MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Cheyana | 2025-09-16 10:12:46+00:00
One of my favorite quotes/passages from Sci-Fi, is from Clarke’s 3001:The Final Odyssey…” Imagine that you're an intelligent extraterrestrial, concerned only with verifiable truths. You discover a species that has divided itself into thousands - no, by now millions - of tribal groups holding an incredible variety of beliefs about the origin of the universe and the way to behave in it. Although many of them have ideas in common, even when there's 99% overlap, the remaining one percent's enough to set them killing and torturing each other, over trivial points of doctrine, utterly meaningless to outsiders. "How to account for such irrational behavior? (...) religion was the by-product of fear - a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe. For much of human prehistory, it may have been a necessary evil - but why was it so much more evil than necessary - and why did it survive when it was no longer necessary?”
by Defman | 2025-09-16 10:14:11+00:00
No, you should name it "Your Pictures" because the app is communicating to the user that in this tab there are "your pictures". The article gives an example for the case:

> Similarly, a support agent might tell you to “Go to your cases” over webchat or a phone call. This is confusing if the UI says “My cases”.

Replace "cases" with "pictures" :)

If, however, there's a button which lets you upload pictures, it should be "Upload my picture", because the user is the one who's communicating to the app about their intent.
by everyone | 2025-09-16 10:14:14+00:00
Perspective from an outsider...

I have always been a game dev but recently I made my 1st web-app, and I looked at React and Angular and in the end I just used basic html, css and javascript + jquery. It just seemed a lot simpler to make the final product rather than use more tools to make it for me at a remove of 1.

Though if I was going to make a giant complex website (like facebook or something) then I would consider React, I defo preferred it to Angular cus it had a more "do what u want" vibe rather than "do things this way".
by 3036e4 | 2025-09-16 10:15:59+00:00
My next phone will almost certainly be two phones. One cheap and super standard Android phone to just run banking apps and similar that insists on Google Play etc. Locked down and boring, turned off most of the time. Then a second phone for everything else (terminal with sshd, emacs, emulators, media players ... the stuff that allows a phone to be the general purpose computer it should be).

Looks increasingly unlikely that there will be convenient ways to have the best of both those worlds in a single device. For now it is somewhat possible with Android, but the experience keeps getting worse.
by mnky9800n | 2025-09-16 10:16:14+00:00
I like to follow some VCs in europe (like Michael Jackson, no relation) who are harsh on europe for being short sighted on business and politics. i guess many of them are on twitter too but I don't really like twitter since it's new ownership. overall i find linkedin to be a nice amount of social media becuase its kind of boring you give up scrolling pretty fast, and you can post stuff there and get some feedback or distribution of your work (e.g., academic papers, find new users for FOSS you write). also because it is always showing your old posts to people for like weeks after you post them, this works out that scrolling is boring. people seem to always see everything eventually.
by gigatexal | 2025-09-16 10:16:43+00:00
they're just a mature company doing mature company things ... still there's a lot of really strong inertia:

the MacBook line of hardware is the best it's ever been

the phones continue to improve year over year incrementally sure but they're solid -- I'm very keen to see what the rumored folding iphone gets us

AirPods I can't live without

idk -- macOS26's spotlight just stole a lot of good things from things like Alfred and other launchers -- it continues to become a more useful OS

nothing I need to do for my day to day as a data engineer is hindered by being on a Mac -- linux and containers are useful and solved now (hello Colima)

maybe I am just a lost fanboy but im very happy currently
Show HN: I used n-grams to see which LLM writes most like a human
by shadowblue | 2025-09-16 10:16:54+00:00
Hi HN,

After learning about n-gram models in a Natural Language Processing class, I got curious about how well they could represent something abstract like writing style. To test this, I built a simple game that compares your writing to that of three LLMs: GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet.

You write a short story based on a prompt, and the tool uses pre-built n-gram models to tell you which LLM's style is most similar to yours. There's no sign-up required to try it.

I wrote a companion post that goes into more detail on how the comparison works and how I built the models: https://ramjanarthan.com/teaching-computers-language/

I'm keen to hear any feedback you have.
by defrost | 2025-09-16 10:17:28+00:00
> far better in terms of emissions

Particle emissions isn't what I responded to .. in terms of carbon and greenhouse gases what matters more is trees not being replaced.

In the course of, say, plantation growing timber for lumber generates sufficient burnable wood for landowners and a wider community - the final lumber trees are the ones that weren't weeded out earlier (and burnt) and have been routinely lopped of branches (more burnable wood) to minimize knots, etc.

Forrest management is a thing, timber for lumber, coppicing for regrowth, et al has been going on for several thousand years and has been part of traditional surface carbon cycle.

As has large scale grassland (and forest undercover) burning off for fire management.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-09-16 10:17:48+00:00
> The switch to LCDs/LEDs was in a lot of ways a step back. Sure, we don't have huge 40lb boxes on our desks, but we lost the ultra-fast refresh rate enabled by the electron beam, not to mention the internal glow that made computers magical (maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy, like people in the 80s who swore that vinyl records "sounded better").

CRTs don't have particularly good refresh rates. There is very little delay on the output scan, but 99% of the time the delays built into rendering make that irrelevant compared to fast screens using other technologies. And the time between scans doesn't go very low.

I have no idea what you mean by internal glow.
by kqr | 2025-09-16 10:17:58+00:00
You might not even need fancy techniques to have UX similar to a React app. When the page load is fast enough, browsers hide that it happened. This means you can afford to do everything in the backend and just send plain HTML over to the user. For example the Decision Drill[1] application performs a complete page load on every interaction, but the server is fast enough that at least with my internet connection, it feels to me like the corresponding React-based application would.

[1]: https://xkqr.org/decision/
by Mindwipe | 2025-09-16 10:19:07+00:00
This is a really rough UI update to ship out of Apple.

I don't want to use "the worst UI thing they've ever done" lightly, but it is hard to think of something that feels this unfinished and hard to use. Why are none of the corner radii consistent? This is literally the sort of thing Apple's entire reputation is built on getting right! It's like an amateur hour Linux skin.
by rsynnott | 2025-09-16 10:19:37+00:00
Living _forever_ seems like... not necessarily that attractive an idea.

(Also most of the afterlives on offer don't seem particularly attractive.)

As someone who doesn't believe and never has believed that there was an afterlife, there is something kind of horrifying about the _inescapable, eternal_ nature of such a thing. I think this may be different if it's a concept that you've been sold on as a kid, but from the outside, it's really kind of unsettling.
by washadjeffmad | 2025-09-16 10:19:47+00:00
If they haven't yet, what will get them to look?

Since '93, the range allowed for Palestinian fishing boats has been reduced from 20 to 3 nautical miles by Israeli naval vessels. Because primarily only young fish are found that close to the shore, and because constant damage to infrastructure means untreated wastewater is being dumped close by, it's a pretty bleak picture.
by disposablese | 2025-09-16 10:20:11+00:00
I do not like the word “my” anywhere in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Putting on my autistic , very factual, and methodologically empathetic hat on, I prefer a clear line of separation—machines should act as machines, not as personalized companions. I prefer “your” everywhere.

I wanted to do research in HCI a while back, but funding in this area is limited. To me, HCI research felt overly focused on making computer interaction more personable by adding layers of so-called "personalization." Let interaction with machines remain objective, straightforward, and friendly—especially for older people.
by account42 | 2025-09-16 10:20:30+00:00
So someone who is used to industrialized cake baking prefers industrialized cake recipes? What exactly do you think this means about the quality of cake you can bake from scratch at home? Do you really need a cake expert to tell you what cake is good??

Blind testing is missing the point - you're not trying to emulate some perfect standard. The little imperfections and variances in the result are the value.
by Topfi | 2025-09-16 10:22:09+00:00
Maybe I misunderstand you, but looking at their own documentation on the topic, I hardly see any advantage in terms of privacy when using Cursor Privacy Mode over OpenAIs Data Controls:

> OpenAI

> We rely on many of OpenAI's models to give AI responses. Requests may be sent to OpenAI even if you have an Anthropic (or someone else's) model selected in chat (e.g. for summarization)*. We have a zero data retention agreement with OpenAI.

Source: https://cursor.com/security

I will say that the Security page by the Cursor team is a very nice overview, even going into Auth, etc. and applaud that, but see nothing here that differentiates their use of e.g. OpenAI models from the agreements OpenAI offers themselves. Essentially, I don't see why anyone would have such severely heightened trust in Cursor over competitors in this area. If they only provided self hosted models, I could understand it, but not the way they operate.

Personally, both because of the way and on what LLMs have been trained on, on top of my expectation in terms of privacy, regardless of model provider assurances, I'd treat any LLM derived/assisted/reviewed code as public the second you send it to some providers server hosted model and some form of FOSS to boot. Basically, if you used Cursor, Codex, Augment or anything of that sort, I'd reduce any future privacy expectations straight away, might as well put it on public Github for everyone to see.

Only self-hosting on prem is an option for keeping control of your codebase, though personally, I'd still consider licensing such code as FOSS, considering no model wasn't trained on EUPL, GPL, etc. Personal (very much philosophical and not at all legal, as that goes into what training is, weights, etc. arguments that can go on eternal) opinion, but I'd argue whether you are MSFT or a small startup, if you derive a significant amount of new code from LLMs, arguing that copyleft shouldn't be at the very least on the mind of your legal department isn't reasonable, but of course, this will have to be decided by courts and likely in favour of those with the best legal teams. I doubt if any of the "80% of our code is written by LLMs" were true, that'd convince a court to enforce copyleft upon the product in question, but personally, that'd be my viewpoint.

Regardless of licensing, if you send your code to Cursor, purely privacy wise, you shouldn't have reservations about OpenAI.
by Rendello | 2025-09-16 10:22:27+00:00
This is very apparent in my work right now, as well as "all models are wrong, some models are useful".

I'm parsing some "simple" CSVs into a DB, but I have to keep the concrete representation intact for another purpose. The DB format will be similar to the CSV format, but can't be quite the same. I would've figured this would take a day or two (I've written many parsers before), but the amount of details I have to consider has lead me to circle back to this problem for a long time.
by sillyfluke | 2025-09-16 10:23:21+00:00
>It is far, far better if the existing system _stays useful_

I doubt anyone is arguing the opposite. The point of the parent is that the system staying useful and not turning hostile on your usecase is not under your control or something you can personally prevent, and until that magically changes it's best to structure your use case to be least affected by things not in your control.
by machina_ex_deus | 2025-09-16 10:24:11+00:00
Tell my friend whose both parents were murdered in Nir Oz that Hamas isn't an existential threat. Hamas is an existential threat. We cannot live in peace while it exists. We're done tolerating Palestinian aggression. Hamas wasn't an existential threat when it was just rockets, but once they've crossed the border and assaulted our cities where we live they became an existential threat we cannot allow, even if the world screams genocide as we destroy them.

We're not here to win the victimhood competition. This isn't 9/11 where the U.S living peacefully wasn't threatened. If we don't eradicate this threat our cities will be assaulted again.

We're here to live in peace, and if that means eradicating hamas while there are heavy Palestinian casualties, so be it. That's the only option for us to live in peace. This is an existential war for Israel. There are relatively few casualties compared with what would've happened if Israel actually decided to genocide the Palestinians. We could've killed them all if we wanted, but we only fight Hamas as we must do. Eradicating Hamas is a daunting task. We're actually fighting selectively at the cost of our soldiers lives. If the intention was genocide the Palestinians would've been dead by now. The intention is to destroy Hamas at minimum causalities.
by glaucon | 2025-09-16 10:24:40+00:00
Great looking tool, thanks. Looking through your "Futures" on the README I do think ... "Add videos demonstrating common concepts and attacks (such as race attack, finney attack etc)." ... would certainly make it accessible to a wider audience which, given the amount of effort you've put in, seems like a good idea.

Something like these two videos, only based on your tool, would be very good - to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_160oMzblY8 (Part 1), https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=xIDL_akeras (Part 2) .
by card_zero | 2025-09-16 10:25:16+00:00
Like another post says, "The Mac was a philosophy". I bought a series of them but stopped around the year 2000 because they threw away the philosophy in favor of innovation. I think things were going south already around 1998. Remember Sherlock? On system 8.5 it would regularly interrupt the user (sending games from full screen to windowed) to display a dialog to say that it was indexing files. This couldn't be turned off except by disabling the Sherlock extension altogether.

That says that Sherlock's mission wasn't to help the user do user activities, but to get the user out of the way of Sherlock's activities, while keeping the user informed about the magnificence of Sherlock. This attitude became really popular with every OS that was competing to be innovative, and we're still stuck with it today. Shut up user, pay attention, look at my features!
by eviks | 2025-09-16 10:25:34+00:00
All such criticisms would be much more defendable if the authors' view of the past weren't so rosy with a strong liquid blur of the Job's myth.

> that are, once again, intuitive, discoverable, easy to use, and that both look and work well.

Never was this the case! All these past OSes had a lot of the same fundamental flaws along all of those dimensions, from basic search ("discoverable/easy") fails in both iOS and macOS.

Otherwise maybe it's indeed closer to

> I’m becoming more cynical with age and general tech fatigue
by IshKebab | 2025-09-16 10:25:36+00:00
> The main evidence is that they haven't.

They have taken many gradual steps in the direction of locking things down.

> it would be quite damaging to an important part of their user base.

Not as important as we'd hope. Look at iOS.

> Other than that, you're essentially asking me to prove a negative.

They could have said "we won't ever lock down macOS". They haven't.

I'll file this under "mark my words". Like this one :-D

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17363885

(I think it will probably take longer than 7 years though; maybe 15.)
by ForHackernews | 2025-09-16 10:26:05+00:00
As I understand it, Google wants to "organize the world's data": that means all of it, secret, public, private, legal, illegal, ill-gotten and freely handed over. There's no "malevolence", Google is not a person. It's an organization and hoovering up data is its raison d'etre. Unless regulators force it to do otherwise, it will gather and store data.

This is the company that set up a fleet of cars to take photos of everything and snort up wifi traffic while they were at it. https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/
by palmfacehn | 2025-09-16 10:26:53+00:00
I believe that after 10k USD additional AML regulations kick in. Then there are a related class of pseudo-crimes around structuring payments to avoid the 10k threshold. Part of it may be PayPal's policies, but as I understand these things are generally to cover things on their end from regulatory risk factors.

That's just one of the headaches they deal with. Also one of the reasons for using cryptocurrencies. PayPal may be creating the worst of both worlds by combining the complexity of cryptocurrency transactions with the need to abide by byzantine regulations.
by comprev | 2025-09-16 10:27:08+00:00
Apple's accessibility features enabled my mother to enjoy what little independence she had due to a rare debilitating illness [Multiple System Atrophy].

She could read eBooks & emails, listen to audio books, view photos and call her family by herself (iPhone use extends to many uncles/aunties/cousins).

Every few months I would help her recalibrate her iPad as it was a vital life line.
by codethief | 2025-09-16 10:27:35+00:00
> If you recall the (in)famous "PHP: a fractal of bad design", React basically ticks every box in this rant and then some.

I dare you to walk us through that blog post and explain to us in detail how React "basically ticks every box".

Not only does React not compare to PHP in the slightest, I also find this comparison rather wild because other web frameworks rank so much higher than React on the "quirks & arcane code you need to understand" scale. (I have PTSD from Angular and Vue in particular.)
by emporas | 2025-09-16 10:28:28+00:00
Funny thing is, most Coinbase or Kraken or Binance transactions of BTC and Ethereum are simple SQL transactions in a normal database.

An immutable ledger to put information is the best invention since sliced bread, and that can only be achieved by an underlying economic system to maintain such a ledger.

That being said, probably all crypto (except one) will go to zero very soon. Crypto is a bubble, but it doesn't mean that the underlying technology is useless.
by Fluorescence | 2025-09-16 10:28:42+00:00
What?

It's pretty much the same. Click the speaker icon the menubar, bluetooth is one of the options, third click to choose a connection.

There are plenty of excellent extensions if you want something different. I use dash-to-panel to combine the system tray in my dock and not have a pointless menu bar.

> zero windows

Are you not calling the MacOS sound-panel a window? It's the same type of panel you use in Gnome!

I use both everyday and it's MacOS that's buggy, inconsistent and hobbled:

- my speaker doesn't appear in the MacOS sound panel but does appear in the bluetooth section of settings so I have to go there to connect and it works as a speaker. MacOS is literally worse than Gnome at this specific task!

- I also can't use my Mac as a bluetooth speaker but I can use Linux as one. Pretty lame.
by balamatom | 2025-09-16 10:29:15+00:00
Node.js is boring stack for me.

But instead I am asked to work with tools from the wet nightmares of React developers.

Stuff that runs in Node - yet is designed as if Node, the DOM, or the OS, didn't exist.

Now that's never boring. They can't even consider that everything might work better without their favorite tool, than with it. It's surreal. And awful.
TIL that the iPhone Air camera bump is thicker than the main body
by fdomingues | 2025-09-16 10:29:22+00:00
From the page 329 of the Accessory Design Guidelines[1], the camera bump is 5.68mm thick, the main body is 5.64mm, as advertised everywhere, which brings the total thickness to 11.32mm.

Is this good? Is this bad? Don't know, don't care.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/accessories/Accessory-Design-Guidelines.pdf
by mickael-kerjean | 2025-09-16 10:30:06+00:00
> using plain strings, what happens when you do a typo?

The tests fails

> Will your app will silently break or you’ll have a compile time error?

There is no silent error. In practice, there are a couple fail safes:

- using both eslint and tsc: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/blob/master/pub...

- the code is full of runtime assertions: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/blob/1d1bad001b...

- unhandled error (like most assertion) will interrupt everything to show a scary looking screen: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/blob/1d1bad001b...

- controlled error which are part of the regular error handling will stop the flow showing a screen like this: https://demo.filestash.app/?error=test
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-16 10:30:39+00:00
> they're protecting themselves

[citation needed]

The theory here is that it provides a marginal security improvement if there is malware on the phone, but if there is malware on the phone then there are a hundred other things it can do to the same effect and you're likely screwed anyway. And by doing this, you also block the user from taking screenshots, which is bad, because screenshots are harder for computers to parse, and that's a marginal security advantage. If the user is going to send e.g. their account number to someone else (for a legitimate reason), it's better that they do it as a screenshot than that you force them to type it as text, because text is machine searchable. Which is worse when that messaging system gets compromised and then the attacker can do a text search for a pattern matching a bank routing number and be more likely to discover that message than if it was only there in a JPG.

Meanwhile the primary consequence of preventing screenshots is to inconvenience customers, which is an actual cost to the bank, because there is only a threshold amount of BS customers will put up with before switching banks and banks are constantly pushing up against that line already with all of their other BS.

But then the lower-quality banks do it anyway because there is a box they can check which sounds like it's locking something down, so they check it without thinking. Which is a great canary for customers who want to know if their bank is dumb -- if they require this then they probably do all kinds of other dumb stuff and it's a strong indication you should switch banks before you get screwed by them doing some other foolish nonsense.