MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by measurablefunc | 2025-09-04 06:47:49+00:00
You don't have to imagine, there is a logically rigorous argument¹ that establishes the equivalence. There is also nothing unusual about neural networks or Markov chains. You've just been mystified by the marketing around them so you think there is something special about them when they're just another algorithm for approximating different kinds of compressible signals & observations about the real world.

¹https://markov.dk.workers.dev/
by moomoo11 | 2025-09-04 06:50:03+00:00
You could use notion if you want forms (event sign ups or tracking stuff like inventory). There’s a way to make notion pages a “website”.

It’s something a little easier than Wordpress for non technical people. Nothing is super simple but at least notion can be figured out more easily than code or admin panels. When you’re not there, they won’t be completely in the dark.

Just my 2c.
by benrutter | 2025-09-04 06:50:42+00:00
I looked, and there's more than 1000 available episodes of IOT on the BBC, they're all (at least every one I've heard) brilliant.

I'm curious if anyone here has any particular favourites?

I remember really enjoying the Plankton episode because it took me the classic IOT route of "That doesn't sound interesting, but I'll give it a listen" to looking up all the reading list.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001r1t5
by ellen364 | 2025-09-04 06:51:03+00:00
Love a bit of source analysis.

I'd widen the frame a bit. People scared of losing their jobs might underestimate the usefulness of AI. Makes sense to me, it's the comforting belief. Worth keeping in mind while reading articles sceptical of AI.

But there's another side to this conversation: the people whose writing is pro AI. What's motivating them? What's worth keeping in mind while reading that writing?
by pas | 2025-09-04 06:51:25+00:00
commercial TV and radio stations were a very well established thing already by the 90s, the audience paid for their receiver and in exchange for the ads got to see movies and serialized shows.

similarly there were free magazines which were basically ad booklets with some minimal original content in between a ton of ads

... there were ISPs experimenting with the model, both for users and for hosting

free email boxes were the norm, with 5-10MB storage

...

and just as now there was also HBO and fancy cable stations and encrypted stations, and many people did pay for magazine subscriptions

...

the real problem is that a hypergiant is cross-financing the development of a browser

these cross-financing setups ought to be firewalled, the browser should be in a foundation

(of course we know that in practice these are not super useful, see eg. OpenAI, but ... in the end California regulations seem to have helped to keep OpenAI as a "non-profit")
by dlcarrier | 2025-09-04 06:51:26+00:00
I have a Bigme Galy, that uses a Gallery 3 display, as well as a Kobo Libra Colour, which uses a Kaleido 3 display.

I regret buying the Kobo Libra Colour, solely because of the display. You pretty much need the backlight on any time it isn't in direct sunlight, and even then the contrast is worse than a first-generation monochrome E Ink display, and the saturation is pretty low. Monochrome text is also a bit fuzzy.

The Bigme Galy display works in the same lighting as monochrome displays, with nearly as good of contrast. Saturation with primary colors (cyan, magenta, and yellow) is excellent, and with secondary colors it's not as good but still better than the Kaleido display. Magenta is the most vibrant, so green struggles the most.

The Gallery display does take several times longer to refresh in full color mode, but it has a monochrome mode that refreshes at a similar rate to monochrome eink displays on ebook readers, so you get dynamically chose between color or speed.

Both ereaders have laughably bad software, so that didn't have a net affect on my preferences.
by makeitdouble | 2025-09-04 06:53:38+00:00
My general point would be that mistreating part of the population is a tool in a toolbox, and countries from all boards use it way more than we acknowledge.

We have democracies that either hang people on public places, pass eugenic laws, sentence gays to prison, or will engage in ethnic cleansing under official orders. Even in milder areas, prventing whole sections of the population from getting citizenship or limiting their reach (mass incarceration etc.) are well know levers that help a country be nice to its most vocal population while shutting down a whole section of the population. Those are readily available tools, whatever the political system.

And being well managed isn't abstract, you might be better off living in Monaco or Morocco, which are full fledge kingdoms, than a democracy like Nigeria for instance.
by lilyball | 2025-09-04 06:54:09+00:00
It's not just 5 moves. It's 5 crossing changes (which don't change the number of crossings, they just change the order of the strings in a crossing). Unknotting also involves moving the strings around to add or remove crossings, without performing crossing changes (if you take a loop and twist it into a figure eight, you've moved the strings and created a crossing but you haven't cut the strings and performed a crossing change).

If you look at the preprint paper, the knot it starts with has 14 crossings, but they actually move the strings around to end up with 20 crossings prior to performing the first 2 crossing changes in the unknotting sequence. So the potential space for moves here is actually rather large.
by gnoack | 2025-09-04 06:54:13+00:00
Etoile had its own Smalltalk dialect back in the day, Pragmatic Smalltalk. This was a Smalltalk based on the Objective-C runtime, based on an OMeta implementation and a LLVM backend. David Chisnall, who created it at the time, ended up getting involved more in LLVM in the long run, I believe.
by janalsncm | 2025-09-04 06:55:04+00:00
I have been promoted while working remote, so I disagree.

I don’t have 2 different 1 hour commute blocks on my calendar. While you’re fighting traffic, I’m working. While you’re rushing through your morning routine, I’m sitting at my computer catching up on slack. While you’re finding the meeting room, I’m reading the meeting prep material. While you’re getting distracted by Sales in your open office, I’m locked in, midway through a 2 hour coding session.
by moomoo11 | 2025-09-04 06:57:14+00:00
There’s nothing special imo about it being in the terminal run as a command. It’s just nice that it can do stuff in the terminal, and it could have done this as an electron wrapper app.

The only reason I use Claude code is because I prefer its performance/results over using something else.

I was using cursor before through VSC. Instead of the side panel now I just have a pinned terminal on the right in which I use CC.
by globular-toast | 2025-09-04 06:57:20+00:00
JOSM, the OSM editor, has a clever way to do this. It links photos to locations on your track using the timestamp of the photograph. The only problem with that is the time on the camera is probably off by a bit. So to solve that you just take a photo of the time on your GPS device at some point in your walk (usually the start). That's then used to determine the offset to align everything.
by toast0 | 2025-09-04 06:57:38+00:00
Getting a 2% discount on everything doesn't take a lot of time, or cost me anything directly. I did have to call the issuer once to get it changed from 1.5% to 2%, but there was a pretty good ROI on that ten minute phone call.

I also have a 4% card, which took a good amount of effort, and needs regular attention as the issuer has realized it wasn't a good idea and is changing the deal. Now it has a limit and then falls back to 2%. Probably still worth the effort.

Miles/points seems like a lot of work though. I could see a study showing that's not worth the effort for most people... but I think the thing there is to find a card with points that are valuable for you and then maximize that, so there's not a one size fits all there.
by gloosx | 2025-09-04 06:58:02+00:00
Expensive part is providing the services at loss to get the biggest part of the market, which is the current state of affairs. At some point the market leader will emerge and it will price things according to the actual cost of running this thing + markup, and ALL efforts would be going into squeezing as much profit as possible from the leading position. At the same time usability and quality would not be priority anymore. We are enjoying the late-capitalism at it's peak here.
by RianAtheer | 2025-09-04 06:58:39+00:00
Fintech vs Banks isn’t just a rivalry but it’s shaping the future of finance. Startups bring speed, innovation, and customer focus, while banks bring trust, scale, and regulatory strength. The real future? A hybrid model where collaboration fuels innovation and the competition keeps everyone sharp.

What do you think? Will fintechs and banks be friends, foes, or both?
by maggit | 2025-09-04 06:58:41+00:00
There was a Minesweeper on here that used a SAT solver, but I cannot find it at the moment. As I recall, it never had any issue with resolving the board quickly. I think it dynamically resolved where the mines would be as you played the game, and if you clicked a square that could be a mine, it would be a mine, except, I believe, when there were no open squares that were safe.

(Edit: Here it is! https://pwmarcz.pl/kaboom/ And the write-up: https://pwmarcz.pl/blog/kaboom/ )

This is similar in spirit to my take on the game: https://magnushoff.com/articles/minesweeper/

Unfortunately, not being familiar with SAT solvers, my implementation can grind to a halt in some configurations :)
by JohnKemeny | 2025-09-04 06:59:13+00:00
Turing, Church, and even Knuth got their degrees before CS was an academic discipline. At least I don't think Turing studied Turing machines in his undergrads.

I'm saying that lots of people like to post their opinions of LLMs regardless of whether or not they actually have any competence in either computational linguistics or deep learning.
by avian | 2025-09-04 06:59:45+00:00
In Our Time has been my favorite podcast to listen. It made me appreciate how well moderated a discussion among experts can be and how poorly most moderators on other radio programs or conference panels do their jobs.

My complaint with In Our Time is that BBC started inserting the "this program is supported by ads outside of the U.K." ads in the middle of the discussions. The ads start and end with an extremely annoying loud chime that just blows out the speakers if I have the volume turned up to understand a guest that's speaking in a more soft voice.
by smaudet | 2025-09-04 07:00:12+00:00
Agreed. Qt, for all it's flaws, focused on cross platform. Despite getting sold/resold nearly to oblivion, it had a commercial end (some paying customers), and so it received a level of polish that gtk just never did.

Not to mention, when the gtk3 devs went off the deepend, completely broke backwards compat so they could try some new UI...and you couldn't consistently run gtk on Linux...
by spauldo | 2025-09-04 07:00:40+00:00
I suspect it depends on the industry and type of product.

In the PLC market, I've worked with Schneider-Electric, Wago, and Emerson support. All three were excellent. They're excellent because they know we're going to choose which vendor to use for our next project based on our experience with the current project.

For protocol bridges, I've dealt with Digi and Real Time Automation. Digi's support was halfhearted at best. RTA spent hours talking on the phone and even dug through a closet to find documentation for an ancient version of one of their products in order to help me figure out how to interface with it. Guess who we used for the next project?

Price is important but my time is expensive. Good support for a more expensive product wins over poor support for a cheap one.

But all this only works because of the nature of our industry. For consumer goods, good support will lose to price nearly every time.
by Freak_NL | 2025-09-04 07:01:12+00:00
An interesting example, but one that also highlights how AI fails to address it correctly.

Email validation in 2025 is simple. It has been simple for years now. You check that it contains an '@' with something before it, and something after it. That's all there is to it — then send an email. If that works (user clicks link, or whatever), the address is validated.

This should be well-known by now (HN has a bunch of topics on this, for example). It is something that experienced devs can easily explain too: once this regex lands in your code, you don't want to change it whenever a new unexpected TLD shows up or whatever. Actually implementing the full-blown all edge cases covered regex where all invalid strings are rejected too, is maddeningly complex.

There is no need either; validating email addresses cannot be done by just a regex in any case — either you can send an email there or not, the regex can't tell — and at most you can help the user inputting it by detecting the one thing that is required and which catches most user input errors: it must contain an '@', and something before and after it.

If you try to do what ChatGPT or Copilot suggests you get something more complex:

^[a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}$

And it even tempts you to try a more complex variant which covers the full RFC 5322. You don't want to go there. At best you catch a handful of typos before you send an email, at worst you have an unmaintainable blob of regex that keeps blocking your new investor's vanity domain.

> If you need stricter validation or support for internationalized domains (IDNs), I can help you build a more advanced version. Want to see one that handles Unicode or stricter rules?

AI is not helpful here.
by bux93 | 2025-09-04 07:01:36+00:00
It has to do with him driving the conversation to a specific point in the narrative; academics tend to meander and go off on tangents, but he invited three of them and the next topic is the point of expertise of the following person. You can sometimes hear him reward the guests "yes, that's what I was getting it" or "that's a great way to put it". In other words; he did some prep! Unlike many podcasters.
by locallost | 2025-09-04 07:01:50+00:00
Not a fan of fancy websites, but this one really hits the nail on the head.

It's telling about society how much of these conversations revolve around work. It makes sense, since it's where we spend most of our time, but at the same time a lot of people are not happy at work. Recently I've been avoiding this type of smalltalk because it has this pattern that starts with "and what do you do for a living". I'm trying to make the world a better place is not usually the answer. I wish it gets normalized to ask "what do you like to do in your life" as a first question. I like to cook and fix bicycles and in general do something practical.
by Earw0rm | 2025-09-04 07:01:52+00:00
Autonomous vehicles are an interesting subset.

Even though the system rules and I/O are tightly constrained, they're still struggling to match human performance in an open-world scenario, after a gigantic R&D investment with a crystal clear path to return.

Fifteen years ago I thought that'd be a robustly solved problem by now. It's getting there, but I think I'll still need to invest in driving lessons for my teenage kids. Which is pretty annoying, honestly: expensive, dangerous for a newly qualified driver, and a massive waste of time that could be used for better things. (OK, track days and mountain passes are fun. 99% of driving is just boring, unnecessary suckage).

What's notable: AVs have vastly better sensors than humans, masses of compute, potentially 10X reaction speed. What they struggle with is nuance and complexity.

Also, AVs don't have to solve the exact same problems as a human driver. For example, parking lots: they don't need to figure out echelon parking or multi-storey lots, they can drop their passengers and drive somewhere else further away to park.
by dlcarrier | 2025-09-04 07:02:24+00:00
C has a lot of feature creep, and C++ is just C with extra feature creep.

The original C compiler ran on a PDP-11, which usually had just kilobytes of RAM. The syntax was written around compiling with such limited resources, hence the need for headers, primitives, semicolons, linkers, and so on.

It has changed a lot over time, but seems to be adding baggage, not removing it.
by kar1181 | 2025-09-04 07:02:40+00:00
Also love Zed, but sigh, it's VC funded. We all know how this is going to end. Best VIM mode ever implemented in a (non vim) app. I use it as my 2nd editor (most of the time in Jetbrains products).

I just hope I'm wrong about the medium term impact of the VC funding but rushing AI AI AI out seems to be a sign of that rather than fixing fundamental issues that remain such as the ugly font rendering.
by janalsncm | 2025-09-04 07:02:49+00:00
> good companies should be able to leverage AI to become much more efficient

I feel like this should be a “both and” situation. AI is not a panacea. If your company has 10 good engineers and a ChatGPT subscription, and my company has 100 good engineers and a ChatGPT subscription, we are going to move considerably faster.

Until someone gets an exclusive contract with AGI, it doesn’t change things.
by lukol | 2025-09-04 07:03:03+00:00
Claude to the rescue: This is an interactive data story from The Pudding about research showing that talking to strangers makes us feel better, despite our expectations.

The piece follows conversations from a study of nearly 1,700 video calls between strangers with different backgrounds (age, race, politics, etc.). While people predicted they'd have negative experiences talking to strangers, the vast majority actually felt better by the end of their 30-minute conversations - regardless of how different they were from each other.The story argues that we've lost "bridging social capital" (connections with people unlike us) and explores how this contributes to declining social trust.

It ends with a personal reflection on helping a bleeding teenager on the subway, suggesting that despite our fears, most people will help strangers when needed - and that these connections are crucial for tackling big societal challenges.
by pmontra | 2025-09-04 07:04:08+00:00
> But it may then turn out to be the case that some non-intelligent systems are more effective than some intelligent systems.

That is surely the case on limited scopes. For example the non neural net chess engines are better at chess than any human.

I think that neural networks compare with human intelligence in a fair way, because we should limit their training to the number of games that human professionals can reasonably play in their life. Alphago won't be much good after playing, let's say, 10 thousand games even starting from the corpus of existing human games.
by ktallett | 2025-09-04 07:05:52+00:00
This is really interesting as I have been looking at a way of going GUI free on an MNT Pocket Reform but still able to use the things I need; markdown,python and julia editing, plus uploading to dropbox using maestral, and the occasional diagram creation. It is the latter that is letting me down at the moment as I would prefer to not have to ssh in.
by moomoo11 | 2025-09-04 07:06:10+00:00
I want to grow food/produce in a small space, and sell them.

Like imagine grow kits in cities growing essential produce and selling it right there.

I met some Mennonites who run a hydroponic operation that sells produce to high end restaurants. I was surprised how compact it was. It would be cool to figure out how to use robotics and vision, and partner up with a creative gardener who wants to trial and error and sell better tomato’s than I get at WF made locally.
by pontifier | 2025-09-04 07:06:55+00:00
I recently saw another video about a high accuracy 3d positioning stage. The differences and similarities were very interesting. For instance, both used rigid rods with ball joints for accuracy, but wildly different encoders and testing methods.

https://youtu.be/MgQbPdiuUTw?si=5r0DVsxVT1owyKk6
by asimovDev | 2025-09-04 07:07:48+00:00
neovim (vim) plugins can make web requests, so you could steal secrets from a .env file being edited by, for example, making a LSP plugin active for .env files? According to my limited knowledge of LSP and how neovim plugins work, it should be possible

Could also just phone home everything a user edits using the text editor I bet.

Can someone tell me, when someone has a terminal buffer, using a vim plugin, could you potentially steal their root password when a user runs a sudo command?

And following up, could you, using that password, allow SSH connections and open ports in other system config files? Disable firewall? And potentially execute other commands using `:!` ?
by ceronman | 2025-09-04 07:08:23+00:00
Very cool. I think Wasm is a nice instruction set, but I agree that its structured control flow is a bit weird and also the lack of instructions to handle the memory stack. But it's much more cleaner than something like x86_64.

If you are interesting in learning in more detail how to write a C compiler, I highly recommend the book "Writing a C Compiler" by Nora Sandler [0]. This is a super detailed, incremental guide on how to write a C compiler. This also uses the traditional architecture of using multiple passes. It uses its own IR called Tacky and it even includes some optimization passes such as constant folding, copy propagation, dead code elimination, register allocation, etc. The book also implements much more features, including arrays, pointers, structs/unions, static variables, floating point, strings, linking to stdlib via System V ABI, and much more.

[0] https://norasandler.com/book/
Show HN: Brainstormer – AI copilot that sketches with you on Excalidraw
by shivangdoshi07 | 2025-09-04 07:08:23+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Brainstormer, an open-source project that explores how LLMs can collaborate inside apps—not just in a chat box.

What it does • Works like a Copilot for brainstorming: you sketch ideas on an Excalidraw canvas and the AI can extend them with flowcharts, notes, or diagrams. • Lets both humans and AI co-create visually instead of being limited to text. • Lightweight, open source (MIT-licensed), built with React + Excalidraw.

Quick demo video: https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/544e39b2-6181-47a...

Repo: https://github.com/shivangdoshi07/brainstormer

Let me know what you think of this. Thanks!
Show HN: rm-safely – A shell alias that moves files to trash instead of deleting
by zdkaster | 2025-09-04 07:08:29+00:00
I made rm-safely, a simple shell wrapper that moves files to trash instead of permanently deleting them. It prevents accidental deletions from autocomplete mishaps or hasty rm -rf commands.

Should work as a drop-in replacement for rm but safer.

Would appreciate any feedback!
by nicbou | 2025-09-04 07:08:36+00:00
I considered all the options back in 2021 and went with the iPad Mini.

My reasons: much better software for sketching, not bound to a single ereader app, multiple ways to send stuff around, perfect size.

Many years later, I would still choose the same. I use it to annotate webpages, sketch, read books and read queued articles in instapaper. It's distraction-free but still connected. I can Airdrop drawings or load my handwritten notes on the Macbook app. Tap to define is so good I've absent-mindedly tried it on a paper book.

The LED screen is great for some things and bad for others. You have to turn it on and unlock it. You can't SSH into it or sync your drawings as simple files. Otherwise, it's really good.