MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by EdwardCoffin | 2025-08-26 15:04:17+00:00
If there were another writer of non-fiction as deeply researched I'd compare McPhee to, it would be Robert Caro. I already knew from Caro's memoir Working that Caro did not use a tape recorder in his interviews with subjects, and from this article about McPhee's method, I learned that McPhee does not either. I'm a bit surprised: I'd have thought for such deep research one would want a recording to refer back to, but both seem to feel that the drawbacks of influencing their subjects outweigh their benefit.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-26 15:04:29+00:00
Has nothing changed from thousands of years ago from the greek democracies though?

I thought that we have changed for the better, if not, then well, I am forced to accept it. But it is so fucking sad that we have to accept that same rules of money drove society and it would continue doing so. That's really fucked up if we think about it.
by glenstein | 2025-08-26 15:04:29+00:00
I agree much more with your approach.

The way I've heard it best described is these notions of electrons and photons etc will still be retained as a special case of whatever theory supersedes them, which is critical, because that's at the heart of the "relativity of wrong" argument.

Some take the prospect of a future revision of theories to mean our present state of knowledge is no different than any prior failed theory, which I think is an urgently, catastrophically wrong, catastrophically confused way to regard the history of scientific knowledge.
by reify | 2025-08-26 15:04:59+00:00
Proton Mail offers a feature that allows you to easily unsubscribe from any mailing list you no longer wish to receive messages from.

I move all the crap emails to one folder and hit the "unsubscribe button" and lo and behold they all unsubscribe.

I then delete them all

https://proton.me/support/auto-unsubscribe
Show HN: Smooth – Faster, cheaper browser agent API
by liukidar | 2025-08-26 15:05:02+00:00
Hey there HN! We're Antonio and Luca, and we're excited to introduce Smooth, a state-of-the-art browser agent that is 5x faster and 7x cheaper than Browser Use (https://docs.circlemind.co/performance).

We built Smooth because existing browser agents were slow, expensive, and unreliable. Even simple tasks could take minutes and cost dollars in API credits.

We started as users of Browser Use, but the pain was obvious. So we built something better. Smooth is 5x faster, 7x cheaper, and more reliable. And along the way, we discovered two principles that make agents actually work.

(1) Think like the LLM (https://x.com/karpathy/status/1937902205765607626).

The most important thing is to put yourself in the shoes of the LLM. This is especially important when designing the context. How you present the problem to the LLM determines whether it succeeds or fails. Imagine playing chess with an LLM. You could represent the board in countless ways - image, markdown, JSON, etc. Which one you choose matters more than any other part of the system. Clean, intuitive context is everything. We call this LLM-Ex.

(2) Let them write code (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.07339)

Tool calling is limited. If you want agents that can handle complex logic and manipulate objects reliably, you need code. Coding offers a richer, more composable action space. Suddenly, designing for the agent feels more like designing for a human developer, which makes everything simpler. By applying these two principles religiously, we realized you don't need huge models to get reliable results. Small, efficient models can get you higher reliability while also getting human-speed navigation and a huge cost reduction.

How it works:

1. Extract: we look at the webpage and extract all relevant elements by looking at the rendered page.

2. Filter and Clean: then, we use some simple heuristics to clean up the webpage. If an element is not interactive, e.g. because a banner is covering it, we remove it.

3. Recursively separate sections: we use several heuristics to represent the webpage in a way that is both LLM-friendly and as similar as possible to how humans see it.

We packaged Smooth in an easy API with instant browser spin-up, custom proxies, persistent sessions, and auto-CAPTCHA solvers. Our goal is to give you this infrastructure so that you can focus on what's important: building great apps for your users.

Before we built this, Antonio was at Amazon, Luca was finishing a PhD at Oxford, and we've been obsessed with reliable AI agents for years. Now we know: if you want agents to work reliably, focus on the context.

Try it for free at https://zero.circlemind.co/developer

Docs are here: https://docs.circlemind.co

Demo video: https://youtu.be/18v65oORixQ

We'd love feedback :)
by jonhohle | 2025-08-26 15:05:16+00:00
Also a baby GenX and also not thrilled with the name. It could be great, but am I going to use it on my elementary aged child’s devices.

I’ve long thought the casualness of everything is our (GenX collective) fault, however. I see this as an extension of tshirt and jeans to work at an office job. The unforeseen consequence being the elimination of decorum everywhere. It’s not really about vulgarity, but a general lack of respect for others, standards for ourselves, and dissolving social culture. What language is reserved for shock, emphasis anymore?
by thisiswhy1 | 2025-08-26 15:05:18+00:00
A friend at grad school was asking me for advice -- he had an "in" at Intel -- make $250k and do nothing. A friend had promised a basically no-show position for him. My friend was debating between this $250k/yr no-show position at Intel (no growth) vs something elsewhere which was more demanding but would provide more growth.

This isnt the only no-show position I've heard about at Intel. That is why Intel cannot catch up. You probably cannot get away with that at Apple.
by nonethewiser | 2025-08-26 15:05:18+00:00
Do you think an invasion of Taiwan brings risk of a new, worse status quo? I think that's primarily why China doesn't invade. If it were possible to just achieve an easy, total victory then there is no reason to wait for Taiwanese people to change their mind about joining China.

Im also confused why you say China's inaction on Taiwan isnt about TSMC its about patience, but patience is running out because China wont need TSMC in 10 years. That seems to contradict itself.
by cjpearson | 2025-08-26 15:05:22+00:00
For a magazine like the New Yorker, there was money. You might be interested in Bryan Burrough's experience writing for Vanity Fair in the 90s and 2000s.

> For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story. Then, as now, $166,000 was a good advance for an entire book. Yes, I realized it was obscene. I took it with a grin.

https://yalereview.org/article/burrough-vanity-fair-graydon-...
by alt227 | 2025-08-26 15:05:39+00:00
Apple purposely make it so after 3 new versions of the OS you cannot upgrade the OS on the hardware any further. This in turn means you cannot install new software as the applications themselves require the newer versions of the OS. It has been this way on apple hardware for decades, and has laid the foundation of not ever needing to provide backwards compatibility for more than a few years as well as forcing new hardware purchases. The 'emulation story' only needs to work for a couple of generations, then it itself can be sunsetted and is not expected to be backwards compatible with newer OSes. It is also the reason it is pretty much impossible to upgrade CPUs in Apple machines.

> IMO, this is better then carrying around 40 years of cruft.

Backwards compatibility is such a strong point, it is why windows survives even though it has become a bloated ad riddled mess. You can argue which is better, but that seriously depends on your requirements. If you have a business application coded 30 years ago on x86 that no developer in your company understands any more, then backwards compatibility is king. On the other end of the spectrum if you are happy to be purchasing new software subscriptions constantly and having bleeding edge hardware is a must for you, then backwards compatibility probably isnt required.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-26 15:05:51+00:00
The Dutch national broastcaster upgraded their Teletext infrastructure (which was still running on old tech from the 80s) back in 2023: https://over.nos.nl/nieuws/teletekst-kan-weer-jaren-vooruit-...

The website (https://nos.nl/teletekst/101) and app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eoffice.an...) are very popular (no ads on either), but so is the website which covers a fraction of a modern browser's screen.

There's something about the short-form just-the-facts writing that makes information and news much easier to read than the puff pieces you find on many websites these days.
by gus_massa | 2025-08-26 15:05:52+00:00
Hard question. Probably...

I have more information about Calculus for the first year of the university here in Argentina. Officially nothing changed, but we are not teaching some of the weird substitutions for integrations, like x=sen(theta) (or it was in the other direction?) for Integral[(sin^3(t)+cos(t))/(sin^5(t)+7cos^3(t))dt]. Wolfram Alpha can solve it, and unless you work in a very specific are it's not worth.

Linear substitutions like x=7t+2 are very important, and students MUST learn that. Not linear like x=t^2+1 are very useful and there are a lot of interesting tricks, probably worth learning.

Integration by parts, I'm not sure. In the first year it's only a nice trick but it's useful for some statistic results, like Integral[xe^{-x^2}dx] that have a lot of applications that are studied by many careers without more math courses. It's also useful in some branches of advanced math and physics, but perhaps it can be delayed in those cases.

A big chunk of teaching if giving a general understanding of the topic, later they can use the integrations tables, Wolfram Alpha or AI. It's very hard to understand the topic if someone only types the question in Google and copy whatever Gemini says. Some may claim it's important to teach critical thinking, but that's even harder than integration and it's even harder if someone wants to think critically about the AI results with zero understanding of the simple cases.

Back to your question... I don't know how the government can compensate that, unless they add 2 more years to high school. But everyone will complain and they will lose the elections and everyone will continue complaining.
by antonyh | 2025-08-26 15:05:53+00:00
Three things that have bitten me recently:

1. beware of encryption, especially Microsoft and Apple. I've encrypted Apple disk images with lost passwords, and USB drives that I'm not sure I'll ever decrypt now that I've mostly moved to Linux

2. USB drives rot. I have at least one sitting on my desk that doesn't work, or doesn't work with Linux, or is encrypted, I can't tell but I think it's dead and I've no idea what's on it

3. assume anything other than text or open formats will be useless later. I've a ton of info archived in closed proprietary formats that I might never be able to access.

Duplication is inevitable. I've a box of CD/DVD archives, a dozen large USB drives, two NAS, and half a dozen computers, and with all that storage and space I can't even have a definitive music collection. It's on both NAS, multiple computers, an MP3 player, my phone, and all the copies are different. We've 14 terabytes of photos, and so I now need to buy another NAS to replace the two I have and keep the old ones as a backup. It's endless curation, both for hardware and data.

And yet, the code I've lost. The photos that didn't make it to backup. I have those regrets too, like they were truly valuable.

Final thoughts: cloud storage isn't storage, it's short term for shuffling data between devices. Even email isn't secure - Yahoo deleted all my messages without warning because I didn't log in for a year.
by pikuseru | 2025-08-26 15:06:11+00:00
How about making a new game with help from your son (even if it’s ideas) and making some new memories? ;-)

The problem I found is that a lot of the stuff I made is tied to the hardware, OS and SDKs I used to make and run it (especially PalmOS and J2ME stuff - although Apple is just as bad.)

Luckily I’ve been able to find an emulator called Cloudpilot Emu to run some of my old PalmOS games in the browser.

I think if I was doing a game now and wanted to be able to look back on it in 10 to 20 years time I’d be doing it in C with SDL or JavaScript - although you’re betting on those being around. Or at least some virtual machine / runtime that could be ported to some new OS / platform.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-26 15:06:16+00:00
Two viruses have been entirely eliminated in the wild, one (Smallpox) still exists in government research facilities the other (Rinderpest) I believe is just gone because it wasn't useful as a direct weapon (humans aren't affected) and nobody actually wants Rinderpest, it was just killing cattle and while poor farmers need their cattle or they'll starve the rich want to drink milk and eat steak so they weren't keen on this virus either and helped fund its eradication.
by alt227 | 2025-08-26 15:06:30+00:00
> Right, we're going to go in an entirely different direction, and provide you with something absolutely mind-blowing, but we're going to have to do software emulation for backward compatibility and that will suck for a while until things get recompiled, or it'll suck forever if they never do

For an example of why this doesnt work, see 'Intel Itanium'.
by m000 | 2025-08-26 15:06:46+00:00
Your suggestions are far off from realpolitik. This is the recipe followed post-WW1, which brought us WW2. Europe itself is the proof that cooperation and good relationship among neighbours are the policies that bring peace and prosperity.

And Putin is not an idiot to attempt expansion to lands with no ethnic-russian population. Such thing is clearly not feasible without the power structures of the former USSR.
by mtlynch | 2025-08-26 15:06:46+00:00
Thanks for reading!

>I've considered moving away from this pattern for security though. If someone targets me, they can easily work out my email address for any service.

Yeah, I do [servicename]-[4-6 random characters]@mydomain.com to avoid this. That way, I can recognize which service the email is associated with on quick inspection, but it's not predictable.

The downside is that if I'm talking to a customer service agent in person (e.g., at an airport or hotel) and they ask my email, they're confused about why I don't know it, and I have to look it up on my phone. Also a problem if I don't have network connectivity when they ask.
by ksec | 2025-08-26 15:06:53+00:00
When even Gruber start criticising Apple. You know it is bad. From Apple invented USB-C, to selling AirPod below cost, and invented big.LITTLE CPU computing. Sometimes still persist to this day before of his story.

But if even its die hard fans cant find excuses for the appalling Ads they are putting out, design changes that makes no sense, and App icons etc. May be Apple has really changed.

As someone on HN recently stated, in many ways Google Pixel and Android now feels more old school Apple than modern Apple.
by Eric_WVGG | 2025-08-26 15:06:56+00:00
I have heard that Apple Silicon chips are designed around the retain-release cycle that goes back to NeXT and is still here today (hidden by ARC compilation), but I don't think that's the whole story. Back when the M1's came out, many benchmarks showed virtualized Windows blowing the doors off of market-equivalent x86 CPUs.

Also, there's the obvious benefits of being TSMC's best customer. And when you design a chip for low power consumption, that means you've got a higher ceiling when you introduce cooling.
by 0xffff2 | 2025-08-26 15:07:00+00:00
Can I ask what bank and why on Earth you continue to give them your business?

I guess I'm unusual in that I've been using an "online" only bank for 20 years (back then it wasn't so online... I had a stack of UPS overnight envelopes for check deposits), but I cannot imagine patronizing a bank that won't let me log in and do basically anything from a browser.
by wowczarek | 2025-08-26 15:07:04+00:00
Applying sawtooth correction will remove _some_ of the jitter but at the time server level, not network level, and quantisation error is not the main source of jitter here (I'm talking long time constants) - Packet Delay Variation (PDV) and internal time comparisons are. Plus, any decent loop should average the sawtooth and transform it into fluctuations slow enough that they will not have that much effect on what is being measured in the blog post - the output of the time server looks nothing like the raw 1PPS input, at least in the short term it doesn't. Of course sawtooth should be removed and let's hope his time servers do it, especially the RPi ones.
by qwytw | 2025-08-26 15:07:09+00:00
> companies in 2015 and that projected for 2025 to see this trend

It's easy to grow very fast when you are starting from a very low base. Especially when you are chasing someone.

It's a bit like China's GDP per capita. If it continued growing at the same pace as between 2000 and 2020 it might have had a chance to catch up with US in a few decades or so from now. Certainly Western Europe.

Yet based on current trends they will never close the gap (then again who knows what will change in the next 10-20 years or so).

Of course demographic collapse is not that far either. US and Europe at least have immigrants propping them up.
by frankbreetz | 2025-08-26 15:07:26+00:00
The issue with hiring many juniors is, when there is another dev boom, all the juniors that were hired, now mids or seniors, are going to jump ship to whoever is going to pay them the most. So, the company can either grow talent and then pay them market rate or hire at market rates from other companies that grew them. Hiring juniors, while good for the industry in the long run, doesn't really benefit an individual company. It is game theory and it is still why senior developers make a lot of money despite there being an oversupply of juniors.
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-26 15:07:44+00:00
What’s the use of having “better fabs” to make worse products that the market doesn’t need and not be a foundry for other companies that can use it?

The reason they are in the shape they are in right now is because they didn’t have the volume to invest in the next generation and even now the CEO said they aren’t going to invest in making a cutting edge foundry until they have customers committed to it.
by mike_hearn | 2025-08-26 15:07:44+00:00
Yeah but Google Voice isn't something you're meant to use to receive SMS codes. That's very US specific, and if you go there you've undermined the security the bank was trying to provide.

The reason they used SMS codes for a while is because phones have always tried to block malware from reading your screen or SMS storage whereas PCs don't, and because phones can do remote attestation protocols to the network as part of their login sequence. The SIM card contains keys used to sign challenges, and the network only allows authorized radio firmwares to log on. So by sending a code to a phone you have some cryptographic assurance that it was received by the right user and viewed only by them.

2FA and RA are closely related for that reason. The second factor is dedicated hardware which enforces that only a human can interact with it, and which can prove its identity cryptographically to a remote server. The mobile switching center, in the case of SMS codes.

Obviously, this was a very crude system because malware on the PC could intercept the login after the user authorized, but at least it stopped usage of the account when the user wasn't around. Modern app based systems are much more secure.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-26 15:07:55+00:00
> theory that universities broadly started inflating grades, but excepted computer science is pretty damn bold one that you've made baselessly

I'm saying that a source from more than a decade ago describing a general trend doesn't explain why recent CS graduates are facing a worse job market than folks five years ago did.

Grade inflation, per your source, has been happening for decades across the board. That does not tell us why "since the widespread adoption of generative AI, early-career workers (ages 22-25) in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a 13 percent relative decline in employment even after controlling for firm-level shocks" [1].

[1] https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/...
by basscomm | 2025-08-26 15:07:57+00:00
> Since the advent of LetsEncrypt, ACME, and Caddy I haven't thought about SSL/TLS for more than about an hour per year

I run a couple of low-stakes websites just for fun and manually updating certificates takes me about 10 minutes a year, and most of that is remembering how to generate the csr. Setting up an automated process gains me nothing except additional points of failure. Ratcheting the expiration down to 47 days is an effort to force everyone to use automation, which makes no sense for small hobby sites.

> I'm not sure why many people are still dealing with legacy manual certificate renewal

Not everyone is a professional sysadmin. Adding automation is another layer of complexity on top of what it already takes to run a website. It's fine for large orgs and professionals who do this for a living at their day jobs, but for someone just getting their feet wet it's a ridiculous ask.
by out_of_protocol | 2025-08-26 15:08:05+00:00
I see Ryzen 5 3550H + 16GB + 512GB + EUT VAT + free shipping at 152EUR (random Aliexpress deal, says "Ninkear G3 Pro") - not much considering bundled up RAM and Disk, N100 costs a little bit less.

Braindead YouTube-solution would be to buy this device, connect to TV, wireless mouse and install Windows 10/11 LTSC, install firefox + favorite addons. N100 is barely enough for 4k@60, and Ryzen gets a bit more juice to live comfortably
by paceaux | 2025-08-26 15:08:08+00:00
You really might want to look into what the DOM is and how it works.

When HTML reaches the browser, all the markup is parsed, and the browser creates a Document Object Model (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document_Ob...). That object model is an extremely robust API that's loaded with tons of functionality, not the least of which is working with events (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document_Ob...).

The browser itself brings so much functionality that you can do stuff like check the status of the battery; create, save, and access files; get someone's precise lattitude and longitude; and _create and subscribe to streams_.

I'm not sure what you mean by, "html does not allow for event handling," ... but if HTML exists in a browser at all, there's plenty of event handling to go around.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-26 15:08:16+00:00
Please pardon me since I don't know if this is satirical or not. I'd wish if you could clarify it.

Because if this is real, then the world is cooked

if not, then the fact that I think that It might be real but the only reason I believe its a joke is because you are on hackernews so I think that either you are joking or the tech has gotten so convincing that even people on hackernews (which I hold to a fair standard) are getting scammed.

I have a lot of questions if true and I am sorry for your loss if that's true and this isn't satire but I'd love it if you could tell me if its a satirical joke or not.