MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by neilv | 2025-08-21 06:14:50+00:00
Less relevant, but reminds me of my all-time favorite grocery store LP encounter, near MIT. The chain was running this big promotion with lots of tear-open prize tickets that are either coupons or game board pieces, so I had been visiting often, to buy ramen noodles (one ticket per package!) and I had a small stack of coupons in my wallet. I was checking my coupons for this visit in the middle of a center aisle, and was returning my wallet to my back pocket, when this nice middle-aged probably church-going woman store employee walked up, looked at me, and the "oh!" expression on her face said she was very surprised that I was stealing. She hurried off. When I get to the checkout, this middle-aged guy acting a bit like a drunk comes behind me and boxes me in, by sprawling across both the lane and the conveyor. The young checkout woman says to him, annoyed, "Not you again." The guy strikes up a conversation with me. "That's a nice backpack. ... If I had a backpack like that, people would think I was stealing something." It was an ordinary cheap bare-bones store-branded backpack. He's getting close to illegally detaining me, which would go extremely badly for him. To de-escalate, I do my best folksy code-switching, and pretend not to know what's going on. My hyperobservant mode also kicked in: there was abnormal maneuvers of multiple people from the other side of the checkouts. One young guy coming up with the others, my eyes dark to him, he sees I see him, and for some reason gets a look like he's noping the f right out of whatever is going down, and he spins 180 and quickly walks away. Eventually, this friendly and sensible person, who I took to be the manager on duty, comes up on the other side of the checkout, and we have a friendly conversation about the ticket promotion. I think she immediately realized that I was a good-natured MIT type, not a shoplifter. And I would guess she thought the LP guy was a clown who risks getting the store sued someday.
by edg5000 | 2025-08-21 06:15:28+00:00
In China they have car battery swap stations. For such batteries, owenership does not make much sense, so a subscription model indeed seems logical. The monthly fee covers the cost it takes for the company to replace worn cells; electricity could be charged separately for cars. For scooters, since the batteries are easy to swap yourself, buying and swapping a new battery is not that big of a deal, so I don't see subscriptions working as well there as for cars.
by wolvesechoes | 2025-08-21 06:16:22+00:00
> if you're using IDEs, OSes don't really matter

Unless you are using Visual Studio that blews out every other IDE out of the water if you consider debugging and profiling experience.

> As in case for the desktop, you can switch out your audio stack, alter the display of any element and many other things. Using windows is borrowing some shoes while Linux can be your favorite slipper.

Ah yes, biggest Linux advantage - being a mud hut.
by krackers | 2025-08-21 06:16:56+00:00
I think there was some quote from Karpathy who said that RLHF isn't actually "true" RL. As an armchair person, even after trying to understand it RLHF always seemed so roundabout. You don't have some open ended environment, you already have a fixed set of preferences. Instead of directly optimizing the model against that like DPO does, RLHF goes out of its way to train value/reward networks encoding these preferences then optimizing against that. I assumed that maybe it was just done this way for performance or stability or some other math -heavy reason, it was good to see that my suspicion was not off-base.
by pastage | 2025-08-21 06:17:11+00:00
Rehabilitation and support is not what "people" want. Political parties that want more punishment seldom want to spend money even on punishments. So it becomes impossible to put people on a straight path. Having courts do their job is very expensive as well so instead people build their careers on getting fast convictions of people. The thing that helps is consistently building a society that cares, you have to know that the society will certainly react to your actions.

Having a hidden social credit system hidden and managed by a private actor seems like the worst way of doing it.
by Tor3 | 2025-08-21 06:17:29+00:00
I usually printed my listings etc. with "condensed" fonts. They looked very nice. Even so, I can't remember that the non-condensed fonts should look that wide, when looking at the web page.. I remember something kind of like that, but not the standard mode.

I have an OKI Epson-compatible matrix printer somewhere in the man cave. The last time I printed anything on one was a Snoopy calendar generated by the Snoopy Calendar Fortran program. If I ever get the mess in the cave sorted out I'll get that printer hooked up again, to something. The 80's mini maybe..
by sometimes_all | 2025-08-21 06:17:32+00:00
Bloomberg's ads are slightly separate from their regular ads; the "other content" is still news most of the time - Bloomberg is at its heart a data and news feed company (the video news is mostly an add-on for them), so they are doing what they do best anyway. "Idiocracy" is an interesting example; while the style is similar, the side content on BTV, while a pale shadow of the actual terminal, is actually quite information-rich (especially on BTV+); the actual terminal is entirely populated by feed/data/whatever function you're using.
by hannasanarion | 2025-08-21 06:17:40+00:00
Having the agent plugged into the DB doesn't mean the agent can see everything in the DB. If that plug includes an automatic "where current user has access" filter, then the agent can't know anything the user can't know.

That's what the bank agent analogy was meant to tell you. The agent has a direct line to the prod DB through their computer terminal, but every session they open is automatically constrained to the account details if the person on the phone right now and nobody else.
by yongjik | 2025-08-21 06:17:41+00:00
South Korean internet is dysfunctional enough that it's possible that Google is not showing the correct site at the top because the government site's designer helpfully decided to make the site "secure" by adding to robots.txt:

User-agent: * Disallow: /

Source: Worked at Google Korea years ago. Back then, those things were common, and were commonly accepted as a solution to the problem "All your user's profiles are available in plain text, open to public, and searchable from Google!"
by teiferer | 2025-08-21 06:18:45+00:00
> I didn't get why stick with the requirement that review is a single commit

Yeah that is pretty weird. If 5 people review my code, do they all mangle the same review commit? We don't do that with code either, feels like it's defeating the point.

Review would need to be commits on top of the reviewed commit. If there are 5 reviews of the same commit, then they all branch out from that commit. And to address them, there is another commit which also lives besides them. Each commit change process becomes a branch with stacked commits beinf branches chained on top of one another. Each of the commits in those chained branches then has comment commits attached. Those comment commits could even form chains if a discussion is happening. Then when everybody is happy, each branch gets squashed into a single commit and those then get rebased on the main branch.

You likely want to make new commits for that though to preserve the discussions for a while. And that's the crux: That data lives outside the main branch, but needs to live somewhere.
by j_chance | 2025-08-21 06:18:54+00:00
Ok this took some time to think about. I've always conflated entropy and randomness/data, but this is wrong. Say that i sample 512 bytes of data from an entropy source. That data is no longer entropic, because it's no longer uncertain. It's now information (assuming it can be used to inform about the entropy source). It may be random looking, but not entropic.

I think I see what you mean. Information and entropy are fundamental opposites, information cannot be entropy and entropy cannot be information. Information is certainty, entropy is uncertainty.

So with information theory, we measure entropy sources to get information, but it's disconnected from the reality of entropy in physical processes. Which is maybe fine? It seems like an abstraction that is 0 cost. Like if i roll a dice and i compare that to flipping a coin, the relative amount of information yielded is based on the number of distinct outcomes given some arbitrary constraints (what side is facing "up" for each object assuming the human operates the object fairly).

If we then do some reasoning using this relative difference in amount of information, the physical, thermodynamic reality of the human doing the action, the object moving through space, etc etc is arbitrarily stripped away, but with no impact to the soundness of the reasoning about the information (assuming the human has not rigged the system/the entropy source is sound). Sorta like algebra over a field. Any field can be used so long as the axioms of the algebra hold.

So it all comes down to soundness of entropy sources...?

(this has improved my understanding of information theory _significantly_ :pray:)
by uoaei | 2025-08-21 06:19:56+00:00
What is the primary reason for hard-coding these kinds of things? Gotta imagine CScientists would have debated this during the design phase. I have some hypotheses, are any of these right?

* correctness/verifiability analyses

* security? in compiled tools (prevent malicious re-configuration)

* an assumption of the inertia of law

* general incompetence/naivete

???
by birdfood | 2025-08-21 06:20:02+00:00
I considered Django pretty seriously and worked through most of the excellent Mozilla tutorial.

I prefer Django's having models defined in code and being able to generate views and migrations based off these. The auth situation seems more robust.

Obviously there's direct benefit to me with working with a familiar language.

The decision to give Rails a go instead really game down to me trying to minimise how many pieces I need to tape together. And with Django it seems I'd need to sort out my own frontend story and build my own deployment process. Rails has defaults for both of these now. I'm fully prepared I might decide to rebuild with Django in the future, but right now Rails is working.
Show HN: I replaced vector databases with Git for AI memory (PoC)
by alexmrv | 2025-08-21 06:20:11+00:00
Hey HN! I built a proof-of-concept for AI memory using Git instead of vector databases.

The insight: Git already solved versioned document management. Why are we building complex vector stores when we could just use markdown files with Git's built-in diff/blame/history?

How it works:

Memories stored as markdown files in a Git repo Each conversation = one commit git diff shows how understanding evolves over time BM25 for search (no embeddings needed) LLMs generate search queries from conversation context Example: Ask "how has my project evolved?" and it uses git diff to show actual changes in understanding, not just similarity scores.

This is very much a PoC - rough edges everywhere, not production ready. But it's been working surprisingly well for personal use. The entire index for a year of conversations fits in ~100MB RAM with sub-second retrieval.

The cool part: You can git checkout to any point in time and see exactly what the AI knew then. Perfect reproducibility, human-readable storage, and you can manually edit memories if needed.

GitHub: https://github.com/Growth-Kinetics/DiffMem

Stack: Python, GitPython, rank-bm25, OpenRouter for LLM orchestration. MIT licensed.

Would love feedback on the approach. Is this crazy or clever? What am I missing that will bite me later?
by dsign | 2025-08-21 06:21:06+00:00
They need to legalize the possession of birretudas:

https://w.ouzu.im/lit/birretuda

Seriously though, I think the problem is not so much the particular tax on books (though this measure would help) but the way those taxes are computed.

This is just a dumb idea, but if a company or a person has X amount of money to put into a product that then can be sold in essentially free-to-produce copies at a Y price, and then a consumer spends an amount of time Z consuming it, then there should be a tax computed on those three variables X, Y, Z. The idea being that huge actors with high X can end up having a lot of Z. And Z is citizen time, which is dangerous to let it be captured by the interests of big capital in detriment to the interests of lesser capital and other people. But I guess that sounds too socialist :-( .
by maunke | 2025-08-21 06:21:57+00:00
Very nice to read.

Sourcehut is missing in the list; it’s built on the classical concept of sending patches / issues / bugs / discussion threads via email and it integrates this concept into its mailing lists and ci solution that also sends back the ci status / log via email.

Drew Devault published helpful resources for sending and reviewing patches via email on git-send-email.io and git-am.io
by Alecocluc | 2025-08-21 06:23:33+00:00
Hello everyone, my name is Álex and I’m a young software developer who recently launched his first SaaS. I started coding before I was 15, and since then I’ve been fascinated by the web and entrepreneurship. I set out to learn programming so that one day I could make a living from what I love. And here I am—there’s still a long road ahead, but I’m ready to face it with the same drive I had when I started.

Since the beginning of this year I’d been looking for ideas to build a SaaS using different methods, but nothing worked. Until one day I came across it in the simplest way possible: I had a Spotify family plan with my friends that we paid monthly, and I always noticed someone forgot to pay (even the person managing the shared payment). Add to that other subscriptions and even trial periods, which made me think it would be a great idea to create an app for this problem. That’s how SubBuddy (subbuddy.io) was born.

I did some market research and saw there was considerable room for improvement, since the main solutions focused only on working as a planner, no reminders or automations to make the user experience easier. Here’s how the development phase went:

First month of development: Together with a friend, we started building the app using AI, which didn’t turn out so well, as it produced very messy code and created complex solutions to simple problems. So the first lesson was to stop seeing the AI agent as a magician and work with it as if it were a very fast junior dev.

Second month of development: Development was moving quickly and it was starting to look great; however, the more features we built, the more we thought of—something we initially saw as a good thing. Nothing could be further from the truth: building increasingly complex features made development drag on too much. So we decided to go back to basics and launch a simpler version so we could improve the app thanks to user feedback, implementing features users actually need.

On launch day I got a couple of customers, and one of them left a review praising the product and suggesting a couple of changes that would make it more complete. Honestly, it’s something I’m very proud of—especially given that this is my first adventure in the startup world. Now it’s about keeping at the app and bringing in new customers at the pace I’ve started. I’m sure there’s a great story ahead from here on out!!
by hunglee2 | 2025-08-21 06:24:10+00:00
Everyone going to raise prices, as tariffs - especially Trump style now-you-see-it-now-you-don't tariffs - inject cost ambiguity in the market.

This is the ideal time for sellers to increase their prices not only as hedge against uncertainty of future input costs but also because the buyers are no longer certain what things cost anymore, making them vulnerable to exploitation.

Isabel Weber described this as 'sellers inflation' - where a secondary (perhaps most widespread) inflation happens because of the embedded imperative of profit making companies taking advantage of cost / price ambiguity, and who will always charge what 'the market can now bear to pay'

And we're all robbed because wages inflate last
by whyenot | 2025-08-21 06:24:31+00:00
In the late 1970s, my dad purchased an S-100 bus computer from Thinker Toys for about $3,000 (would be close to $15,000 today after adjusting for inflation). It had a Z80 microprocessor and ran CP/M. As was true of many hobbyist computers from this era, it came with full source code (in beautifully documented assembly) both for CP/M and for the BIOS. This was important because if you wanted to add peripherals or make other modifications to your computer, you had to edit the source code and recompile the BIOS.

A few years later my dad decided to buy an Epson MX-80 for his computer. The daisy-wheel and the plotter at work (he worked at SRI) just didn't cut it, I guess? This required buying a serial card for the S-100. In order to get that printer to work, he had to first, wire up a cable because the data lines from the card were on different pins in the printer. I believe there was a version of the MX-80 that came with a serial port instead of a parallel port which made some things easier. I was recruited as his assistant. Then he had to modify and recompile the BIOS. Then he had to also make some changes to CP/M. This was a process of trial and error that lasted for weeks. I remember I was away at summer camp and he sent me a letter he printed out on that printer. He was so happy that he finally got it to work.

Anyways, this resurfaced that memory and I thought I might as well share it. I still have the printout he sent me somewhere.
by mrheosuper | 2025-08-21 06:25:54+00:00
call me insane, but i used to want a virtual assistant that run and listen to me 24/24. Yeah, some paranoid would scream like hell, but think about what we could achieve.

It could listen to my conversation, take notes, and auto add a reminder in my calendar if needed.

Since it has a large amount of context, i could something "Hey do you know when John said he would come back from his trip?" and it would answer me "Yes, he said he would be back on Friday at 5 PM".
by eastbound | 2025-08-21 06:26:24+00:00
Critics have a political agenda, they overrate movies with “a message”, the message being always leaning Californian. The movie industry is a massive sector with lobbies, and paid critics are no stranger to that.

And as the sibling says, audience pays to see a movie. The audience, the people, are more politically balanced. There is no bias or selection: It’s the democratic components, including people that the “in” lobbies don’t like.

If only we could get rid of this damn audience!
by sometimes_all | 2025-08-21 06:26:47+00:00
I have a 13 mini for about 3 years now - still holding up for most of the working day (about 15 hours). The trick is to reduce the number of apps you have on the phone, reduce the number of apps which like running on the background, and not watch a lot of videos.

I figured it out that treating it as a communication device + payments device + maps + very occasional content viewer, ie mostly as a utility will make the phone last much longer.
by JPLeRouzic | 2025-08-21 06:26:55+00:00
What I mean is that the Hayflick limit is a concept from the laboratory; it applies to cells that divide quickly, like skin cells, but it has limited practical use for strategies aimed at extending an animal's lifespan, because as the animal or human ages, it will lose neurons and muscle strength (including heart muscle).

In other words, 100% of humans relying only or mainly on telomere repair will be faced with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and/or ALS, as well as cardiovascular diseases, before they reach 100 years old.
by urban_winter | 2025-08-21 06:26:59+00:00
> You'd be surprised by how many amateur cyclists ride more than that each year.

You wouldn't.

As an 8k km/yr cyclist with a lot of cycling friends, I can tell you that 12.5k/yr is extremely high for an amateur. Sure, there are some, but a truly tiny proportion.

8k/year eats bikes, BTW. I used to wear out rims regularly before I switched to disks and chains/sprockets didn't even last a year (on a fixed gear bike).
by littlecranky67 | 2025-08-21 06:27:25+00:00
I am on an iPhone SE 3rd gen. due to the small form factor. It is already annoying to surf the web even with an adblocker, lots of cookie banners, notes, requests to install app/signup etc. take so much screen space that you can see no content. Clearly developers do not test or care for small screens anymore.
by lmm | 2025-08-21 06:29:07+00:00
There was a locally-hosted Git server platform called Stash. Atlassian bought it, rebranded it as "BitBucket Server" (positioned similarly to GitHub Enterprise or self-hosted GitLab) and gradually made it look and feel like BitBucket (the cloud product), even though they're actually completely separate codebases (or at least used to be).
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-08-21 06:29:08+00:00
In my experience of film reviews, Rotten Tomatoes high positive scores are not always representative of how entertaining some content will be.. However, the negative skew is almost always accurate for how bad something will be for all viewers.

The bimodal distribution of professional critics versus community opinions obviously describes what is happening behind the data. Recycled AstroTurf for 1980's cult films have little appeal to modern viewers even with maximal pandering for nostalgia.

Good Hollywood writers likely starved to death, and were replaced with LLM interpreted Nielsen Media Research data. Most video games offer better writing now... lol =3
by eafkuor | 2025-08-21 06:29:25+00:00
> Alas, when I want to actually leave feedback on the PR, I have to open the browser, navigate to the relevant line in the diff, and (after waiting for several HTTP round-trips) type my suggestion into a text area

This doesn't seem like much of a problem, does it? It's a matter of alt-tab and a click or two.

Also, what is the point of having reviews in the git history?
by gtsnexp | 2025-08-21 06:29:52+00:00
Question for the organizers: Is there an inactivity timeout on claimed sub-problems? Say someone “claims” a task and then goes quiet, others hold back; but without claims, you risk duplicate effort, right? How do you balance that? If there’s a policy already, what counts as “active”? A short status note, a link to a draft, or partial results? If not, would you consider a lightweight scheme:

Soft claim (one task per person); progress update within 7–14 days (longer for big items); auto-release if no update; extensions on request; Tag some tasks as “pairable” so two people can collaborate openly.

Curious how you’re handling throughput vs inclusion here.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-21 06:30:21+00:00
Visual C++ toolchain is rather easy to install, the issue is briging other OS expectations to Windows, likewise the other way around.

However I fully agree with you, the tooling for a given language should be written in the language itself, and it is an ecosystem failure when it doesn't happen.

I also feel that this trend, as usual, is people building their portfolio in the current trendy languages.
by kasperni | 2025-08-21 06:30:30+00:00
> the answer is technical inertia (or technical debt, if you will)

One of the issues. There are number of others. For example, VAT is a value-based tax. A VAT cut gives the biggest savings to people who spend the most. Since wealthier people typically spend more, they would save more money in absolute terms. For example, a family with a food budget of 3,000 kr. would save 300 kr., while a family with a food budget of 8,000 kr. would save 800 kr. Politically, some parties might prefer tax breaks that focused on lower-income groups.

Another issue, will the cost savings actually be passed on to the consumer?