MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: MarkFlowy – A Markdown editor, which is lighter, smarter and purer
by drl5 | 2025-08-28 14:16:39+00:00
Why develop it?

First of all, I don't like the idea of all in one. In particular, I almost only need words. I have used Typora. It is really good, but it can hardly satisfy me except editing. So I wonder if there is a simple Markdown editor that can manage files and has a good editing experience? Then there is MarkFlowy.

Features:

MarkFlowy has been independently developed for 2.5 years.Based on the design philosophy of being lightweight, simple, and highly available, it now boasts a considerable number of functions such as:

- Local Priority: MarkFlowy is a pure editor designed to edit your local content. The synchronization method is left to the user's choice. Currently, it provides a Git manager and will later integrate with other similar cloud storage services for synchronization. Feel free to provide feedback on this.

- User Experience First: It offers multiple editing modes, including source code and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). Additionally, it supports custom themes. Furthermore, high performance is the foundation of a good user experience. MarkFlowy has a lightweight package size and specialized performance optimization. Real-world testing shows that on an M1 Mac device, editing documents with over 200,000 characters can still ensure smooth writing in both Chinese and English.

- AI Support: MarkFlowy integrates with multiple AI vendors such as Deepseek, Openai, and Ollama. It also supports using their features within the editor for tasks like Q&A, summarization, translation, etc., to enhance your writing efficiency.

- Simplicity: Out-of-the-box usability. You only need to familiarize yourself with Markdown syntax to use it easily. It also provides synchronization methods such as Git and a powerful file management tree.

Apart from these features, MarkFlowy can edit text files (txt), JSON files, and view image files, among other useful functions. We welcome everyone to experience, exchange ideas, and participate.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-08-28 14:17:01+00:00
Fast algorithms are often more complicated.

To give just one simple example: to get the textbook complexity bound for the Dijkstra algorithm, you need some fancy mergeable heap data structures which are much more complicated, and thus time-intense to implement than the naive implementation.

Or you can get insane low-level optimizations by using the SIMD instructions that modern processors provide. Unluckily, this takes a lot of time and leads to code that is not easy to understand (and thus not easy to write) for "classically trained" programmers.

Yes, you indeed need a lot of skills to write such very fast algorithms, but even for such ultra-smart programmers, finding and applying such optimizations need a lot of development time, which is why this is often only done for code parts that are insanely computation-intense and performance-critical such as video (and sometimes audio) codecs.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-08-28 14:17:27+00:00
Haha, recognise. I invented a fast search algorithm and worked with some academics to publish a paper on it last year.

They threw in all the complex math to the paper. I could not initially understand it at all despite inventing the damn algorithm!

Having said that, picking it apart and taking a little time with it, it actually wasn't that hard - but it sure looked scary and incomprehensible at first!
by vel0city | 2025-08-28 14:17:34+00:00
If a bakery goes to a bank and gets a loan to fix their ovens is that a bailout?

Things like TARP bailouts and the auto industry bailout were weird one-off programs with very narrow beneficiaries that nobody else really had access to. This loan program in question is a normal, long standing program that anyone can apply for and has funded a lot of different things. Do you not see a difference between these?
by Aurornis | 2025-08-28 14:17:41+00:00
Exactly. All of the claims that OpenAI is losing money on every request are wrong. OpenAI hasn’t even unlocked all of their possible revenue opportunities from the free tier such as ads (like Google search), affiliate links, and other services.

There’s also a lot of comments in this thread who want LLM companies to fail for different reasons, so they’re projecting that wish on to imagined unit economics.

I’m having flashbacks to all of the conversations about Uber and claims that it was going to collapse as soon as the investment money ran out. Then Uber gradually transitioned to profitability and the critics moved to using the same shtick on AI companies.
by JCM9 | 2025-08-28 14:17:42+00:00
Agree it’s not the fashionable thing. There’s a line from The Big Short of “This is Wall Street Dr Bury, if you offer us free money we’re going to take it.”

These companies are behaving the same way. Folks are willing to throw endless money into the present pit so on the one hand I can’t blame them for taking it.

Reality is though that when the hype wears off it’s only throwing more gasoline on the fire and building a bigger pool of investors that’s will become increasingly desperate to salvage returns. History says time and time again that story doesn’t end well and that’s why the voices mumbling “bubble” under their breath are getting louder every day.
by xenotux | 2025-08-28 14:17:52+00:00
I've been in engineering, TLM, and management roles in multiple companies. In terms of output, TLMs are not held to the same standard as full-time engineers at the same level, period. Their engineering contributions are dissected only if their performance as a manager is in serious doubt.

In any role, there are some folks who push themselves too hard, and there is no one to tell them "stop", but that's their choice.
by squigz | 2025-08-28 14:18:37+00:00
I imagine I could write a similar blog post about my experience in the field while suffering from autism and severe depression.

But the thing is, if you asked my employers, I'm sure they'd give very good reasons as to why I was let go.

I wonder what some of those 20 companies he's worked for would say if they were allowed to share their side.

I'm not trying to blame Kenneth here, but things are not often as clear cut as he is implying here.
by UncleOxidant | 2025-08-28 14:18:38+00:00
You could load up LMStudio on your current hardware, get qwen3-coder-30b (8bit quant) and give it some coding tasks, something meaty (I had it create a recursive descent parser in C that parses the C programming language). At the end of it's response it shows the tok/sec. I'm getting 36 tok/sec on the Framework running that model.
by endymion-light | 2025-08-28 14:18:43+00:00
I don't mind people doing blog-posts advertising they're own companies - but I feel like i'd like a little bit more substance within this topic. It is interesting in a way, I find I turn to things like gemini 2.5 within simple OCR/NLP and now more substantial image editing than specific models.

I think that's more because of the current state of the industry, a lot of those models are either internal, paywall locked or annoying to use. I don't want to waste effort in trying to sign up for a 4 week trail of X service to perform a one off task.

Unfortunately, this post didn't really elucidate or go into an interesting topic within this space.

I'm not expecting a research paper, but it would be great to get some stats, graphs, examples and meat on the bones. I opened this up expecting some actual examples of problems within OCR & NLP and showing how X multi-modal model solves them.
by gitaarik | 2025-08-28 14:18:51+00:00
Yeah, and then we should also maybe install spyware on everybody's phones, so the government can scan our phones for child porn, because people are using phones to share child porn you know, and that is bad you know.

And if we're at it, we should maybe also put camera's and microphones in everybody's houses so we can see what everyone's doing all the time, because many children are being hurt in houses you know.

But don't worry, if you don't want all of this you can just get this degoogled phone just around the corner and it works perfect you know, because everybody is using them and there's a big market for it and it's very easy to use.

Or maybe not
by Ahineya | 2025-08-28 14:19:13+00:00
TL;DR: I made a Brainfuck IDE, macro language, and a RISC-like VM in Brainfuck. Then I wrote an assembler, linker, and a buggy C compiler for it. Finally I used all of this to parse Doom WAD files and display Doom’s titlepic — still technically in Brainfuck.

Demo: https://braintease.dev Code: https://github.com/ahineya/braintease Full Writeup + Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/brainfuck/comments/1n1trwc/i_made_a...
by in_cahoots | 2025-08-28 14:19:21+00:00
I think point #4 is a little off. Rich people think they have more power than poor people, but at least in this case they lacked the motivation to actually try to change things.

Look at the facts. The article throws out a bunch of famous names, and shows the Kardashians protesting. And yet the protest seemed to last only a few days before one person was arrested and the rest lost interest. A city of millionaires only raised $76k in a GoFundMe.

This doesn't paint a picture of powerful people being thwarted. It's a bunch of unserious people writing letters for a few weeks and then losing interest when things don't immediately go their way.
by jmount | 2025-08-28 14:19:59+00:00
Peter Winkler shares some great variations of this: "Boy Born on Tuesday" (p. xix) and "Men with Sisters" (p. xxii) in "Mathematical Puzzles".

"Mrs. Chance has two children of different ages. At least one of them is a boy born on Tuesday. What is the probability that both of them are boys?"

(note: it is a puzzle, not a biology or data demography problem. so there are 50/50 independence assumptions on gender and uniform day of week assumptions prior to adding the conditioning.)
by cj | 2025-08-28 14:20:25+00:00
The only reason unit economics aren't generally used for software companies is the profit margin is typically 80%+. The cost of posting a Tweet on Twitter/X is close to $0.

Compare the cost of tweeting to the cost of submitting a question to ChatGPT. The fact that ChatGPT rate limits (and now sells additional credits to keep using it after you hit the limit) indicates there are serious unit economic considerations.

We can't think of OpenAI/Anthropic as software businesses. At least from a financial perspective, it's more similar to a company selling compute (e.g. AWS) than a company selling software (e.g. Twitter/X).
by UncleOxidant | 2025-08-28 14:21:36+00:00
I haven't done any fiddling with that yet. Out of the box it seems to allocate 1/2 for the iGPU. The qwen3-coder-30b 8bit quant model was (as you would expect) only taking 30GB (a bit less than half of what was allocated). Though weirdly, in htop it shows that the CPU has 125GB available to it, so I'm not sure what to make of that.
by mthorbal | 2025-08-28 14:22:14+00:00
I understand that this effort is well intentioned but IMHO this is a colossal waste of time, ad here is what I mean: many of these terms have become well understood in the programming/software space, have unambiguous meaning and serve as communication shortcuts in conversation, documentation and sometimes code itslef. Image how much time will be wasted understanding and disambiguating the proposed alternatives.
by the_gipsy | 2025-08-28 14:22:22+00:00
Why can you not frame it as: "a random family has been sampled, the sample family has two childs, one of them is a girl"?

I.e. without "discarding", just giving some additional, but not complete, information on the random sample. Is adding information about the picked sample the same as discarding all contrarian samples? Why is this relevant?
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-08-28 14:22:26+00:00
> Replace "paper" with anything else you consume in your everyday life.

You eat apples, but if you replaced "apples" with "human babies", then by eating them you would be committing murder and cannibalism. It's an unpopular opinion, but this logical argument proves you are a murdering cannibalistic monster.
by jcarterwil | 2025-08-28 14:22:43+00:00
Most attempts to improve processed food stop at swapping ingredients: less sugar, fewer calories, lower salt. The evidence suggests that doesn’t solve the real problem.

A more useful way to approach reformulation is to focus on the metabolic systems most affected by ultra-processed foods. Think about protecting the liver by capping added sugar and fructose and reducing seed oils, feeding the gut by adding real fiber and removing emulsifiers that disrupt the microbiome, and supporting the brain by rebalancing fats and including essential nutrients. This way of thinking, sometimes called the metabolic matrix, has already been applied at scale in the Middle East, where a major food company reformulated hundreds of products.

The other missing piece is verification. Labels and nutrient panels don’t tell you whether a food reduces metabolic stress. Continuous glucose monitors do. A simple A/B test comparing the old and reformulated product shows immediately whether you flattened the glucose spike. That gives you real outcome data within days rather than waiting for epidemiology years later.

This frames reformulation as an engineering problem: change the inputs, define the constraints, then measure the outputs with real human data. It shifts the conversation from “does the label look better” to “does this food reduce glycemic pressure in practice.”

I’m curious whether others have tried using CGMs or other biometrics in product design. Could this become a standard tool for validating food and nutrition claims?
by nemomarx | 2025-08-28 14:23:39+00:00
I feel pretty sympathetic, but I also feel sympathetic when I imagine working with someone who has outbursts. The details of how he responds to "routine workplace stress" and the actual symptoms are pretty absent from this piece.

I'm not sure how to resolve the interests of everyone involved - I just know that when I've had to work with a colleague who was volatile or prone to yelling at me it made my own life and mental health much worse.
by nradov | 2025-08-28 14:23:53+00:00
Your comment is quite disconnected from reality. Blaming the city of LA makes a lot of sense. The mayor Karen Bass was completely ineffectual. And even before she was elected the city had failed to properly upgrade their fire fighting infrastructure or building codes.

Most volunteer fire fighters act as reserves in more rural areas and are only called up for major incidents. The city of LA and surrounding cities like Calabasas don't rely heavily on volunteers.

Climate change might be a minor factor in the intensity of the 2025 Southern California wildfires but those have been happening periodically for millennia. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) will sometimes dump a lot of rain on Southern California for several years at a stretch causing extensive brush growth, then shift north for several years allowing everything to dry out. At that point any little spark will ignite a raging wildfire, especially when the Santa Ana winds are blowing. This is not "forest" that can be actively managed, it's chaparral in rough hilly terrain. It's simply impossible to clear much of the brush or conduct controlled burns. The only effective measures are building fire-resistant structures with defensible space around them — or simply not building in those areas at all.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-28 14:23:55+00:00
Ah, there it is. The excuses, it's scrum all over again.

Mystical practitioners discount the studies done in the open as not fair or not being done right, or the people participating not believing in it hard enough.

My man, 95% of AI pilots failed.

https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat...

> As it is, I have no problem with your naysaying, I'm getting results, your disbelief doesn't change that

Studies and evidence mean nothing to cults and religious believers, so yeah, I am happy that you feel and believe like you have your personal connection to the higher being that is the LLM. Keep the faith!
by morleytj | 2025-08-28 14:23:57+00:00
This is very unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that the author has been excluded and is suffering to this extent.

On another note though:

"This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience."

I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those patterns from reading AI-generated language now too.
by techpineapple | 2025-08-28 14:24:08+00:00
I’m suss about this paper when it makes this claim:

“where AI is more likely to automate, rather than augment , human labor.”

Where is AI currently automating human labor? Not Software Engineering. Or - what’s the difference between AI that augments me so I can do the job of three people and AI that “automates human labor”
Show HN: Posting My Startup for 10th Time, An AI Navigation and Task Assitant
by Dhavidh | 2025-08-28 14:24:10+00:00
I've built a tool that empowers customers to retrieve real-time data and take direct actions on your website, all powered by ChatGPT Agent Operator and Anthropic Computer Use. No more digging around-just ask and act, Posting for the 10th time because am bad at marketing and don't know how to get my first customer
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-28 14:24:14+00:00
> can't do anything with respect to legislators. In their eyes, your privacy and the consumer's rights are less important than some grandma

You’re correct, but for the wrong reasons. Privacy framings don’t work because people who care about privacy are unusually politically nihilistic and/or lazy. I’ve worked on privacy legislation. I’ve also worked on other laws. Nobody calls or writes about the former. With the latter, it was almost trivial to demonstrate to the elected that there was real political capital in embracing the issue.
by lelanthran | 2025-08-28 14:24:57+00:00
It's a failing of many type systems of older languages (except Pascal).

The best way in many languages for flags is using unsigned integers that are botwise-ORed together.

In pseudocode:

Object someObject; foo (someObject, Object.Flag1 | Object.Flag2 | Object.Flag3);

Whatever language you are using, it probably has some namespaced way to define flags as `(1 << 0)` and `(1 << 1)` etc.
by DavidPiper | 2025-08-28 14:25:01+00:00
This is a very curious take (pun intended). I also agree with many of the lines of questioning you've written here. (Not American, but very generalise-able of course.)

Based on your bio, I'd be genuinely interested to know if you have thoughts on a very related question that I've been struggling with lately:

If we can create things that people believe reflect reality (news, literature, video games, ...), or further create fake things that people believe are completely real (voice clones, deep fakes, AI video, ...), what evidence (or other factor) is sufficient for someone with this questioning mindset to stop questioning and start acting?
by Ericson2314 | 2025-08-28 14:25:33+00:00
So from the capsicum perspective, when you spawn a process, it should be maximally isolated by default. Any sharing of resources should be opt-in, not opt-out.

This is not a big change implementation-wise, but it completely changes the programming model. Instead of dreaming up endless new sandboxing strategies, we just give processes exactly what they need, no more, no less.
by standardly | 2025-08-28 14:25:57+00:00
> There is no reason for an employer or professional colleagues to be aware of an employees medical issues.

Totally agree, but it can get a bit weird. I struggle with depression, and at times I have felt like I owed my co-workers/manager/boss an excuse as to why I "suck" sometimes. IE; I didn't show up late for the meeting because I am irresponsible, rather because I'm just in a bad spell this week and have brain fog. If I don't tell them, they may think the former. If I do tell them, who knows.
by Mallowram | 2025-08-28 14:26:25+00:00
The clearest direct claim is if there are no contradictions then language is impossible.

Language is not a "reflection of reality" in any way shape or form: reality is always specific, language is always arbitrary.

We're currently in a neurodynamic/neurobiological overthrow of psychodynamic principles that obviates in presocrats onwards.

The fact is language has nothing really to do with reality and has only to do with subjective biases that arbitrarily perform gibberish in the stead of status-gain, control, etc (pick any primate bias that Aristotle onwards was unconscious to).

“We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use linguistic representations to think.” Ev Fedorenko Language Lab MIT 2024
by bogwog | 2025-08-28 14:26:45+00:00
Do you think the government would be able to get away with altering data after the fact? If they released it, someone downloaded it, and would be able to easily spot changes. It could even be (and probably is) automated.

And either way, what does the blockchain offer if the government comes out and says that some previously published numbers were incorrect, and they publish new ones? You'll have two competing versions of the same data, with one considered obsolete because the government says so.

And none of this matters if they're altering the data before publishing.
by petralithic | 2025-08-28 14:26:59+00:00
I think you're reading too much into my comment. It's not a put down, I'm genuinely asking because it seems many people still think anyone serious about AI just types prompts into Midjourney, but it's become a lot more complex than that, akin to electronic music production; producers haven't played every single note with a physical instrument their synths synthesize yet their arrangement of the notes is what makes them a producer, and so too with AI workflows such as those seen in ComfyUI. If one is not familiar then they might not understand where the field is today.

Regarding prompts, I never said a computer "understands" or is "emotional" about an image, I don't think anyone actually thinks that, on either side of the debate so not sure why you're bringing that up. By "compressed" I just meant in the information theory way, in that if you have a specific series of words, and a given temperature and other settings for a given model, it will deterministically produce the same image, hence the set of those attributes can be thought of as a compressed representation of that image. I made no claims about it thinking whatsoever.

> It can produce things it's never seen based on lots of things that it has seen.

Yes, just like humans, as I had said in my initial comment about the same old arguments being said since 2021 when Stable Diffusion came out. But again that's tiresome so let's not repeat that here too.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-28 14:27:03+00:00
“American Bitcoin, the bitcoin miner backed by two of U.S. President Donald Trump's sons, has locked in crypto and traditional investors to back an all-stock merger that will allow the firm to soon start trading on the Nasdaq, the company's largest investor said.”

It aims “to start trading in early September” [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/american-bitcoin-...
by 4ggr0 | 2025-08-28 14:27:38+00:00
There's an "apology"/response from Keith.

https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2023-01-an_overdue_apology

"i'm sorry, hope we can continue working together in the future" seems like a very mild response to allegedly fumbling 30k, but what do i know...

> the asynchronous landscape within Python's ecosystem failed to meet my expectations, leading me to conclude that Requests should retain its synchronous nature.

i concluded that the ecosystem does things differently than my personal standards, so i'm gonna revert and keep the money. nice.