MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GabrielBianconi | 2025-08-04 19:42:25+00:00
AFAIK, distillation typically refers to tuning on the logits of the larger model, so you wouldn't be able to do that with fine-tuning APIs (OpenAI + Google in our blog post). We fine-tune on the outputs themselves.

But broadly speaking, yes, we generate data using a large model, curate the best samples using metrics from the environment, and fine-tune on that data. This isn't a novel technique from an academic perspective; our focus is on applying it to different use cases (e.g. agentic RAG, agentic tool use) and models (OpenAI, Google, Qwen).

Thanks!
by thewebguyd | 2025-08-04 19:42:38+00:00
> My "favourite" (/s) feature is windows that _stick_ on top of others. Like, some updater for some app that just stays on top of other windows even without having the focus.

Then in Apple's infinite wisdom, doesn't let you manually set a window to be always on top - one of my most missed features from Gnome, KDE, and even Windows has it with PowerToys.

I love my macbook's hardware, but macOS has to be one of the most frustrating operating systems I've ever used.
by EPendragon | 2025-08-04 19:42:41+00:00
@HNModerators, I don't know why it was necessary to change the title of my post from "Customizing tmux and making it less dreadful" to "Customizing tmux". The point of the title was not the overview of all of the customization options, but the effort to make it more usable, convenient, and pleasant to use.
by Comma2976 | 2025-08-04 19:42:45+00:00
The treatment of the West Bank today, just like the early days of the Irgun and Haganah, immediately disproves every suggested notion in this. It's frankly insultingly bad, the same trite propaganda from all the way back to "I would say to England if I could an Arab Palestine is a threat to Great Britain and a menace to the world. A Jewish Palestine is an asset to Great Britain and a blessing to the world."

I hope this guy is just grifting for clicks, which would explain rationalizing Trump and defending Eric Adams, and didn't actually buy any of it himself.
by yosito | 2025-08-04 19:43:16+00:00
> if you're an insurance or financial services company in Chicago and getting applications from people with a degree from Stanford and 10 years of amazing experience at FAANG companies, they are fakes.

Maybe this explains why in my last job search I sent over 3000 applications and got almost nothing but form letter rejections back. I've got 10 years of mission-driven experience and NASA on my resume. In the end, I got my current job through a personal connection with someone I've known for 20 years.
by derbOac | 2025-08-04 19:43:24+00:00
> But as Goethe said, every fact is already a theory. That’s why facts cannot save you. “Data” will not save you. There can be no objective story since the very act of assembling facts requires implicit beliefs about what should be emphasized and what should be left out.

There may be no objective story, but some stories and fact theories are more rigorous and thoroughly defended than others.
by toisanji | 2025-08-04 19:43:27+00:00
Nice work on offline.kids and kudos for tackling screen-free play. I've been playing in a similar space. If you want something complementary for the inevitable “but why?” moments, you might like StudyTurtle Ask (https://studyturtle.com/ask). It’s a free, no-signup AI Q&A tuned for 3–9 year-olds with:

Strict age calibration (matching phrasing and examples to each developmental level)

Concrete analogies (“volcanoes are like shaken soda bottles”) and kitchen-table experiments you can actually do
by Telemakhos | 2025-08-04 19:44:01+00:00
The author talks about certain groups, like offshored call center employees whose sleep schedule is shifted so that they can respond to needs of people in a different time zone... but wouldn't mobile phone usage have a more widespread (really pervasive) impact on sleep than irregular labor conditions for a few? There are studies showing significant associations of mobile phone use and poor sleep quality.[0] I don't get the feeling that a strong link between mobile phone use and poor sleep quality would appeal to the Journal of Political Philosophy, though.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9707689/ in India, https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10.... in UK
by pixl97 | 2025-08-04 19:44:14+00:00
>o that the kids can nag mom into buying unneeded items

Excellent. Personal shoppers are 'adblock for IRL'.

>You owe the companies nothing. You especially don't owe them any courtesy. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
by EForEndeavour | 2025-08-04 19:44:22+00:00
Good catch. Yeah, definitely AI-generated. The text in the images are in that unmistakeable ChatGPT 4o image generation font that's weirdly kinda fat and oddly kerned.

On AI's struggles with hands: do humans have four or five fingers? Why not both!? https://offline.kids/activity/diy-jigsaw-puzzle/
by pjcodes | 2025-08-04 19:44:43+00:00
Thanks a ton. Honestly, I’ve always been user zero of this app. I went through a bunch of versions before launching because I wanted it to create just the right amount of friction for anyone who struggles with impulsive buying (like I did).

And that’s a great suggestion. I did think about building a browser extension early on, but purposely kept things simple until I could get real feedback from people actually using it. The goal isn’t to build more features, it’s to build something that genuinely helps people grow their wealth so I really appreciate ideas like this and will definitely keep it on my list.
by uticus | 2025-08-04 19:44:46+00:00
> I don't use it and have no plans using it. I'm certain I'm not alone.

Too easy to refute. Treating "Excel" as actually "spreadsheet processing," the software has been so consistently and hugely popular that everything from early PDAs [0] to Google Sheets / iCloud Numbers has supported it. Every type of personal computing device has it, from graphic calculators [1] to laptops to tablets to PDAs to many cell phones.

> I suspect most of the Excel users use it like CVS editor.

Like some classes of addictive chemical compounds, you may start with this but quickly find it is the gateway to other habits.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_95LX

[1] https://education.ti.com/en/software/details/en/139B977E62CB...
by ndiddy | 2025-08-04 19:45:15+00:00
In that case you're still subject to the companies who have billions of dollars to spend on training frontier models and server farms full of GPUs. They're free to change their pricing or the quality of the services offered at will (see the recent Claude Code limit changes). Long-term, what you're describing would be a ton of underpaid "entrepreneurs" with no benefits all working away on whatever B2B SaaS web app while all the real money gets made by the AI services they subscribe to. It would be similar to how Uber has "democratized" taxis.
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-04 19:45:25+00:00
Exactly this.

We have so many outdoor toys from footballs and outdoor table tennis tables, to outdoor chalk, sand pits and so on and so forth.

Yet most of the time the boys just want water fights and the girls just want to do cartwheels.

Structured play is definitely important. But unstructured play even more so. It’s amazing what kids can find to entertain themselves when they’re left alone.
by jay-barronville | 2025-08-04 19:45:36+00:00
Even after years of not building anything substantial with PHP, it still maintains a soft spot in my heart. I remember how it felt writing PHP code ~15 years ago and feeling so productive. I felt that I could do anything with it. Then the Laravel framework came around and made that experience at least an order of magnitude better.

I think the main issue for PHP nowadays is the curse that it had many issues (especially security-wise) in the past and so many folks believe that the PHP of today is still the PHP of the past, when in actuality, it's evolved into a pretty dope programming language/environment with some pretty decent features. It seems like this is something that the PHP community can't shake no matter how hard they try.
by mrow84 | 2025-08-04 19:45:43+00:00
> The case emerged on July 20, when both organizations filed a complaint with the Belgian federal prosecutor against two members of the Israeli army’s Givati Brigade who were attending the Tomorrowland music festival with their military flags.

> The complaint accused them of direct involvement in war crimes and acts potentially constituting genocide in Gaza — specifically, indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas, torture, and forced displacement.

Seems pretty clear?
by randysalami | 2025-08-04 19:46:03+00:00
"tech companies", "companies [who] control the models", "whoever"

To be more discrete, patchwork alliances of elites stretching decades and centuries back to concentrate power. Tech companies are under the thumb of the US government and the US government is under the thumb of the elites. It's not direct but it doesn't need to be. Many soft power mechanisms exist and can be deployed when needed e.g. Visa/Mastercard censorship. The US was always founded for elites, by elites but concessions needed to be made to workers out of necessity. With technology and the destruction of unions, this is no longer the case. The veracity of this statement is still up for debate but truth won't stop them from giving it a shot (see WW2).

"Whoever can get the most stories into the heads of the masses runs the world."

I'd argue this is already the case. It has nothing to do with transformer models or AGI but basic machine learning algorithms being applied at scale in apps like TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook to addict users, fragment them, and destroy their sense of reality. They are running the world and what is happening now is their plan to keep running it, eternally, and in the most extreme fashion.
Ask HN: What is the go-to programming language in your industry and why?
by vishalontheline | 2025-08-04 19:46:13+00:00
There are trendy languages and there are workhorse languages.

Back in 2010, the trendy language was Ruby. Many companies were built on Ruby. Yet, PHP programmers were the silent majority. More recently, Rust, Elixir, Zig, Kotlin, TypeScript and others have been getting a lot of attention. Yet, in my industry - web development - PHP may still be king of the hill on the server, and JavaScript on the client.

My guess as to why this is - they became big first and were "good enough" - and no one's rocking the boat by introducing big changes on a regular basis.

My research shows that in aviation, Ada is still huge. In banking, Cobol. In automotive, C/C++. In embedded, it's C/C++. In data science, Python. In enterprise systems, Java. But, I don't know the "why", although I can guess.

Yet, if you were to browse Hacker News, you'd be lead to believe that the new kids on the block are absolutely crushing it.

I think Rust might be the go-to language for Crypto companies, but I don't know for sure.

It's difficult to separate signal from noise. So, that begs the question: in your industry, what languages and tools are dominant? Why? What's the penetration of newer languages like - is anyone losing sleep that their bread and butter is going to go out of style? How about No-Code tools? have they taken over?

Thank you!
by TrnsltLife | 2025-08-04 19:46:19+00:00
Very cool. I loved reading your write-up. It reminded me of something I'd read in a steampunk novel once. I had to Google it to get the details. It's the kinotrope from Gibson & Sterling's Difference Engine.

I found a blog post about it and someone who made one with a servo for each pixel. Now that would be expensive!

https://differencing.blogspot.com/2010/04/kinotrope-clackers...
by mjaniczek | 2025-08-04 19:46:33+00:00
Related: Rubber duck channels. https://wolfgangschuster.wordpress.com/2023/04/14/ducks/

I've now seen this across two companies, and it's great to have #rd-martinjaniczek where I can just talk about what I'm doing as I'm doing it, post error messages and later how I solved them (or let somebody else jump in and tell me how they solved it etc.), it helps Slack searchability and combats the remote loneliness, it's pretty great.

And reading other folks' RD channels, you realize how frickin' funny some people are.
by delichon | 2025-08-04 19:47:02+00:00
As a high school teacher with a multi ethnic classroom, I don't believe that scheduling is significantly a multi-cultural issue, but rather it's a specific school and community issue. For instance the time at which school starts is less downstream of puritan or protestant heritage, and more a matter of when the sun rises, and how far the busses have to travel. It emerges from lots of discussion with parents and staff.

One thing that came out of those discussion is a four-day school week. That is popular with rural parents across cultures.

The fact that some of our students come from a White or Hispanic or Native American heritage doesn't enter into the conversation, other than through their individual expressed preferences. Some cultures tend to speak more quietly and it's up to us to listen carefully. But we care about what those parents care about, not what our assumptions about their culture would lead us to guess they care about.
by jabroni_salad | 2025-08-04 19:47:20+00:00
If it was just one human requesting one summary of the page nobody would ever notice. The typical watermark for junk traffic is pretty high as it was.

I have a dinky little txt site on my email domain. There is nothing of value on it, and the content changes less than once a year. So why are AI scrapers hitting it to the tune of dozens of GB per month?
by lynndotpy | 2025-08-04 19:47:32+00:00
The "illustration" on the front page absolutely smacks of the ai-generates aesthetic, and especially the illustrations in the "posts".

I don't understand what the point of this website is. It's disingenuous, shallow, and artificial. If someone wanted to outsource their relationship with their offspring to a text generator, why wouldn't they just go to ChatGPT directly?

I can't imagine there's much overlap between people who want their kids to have less screen-time, but also have no standards for what replaces the screen time.
by illwrks | 2025-08-04 19:47:41+00:00
Somewhat related… I have an old dead Wi-Fi camera, it was always buggy but was useful when it worked initially.

With a spare raspberry pi kicking around, I’ve put together a better solution using Motion, a Webcam, iNotify and a Dropbox uploader script. It works like a charm, after a powerloss etc the pi boots up, starts Motion and then starts watching for events, motion triggers and saves video clips to a folder, iNotify watches for new files saved and then uploads to Dropbox.
by Anon1096 | 2025-08-04 19:47:49+00:00
The "deal" at Microsoft is that you get paid 30-50% less than other big tech employers but it's a lot chiller (imo this is true from my experience at both msft and faangs, I hear it's worse recently though). A LOT of people are there for the lower work pressure and no RTO. If they get rid of that, there's no reason not to jump to Google where you'll get paid substantially more except for needing to grind leetcode. Or even go to Meta/Amazon if you're willing to grind for even bigger bags of cash.
by stereolambda | 2025-08-04 19:47:58+00:00
Many historians work on manuscripts and/or large archives of documents that might not be digitized, let alone be accessible in the internet. The proportion of human knowledge that is available in the internet, especially if we further constrain to English-language and non-Darkweb or pirated, is greatly exaggerated. So there are infrastructure problems that LLMs by themselves don't solve.

On the other hand, people tend to be happy with a history that ignores 90+% of what happened, instead focusing on a "central" narrative, which traditionally focussed on maybe 5 Euro-Atlantic great powers, and nowadays somewhat pretends not to.

That being said, I don't like the subjectivist take on historical truth advanced by the article. Maybe it's hard to positively establish facts, but it doesn't mean one cannot negatively establish falsehoods and this matters more in practice, in the end. This feels salient when touching on opinions of Carr's as a Soviet-friendly historian.
by jasonvorhe | 2025-08-04 19:48:21+00:00
Having had to setup some Windows systems for a client of mine, all I can say it that they've long abandoned all hope of ever shipping a somewhat coherent UI. It's just not going to happen. Lipstick upon lipstick on frankensteined pigs just aren't going to work. At some point they'll have to start from clean slate or else we'll see 1990s ui remnants leaking through into the 2040s. It's just not going to happen until they start bleeding market share on the desktop. iirc it took desktop linux ~10 years from 1 to 2% and 1 year from 3 to 4% so there's movement in the market.

DHH pushing desktop Linux for developers, Pewdiepie making videos about Linux and GrapheneOS, there's definitely an accelerationist argument to be made here.
Show HN: Copilot-style assistant that works offline, with screen/mic/text
by Steelsky | 2025-08-04 19:48:41+00:00
I got frustrated trying to use GitHub Copilot in restricted environments, airgapped networks, legacy IDEs, places with no extensions allowed. So I built QuietPrompt, a local-first Copilot-style helper. It comes with an installer to Windows too, Installer.

It reads your screen (via hotkey OCR), listens to your mic (Whisper), or grabs from clipboard, and pipes it to your own LLM, totally offline. Works with Qwen 30B but requires a heavy PC, 32GB RAM min and a 3060 Ti GPU min.

Open-source, free for personal use, Windows-only for now. Happy to hear what you'd improve or add.
by anabab | 2025-08-04 19:48:47+00:00
Post office offering emails is an interesting idea if you extend it further in the physical world. As in, using this identifier to deliver correspondence/parcels as well.

pros:

- privacy. Senders have zero idea where you actually are. mapping to physical addresses is performed by the post.

- no need to update addresses in a million accounts when you move, your email points to the new physical address automatically (no idea how that works in other countries, but here you can set automatic forwarding for at most 1.5 years after you move).

cons:

- goods being sent to gmail addresses
by uticus | 2025-08-04 19:48:51+00:00
Agreed, it has permeated every single industry in the developed world. Professional software developers have been known to reach for it, in a pinch, over dozens of other known and much more powerful tools.

The immediate feedback and visual layout make it the definition of "killer app." Jupiter notebooks has been trying to replicate the magic for years. Entire businesses and industries are built around selling products to successfully replicate what was originally living in a spreadsheet somewhere.
by dagw | 2025-08-04 19:48:57+00:00
My core memory of SGI workstations was not that they necessarily were super fast when it came to pure flops (especially towards the end of their life), but how smooth and solid they were. Even if our Nvidia/Wintel machines were faster on paper and faster at things like rendering, the SGI machines would run buttery smooth no matter what we threw at them. Whether scrubbing through complex composition shots, doing real time lighting preview, or manipulating large 3D models, the frame rate and latency on the SGI machines was rock solid.
by tim333 | 2025-08-04 19:50:40+00:00
>Everything revolving around these LLMs so far as been tech hype culture...

compare with a headline from today:

>OpenAI’s ChatGPT to hit 700 million weekly users, up 4x from last year

I don't think there was much that hype when ChatGPT launched. Just an awful lot of people using it because it's kind of cool.

The critics seem to do a certain amount of goal post moving, like saying it's doing well by having unprecedented user growth is met by - f*king prove LLMs can indeed produce wholly novel research. Is anyone actually claiming they produce wholly novel research?

There is a similar effect with the featured blog post where the guy makes some perfectly reasonable arguments why he doesn't really like LLMs and doesn't want to work on them and then instead of titling it "Why I hate LLMs" goes with "Why I hate AI." But there's some quite cool stuff in non LLM AI like AlphaFold and trying to cure diseases. If you are talking about LLMs why not put LLM in the title?
by davchana | 2025-08-04 19:50:46+00:00
Related, there are many painters, who work as employees at truck repair or denting painting shops, and write generic words like TANK on Diesel Tank, or like OK BYE TATA on rear bumper, or simply names, with dome petals around them. They start with a yellow rectangle, and then paint black lines as negative space, eventually bringing out yellow letters out.
by quesera | 2025-08-04 19:51:03+00:00
I have deep knowledge of only a tiny few square miles of sparsely-populated mostly-forest in New Hampshire.

I see both surprsing accuracy, and the occasional baffling "I wonder what looked dense there??" errors.

So as usual, LIDAR returns non-intuitive results sometimes, and is ideally refined by ground research, when the budget allows.

But I'll definitely check out the apparent errors in more detail next time I'm there. :)
by lazyeye | 2025-08-04 19:51:15+00:00
Nobody here has provided any evidence for anything they've stated either.

Apparently after the recent election, the jobs numbers were adjusted down by close to 800k, (meaning of course, they had been inflated by 800k prior to the election). This would be the largest adjustment in 50 years (outside of covid).

Discussed here

https://youtube.com/shorts/Mcpom9jUNJE
by zahlman | 2025-08-04 19:51:20+00:00
Timsort, the Zen of Python, and many other things. Over 2500 commits to the CPython repository overall (11th on the all-time list). Quite good at explaining details of how floating-point works, especially as relates to Python, IMX. And extraordinarily helpful over a long period of time: https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=user%3A2705542+is%3Aanswe...
by larodi | 2025-08-04 19:51:39+00:00
1. This also helps ppl better understand the crave for chat/social and generally getting high on internet info. now with local models being like pocket archives of most all that you can think of, it is also possible to do very accelerated coding with zero net connectivity.

2. prototyping is often about allowing oneself to stitch things in the ugliest possible way.
by khushick | 2025-08-04 19:51:44+00:00
Hi, we ran a detailed study at Churnkey across billions of dollars in revenue and millions of subscriptions.

We found that:

Customers who accept a discount stay 5.1 months longer on average.

11% remain subscribers over a year later, even after the discount expires

For the customers in the 90th percentile, they stayed for an average of 13.4 months when offered a discount at point of cancellation

Discounts were accepted 8.7% of the times

People accepted discounts within 45 seconds when offered

Data biases

Churnkey has anti-abuse built in so people can't misuse discounts

We only offer discounts at point of cancellation to retain customers.

Open to interpretations on the data.
by badlibrarian | 2025-08-04 19:52:02+00:00
You mean abstracted stuff like this instead of two lines of code that actually uses x and y?

[ cos(θ) -sin(θ) 0 0 ] [ sin(θ) cos(θ) 0 0 ] [ 0 0 1 0 ] [ 0 0 0 1 ]
by Loughla | 2025-08-04 19:52:02+00:00
(outside of cases of abuse) The venn diagram of people in my life who have gotten divorced and the people in my life who struggle to communicate their wants and needs is almost a circle.

You have to be open, honest, and willing to listen to the other person while laying your own ego aside. This is something that many people really struggle with. It becomes a power game and trying to prove who's right instead of trying to genuinely solve problems with each other.

I don't get it.

Source: married at 21 and decades later, we're very, very, very different people than we were, but still very happy together.