MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DonHopkins | 2025-08-08 12:06:30+00:00
Instead of a business card, I'd love an ultrathin pleasure card you can refill with virtual beer and virtually drink! You could input your weight, and it could track you BAC!

I made "PalmJoint", a beamable Palm pleasure card for CodeCon 2002, when everybody was beaming their contacts around by IR at conferences, I would beam an interactive doobie simulator a bunch of people could play together in a circle. Each person gets their own doobie, and you can have contests to see who can virtually smoke theirs the quickest, or keep it lit for the longest time. I never get around to implementing an IR token passing network:

https://donhopkins.com/home/images/PalmJoint.png

https://donhopkins.com/home/PalmJoint/Src/PalmJointMain.cpp

Some conferences of the era had kiosks with IR LEDs that beamed out a Palm app with a conference map and schedule, which would have been great to hijack for beaming out PalmJoints instead.
by lafalce | 2025-08-08 12:06:32+00:00
I wanted to share a small project I built called Hacker5News. It’s a simple web app using Axum that fetches and displays just the top 5 stories from Hacker News.

I made this because, between work and studying, I rarely have time to keep up with all the news and discussions. Seeing hundreds of new posts every day can be overwhelming, so I wanted a way to quickly catch up on the most important stories without the anxiety of missing out.

The app is open source and super easy to run. It opens in your browser and shows a clean, distraction-free list of the current top 5 articles.

Would love any feedback or suggestions! Thanks for checking it out.

Repo: https://github.com/mateolafalce/hacker5news
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-08-08 12:06:53+00:00
If I'm writing for a human contributor, I'm gonna have a pretty high bar for the quality of that writing.

An agent on the other hand, one who is in that sweet spot where they're no longer ignorant, and not yet confused... It's nice to have them dump their understanding to agent_primers/subsystem_foo.md for consumption by the next agent that touches that subsystem. I don't usually even read these until I suspect a problem in one. They're just nuggets of context transfer.
by paulsutter | 2025-08-08 12:06:55+00:00
> Carbon emissions can first and foremost be reduced by reducing the combustion of fossil fuels.

Exactly! It can’t be reduced or increased by edits to federal PDF files that nobody reads

Commercial efforts are the only solution, and will happen because new energy is cheaper and better. Photovoltaic and battery improvements are our best path forward. Industrial policy can help but we’ve never really had that in the US
by jqpabc123 | 2025-08-08 12:07:24+00:00
Kranzburg's First Law of Technology

"Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral."

Given any new web based system, one of the first things it will be applied toward is privacy invasion. Because privacy has become the common currency of the web economy. Every web site with any relationship to advertising is a participant in it --- wittingly or not.

This is the path of least resistance to making money. It's just how capitalism works on the web.
by lawik | 2025-08-08 12:08:26+00:00
This probably got second-chanced or something because I posted it over a week ago. Funny that this went up here since the follow-up is probably more in-depth.

https://underjord.io/booting-5000-erlangs-on-ampere-one.html

Hope people enjoy it, both the technically interesting bits and the general goofiness of it all. I personally have enjoyed making the number go up.

I hope my co-fouunder on NervesCloud does some write-up on the allocator variations he has been trying. Every day he pops in and asks me to throw 5000 devices at the servers and see what they do. mimalloc, jemalloc and some others. Those two seem to do a better job with fragmentation for the BEAM than whatever we had by default, presumably from glibc.
by jsnell | 2025-08-08 12:08:39+00:00
Does sufficient capacity for recasting actually exist in the US or would it need to be built? If the latter, how long will it take to build it?

I suspect it doesn't exist yet. In fact, the majority of the US trade deficit with Switzerland is attributable to a very recent spike in gold imports. And my understanding is that in turn is a triangular arbitrage trade where physical gold has higher prices in the US, so 400-ounce bars of gold were getting exported from London to Switzerland to be recast, and then to the US.

This was never going to be a durable trade, since the arbitrage only existed due to an expectation of future tariffs on Gold. It probably also was a major contributor Switzerland having just been slapped by extremely punitive tariffs on actually productive sectors of the economy. Good riddance.
by davydm | 2025-08-08 12:09:40+00:00
NullAI.

NullAI is the best. When you ask it a question, it sits there until you come up with a good enough question that you answer it yourself, or get an answer from a regular web search, which really should have been your first port of call (scrolling past the "helpful" in-page assistant which generally either answers your question with the most obvious, unhelpful answer, or simply parrots a StackOverflow answer, typically the wrong one).

NullAI doesn't write buggy code. That's because NullAI doesn't write any code. Instead, NullAI watches on as you read docs and posts and actually learn the domain you're trying to wrangle.

NullAI doesn't do shitty code reviews either. It just stfu and let's people who actually understand the domain talk.

NullAI also doesn't do pictures, so I guess you'll have to find another agent for that.
by ghm2180 | 2025-08-08 12:10:05+00:00
Is it just me or does the showing of hyperspheres deliberately meant to obfuscate some kind of a trade secrets of how to select examples for human to send to a human?

The obfuscation being use of a support vector machines which are the goto for selecting the Support vectors and ignoring the outliers and distance being defined between embedding vectors.

I could be wrong they could be using something different for clustering or fancier like a variant of DBScan.
by zwnow | 2025-08-08 12:10:20+00:00
Doing it professionally destroyed all the magic for me. Everything is slop, customer appointments are exhausting af, nobody is able to precisely communicate their needs and im supposed to be the people pleaser saying "sure can do" to every lunatic idea some person with enough money has. If you want to take responsibility and actually build a valuable product your only option is open source software as companies, no matter the size, do not care about the nuances a feature might have as long as its shippable. Big tech has embarked into enshittification for over two decades now. Imagine being paid for making a product worse. Fuck this industry, money is the only driver for me. Once that's gone, which surely will happen with companies trying to replace devs with AI, I'll hopefully find a way to keep my income stable in a different profession that is actually enjoyable.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-08 12:10:41+00:00
>I'm not sure what more you want me to backup. Would you like the actual legal citations on those?

Screeching about whatever fed law changes or lack thereof the Brady Campaign told you to screech about is pointless. Fed law directly affects only a tiny minority of buyers because people buy what's available and no recent federal law changes have increased/decreased the legal buyer pool and sales volume.

You don't need the CDC or the NIH or whatever other "authoritative" source who's boot you prefer the flavor of in order to make assessments of how things have changed over time. State law changes and sales data are very easy to come by. Those are where the real meat of the change is. Many states over the past 20yr went from it being a hassle to "just toss a pink Ruger in your purse" to a simple retail transaction.
by awestroke | 2025-08-08 12:10:48+00:00
I'll show you a few misspelled words and you tell me (without using any tools or thinking it through) which bits in the utf8 encoded bytes are incorrect. If you're wrong, I'll conclude you are not intelligent.

LLMs don't see letters, they see tokens. This is a foundational attribute of LLMs. When you point out that the LLM does not know the number of R's in the word "Strawberry", you are not exposing the LLM as some kind of sham, you're just admitting to being a fool.
by Cyan488 | 2025-08-08 12:11:01+00:00
Electronics can be surprisingly easy and cheap to build these days. He designed the circuit and layout with software called KiCAD (free and open source) then submitted the designs to a fabrication house - probably a popular offshore one - that easily can handle that level of board and component placement complexity. It would probably cost only a few hundred to build and ship, with 1 month turnaround time.

You can also hand-assemble surface mount parts by applying solder paste carefully to the pads, then placing all the components on the paste and heating the board until all the solder melts. That would have very time consuming for all those LEDs!
by orbital-decay | 2025-08-08 12:11:09+00:00
I gave it a random sci-fi novel and made it translate a chapter, which is something I do with all models. It refused to discuss minors in sexualized contexts. I was like W.T.F.?! and started bisecting the book, trying to find the piece that triggers this. Turns out there was some absolutely innocent, two sentence long romantic remark involving two secondary 17 years old characters in an unrelated place.

Another issue is that it sometimes has occasional refusals and total meltdowns where it redacts entire paragraphs with placeholder characters, while just trying to casually talk with it about some routine life matters.

That's ridiculous and makes that model garbage at any form of creative writing (including translation) or real life tasks other than math or coding. It has very poor knowledge for a 120B MoE. If you look at the "reasoning" it does, it actually mostly checks the request against the policy.

I thought they must have spent most of their post-training hunting the wrongthink and dumbing the model down as a result, but I can see how the synthetic pretraining data can explain this.
by nottorp | 2025-08-08 12:12:04+00:00
> lol good luck doing Slack Thread archeology instead then.

The OP pretends they're actually placing all info into organized documentation in ... Confluence or something. I suppose in real time as the slack thread develops, because they aren't going to find anything a week later...

> (I'm not experienced with Teams but since its Microsoft, it's likely worse.)

Slack is a paragon of usability compared to Teams.

My guess is no one in the OPs organization remembers email etiquette. In theory with proper quoting you won't need to review all messages in a thread because the most recent one already has all the info.

Tbh i use email style indenting even when replying to Slack messages.
by benterix | 2025-08-08 12:12:05+00:00
Infosec is a bit different - this industry is all about (1) expert knowledge and (2) secret sauce. You disclose a part of your secrets, like the security findings, and in exchange your reputation for expert knowledge increases. Telling the world "I automated the boring parts with LLMs" will not only get you "duh, everybody does it now" but will cast doubt on your expertise. That's why these repeated disclaimers at the beginning "we didn't use fuzzers etc., it was all manual process because we knew what to look for" etc.
Show HN: MMSI decoding for all entity types (ships, SAR, coast stations, etc.)
by leoneljdias | 2025-08-08 12:12:51+00:00
Most MMSI decoders fail on special prefixes like 99 or ignore non-ship entities. mmsi-country-lookup follows ITU-R M.585-9 (2023), validates all MMSI formats, and returns both entity type and country/region.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-08 12:13:31+00:00
One thing that helped me was doing some tutorials for pico-8, an intentionally 'weak' game platform, one of which is a platform game with a simple / understandable inertia / gravity simulation (jumping, running left/right; think Mario). It was understandable enough with an x / y position for the character and a delta-x / delta-y representing their current speed. Every frame the dx / dy would get changed depending on player input and/or character state.

Ex: if player presses jump button, set state to 'jumping' and dy to 1. Every frame, dy = dy * 0.9. When dy <= 0, set state to 'falling'. Every frame, dy = dy * 1.1 until dy = 1 (terminal velocity). Then add some collision detection.

I think those basics are also behind the simpler physics simulations, the 'falling sand' types would be ideal for an application like this.
by danabramov | 2025-08-08 12:14:22+00:00
Some of this is already outdated. With the switch to non-indexing relays (“Sync 1.1”), people are already running independent relays quite cheaply. There are also actual independent AppViews coming up.

https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l
by o_m | 2025-08-08 12:14:59+00:00
Back in 2018 I worked for a client that required we used Jira. It was so slow that the project manager set everything up in Excel during our planning meetings. After the meeting she would manually transfer it to Jira. She spent most of her time doing this. Each click in the interface took multiple seconds to respond, so it was impossible to get into a flow.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-08 12:14:59+00:00
If AGI is ever achieved, it would open the door to recursive self improvement that would presumably rapidly exceed human capability across any and all fields, including AI development. So the AI would be improving itself while simultaneously also making revolutionary breakthroughs in essentially all fields. And, for at least a while, it would also presumably be doing so at an exponentially increasing rate.

But I think we're not even on the path to creating AGI. We're creating software that replicate and remix human knowledge at a fixed point in time. And so it's a fixed target that you can't really exceed, which would itself already entail diminishing returns. Pair this with the fact that it's based on neural networks which also invariably reach a point of sharply diminishing returns in essentially every field they're used in, and you have something that looks much closer to what we're doing right now - where all competitors will eventually converge on something largely indistinguishable from each other, in terms of ability.
Show HN: A creative writing game that makes writing fun for kids
by areales | 2025-08-08 12:16:11+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m Andres Reales, a solopreneur who builds apps on my 5 - 8ish am while I'm still on my 9 - 5

While interviewing teachers for my other project, Wise Owl Teacher, I kept hearing the same problem: kids don’t write enough anymore because writing feels boring or intimidating.

To fix this, I created Story Writing Lab, a creative writing game that turns storytelling into a fun, interactive experience for kids and students.

The idea: To gamify writing so kids play and create stories naturally.

It’s simple and engaging, perfect for classrooms or home use.

Check it out here: https://storywritinglab.com (feel free to try it out and share your thoughts).

Andres
by tailspin2019 | 2025-08-08 12:16:50+00:00
I agree with you on MsBuild being powerful.

I often really hate certain technologies like MsBuild and use them begrudgingly for years, fighting with the tooling, right up until I decide once and for all to give it enough of my attention to properly learn, and then realise how powerful and useful it actually is!

I went through the same thing with webpack too.

MsBuild is far from perfect though. I often think about trying to find some sort of simple universal build system that I can use across all my projects regardless of the tech stack.

I’ve never really dug much into `make`… Maybe something like that is what I’m yearning for.
by chiph | 2025-08-08 12:17:14+00:00
The inflation part is guaranteed. Not sure about the "stag" part, but it could be coming - a friend works at a company whose product is used in many other industries (it's a critical part of their production lines), and their orders are down. This might be because of the death of manufacturing in the US, but might also be because their orders are also down.

For those who haven't heard the term before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation
by grafmax | 2025-08-08 12:17:33+00:00
Productivity has grown. But that has more or less stopped going to the median worker since mid-70s (post inflation). This is known as the pay-productivity gap. There has been some increase, but most of the gains have gone to the wealthiest. Our issue today isn’t productivity. It’s redistributing the gains from the wealthy minority who have received the lion’s share to the rest.

And you mention being richer. We also have an unfolding climate crisis, authoritarianism, mass surveillance, and the real possibility of imminent nuclear war (brewing now with China). All these things are the result of a wealthy minority controlling policy for their own interests. And the wealthy minority has gotten there through the same market mechanisms that exploit workers and concentrate wealth. Are we better off when we are much closer to our own self destruction? It’s this wealthy minority that has brought us here. Their relative power continues to grow.

In fact, many of the gains in wealth we have seen are not the result of markets but either savvy government policy or the result of people pushing back on the power of the ruling class. Markets have good and bad sides. It’s best to take off our rose colored glasses and see markets for their good and bad.
by carlosjobim | 2025-08-08 12:17:38+00:00
You made money before taking the loan, as your property increased in value. Taking a loan is a way of realizing the profit, but you can of course also sell your real estate.

The money is paid back during the course of decades, when that money will be worth 1/4, 1/3 or half to what it is worth now. And your real estate is ripe to be mortgaged again for another jackpot payout.

Hundreds of millions of people all over the world do it, and tax authorities applaud it. Who do you think writes the tax code?
Show HN: Brandolia – AI that generates full brand identity in 60 seconds
by kokau | 2025-08-08 12:17:45+00:00
Hey HN! I made *Brandolia*, an AI tool that builds your entire brand identity in under 60 seconds. Enter your *brand name* + *industry*, and instantly get: - A 4K-resolution logo - Color palette & typography - Slogan, storytelling, brand vision - Tailored marketing strategy

Try it for free (no signup required).

Would love to hear your thoughts, ideas, or suggestions—launching solo, so any feedback helps!
by DonHopkins | 2025-08-08 12:17:48+00:00
For beaming a lit joint around, you would definitely need an acknowledgement that it was safely passed, lest it drop on the floor! But how would you prevent duplication if several people received the same joint? I'd just mark that bug "Intended Feature: Will Not Fix."

The Bluetooth Bong was a vast improvement over the MIDI Bong.

MIDI aftertouch on the carburetor was a nice improvement over your grandfather's old Serial Acoustic 300 Baud ASCII Bong, but the Bluetooth Bong HID has a much higher bandwidth, multitouch chording, accelerometer tilt tracking, modular monophonic splash resistant microphone, and they weren't as easy to accidentally knock over because they were wireless. An extremely important feature if you have cats around.

But nothing beats a high-end spill-proof Rooᴙ 802.11be NVB (Network Video Bong) with fully submersible IPX8 smoke resistant stereo mics.
by russellbeattie | 2025-08-08 12:19:23+00:00
> "...would drastically shift power."

What exactly do you think will change? The administration is already ignoring the law with impunity. Unless there's a big enough swing so that impeachment and conviction is a reality, Congress will have essentially zero impact.

Around 40% of the country still supports the president unconditionally. They are truly ecstatic with what's happened so far. The other 60% are being gerrymandered so their majority status is inconsequential. If Republicans do lose the House, it'll most likely be by a small margin, and the current Congress will rush through a bunch of laws to be signed that will make the next one as useless as possible.

And even if there was in fact a huge swing allowing Congress to try and stop the White House's wrecking ball, the amount of damage between now and January 2027 will be monumental and irreversible.
by alexellman | 2025-08-08 12:19:49+00:00
Cursor has gotten more expensive and Claude Code is about to impose new rate limits. To help keep track of your spending and usage I built an open source tracker that tracks both together.

It works in your command line and updates a live dashboard on my website (optional). I also aggregate everyone's token usage together and breakdown the models people are using.

The repo is here https://github.com/ellmanalex/pricepertoken-ai-coding-tracke...
by pclmulqdq | 2025-08-08 12:20:05+00:00
Yeah, the point of most artist residencies is that the artists are the product, not the customer. The general idea is that artists and art make a place more attractive to visit, so the residency brings artists to your place to attract an art-consuming customer demographic. Professional artists understand this dynamic and are very comfortable with it, and being the product in this way can be a very symbiotic relationship since (1) you get paid and (2) being in the new place with new people brings new ideas.

This seems to be more of a training camp or a writing intensive than a residency, but I am not sure what the appropriate name for that is.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-08-08 12:20:07+00:00
> You made money before taking the loan, as your property increased in value. Taking a loan is a way of realizing the profit, but you can of course also sell your real estate.

That's incorrect on both counts. You did not make money and the loan is not a way to realize the profit since you have to pay it back, as explained before.

I think this illustrates that finance and accounting are very poorly understood topic and are easily used for sensationalism.
by tecleandor | 2025-08-08 12:20:17+00:00
Seems like the train set is around 30 feet longer and has more (maybe shorter) cars than the Acela express.

It'd be nice to see the distribution to know if there are some other efficiencies with relation to total length (shorter power cars) or internally (better seat distribution, maybe less first class...). Haven't looked much around, so maybe it's easy to get that info.

--

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avelia_Liberty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acela_Express_(trainset)