MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by troupo | 2025-08-15 05:38:59+00:00
The notch reduces the space available in the top menu bar. And since Apple is still incapable of creating a built-in Bartender-like functionality you end up with less space on screen.

It's an actual objective fact of life.

You don't get a larger 15"/16"/17" inch screen. You get a screen that size minus the notch because of a psychotic obsession with thinness. And then they struggle to compensate for that with barely working workarounds in software that don't cover even half of cases.
by lucideer | 2025-08-15 05:39:53+00:00
I use Toshy along with an Apple keyboard to work around Linux distros' unfortunate Windowsiness here but I really really wish someone would release a fully fledged distro or DE put together with Apple keyboards in mind.

There's a lot of things about Apple I dislike but it's clear Microsoft's overloading of Ctrl for GUI shortcuts was a move made with complete disregard for terminal users, & one that's resulted in decades of pain for anyone regularly switching between GUI & terminal contexts, & I have to give it to Apple that Cmd was clearly designed to respect, retain & augment optimal terminal use.
by hintymad | 2025-08-15 05:41:58+00:00
What drove me crazy when I started to learn Japanese was that a Kanji characters can have so many different pronunciations. The most egregious example is 煙草, whose pronunciation is the really just tabacco(tabako, or タバコ). I knew the etymologies and the historical context on why Japanese evolved like that, but it's nonetheless hard for me to remember all the pronunciations, at least initially.

Also, I find that knowing Kanji is essential in appreciating part of Japanese culture. Take their addresses, for example: Kinukawa is really meaningless, but 鬼怒川 is such a amazing name. Similarly, Akihabara means little if all we know is the pronunciation, yet its Kanji 秋叶原 is such a beautiful and poetic name that invokes complex emotions.
by Closi | 2025-08-15 05:41:59+00:00
> All the other things he mentioned didn't rely on breakthroughs, LLMs really do seem to have reached a plateau and need a breakthrough to push along to the next step.

I think a lot of them relied on gradual improvement and lots of 'mini-breakthroughs' rather than one single breakthrough that changes everything. These mini-breakthroughs took decades to realise themselves properly in almost every example on the list too, not just a couple of years.

My personal gut feel is that even if the core technology plateau's, there's still lots of iterative improvement to go after on the productisation/commercialisation of the existing technology (e.g. improving tooling/ui/applying it to solving real problems/productising current research etc).

In electric car terms - we are still at the stage where Tesla is shoving batteries in a lotus elise, rather than releasing the model 3. We might have the lithium polymer batteries, but there's still lots of work to do to pull it into the final product.

(Having said this - I don't think the technology has plateau'd - I think we are just looking at it across a very narrow time span. If in 1979 you said that computers had plateau'd in 1979 because there hadn't been much progress in the last 12 months they would have been very wrong - breakthrough's sometimes take longer as technology matures, but that doesn't mean that the technology two decades from now won't be substantially different.
by ameliaquining | 2025-08-15 05:42:15+00:00
ChatGPT is not a SaaS in the relevant sense, because, if you had a magic genie that could do the work of a hundred 99th-percentile software engineers for free, that would not suffice to let you clone it. You would also need to acquire tens of thousands of GPUs and put them to work training the foundation model, which reportedly would cost a billion dollars or more. LLMs are very unlikely to move the needle on this requirement even if they keep becoming more and more capable.

One could sort of analogize it in this respect to an IaaS like AWS rather than a SaaS; you're paying them a big monthly premium primarily so that you can avoid substantial physical capex, not to avoid the costs of software development.

(I agree that the post's framing is deeply silly in a number of respects; it's just that this specific objection doesn't go through.)
by TheDong | 2025-08-15 05:43:07+00:00
> Mac Mini is i believe the most efficient consumer computer made ever

My raspberry pi is sitting at 3 watts, and runs linux software just fine.

A Mac Mini uses multiple times that, and can barely run any software I care about (i.e. linux).

They're both consumer computers, and yes there's a massive difference in their capabilities, but "most efficient ever" is a really strong claim.
by pjbk | 2025-08-15 05:44:12+00:00
Well, outside of Sanborn and his collaborators, who knows. When the puzzles were first revealed and people started trying to crack them, some of them explored out of the box approaches like the design of the sculpture, odd-shaped letters, shadows of the symbols, it's geographic position, etc. However eventually all first 3 turned out to be classic cryptographic algorithms (Vigenere for K1 and K2, transposition for K3), with the information to solve them contained within the cyphertext of the sculpture. For K4, Sanborn has hinted that this may not be the case.
by koiueo | 2025-08-15 05:45:08+00:00
The universality of copy/paste is overrated. It's literally just adding shift in terminal emulators, no biggie.

A bigger UX problem (on Linux) imo is the multitude of clipboards, we have x11, vim... Those can be synchronized or not, they manifest different behaviors...

And btw while apple is often offered as some golden standard for key bindings, I think the situation there is much (MUCH) worse: apps often intercept and handle common combinations on their own, with unclear precedence, which leads to non-deterministic behavior and a complete mess if you want to override any standard combination.
by AnonymousPlanet | 2025-08-15 05:45:16+00:00
That's an arrangement I also really appreciate. But the origins are different from what most might assume.

Apple introduced copy and paste in 1983 using the command key. Microsoft later copied the idea using the control key because PCs lacked a command key [1].

X had super, meta, hyper keys before the PC's stunted set of modifiers became a standard [2]. Microsoft and the PC are rarely the origins of things, mainly because CP/M, DOS and later Windows were poor, amateurish, and incomplete copies of other systems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut,_copy,_and_paste

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_key_(keyboard_button)
by monster_truck | 2025-08-15 05:45:17+00:00
This is a naive take, borderlining on bait. They are not 'trying', they have by and large succeeded. Both the PO and KO series devices are fantastic value for their respective prices.

If you consider something like the TX-6 an overpriced status symbol, you have clearly never tried to make a 6 channel stereo mixer this small with these specs. And if you can't imagine a use for something so small and portable, then it simply isn't for you.
by waterhouse | 2025-08-15 05:46:53+00:00
Looks to be (1269 words into the article according to wc):

> [Parker and Stone]’s lawyer, Kevin Morris, insisted that any South Park revenue not derived specifically from broadcast on the cable channel would go into the pot for calculating the men’s share of back-end profits.

Though that might be a precursor to enabling this (400 words later):

> With negotiating leverage, Parker and Stone agreed to a 4-year $75 million deal and, separately, a 50/50 cut of advertising revenue for any digital property…in perpetuity.
by YuukiRey | 2025-08-15 05:49:42+00:00
I share examples of LLM fails on our company Slack and every week LLMs do the opposite of what I tell them.

I say capture logs without overriding console methods -> they override console methods.

YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO CHANGE THE TESTS -> test changed

Or they insert various sleep calls into a test to work around race conditions.

This is all from Claude Sonnet 4.
by koiueo | 2025-08-15 05:50:08+00:00
OTOH, Microsoft's introduction of "menu accelerators" (Alt+*) is an incredible productivity booster (which luckily most Linux graphical toolkits have adopted).

I got to appreciate it only after I had to use macOS at work.

Somehow I got used to Ctrl workarounds in terminal emulators (just add shift). But the lack of accelerators bugs me immensely.
by steren | 2025-08-15 05:50:13+00:00
I myself have wondered why VisionOS Safari wasn't more leaning into the idea that the DOM has semantics (e.g. <header> <footer> <nav>) and CSS is already able to convey depth information.

I love the idea. Good luck with the project. (I maintain a <stereo-img> web component, see https://stereo-img.steren.fr/, and I had fun adding Ray tracing to DOM elements: https://rtx-on.steren.fr/)
by convo-lang | 2025-08-15 05:50:37+00:00
I very much agree with you. I wanted to minimal scripting language that worked with LLMs and had as few abstractions as possible.

I'm actually working on a system that uses Convo-Lang scripts as form "sub-agents" that are controls by a master Convo-Lang script.

And regarding your "maybe renderable" comment, Convo-Lang scripts are parsed and stored in memory as a set of message objects similar to a DOM tree. The ConversationView in the @convo-lang/convo-lang-react NPM package uses the message objects to render a conversation as a chat view and can be extended to render custom components based on tags / metadata that is attached to the messages of the conversation.
by hnfong | 2025-08-15 05:51:39+00:00
Why are bad things usually "more important"?

Everyone has some flaws, yet generally we remember the positive deeds that great people did in history. The positive deeds are usually exceptional, while the flaws are often commonly found in many humans (at least relative to the era when that person lived) that they're unremarkable. And we remember and celebrate the exceptional deeds instead of dwelling on the human flaws.
Ask HN: How are you scaling AI agents reliably in production?
by nivedit-jain | 2025-08-15 05:51:54+00:00
I’m looking to learn from people running agents beyond demos. If you have a production setup, would you share what works and what broke?

What I’m most curious about:

- Orchestrator choice and why: LangGraph, Temporal, Airflow, Prefect, custom queues.

- State and checkpointing: where do you persist steps, how do you replay, how do you handle schema changes.

- Concurrency control: parallel tool calls, backpressure, timeouts, idempotency for retries.

- Autoscaling and cost: policies that kept latency and spend sane, spot vs on-demand, GPU sharing.

- Memory and retrieval: vector DB vs KV store, eviction policies, preventing stale context.

- Observability: tracing, metrics, evals that actually predicted incidents.

- Safety and isolation: sandboxing tools, rate limits, abuse filters, PII handling.

- A war story: the incident that taught you a lesson and the fix.

Context (so it’s not a drive-by): small team, Python, k8s, MongoDB for state, Redis for queues, everything custom, experimenting with LangGraph and Temporal. Happy to share configs and trade notes in the comments.

Answer any subset. Even a quick sketch of your stack and one gotcha would help others reading this. Thanks!
by sgjennings | 2025-08-15 05:53:33+00:00
I mostly solve this by putting a branch on the merge commit M, then the “real” change R is a child of that. The PR is targeted to merge R into M.

As the parents of M are merged, I rebase the whole stack. When M has a single parent left, I abandon M and retarget the PR to merge R into that parent.

It requires a little babysitting, but the PR shows the diff I want it to.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-15 05:53:57+00:00
Exactly both of these sentiments are what, to me, make photography and film (movies in general) so much more interesting, both visually and emotionally more textured from a couple decades ago, compared to the forced perfection of both today as practiced by so many creators.

I practice black and white photography, for example. So much of what I see of it now looks like the overdone, over-edited forced perfection of style derived from the gritty beauty of much more crudely interesting monochromes of decades past.
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-08-15 05:54:42+00:00
> There’s not enough rich people with enough money/assets/wealth to actually make a difference

They could make a difference to some. Also consider the harm they do to the system through their politics. It's not just the wealth hoarding, it's the attacks on education and social safety nets.

I think in practice you want to take steps towards structural wealth equality. It's a problem when someone has their big ideas and step-functions a society into them. I have enough intellectual humility to admit that my conception of what policies and systems we need would most likely not work in practice. But changing a few things to be more socialist, measuring, then course correcting would be nice for once. Instead we get Capital and their purchased representation telling us what works and stepping towards what's good for them.

Also apologies but I won't read a 400 page book on your recommendation. But looking over the topics covered it seems to be about states that tried a command economy. To me a command economy is obviously foolish. How is a government, notorious a slow moving decision maker, going to replace the free market? As you said it's an organism. It's complicated with millions of actions happening in parallel. I want incentives to be changed - ideally with as few changes as possible.
by kromem | 2025-08-15 05:55:29+00:00
Latent space reasoners are a thing, and honestly we're probably already seeing emergent latent space reasoners starting to end up embedded into the weights as new models train on extensive reasoning synthetics.

If Othello-GPT can build a board in latent space given just the moves, can an exponentially larger transformer build a reasoner in their latent space given a significant number of traces?
by Aachen | 2025-08-15 05:56:35+00:00
I guess I've always been a bit ideological, also not being on Facebook after the numerous negative examples of how they treat customer data, and so I exclude myself from WhatsApp that is ubiquitous in my country sadly. There's one or two people I would have more contact to, but don't, because they don't think it's worth installing any one of the many messengers I've got installed; it's apparently on me to install the one thing that we all agree is suboptimal at best. Yeah, no thanks, I'm okay over here

Similarly for Twitter. It was an independent company run by people who had, as far as I heard, fine intentions. Like making money and being a good platform can go together, though iirc they weren't great at the former. Then Elon came along and tore down the ethics standards. Idk, I just don't need to be part of that when people have been developing perfectly good alternatives in the meantime. It took a few years but by now I'm not actually sure who's still on Twitter but not (at least also) on Mastodon that I'd like to talk to, but I'm sure there'll be some people if I look for them. I just don't know that it's worth it

I also don't like that it's now a closed website; not really part of the web, idk why they bother having URLs still if you can't view them without signing up first. Not really a great medium for posting/announcing things anymore either

Of course, if you're happy to stay put with your friends, I'm sure you'll be just fine as well without needing to experience too much of what goes on outside of that community. You could use WeChat or anything else for that purpose as well

The only thing I keep recommending to people is to always have at least 2 options: WhatsApp and another messenger. GitHub and some git mirror. Twitter and another microblogger. Then people can choose, communities can move gradually without disruption, you're harder to deplatform, service disruptions aren't as big a deal, and the platforms have to actually compete to be one's choice of where you go first to post and read things
by xscott | 2025-08-15 05:57:08+00:00
I think one could argue that being able to make chips in the US is a national security concern. Leaving all the politics about who and why out of it, that kind of budget isn't out of the realm of possibility from that angle. Submarines, satellites, and aircraft cost a lot too.

Btw, I'm taking your word for it that it would require that amount of funding. I've wondered why Intel can't dig themselves out of the hole by adapting to the market. From my naive point of view, it sure seems like someone could make matrix multiply / relu chips a lot cheaper than Nvidia prices. I don't think people care much it being CUDA so long as they've got something to wrap up in Tensorflow or PyTorch or whatever.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-08-15 05:57:10+00:00
> A bigger UX problem (on Linux) imo is the multitude of clipboards, we have x11, vim... Those can be synchronized or not, they manifest different behaviors...

I would probably like vim's + register to always sync with the X/Wayland clipboard where possible², but it is perhaps worth pointing out that vim has (at least?¹) 28 "clipboard" slots (+, *, a-z) and this is a feature not a bug. Having accepted that, I would likewise point out that X having a clipboard and selection buffer is an intentional feature. I'd support universally supporting one single shared clipboard that everything uses properly by default, but I wouldn't want to limit the other options to do it.

¹Edit: Nope, much more than that: https://learnvim.irian.to/basics/registers

²Edit: Oh, yes, I do agree that I would be in favor of making that the default register as well so that ex. just `yy`/`p` used it.
by jjani | 2025-08-15 05:57:20+00:00
Late reply, but this isn't really so much about being "lazy", more about unrealistic standards. It's like if all IT fresh grads in Sweden (to name the same random country again) would only want to work at Spotify or DICE or bust. And they'd rather live with their parents for two years after uni in the hope they might get a job at either of those 2 then go work at a smaller company outside of Stockholm that would instantly hire them.

This permeates through in every facet of society. For example, the exact same psychology is the reason behind having the lowest birthrate in the world. Don't have the money to raise a child in a nice new apartment in a great neighborhood including tens of thousands dollars spent on private education? Ok, then no child it is.
by zamadatix | 2025-08-15 05:57:24+00:00
I can't tell if this is trying to say the ACA should have set it to 0% so there is no incentive, if there is supposed to be something special about 20% which makes executives greedy but at 100% they'd have no interest in trying to make a bigger bonus, or if I'm missing something else completely. I feel like it has to be the latter, I just can't figure out what.
Ask HN: What's your most valuable query to an LLM?
by baalimago | 2025-08-15 05:57:34+00:00
I'm moving some terraform state after a refactor. A very tedious problem (as some of you may know). About 50 resources to be destroyed, and 50 to be created, it would take me at least 1-2 hours to manually move the state, more if I mess up somewhere along the way and have to redo it.

So, to dodge this, I created a detailed prompt asking claude sonnet 4 to do this for me. I gave it very clear instructions (~2 min writeup) + the plaintext terraform plan. It successfully generated all the terraform state mv commands I needed in about 1-2 minutes, which I could xargs and boom, done! High value LLM query! Low amount of input tokens (relatively speaking), low amount of output tokens, saving magnitudes of time (which, as we all know, is money).

Please share your high-value LLM queries!
by mirekrusin | 2025-08-15 05:58:04+00:00
Feels like running psychology experiment with fruit flies because it's cheaper and extrapolating results to humans because it's almost the same thing but smaller.

I'm sorry but the only hallucination here is that of the authors here. Does it really need to be said again that interesting results happen when you scale up only?

This whole effort would be interesting if they did and plotted result while scaling something up.
by apparent | 2025-08-15 05:58:24+00:00
The EO only calls for elimination of birthright citizenship on a prospective basis. It would not affect anyone who is currently a citizen. It would simply be marked on your birth certificate if you were a citizen, based on whether your parents are citizens (either one). This is not at all remarkable, and plenty of countries operate this way. The US is somewhat anomalous in granting citizenship to children born to tourists or illegal immigrants, simply because they were in the US when the child was born.
by savolai | 2025-08-15 05:58:38+00:00
With all kindness: Compared to mac/ios, android and linux and windows ux is death by thousand papercuts. (I’m not saying apple is perfect either, and maybe we have landed in a digital experience world that is broken for nearly everyone anyway, but I digress. :)

I am already cognitively burdened. I do not need developers telling me at what point the cumulative inconsistencies become a biggie. Copy-paste is a common action and each inconsistency I need to learn is away from my core tasks and ability to focus on those is already scarce as f.

Devs do not get to decide how central a terminal is to my workflow, and whether that terminal app deserves to have the right to tell me that it’s now a special butterfly I need to accommodate my cognition for.

But I guess Linux desktop has chosen its path of being only for tinkerers who are prepared to adopt an entire culture of quirks instead of users focusing on what’s important for them in their own lives.

I’m disappointed this still does not fix the core issue of this being broken for everyone by default.
by lucideer | 2025-08-15 05:58:39+00:00
I've always found menu accelerators odd.

I find them a little too dependent on individual app developers word choices to have any kind of consistency across apps I use, plus I tend not to use menus for anything other than infrequent settings changes. Given that they haven't seemed substantially different to macos displaying annotations for bound shortcuts within the menus.

(admittedly I use mac in work & my personal computers at home have all been Linux since my Windows 2003 workstation died, so my knowledge of modern windows apps & their attached accelerators is rusty & I'm probably biased here)
by ExoticPearTree | 2025-08-15 05:58:47+00:00
I think it has to do with the fact that you can export tge profit to friendlier jurisdictions afterwards.

For this reason a lot of tech companies have subsidiaries in the Nerherlands. Uber is the first example that comes to mind. All card charges when you take an Uber in Europe are to Uber N.V - which is a Dutch Entity.
by atoav | 2025-08-15 05:58:52+00:00
> The universality of copy/paste is overrated. It's literally just adding shift in terminal emulators, no biggie.

As an university level educator: This is repeatedly a major hurdle for beginners, that makes the terminal (just text) feel like a different thing than just text to them. This and the fact that you can't just select the commands you have written with the mouse or with shift arrow makes beginners go mad, seemingly for no reason. And I count myself in there, I struggled with this for more than a year. When do you paste how? When donyou copy how?

The problem when you're learning this yourself is that you won't even have the correct vocabulary to describe what you want to know, it just feels like 99% of the world works and the 1% that doesn't is the terminal.

I get that this is historical, but if we want people to understand computers betond the consumer level this is literally like Blender changing from righ-click-select to left-click-select. Back then all the pros said it is no biggie just like you, but it turns out it was a biggie, because since then popularity exploded.

We terminal nerds lose nothing if more people understand terminals, quite the opposite.