MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-09-03 15:19:40+00:00
>There’s no reason these things shouldn’t last more than 20-30 years on average.

This is actually a difficult problem I feel. Misaligned incentives aside. How do you keep a company running if it is so good it captures the whole market in 15 years, but it takes 30 years before it's products need replacing? (This is a simplistic presentation of the issue, but I feel it's understandable enough to start to formulate ideas on how? You could think of lightbulbs that last a century if you like {would lack of competition inhibit progress??}.)

I would love to buy Samsung's washer division, say, and work to make the machines invincible and completely repairable. Then use the profits to bootstrap other such projects. Eventually make the company cooperative, etc, maintain the longevity and work on reducing running costs, improving cleaning, etc.
by rectang | 2025-09-03 15:19:43+00:00
A few months ago, I was studying Giant Steps and I came across the “Giant Steps is actually very simple (yes, really)” video by Dave Pollack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd75Mwo4JNo

Pollack argues that the main reason that Giant Steps is such a high mountain is because it is traditionally played at such a ferocious tempo. Slow it down, and the Coltrane Changes become fairly ordinary ii-V-I substitution progressions.

I’m persuaded. I love Coltrane, and I’ve listened to the Giant Steps album countless times. The Coltrane Changes are very nice, but in the line of other jazz theory such as tritone substitution, the deceptive cadence, and so on.

The main thing with Giant Steps is that to play it like Coltrane does you have to practice it to death, accumulate a vocabulary of riffs, and gain facility at improvising over sophisticated changes moving at a speed that other tunes won’t have prepared you for.

EDIT: I originally posted the wrong link, to Giant Steps slowed down 30%. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilbrDJy9-98
by user3939382 | 2025-09-03 15:20:01+00:00
I have a better proposal. Let's scrap the web. It's corrupted and broken, it hasn't been fun since MySpace. We serve native apps like VNC over kitty graphics protocol + mosh/ssh + ios/android/windows/macos mosh/ssh client. Even if we need to distribute a customized terminal to make it work. Get rid of the browser and the app stores at the same time.
by threatofrain | 2025-09-03 15:20:04+00:00
So it's a noisy abstraction. Programmers deal with that all the time. Whenever you bring in an outside library or dependency there's an implicit contract that you don't have to look underneath the abstraction. But it's noisy so sometimes you do.

Colleagues are the same thing. You may abstract business domains and say that something is the job of your colleague, but sometimes that abstraction breaks.

Still good enough to draw boxes and arrows around.
by tripletpeaks | 2025-09-03 15:20:20+00:00
Someone elsewhere on this page posted some details of the author's bio. They worked on Chrome/Blink for years. So of course they're upset Apple kept them from being the only browser anybody targets, and any crap they tried to push on us from being instantly adopted nearly everywhere. I'm sure that was frustrating, that they weren't able to capture the entire market, just nearly all of it.

Monopolies suck, but since regulators are asleep at the wheel and have been my entire (no longer brief) life, Apple's my chosen kaiju to fight the other kaiju on my behalf. Sure it might smash Tokyo sometimes, but the others are trying to smash Tokyo and then some, so, I wish it well (while also wishing we didn't have kaiju at all)

Like how you'd rather not have any giant monsters around, but when a really bad one shows up, you're glad Godzilla's there anyway.
by psadauskas | 2025-09-03 15:21:27+00:00
Location: Boulder, CO Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: 20 years in the Rails webdev stack: Ruby, Rails, Turbo, Stimulus, Hotwire. Various Javascript frameworks as they come and go: React, Svelte, Vue. DevOps with Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Azure. Résumé/CV: https://resume.sadauskas.com/ Email: psadauskas@gmail.com

There’s an inflection point in every startup, where you’ve got your MVP and first customers, and now you need to scale everything. You need to make the application faster while also adding features and fixing bugs. You need to grow the whole team, not just engineering, and build the tools to support them.

This is where I’m in my groove. I’ve grown teams from 3 to 100+, improved performance while scaling to 100x the load, and designed and built features from the ground up in an iterative and agile manner to minimize time-to-delivery while maximizing flexibility for future work.

I have over 20 years of experience as a full-stack web application developer, primarily as a Rails developer since its inception. I also have experience with a large variety of languages, frameworks and technologies. I’m comfortable working at entire levels of the app stack, from CSS to SQL. I have the experience to know when to hack together a quick solution, or take the time to architect a foundation that will scale and provide a platform upon which the team can build stable features for years.

If you’re an early stage startup that has found product/market fit, and needs someone to scale both your product and your team, then I’d be a great choice to help you out.
Launch HN: Risely (YC S25) – AI Agents for Universities
by danialasif | 2025-09-03 15:21:35+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Danial, co-founder and CTO of Risely AI (https://risely.ai). We're building AI agents that automate operational workflows inside universities. Here’s a demo: https://www.loom.com/share/d7a14400434144c490249d665a0d0499?....

Higher ed is full of inefficiencies. Every department runs on outdated systems that don’t talk to each other. Today, advising staff are looking up enrollment data in PeopleSoft or Ellucian, checking grades and assignments in Canvas, and trying to track engagement in a CRM, if they even have one. Often, it’s just spreadsheets and email. One advisor told us they were losing 8+ hours/week just trying to answer: “Which students are struggling?”. During that lag, students slip through the cracks, and every lost student costs a school tuition.

I’ve spent the last decade building large-scale systems, but about a year ago, I left my job to build something personal. My time at UC Berkeley reinforced what my parents taught me when we immigrated to the U.S. - that education is the most powerful tool for upward mobility. But nearly 40% of students never graduate. Many of these students are capable and just need support, but the systems meant to support them are overwhelmed and broken.

So we built Risely. Our first agent focuses on academic advising and retention. It connects to a school’s systems, unifies the data, flags at-risk students, drafts outreach, and answers natural-language questions about caseloads and course progress. It gives staff leverage and time back, while helping more students stay on track.

The harder part is everything under the hood: - Connecting to archaic SIS, LMS, and CRM systems with inconsistent APIs and data models - Normalizing messy institutional data into something agents can reason over - Handling real policy constraints around FERPA, isolating tenant data, and meeting strict security and privacy standards for student PII - Designing agent workflows that are traceable, reviewable, and safe to run in production - Building infrastructure that can adapt to different institutional rules, processes, and edge cases.

We started with advising because retention ties directly to both revenue and student success. But the same foundation applies to registrar, admissions, financial aid, research administration, and other critical functions. As more agents come online, they can begin to coordinate with each other and hopefully improve the entire operations of a college or university.

If you’ve built systems that had to reconcile messy data, inconsistent workflows, or policy constraints using LLMs, we’d love to hear how you approached it.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about the above, and anything in this space!
by bdelmas | 2025-09-03 15:21:49+00:00
Yes in data science there is say: “there is no free lunch”. With ChatGPT and others becoming so prevalent even at PhD level people that will work hard and avoid to use these tools will be more and more seen as magicians. I already see this in coding where people can’t code medium to hard things and their intuitions like you said is wacky. It’s not the imposter syndrome anymore it’s people not being able to get their job done without some AI involved.

What I do personally is for every subject that matters to me I take the time to first think about it. To explore ideas, concepts, etc… and answer questions that would ask to ChatGPT. Only once I get a good idea I start to ask chapgpt about it.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-09-03 15:22:09+00:00
Android can screen calls, but normally your phone doesn't even ring, and if it does, it is listed as spam. They must have some kind of Google insider internet info that can recognize these types of calls.

This is big because I often receive calls from unknown numbers for work, and those get through. What sucks is that people tend to hang up if you screen the call, even if it is legit.
by robenkleene | 2025-09-03 15:22:13+00:00
This is such a funny example because language is the main way that we communicate with LLMs. Which means you can make tie both of your points together in the same example: If you take a scene and describe it in words, then have an LLM reconstruct the scene from the description, you'd likely get a scene that looks very different then the original source. This simultaneous makes both your point and the person you're responding to's point:

1. Language is an abstraction and it's not deterministic (it's really lossy)

2. LLMs behave differently than the abstractions involved in building software, where normally if you gave the same input, you'd expect the same output.
by watwut | 2025-09-03 15:22:26+00:00
1.) Look, Spaniards are Europeans by any reasonable definition. They are part of Western Europe.

2.) Traditional western depiction of Jesus looking like Spaniards would be no exception. Traditional western depiction of Jesus tend to look sorta kinda like locals do.

3.) Europeans do have wild range of eye colors and hair colors. The eye color and hair being some specific colors even for whites is weird, because even whitey whites have all kind of hair colors and eye colors.

> "European" is a politically correct descriptor for the common set of physical traits often described as "white,

No it is not and to the extend it is, it is absurd whistleblowing attempt - the one that ends up redefine Western Europe as a place that excludes Spaniards.
by quietbritishjim | 2025-09-03 15:22:44+00:00
Looking at the Wikipedia article for fish, it looks like a reasonable definition would be:

* Everything in the subphylum vertebrata (i.e. vertibrates)

* Except tetrapoda (tetrapods: amphibians, reptiles, mammals and the like).

It's not perfect because tetrapoda does fit within vertebrata in a biological / genetic sense (as a sibling comment put it: fish is not a monophyletic group). But it's a precise enough definition that I don't think we need to claim that we're all fish or that there's no such thing as a fish (as the QI elves would say).
by troyvit | 2025-09-03 15:22:56+00:00
They stole share from Google because search is becoming obsolete, not because a new search engine came to town. It's like saying 5G stole market share from AOL's dial-up business. Search still has a use, and Google still takes > 90% of all search, so it's still a monopoly, and I'll add that Google is trying to leverage that monopoly to expand Gemini.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-09-03 15:23:09+00:00
Do you really think this cloud service will be up and functioning for 20+ years? How much stuff like that was set up in 2005 and is still working?

But even without that calculus, you can put a bunch of stickers on, all over the machine. They cost nothing and can be applied automatically. Better yet, punch it into some central metal part of the washing machine like the VIN on a car.
by Spoom | 2025-09-03 15:23:15+00:00
chrome://flags/#prompt-api-for-gemini-nano to enable this on current Chrome (at least on Linux). It worked after I enabled that flag and restarted Chrome, though it required two tries (apparently it needed to download a model).

I tried to figure out if this stuff was available in other browsers but unfortunately came up short.

Googler, opinions my own.
by cvhc | 2025-09-03 15:23:56+00:00
I have quite opposite experience. I've never seen ads for Chrome but frequently see Apple (including Safari). And when I search for "chrome" or "browser" in Play Store, Firefox/DDG/Opera come before the true Google Chrome: https://imgur.com/a/LJiUX4m

I just don't think Mozilla have spare money to film a nice commercial...
by everforward | 2025-09-03 15:24:02+00:00
> I think if you create a task but don't await it (which is plausible in a server type scenario), it's not guaranteed to run because of garbage collection or something.

I think that use case doesn't work well in async, because async effectively creates a tree of Promises that resolve in order. A task that doesn't get await-ed is effectively outside it's own tree of Promises because it may outlive the Promise it is a child of.

I think the solution would be something like Linux's zombie process reaping, and I can see how the devs prefer just not running those tasks to dealing with that mess.
by toastal | 2025-09-03 15:24:29+00:00
> Electrolux washing machine

I had to buy one a couple of years ago. Snarkily I asked the floor salesman if I could get the washer “without all the smart features”. He said “let me check”, which had me puzzled. He came back to inform me that they still had last year’s model which was before the “smart” features were rolled out. He said they can sell it on the same warranty, & since it was older I would get a significant discount. I cherish that machine for its dumbness.

…No such luck for TVs.
Show HN: Precog – Enhanced OCR + Agentic PDF analysis tools for highlighting txt
by ieuanking | 2025-09-03 15:24:42+00:00
Hi HN,

We built Precog because current AI chatbots and platforms do not offer good PDF annotation tools to highlight and cite answers directly from uploaded PDFs.

Precog is great for draft revision, quote gathering, and source skimming. When chatting with Precog, Precog stays contextually locked to the information in the PDF added to the context window. Reference uploaded files, found sources, and analysis points using the @ symbol referencing (like Cursor). We have found that through @ symbol referencing in-prompt, hallucination is minimized, and as notes and interactions are made, the context awareness around the user's needs increases dramatically.

If you think this tool is helpful, I'd love your feedback and any questions, comments, or critiques.
by eth0up | 2025-09-03 15:24:44+00:00
"pretend democracy"

I rarely offer an opinion here, expecting in advance it will gray into oblivion, however politely or sincerely it's presented. I see it happen to others often enough to remember.

In most cases I see the word democracy used, I have the exact thought, "pretend democracy". I don't deliberately try to be a morose cynic. I've just become incapable of thinking the very word without the subjunction "pretend".

The corporatism burgeoning here makes this seem undeniable to me. Am I that delusional? Is it really not that bad? Do the so called people really have a level of influence over their society befitting of the word? I don't see it. I just see words.
by cnst | 2025-09-03 15:24:47+00:00
What's worse than the inability to NOT have a permanent standardised real-name identifier on your device at all times and on all devices?

Apple has really questionable security as well. There's lots of people who have reported Apple randomly asking for Apple Account passwords all of a sudden in popups, on both iOS and macOS, the same way as malware would; or forcing password resets every day or every week.

BTW, do you know how many customer accounts did Apple terminate in 2024? It's 128'961'839 — nearly 129 million customer accounts terminated in just one year.
Ask HN: Why does Google word privacy settings like you agree even when off?
by matesz | 2025-09-03 15:24:52+00:00
Found this confusing language in personal Gmail account update today.

The intro paragraph says "You agree to let Google Workspace use your Workspace content and activity to personalize your experience across Workspace". And only then they present with the options - whether to turn the special features on or off.

It reads like you're agreeing to the data use regardless of whether you actually enable the features. The detailed documentation suggests data is only used when features are enabled, but that opening sentence creates blanket consent language.

Is this intentionally misleading UX copy, or just sloppy writing that creates legal ambiguity?
by cjbgkagh | 2025-09-03 15:24:54+00:00
Granted that capital costs are a barrier to entry and that barriers to entry leads to non-perfect competition, but the exploitability is limited in the case of LLMs because they exist on a sub-linear utility scale. In LLMs 2x the price is not 2x as useful, this means a new entrant can enter the lower end of the market and work their way up. The only way to prevent that is for the incumbent to keep costs as close to marginal as possible.

There is a natural monopoly aspect given the ability to train and data mine on private usage data but in general improvements in the algorithms and training seem to be dominating advancements. Microsoft's search engine Bing paid an absolute fortune for access to usage data and they were unable to capitalize on it. LLMs have the unusual property that a lot of value can be extracted out of fine tuning for a specialized purposes which opens the door to a million little niches providing fertile ground for future competitors. This is one area where being a fast follower makes a lot of sense.
by joaomacp | 2025-09-03 15:25:03+00:00
The actual reason they tell you to register for warranty via a phone number is for a salesperson to pick up, and upsell you on "enhanced warranty" or "insurance". It's proven that people feel awkward saying no to a salesperson, and agree to pay extra much more often than they would do online (they'd just tick "no" on the enhanced warranty paid product).

That's also why the author went on a queue: the call-center is not for the washing-machine company, it's an insurance-selling center that works with multiple companies.
by fluoridation | 2025-09-03 15:25:27+00:00
Wikipedia:

>An adult is an animal that has reached full growth. The biological definition of adult is an organism that has reached sexual maturity and thus capable of reproduction.

>In the human context, the term adult has meanings associated with social and legal concepts. In contrast to a non-adult or "minor", a legal adult is a person who has attained the age of majority and is therefore regarded as independent, self-sufficient, and responsible. They may also be regarded as "majors". The typical age of attaining adulthood for humans is 18 years, although definition may vary by country.

Merriam-Webster:

>(adjective) fully developed and mature

>(noun) one that is adult; especially: a human being after an age (such as 21) specified by law

Your definition of "adult" is one no one uses.

>Past generations considered this character the bedrock that adult behavior rested upon.

Even if I grant that that's true, why should I care? Past generations killed infants in fields to benefit crops, and captured survivors of battles to enslave them. Appeals to tradition are uncompelling.
by regularization | 2025-09-03 15:25:47+00:00
In February 2022 the fed funds rate was 0.08. In October 2022 it was up to 3.0. From November 2022 to January 2023 Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Salesforce laid off tens of thousands of people. They were no more or less productive then the day before they were laid off. At this time hiring basically stopped for everybody, and wages did not keep up with inflation. So this affected all SWE'S on some level. Nothing happened to their productivity, the system just changed.

Some say some of these people never should have been hired to begin with and they weren't being productive, but that was just another anomaly of the system.

Some defend the system and so-called market at every turn, with workers racing around to be productive at its whims, but it kind of becomes like Calvinists trying to satisfy a fickle god to ensure their salvation.

The unproductive, parasitic heirs at the top use the unproductive business cycle crises endemic to their system to discipline workers - jacking up unemployment and freezing wages.

I look at the new Acela trains in the US, currently slower than the old ones, the power problems and RFK Jr's new health mandates, and I compare them to China's five year plans, high speed rails, solar and wind rollout and capacity, and wonder where the US will be in a few decades, or even one decade.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-09-03 15:25:52+00:00
Also anecdotally: back in my sysadmin days, the Supermicros we had had so many more problems than the Dells. Granted this was 2012-2015 era hardware being run in 2018, so I can't say for certain if that's even remotely still true, but yeah.

The 'Micro's ethernets were all shot by the time we closed up shop so each had an expansion card for 10G ethernet at that point, and one we had to run VM management on 10G because the 1G we used elsewhere had shit the bed in that unit somewhere along the way and we couldn't be bothered to buy yet another card and tear down the server again for it. Plus management traffic was negligible.

I don't miss that job. Fuck being on-call.
by NoGravitas | 2025-09-03 15:26:10+00:00
There are exactly three nice things about passkeys.

1. It forces the use of keys with a reasonable amount of entropy, and the use of a password manager to access them. 2. They will not make it easy to use a key with the wrong site (also true of a good password manager). 3. Uses public/private keypair so key itself is never sent over the wire (even encrypted).

The real question is whether these properties are worth all the costs (enumerated in this article).
by GeekyBear | 2025-09-03 15:26:39+00:00
> Apple took the novel, and IMO far more disturbing and reprehensible, approach by simply not giving anyone any choice.

Users who disagree with the concept of walled gardens have the choice of buying into an open platform.

As long as the platform creator is honest and doesn't try to yank away the supposed freedom to run any software you like that they fraudulently promised when they announced and marketed the platform.
by simonw | 2025-09-03 15:26:44+00:00
I wonder if you're stuck on an older model like GPT-4o?

EDIT: I think that's likely what is happening here: I tried the prompt against GPT-4o and got this https://chatgpt.com/share/68b8683b-09b0-8006-8f66-a316bfebda...

My consistent position on this stuff is that it's actually way harder to use than most people (and the companies marketing it) let on.

I'm not sure if it's getting easier to use over time either. The models are getting "better" but that partly means their error cases are harder to reason about, especially as they become less common.