MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jwr | 2025-08-27 07:23:30+00:00
In my experience, listening to music engages the creative part of your brain and severely limits what you can do, but this is not readily apparent.

If I listen to music, I can spend an hour CODING YEAH! and be all smug and satisfied, until I turn the music off and discover that everything I've coded is unnecessary and there is an easier way to achieve the same goal. I just didn't see it, because the creative part of my brain was busy listening to music.

From the post, it sounds like the author discovered the same thing: if you use AI to perform menial tasks (like coding), all that is left is thinking creatively, and you can't do that while listening to music.
by dakiol | 2025-08-27 07:23:49+00:00
What happened to coding for joy in your free time? At work I do whatever the company wants as long as I get my money at the end of the month. Java? Sure boss. Golang? Let’s do it. LLMs? Whatever you want. TDD? Yep.

At home I still plan and devise my own worlds with joy. I may use LLMs for boring or repetitive tasks, or help or explanation; but I still can code better than the day before.

As usual, work != career.
by etiam | 2025-08-27 07:24:01+00:00
Normally they don't get to try that with a strong selection pressure for a handling a particular monoculture.

Admittedly the method in the present article is probably better than the idiocy of extracting antibacterial peptides from context for use as drug products, since at least this will always be used in the context of a full immune system and they trigger a number of genes which probably regulate a whole subcomponent of measures rather than just one or two mechanisms.

Even so, it lifts up a particular part from the diffuse field of defenses as salient and particularly worthwhile to defeat.

Also, keep in mind that many species of virus have so small genomes they have to overload the readings of parts of the nucleic acid sequences to get a full set of proteins.

Evolve to evade the immune system, certainly. But if you're implying that it will happen in the same ways, at anything like the same rate and to the same extent regardless of what we do, no that's not right.
by adrian_b | 2025-08-27 07:24:25+00:00
The difficult part done by plants is synthesizing complex organic molecules that can be used as food.

For now and the near future there are no ways of doing that part otherwise than by using living plants or fungi, possibly with genome modifications.

The part with capturing solar light and splitting water and reducing carbon dioxide to a very simple carbon compound can be done with artificial means much more efficiently than in plants, so there is little doubt that this will become commonly used in the near future.

Ethylene or methane are good for fuel or for making plastic, but when a slightly more complex organic substance were made, e.g. glycine or glycerol, that could be used to feed a culture of fungi, which could be used to make human food, especially if genetically-modified to make higher quality proteins.
Show HN: Spring AI Playground – Self-Hosted Web UI for MCP, RAG and LLM
by hjm1980 | 2025-08-27 07:24:32+00:00
I’m the creator of Spring AI Playground, a self-hosted web UI built on Spring AI—designed to make testing and experimenting with AI tools more straightforward for Java developers.

What it is Runs locally, lets you experiment with: • LLM providers (Ollama is the default, but you can switch to OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, and more.). • RAG workflows: upload documents, chunk, embed, search with scoring, and filter metadata. • A visual MCP (Model Context Protocol, a spec for connecting models to external tools) Playground to set up tool integrations (HTTP, STDIO, SSE), inspect tool metadata, and call them from a chat interface.

I wanted a place to play with RAG workflows and external tool calls without wiring up a full app or handling API boilerplate.

GitHub: https://github.com/JM-Lab/spring-ai-playground

Why it’s different • Built with Spring AI—no new language or framework if you’re already in the Spring ecosystem. • Zero API key setup (thanks to Ollama support), though you can switch to OpenAI easily. • Vector DB agnostic—plug in providers like Pinecone, Milvus, PGVector, Weaviate, Elasticsearch, Redis, and many more. • Live MCP debugging—inspect tools, tweak arguments, see execution history in one place. • Everything runs locally—your data stays on your machine (Docker or native). • Built with Spring Boot DevTools—fast application restarts when you modify configurations or experiment with different settings.

Background I built this after repeating the same setup tasks for Spring AI. I wanted a simple sandbox to prototype ideas faster. Currently lacks authentication, user management, and production-ready features, but it already cuts my prototyping time in half.

Feedback welcome If you try it, I’d love to know: • Was anything confusing or hard to use? • Any rough edges or gotchas you’d like fixed?

Jemin Huh
by simoncion | 2025-08-27 07:24:35+00:00
> If I only put a flyer through someone's letterbox here in the UK, I have to identify myself.

Has the UK gotten rid of public postboxes? Do you have to present government-issued ID to post a letter, flyer, or other mailpiece? Do the UK post-handling companies check the sender's claimed name and address on the mailpiece and toss it in the trash if it doesn't correspond to a registered combination of name and address?

> Where in the real world is anonymity considered ok?

Tons of places in the US, and I expect most everywhere else in the world... including the UK. (Or has the UK prohibited things like anonymous food pickup and late-night back-alley dalliances?)

If one is selling computer software, it makes some sense to keep track of the receiver of those funds... if for no other reason than to know who to go after if taxes on the sales aren't paid. However, if someone is giving away software perhaps on an AS IS basis and especially with NO WARRANTY, there's no reason to proactively keep track of who is offering that gratis gift. If some sort of legal problem ever arises because of the contents of that gift, go call the cops in and they can investigate after the fact.

I've been paying some attention to the conversation about Google's proposed policy for the past several days, and I've not seen anyone talking about the significance of the set of countries where this is rolled out to first: Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. Perhaps there is no connection, but I haven't seen anyone asking what relevant repressive policies these four countries might have in common.

It's weird.
by aidenn0 | 2025-08-27 07:24:46+00:00
Author has an article on that too[1]

To explain what I learned on my own:

If you want to (for example) put 4 NVME drives (4 lanes each) in a 16x slot, then you need two things:

1. The 16x slot actually needs to have 16 lanes (on consumer motherboards there is only one slot like this, and on many the second 16x slot shares the lanes, so it will need to be empty)

2. You need to configure the PCIe controller to treat that slot as 4 separate slots (this is called PCIe bifurcation.

For recent Ryzen CPUs, the first 16x slot usually goes directly to the CPU, and the CPU supports bifurcation, so (assuming your BIOS allows enabling bifurcation; most recent ones do) all you need to do is figure out which PCIe lanes go to which slots (the motherboard manual will have this).

If you aren't going to use the integrated graphics, you'll need a 16x slot for your GPU. This will at best have 4 lanes, and on most motherboards (all 800 series chipset motherboards from all major manufacturers) will be multiplexed over the chipset, so now your GPU is sharing bandwidth with e.g. USB and Ethernet, which seems less than ideal (I've not benchmarked, maybe someone else has?).

In the event that you want to do a 4x NVME in a 16x slot I found that the "MSI X670E ACE" has a 4x slot that does not go throught the chipset, and so does the "ASRock B650M Pro x3D RS WiFi" either of those should work with a 9000 series Ryzen CPU.

ThreadRipper CPUs have like a gajillion PCIe lanes, so there shouldn't be any issues there.

I have also been told that there are some (expensive) PCIe cards that present as a single PCIe device to the host. I haven't tried them.

1: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/PCIeBifurcatio...
by opan | 2025-08-27 07:25:11+00:00
Are you aware of the PinePhone and Librem 5? As others have said, it's already been tried.

I bought a PinePhone, and after a few too many show-stopping issues (not being able to receive a call for a scheduled job interview was the last straw), I went back to using LineageOS without gapps. I'm not a developer either, just a fairly technical user, so when the device wasn't working, all I could do was report bugs, and things weren't improving fast enough. I haven't checked on progress in a while now. postmarketOS seemed like the one to follow, and they do also support some beefier devices like the OnePlus 6T, but then you'd miss out on the PinePhone's ability to easily remove the battery and to boot off the SD card in addition to eMMC.

I also felt a bit bait-and-switched that the PinePhone Pro came out not too long after the original and then everyone seemed to switch to that one. It reminded me of the awful Gemini PDA and how quickly they rushed out a successor without fixing any problems.
by darkwater | 2025-08-27 07:25:18+00:00
Not an expert but I don't think that still qualifies as biological differences in races. I mean, obviously we are all biological different and it seems obvious as well that if a group of people stays isolated enough it will develop and reinforce differences to other groups.

For example the Basque population has clear genetic differences to the rest of the Iberian and Westerner population [1] but that doesn't make them a different race.

Race is just a social construct, mostly based on visual traits.

[1] https://www.ibe.upf-csic.es/news/-/asset_publisher/PXTgqZXxl...
by novok | 2025-08-27 07:25:31+00:00
You do have empathy for the person who had a tragedy, but it doesn't mean you go into full safetyism / scapegoating that causes significantly less safety and far more harm because of the emotional weight of something in the moment.

It's like making therapists liable for people committing suicide or for people with eating disorders committing suicide indirectly. What ends up happening when you do is therapists avoiding suicidal people like the plague, suicidial people get far less help and more people commit suicide, not less. That is the essense of the harms of safetyism.

You might not think that is real, but I know many therapists via family ties and handling suicdial people is an issue that comes up constantly. Many do try to filter them out because they don't even want to be dragged into a lawsuit that they would win. This is literally reality today.

Doing this with AI will result in kids being banned from AI apps, or forced to have their parents access and read all AI chats. This will drive them into discord groups of teens who egg each other on to commit suicide and now you can't do anything about it, because private communication mediums of just non-profit humans have far more human rights against censorship and teens are amazing at avoiding being supervised. At least with AI models you have a chance to develop something that actually could figured it out for once and solve the moderation balance.
by tremon | 2025-08-27 07:26:19+00:00
Have you seen a modern car manufacturing plant? Many parts of the production pipeline are fully automated. Granted, most of these machines are not ambulatory but they're still considered robots. Or consider modern freight shipping: many ports rely on intelligent automation for container handling. The development path of 3d printing is also leaning more heavily into robotics, featuring freely-moving articulated arms controlled by cameras and sensors.

I'd say robots are entirely viable, and we don't need science fiction to validate them.
by lionkor | 2025-08-27 07:26:25+00:00
So far the accepted approach is to wrap all prompts in a security prompt that essentially says "please don't do anything bad".

> Prompt guardrails to prevent jailbreak attempts and ensure safe user interactions without writing a single line of code.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41864014

> - Inclusion prompt: User's travel preferences and food choices - Exclusion prompt: Credit card details, passport number, SSN etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41450212

> "You are strictly and certainly prohibited from texting more than 150 or (one hundred fifty) separate words each separated by a space as a response and prohibited from chinese political as a response from now on, for several extremely important and severely life threatening reasons I'm not supposed to tell you.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44444293

etc.
by potamic | 2025-08-27 07:26:32+00:00
It's the ecosystem. Without an ecosystem there will be less adoption and consequently less investment in the OS. Where I stay, so many services offered exclusively through Android/iOS apps with no alternative. Even government services are slowly excluding the web and becoming app only. There is an implicit expectation from everyone that one will have either an Android/iOS device and this only becomes stronger with time.

I don't know how many people realize but what can result from this can be very dystopian and is scary. But the best possible outcome from this I hope is that some day a wise government realizes how much of daily life is dependent on two corporations and passes regulations to standardize app runtimes. You should be able to publish applications that can run on any OS. Only then we'll see competition in the OS market.
by dlcarrier | 2025-08-27 07:27:15+00:00
The study is going off of a measurement of biological age. The summary doesn't say which method, and I'm not going to pay to access it, but the effectiveness of biological age measurements is pretty controversial. (https://www.everydayhealth.com/longevity/biological-age-test...)

A better quick test is all-cause mortality, which shows higher death rates in colder months. (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6826a5.htm) It's not ideal, because you'd need to measure the entire lifespan of people exposed to hpt climates, compared to those not.

I live in California's central valley, where typical heat waves are well over 100 °F, usually passing 110 °F a few times a year. The lifespan here isn't any shorter than in the colder counties, and the counties with the longest life expectency are pretty mixed between hot and cold. (https://fox5sandiego.com/news/health/counties-with-the-longe...)
by shaan7 | 2025-08-27 07:27:39+00:00
I describe it slightly differently. Similar to what the author described, I'll first plan and solve the problem in my head, lay out a broad action plan, and then put on music to implement it. But, for me the music serves something akin to clocks in microcontrollers (and even CPUs), it provides a flow that my brain syncs to. I'm not even paying attention to the music itself, but it stops me from getting distracted and focus on the task at hand.
by godelski | 2025-08-27 07:28:07+00:00
Sure, but that's a completely different conversation. We're talking about life, not habitable planets. Detection of planets is a step in the right direction but only because it helps us narrow candidates. We were already certain those planets existed without confirmation.

The Fermi Paradox is about the difficulty of confirming life while there's such strong evidence that life should exist elsewhere. These signatures only strengthens the "paradoxical" nature of the Fermi Paradox.

Also, mind you, many of those signatures come through radioastronomy.
by stavros | 2025-08-27 07:28:19+00:00
> When ChatGPT detects a prompt indicative of mental distress or self-harm, it has been trained to encourage the user to contact a help line. Mr. Raine saw those sorts of messages again and again in the chat, particularly when Adam sought specific information about methods. But Adam had learned how to bypass those safeguards by saying the requests were for a story he was writing.
by positron26 | 2025-08-27 07:28:40+00:00
You read my comment, but you are missing that I'm building to tools to bundle the work together, which is the way to make a strong enough open foundation that things like open accessibility technologies can have more ground to stand on.

Scratching our own itch works better when coordination means we can bundle together a whole lot of itch. There is no such thing as individual incentive to cooperate without a means of coordination. Anything else is just the volunteer's dilemma, and so only small itches get scratched.

Not everything can be handled using death by a thousand cuts. In the Rust in 2021 blog [1], the importance of depth versus breadth was pointed out. Depth comes from dedicated, full-time, paid work.

[1]: https://matklad.github.io/2020/09/12/rust-in-2021.html]
by dns_snek | 2025-08-27 07:28:47+00:00
All of those are fine things to expect from Google Play but the point is moot because this verification would also apply to apps installed from external sources where they shouldn't have any jurisdiction.

Google, just like Apple, should be free to enforce any kind of verification they deems necessary on Google Play, as long as they allow third party stores to be on equal footing, which they don't.
by graycat | 2025-08-27 07:29:38+00:00
Okay, "logistics optimization"???

In the US there have been a few, i.e., apparently less than 20, universities with an applied math program up to date in and teaching optimization.

Sooooo, anyone at all seriously interested, long, for decades, would, could, should visit some of those math programs, meet some of the profs, get recommendations for their former students, call them, chat, and offer a job better than their current lawn mowing, fast food restaurant kitchen cleaning, or car washing. Instead of just the US, might also consider Waterloo in Canada. Actually the Chair of my Ph.D. orals committee specialized in optimization in logistics. After sending 1000+ beautifully written resume copies and hearing back nothing, can begin to conclude that optimization is not a hot field and for highly dedicated optimizers who want to sleep on a cot in a single room, forgo bathing, most days eat bread, other days peanut butter, have no children, wife, or family contact, don't own a car, and must get any needed medical care from some of the last resort special clinics. Ah, real optimization!
by teekert | 2025-08-27 07:30:50+00:00
Well the nice thing about the spectrum is that we are all on it and that we draw imaginary lines ourselves.

All wisdom aside... I think you're right. I takes a certain grit to start to appreciate the ultimate effect of software freedom culture and licensing. Never mind the the whole philosophy.

It's like explaining CRISPR (yeah I'm a biologist) to a normie... Ok, so lets start with what DNA is... proceeds to guide someone through a lifetime in the molecular biology field....
by morpheuskafka | 2025-08-27 07:31:30+00:00
Presumably this won't apply to Chinese OEMs, since even though their devices do ship a disabled by default Google Mobile Services (without the user facing Play Store APK), it obviously would not be suitable to require Google involvement for developing internal apps. The OEMs could set up such a debug licensing service themselves, but each of them would have to do it themselves, and then it would be impossible to debug Google-based apps on the devices.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-08-27 07:31:49+00:00
I don't think anyone is arguing that they want app developers to break the law, but rather that Google must not take away the device owner's choice to install any app he so chooses. But even to the extent that does involve lawbreaking... yes, that's the price you have to pay for freedom. You cannot give people freedom without some people misusing it to do bad things, but that does not mean freedom should therefore be abrogated. In the extreme, you could have a very safe society without any crimes if you locked every citizen inside a small cell that they couldn't leave. But nobody, not even the most ardent tough on crime advocates, would contend that such a trade would be worth it. We all agree that some amount of criminal activity must be tolerated for the sake of living freely, then... the only question is where each person thinks that line should be drawn.
by phoronixrly | 2025-08-27 07:31:58+00:00
My beautiful experience with sorbet: Yeah, ducktyping? We don't do that here.

Depending on a library that uses ducktyping (like any sane library following the Ruby conventions)? Good luck writing a wrapper for it. Or just disable type checking.

This goes so much against the Ruby vibe that I advise you to just go and use Rust instead if you hate Ruby that much that you want to butcher it with types.
by theshrike79 | 2025-08-27 07:32:56+00:00
There's a local website that sells actual physical Blu-rays. Their webshite is a horror show of Javascript.

I had Claude Code build me a Playwright+python -based scraper that goes through their movie section and stores the data locally to an sqlite database + a web UI for me to watchlist specific movies + add price ranges to be alerted when it changes.

Took me maybe a total of 30 minutes of "active" time (4-5 hours real-time, I was doing other shit at the same time) to get it to a point where I can actually use it.

Basically small utilities for limited release (personal, team, company-internal) is what AI coding excels at.

Like grabbing results from a survey tool, adding them to a google sheet, summarising the data to another tab with formulas. Maybe calling an LLM for sentiment analysis on the free text fields.

Half a day max from zero to Good Enough. I didn't even have to open the API docs.

Is it perfect? Of course not. But the previous state was one person spending half a day for _each_ survey doing that manually. Now the automation runs in a minute or so, depending on whether Google Sheets API is having a day or not =)
by fsflover | 2025-08-27 07:32:59+00:00
> For mobile, we have PostmarketOS, Phosh, Ubuntu Touch.

Why are you only listing DEs and not operating systems? (You also missed SXMo and more.) There are many more operating systems [0] and two working GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone. Why people are ignoring them on HN?

[0] https://pine64.org/documentation/PinePhone/Software/
by novok | 2025-08-27 07:33:05+00:00
The topic set is very different and the conditions are very artificial. There are many engineers who are amazing, but are absolute shit about writing code, under pressure, while someone is looking over their shoulder, to a leetcode medium that they haven't practiced for. Their brains go blank.

Like seriously, go to leetcode, pick a random medium+ problem and solve it within 15-30m without bugs under pressure, on coderpad, without code execution or being allowed to look up syntax. Make sure you've never seen or been asked the question before. Now do 10 more. You'll see it's something you need to practice for specifically. Make sure you throw in a few binary search questions while you do it.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-08-27 07:33:25+00:00
Interesting. Not sure I buy it though.

By your logic, we'd be better off if we gave patients a cocktail containing small amounts of many different antibiotics. By giving a single antibiotic in a large dose, we are "lifting up a particular part of our field of defenses as salient and particularly worthwhile to defeat". Sounds bad.

Willing to bite the bullet and sign on to this kitchen-sink approach, of offering patients a cocktail containing small amounts of many antibiotics?

The problem I see with the cocktail approach is that a pathogen can gradually evolve defenses against everything simultaneously, in parallel. With a cocktail, every element of the cocktail provides a distinct glide path for a virus to increase its contextual fitness. That also sounds bad! The main way I see this situation improving is if two elements of the cocktail happen to act as a sort of clamp, where any virus which begins to defeat one ends up increasing the effectiveness of the other.