MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by HaneneMaupas | 2025-08-03 16:28:04+00:00
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by benoau | 2025-08-03 16:28:14+00:00
I think it's a combination of three things:

1) AI threatens to take-over how you use your phone, it threatens to reduce apps to an API that it will use on your behalf so you don't use the apps yourself

2) By doing that it commoditizes the hardware because the software experience is virtually identical across platforms, you say make a dinner reservation and it doesn't matter what calendar you use, what restaurant app etc

3) Apple is no longer assured to be able to gatekeep or ban these things so if they aren't producing the most useful or entrenched assistant someone else could become people's primary interface for iPhones

There's a lot of parallel with "super apps" -

> Apple’s fear of super apps is based on first-hand experience with enormously popular super apps in Asia. Apple does not want U.S. companies and U.S. users to benefit from similar innovations. For example, in a Board of Directors presentation, Apple highlighted the “[u]ndifferentiated user experience on [a] super platform” as a “major headwind” to growing iPhone sales in countries with popular super apps due to the “[l]ow stickiness” and “[l]ow switching cost.” For the same reasons, a super app created by a U.S. company would pose a similar threat to Apple’s smartphone dominance in the United States. Apple noted as a risk in 2017 that a potential super app created by a specific U.S. company would “replace[ ] usage of native OS and apps resulting in commoditization of smartphone hardware.”

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.njd.544...
by ezekiel68 | 2025-08-03 16:28:46+00:00
I will start with a basic markdown outline and then use a prompt describing more of the system in just flowing (yet coherent) thought and, crucially, I'll ask the model to "Organize the spec in such a way that an LLM can best understand it and make use of it." The result is a much more succinct document with all the important pieces.

(or -- you can write a spec that is still more fleshed out for humans, if you need to present this to managers. Then ask the LLM to write a separate spec document that is tailored for LLMs)
by kepano | 2025-08-03 16:29:15+00:00
> Assigned channels where you are expected to post your random thoughts feels utterly dystopian to me.

I agree that if it becomes a top-down expectation or a performance metric it would be terrible. The practice at Obsidian was emergent and bottom-up. Maybe that's because of the small team size and flat structure. Also why the article states "They should be muted by default, with no expectation that anyone else will read them."
by dabedee | 2025-08-03 16:29:18+00:00
I think you're hitting the real divide here. Some people are so ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention that they can't admit when it works, even when the evidence is staring them in the face. Also notable [0]: "[...] in any given year, we see up to 3,000 merger filings that get reported to us. Around 2% of those actually get a second look by the government, so you have 98% of all deals that, for the most part, are going through. Around 2% of those actually get a second look by the government, so you have 98% of all deals that, for the most part, are going through." The FTC wasn't blocking everything, just the deals that would entrench monopolies.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/15/ftc-chair-lina-khan-on-sta...
by sibeliuss | 2025-08-03 16:29:27+00:00
You can still do both. Its just all of the grunt work is no longer grunt work, and all the tech debt you've been putting off is no longer an issue, and all of the ideas you've been meaning to try out but don't have the time can suddenly be explored in an afternoon, and so on and so forth.

For new features, by all means code it by hand. Maybe that is best! But a codebase is much more than new features. Invaluable tool.
by andrewrn | 2025-08-03 16:29:53+00:00
I really cannot imagine working remote full-time, it sounds so depressing. We already don't go to church or bars or movies or clubs anymore. Work is one of the few remaining places to interact with other humans.

I'd be interested in trying this if I was remote, but I still just prefer in-person work.

I worked an in-person job recently at an oil company where we had no regular meetings (I was doing absolute grunt drafting work), and it was the most depressing experience of my life. This would be better than in-person w/o water cooler chats.
by slwvx | 2025-08-03 16:30:31+00:00
I think Tim Cook has bad product and design taste [1], and see no reason to think that there are enough good design people at Apple to make a good car. I think they likely got stuck looking at making a car version of the gold Apple Watch Edition [2] and rightly shut the project down.

[1] https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/07/31/ep-428

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/2/23900158/apple-watch-edit...
by nucleardog | 2025-08-03 16:30:59+00:00
> Granted, it gets harder and more expensive with increasing scale, but it's a necessary expense if you care at all about business continuity issues. On a personal level, it's much cheaper though, especially these days.

I don't go as far as "live mirror", but I've been advocating _for years_ on here and in meatspace that this is the most important thing you can be doing.

You can rebuild your infrastructure. You cannot rebuild your user's data.

An extended outage is bad but in many cases not existential. In many cases customers will stick around. (I work with one client that was down over a month without a single cancellation because their line-of-business application was that valuable to their customers.)

Once you've lost your users' data, they have little incentive to stick around. There's no longer any stickiness as far as "I would have to migrate my data out" and... you've completely lost their trust as far as leaving any new data in your hands. You've completely destroyed all the effort they've invested in your product, and they're going to be hesitant to invest it again. (And that's assuming you're not dealing with something like people's money where losing track of who owns what may result in some existence-threatening lawsuits all on its own.)

The barrier to keeping a copy of your data "off site" is often fairly small. What would it take you right now to set up a scheduled job to dump a database and sync it into B2 or something?

Even if that's too logistically difficult (convincing auditors about the encryption used or anything else), what would it take to set up a separate AWS account under a different legal entity with a different payment method that just synced your snapshots and backups to it?

Unless you're working on software where people will die when it's offline, you should prioritize durability over availability. Backups of backups is more important than your N-teir Web-3 enterprise scalable architecture that allows deployment over 18*π AZs with zero-downtime failover.

See, as a case study, Unisuper's incident on GCP: https://www.unisuper.com.au/about-us/media-centre/2024/a-joi...
by jeffvroom | 2025-08-03 16:31:25+00:00
I do believe I'm right about this :) I've had a few weeks now to understand how this does explains the world better. That said, I've always had a hard time getting people to understand me so I hope at least someone can look past that and see how important this discovery is for the world. I appreciate your feedback. I have my work cut out for me here!
by crooked-v | 2025-08-03 16:31:55+00:00
I think the Apple Silicon transition is far from something that could be expected from 'any' company. Microsoft already tried something similar with ARM Surface machines and the whole attempt was an absolute failure.

> I think that is exactly right.

I think that's entirely wrong. The hardware just isn't there yet! The AVP is the closest you can get to real "AR glasses" at the moment (as distinct from the Xreal 'non-context-aware screen overlay with a tiny FoV and fixed position'), but it turns out the hardware needed for that is >1 lb of stuff.
by unethical_ban | 2025-08-03 16:32:06+00:00
Apple has historically been a little behind the curve in technology, but then excelling at execution and user experience.

If they could (quickly) come out with a personal assistant which was really useful for people's planning and shopping and productivity, which knew how to navigate the apps and services on a person's apples phone/computer/cloud data, and do it locally and/or privately... They'd be in a good position even if it wasn't the absolute leader of the pack.

AI is going to be so powerful in the coming years that if apple falls behind AND doesn't give the keys to some other company to integrate AI, then I could see people jumping ship.
by ttul | 2025-08-03 16:32:17+00:00
The use case that immediately comes to mind is analysis of legal documents. Lawyers spend a lot of time going through piles of contracts during due diligence for any kind of investment or acquisition transaction, painstakingly identifying concepts that need to be addressed in various ways. LLMs are decent at doing this kind of work, but error-prone (as are humans, by the way). Having a way to visualize the results could be helpful in speeding up the review process of the LLM’s work.
by ryanobjc | 2025-08-03 16:32:17+00:00
As a long time Mac and iPhone user, I just don't get all the complaints about innovation. Macs are as innovative as they ever have been, maybe more. Apple silicon has been an absolute powerhouse and godsend for battery life.

iPhones are great, and continue to be awesome. Airpods are so good they make bluetooth headphones look like the garbage they are.

When you look at the grand scope of thing, the primary thing the commenters are missing are the Jobs' pageantry and showmanship. Which I also miss. But in terms of capability, I am quite happy with what we have.
by drewbeck | 2025-08-03 16:32:22+00:00
I find it very strange to make this judgement by comparing Apple to Microsoft, nvidia, Meta. None of those companies are in the same business as Apple. If Apple fails to “beat” these companies they will still have incredibly popular consumer products and successful services.

The competition is only in the mind of business writers and pundits; it maybe matters for the stock market but Apple has never made their stock the main driver of their efforts.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-08-03 16:32:33+00:00
Pi's lack IO so they have quite poor performance for a lot of drives. They also aren't really very competitive price wise compared to low end AMD64 machines that have considerably more computation and IO capabilities at this low end price point. What Pi's are good at is very low power consumption and being small, once you add 4 hard drives small and low power don't matter much anymore and you wont take up much more power and space moving to MITX.

ARM64 does limit what software you can run as well as does the anaemic GPU hardware. They are good for other things and very small servers (like PIHoles) but once multiple drives are involved they aren't the right solution anymore.
by hashstring | 2025-08-03 16:32:46+00:00
I agree with taxing large companies more, however the log fee could also hinder the sale of companies that are legit only interesting enough for large companies to buy, preventing certain startups from being able to successfully sell.

I haven’t given this much thought, but my gut feeling is that it should be OK for a big company to acquire a smaller one if both sides agree and it’s not blatant anti-trust material (as with Meta acquiring Instagram).
by nicoburns | 2025-08-03 16:33:00+00:00
> AI threatens to take-over how you use your phone, it threatens to reduce apps to an API that it will use on your behalf so you don't use the apps yourself

It threatens to do that, sure. But the reality will likely be significantly less dramatic. The most likely outcome is AI (like every other hyped technology) finds a niche and that everything else carries on as it was.
by dfabulich | 2025-08-03 16:33:12+00:00
Browser vendors can't simply "choose" to open direct DOM access to WASM.

When defining standardized DOM APIs in WebIDL, WebIDL assumes that you can use JavaScript strings, JavaScript objects + properties, JavaScript Exceptions, JavaScript Promises, JavaScript garbage collection, and on and on and on. Almost all of the specification of WebIDL itself is about the dozens of types that it assumes the platform already provides. https://webidl.spec.whatwg.org/

WebAssembly doesn’t have any of those things. As a low-level VM, it supports only modules, functions, bytes, numbers (32-bit and 64-bit integers and floats), arrays (called “tables”), and opaque pointers (“reference types”).

No one has ever standardized a DOM API for low-level languages. You’d presumably need to start by defining a new low-level WebIDL design language just to define a low-level DOM API.

Defining WebIDL itself has taken decades.

Today, the browser vendors aren’t convinced that a new low-level DOM API is worth their time. It’s better to make existing JS web apps faster than it is to begin a multi-year (multi-decade?) project to make a new thing possible that could be better in the long run.
by margalabargala | 2025-08-03 16:33:18+00:00
Like the other commenter said, doing something that looks like a nazi salute doesn't make you a nazi, and supporting far right parties does not make you a nazi.

Both those things do however make other people think you may be a nazi, which is all that really matters here.

Whether Elon Musk is a nazi is irrelevant, what matter is that people think he is.
by mingus88 | 2025-08-03 16:33:21+00:00
They also had a record breaking quarter for their services, when streaming services everywhere are bleeding out

Yeah I guess it’s been a while since their last iPhone moment but that entire decade was just one revolution after another for every segment of tech, and Apple came out on top

With their in-house chips they’re going to do fine for AI, even if they need to partner with someone else on it
by kqr | 2025-08-03 16:33:37+00:00
It also gives you cover to ask questions that reveal politically inconvenient truths: you can pretend you had no idea that answer would pop out of it.

(Of course, in an organisation that contains many politically inconvenient truths, you can easily end up doing that too much and people will catch on to it and dislike what you're doing. Another drawback is you have to be willing to look stupid and trust that the stupid first impression goes away with time.)
by 1659447091 | 2025-08-03 16:33:53+00:00
> You should own your own custom-fitted boots though

I would preach this with snowboard boots (+ helmet), made travel easier as well when you live nowhere near snow. Trying to take up skiing now and have no idea why I didn't think to do this with ski boots. Would probably help, a lot.

As for rentals it's easy to avoid beat-up janky gear. Have to go places just outside the ski town areas. Usually have to find a shop outside the resort for snowboards if you bring your own boots anyway, but easier to find better gear options. I remember getting a new (or basically new) K2 board from a general sports store in Reno, same for getting rentals in Queenstown or Denver or Vancouver before hopping on a bus.

Shops outside the resorts tend to have reasonably priced demo rentals, newer high end gear they are hoping you buy afterwards. Far better equipment that is nicely tuned than anything the resorts offer.

Not paying the oversize/ski baggage fee and lugging that gear around the whole trip while having quality rentals available levels the rent vs buy equation -- if buying a season lift pass makes sense so does buying your own gear, otherwise it's more hassle than it needs to be, imo.
by kllrnohj | 2025-08-03 16:34:04+00:00
Apple Silicon either followed Microsoft's direction (who pushed for ARM laptops a solid 8 years before M1) or just did a better iteration than Intel at the same time Intel was struggling.

Regardless of how you want to frame it, there clearly wasn't any grand innovative strategic vision in play there from Apple. It was just an incremental improvement to long established products with no shortage of equally significant and impressive increments improvements from others along the way.
by allears | 2025-08-03 16:34:08+00:00
The USA profits from this (in dollars and cents) for a number of reasons. For one thing, our industries need smart people to build competitive products. For another thing, being a center of science attracts investments to the US, and also generates revenue from visiting students and scientists. Not to mention the kinds of benefits that may not have immediate cash payoff, but better position the US to be a world leader.

We seem to have given all that up now, for reasons that aren't very clear to me.
by graemep | 2025-08-03 16:34:09+00:00
Yes, very likely, but then why are you using AWS at all?

I think a lot of people are missing a key part of the wording of my comment, that capitalised for emphasis "IFF" (which means "if and only if").

I am absolutely certain a lot of people would save money using VMs - or at scale bare metal.

IMO a lot of people are using AWS because it is a "safe" choice management buy into that is not expensive in context (its not a big proportion of costs).
by ako | 2025-08-03 16:34:16+00:00
I don't agree, to me switching from hand coded source code to ai coded source code is like going from a hand-saw to an electric-saw for your woodworking projects. In the end you still have to know woodworking, but you experiment much more, so you learn more.

Or maybe it's more like going from analog photography to digital photography. Whatever it is, you get more programming done.

Just like when you go from assembly to c to a memory managed language like java. It did some 6502 and 68000 assembly over 35 years ago, now nowbody knows assembly.
by lapcat | 2025-08-03 16:34:20+00:00
The author compares Apple to Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, and Nvidia. Broadly speaking, each company is in "tech", but looking more specifically, they are fundamentally in very different categories of tech.

Apple is a hardware company. Its primary products are smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, and tablets. That's always been true, since they were "Apple Computer". On the other hand, Alphabet and Meta are advertising companies. Their primary products are ads. Does the author suggest that Apple become an advertising company? How would that even fit with Apple's hardware portfolio? Tesla sells automobiles; Apple could try to sell automobiles too, but... why? Apple has no experience in automobiles. Nvidia is kind of a one trick pony: it sells GPUs, which are currently in massive demand. But is anyone saying, well, Tim Cook has no vision, because Apple didn't make GPUs? Surely Steve Jobs wasn't going to make GPUs either. That's not what Jobs was all about.

Apple is the most successful and profitable consumer computing hardware vendor in the world. They kick their direct competitors asses. Perhaps that market is somewhat saturated and doesn't have as much room for growth as other markets. But so what? It seems like critics just want "growth" without any purpose behind the growth. Steve Jobs always had a purpose and wasn't just looking for money, money, money. The innovation was oriented toward consumer computing hardware.

Meta tried to pivot to the so-called "metaverse", and that got them nowhere. They're still throwing billions at it every year with hardly any return. Nonetheless, Meta is still kicking ass at its core business: selling ads on social media. Now Meta is trying to pivot to AI, throwing a ton of money at it, but who knows how that will pan out for them. Nothing yet. We're supposed to be impressed by 9-figure pay packages for individual engineers, and that is impressive in a way, but it's not impressive in the sense of, look how that paid off for Meta.

It's not clear that even Apple and Microsoft are direct competitors. There's still macOS vs. Windows, which is more or less at a stalemate, but that's not the biggest piece of either company's revenue anymore. And again, nobody is out there saying that Tim Cook lacks vision because Apple is not winning desktop OS market share. None of the critics in the media even care about desktop OS market share.
by gonzo41 | 2025-08-03 16:34:20+00:00
isn't the VR Scuba mask dead now?

I think Apple is hitting a wall that most tech companies are hitting. New gadgets aren't really improving our lives.

We have the internet on our phones, Now the internet is a wasteland.

Probably the biggest cultural innovation of the last 5 years has been podcasts and that's just gussied up radio.
by heavenlyblue | 2025-08-03 16:34:46+00:00
I saw tourists parking cars in New Zealand and, because the road is on an incline sideways, some cars would fall into a ditch.

Was the car driven recklessly or was it a parking/reversing mistake? This kind of thinking just brings unnecessary racism.

You would think that UK would have a lower rate of traffic incidents with it's "safe" approach to driving but numbers speak the opposite.
by Arnt | 2025-08-03 16:35:16+00:00
Reminds me of a story about AWS. Why AWS doesn't support IPv6. Some kind of network equipment would need to be replaced, and AWS had so many that it would need the complete world production for a year in order to get v6-capable gear.

Q: What happens if we spend nearly $3T on stuff of which the world production is smaller? A: Some people will commit to much less in the short term. Some others will be careless and sign a contract with Nvidia that lets Nvidia sell them the last H100s before production ceases, at today's prices.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-08-03 16:35:23+00:00
The bandwidth of the encoding is too low for playing cryptographic games. This doesn't preclude faking a video by introducing the code into your faked video--it's just that that is much, much more difficult than stringing pieces together in an incorrect fashion.

This is more akin to spread spectrum approaches--you can perfectly well know the signal is there and yet finding it without knowing the key is difficult. That's why old GPS receivers took a long time to lock on--all the satellites are transmitting on top of each other, just with different keys and the signal is way below the noise floor. You apply the key for each satellite and see if you can decode something. These days it's much faster because it's done in parallel.