MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chipotle_coyote | 2025-08-18 03:33:08+00:00
> still markdown just isn’t powerful enough for anything non trivial

I see this sentiment a lot, and my reaction is always, “Sure it is, with asterisks.” In the past decade I was the primary author of the RethinkDB documentation, a senior technical writer on Bixby’s developer documentation, and am now a contractor working on Minecraft’s developer docs. All of them were large, decidedly non-trivial, and Markdown. Microsoft’s entire learning portal, AFAICT, is in Markdown.

And the thing is, each of those systems used a different Markdown processor. My own blog uses one that’s different from all of those. According to HN, I should be spending virtually all my time fighting with all those weird differences and edge cases, but I’m not. I swear. The thing about edge cases is they’re edge cases. I saw a “Markdown torture” document the other day which contained a structure like this:

[foo[bar(http://bar.com)](http://foo.com)

and proudly proclaimed that different Markdown processors interpret that construct differently. Yes, okay, and? Tell me a use case for that beyond “I want to see how my Markdown processor breaks on that.”

The asterisk is that almost any big docs (or even blogging) system built on Markdown has extensions in it, which are usually a function of the template system. Is that part of Markdown? Obviously not. Is it somehow “cheating”? I mean, maybe? At the end of the day, 99% of what I’m writing is still Markdown. I just know that for certain specific constructs I’m going use {{brace-enclosed shortcodes}}, or begin an otherwise-typical Markdown block quote with a special tag like “%tip%” to make it into a tip block. Every system that proclaims it’s better than Markdown because it allows for extensions, well, if you take advantage of that capability, look at you adding site-specific customization just like I’m doing with (checks notes) Markdown.

If reStructured Text works better for you, or AsciiDoc, or Org Mode, great! Hell, do it all in DITA, if you’re a masochist. But this whole “this is obviously technically superior to Markdown, which surely no one would ever do real work in, pish tosh” nonsense? We do. It works fine. Sorry.
by NearAP | 2025-08-18 03:33:45+00:00
I was in Enterprise software and even though I didn’t visit users, I dealt with them regularly eg through video calls or engaging with them via support forum if support escalates an issue.

And yes we were judged on how pleasant to use our software was. If we miss a feature or ship a feature that customers intensely dislike, best believe that we’ll get a torrent of negative feedback on our support channels
by thwarted | 2025-08-18 03:35:44+00:00
> the discourse around LLM use in the creative space has just shown me that many people in technology simply have little to no comprehension of the arts and humanities and have no clue what it is that artists actually do, or even how to intelligently engage with artistic works

While shitting on "people in technology" is the pastime du jour, the technologists may be boosters, but non-technical, non-creative people also have "little to no comprehension of the arts and humanities and have no clue what it is that artists actually do, or even how to intelligently engage with artistic works". And that's because they are mainly consumers of the creative output.
by troupo | 2025-08-18 03:35:58+00:00
> Sorry, cookie banners are a direct result of EU legislation, it really is that simple.

Please write to me the relevant part of the legislation that require a full screen cookie banner that requires you to manually click "no" on each of the 1000+ "partners".

> you've offered zero facts to support it either.

Ah yes, and you've provided a lot of support to your "cookie banners as we see them implemented by literal ad business industry groups are the result of the legislation"

> and know exactly why we made the decisions we did based on the legal advice given in each instance.

Oh, I do, too. The legal council is "since you insist on using fifteen different marketing tools each relying on tracking, we have to include these banners developed by the advertising and tracking industry to cover our assess".

> You want this conspiracy narrative

Once again: it's not a conspiracy theory. It's literally done in the open.

> could you not agree that moving forward, a centralized browser-based setting is the better solution for all parties involved?

GDPR has been around for 9 years now.

Somehow, world's largest advertising and user tracking company that incidentally makes the world's most popular browser came up with exactly zero proposals to do that.

In the same time they have come up with at least three to keep tricking people into tracking. The latest one was literally "how to build a more private web? by turning on tracking" https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1664682689591377923 ("no thanks" in those screenshots turns off data sharing and tracking)

But yes do tell me how this blatant open flaunting of user privacy is "conspiracy thinking".

Edit: also please tell me whether "we're creating a user profile on you, collect device identifiers and precise geolocation information, and storing that data for 12 years" is conspiracy thinking and the direct result of GDPR?
by privatelypublic | 2025-08-18 03:36:39+00:00
If you want to go back to the start, look up MICR. Used to sort checks.

OCR'ing a fixed, monospaced, font from a pristine piece of paper really is "solved." It's all the nasties of tue real world that its an issue.

As I mockingly demonstrated- kerning, character similarity, grammar, lexing- all present large and hugely time consuming problems to solve in processes where OCR is the most useful.
by Jedd | 2025-08-18 03:36:53+00:00
I'm in NSW - curious on what you got, what subsidy/ies you were able to obtain.

I'd previously looked into this and it sounded like a package was required - PVC + battery - whereas I've already got 10kW inverter + 12kW panels, and basically just want something around that size (40kWh).

Street pricing seemed to be around the $9k installed per 10kWh, so a) your subsidy options sounds spectacular - around 60% discount? - and b) payback for me would probably be around 8 years.

But if I switch vendors (Amber I think is what one of my friends is on) I can engage in something analogous to wholesale market activity, 10m bidding / sales, rapidly decrease the projected lifetime of my battery, but potentially be $-positive even through the winter months.

But all that feels like something the power companies here in AU are going to try to try to undercut / tax.
by int_19h | 2025-08-18 03:37:34+00:00
It's kinda hilarious to see "simple task ... like translation". If you are familiar with the history of the field, or if you remember what automated translation looked like even just 15 years ago, it should be obvious that it's not simple at all.

If it were simple, we wouldn't need neural nets for it - we'd just code the algorithm directly. Or, at least, we'd be able to explain exactly how they work by looking at the weights. But now that we have our Babelfish, we still don't know how it really works in details. This is ipso facto evidence that the task is very much not simple.
by phil21 | 2025-08-18 03:37:44+00:00
> I think many people don't realise that we are very much in the middle of shit creek and without a paddle.

Yep. I've watched things for some time, and I think almost everyone is stuck in a "I was 20 years old and things were like X" mentality. Including their take on China capabilities.

Yes, China was the place you outsourced cheap BS that had horrible quality to 25 years ago for stupid cheap labor and materials.

Today? You are not outsourcing to save money, at least in the direct sense. You are outsourcing there because it may be the only place in the world that can get shit done for you in a reasonable time with a reasonable competency level.

And at this point? It's basically the entire value chain short of product marketing and branding for many products. All the technical design knowledge is located there for the most part, and operates at lightspeed compared to the US.

If we went to war it'd be over as soon as the weapons stockpiles got depleted - only one side has the capability to manufacturer at scale. And it's not even like a mismatch - it's an ability vs. complete inability.
by 0x457 | 2025-08-18 03:39:14+00:00
> You know, choose boring technology.

Is it a boring technology? I remember trying Node.js when it just came out, and I don't think all that much improved. Whole node.js always felt one step forward, two steps back. A lot of early design decisions still hurt it.

I would call it stagnated before I call it boring.
by j780 | 2025-08-18 03:39:45+00:00
Get a library card! My local library card includes free digital access to newspapers " from 100 countries in 60 languages" as well as streaming video, audiobooks etc. They also have a makerspace with 3d printing, green screen, recording studios, video games, tool rental etc. all at low or no cost. I let my card expire but I see it's still free in my city.
by waltbosz | 2025-08-18 03:39:58+00:00
There is an Asimov story called "Someday" in which a toy computer called a Bard generates random fairy tales and reads them to children.

In the story two children try to hack their Bard, to make it tell more interesting modern stories, by feeding it a new vocabulary of modern words. In the end, it just generates the same old fairy tale plots using the new words it has learned.

I really feel like that story embodies today's AI generated stories. I've tried to get ChatGPT to generate original fairy tales and whatever plot prompt I give it, it spits out what is essentially the same dull story every time.

I always enjoy spotting a good anachronism in a sci-fi story (societies with space travel but still use typewriters), but this is a case of really spot on prediction.
by alchemist1e9 | 2025-08-18 03:39:59+00:00
ripgrep-all and recoll come to mind as projects that might be helpful to look at for supporting additional file types.

Fallinorg is great and something I’ve also thought about quite a bit. Local LLMs probably could enable lots of organizational workflows. I can’t wait to try what you have. Thanks for sharing and working on this problem.
by int_19h | 2025-08-18 03:40:40+00:00
As someone whose native language isn't English, I disagree. SOTA models are scary good at translations, at least for some languages. They do make mistakes, but at this point it's the kind of mistake that someone who is non-native but still highly proficient in the language might make - very subtle word order issues or word choices that betray that the translator is still thinking in another language (which for LLMs almost always tends to be English because of its dominance in the training set).

I also disagree that it's "not even remotely close to reaching human-like quality". I have translated large chunks of books into languages I know, and the results are often better than what commercial translators do.
by xenotux | 2025-08-18 03:40:59+00:00
I think that's an odd way of viewing creativity: unless you can pull off the whole thing, you're not really creative/

What about people who are not native speakers? Who are dyslexic? Do we deny them the spark of creativity because they can't write perfect prose without help? Heck, what about most sci-fi writers? Their editors often do a lot of heavy lifting to make the final product good.

If you have a killer idea for a meme or a really clever concept of a four-panel comic strip, but don't know how to use Photoshop or can't draw very well, is it a sin to ask a machine to help? Is your idea somehow worthless just because you previously couldn't do that?

I'm not disputing that a lot of people don't use these tools this way. In fact, that was exactly my point. If your "idea" is to crank out deceptive drivel, I'm not defending that.
by abouhmad | 2025-08-18 03:41:05+00:00
As a passionate home cook, I built an app that instantly turns whatever’s in my fridge into recipes. The app is built using Flutter & Dart, and uses the ChatGPT API. I have some fun ideas regarding a physical inventorying system that syncs with the app using RFID that I’m also toying with for a future release.

I’d love to get your thoughts on the concept
by int_19h | 2025-08-18 03:45:11+00:00
Same way it happened last time we had a bunch of major advancements in labor rights. Things get shitty everywhere, but at an uneven pace, which combined with random factors causes a spark to set off massive unrest in some countries. Torches and pitchforks are out, many elite heads roll, and the end result is likely to be even worse, but elites in other countries look at all this from the outside and go, "hmm, maybe we shouldn't get people so desperate that they will do that to us".
by phil21 | 2025-08-18 03:45:20+00:00
It's a nonsensical argument as you've discovered. It's due to the dollar value of things. And yes, jet engines are about as bespoke as you can get - incredibly man-hours intensive and it reflects in the price.

As some point folks will discover that dollars do not actually equal physical goods. Exporting 100 F35s at $100m/ea is not the same value to a country under duress as the capability to manufacture $10B of random consumer goods. Nevermind the supply chain of that F35 is not remotely contained to domestic manufacturing.

It's hand-wavy financialization of America speak.
by dml2135 | 2025-08-18 03:45:30+00:00
I'm not talking about worthless schools -- I'm talking about the Ivy Leagues.

Worthless degrees, yes, but why are we not holding our most prestigious schools responsible for charging outlandish prices for worthless degrees? They are the ones with power misleading young adults who maybe should know better but guess what, they often don't, and that's a mistake but not one that should ruin you financially for the rest of your life.

But yes, you are right that this is not the majority of student loan borrowers.
by dml2135 | 2025-08-18 03:47:21+00:00
I qualified my initial comment with "for professions that do not provide a salary that could pay for said tuition".

And my comment is not about people thinking they'd be getting rich -- it's about people making a (or what should be) reasonable assumption that they'd make enough money to pay off their tuition without lifelong financial struggle.

Yes, state schools are the smart choice here.

My point is it's not all on the student, they are victims to a large extent. We should also place blame on these elite institutions for suckering in young adults with their prestige and then not delivering a product that is worth what they charge. And on the government for providing a blank check for this nonsense.

Anyway, I do think we're mostly in agreement. And btw, I'm fine, I'm just speaking from the experiences of many of my peers, which have left me pretty teed-off at a prestigious university in my city that I will refrain from calling out by name.
by emporas | 2025-08-18 03:47:22+00:00
OpenSCAD doesn't seem to be bad at all, but not thrilled with a custom language to write scripts on it. I found a Rust crate which might help.

I haven't managed yet to write Rust and interoperate with FreeCAD or Blender, so if it is easier to write Rust for OpenSCAD I might settle on OpenSCAD. I have to experiment somewhat to find the most compatible with Rust between the three.
by raspasov | 2025-08-18 03:49:15+00:00
I just saw a small 3D demo running at 120fps+ that some of the newer JVM vector APIs supposedly enable.

Link to demo @ timestamp: https://youtu.be/UVsevEdYSwI?t=653

My experience with 3D graphics is minimal, but I'm curious to know if these newer developments are significant in any way for 3D work.
by brockferocious | 2025-08-18 03:49:52+00:00
I built a simple CLI tool to track Claude Code usage and costs after seeing the desktop app for usage tracking (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44933255). I don't really want another app on my machine, and I'm perfectly fine using claude code in the console or cursor.

BUT, like you, I want to know if I'm really getting all the value out my $200 a month subscription...
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-18 03:50:08+00:00
> There are very few theories of business and/or economics where profits increase while costs are steady where prices don't increase.

There is a very specific and relevant one: The one in which supply is inelastic. In other words, the one in which it's hard to build new power plants.

When that happens, the cost of operating existing power plants hasn't changed, but demand goes up. In normal economics, demand going up causes the price (and therefore profit) to go up, which in turn attracts more suppliers that increase supply and mitigate the amount the price can increase.

If the supply can't go up then price does. That's econ 101 and it's happening just as it's expected to -- it's simply what happens if you make it hard to increase supply.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-08-18 03:51:18+00:00
I have only one issue I've encountered with Deno that mattered (so to speak) and it's probably my fault. I actually created an issue for it (https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues/30433).

My project config is weird (slightly more sophisticated that my repro), so, it's probably on me. Otherwise I absolutely love Deno. It makes TypeScript simple and joyful. It's the simplicity this language/tooling ecosystems badly needs in my opinion. Sometimes I feel like it makes TypeScript feel a bit more like working with Go; you can just throw a main.ts in there and build an excellent CLI from it in minutes.
by bigger_cheese | 2025-08-18 03:51:52+00:00
The AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) website has some good data can see price of electricity in realish time. This is for the NEM (which is east coast states + South Australia), the west coast is on a separately managed grid with no interconnection.

https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-...

You can also view the breakdown of where the grid is sourcing energy from (i.e. what portion of the grid is supplied from solar pv etc at any given time).

I know that some big industrial users (large factories etc) can optimize/spin up production lines etc based on the spot price. Although I'm not sure if they use the same public AEMO data there might be a dedicated api or similar involved.
by dangus | 2025-08-18 03:52:12+00:00
I feel like the logic of your question is actually inverted from reality.

It’s kind of like you’re saying “prove god doesn’t exist” when it’s supposed to be “prove god exists.”

If a problem isn’t documented LLMs simply have nowhere to go. It can’t really handle the knowledge boundary [1] at all, since it has no reasoning ability it just hallucinates or runs around in circles trying the same closest solution over and over.

It’s awesome that they get some stuff right frequently and can work fast like a computer but it’s very obvious that there really isn’t anything in there that we would call “reasoning.”

[1] https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
by echelon | 2025-08-18 03:52:34+00:00
Search is dead to me now. I'm using LLMs, mostly ChatGPT, for most of my inquiries.

It's so laborious to sift through shitty Google search results when ChatGPT will uncover unknown unknowns.

I don't want OpenAI to become the new monopoly de jour, but I'm certainly happier as a user with their platform than I am with Google search.

Google stopped being a powerhouse tool when they dropped advanced search predicates a decade or more ago.
by acoustics | 2025-08-18 03:52:45+00:00
Interestingly, a lot of the engineers I know are hoping for the exact opposite. They're hoping that AI will humble the business, management, product types.

The way they see it, AI can easily shit out a hundred product concepts, market research, slide decks, sales emails, reports, etc. No need to bring on MBAs or self-proclaimed visionaries or LinkedIn gurus.

I think both camps will be disappointed. The engineers will be disappointed that they'll still need vapid business/product people to keep them pointed at projects that will actually put food on the table. The business/product people will be disappointed that they'll still need sanctimonious engineers to make anything actually work.
by int_19h | 2025-08-18 03:52:53+00:00
The easiest way to implement this is to have literally everyone pay a flat tax on the non-UBI portion of their income. This then effectively amounts to a progressive income tax on total income. If you do some number crunching, it wouldn't even need to be crazy high to give everyone the equivalent of US minimum wage; comparable to some European countries.

Over time, as more things get automated, you have more people deriving most of their income from UBI, but the remaining people will increasingly be the ones who own the automation and profit from it, so you can keep increasing the tax burden on them as well.

The endpoint is when automation is generating all the wealth in the economy or nearly so, so nobody is working, and UBI simply redistributes the generated wealth from the nominal owners of automation to everyone else. This fiction can be maintained for as long as society entertains silly outdated notions about property rights in a post-scarcity society, but I doubt that would remain the case for long once you have true post-scarcity.
by raspasov | 2025-08-18 03:53:29+00:00
That has always been one of Clojure's main strengths (async & concurrency). With the new JVM VirtualThreads, things are looking better than ever.

The transition of core.async specifically to VirtualThreads is still WIP as far as I understand, but with minimal tweaks, 90% of the benefits are already there, even with the current latest version.
by doix | 2025-08-18 03:54:16+00:00
Yes, I don't quite get it. When I need to maintain a fork, I just add an extra remote to git. Then I fetch upstream (what I call my remote) and rebase my changes against whatever branch I'm following. At any point in time I can generate a patch file that works for whatever version I have rebased against.

Seems easy enough, I read the article multiple times and I don't get why what they are describing is needed.
by mdaniel | 2025-08-18 03:55:18+00:00
You are aware of which thread you're discussing this in, right? The one where a bunch of like-minded souls enumerated all the address space in a few weeks?

The sibling link above that queries Wayback's warc index shows at least the first several are only 6 alnum wide so it's no wonder the ArchiveTeam got them in reasonable time

Picking one at random, it seems the super sekrit deets you're safeguarding include buyrussia21.co.kr which, yes, is for sure very, very secret
by qnleigh | 2025-08-18 03:55:33+00:00
I suspect not literally this, but the point is one doesn't need to treat reaching out to an old friend with overtures and formalities. Probably you need a bit more context if you haven't seen them in years, but you don't have to make a big deal out of it (e.g. the 'oh I know it's been a while...').
by dwd | 2025-08-18 03:56:10+00:00
The best fantasy/sci-fi literature involves a lot of world building.

For some, the world building came first and the stories were an offshoot of that.

Tolkien needed a world and stories to bring life to the languages he was inventing.

Raymond E Feist's Midkemia was a massive collaborative effort for a RPG world. He has stated: "I don't write fantasy; I write historical novels about an imaginary place. At least that's how I look at it."

This is what you won't see AI doing...yet.