't have any JetStream performance numbers. There is no attempt at any kind of disingenuity, marketing, or pulling wool over anyone's eyes.

And I would never ever claim that JetStream yields the same performance numbers as Core NATS, that's impossible! JetStream does a lot more and involves a lot more I/O than Core NATS.

However, if I get pressed for numbers in a meeting: I do know the orders of magnitude that NATS and JS operate at, and I will even be willing to say with some confidence that Core NATS performance numbers are pretty much always going to be up to the 'millions of messages per second'. But I will remain very resistant to making any claim any specific JS performance numbers because in the end the answer are 'it depends' and 'how long is a piece of string' and you can scale JetStream throughput horizontally using more streams just like you can scale Kafka's throughput by using more partitions.

Now in some meetings some people don't like that non-answer and really want to hear some kind of performance number so I normally turn the question and ask them what their target message rates and sizes are going to be. If their answer is in the 'few thousands of messages per second' (like it is in your case if I'm not mistaken about the call in question) then, as I do know that JetStream typically comfortably provides performance well in excess of that, I can say with confidence that _at those kinds message rates_ it doesn't matter whether you use Core NATS or JetStream: JetStream is plenty fast enough. That's all I mean!
by senekor | 2025-08-31 17:01:20+00:00
I mean, it certainly is that, but not only that. Jujutsu has more to offer than a consistently designed CLI. You can't do non-blocking merge/rebase conflicts with Git aliases. You can't do `jj absorb` with Git aliases. And you can't automatically rebase all descendants of a branch without first merging them all together, which may cause conflicts that then prevent you from performing the actual rebase. Just some examples of "more than a bunch of Git aliases" ;-)
by mock-possum | 2025-08-31 17:02:09+00:00
I really wish there was something between Furnace and OpenMPT - where you could mix hardware-reproducible chiptune sequencing seamlessly with more modern soft synth and samplers. Renose is plenty capable, but it’s felt awkward to fiddle with when I’ve tried it - I really just need to sit down and devote a period of extended experimentation to it.
by bigyabai | 2025-08-31 17:02:10+00:00
Bitwig's "The Grid" really scratches this itch for me: https://www.bitwig.com/the-grid/

I own a pretty fun analog semimodular (Behringer Neutron), but the Bitwig plugin supports 16+ voice polyphony which is pretty unique outside VSTs and $10,000+ analog synths
by javcasas | 2025-08-31 17:02:27+00:00
There was this meme I read somewhere:

"Here is a button. If you press it, you get $50.000, but someone you don't know dies. Will you press it?

Some people never press it. Some people press it once, maybe twice. The billionaires press it as fast as they can."

This time we got to know one of the victims, but definitely all those projects he was working on generated so much value for the shareholders.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-31 17:02:36+00:00
>Microsoft basically killed Nokia from the inside.

Nokia was dead man walking since the first iPhone dropped and Nokia employees of that time will tell you the same as they also wrote here before.

Even before Microsoft took over, Nokia's corporate structure, culture and management was too slow, bureaucratic and cumbersome to modern SW development, to be able to turn the giant ship around and catch up with what Apple and Google have already launched, let alone overtake them. It was game over for them already, Microsoft or no Microsoft.
by nextos | 2025-08-31 17:04:12+00:00
I disagree. The N770-N9 saga could have competed with the iPhone. Some of these devices came to the market earlier.

But the company treated it as a side project due to internal politics. They didn't want to bother Symbian.

A classic innovator's dilemma problem. Then Microsoft (Elop) came in, killed the N9, and shifted to Windows.
by gardnr | 2025-08-31 17:04:26+00:00
This changed my experience significantly:

https://github.com/BeehiveInnovations/zen-mcp-server/blob/ma...

It basically uses multiple different LLMs from different providers to debate a change or code review. Opus 4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT-5 all have a go at it before it writes out plans or makes changes.
by majormajor | 2025-08-31 17:05:10+00:00
Removing overtime exemptions (across the board, not just for software) seems like a clear winner on many axes.

* Folks working more can have direct immediate compensation for it, vs handwavy promises of maybe future promotions or stock option rewards

* Creates jobs by lowering incentives to just over-work the people you already have

* Spreads out the income tax load by creating more paid labor out of thin air to get the same amount of total work done - better to have that marginal change in the average person's pocketbooks and income tax than tax-sheltered locations for corporations or the highly-wealthy
by mindslight | 2025-08-31 17:05:37+00:00
Keep on hacking at basebands. In the US, changing a device's IMEI is only illegal when done with intent to obtain unauthorized service. Using a phone of your choice on your side of the radio wave demarc falls squarely under Carterphone.

(Never mind clunkier but more straightforward solutions like a libre device/OS using wifi from a mifi)
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-31 17:06:20+00:00
>I disagree. The N770-N9 saga could have competed with the iPhone.

Says you, not the market. You are free to disagree, but history proves you wrong. If N770-N9 were such good devices for the gen-pop, they would have beaten iPhone sales to the moon and show Apple that they were wrong, but they weren't. The average user is not your tech savvy HN user who likes to tinker with mobile FOSS Linux devices, and iPhone's success proved this.

>[...] due to internal politics.

That's exactly what I said. Having better tech is useless if your corporate management, product execution and marketing is shit. That's why Apple and Google won, and Nokia, Motorola, and et-al lost on the free market.
by aeblyve | 2025-08-31 17:07:07+00:00
I don't think phones were ever "user-controlled", each one is designed fundamentally to connect to corporate-run wireless networks. Thus they want a say in the types of communications you do, gating certain kinds like RCS behind attestation. To that end there will be never be an alternative without some channel control.

Not totally unlike the way Bell used to strictly regulate their own user endpoints in the 20th century.

Within that stage, I could be wrong, but I would expect a somewhat freer software ecosystem there, as it is an economy oriented around manufacturing, and it is useful to write many various applications around that end.
by chamomeal | 2025-08-31 17:07:15+00:00
Idk I think caching is a crucial part of many well-designed systems. There’s a lot of very cache-able data out there. If invalidating events are well defined or the data is fine being stale (week/month level dashboards, for example), that’s a fantastic reason to use a cache. I’d much rather just stuff those values in a cache than figure out any other more complicated solution.

I also just think it’s a necessary evil of big systems. Sometimes you need derived data. You can even think about databases as a kind of cache: the “real” data is the stream of every event that ever updated data in the database! (Yes this stretching the meaning of cache lol)

However I agree that caching is often an easy bandaid for a bad architecture.

This talk on Apache Samza completely changed how I think about caching and derived data in general: https://youtu.be/fU9hR3kiOK0?si=t9IhfPtCsSyszscf

And this interview has some interesting insights on the problems that caching faces at super large scale systems (twitter specifically): https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2023/01/12/caching-at-t...
by tcoff91 | 2025-08-31 17:08:27+00:00
The main thing that makes it more powerful imo is that you can accomplish insane rebases with 1 command that would be really difficult with git.

Like let’s say you have 4 separate PRs in review that have no dependency on each other. You then work on new stuff on top of an octopus merge of all 4. You are exploring different approaches to a solution so you have several anonymous branches where you have tried different things. You want to rebase on master, so you just run jj rebase -d master. All 4 PR branches, the octopus merge, the anonymous branches, they all get rebased with that 1 command. If there are conflicts the first class conflicts mean that you can fix the conflicts whenever you want. If one of your experimental anonymous branches is in conflict but you are unlikely to go with that approach, just leave it in a conflicted state unless you change your mind that you want to actually go that direction.
by timr | 2025-08-31 17:08:53+00:00
> Criticism and news reporting are very clear exceptions to this case, or politicians would sue every time their speech was quoted negatively.

That's why it would be good to have some specifics, as opposed to...the parade of generalities and thinly veiled character attacks in this article.

Yes, you're allowed, with specific rules, to make samples for criticism, parody, etc. You're not allowed to just make a video reel of long clips for "archiving". So it really matters a lot what was actually done here, and that is what we don't know.
by inglor_cz | 2025-08-31 17:10:11+00:00
This analogy does not seem to be very strong. No one is making any progress on time travel, which may well be totally physically impossible.

On the other hand, our knowledge of mechanisms of aging has been growing fairly rapidly in the last decade or so, and if history is any teacher, such a growing heap of discoveries usually produces some concrete applications sooner or later.

We can already rejuvenate individual cells and smaller samples of tissues in vitro. That is not yet a recipe for a functional treatment of a living organism, but it is a (necessary) step in that direction.

There is also Sima the rat, breaking the longevity record for Sprague-Dawley rats by living for 1464 days after Katcher's treatment. Out of 8 subjects total.

Could be a random occurence, but the chances to break the longevity record in just eight rats are very, very low. And if it wasn't a random occurence, we already saw a meaningful life extension in an ordinary mammal.
by ceejayoz | 2025-08-31 17:10:35+00:00
> What does "included an email address" mean exactly?

They tell you how to contact the reporter when you get a copyright strike. They encourage you to do it via a logged-in YouTube account; if you don't, there's a confirm your email step.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807622

> It never occurred to me that he might have the hallmarks of a political operative…

It's a political appointment.
by trueismywork | 2025-08-31 17:10:37+00:00
You're arguing in circles. Either bcachefs is experimental and hence needs a lot of changes and tools to make sure that users dont lose data and hence the fixes are not critical/users can use a custom branch. Or it is stable and the only thing users need is actual big fixes. Not new tools in an RC3.

Don't compare bcachefs with btrfs for stability. Compare it with ext4. (And dont care anecdotal data, compare the process).
by eric-burel | 2025-08-31 17:10:45+00:00
"Businesses produced and maintained quality content, Google rewarded the businesses with visitors while diverting some to their ads" that's idealistic, I am happy to see Google algorithm losing its monopoly, even if AI seach ends up being a bubble. When search engines will stop reducing website sorting to some stupid algorithm picked because of scalability while neglecting quality, I will start pity them. By the way this is, again, a low quality short opinion article about AI going to HN front page while not deserving it, it's really an annoying trend.