MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by athrowaway3z | 2025-08-27 07:05:05+00:00
AI is two things.

- The chatbot people have a personal attachment to

- The processing tool.

In the second, you only care about the result. Something like Claude Code can call any other provider if that's cheaper and visa-verse. Once I have the result, my dependency / lock-in is no more than a brand of toilet paper. The providers will have to do the 'capitalism thing' and compete.

It's almost like WeWork's, valuated at IT levels by being in the style, only for investors to eventually figure out the marginal production costs are not reducible to near 0, and you can't just bully out competition / network-effect to get a monopoly.

And this applies to any company that wraps and re-sells AI.

Something the tech-VC world is so unfamiliar with, it's scrambling to present the truth of what is 'econ-101' for the rest of the world.
by herodoturtle | 2025-08-27 07:05:58+00:00
Came here to say the same.

Don't want to start a separate comment thread repeating what's been said before, but I felt compelled to contribute to the crescendo of this one instead.

These visualisations are simply great.

Programmer of 30 years here. Studied Big O formally around 20 years ago. Loved the refresher. But beyond all that, I found the in-line animation examples were just superbly executed.

I would have absolutely *loved* this style of teaching in my undergraduate algorithms class. It is tangible and practical - not to mention fun.

Kudos to the author.
by lh_mouse | 2025-08-27 07:06:37+00:00
I think it's not correct to say 'Wine is an emulator', as its name suggests it isn't. Both programs are x86-64 and they run natively; they just call different APIs, backed by glibc or Wine, and eventually lead to (maybe different) syscalls to the Linux kernel. This also means they run on the same, physical hardware.
by nine_k | 2025-08-27 07:06:44+00:00
Facing an avalanche of troubling, attention-grabbing, manipulative, and often misleading information, people protect their sanity by irony and nonchalance. A genuine expression, which does not employ irony and invites the reader to also cast away the shield of cynicism, feels both like an attack and the pull of something desirable but unattainable. The resulting pain, modulated by the protective irony, is expressed as cringe.
by johnnyfaehell | 2025-08-27 07:06:55+00:00
The thing is that so many people are used to doing whatever they want from behind the safety of their screen and are now able to do a lot of things they don’t want anyone to know about. Now the law and common sense is catching up and we’re starting to see things we take for granted in the physical world are coming to the digital world. And I think a lot of people are scared of not being able to do what they used to or being found out for doing it.

Plus, and doing what you suggest but in a country where board directors don’t need to be public really solves it.
by novok | 2025-08-27 07:08:02+00:00
After a certain point, people are responsible for what they do when they see certain words, especially words they know to be potentially inaccurate, fictional and have a lot of time to consider the actual reality of. A book is not responsible for people doing bad things, they are themselves.

AI models are similar IMO, and unlike fiction books are often clearly labeled as such, repeatedly. At this point if you don't know if an AI model is inaccurate and do something seriously bad, you should probably be a ward of the state.
by positron26 | 2025-08-27 07:08:05+00:00
Mobile OSs are very consumer focused. I have criticized the FSF for, in there lengthily argued ways, abandoning the consumer.

You have to commercialize openness if you want the muscle of the consumer to be able to produce it.

Short presentation of the basic concept: https://youtu.be/SO46oEdlkY8

Some things with massive value in excess of the cost of production cannot be pursued by capital nor bought by the individual. Your choices are government, non-profit, or something in between all three. PrizeForge aims to be between all three and to completely change how we do consumer open source, incidentally bringing billions of dollars into making it.
by randomtoast | 2025-08-27 07:09:03+00:00
> Does this happen in Germany? Never heard of it and I doubt it's legal, if it happens.

Yes, it does happen, mostly to YouTubers who are filming in public, which is perfectly legal in the U.S. These YouTubers are legally speaking independent journalist, they do not work for a big news organization, but work for themselves and investigative with their own cameras in public, again perfectly legal in the U.S.

In Germany the police has stopped famous YouTubers in the past for doing so. There is plenty of discussion on that on social media.

One quote from the community: "Yes, German regulations are the strictest in the free world."

https://www.reddit.com/r/berlin/comments/8eslik/comment/dxxp...

Related Topic from news media coverage: "The US [human rights] report claimed there were serious restrictions on freedom of expression in Germany"

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-rejects-us-censorship-claims-i...

So it is indeed an issue and the public is already aware of it.
by darkwater | 2025-08-27 07:09:16+00:00
> The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers. The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day.

That's why we should be against it but hey, we can provide more value to shareholders!
by ajb | 2025-08-27 07:09:31+00:00
The Android stack, right back to the pre-aquisition "Danger" stack, ripped out everything GPL'd above the kernel, and Google has been investing in their "fuschia" project to make a non-GPL'dv kernel as well. Gradually making more and more of it proprietary was the plan.

Google is a big company and there may have been some factions pushing to make android an open ecosystem, but I don't see that that was ever the companies intent overall.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-27 07:10:06+00:00
Heh! GNU groff, in particular its grotty driver, still does that to this day. There is a lengthy list of things that in ASCII or Latin-1 modes it composes with a character, a BS, and then another character.

https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/UnicodeKeybo...
by aidenn0 | 2025-08-27 07:11:07+00:00
I looked into this as an option because (similar to the author, from the sounds of it[A]):

1. I already had a 2.5" hotswap setup

2. 2.5" 8TB SSDs are 4x as expensive as 8TB NVMEs.

A: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/NVMeOvertaking...
by csomar | 2025-08-27 07:11:13+00:00
Mostly because the "web" was sabotaged. I use archlinux and my only GUI application is a web browser. On mobile, I need an email app, maps app, food delivery app and a communication app. Even whatsapp doesn't work on the web (on purpose).

If the web was enabled, app stores wouldn't be possible and you could run anything without an installation. But somewhere along the line both Google and Apple realized that this isn't really to their benefit and "walled ecosystems" are an advantage.
by af78 | 2025-08-27 07:11:25+00:00
I share your pessimism.

Le Pen's far-right National Rally (RN) has had ties with the Kremlin for a long time. That alone should have discredited this party a long time ago, but no, it is ranking as high as ever, even after russia's overt invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Mélenchon's far-left "France Insoumise" party ranks very high too, and is similarly pro-russian, anti-EU, anti-NATO.

In the town where I live, more than half the votes have gone to the RN these past elections. I often feel like a Cassandra.
by latexr | 2025-08-27 07:13:12+00:00
> The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day.

That dumb attitude (which I understand you’re criticising) of “more more more” always reminds me of Lenny from the Simpsons moving fast through the yellow light, with nowhere to go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR10t-B9nYY

> I suspect it doesn't matter how we feel about it mind you. If it's going to happen it will, whether we enjoy the gains first or not.

That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable, though inaction and giving up certainly helps that along.
by 999900000999 | 2025-08-27 07:13:29+00:00
My big issue with any expensive portable device is I might just drop it.

I'm typing on this laptop right now. I brought it for 450 USD on sale. https://www.bestbuy.com/product/asus-vivobook-s-14-14-oled-l...

Aside from Linux driver issues, shame on our community for downplaying this, it's an amazing computer. I swapped in a 2TB SDD, and I'll be using it for years.

If I drop it or do something stupid, I'm out 450$. Even a decent Macbook is only going to be about 1500$.

At 3000 Euro, 3500 USD I'd be afraid to take it out of the house, at which point a desktop is going to be significantly cheaper, better, easier to fix and less accident prone.
by safety1st | 2025-08-27 07:14:12+00:00
Well, an internal, relatively free market with some barriers against foreign competition is exactly the strategy that a number of Asian countries employed to get rich, and furthermore, earlier in its history the USA did exactly the same thing. Whether it is "antithetical" or not.

I think your comment is low quality. Like I made an effort here to write at length about how government and economics work in the hopes that someone would learn from it, and you strawmanned one idea and called it "wild." This is not the Hacker News way and it is not commenting in good faith.
by djrj477dhsnv | 2025-08-27 07:14:22+00:00
For the issue of people not wearing seat belts causing insurance premiums to rise for all, a solution is for insurance companies to be allowed to refuse compensation in cases where seat belts weren't properly used.

And yes, if those people have no way to pay for extreme medical treatments to save their life, they shouldn't be provided further assistance. They should bare the consequences of their decisions. Future generations will hopefully make smarter decisions as a result.
by godelski | 2025-08-27 07:15:05+00:00
What an absurd ask. How is a $2.5 trillion dollar company supposed to make any money if it has to spend a bit of time on security? Did you even think about the economy?

Clearly it wasn't doing fine in 2018 when Apple became the first trillion dollar company. Nor was it when in 2012 when Apple's market cap exceeded oil companies, barely breaking half a trillion dollars. And the economy was definitely in shambles back in 2005 when no company even had a 400bn market cap! Seriously, how could the economy ever survive?!

Where would the wold be without all those innovations. Like the 2005 invention of YouTube, the 2007 release of the iPhone. Where would we be without such world changing technologies that followed with tech's rise in global dominance? Technologies like, Bitcoin, VR, and an even thinner iPhone? Do you even know how many peoples' lives these technologies have saved? Seriously? Because I don't...
by kelnos | 2025-08-27 07:15:15+00:00
> Why is it so complex to have a foss mobile OS.

In a way it's not. As you mention, we have several of them. But they won't have mass-market appeal until they can run the same sorts of apps that Android and iOS can run. And no, "just use the mobile website" is not an answer.

How do I deposit a check with my bank on my phone without the app? I can't; the mobile website doesn't have that functionality. How do I send someone money via Zelle without the app? I can't; the mobile website doesn't have that functionality.

How do I use contactless payments? I can't; the ability to build an app like Google Wallet or Apple Pay requires deep pockets and trusted payments industry connections that open source mobile OS developers will likely never have.

How do I use Google's productivity suite? I can't; the mobile websites aren't functional enough. How do I use Microsoft's? Ditto.

How do I use the remote-lock functionality of my car? I can't; that's only available through the Android and iOS apps.

I could go on, and on, and on, but I think you see the point. Many people who advocate for these alternative OSes don't get it. "Do you really need that functionality?", they ask. "Why can't you just do that stuff in a web browser on your laptop instead of on your phone?", they ask. "Just use a physical credit card like I do!" And then they wonder why their alternative mobile OS will never go mainstream.

People actually really care about those features and capabilities. It doesn't matter if the people who build these alternative mobile OSes don't care, or think they're stupid, or unsafe, or bad for privacy, or whatever. If you don't build what people want, they won't use your stuff.

Emulating Android sufficiently well enough to run Android apps is a decent start, but so many apps rely on Play Services and Play Integrity that it's a losing battle, or at best a cat-and-mouse game to keep things working.

On top of that, mobile chipset BSPs require financial commitments and being a Real Company. Most open source outfits can't cross that bar, and the likes of Qualcomm will be wary dealing with an organization that wants to do open source.
by ahoka | 2025-08-27 07:15:34+00:00
From the masterpiece, Tragedy of the Man, describing the future where everything is done in the name of efficiency:

THE GREYBEARD You left your workroom in great disarray.

MICHELANGELO Because I had to fabricate the chair-legs To the quality as poor as it can be. I appeal’d for long, let me modificate, Let me engrave some ornaments on it.

They did not permit. I wanted as a chance The chair-back to change but all was in vain. I was very close to be a madman And I left the pains and my workroom, too. (stands back)

THE GREYBEARD You get house arrest for this disorder And will not enjoy this nice and warm day.
by imtringued | 2025-08-27 07:15:40+00:00
Actually, declining birth rates have a positive effect on national per capital wealth, but not in the way the paper talks about it.

By not having children, parents save costs and can instead accumulate more wealth per capita. This doesn't actually increase aggregate wealth though. It's the same wealth distributed over fewer people, making it look like you can population crash your way to wealth.

It is a somewhat perverse way to look at society, but par for the course for economists.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-27 07:16:44+00:00
In 2025, we all use Windows and macOS laptops around here, Linux is something we run on cloud environments, mostly the distributions of the cloud vendors themselves, which certainly don't upstream everything.

The use of managed language runtimes, and SaaS products with low code/no code, makes the OS kind of irrelevant, and many times we don't even consider Linux on the cloud vendor, it is seen as an implementation detail, as many workloads are done via managed deployments like Vercel, Netlify, Azure Web App Service, and similar services.
by energy123 | 2025-08-27 07:17:20+00:00
It's not parody. I'm trying to provide the LLM with what's missing, which is a theory of how the system fits into the world: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

Without this it defaults to being ignorant about the trade-offs that you care about, or the relevant assumptions you're making which you think are obvious but really aren't.

The "simple stream" aspect is that each task I give to the LLM is narrowly scoped, and I don't want to put all aspects of the relevant theory that pertains just to that one narrow task into a more formal centralized doc. It's better off as an ephemeral part of the prompt that I can delete after the task is done. But I also do have more formal docs that describe the shared parts of the theory that every prompt will need access to, which is fed in as part of the normal context.
by kelnos | 2025-08-27 07:18:52+00:00
> I use archlinux and my only GUI application is a web browser.

Debian here, and... yup. It's so weird to realize this. I have lots of browser windows open with lots and lots and lots of tabs open, but the only other app I have open is a Matrix client (which honestly is not that great; Element's web version has more features and better polish), and a terminal. If you can call a terminal a GUI app.

Sure, I do use native apps sometimes. A calculator app, GnuCash, VLC, some others. But they're not open all the time; they're infrequent-use apps. And a lot of my VLC use has been replaced by streaming on the web.

It's incredibly sad.
Show HN: Chrome Extension to Preview Escaped Strings
by rand_num_gen | 2025-08-27 07:19:01+00:00
Hi HN! I got tired of squinting at escaped strings when debugging LLM API calls, so I built a Chrome extension that instantly renders them.

When working with OpenAI/Claude/etc APIs, the request/response logs are full of escaped strings like "You asked:\n\n\"What is recursion?\"\n\nRecursion is when...". This extension lets you select any text containing these escape sequences and instantly see what it actually looks like.

How it works: Select any escaped string on a webpage → See the rendered output in a floating panel. Works great on API logs.

No more copy-pasting into console or online decoders. Everything runs locally in your browser.

GitHub: https://github.com/aeft/escaped-string-viewer

Built this to scratch my own itch - would love to know if others find it useful!
What accounting solution is not a pain in the ass for C Corps?
by CrisLenta | 2025-08-27 07:19:18+00:00
Im looking for an accountant - either boutique, or something like pilot/fondo for my startup.

It's a delaware c corp in the gaming space, just got the first SAFEs in, and am looking for an accounting solution that actually frees up my time. I've read many posts online about how bench was a mess, about how pilot messed up etc.

Do you have actual names, recommendations from your own experience?
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-08-27 07:19:39+00:00
Stallman has a long history of being very abrasive and ideological. He is the kind of guy who makes zero concessions for practicality, and he insists on prioritizing user freedom because he has always feared that otherwise users will be locked out of having the ability to truly control their computers. It's always been kind of easy to laugh at his crusade because of how zealous he is, and how absurd the scenarios he warns about seem to be. The thing is... he seems to have been right the whole time. Companies really do want to lock you out of controlling the devices you own, and do so at the first opportunity. So... Stallman was right.
by stavros | 2025-08-27 07:19:44+00:00
Every kind of project is faster with AI, because it writes the code faster.

Then you have to QA it for ages to discover the bugs it wrote, but the initial perception of speed never leaves you.

I think I'm overall slower with AI, but I could be faster if I had it write simple functions that I could review one by one, and have the AI compose them the way I wanted. Unfortunately, I'm too lazy to be faster.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-27 07:20:01+00:00
We really don't need two of these each for every individual country, as Hacker News currently has running for Australia and Japan already. It's 25 countries, now.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45030115

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45034684
by teekert | 2025-08-27 07:20:10+00:00
So the real question is: Why are people so social and pleasant, and why are companies so egoistic (and I mean egoistic in the cancer/parasitic/enshitifying way, not in the Ayn-Rand/social/We-are-all-equal way).

Is it the lack of deep, DNA encoded morality? What are we going to do about this? What is the DNA of an organization anyway?

How, as a society can we take away these stimuli that make it so natural to consume individual freedoms when we grow our tribe-size?

Maybe we need more freedom, more freedom to say: "F-this I'm out of here, I just like the set of rule of this other society better." Maybe we are still too constrained. By our ways of generating income, by our countries, continents and ultimately our planet. We have 1 lifetime, we have to make do with what we find.
by vintermann | 2025-08-27 07:21:00+00:00
> The evidence for much of these vast clashes

Before agriculture, supply trains weren't a thing. How much less wouldn't they have been a thing before language.

It's not that I think ancient people were nice, far from it. But "vast clashes" suggest armies, wars of extinction etc. and those wouldn't have been a thing for economic and logistic reasons. Your tribe might have been better at killing than your neighboring tribe, but they weren't a thousand times better at it.

Even into recent prehistory, this was true. I speak a language descendend from more or less invading steppe peoples (as do we all here), but they're just a small part of my genetic ancestry. That is actually still mostly from European hunter-gatherers. My Y-DNA is from EHGs too, like the majority in my country, so there clearly wasn't the stereotypical "taking all the women as slaves" event that many imagine either.

Agriculture and horses gave some people from outside a big advantage, sure, big enough to dominate in many ways, but not big enough to wholesale replace the people who lived in this part of the world already. "Vast clashes" is not the right way of thinking about how some early hominids replaced others.
by preisschild | 2025-08-27 07:22:01+00:00
> For mobile, we have PostmarketOS, Phosh, Ubuntu Touch. I really must try living in them, is it on me? IDK, our government even has an identity app for iOS and Android. I should not be using it, I should stick to web. But its so much more convenient. I'm just weak, aren't I?

Don't forget GrapheneOS, LineageOS and other de-googled FOSS Android Versions
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-08-27 07:22:06+00:00
>Orban says nothing about Europe.

Hungary is literally in Europe. If Orban says nothing about Europe, then nothing can ever say anything about Europe.

Your country is choosing to stay in a union with Orban's. If EU membership is meaningless, as you imply, it should be easy for your country to quit in order to make a point about Hungary.
by tamimio | 2025-08-27 07:22:53+00:00
That's an argument I had with a friend last year. I told him generative AI will make writing code easier, but the life of whoever is writing it far worse. Because writing code without using AI is done with some sort of due diligence: you memorize some stuff, look up other stuff in the docs or online, and you take some time actually solving the problem you have. If you succeed, you would've spent the needed time at YOUR pace, with an intrinsic reward of feeling good that you achieved something. With AI, on the other hand, you are in semi-cheat mode, throwing prompts after prompts and now you are trying to catch someone/something else's pace, zero reward, and more mentally exhausted.

The best approach is to use AI only when you are stuck and looking for potential solutions, but we all know that is not going to happen unless you have extreme self-control.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-08-27 07:23:12+00:00
I don't think anyone is saying Google must allow anonymous apps on their app store. Nor is there anything wrong with giving the user of a phone the option to only install apps which have been vouched for by some trusted third party. The problem is, Google wishes to take away my choice to install apps that don't follow their rules. And that's bullshit. It's my device, which I own. Nobody except me should be able to restrict what does and does not run on that device.