MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sokoloff | 2025-08-15 13:44:53+00:00
Suppose you created the original prior art and want to get your original design manufactured on China. The Chinese manufacturer might the best in the world and cheapest source but unwilling to defy the Chinese patent.

Your tiny order isn’t worth their whole business, but if you did the original design that feels patently* unfair to you.

* sorry, couldn’t help myself
by danaris | 2025-08-15 13:44:54+00:00
"Justice" is not a scalar. It is a matrix, at best.

In some parts of America, and in some aspects, "justice" was still clearly increasing up until the second Trump presidency. This is especially true for the treatment of various marginalized groups (especially queer people, where it's quite obvious that "justice" for them increased markedly with the Obergefell v Hodges decision in 2015, and continued to improve in many ways after that).

In other areas and ways, it peaked before 9/11 and has dropped a great deal since.

In still others, it's been on a long slow decline since some time in the latter part of the 20th century.

And this is part of why some people are so angry these days: they see "justice" decreasing for them, while it increases for other people—including some of the people they've always considered to be beneath them—and they wrongly conclude that it's a zero-sum game, and they need to reduce justice for those other people in order to bring it back for them.
by the_gastropod | 2025-08-15 13:45:02+00:00
Yep, exactly. I selfhost Vaultwarden and a bunch of other apps that my family also use. So I run Authentik, which lets them only have to worry about remembering one login, and they then have a little dashboard of all our apps, and can click to login to whatever they want. It's a pretty decent little system, and I'm happy I can now add Vaultwarden to it.

The bigger your users x applications number, the bigger the benefit. It make user management easy (e.g., you only have to manage users in one place instead of N)
by lxgr | 2025-08-15 13:45:57+00:00
Your comment just made me realize how easy it would actually be for a court to implement such a ban these days: They could simply require Apple to not ship a content blocking API anymore in their jurisdiction. Thanks to Apple's ban of third-party browsers, that would be enough.

On Android, the situation is slightly better, since browsers can be sideloaded, but ad blockers would quickly become a niche phenomenon.
by soulofmischief | 2025-08-15 13:46:35+00:00
It's worth mentioning Orca[0] by Hundredrabbits, a 2-dimensional esolang which does incorporate time (and thus distance) and so is really 3-dimensional.

It's also worth checking out Extempore[1] by Andrew Sorensen and Ben Swift, which grants you have incredibly precise timing semantics at the sample level.

"Each extempore process has a scheduling engine built-in, allowing tasks to be scheduled for execution at a precise time in the future. Unlike threading constructs such as sleep() or wait(), which don’t provide strong guarantees about temporal accuracy (i.e. the time they’ll sleep/wait for), Extempore's scheduling engine is guaranteed to execute its tasks at the requested time (the number of audio samples since Extempore was started). This temporal guarantee is significant for time critical domains such as audio and graphic, and real-time systems programming."

What's cool about this is that you're able to modify the program while it's running, and only update sections of it at a time, using the editor as a scratchpad, and it supports networking so you can precisely synchronize a herd of non-local devices and do things you'd have an extremely hard time doing in other languages. The applications extend far beyond just audio and visual programming.

What both of these languages have in common is that they are designed for live coding, or as Sorensen says, cyberphysical programming. I am very interested in the marriage of these technologies and recent transformer models.

[0] https://100r.co/site/orca.html

[1] https://extemporelang.github.io/docs/overview/time/
by cgriswald | 2025-08-15 13:46:50+00:00
Yes. We figured it was a mistake and watched a single dubbed episode and it was terrible. IIRC when I googled it I found out it was an intentional decision and of course people were talking about just pirating the original.

Edit: It has been some months, but I also vaguely recall the episodes getting the Japanese audio out of order, which is why we thought it was just a mistake for that episode until we 'caught up' to the newest episodes.
by sublimefire | 2025-08-15 13:46:50+00:00
This is very much a bad faith argument without any specifics. I found Prusa to be good enough. Do you have any examples of open hardware printers that were evaluated that did not meet the bar?

Regardless the topic is about open hardware being squeezed using shady tactics. It means leas competition, less innovation. Rules to kick such players should be easy to enforce as opposed to required to pay quite a lot for such an action.
by Symbiote | 2025-08-15 13:46:56+00:00
Your comment has nothing to do with the article, or the differing approach of the Swiss (who I'm sure also have legal protection for endangered species).

> There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured.

Remember if these adults were in the room, the political cohort angry about the bat tunnel wouldn't have been able to stop low-traffic neighbourhood schemes, cycle paths, air-quality regulations, Manchester's congestion charge, etc.
by cratermoon | 2025-08-15 13:47:13+00:00
I'm unwilling to accept the discussion and conclusions of the paper because of the framing of how LLMs work.

> socio-emotional capabilities of autonomous agents

The paper fails to note that these 'capabilities' are illusory. They are a product of how the behaviors of LLMs "hack" our brains and exploit the hundreds of thousands of years of evolution of our equipment as a social species. https://jenson.org/timmy/
by AlexandrB | 2025-08-15 13:47:31+00:00
IP is just too strong. The terms are ridiculously long (especially for copyright), there are multiple workarounds for "fair use", such as DMCA, and patents on simple concepts like linked lists are not laughed out of the room.

All of this stuff needs to be weakened (and shortened). Part of the reason Chinese companies are able to iterate quickly on technology like 3d printers or drones is that it's possible to simply ignore this stifling IP regime until you actually need to start selling internationally.

It's telling that the article specifically calls out patents originating in China. It seems ridiculous to treat these as serious filings and not shredder fodder when the originating country happily allows their local industry to ignore western patents. The asymmetry here leads to obvious advantages for Chinese companies.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-15 13:47:48+00:00
There is no misaligned goal. China isn’t out to destroy the US.

It’s more jealousy of being overpowered. It’s sad but I think this is ultimately the brutal truth we have to accept. There’s no other logical outlook on this. Literally if left to its own devices China isn’t interested in the war.

The US is out to do everything to stop Chinas ascendency to become the new world power. And of course both sides as a result will increase military presence but neither side wants to engage in war.
by gosub100 | 2025-08-15 13:47:52+00:00
That's not really an Occam's Razor conclusion. I would say the reason is that multiple lawsuits were already filed, and to admit the gun was defective essentially means you lose all the suits overnight. At the time, they chose to ride it out because they didn't know how many of these guns were actually defective.

My guess is it was a perfect storm where the defect rate was low enough to escape their quality control but high enough (or perhaps delayed long enough, meaning it takes years for the defect to appear) to lead to a clear signal after the horse got out of the barn. Enough suits were filed that they perhaps risk bankruptcy if they lose all of them.

That's just my speculation, and seems to be more plausible than some side effect from mental illness.
by motorest | 2025-08-15 13:48:00+00:00
> Being entirely dependent on Chinese manufacturing to make anything.

I'm sorry, it's very hard to take this sort of concern seriously.

The express goal of US's take on neoliberalism was to dump all manufacturing onto countries like China while abusing IP to prevent anyone else, China included, from ever being able to compete.

Now that the rules that the US abused to stifle innovation are being used by someone else to protect their own investment, you suddenly cry foul?

The US needs to put on their big boy pants and figure out ways to compete in the same terms that everyone else had to endure, just like the whole world was forced to learn how to deal with that. If someone else has the IP you need, pay them. Or do you honestly expect that arbitrary rules are only acceptable if they clearly benefit you alone?
by da-x | 2025-08-15 13:48:28+00:00
I dislike flash cards, preferring to answer open questions instead, where you have to fill a word in a sentence. Open questions also prevent rot learning.

LLMs are really good at generating such open questions.

E.g. "The committee was ______ to the proposal, provided that a few minor adjustments were made to address public concerns." - I generated this using a simple prompt. Guess the word that needs to be filled in :)
by Nikuson | 2025-08-15 13:48:55+00:00
Hi HN,

I built NeuralSide — a minimal AI sidebar for Chrome. It brings GPT-5 and Mistral into the browser sidebar so you can ask questions, write, and code without switching tabs.

Why I made it: - I was tired of context switching between a page and a separate AI tab. - I wanted quick Q&A, writing help, and code explanations in the same window.

What it does: - GPT-5 & Mistral in one sidebar - Chat, writing, code help, summarize/explain text from the page - Keyboard shortcut + lightweight UI - No page takeovers, no distractions

I’d love feedback on: - UX (is the sidebar smooth enough?) - Prompts/presets you want - What to add next (multilingual packs? export? site-specific presets?)
by austin-cheney | 2025-08-15 13:49:07+00:00
> In fact, I see your publicly posted resume; are there really developers out there rawdogging Javascript? What problem space do you hire for that mandates the ignorance of >15 years of JS libraries?

Performance, security, and portability to start. If you work in a high security environment you should expect to NOT have access to things like Maven or NPM.

I hear so very many people on HN and the real world complain about web bloat. Even the people who contribute to that bloat and cannot live without the contributing factors complain about it. As somebody who is only writing personal software now and working in a completely unrelated field I certainly wouldn't punish myself with bloat that requires far more work than executing without it.
by jackdoe | 2025-08-15 13:49:20+00:00
Ignoring the moral question in the story, many people are satisfied by saying "haha funny, the cat is both dead and alive" and they just move on.

Reading Pratchett for almost 30 years, it has fueled quite an interested in quantum mechanics in me, he subtly introduces QM teasers in almost every book I read. Particularly Mort.

As I dropped out of highschool, I didnt have the luck to properly study physics, but in my 30s, I my existential crisis hit, as they say, a man dies twice, and the stupid half dead cat wouldn't leave me alone. And one night the omnipotent youtube algorithm recommended Susskind's lectures to me, then Feynman, Shankar, .. it just kept going. Now I watch and re-watch them but take screenshots and send them to claude when I am confused (which is still most of the time).

If you are a layman like me and just want to know what is up with the cat, I encourage you to watch Sean Carroll's lectures (dont miss the Q&A videos) and it will for sure allow you to ask at least better questions.

I love that cat so much.

---

Sean Carroll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI09kat_GeI&list=PLrxfgDEc2N...

Richard Feynman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kFOXP026eE&list=PLS3_1JNX8d... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAnnEiAjN6U&list=PLYZ3-8b-4z...

Leonard Susskind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyX8kQ-JzHI&list=PL6i60qoDQh...

Ramamurti Shankar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK2eFv7ne_Q&list=PLF366409F5...

Barton Zwiebach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jANZxzetPaQ&list=PLUl4u3cNGP...

Carl Bender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYNOGk3ZjFM&list=PL43B1963F2...

If you struggle with calculus, I found Herb Gross to be partucularly good

Herb Gross: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFRWDuduuSw&list=PL3B08AE665...

Of course watch 3blue1brown, alphaphoenix, styropyro etc as well
by octo888 | 2025-08-15 13:49:25+00:00
> They pick a year in the future - 2045, say - and ask: what should the national train timetable look like then, if we want to meet our national objectives as a country?

I love this. In the UK we're currently in the middle of a ~25-30 year rail upgrade programme and if you ask what the new timetables will look like (i.e. tangible benefits), they look at you as if you had 3 heads.

They're too busy blowing their own trumpet any time they complete a minor piece of work to answer such nonsense questions.
by 0xak | 2025-08-15 13:49:50+00:00
That is ill-posed. Take any algorithm at all, e.g. a TSP solver. Make a "most probable next token predictor" that takes the given traveling salesman problem, runs the solver, and emits the first token of the solution, then reruns the solver and emits the next token, and so on.

By this thought experiment you can make any computational process into "predict the most probable next token" - at an extreme runtime cost. But if you do so, you arguably empty the concept "token predictor" of most of its meaning. So you would need to more accurately specify what you mean by a token predictor so that the answer isn't trivially true (for every kind of thought that's computation-like).
by nunez | 2025-08-15 13:50:05+00:00
from the article:

> Other companies, like Microsoft and Google, are sneaking AI charges into your existing software-as-a-service (SaaS) bills

They really are. My Google Workspace bill was increased by $5/month purely because of the "value add" that AI provides.

I turned Gemini off in my tenant (like, chatted with customer support to REALLY turn it off). I have no desire to turn it back on. There is no way to remove the $5/month increase.

At this point, they are literally just stealing $60/year from me (and others) to fund their AI bullshit.

As soon as I find an alternative to Drive and Docs, I am gone. I found this unacceptable.
Show HN: Kommander – Open-source CLI that turns natural language into commands
by debacodes10 | 2025-08-15 13:50:11+00:00
Hey HN,

Co-founder of Kommander here. For years, my co-founder and I have been frustrated by the constant context-switching of development: you're deep in code, then you have to stop, open a browser, and search for that one specific ffmpeg flag or the right rsync syntax.

We loved the idea of AI in the editor (like Cursor) but wanted that power directly in the terminal, where so much of our work happens.

So we built Kommander. It's a simple, open-source Python tool that lets you type what you want to do in plain English (kom ask "create a new python project, init git, and add a .gitignore"), and it generates the shell script for you. Crucially, it never executes anything automatically—it shows you the script first and asks for your approval.

It's cross-platform (PowerShell on Windows, bash/zsh on Linux/macOS) and uses Google's Gemini API (you bring your own key, which you can configure easily).

The project is MIT licensed and we just pushed v1.0.0 to PyPI (pip install kommander-cli).

We'd be honored to get your feedback. What do you think? Any and all thoughts are welcome!
by btschaegg | 2025-08-15 13:50:27+00:00
I think you have a good premise for a science fiction story right here: Say some "magic" (i.e. invented) physics quirk allows you to travel both into the future and the past, but all you can do is essentially accelerate and rewind time drastically. You don't "jump" to a time, there's still a physical presence, and colliding would have catastrophic results.

The logistical impacts from that would yield plenty of storytelling material: If you want to travel back in time, you need some ancient cellar that has been undisturbed since the target timeframe. If you want to skip forward, you need to establish that cellar, and round trips are limited by the space available.
by alphazard | 2025-08-15 13:50:28+00:00
Has anyone been able to separate creativity from hallucination in LLMs? As in: we can affect one without the other, or measure one without the other. In humans we understand when someone is doing one vs. the other. The biggest difference is that a creative person knows they will have to take action to bring about their vision, but a hallucinating person thinks their vision already exists.

It seems like the LLM phenomenon that we call hallucination is descriptively the same phenomenon that we call creativity in other contexts. If the LLM adds a new function or feature to the current project as part of work on another feature, that's creativity. But if it assumes a function or type in another project, which can't easily be changed, we call that hallucination. Even though it could just as easily add that feature if it had access to that code as well.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-15 13:50:36+00:00
The costs seem to be low enough that you can just sign up for an account for a month on them, see how you like a few, and settle on the one you like best, and cancel the others.

For me, I've been using Github's Copilot, which somehow gets me access to ChatGPT5 through Visual Studio Code. It's $10 per month at this time, and well worth it for recreational use.
by Razengan | 2025-08-15 13:50:38+00:00
Learning about radicals was a massive Level Up in my Japaneseability.

THey're like protocols/interfaces on OOP classes ^^ or more accurately, like "tele" and "phone" in "telephone", "icon" in "iconography" and obviously many more words in English made up of bits and pieces of other words.

Once you recognize the parts, you'll be able to able to guess/infer what the word means even if it's your first time seeing it. Same with radicals in Kanji.
by svnt | 2025-08-15 13:50:39+00:00
I'm saying adding "think step by step" does not get you close to actual reasoning, it just produces marginally self-consistent linguistic reasoning.

Actual reasoning requires training on diverse data sources, as you noted, but also coached experimentation (supervised fine-tuning) not just adding "think step by step" instruction to a model trained on typical textual datasets. "Think step by step" came first and produced increased performance on a variety of tasks, but was overhyped in its approximation of reasoning.
by throwanem | 2025-08-15 13:50:57+00:00
The recommendation I've had and am happy to pass along is to begin with Guards! Guards!, which is the first novel where it really becomes evident what Pratchett has to say now he's gotten all the juvenilia out of the way and set to work in earnest.

The series is certainly worth the trouble, though possibly not if you approach it with the expectation of being graded.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-08-15 13:51:02+00:00
Yeah it adds up until you have learned it and don't need to look it up again next time

Using the LLM guarantees you will need to use the LLM every time imo

Just like using a calculator guarantees you'll never learn to do mental math. Yes it's easier and we all have calculators in our pockets now, but when you don't actually train a skill you become reliant on the tech

That's a bad outcome in many ways imo
by appreciatorBus | 2025-08-15 13:51:38+00:00
For me the contradiction is simply how much of the status quo doesn't have to justify itself with those rules.

It may seem like an improvement to say that a rail project has to be careful about bats. But left unsaid is that the highway that already exists and competes with rail was never asked to perform such an analysis, and it's likely someone could adding lanes to that highway with much less stringent requirements.

So what is ostensibly environmental law, really ends up being a status quo law - if the status quo is bad for the environment, the law perpetuates it. The headline is about bats and trains, but everything from insects, to animals to people are killed right now - every day - on highways and no one bats an eye.
by lbhdc | 2025-08-15 13:52:39+00:00
As someone with a degree in fine arts, good. A lot more of these programs need to be downsized or removed. Not because they aren't popular, they are (or were when I went) extremely popular. Rather they have poor outcomes for the students. After 4 years, I was left with the realization that I had wasted my time, and I was further away from a career than my peers.

I know people will push back and say that is not the point of the university. But it doesn't change the fact that our economy is not built on poetry and painting, but we educate large number of people to specialize as one. Those people are instead left in debt with no path forward in their chosen field.
by fabian2k | 2025-08-15 13:52:43+00:00
I can't judge the legal aspects. But a significant point here is that Adblock Plus allows you do pay them to get preferential treatment for your ads.

I don't know how much this part affects the legal issues here, but for me that is quite a different situation than a pure ad blocker. There is a coercive element here, if your ad blocker is used widely enough and you take money for preferential treatment.
by ItsBob | 2025-08-15 13:53:07+00:00
Ok, I'll bite... what if an "ad" on a website is a bit of javascript that mines bitcoins using my GPU? Does this mean I have to let it do this?

What if it does it while showing me an ad for something at the same time?

How does running a bit of software on my computer concern anyone other than me?

I am not a lawyer and I haven't read the court's rulings but this seems assinine!
by kstrauser | 2025-08-15 13:53:11+00:00
A friend raised what I consider a very valid point, that ad blockers are assistive technology for people with ADHD. They prevent the web from being an unusable mess of shiny distraction. And as such, in America, blocking ad blockers is a violation of the ADA.

I’m being completely serious here and so is he. I can barely use the web without ad blockers. They make it possible for me to participate in online life. Remove them and you largely remove me. An attack on ad blockers is a direct attack on even the slightly neurodivergent, and should be treated as such.
by daft_pink | 2025-08-15 13:53:13+00:00
This is what I believe is happening:

1. AI adoption has outpaced expectations relative to Moore's law. Silicon Valley startups typically price their services based on anticipated future costs rather than current ones. While it was clear that AI inference costs would decline substantially, the rate of adoption was faster than projections, creating a gap where usage scaled faster than costs could decrease.

2. As companies like Cursor began recruiting talent from Claude, Claude responded by raising prices, recognizing that they were now competing directly with services built by their former employees.
by eemil | 2025-08-15 13:53:51+00:00
Even if the patents are only valid in China, this is going to hurt western companies a lot. If you're manufacturing a product in China, you'll need to either:

1. Pay the patent trolls, giving them power and hurting your margins

2. Move manufacturing to a more expensive, less competitive country

In the long run, you could argue that point 2 will lead to domestic manufacturing which everyone wants. But unless you can find a way to make these companies actually competitive (e.g. tariffs on chinese printers), I think the more likely scenario is these hamstrung companies will wither and go out of business.