MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by t0md4n | 2025-08-18 13:40:45+00:00
It wouldn’t be instant, next week or even next month. Pre-training doesn’t happen that frequently and varies between each model provider. As for the strawberry test, this is a tokenization issue that is fundamental to LLM’s, however, most models can now solve this type of question using thinking/code/tools to count the letters.

https://imgur.com/a/NqIJEx6
by tonyarkles | 2025-08-18 13:40:49+00:00
Sort of. Keeping the receiver on and listening 24/7 is going to still use significantly more current than not having the receiver on and putting the microcontroller into a deep sleep mode. The approach in my sibling comment explains how IoT LoRaWAN devices are able to use ~0 current the vast majority of the time and run off, say, a CR2032 battery.
by falcor84 | 2025-08-18 13:41:01+00:00
> So, kids, let's not be asking any AI chatbot whether you should divorce your husband, how to cheat on your taxes, or if you should try to get your boss fired. That information will be kept, it may be revealed in a security breach, and, if so, it will come back to bite you in the buns.

Just as a PSA - there's nothing unique to AIs here - whenever you ask a question of anyone, in any way, they then have the memory of you having asked it. A lot of sitcoms and comedic plays have the plot premise build upon such questions that a person voiced then eventually reaching (either accurately or inaccurately) the person they were hiding the question from.

And as someone who's into spy stories, I know that a big part of tradecraft is of formulating your questions in a way that divulges the least about your actual intentions and current information.

If anything, LLM-driven AIs are the first technology that in principle allow you to ask a complex question that would be immediately forgotten. The thing is that you need to be running the AI yourself; if you ask an AI controlled by another entity, then you're trusting that entity with your question, regardless of whether there's an AI on the way.
by ksu999 | 2025-08-18 13:41:11+00:00
Interesting discussion here. One thing I’d add is that beyond using VPNs or private browsing modes, tools like antidetect browsers can help a lot when managing multiple identities or accounts online. They provide separate digital fingerprints and reduce the risk of bans or tracking. For example, Multilogin (https://multilogin.com/antidetect/mobile-antidetect-browser/)explains how this works in practice.
by weatherlite | 2025-08-18 13:41:27+00:00
It's not clear to me why Google has to be broken up. Google built the best browser around, people aren't using it for no reason, and then it used its user base to direct them to their search - which to me sounds reasonable (most people would use Google for search even if they're on a different browser. Whether it's habit or simply a superior search engine - that's what they want).

Making Google sell chrome, to me , wouldn't be different than making Nvidia sell a big part of their GPU know how or making Microsoft sell Windows or making Apple get rid of the App Store.
Ask HN: Why choose pixels while rasterizing circle?
by shivajikobardan | 2025-08-18 13:41:33+00:00
https://imgur.com/a/2e21Yro

Like here, I can simply plot the pixel that is a part of circle. I don't quite get with this choosing a midpoint, finding a distance from midpoint stuffs.

https://funloop.org/post/2021-03-15-bresenham-circle-drawing-algorithm.html

I am studying about bresenham's circle drawing algorithm btw.
Show HN: Cursed Greeting Card Generator
by racenis | 2025-08-18 13:42:04+00:00
I have never done any kind of commercial software, so I decided to try it out.

Probably the best way to do it would be to get a job doing programming, but despite having 2 degrees in computer science, programming for 15 years and a year of applying to hundreds of jobs I still couldn't get one.

So I just got a job stocking shelves in a grocery store for ~3 months to gather some capital and registered a limited liability company.

Personally I would have preferred doing a desktop app, but since they are not popular anymore, I made a SaaS.

Since I had just finished working on a raytracing renderer for my graphics package, I decided to make a bingus-my-beloved style image generator.

Basically I just save the list of operations needed to compute each pixel color of an image, instead of executing the operations immediately. Then I convert it into a bytecode-like format and store it. When generating images I just execute the bytecode to generate the final color values for each pixel in an image.

I also used Google Cloud! (I have never used a cloud before and I heard that it is a good cloud).

Personally I don't really like doing frontend and CSS, so I minimized my use of it via arcane <table> magic that I discovered on StackOverflow 15 years ago. At least it renders correctly in Internet Explorer 6.

Most SaaS project don't really generate any revenue, since they solve problems that don't exist, so I would not be upset if this project flops.
by bluGill | 2025-08-18 13:42:05+00:00
Most of those places are "middle on nowhere". Location matters in real estate, if I can't get to my job in a reasonable amount of time it doesn't matter what I can do. My job is in Des Moines, if you have me the largest mansion in SF for free (including taxes and utilities) I still couldn't afford to live there (plane tickets would cost me several hundred dollars/day and the flights are 5 hours each way by the time I get to the airport an hour early)
by degamad | 2025-08-18 13:43:19+00:00
Jacking the price up before you buy allows you to decide not to buy, and to switch to an alternative instead. So VW has an incentive to keep up-front prices low.

Once you have bought the car, you are locked into paying the higher subscription costs, because the costs of switching are much higher than the increased subscription costs. There are no alternative suppliers for "increased performance" of your VW. Thus, the disincentive of lost sales is removed, and VW is not incentivised to keep subscription prices low.

(See also: Netflix)
by andai | 2025-08-18 13:43:52+00:00
Thanks. Author mentioned TiddlyWiki as inspiration. But the whole point of TiddlyWiki was that it doesn't need a server right?

So I'm trying to understand the difference, the payoff. I understand that local web APIs are ass and you very quickly run into the need for a server.

But I'm wondering about the utility of combining the two approaches. It seems like a contradiction in terms. Here's a server to help you with your dev setup oriented around not needing a server.

I guess the main win would be cross device access? You have it online and you can edit it easily.

I'm editing my stuff on my phone in a text editor. And syncing it to my laptop with a sync app.
by _factor | 2025-08-18 13:44:13+00:00
We need to be critically honest about how our system operates.

Land is finite. As population grows, supply and demand dictate it will rise in value if you hold.

If you rent property that someone else would prefer to buy for habitation if made available at market rate, you’re benefiting at overall society’s expense. Similarly if you take units off the market as investment vehicles.

Productivity matters most in economics. Without it you’re just shifting money around. Owning as a middle man is essentially the opposite of productivity.

As rentals become the only option and a small percentage of land owners become the only housing option, we’re going to see a rise in wealthy untethered types who rent and move at will. Similarly, we’ll start seeing ghettos form in the scant land remaining after this fully plays out.

The problem is that you can’t tell an individual who had to go through hell to own a place, on the verge of a second home, not to rent instead of sell. This society is a hammer taking a chip out of every successful shoulder. “Why should I do society a favor when society did me none?” Is a common mindset that just exacerbates the issue.

We’re creating a resentful generation who feel disenfranchised and taken advantage of, and it’s only going to get worse. I fear for uprisings and surveillance states incoming.

For real solutions, bring back work from home. No need for dense housing when you’re not forced to live in a particular area.
by miroljub | 2025-08-18 13:44:32+00:00
> Many people use cow to mean all bovines, even if technically not correct.

Come on now :0

I just complained non-natives would have a problem distinguishing between a cow and a calf, and you had to bring those bovines.

To make it easier, would just drop that in my native language, the correct term for bovine is more used to describe people with certain character, that animal kind.
by perrygeo | 2025-08-18 13:45:10+00:00
For me, dev testing is something that I use directly in the hot feedback loop of writing code. Typically, I'll run it after every change then manually inspect the output for quality assurance. it could be as simple as refreshing the browser or re-running a CLI tool and spot checking the output. Importantly, dev tests for me are not fully fleshed out - there are gaps in both the input and output specifications that preclude full automation (yet), which means my judgement is still in the loop.

No so with CI tests. Input and output are 100% specified and no manual intervention is even possible.

There are some problems where "correct" can never be well defined. Think of any feature that has aesthetic values implied. You can't just unit test the code, brush off your hands and toss garbage over the wall for QA or your customers to pick up!

I use this technique mainly to avoid an over-reliance on automated testing. I've seen far too many painful situations where the unit tests pass but the core functionality is utterly broken. It's like people don't even bother to run the damn program they're writing! Unacceptable and embarrassing - if encouraging ad-hoc tests and QA-up-front helps solve this, it's a huge win IMO.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-18 13:46:20+00:00
This comment doesn’t make sense. Are you using condos to refer to properties with shared walls where the whole building (and land) is owned by the condo owners? If so, then there is no landlord getting a big payday.

Condo expenses are what they are because taking care of a big building is expensive, but also because the condo board sometimes defers maintenance for many years or decades, and then the problems become expensive to fix.
by novoreorx | 2025-08-18 13:46:56+00:00
Thank you, I'm glad you find it useful! The reason I didn't implement auto-parsing in the text editor is that I want it to avoid affecting the tree component on the left side. Sometimes, I like to write something before copying the tree. It's like a scratchpad for me to finalize the text I want. Also, since it's auto-generated, if it were also auto-parsed, it could cause an infinite loop whenever anything is changed.

Drag-and-drop functionality was actually the first thing I considered. However, I want to keep the code clean and avoid involving too many third-party libraries. So, I came up with this method to make reordering easy while keeping it simple to implement.

I will submit it to Superlaunch, although I feel that it might not be valuable enough to be considered a product :)
by taneq | 2025-08-18 13:47:30+00:00
Have you tried being severely myopic to begin with? :D My presbyopia has kicked in surprisingly quickly (at a guess, 1.5 diopters over 2-3 years) but that just means I can look past my glasses at close things, like the opposite of your stereotypical half-moon reading glasses. Hey, I should make some of those out of an old pair...
by nzach | 2025-08-18 13:48:10+00:00
>Provide detailed specifications for the work to be done

I've been playing around with vibe coding for a few months and my experience doesn't really match this advice.

I used to think this was the correct way and based on that was creating some huge prompts for every feature. It took the form of markdown files with hundred of lines, specifying every single detail about the implementation. It seems to be an effective technique at the start, but when things get more complex it starts to break down.

After some time I started cutting down on prompt size and things seem to have improved. But I don't really have any hard data on this.

If you want to explore this topic one thing you can do is to ask you LLM to "create a ticket" for some feature you already have, and try to play around with the format it gives you.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-18 13:48:11+00:00
it seems feasible, it's more a matter of how much of a priority it is.

I follow Google most closely. They design and manufacture their own accelerators. AWS I know manufactures its own CPUs, but I don't know if they're working on or already have an AI accelerator.

Several of the big players are working on OpenXLA, which is designed to abstract and commoditize the GPU layer: https://openxla.org/xla

OpenXLA mentions:

> Alibaba, Amazon Web Services, AMD, Apple, Arm, Google, Intel, Meta, and NVIDIA
by incomingpain | 2025-08-18 13:48:40+00:00
>I used to try a few OSS projects before building anything myself. Recently, with LLM coding assistants/agents, I’m spinning up small, single-purpose tools tailored to my workflow. They’re not “better” than mature OSS (in fact they are often brittle and narrowly scoped) but they solve my exact problem faster than learning how to install, configure and use a new tool.

Ive been coding a great deal of things. I'm approaching things that before LLM coding I wouldnt have gotten into.

>And it got me thinking, if more developers do this what happens to OSS?

In my case I just spent a few weeks building a new OSS project, yet unreleased publicly, to scratch multiple itches. It does things that essentially i have no competitor. My main starting problem was that I wanted to make a change to another open source project but it's in golang and i dont know go.

What happens to OSS when we get essentially unlimited new options of things in every language? The new golden era is among us.

>Do we risk fragmentation into many private one-offs instead of shared libraries?

Do we risk having LLM coders fixing every problem and expanding the shared big projects as well?

>For maintainers: are you seeing fewer users, less feedback, or different kinds of contributions?

Looking at insights on github, my big project, which ive neglected for years has died lol.
by qgin | 2025-08-18 13:48:49+00:00
The choice between human therapist and computer chat is not a choice that most people in the world have. Most humans do not have access to a human therapist.

We should absolutely be talking about how to make LLM systems better at handling critical situations like this. But those that suggest that people should only talk to human therapists about their problems are taking a very “let them eat cake” position.
by Topfi | 2025-08-18 13:49:44+00:00
Sorry to hear that it did not go well for you. Yes, I did go through with it, was in April of 2024 (Trans-PRK via a Schwind AMARIS) and I did have a rather painful recovery, especially on day two and three after the surgery.

From there on, the pain and foreign object feeling quickly subsided alongside the remaining "haze" and by day five, I neither had any subjective pain, nor any major issues reading text (both typed and digital). Had multiple check-ins of course, both at the clinic which performed the surgery and with my decades long ophthalmologist, no issues were found there either. Subjectively, I do not experience a heightened severity in dry eye symptoms for what that is worth.

Also had a clinical rotation in Ophthalmology just this month (small world, though was why I felt the urge to comment) and the attendings did assess my epithelium as having regrown evenly too.

What could have gone wrong for you and how to go about this, I really can't say and I am sure you have already considered /pursued it, but I can only suggest getting a second opinion from another established ophthalmologist, including looking at the eye drop regiment prior to the surgery and during, as well as post recovery.
by immibis | 2025-08-18 13:50:27+00:00
I use runit for some non-system-level stuff. It's extremely simple, possibly too simple. It doesn't manage load order - if a dependency hasn't loaded yet, you just exit the script and the service manager tries again in 2 seconds. Service scripts are just shell scripts.

There are two ways to design a system: so simple that it has obviously no bugs, and so complex that it has no obvious bugs.
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-08-18 13:50:53+00:00
> But with AI, quality/performance is the priority. That’s why we see so many new AI startups and use cases lighting up as AI improves and finally becomes ‘good enough’ for new use cases.

But also, we are seeing models leapfrog each other; the best model this week is often not the best model next month and certainly not next quarter. I still see merit to the idea that cloud providers should focus on being the place where companies put their data, and make it easy for companies to bring models and tools to that data.

I agree with the article that Apple is probably cooked if the continue their current path for another couple of years.
by codedokode | 2025-08-18 13:51:00+00:00
> As for running a local server, VS Code devcontainers are the solution. Open your workspace, it runs the devcontainer, and you have a server up without extra hassle

it's not easy to install VS Code, let alone use it. VS Codium (and VS Code) are Electron apps, and it is difficult to sandbox them, as Electron (and Chromium as well) use suid helper - a priviledged binary that launches as root, and I won't allow suid binaries in a sandbox. Also, it requires GPU access for fast rendering, and it is difficult to provide in a safe way or switch to software rendering (I couldn't figure it out). Electron apps are a pain to install.

One could use a virtual machine, but it would use more resources.

Obviously, that's not VS Code's issue, it is a problem with Linux which doesn't come with a good sandbox.

It is much easier to type python -m http.server to launch a server, but you need to open a terminal and navigate to a directory first, that takes lot of time I would rather spend on something different (like figuring out how to work around issues with suid binary in Electron apps). And this looks like a hacky workaround, launching a web server only to gain more privileges in a browser.
by anyg | 2025-08-18 13:51:01+00:00
This is quite similar to what I was trying to explore with [1] & [2] yesterday. Currently, the only option I found is to use localStorage and give the user the option to manually export and import.

Hyperclay has given me some ideas. What I want is something like [3] but that the user only needs to install once. One electron app that can load our mini-apps.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44930814

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44933897

[3] - https://www.electronjs.org/fiddle
by kordlessagain | 2025-08-18 13:51:39+00:00
As one does, I've built an alternative to MCP: https://ahp.nuts.services

Put GPT5 into agent mode then give it that URL and the token 'linkedinPROMO1' and once it loads the tools tell it to use curl in a terminal (it's faster) and then run the random tool.

This is authenticated at the moment with that token, plus bearer tokens, but I've got the new auth system up and its working. I still have to do the integration with all the other services (the website, auth, AHP and the crawler and OCR engine), so will be a while before all that's done.
by smjburton | 2025-08-18 13:52:21+00:00
> The more data you give any of the AI services, the more that information can potentially be used against you.

It may seem obvious, but Sam Altman also recently emphasized that the information you share with ChatGPT is not confidential, and could potentially be used against you in court.

[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/altman-your-chatgpt-conversations...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/25/sam-altman-warns-theres-no...
by lproven | 2025-08-18 13:52:49+00:00
I agree about the virtues of the kit. I owned several Archies and loved them.

But the goal of a company is to survive, sell stuff, and make money. One division of Acorn survives, makes money, and dominates the industry, and the A in its name stands for Acorn.

(Some other bits survive inside Broadcom and things.)

It focussed on the successful bits and executed superbly. As the desktop PC industry consolidated on x86 and MS OSes it moved away. Good move. That's keeping your eye on the ball, in my book.

I can't think of any other company that did so well.

Sun, SGI, Cray, DEC, all either dead, or acquired, or sold on and split up, or sold off the divisions they were known for, and little or nothing of their tech lives on. IBM still makes POWER servers and workstations. That's about it. But not PCs.

Apple makes machines that use the Acorn ARM instruction set and can't run any binaries from their own PowerPC era kit, let alone 68k. It's doing great but by savagely chopping away legacy tech.

I think Acorn did great by comparison!
by altairprime | 2025-08-18 13:52:55+00:00
It offered simple meditation exercises rather than guided analysis. It failed to study the context surrounding the feelings and ask if they were welcome or unwelcome. It failed to see that things were going downhill over months of intervention efforts and escalate to involving more serious help.

Bah. How incompetent.

I’m untrained and even I can see how the chatbot let her down and construct a better friend-help plan in minutes than a chatbot ever did. It’s visibly unable to perform the necessary exploratory surgery on people’s emotions to lead them to repair and it pains me to see how little skill it truly takes to con a social person into feeling ‘helped’. I take pride in being able to use my asocial psyche-surgical skills to help my friends (with clear consent! I have a whole paragraph of warning that they’ve all heard by now) rather than exploiting them. Seeing how little skill is apparently required to make people feel ‘better’ makes me empathize with the piper’s cruelty at Lime Tree.
by cybersecmele | 2025-08-18 13:53:01+00:00
Github and GitLab cannot be used as backup as an outage can occur on both platforms leaving you with no access to your data/backup. Its a collaboration platform. Both GitHub and GitLab experienced many outages in 2024 and its best to use backup tools or at least create your own scripts to properly secure your data and ensure it is recoverable.
by spogbiper | 2025-08-18 13:53:34+00:00
There was a long legacy of using 80x25 and lots of software that would assume this layout. I think that comes from an even older legacy of dumb terminals such as the VT100 that used 80x24 plus one line for a status line. BTW 80 columns comes from an even older legacy of IBM punch cards having 80 columns. Basically, anything that wasn't 80x25 was going to break a lot of things
by joshstrange | 2025-08-18 13:53:45+00:00
> Why couldn’t my watch and glasses be everything I need?

People like screens. They like seeing IG pictures,they like scrolling through TikTok, they like seeing pictures/videos their friends/family send/post. I doubt many people will want to see pictures/videos on a watch screen or in glasses (which still have a ways to go).

Also I don't buy the premise of this article that Apple is deciding to take a backseat in AI, they were late to the party but they are trying (and failing it seems) to build foundational models. Reaching for OpenAI/Anthropic/etc while they continue to work on their internal models makes a lot of sense to me. It acknowledges they are behind and need to rely on a third-party but doesn't mean they won't ever use their own models.

Unless something changes (which is absolutely possible) it does seem we are headed towards LLMs being comedities. We will see what OpenAI/Ive end up releasing but I don't see a near-future where we don't have screens in our pockets and for that Google and Apple are best placed. With the GPT-5 flop (It's 4.6 at best IMHO) I have less concerns with LLMs growing as quickly as predicted.