MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by h0h0h0h0111 | 2025-08-27 07:51:11+00:00
I don't think it's unfortunate - in principle, return on investment today can achieve greater humanitarian impact tomorrow vs humanitarian impact today.

Of course, this creates a perverse situation where choosing humanitarian impact today over investment is always irrational, but this is the fundamental tension in charity vs investment, and aside from relying on governments and guilt, I'm not sure we have discovered a great model to solve it
by nine_k | 2025-08-27 07:51:26+00:00
> Why is it so complex to have a foss mobile OS.

This is not too hard. What is hard is to trust it enough. A FOSS OS, by definition, allows to install whatever software, and allows for modification of itself. It is built to overcome limitations, not impose them. In this regard, it's a perfect tool for a criminal who wants to circumvent security measures, because these are limitations. It's the same problem as with cheaters in online games, only with more than games on stake. Banks and payment systems want guarantees of integrity and protection, including protection from user's actions.

A FOSS OS also assumes that the user values the freedom, and is competent in its technical aspects. This is emphatically not true about many users. They choose iOS because it's locked down and thus they cannot inadvertently do something they don't understand, and can't be bothered to learn. More importantly, their grandmother cannot do something she doesn't understand but scammers persuade her to do.

It's a bit like driving on public roads. If you want to drive yourself, you have to reveal your identity and obtain a license. If you want the hassle, take a bus, but buses only go along their routes. Letting unlicensed people drive cars where they see fit was found unacceptably dangerous for everyone eround. Maybe mainstream mobile software development will follow this model, too :(
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-08-27 07:52:13+00:00
LLMs can obviously do things, so we don't disagree there; I didn't argue they couldn't do things. They can definitely act as agents of their operator.

However, I still don't think LLMs have "agency", in the sense of being capable of making choices and taking responsibility for the consequences of them. The responsibility for any actions undertaken by them still reside outside of themselves; they are sophisticated tools with no agency of their own.

If you know of any good works on nonhuman agency I'd be interested to read some.
by microtonal | 2025-08-27 07:53:17+00:00
GrapheneOS and SailfishOS focus on a narrow set of devices and they can keep up with hardware support. I agree that you have to make concessions in terms of allowing proprietary firmware blobs and opaque baseband hardware. You also have to choose your hardware wisely (e.g. GrapheneOS can/could piggyback on Google's driver work).

I was just saying that you can make the problem more narrow by not trying to support every device out there. Start small and pick your battles (which probably means using AOSP and using sandboxed AOSP).

I think the main issue of many previous attempts was what typically happens in the FLOSS community: there are N attempts rather than one coordinated attempt (Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, PostmarketOS, PureOS, etc.) and everybody is targeting different hardware. It's similar to how the Linux desktop got fragmented, though it's even more problematic for mobile, since the usage is probably 1/1000th of Linux desktop usage.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-08-27 07:55:40+00:00
Thanks, I wasn't trying to cherry pick or anything. But I don't think that the full text changes the substance of what is laid out in the first couple of paragraphs. The FSF (and by extension Stallman) refrains from calling the user names if he chooses to use nonfree software, presumably because they recognize that freedom must include the freedom to run any software at all, even if they consider it harmful. But they are quite clear that they do consider it harmful both to oneself and others to run nonfree software, even if it is useful. That, to me, is very much refusing to make concessions to practicality within their ideology. The only concession they do make is an explicitly ideological one, not a practical one! So again, this piece seems to me to support my claim, not to disprove it.
by Yaina | 2025-08-27 07:56:29+00:00
It is true, and what you quoted does not contradict this.

https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/signing-...

You can temporarily install extensions in about:debugging, but everything permanent needs to be signed.

> Add-ons need to be signed before they can be installed into release and beta versions of Firefox. This signing process takes place through addons.mozilla.org (AMO), whether you choose to distribute your add-on through AMO or to do it yourself.
by elcritch | 2025-08-27 07:56:43+00:00
No, the drugs don't make doing chores fun or any of that.

For those with ADHD they turn on the prefrontal cortex which reduces or removes the feeling of utter torture and pain from doing chores.

It's sort of like taking a drug that takes away the fear and almost physical inability to to touch a hot stove most people have. Normally that'd be bad. Except here the hot stove is actually harmless and useful to touch.
Ask HN: What to learn for math for modeling?
by shivajikobardan | 2025-08-27 07:57:01+00:00
parametric cubic curve

boundary representation

blending function

spline

b-spline

cubic bezier curve

de casteljau algorithm

I have been diving into these topics since few days and I have not understood anything. I tried peter shirley's textbook on Computer Graphics. Foley et al, Hearn baker etc...

It is clear to me that I lack the mathematics preriquisites for understanding this. Thus, I am deeply asking for resources that I can do to brush up. Me being a computer engineering graduate I have done math classes, it is just that I became like a calculator instead of understanding the logic behind doing the formulas and steps so need a short revision.
by cjk | 2025-08-27 07:57:01+00:00
We've been using mise since it was called rtx at $DAYJOB, and it's caused many a headache (mostly around upgrades/backcompat/etc.). We use it both on dev machines and in CI. In spite of that, it’s decent at what it does, and I wouldn’t soon replace it with individual version managers, given that we have similar needs.

However…more than once we've seen language runtimes that used to be available exclusively via plug-ins be migrated to be internal to mise, which broke everyone's setups in strange and hilarious ways, and caused countless hours of debugging.

Less bad overall than using individual runtime version managers for sure. But the next time mise costs us a bunch of hours fixing multiple engineers' setups, I intend to find another solution, even if that means writing my own. It’s burned us nearly one too many times.
by davidhyde | 2025-08-27 07:57:02+00:00
Here are some more points to consider.

1. Allowing user initiated early retry exit. Nothing is stopping some other developer from wrapping your function-with-retries in their own retry-able function. And then another developer even further removed from the details to wrap that one again. Now you have n pow 3 retries and you have services timing out after an hour instead of milliseconds or seconds. Remember that your function-with-retries can just look like a slower flakey function to them. Perhaps exposing the retry variables in the api is the answer, perhaps not.

2. Code readability and debug-ability. Wrapping a piece of work in a function pointer and giving it a generic name like “action” increases cognitive load and makes the codebase slower to read. This is especially true if the contents of the action is so far up the boilerplate chain that the developer has already forgotten what it does. This is a part of the codebase that will be read to troubleshoot the failure so it helps if it is self describing.

3. In my experience, retries are often added when the failure mode is not well understood or as a quick hack to get things over the line. However, we sometimes cannot control what we call so they are an also valid mechanism to use under certain circumstances.
by hn_throw2025 | 2025-08-27 07:57:18+00:00
I use Zoom rather than Teams, but have no problems playing background music with Spotify. Just have to make sure that “share computer audio” is not enabled when sharing your screen. Also, when I was using the mic of my bluetooth headphones, any music played would be mono and lower quality due to bluetooth bandwidth. Since moving to using a dedicated mic on my desk, the bluetooth headphones are output only and back to good quality stereo (MacOSX and Bose QC35).
by cx42net | 2025-08-27 07:57:23+00:00
I saw that the rabbit hole is deep, and I don't want to fall into that one (already slipped a bit). I don't want to solder mine, so buying one already built (such as the glove80 or the moonlander) is already taking too much time for me.

Repairing mine is not possible, it's the wrist support that is worn out and it's glued to the keyboard...
by yfontana | 2025-08-27 07:57:39+00:00
Open source models like Flux Kontext or Qwen image edit wouldn't refuse, but you need to either have a sufficiently strong GPU or get one in the cloud (not difficult nor expensive with services like runpod), then set up your own processing pipeline (again, not too difficult if you use ComfyUI). Results won't be SOTA, but they shouldn't be too far off.
by lyu07282 | 2025-08-27 07:58:05+00:00
I think it also fits within the larger age verification thing the powers that be have been pushing heavily. Whatever it is I don't think that's cynical or conspiratorial, I think not to be questioning their hidden motives is naive. They don't really care about teen suicide as a problem to report on and to find solutions to. They never cared about children getting murdered if it's part of our official foreign policy, so I don't know why I should not question their motives now.
by BAAIBeijing | 2025-08-27 07:58:36+00:00
Hi HN, we're sharing an update on our work to improve reasoning in retrieval systems for RAG and Agents.

Our project, BGE-Reasoner, is an open-source, three-stage framework (Rewrite, Embed, Rerank) that showed strong performance on the BRIGHT benchmark for reasoning-intensive retrieval as of our submission on Aug 21.

Our main contribution is using synthetic data and reinforcement learning to handle complex queries that go beyond simple semantic matching. We're sharing this because we believe the framework itself is a solid, replicable contribution for anyone working on advanced RAG or Agent search.

We're in the process of open-sourcing the model weights, code, and training data to the community.

Love for you to take a look, share your thoughts, and we welcome any and all feedback or critiques. Thanks!

- Github: https://github.com/FlagOpen/FlagEmbedding/tree/master/resear...

- Benchmark: https://brightbenchmark.github.io
by corimaith | 2025-08-27 07:59:15+00:00
>This is really not an important part of what gives LLMs their power. The core is that you have a large scale artificial neural net.

What seperates transformers from LSTMs is their ability to proccess the entire corpus in parallel rather in-sequence and the inclusion of the more efficient "attention" mechanism that allows them to pick up long range dependencies across a language. We don't actually understand the full nature of the latter, but I suspect that is the basis behind the more "intelligent" actions of the LLM. There's quite a general range of problems that a long-range-dependency was encompass, but that's still ultimately limited by language itself.

But if you're talking about this being a fundamentally a probability distribution model, I stand by that, because that's literally the mathematical model (softmax for the encoder and decoder) that's being used in transformers here. It very much is generating a probability distribution over the vocabulary and just picking the highest probability (or beam search) as your next output.

>The LLMs absolutely world model and researchers have shown this many times on smaller language models.

We don't have a formal semantic definition of a "world model", I would take alot of what these researchers are writing with a grain of salt because something like that crosses more into philosophy (especially in the limits of language and logic) than hard engineering that these researchers are trained on.
by WalterBright | 2025-08-27 07:59:26+00:00
Just for fun, I found among my dad's papers the written tests he had to pass before he could even sit in the cockpit of an F-86 Sabrejet. They were quite comprehensive and full of minutia. For damn sure the AF wasn't going to let anyone fly one of those monsters without proving they could study and learn everything about them by heart. No excuses about brain freeze is going to fly (pun intended).

One day, he was flying along in his F-86 over the Arizona desert when the engine conked out. He radioed the situation to the tower, who advised him to bail out. But he knew how to figure out hour far he could fly given his speed, altitude, weight of the fuel, wind speed, etc. and calculated that he could make the strip. And he did, with a few feet to spare.

There's no way I would even dare fly one without mastering all that stuff, either.
by cx42net | 2025-08-27 07:59:39+00:00
Wow, thank you for all these. I didn't knew Incase picked up the Microsoft keyboard but that's a good news (too bad they haven't restarted the "Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000", this one was my absolute favorite!

One thing that makes me hesitant to buy one of these, is that I'm hoping that with one such as the Moonlander or the Glove80, I can replace the used part easily, which should cost less in the long run (but maybe I'm wrong here).
by elliotto | 2025-08-27 07:59:43+00:00
I think the nature of a conversational interface that responds to natural language questions is fundamentally different to the idea that you talk to yourself while reading information sources. I'm not sure it's useful to dismiss the idea that we can talk with a machine.

The current generation of LLMs have had their controversies, but these are still pre alpha products, and I suspect in the future we will look back on releasing them unleashed as a mistake. There's no reason the mistakes they make today can't be improved upon.

If your experiences with learning from a machine are similar to mine, then we can both see a whole new world coming that's going to take advantage of this interface.
by Towaway69 | 2025-08-27 07:59:47+00:00
What if Google is responsible?

What if the tech industry, instead of just “interrupting” various industries, would also take the responsibilities of this interruptions.

After all, if I asked my doctor for methods of killing myself, that doctor would most certainly have a moral if not legal responsibility. But if that doctor is a machine with software then there isn't the same responsibility? Why?
by ufmace | 2025-08-27 08:00:02+00:00
On the one hand, it's nice to see Ruby and the Ruby tooling system getting some love.

On the other, I'm not sure if this is really needed. Most of this stuff already works fine in Ruby with Bundler. Did you know that Bundler already has a really nice syntax for inline requirements for single-file scripts?[0] Seems like a lot of people forgot. Installing Ruby hasn't generally been much of a hassle either AFAIK. Bundler also doesn't seem to have the Python venv problem - it works fine for keeping a bunch of gem versions around in the same Ruby install and only activating the specified ones. I think Gemfile and Gemfile.lock is what Python always wished they had. I guess more speed never hurt, but it never felt like bundler was painfully slow for me, even on huge codebases. So is there really a big win here?

Though I guess plenty of Python gurus probably feel the same way about the uv craze when their existing tooling works well enough for them.

[0] https://bundler.io/guides/bundler_in_a_single_file_ruby_scri...
by vector3 | 2025-08-27 08:01:07+00:00
Is this truly "native" to Gemini 2.5 Flash as they call it? Isn't this a dedicated and different text-to-image model hooked up to Gemini 2.5 Flash with function calling? or do they somehow merge the weights of the two models whilst also not incurring in side effects like degradation in performance?
by ranguna | 2025-08-27 08:02:32+00:00
What do you mean sensible units? kW is instantaneous power whilst kWh is the amount of power created in a unit of time. In other words, this power plant generates 100kW of power and produce 876MWh in a year.

If you have an average of MWh a city needs, having MWh is a helpful metric, as well as kW to make sure you can power the city on peak consumption. No?
by originalvichy | 2025-08-27 08:03:05+00:00
This is exactly the conversation I had with a colleague of mine. They were excited about how LLMs can help people interact with data and visualize it nicely, but I just had to ask - with as little snark as possible - if this wasn't what a monitor and a UI were already doing? It seems like these LLMs are being used as the cliche "hammer that solves all the problems" where problems didn't even exist. Just because we are excited about how an LLM can chew through formatted API data (which is hard for humans to read) doesn't mean that we didn't already solve this with UIs displaying this data.

I don't know why people want to turn the internet into a turn-based text game. The UI is usually great.
by elliotto | 2025-08-27 08:03:12+00:00
As part of my role I watch a lot of people use LLMs and it's fascinating to see their different mental models for what the LLM can do. I suspect it's far easier to explore functionality with a chirpy assistant than an emotionless bot.

I suspect history will remember this as a huge and dangerous mistake, and we will transition to an era of stoic question answering bots that push back harder
by ceving | 2025-08-27 08:03:43+00:00
It is so slow:

$ sudo wc -l /var/log/syslog 4982 /var/log/syslog $ sudo cat /var/log/syslog | bash -c "time gonzo" real 6m13,359s user 6m42,317s sys 0m28,946s

Six minutes on my virtual machine for 5 thousand lines.
Show HN: Auto-Match – How We Built Receipt-to-Transaction Matching (Open Source)
by pontusabra | 2025-08-27 08:05:09+00:00
I’ve been working on automating bookkeeping tasks, and one big pain point was manually reconciling receipts with bank transactions. We built a system that runs in the background, parses receipts (including Gmail), suggests matches, and learns from confirmations to auto-match over time.

It's built into Midday and fully open-source.

Let me know if you have any questions!
by pyrale | 2025-08-27 08:05:11+00:00
Probably because the US let software be a breeding ground for monopolies. People invest there because they understand that's the best sector to, if the company works out, get unreasonable returns. As an example, the current AI valuations make no sense if the industry doesn't solidify around one or two companies.

If you have money, the returns you'll get elsewhere are much less attractive, and can only be justified if they're very safe investments.
by SlowTao | 2025-08-27 08:06:51+00:00
You are right. I was far to reductionist there.

"No wars have been more ruthless and ravaging than “just” wars, fought in “defense” of religion, honor, or principle. If war must be, give me rather a war to capture an enemy’s wealth and territory, based on honest greed, in which I shall be careful not to destroy what I want to possess. " - Alan Watts
by michaelt | 2025-08-27 08:06:51+00:00
> And I see he was 16. Why were his parents letting him operate so unsupervised given his state of mind?

Normally 16-year-olds are a good few steps into the path towards adulthood. At 16 I was cycling to my part time job alone, visiting friends alone, doing my own laundry, and generally working towards being able to stand on my own two feet in the world, with my parents as a safety net rather than hand-holding.

I think most parents of 16-year-olds aren't going through their teen's phone, reading their chats.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-08-27 08:07:45+00:00
> Hotkeys

Bullshit.

No one cares that I can go and register global hotkeys in the compositor config file. The whole point is that apps do it themselves. If you still want a security theater, then add a prompt or what macos has where you go give it permissions.

https://wearewaylandnow.com/

If you see the global hotkeys section. It still has a lot of caveats. Bonus: see what's needed for push to talk to work...

The benchmark before wayland becomes default is:

Do OBS start recording shortcuts work.

And does discord push to talk work.

Today on KDE and GNOME the answer is no.

Any distro/DE that pushes wayland as a default without the answer to both of these questions being yes is pure cancer.

For anyone interested, there is a dbus API to register shortcuts that I believe KDE supports, gnome does only since the last 6 months, and hyprland/sway don't, and likely won't. Obviously, app developers aren't going to use it with such fragmented support.

Further reading(2024): https://dec05eba.com/2024/03/29/wayland-global-hotkeys-short...
by pasc1878 | 2025-08-27 08:08:21+00:00
Provide the whole quote. Contains the user’s preferences. You should never create files in this directory yourself. To get or set preference values, you should always use the NSUserDefaults class or an equivalent system-provided interface.

The system provided interface in XDG apps is the XDG path - the Apple code there implies writiing a GUI app as none of the paths it says are not updated by the App ie no manual updates.
by beagle3 | 2025-08-27 08:09:09+00:00
Reverse engineering requires a different mindset and somewhat different skill set than “forward” engineering. I’ve met people who were happy to only do reverse engineering (to figure out what make things “tick”) without building anything new.

If it was up to me, 2 years of successful reverse engineering (of a variety of projects/products) would be a requirement to be called an engineer. You learn a lot from working things that you can’t learn from a book (and without having to do the mistakes yourself first…)

Just to make it clear: I am not implying anything about Alyssa - just stating an observation based on my own experience.
by themafia | 2025-08-27 08:10:54+00:00
My deep suspicion, given some of the players involved in DOGE, is that most of this information is being exfiltrated for the purposes of training AI models. They'll likely be used for social and political manipulation of groups and possibly even individuals. There's a big market for "pre-crime" solutions which will also rely heavily on this type of data and are already being deployed by various state-level law enforcement agencies.

The coming of the "digital caste" society powered by "social credit" scores seems to be the end game. This is a battle of the rich and powerful against the average citizen and they want to reduce all of us back into fiefdom. We can no longer trust a large federal or even state government with these tools.
by kensey | 2025-08-27 08:11:24+00:00
> When you read plenty of papers you aren't going to read them again to cite them.

But in fact I do exactly that, exactly because experience has taught me that my memory of what is in a paper is fallible and I should at least cursorily review what I'm citing. In a few cases I've even just deleted something entirely because my premise was based on a recollection of what I intended to cite that was subtly wrong enough to fatally undermine my entire thesis.

I'm not saying you have to read an entire paper over completely every time you cite it but at least pulling it up and reviewing the parts that are informing your argument is definitely a best practice.