MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spwa4 | 2025-08-06 12:58:56+00:00
It's scary how this is actually being called out as a problem of capitalism ... when anyone can look up history and see communists were actually doing this in 1946. Not just phones, they were doing it on the street, going as far as sending out people to listen in on conversations everywhere. Makes sense, I guess: there were barely any phones to tap when communists started doing this.

In case you don't know mass phone tapping didn't start in the US until decades (plural) later.

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

Not that I have experienced socialists/communists reacting positively to being proven wrong much before. Even when proven wrong by their own historical record (yes, they PROUDLY published they were doing this in 1946, after all, that's what Marx instructed them to do). Yes, the need for mass surveillance of the masses is actually in Marx and Engels's work.

In fact it was a part of Marx's work in much the same way as you are arguing it here: he was falsely accusing capitalist and bourgeoisie of mass surveillance, even while he was trying to do it himself. But yeah, Marx is Marx. His whole work, a pamphlet discussing massacring the bourgeoisie ... when, of course, both he himself and his family (up and down, his parents, he himself, his wife, his children) were very much part of the "hated" bourgeoisie. But, of course, in his mind he was excluded. He himself was very much not the evil he was trying to fight, and that every description he published said otherwise ... Very on-brand for communists, that.
by sundarurfriend | 2025-08-06 12:58:56+00:00
Since licensing has come up a few times in this thread: I've been hearing recently that the Mozilla Public licence (or the EU Public licence) is a good middle ground between the "viral" GPL and the "do whatever" MIT - as per my understanding, if your code is MPL or EUPL, it can still be incorporated as part of software that has a different licence, but any direct changes to the MPL/EUPL licensed code itself has to be shared openly.

Does anyone here have experience with them, or knowledge about whether that description is more or less correct?
by happens | 2025-08-06 12:59:00+00:00
That sounds like a good strategy! I've dabbled in writing task runner, and relaying logs with preserved colors and formatting without messing up the terminal and interleaving messages from different tasks is a huge hurdle.

I wish there was a standard for telling processes "keep the colored and formatted output, but assume it will be read line by line"... It's possible to just let processes write into pty's and then parse the output, but then you pretty much have to implement an entire nested terminal emulator :-(
by bavell | 2025-08-06 12:59:22+00:00
> I think OpenAI may have taken the medal for best available open weight model back from the Chinese AI labs.

IMO, the "I think..." bit could be ambiguous and read as, "In my opinion, OpenAI may have...".

I agree with you it's not a hard/bold endorsement but perhaps leading with the disclaimer that you're reserving final judgement could assuage these concerns.
by newsclues | 2025-08-06 12:59:45+00:00
I have an air gradient monitor.

There are three outputs. LEDs that go from green to yellow or red. The small display. A webpage dashboard. Or you can plug the data into HA for whatever you want.

The only issue I have with the display is that it’s monochrome and that prevents making data easy to read the trends, by showing positive changes as green or negative ones as red.

If the display is too small the LEDs are easily visible for quick information and then the dashboard is for more data.

Reviewers often have their issues really understanding how people use products, often because rapidly changing things to review, doesn’t allow them the time to truly use and understand a product.
by al_borland | 2025-08-06 13:00:13+00:00
I do wonder how this plays out over time. As people go to AI to ask questions, instead of places like Reddit, where will AI get new or more current information?

I also question if we even want to lean on sites like Reddit so hard. It turns AI into a way to effectively ask random people on the street, rather than good factual information from reliable sources.
by FeloniousHam | 2025-08-06 13:00:17+00:00
> but good quality food is expensive (in the US -- many other parts of the world have their quality food cheaper but I digress

Let's digress.

I read this frequently in various forms on this forum, and it's always "just so" justification. My own heuristic thought is that "low quality" food (high energy, long shelf-life processed foods) is very cheap because it is produced at scale and can be stored, while "high quality" (fresh products) is not cheap for the opposite reason.

The US has the cheapest food in the world [1]. Expensive food is expensive, but I would bet quality food is cheaper here than anywhere else. The "problem" is that when presented with a cheap, easy, tasty, high calorie food option against a relatively more expensive "quality" option, consumers choose the former because it's cheaper, easier, tastier, and provides more calories. I would bet this is even true when the absolute difference in price is small.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91208387/food-grocery-prices-us-...
by Macha | 2025-08-06 13:00:24+00:00
Honestly, VR/AR is a small gaming peripheral business, like joysticks and third party controllers. And their are companies that make that their thing and make money from it, but it was never going to be profitable enough to be the thing that a company the size of Facebook pivots to, which I could see being a consumer in the space before Facebook got in and after too.

Don't get me wrong, VRChat and Beat Saber are neat, and all the money thrown at the space got the tech advanced at a much faster rate than it would have organically have done I'm the same time (or potentially ever). But you can see Horizon's attempt to be "VRChat but a larger more profitable business" to see how the things you would need to do to monetise it to that level will lose you the audience that you want to monetise.
by api | 2025-08-06 13:00:38+00:00
Natural selection optimizes for long term survival of genes. Humans are probably long-lived because we have high maintenance offspring and a survival strategy built around communicating culture, but this only necessitates survival through 2-3 generations worth of time. Anything beyond that won't be selected for.

Same with health, etc. A bio professor once said "life doesn't work perfectly, it just works." There's a lot left on the table because evolution optimizes for the median case over time.
Show HN: AWS CodePipeline events via MQTT – with Tailscale support
by nkorai | 2025-08-06 13:01:01+00:00
TLDR; what the title says: AWS CodePipeline events via MQTT, optionally with Tailscale support, vended as a CDK construct.

I've recently been working on a couple of side projects in AWS that are all CI/CD-ed via AWS CodePipelines and I ran into a problem: my PC is in my office on the 3rd floor but I hang out with my wife and dogs on the 1st floor between code sessions. When I push code out I have to wait for the deployment to flow through the pipeline so I'll head downstairs to burn that time while getting some quality time in with the family.

However! Sometimes I'll push something that breaks the pipeline, defeating the whole purpose of pushing and leaving. This then led to me getting paranoid/fixated and logging in via the AWS app on mobile a bunch to check in on the pipeline statuses - a huge pain if you've ever done the following dance: log in via SSO through the app -> open authenticator for TOTP -> pick the correct account -> navigate back because it's not the correct account -> click through to code pipelines -> open the internal app browser since CodePipelines is not a natively supported view in the app.

Now yes - I could just hook up email notifications and if you are happy with that, that is completely fine. But I had it in my head that I wanted to be able to just glance up and take a look and get a quick status of: is something still running in the pipeline, was there a successful deployment in the last hour or so and also did the pipeline execution fail. So there's a future project here to build a little LED status indicator thing as an MQTT client of this MQTT broker solution that receives the various different pipeline statuses from various different accounts in a centralized place. This let's me side step having to set up AWS credentials for all of the different AWS accounts by just leveraging the Tailscale <-> local LAN networking.

This will certainly fall into an extremely monumentally tiny niche but thank you if you made it this far and sorry there was no mention of AI in this post (I joke I joke).
by zuhaib-rasheed | 2025-08-06 13:01:04+00:00
A few months ago, I was playing around with ChatGPT and thought: “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could turn this prompt into an actual app — with buttons, inputs, and a shareable link — without writing code?”

That late-night idea became MagicNode — a visual AI app builder where anyone can create and share AI-powered tools in minutes, no coding required.

Since then:

Built a drag-and-drop editor for creating AI workflows

Added support for custom UIs on top of AI prompts (forms, logic, etc.)

Launched an App Store where creators can publish or monetize their apps

Saw creators build social content tools, client lead-gen bots, legal Q&A helpers, and more

We’re calling it “Canva for AI apps” — and people are actually using it

We just launched publicly this week and I’d love feedback, questions, or ideas.
by TheDong | 2025-08-06 13:01:22+00:00
> the determination is made based on the degree of likelihood that [it will prevent alternative browser engines]

If you interpret that very liberally, doing a region-locked "you can release alternate browser engines but only regionlocked to japanese apple accounts" could be seen as intentionally preventing alternative browsers from existing.

Why would mozilla port firefox when it can only target a tiny fraction of its users?

I know it's not super realistic, but maybe there's a path to global browser choice in there.
Show HN: An open-source e-book reader for conversational reading with an LLM
by takigon | 2025-08-06 13:01:36+00:00
Hi HN! I've been working on BookWith, an open-source e-book reader that integrates AI as your reading companion.

The problem: Traditional e-readers are passive. When you encounter something unclear, you have to context-switch to search for it. Your highlights and notes remain isolated, and you can't easily connect ideas across different books.

My solution: BookWith embeds an AI that maintains full context of what you're reading. It features:

- Context-aware AI chat: Ask questions about the current page/chapter and get instant answers

- AI podcast generation: Automatically converts book content into conversational podcasts using Google Cloud TTS

- Multi-layer memory system: Short-term (last 5 conversations), mid-term (summarized every 20), and long-term (vector search) memory that maintains continuity across reading sessions

- Smart annotations: 5-color highlighting system that AI can reference and analyze

Technical stack: Built as a fork of Flow (epub reader), with added LLM integration and vector database for semantic search. Supports multiple LLMs and languages (EN/JA/ZH).
by ascagnel_ | 2025-08-06 13:02:06+00:00
The way Google handles the Chromium source (one big Git monorepo that's undergoing near-constant refactoring) means anything that doesn't want to hard fork is limited to bolting on a new UI and features around the core rendering engine -- but anything inside that core rendering engine won't be long-lasting.

So Brave, Arc, Dia, Edge, et al., all add their own sauce on top of Chromium, but none of them can make changes like back-porting Manifest V2 back into their Chromium.
by djoldman | 2025-08-06 13:02:47+00:00
> Bob needs a new computer for his job.... In order to obtain a new work computer he has to create a 4 paragraph business case explaining why the new computer will improve his productivity.

> Bob’s manager receives 4 paragraphs of dense prose and realises from the first line that he’s going to have to read the whole thing carefully to work out what he’s being asked for and why. Instead, he copies the email into the LLM.... The 4 paragraphs are summarised as “The sender needs a new computer as his current one is old and slow and makes him unproductive.” The manager approves the request.

"LLM inflation" as a "bad" thing often reflects a "bad" system.

In the case described, the bad system is the expectation that one has to write, or is more likely to obtain a favorable result from writing, a 4 paragraph business case. Since Bob inflates his words to fill 4 paragraphs and the manager deflates them to summarise, it's clear that the 4 paragraph expectation/incentive is the "bad" thing here.

This phenomenon of assigning the cause of "bad" things to LLMs is pretty rife.

In fact, one could say that the LLM is optimizing given the system requirement: it's a lot easier to get around this bad framework.
by adornKey | 2025-08-06 13:02:49+00:00
Rushing is not good. Some People with good results started early and spent a lot of time reading transcripts of oral exams - and copied homework from other people. Some of them are professors now.

If good results are important, it's most important to know what happens in the exam - and adapt professionally. Learning is fun. I myself always did a lot of homework. But I wish I had been more professional - constant challenges are fun, but most of it is not very time-efficient.
by r3trohack3r | 2025-08-06 13:03:22+00:00
Copyright is but one pillar of intellectual property law.

I’d like to see an attempt by useful freedom respecting software projects to deploy patents to combat non-free reimplementations.

A GPL license that grants you rights to the backing patent as long as the software you develop with it is also released under the GPL license.

Use the library for closed source software? Copyright violation. Reimplement the software under another license? Patent violation. Create something slightly different and call it the same thing? Trademark violation.
by jMyles | 2025-08-06 13:04:15+00:00
I've seen two doctors who took a look at my eyes and said everything's healthy, and that I'm just experiencing age-related presbyopia (I'm 43m).

My symptoms are as follows:

* My eyes become dry very quickly if they are open at a normal width.

* Due to the above, I spend much of the day with my eyes in a fairly squinted configuration.

* I cannot read, eg, text on my phone without squinting.

* Covering one eye (particularly my left eye) seems to improve my vision.

* My eyes often hurt / burn, especially in the evening.

* I have gnarly floaters in my left eye.

* Reading glasses are not much help; in order to benefit from them, I need to open my eyes more, which makes them very dry within 60 seconds.

* My eyes are often red and cloudy, especially in the morning.

* I occasionally wake up during the night from pain / dryness in my eyes.

* Unlike what I understand is typical for presbyopia, my vision does not degrade throughout the day, and is often a bit better at night.

Observations about things that have changed this:

* Sub-freezing temps seem to bring about a fairly fast (ie, within 1-2 days) and dramatic relief. Each year for the past few, I've gone to Colorado in mid-Feb for three weeks or so, and these are the best vision weeks of the year. However, I spend much of my time in Florida, so I rarely encounter cold temps.

* The drops that the doctor puts in to dilate pupils seem to trigger dramatic improvement, lasting 1-2 days.

* Spending time outside and using an RLCD monitor in the sun does seem to bring about some pain relief, but even multiple days in a row of this don't seem to improve my up-close vision or eye dryness.

I've tried searching every term I can think of, and as I say, I've seen multiple doctors (though I'm happy to go again). If anybody has any insight, I'd really value it. I'm struggling with this.
by charcircuit | 2025-08-06 13:04:17+00:00
The issue that you bringing up was more of an issue of Microsoft thinking they were finished with the web and the lack of automatic updates. It was not due to lack of diversity of engines, but of market share of a single product. This is very different from having the dominant browser engine invested in the success of the web with automatic updates to ensure that the web platform is able to advance and not stagnate.
by dataflow | 2025-08-06 13:04:21+00:00
> Basically, they show that you can use SAT to solve Sudoku, and then claim that this makes Sudoku NP-complete. (All it shows is that Sudoku is in NP.)

Wait, did you mess up the direction here too, or am I confused? If you reduce problem A to B, then it means B is at least as hard as A, because solving it would solve A. Which certainly means in this case that Sudoku is NP-hard. And it doesn't (without introducing additional facts) imply Sudoku is in NP either. I don't see anything wrong here, do you?
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-06 13:04:21+00:00
Unfortunately, I installed uBlock Origin Lite but it shows up disabled in Safari (MacOS). I have latest OS and Safari (MacBook Pro, Nov. 2023).

Console shows: 'Private sandbox for net.raymondhill.uBlock-Origin-Lite.Extension : <none>'

I've tried a number of things to reset Safari but still no luck.
by captainreynolds | 2025-08-06 13:04:31+00:00
I have one of these AirGradient indoor units. I also have a dedicated RadonEye Bluetooth device and Airthings wave Pro.

The oled display is nice, but I rarely care in realtime what the exact metrics are. I have that stored as time series stats sso I can see trends over time. Exactly like I do for metrics of production systems in SRE life.

The unit also has a series of LEDs across the top and I can read the actual status from 20’ away (which is as far as I can get without going out a window or around a corner).

One green led? Good. Two green leds? Meh. Three LEDs? They’re red now and that’s not great

Single red led in the top left in addition to any on the right? Spectrum is having yet another outage (no internet)

No LEDs? Not powered on

Reviewer was overly severe and did his readers a disservice.

It’s better imho than my Airthings wave pro, and it lets me get awesome, actionable time series data. It’s sensitive enough to show air quality taking a dive overnight with two people and multiple pets breathing in the same room (one green during the day, three or four red at night), and also to show that adding a half dozen spider plants keeps co2 well in check (consistent one green led).

And I can read the air quality from across the room without getting out of bed.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-08-06 13:05:06+00:00
I think your point and mine passed one another like ships in the night. It's not a matter of our varying ideas of expression vs societal expectation, the defining feature of "barely legal" content is that it's legal. That puts people in a really interesting position where it's illegal to follow the law in a way that the people who wrote the law didn't intend and don't care for. For me, it's hard to tell the difference between that and just making the law up on the fly, and that's what I wanted to illustrate. One can imagine the "pieces of flair" scene from the movie Office Space in this context.

"She's eighteen."

"The law says she has to be eighteen."

"It says she has to be at least eighteen. We'd be more comfortable if she was twenty one. Or if you'd at least stop mentioning that she's eighteen."

"But...the law says she has to be eighteen."

"Do you really want to just the bare minimum? Look at Jim over there, he exclusively makes GILF content."

camera pans to Jim, chatting with a lovely older lady

"So she has to be eighteen?"

"Yes, but you have to tell people she's at least twenty one."
by geerlingguy | 2025-08-06 13:05:13+00:00
That, and many reviewers are given the "here's 20 products, I need an article hitting these buzzwords in X Weeks" task.

You can't just do that and get in quality testing time with more than one or two products.

Reviewing things fairly and helpfully is hard and takes time, and especially as AI slop takes over writing (thankfully it looks like this article at least has a byline), I think it's going to be harder and harder to find actual useful human reviews to guide decisions.
by pron | 2025-08-06 13:05:17+00:00
The problem is this: a proof of P ≠ NP is likely to appeal to some theorem in some area of mathematics. Whether or not that theorem has already been formalised is actually unimportant, because it's already accepted as convincing. But the core of the proof would be some sort of a reduction from P ≠ NP to that theorem, and that reduction is likely to be novel and very arduous to formalise.
by yupyupyups | 2025-08-06 13:05:49+00:00
>and as we all know that'll be the end of the world.

I'll enjoy seeing all the accounts on MacRumors clawing their eyes out when that happens.

It would be naive to think that Apple isn't funding sites and narratives on the internet to serve their economic interests.

One of the most outlandish one being that freedom to use your phone however you want would necessarily compromise security and privacy for everyone. It's such a bizarre and indefencible take, and yet it's repeated over and over again on those Apple-worship platforms.
by ascagnel_ | 2025-08-06 13:05:55+00:00
Valve goes one step beyond loot boxes with their marketplace: you get a loot box, pay to open it (basically a slot machine spin), and you get an item in a "game of chance" -- but that item is a "thing of value" that can be sold on Valve's official, first-party marketplace.

Every definition of gambling I've seen includes some variation of "winning a thing of value from a game of chance", and while loot boxes for in-game rewards skirt that (the thing you're getting is typically described in the fine-print as having no monetary value), Valve's user-driven marketplace is setting a real-world value.

Put another way: EA FC's card packs or Genshin Impact's gacha spins are worth nothing outside of those games, but I've sold Counter-Strike skins to pay for a decent chunk of my Steam Deck.
by jdoliner | 2025-08-06 13:06:08+00:00
I saw an interesting argument recently that the reason you get this type of verbose language in corporate settings is that English lacks a formal tense. Apparently it's much less common in languages that have one. But in corporate English the verbosity is used as a signal that you took time to produce the text out of respect for the person you're communicating with.

This of course now gets weird with LLMs because I doubt it can last as a signal of respect for very long when it just means you fed some bullet points to ChatGPT.
by teemur | 2025-08-06 13:06:22+00:00
> Is this situation in any way realistic one?

No, it's much worse than that. In real life you talk about pages and pages of documents and power points and meetings after meetings if you happen to need a computer/server/configuration that's not in the pre-approved list. (I really wish I was exaggerating. And of course no, not all employers are like this to state the obligatory obvious.)
Show HN: YouTube to NotebookLM – Send YouTube channels to chat with content
by snipo | 2025-08-06 13:06:27+00:00
I was tired of sending videos one by one, so I've built a Chrome extension to send video notes from YouTube to NotebookLM in one click.

Here's how it works:

Open any channel, playlist, search result, or video on YouTube.

Click on the NotebookLM button and choose an existing notebook or create a new one.

The extension sends all available videos to NotebookLM up to the limit.

It is free to use and available for Chrome. I would love to hear your feedback!