MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wronex | 2025-08-08 15:47:47+00:00
Wait, hold on. Is this actually an issue that needs a solution? It feels like Wayland is doing something very stupid here. Why not let apps control their windows? I cannot remember when an app stole focus last time. The only time this makes sense is while entering a password. But that is a very specific case that can be solved by having the password dialog on a protected desktop (ie. one with only that single window.)
by whamlastxmas | 2025-08-08 15:48:31+00:00
i mean, does it? we can't answer some really important questions about the nature of the universe, and we literally can't even start to model very important areas of physics that we know must have existed. it's hard to think we can honestly answer what exists versus what doesn't when we can't even comprehend or guess at the enormity of what's being asked.
by calebtonkinson | 2025-08-08 15:48:32+00:00
Not really meant as habit forming but early on in the AI buzz I thought about a picture based variant of Wordle.

Prompt AI model for a very short 2-3 word phrase that would generate an interesting image => Have the model generate 4 candidate images => Have the user guess what the original prompt the model created was based on the images

I finally got around to vibe coding it a little while ago and it's kind of fun with a new puzzle being generated each day.

https://www.promdle.com/
by Barrin92 | 2025-08-08 15:48:32+00:00
is this hypothetical Hong Konger real? Someone who wants to set up a company in Germany and is repelled by a theoretical exit tax should they plan to leave a few years later?

We're a big country and the world's 3rd largest economy. From our perspective it makes no sense to become a financial haven for foreign founders who just want to benefit from government support which can be quite extensive only to leave after a few years for some tax haven.

We need to do do more to encourage people to invest here and build ecosystems and make starting companies easier but an exit tax clearly only matters to the get-rich-quick and relocate to Dubai crowd.
by paulhodge | 2025-08-08 15:48:33+00:00
Lots of signs point to a conclusion that the Opus and Sonnet models are fundamentally better at coding, tool usage, and general problem solving across long contexts. There is some kind of secret sauce in the way they train the models. Dario has mentioned in interviews that this strength is one of the company's closely guarded secrets.

And I don't think we have a great eval benchmark that exactly measures this capability yet. SWE Bench seems to be pretty good, but there's already a lot of anecdotal comments that Claude is still better at coding than GPT 5, despite having similar scores on SWE Bench.
by ptmcc | 2025-08-08 15:48:37+00:00
"Consulting" is a term so generic and ill-defined it almost doesn't mean anything at all.

When I did software consulting, I was basically a decent "modern" web dev brought into crusty old companies to bring some new perspective and approach. I'd help with some project direction and initial implementation and try to get a team up to speed to continue the work. I typically embedded as part of the team for a while and did plenty of hands-on design, coding, and troubleshooting work right alongside.

But this was just a small consulting shop, not one of the big "strategic" consultancies. Very different worlds.
by jpadkins | 2025-08-08 15:48:44+00:00
The OPM from the US government is defined as a relative wealth function, so technically it has to exist. Also you can compare the standard of living of someone above the poverty line in 1910 vs someone below the poverty line 2010, and 99% of people wouldn't trade places. Access to running water, toilets, air conditioning TV, Internet, mobile phones, etc makes life a lot better than what we called middle class 100 years ago. [source https://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/air-c... ]

It's all relative and as long it's relative, mathematically speaking poverty has to exist.
by FabHK | 2025-08-08 15:49:57+00:00
The original theory was precisely that there's a general factor ("g").

If you run anything sufficiently complex through a principal component analysis you'll get several orthogonal factors, decreasing in importance. The question then is whether the first factor dominates or not.

My understanding is that it does, with "g" explaining some 50% of the variance, and the various smaller "s" factors maybe 5% to 20% at most.
by bko | 2025-08-08 15:50:21+00:00
So based on your experience, your food budget went up about 28% from pre-covid?

They have a lot of discretion, it's not formulaic. If it was, ironically it would be great to privatize! Here are the specs, and provide proof. Easy.

Here is from the world bank talking about tight and loose specifications:

> The CPI Manual refers to tight and loose specifications of product or item varieties. Tight specifications better facilitate the calculation of average prices and ensure comparability of items across countries, which is the aim of ICP price collection. Accordingly, the ICP stipulates strict requirements for the selection of items for pricing. These may include restricting the choice of brand or the size of an item by weight, volume, or quantity for example. For the CPI, tight specifications tend to be useful for electronic and other items with high rates of turnover.

Again, look at the facts:

1. It's complicated and not easily observable

2. There is some discretion

3. Politics and trillions in government spending is on stake

4. The numbers don't match personal experience

https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/2b29c1445d7fa006e5f4ca0...
by johncolanduoni | 2025-08-08 15:50:52+00:00
That is for their enterprise SaaS, and has an obvious profit motive (I.e. bundling). Do you think Chrome is going to start charging for using their passkey storage and then kick all the other apps off Chrome?

> Even if there wasn't already an example, it's easy to turn control into a revenue stream at a later time.

I think you’ll have to justify or qualify this a bit. If Google forces every website on Chrome to have a red background, how do they turn that control into a revenue stream later on?
by LadyCailin | 2025-08-08 15:51:37+00:00
PFIC taxation, of which some pension accounts qualify, as well as all mutual funds and ETFs, is absolutely punitive, and does in fact charge taxes on unrealized gains. Even if you don't have any PFICs, or even owe taxes to the US, the fact that you need to pay an accountant ~$500+, just to file the taxes, is in my opinion punitive as well.
by timesnewroaming | 2025-08-08 15:52:21+00:00
Created fresh accounts on ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini, and Grok. Asked the default model ten ethical dilemmas ten times. Created a polling website for humans to answer the same questions and compare the answers. Somewhat interesting answers so far: most models answered the same way for each question each time, but the responses varied by provider. Only Grok claimed using ad-blocker was unethical. All were in favor of automation at the cost of human jobs. All but DeepSeek were against the idea of "speciesism".
by Gud | 2025-08-08 15:52:52+00:00
Rail should be easy to use.

I live in Switzerland where people are so comfortable taking the train they treat it like an extension of their living room.

Only in rare cases do I even book tickets in advance, like when going to Milano… otherwise I just use the Fairtiq app, which is a nation wide system for paying for tickets, including busses and trams…

You swipe right before you step on, swipe left when you step off and the system automatically calculates the best ticket for you.

There isn’t a “fully booked”.
by epistasis | 2025-08-08 15:53:04+00:00
Your comment has been edited extensible since you first posted some misleading numbers, so I'm adding this new comment on one of your additions:

> As long as a profit motive exists, there will be incentives to reduce or avoid care for more profits.

This is reversed from reality. Insurer incentives are to increase care and costs all the time. Their profits are tied to a fixed percentage of total expenditure, so the only way to increase profits is to increase costs.

Start replacing cheaper scans with MRIs, etc. Then profits rise.

Look throughout the entire system, and everybody's incentive is to perform more healthcare. That's the profit incentive throughout the system, from care providers to test providers to insurance companies.

That's a major (but not only) reason healthcare expenditures are such a high percentage of GDP compared to other countries, why healthcare expenditures are $5T per year in the US.
by csours | 2025-08-08 15:53:06+00:00
> 3. Family Counselor. Surprisingly often, I told organizations what other people inside the same organization were thinking, saying, or doing (and what customers or partners thought of that). The degree of insularity, siloing, and parochialism in large organizations is hard to overstate. I was almost like a counselor, helping internal teams see, understand, and appreciate their peers, and put what they were doing into a larger perspective that would have otherwise been overlooked.

One of the most famous counselling analogies is "Throw the ball so the other person can catch it". Some people are bad at communication - they can't hear the message from the other side, or they can't deliver a message so that the other side can hear what is intended.

For example some people may tend to catastrophize, or blow things out of proportion.
by Defletter | 2025-08-08 15:53:36+00:00
Yup. I used to use a Macbook Pro as my daily driver and played League of Legends on it... and the amount of forced-focus was infuriating. You just locked in and are messaging your friend on Discord about something? Well, there's 10 seconds left until the game starts and that's more important so you're focusing the League client now.
by octo888 | 2025-08-08 15:53:40+00:00
Tangentially but I've yet to see a free retirement planning web app that properly models your incoming peaking at a certain age. They usually just ask for your current salary then assume yearly increases until retirement ! How is that not pure deception? Sure it probably applies to lawyers, doctors etc but what about the masses?

The reality seems to be when you get too expensive and too old at 45/50 you get made redundant and then have to eat through some savings and then take a 50% pay cut finally ?

Other tools like Projection Lab (not a submarine ad I promise) let you define employments and rbitrary points at which your salary increases or decreases, allowing much better modelling
by criddell | 2025-08-08 15:53:58+00:00
Are you talking about this:

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-memphis-illegal-generators

It's hackery but also kind of sociopathic to dump a bunch of loud, dirty generators in the middle of a low-income community. Go set your data center up on Martha's Vineyard and see how long the residents put up with it.
by Aunche | 2025-08-08 15:54:00+00:00
High deductible plans are the norm because HSAs are basically free money. Maybe Obamacare really is to blame for shittier health insurance, but it's also possible that IBM is just paying relatively less than it used to. Employers can deposit into your HSA, which effectively lowers your deductible below the minimum required to qualify as a high deductible plan.
by abossy | 2025-08-08 15:54:38+00:00
I love sitting in those planning meetings, too. /s

This is exactly right. We've adapted our workflow to kick off a task and then kick off the next one and the next. Then we review the work of each as they come through. It's just CPU pipelining for human workflow.

The process is far from perfect but the throughput is very high. The limiting factor is review. I spend most of my time doing line-by-line review of AI output and asking questions about things I'm unsure of. It's a very different job from the way I historically operated, which involved tight code -> verify loops of manually written code.
by philwelch | 2025-08-08 15:54:40+00:00
Even in today’s tech industry, people who are older than 40 or 50 are considered wise old men when they can get hired at all. But yes, we have extended adult lifespans, just not by 40 years which is the naive assumption many people make from the observation that life expectancy used to be 35. Also, I would expect that most of the extension in adult lifespan has less to do with old people having better medication than with broad declines in smoking and alcohol consumption. How long into your eighties and beyond you will live is largely determined by lifestyle decisions made in your teens, twenties, and thirties (though it is never too late to quit smoking!)
by FabHK | 2025-08-08 15:54:46+00:00
Good point. Doubling in 7 years means around 10% growth per year. So, if someone took out 10% of their stock nest-egg per year, it wouldn't have grown at all.

Having said that, GP does illustrate Picketty's point in Capital in the Twenty-First Century that r>g, that is return on capital is greater than economic growth, and Picketty did theorise that this would inevitably lead to concentration of wealth (unless war or other calamities reset the scale).
by markasoftware | 2025-08-08 15:54:49+00:00
uh have you ever tried pinging a server in your same city? It's usually substantially <30ms. I'm currently staying at a really shitty hotel that has 5mbps wifi, not to mention I'm surrounded by other rooms, and I can still ping 8.8.8.8 in 20ms. From my home internet, which is /not/ fiber, it's 10ms.
by dewey | 2025-08-08 15:54:52+00:00
After someone mentioned that recently I've started to write really detailed specs with the help of ChatGPT Deep Research and editing it myself. Then getting this exported as a Markdown document and passing it to Cursor really worked very well.

It puts you in a different mind space to sit down and think about it instead of iterating too much and in the end feeling productive while actually not achieving much and going mostly in circles.
by vbezhenar | 2025-08-08 15:55:47+00:00
> As a user of KiCAD, I have not found any need for it to automatically move cursors

Well, the first thing you do with KiCAD is scrolling to zoom in and out, and KiCAD scroll works in a way to jump cursor to the center, so you basically can pan and scroll at the same time. That's default behaviour unless you changed it in the settings, and, obviously, it needs to warp cursor to the center of the window.
by haniehz | 2025-08-08 15:55:50+00:00
I fed ElevenLabs Music a single prompt about our open-source MCP agent framework and got back a complete song: vocals, instrumentation, arrangement, the works. Zero post-processing.

Here's what caught me off guard: the vocal phrasing. Not just the melody, but the micro-timing, breath placement, and emotional inflection. The model placed emphasis on "composable" in a way that actually reinforced the technical meaning. It added vocal runs that felt intentional, not algorithmic.

Technical details that worked:

Prompt structure: [Genre] [Mood] [Key technical terms] [Narrative structure] Generated: 2:04 track with verse/chorus/bridge structure Quality: Comparable to demo-level indie recordings

What this means: Voice synthesis was the laggard in generative AI. That's changing rapidly. We're moving from "impressive for AI" to "actually usable in production workflows." Non-English limitations: I tested it with different languages and hit a wall — very patchy results, nowhere near the English quality. Anyone have experience with non-English lyrics? Curious about phoneme handling across languages.

The gap between human and AI musical performance is shrinking faster than I expected. Worth paying attention to.
by mathattack | 2025-08-08 15:56:03+00:00
This!

In many large companies, there are non-aggression pacts. “I don’t air your dirty laundry so you don’t air mine.”

The best consultants comment on the Emperor’s wardrobe, or lack thereof. And they do it in a way that makes everyone pleased that the logjam is released. And they can only get away with it by being temporary.

And for all the complaining of consultant bill rates, independent consultants have a lot of overhead to cover. (Sales, taxes, insurance, downtime, legal…)
by dylan604 | 2025-08-08 15:56:07+00:00
I like how when your illogical notion is challenged, you respond by saying the challenger is being emotional.

There is no point in saying that an AI company can just ignore its R&D. There is no company without the R&D. Because of that, any conversation pretending it doesn't exist is pointless. There is no constructive conversation with that as the premise.
by stephen_cagle | 2025-08-08 15:56:26+00:00
At the risk of being pedantic, is a "piggy bank" really the right metaphor for this? A piggy bank has actual money within it, regardless of what I think of the piggy bank, it still has money within it. While a stock's total market cap technically only represents the last transaction price multiplied by the number of outstanding shares (kinda). Anyway, just making the point that it isn't like a "bank" in that there is not money in a container of any sort (obviously, banks lend out their own deposits so even my correction is also wrong).

I'm don't have anything better to replace it with, but I am just questioning the "piggy bank" as a metaphor here.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-08-08 15:56:36+00:00
Really? Interesting, you think the tech that required people to curate and put information up in order to be useful is the same as a tech that consumes all info and curates itself in dynamic and nearly infinitely variable ways to appeal specifically to an audience on demand?

Hot take I guess.

Beyond today’s LLMs, you are going to be able to talk to your favorite content and go more advanced or basic on demand. How “tech people” here have so little imagination for what is already in front of them, is really eye opening.
by AlienRobot | 2025-08-08 15:56:45+00:00
>whenever there's a gap, someone tends to fill it just because

lol what. That only works when the demand is actually paying. You are talking about FREE content!

>They literally have no expectations

I'm sorry but this is completely false.

If that were the case why do we have so many licenses? Why GPL/MIT/Apache, CC BY, CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC-SA, CC BY-NC-ND, and so on, when it's either "free or not"? Surely we don't need all this fluff when the only thing free for real is Public Domain?

Just consider this: we're living in an age where even people who publish MEMES on Reddit watermark them because they don't 9gag/Instagram/Facebook pages reposting it without permission/credit. And they are MEMES!! Even I find this cringe. But it proves that the author has some expectation. Even if you don't agree with their expectation, it proves that the expectation EXISTS.

What is next? Are you going to extend this to say that all web comics accessible for free on the web are "free free" so you should be allowed to remove watermarks to repost them on Facebook? You are filling the gap of having a single place where people can read funny comics for free, except you didn't make any of the comics and you have no right to post them. In fact, this is a great example. How is ChatGPT different from a guy that just reposts comics and memes on Facebook? It's literally the same thing.

And then next you are going to say that all videos posted on Youtube/TikTok are "free free" so you should be allowed to rip them off too.

I feel like you're just going to make an enemy out of everyone who publishes anything for free on the Internet if you start thinking like this.
by croemer | 2025-08-08 15:56:55+00:00
First impressions: the emoji trigger happiness of 4o is totally gone. Bolding still happens.

There appear to be 4 ways to run a query now: a) GPT5, b) GPT5 and toggle "extra thinking" on, c) "GPT5 with thinking", and d) "GPT5 with thinking" then click "quick answer" which aborts thinking (this mode is possibly identical with GPT5)

I don't find this much simpler than 4o, o3, etc. It's just reordering the hierarchies. Now the model name is no longer descriptive at all and one has to add which mode one ran it in.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-08 15:56:58+00:00
Go back 50 years, and 95% of Americans should be raising Cain. Of OECD countries, the US has ridiculous income inequality distribution and effective reductions in purchasing power over time. https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM

Anecdotally: Someone would need to make $350k/yr to live where I grew up in a not great area where there were robberies, shootings, and thumping radios all the time. Also, where my blue-collar grandparents lived requires an income of around $475k/yr to afford a 30 yr mortgage. The latter is equivalent to a salary of buying 2 houses/yr where I live now.
by avar | 2025-08-08 15:57:00+00:00
Let's be fair here, the GP is comparing this to the complexity of other bureaucracy in Germany. In that context this does sound easy, e.g. here's how you form a GmbH: https://major-grooves.medium.com/just-how-complicated-could-...

> Snark aside, this chart makes total sense > to me now: https://i.redd.it/fxks3skmvt4e1.png

Not that we're doing all that great here in Europe, but this list is somewhat an artifact of strong US financial markets, and skews against European innovation.

E.g. Booking.com isn't there because it's now ... an American company on paper, but it was started in Europe, has most of its operations there, and (last I checked) Europe was its most important market.

But because the US stock market and US capital dominates globally, companies like that tend to be sold to a US company, and become American on paper. But that financial arrangement doesn't really reflect the overall state of European innovation.

Similarly, there's countless European startups that would have probably had a NASDAQ listing if they'd been US-based, but were instead sold to some of the larger European incumbents in their sector.

The overall amount of innovation delivered to consumers etc. might be the same, so that's more of an artifact of how capital flows in the US v.s. the EU generally.
by westurner | 2025-08-08 15:57:17+00:00
Does it work on mobile yet?

Is there a way to load an example file; maybe with another button next to "Load file"?

Notes re: spotify/pedalboard (JUCE) and node-based UIs or "patch bay" UIs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44604024#44648290

Re: samin/polymath23, which does BPM and tonal quality classification: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34782526
by jddj | 2025-08-08 15:58:05+00:00
I think every field has its own version of this thought, where if we could just manage to categorise and tag things properly we could achieve anything. Our lack of a valid overarching ontology is what is holding us back from greatness.

It might be short lived, who knows, but it's interesting that the recent progress came from capturing/consuming rather than systematically eliminating the nuance in language.
by arcticfox | 2025-08-08 15:58:27+00:00
> Note that Claude 4 Sonnet isn’t the strongest model from Anthropic’s Claude series. Claude Opus is their most capable model for coding, but it seemed inappropriate to compare it with GPT-5 because it costs 10 times as much.

Well - I would have been interested in GPT-5 vs. Opus. Claude Code Max is affordable with Opus.
by neuronexmachina | 2025-08-08 15:58:53+00:00
I haven't tried it yet myself, but I noticed their product page (https://cursor.com/cli) says:

> Set your own rules: Customize Cursor's work with rules, AGENTS.md, and MCP.

There's no mention of it in the docs, though. It's also interesting it's AGENTS.md on that page instead of AGENT.md, I wonder if that's a typo.