MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by presentation | 2025-08-08 13:00:10+00:00
Yeah their startup times aren’t great. They’re making a trade off by loading a ton of data up front, though to be fair a lot of the local first web tooling didn’t really exist when they were founded - the nascent Zero Sync framework’s example project is literally a Linear clone that they use as their actual bug tracker, it loads way faster and has similarly snappy performance, so seems clear that it can be done better.

That said at this point Linear has more strengths than just interaction speed, mainly around well thought out integrations.
by wilkystyle | 2025-08-08 13:00:10+00:00
Trade-offs abound, but this sounds amazing to me. I already have hotkeys to instantly switch between browser/terminal/Emacs/etc., so it's not an issue for me. What is an issue is some other application stealing focus while I'm typing elsewhere and (as another commenter mentioned) accidentally pressing space or some other key that performs an action in whatever pop-up or application stole the focus.
by seabass-labrax | 2025-08-08 13:02:23+00:00
Do they actually walk out with more, though? Looking at the 'businesses for sale' listings here in the UK, I can see most of the hairdressing salons have an asking price of between 2x and 10x the statutory minimum wage. So even if the hairdresser built the business by themselves in only a few years, has never sold any stock, and has no outstanding loans, they'd probably get no more than twice what they'd have earnt as a non-entrepreneurial hairdresser over the same period. Then that will also be taxed at a higher rate.

I'm not saying that being an entrepreneur isn't a good way of making money in certain circumstances, but I think that starting any brick-and-mortar business is barely viable compared to persuing a white-collar career where one's final salary would dwarf the value of even the most successful hairdressing enterprise.

TLDR; the promise of money alone cannot motivate someone to become an entrepreneur.
by srid | 2025-08-08 13:02:24+00:00
Here are two submissions on Jon Pretty, one from 2021 when the cancellation happened, and another from this year when it became clear who the wrongdoers really were. It is really interesting to compare the nature of discussion between the two threads:

2021 My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26961482

2025 The untold impact of cancellation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44755644

ETA: Here's another thread:

2024 Jon Pretty wins in court against sexual harassment claims by Scala community https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40169578
by jordanb | 2025-08-08 13:02:48+00:00
The new Amtrak cars on Midwest and California service are made by Siemens. They are a huge downgrade in terms of customer comfort versus the old equipment. The seats are worse than a budget airline seat. This is in contrast to the old equipment where the coach seats were more comfortable than a domestic first class airline seat. The business class seats on the old trains were practically lay-flat, the new ones don't recline at all.

Unfortunately Siemens has become something of a monopoly outside of Asia and France for passenger trains and they've apparently decided that train travel should be uncomfortable, with bad seats and harsh lighting.

The upside to these new Acela trains is that they were built by the French railcar maker Alstrom, not by Siemens like the rest of the new Amtrak carriages.
by captainregex | 2025-08-08 13:02:51+00:00
one of my day to day responsibilities involves using a portal tied to MSFT dynamics on the back end and it is the laggiest and most terrible experience ever. we used to have java apps that ran locally and then moved to this in the name of cloud migration and it feels like it was designed by someone whose product knowledge was limited to the first 2/5 lessons in a free Coursera (RIP) module
by wim | 2025-08-08 13:03:23+00:00
Funny how reasonable performance is now treated as some impossible lost art on the web sometimes.

I posted a little clip [1] of development on a multiplayer IDE for tasks/notes (local-first+e2ee), and a lot of people asked if it was native, rust, GPU rendered or similar. But it's just web tech.

The only "secret ingredients" here are using plain ES6 (no frameworks/libs), having data local-first with background sync, and using a worker for off-UI-thread tasks. Fast web apps are totally doable on the modern web, and sync engines are a big part of it.

[1] https://x.com/wcools/status/1900188438755733857
by its-kostya | 2025-08-08 13:03:24+00:00
So what's the alternative? Being referred to an IM thread where there is still the long history but the discourse is full of short, impulsive messages written in haste? And you are expected to be instantly available to read the thread and respond? Email is better set up for thoughtful, async communication and finding thread by "subject".

What the article doesn't state but implies is when someone sends you an email thread, it should be a standalone message that clarifies the state of things and the ask. And if the reader needs the context of how something got there, they can refer to the thread history.
by dminik | 2025-08-08 13:03:40+00:00
I'm not impressed. On mobile, the docs are completely broken and unreadable. Visiting a different docs subpage breaks the back button.

Firefox mobile seems to think the entire page is a link. This means I can't highlight text for instance.

Clicking on things feels sluggish. The responses are fast, but still perceptible. Do we really need a delay for opening a hamburger menu?
by mpercival531 | 2025-08-08 13:04:14+00:00
iOS Mail app does not support IMAP IDLE like any ordinary email clients.

It only supports a proprietary IMAP extension that uses Apple Push Notification Services (APNS) as a sideband channel for IMAP servers to signal the iOS Mail app.

Last I researched this (like… years ago), most IMAP-based email providers that are listed by the iOS Settings have implemented the extension, except for Gmail and Exchange. Fastmail then got on the train since 2015.

Not sure what is with the tweet targeting Fastmail specifically though.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-08-08 13:04:29+00:00
> instant UX

I do not get the hype. At all.

"Local first" and "instant UX" are the least of my concerns when it comes to project management. "Easy to find things" and "good visibility" are far more important. Such a weird thing to index on.

I might interact with the project management tool a few times a day. If I'm so frequently accessing it as an IC or an EM that "instant UX" becomes a selling point, then I'm doing something wrong with my day.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-08 13:05:12+00:00
See https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1186940/Lisps-Mysteriou...

Also other languages have stolen most of what was unique about lisp like: the garbage collector, dynamic data structures on your fingertips, Map<String, Object>, etc. Almost all the examples in Peter Norvig's book

https://unglueit-files.s3.amazonaws.com/ebf/59f74a93bbc1435c...

can be coded up just fine in Python. Try doing that in FORTRAN or COBOL in the 1970s in you're in the house of pain.
by swsieber | 2025-08-08 13:06:03+00:00
Honestly, having used InstantDB (one of the providers listed in their post), I think it'd be a pretty nice fit.

I've been writing a budget app for my wife and I and I've made it 100% free with 3rd party hosting:

* InstantDB free tier allows 1 dev. That's the remote sync.

* Netlify for the static hosting

* Free private gitlab ci/cd for running some email notification polling, basically a poor mans hosted cron.
by ClarityJones | 2025-08-08 13:06:30+00:00
I think this is a meta-allusion to the theory that human consciousness developed recently, i.e. that people who lived before [written] language did not have language because they actually did not think. It's a potentially useful thought experiment, because we've all grown up not only knowing highly performant languages, but also knowing how to read / write.

However, primitive languages were... primitive. Where they primitive because people didn't know / understand the nuances their languages lacked? Or, were those things that simply didn't get communicated (effectively)?

Of course, spoken language predates writings which is part of the point. We know an individual can have a "conscious" conception of an idea if they communicate it, but that consciousness was limited to the individual. Once we have written language, we can perceive a level of communal consciousness of certain ideas. You could say that the community itself had a level of shared-consciousness.

With GPTs regurgitating digestible writings, we've come full circle in terms of proving consciousness, and some are wondering... "Gee, this communicated the idea expertly, with nuance and clarity.... but is the machine actually conscious? Does it think undependably of the world, or is it merely a kaledascopic reflection of its inputs? Is consciousness real, or an illusion of complexity?"
by chipsa | 2025-08-08 13:06:44+00:00
I promise there is not an OBD2 port inside the headlights of cars.

There is CANBUS to the headlights, but that is not a OBD2 port. And more securely designed cars can put that in a less secure zone, so it can only send and receive commands for exterior things like lights, and not be able to have commands for keys injected, because that bus will not accept those commands.
by rowanG077 | 2025-08-08 13:07:58+00:00
How so? Asking LLMs to solve a problem can be a problem of any form. For example I just asked this.

Can you give me a very large semiprime?

And claude opus answered:

Here's a very large semiprime:

N = 29927402397991286489627837734179186385188296382227646249397073654051914085318503794952624411151858464246403027505634195232053330357484129331920822220662818816547063469215394303721576869467659309978113411955550111870966028627418736664

This is a over 200-digit semiprime. Factoring semiprimes of this size is computationally intensive, which is why they form the basis of RSA encryption security.

---

Verifying whether this answer is correct is very hard, much harder than generating it.

Problems of this form come up very often. Not even in formal mathematics. Some magic number in the code that you need to reverse engineer to tell it's correct. Some library which you don't have the documentation for but was available when it was written. Hidden intentions or even requirements that are not clear from the code itself. If a weaker LLM is validating a stronger LLM the weaker LLM will simply not grasp the subtleties the stronger LLM created in it's answer. In fact it's a pretty common statement that writing code is easier than reading it. Which is precisely about generation vs validation.
by renmillar | 2025-08-08 13:08:19+00:00
Could be that you need massive amounts of data from those super expensive production training runs, and it's tough to figure that out from publicly available data and academic computing resources. Maybe the combination of gradual efficiency improvements, bigger compute clusters, and test-time reasoning keeps the cloud models in the lead. Plus, even if it's exponential scaling, wouldn't that still favor the big data centers? That would put local/edge models at a serious disadvantage.
by tedggh | 2025-08-08 13:09:12+00:00
This is a good article and I appreciate the author sharing his ideas. But that screenshot showing an example of poorly written code. Man if someone in your team is writing code like that you have much more serious problems. I understand the need for guardrails and standards, but when you go through the right process of hiring someone and giving an offer this should not happen. This is the equivalent of a law firm hiring a lawyer then adding a tool that checks their work when drafting documents making sure they don’t make mistakes. I’m not talking about complex compliance issues but fundamental knowledge a lawyer should have. The case can be made this is for junior developers, and I agree it can be useful, but there’s usually a path for junior developers that involves 1:1 mentorship before they start pushing critical code. We do have standards and guidelines in my team, but most of them are nice-to-haves. We assume we are all professionals and trust each other’s work even when many times we disagree on design and coding style. Our effort and enforcement is testing, accountability and good documentation. We nudge for readable code. We have a guy that loves Regex and we let him use it if well documented.
by apwell23 | 2025-08-08 13:09:39+00:00
> I hope your kids learn as well from books as their peers learn from AI.

Its ok if they don't learn 'as well' as kids learning from screens.

> Teachers, should be terrified. Homeschool kids can literally put themselves through school now with the right motivation.

Thats what they said about internet, youtube, tv and radio before that. Turns out learning was not limited by access to hot new technology.
Show HN: Stop typing numbers – scan and save contact info instantly
by akash-bilung | 2025-08-08 13:10:32+00:00
At events, meetups, or conferences, no one wants to stop and type phone numbers or emails.

That’s why I built a free tool to generate vCard QR codes — just scan and instantly save contact info to any smartphone.

It's perfect for business cards, booths, speaker slides, or networking tables. No app required. No signup. No tracking. Just fast contact sharing.

Try it here: https://contactconverter.app/tools/qr-generator

Would love feedback on the UX, edge cases, or features you'd like (batch generation, custom branding, etc.).
by marcyb5st | 2025-08-08 13:11:17+00:00
We successfully built an AL pipeline by building models that quantify both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties and use those quantities to drive our labeling efforts.

Specifically, post training you measure those on an holdout set and then you slice the results based on features. While these models tend to be more complex and potentially less understandable we feel the pros out-weight the cons.

Additionally, giving access to a confidence score to your end users is really useful to have them trust the predictions and in case that there is a non-0 cost for acting due to false positives/negatives you can try to come up with a strategy that minimize the expected costs.
by K0balt | 2025-08-08 13:11:28+00:00
How would one separate syntax from the language?

Some kind of syntax.conf where syntax would be defined?

I guess that would mean a syntax compiler stage to an intermediate language- kind of like the way many “languages” compile down to js?

Or perhaps a shallower version of that idea, with a “plain” syntax and the syntax wrapper lives in a pre-render in the IDE?

How would you choose to accomplish this?
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-08 13:11:36+00:00
Yes, GPT-5 is more of an iteration than anything else, and to me this says more about OpenAI than the rest of the industry. However, I think the majority of the improvements over the past year have been difficult to quantify using benchmarks. Users often talk about how certain models "feel" smarter on their particular tasks, and we won't know if the same is true for GPT-5 until people use it for a while.

The "GPT-5 will show AGI" hype was always a ridiculously high bar for OpenAI, and I would argue that the quest for that elusive AGI threshold has been an unnecessary curse on machine learning and AI development in general. Who cares? Do we really want to replace humans? We should want better and more reliable tools (like Claude Code) to assist people, and maybe cover some of the stuff nobody wants to do. This desire for "AGI" is delivering less value and causing us to put focus on creative tasks that humans actually want to do, putting added stress on the job market.

The one really bad sign in the launch, at least to me, was that the developers were openly admitting that they now trust GPT-5 to develop their software MORE than themselves ("more often than not, we defer to what GPT-5 says"). Why would you be proud of this?
by dkersten | 2025-08-08 13:13:03+00:00
If AGI has human capability, why would we think it could research any faster than a human?

Sure, you can scale it, but if an LLM takes, say, $1 million a year to run an AGI instance, but it costs only $500k for one human researcher, then it still doesn’t get you anywhere faster than humans do.

It might scale up, it might not, we don’t know. We won’t know until we reach it.

We also don’t know if it scales linearly. Or if it’s learning capability and capacity will able to support exponential capability increase. Our current LLM’s don’t even have the capability of self improvement or learning even if they were capable: they can accumulate additional knowledge through the context window, but the models are static unless you fine tune or retrain them. What if our current models were ready for AGI but these limitations are stopping it? How would we ever know? Maybe it will be able to self improve but it will I’ll take exponentially larger amounts of training data. Or exponentially larger amounts of energy. Or maybe it can become “smarter” but at the cost of being larger to the point where the laws of physics mean it has to think slower, 2x the thinking but 2x the time, could happen! What if an AGI doesn’t want to improve?

Far too many unknowns to say what will happen.
by imtringued | 2025-08-08 13:13:13+00:00
At least you're truthful when you say it's completely made up.

Here is the corrected version:

Imagine a revolutionary technology comes out that has the potential to increase quality of life, longevity and health, productivity and the standard of living, or lead to never before seen economic prosperity, discover new science, explain things about the universe, or simply give lonely people a positive outlet.

But there was one catch: during its release, an error was made on a chart. It turns out that it did not lead to the massively over exaggerated benefits that were promised and that it merely represents a minor incremental improvement over its predecessor and that it will be overshadowed in a matter of months by another release from a competitor.

Where should this community focus its attention?
by AdmiralAsshat | 2025-08-08 13:13:42+00:00
Email threads are useful for context. I much prefer having the email thread to understand what is being asked and why, rather than a lone email from someone (usually a PM or someone non-technical) that attempts to paraphrase the ask--poorly--and gives me a nonsensical request: "AA, please tune the turbo encabulator."

But it's also really helpful when someone at least summarize or reiterates the specific ask to me at the top of the email thread, rather than just CC'ing me on a reply with "+AA". That seems to be more what the author's complaint is about.
by swsieber | 2025-08-08 13:13:58+00:00
I think the current crop of sync engines greatly benefit from being web-first because they are still young and getting lots of updates. And mobile updates are a huge pain compared to webapp updates.

The PWA capabilities of webapps are pretty OK at this point. You can even drive notifications from the iOS pinned PWA apps, so personally, I get all I need from web apps pretending to be mobile apps.
by twodave | 2025-08-08 13:14:10+00:00
Perhaps not, but what is the impetus of discovery? Is it purely analysis? History is littered with serendipitous invention; shower-thoughts lead to some of our best work. What's the AGI-equivalent of that? There is this spark of creativity that is a part of the human experience, which would be necessary to impart onto AGI. That spark, I believe, is not just made up of information but a complex weave of memories, experiences and even emotions.

So I don't think it's a given that progress will just be "exponential" once we have an AGI that can teach itself things. There is a vast ocean of original thought that goes beyond simple self-optimization.
by webdevver | 2025-08-08 13:14:10+00:00
the pragmatic thing to do is just let the Free Market decide. as far as i understand, windows just lets apps grab whatever window they want, whatever input they want, right? and everything Just Works(tm). app writers are discouraged to make things too clever by virtue of users having the choice of not using the app in question.

why cant linux guys just... copy windows?

android-ifying this space with permissions, channels, protocols etc, and pretending that apps are insecure is adding friction that benefits nobody imo.
by M4v3R | 2025-08-08 13:14:20+00:00
This is what I got from your prompt in one shot with GPT-5 Thinking:

Game: https://chatgpt.com/canvas/shared/6895f722f2708191ac4a6d1645...

Conversation: https://chatgpt.com/share/6895f74a-0c5c-8004-b349-69da096531...

The controls are inverted for some reason and it could be a bit faster, but I fixed both of these easily with one prompt and here's the corrected version: https://chatgpt.com/canvas/shared/6895f82759f88191ba41c9fcd5...
by kevindamm | 2025-08-08 13:15:19+00:00
I kind of agree and don't. You could say HTTP+DOM is the API, we're already there. But it lacks the structure and a more explicit regularity (in part because it's meant for human consumption, not programming). And if you were to describe the whole protocol (including CSS and JS as they can change ordering, even content, of what's shown) it's incredibly more complicated than the equivalent, distilled representation.

There are efforts going back at least fifteen years to extract ontologies from natural language [0] and HTML structure [1].

[0]: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d... (2010) [PDF]

[1]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2009.02.011 (2009)
by bravetraveler | 2025-08-08 13:16:01+00:00
Want with one hand, shit in the other. See which fills first -- expectations, heh. IM can and will wait. Especially "hi".

Down with ever-expanding threads. I try not to engage with them at all, preferring a briefing that explains why I'm being involved and the change in priority. If dragged in with a simple "see below"; looks messy, best of luck.

Thanks for being unprepared and showing your interest in staying that way. Helps me keep a safe distance.
by daveguy | 2025-08-08 13:16:04+00:00
You seem to be confusing the construction of system prompts with "training". Prompts do not change a model's weights or train them in any way. Yes they influence output, but only in the same way different questions to LLMs (user prompts) influence output. Just because it's not available in current user interfaces to use commit messages as a prompt does not mean the model wasn't trained with them. It would be a huge failure for training from version controlled source code to not include the commit messages as part of the context. As that is a natural human language description of what a particular set of changes encompasses (given quality commits, but quality is a different issue).
by mossTechnician | 2025-08-08 13:16:37+00:00
Hacker News comment sections are the only part of the internet that still feel "impossibly fast" to me. Even on Android, thousands of comments can scroll as fast as the OS permits, and the DOM is so simple that I've reopened day-old tabs to discover the page is still loaded. Even projects like Mastodon and Lemmy, which aren't beholden to modern web standards, have shifted to significant client-side scripting that lacks the finesse to appear performant.
by jeffnappi | 2025-08-08 13:16:37+00:00
We have no idea what AGI might look like, for example entirely possible that if/when that threshold is reached it will be power/compute constrained in such a way that it's impact is softened. My expectation is that open models will eventually meet or exceed the capability of proprietary models and to a degree that has already happened.

It's the systems around the models where the proprietary value lies.
by nerdjon | 2025-08-08 13:16:38+00:00
I am a bit confused here as well, is there a difference between "Push" and the notifications on iOS?

I just checked my emails, I use Amazon Workmail and even that has push support. The only one for me that doesn't is my lesser used gmail.

To my knowledge I get alerts quickly with that email, I have never had an issue of not.