MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I hand-coded a white-cube-style portfolio website
by ayaros | 2025-08-03 17:30:13+00:00
The last Show HN I did got me a wide amount of attention for that project, and I'm incredibly grateful to everyone here who upvoted and commented. I realize, of course, that it's also the luck of the draw. I did my best to fix some of the issues pointed out in the comments. There are still a few more things I need to fix, which I'll get to soon!

In any case, I figured I might as well share another project I've worked on. This isn't as complex as LisaGUI, and it's perhaps not as Show HN-friendly in that there's not really much to tinker with, but it was hand-crafted with great care, and it's technically interactive.

This is a gallery website I created for my grandmom's artwork. I coded everything by hand from scratch. Like LisaGUI, the website's front-end is a single page with no frameworks. You will need JS enabled; there's a bit of code that retrieves images and string data about each painting.

On the back-end, I wrote a utility to modify the gallery database (which is just a JSON file and some directories holding images). The utility consists of a python3 script that runs a locally hosted server. This launches the default browser and opens up a GUI that lets you rearrange and edit the image file and strings for each entry in the database. I created a short video demo which showcases this; it can be watched here: https://yaros.ae/data/misc/loriegalleryeditordemo.mp4

This was made during the height of the pandemic. My grandmom was depressed about not being able to go out as much as she was used to. In the past I had discussed the idea of making a website for her, and at that moment it seemed like the perfect thing I could do to help cheer her up.

Why code this from scratch? First, at the time I couldn't find a website builder offering the exact kind of template I was looking for. I wanted something that had the look and feel of a white-cube art gallery with placards on the wall next to each painting. Second, sites offered by site builders tend to be quite bloated. I wanted the leanest, simplest site possible for my grandmom's work. Third? Well of course, to see if I could do it.

I also have a clone of this site hosting my own artwork (https://art.yaros.ae/). I originally planned on making this extensible and more user-friendly so anyone could use it as their portfolio, but I never got around to it. (Consequently, right now this isn't licensed for anyone else to use.) But at this point, for most people it would probably be easier and take far less time to just set up something on Squarespace or Wix or some other site builder. The average artist probably doesn't want to have to go through the hassle of manually hosting their own site anyway (or doing something silly like updating it through commits via GitHub!).
by HappMacDonald | 2025-08-03 17:30:30+00:00
I guess to try to echo the question: If a reader was reading along and just ran into "葡" in isolation in the text (eg, not adjacent to another character that it normally combines with) would they be able to confidently emit any sound that corresponds to what they are saying, or would it be perceived more like a punctuation error in English given that anglophones do very little to change the sound they are making as a result of punctuation (possibly just changing rhythm instead)?
by tenuousemphasis | 2025-08-03 17:32:49+00:00
Chesterton's Fence:

>In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
by gregjor | 2025-08-03 17:32:57+00:00
Look to Excel for guidance. Excel reigns as the most widely-deployed and used non-code/low-code tool.

Multiple studies show that something like 90% of spreadsheets contain logic errors. That might come from the UI and the tool, but in my experience it mainly comes from the users. Most people can't write out their business requirements on paper consistently and completely. We have known for decades that gathering and thinking through requirements describes the hard part of programming, not writing the code.

Where do no-code builders get stuck the most? At the very beginning, trying to describe their problem in plain English. They aren't thinking in terms of if/then conditions or organizing their data in a way to get good results from the tool.

A long time ago SQL got promoted as a way for non-coders and managers to query databases without needing programmers. Look how that worked out.
by const_cast | 2025-08-03 17:33:11+00:00
Valid does not mean productive.

The unfortunate reality is that people hold these beliefs not because they are true, but because they desperately want them to be true.

Self-destruction is perhaps the most common behavior there is. We would all like to believe nothing is our fault and the world just sucks, and such a belief is very comfortable. But we form that belief because it is easy, because it requires no thought, and because it ultimately hurts us.

Being a failure is easy, being a failure that's not your fault is even easier. Trying, winning, is hard. Lots of people would rather just not play at all. They think doing so will help them, because winning is hard. But it doesn't, it's just self-destructive.

It's like not showing up to an interview because you're worried it'll go bad. Yeah, it might. But you can't get a job you didn't even interview for.
by andrewrn | 2025-08-03 17:33:16+00:00
I do wonder what AI will do to this dynamic. The generative capabilities will surely turbocharge the existing dynamic (which frankly I don't see how it can get too much worse), but I do wonder about AI applications that can act as a sort of tether to the conscious type 2 thinking.

When conscious, you define how you'd like to spend your time, and that agent/AI can help reel you in when you lapse into unconscious scrolling. Or an AI that curates only topics you'd be happy spending time viewing.

A bunch of very powerful people have a huge vested interest in not letting these things happen, though, so I'm not hopeful.
by bigmadshoe | 2025-08-03 17:33:25+00:00
It’s funny that they chose only negative characteristics as traits, as if to imply that they could make the models “good” just with guidance from these vectors.

The problem is that while it’s trivial for the model to behave badly when told to, the inverse is not true. Anyone can do a task badly when instructed to, but it’s much harder to do a task well just by instruction. There’s a difference between being good and being not bad.

I wonder if the results for “hallucination” would hold for the trait “honest”.
by toast0 | 2025-08-03 17:33:55+00:00
> Prices for HDD do drop when the TB available rises but there seems to be a "floor" price.

For SSD, there definitely appears to be a floor price.

The floor price for new hard drives is somewhere around $50-$80. When a drive at a certain capacity is only sellable for $50, most of the options disappear. Looking at newegg, you can get a 1TB drive for $60, 2TB for $65, and 4TB for $75 ... The price floor is around there. But if you want the best $/TB, you've got to get larger drives.

For SSDs, the floor is a lot lower. You can get a 128gb ssd for $22, 256Gb for $25, 512GB for $33, 1TB for $50, and then after that $/TB stays pretty consistent, there's not a lot of reduction in cost due to density like with hard drives.
by HappMacDonald | 2025-08-03 17:33:57+00:00
> old-fashioned paper dictionaries

Since English dictionaries are arranged in "alphabetical order" to make finding the word one wishes to know the definition easier, I'm not curious if the Chinese writing system has anything approaching an "alphabetical order", or any kind of canonical way to order strings of Chinese text. And relatedly, how do they find words in their dictionaries?

(this is normally something I would google but it doesn't sound like something I'd get a high signal to noise ratio on given the ambiguous terms at hand)
by roughly | 2025-08-03 17:34:37+00:00
Like a lot of the research Anthropic has done, this and the “emergent misalignment” research they link to put more points in the “stochastic parrot” hypothesis column. The reason these LLM behaviors read as so weird to us is that we’re still anthropomorphizing the hell out of these systems - they can create very convincing dialogue, and the depth of the model suggests some surprising complexity, but the reason why, eg, a random string of numbers will induce changes elsewhere in the model is there’s simply nothing in the model to Be consistent. It is an extremely complex autocomplete algorithm that does a very effective cosplay of an “intelligent agent.”

My suspicion is that when we eventually find our way to AGI, these types of models will be a _component_ of those systems, but they lack some fundamental structuring that seems to be required to create anything like consistency or self-reflection.

(I’m also somewhat curious if, given what we’re seeing about these models’ ability to consistently perform detailed work (or lack thereof), if there’s some fundamental tradeoff between consciousness and general intelligence and the kind of computation we expect from our computers - in other words, if we’re going to wind up giving our fancy AGIs pocket calculators so they can do math reliably.)
by Arainach | 2025-08-03 17:35:34+00:00
>The lengthened times for showing up at the airport mean that it no longer even makes sense for many people to take shorter flights

Shorter flights should generally be rail anyway.

The math on "no longer makes sense" isn't run, but short flights were never cheaper - the benefit is that I either don't have to pay attention and drive for hours or that I don't need to be on a slower bus for more hours.
by jslabovitz | 2025-08-03 17:35:37+00:00
Having this author as a travel companion would be a nightmare.

> In the many great cities I have actually lived and worked in, I would never consider spending whole days walking.

How utterly strange! I can't think of a city I've lived in which I've not explored extensively by walking. The idea of simply moving to a place and never seeing it as new and strange, never having the urge to learn it by exploration, feels completely alien to me.

I suppose that's why I ensure I avoid this particular type of person when traveling... :-)
by the_snooze | 2025-08-03 17:35:58+00:00
I feel that any vision needs to have some actual execution behind it, otherwise it's just a twinkle in someone's eye. "Built for Apple Intelligence" is literally the slogan for Apple's 2024 lineup. The vision is there front and center. But everything they layed out in their vision (and explicitly advertised!) has been a joke so far, falling somewhere between half-baked, trivial, or nonexistent. They've had to pull that ad showing contextually-aware interactions because that's nowhere near ready. https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/...

After a certain point, it becomes a "put up or shut up" situation for those making wild claims. That's where all the criticism is coming from, and rightfully so. Sure, set a course for the future, but until there's something real to show in the present, it's all empty hype until proven otherwise.
by svat | 2025-08-03 17:36:06+00:00
In the secretary problem, you're trying to maximize the probability of selecting the absolutely best candidate. In other words you assume that you “win” if you select the best candidate and “lose” otherwise (even if you end up picking the second best who is almost as good!), and you're trying to maximize the probability of winning. (The optimal solution says you can win with probability 1/e ≈ 37%, meaning that ≈63% of the time you lose!)

This has always seemed the most unsatisfying assumption in the problem to me, with application to no real-life case that I can think of. The Wikipedia article has some stuff on relaxing this assumption, in its section titled “Cardinal payoff variant” (it seems that the optimal at least under one set of assumptions is √n rather than n/e, though those assumptions also seem unrealistic): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Secretary_problem...
by js2 | 2025-08-03 17:36:13+00:00
Your comment is not a fair interpretation of what I wrote.

For the record, I write better and more detailed commit messages than almost anyone I know across a decades[^0] long career[^1,^2,^3,^4,^5]. But I'm not immune from making mistakes, and everyone can use an editor, or just runs out of mental energy. Unfortunately, I find it hard to get decent PR reviews from my colleagues at work.

So yeah, I've started using Claude Code to help review my own commits. That doesn't mean I don't understand my changes or that I don't know why I made them. And CC is good at banging out a first draft of a commit message. It's also good at catching tiny logic errors that slip through tests and human review. Surprisingly good. You should try it.

I have plenty of criticisms for CC too. I'm not sure it's actually saving me any time. I've spent the last two weeks working 10 hour days with it. For some things it shines. For other things, I would've been better off writing the code from scratch myself, something I've had to do maybe 40% of the time now.

[^0]: https://seclists.org/bugtraq/1998/Jul/172

[^1]: https://github.com/git/git/commit/441adf0ccf571a9fe15658fdfc...

[^2]: https://github.com/git/git/commit/cacfc09ba82bfc6b0e1c047247...

[^3]: https://github.com/fastlane/fastlane/pull/21644

[^4]: https://github.com/CocoaPods/Core/pull/741

[^5]: None of the these are my best examples, just the ones I found quickly. Most of my commit messages are obviously locked away by my employer. Somewhere in the git history is a paragraphs long commit message from Jeff King (peff) explaining a one line diff. That's probably my favorite commit message of all time. But I also know that at work I've got a message somewhere explaining a single character diff.
by jakewins | 2025-08-03 17:36:13+00:00
The shortest bed f150 you can buy is 5.5ft, with a 2ft tailgate, trivially hauling 8ft with just a few inches overhang with the tailgate down, and easily doing 10ft lumber.

Again, I think pickup trucks are idiotically oversized and dangerous to pedestrians, but arguing against them by repeating things that anyone that uses a pickup knows is nonsense is not helping win over any detractors.
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-03 17:37:29+00:00
> who knows how Macromedia would have handled it and maybe it wouldn’t have had to be removed from browsers under Adobe’s watch due to security issues.

Flash always was a dumpsterfire, and so were virtually all browser plugins using native code. There's a reason NPAPI was deprecated eventually.

The exception of course is ActiveX. There was no way to ever make that shitshow even reasonably safe, simply given how its execution model was.
by sugarpimpdorsey | 2025-08-03 17:37:53+00:00
The author's primary lament seems to be he purposely didn't invest in a rapidly growing company because of:

1. Some personal dislike of the principals or their product or petty political disagreement

2. Company grows 500% (as predicted)

3. Everyone else makes money except the author who deliberately didn't invest ( see #1 above)

4. It's not fair!

5. Write angry sour grapes substack blaming the current administration for all your problems.
by imiric | 2025-08-03 17:38:31+00:00
Great collection!

My favorites from this era:

- DataChild of SAE - Tune 1[1]

- Zoef of FAiRLiGHT - Tune 2[2]

They're from a CLASS installer of THPS2. Allegedly :)

[1]: https://archive.org/details/DatachildOfSae-Tune1

[2]: https://archive.org/details/ZoefOfFlt-Tune2
by datameta | 2025-08-03 17:40:55+00:00
I wouldn't like the takeaway from my comment to be that any extra intensity beyond daily walking is wasted. Instead my point is that for some, walking is one of the few exercises within reach that is sustainable with low injury risk.

I am also saying that for those new to the gym, starting with say 10-20 minutes every day is better in the long run than 1-1.5 hours three times a week before the body is acclimated or before proper form is developed. This lowers the risk of injury that could set back the health improvement endeavor.
by sarchertech | 2025-08-03 17:41:08+00:00
> Chinese reading education seems to work well despite the lack of phonics,

From what I remember from taking Mandarin in college, Chinese students learn to read much slower than speakers of languages with phonetic alphabets.

I did a quick Google search for the exact numbers and it looks like Chinese students are expected to recognize 3k characters by the end of 6th grade. While US students are expected to be able to read 20k words by that time and some sources I found said up to 40k.
by HappMacDonald | 2025-08-03 17:41:16+00:00
> French pronunciation is mostly consistent (more so than English at least)

Most of English's inconsistencies stem from words absorbed from other languages, and far and away the largest helping of that was the French that British nobility picked up during the Norman invasion.

My understanding of French pronunciation primarily revolves around the idea that 80% of words end in three randomly selected vowels followed by 1-3 randomly selected maximally hard consonants such as j, x, z, k.. and that the sum total of those randomly selected letters always sound identical to the vowel portion of the word "œuf" which means "egg". Which is also basically like trying to say "eww" while you have an egg in your mouth.
by gedy | 2025-08-03 17:41:43+00:00
> My suspicion is that when we eventually find our way to AGI, these types of models will be a _component_ of those systems

I think this is a good summary of the situation, and strikes a balance between the breathless hype and the sneering comments about “AI slop“.

These technologies are amazing! And I do think they are facsimiles of parts of the human mind. (Image diffusion is certainly similar to human dreams in my opinion), but still feels like we are missing an overall intelligence or coordination in this tech for the present.
by deadpannini | 2025-08-03 17:42:17+00:00
If they hate Lina Khan, it's because she's liable to make demands on them without knowing anything about their business. In the worst case, her office turns outright extortionist, as the current administration is bent on demonstrating.

None of that conflicts with the observation that large, well-financed, entrenched players better at navigating regulatory obstacles than small upstarts.
by Illniyar | 2025-08-03 17:43:25+00:00
I can see this working with "evil" and "sycophantic" personas. These seem like traits that would be amenable to input and thus be detectable by manipulating the input.

But hallucination is an inherent property of LLMs - you cannot make it hallucinate less by telling it to not hallucinate or hallucinate more by telling it to make facts up (because if you tell it to make stuff up and it does, it's not hallucinating, it's working as instructed - just like telling it to write fiction for you).

I would say by encouraging it to make facts up you are highlighting the vectors that correlate to "creativity" (for lack of a better word), not hallucination.
Show HN: Splash – Automatically add colors to make logs easier to read
by joshi4 | 2025-08-03 17:43:26+00:00
Splash adds beautiful, adaptive colors to make logs easier to read.

There's no config or setup required, just pipe input to splash and it auto detects common log formats and adds color to make them easier to scan. You can mix and match multiple log formats in a single stream.

Regexp and string search is also built in.

I built Splash as I found it frustrating to scan and find a particular test/line while developing locally - I would often add "ASDF" or "####" to make lines stand out.

Splash's color scheme makes it easy to scan and find the zone you're interested in. Use string or regexp search to highlight individual log lines.
by kllrnohj | 2025-08-03 17:43:32+00:00
iPhone was a new UI focused around capacitive touchscreens which at the time was itself an entirely new category.

What, exactly, did M1 change about anything about using a laptop? Longer battery life? Faster? Okay, same improvements as had been featured for the last 20 years. And it wasn't any thinner, depending on the model line it was substantially thicker even.

So what exactly was new about M1 that wasn't just a bog standard iteration we'd seen dozens of times by that point?

Even just considering Apple's product line surely you'd have to rank things like Intel's Core 2 as more significant, as it enabled the creation of the MacBook Air and was Apple's return to subcompact laptops. Or Intel's thunderbolt which radically changed the entire I/O story and capabilities for Apple, who fully embraced it.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-03 17:44:10+00:00
This is where user-friendliness is a requirement, not a luxury.

Anyone who has ever looked at an EHR/EPIC screen, can tell you that the 1990s Web called, and wants its tables and frames back.

In fact, one doctor I went to, still ran Windows 95 (in 2009), because they didn't want to deal with new interfaces.

Engineers are notoriously unsympathetic to usability and simple GUIs, but I have found them to be an absolute gold mine, if you want people to actually use your product. Apple and Google are trillion-dollar companies, now, mainly because of their simple, usable UX.
by vessenes | 2025-08-03 17:44:12+00:00
Lots of interesting stuff in the summary; a typical Anthropic-grade exploration and analysis. Thanks you guys!

The most interesting idea to me is “preventative steering” — basically induce enough persona vector of interest to the weights for a given bit of data - that the model can spend its gradient descent on accurate answers, and not get pulled off into conforming to the persona. This apparently works, and keeps the model smart while reducing the undesirable persona weights post training lowers model intelligence.
by throwaway6612 | 2025-08-03 17:44:16+00:00
If I entertain your opinion that they are right of mainstream democratic voters (debatable, but let’s say so). How would you reconcile that with the fact that they are far more to the left than mainstream republican voters?

You’re operating on a fundamentally flawed premise. This is why if you’re using labels you have to compare against the general population. Just because you’re more left than Bob doesn’t make Bob right-leaning.
by atmosx | 2025-08-03 17:45:18+00:00
"Unfortunately, I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on,” wrote Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a note to staff obtained by WIRED."

Ref: https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-dario-amodei-gulf-stat...

Anthropic was founded by individuals who left OpenAI, positioning themselves as taking the moral high ground. Well, I guess that was that... :-)
by ryandrake | 2025-08-03 17:46:16+00:00
> Not to mention most people still want intimate relationship ...yeah that thing called sex, while I'm sure someone is working on it somewhere this is gonna take a while to automate.

I think "good enough" sex robots are closer than you think. There are already existing physical products approaching that territory, and if you ignore current taboos, there's likely a huge market to be staked out once these are more... lifelike, I guess?. Things like AI girlfriend substitutes (and AI boyfriend substitutes) are under active research and development with a market already willing to pay, so merging them with those existing and future physical/robotic products would be an obvious next step.