MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ata_aman | 2025-08-11 19:49:44+00:00
Funny coincidence, I just published an offline infinity-scroll notes app[0] today to replace my long txt file. Desktop version probably in a couple of days. Last time I published an app for myself, my friends (and ~1k others!) loved it so trying doing it again.

I've used a .txt pretty much my whole life from my old Vaio running Ubuntu to my Mac books after, especially as a heavy terminal/nano enjoyer. I always saved it as do.txt in my base dir. Thousands of lines which was always nice to look at and more importantly easy to reference links I used during debugging or troubleshooting from months ago. It's a weird mix of a bookmarking list, daily to dos and quickly jotting down phone numbers or details while on the phone with someone (if I'm not on my personal laptop, I usually type the thing while I'm on the phone in the PC browser address bar then copy it over which is not ideal because auto-search).

Another strategy I've used is iMessaging myself with links or notes, which in my opinion is the best way since it auto syncs AND you can pin yourself in the iMessage app for quick access.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/infinote-single-page-notes/id6...
by camgunz | 2025-08-11 19:50:54+00:00
I spend a fair amount of time flagging stuff in those threads that's outright anti-Semitic or propaganda, and if that goes on too long I just flag the whole post and move on. It's one thing to have an in-depth discussion about colonialism, the history of the surrounding Arab states and early Zionism, ongoing Israeli politics, the Jewish diaspora, etc. It's quite another to engage in a fruitless moral oneupsmanship (neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis will wake up suddenly and say "Oh, HN has decided we're to blame; I guess we'll call the whole thing off"), or to reckon not at all with the fact that the destruction of Israel (through boycott, invasion, or minority democratic status) leads to the murder of horrifying numbers of Israeli Jews. As with pretty much all war I'm disgusted by what Israel is doing. I don't see that as a reason to drum up anti-semitism or casually imply the destruction of Israel and the attendant murder of millions of people would be a net good.

So, that's why I flag that stuff. I also think it's pretty absurd to think that HN censors opinions. I and others constantly criticize SV bigwigs like Marc Andreessen (can somebody ask ChatGPT how many goddamn 'e's are in his name, Jesus Christ) and Paul Graham, lots of tech-skeptic stuff gets posted here and makes it to the front page.
by jodrellblank | 2025-08-11 19:51:23+00:00
The recent HN thread on receipt printers for task tracking had this comment which I wish got some attention and replies:

"The biggest killer for any task tracker I find is an accumulating backlog of items that seem too important to quit but too intractable to make progress on." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44270076

(I suspect that’s part of too many browser tabs hanging around, too)
by lupusreal | 2025-08-11 19:51:49+00:00
Interactive chat sessions about your literary interests with a good LLM will produce much better book suggestions than reading book reviews in newspapers. It's not even close, because unless your interests are as simple as "whatever book publishers want to sell this week", the newspaper book reviewer just happening to cover a book up your alley is about as common as a planetary alignment.

I asked ChatGPT for 20th century space operas with literary merit or lasting recognition. It suggested Nova by Samuel Delany. Great book. How many newspaper book reviews would I have to read before I got suggestions for books in that category? I'd probably die waiting.
by jama211 | 2025-08-11 19:52:05+00:00
Interestingly enough, this just shows how different people like and hate different things. I personally can’t stand writing with a pen, and am very fluent and fast with a virtual keyboard and would never describe the experience as horrible. I’m writing this on one right now, and it’s great.

I also don’t want to carry an extra thing in my pocket when I already have a phone.

But I’m glad what works for you works for you!
by projectazorian | 2025-08-11 19:52:14+00:00
> if AI is so good why aren't people just doing 15 PRs a day on open source projects like Node.js, React, Kubernetes, Linux, Ansible, etc?

Because those projects are mature and have a very high bar for contributions, so aren't a good fit for AI?

Opening a PR on Linux is very different from opening a PR on a company's non-critical-path CRUD service.
by lesuorac | 2025-08-11 19:52:30+00:00
What would you change in your life with that kind of windfall?

Definitely not going to quit my job.

Definitely not going to go back to school.

Sure, I could spend it on a vacations over the next decade but I could already do that so not life changing.

I like my car already.

Maybe a renovation?

At the end of the day, I'm already doing things I like to do so additional money mostly is just going to be saved which isn't life changing. It's nice but not life _changing_.
Show HN: ToDiagram AI – From text to diagram, fast and easy
by iCutMoon | 2025-08-11 19:52:39+00:00
I’ve been working on creating diagrams from JSON, YAML and similar formats for about three years. Over time it has grown into a general-purpose diagramming tool. With the recent addition of the MCP Server and ToDiagram Chat, I’m optimistic about where it’s headed.

You can use your own OpenAI key, stored locally, without needing to sign up and generate diagrams by using natural language.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-08-11 19:52:43+00:00
0. Critics aren't necessarily negative.

1. Seemingly no one has ever made a recommendation feed that's actually as interesting and insightful as human experts.

2. You probably don't want a feed of content you "like" as a fan in some hobby. You want a lot of content that's interesting, which can be a very different thing entirely.

3. Critics can highlight aspects and context you missed, or help you vocalize and understand your own reactions to a work.

4. Other people have different opinions. To really participate in a community you need to be exposed to those opinions and engage with them.

A lot of intellectually rich works like Paradise Lost and Kant are best read alongside the commentary and reactions to their work. You're missing out if you're not reading the reactions to "the ones who walk away from Omelas" for example.
by Polizeiposaune | 2025-08-11 19:53:02+00:00
Not the first time that an AI has made this sort of mistake:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-DGB-42522 (from 2015)

Google's solution was to prevent its algorithm from calling anything a gorilla, and that restriction was apparently still in effect in 2023:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/22/technology/ai-photo-label...
by kace91 | 2025-08-11 19:53:21+00:00
>If you toss a rock in Western Europe, you’ve got a better chance of hitting a football fan than someone who wants to go bouldering or train for a marathon.

Yes and no. If you HAVE to choose a specific hobby, football will have more chances than others; but it will still work in a minority of cases and assuming carries an implication.

A comparison I could make is starting a conversation in the US with 'did you watch fox news yesterday?'. Out of all channels, it's the most watched one; but you still have high chances of asking a non-viewer, and then get hit by negative connotations.

Personal hobbies are much better topic for various reasons (you don't assume, people will naturally be exited about discussing their own, etc).
by edot | 2025-08-11 19:53:21+00:00
That’s an interesting observation. I’ve wondered how he can be so “creative” if you can call it that, but I guess if you have lots of assistants who can read all of the “well, technically you can do XYZ” sections buried deep in odd legal texts, and you enjoy doing stuff just to get more limelight, these actions are inherently attention grabbing because they are so novel.
by theZilber | 2025-08-11 19:53:24+00:00
The article's headline is great and it delivers the message clearly. But the whole premise to support the message is very assumptive - "there is no moat". There is a lot moat in cursor, bolt, lovable. The same way there is moat in the chat apps of openai, anthropic, gemini...

They say there is no moat, but in fact, a feature in anthropic takes a good few months up to a year to appear on openai chatapp, and the same is true vice versa.

You could say some of those issues are solvable by allocating more money, and resources, which might be true, and it could be true that it would be beneficial for openai to develop their own cursor platform in the future, to get better margins. But in reality, who knows when that future would come? Maybe by then cursor will have much more moat and entering the market would be much more difficult. Maybe openai will continue developing their core product and entering other domains will not be worth the effort.

Currently, LLMs as a product have not been solved. All companies operate at a lose in order to rise the top, and we still don't know how it will be monetized in the future. But as it stands - there is already moat, moat in infrastructure - even though a few years ago they said that llms have no moat, now there is already a strong set of features and "agents" that deliver us the deep reasoning, online searching, and multimodal experience.

So, there is moat. But moat can accumulate over time. For the article to be true - it should prove the the current moat is low, and it can not accumulate.
by lurk2 | 2025-08-11 19:53:57+00:00
It has far more to do with respect for private property due to the existence of a class of sophisticated, politically literate professionals capable of opposing development. Europe and Canada are similar; the extent to which this retards the economy is more obvious in Europe. It isn’t hard to build a road when you can just expropriate all the land and completely disregard environmental impacts.
by nartho | 2025-08-11 19:54:25+00:00
Is it though ? I feel like what ML can achieve is amazing, but, call me a pessimist, I'm bracing for the influx of elaborate scams, propaganda, deep fakes etc who will manage to drive a wedge even further in our society than social networks did. As for programming, my skills are not good enough not to risk an atrophy if I use code completion. I do ask Claude for feedback though. I've always been a tech enthusiast but this is the first time I want to build a cabin in the woods and live off-grid. The tech itself is amazing but I'm not looking forward to all the slop we're going to be flooded with.
by mikestorrent | 2025-08-11 19:54:37+00:00
D-Wave themselves do not emphasize this use case and have said many times that they don't expect annealing quantum computers to be used for this kind of decryption attack. Annealers are used for optimization problems where you're trying to find the lowest energy solution to a constraint problem, not Shor's Algorithm.

In that sense, they're more useful for normal folks today, and don't pose as many potential problems.
by lemontheme | 2025-08-11 19:54:40+00:00
Okay, so there are people who do this? I've actually considered it on several occasions, but it always felt a bit 'wrong', like prepending rather than appending to an array.

I like the idea though of less important things being farther down, like sediment, whereas current/important things stay closer to the surface. There's a fun metaphor in there.

Might try your way, after all!
by yoyohello13 | 2025-08-11 19:55:17+00:00
We use GitLab ci, issue tracking, dep scanning, everything at work and I can report it is amazing. All self hosted and never had any issues. I’ve got our entire deployment process setup through GitLab ci and it’s been rock solid. It’s $150/month per seat for the ultimate tier, but it’s 100% been worth it for us.
by martin-t | 2025-08-11 19:55:41+00:00
I couldn't believe the number of people who were saying that "Microsoft are the good guys now" or "Microsoft loves open source now".

Microsoft stopped openly attacking open source at a time when open source was clearly winning:

- most servers were running linux

- most phones and tablets were running android

- people were buying tablets instead of desktops

- Google was openly promoting open source through GSOC

- large corporations were regularly releasing their tools as open source

Most importantly, developers openly hated Microsoft for holding the industry back (remember IE6?).

So they did what any good corporations does - they went along with the winning side.

And now they they have positive emotional connotations in devs' minds, or at least organizational buy-in again, they can do what corporations do best - making money by abusing their position with barely any competition.

---

The lesson here are: - Corporations should simply not have this amount of power. - Corporations are amoral, they don't have values, views or beliefs. They are systems designed for optimizing goals. You can never _trust_ a corporation - not because they are untrustworthy but because trust is a human-to-human level concept, it does not have any meaning in human-to-system interaction.
by churchill | 2025-08-11 19:55:43+00:00
Yes. For cocaine, for example, they have large farmer networks that cultivate coca, harvest and process it lightly (drying, etc.). The cartels then finish the process and undertake the logistics of shipping it across borders, into the US, or across the Atlantic into Europe.

This logistical leg is where most of the work is done since you have to:

Maintain large slush funds for bribing law enforcement.

Run workshops and technicians that strip civilians cars, embed cocaine in the nooks and hand them over to American civilians to drive over the border.

Hire engineers from Pakistani universities to build narco-submarines in riverine deltas, which are then used to cross the Atlantic for European supplies.

Maintain contact with your African coastal syndicates who have another trans-Saharan route for getting drugs into Europe.

Run payroll for your workforce (this is a business after all).

Maintain a decently trained fighting force to slaughter enemies that encroach on your turf. Or informants, uncompromising cops, politicians, etc. This includes training, paying, initiating them, and hiring good experienced fighters. Right now, it's credibly reported that Mexican cartels are volunteering to fight in Ukraine to gain experience with drones and other UAVs to expand their war-making capabilities.

Hire chemistry undergrads from local STEM universities to turn synthetic precursors from Asia into fentanyl, etc.

So, just like African cocoa farmers and American growers see just a tiny slice of the profit the end-products produce, the cartels are in the logistics & firepower business; they've outsourced a huge chunk of the business to growers, just like their peers in the chocolate and grocery business.
by js8 | 2025-08-11 19:55:52+00:00
Comparative advantage somewhat works on international level, but with very specialized stuff. There is no reason every country needs its own space program, its own EUV tooling or its own global positioning system.

But for commonly used goods that every person needs, every country would benefit from producing these on their own, thanks to various synergies.

Specialization has also transaction cost. If you're skilled it might be better to plumb some things yourself than call a professional and risk him being a hack.

So I don't think it's one system being better than other. Rather, specialization is like paralelism - there is a transaction cost due to nonlocality, but also better scaling. So, like with paralelism, the rule should be - try as much as you can to produce locally, and specialize only where the scale advantage becomes really strong (usually that happens with high-tech products that are needed in very low quantities - by centralizing production, knowhow is easier to apply and capital costs are easier to justify).
by tengwar2 | 2025-08-11 19:56:01+00:00
But you could access the hardware directly. I don't remember the details, but I build a hardware clock running at 10ms cycle time and was able to poll it. Also my build relied fundamentally on reading from a couple of external DAC converters which presented 2 x 10-12 bits for x and y coordinates to some sort of PIO arrangement which I don't now recall. I didn't write a device driver, which I remember as being significantly more difficult (mainly because you couldn't use CodeView).

Just as a brief explanation: this was in the late 80's. I was using a device called an imaging photon detector to detect individual photo events. This was the back end of an early electronic camera running at about ISO 1G. Not a digital camera - the photo events were recorded as analogue xy coordinates, with a resolution of about 400x400 and a photon rate of about 100k/s (not an exact figure - as the rate increased, you lost an increasing number of events due to clash. I had a load of wire-wrap to rearrange the bits before they were presented to the computer (bit-bashing on the 80386/33 wasn't fast enough), then the xy coordinated were presented to some sort of PIO. In some cases I wanted to take video, hence the hardware clock, since the nearest thing available on the PC only ran at something like 13.3Hz and was used for polling the mouse. There was no GUI available at the time, so I built my own.

I don't remember a huge amount of detail, and the source is on 5¼" floppy, but as I remember it none of this was difficult for a very amateur self-taught C/asm programmer. The only significant problem was working out that the OS/2 1.0 documentation of the mouse system lied (it didn't have the display capability claimed, and attempting to use it shut down mouse polling), and third party manuals just copied the lies without testing. That was easy enough to work out, and building a couple of threads to display the mouse cursor was easy.
by lillecarl | 2025-08-11 19:56:27+00:00
I think filtering on upvotes/downvotes, comments/views, sub, user and whatever metrics they have on the content can help AI companies train on somewhat reasonable things. Blend it with Wikipedia, scientific papers, reliable newspapers and you're golden?

Metadata is what makes gold out of poo, I assume model developers can "train negatively" too if metadata suggests they should.
by nobleach | 2025-08-11 19:56:30+00:00
But I've yet to meet a person that said, "Oh, Rachel and Chandler from Friends... maybe Windows IS cool!". It wasn't cool, it wasn't anything. Apple was trendy with the designers and creative types, and Windows was what you probably used at your doldrums day job. The only place where MS has ever been "cool" is with gamers. I think your "Walmart" analogy is a perfect one.
by 93po | 2025-08-11 19:56:31+00:00
You can tell that journalism is dead because they cite how much it's allegedly dropped in the past year with literally zero other info or context. Ok, dropped from what to what? How does this compare to other cities? Has it gone up consistently for the last deacde? How much crime is still happening after that drop? Is the drop in real, predicted crime, or just reports of it? Are there reasons why reporting would go down despite crime not going down?

And to cite these numbers without providing context at the same time of citing them that someone was literally fired for allegedly manipulating the data. And to be clear they're just allegations, but also the data is controlled by someone whose job and ego is tied to these numbers dropping, and the rate of the drop is basically unbelievable - 25% to 28% drop in a single year? After suggesting it went down 34% the year before?

Even if my info I just wrote is something someone could dispute, is it not part of journalism to at least provide the bare minimum of context for people to at least know why this is controversial? If Trump's position on this is so soundly and clearly misguided, then it shouldn't be a problem at all to provide all facts and context to demonstrate as much. Instead we're given a single fact with zero other context.
by michaelt | 2025-08-11 19:56:47+00:00
It's a good deal more complicated than that.

MPs belong to political parties - consider what happens if an MP's constituents and an MP's party disagree?

They might be allowed to vote against the government, if their vote will have no effect on the bill's passage - but if they actually stop the bill's passage? They're kicked out of the party, which will make the next election extremely difficult for them.

MPs are elected for reasonably long terms - and that means they regularly do things that weren't in their party manifesto. Nobody running for election in 2024 had a manifesto policy about 2025's strikes on Iran, after all!

That flexibility means they can simply omit the unpopular policies during the election campaign. A party could run an election campaign saying they're going to introduce a national ID card, give everyone who drinks alcohol a hard time, cut benefits, raise taxes, raise university tuition, fail to deliver on any major infrastructure projects, have doctors go on strike, and so on.

Or they can simply not put those things in their manifesto, then do them anyway. It's 100% legal, the system doing what it does.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-11 19:57:30+00:00
I had long term business relationship with a company, originating and developing a product for them.

From 50 - 1000 employees things worked very well. There was a great deal of continuity in the relationship. Lots of trust and flexibility in both directions. Our product quickly became the best available, by a long margin, and for a couple decades.

But after they passed about 1500 - 2000 employees they got more organized. A formalized organization and process system. Things quickly went downhill. As someone working from outside the company, their processes were incredibly disruptive and inefficient for me. Likewise, their turnover replaced a situation of working with long time friendly colleagues, who knew me very well, to working with people who had no idea what my positive reputation was, my track record of delivering quality without the hammer of conformance, etc.

The project's ambitious upward trajectory stalled. Even then it took about ten years to fall behind other players. But it never recovered. Today it operates deep in the shadows of others.

Virtually every employee I worked with was wonderful, inclined to be as supportive as restrictions allowed, etc. But the institutionalization smothered the organizations ability to operate with any flexibility, no matter how dysfunctional or value destroying the results.

The company became like someone who has permanently lost the ability to form new memories.

You can't build anything special with someone who keeps forgetting any context. I spent many years cycling between depression and resurrected determination trying. But finally gave up.