MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AlexandrB | 2025-08-18 15:33:13+00:00
> fear mongering

The last 10 years of tech "innovation" is basically what the article describes but happening to other tech products[1]. So, why is this fear mongering? It's basically inevitable unless:

a. There's legislation. But I would bet on legislation for the opposite - storing chats forever - instead.

b. AI moves to on-device where users have control of their own data. Also unlikely considering how much tech loves web technologies and recurring revenue streams.

[1] https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/menstrual-tracking-app-d...
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-18 15:33:26+00:00
In practice ads are delivered by adware (and bundled with spyware), and are pretty much always a type of trojan (you never receive warning that a site is going to send you ads). Characterizing them as information is also misleading; their entire purpose is to get people to make suboptimal if not poor decisions. They're somewhere between noise and disinformation.

Without the malware part, there would obviously be no objection on the grounds that you're "free-riding" since there would be no measurement. But even simple images or text can be and frequently are a malicious attack on one's mind (e.g. soda/fast food ads, links to fraudsters), so even without a software component, it is good security posture to filter them.

The scripting capabilities of the web are meant for people like [0] to use. Using them for surveillance and propaganda distribution is abuse.

[0] https://ciechanow.ski/
by kubb | 2025-08-18 15:33:40+00:00
How much money can you pull out as a failed startup founder?

About a mil? Maybe two? Seems realistic…

People have to invent whatever seems reasonable while squinting given how much accumulation of capital there is.

The guys with money are easy to fool. Just lie to them about your „product”, get the cash, get out of the rat race, smooth sailing.

Of course easier said than done. I can’t lie this convincingly, I don’t have the con man skillset or connections.

So I’m stuck in a 9 to 5. Zzz…
by em-bee | 2025-08-18 15:34:00+00:00
covid was a special case, because obviously a mass gathering in that time would have been considered a health risk. a lot of countries went into emergency mode and used exceptions to implement or enforce these rules. they are not a good indicator of what is normally acceptable and allowed.

just because something was possible to happen during covid does not mean that it is possible to happen otherwise. comparably what is happening in the US now is also exceptional and we have yet to see if that becomes the new normal.

btw, it turns out i was wrong, you don't even need permission, you just need to announce the demonstration. there can be restrictions, and in specific circumstances a demonstration can be disallowed. but by default all you need to do is make an announcement towards the appropriate institutions.
by lan321 | 2025-08-18 15:34:05+00:00
We have some of that, but it's not the whiteboards. The dev one gets used multiple times a day in a room with only developers. No management, no power structure around.

It's my general experience, also in prior workplaces, that sometimes a little drawing can tell a lot, and there's no quicker way to start it than to walk 3 meters and grab a marker. Same for getting attention towards a particular part of the board. On Excalidraw, it's difficult to coordinate people dynamically. On a whiteboard, people just point to the parts they're talking about while talking instinctively, so you don't get person A arguing with person B about Y while B thinks they are talking about D which is pretty close to Y as a topic.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-18 15:34:20+00:00
For the execution environment in which firmware SETUP ran, there were often hardwired assumptions, particularly in the parts of SETUP that provide full-screen TUIs with menus and entryfields and pop-up help boxes and whatnot, that the screen was 25 rows high.

Also remember that SETUP as a whole was often a mess of different ROM programs from different manufacturers. Far too many thought it their own ROM's business to clear the display and set text mode before they splashed their copyright strings, prompts, self-test, and hardware auto-detection information up.

Yes, they could have done things properly. The way to detect an existing screen size was there from the VGA onwards. And they could have left the display uncleared. And the whole preserve-my-graphical-splash-screen thing eventually did happen.

They did not.
by hendo3000 | 2025-08-18 15:34:57+00:00
There was an article on HN about the valuations of AI being out of touch with the question; what problem is being solved?

We use generative imagery/video at my job and it's adding value. I see value being added for coders.

There's real innovation happening, but I find it's mostly companies cutting corners making customer service even shittier than it already was.
by LeftHandPath | 2025-08-18 15:35:06+00:00
Great list. I remember being called in to look at software my company was thinking of buying, once... Only our finance/accounting people had looked at it so far. The thing barely worked. The desktop window kept flashing. Special characters were accepted and then broke the output. Extreme lack of features needed for the supposed goal.

I was able to find us an open-source / self-hosted solution that worked far better (bookstack). But I was amazed at how far the company selling the software got with us -- seems like most never get pushback, they just make sales by labeling themselves as fit-for-purpose regardless of whether or not they generally work.
by faluzure | 2025-08-18 15:35:21+00:00
Yup.

On startup, it runs cpuid and assigns each operation the most optimal function pointer for that architecture.

In addition to things like ‘supports avx’ or ‘supports sse4’ some operations even have more explicit checks like ‘is a fifth generation celeron’. The level of optimization in that case was optimizing around the cache architecture on the cpu iirc.

Source: I did some dirty things with chromes native client and ffmpeg 10 years ago.
by jonfw | 2025-08-18 15:35:27+00:00
I have a blog post here that has an example of dynamically changing the tool list- https://jonwoodlief.com/rest3-mcp.html.

In this situation, I would have a tool called "request ability to edit GLTF". I This would trigger an addition to the tool list specifically for your desired GLTF. The model would send the "tool list changed' notification and now the LLM would have access.

If you want to do it without the tool list changed notification ability, I'd have two tools, get schema for GLTF, and edit GLTF with schema. If you note that the get schema is a dependency for edit, the LLM could probably plumb that together on it's own fairly well

You could probably also support this workflow using sampling.
by adev_ | 2025-08-18 15:35:51+00:00
> could take back manufacturing dominance from countries with low wages (like China)?

The idea that China is a low wages country should just die. It was the case 10y ago, not anymore.

Some part of China have higher average salaries than some Eastern European countries.

The chance of a robotic industry in the US moving massively jobs from China only due to a pseudo A.I revolution replacing low paid wages (without other external factors, e.g tarifs or sanctions) is close to 0.

Now if we do speak about India and the low skill IT jobs there. The story is completely different.
by meistertigran | 2025-08-18 15:36:25+00:00
So like, Obsidian, but for HTML?

The file itself provides both the dynamic functionality and data storage, but you need an engine (like obsidian) to make the data persistence and dynamic parts work together. I.e. if there is a button that adds a task to a todo app, your engine modifies the HTML file with the new content.
by barnas2 | 2025-08-18 15:36:26+00:00
Long drives for me used to be a fucking nightmare, especially long highway drives. Anything over 5 hours was basically an impossibility, now with medication it's really a mild inconvenience. I just moved to a new area, and I have a friend 2 hours away in another town. I don't even think about the drive when making plans, I'll happily drive up, hang out for a few hours, then drive back home. I still have limits on how long I want to drive (did 10-11 hour driving days when I was moving cross country, and that sucked), but they're way higher.

Having a car with lane centering cruise control also helps a ton, at least where I live. Not having to micro-manage a car for several hours when you're on a long drive reduces the cognitive load.
by net01 | 2025-08-18 15:36:32+00:00
Honestly, not that big of a deal. the price of batteries is so low per KW and the cost of generation is so low that, in the case of a major crisis, they could just keep them running. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-battery-cell-pric...

And prioritizing humans (home heating, food freezing, etc ) over servers is a good thing.
by c0balt | 2025-08-18 15:36:35+00:00
> It would be cool to have a repo with suggested hardening for common services

From packaging stuff for nixpkgs, a distro that often is without upstream support, it is usually very useful to look at how mainstream distro package services.

Those hardening steps also tend to be well tested even if sometimes a bit lax. If you want to find out how, e. G., postgresql can be hardened, consider looking at the Debian, Ubuntu and/or RHEL packages as a starting point.
by dkarl | 2025-08-18 15:36:39+00:00
"Accommodate" means change focus, like your natural lens does when you focus on objects at different distances. Most artificial lenses implanted today have zero ability to change focus. There are newer "accommodative" lenses that have a limited ability to change focus, but from what my ophthalmologist told me, they're still primitive and not even close to what natural lenses do, which is why fixed focus lenses are still more common.
by jpadkins | 2025-08-18 15:37:09+00:00
I can't take paper seriously when they have sentences like this:

> In an agentic web, systems will autonomously discover optimal vendors and evaluate solutions without human research, establish dynamic API integrations in real-time without pre-built connectors, execute trustless transactions through blockchain enabled smart contracts, and develop emergent workflows that self-optimize across multiple platforms and organizational boundaries. Early experiments show procurement agents identifying new suppliers and negotiating terms independently, customer service systems coordinating seamlessly across platforms, and content creation workflows spanning multiple providers with automated quality assurance and payment.
by agloe_dreams | 2025-08-18 15:38:26+00:00
Thats super reasonable - I'm a person with ADHD so if I'm asking questions in a grocery store context - I might fully forget things or take way too long to get things done - Going for a walk in nature is absolutely a much better place for questions like that to me though. I think I would prefer to not have tech in the moment to take me out of the space.
by igleria | 2025-08-18 15:38:26+00:00
> personally believe we are already beyond the point where electoral politics can solve this issue and a violent resolution is inevitable.

I do think more or less this too, but it could be 4 years or 40 before people get mad enough. And to be honest the tech gap between civilian violence and state sponsored violence has never been wider. OR in other words, civilians don't have reaper drones etc etc.
by ljf | 2025-08-18 15:38:43+00:00
Agreed - 95% of the questions I ask Copilot, I could answer myself by searching emails, Teams messages and files - BUT Copilot does a far far better job than me, and quicker. I went from barely using it, to using it daily. I wouldn't say it is a massive speed boost for me, but I'd miss it if it was taken away.

Then the other 5% is the 'extra; it does for me, and gets me details I wouldn't have even known where to find.

But it is just fancy search for me so far - but fancy search I see as valuable.
by Agraillo | 2025-08-18 15:38:56+00:00
I finally also recalled this project (tiddlywiki), but CMIIW, the statefulness of the hyperclay is only for developers, the end user will get the same conventional html. Without some kind of common solution/protocol/standard on the browser side that would allow persistence it's not so exciting. Theoretically there might be some kind of simple protocol that would save html file versions on the server based on the cookie, but there are so many ways this can go wrong
by dylan604 | 2025-08-18 15:39:32+00:00
I have one for my iCloud account that sets entries for various astro events. I subscribed to it years ago, so I don't have a clue as to where/when I came across it. I have no idea how it was built, so no info on calDAV or not.

Anyone more familiar with calendar subs that could offer insight to find out how I can trace this back?
by infecto | 2025-08-18 15:39:33+00:00
Has inaccuracies been an issue for any of the systems you have developed using LLMs? I hear your complaint quite a bit but it does not align with my experience. Definitely one shotting a chatbot around an esoteric problem introduces possible inaccuracies. If I get an LLM to interrogate a pdf or other document that error rate drops significantly and is mostly on the part of the structuring process and not the LLM.

Genuinely curious what others have experienced but specifically those that are using LLMs for business workflows. It is not to say any system is perfect but for purpose driven data pipelines LLMs can be pretty great.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-18 15:40:07+00:00
The US public thinks bringing back domestic manufacturing will bring back good jobs. Of course, this is not true. Most of this will be automated. Importantly, any job can be a good job with a sufficient wage and labor protections. The performance art around "good manufacturing jobs" is a carrot being thrown to an unsophisticated electorate so they don't find out there aren't going to be good jobs for them (and so they don't figure out that organizing and labor policy are the only ways to better jobs). Very similar to the propaganda of unskilled vs skilled labor and the justification for the pay disparity between the two.
by coffeecoders | 2025-08-18 15:40:23+00:00
This is one of those things that should be unnecessary if we all had perfect self-control, but the reality is these apps are engineered explicitly to bypass that.

It feels a bit silly to need guardrails for something as trivial as scrolling.

Shameless personal plug: I wrote about it here. https://nabraj.com/blog/swipe-scroll-repeat-addiction/
by progne | 2025-08-18 15:40:25+00:00
The fact that the two highest profile examples of starvation in Gaza have confounding conditions makes me suspect otherwise. If it is as widespread as feared, it should be easier to find pictures of starving Gazans than fat Gazans.

It is notable that in the same famous photo of the emaciated Mohammed Zakaria al‑Mutawaq in the NYT article, his not-malnourished looking brother Joud was cropped out. And their mother is not emaciated. Is she supposed to be starving her younger child to feed herself and her other son? To me this is evidence of press cooperation with a propaganda campaign.

I submit that if you find either side in this propaganda war to be credible by default, you do the other side a disservice.
by kemayo | 2025-08-18 15:40:26+00:00
> Chat is like the command line, but with easier syntax.

I kinda disagree with this analogy.

The command line is precise, concise, and opaque. If you know the right incantations, you can do some really powerful things really quickly. Some people understand the rules behind it, and so can be incredibly efficient with it. Most don't, though.

Chat with LLMs is fuzzy, slow-and-iterative... and differently opaque. You don't need to know how the system works, but you can probably approach something powerful if you accept a certain amount of saying "close, but don't delete files that end in y".

The "differently-opaque" for LLM chatbots comes in you needing to ultimately trust that the system is going to get it right based on what you said. The command line will do exactly what you told it to, if you know enough to understand what you told it to. The chatbot will do... something that's probably related to what you told it to, and might be what it did last time you asked for the same thing, or might not.

For a lot of people the chatbot experience is undeniably better, or at least lets them attempt things they'd never have even approached with the raw command line.
by nwatson | 2025-08-18 15:41:03+00:00
Yeah ... animal (and plant, etc.) populations in a stable environment have a lot of random variations that confer no outright distinct advantages over their peers, they are distributed along the normal plane to the current evolutionary gradient. When environments suddenly change, it's not like animal populations rapidly create new random mutations that confer advantages in subsequent generations. Rather, the new conditions make previously existing traits that some animals within the population had and others didn't have more significant to survival, and so those advantageous traits are emphasized in subsequent generations.

After this "evolutionary bottleneck", other new random mutations / variations will occur generations later that might have no seeming immediate advantage / disadvantage to the "new normal", but at some subsequent change in the environment, the cycle of weeding out "bad" traits will happen again.
by realityfactchex | 2025-08-18 15:41:31+00:00
> Your data is safe, never stored.

Obviously it has to be stored somewhere. Can this be clarified?

> Is my data secure? Yes, your data is processed securely and is never stored on our servers.

Ok, is it sent to or stored on someone else's servers, if not yours? Is it sent to your servers but not stored? Is it all run on the local device?

I can't tell if this is a local-only tool or sending data out. Clarifying the answer to these ambiguities on the homepage would make sense IMO.
by mdaniel | 2025-08-18 15:42:03+00:00
You're welcome to do that in print media, but on the web the proper way is the abbr element with its title attribute <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...>. Related to the distinction, I'd bet $1 there's some fancy CSS that would actually expand the definition under @media print

I can attest the abbr is also mobile friendly, although I am for sure open to each browser doing its own UI hinting that a long-press is available for the term
by throwaway29246 | 2025-08-18 15:42:20+00:00
> Back to AI, there are loads of offline models we can use. Many like Ollama that will even download it. Install Ollama, on the ollama site find a model name and "ollama run model-name" and you can use it.

A privilege that is limited to the top 1%. It may come as a surprise, but most people don't have 32GB of VRAM [0]. The rest of us with normal people hardware are stuck with AI cloud providers or good old searching, which is a lot harder now that those same AI providers have ruined search results.

[0] There are some lightweight models you can run on normal people hardware, but they are just too unreliable even for casual usage and are likely to waste more of your time than they save.
by addaon | 2025-08-18 15:42:22+00:00
I have the answers available (I have a phone and good connection), I just am tactical about when to pursue the answer in realtime and when not. If it feels like it's going to open up a wider field of questioning -- or if it feels like I'll learn that this vein is fully mined and goes nowhere -- I'll spend a few minutes searching; otherwise, defer.
by Balgair | 2025-08-18 15:43:10+00:00
> Land is finite. As population grows, supply and demand dictate it will rise in value if you hold.

Nitpick: There is a lot of land. We're not going to run out of it anytime soon. What we are consuming is 'good' land. That definition will depend on a lot of things, of course.

For instance, in Denver, there is a lot of land. It's just that all the land to the west is rugged mountains. Great, so all the land to the east then, plains, right? You can build houses all the way to Kansas! Yes, but all that land is filled with bentonite clay which expands 4x with water (yes really!). You can't build cheap and safe houses on it. So, land values increase as more people move to Denver, simple supply and demand.

This kind of thing is all over the world. You can build more houses just about anywhere, but making these houses safe, cheap, and where you actually want to live, that is the problem.
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-08-18 15:43:25+00:00
problem with MCP right now is that LLMs don't natively know what it is

an LLM natively knows bash and how to run things

MCP is forcing a weird set of non-normal rules that most of the writing of the web doesn't support. Most of the web writes a lot about bash and getting things done.

Maybe in a few years LLMs will "natively" understand them, but I see MCP more as a buzzword right now.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-18 15:43:45+00:00
> In my uneducated experience MCP is nothing more than a really well structured prompt.

MCP isn't a prompt (though prompts are a resource an MCP server can provide). An MCP client that is also the direct LLM manager toolchain has to map the data from MCP servers tool/prompt/resource definition into the prompt, and it usually does so using prompt templates that are defined for each model, usually by the model provider. So the meaningful part of having a “really well-structured prompt” part isn't from MCP at all, just something that already exists that the MCP client leverages.
by delusional | 2025-08-18 15:43:53+00:00
I mirror that experience, except for the latter half. I enjoy just being outside and letting my mind wander, letting it wonder about odd questions in the moment. I never actually want or care about the answers, I just like the feeling of thinking.

I already have my phone, I could look up the answers immediately. The reason I don't isn't that I can't. It's that asking the question is the point, not answering it.
by addaon | 2025-08-18 15:44:16+00:00
> I rarely have questions of others but I always question myself.

There's only so many questions I have the ability to answer myself. Of those, there's only so many that I have the lifespan to answer myself. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and even on the shoulders of average people -- really it's shoulders all the way down. Unless the questioning itself is the source of joy (which it certainly sometimes is), I prefer to find out what others have learned when they asked the same questions. It's vanishingly rare that I believe I'm the first to think through something.
by coffeecoders | 2025-08-18 15:44:30+00:00
It won't be a musical scale if mapped directly to Hz (maybe sine wave mapping?).

For example, prime 2 → 2 Hz (inaudible), 101 → 101 Hz (deep bass), 1009 → ~1 kHz (bright tone).

Right now the app just maps primes to MIDI notes so they sit nicely on a piano.
by net01 | 2025-08-18 15:44:55+00:00
> Hopefully Ladybird Browser will be out by then.

Right now LB is incredibly slow and will be slow for a long time. Most of the cost of browser engines isn't implementing the code but optimizing it; thousands of PhD hours are poured into optimizing 1 JS function.

I've been using LB every day for about 2 months now.

Related to the article, I think FF is not dead; they have servo that is developing fast and will be incredibly fast and responsive. FF isn't going anywhere. They just accumulated a lot of technical debt and will be leaner once servo is out.
by mensetmanusman | 2025-08-18 15:45:36+00:00
Hard to honestly say if China is low wage. On one hand, their wages have risen as the work force has shrunk now for a few years and tasks are being outsourced to other countries. On the other hand, their currency is pegged meaning that the earning power of the workers should be much higher so that they can afford the things they are making and transition to a consumer driven economy.