MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jayd16 | 2025-08-16 16:26:01+00:00
It's yet to be seen what it actually eliminates and what they're willing to actually enable by default.

The architecture does seem to still be in the general framing of "treat large files as special and host them differently." That is the crux of the problem in the first place.

I think it would shock no one to find that the official system also needs to be enabled and also falls back to a mode where it supports fetching and merging pointers without full file content.

I do hope all the UX problems will be fixed. I just don't see them going away naturally and we have to put our trust in the hope that the git maintainers will make enjoyable, seamless and safe commands.
Show HN: Alexandrie – A lightweight Markdown note-taking app (Vue/Nuxt and Go)
by tom238 | 2025-08-16 16:26:08+00:00
I’ve been building Alexandrie, an open-source note-taking app focused on being lightweight, offline-friendly, and cleanly designed.

Built with Vue/Nuxt (frontend) and Go (backend)

Stores files via MinIO, supports hundreds of notes without slowing down

Designed for students, developers, and creators who want a simple Markdown workflow

Features: snippets, keyboard shortcuts, offline mode, export, structured categories

Repo: https://github.com/Smaug6739/Alexandrie

Contributions and feedback are welcome.
by jascha_eng | 2025-08-16 16:26:31+00:00
The real leap was going from gpt-4 to sonnet 3.5. 4o was meh, o1 was barely better than sonnet and slow as hell in comparison.

The native voice mode of 4o is still interesting and not very deeply explored though imo. I'd love to build a Chinese teaching app that actual can critique tones etc but it isn't good enough for that.
by dfxm12 | 2025-08-16 16:27:42+00:00
I don't know if I exactly follow the analogy, but engines are not binned like CPU's. If you have questions about if you're "on your own" with mods, check with whoever has your warranty and insurance. It might be different car to car or even state to state. Likely, you can get some work done at a dealership that won't void your warranty and tune to a level that doesn't affect your insurance.
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-16 16:28:34+00:00
How is that different than the models today are actually usable for non trivial things and more capable than yesterdays and it’s also true that tomorrow’s models will also probably be more capable than today’s?

For example, I dismissed AI three years ago because it couldn’t do anything I needed it to. Today I use it for certain things and it’s not quite capable of other things. Tomorrow it might be capable of a lot more.

Yes, priors have to be updated when the ground truth changes and the capabilities of AI change rapidly. This is how chess engines on supercomputers were competitive in the 90s then hybrid systems became the leading edge competitive and then machines took over for good and never looked back.
by jppope | 2025-08-16 16:28:40+00:00
Maybe but at this time it doesn't appear to be a "winner take all" market, its actually looking more and more like a commodity or utility market... There doesn't appear to be a moat or proprietary advantage to any providers (except at the hardware level) or anyone at the application layer. I've never once heard that someone would only use ChatGpt and could never use Claude. The improvements between model versions are minor at this point. How would someone win this market? I think its also a foregone conclusion that the only way to profitably monetize this market will be ads or to raise the price for inference in the future.
by Jensson | 2025-08-16 16:29:12+00:00
> But the algorithms they teach humans in school to do long-hand arithmetic (which are liable to be the only algorithms demonstrated in the training data) require a single unique numeral for every digit.

But humans don't see single digits, we learn to parse noisy visual data into single digits and then use those single digits to do the math.

It is much easier for these models to understand what the number is based on the tokens and parse that than it is for a visual model to do it based on an image, so getting those tokens streamed straight into its system makes its problem to solve much much simpler than what humans do. We weren't born able to read numbers, we learn that.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-08-16 16:29:13+00:00
The people who were convicted of multi-million dollar fraud resulting in someone walking away with millions of dollars of others bitcoin deposits, IIRC (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Karpel%C3%A8s if you want to check details).

Also, I couldn't see where it is based? Anywhere in Five-Eyes countries, or places like USA with national security letters (or just their fascist government) is probably not going to fit most people's that models.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-16 16:29:33+00:00
The answers were likely cherrypicked, but the 1/14 gpt5 answer is so damn good! There's no trace of that certainly - gptisms - in conclusion slop.

9/14 is equally impressive in actually "getting" what cursed means, and then doing it (as opposed to gpt4 outright refusing it).

13/14 is a show of how integrated tools can drive research, and "fix" the cutoff date problems of previous generations. Nothing new/revolutionary, but still cool to show it off.

The others are somewhere between ok and meh.
by nikolayasdf123 | 2025-08-16 16:29:50+00:00
Internet did not take away jobs (only relocated support/SWE from USA to India/Vietnam)

these AI "productivity" tools straight up eliminating jobs. and in turn wealth that otherwise supported families, humans, and powered economy. it is directly "removing" humans from workforce and from what that work was supporting.

not even hard takeoff is necessary for collapse.
by Theodores | 2025-08-16 16:30:20+00:00
Once upon a time, my father, who could not cook, harshly criticised my onion chopping technique. This knocked my confidence in the kitchen quite a bit. I refused to learn the fancy techniques of the TV gameshow celebrity chef that my dad was enamoured with.

In my opinion, so long as you are chopping onions, all is well. Sure it could be dangerous, with fingers and egos at stake, but far worse is to not be chopping onions as that means ready meals, take out meals and having a poorer diet.
by jasonvorhe | 2025-08-16 16:30:26+00:00
Frustration free as Windows? You're kidding, right?

I recently showed a client of mine how Ubuntu works out of the box. No hours of rebooting, no ads in any menus, no online account requirement, no persistent anti-malware scanning, no UI elements from the 90s showing through. Drivers can be an issue, power usage perhaps, maybe sleep is annoying (especially on shit hardware) on laptops but apart from that I don't know how you can even compare the frustration from a recent Windows system with a modern Linux desktop.
by m4nu3l | 2025-08-16 16:32:03+00:00
>governments generate wealth all the time. Public education, public healthcare, public research, public housing. > These are all programs that generate an enormous amount of wealth and allow citizens to flourish.

I thought you meant that governments generate wealth because the things you listed have value. If so, that doesn't prove they generate wealth by my argument, unless you can prove those things are more valuable than alternative ways to use the resources the government used to produce them and that the government is more efficient in producing those.

You can argue that those are good because you think redistribution is good. But you can have redistribution without the government directly providing goods and services.
by bwfan123 | 2025-08-16 16:32:28+00:00
This is close to what the apple paper [1] also found on constraint satisfaction problems. As an example, on towers of hanoi, past a frontier, accuracy collapses.

Even when the algorithm steps are laid out precisely, they cannot be followed. Perhaps, LLMs should be trained on turing machine specs and be given a tape lol.

Constraint satisfaction and combinatorics are where the search space is exponential, and the techniques are not formalized (not enough data in training set), and remain hard for machines as seen in the Problem 6 of IMO which could not be solved by LLMs. I suspect, there is this aspect of human intelligence which is not yet captured in LLMs.

[1] - https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-think...
by Jensson | 2025-08-16 16:32:38+00:00
> LLM's struggle with simple maths by nature of their architecture not due to a lack of logic.

No, if it was good at logic it would have overcame that tiny architectural hurdle, its such a trivial process to convert tokens to numbers that it is ridiculous for you to suggest that is the reason it fails at math.

The reason it fails at math is because it fails at logic, and math is the most direct set of logic we have. It doesn't fail at converting between formats, it can convert strawberry to correct Base64 encoding, meaning it does know exactly what letters are there, it just lacks to logic to actually understand what "count letters" means.
by Davidzheng | 2025-08-16 16:33:57+00:00
Isn't "But even then – any serious legal situation (like a contract) is going to want a human in the loop to verify that the translation is actually correct. This will require actual translator skills." only true if the false positive rate of the verifier is not much higher than the failure rate of the AI? At some point it's like asking a human to double check a calculator
by gyomu | 2025-08-16 16:33:59+00:00
Yes, that's also what caught my attention. I landed on this article by way of reading about barnacles, and that the Barnacle Goose is named as such because it was thought it was born from barnacles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnacle_goose

Maybe it's hard for us to realize how filled with superstition the world used to be; and how so little was understood and in such minuscule proportions compared to today, such that most anything could appear plausible under the right circumstances.
by Grimeton | 2025-08-16 16:34:44+00:00
Because everybody is fighting over legal/illegal tuning:

When you just change your software and you gain 50bhp that DOES NOT make your car faster. The gears still have the same ratio and the maximum speed doesn't change because the engine went up to max rpm at 200bhp and now goes up to max rpm at 250bhp.

Even raising the max rpm won't get you anywhere because to go from let's say 6500rpm to 8000rpm requires so much power and modifications that you won't achieve that with software alone.

So as long as only the software is changed the maximum operating parameters of the car are NOT changed.
by furyofantares | 2025-08-16 16:34:49+00:00
I don't think 'random' is doing any of the work. These sound like they would work fine with a deterministic PRNG seeded at 0. They don't sound like they need to be looking at lava lamps or the like.

It's that there's a population of values (integers for factoring, nodes-to-delete for the graph) where we know a way to get a lot of information cheaply from most values, but we don't know which values, so we sample them.

Which isn't to say the PRNG isn't doing work - maybe it is, maybe any straightforward iteration through the sample space has problems, failure values being clumped together, or similar values providing overlapping information.

If so that suggests to me that you can do better sampling than PRNG, although maybe the benefit is small. When the article talks about 'derandomizing' an algorithm, is it referring to removing the concept of sampling from this space entirely, or is it talking about doing a better job sampling than 'random'?
by gethly | 2025-08-16 16:35:55+00:00
Chargebacks are indeed quite detrimental to merchants as they are the ones paying it. And if you have bad customers(maybe competition is trying to put you out of the business), you might get deep into red quite fast. Usually it is anywhere between 20 and 50 euros, which is crazy when it is just a reverse of the bank transfer which is the tech in the background. Like if you run a small online store and you sell 10€ items where you make a 5€ pre-tax profit, having a 20€ chargeback on such sale can be really dangerous.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-08-16 16:36:03+00:00
Hilarious how putty.org hasn't been updated, and still has a FINAL WARNING video on the landing page.

Extrapolated to the present time, all of us vaccinated individuals are now suffering the big consequences.

Too bad all nutjobs aren't so easy to disprove by simply taking a single large breath. :)
by mdip | 2025-08-16 16:36:13+00:00
This is interesting, it really sounds like they were running a pretty normal salvage operation with the evil twist of "they were selling the salvaged drives as new" -- kinda feels like dialing back the odometer on a car.

Barring that "evil twist", they'd not be doing anything all that uncommon/illegal but refurbished hard drives and the companies that sell them have been a bit scammy/"buyer beware" hardware for as long as I can remember.

Back in the early 90s, I spent a year saving up for and building the best 486 PC I could buy. I went with a 330MB[0] SCSI drive that I picked up from a small magazine advertisement in Computer Shopper. They advertised it as refurbished, and there was no such thing as SMART parameters to reset (were there even counters of any kind back then, I can't remember?) so there was no way to tell how long it had been used except for the price. These were more than half off.

It seemed shady, the price was still several hundred dollars (though, I want to say something like $500 off of the cheapest new option) and being a dumb teenager, I called the number and placed the order.

My heart sunk a bit when it arrived. If memory serves, this was the one that came with all but one of the threaded screw slots completely stripped (of the four I needed to use given my case). Technically, they were all stripped, but one of them still had the screw -- left behind, evidently, because it became welded to the hole.

After some delicate work with a metal file, I got it all installed and nothing worked. So I called the manufacturer who took about ten seconds to find the problem: That's a Differential SCSI drive. It took another few minutes for him to explain what that meant. There was no mention of this in the advertisement (they didn't even include the model number, just "330GB SCSI DRIVES!" I think these were common in AS/400s or something along those lines.

fsck.

So ... I bought a differential SCSI controller, cable and terminator, which set me back more than half of the savings from the drive. Because, as a teenager, I hadn't learned about the sunk cost fallacy.

I hadn't appreciated, then, what a miracle it was that when everything was plugged in correctly, it all worked and continued to work until I upgraded the drive. The thing was extremely loud (occasionally making a unique sound similar to when wood hits a circular saw, like the magnetic head was grinding off some of the platter -- given its size, it had plenty of room to chisel the bits onto the surface ...). It was a massive heat source for not just the case, but the room. But it served my stupid BBS for several years, somehow.

[0] It's been so long, I may not have that capacity right. It was 3-4 times what was typical at that time (I ran a BBS with file"z"). It was a 5.25" drive that required a full height slot (it was about 3/4 full height) to give you an idea.
by zahlman | 2025-08-16 16:36:45+00:00
Wow! I love how this guy thinks. I've been meaning for a long time now to do some blog posts evangelizing for people to take control of their computer and treat it as the powerful tool that it is, rather than just another privacy-invading glowing rectangle. This piece is definitely worth a citation and a shout-out, and I wish the company well.
by simianwords | 2025-08-16 16:36:45+00:00
Disagree. You have to try really hard and go very niche and deep for it to get some fact wrong. In fact I'll ask you to provide examples: use GPT 5 with thinking and search disabled and get it to give you inaccurate facts for non niche, non deep topics.

Non niche meaning: something that is taught at undergraduate level and relatively popular.

Non deep meaning you aren't going so deep as to confuse even humans. Like solving an extremely hard integral.

Edit: probably a bad idea because this sort of "challenge" works only statistically not anecdotally. Still interesting to find out.
by toast0 | 2025-08-16 16:37:41+00:00
> In the case of fraud (like the article's example of a thieving storefront), banks can simply reverse the transfer. This is not an all-or-nothing deal where CCs are always safe because of theoretical chargebacks, and bank transfers are not.

US wire transfers generally can't be reversed --- sometimes, if an error is noted immediately, and the destination bank cooperates, they'll send the money back; but the recipient can pull cash out immediately or wire the funds somewhere else immediately, and then your recourse is through the courts. ACH transactions are like checks; they can be reversed, but only if there was a mistake or they were unauthorized, not because of a service complaint; again, if you have a service problem, recourse is through the courts.
by xdennis | 2025-08-16 16:38:30+00:00
The draft/promaja. In Eastern Europe people genuinely think that if you leave two windows open you'll get various diseases like cold/flu/headache/ear pain/etc.

I've tried to understand this belief. So if you stand outside and it's windy, that's perfectly fine. But if you're inside, and you open two windows, that's deadly, even if there's no draft to be felt. I think some people think it's even more deadly if you can't feel it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/comments/1csstle/draft_myth...
by jqpabc123 | 2025-08-16 16:38:57+00:00
Yes, this might make sense if you could do the maintenance yourself --- but this is not at all easy or even possible in some cases without expensive/specialized electronic tools --- and this is all by design.

Something that should be simple like changing the battery is actually an intricate process on some models involving all sorts of resets and nonsense. A mistake can "brick" your car. I know someone who did this and had to have the car towed to the dealership where they were subjected to a good ole fashioned ($$$) reaming --- all for a dead battery.

https://www.mercedesmedic.com/mercedes-battery-replacement-d...

For me, a 5 year old Mercedes is just not worth the headache --- and again, this is by design IMO. If you choose to buy one for basic transportation, my advice is make sure you have a backup vehicle.
by DavidCanHelp | 2025-08-16 16:39:40+00:00
"This entire 20-chapter computer science textbook was created in a single extended session through human-AI collaboration. I provided the vision and structure—a complete CS education from counting in binary to securing Unix systems—while Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant) generated the detailed content, working code examples, and exercises.

What's remarkable is the consistency and depth achieved in one continuous writing session. Each chapter maintains the same pedagogical approach: theory explained clearly, followed by working implementations in appropriate languages (C for systems programming, Python for algorithms, Assembly for low-level concepts), and practical exercises. The AI didn't just regurgitate textbook material—it created cohesive explanations that build naturally from fundamentals to advanced topics, with over 500 working code examples that actually demonstrate the concepts rather than just describing them. The goal was to democratize computer science education by creating a resource equivalent to a full CS degree that anyone can access for free. The speed of creation (one session) contrasts with the depth of content (1000+ pages), showing how AI can help make quality education more accessible while maintaining the rigor and completeness that learners deserve." -- Claude
by thegrim33 | 2025-08-16 16:39:56+00:00
The Garmin change was pretty gross, they tried to market the change as "instead of suspending your plan when you don't need it, now you just cancel your plan anytime and renew when you want", but they didn't call attention to the fact that renewing after cancelling results in a $60 "reactivation" charge. Which, for the lower tier plans, is the equivalent of 4 months of service. So, if for example, you cancel for 6 months over the winter, then renew in spring/summer, they essentially charge you for 4 of the 6 months you were cancelled.

It's also fun since Garmin devices are safety-critical devices, and with those plan changes people are now more incentivized to hold off on having a plan in order to save money; they've created incentive for people to be less safe.
Show HN: Embedr – Agentic IDE for Arduino, ESP32, and More
by sinharishabh | 2025-08-16 16:40:03+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m building an agentic IDE for hardware developers. It currently supports Arduino, ESP32, ESP8266, and a bunch of other boards (mostly hobbyist for now, but expanding to things like PlatformIO).

It can already write and debug hardware projects end-to-end on its own. The goal is to have it also generate breadboard views (Fritzing-style), PCB layouts, and schematics. Basically a generative EDA tool.

Right now, it’s already a better drop-in replacement for the Arduino IDE.

Would love feedback from folks here.
by forgetfulness | 2025-08-16 16:40:37+00:00
> Not necessarily. Such forces could be outvoted or out maneuvered

Could.

> So many assumptions. There is no need to just assume any particular distribution of boredom across the future population of the world. Making predictions about social unrest is even more complicated

I’m assuming that previous outcomes predict future failures, because the forces driving these changes are of our societies, and not a hypothetical, assumed new society.

In this world, ownership, actual, legal ownership, is a far stronger and fundamental right than any social right to your well-being.

You would have to change that, which is a utopian project whose success has been assumed in the past, that a dialectical contradiction of the forces of social classes would lead to the replacement of this framework.

It is indeed very complicated, but you know what’s even more complicated? Utopian projects.

Sorry but I see it as far more likely that the plebes will be told to kick rocks and ask the bots to generate art for them, when asking for money for art supplies on top of their cup noodle money.
by Catbert59 | 2025-08-16 16:40:49+00:00
Problem is that most our embedded stuff is heavily NDA'ed and will never (and isn't allowed to) end up in LLMs. So we will be sticking to hand-writing most stuff.

At work we have access to the latest LLMs (Claude, Gemini, Open AI) and they are not really usable. The code looks great (which makes it extremely hard to debug) - but produce too much hallucinations.
by neurostimulant | 2025-08-16 16:40:51+00:00
> With humility and love, Mark (“MagicalTux”) Karpelès, CTO VP.NET

Huh, I thought Mark Karpelès is working at Private Internet Access.

From the about page:

> currently head of karpeles labs, a multi faceted research and development firm specializing in highly complex technology systems

I guess he quit to run a competing vpn company?
by latchkey | 2025-08-16 16:41:17+00:00
This has _nothing to do with dodging taxes_. Everyone, including me, should pay their taxes within the rules of law. Do you pay taxes when you "borrow" funds from a credit card and pay them back every month? No.

This is really no different except that instead of borrowing from a third party, you're borrowing from yourself. In the same way that you don't pay taxes when you borrow from a bank or when you borrow from your friend. Cut out the middleman and be your own bank.

My prediction is that one day, people will think of crypto as the traditional finance system. We're already seeing the transition happening today.