MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by diego_moita | 2025-08-09 18:22:17+00:00
For Windows only (because that's the most common platform in the world): C# and .Net. The UI is mostly either WPF or WindowsForms.

For Mac only: new apps use Swift, legacy ones use Objective-C, both with AppKit.

Linux only: these are quite rare and there is a broad mix of them: C++, Java, etc.

Cross-platform: C++ with Qt seems to be the standard. Go and Rust seem to be rising. Rising UI libraries are Tauri, Slint and Iced. There are other alternatives like cross-platform .Net, Java or Flutter. But they don't look very solid and widely adopted.

Then there are other UI frameworks for some specific use cases (games, scientific applications, etc).
by Philpax | 2025-08-09 18:22:26+00:00
I wouldn't mind diversity, but in this particular case, Simon has been consistently documenting, exploring, and commenting upon AI advancements. As far as I can tell, nobody has attempted to keep up with his pace, aside from maybe Zvi, whose writings are much less compatible with the HN audience at large.

That is to say, I don't think this is a consumption issue - it's a production issue.
by delfinom | 2025-08-09 18:22:41+00:00
The funding was never cut. That was misinfo spread by morons because there was a typical Trump dispute of "mexico will pay for it". But the reality was that was in talks of a Mexico specific coverage program. The Panama program was never touched and is run by a third party agency with stakes holders consisting of the USDA and Panama government.

But yes the current outbreak built up since COVID.
by EnergyAmy | 2025-08-09 18:23:07+00:00
From the link:

> However, Dennett is not denying the existence of the mind or of consciousness, only what he considers a naive view of them

It doesn't seem like he's Eliminativist. It also seems like the criticisms rely on harping on about qualia, which is one of the sillier schools of sophistry. I'd need to see actual criticisms before believing that Dennett is pushing for something comical.
by danielvf | 2025-08-09 18:23:28+00:00
As others have pointed out, this is primarily due to the American Civil War when the Medal of Honors was given out much more freely than today.

Here's the breakdown on more recent conflicts:

WWII, 625 total recipients, 13 Irish, 2.1%.

In the Korean War, there were 152 Medal of Honors, 3 given to Irish, or 1.9%.

In the Vietnam War, there were 271 Medal of Honors, 13 given to Irish, or 4.8%.

There were 36 Medal of Honor medals given out in the wars in Iraq and Afganistan. Of these, 3 are marked as Irish on that page, or 10.7%.
by ghaff | 2025-08-09 18:24:24+00:00
I took a grad marketing class once with a business professor who studied this sort of thing. GMATs rather than SATs but same idea. Basically GMATs mattered more than anything else especially metrics such as letters of recommendation that were basically worthless.

I knew the director of admissions somewhat at an elite school and he said that they basically put a couple of quantitative metrics (like SAT) on one axis and read essays and considered other metrics like interviews on the other axis for diversity before that term became popular.

The upper right more or less got in, the lower left didn't, and then they debated the middle ground.
by timr | 2025-08-09 18:24:31+00:00
From the other link on the front page about this subject [1]:

> Illegal cattle smuggling, long considered one of the most efficient money-laundering routes for the drug cartels which terrorised San Pedro Sula, is regarded as the main reason for the accelerating advance. Up to 800,000 cattle a year are illicitly raised in nature reserves, such as the UNESCO-protected Rio Platano Biosphere in Honduras, and then smuggled by boat and truck up to Mexico. The flies, of course, travel with the livestock, embedded in cattle hides, accelerating their advance.

> “Everything indicates that illegal cattle routes from Central America are the arteries through which the screw worm is circulating again toward Mexico,” wrote Jeremy Radachowsky, director for Mesoamerican and the Western Caribbean at the Wildlife Conservation Society, in a recent paper.

So for those who keep trying to make the connection, it has little, if anything, to do with US politics. Meanwhile, I had no idea that cattle smuggling was a money-laundering route for drug cartels. TIL!

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
by bognition | 2025-08-09 18:24:36+00:00
Think of an agent as a standalone script or service. They have a single function take inputs and create outputs.

You can chain agents together into a string to accomplish larger tasks.

Think of everything involved in booking travel. You have set a budget, pick dates, chose a destinations, etc…. Each step can be defined as an agent and then you chain them together into a tool that handles the entire task for you.
by cedws | 2025-08-09 18:25:05+00:00
I was initially optimistic about Bitchat but after investigating it does just seem to be an early hobby project. We need more than individual apps meshing via Bluetooth. I’m doubtful Bitchat will ever be used outside of a group of nerds at a festival.

We need a standardised protocol commonly implemented by manufacturers. The closest we have now that I’m aware of is Apple’s Find My network in which it is possible to smuggle arbitrary data very slowly. [0]

[0]: https://github.com/positive-security/send-my
by Philpax | 2025-08-09 18:25:25+00:00
Rust + egui, but it's a far cry from the convenience or iteration speed of the web. Wherever possible, I build webapps instead, just because it's so much faster to get results (especially with LLMs!)

With that being said, I'd like to try the modern .NET stack sometime. Shame that the UI side of things is still largely Windows-only, and even Microsoft themselves don't know which UI framework they're using this week.
by ebiester | 2025-08-09 18:25:28+00:00
I disagree from almost the first sentence:

> Learning how to use LLMs in a coding workflow is trivial. There is no learning curve. You can safely ignore them if they don’t fit your workflows at the moment.

Learning how to use LLMs in a coding workflow is trivial to start, but you find you get a bad taste early if you don't learn how to adapt both your workflow and its workflow. It is easy to get a trivially good result and then be disappointed in the followup. It is easy to try to start on something it's not good at and think it's worthless.

The pure dismissal of cursor, for example, means that the author didn't learn how to work with it. Now, it's certainly limited and some people just prefer Claude code. I'm not saying that's unfair. However, it requires a process adaptation.
by cwizou | 2025-08-09 18:25:36+00:00
My point was, a lot of the early corporate support were smallish companies built specifically around Linux. RedHat is the perfect example of that, it started as a university project to make a distro.

It took a while (and a lot of pain) to get a lot of driver vendors to come fully into the project, yet Linux was already gaining a bunch of traction at that time (say last half of 90s).

I'll give you that Intel was always more or less a good actor though! But Google didn't exist when Linux already mattered. And when Google was created, they definitely benefited a lot from it, basing much of their infra on it.

Marketing needs (and laywer approval) can bring support faster than most things. Opus for audio is a good example of that too.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-09 18:26:22+00:00
You're overestimating the difficulty here. You don't really need to wait a month either. There's plenty of variance on a day by day basis, but you can still generally see whether the number is trending up or down. And most people tend to cycle through the same foods, so portion control isn't particularly hard.

For instance this is something every single person who's into body building does, because you want to be in a slight caloric surplus when bulking, and then you want to get back into a slight calorific deficit when cutting.
by uecker | 2025-08-09 18:26:28+00:00
Note that only one or two lines of this file is needed here, the rest is for other experiments... And a user would simply use the "literal" macro. I also do not think the Zig version is really that much clearer or obvious. I would not recommend to write such code anyway, neither in C nor in Zig. The "unreachable" version is far better.
by btown | 2025-08-09 18:26:29+00:00
If you want the things mentioned in this article, I highly recommend looking at https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol... and https://modelcontextprotocol.io/community/sep-guidelines and participating in the specification process.

Point-by-point for the article's gripes:

- distributed tracing/telemetry - open discussion at https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol...

- structured tool annotation for parallelizability/side-effects/idempotence - this actually already exists at https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-06-18/sch... but it's not well documented in https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-06-18/ser... - someone should contribute to improving this!

- a standardized way in which the costs associated with an MCP tool call can be communicated to the MCP Client and reported to central tracking - nothing here I see, but it's a really good idea!

- serialization issues e.g. "the server might report a date in a format unexpected by the client" - this isn't wrong, but since the consumer of most tool responses is itself an LLM, there's a fair amount of mitigation here. And in theory an MCP Client can use an LLM to detect under-specified/ambiguous tool specifications, and could surface these issues to the integrator.

Now, I can't speak to the speed at which Maintainers and Core Maintainers are keeping up with the community's momentum - but I think it's meaningful that the community has momentum for evolving the specification!

I see this post in a highly positive light: MCP shows promise because you can iterate on these kinds of structured annotations, in the context of a community that is actively developing their MCP servers. Legacy protocols aren't engaging with these problems in the same way.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-08-09 18:27:03+00:00
My impression has been that in corporate settings (and I would include LinkedIn in that) AI optimism is basically used as virtue signaling, making it very hard to distinguish people who are actually excited about the tech from people wanting to be accepted.

My personal experience has been that AI has trouble keeping the scope of the change small and targeted. I have only been using Gemini 2.5 pro though, as we don’t have access to other models at my work. My friend tells me he uses Claud for coding and Gemini for documentation.
by philwelch | 2025-08-09 18:27:40+00:00
High school grades are gameable, probably moreso than athletic scholarships or standardized tests.

Legacy admissions are part of the hereditary class system. The reason people go to elite schools isn’t just to receive an education, it’s also a status symbol and networking opportunity. If you do manage to get accepted by an elite school purely on merit, that’s not just an opportunity for you personally, it’s a chance to pass that status down to your children.

But yeah the rest of it is bullshit (and often a fig leaf for discrimination).
by chowells | 2025-08-09 18:29:52+00:00
No mention that both sets of primaries come from the biology of the average human eye, and other animals might be better served by other colors? Ok, yeah, that's not really relevant to the point the article was actually getting to, but I think it's important to remember. There's nothing magical about those colors. They effectively stimulate color receptors in our eyes such that our brains interpret the input in ways that can be combined to cover a pretty large gamut of the full range our eyes can perceive.

But as for what the article actually does focus on, I absolutely agree. You can create some really striking art by restricting your gamut to the range you can cover with a particular set of pigments.
by kens | 2025-08-09 18:29:55+00:00
Related is that English has 11 basic color terms: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple, and gray. As a result, trying to teach cyan and magenta as primary colors will be much harder than teaching blue and red as primary colors.

For more on basic color terms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Basic_color_terms
by diimdeep | 2025-08-09 18:30:06+00:00
Just a thought but would't it be a better world if we didn't had wifi and bluetooth chips in the first place and cellular modem would worked in user land and had API to build upon while not being separate black box hardware and os living it's own life, with capability to reach freaking satellite in space.

bluetooth chips is child's play compared to cellular chips, just saying.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-09 18:30:10+00:00
I see sooo many comments on this submission talking about large files. It feels massively over-relresented a concern to me.

On Linux, a good number of FS have builtin compression. My JSON all gets hit with lz4 compression automatically.

It indeed annoying having to go compress & decompress files before sending. It'd be lovely if file transfer tools (including messaging apps) were a bit better at auto-conpressing. I think with btrfs, it tests for compress ability too, will give up on trying to compress at some point: a similar effort ought be applied here.

The large file question & efficiency question feels like it's dominating this discussion, and it just doesn't seem particularly interesting or fruitful a concern to me. It shouldnt matter much. The computer can and should generally be able to eliminate most of the downsides relatively effectively.
by username332211 | 2025-08-09 18:30:21+00:00
The really funny part is that this is probably fairly easy to achieve in the United States. The only part of the Soviet system you'd need to implement is the migration and residency control regime.

Currently people all over the world are free to move to New York, which makes the city unaffordable. If you forbade anyone not born within it from moving there, Manhattan would be fairly affordable and homelessness would be much reduced.

All you need to do is to free yourself from that bourgeois delusion that a man from Mexico (or worse, West Virginia) has any right to live in that city.
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-09 18:30:22+00:00
I have 40V electric lawn mower. It takes nearly the full charge on two batteries to cut my average suburban-sized lawn. Sometimes I can't even complete it on that depending how tall the grass is. Add in edge trimming and blowing away the clippings and then multiply that by a number of lawns or larger properties and I think you would need dozens of batteries.

BTW "more convenient and cheaper" are strong arguments when you're in a competitive business. Lawn services are usually just a guy with a truck hustling for customers. The more lawns you can cut the more money you make. Anything that causes downtime such as running out of charged batteries is going to be a large negative.
by roywiggins | 2025-08-09 18:30:36+00:00
The way it mostly works is that if a company hires a Morgan Freeman impersonator to do the voice over for their car commercial, Morgan Freeman can sue them for using his likeness without permission:

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/849...

> We need not and do not go so far as to hold that every imitation of a voice to advertise merchandise is actionable. We hold only that when a distinctive voice of a professional singer is widely known and is deliberately imitated in order to sell a product, the sellers have appropriated what is not theirs and have committed a tort in California.
Ask HN: What do do with inherited WW2 material
by Trashmetoday | 2025-08-09 18:30:55+00:00
We have inherited some WW2 German material that we do not know what to do with. The material has been in storage since just after WW2. The family member who acquired this was a multi-star US Army General and much of the material would be considered as “trophies of war” by past standards, but it is not so easy to get rid of. From the general’s high-ranking position in the military, we are certain some of the items would be considered collectable and not run-of-the-mill items – e.g. museum artifact quality. We do not want to sell it to collectors, we do not see to make any money on this, and are worried that our storage unit will be broken into and we will be embarrassed.

Any ideas on disposing of this material?
by lyu07282 | 2025-08-09 18:31:21+00:00
You have a very distorted view of what liberalism means, we say liberal democracies and liberal international order for a reason. They are all liberals. Reagan and Clinton famously both did neoliberal reforms. I'm not saying they did the wrong thing to reach justified meritocracy, or the degree to which the free market requires regulation by a strong government, or how much we should rent control land lords, I'm saying we are all fucking peasants.
by db48x | 2025-08-09 18:32:36+00:00
It depends on the pest. Some of them are easier to eliminate than others. With screwworm flies the only offense we have is to raise them by the billions, sterilize them with radiation, chill them down, and then drop them out of airplanes. Fertile females end up mating with sterile males and then cannot lay any eggs before they die. Each generation then becomes radically smaller than the previous. Since their lifecycle is only a few weeks long this eliminates them in a few months. They were able to successfully eradicate the screwworm fly from North and Central America, but a combination of expense and diplomatic entanglements prevented them from continuing south past Panama. There have been outbreaks before, most notably in Egypt (or maybe just northern Africa, I forget) a few decades ago.

We have different responses to other pests. For example, Florida maintains a mosquito control program that sprays vast swathes of the state with insecticide from both the ground and the air every 7 days. I imagine that other southern states do as well.
by simonw | 2025-08-09 18:32:39+00:00
This is happening already. The LLM vendors are all competing on coding ability, and the best tool they have for that is synthetic data: they can train only on code that passes automated tests, and they can (and do) augment their training data with both automatically and manually generated code to help fill gaps they have identified in that training data.

Qwen notes here - they ran 20,000 VMs to help run their synthetic "agent" coding environments for reinforcement learning: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/22/qwen3-coder/
by falcor84 | 2025-08-09 18:32:49+00:00
As I see it, all of civilization is built on top of this "laziness" principle of "I'm tired of having to deal with X, how can I sort X so that I don't need to think about it anymore, and can instead focus on Y". I'm general, people want their brain to work on other stuff, not what's currently in front of them.
by extra88 | 2025-08-09 18:32:56+00:00
Apple Watch is multi-touch, if you hold two fingers on the face, it announces the time.

Which relates to the cost and battery life of the Apple Watch, it's a mainstream device that many people with varying disabilities can use. It has a full-fledged screen reader in its operating system, in addition to the development costs to support multiple interaction modalities, some will not be achievable with lower-powered, less specialized processors.
by seanhunter | 2025-08-09 18:33:00+00:00
On Wolfram specifically, GPT-5 is a huge step up from GPT-4. One of the first things I asked it was to write me a mathematica program to test the basic properties (injectivity, surjectivity, bijectivity) of various functions. The notebook it produced was

1) 100% correct

2) Really useful (ie it includes various things I didn’t ask for but are really great like a little manipulator to walk through the function at various points and visualize what the mapping is doing)

3) Built in a general way so I can easily change the mapping to explore different types of functions and how they work.

It seems very clear (both from what they said in the launch demos etc and from my experience of trying it out) that performance on coding tasks has been an area of massive focus and the results are pretty clear to me.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-08-09 18:33:35+00:00
Standardized tests work much better than high school grades, and also handle cases like young students who go to university at or before the "normal" age of a high school student.

The SAT and GRE aren't perfect, but they're a massive help to students who would otherwise be outside the normal path. Get a high score on the SAT, and nobody cares whether you went through traditional K-12.
by sedawkgrep | 2025-08-09 18:34:03+00:00
> I bet there are quite a few people in the United States alone who would love to have this life, who would love to have a guaranteed job, a guaranteed roof over their heads, and the heads of their children.

I'd almost venture to say the majority of people, and definitely those who suffer from a disability of some sort; especially mental health, where one may not mentally function well enough from one day to the next to be able to reliably hold a job.
by orochimaaru | 2025-08-09 18:34:40+00:00
The SAT isn't strong enough to predict anything. It can generally be answered by someone in their sophomore year at college or even their freshman, depending on what level of courses they are taking.

The problem finding a hard enough test with as little human intervention for assessments. Because human intervention brings with it subjectivity. This subjectivity was manageable when there weren't so many people applying for top schools (e.g. in the early 1900's). But right now its not.

SAT/ACT/GRE are no indicator of success. What this "study" is merely proving is that schools may have regressed in their rigor for grading hard courses.
by Tade0 | 2025-08-09 18:35:09+00:00
Low end cars tend to be more reliable as they're:

1. Built at a larger scale and at lower margins, so thoroughly tested beforehand.

2. Equipped with fewer features which might require maintenance.

3. Using generationally older powertrains oriented for economy, not performance.

That being said Lexus' original differentiator was reliability - particularly versus its peers price wise.

Also I guess this doesn't apply to various four wheeled appliance manufacturers like GM, Ford, Stellantis, Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi, all of whom do cheap out on essential components.
by cyberax | 2025-08-09 18:35:13+00:00
CORBA got a lot of things right. But it was unfortunately a child of the late 80-s telecom networks mixed with OOP-hype.

So it baked in core assumptions that the network is transparent, reliable, and symmetric. So you could create an object on one machine, pass a reference to it to another machine, and everything is supposed to just work.

Which is not what happens in the real world, with timeouts, retries, congested networks, and crashing computers.

Oh, and CORBA C++ bindings had been designed before the STL was standardized. So they are a crawling horror, other languages were better.