MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tedsanders | 2025-08-18 07:08:22+00:00
Communication is important, sure. But I don’t think it’s the most important skill for managers.

If communication was the key skill needed to be a great manager, it would imply that great managers could parachute in to run any old team, as long as they were able to communicate well.

But the best managers don’t just communicate their decisions; they need to exercise judgment and expertise to make good decisions in the first place. And making good decisions requires understanding your technology/product/team very well, which all go far beyond communication.
by godelski | 2025-08-18 07:09:03+00:00
DDG has its own crawler, but yes, it does get most of its index from Bing. But I believe also from places like Yandex (or used to).

I'm no Microsoft fan, but man you're splitting hairs here. And most of the non-Google engines get a good portion of their index from Bing because it is available and saves everyone from getting scraped to death. Though I guess that's happening now anyways...

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources
by threeducks | 2025-08-18 07:09:39+00:00
As far as I am aware, the "hanging" issue remains unsolved to this day. The underlying problem is that LLMs sometimes get stuck in a loop where they repeat the same text again and again until they reach the token limit. You can break the loop by setting a repeat penalty, but when your image contains repeated text, such as in tables, the LLM will output incorrect results to prevent repetition.

Here is the corresponding GitHub issue for your default model (Qwen2.5-VL):

https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen2.5-VL/issues/241

You can mitigate the fallout of this repetition issue to some degree by chopping up each page into smaller pieces (paragraphs, tables, images, etc.) with a page layout model. Then at least only part of the text is broken instead of the entire page.

A better solution might be to train a model to estimate a heat map of character density for a page of text. Then, condition the vision-language model on character density by feeding the density to the vision encoder. Also output character coordinates, which can be used with the heat map to adjust token probabilities.
by zoeysmithe | 2025-08-18 07:09:53+00:00
Classism in higher education, science, etc is sadly all too common. Even those in the 'correct' class have uphill battles as science very much is vulnerable to ego, politics, etc and reform can be difficult, or in some cases impossible, regardless of merit.

It makes you wonder what obvious thing is being ignored right now due to these politics. I would not be 100% surprised if people in the future accepted things like 'ghost experiences' as normal things. There's just way too many stories and experiences to entirely write it off, but who knows. I feel like hand wavey excuses like third-man, carbon monoxide suddenly everywhere, thought experiments about brains releasing chemicals, calling everything a hallucination, intuition impossible to know conventionally just called luck, etc is the system trying hard to deny this.
by listenallyall | 2025-08-18 07:11:05+00:00
The response you're responding to here was to "ben_w", he discussed better-than-a-billionaire housing. My original reply to your earlier comment is above, basically just asking what type of housing you anticipate under a UBI system.

To me, "just enough to avoid starving" is a prison-like model, just without locked doors. But multiple residents of a very basic "cell", a communal food hall, maybe a small library and modest outdoors area. But most of the time when people talk about UBI, they describe the recipients living in much nicer housing than that.
by biztos | 2025-08-18 07:12:40+00:00
I'm a subscriber, but the Criterion apps do downloads right some of the time if you're lucky, the choice of subtitles is usually English or English, discovery is Netflix-level bad, they can't be bothered to create any interactive info, and most of the actual Collection is not available for streaming.

I still pay them every month because they have the goods but it's so frustrating that the people with the most film-buff oriented catalog and their hearts (presumably) in the right place have so little ability to deliver on UX.

(I used to subscribe to MUBI as well, which is stronger for new indie films, but didn't have time for both, and MUBI app was so bad it could have been a fork of the Criterion app.)
by Lio | 2025-08-18 07:13:31+00:00
I never felt that way. I thought both the Amiga and the ST were great, each with useful and unique features but I still loved the Acorns.

IMHO the GUI was better on RiscOS and being able to run video at 25fps in just software felt like magic. At the time, I never saw Amigas doing that without expensive hardware like the Video Toaster, even Amiga A3000s.

You could even get 12.5fps video off floppy disc which seemed crazy at the time.
by lelanthran | 2025-08-18 07:14:43+00:00
> I've never understood why anyone would care about titles at all.

I cannot understand this sort of notion at all.

1. You don't care about $SOMETHING - great, I can understand that.

2. You don't understand why others care about $SOMETHING - Sure, I can understand that too.

3. You feel a need to broadcast this lack of understanding to the world - wtf?

I mean, I'm ignorant on a lot of subjects, but I hardly ever boast about my ignorance.

It's like when people proudly tell me "Oh no, I've never been any good at Maths": sure, lots of people aren't good at reasoning, but is being stupid something to brag about?
by zoom6628 | 2025-08-18 07:14:45+00:00
This is great. I was a huge fan of typora for writing docs a few an ago and now do all in obsidian. In both the editing is plaintext but the visible text is rendered inline with formatting.

Love what you have done and will use in a project next week.

Especially applaud your avoidance of npm, dependencies, and the usual ubiquitous JavaScript deluge.
by ludicrousdispla | 2025-08-18 07:15:14+00:00
Earlier this year I made some good progress on creating an automated weekly (or monthly) topical digest of HN with the use case being that a person could just check if there were posts on a particular topic of interest to them.

I've paused development on it for a bit to work on something else, but let me know if you have an interest and I'll post some sample output to github.
by zevon | 2025-08-18 07:16:36+00:00
In many countries, that ordnance is still found and disposed of more or less regularly. The decaying involves lots of nasty chemicals. It's happening at sea as well, by the way (because they dumped their leftovers after the wars there). Here's a short info piece by the German environment ministry about the issue: https://www.bundesumweltministerium.de/en/topics/marine-cons... and here's a European map: https://ec.europa.eu/maritimeaffairs/atlas/maritime_atlas/#l...
by lifthrasiir | 2025-08-18 07:16:42+00:00
I'm not here for arguing against linguistic concepts, so let me cover just one thing:

> None of this helps to explain why there might be a conflict between Markdown and agglutination, though.

reST, not Markdown. (Yeah I totally get it though because I made the same mistake in the OP!) Those languages often need to highlight individual morphemes inside space-separated "words", but reST assumes space-separated "word" as a default, hence annoyance.
AI That Customizes Every Email-Is This Worth Building?
by ivyiscool | 2025-08-18 07:16:56+00:00
We’re testing a new product focused on cold email outreach automation — and we’re looking for early feedback.

Here’s what it does: • Connect your email and send cold email sequences • Control send limits per day, set follow-up rules • Track opens, clicks, and replies automatically

But here’s the twist: This isn’t just another cold email tool.

We’re building AI-powered personalization at scale. Instead of just using simple merge tags like {{firstName}}, our system analyzes each recipient’s industry, job title, and company to tailor the tone and content of each email — aiming for real “1:1 feeling” at scale.

Right now, we’re testing whether this kind of AI-driven personalization can actually increase response and conversion rates.

If you’ve ever sent cold emails, we’d love your thoughts: • What’s the biggest pain point you want a tool like this to solve? • How important is personalization to you — and what does it really mean to you? • What’s one feature you think cold outreach tools are missing?

Feel free to drop your comments, share your ideas, or DM if you’d like early access.

Let’s build something better — together.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-18 07:17:49+00:00
> 3. Are devs using APIs directly with LLM providers or with big tech?

Right now it is cheaper to use one of the all you can prompt packages from the providers themselves. They are still massively subsidising token cost. Or they're overcharging the API per token cost. Either way, for a dev having a fixed cost even w/ limits often works out better. Running claude code w/ c4 can easily cost 20$ a session. Multiples of that if you're multitasking w/ lots of parallel instances running on multiple tasks.
by guyomes | 2025-08-18 07:18:11+00:00
> Does Google have similar deals in other countries

Wikipedia has pages on antitrust cases against Google in the world [0] and specifically in U.S. [1,2] and in European Union [3].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google#Antitrust

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_cases_against_Google...
by cayu-ai | 2025-08-18 07:19:13+00:00
We work in blue-collar industries such as logistics and manufacturing, the backbone of the U.S. economy, where most processes remain manual.

Small and mid-sized companies resist change. Convincing them to adopt even basic “data entry” automation can take months. Many prefer to keep friends or relatives on the payroll instead of modernizing. At the level of production lines or logistics functions, the resistance is stronger. The prevailing view is: “we have done it this way for decades, why change.”

I believe the future will not come from persuading reluctant incumbents. It will come from new manufacturing companies that start digital-first, with AI at their core. These firms will redeploy workers into higher-value roles, outpace legacy operators, and set a new standard for U.S. competitiveness.

Case in point - China. They started manufacturing companies mostly from 2000s, using slightly more modern tech than US did in 50s. Obviously, China has more efficiency and higher production capacity per (any normalized unit). Or, in financial services, in APAC, nobody uses checks, or even in Africa. Because they did not have to deal with legacy financial systems.

The opportunity is not to patch the old, but to build the new.
by pavlov | 2025-08-18 07:19:31+00:00
This is coming close to WWW's original vision because the very first web browser was also an editor. Tim Berners-Lee's application on the NeXT was basically a wrapper for the operating system's built-in rich text editing class named TextView. (It later became NSTextView on Apple's Mac OS X and still powers the TextEdit app on Mac.)

We lost editing for two reasons:

1) The HTTP PUT method didn't exist yet, so edited HTML files could only be saved locally.

2) Mosaic built a cross-platform web browser that defined what the WWW was for 99% of users, and they didn't include editing because that would have been too complex to build from scratch in their multi-platform code base.
by brumar | 2025-08-18 07:20:19+00:00
Very good. I was wondering why nobody did something like that before. At least this was my conclusion from my google searches few months ago. From a design perspective, I don't like storing state in the DOM itself, I would have find much more flexible to have the state in a json as a single source of truth and use reactive patterns such as state change => ui change and not hiting the DOM directly. That sounds like big framework things, but it saved me from acute headaches in a personal similar framework I did for self-contained apps. It was not HTML but I thought I would apply the same logic if I had to do it for html apps too.
by franga2000 | 2025-08-18 07:20:41+00:00
Every possible solution is terrible, many people have thought about this and nobody has found one that isn't.

The "24 hour code" one you suggest is something the EU is prototyping. Since there's nothing stopping an adult from sharing their code with a minor, or even code-sharing (or selling) websites to pop up, they want it to be bound to a particular device. So what they've done is added integrity checks to the app, so you can only run it on a locked down phone.

Want to run GrapheneOS for privacy and security? Or use an unofficial ROM to get updates on a phone the manufacturer stopped supporting? Just want to uninstall the bloatware and spyware the manufacturer installs? Want to use Linux? Have an old computer without a TPM? All of that and more - congrats, no "adult content" for you.

And no, it's not "porn", it's "adult content", which is a much broader and blurrier category. Is discussion of sexual orientation or gender issues adult content? Sex education? Medical information about "private parts"? News articles mentioning scary things like rape?

This is bad technology and it should never be developed. Do Not Create The Torment Nexus.
by phtrivier | 2025-08-18 07:21:55+00:00
I have my last electricity bill, from France, something that's indexed on the "public price" (so it's possible you get extra discount, but I bet it's representative)

Electricity itself is priced at around 0,14 €/kWh (sparing you the 6th significant digits), so roughly $0,16/kWh at current exchange rates and taxes of of 0,034 €/kWh ($0,039/kWh).

Let's round it to up to $0.17/kWh, which is surprisingly close to your number.

The additional taxes are a "flat" fee of 1,8 €/month (2 $/month),

Then there is the registration itself, with sits at about $15 / month. (I can challenge myself to getting bills where the registration and taxes are bigger than the actual current.)

I'm not sure how I would get a nice number in "€/kWh", though ?
by JdeBP | 2025-08-18 07:22:02+00:00
BBC BASIC is not Microsoft BASIC. You cannot reason about the operation of BBC BASIC from only knowing about Microsoft BASIC.

Whereas I suspect that I am nowhere near the only person on this page who once disassembled ROMs on a BBC Micro. We can state, in contrast, that there was no such self-modifying code. Again, BBC BASIC was in ROM.

Those lucky enough to have a copy of Jeremy Ruston's book after all of these years, or the retrocomputing enthusiasts who still have working Beebs, could even tell you exactly where in ROM the code was that fetched the next token for execution.

I never actually owned a copy of the book, and somewhat envy anyone who still has a copy; although to compensate I do have part of one of my own disassembly listings still, buried somewhere. (-:
by maelito | 2025-08-18 07:24:16+00:00
Am I the only one that does not understand what the author wants to explain ?

Do we need a story with illustration to understand how a new framework works ? What's the plain markdown 2 to 3 paragraph that explains the concept ?

Edit : here it is. https://docs.hyperclay.com/docs/docs-tldr-paste-in-llm/#how-...

> Whenever the page changes—or the user explicitly saves the page—we grab all the HTML, make a few modifications, and then POST it to the backend’s “save” endpoint.

Wait, so instead of storing JSON we store HTML with all its verbosity and all its tags that have nothing to do with the user edit (e.g. a small profile description change) ? What about if the webmaster then wants to change the HTML title of the profile description block ? The user's version just diverged from the webmaster's ?
by bayindirh | 2025-08-18 07:25:00+00:00
While I make a lot of anti-LLM comments here, my qualm is with user facing "AI companies" using internet as their scrape-ground to detriment of everyone.

From what I see, the real AI, the ones users don't see, but the ones powers research infrastructures or working on private data are doing some real work and creating real results is the future. The LLMs many see are toys when compared to these ones.

I have seen AI models run experiments in lab, the boring vision models like YOLO creating real predictions and insights about our ecosystem, and fine tuned local LLMs provide real insights.

Hardware companies are not in a bubble because of this, but user facing LLMs are in a bubble.
by goku12 | 2025-08-18 07:25:13+00:00
I can't agree with the 'they can't ever get off of it' part. Newer generations of psychotropic drugs are much more effective and way less dependency inducing than even what was available a decade back. For many illnesses that are caused by life events rather than genetics, those medications are effective at improving the symptoms to a level where they can be weaned off and further management with just the therapy is possible.

And while at it, not everything can be treated with gym or hobbies. They work well for mild to medium severity depressions. But even getting up from bed is nearly impossible for people with high severity depressions, much less attend a gym or go fishing. The doctors usually prescribe the medications till they can manage to do start them. And then there are other conditions for which a healthy lifestyle is simply not the appropriate or effective treatment.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-18 07:25:31+00:00
Yes but still, talking to someone helps. No matter what they say back. If an LLM is the only thing around at the moment (e.g. in the middle of the night) this can be useful for therapeutic purposes.

Therapy isn't only about what the therapist says to you. There is a lot about you talking to them and the process that creates in the mind. By sharing your thoughts with someone else you view them from a different perspective already.
by wiz21c | 2025-08-18 07:28:22+00:00
you need to work on big project for these flaws to become a problem. Say, you have a huge code base, 100000's of lines that you didn't write. Then you want to refactor a method's name. Python can't give you any guarantee the refactoring is fully complete. Only a real typed language can do that.

I write 95% of my code in python, I love it, it's my go to language for many things. But for huge code base which I don't master, the lack of type system makes me more than nervous.
by Simon_O_Rourke | 2025-08-18 07:29:49+00:00
> If the selection function for senior leadership is tuned to a certain personality type, you're doomed to repeat your mistakes.

Amen, Amen... Preach brother!

All this rings true, from the complete org dysfunction, to the security theatre, all of it paints the hellscape of large enterprises in great detail.

My own personal struggles in this corner world resonate strongly here. I worked in a large energy company, with layers upon layers of incompetence and waste.

Including paying a consulting company a small fortune to build a data warehouse that was so locked down that they had to pay them more and regularly, to access the data it contained.

Security theatre where bozos would open your desk drawer if it was unlocked and confiscate your paper notes and books unless you crawled back to the apologizing.
by wiz21c | 2025-08-18 07:30:53+00:00
I happen to prototype in python then move on to rust when things solidify... For those who don't know rust, its compiler is pretty slow. I mean, when you want to add a feature to an existing code base, each "run" you do to test the new feature imply relinking the whole project: that's very slow (or you have to split the project in sub project, but I'm lazy). In that situation, prototyping in python makes sense (at least to me :-)
by lazide | 2025-08-18 07:31:34+00:00
And communism and socialism do so much better?

Just look up all the ecological and environmental disasters in Eastern Europe and Russia, or the insane economic fuckups from the ‘great leap forward’ (or even going on right now!) in China for a breath of fresh air, amiright?

People be people. No system is going to magically solve these problems, but some (anything authoritarian, usually!) can certainly make them worse.
by svara | 2025-08-18 07:31:42+00:00
Not at all.

I don't want to address directly your claim about lack of generalization, because there's a more basic issue with the GP statement. Even though I will say, today's models do seem to generalize quite a bit better than you make it sound.

But more importantly, you and GP don't mention any evidence for why that is due to specifically using next token prediction as a mechanism.

Why would it not be possible for a highly generalizing model to use next token prediction for its output?

That doesn't follow to me at all, which is why the GP statement reads so weird.
by OutOfHere | 2025-08-18 07:32:24+00:00
It is true, but with major caveats.

Firstly, one has to submit strong evidence, call them repeatedly, and wait for many months. It is not a pleasant experience.

Secondly, in the real world, any vendor like Amazon or Ebay or Uber or Lyft will immediately freeze the user's account if a dispute is initiated, barring the user from using the service. This is a substantially worse outcome for the user.
by dismalaf | 2025-08-18 07:33:28+00:00
> web browser was also an editor

Ummmm all the browsers I know of are also editors... Are there any that aren't?

Edit - does no one use dev tools anymore? No HTML? No vanilla JS and CSS? Everyone just using TS, React and gluing things together? Like, you literally have an entire IDE in your browser (assuming you use anything derived from Chrome, Firefox or Safari) that can code a web page live...
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-18 07:33:59+00:00
Making a more read/annotate/write web is near and dear to my heart. There's a lot I find admirable - noble about pages like Hyperclay!

But also, it's a distinctly different answer for each page to build its own toolkit for the user (Hyperclay) vs TBL's read-write web. The user-agent ought, imo, afford standard tools that are going to work across web pages, that extend the user agency whatever site they are visiting.
by pembrook | 2025-08-18 07:34:01+00:00
Not for long if the EU government keeps raiding it for billions.

EU social welfare programs are all in a precarious state and the EU is currently taking on massive debts to re-arm again. Their economy is also not growing and China is eating their lunch economically (autos, manufacturing, industry).

Public opinion has turned so dramatically against big tech that triggering $10B in fines is like taking candy from a baby. Expect this to 10X by the end of the decade.

The incentive structure is there and the EU has already realized they can raid US companies in the name of 'privacy' without much pushback (hilariously, they're also constantly trying to undermine encryption at the same time...so we know they don't actually care about "privacy," just easy money).
by heikkilevanto | 2025-08-18 07:34:22+00:00
Interesting idea. Well put it on the list of things I should try some day.

After a quick look at the site, I like the idea. But I wonder where it's limitations start to get in the way.

How about security, if I can modify the page, who else can? And who controls that?

How much code and logic does it handle before getting difficult to maintain? And how much data?

If I make an useful app with it, say to track beers, can I share the app with other people without so they can track their own beers, without sharing my personal data?
by clemensnk | 2025-08-18 07:34:26+00:00
This is really neat! It echoes many of the ideas we've been exploring with the Webstrates project (https://webstrates.net). We've been using the DOM as persistence layer for building malleable collaborative software for smaller groups, whereas hyperclay focuses on using the same mechanisms for traditional webpages. Recently, I have been experimenting with a local-first approach to Webstrates (https://github.com/Webstrates/MyWebstrates). Might be interesting to explore if a Webworker-based approach like in MyWebstrates could be used for offline editing in hyperclay.