MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lapcat | 2025-09-03 12:46:25+00:00
> Market competition underlies the enterprise of standards. It creates the only functional test of designs and functions as a pressure release valve that enables standards-based ecosystems route around single-vendor damage. Without competition, standards bodies have no purpose, and neither they, nor the ecosystems they support, can retain relevance.

This is a strange rant about Apple specifically, because Apple, Google (the author's former employer), and Microsoft (the author's current employer) collectively monopolize both web browser market share and consumer OS market share on desktop and mobile. There is no competition, there are no web standards anymore except what the monopolistic browser vendors decide, and indeed the WHATWG successfully executed a coup d'état against the W3C standards body. Worldwide, Android has higher market share than iOS, Windows higher than macOS. I'm not trying to defend Apple, but I do think the author neglects to mention the essential role of his employers in this monopoly, destruction of competition, and assault on standards.

The author calls WebKit a "sham" of an open source project, not mentioning that Google used to participate in WebKit but then abandoned it, forking into a Google-controlled browser engine. Google's dominance of the web is so complete that even Microsoft was forced to abandon its own browser engine and adopt Google's. And we've seen the results of that: websites that only work in Chromium—thereby forcing browser vendors to adopt Chromium, furthering Google's monopolization—and worse, the debilitation of web browser extensions via the deprecation of Manifest V2. And if Apple doesn't happen to implement whatever Google decides, the author complains about it; why doesn't the author complain about how Google is driving all of the so-called "standards"? Why is the author not complaining about the lack of diversity in web browser engines? And even Firefox is ultimately beholden to Google, ironically arguing in court to preserve Google's monopoly so that Firefox can continue to receive Google money, Mozilla's main source of financing, even while Google continues to monopolize and force browser engines other than its own into obscurity. Firefox is a shell of its former self.

Again, this is not a defense of Apple. But Google and Microsoft are equally bad. Apple is at worst a duopolist, so how about talking about the other side of the duopoly?

The author seems to think that Apple is specifically targeting the web, trying to undermine it, but as a Mac user and developer for almost 2 decades, I don't think this is specific to the web or Safari. Whether it's malice or incompetence, Apple has been undermining the Mac too. Their software quality overall is now atrocious. And their UI is becoming atrocious too with "Liquid Glass", on all of Apple's platforms. If you focus only on Safari and WebKit, you're missing the forest for the trees.
by whizzter | 2025-09-03 12:46:27+00:00
This project is not "business" bound, it's a DB abstraction so business concerns are layered outside of it (but it's a worthwhile pursuit since it rethinks some aspects I haven't seen elsewhere in all the years of DB announcements here and elsewhere).

And yes, write amplification is one major concern but the question is that considering how hardware has changed, how does one design to avoid it. Our classic 512byte, 4k,etc block sizes seems long gone and does the systems "magically" hide it or do we end up with unseen write amplification instead?
by pastor_williams | 2025-09-03 12:46:36+00:00
“Reminder: On Chinese social media platforms, please do not mention sensitive topics such as politics, religion and drugs!!!”

"Some Americans reported having their content blocked or accounts suspended for material deemed sensitive by RedNote, as content moderators control what the Chinese audience can see. A search on RedNote for Xi Jinping, China’s leader, comes up blank."

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2025/0129/Ameri...

It seems like the Chinese government works pretty hard to make sure its own citizens don't understand how bad things are in China. Maybe they fail at that but it isn't for lack of trying.

"It's hilarious to me that one side is sharing that Chinese people are convincing Americans that they've been fed propaganda about China, and the other side is saying that no, it's the Americans telling the Chinese that THEY are being fed all the propaganda! This is hilarious and dumb, but not as crazy as what happened on the Tiananmen Square in 1989!"

https://imgur.com/gallery/idea-that-bunch-of-americans-flood...

For all its faults I think I trust America's freedom of speech to make information available better. We should be diligent in protecting it as a principle because although the government is somewhat constrained by the first amendment, others are not.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-09-03 12:46:44+00:00
This has nothing to do with "everyone thinking they can code now", come on! People aren't asking cc to setup their cloud instances of ollama, they're likely getting a c/p line from a tutorial, just like they've always done.

What's likely happening here is that people are renting VMs and one-line some docker-compose up thing from a tutorial. And because it's a tutorial and people can't be bothered to tunnel their own traffic, most likely those tutorials are binding on 0.0.0.0.

Plenty of ways to footgun yourself with c/p something from a tutorial, even if you somewhat know what you're doing. No need to bring "everyone thinking they can code" into this. This is a tale as old as the Internet.

Another thing is that docker, being the helpful little thing that it is, in its default config will alter your firewall and open up ports even if you have a rule to drop everything you're not specifically using. So, yeah. That's probably what's happening.
by AIPedant | 2025-09-03 12:47:24+00:00
It is simply wrong to describe touch and proprioception receptors as 2D.

a) In a technical sense the actual receptors are 1D, not 2D. Perhaps some of them are two dimensional, but generally mechanical touch is about pressure or tension in a single direction or axis.

b) The rods and cones in your eyes are also 1D receptors but they combine to give a direct 2D image, and then higher-level processing infers depth. But touch and proprioception combine to give a direct 3D image.

Maybe you mean that the surface of the skin is two dimensional and so is touch? But the brain does not separate touch on the hand from its knowledge of where the hand is in space. Intentionally confusing this system is the basis of the "rubber hand illusion" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_transfer_illusion
by conradev | 2025-09-03 12:47:26+00:00
Firing voice actors is not great. Replacing human-narrated audio with AI narrated audio is not great.

But the coverage of audiobooks is… also not great? Of the books I've purchased recently, maybe 30% or less have audiobooks? What if I want to listen to an obscure book? Should I be paying a human narrator to narrate my personal library?

The copyright holders are incentivized to make money. It does not make financial sense to pay humans to narrate their entire catalog. As long as they're the only ones allowed to distribute derivative works, we're kind of in a pickle.
by echelon | 2025-09-03 12:47:44+00:00
The GPCRs [1] that do most of our sense signalling are each individually complicated machines.

Many of our signals are "on" and are instead suppressed by detection. Ligand binding, suppression, the signalling cascade, all sorts of encoding, ...

In any case, when all of our senses are integrated, we have rich n-dimensional input.

- stereo vision for depth

- monocular vision optics cues (shading, parallax, etc.)

- proprioception

- vestibular sensing

- binaural hearing

- time

I would not say that we sense in three dimensions. It's much more.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_protein-coupled_receptor
by CarVac | 2025-09-03 12:48:24+00:00
I would love to add it to my 1Ds3. I recall reading that once upon a time Canon wrote ML devs a strongly worded letter telling them not to touch a 1D, but a camera that old is long obsolete.

(I literally only want a raw histogram)

(I also have a 1Dx2 but that's probably a harder port)
by chamomeal | 2025-09-03 12:48:33+00:00
Seems like LLMs really suffer from the "eh I'll just write it myself" mindset. Yesterday on a react app using react-query (library to manage caching and re-fetching of data) claude code wanted to update the cache manually, instead of just using a bit of state that was already in scope in the exact same component!

For me, stuff like that is the same weird uncanny valley that you used to see in AI text, and see now in AI video. It just does such inhuman things. A senior developer would NEVER think to manually mutate the cache, because it's such desperate hack. A junior dev wouldn't even realize it's an option.
Show HN: /dev/push – An Open Source Vercel/Render Alternative
by hunvreus | 2025-09-03 12:48:39+00:00
Really, that's it: an open source and self-hostable alternative to Vercel, Render, Netlify, Laravel Cloud and the likes.

Obviously simpler, but it should handle the basics pretty well:

- Git-based deployments: Push to deploy from GitHub with zero-downtime rollouts and instant rollback.

- Multi-language support: Python, Node.js (beta), PHP (soon)... basically anything that can run on Docker.

- Environment management: Multiple environments with branch mapping and encrypted environment variables.

- Real-time monitoring: Live and searchable build and runtime logs.

- Team collaboration: Role-based access control with team invitations and permissions.

- Custom domains: Support for custom domain and automatic SSL certificates.

- Self-hosted and open source: Run on your own servers, MIT licensed.

Pretty early, but ready for use. I have it running on a Hetzner server at https://app.devpu.sh for my own apps (you can leave me your email/account if you want to try the online version).

I'm working on a lot of additional features: PHP, RoR, custom containers, metrics (CPU, RAM, I/O), support for remote nodes with Docker Swarm...

PS: the whole thing is built with FastAPI and HTMX. In the process, I built Basecoat (https://basecoatui.com) as a vanilla HTML/CSS/JS port of shadcn/ui.
by the_af | 2025-09-03 12:48:52+00:00
> The gap between Western perception and Chinese reality is enormous, and it reveals something important: we're worried about a system that barely exists while ignoring the behavioral scoring systems we actually live with.

This rings very true. It's pervasive online, and HN is no exception. The "China scare" is pervasive, "in China they do (some imagined nasty thing that of course the US or Europe would never do, no siree!)".
by yeoyeo42 | 2025-09-03 12:49:05+00:00
no, the first principles could be reduced to the domain that you're working in, which in this case would be non-relativistic physical optics. that is, the description of electromagnetic waves using maxwells equations. these could be considered true first principles for this problem domain.

you don't need to go to quantum physics or general relativity for everything, that would mean that a description from first principles is impossible for any field that doesn't (yet) directly connect there like biology, psychology, you name it. which may be technically correct but clearly not in the spirit of the idea.

in general this article has a quite surface level focus and narrow scope. there isn't even a description how the most common physical rendering primitive ever, a ray of light, is related to electromagnetic waves in mathematical terms. the article is not very mathematical in general which is disappointing.
by haltcatchfire | 2025-09-03 12:50:12+00:00
> Yes, the water wheel will generate electricity all year round. In winter, it produces between 120 and 170 kWh per 24-hour period, with peak generation reaching up to 11 kW per hour. In summer, it generates between 3 and 5 kW per hour.

Seems like a nice complement with solar, given that they peak at each others inverse.
by badbart14 | 2025-09-03 12:50:50+00:00
I remember this paper when it came out a couple months ago. Makes a lot of sense, the use of tools like ChatGPT essentially offshore the thinking processes in your brain. I really like the analogy to time under tension they talk about in https://www.theringer.com/podcasts/plain-english-with-derek-... (they also discuss this study and some of the flaws/results with it)
by teekert | 2025-09-03 12:51:52+00:00
Anybody who has tried to shortcut themselves into a report on something using an LLM, and was then asked to defend the plans contained within it knows that writing is thinking. And if you outsource the writing, you do less thinking and with less thinking there is less understanding. Your mental model is less complete, less comprehensive.

I wouldn't call it "cognitive decline", more "a less deep understanding of the subject".

Try solving bugs from your vibe coded projects... It's pain, you haven't learned anything while you build something. And as a result you don't fully grasp how your creation works.

LLM are tools, but also shortcuts, and humans learn by doing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is pretty obvious to me after using LLMs for various tasks over the past years.
by the_af | 2025-09-03 12:52:20+00:00
Earning minimum wage is a very bad situation in many democratic countries, the US included.

There's nothing special to China in this regard.

There's very little real data on day to day life in NK, mostly fantasizing by the West, but what do you think is day to day life in Iran? I doubt it's crazy. It's probably a lot like in many other countries. Iran is not a hell-hole.
by fzwang | 2025-09-03 12:52:23+00:00
That's pretty normal. The culture in the Bay area is quite unique in the early suppression of any "common"/status-quo sense. So even silly/"stupid" ideas are entertained.

If you're building anywhere else, I think you have to be more active in curating who you surround yourself with. Most other people are on salaries building/supporting businesses that are proven with low risk, so their mindset to life is quite different. There are risk takers in any city, but it takes more effort to find them.

When I worked in VC, I really enjoyed talking to builders from "unlikely" places, middle of nowhere Kansas, Atlantic Canada etc. They had to overcome much more social resistance to work on their ideas.
by jennyholzer | 2025-09-03 12:52:46+00:00
> In post-task interviews:

> 83.3% of LLM users were unable to quote even one sentence from the essay they had just written.

> In contrast, 88.9% of Search and Brain-only users could quote accurately.

> 0% of LLM users could produce a correct quote, while most Brain-only and Search users could.

Reminds me of my coworkers who have literally no idea what Chat GPT put into their PR from last week.
by bgwalter | 2025-09-03 12:52:59+00:00
The paperclip maximizer story, where an AGI directs all economic resources towards manufacturing paperclips, was wrong. We have the the graphics card maximizers, where humans voluntarily redirect vast economic resources towards generating a maximal stream of tokens that hardly anyone wants. Or perhaps call them token maximizers.

There used to be the notion that "talk is cheap". Now we are spending $trillions on generating idle talk.
by naasking | 2025-09-03 12:53:15+00:00
> Meanwhile, look at any two nerds arguing. It's always nuanced and over minute things that they'll always insist are very important (because often it is, but only at that level).

Sorry, but no, nerds are huge bikeshedders, and often miss the forest for the trees. I think this also explains how dismissive you are of experts who have actually worked with Musk and don't seem to share your low opinion of his expertise in certain areas. Often the importance of nuance is overblown, as it typically only has third or fourth order effects that can be ignored in favour of focusing on the first and second order factors that dominate.
by quotemstr | 2025-09-03 12:53:40+00:00
"Studies" like this bite at the ankles of every change in information technology. Victorians thought women reading too many magazines would rot their minds.

Given that AI is literally just words on a monitor just like the rest of the internet, I have a strong prior it's not "reprogram[ming]" anyone's mind, at least not in some manner that, e.g. heavy Reddit use might.
by throw0101a | 2025-09-03 12:54:29+00:00
Florida re-orged their site, so all the old links are broken:

* https://www.fdot.gov/docs/default-source/research/Completed-...

Do a search for "FDOT-BDV25-977-13" I guess. That study ("Naturalistic bicycling behavior pilot study") is referenced here:

* https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2023-03/Bicyclis...
by danaris | 2025-09-03 12:54:34+00:00
...So anyone who coded on their own, you'd just reject out of hand?

And (granting, for the moment, your premise that everyone worth hiring used the LLMs) how do you know what they do with the code after they take it from the chat window? My limited experience with the code from LLMs is that there's only so much massaging it's worth giving it through the chat interface, and then you need to just take it and edit it by hand.
by DavidWishengrad | 2025-09-03 12:54:59+00:00
Flourishing presupposes life. You can’t have joy or suffering without first being alive. That makes life the irreducible baseline. Once secured, we can and must argue about flourishing — but it can’t replace life as the first axiom, because flourishing collapses if life is gone.

You are saying you agree, then you are saying you disagree.

It's one or the other. You do have to choose and pick a side.

You will never receive a more important commination while you live.

It's important that if you agree that you affirm it and stick with that.

It's a yes or no (with legitimate evidence to refute it as the most important communication in human discourse and the most important paper ever presented).

People are watching. Affirm, share, and anchor. People can type all they want, but without presenting higher truth there is no legitimate rebuttal known.

A person either chooses to agree that Life is Most Important or they choose not to agree Life is Most Important, after being presented it.

You said you agreed, so if you agree why are you typing stuff that appears to say you don't agree?

No one said love, compassion, justice and all the rest are not valid truths and needed for the quality of life.

It's the very dismissal of this very truth that is the root cause of all needless and preventable suffering and death. That is what is now proved in this paper. Any system, person, AI, whatever, that is not aligned with it is unsafe by definition.
by nanliu | 2025-09-03 12:55:07+00:00
The desire to come and immigrate to the US has greatly diminished. This use to be a easy decision for foreign students to stay in the US for work opportunities. Nowadays, a US degree isn't considered prestigious outside of a few elite schools and the cost has completely spiraled out of control. I've talked to numerous colleagues who abandoned waiting for a green card because it's no longer a clear cut decision. Opportunities and quality of life in other countries have either caught up or surpassed the US in certain areas. This would of been unthinkable 10-20 years ago.
by ETH_start | 2025-09-03 12:55:27+00:00
When I'm really using AI, my mind is pushed to its very limits. I'm forced to maintain context that is much more complex than anything I had to keep in working memory pre-AI. But it also feels easier because you don't have to do nearly as much thinking to get every given task done. So maybe I get lazier, not in how much I accomplish, but in how much effort I put forth. So if my previous working intensity applied with AI would let me finish 10x as much work, now I'm content with exerting half as much effort and getting 5x as much work done as my pre-AI self.
by tomrod | 2025-09-03 12:56:32+00:00
A few things to note.

1. This is arxiv - before publication or peer review. Grain of salt.[0]

2. 18 participants per cohort

3. 54 participants total

Given the low N and the likelihood that this is drawn from 18-22 year olds attending MIT, one should expect an uphill battle for replication and for generalizability.

Further, they are brain scanning during the experiment, which is an uncomfortable/out-of-the-norm experience, and the object of their study is easy to infer if not directly known by the population (the person being studied using LLM, search tools, or no tools).

> We thus present a study which explores the cognitive cost of using an LLM while performing the task of writing an essay. We chose essay writing as it is a cognitively complex task that engages multiple mental processes while being used as a common tool in schools and in standardized tests of a student's skills. Essay writing places significant demands on working memory, requiring simultaneous management of multiple cognitive processes. A person writing an essay must juggle both macro-level tasks (organizing ideas, structuring arguments), and micro-level tasks (word choice, grammar, syntax). In order to evaluate cognitive engagement and cognitive load as well as to better understand the brain activations when performing a task of essay writing, we used Electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain signals of the participants. In addition to using an LLM, we also want to understand and compare the brain activations when performing the same task using classic Internet search and when no tools (neither LLM nor search) are available to the user.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872
by tracker1 | 2025-09-03 12:56:40+00:00
Seems completely reasonable given how many people are doing similar with RPi and other similar boards and chips. A Pixel 5 is more powerful than a lot of them, with the screen often being the biggest power drain. I'm curious what tweaks can be done to minimize power use overall as I'm assuming heavy loads could heat up the phone a bit.

Looking at the underlying block arch (Hugo), seems to be written in Go an should be pretty good for serving the content overall.

Aside: I've become a pretty big fan of SSG, and have been wanting to build a desktop mostly markdown based blog editor that then publishes to Cloudflare infrastructure... Just been lazy about actually picking it up (thinking Tauri/Rust + React/MUI for the app) with git integration and optionally direct or github action for push. I can't recall the name, but MS actually had a nice gui blog editor that integrated with a few engines a couple decades ago, but long since abandoned.
by the_af | 2025-09-03 12:56:52+00:00
To be fair, the job of infallible dear leader in a major Western democracy is very prone to getting involved in wars, with bad repercussions for the people involved in all sides... (and destabilizing the world in the process). While some people in that country oppose these war adventures, it's difficult to voice because said country has a secular religion of worshipping its own armed forces, and speaking contrary to this can have anyone ostracized.

I'm not talking about Russia, China or North Korea, though of course it can also fit some of those countries.
by righthand | 2025-09-03 12:56:58+00:00
Firefox dev tools tell me why my requests and scripts fail because of CORS or blocked by a plugin or what have you. Chrome doesn’t remotely even provide that info.

I honestly have never seen a Chrome dev tools feature that was better or necessary for good web development that Firefox didn’t already have in the last 15 years. Yet I always see this bizarre sentiment of how the dev tools were better “just because”.