MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by idiotsecant | 2025-09-29 11:45:27+00:00
Imagine you've never tasted chocolate and someone gives you a very good description of what it is to eat chocolate. You'd be nowhere near the actual experience. Now imagine that you didn't know first hand what it was like to 'eat' or to have a skeleton or a jaw. You'd lose almost all the information. The only reason spoken language works is because both people have that shared experience already
by nabla9 | 2025-09-29 11:46:02+00:00
> I still review every line, shape the architecture, and carry the responsibility for how it runs in production. But the sheer volume of what I now let an agent generate would have been unthinkable even six months ago.

>That said, none of this removes the need to actually be a good engineer. If you let the AI take over without judgment, you’ll end up with brittle systems and painful surprises (data loss, security holes, unscalable software). The tools are powerful, but they don’t absolve you of responsibility.

I feel the same. AI is "the code monkey". Like very inexperienced that works hard and fast, has learned a lot but can't put it into practice. They need constant supervision and review.

This will be very challenging for inexperienced programmers. Normally learn by coding. You write code for fun or for money, get review from more experienced, ask questions and improve. Now a new programmer is expected to review AI generated code and learn programming and managing AI.
by t_mahmood | 2025-09-29 11:46:24+00:00
Okay, this is interesting! I thought it's just a cut down version of Google's base packages. I didn't realize it's a complete reimplementation.

So, I complete LineageOS installation without MindTheGapps, then install fdroid, add the microG repo, To install any Playstore dependent application use aurora store.

No gotchas?
by n2d4 | 2025-09-29 11:46:32+00:00
It's an interesting question, and I'm sure there are useful things to learn from it, but the focus on whether AI is "alive" ruins the article. In this sentence:

> Many people believe LLMs are just equations, mechanically churning through statistically derived calculations.

Those people would be factually correct, as that is exactly what an LLM is. Whether that implies that they should have some kind of "rights" is irrelevant to this conversation, I don't know why the article keeps talking about it.

It all feels very much like "well there's this obvious explanation... or maybe we have created AGI and it's trying to communicate!" Not useful.
by globnomulous | 2025-09-29 11:47:14+00:00
> The increase in soundquality since that tech is marginal at best.

I'm glad you enjoy your system, but, having upgraded from a very, very good 70s system to a pretty excellent system using contemporary parts, I can assure you that both objectively and subjectively your system from the 70s is inferior, and the difference isn't marginal. It's massive.
by linmob | 2025-09-29 11:47:56+00:00
Fair point!

That said, Google Play is not really the thing to compare this too. F-Droid could be. Summing up the "Show all ..." counts, F-Droid clocks in at 6147 apps, and it started way earlier (2009? 2010?).

Some of these F-Droid apps (specifically those created in QtQuick or Flutter) should also run with very minor tweaks on #MobileLinux.

Also, there's more than these 720, some are just very hard to evaluate (because they are for hardware or services I don't have/use), which then keeps me from adding these apps.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-09-29 11:48:13+00:00
Across... well, basically every category of product... the product which you are most likely to purchase next is the same (or a substitute for or a complement to) the last product you purchased.

Thanks for summarizing the logical fallacy of "personalized ads".

Maybe what you say applies within the narrow context of a single brick and mortar retail establishment --- clothing for example.

If I buy a shirt at a *clothing* store, when I visit this same *clothing* store again (in a few weeks or months) I may be inclined to buy another one. The mere fact that I took the time to visit again suggests it is likely.

But just after buying a shirt, how likely am I to buy another one when I visit a pet supply store across town?

The brick and mortar world is naturally divided and separated by context. When you walk into a pet supply store, you *never* get hit with ads for clothing.

This is not true with on-line advertising which is totally divorced from any rational context and as a result, the ads are much less effective than they could be.

And the ad networks don't really care if the ads are effective or not. In fact, they probably prefer it not be to encourage advertisers to spend more on advertising in a "black box" system that they fully control.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-09-29 11:49:09+00:00
I have always found MPMC ring buffers to have worse tails than pointer-based MPMC queues. These are very unfashionable (especially in rust) but can be made wait-free with a single atomic for readers and writers. The SPSC ring buffer is perfect, but adding either more producers or more consumers makes the whole thing have terrible pathologies.

Reading the article again, this lockless bag idea also needs two atomic writes on every operation.
Unit Tests for LLMs?
by simantakDabhade | 2025-09-29 11:49:31+00:00
is theres any package that helps do like vitest style like quick sanity checks on the output of an llm that I can automate to see if I have regressed on smthin while changing my prompt.

For example this agent for a realtor kept offering virtual viewings (even though that isnt a thing) instead of doing a handoff, (modified prompt for this) so a package where I can write a test so that, hey for this input, do not mention this or never mention those things. Or for certain inputs, always call this tool.

Started engineering my own little utility for this, but before I dove deep and built my own package, wanted to see if something like this alr exists or if im heading down the wrong path here!

p.s. not sure if this should be called evals, kinda overlapping but yeah what should this even be called?
by rlpb | 2025-09-29 11:50:30+00:00
> closing out anonymous (but good) software

I don’t think we should be framing their new rules like this. They are closing out F-Droid, which is not anonymous, due to a technicality of their implementation. At best, they are collateral damage. At worst, it is malicious compliance in response to a directive that was supposed to ensure their continued existence.
by troupo | 2025-09-29 11:50:44+00:00
With Word especially (and probably with any software approaching anything that can be viewed as professional) the long tail is unbelievably long, and "users only care about 20% of your application" may actually become "users may only care about 20% where no two users share the same 20%". Here's Microsoft's own research on it from an era when people were actually doing research: https://web.archive.org/web/20080329042649/http://blogs.msdn...

--- start quote ---

Beyond the top 10 commands or so, however, the curve flattens out considerably. The percentage difference in usage between the #100 command ("Accept Change") and the #400 command ("Reset Picture") is about the same in difference between #1 and #11 ("Change Font Size")

--- end quote ---

The whole series is great: https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn... and there's a presentation, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHiNeUTgGkk
by maxehmookau | 2025-09-29 11:50:59+00:00
I agree and it bugs me too.

Sometimes I just want to enjoy a thing with other people enjoying a thing without any expectation that it might end up as "content" to be monetized by the algorithm.

I don't look forward to mass adoption of things like Meta glasses, where even the mundane examples of _going outside_ are all content opportunities waiting to happen.
by xtiansimon | 2025-09-29 11:51:16+00:00
To put it in the words of John Connor: “That Terminator is out there, it can't be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with, it doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop… EVER, until you are dead!”

LOL. Years ago I was listening to an interview with a MIT Media Lab alumnus, who answered an audience question about Star Trek. Of course she’s a fan, she explained, but Star Trek is a work of fiction, and her work in the lab, while imaginative, is not fictional.

Similarly, anthropomorphic technology is entertaining, but stop there. At least that’s the notion I subscribe to.
by kokada | 2025-09-29 11:51:40+00:00
But in this case it is not like you're in the bleeding edge (you aren't anyway since Pop OS is based on Ubuntu LTS that is already a more conservative distribution even when a new version is released), you're in a stable distribution from almost 3 years ago.

This is the point where things start breaking because it is too old, not because it is too new. Case in point I know at least one or two projects that drops anything from their CI that is not the newest LTS release, and there are probably more.
by Fluorescence | 2025-09-29 11:51:41+00:00
You can get bluetooth keyboards on aliexpress for under £2.

If dealing with that type of budget then scavenging is probably the better route especially as online payments may also be out of reach.

In general, as a frugal person, buying "converter" type hardware is rarely a win because mass produced things are so much cheaper than more trivial but niche things.

However, converter type things are often unused clutter someone would happily give away. Just yesterday I came across some ps2 to usb converters. I can't imagine ever needing one again...but imagine the horror of not having one if you did! I probably didn't need to keep two though...
by bigppwong | 2025-09-29 11:51:51+00:00
Hello Hacker News,

I'm the creator of EdgeBox. For a while now, I've been fascinated by building LLM agents, but I've consistently hit a wall: most agent sandboxes are just command-line interpreters. They can run code, but they can't use a computer in the way a human does.

That's why I built *EdgeBox*. It's a free, open-source desktop application that brings the power of a cloud sandbox to your local machine, with one key difference: it provides both a *command-line shell AND a full graphical (GUI) desktop environment*.

The goal is to empower LLMs with true "Computer Use" capabilities. Instead of just executing Python scripts, your agent can now:

* Open Google Chrome to browse websites and research information. * Use a pre-installed VS Code to interact with a codebase. * Programmatically control the mouse and keyboard to interact with any desktop application. * "See" the screen via built-in screenshot capabilities to understand the GUI context.

*How it works:*

The architecture is straightforward. When you start a session, it spins up an isolated Docker container with a complete Ubuntu desktop environment. All communication between your LLM client and the sandbox happens locally via the *MCP (Model Context Protocol)*, a standardized HTTP interface. This means you can easily connect it to clients like Claude Desktop, OpenWebUI, LobeChat, and more.

*Key Features:*

* *100% Local & Private*: All data stays on your machine. * *GUI + CLI*: The best of both worlds for agent capabilities. * *Multi-Session Support*: Run multiple, isolated sandboxes concurrently using the `x-session-id` header. * *Secure*: Each sandbox runs in a separate, resource-limited Docker container.

The project is heavily inspired by the open-source E2B Code Interpreter, which provided a fantastic foundation. My contribution was to package it into a local-first desktop app and, most importantly, add the full GUI desktop layer.

The project is open-source, and I would love to get your feedback, hear your ideas for new features, or see what kind of powerful agents you build with it.

You can check out the GitHub repo here for downloads and more details: https://github.com/BIGPPWONG/edgebox

Thanks for reading!
by inDigiNeous | 2025-09-29 11:53:04+00:00
Well, back in the day you had 4 megs of ram, MS-DOS and other OSes that are simple as they come, and full access to the hardware.

These days if you want to support macOS, Windows, Linux: I say good luck to you, Electron can save you there.

Electron is not crap, but many javascript developers are crap. You can make fast and memory efficient apps in Electron, if you know how to code.

(Note: Slack or Discord developers don't have that skill)
by Forgeties79 | 2025-09-29 11:53:44+00:00
>I don't look forward to mass adoption of things like Meta glasses, where even the mundane examples of _going outside_ are all content opportunities waiting to happen.

My first experience akin to this happened when I was at the grocery store during Covid. This guy stood near the checkout lines and just did a big arc with his phone filming all of us and mocking masks. Like the author of the blog sometimes I’m just like “it’s not worth it” but I had one of my kids with me and when I asked the guy to stop, he started ranting at me about how he uses an app that blurs faces, it’s a free country, etc. I just moved on but it’s like… dude, we’re all just trying to get through the day out here and I’m with my kid at the grocery store. Do I really need to be putting up with this crap?

I imagine if people actually start wearing any of these smart glasses in any appreciable number these experiences will be sadly pretty typical.
by Avamander | 2025-09-29 11:53:48+00:00
Please understand that supposedly poor data quality is not a defence against an authoritarian country wanting to implement a social credit system.

Some national ID system won't make such ambitions significantly easier, but lack of such a system causes exactly the issues you quoted.

So is this hypothetical social credit system in the hands of an incompetent government worth it all? Over identity theft and the multi-billion industry around it?
by jnxx | 2025-09-29 11:53:51+00:00
Especially since all the above is designed as additive tech which uses a lot of brain hacks: Infinite scrolling, dopamine maximization, "check for new messages!" and so on.

How do you reduce your consumption of addictive stuff, in the easiest way? You quit, full stop.

It is the same as if you want to quit smoking, or as if you realize that you are drinking four cans of beer each summer evening and realize this is not good for you. It is far easier to quit, and decide what to do instead, than to "reduce".
by incomingpain | 2025-09-29 11:54:02+00:00
>Autism may be the price of human intelligence, linked to human brain evolution

I have autism, I got a temp ban from one of the big autism subreddits because before I knew autism, I thought autistic people who seem to dominate the IT industry were simply the next evolution, far more logical, dont let emotions cloud your judgement.

But I've since understood better that indeed it's a "price" or "cost". Having no friends, no social life, and having random people for no reason at all hate you is quite a shit life to live.
by usrusr | 2025-09-29 11:54:10+00:00
Really not that complicated, actually: even at the best of times, it's always a struggle between ideas roughly in the corner of "a better world for everybody" (positivity!) and ideas built on some form of "us vs them" (zero sum, or worse). The latter come in different colors, they can co-opt religious concepts, the idea of community anywhere between the small scale of family all the way to the large scale of nation, or even social constructs orthogonal to those such as class. Or some combination thereof. At the best of times, it's still close enough to a tie between positivity and the others.

Enter climate change: positives become a much harder sell, those can't really ignore it. But the zero sum ones (or negative sum, that difference does not really matter) remain unaffected - or in some ways even become more attractive.
by tiahura | 2025-09-29 11:54:12+00:00
He acknowledges the issue in the article, but doesn’t seem to grasp it fully.

Public means not private. What you do in public is not private. In presumptive free societies, when in public, one is allowed to notice what others are doing in public. Secret is the opposite of public.

The paranoia around being seen feels a lot like the other reptile-brain based phobias like fear of poisoning with vaccines.
by homeonthemtn | 2025-09-29 11:55:22+00:00
I was having a similar discussion regarding the Renn faire this weekend. It's silly fun, but it used to be you could dress up as your persona and escape for a while (see also: larping, SCA, or really any number of similar outlets) . However now everything is being recorded, and those recordings act both as unwanted publicity and as a method of cultural mining and extraction

What once was a funny little niche character at the faire is now a TikTok tourist spot.

Where once you could dress up as your pseudo anonymous alter ego with friends and have fun, now you get recorded without consent and get to enjoy all the perks that can come with

Ultimately it will be up to us as a society to determine what is acceptable or how to communicate boundaries for this new element in our culture, with the understanding (to the authors point) that some of us will be against it and others will be enthusiastically for it.
Show HN: I built a professional PO file translation platform
by toutoulliou | 2025-09-29 11:56:04+00:00
After spending countless hours manually translating PO files for my websites and losing time on repetitive translation tasks, I built TranzlyWeb - a professional translation management platform that transforms hours of work into minutes.

What you'll see on the site: - Upload PO files and get professional translations in minutes, not days - 15x faster than manual translation with 95% accuracy rate - Support for 50+ languages with automatic translation tools - Free plan to get started, Premium for unlimited translations ($10/month) - Project management system to organize your translation files - HTML translation tool for direct website content translation

The platform handles everything from basic PO file editing to advanced translation workflows, collaboration tools, and quality assurance. You can start free with basic tools and upgrade when you need unlimited power.

Key features: - Professional-grade translation management - Automatic file translation with human review options - Project organization and file management - Real-time translation progress tracking - Export translated files in multiple formats

I built this because I was tired of spending 8+ hours per PO file doing manual translation work. Now the same work takes just a few minutes with professional results.
by cesarb | 2025-09-29 11:56:14+00:00
> but general-purpose computing is very much alive and kicking in laptops, desktops, and servers.

Two words: Secure Boot.

The only reason we still can run operating systems without Microsoft's approval on these devices, is that alternative operating systems like Linux were already popular enough when Secure Boot was introduced, so to prevent the risk of antitrust enforcement Microsoft allowed (and AFAIK required) that firmware has an option to disable Secure Boot or enroll your own keys, and Microsoft also signs the bootloader of several Linux distributions (as long as they meet some stringent requirements).

But this can change, since all of that is part of Microsoft's hardware requirements for running Microsoft Windows (which hardware makers must follow if they want their devices to run Windows). And it already has, at least twice: some ARM-based laptops were shipped without that option (the hardware requirements back then were that you must be able to disable Secure Boot or enroll your own keys on x86-based hardware), and a class of devices (the so-called "Secured Core" devices) comes with the "third-party" key, which Microsoft uses to sign Linux distributions, disabled by default. Nothing prevents it from being locked down even further in newer versions of Microsoft's hardware requirements, in the name of "security".
by psychoslave | 2025-09-29 11:56:15+00:00
99% hardship of any advanced tool that is expected to be used by any random person is in integration, discoverability, fault tolerance, pragmatic relevant guidance.

I love Vim (RIP Bram, thanks for all the fish), but it's a tool for the less than 1% who loves that kind of thing.

Most people won't learn the tool because they see it only as an anecdotal detail bringing hindrance in their quest to "something".
by toutoulliou | 2025-09-29 11:56:39+00:00
I've been running multiple websites for years, and one of my biggest pain points was translating content to make it accessible to international audiences. I was spending 8+ hours per PO file doing manual translation work, dealing with human errors, typos, and inconsistent quality across files.

The breaking point came when I had to translate a large Django project with hundreds of translation strings. I realized I was spending more time on translation than on actual development. That's when I decided to build a solution.

I started by creating basic tools for my own use - simple scripts to automate parts of the translation process. But as I refined these tools, I realized other developers and website owners were facing the same problems. So I decided to build a comprehensive platform.

What makes it different from other translation services is that it's specifically designed for PO files and website content, with workflows that understand the context of web development. It's not just another generic translation tool - it's built by someone who faced the same problems you're facing.

I'm constantly improving the platform based on user feedback. If you try it and have suggestions, I'd love to hear them. The goal is to make professional translation accessible to everyone, not just big companies with big budgets.
by ofrzeta | 2025-09-29 11:56:40+00:00
Maybe off-topic and patronizing .. sorry about that.

"Running around in the woods, firing small plastic pellets at other people, in pursuit of a contrived-to-be-fun mission, turns out to be, well, fun."

I was wondering if there are no biodegradable bullets for Airsoft and found out that they exist. Maybe a better solution than plastic in the woods.
by elpocko | 2025-09-29 11:56:55+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

Since you exclusively post on HN for self-promotion, flagging your submissions on sight is the right thing to do.
by munchler | 2025-09-29 11:57:00+00:00
> I occasionally see people saying “well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces”.

> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.

Sorry, that's not clear to me at all. If you're going to accuse other people of "nonsense", you should probably avoid circular reasoning yourself.
by jen729w | 2025-09-29 11:57:01+00:00
I get it, but the alternative is what? Get model release forms from anyone in a public space every time you turn your video camera on? Who's to say how much of you I have in the shot? Do you feature? Did you flash by? Are you blurred? Recognisable?

I was shooting video of a car park exit last year. (I was trying to prove to the shopping centre owners that it was dangerous.) Mundane footage. Some lady drives out in her car and sees me. Winds the window down and starts on the you don't have the right to film me carry-on.

I politely informed her that, I'm sorry, but I do. She's in public. That's the law (in Australia).

Another fun one, while I'm here. C. 2010, we're shooting a music video in central Melbourne. We're on the public pavement. There's a bank ATM waaaay in the background. Bank security come out. Sorry mate, you can't film here.

We told them, we can. We're on public land. So they call the cops. We politely wait for the cops. The cops turn up.

"This sounded much more interesting on the radio", the cop says. They left us alone to finish the shoot.