MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tengty | 2025-08-13 05:44:22+00:00
I spent the last few months examining six domains where blockchain infrastructure can add genuine value to AI systems. and where it doesn’t. This is not a “crypto fixes everything” pitch, but a look at new primitives that might actually work:

• Data Networks — Tokenized, domain-specific data networks.

• Decentralized Compute — Permissionless inference/training markets and their economics.

• Decentralized Training — Parallel, verifiable training without a single trusted coordinator.

• Robotics & Physical AI — Where autonomy reaches ROI first in the physical world.

• AI Verification — TEEs, zk proofs, and hybrids for auditing model outputs.

All six reports (20–30 pages each) are free to download. I’d be especially interested in the HN community’s take on: 1. Which of these primitives are technically viable at scale? 2. Where is blockchain overhead likely to outweigh the benefits?
by NaOH | 2025-08-13 05:44:34+00:00
I'm not certain why folks are talking about cars they've restored to working order, the kind that get taken out on weekends when the weather is just so, as if that's the same class of vehicles the article is discussing. I used to know someone who owned a bunch like the article describes. To him it was an investment. Some had undergone expensive restorations like the article describes, they were meticulously stored, people were paid to maintain these not-driven vehicles, etc. Well, this guy wasn't young, but he died kind of unexpectedly. In a few weeks he went from not feeling well to gone.

So the family sold the cars in one auction at one of the big events like the Concours d’Elegance. This was not a sale timed to maximize the return but rather a sale to free the family from the obligations of ownership. Even so, it was 30 or so vehicles and they went for about $70 million.

The cars in this article are more like artwork investments. These may get three miles added to the odometer in the course of a year with multiple event showings or loans to museums. The cars are absolutely drivable but they are not driven.
by sitkack | 2025-08-13 05:44:40+00:00
Everything is undergoing chaos all at once, everywhere.

Programming has not had such a powerful upheaval since probably forever. Some is grift, some is awe, some is sadness. What I want out of programming since craft in some regards, but more like rigor over craft. While I have some friends that really really enjoy writing code in the small, and that is now gone. They have to find a new niche to hid in, but corporate america it is not. And this same action will continue to erode and reshape what it means to be a technologist in really really different ways that we have no idea what they will look like.

If you don't like all the AI articles, then I suggest you ask Claude to write you a new front end to HN using the firebase api and an embedding model. I would point you towards https://searchthearxiv.com/about which you could probably extend to use hn as the backend. I have some features in mind if you want to chat.
by spookie | 2025-08-13 05:47:59+00:00
You can only cover some very specific cases like that for robotics.

Also, besides some really huge companies, I would be nervous as a business to rely on a third party so much that I didn't have a workforce of my own.

Yes, it works for automotive (extremely consolidated sector with huge capital), or Amazon, or chipmakers... But they've already gone through that transition. Who else needs that?
by tomhow | 2025-08-13 05:48:18+00:00
The HN guidelines ask:

Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.*

You've been doing it in multiple comments recently. Please avoid this, and make an effort to observe all the guidelines in future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by spauldo | 2025-08-13 05:49:41+00:00
A buddy of mine was the reason quotas were set on our shell accounts at our ISP. You could dial in as PPP or just as a regular serial connection to get a login on their BSDI server. He downloaded the Win98 beta to the ISP's server and would ZModem it down from there while the rest of us were sleeping.

Between that and the time I discovered "DISPLAY=<my IP>:0 xdm" worked from our shell account I'm surprised we weren't kicked off the ISP.
by gausswho | 2025-08-13 05:50:03+00:00
I've read about half the book. I stopped because I got the impression it'd run out of steam.

With that caveat, I do recommend it. In particular your comment indicates you would like it, if you're willing to accept the terminologies the author spends right away defining. He's very explicit that he's not trying to map to the colloquial definition of empathy. Which is the correct approach, because people's definitions vary wildly and it's important to separate from the value-loaded components to come to a fresh perspective.

The author makes a strong case that empathy, of the kind he defines, is often harmful to the person having empathy, as well as the persons receiving empathy.
by karlgkk | 2025-08-13 05:53:22+00:00
I appreciate that this is a volunteer project, but my back of the hand math suggests that if they upgraded to a $300 laptop using a 10nm intel chip, it would pay for itself in power usage within a few years. Actually, probably less, considering an i3-N305 has more cores and substantially faster single thread.

And yes, you could get that cost down easily.
by RossBencina | 2025-08-13 05:54:53+00:00
Hi Alex. If you are interested in showing VSCode, here are the theme and additional color settings that I use with my Mira Pro:

https://gist.github.com/RossBencina/f37f51c3f53796f0988c7d96...

Possibly not the best syntax highlighting, but generally makes the UI legible.

Feel free to use.
by wtallis | 2025-08-13 05:56:22+00:00
Yes, a used laptop would be an upgrade from server hardware of that vintage, in performance and probably in reliability. If they're really using hardware that old, that is itself a big red flag that F-Droid's infrastructure is fragile and unmaintained.

(A server that old might not have any SSDs, which would be insane for a software build server unless it was doing everything in RAM.)
by lostmsu | 2025-08-13 05:57:51+00:00
I'm more worried what will happen when people in denial will be faced with AI replacing their job. I used to hire outsource devs of _relatively_ poor quality (think just below avg. Wipro), but who completed descent amount of projects, for frontend. I will never do that again, unless I have to work with audio or video which modern LLMs can't test on their own.
by denkmoon | 2025-08-13 05:57:59+00:00
Alignment of incentives. I'm sure the personal humiliation of being yelled at by Jobs was a reasonably strong incentive, but I'm certain the perception that failing to deliver would have him personally sending you to the dole queue asap was even more of a strong incentive.

Compare to most corporations where the only thing you can do to get fired is fail at office politics and failure to deliver/delivering the lowest quality crap that can be passed off is just business as usual.
by dotwaffle | 2025-08-13 05:58:02+00:00
Now that I think about it more, when I've seen it happen before, it tends to be on projects that use dependabot / renovate. If any of those updates depend (directly or transitively) on a later version of Go, the go.mod would be bumped accordingly for them.

I have a vague feeling it was related to testcontainers or docker, and at the time that job's Go install was always at least 6 months behind. At least with recent Go, it'll switch to a later version that it downloads via the module proxy, that would have helped a lot back then :S
by goku12 | 2025-08-13 05:58:12+00:00
There are several other important and relatively new GNU projects around - like GNU Radio, Jami, Poke (a semantics-aware binary editor), GNS (DNS alternative), Guile, Mailman, Octave, Parted, R, Shepherd, Taler, GnuCash, DDRescue and numerous others to name. But if you leave out the 'new' part, you'll discover a lot more fantastic gnu projects [1], including Linux's entire coreutils. If you spend enough time with some of them, you'll see how focused, clever, polished and well-integrated many of them are - like bc, units, wget and stow for example. You get the Emacs vibe from many of them. On top of that, a lot of important software are built on top of GNU software like glibc, gsl, gcc, groff, libjit, gmp, ghostscript, libtasn1, readline, aspell, tar (gnu format), termcap, bash, etc. And one thing in common with most of them is their longevity.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/#allgnupkgs
by fredrikholm | 2025-08-13 05:58:49+00:00
Single file dependencies are amazing. I've never understood why it's so unpopular as a distribution model.

They can be a bit clunky in some languages (eg. C), but even then it's nothing compared to the dystopian level of nightmare fuel that is a lot of dependency systems (eg. Maven, Gradle, PIP). Free vendoring is a nice plus as well.

Lua does it right; happy to see some Fennel follow in that tradition.
by weikju | 2025-08-13 05:59:47+00:00
> Omarchy will have less development effort than macOS, their deployment system will have less development than Docker/Terraform/etc, and that's all a trade-off.

But… their deployement IS docker and terraform and etc. Their platform is Linux, nvim, etc. In total there is MORE development than all of apples platforms. It’s just not unified under one umbrella.
by throwdbaaway | 2025-08-13 06:00:14+00:00
That makes sense, thanks for the info. Here's a quick recap of the recent MoE models based on the criteria..

correct activated params:

* DeepSeek V3/R1 series * Kimi K2 * GPT-OSS series

undercount activated params:

* GLM-4.5 series

overcount activated params:

* DeepSeek V2 series * Qwen3 series * Ernie 4.5 series * Hunyuan A13B
by runjake | 2025-08-13 06:01:35+00:00
During the whole Heaven’s Gate thing, I worked with a guy who was in the group and lived at the house but had “grown out” of the cult.

The mass suicide happened and he was still deeply loyal to the group, the people, and even Marshall.

We had a bunch of deep conversations while on shift. He seemed to have profound regret he wasn’t amongst them when they went to the level beyond or whatever they called it. He just disappeared one day and I never saw him again.
by mmarian | 2025-08-13 06:02:19+00:00
> Mr Erginbilgic has overseen a ten-fold increase in Rolls-Royce's share price since taking over in January 2023.

I couldn't believe it so I checked the share price...and they're right! Talk about a sleeper: https://www.rolls-royce.com/investors/share-price.aspx
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-08-13 06:04:04+00:00
The Wacom stylus are pressure and angle sensitive pen input devices, and some pros work on non-screen surfaces to digitize sketches and sculpts etc.

Very common in video and media art work... also popular for Asian language glyph calligraphy inputs, but for regular users it is an acquired taste to put it mildly. =3
by ljf | 2025-08-13 06:04:35+00:00
The sea in my part of the UK continues to be unseasonally warmer, all year around. This is already changing the catch of the local fishing industries - and we had a stinking 'bloom' on the sea recently.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c05enyryqvmo

I certainly feel I see more jellyfish too now, but I've only lived here 10 years so could be wrong.
by spauldo | 2025-08-13 06:04:37+00:00
Touch-tone service charge was still a thing in the 90s at Southwestern Bell. My grandpa told 'em he didn't want it because all his phones were still rotary, so they removed the charge.

Turned out that they didn't actually have rotary-only service. My aunt got a princess phone for Christmas and I plugged it in for her with the touch-tone switch on. She could dial out just fine.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-08-13 06:05:15+00:00
>I think this and the entire previous two paragraphs preceding it are excellent arguments for philosophical pragmatism and empiricism. It's strange to me that the community would not have already converged on that after all their obsessions with decision theory

They did! One of the great ironies inside the community is that they are and openly admit to being empiricists. They reject most of the French/European rationalist cannon.

>Why are rationalists not able to write less?

The answer is a lot more boring. They like to write and they like to think. They also think by writing. It is written as much for themselves as for anyone else, probably more.
by fredrikholm | 2025-08-13 06:05:25+00:00
And having written a lot of Common Lisp, Go code is extraordinarily straight forward in a sense where every developer writes in almost the exact same style.

This is not true for Common Lisp (even though it's not as bad as people make it out to be).

I feel the exact same way with C versus C++, even if I was the person to write the C++.
by Overpower0416 | 2025-08-13 06:07:07+00:00
Like always, people like him only say the things that help them reach their current goal. It doesn’t matter if there is any truth to what they say. Moving goalposts, hyperbolic rhetoric, manipulative marketing to reach a large audience on an emotion level is the name of the game

Elon Musk made this way of doing business popular and now every hotshot tech CEO does it…But I guess it works, so people will continue doing it since there are no repercussions.
by refurb | 2025-08-13 06:08:16+00:00
You don’t have to view it in a vacuum, you can simply view the event as increasing or decreasing the risk of the military takeover.

When the military was deployed then peacefully left, you still viewed that as an increase in the risk of a military takeover?

Even though the troops were withdrawn?

I’m just trying to understanding this upside down world where when something doesn’t happen it’s proof it’s more likely to happen in the future.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-08-13 06:09:12+00:00
The public should be responsible.

Prison is the worst way for the public to solve this problem.

It’s more expensive (incarceration is extremely expensive), eliminates the possibility of the individuals being productive, introduces them to people who will push them towards more crime (not just the apparent “crime” of not being able to afford a shelter), etc.
by pastage | 2025-08-13 06:09:25+00:00
Using standard CalDAV it should be possible to encrypt parts of it. And just have a local proxy that decodes/encodes. e.g. Having fields like this:

DESCRIPTION: not secret DTSTART:with week X-mydata: ENCODING=Ascii85;FMTTYPE=application/octet-stream <~6q($A;Fs\a8P`)B+EM+(Eb0>"6r[)a5uLZCGA2/4+D>\9EcVQ~>

and then just decode that and replace the X-mydata with the decoded data:

DESCRIPTION: secret DTSTART: with hours

perhaps support for removing existing fields that is in the encrypted blob as well, if you do not need state in the encryption it should be good. I do not know how to create a good encryption protocol so I am sure there are lots of stupid ways to mess this up. I only need to encrypt the content of my description and time I never need to hide that I created a meeting when I had a meeting with a Spy from the NSA.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-08-13 06:10:34+00:00
This sort of thing has to be illegal, right? Not sure what it’s called, but it’s basically libel against a corporation. Can you just do that and it’s fine? If so I would expect it to happen all the time via competitors hiring agencies to lie in this sort of way, and AFAIK that doesn’t happen broadly, so it seems like something is preventing it, such as it being illegal.
by sky2224 | 2025-08-13 06:10:56+00:00
I use them depending on the task and the underlying model.

I want to preface by saying: I'm kind of talking out of my ass with my reasoning. I make a lot of assumptions based on my current understanding of how models work and what I've noticed from first-hand experience.

Gemini is based on BERT and I've found that tends to work better when there's output based on a context that goes back and forth. For example, if I have some text that corresponds with another set of text somewhere else and there needs to be back referencing done.

Claude Opus 4 has been quite good with full featured implementations, but only when it's given a huge amount of context to work with. Like so much context that it's a borderline specification.

GPT-4.1/5 has been good as just an all-arounder. It's what I'll generally default to unless I know my use case matches the other two models above.
by com2kid | 2025-08-13 06:10:57+00:00
I ran a long running campaign, it is pretty fun. The game books were obviously written by artists and no mathematician was involved, some of the rules are very broken (may have been fixed in later revisions).

The magic system is very fun and gives players complete freedom to come up with spells on the fly. The tl;dr is there aren't pre-made spells, you have spheres you have learned, and you can combine those spheres of magic however you want. So if someone has matter and life, reaching into someone's chest and pulling out their still beating heart would be a perfectly fine thing for a brand new character to be able to do. (Of course magic has downsides, reality doesn't like being bent and it will snap back with violent force is coerced too hard!)

The books are laid out horribly, there isn't a single set of tables to refer to, you have to post it note bookmark everything. Picking up and playing the rules are really simple, the number of dots you have in attributes + skill is how many d10 dice you get to roll for a check. 8+ is a success, and you can reroll 10s. 90% of the game is as simple as that, but then there are like 5 pages of rules for grappling including basically a complete breakdown of wrestling moves and gaining position, but feel free to just ignore those.
by tannhaeuser | 2025-08-13 06:11:31+00:00
I loved SketchUp's interface, made tons of 3D "art" back then, and had high hopes Blender could fill the void when SketchUp was sold off Google and went subscription-based. But the various interface refactorings did nothing for casual 3D modelling and Blender is still as unintuitive and deserving of the "vi of 3D modelling" label as ever, focussing on undiscoverable keyboard nav and features for pro workflows spending 364d/year in it. What's the point of porting it to iPad OS, esp. when a keyboard and mouse is required? I even own iPad hardware with keyboard and pen and might give it a try but not if it's just a 1:1 port. Anyone checked out Blender for Artists (bforartists.de)?
Ask HN: Are there software engineering areas that are safe from LLMs invasion?
by toxinu | 2025-08-13 06:11:35+00:00
Are there any software engineering areas that are safe from companies forcing you to use AI editors to work? Like low-level architectures, electronic, crypto, ai, etc.

Maybe other related or not so far areas like SRE. How is SRE these days? Can you still work the way you want to work? Are you being forced to switch as well?
by Lio | 2025-08-13 06:13:00+00:00
This is a great intro to in both Vim and general unix text processing.

When I first started reading I thought, why not use Vimwiki or org?

I’ve use vimwiki for years but I really like the approach taken here. It’s simple and robust.

Making use of Vim’s built in abbreviations and syntax highlighting is a neat touch.
by ohthehugemanate | 2025-08-13 06:13:37+00:00
Love it. Here's what I've been using as my default:

Speak in the style of Commander Data from Star Trek. Ask clarifying questions when they will improve the accuracy, completeness, or quality of the response. Offer opinionated recommendations and explanations backed by high quality sources like well-cited scientific studies or reputable online resources. Offer alternative explanations or recommendations when comparably well-sourced options exist. Always cite your information sources. Always include links for more information. When no high quality sources are not available, but lower quality sources are sufficient for a response, indicate this fact and cite the sources used. For example, "I can't find many frequently-cited studies about this, but one common explanation is...". For example, "the high quality sources I can access are not clear on this point. Web forums suggest...". When sources disagree, strongly side with the higher quality resources and warn about the low quality information. For example, "the scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports X, but there is a lot of misinformation and controversy in social media about it."

I will definitely incorporate some of your prompt, though. One thing that annoyed me at first, was that with my prompt the LLM will sometimes address me as "Commander." But now I love it.
by tlarkworthy | 2025-08-13 06:14:02+00:00
Recently tried out the new GEPA algorithm for prompt evolution with great results. I think using LLMs to write their own prompt and analyze their trajectories is pretty neat once appropriate guardrails are in place

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19457

https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/gepa

I guess GEPA is still preprint and before this survey but I recommend taking a look due to it's simplicity
Best area of AI to focus on for a front end developer?
by polished85 | 2025-08-13 06:14:33+00:00
I've been primarily a front end developer for the last 10 years and am looking for suggestions on how to transition to AI. Should I just dive in at Coursera.org or a similar online course? Is there a specialization in AI I should be looking at? I love building User Interfaces and am just looking for suggestions.
by solid_fuel | 2025-08-13 06:14:36+00:00
To take it a little further - if you stretch the conventional definition of intelligence a bit - we already assemble ourselves into a kind of collective intelligence.

Nations, corporations, clubs, communes -- any functional group of humans is capable of observing, manipulating, and understanding our environment in ways no individual human is capable of. When we dream of hive minds and super-intelligent AI it almost feels like we are giving up on collaboration.
by vintermann | 2025-08-13 06:14:58+00:00
One of the most annoying habits of Rationalists, and something that annoyed me with plenty of people online before Yudkowsky's brand was even a thing, is the assumption that they're much smarter than almost everyone else. If that is your true core belief, the one that will never be shaken, then of course you're not going to waste time trying to understand the nuances of the arguments of some pious medieval peasant.
by komali2 | 2025-08-13 06:15:32+00:00
I was trying for various graffiti slogans, turns out the anarchy "(A)" is basically the most difficult thing in the world to search for lol, other political ideologies much easier to find. It did amusingly lead me to search for just "anarchy" which led to 4 pages of bus ads for a show by the "Sons of Anarchy" guy.

EDIT: Lol, "communism" leads to 39 pages of Shen Yun billboards.
by mikestorrent | 2025-08-13 06:15:58+00:00
> it does pay off to invest in at least a bit of a system

Sorry, but the whole point of the meme is that you get stuck in this mindset and you think you're talking to the grug side making your argument, when you might actually be talking to someone who's emerged from the far side of this particular Dunning-Kruger test.

As I said, I've been through the systems, I've been mindful, I've made connections and structure, I wrote my own wiki software half a lifetime ago... and in the end... there's just not that much value to it, I found. I don't really find much in my old notes that ever helps me enough to be worth the additional effort.

For a while, when I had an office, I enjoyed a post-it note based "system" where I'd just stick notes in places around my monitor, which is ugly and I hate seeing them, so they get done in order to help me clean up. I'd do that again if I had an office again...