MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rfwhyte | 2025-08-25 16:56:20+00:00
The #1 reason I would never EVER use any of these AI agents or browsers or whatever, is despite what these companies may say, they don't work work for ME, the work for the corporations who own them, and those corporations don't give a single f*ck about any of us, all they care about is money.

That means if I want to buy a widget, and I ask the AI to find me the best deal on a widget, the AI agent isn't actually going to find me the lowest priced widget, but rather the widget that makes the most profit for the AI company and whichever widget maker has paid the AI company the most money to have their AI promote it.

There will be zero transparency and accountability around any of this, and all the AI agent / browser companies will claim their AIs are working for their "Users" but like everything else these days they'll actually be working for whichever sleazebag scammer or deep pocketed mega corp that's willing to pay them the most money to shill their products, as there's just far too great an incentive to lie, cheat, steal and deceive, and if capitalism has taught us anything, its that principles get tossed in the bin ASAP as soon as real money gets involved.
by imglorp | 2025-08-25 16:57:23+00:00
Rapid onset enshittification by new owner who is hostile/oblivious to the community. Background info here: https://imgur.com/gallery/imgur-is-near-dead-suggestion-poss...

* Imgur's US mods were all laid off * Imgur official discord server is gone * Basic site maintenance is lagging (notifications have been broken for days) * Ads are being ramped up, including NSFW ones
by dansmyers | 2025-08-25 16:57:24+00:00
If you're interested in ancient math, take a look at Eleanor Robson's accessible paper on the Plimpton 322 tablet:

https://scispace.com/pdf/words-and-pictures-new-light-on-pli...

Robson's argument is that it isn't a trig table in the modern sense and was probably constructed as a teacher's aide for completing-the-square problems that show up in Babylonian mathematics. Other examples of teaching-related tablets are known to exist.

On a quick scan, it looks like the Wildberger paper cites Robson's and accepts the relation to the completing-the-square problem, but argues that the tablet's numbers are too complex to have been practical for teaching.
by yardshop | 2025-08-25 16:57:33+00:00
I thought this might be about the saying I've heard a bunch recently, "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast."

I've mostly heard it in the context of building and construction videos where they are approaching a new skill or technique and have to remind themselves to slow down.

Going slowly and being careful leads to fewer mistakes, which will be a "smoother" process and ends up taking less time, whereas going too fast and making mistakes means work has to be redone and ultimately takes longer.

On rereading it, I see some parallels: When one is trying to go too fast, and is possibly becoming impatient with their progress, their mental queue fills up and processing suffers. If one accepts a slower pace, one's natural single-tasking capability will work better, and they will make better progress as a result.

And maybe its just my selection bias working hard to confirm that he actually is talking about what I want him to say!
by numpy-thagoras | 2025-08-25 16:57:40+00:00
This is the first time in a long time on Hacker News that I've not seen universal disapproval to this measure. People are actually arguing for it, even as a devil's advocate? What the UK has been doing is wrong, it is disenfranchising and disempowering people.

The UK is not a democratic or even liberty-focused state anymore. It's always been ruled by a crowd of people who went to privately-funded schools that cost a fortune. Half the government's politicians and staffers can trace their relations back to the same historical personage.

They aren't afraid for their kids with these laws. They're afraid that this ossified, stunted system of power that's been built over 800 years will break, and they will be out of a job with pitchfork-wielding crowds chasing them out of London.
by patrickhogan1 | 2025-08-25 16:58:01+00:00
Something changed about 1 year ago where the spam calls I get are 10x higher than in the past. It got so bad I had to change how I use my phone. Any caller not in my contact list goes immediately to voicemail.

I’ve tried several robocall blockers, but they tend to cause connectivity issues.

If anyone else has this problem, what are you using to prevent robocalls?
by thamsanqaDream | 2025-08-25 16:58:12+00:00
On June 1, 2024, my friend and I opened Blender for the first time. We wanted to launch a fashion show, but doing it physically was too expensive(at least for us). So we tried it in 3D. By September 8, we had our first CGI fashion show. The quality wasn’t perfect, but the feeling was.

And that’s when we realized what if we could open this up to every non-3D creative who wants content?

That’s why we’re building cr8-xyz, an open-source platform that makes 3D content creation simple and intuitive. Think of it as making world-building as easy as Canva, but with the power of Blender and a global creative community behind it.
by Anthony-G | 2025-08-25 16:58:12+00:00
The article mentions streams as being a safe source of drinking water for rural communities — as most of the population were during the medieval period.

My mother from rural north-west Ireland drank water from a stream for the first 25 years of her life. There was no running water in her home-place until the late 70s (after she had moved out). Rain water was collected from the gutters in barrels for washing and other uses but water for drinking had to be carried by bucket from a stream 1km away across fields on the side of a hill that were muddy when it rained. I’m guessing drinking water from a stream would have been even more common in the preceding decades and centuries.
by wjsekfghks | 2025-08-25 16:58:22+00:00
hey! that's awesome to hear, thanks for the feedback.

we've tried a lot of things to make code more in-line with our paradigms (initially tried a few agents to parse out "project rules" from existing code, then used that in the system prompt), but have found that the agents tend to go off-track regardless. the highest leverage has just been changing the model (Claude writes code a certain way which we tend to prefer, vs GPT, etc) and a few strong system prompts (NEVER WRITE COMMENTS, repeated twice).

so the questions here are less about that, but more about overall functional / system requirements, and acknowledging that for stylistic things, the user will still have to review.
by qwertylicious | 2025-08-25 16:58:24+00:00
As a homeowner I literally pay a fee every month to fund the construction and maintenance of the infrastructure that gets water to my home.

If that water supply is cut off without valid reason, there is a complaint mechanism with the local utility commission where the issue can be heard and resolved.

I also live in the municipality where my water is supplied, and therefore am represented by its government.

Therefore I am both economically and politically invested in that infrastructure.

Unfortunately none of this is true for the folks in this article.

Is that a "guarantee"? No. Nothing is guaranteed. But it's far better than the arrangement these folks operated under.
by mrandish | 2025-08-25 16:58:25+00:00
Well... no, it's not. As long as device owners can choose which and how many app stores are on their device, regulators and courts will be satisfied. If users then choose number_of_app-stores == 1 and app_store_provider == "Apple", that's the user's choice - and for many users, like Grandma, that may be the right choice.

Regulators have never ruled that Apple can't have an app store or that the number of enabled App Stores MUST be more than 1 - only that the legal owner of the device have an opportunity to choose. Scenarios like "Oh no, the EU wants to take away Grandma's one safe, simple walled-garden app store so she's left to fend for herself on the dark web" is a disingenuous straw man exaggeration by Apple and their apologists to protect Apple's multi-billion dollar app store monopoly.

Once there's owner choice, even Grandma who chooses Apple as her only app store will pay lower prices and very likely gain other safe options like a full featured Firefox with Ublock Origin ad blocking. Just the existence of competitive choice is beneficial - even to users who choose "no competition". Plus Apple will finally have a real incentive to be more responsive and reasonable with app developers regarding app store prices and policies - which will help solo and small startup app developers.
by inerte | 2025-08-25 16:59:16+00:00
I agree with you but there are levels of purchase. This article explains it well https://a16z.com/ai-x-commerce/

Let's say even if I always buy "Deodorant X", I might instruct my agent every month to go out and buy it from the cheapest place. So I wouldn't do it for "any chairs" but the usual purchase from a certain brand, I can see myself automating this. In fact, I have because I use Subscribe & Save from Amazon, but sometimes things are cheaper on the brand's website or some other marketplace.
by latexr | 2025-08-25 16:59:29+00:00
That read like a bizarre tangent, because it didn’t at all address the argument. To make it clear I’ll repeat the crux of my point, the conclusion that the other arguments lead up to, which you skipped entirely in your reply:

> They’re far from impervious to corruption.

That’s it. That’s the point. You brought up corruption, and I pointed out blockchains don’t actually prevent that. Which you seem to agree with, so I don’t get your response at all.

> But they are the ones who are actually working and developing practical applications.

No, they are not. If no one wants to use them because of all the things they do wrong, they are not practical.

> They are the ones doing actual engineering and dealing with real challenges and solving the problems that people are now facing

No, they are not. They aren’t solving real problems and that is exactly the problem. They are being used almost exclusively for grifts, scams, and hoarding.

> such as "how the hell do we deny access to bad actors on the open global internet who have endless resources and have nothing to lose by breaking social norms"?

That is not a problem blockchains solve. At all.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-25 16:59:37+00:00
Would you be OK if it was your family who got killed in that "single accident" by an illegal driver which would have been preventable if he'd not be allowed in?

In any civilized society, the crimes of illegal immigrants should be zero, because they shouldn't be here in the first place driving 18-wheelers professionally without proper visa and vetting that they're skilled for the job.

But this is what you get when there's no direct liability and accountability from employers and governments on who they let on public roads when they crash and kill someone.
by wat10000 | 2025-08-25 16:59:59+00:00
I think this is an argument for the log scale. I'd argue that the things you say it communicates are not actually correct.

Adobe's size has been growing exponentially pretty much this whole time. The rate increased slightly in the mid-2010s. SumatraPDF started out that way too, but managed to level out after about a decade.

Relative size is what matters here. That increase from ~2.5MB to ~5MB in the mid-90s was pretty significant for the time. In terms of the impact on users, it's probably at least as important if not more so than going from 300MB to 600MB 25-30 years later.
by cogman10 | 2025-08-25 17:00:17+00:00
For something like this, annotated graphs and examples (IMO) work a lot better than formulas in explaining the problem and solution.

Particularly because distributed computer systems aren't pure math problems to be solved. Load often comes from usage which is often closer to random inputs rather than predicable variables. Further, how load is processed depends on a bunch of things from the OS scheduler to the current load on the network.

It can be hard to really intuitively understand that a bottlenecked system processes the same load slower than an unbound system.
by jm4 | 2025-08-25 17:00:28+00:00
I tried Omarchy for a bit. It's a nice setup and DHH made some good choices, but I'm right there with you.

Most often, I use maximized windows for the things I'm actively working on and floating windows for something like popping over to a file manager for a quick operation. In Hyprland, this often meant using separate workspaces for the main apps I always have open and workspace switching is more effort than alt+tab. I'm also a heavy user of hotkeys for my most frequent apps. They are set up to focus or launch the app.

I ended up gaining little to nothing from the Hyprland setup that I didn't already have or could easily implement in Plasma so I went back after several days. I was also having weird problems launching some games in Steam. In particular, Balatro wouldn't launch under Hyprland even though it works fine under Plasma/Wayland. I spent some time troubleshooting to no avail before deciding it just wasn't worth it.

I did get some new ideas from Omarchy though. I never thought to set up xcompose before. I also like what DHH did with PWAs.

In any case, I like what DHH is doing because it's making people try Linux when they otherwise may not have. What's especially cool is he's proving that you don't need to dumb things down, which is exactly what everyone else has tried to do all these years. Omarchy is 100% a power user setup and does an awesome job of showing what Linux is capable of while still being very accessible to newcomers.
by stronglikedan | 2025-08-25 17:01:06+00:00
> the web folks have hijacked the term "API" as a short hand for "web API".

I don't see it. API is too vague to mean one type of API, whether it's one from before the web, or a web API. As soon as there was more than one type of API, the term API became incomplete without a qualifier. Nothing was hijacked, and your sentence includes an incomplete term.
by grues-dinner | 2025-08-25 17:02:09+00:00
It's the same scam selling ideas that sound good to people who don't understand what a "joule" as Pavegen and the other systems that generate energy from footfall or passing cars. Mechanical energy is pretty "low grade" as energy goes.

It 100% works, but it's a system that has very specific applications and doesn't scale up well. And the best systems use a magical property of some fairly heavy materials called "being liquid" to simplify the logistics of getting millions of tonnes of weight to the lifting mechanism.
by bityard | 2025-08-25 17:02:53+00:00
It's never been a better time to get into DIY electronics projects. Literally every part of the process is well within a curious hacker's abilities. Microcontrollers and cheap sensors/displays started becoming commonplace around 15 years ago, and the most recent innovations are good and cheap PCB production and 3D printing your own parts/enclosures.

You might check out https://hackaday.com/blog/. They quite often feature projects from people who built the thing they wanted, instead of buying it. (Often because the thing they wanted couldn't be bought in the first place.)
by homakov | 2025-08-25 17:03:23+00:00
I wasn’t criticizing the guide — just pointing out real OAuth2 pitfalls that still affect users.

The spec itself made mistakes:

• Silent account hijack via “Connect this provider.”

• Redirect leaks of code (via Referrer) or access_token (via #hash).

• CSRF because state was optional and often ignored.

The point is: these aren’t obscure edge cases, they’re structural issues baked into the protocol.
by ihatehn | 2025-08-25 17:03:27+00:00
On top of the OsmAnd user experience being a little rough (it can do a lot, but not gracefully) it relies on accurate OSM data underneath. So the best thing to do is at least make a Note on OSM, or edit it yourself, and mark that intersection as having a no-turns-allowed restriction.

Even Google is relying on user submissions to keep its stuff accurate these days, they just have money to pay editors and reviewers.
by stpedgwdgfhgdd | 2025-08-25 17:03:58+00:00
Mmmm… read the book on Extreme Programming.

The idea is that you let the code drive the system and do not optimize prematurely. Sometimes developers design parts that are not needed, and often not in the first phase.

It is a way to evolve a system unbiased. Of course there is a trade-off. If the refactoring/change is very expensive, like a database schema change in production, it is good to spent a lot of upfront design. Takes experience to see where you can relax and where you need to be careful.
by browningstreet | 2025-08-25 17:05:03+00:00
I have all my windows centered but pyramid stacked. I can see a bit of everything but my main browser is in the center. Slack is in the upper right, and the browser leaves a bit of the Slack screen open. I keep Obsidian in the lower left such that I can see the organization panel.. it helps me keep a mental map of the notes I'm working with.

In the center are two Chrome browsers representing two separate profiles.. a personal profile for some flows, and a work profile for others. Again, stacked so that I can see most of the tabs.

I've never dared to dream that I could combine this habit with some Hyprland-style "spontaneous windows launched by keybinds". I'd love that. A prime stack of core windows and an omega stack of ephemeral windows.

When I have multiple screens I also tend to stack one above the other, as opposed to left and right.

Corner case all the way.
by infamouscow | 2025-08-25 17:05:16+00:00
Being outside of US legal jurisdiction is exactly why they ought to be thrown into a wood chipper.

I don't understand why this doesn't happen EVERY DAY until the problem is resolved.

And before someone cite US code: it's virtually impossible for foreigners to seek justice in this context. Not only do these criminals lack the money, education, and access to legal representation to do so, but the DoJ has better things to do than spend their time looking into the veracity of an international claim of this kind.
by bluGill | 2025-08-25 17:05:23+00:00
Depends on the area.

I live in iowa - nearly everyone is on rural water because wells don't produce much water. I'm on a well and I can't water my lawn - after an hour my well is empty. My well is about a meter in diameter so that should be a lot stored. it would be $20k to extend the city water pipe to my lot.

i used to live in MN, there I knew farmers on a 5cm well who had no problem watering lawns, and 50 cows from the well.

in colorado where this story is water is less available than iowa. (most farms have a year round creek that could be treated to become drinkable)
by thegrim33 | 2025-08-25 17:05:37+00:00
Something I've been doing a lot lately is investigating the people on HN that push various beliefs, and in this comment thread there's two voices pushing for how much AI is going to continue to grow, going forwards.

Who are these two voices? Well, we've got fragmede, who, looking through their HN profile, works at NVIDIA as a "senior AI infrastructure engineer", and we've got mh-, who, looking through their HN profile, works at Wunderkind, which is "pioneering a new category of AI agentic marketing".

So, the two people in here pushing messaging about how great and valuable AI is, and how it'll continue to get better, have their jobs/livelihood tied to AI and people continuing to pour money into AI.

It almost always turns out that way. The people protesting the loudest for some idea universally are somehow tied to profiting by convincing people of that idea. Not that that means they're wrong, of course. Just providing context.
by AJ007 | 2025-08-25 17:05:57+00:00
Between the 0 real security and the generational jump in capability fraud now has because of AI, there is no excuse for the continued existence of traditional voice or SMS. We'll never be able to solve compromised devices or social engineering of others, but the idea that anyone/any software in the world can push a message to a device and then immediately communicate with that person is absurd.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-08-25 17:06:06+00:00
This should be possible on X11 using standard extensions. XCompositeRedirectWindow to render your window to a virtual buffer, get pixmap, bind pixmap to new croppedWindow as a GL texture, here apply a crop transform. Then optionally unmap original window. Finally, we have to remap input events. This is trivial browser-style event interception, XSelectInput, change x,y, XSendEvent. I can try to make it work sometime this week. A CLI tool you'd use like `xcropwindow windowID x y dx dy`. As a side effect, this way you can have multiple viewports into different parts of a window. But there's probably a few deal-breaker edge cases I'm missing.

On the other hand, the Great Wayland Security Theater probably doesn't admit such riff-raff.
by OptionOfT | 2025-08-25 17:06:28+00:00
I'm surprised by this, as Belgium changed its tax policy towards these vehicles. It used to be that you could register as a commercial hauler, ergo a lot less tax. Put in an LPG in the back and it's cheap to drive.

Lower costs made this interesting, as now you can have a vehicle that can do it all, at lower cost.

That tax benefit disappeared in the last 3 years ago, making these vehicle taxable like normal road vehicles, unless you actually have a company (which isn't as easy to get as registering an LLC): https://www.vlaanderen.be/belastingen-en-begroting/vlaamse-b...
by 9rx | 2025-08-25 17:06:30+00:00
> Communism gives politicians 100% control over the country

Impossible. Communism has no concept of state (nor money, nor class). That's, like, its defining feature.

Of course, you can't just wish for class, state, and money to go away. They are necessary features of our current world. Communism is the imagined outcome of what happens after we achieve post-scarcity. It is a work of science fiction. Star Trek is a more modern adaptation on the same idea.

> Communism can never work since its an autocratic system

If it were more than science fiction, it is literally the opposite, but, again, depends on post-scarcity. You are likely confusing communism with the Communist Party, who believe in an autocratic system being necessary to pave the way to achieving post-scarcity, with, on paper, a desire to get there.
by xp84 | 2025-08-25 17:06:40+00:00
I'll definitely believe it when I don't see those calls, but I could not be more in favor of turning the phone network into a much more "trusted" type of system -- similar to how SSL certs used to be prior to the Let's Encrypt era, where it requires some form of validation of something besides 'existence':

Conceptually, someone US-based should have to cryptographically sign, with their license to continue participating at stake, an assertion that the source phone number is real. People should be free to configure their devices or phone accounts (A) what countries to accept calls from and (B) whether to accept unverified calls whose numbers are presumably spoofed.

Note: i'm aware that SHAKEN/STIR or whatever exists and shares some of that idea, I'm just looking forward to full adoption of something so that I can make those choices described above.

Combine this next with ability to report numbers who spam (with the Apple/Google duopoly it should be trivially easy to put a "report spam" button in the call UI) and sanction providers (first financially and eventually with revocation of their credential to sign calls).

Maybe 30 years ago it would have been seen as too draconian to prevent someone from being able to call others anonymously but the Internet exists and provides ample avenues for those cliche use cases like "whistleblower needs to talk to journalists" so I'm 100% happy to have 'burdensome regulation' here if it stops scammers from ruining the phone as a usable channel for urgent information like "Your car is ready to pick up from the shop" or "Hi, you're the emergency contact for ____ and they are headed to the hospital."