MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by steveruizok | 2025-09-18 21:08:08+00:00
Hey, thanks! React Flow is more narrowly focused on flow charts and workflows. It’s also MIT licensed and much more popular (looking at NPM installs) and sells premium access to docs and examples, while we license the library directly. Our canvas is more broadly capable, with a default feature set closer to Excalidraw, except that we use React / DOM for the entire canvas, like React Flow does. We also have a very different way of managing the canvas data, closer to a game engine than a controlled React component. I should write some blog posts.

Two of the starter kits we released today are more flowcharty. It’s been possible to make this kind of thing with tldraw for about 18 months, since we made our bindings API, and a few teams have built graph UIs on tldraw already, but I wouldn’t say it’s an easy path. Hopefully these starter kits will make it easier to uh start.
by barnabee | 2025-09-18 21:08:24+00:00
Nobody must watch ads, that's the point

Businesses that rely in it don't have an innate right to exist. It is ok for some businesses that are viable now to not be in a future, better world. It's ok for some people who are rich now not to be as a result of that.

It's ok for there to be less total content, too. Perhaps that's even desirable when so much is bottom of the barrel stuff (and sometimes 100% a net societal negative) because that's the only way to fund something with a handful of ad views.
by upboundspiral | 2025-09-18 21:08:24+00:00
This seems like it could be a long term existential threat for AMD. AMD CPU + GPU combos are finally coming out strong, both with MI300+ series in the supercomputing space, Strix Halo in laptops, etc. They have the advantage of being able to run code already optimized for x86 (important for gamers and HPC code), which NVIDIA doesn't have. Imagine if Grace Blackwell had x86 chips instead of Arm. If NVIDIA can get Intel CPUs with its chip offerings, it could be poised to completely take over so many new portions of the market/consolidate its current position by using its already existing mindshare and market dominance.
by adamcharnock | 2025-09-18 21:08:25+00:00
I’ve just been reading some of Vernor Vinge’s books and they’ve certainly hit different the second time around (A Deepness in the Sky, A Fire Upon the Deep).

I think it really is mostly that I’ve changed. It’s been a slow change that has been hard to notice from the inside, but one that becomes quite stark when re-experiencing a fixed point such as a book.
Ask HN: Ex-postdoc in physics feeling directionless. How to get out of it?
by lostathome | 2025-09-18 21:08:26+00:00
I’ve wrapped up a postdoc in physics after a long run through high school, an undergraduate degree at a top university, and a PhD from another elite institution. I’ve been following the “usual path” for years—just keep moving forward out of habit.

However, chronic illness, a lack of motivation, and depression have made the past few years extremely unproductive. I’m not interested in continuing in academia (perhaps I never was and wanted to please people), and I don’t want a job that will feel like a soul‑crushing grind.

I’m currently unemployed. I’ve applied to more than 50 positions but haven’t received any responses, and the job boards feel like they’re showing me a very narrow set of options. I need a few months to prepare for interviews properly (Leetcode is so hard), and bills are approaching.

I’m not sure whether I should take a break to recover or keep pushing. The thought of all those years spent studying, presenting, and publishing feels pointless when nothing tangible has materialized. I know I should not compare to my other peers, but it feels like everybody else has a network of people supporting them/has managed to advance/jump into the next career.

I’m considering starting with small gigs or a side project, as I used to do in physics—build something incremental. But I am not sure what to do and where to find opportunities (I do not even mind an old fashioned working class job, as this is my social background, poor and working class). And I worry that this could sap my ambition or stall momentum. I’ve also learned that building a network is far more valuable than anything else.

I suspect others have been in a similar place and would appreciate hearing how you found your way out of this rut.

P.S. Used an LLM to scramble my writing patterns.
by non_aligned | 2025-09-18 21:08:59+00:00
> It's a cute "how do I reach these kids?" idea

But... which kids? Do we have a fundamental problem reaching kids who are interested in basketball? My kid had a period of being interested in dinosaurs, but I never felt the need to reframe everything in dinosaur-terms because of that. In fact, you kinda want them to broaden their horizons beyond dinosaurs?

The real challenges in education are elsewhere, and a lot of it has to do with socioeconomic status and bad influences early in life.
by rickstanley | 2025-09-18 21:09:11+00:00
I can not recommend Xenophon's Anabasis (AKA March Of The Ten Thousand) enough.

I'm rereading it for the fourth time, in less than 2 years. There's a variety of themes:

- political intrigue; - religion; - moral, ethics; - companionship; - brotherhood;

etc. Xenophon is eloquent and straight to the point, I really like his approach in this narration.

Now, on the topic of "rereading", I've often thought that maybe I should (have) read other books; that perhaps I was "spending too much time" in one book, but I just don't care enough to ruminate on this thought, and besides, there's always something new to learn from it.

Concurrently I'm reading "Crime & Punishment", which I also recommend.
by krapp | 2025-09-18 21:09:18+00:00
OK, holocaust deniers, racists and anti-vaxxers. The point is, platforms always had a right to ban people, that was always the deal. And it still isn't the same as actual government oppression of free speech, which is clearly what's happening WRT this Charlie Kirk stuff. Even if you take the most cynical, negative interpretation of the COVID misinformation bans and "Twitter Files" to me this still seems categorically worse.
by diurnalist | 2025-09-18 21:10:11+00:00
> Also, thoughts on Vector vs otel agent?

IMO, with the current tech, it entirely depends on what data you're talking about.

For metrics and traces, I would use the OTel collector personally. You will have much more flexibility and it's pretty easy to write custom processors in Go. Support for traces is quite mature and metrics isn't far off. We've been running collectors for production scale of metric and trace ingest for the past couple of years, on the order of 1m events/sec (metric datapoints or spans). You mentioned low volume so that's less important, but I just wanted to mention in case others find this comment.

Logs are a bit different. We looked in to this in the past year. Vector has emerging support for OTLP but it's pretty early. Still, I bet it's pretty straightforward if your backend can ingest via OTLP. Our main concern with running the otel-collector as the log ingest agent was around throughput/performance. Vector is battle-tested, otel is still a bit early in this space. I imagine over time the gap will be closed but I would probably still reach for Vector for this use-case for higher scale. That said, YMMV and as with any technical decision, empirical data and benchmarking on your workloads will be the best way to determine the tradeoffs.

For your scale you could probably get away with an OTel collector daemonset and maybe a deployment with the Target Allocator (to allocate Prometheus scrapes) and call it a day :)
by npteljes | 2025-09-18 21:10:12+00:00
I'm on KDE for the last 2-3 years on multiple machines, and I can't say I spotted any KDE bugs. My system is debian testing + KDE though (and I tried it on Manjaro as well). Sometimes it's not the DE, but the distro they come in. Kubuntu reviews bemoaned regressions, for example - some kubuntus worked well, and the next ones didn't.
by ClassAndBurn | 2025-09-18 21:10:37+00:00
Nvidia sees the forest of the trees. The consequences of the US government buying steaks and Intel are that there will be Federal requirements for us companies using Intel. This is entirely about the foundry business. Nvidia is at risk when 100% of the production of its intellectual property occurs in Taiwan. They're more interested than anyone else in diversifying their foundry solutions. Intel has just been a terrible partner and totally disregards its customers. It's only because of the new strategic need for the US to have a foundry business that the government is saving until. NVIDIA is understandably supportive of this.
by spwa4 | 2025-09-18 21:11:11+00:00
> Well now see that'd be government spending and the majority of our voters/government don't want none of that

What do you mean? Trump spent more than the US government has ever spent before just this year. He did so in his last term too.

He just doesn't want to spend it on necessary things. After all, they're necessary. If he doesn't do it, someone will, right? There's a slight issue with this reasoning: it usually ends in the state having to do it anyway, at greatly increased cost, further increasing the already eye-watering spend Trump did.
by jll29 | 2025-09-18 21:11:18+00:00
Hardware: Lenovo ThinkStation <-- IBM PC AKA IBM 5150

Software: OmniGraffle 7 <-- OmniGraffle 6

Book: SICP (I like the 2nd edition best, now the latest based on Python is an aesthetic crime IMHO.)

For software, many programs reach the bloat status, of course there is the old joke about any system growing until it can send email (or having its own embedded LISP variant ;-).
by ricardobeat | 2025-09-18 21:12:41+00:00
I wonder what the imagined path to production for small projects is meant to be.

- for hobby projects: at what moment do you go from hobby to commercial license (and need $6k in cash)?

- for new businesses: you now either have a 90-day window to find product-market fit, or assume you'll have to burn $6k in the event of failure?
by xyzelement | 2025-09-18 21:12:49+00:00
Totally agree, even without reading your links. What matters is the actual faith in Gd. I see this myself. We're members of two temples - one more orthodox and one more what you'd call casual.

The people that show up to the casual one once a year or even a few times a year aren't really "different" than someone who doesn't bother to show up. It's good they are there but the religion isn't influencing how they think and act - which is why the TFR is similar between casually religious and casually non-religious.

Where things differentiate is on the extremes. Someone explicitly atheistic (vs just non-religious) has a TFR around 1 from what I remember, while orthodox and ultra-orthodox have 3.3 and 6.6 respectively. What makes the difference is the degree to which they allow the religion to permeate their mundane existence, which is a factor of faith.
by squigz | 2025-09-18 21:13:32+00:00
> i.e. we've been educating people for 1,000s of years even without textbooks.

By using the tools available at the time we did, certainly. That involves physical tools like writing, but also non-physical tools like better ways of conveying and disseminating information, better ways of testing the efficacy of various approaches, etc, etc.

Education has to evolve, as it always has. While I'm not sure TFA is it, I do think LLMs will have a role to play in making learning more accessible and enjoyable for everyone, not just kids.
by Vincent-AiLangu | 2025-09-18 21:13:58+00:00
Good idea chfritz, I agree with the positives of off the shelf components. However a ham slicer is quite large and loud( I can not directly control the motor speed). And the biggest drawback is that they slice vertically and that makes it hard to place the tomato on the bun.

Slicing horizontally lets the tomato slice just fall down.
by GordonS | 2025-09-18 21:14:23+00:00
I'm using OpenObserve - it does logs, metrics and traces all under one roof. Handles alerts too.

It's been solid, but the UI is kind of clunky and a little buggy here and there. Dashboards are tricky to setup too. But it has no dependencies, and was easy to setup, and I couldn't find anything else that handled logs too.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-09-18 21:15:17+00:00
Khan academy and brilliant are both excellent. They're hand crafted and limited in subjects and depth, but i think establish the current "roof" in how perfectly structured self-learning materials would look. I've heard from teachers using them in schools and found excellent results.

AI rephrasing words better to each individual isn't interesting to me. Automatic Interactive small quizzes, puzzles, and self adjusting difficulty level would be amazing, but i don't see AI really reaching that level.

When i see AI "quiz me on this" it gets stuck asking direct factual question about the text. But a good question challenges assumptions, and prod deeper understanding.
by jm4 | 2025-09-18 21:15:20+00:00
GNOME. You have to install an extension to get a dock at all. Almost nobody runs vanilla GNOME because it's missing basic things. They refuse to have a system tray. I don't particularly like the system tray, but that doesn't change the fact that some apps continue to run the background when you quit them by closing the window. Up until recently, you had to install a system tray extension so you could properly quit programs like Steam. Finally, the GNOME developers added functionality where you can see background apps and close them, but it's hidden behind a few clicks. A clipboard manager is another one. KDE includes it by default. GNOME? There's an extension for that. And the problem with extensions is they always break every single time GNOME is updated.
by fluoridation | 2025-09-18 21:15:26+00:00
>cheaper multi-gpu setups

Nah, nobody cares about that. Even in their heyday, SLI and CrossFire barely made sense technologically. That market is basically non-existent. There's more people now wanting to run multiple GPUs for inference than there ever were who were interested in SLI, and those people can mix and match GPUs as they like.
by rglover | 2025-09-18 21:16:08+00:00
What I've found works best:

1. Assume that any model will start to lose focus beyond 50K-100K tokens (even with a huge context window).

2. Be gluttonous with chats. At the first sign of confusion or mistakes, tell it to generate a new prompt and move to a new chat.

3. Write detailed prompts with clear expectations (from how the code should be written to the specific implementation that's required). Combine these with context like docs to get a fairly consistent hit rate.

4. Use tools like Cline that let you switch between an "Act" and "Plan" mode. This saves a ton of tokens but also avoids the LLM getting stuck on a loop when it's debugging.

I recently wrote this short blog post related to this: https://ryanglover.net/blog/treat-the-ai-like-it-s-yourself

The above approach helped me to implement a full-blown database wrapper around LMDB for Node.js in ~2 weeks of slow back-and-forth (link to code in post for those who are curious).
by msm_ | 2025-09-18 21:16:14+00:00
I guess the only solution is to self-host. I've even been migrating my dedicated server to a homelab I'm slowly building. But that's a very time-consuming option, has a high chance of breakage, and not even available for 99.5% of people. And most people don't wants to spend hours and hours of private time to babysit own email server, which is understandable. Finally, it's not free.

I wonder what would have to happen for people to become more digitally sovereign, but I doubt it'll ever happen. If anything, we're going in the other direction.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-18 21:16:53+00:00
I had a friend who had one of those capacitive video disc players when I was a kid. Those got front of mind for me a few years ago when I noticed that a local fleas market had a lot of the discs but no players. I found out you could probably get a deadstock player on EBay but the belts would need replacing and when the stylus needed replacing… well they don’t make them anymore.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-09-18 21:16:59+00:00
> Star Wars missile defense project in the 80s which was impossible to fund.

You mean, it was impossible to fund until the achievement of tangible results, multiple projects were funded under that umbrella and many got rich from it, if you ask them, they'd say it was worth it.

Similarly, the people who advocate for this project are among those who'd gain from it, not among those who'd pay for it. Without that crucial difference, their story would be very different.
by cardanome | 2025-09-18 21:17:13+00:00
I mean I live in Germany where Hans Asperger oversaw the mass killing of autistic children. He decided which one were to be murdered or which had the "right kind of autism" i.e. Asperger syndrome and could serve the fatherland. (Just to be clear, the differentiation between autism and Asperger has not and had never any scientific leg to stand on.)

The term Asperger syndrome was only removed from the DSM in 2013.

For autistic children something called Applied Behavior Therapy is still the most common treatment. It is the same thing they use in gay conversation camps. Yes, literally. It can be super traumatizing to autistic children.

The way we treat neurodivergent people is absolutely abhorrent.

That said, the main issue people don't get a diagnosis is not lack of trust but lack of access. Most people can't afford it or are not able to jump over the bureaucratic hurdles to get it.
by eth0up | 2025-09-18 21:17:24+00:00
I draw the line with my computer, or dedicated computing devices. This could be quite a debate with phones, doing dozens of insidious things in the background in perpetuity. But my fucking ladder doesn't need JavaScript, nor does my freezer.

Anyway, I admire the Amish. I'm not extremely far off. I hope to actually keep stumbling in that direction. I wouldn't expect others to though.
by vkou | 2025-09-18 21:17:45+00:00
> I'm sure this is a fixable bug

I'm sure it is, but the bar for accuracy in education is way too high for a mistake as blatant as this to be allowed to slip through.

(I'm sure someone will chime in about their useless Hum 10 teacher making an even bigger gaffe, and how this can be excused, it's just a beta...)
by Lerc | 2025-09-18 21:17:46+00:00
I would be interested to see how capable it would be at going against cultural standards to preserve accuracy.

It's very hard for humans to imagine some mundane things when they go against their expectations. I would imagine AI would suffer similar issues, but there is a potential for them to do better. It strikes me as fascinating because I would consider it to be a sign of a greater level of reasoning, but because it goes against expectations would be considered worse by many.

Some examples of what I am thinking about.

Grass is only around 60 million years old, depictions of earth earlier than that frequently show grass.

Jesus did not grow a beard until a couple of hundred years after his death.
by Jtsummers | 2025-09-18 21:17:48+00:00
That's not even the real waste in DOD. The real waste is mostly in failed projects. Projects that either never deliver, or deliver years late and millions or billions over budget, typically with reduced features. They'd have to buy a million of those hot cups to come close to the waste that occurs due to these failed projects.

DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem.
by gabriel666smith | 2025-09-18 21:17:49+00:00
Haha. It's lucky that art is subjective, so I'm definitely right :-)

I wasn't saying a piece shouldn't stand on its own on first viewing - that is not hospitable, IMO. I think you misinterpreted what I was trying to say: That I like art that has prismatic qualities, ie, revealing different things when looked at from a different time and place.

This isn't mutually exclusive with the first angle you come at it from being beautiful. It's just additive.
by nickdandakis | 2025-09-18 21:18:02+00:00
Here to say that I have been working on a canvas-based app for a while now. Canvas apps are hard y'all!

I greatly appreciate tldraw and think the licensing changes are completely reasonable. The team is highly responsive on Discord, and looking forward to the company nailing down the nuances of pricing out this specific business model.

Pricing is difficult as it is, open source pricing double so, open source canvas library pricing has got to be one helluva hard problem to solve.

I would like to see more improvements to the sync portion, specifically more granular authorization controls.
by sho_hn | 2025-09-18 21:18:04+00:00
I can't quite promise yet that we will do this, but let's say there have been two recent developments that increase the probability by quite a lot:

- X11 is nearing EOL, and once we drop support for it this will get a lot less painful to do.

- If we want to switch to a virtual desktop / paging protocol that supports this we need to switch away from the current one, and it just so happens that in late 2024 a new protocol called ext-workspace made it into Wayland that is flexible enough to work for this purpose.

I'd say at this point the biggest problem is designing a UX for it that makes sense and doesn't confuse the hell out of people. If you want to contribute to e.g. that design discussion in our VDG working group that could be a good place to start.

> could I do some crowdfunding to hire a dev to do this feature and if so who?

Someone else has pledged a bounty:

https://discuss.kde.org/t/bug-fix-per-screen-virtual-desktop...
by janalsncm | 2025-09-18 21:18:47+00:00
Getting into an elite college is an arms race. Anything you can sell to a parent which will give them a leg up over other parents is a viable product. To put a finer point on it, a teacher + your product beats a teacher.

> Helping inner city kids who are 3 grades behind in reading doesn’t print money

100% and this is broadly why ed tech doesn’t move the needle.
by slg | 2025-09-18 21:18:49+00:00
>Now, why would someone take out a prominent spokesperson for their own party? They wouldn't, because that's not something that people do to other people they agree with.

This is why I think the American government is doomed in its current construction. First past the post voting has conditioned people like you to believe that everything is binary. You describe a world with only two parties that can have no dissention in those parties and no possible disagreements among their members. Isn't it obvious how flawed that mindset is?

This country desperately needs more than two options to every issue, but our system is inadvertently designed to ensure that doesn't happen.
by lioeters | 2025-09-18 21:18:51+00:00
> By that logic all communication is impossible

I interpreted it as implying all communication is imperfect, more or less. Each speaker and listener uses language from their own personal context, and reads meaning into each word from their experience, education, even personal preferences.

As for "boring", I feel it was the right word at the time. It's a rhetorical trick, maybe a click bait, to use a word in an unusual way to get attention. Here the word boring, typically negative, is used in a positive encouraging manner. That makes me want to read more to find out why.
by nradov | 2025-09-18 21:19:01+00:00
Some of us do sprint workouts every week or two as part of sports training. Those are exhausting and require some recovery but you won't get faster unless you put in work.

But your point about misleading terminology is correct. That's why modern methodologies such as Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) have adopted the more neutral term "iterations" which doesn't imply anything about velocity.

https://framework.scaledagile.com/iterations/