MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sohkamyung | 2025-09-04 06:11:22+00:00
I still use OSMAnd because it can take photos (with GPS coordinates) at waypoints while recording a track.

I use this to take photos of images from my DSLR while on nature walks.

I later download the waypoint photos and upload it to iNaturalist to get the location information I need to link the location to my higher resolution camera images.

More reliable than linking my camera to my phone (via Bluetooth) to record the location info.
by wkat4242 | 2025-09-04 06:12:53+00:00
"The West" wasn't really relevant in this discussion, all I wanted to point out is that Russia has a much larger pool of cannonfodder who can't refuse (the benefit of a dictatorship) so drawing things out is always to their benefit.

That the west is also doing some bad stuff (though really in the EU we're not that bad IMO, most EU countries recognise Palestina now, it's just for a few blocking hard measures against Israel) isn't really a relevant topic in this. We're not going to have boots on the ground in this conflict until an agreement is reached because of the risk of escalation.
by llbbdd | 2025-09-04 06:13:04+00:00
Ah okay, I remember this. I'm not sure the they were proved right that conclusively - from my neck of the woods it seemed like it invented issues where there weren't any previously. And maybe that was the point - I wasn't involved. But where I was, the terminology wasn't controversial until it was, and that seemed to be a choice (maybe by Github to follow social convention).
by rich_sasha | 2025-09-04 06:13:44+00:00
It's weird. All of our attributes which we hold and value, and develop via a mix of genes and training - intelligence, but also strength, stamina, reflexes - we acquired, if you strip it all off to basics, to feed and to procreate. That's all evolution cares about.

Now, we are social animals, and we grew to value these thing for their own right. Societies valued strength and bravery, as virtues, but I guess ultimately because having brave strong soldiers made for more food and babies.

So over time, we tamed beasts and built tools, and most of these virtues kind of faded away. In our world of prosperity and machine power on tap, strength and bravery are not really extolled so much anymore. We work out because it makes us healthy and attractive, not because our societies demand this. We're happy to replace the hard work with a prosthetic.

Intelligence all these millenia was the outlier. The thing separating us from the animals. It was so inconceivable that it might be replaced that it is very deeply ingrained in us.

But if suddenly we don't need it? Or at least 95% of the population doesn't? Is it "ok" to lose it, like engineers of today don't rely on strength like blacksmiths used to? Maybe. Maybe it's ok that in 100 years we will all let our brains rot, occasionally doing a crossword as a work out. It feels sad, but maybe only in the way decline of swordsmanship felt to a Napoleonic veteran. The world moved on and we don't care anymore.

We lost so many skills that were once so key: the average person can't farm, can't forage, can't start a fire or ride a horse. And maybe it's ok. Or, who knows, maybe not.
by theshrike79 | 2025-09-04 06:13:57+00:00
So if the "consensus" adopts ... Erlang, you will just start using it?

And because this "consensus" adopted it, you know what it's good for and what kind of problems its good at solving and whether it's a good option for what you specifically are doing?

Using LLMs is a skill that's (currently) a bit hard to teach, it's a ball of math and vectors that doesn't work in a deterministic way. Some magic words in the prompt will try to make it do something, but not always.

You really need to use one, preferably a few different ones, and get a feel for how they operate. Like driving a car. You can watch 420 hours of videos of people driving cars, but you really need to sit in one to get comfortable doing it.
by atoav | 2025-09-04 06:14:09+00:00
Artists, especially on bandcamp, are often the underdog. Being proud of not paying them is like being proud to watch a street artist "for free", because fuck them for doing it in public. My ethics say: "If you don't like it, ignore it and walk on, if you liked it enough to stop and watch you give them something."

Meanwhile most online ads are supporting multinational corporations that already may earn money with your browsing data and try to manipulate your choices every step. All while delivering their ads in a way that makes it a threat to not block them. That isn't remotely the same. If you need my money to survive, give me the choice to pay instead at least.

The exact same software could have been marketed as something to discover new music, for free and the musicians would be mostly okay with it.
by torginus | 2025-09-04 06:14:21+00:00
The whole 'startup/scaleup' culture (which have become the industry titans of today) - is insane and have been insane for as long as it has been a thing - the culture of either 'just grow and figure out how to monetize'(Social media, food delivery etc.) or 'we're selling you this technology that doesn't exist yet but going to be insanely valuable in the future (AGI, self driving)' or 'we're selling shovels to the first 2' (cloud providers, Nvidia) has been insane.

I'd argue that compared to a decade. 15 years ago, relatively little value has been created. If you sat down in front of a 15 yo computer, or tried to solve a technical challenge with the tooling of 15-10 years ago, I don't think you'd get a significantly worse result.

Yet in this time the US has doubled its GDP, most of it owning to the top, to the tech professionals and financiers who benefited from this.

And some of this money went into assets with constrained supplies, such as housing, marking up the prices adjusted for inflation, making average people that much worse off.

While I do feel society is making progress, it's been a slow and steady march. Which in relative terms means slowing. Of I gave you $10 every week, by week 2, you'd double your wealth, by the end of the year, you almost didn't notice the increase.

Technology accumulation is the same, I'd argue it's even worse, since building on top of existing stuff has a cost proportional to the complexity for a fixed unit of gain (and features get proportionally less valuable as you implement the most important ones first).

Sorry got distracted from my main point - what happens when people stop believing that these improvements are meanigful or that technology that was priced in to produce 100x the value will come at all (and more importantly the company you're invested in will be able to caputre it)?
by roywashere | 2025-09-04 06:14:41+00:00
I’m surely happy to not live in the UK at the moment. And Indonesia of course. If I would live in one of these countries I’d be using VPN. And maybe in the (not so distant) future this is preferable in the US too.

> We're trying to build public opinion against that.

Good on you!

But to be honest; it seems that it would be in Mullvads interest if the US starts requiring “open encryption” for internet services! Then more people would feel the need for VPNs
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-09-04 06:15:29+00:00
"Didn't Apple say that 1) they weren't interested in being in the Search Engine business 2) (in testimony) Google was by far the best search engine that they were going to use anyway ?"

That testimony worked in favor of the government

It raises the question, "Then why pay them?"

Google had no answer

The company always has an alternative explanation for its actions that lacks any relation to advertising services, or profit motive
by simianwords | 2025-09-04 06:16:01+00:00
Why do you assume investors don’t know about this? They know some investments follow the power law - very few of them work out but they bring most value.

The very existence of openAI and Anthropic are proof of it happening.

Imagine you were an investor and you know what you know now (creativity can’t be predicted). How would you then invest in companies? Your answer might converge on existing VC strategies.
by IceHegel | 2025-09-04 06:16:10+00:00
Unless there is a trick that I am missing, I don't think this will work by itself. The fundamental thing is what can the model attend to as it generates the next token.

If you give a summary+graph to the model, it can still only attend to the summary for token 1. If it's going to call a tool for a deeper memory, it still only gets the summary when it makes the decision on what to call.

You get the same problem when asking the model to make changes in even medium-sized code bases. It starts from scratch each time, takes forever to read a bunch of files, and sometimes it reads the right stuff, other times it doesn't.
by lemontheme | 2025-09-04 06:18:08+00:00
It’s exciting that Zed even has a Helix mode. That was a big moment for Helix.

Last time I tried it, though, I immediately ran into parts of the keymap that hadn’t been translated yet. I’m already at my limit of tools in beta mode/built from my own fork, so I switched back to Vim mode – where the team is on record explaining their thorough testing methodology.

As a Helix user of two years, I sometimes wonder if I actually like the Helix keymap (certainly some parts are nicer than Vim’s) or if I simply tolerate it because of how nice it is to get a polished TUI IDE out of the box. Either way, my muscle memory expects Helix mode now, rather than Vim.
by awanderingmind | 2025-09-04 06:18:53+00:00
According to the actual paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.24088), it has been an open conjecture since at least 1977. The quote:

> Unknotting number has long been conjectured to be additive under connected sum; this conjecture is implicit in the work of Wendt, in one of the first systematic studies of unknotting number [37]. It is unclear when and where this was first explicitly stated; most references to it call it an ‘old conjecture’. It can be found in the problem list of Gordon [13] from 1977 and in Kirby’s list [16].

'Additive' here means that if u(K1) is defined as the unknotting number of the knot K1, and u(K1#K2) the unknotting number of the knots K1 and K2 joined together, then u(K1#K2) = u(K1) + u(K2). It is this that has (assuming the paper is correct) been proven false. A deceptively simple property!

edit: I initially incorrectly had a ≤ sign instead of =
by theshrike79 | 2025-09-04 06:19:12+00:00
I've had the Corporate Approved CoPilot + Sonnet 4 write a full working React page for me based on a screenshot of a Figma model. (Not even through an MCP)

It even discovered that we have some internal components and used them for it.

Got me from 0-MVP in less then an hour. Would've easily taken me a full day
by zxexz | 2025-09-04 06:19:45+00:00
It does seem to. I’ve been working on some personal projects where I’ve needed to look up and research transformers quite a bit (the kind that often has a ferrite core) and it has been frustrating. Frustrating not just trying to search for the wire datasheets, etc., but also because I often have to use the other transformer via service to find what I’m looking for because search is so enshittified by the newer definition.
by muzani | 2025-09-04 06:20:03+00:00
How many $1 cups would you have to sell to make the equivalent of an engineering salary? Now work backwards from that - cost of a cup, cost of beans, transportation, water, heating the water, and all the people needed to move this, with two shifts covering the peak hours at breakfast, lunch, and dusk, plus cleanup.

Selling was fairly easy, but if you pay good wages, you get mediocre people. If you pay mediocre wages, you get terrible people. And with cheap coffee, we were cursed with either terrible people or working 14 hours a day for terrible profit.

The partners were almost as bad. The people we'd rent the spot from. The ones who moved the beans and sold the cups. The ones who handled disputes. It was just toil for most of them. I don't blame them; they're not getting rich either. At least in software, if you were willing to work 14 hours a day, you get peace.
by 4gotunameagain | 2025-09-04 06:20:22+00:00
The first link is full of youthful anger (and a bit of cringe) not recognising the immense technical debt C is carrying. It is a 50 year old language written on a PDP.

For example the author rages about things like integer sizes, while every single serious C programmer does not use ambiguously sized types.

Sure, C has issues. A lot. But it is the cornerstone of our technological marvel. Everything around you runs C, everything in space runs C as well.

Do we have much better options for some applications nowadays ? Of course.

Will C go away ? No.
by tibbar | 2025-09-04 06:20:27+00:00
Experimentation is a toolkit for optimizing things. That's it. For example, if you are Uber, you might offer a bonus to people to work more. How much money do you offer? Is there a relationship between how much you pay and how well people perform? To determine this, you need empirical data, you need to be able to split people into groups, and you need to be able to measure things about the groups. And you need some guardrails to keep yourself from p-hacking. As the number of people and the amount of money increases, the number of interesting questions rises rapidly. These are all things you get from an experimentation platform.

Experimentation works best when a) it's easy to try different parameters for a thing, and b) there is a lot of money involved.

Your comment is weird to me because you seem to be implying that experimentation is a cult because there are no things worth optimizing, and/or optimizing things has a negative societal effect. Those things are obviously true some of the time, but it's not very interesting.
by AIorNot | 2025-09-04 06:20:50+00:00
Because consciousness itself cannot be explained except through experience ie consciousness (ie first person experience) - not through material phenomena

It’s like explaining music vs hearing music

We can explain music intellectually and physically and mathematically

But hearing it in our awareness is a categorically different activity and it’s experience that has no direct correlation to the physical correlates of its being

The common thought experiment is the color blind researcher experiencing color for the first time(Mary the Colour Scientist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument)
by llbbdd | 2025-09-04 06:22:19+00:00
It is! If the thing runs like shit, say it runs like shit. Say it's native or not, like every topic title and comment on HN until we weep of boredom. I know it's rust! everything is rust here! Is there any other reason I should care? Are we a forum for discussing interesting technology or are we a forum for discussing alternatives to VSCode? And again, who is switching? People shipping products or HN posters with their dumb metrics?
by silisili | 2025-09-04 06:22:47+00:00
As a 20 year remote employee across multiple companies...in my experience, this is true depending on one's definition of career. If you want to advance high in the company, remote is going to stifle you unless the entire company is remote. And even then something as small as skipping an offsite or keeping your cam off will stifle you. Humans like connection, apparently.

My own career progress was much slower and topped out lower than (in my enlightened opinion) much less qualified folks in office.

That said, it's a tradeoff. I -still- wouldn't move to work in office knowing this. I value my family, time, and lifestyle I'm able to afford in a place I want to be more than making tons of money.

In another 10 or 20 years I'm half sure I'll run the numbers and regret that, but so far so good.
by momiforgot | 2025-09-04 06:23:35+00:00
LLM-powered shovelware sits in the same box as coke-induced business ideas. Both give you the dopamine rush of being “on top of it” until the magic wears off and you’re scrubbing your apartment floor with a toothbrush at 4 AM, or stuck debugging a DB migration that Claude Code has been mangling for five hours straight.
by itchingsphynx | 2025-09-04 06:23:44+00:00
>Discussion: Consumption of LNCSs was associated with an accelerated rate of cognitive decline during 8 years of follow-up. Our findings suggest the possibility of long-term harm from LNCS consumption, particularly artificial LNCSs and sugar alcohols, on cognitive function. Study limitations include self-reported dietary data, selection bias from attrition, and residual confounding from co-occurring health behaviors.

Should be “[Reported] consumption of LNCSs…”
by ausssssie | 2025-09-04 06:23:48+00:00
> For automative occupations, a lot of it is software engineering, auditing, and accounting, where there are well-defined workflows and LLMs are good at doing one-off tasks without a lot of feedback. For augmentative cases, you’re looking at more complex or managerial roles.

Nope coding is definitely augmentive for Sep 2025 and before. Maybe more so than managing.
by atoav | 2025-09-04 06:23:50+00:00
One can be angry for symbolic reasons as well. If your CEO told you to "Get your code on github, it is free", you would probably rightfully question whether they understood the reasons why people develope and maintain open source software in the first place.

Similarly here. It is not about the act of people listening to the music for free. If this was a problem, a musician would just restrict access to those tracks. It is about a spirit of taking without giving back, which could be understood as: "Haha you idiots, thanks for providing it for free, I am not paying then". A bit like stopping to watch a street performer, and instead of clapping and (eventually) tossing a coin going like: "We are in a public space, I don't need to pay, idiot. Your own fault!".

Technically correct, but ethically wrong and shows they don't value the work of artists. This is just about words and showing some respect, not about money. And since words and showing respect literally cost nothing this makes the insult even greater.
by simianwords | 2025-09-04 06:24:20+00:00
I predict this won’t be the case. The switching cost to a non Ad LLM is too low for me to be bothered with an ad based LLM.

OpenAI must justify ads when its competitors are not sending ads. Why would they? OpenAI models must be so good that it should be worth dealing with ads compared to say Claude or DeepSeek.
by theshrike79 | 2025-09-04 06:25:01+00:00
It doesn't say no.

For me it built a full-ass YAML parser when it couldn't use Viper to parse the configuration correctly :)

It was a fully vibe-coded project (I like playing stupid and seeing what the LLM does), but it got caught when the config got a bit more complex and its shitty regex-yaml-parser didn't work anymore. :)
by pama | 2025-09-04 06:25:11+00:00
Sauro, if you read this, please refrain from such low-content speculative statements:

“On a loose but telling note, this is still three decades short of the number of neural connections in the human brain, 1015, and yet they consume some one hundred million times more power (GWatts as compared to the very modest 20 Watts required by our brains).”

No human brain could have time to read all the materials of a modern LLM training run even if they lived and read eight hours a day since humans first appeared over 300,000 years ago. More to the point, inference of an LLM is way more energy efficient than human inference (see the energy costs of a B200 decoding a 671B parameter model and estimate the energy needed to write the equivalent of a human book worth of information as part of a larger batch). The main reason for the large energy costs of inference is that we are serving hundreds of millions of people with the same model. No humans have this type of scaling capability.
by hyperadvanced | 2025-09-04 06:26:00+00:00
On the thread of copywriting/publishing, my wife works in the field. She recently has had trouble with authors submitting low quality material - vague, nonsensical, lacking voice. I told her it sounded like AI and sure enough it was. I don’t blame her because she’s pretty offline. But the point stands that basically no one wants this crap. I don’t want your “one pager” that GPT pooped out, I want you to sit down and compose the problem in a digestible way, one that makes me think and one that shows that YOU have thought about it.
by freehorse | 2025-09-04 06:26:13+00:00
As I said, I do notice when it is blurry, and in such a case it is a problem with anything that is rendered on that monitor not just zed. As I said, this does not happen "on any monitor" that is not hidpi. I use multiple operating systems on my day to day work, so I am not as brainwashed by apple as to not notice when such rendering issues arise.

I know some people have bad experiences with 1440p and macos for some reason, but I haven't had any such experience that I could not fix. So all these are not universal. Some people act as if any monitor below 200dpi will look terrible on macsos. This is definitely not the case.
by hnlmorg | 2025-09-04 06:26:53+00:00
That wasn’t my experience in the UK.

Sony Ericsson dominated the high end consumer phones. They supported Java games, Google Maps, could play MP3s, and so on and so forth. These feature phones weren’t nearly as advanced as the iPhone but this is pre-iPhone.

And BlackBerry dominated the business domain. With Palm and Windows CE taking some specific domains, eg where security was a greater concern.

The Motorola Razor (however it was spelt) was massive around your time of working at Nokia. Though granted that’s not high end.

There wasn’t really a bit smartphone market then. Largely because phone manufacturers were still figuring out how to make smart phones successful. Most businesses either went down the Blackberry route, or the PDA route. Nokia definitely dominated with Symbian handsets but that was such a small fraction of the overall high end and business devices in people’s hands that it’s hardly noteworthy.

At least that was the trends I saw in the UK. Maybe in parts of Europe Nokia had more popularity?

Edit, looking into this, it seems I’ve either been misremembering or lived in some kind of bubble.

Eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_...

My apologies for disagreeing with you.
Dumb token counter for Claude/ChatGPT UI
by quantum-pilot | 2025-09-04 06:27:43+00:00
Firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ai-chat-context-window/

Chrome - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ai-chat-context-window/mimifpjpnpkpkkjbmkpchgdglkdmdmof

Github - https://github.com/quantum-pilot/ai-chat-context

I think these companies should display how much tokens have been used for a model in chat (especially paid plans), but I guess they don't because it probably backfires on them.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-09-04 06:27:52+00:00
Could be a nice move for them and it sounds like they have some valuable skills they could add to the Codex team.

I'm pretty impressed with the web ui of Codex lately. The cli ui didn't really impress me when it came out (a bit flaky and buggy and tedious to use). But the web UI is nice. I've created a few alright PRs with it. I think I have about 60-70% merge rate, some with manual changes made by me on the same branch. I like the mode of just keeping that stuff on a branch and interacting via Git.

It has its limitations but I do like this UX and DX. And I've so far not experienced any rate limiting on the plus plan.

I'm curious to learn how others are feeling about this. I know Claude Code and other solutions are popular. But how do they stack up in terms of usability and utility compared to codex?