MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scarecrowbob | 2025-09-07 17:27:01+00:00
Threads like this -make me- more anti-American.

"I certainly condemn the killing of innocent civilians". No you don't. That's BS you're telling yourself so you can feel unconflicted about what should be a simple moral calculus.

I am not sure what certifies your moral; God or logic or whatever that tells you that how you live your life is justified.

I do know that I have morals, though.

"Don't murder people" is pretty easy for me to justify categorically.

If you have to put a big [*] next to that which says "if my boss tells me to kill someone, it's okay", then you really don't have any morals.

That math is easy for most folks to do.

The thing that probably keeps you from being able to do that math is some relative certainty that you personally will never have to be on the "risk/benefit analysis" board for these kinds of murderers.

But that's an error.
by anonym29 | 2025-09-07 17:27:28+00:00
>The 128 GB Strix Halo system was tempting me, but I think I'm going to hold out for the Medusa Point

I was initially thinking this way too, but I realized a 128GB Strix Halo system would make an excellent addition to my homelab / LAN even once it's no longer the star of the stable for LLM inference - i.e. I will probably get a Medusa Halo system as well once they're available. My other devices are Zen 2 (3600x) / Zen 3 (5950x) / Zen 4 (8840u), an Alder Lake N100 NUC, a Twin Lake N150 NUC, along with a few Pi's and Rockchip SBC's, so a Zen 5 system makes a nice addition to the high end of my lineup anyway. Not to mention, everything else I have maxed out at 2.5GbE. I've been looking for an excuse to upgrade my switch from 2.5GbE to 5 or 10 GbE, and the Strix Halo system I ordered was the BeeLink GTR9 Pro with dual 10GbE. Regardless of whether it's doing LLM, other gen AI inference, some extremely light ML training / light fine tuning, media transcoding, or just being yet another UPS-protected server on my LAN, there's just so much capability offered for this price and TDP point compared to everything else I have.

Apple Silicon would've been a serious competitor for me on the price/performance front, but I'm right up there with RMS in terms of ideological hostility towards proprietary kernels. I'm not totally perfect (privacy and security are a journey, not a destination), but I am at the point where I refuse to use anything running an NT or Darwin kernel.
by neitherboosh | 2025-09-07 17:27:38+00:00
Hm, this comment makes me realize that there isn’t really a social consensus on whether or not AI generated content is welcome in these kinds of discussions. On one hand, I’m generally annoyed any time I see unsolicited AI generations because it’s usually garbage and I could have just asked an AI myself. But in this case I probably wasn’t going to and this comment is genuinely insightful…

I guess I would have preferred some kind of qualifier at the beginning saying it’s not written by a human
by Zigurd | 2025-09-07 17:28:15+00:00
I drag Elon pretty frequently in my video essays on that short form video site. I started because his artificial urgency, like telling his employees this company will be out of business usually they don't pull off some miracle like making FSD work this year for sure, is a laughably bad behavior pattern usually seen among crappy founders of much smaller crappy companies.

But it turns out there was such a rich vein of examples of being a bad manager that you just have to keep digging. Completely unsurprising that a CFO would bail before being forced to, at the very least, avert his eyes from something sketchy.
Show HN: I Made An App That Cannot Be Used
by mojambo96 | 2025-09-07 17:28:18+00:00
Today, I’m proud to announce my latest invention, an app that you cannot use.

Yes, in fact it makes your phone unusable too.

Introducing The Hardest Focus App: Pocket.

You can start focus only by physically putting the phone away

- In your pocket (when outdoors) - Face down (while working/studying) - Or just Lock it.

No buttons, Just real focus.

But, if you get distracted and check your phone - You get a 5 second warning to correct yourself.

If you do not comply, all that progress will be murdered ruthlessly with a cold indifference to your feelings.

And for when you're deeply possessed by the algorithms, just tap twice on the back of your phone to summon the focus gods. It instantly opens pocket, locks you out of the phone and starts focus session.

However, during focus if your phone is locked and your mom calls

You can answer it and tell her you're locked in. The pact is broken only when you unlock the device.

Pocket is built on a core belief that true focus can only be achieved with physical disengagement and punishing bad behavior to build discipline.

This is my strongly opinionated take on focus with the Hardest Focus App

Focus is not a game. Focus is deadly.

Every year more deaths can be attributed to accidents that happen due to lack of focus than any natural cause.

Available on iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6746587044
by commandar | 2025-09-07 17:29:02+00:00
Roo has codebase indexing that it'll instruct the agent to use if enabled.

It uses whatever arbitrary embedding model you want to point it at and backs it with a qdrant vector db. Roo's documents point you toward free cloud services for this, but I found those to be dreadfully slow.

Fortunately, it takes about 20 minutes to spin up a qdrant docker container and install ollama locally. I've found the nomic text embed model is fast enough for the task even running on CPU. You'll have an initial spin up as it embeds existing codebase data then it's basically real-time as changes are made.

FWIW, I've found that the indexing is worth the effort to set up. The models are generally better about finding what they need without completely blowing up their context windows when it's available.
by b112 | 2025-09-07 17:29:13+00:00
It's not just war on our economy. It's an attempt to steal our country from us. To take our homes, our nation away.

Repeated '51st state' blather. Threats of using tariffs until we capitulate and join. Talk of re-drawing the border because someone thinks it "looks weird". and stealing our land and water by force.

If someone wants to add tariffs to imports, it's silly, dumb, misguided, but well.. the US is free to do that. But try to take our identity away? Our home? Our nation.

This will not be put aside for decades

When you get stabbed by a random nutjob, it hurts, but whatever. When you get stabbed in the back by a friend, a brother? The hurt and pain is like a nova. It will never be forgiven, never put out of mind.
by opo | 2025-09-07 17:29:27+00:00
The Soviets could never have done a large invasion of Japan. They had a few ships that the USA had given them as part of Project Hula, but that is nothing compared to what would be needed for a full scale invasion of Japan. They did have plans to possibly attack Hokkaido, but as the wikipedia entry says "Historians have generally considered it unlikely that an invasion of Hokkaido would have succeeded."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_Soviet_invasion_of_Ho...

In comparison, the proposed allied invasion was planned to have 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, and 400 destroyers and destroyer escorts. Even that wasn't considered enough:

>...Ken Nichols, the District Engineer of the Manhattan Engineer District, wrote that at the beginning of August 1945, "[p]lanning for the invasion of the main Japanese home islands had reached its final stages, and if the landings actually took place, we might supply about fifteen atomic bombs to support the troops."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall
by ptero | 2025-09-07 17:29:45+00:00
I see belt and road as orthogonal to the above. This is an initiative focused on a mix of PR and economy. While there are likely many layers of the intent behind it, I think the main one is to establish resource access as well as access to the markets for China exports and enable the stable growth of the Chinese economy.

The success of the initiative still remains to be seen: it is definitely not a failure, but many things can derail it, both inside and outside of China. In either case I see very little desire from the China to throw its non-economic might around outside of what they consider to be part of the Greater China territorial area (Taiwan, South China and Philippine seas). My 2c.
Show HN: A livestream of all image descriptions (alt text) on Bluesky
by bobbiechen | 2025-09-07 17:29:59+00:00
In 2019, an academic paper by Gleason et al. found that only 0.1% of Twitter image posts had any form of image description (alt text) [1].

I wanted to see the analogous number for Bluesky today - my full blog post is here [2], but I found looking at the live stream was illuminating and fun too:

* Bluesky image posts are frequent enough to keep moving, but not so frequent that it's an unreadable blur.

* There's lots of bot content for things like ADS-B feeds (planes nearby), radio station "Now playing", and good old-fashioned affiliate link spam.

* There is a lot of detailed descriptions for sexual content. This was a surprise to me!

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3308558.3313605 [2] https://digitalseams.com/blog/image-descriptions-on-bluesky
by chuckadams | 2025-09-07 17:30:06+00:00
> Elsewhere on HN right now is a post about a dermatologist vibecoding an app for skin stuff. I view the “need/use ai for coding” as an indictment against how complex software development has become

One other way to look at it is that software is realizing enough of the dreams of reusability that cobbling together scripts at such a high level with only the smallest understanding is finally becoming possible. I'm not going full Pangloss here, development is still a massive clusterfuck in many places and probably always will be by its nature, but the frontiers have pushed waaaaay back since I got started.
by onetimeusename | 2025-09-07 17:30:11+00:00
>It starts to look less like a principled stand on legal consistency and more like a cultural preference.

I think there's an implicit cultural preference when people argue in favor of more immigration though. It's also just assumed immigrants themselves don't have cultural preferences when it seems they do. On the one hand there's an argument made against cultural preferences but on the other we see things like ethnic neighborhoods such as barrios develop and then those are defended and diversity is said to be our strength. So I don't think it is consistent to be pro immigration and anti cultural preference.
by estimator7292 | 2025-09-07 17:30:12+00:00
Not even remotely the same scale of problem. Like at all.

If your business suddenly starts generating Tbs of traffic (that is not a ddos), you'd be thrilled to pay overage fees because your business just took off.

You don't usually get $10k bandwidth fees because your misconfigured service consumes too much CPU.

And besides that, for most of these cases, a small business can host on-prem with zero bandwidth fees of any type, ever. If you can get by with a gigabit uplink, you have nothing to worry about. And if you're at the scale where AWS overages are a real problem, you almost certainly don't need more than you can get with a surplus server and a regular business grade fiber link.

This is very much not an all-or-nothing situation. There is a vast segment of industry that absolutely does not need anything more than a server in a closet wired to the internet connection your office already has. My last job paid $100/mo for an AWS instance to host a GitLab server for a team of 20. We could have gotten by with a junk laptop shoved in a corner and got the exact same performance and experience. It once borked itself after an update and railed the CPU for a week, which cost us a bunch of money. Would never have been an issue on-prem. Even if we got DDoSed or somehow stuck saturating the uplink, our added cost would be zero. Hell, the building was even solar powered, so we wouldn't have even paid for the extra 40W of power or the air conditioning.
by stickfigure | 2025-09-07 17:30:12+00:00
I guess I am curious about this "visa shopping" problem - is it really a big deal? And if it is, how hard is it going to be for a motivated applicant to establish "proof of residence" in an arbitrary country? Are we talking about a utility bill?

Is this just going to derail world travelers who want to add a last minute US leg to their itinerary? That would seem entirely pointless.

Honestly I'm pretty confused.
by beefnugs | 2025-09-07 17:30:59+00:00
Once already I got an automatic update start the next day with a full screen unskippable SET UP A MICROSOFT ACCOUNT. I dont even recall what i did in the haze of anger, but i think just restarting a couple of times, eventually removing the internet cable, it eventually just went away?

These animal fucks are going to force people away
by dangus | 2025-09-07 17:31:02+00:00
It’s just as easy to run a script to remove them on Windows but most people don’t do that.

I would say that this vision of Windows would involve Microsoft essentially producing a Linux graphical shell similar to Gnome and KDE with a bunch of convenience tools that are typical to the Windows experience. It would have defaults like the Bing brower and all the typical Windows revenue-generating stuff.

I don’t think the GPL requirement to release code is a problem for the business model. Not all of the tooling has to be released as GPL and even if some of it does, the brand and commercial partnerships of Windows will mean that most people don’t go out and replace Windows with the hypothetical de-commercialized version.

We see this with VSCode where Microsoft is totally fine to release the code with an even more permissive license than the GPL, but they keep the extension marketplace gated. If you want Microsoft’s extensions you have to use VSCode.
by g-b-r | 2025-09-07 17:31:49+00:00
> MentraOS allows multiple apps to run at the same time and access context at the same time by running apps in the cloud.

I don't really see why you'd need a cloud for multiple apps to access "context" at the same time (or to be able to run more than one).

Being able to run apps on the cloud is nice, for the ones that are too heavy for the device, but I don't see why it would have to be a requirement.

You'll also have unnecessary lag in some situations, where a simple local app would be enough, and you'll be unable to do anything without an internet connection.

> This is enabled by relay servers. You can use Mentra's relay server, or host your own.

> This is the architecture that we use and recommend so multiple apps can run at once and access powerful AI, while saving your phones battery. If you need to run offline or on the edge, we're working on the Mentra Edge SDK so you can skip the cloud, but it has downsides - only 1 app at a time.

You're able to run AOSP on those devices, I don't see why you couldn't run several lightweight apps at the same time; if you mention the sdk, besides, I imagine that only apps that explicitly add support to run locally will be able to do so.

And, for lightweight software a constant data exchange will easily consume more battery than running everything locally.

> Remember, every app on your phone is communicating with its own backend - which you have to trust. This isn't different.

Every app on my phone?? You've never heard of local, offline apps?

And exchanging some data with a server is not the same as running entirely remotely, which necessarily requires transmitting all the data the app uses.

it's wild that you think that a "cloud app" has no privacy downsides compared to normal software.

> Users aren't forced to use the store. You can self host a relay server, self host a store, etc.

That's good.

But for yours, default store (that would likely become the dominant one, if your system were successful) you decided to require an account, reducing privacy further.
by palata | 2025-09-07 17:32:23+00:00
Unfortunately, and as much as I like Linux for phones, I think it's very, very far from AOSP. It completely misses the AOSP security model and the apps (no, I don't believe that running waydroid on Linux is entirely viable, otherwise instead of Linux for phone we would have Waydroid as an alternative to Android).

I think the only realistic alternative would be to build upon AOSP properly, with Google being just a contributor instead of the owner. But it cannot come from a community fork by someone in their garage, it has to come from Android manufacturers. I was hoping that Huawei would start something like that, instead they went with their own HarmonyOS.
by general1465 | 2025-09-07 17:32:32+00:00
What you are describing - going to a remote site, sort out something with client and going back - is a business meeting and that falls under visa waiver / tourist visa in any country, because the worker who is doing the job is not paid by the local company, but by his employer in his home country.

With this logic it would be illegal to have a vacation and also write a code in a free time.
by perching_aix | 2025-09-07 17:32:36+00:00
Right. Well, I think they were being perfectly appropriate and that your comparison is asinine: starvation is about as indisputably bad as one can think of, whereas missing out on social media really isn't. Almost as if highlighting that was my damn point, which they then found appreciable, and you clearly didn't.

Coincidentally related is why I withdrew myself from most online community spaces. Pretty much the only alternative to constantly and pointlessly arguing, or being reliant on content sorting and filtering. The latter two of which will constantly receive some (but on occasion a lot?) of commentary about being biased in some way, automatically or manually (how would one know?), fairly or unfairly (according to who?), and repressing dissent or giving a voice (usually both, but never to satisfaction).
by owenversteeg | 2025-09-07 17:32:40+00:00
Funny enough, this sort of thing is _usually_ true. Civilians doing things in some sort of vaguely coordinated mass movement is typically a very weak force vs any industrial process. See, for example, WWII scrap drives, which were far more invasive and not terribly effective, even for easily recycled materials like aluminum. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/41736/were-worl...

Modern industrial forces are generally far, far more powerful than we realize. The great Falun mine, jewel of Sweden, producer of 2/3rds of all Europe's copper, builder of empires, produced 3,000 tons/year at its absolute peak; today, current copper production is quite mechanized and produces 18.3M tons/year. There is approximately nothing we can do by hand, or with our household items, that matches the power of industry.

But silver, with its small production, is a bit of an outlier. Worldwide silver production is only 25k metric tons/year, so if each of 131 million US households has a 52-piece set of .925 sterling silver at 1 troy oz sterling silver/piece, that is 0.925 * 52 piece * 1 troy oz/piece * 31.1g/troy oz * 131 million or 196k metric tons. Obviously nowhere near every household will have a full 52-pc set, some will have none and some will have larger sets, but if even 1/4 of households sell just one set, that is two entire years of worldwide silver production; the effects would be massive.
by amluto | 2025-09-07 17:33:32+00:00
> This effectively ends “visa shopping” - the practice of applying at embassies with shorter wait times or perceived easier approval rates. It also prevents circumventing countries where the US has suspended visa operations. Exceptions remain for diplomatic visas, UN-related travel, and emergency/humanitarian cases.

Let’s give this a computer analogy. Suppose I run a multi-datacenter service, and I have an endpoint in Europe and an endpoint in Asia. I accept requests for any account at any endpoint, and I discover that I have faster response latency and fewer 500 errors at the European endpoint than the Asia endpoint. Some of my Asian users have started using the European endpoint. Do I:

(a) Decide that this is just fine — the users are load balancing for me?

(b) Fix my system so that I treat requests fairly regardless of which endpoint they hit and maybe add front ends so that the front end isn’t a bottleneck?

(c) Start unconditionally rejecting requests if the account isn’t in the endpoint’s region? Or maybe even require the account and the originating IP to be in the endpoint’s region.

—-

(a) is a bit lazy but could work fine in the context of the Internet if I can encourage clients to load balance in an intelligent manner. It’s pretty obnoxious if the clients need to get on an actual airplane (and make visa-related API calls to do so!) to switch endpoints.

(b) seems ideal. If my system is weak I should fix it.

(c) seems unbelievably inappropriate to me.

Now let’s consider real life. There’s some actual human being, not a phone app. They’ve just finished a PhD in the US, and they have actual friends. They want to get a job in the US where they will benefit the US economy. And their desire is even compatible with US immigration rules. Except that they’re from Asia. Should the US:

1. Let them apply from within the US and let them stay here while applying (which should be fast — why is there a queue anyway? Either they should be accepted or rejected, but we benefit no one by making it slow). Then they are still around their US friends and they’re more likely to stay.

2. Require them to go visit Canada or something similar to apply? Seems pretty silly, but at least they’ll likely either end up benefitting the US or Canadian economy.

3. Require them to go back to Asia, where they have no apartment and will possibly need a job before their visa application can finish processing, and let the rather growth-oriented Chinese system try to give them an offer that gets them to stay, fairly happily, in China?

Even putting aside that choosing (c) and (3) is kind of inhumane to make someone leave all home for a few months if they are indeed eligible for a visa to stay, this seems UTTERLY STUPID as a matter of US policy. Why on Earth do we think it’s reasonable for the embassy’s local waiting time and acceptance rate to be a relevant part of our policy for who ends up getting a visa?

And yes, I know people who came to the US, got PhDs (and even brought the money to pay for them here with them), and then started companies abroad because of US visa rules.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-09-07 17:33:35+00:00
Fenix 6 Pro MIPS guy here, you can pry that $600 watch from my cold, dead wrist!

I tried AMOLED once - it lasted about 3 weeks and 200 miles before I sold it.

AMOLED is visible in sunlight, yeah, but even with always-on it only brightens when you lift your wrist...which is always infuriatingly late, coming moments after I look at my wrist. And because they want to minimize that annoying latency, it's constantly blinking on and off with false positives demanding attention like a strobe light. Maybe I have poor form with trekking poles or an over-sensitive/miscalibrated IMU, but I remember one particular foggy dawn hike when was triggering with basically every step. The silent morning light and the mist off the lake should have been magical, instead they just reflected the blinky light on my wrist.

I stare at glowing, colorful screens from 9-5 and struggle with distractions that similarly demands my eyeballs in the morning and evening. When I go into the woods it's because I want to leave those screens behind, not put an ever-larger, ever-more-vibrant one on my arm.

(My wrist will probably be dead and very cold someday when the weather changes and I try to push my ultralight 40F bag to lower temps than it is capable of and couldn't send an SOS because my F6P doesn't have sat comms. You shouldn't have to wait long, it's September...jk, don't worry.)

Probably going Coros or Suunto next, Garmin has lost the plot.