MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-06 10:19:45+00:00
There's an open pull request https://github.com/ollama/ollama/pull/9650 but it needs to be forward ported/rebased to the current version before the maintainers can even consider merging it.

Also realistically, Vulkan Compute support mostly helps iGPU's and older/lower-end dGPU's, which can only bring a modest performance speed up in the compute-bound preprocessing phase (because modern CPU inference wins in the text-generation phase due to better memory bandwidth). There are exceptions such as modern Intel dGPU's or perhaps Macs running Asahi where Vulkan Compute can be more broadly useful, but these are also quite rare.
by pimterry | 2025-08-06 10:21:24+00:00
For generic consumer products, sure, but for dev & technical power user tools the audience is big enough that these arguments doesn't hold water. Stack Overflow's latest survey shows nearly 30% of professional devs using Ubuntu specifically (https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#1-computer-o...) and my own metrics (building a cross-platform dev desktop app with a global dev/technical user base) show pretty similar numbers: 65% windows, 20% Mac, 15% Linux. I would expect there's a significant (comfortably above 10%) Linux user base within the claude computer use audience.

The practical reality of distributing is mildly complicated, but there's now lots of good cross-distro options, and not having to deal with code signing everything makes some parts much easier than Mac & Windows. Ignoring that many users is fair enough for a startup or first MVP, but quite surprising for a company at Anthropic's level.
Ask HN: What are your eye fatigue symptoms? What has worked to heal your eyes?
by jMyles | 2025-08-06 10:21:56+00:00
This decade might be the peak for backlit screen time across humanity (with screens having grown in prevalence to the point of ubiquity in many cultures, but tech like e-ink and RLCD seemingly on the horizon to shift things the other way).

How are your eyes faring? What are your specific symptoms? What has worked at ameliorating them?
by benreesman | 2025-08-06 10:22:12+00:00
"Because you can and its cool" would be reason enough: plenty of revolutions have their origin in "because you can" (Wozniak right off the top of my head, Gates and Altair, stuff like that).

But uncensored is a big deal too: censorship is capability reducing (check out Kilcher's GPT4Chan video and references, the Orca work and Dolphin de-tune lift on SWE-Bench style evals). We pay dearly in capability to get "non-operator-alignment", and you'll notice that competition is hot enough now that at the frontier (Opus, Qwen) the " alignment" away from operators aligned is getting very, very mild.

And then there's the compression. Phi-3 or something works on a beefy laptop and has a nontrivial approximation of "the internet" that works on an airplane or a beach with no network connectivity, talk about vibe coding? I like those look up all the docs via a thumbdrive in Phuket vibes.

And on diffusion stuff, SOTA fits on a laptop or close, you can crush OG mid journey or SD on a macbook, its an even smaller gap.

Early GPT-4 ish outcomes are possible on a Macbook Pro or Razer Blade, so either 12-18 month old LLMs are useless, or GGUF is useful.

The AI goalposts things cuts both ways. If AI is "whatever only Anthropic can do"? That's just as silly as "whatever a computer can't do" and a lot more cynical.
by graemep | 2025-08-06 10:24:28+00:00
The correct word here is cultures, not races. South Asians of European ancestry (like one side of my family) are still culturally south Asian (albeit a particular subculture in our case). I know lots of people of non white ancestry who are culturally British (I mostly am myself).

I think culture is also a lot less dehumanising than race because it is complex and therefore less prone to grouping people in the same stereotyped way. Not all South Asian cultures are the same - there is a huge difference between, for example, an urban Sri Lankan (as I was born) and a rural Pakistani. Much as there are huge cultural differences within Europe (e.g. between Wales and Albania).

I do agree that stereotyping leads to dehumanisation, but I also think cultural differences are worth talking about. I also strongly agree that thinking in terms of race rather than culture is very damaging and encourages racism.
by troupo | 2025-08-06 10:24:35+00:00
> Yes, some applications tend to have a large amount of markup for what seems like simple features (the Slack’s input box example). However, the alternative is that browser vendors bake it all in, and then every app is stuck with the opinionated way they think is right. Perhaps some amount of chaos is healthy.

Or, you know, provide a set of usable controls that provide useful functionality out of the box and provide a set of useful APIs so that people can either extend those controls or create their own.

Web Platform provides neither. Compare that to literally every other UI toolkit under the sun. Turbo Vision from 1990s was a better toolkit than anything the web has to offer.
by agust | 2025-08-06 10:26:09+00:00
So after the EU and the UK, Japan is now putting an end to Apple's iOS alternative browser engine ban too.

Those are 3 large jurisdictions, I wonder if that's now a market big enough for Chrome and Firefox to invest into iOS versions of their browser that use Blink and Gecko under the hood. From what I heard this was one of the main reasons they haven't done it yet.
by pvtmert | 2025-08-06 10:26:13+00:00
It is interesting that one of the most solid piece of software component that is relatively resistant to rotting is Shell/Bash scripts. (Including Makefiles)

Python, Ruby, etc. constantly get obsolete over time, packages get removed from the central repositories, ceasing to work.

Obviously shell scripts contain _many_ external dependencies, but overall the semantics are well-defined even if the actual definitions are loose against the shell script itself.

P.S: I have written couple of Bash-script projects that are still running (mostly deployment automation scripts) meanwhile, some of which I was being "smart" and wrote them in Python 2.7, unfortunately ceased to function, requiring upgrades...
by uludag | 2025-08-06 10:26:44+00:00
I've felt similar to the author, a sort of despair that the only point of writing software now is to prop up the valuation of AI companies, that quality no longer matters, etc.

Then I realized that nothings stopping me from writing software how I want and feel is best. I've stopped using LLMs completely and couldn't be happier. I'm not even struggling at work or feeling like I'm behind. I work on a number of personal projects too, all without LLMs, and I couldn't feel better.
by freefrog334433 | 2025-08-06 10:26:45+00:00
The X.com links don't work. The CNN article was on a video showing how Russians treat a deserter. Ukraine has 400,000 deserters, and forces men on the street into vans for conscription. https://www.ukrainemonitor.com/article/837248236 https://www.bitchute.com/video/4GlBx4Dgihge

The Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine are volunteers, well paid (five times average salaries). https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/b0002tho

The people on the ground know how the war is going - there are no more Ukrainians volunteering to fight. Winning attracts, and Russia doesn't need conscription. Amazingly, Ukraine is now recruiting 60+ year old men to fight. https://kyivindependent.com/zelensky-signs-law-allowing-over...
by vrighter | 2025-08-06 10:27:30+00:00
As soon as you changed any gate layouts, it stopped being a gate level emulation of a 4004.

It's just a 4004 emulator (with extra steps). The gate level simulation is of a different device that emulates a 4004.

To be fair, the whole program is amazing as a logic simulator implementation, I'm just nitpicking.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-06 10:27:49+00:00
>I could have fiber, but I see no point in upgrading from DSL. Why? It works.

How do you explain to a caveman that a living in a house is nicer than living in a cave?

>Why bother spending money or time making changes to my home's critical infrastructure. I doubt I'm the only one.

You don't have to pay, In Eastern Europe telcos pay themselves to wire fiber to your door in hopes you'll sign up with them. It's something you don't have in Germany, it's called free market competition. The German mind just can't comprehend having competitive companies that serve the consumers and not sclerotic state supported monopolies that only support the shareholders by robbing the consumers. Why are you guys like this?

>And then there's the millions of boomers

Of course, the way to move forward technologically is to cater tech to boomers habits. That's why Germany is a SW innovation powerhouse.
by elric | 2025-08-06 10:28:15+00:00
The opposite. I regret not pushing harder to be allowed to release more things as open source. Built lots of useful tools at a previous job that would have benefited "the community", and while management initially seemed happy to open source them, the request was never granted.

Now I frequently find myself building things and thinking "damn, wish I could use that to make my life easier".

I'm keeping the details vague because I think I'm still bound by NDAs.
by vegancap | 2025-08-06 10:29:44+00:00
Not quite an open-source project, but I did a massive blog post series on Microservices in Golang. It sort of became a bit of a defacto starting point for a while, it was an immense amount of work and effort. But I found my inbox flooded with people asking for advice, and honestly, writing about it all made me realise how ridiculous Microservices often are. I could tell many of the people asking me didn't really need them, and I found myself trying to advise them away from it. So I ended up with loads of work, but with caveats all over the place trying to convince people they didn't need any of it.

Then I accidentally wiped the database powering my blog, lost all the content, and had loads of people asking me to rewrite them all. Most people were polite, but there were a lot of pushy and entitled people as well... It's a bit of a shame because it was by far the most popular thing I ever did, and they ended up being a massive pain and regret
by benchly | 2025-08-06 10:29:45+00:00
How do you define 'intelligent' and 'evolution?' I think we might differ on what those words mean, which would make this conversation difficult, so let's clarify where each of us is coming from.

My understanding (which may be slightly misguided because this is definitely not my field) is that Intelligence is the ability to use information for reasoning, decision making and achieving understanding. This ability, as a directed action, only applies to creatures with consciousness.

Regarding evolution, my understanding is closer to a process that is more akin to a passive filter, with no guidance to speak of unless we want to stretch the limits of the concept of guidance to encompass survival, which is the genetic materials of those who survive the environment getting passed on, which would also implies that sometimes garbage/noise stays in the gene pool. While information (genetic material) is being passed on, it is not being selected through reasoning or consideration, but more of a mechanical process (although there's an argument to be had that we, humans, might be changing that game).

How would you define those words? Happy to consider understanding different than my own, since I do find it interesting.
by dspillett | 2025-08-06 10:29:50+00:00
It is possible to polyfill an image format, this was done with FLIF¹². Not that it mean FLIF got the traction required to be used much anywhere outside its own demos…

It is also possible to detect support and provide different formats (so those supporting a new format get the benefit of small data transfer or other features) though this doesn't happen as it isn't usually an issue enough to warrant the extra complication.

----

[1] Main info: https://flif.info/

[2] Demo with polyfill: https://uprootlabs.github.io/poly-flif/
by RossBencina | 2025-08-06 10:29:54+00:00
The purpose of a model is to represent salient features of a domain (both the data, behavior, constraints.) In the context of this discussion we are particularly interested in modelling behavior and constraints. As your examples illustrate, it is possible to do a poor job, e.g. model at the incorrect level of abstraction (Human is not salient unless you have a concrete need to model Customer's of other Species), or to introduce specious abstractions. The fact that forming useful domain models is non-trival does not render it worthless.
by motorest | 2025-08-06 10:30:04+00:00
> Homebrew is “just” a package manager, not the core of part of Google.

Yes, this. Sometimes I wonder if those coming up with the Homebrew example have any experience whatsoever with software development. I mean, sure the project is popular and surely doesn't hurt on a resume. But does it showcase any level of technical expertise or mastery? No, I'm afraid not. I would bet that the majority of software engineers would be able to put together an equivalent system in a week or so. Think about it, and pay attention to what are the system's usecases. It's hardly rocket science.
by yubblegum | 2025-08-06 10:30:05+00:00
Sorry but have to call b.s. here. Many of us did in fact, in this very forum, kept pointing out that dumping on GPL (and the man and his ideas behind it) was a mistake and that non-gpl oss was for chumps. And we were greyed to oblivion. Same exact story as with surveillance tech.

Hackernews is hugely responsible for many of the ailments of this field in 21st century. Own it.
by zero_k | 2025-08-06 10:30:35+00:00
I work on a (once top-of-the-line) SAT solver [1] and a (currently top-of-the-line) model counter [2]. Actually, I am very interested in the part of the rebuttal of "when each constraint has at most two variables, then the constraint satisfaction problem (and even the more difficult problem of counting the number of solutions) can be solved in time less than the lower bound that is claimed" -- in the model counting competition [3] there are actually problems that are binary-clause only, and I have to admit I am having trouble counting them any smarter than I already do normal (i.e. >=3 length clause) problems. Is there some very fun algorithm I'm missing that I could use for only-binary clause solution counting? I have thought about it, but I just... can't come up with anything smarter than compiling it into a d-DNNF form, which most SOTA model counters (and so I as well) do.

[1] https://github.com/msoos/cryptominisat/ [2] https://github.com/meelgroup/ganak/ [3] https://mccompetition.org/
by wat10000 | 2025-08-06 10:31:13+00:00
“Trickle down” is about making the masses wealthier in general, not just making shiny new toys for them. It’s easy for the HN crowd to think that a cool new computer equates to wealth, but that’s not what most people consider it to be. Does cutting taxes for the rich allow the common person to buy better food, pay their mortgage off earlier, send their kids to better schools? That’s the question you need to ask about “trickle down,” not how big our TVs would be.
by freefrog334433 | 2025-08-06 10:31:20+00:00
The key word was "effective". Ukraine's attacks haven't had any meaningful effect on the war. I would have no doubt that if Israel lost any of the conventional wars with it's neighbors, nuclear weapons would have been launched.

The original post was postulating that American bombers and intelligence could destroy China's production base. If US attacks did destroy a significant portion of China's factories, and production facilities, I have no doubt the war would become nuclear.
by wolvesechoes | 2025-08-06 10:31:33+00:00
"Web apps" should have been standard desktop apps with a network connection. You don't need a browser to use network protocols (and protocols died when HTTP stopped sending hypertext and started to send JSONs) or call APIs. Your OS manages the network stack.

We can complain how much we want, but the stream of shit, web-shit included, cannot be stopped or reversed. Brace yourself for more.
by ap99 | 2025-08-06 10:31:41+00:00
This, like much of the pharmaceutical approach to well-being, is treating symptoms and not the problem.

Metabolic dysfunction? Fix the metabolism.

Poor understanding of nutrition? Fix the understanding.

Lack of emotional or self-control? Fix the discipline.

Obesity is largely NOT an acute symptom and does not need an acute solution.

If you don't fix the underlying problem you will have weight issues your whole life (because it only gets worse with age).

And that means a lifelong ozempic customer.
by elric | 2025-08-06 10:31:41+00:00
When I was younger, I would have been annoyed at this remark because it detracts from the ideological purity of FOSS. Now that I'm older, I laugh at its naïveté. $megacorp wouldn't pay you. The junior engineer at $megacorp who pulled in your library wouldn't even have read the license. And you as a small FOSS engineer wouldn't have the legal clout to make them pay. You wouldn't even know they were using your library.

But in principle I agree that it would behoove profitable companies who benefit from FOSS to either pay or contribute.
by timpera | 2025-08-06 10:31:52+00:00
I don't know why, but this article reads like it's written by ChatGPT (not saying it is!).

Anyway, I find this debate fascinating. On one hand, Perplexity's behavior is sketchy. On the other hand, it really feels like Cloudflare wants to be a middleman to the web and collect a 30% fee, which seems like a bad idea.
SiteAssist – add a fully-branded AI assistant to any site in 5 min
by rohiddev | 2025-08-06 10:33:36+00:00
Hi HN!

I’m Rohid, founder of SiteAssist (https://siteassist.io).

After months of dog-fooding on my own projects I just pushed the public launch and would love your feedback.

What is SiteAssist?

SiteAssist lets you drop a privacy-friendly AI assistant on any page—product, docs, admin dashboards, e-commerce—by adding one script tag. A lightning crawler indexes your pages (and soon PDFs / files / Notion / Google Drive), then the assistant answers only from that data. You can spin up multiple assistants with different “personalities”. Also, you can call the REST API(with OpenAPI Spec) directly and build your own UI.

What makes it powerful?

· RAG-powered accuracy – the model never hallucinates outside the indexed data.

· Fast crawler – parallelized scraping + focused deduping indexes ~5 k pages in <120 s.

· Customer Identification – you can identify each customer with your own app's ID, email, name and other attributes.

· JavaScript SDK – we have built a powerful js sdk to let you control pass messages between your website and the chat widget to control it programmatically.

· Actions (Coming Soon) – define safe server-side functions (SQL read, post to Slack, etc.) and the assistant will call them via tools.

· OpenAPI spec – everything you can do in the Chat Widget you can do via API. So if you want to have custom UI we have you covered.

· Brand control – colors, greetings, bubble vs inline, language, all configurable.

· No vendor lock-in – choose models from openai, google, anthropic etc. If you don't find your model or want to integrate your own models just reach us. We are happy to add more models.

If you build sites, sell products, or maintain big docs and want faster answers for users, give it a whirl and let me know where it breaks. Honest critiques > compliments.

Live demo & docs: https://siteassist.io

ProdcutHunt launch: https://www.producthunt.com/products/siteassist-ai

Happy to answer anything about the crawler, the RAG pipeline, infrastructure, future plans or pricing. Thanks for reading!

— Rohid
by benreesman | 2025-08-06 10:33:39+00:00
I'm a well-known OpenAI hater, but there's haters and haters, and refusing to acknowledge great work is the latter.

Well done OpenAI, this seems like a sincere effort to do a real open model with competitive performance, usable/workable licensing, a tokenizer compatible with your commercial offerings, it's a real contribution. Probably the most open useful thing since Whisper that also kicked ass.

Keep this sort of thing up and I might start re-evaliating how I feel about this company.
by Intermernet | 2025-08-06 10:33:59+00:00
Feel free, my email is my HN username at gmail. As I mentioned in a sibling comment, I'm not in tech anymore (except for fun) but I'm happy to provide any insights or advice to any questions you may have. I last worked with ERP systems about 10 years ago, but the thing about these systems is that they don't really change, so hopefully my knowledge is still helpful!

As a quick summary, this is mostly all ETL (Extract, Transform, Load). Learn the lowest practical level language you can for each system so you can extract / query exactly the data you need (in SAP it's mostly SQL but there are a bunch of proprietary "languages" and extensions that can help. In MS it's mostly SQL, in Infor it's worth learning some RPG /CL, but only enough to get the data you need). Learn the notification paradigms each system offers (this can be as simple as scheduling jobs, it can be file-system watchers, it can be RPC based, etc. etc. Each system is different, but you need to know when to do stuff with the data. Both on change from external influences, and on completion of whatever job you ran). Thirdly, utilise a modern language for the "Transform" and "Load" phases of the job. I used to use everything from C, C#, Perl, Python, etc. These languages are much easier and much more powerful than something like RPG or pure SQL for a non-maestro. There are people who use complex stored procedures for everything, and that's cool, but it's also a steeper barrier of entry than using a modern, "batteries-included" language.

The reason I initially taught myself Go (13 years ago now) was due to the incredibly powerful and simple data manipulation packages built into it's standard library. It's a damn good language for doing high speed, low latency transformation of lots of data, while being simple and easy to code and deploy. Having said this, the afore-mentioned C, C#, Perl and Python were all working fine before I switched to Go! Use what you know, and what's available in the sytem you're working on.

If you have any questions feel free to send me an email.
by troupo | 2025-08-06 10:34:00+00:00
> I have no idea why, but tree models scare the shit out of college educated developers.

Very few people are "scared" of tree models.

The problem of working with the DOM is that it's:

- 90s JAVA-like verbose unwieldy API that requires tons of boilerplate to do the simplest things

- Extremely anemic API that is neither low-level enough to let you do your own stuff easily, nor high-level enough to just create what you need out of existing building blocks

- An API that is completely non-composable

- A rendering system that is actively getting in the way of doing things, and where you have to be acutely aware of all the hundreds of pitfalls and corner cases when you so much as change an element border (which may trigger a full re-layout of the entire page)

- A rendering system which is extremely non-performant for anything more complex than a static web page (and it barely manages to do even that). Any "amazing feats of performance" that people may demonstrate are either very carefully coded, use the exact same techniques as other toolkits (e.g. canvas or webgl), or are absolute table stakes for anything else under the sun. I mean, an frontpage article last week was how it needed 60% CPU and 25% GPU to animate three rectangles: https://www.granola.ai/blog/dont-animate-height

> So you get people investing their entire careers trying to hide from the DOM with unnecessary abstractions

The abstractions of the past 15 or so years have been trying to hide from the DOM only because the DOM is both extremely non-performant and has an API even a mother wouldn't love.