MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I Got Sick of Juggling Apps, So I Merged Them
by wade123 | 2025-08-13 15:14:07+00:00
Hi HN community,

I built this because I was tired of juggling 3–4 different tools just to work on a single project. When I’m doing research, analysis, plain old reading or knowledge work I usually have:

A note-taking app open

A PDF viewer in another window

ChatGPT in a separate tab

Switching between them constantly killed my focus and made it harder to connect information.

So I decided to merge everything into one workspace:

Rich text editor for notes

PDF viewer for reading & annotating documents

AI chat assistant for instant summaries, Q&A, and analysis

You can open multiple files at once and resize panels however you want. It’s already been helpful for students, lawyers, consultants and pretty much anyone with multiple sources of information at once or just likes to have everything in one window.

I’d love for you to try it and tell me what you think, what works, what doesn’t, and what’s missing.

Give it A try here: www.use-stacks.com

Thanks for reading!
by ixtli | 2025-08-13 15:14:26+00:00
Exactly: we live in a capitalist society which has been in decline into fascism for generations which makes the counter culture the opposite of those things.

I get the sense that because people can think of a few examples of mercenary security people or a few white supremacist groups that "hack" that this is somehow a refutation. It's not. You know about these people because 1) they usually are mean and suck and 2) they are outliers.

As you say: the phreaking / hacking / hobbist subcultures have always been collectivist by nature and the product of those subcultures will always chafe at the profit motive.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-08-13 15:14:33+00:00
Oh, this has to be one of the most evocative titles of today’s HN wave, and I just want to say the picture formed from those 6 words in my admittedly fertile mind is, hilarious and also, intriguing.

A dinosaurs smile, literal data negentropy, telling us about the planet.

I can imagine the ephithet Happy Dinos Smiles for many a label now, thanks.

Hmm.. Imagine if my own smile had such value to intelligent minds, 64 million years from now.

Long term climate dynamics, indeed.
by nozzlegear | 2025-08-13 15:14:52+00:00
> None of them are wealthy enough or operate large enough farms for expensive self-driving tractors.

My father runs his own chopping business and his machines aren't automated or self-driven either. For him, it's all about being able to repair the machines himself. He's been a diesel mechanic and farm hand all his life, so if something breaks on a "traditional" harvester or tractor, he knows how to fix it and get it running again.
by saalweachter | 2025-08-13 15:15:01+00:00
Tractors tend to spread their load with more, gianter, wider tires.

The trade-off for making the tractor larger is that you can pull wider and multiple or multi-function implements to do the entire thing faster in one pass.

The larger contact patch for having an absurd number of wheels reduces soil compaction and reduces the chance you get stuck; working in fewer passes further reduces soil compaction and prevents you from getting stuck (since in the ideal case, you're doing one pass on solid ground, and never driving over tilled soil).
by 9rx | 2025-08-13 15:15:03+00:00
Stack Overflow wasn't bringing in hundreds of billions in revenue and never could have hoped to. A niche won't cut it.

I mean, should it all come crashing down and once the dust settles there is no doubt room for a niche service to rise from the ashes. Many have predicted exactly that AI will have its own "dark fibre" moment. But the current crop of providers seeking "world domination" won't survive if they can only carve out a SO-style niche.
by lucb1e | 2025-08-13 15:15:25+00:00
LLMs cannot tell fact from fiction. What's commonly called hallucinations stems from it not being able to reason, the way that humans appear to be able to do, no matter that some models are called "reasoning" now. It's all the same principle: most likely token in a given position. Adding internal monologue appears to help because, by being forced to break it down (internally, or by spitballing towards the user when they prompted "think step by step"[1]), it creates better context and will thus have a higher probability that the predicted token is a correct one

Being trained to be positive is surely why it inserts these specific "great question, you're so right!" remarks, but if you wasn't trained on that, it still couldn't tell you whether you're great or not

> I'm pretty sure they want it kissing people's asses

The American faux friendliness is not what causes the underlying problem here, so all else being equal, they might as well have it kiss your ass. It's what most English speakers expect from a "friendly assistant" after all

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1703980800&dateRange=custom&...
by brookst | 2025-08-13 15:15:51+00:00
I work on consumer-facing LLM tools, and see A/B tests on prompting strategy daily.

YMMV on specifics but please consider the possibility that you may benefit from working on promoting and that not all behaviors you see are intrinsic to all LLMs and impossible to address with improved (usually simpler, clearer, shorter) prompts.
by kayodelycaon | 2025-08-13 15:15:52+00:00
I have a Canon Pixma Pro 100 and it uses 8 different inks. The “Pro” really means professional. When used with the correct paper, it produces the same high quality prints as any professional service.

Looking at the artwork on my wall, there’s two big things that set prints apart from an original artwork. 1. Computer software doesn’t capture the imperfection of a physical medium. 2. Printers can’t reproduce the texture of layered colors.
Show HN: A platform for solving real-world Linux/DevOps issues
by gpawar19 | 2025-08-13 15:16:04+00:00
I built a small platform for practicing the kinds of problems DevOps, SREs, and Production Engineers actually face such as Linux troubleshooting, Bash scripting, performance bottlenecks, networking issues, and general debugging.

The idea came after preparing for a Meta Production Engineer interview and realizing there are not many places to practice these skills outside of live incidents.

Right now it has 6 challenges with more planned. Feedback from the HN crowd would be hugely valuable both on the concept and the problems themselves.

https://sttrace.com
by enraged_camel | 2025-08-13 15:16:33+00:00
>> Why not?

Because it's just cope. Look at the current reality. Are companies rushing to fix bad or even buggy code written by human devs? No, not in most cases. In most cases, if a piece of code "works", it is left the hell alone. And that's the thing about AI code: it does work. The quality is irrelevant in the overwhelming majority of cases (especially if it's other AIs that are adding to it, which is the case more and more often).
by exasperaited | 2025-08-13 15:16:48+00:00
Yes. But no geek should be getting a Cricut when the Silhouette machines exist and are not so locked down and cloud encumbered.

ETA: I guess a true maths geek nerd artist would probably want something more modular and larger anyway, but the Silhouette machines are varied, interesting, support a pretty well documented protocol (GPGL, a variant of/alternative to HPGL I think) and are supported in Inkscape and Python.
by dc10tonite | 2025-08-13 15:16:51+00:00
Same with "fart," and it's an absolute delight: https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=fart

"Fart bird special" is pretty funny, and "staff farting only" might be my favorite. Other good ones: "BECAUSE THE FART NEEDS," "Juice Fart," "WHOLESALE FARTS"
by visarga | 2025-08-13 15:16:51+00:00
> They don't really know if they're right.

Neither do humans who have no access to validate what they are saying. Validation doesn't come from the brain, maybe except in math. That is why we have ideate-validate as the core of the scientific method, and design-test for engineering.

"truth" comes where ability to learn meets ability to act and observe. I use "truth" because I don't believe in Truth. Nobody can put that into imperfect abstractions.
by IAmGraydon | 2025-08-13 15:17:04+00:00
I think some of his worries are well founded and others are not. I believe AI is not going to replace everyone or even most. Instead, it will eventually be seen for what it is - not actually intelligent, and the bubble that was built on those hopes and dreams will collapse, kicking off a market crash. At the same time, Trump's tariffs are going to spike inflation, preventing the Fed from cutting. That will further Trump's fight with Powell, which will lead to him installing a puppet. Said puppet will cut rates, leading to record-setting inflation that could lead us into something resembling the Great Depression. That is a very likely outcome, in my opinion.
by scrollaway | 2025-08-13 15:17:19+00:00
Sorry; I dropped out of school, so I wouldn't know about 9th grade science projects. Would you like to phrase your constructive feedback as an attack instead? (/shrug)

Edit after your update: As mentioned in the other comment, the tests were mostly ad-hoc. It's nearly impossible to prove whether something is absent from the training data, but it's possible to put the LLM in a bunch of situations which would be conducive to completing with pre-existing knowledge.
by csours | 2025-08-13 15:18:00+00:00
You're absolutely right! Humans really like emotional validation.

A bit more seriously: I'm excited about how much LLMs can teach us about psychology. I'm less excited about the dependency.

---

Adding a bit more substantial comment:

Users of sites like Stack Overflow have reported really disliking answers like "You are solving the wrong problem" or "This is a bad approach".

There are different solutions possible, both for any technical problem, and for any meta-problem.

Whatever garnish you put on top of the problem, the bitter lesson suggests that more data and more problem context improve the solution faster than whatever you are thinking right now. That's why it's called the bitter lesson.
by cwmoore | 2025-08-13 15:18:09+00:00
The Turing Test does not require a machine show any “sophisticated intent”, only effective deception:

“Both the computer and the human try to convince the judge that they are the human. If the judge cannot consistently tell which is which, then the computer wins the game.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing_Machinery_and_Inte...
by api | 2025-08-13 15:18:11+00:00
Learning to innovate steadily and responsibly without just stopping is one of the things I'd put on my list of things humanity needs to figure out.

Individuals can do it, but as I said it doesn't scale. An individual can carefully scale a rock face. A committee, political system, or corporate board in charge of scaling rock faces would either scale as fast as possible and let people fall to their deaths or simply stand at the bottom and have meetings to plan the next meeting to discuss the proper climbing strategy (after discussing the color of the bike shed) forever. Public discourse would polarize into climb-fast-die-young versus an ideology condemning all climbing as hubris and invoking the precautionary principle, and many door stop sized books would be written on these ideas, and again either lots of people would die or nothing would happen.
by jerf | 2025-08-13 15:18:39+00:00
From what I can see in software space, any software-primary company that thinks AI means they can fire 3/4ths of their staff in the near future will get stomped in the market by their competitor who decided to take the 4x productivity improvement instead.

It may make working for a non-software-primary company as a programmer more risky. But then, "be a value provider, where execs can draw a fairly straight line from your contribution to revenue, and not a value consumer" is not new career advice.
by azornathogron | 2025-08-13 15:19:08+00:00
I had a summer job working at a print software company and they had a large format printer with, if I remember correctly, 12 different ink colours. These weren't spot colours - though that's also an example of going outside CMYK - but meant the printer supported a very wide colour gamut and subtle colour grading.

Anyway, yes, professional printing can go beyond just CMYK in various ways.
by bitbasher | 2025-08-13 15:20:17+00:00
This is a common issue with Rust projects as well. At least with Rust you have the idea of "MSRV" (minimum supported rust version). I've never heard it discussed within Go's community.

There's no MSGV. Everyone pins the latest.

This also plagues dependencies. People pin to specific version (ie, 1.23) instead of the major version (at least 1.0 or at least 1.2, etc).
by sebstefan | 2025-08-13 15:20:19+00:00
The flimsy support for Ukraine doesn't erase 50 years of catastrophic effects of USA interventionism

You can cherry pick a few good things. Ukraine, Kosovo, Korea, maybe Libya, the first Gulf war, the Berlin air-lift

Then you come back to reality. The war on terror, El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Laos, arming the Saudis, Irak, Afghanistan

If you engage in 50 or so interventions and all except one fail miserably, often in horrifying ways that result in the deaths of millions of people, it’s really hard to maintain that that’s a good record.
by dc10tonite | 2025-08-13 15:20:27+00:00
This is an excellent point. It should also be noted that the people who want a better position over labor largely write mediocre memos, make bad decisions, barely listen in meetings, and slap together powerpoints for said meetings. As it turns out, AI can also automate the work of thousands of shitty execs and upper management. If only we could apply that pressure in their direction...
by manumasson | 2025-08-13 15:20:56+00:00
Haha, blursed one might say. In seriousness though, the social avoidance of wanting to talk to a computer around others will likely be the largest bottleneck to adoption for this sort of tech. May need to initially frame it as for work from home engineers.

Luckily the other side to this project doesn't require any user behavioural changes. The idea is to convert chat histories into a tree format with the same core algorithm, and then send only the relevant sub-tree to the LLM, reducing input tokens and context bloat, thereby also improving accuracy. This would then also unlock almost infinite length LLM chats. I have been running this LLM context retrieval algo against a few benchmarks, GSM-infinite, nolima, and longbench-v2 benchmarks, the early results are very promising, ~60-90% reduced tokens and increased accuracy against SOTA, however only on a subset of the full benchmark datasets.
by tlarkworthy | 2025-08-13 15:21:19+00:00
the prompt I would like to optimize is the reflection prompt

`You are a prompt‑engineer AI. You will be improving the performance of a prompt by considering recent executions of that prompt against a variate of tasks that were asked by a user. You need to look for ways to improve the SCORE by considering recent executions using that prompt and doing web research on the domain.

Your tasks is to improve the CURRENT PROMPT. You will be given traces of several TASKS using the CURRENT PROMPT and then respond only with the text of the improved using the improve_prompt tool`; const research_msg = `Generate some ideas on how how this prompt might be improved, perhaps using web research\nCURRENT PROMPT:\n${prompt}\n${trace}`

source: https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/gepa#reflectFn

but I would need quite a few distinct tasks to do that and task setup is the laborious part (getting quicker now I optimized the notebook coding agent).
by visarga | 2025-08-13 15:21:19+00:00
> In human learning we do this process by generating expectations ahead of time and registering surprise or doubt when those expectations are not met.

Why did you give up on this idea. Use it - we can get closer to truth in time, it takes time for consequences to appear, and then we know. Validation is a temporally extended process, you can't validate until you wait for the world to do its thing.

For LLMs it can be applied directly. Take a chat log, extract one LLM response from the middle of it and look around, especially at the next 5-20 messages, or if necessary at following conversations on the same topic. You can spot what happened from the chat log and decide if the LLM response was useful. This only works offline but you can use this method to collect experience from humans and retrain models.

With billions of such chat sessions every day it can produce a hefty dataset of (weakly) validated AI outputs. Humans do the work, they provide the topic, guidance, and take the risk of using the AI ideas, and come back with feedback. We even pay for the privilege of generating this data.
by bwfan123 | 2025-08-13 15:21:51+00:00
In tech, change is the only constant. From embedded software in assembly to mobile/web development in javascript to jit-compiled python. This is not easy on engineers or on businesses as they have to keep reskilling at all times. The silver lining to AI is that it is poor at reskilling itself which is why the data-cutoff is circa 2024 for some models.
by smsm42 | 2025-08-13 15:22:00+00:00
Gas and cars are already heavily taxed. In California, for example, it's 61c per gallon now. I am not sure what's the situation in Switzerland, but last time I have been in Europe gas prices there was very significantly higher than in the US (even in California). Given as European gas doesn't seem to be a different product than US gas, I have to conclude Europeans already pay a lost of costs when buying gas. Same with car prices. So claiming car drivers do not pay the costs is just plain wrong.
Show HN: I built a tool to convert Loom videos into Playwright tests
by emregucerr | 2025-08-13 15:22:14+00:00
Hi HN, my name is Emre. I am one of the co-founders of Fume - a tool to generate Playwright test suites from product walkthrough videos.

HOW DOES IT WORK 1. Upload a Loom or equivalent video where you describe what you want to be tested in your app 2. Gemini extracts test scenarios 3. We spawn multiple computer-use agents in parallel to explore your app and write Playwright code.

WHAT’S DIFFERENT Your voice and a screen recording is the most natural way of describing what you want to be tested in an app. Compared to other test builders (AI powered or not) you do not have to spell out steps, think about test design or dynamic data within the app.

HOW YOU CAN TRY IT We have a no-sign-up demo at https://app.fumedev.com/demo

Would love to hear what you think of this UX for creating Playwright tests. Especially if you wrote E2E tests before or used any of the test builders.
by kbelder | 2025-08-13 15:22:27+00:00
I think that's it. Even if there were no improvements with LLMs as they exist today, the integration and usage can still be vastly improved. Right now, we don't have multiple LLM-aware systems communicating, with a standardized information repository.

Right now we have the technology to have an AI observe a room, count the people in it, see what they're doing, observe their mood, and set the lighting to the appropriate level. We just don't have all the sensors and integrations and protocols to manage that. The LLM interfaces with email, your bank, your phone, etc., is crude and clunky. So much more could be done with the LLMs we have now.

(And just to be clear, most of those integrations sound horrible and dystopian. But they're examples.)
by 9rx | 2025-08-13 15:22:31+00:00
> So either Google, Meta, etc. will lose the AI game

They might lose entirely (search, social media, etc.) if users are more likely to direct their eyeballs to "AI" services. And that isn't an impossible scenario. What do you need traditional web search, stupid internet comments, etc. for when an LLM will generate all that and more immediately at your behest? The newspaper companies lost when other forms of media came along. "AI" could easily push things the same way.

But the businesses are still trying to prove that. It is still early days. Only time will tell if they will actually get the aforementioned user base.
by jgalt212 | 2025-08-13 15:22:34+00:00
> Ok. Then it's on people in your camp to a) quantify the impact of specific forms of cheating, b) ensuring that you're not painting with too fine nor too broad a brush.

That's exactly what I proposed above. I didn't say I was right. I proposed a methodology to say that I'm right (or wrong).

> Statistical outlier analysis of different time periods would help settle this matter.
by siva7 | 2025-08-13 15:22:46+00:00
I have a feeling this is the result of RHLF gone wrong by outsourcing it to idiots which all ai providers seem to be guilty of. Imagine a real professional wanting every output after a remark to start with "You're absolutely right!", Yeah, hard to imagine or you may have some specific cultural background or some kind of personality disorder. Or maybe it's just a hardcoded string? May someone with more insight enlighten us plebs.
by cnst | 2025-08-13 15:22:57+00:00
Some companies somehow blatantly get away with not allowing any export at all.

For example, Amazon eero, the overpriced WiFi router that doesn't even work (without phoning back home and having an app installed on your phone). They had an outage like a year ago, and during said outage, all your existing ad blocking stopped working, too, even if you never rebooted during the outage, and even though said blocking is supposed to be performed locally. I think you can't even get the ad blocking unless you or your ISP pays for the special subscription, either. (I imagine the thing could have removed all local ad blocking settings and lists during the time it couldn't confirm you're still a paying customer because their cloud was down?)

Does anyone know how exactly does Amazon get away with not providing data export for their eero product? I haven't seen a Blink or Ring exports, either. The main Amazon dot com does have the export, which has some extensive data you may not think they do collect, but it doesn't cover eero, Blink or Ring.
by kingstnap | 2025-08-13 15:23:00+00:00
A bubble sort of implies this ephemeral quality that is just super wrong.

I think its better to describe AI as a big shake up. Like a Cambrian explosion of sorts.

We will see tons of bankruptcies, in both AI and not AI companies. A ton of low profile ones and likely many high profile ones. It's just the nature of it.
by ttoinou | 2025-08-13 15:23:05+00:00
You're right we probably need at least 3 quadratic bezier curves to cover most uses cases of 3rd degree bezier curves. (In general, not all shapes of 3rd degree bezier curves are used in the wild, that would lead to too much deformation and impossible paths).

But I agree with the OP, artists might only need new tools that use quadratic bezier curves in a different ways
by Vegenoid | 2025-08-13 15:23:10+00:00
I worked in an org with offices in America, India, Europe, and Israel, and it was not uncommon for the American employees to be put off by the directness of the foreign employees. It was often interpreted as rudeness, to the surprise of the speaker. This happened to the Israel employees more than the India or Europe employees, at least in part because the India/Europe employees usually tried to adapt to the behavior expected by the Americans, while the Israel employees largely took pride in their bluntness.
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-08-13 15:23:39+00:00
its mostly about this

a) policy doesn't exist

b) policy is granted as a form of leverage to get and keep voters

c) policy is overturned by next admin

d) policy wasn't really that important, but it enrages people anyway because it's like giving someone $100 and then taking it away.

Sure $100 is nice, but it's not life changing.