MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sim7c00 | 2025-08-21 15:36:22+00:00
wanted to chime in on the educational system. in the west, we have the 'banking system' which treat a student as a bank account and knowledge as currency, hence the dump more info into ppl to make them sm0rt attitude.

in developing areas, they actually implement more modern models commonly, as its newer and free to implement newer things.

those newer models focus more on exactly this. teach a person how to go through the process of finding solutions. rather than 'knowing a lot to enable the process of thinking'.

not saying what is better or worse, but reading this comment and article it reminds me of this.

a lot of people i see, they know tons of interesting things, but anything outside of their knowledge is a complete mystery.

all the while ppl from developing areas learn to solve issues. alot of individuals from there also, get out of their poverty and do really well for themselves.

ofcourse, this is a generalization and doesnt hold up in all cases. but i cant help think about it.

a lot of my colleagues dont know how to solve problems simply because they dont RTFM. they rely on knowledge from their education which is already outdated before they even sign up.. i try to teach them to RTFM. it seems hopeless. they look at me , downwards, because i have no papers. but if shit hits the fan, they come to me. solve the prolbem.

a wise guy i met once said (likely not his words). there are 2 type of ppl. those who think in problems, and those who think in solutions.

id related that to education, not prebaked human properties.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-08-21 15:36:34+00:00
Wait, the electrical pipe water analogy is actually a very good one and it's quite difficult to find edge cases where it breaks down in a way that would confuse a student. There are some (for example, there's no electrical equivalent of Reynold's number or turbulence, and flow resistance varies differently with pipe diameter than wire diameter, and no good equivalent for Faraday's law) but I don't think these are likely to cause confusion. It even captures nuance like inductance, capacitance, and transmission line behaviour.
by imglorp | 2025-08-21 15:37:02+00:00
I've come to realize that viewing the world through the simple lens of laundering causes dumb systems to suddenly make sense. Silly rabbit, you thought these industries were there for the normal public?

Gambling: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/online-gambling-sites-money...

Casinos themselves: https://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/trumps-businesses-...

Commerce: https://www.wired.com/story/wired-awake-180518

Crypto: https://financialcrimeacademy.org/cryptocurrency-money-laund...

Shell companies: https://newrepublic.com/post/192244/trump-celebrates-destroy...

Real estate: https://www.firstaml.com/resources/5-ways-criminals-launder-...
by hello082125 | 2025-08-21 15:37:23+00:00
Everyone is like "AI is going to take my engineering job" - yes, probably yours. But the reality is, the future of AI driven software and architecture in theory you can say is "context engineering", or engineering various "pipelines" of contexts and formats of data transformations. AI Data Engineering? Idk.

But you can do absolutely crazy shit if you're creative.

EDIT:

By the way I just took a look at your tool, I think it's shit. Sorry.
by _Algernon_ | 2025-08-21 15:37:37+00:00
Unless you're arguing that people should kill themselves to save their 100W of power, the future energy use of every alive human is already committed and doesn't matter.

Not to mention that the energy should also include all the extra energy spent on making converting energy into a form that is usable by humans (ie. food). There is probably at least an order of magnitude.
by vdqtp3 | 2025-08-21 15:37:51+00:00
> the safe manoeuverable speed increases with weight

The reason this is true is because at a higher weight, you'll stall at max deflection before you can put enough stress on the airframe to be a problem. That is to say, at a given speed a heavier airplane will fall out of the air [hyperbole, it will merely stall - significantly reduced lift] before it can rip the wings/elevator off [hyperbole - damage the airframe]. That makes it questionable whether heavier is safer - just changes the failure mode.
by alphazard | 2025-08-21 15:38:16+00:00
> Macroeconomics is way out of my wheelhouse

Many of us consider macroeconomics to be out of humanity's wheelhouse. The divide between micro and macro economics is where the real science ends and the bullshit starts. Many of the findings in macroeconomics are politically motivated, tenuous, and haven't reproduced well, just like in the other social "sciences".
by weinzierl | 2025-08-21 15:38:26+00:00
Unicode's original mission was to encode all characters needed for written communication in the world.

Han Unification fails this mission and that is not a matter of opinion.

"I have no idea which "characters common in ordinary books" are missing; the explicit goal of Unicode is to encode exactly that sort of thing."

In

«Günther a souligné l’ambigüité de son discours.»

there is an umlaut and a dieresis.

They are different characters with different function. In traditional book printing they used to look differently and quality fonts do still have both. Unfortunately Unicode does not encode both of them.
by ben-schaaf | 2025-08-21 15:38:40+00:00
> They switched to a subscription model (3 year licenses are still subscriptions)

Licenses are perpetual. It is not a subscription. Don't like the work we've done? You can continue to use that version of Sublime Text until the end of time.

> there has been exactly one release with new features (May 2025)

August 2024 we added kinetic scroll and xdg-activation support for Wayland; we also added the ability to configure image extensions and allow dynamically switching between the hex-editor and image view.

November 2023 we added native font dialog support for switching fonts.

August 2023 we added webp and proper support for running as administrator on all platforms.

November 2022 we added syntax-based code folding and operating system recent file integration

December 2021 we added GB18030 support.

I'll stop there. Those are just the largest, most user facing new features, not any of the new settings, new APIs or improvements that I'd argue are new features.

You can read the full changelogs here: https://www.sublimetext.com/download

> Speaking of releases, they're also usually 6-12 months apart.

We do stable releases infrequently, because they're stable. If you want more frequent releases you can switch to the development releases. You can see from the build number how many builds we've done of ST4 since the release: it's around 150.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-08-21 15:38:45+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).

sorry to hijack your thread but this brought up something i hadn't thought about in a while.

when i was a kid getting into computers, say around 96/97, and for a while after that, i always felt a sense of missing out for not having been born earlier in the personal computing revolution, to really get access to what i felt was the ground floor of computer technology.

but then i got older and realized there's no way my single, non-technical, minimum-wage-earning mom could have paid 70s/80s hardware prices for machines.

given the situation i was born into, i now think i was extremely lucky - just early enough to be heavily influenced by early modern computing, but with relatively modern used hardware becoming more accessible to more people.
by ieuanking | 2025-08-21 15:39:24+00:00
I find it disturbing how little safeguarding there is around ChatGPT and preventing these relationships (I develop AI Agents and have a small startup). I honestly worry so much for today's kids. How they will act without readily available answers and parasocial relationships -- it reminds me of how iPad babies form an addiction to the screen (screen dependency) that can be as severe as drug addiction (as a 2000 baby, I feel lucky to be more addicted to cigarettes than my screen). Somehow, I feel healthier and more human.

We didn't have smartphones as 4-year-olds. I got my first smartphone at 13, and the internet wasn't just a commodified hellhole yet. I loved to go outside and hang out with friends. It's crazy that the top level of screen addiction was video games (which come on, video games are fire, and if anything can be more educational and skill-building than ChatGPT).
by aktau | 2025-08-21 15:39:39+00:00
But there is a grain of truth to their commentary. "Modern" gets old fast, it probably shouldn't be used, just like "new" shouldn't be used in project/library names.

IMHO, removing "modern, flexible and scalable" would improve that line.

I've diagonally read through the README, and for my taste there is overuse of "soft" adjectives (simple, easy, ...) which makes me (an engineer) discard it as marketing-driven.
by mikaraento | 2025-08-21 15:39:40+00:00
Around 2008 a core step in search was basically a grep over all documents. The grep was distributed over roughly 1000 machines so that the documents could be held in memory rather than on disk.

Inverted indices were not used as they worked poorly for “an ordered list of words” (as opposed to a bag of words).

And this doesn’t even start to address the ranking part.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-21 15:39:43+00:00
Giving 1.5 million salary is nothing for these people.

It shouldn’t be mind boggling. They see revolutionary technology that has potential to change the world and is changing the world already. Making a gamble like that is worth it because losing is trivial compared to the upside of success.

You are where you are and not where they are because your mind is boggled by winning strategies that are designed to arrive at success through losing and dancing around the risk of losing.

Obviously mark is where he is also because of luck. But he’s not an idiot and clearly it’s not all luck.
by cherry_tree | 2025-08-21 15:39:46+00:00
IMHO the problem with flagging on HN is its ability to kill a discussion thread in its infancy, preventing most users from ever seeing its existence or having the opportunity for discussion.

Flagging should be just that; a flag for the moderation team to review the submission/comment. It should not at all come with an immediate downranking of the content itself until the moderation team has reviewed the flag and upholds it as appropriately flagged.

If flagging wasn’t a simple way to kill young discussion threads and instead users had to downvote the submissions they don’t like; then discussions couldn’t be so severely impacted by a minority of users.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-08-21 15:39:57+00:00
> I landed on Kurrent

This is madness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurrent#/media/File:Deutsche_K...

> now frequently sign my name with it to the general dissatisfaction of everyone in my life.

When I was a kid, I thought there was a special way to sign things, given how everyone's signatures looked like elaborate Lissajous curves. For awhile, once I had to start signing things, I took care to make sure my name was legible and consistent.

Then I realized I could just make a little wavy squiggle, and nobody cared. Eventually I realized that most signatures, I didn't even have to do a wavy squiggle - the credit card machines at stores would be perfectly happy to accept a straight line, or just a first initial, or a drawing of a kitty-cat.
by fires10 | 2025-08-21 15:40:03+00:00
I generally like having these systems in place, because I find when dealing with certain vendors and businesses that following these helps me weed out many scammers when dealing with large amounts of money. Every transfer required a discussion with the teller asking questions about transfers and if the transaction is suspicious. Yes, criminals will find a way, but I find it provides me an easier screening to ensure some businesses are more likely legit.
by xnx | 2025-08-21 15:40:16+00:00
> I'd still love to see a report that accurately captures training cost. Today's report[1] notably excludes training cost.

From 2022, so possibly out of date: "ML training and inference are only 10%–15% of Google’s total energy use for each of the last three years, each year split ⅗ for inference and ⅖ for training." That's probably close enough to estimate 50/50, or the full energy cost to deliver an AI result is double the inference energy.

https://research.google/blog/good-news-about-the-carbon-foot...
by jf22 | 2025-08-21 15:41:08+00:00
Yeah but if the US wanted to make a tank it would make a tank.

The knowledge isn't in practice but not lost. We still know how to weld steel and built turrets. I mean the full schematics of tanks are available online.

I'm not as worried about "business processes" dying. Who cares how Freddy does submits his TPS report.
by JeremyNT | 2025-08-21 15:41:36+00:00
What tooling are you using?

I use aider and your description doesn't match my experience, even with a relatively bad-at-coding model (gpt-5). It does actually work and it does generate "good" code - it even matches the style of the existing code.

Prompting is very important, and in an existing code base the success rate is immensely higher if you can hint at a specific implementation - i.e. something a senior who is familiar with the codebase somewhat can do, but a junior may struggle with.

It's important to be clear eyed about where we are here. I think overall I am still faster doing things manually than iterating with aider on an existing code base, but the margin is not very much, and it's only going to get better.

Even though it can do some work a junior could do, it can't ever replace a junior human... because a junior human also goes to meetings, drives discussions, and eventually becomes a senior! But management may not care about that fact.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-21 15:41:56+00:00
The amount was just an example. Any kind of transaction using large amounts of cash is going to trigger flags all over the system and you can be expected to be quizzed on the origin of the funds. The only time I've seen someone that legitimately came by a suitcase full of cash it was when a waitress left her daughter said suitcase, which contained decades of tip money that she never spent. It was insanely heavy and it caused quite a few problems when she tried to do a deposit with her local bank.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-21 15:42:15+00:00
I’ve been keeping an eye on these projects too. My hunch is that helloSystem is going to find Qt limiting as it matures, and while ravynOS’ approach is more likely to produce a high fidelity analogue, it’s also much larger in scope and likely to get bogged down in achieving compatibility with existing Mac binaries. I wish the best for both though, because they’re filling an extremely empty niche in the FOSS desktop space.
by shkkmo | 2025-08-21 15:42:24+00:00
If you triple the difficulty, the cost of solving the PoW is still neglible to the crawlers but you've harmed real users even more.

The reason why anubis works is not the PoW, it is that the dev time to implement the bypass takes out the lowest effort bots. Thus the correct response is to keep the PoW difficulty low so you minimize harm to real users. Or better yet, implementing your own custom check that doesn't use any PoW and relies on ever higher obscurity to block the low effort bots.

The more anubis is used, the less effective it is and the more it harms real users.
by lubesGordi | 2025-08-21 15:42:25+00:00
I know, I don't understand what problems people are having with getting usable code. Maybe the models don't work well with certain languages? Works great with C++. I've gotten thousands of lines of clean compiling on the first try and obviously correct code from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.

I've been assuming the people who are having issues are junior devs, who don't know the vocabulary well enough yet to steer these things in the right direction. I wouldn't say I'm a prompt wizard, but I do understand context and the surface area of the things I'm asking the llm to do.
by jandrese | 2025-08-21 15:42:25+00:00
> That being said, one point is very correct here - by far the best effort to resist broad crawlers is a _custom_ anti-bot that could be as simple as "click your mouse 3 times" because handling something custom is very difficult in broad scale.

Isn't this what Microsoft is trying to do with their sliding puzzle piece and choose the closest match type systems?

Also, if you come in on a mobile browser it could ask you to lay your phone flat and then shake it up and down for a second or something similar that would be a challenge for a datacenter bot pretending to be a phone.
by nilkn | 2025-08-21 15:42:25+00:00
If we're actually headed for a "house of cards" AI crash in a couple months, that actually makes their arrangement with Meta likely more valuable, not less. Meta is a much more diversified company than the AI companies that these folks were poached from. Meta stock will likely be more resilient than AI-company stock in the event of an AI bubble bursting. Moreover, they were offered so much of it that even if it were to crash 50%, they'd still be sitting on $50M-$100M+ of stock.
by pjc50 | 2025-08-21 15:42:33+00:00
Place alongside https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962529 "Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?". This is why.

AI is going to damage society not in fancy sci-fi ways but by centralizing profit made at the expense of everyone else on the internet, who is then forced to erect boundaries to protect themselves, worsening the experience for the rest of the public. Who also have to pay higher electricity bills, because keeping humans warm is not as profitable as a machine which directly converts electricity into stock price rises.
by pprnm | 2025-08-21 15:42:36+00:00
If you need a simple text editor without DeltaDB bloat, see CudaText. No so fast drawing speed because it does not use GPU. But drawing speed is not the decision factor for many tasks of text work.

Zed has better drawing speed. But DeltaDB bloat, AI bloat, telemetry, need of modern videocard.
by brushfoot | 2025-08-21 15:42:36+00:00
I read AI coding negativity on Hacker News and Reddit with more and more astonishment every day. It's like we live in different worlds. I expect the breadth of tooling is partly responsible. What it means to you to "use the LLM code" could be very different from what it means to me. What LLM are we talking about? What context does it have? What IDE are you using?

Personally, I wrote 200K lines of my B2B SaaS before agentic coding came around. With Sonnet 4 in Agent mode, I'd say I now write maybe 20% of the ongoing code from day to day, perhaps less. Interactive Sonnet in VS Code and GitHub Copilot Agents (autonomous agents running on GitHub's servers) do the other 80%. The more I document in Markdown, the higher that percentage becomes. I then carefully review and test.
by FuriouslyAdrift | 2025-08-21 15:42:59+00:00
Instead of cash, I hold treasuries. The rest is spread out among low holding cost index funds (watch out for fees... they will kill your profits) and use dividend re-investment. Split things between tax advantaged and non tax advantaged depending on your short and long term goals (ask a certified financial advisor with fiduciary duty for strategies that work for you. It's worth the small fee)

Every time the market takes a crap, I buy. I rarely sell. Keep enough cash or near cash assets in a no penalty account(s) to cover unexpected costs so aren't forced to sell.

A luxurious set up for sure (which took about a decade to get set up) but it's repeatable and fairly stable.

Now, if you have real wealth (like $10s of millions of liquid assets) then look to setting up a MFO or SFO and focus on tax efficiency, etc. That's a whole different set of strategies.
by Windchaser | 2025-08-21 15:43:17+00:00
>> Your designing one thing.

You might well be making 100 AI babies, and seeing which one turns out to be the genius.

We shouldn’t assume that the best way to do research is just through careful, linear planning and design. Sometimes you need to run a hundred experiments before figuring out which one will work. Smart and well-designed experiments, yes, but brute force + decent theory can often solve problems faster than just good theory alone.
Show HN: docmd – A Zero-Dependency Documentation Generator
by enigmazi | 2025-08-21 15:43:25+00:00
Hello People,

I'd like to share a small project I've been working on called docmd. It's a command-line tool written in Node.js that generates clean, fast, and lightweight static documentation sites directly from Markdown files.

The core idea was to create something that gets out of your way. I found myself wanting a documentation tool that didn't require a complex setup with React, bundlers, or a large ecosystem of dependencies. I wanted to just write Markdown and have it turn into a beautiful, functional website.

docmd is an alternative for those who find tools like Docusaurus or Mintlify to be more than they need. It has no client-side framework dependencies, resulting in lightning-fast page loads and a simple build process.

Here are the core features:

- Zero Client-Side Frameworks: Generates plain HTML, CSS, and minimal vanilla JS. This makes sites extremely fast and lightweight.

- Standard Markdown: Uses standard Markdown with YAML frontmatter for metadata. No special syntax to learn.

- Single Executable: Install it via npm, and the docmd command is all you need (init, dev, build).

- Rich Components Out-of-the-Box: Includes built-in, pre-styled components like callouts, cards, tabs, and step-by-step guides using a simple container syntax (::: callout info).

- Theming & Dark Mode: Comes with multiple built-in themes and a light/dark mode toggle that works automatically.

- Built-in Plugins: Includes essential plugins for SEO, sitemaps, and analytics without needing external packages.

- No-Style Pages: An option to create completely custom landing pages with full control over the HTML, while still using the docmd build process.

- Deploy Anywhere: The output is a standard site/ folder that you can deploy to GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel, or any static host.

The entire documentation site for the project is, of course, built with docmd itself. You can see a live demo here: https://docmd.mgks.dev

The project is open source, and the code is on GitHub: https://github.com/mgks/docmd

I'm here to answer any questions you might have. I would genuinely appreciate any feedback, thoughts, or critiques you have on the approach, the features, or the code itself. If you find the project useful, a star on GitHub would be a great encouragement.

Thank you for taking a look.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-08-21 15:43:54+00:00
Theoretically, a large part of Amazon's worth is the skill of its workforce.

Some subset of the population likes to pretend their workforce is a cost that provides less than zero value or utility, and all the value and utility comes from shareholders.

But if this isn't true, and collective skill is worth value, then saying anyone can have that with AI at least has some headwind on your share price - which is all they care about.

Does that offset a potential tailwind from slightly higher margins?

I don't think any established company should be cheerleading that anyone can easily upset their monopoly with a couple of carefully crafted prompts.

It was always kind of strange to me, and seemed as though they were telling everyone, our moat is gone, and that is good.

If you really believed anyone could do anything with AI, then the risk of PEs collapsing would be high, which would be bad for the capital class. Now you have to correctly guess what's the next best thing constantly to keep your ROI instead of just parking it in save havens - like FAANG.