MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alephnerd | 2025-09-04 03:54:59+00:00
It makes me glad to see Etoile is still around.

I played around with it in HS when it was in it's alpha stages because I wanted to find a Linux distro that had the same polish of MacOS X and on which I could dev Obj-C. It was a good attempt, but sadly I haven't seen any Linux skin or distro that has solved the UX polish issue.

Edit: never mind, Étoilé did die around the time I thought it did in the early 2010s.
by KnuthIsGod | 2025-09-04 03:56:28+00:00
"The health tech giant’s OEC 9800 and OEC 9900 Elite C-arm Systems appeared on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Medical Device Recall list. The Class 2 recall pertains to the system's built-in shielding and collimation accessories.

“...Specifically, impacted systems are missing the full layer of lead tape in the collimator covers... The missing lead tape is not detectable by the user,” the notification reads.

The recall falls under the Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act due to concerns about the potential for excess radiation exposure."
by dchftcs | 2025-09-04 03:57:00+00:00
People obviously turning out LLM code uncritically should be investigated and depending on the findings made redundant. It's a good thing that it allows teams to filter out these people earlier. In my career I have found that a big predictor of the quality of code is the amount of thought put into it and the brains put behind it - procedures like code review can only catch so many things, and a senior's time is saved only when a junior has actually put their brain to work. If someone is shown to never put in thought in their work, they need to make way for people who actually do.
by lelandbatey | 2025-09-04 03:57:36+00:00
If I open a new YouTube page incognito, I am not asked to agree to any kind of TOS. I agree to nothing, I merely start watching videos. Where is there a requirement that I must watch the ads if I have never agreed to such?

Even then, I bring this all up as a YouTube Premium membership holder, someone who has been paying for YouTube Premium since the very day it was announced as YouTube Red! I am also a sponsor block addon user, so I skip the "this video is sponsored by Stupid shoes" or whatever, read by the creators. According to you, am I stealing money from them as well, somehow?
by FloorEgg | 2025-09-04 04:00:12+00:00
If intelligence is treated as a scale, should it be measured primarily by (a) the diversity of valid actions an entity can take combined with its ability to collect and process information about its environment and predict outcomes, or (b) only by its ability to collect and process information and predict outcomes?

In either case, the smallest unit of intelligence could be seen as a component of a two-field or particle interaction, where information is exchanged and an outcome is determined. Scaled up, these interactions generate emergent properties, and at each higher level of abstraction, new layers of intelligence appear that drive increasing complexity. Under such a view, a less intelligent system might still excel in a narrow domain, while a more intelligent system, effective across a broader range, might perform worse in that same narrow context.

Depending on the context of the conversation, I might go along with some cut-off on the scale, but I don't see why the scale isn't continuous. Maybe it has stacked s-curves though...

We just happen to exist at an interesting spot on the fractal that's currently the highest point we can see. So it makes sense we would start with our own intelligence as the idea of intelligence itself.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-04 04:00:23+00:00
Last I played with Elementary (couple months ago), there was a finickiness and latency issue with icons.

Elementary also isn't able to enforce a single unified design pattern the same way Apple is able to from a UX perspective.

Linux distros tend to overindex on power users and cli users (makes sense, given the technical userbase) at the expense of building a user experience that is much more user friendly for nontechnical personas.
by igor47 | 2025-09-04 04:00:24+00:00
The point of publishing it seems to me to be "kids in classrooms also think this is a problem". The subject matter is often talked about in the upper echelons and among adults, it's good to see a kid's prospective. It's equivalent to an essay by a kid saying they also struggle with the effects of social media -- it creates a broader consensus environment, helping to build buy in for a shared paradigm
by 1gn15 | 2025-09-04 04:01:42+00:00
I don't find it particularly unusual. With the caveat that the political compass is a huge oversimplification:

Auth right: proprietary software

Auth left: code of conduct (since it's not particularly anarchist; it clearly defines how power works, instead of aiming for structurelessness)

Lib right: open source (MIT-based, corpo projects)

Lib left: free software (AGPL, anti telemetry, anti CLA, usually no code of conduct, anarchist/hacker in nature)
by LocalH | 2025-09-04 04:01:55+00:00
Ok, so the scanned version was indeed 8080 BASIC. However, the 6502 source has been available unofficially since at least 2015. https://www.pagetable.com/?p=774

Nice to see it out there under the MIT license, certainly. This makes it legal to actually use in many scenarios where it wouldn't be legal to use it previously.
by ai_coder42 | 2025-09-04 04:02:45+00:00
I once asked a senior developer "how will you figure out which class/method is causing the server to crash". They gave me all sorts of answers other than "i'll add appropriate log statements and check the logs".

anyone who has actually worked for a while with large data sets should be able to answer your question. but since it "sounds simple", it probably causes most folks to freeze or go onto a tangent.

Unfortunately, because of how our industry treats interviews, people "prepare" for it and that puts even good folks in the mindset of prepared answers rather than practical answers.
by cnst | 2025-09-04 04:02:49+00:00
Can you kindly explain why Blink's monopoly is bad, but iOS Safari's monopoly is good?

Whilst at it, can you kindly explain how Blink is even a monopoly if it's actually separately distributed by 6+ distinct and unrelated/competing vendors, namely, Google, Microsoft, Brave, Vivaldi, Yandex, Opera, etc? Out of these 6 vendors, a total of at least 3 are running an entirely independent search engine, so, these aren't just "fronts", but real competitors.

Whilst at it, can you kindly explain why is it better than I have to use a Windows machine to configure my keyboard or mouse, or the Bluetooth headset, instead of using a web browser on any device with any OS? Or why do I have to download extra apps to get video conference access instead of using a Blink-based web browser from one of like half a dozen vendors?
by 3RTB297 | 2025-09-04 04:04:12+00:00
Around 2010-2015 there was the cloud-based version of this called Grooveshark.

Basically, you streamed each individual file from other people's libraries, which theoretically (at the time) avoided the Napster problem. "You never download the content" they said. It had EVERYTHING as long as the right people were online. Audio books, random weird remixes, you name it.

UMG ultimately took them down.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-09-04 04:04:32+00:00
I just don't understand the point of this kind of argument. I suspect you and I would agree on the reason why people focus this way - they see the guy doing drugs on the sidewalk (or the shooting on the news, or their friend who got mugged, or...), think it's spooky, and decide without looking up any numbers that it shouldn't happen again. It's true that a statistical analysis of mortality or injury risk would focus on other things, but they didn't run that analysis and don't agree that it should dictate their focus.
by anigbrowl | 2025-09-04 04:04:37+00:00
No kudos for falsely putting words in my mouth. Every time I think something's beneath you you manage to surprise me.

It's a simple concept: to the extent that capital is allowed to move freely across borders, so should labor. That doesn't argue for the abolition of nations of borders, but the removal of unecessary friction on natural market flows.
by bayesianbot | 2025-09-04 04:06:20+00:00
So far I’ve just YOLO'd it. But if I install other software directly from git and the source isn’t fully reliable, I’ll usually at least check recent changes, or have codex take a look through the source, just like I read through PKGBUILDs when installing from AUR. It feels crazy that I then update LazyVim and suddenly pull in 150 new commits, some just minutes old, all with free access to my system.
by adityaathalye | 2025-09-04 04:07:59+00:00
Not at all, I'm all about tangents. The blog post itself is a tangent.

Programming is writing for me. So, yes I am the same... I need to type (or sometimes write it longhand), to make progress.

I gave LLMs a fair shake, but generative mode usage overwhelms my nervous system. I could use 'em, maybe, for pattern-recognition. But using an expressive language (Clojure) means I can eyeball my source code and/or grep through it to maintain a good enough view of my system. This also applies to most third-party code I use from the Clojure ecosystem. Libraries tend to be small (a few thousand lines of code), and I can skim-read through them quick enough.

I know there is a black art to it that one is supposed to learn, in order to get useful results, but so far, the incentive isn't strong enough for me.

So, hand typing / writing it is... might as well feel satisfied using my nice keyboard and little notebook, on my way to obsolescence. No?
by dangus | 2025-09-04 04:09:36+00:00
It seems like the real problem here is the curriculum. The school should be removing students' ability to use AI on these assignments, and it really isn't that hard to do.

Phones shouldn't be in the classroom, and devices used in the classroom shouldn't have any access to AI.

Students shouldn't really have homework anyway so I think it's completely reasonable to just have kids doing work on pen and paper in the class for the most part.
by antonvs | 2025-09-04 04:09:46+00:00
That Oxford definition highlights why work such as Nagel's is needed. It can plausibly be argued that LLMs or other AI systems can qualify on all those counts, but many (most?) people wouldn't consider them to have conscious experience.

Characterizing that distinction is surprisingly tricky. "What is it like to be..." is one way to do that. David Chalmers' article about "the hard problem of consciousness" is another: https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf
by crazygringo | 2025-09-04 04:10:14+00:00
You're missing the part where the money Google spends comes back to it in even more ad revenue. Google doesn't pay Apple for access to data. They pay it for traffic that makes them ad money.

If Microsoft spent those billions, it would be receiving ad revenue too.

It's not money thrown down the drain. And it's not for "data".

There's nothing anticompetitive here when it comes to Microsoft choosing whether or not to enter the market.

It's not about acquiring some magic level of data. A startup doesn't have data. Microsoft does. It's not an issue.
by anon-3988 | 2025-09-04 04:10:15+00:00
Imagining yourself flapping your hands in the air is not "what its like to be a bat". People are fooling themselves when they can honestly imagine being a bat. Even the question "I think therefore I am" does not mean that "I" exist. "I" here implies a center of thinking. There is no center. There is only reality and its content. And thinking is apparently one of its content.
by astrange | 2025-09-04 04:12:21+00:00
This is a spiritual error called monism. It's taking non-dualism too far.

> As there are no real difference between this rock and the other rock behind the mountain that I can't see.

There is a real difference between the two; there must be because they're in different places. Monism requires you to deny actually existing differences by saying they're not "real".

> There should be no difference between my thoughts, senses, feelings, emotions etc and that of other people.

This is what in therapyspeak you'd call "not having boundaries". You aren't the same thing as other people; you can tell because the other people don't think that, won't let you borrow their car, etc. It opens them or yourself up to abuse if you think this way.
by vidarh | 2025-09-04 04:13:13+00:00
GC doesn't matter much for a simple compiler, as you either don't need to allocate much (single pass, Wirth-style compilers that generate code inline) or most of what you allocate becomes garbage all at once at the end (AST).

In my half-finished Ruby compiler prototype, even before I added type tagging, and so allocated every integer on the heap, I just didn't add a GC for a long time because it was fine to just leak, because the compiler isn't generally long running.
by thefirstname | 2025-09-04 04:13:27+00:00
I built Manga Translator – an AI tool for translating manga.

Unlike general-purpose translators, this is optimized specifically for manga:

Detects and translates speech bubbles, captions, and sound effects

Preserves layout, font style, and multi-layer text

Understands cultural nuances, idioms, and character relationships

Supports Japanese → English/Chinese (multi-language expansion planned)

It’s designed for readers, translators, and creators who want accurate translations without losing context or style.

Live here: https://mangatranslator.online/

Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback.
by mountainhiker | 2025-09-04 04:14:27+00:00
This is publicly available:

- People who are regularly contributing to the project: https://codeberg.org/org/comaps/members

- Not yet incorporated, plans likely to have a non-profit in Europe.

- All donation spending is on OpenCollective - https://opencollective.com/comaps

- People who want to contribute to the project can just do so on Codeberg, there is no master plan, people just discuss the work, anyone can provide input : https://codeberg.org/org/comaps/members

For comparison, Organic Maps shares nothing about donations and is opaque about direction and decisions. If those question need to be answered before using an app, then it may be time to drop Organic Maps.
by Larrikin | 2025-09-04 04:14:32+00:00
I've already started getting results infiltrated by SEO but for AI. Deep research did return seemingly a top book when I was looking into Ansible. I independently verified it with my own searching in a few different places.

But the other recommendations seemed like crap and when I followed the sources they seemed like AI generated garbage for AI that I couldn't find doing my normal searching.
by squigz | 2025-09-04 04:14:35+00:00
Of course not, because that would be annoying and unwieldy. On the other hand, you can add expansive dictionaries for every language to an ereader for the low, low weight of... nothing at all.

I suspect if you compare the usage of dictionaries among paper book readers vs ereader users, the latter use them more often - probably at least partially because they're so much easier to use. I suspect the incidence of not understanding a word would be pretty much the same.

For myself, I read a lot of older books with archaic and niche terms, so it's practically required to be able to look things up if I want to really understand what's going on.

(As an aside, I looked up a definition on Google just writing this to ensure I was using a word properly. :P)
by celeritascelery | 2025-09-04 04:15:22+00:00
This was a great post that really gets into a lot of the details. As the author of one of the Emacs "clones" I wrote a detailed comment about some of this over on Reddit that might be of interest to readers here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1n7i586/comment/ncbc...
by chneu | 2025-09-04 04:15:45+00:00
a lot of places do it automatically so everyone is paying slightly more on every purchase. A lot of gas stations openly advertise a lower cash price.

There is a local supermarket chain that doesn't accept credit cards at all because they'd have to raise their cash price.

Everyone pays for credit card fees. Not just the people using CCs. Then CC companies pocket those crazy high fees while giving a lil bit back as "rewards".

This is a good example of a system we've normalized in this country which harms most people.
by the_gastropod | 2025-09-04 04:16:59+00:00
The market for reading the NYTimes in Spanish… There’s also a big enough market for reading it in Chinese! (https://cn.nytimes.com)

Since these are online-only versions of the NYTimes, and immigration sources change throughout history, no. This particular market did not exist 100 years ago.

However, the portion of non-English speakers has remained about the same since the 1910 census began asking about this. ~100 years ago, German was the most prominent non-English language spoken in the U.S., and there were over 500 German-language newspapers in circulation. Yiddish newspapers were common in New York. And Spanish newspapers were widely read in Texas. In Chicago, Polish newspapers were common. San Francisco had the Chinese World (世界日報) newspaper.

Your idea that, 100 years ago, everyone spoke English, and we didn’t support non-English speaking is just flatly wrong.
by brettpro | 2025-09-04 04:17:21+00:00
I recently implemented Fish for a project and found it adequate for TTS but wildly impressive in voice cloning. My POC originally required 3-10 audio samples but I removed the minimum because it could usually one shot it.

The model is good, but I will say their inference code leaves a lot to be desired. I had to rewrite large portions of it for simple things like correct chunking and streaming. The advertised expressive keywords are very much hit and miss, and the devs have gone dark unfortunately.
by ares623 | 2025-09-04 04:18:27+00:00
This is the part that really grinds my gears. Careless People.

> The impact on human lives is incredible. People are being fired because they’re not adopting these tools fast enough. People are sitting in jobs they don’t like because they’re afraid if they go somewhere else it’ll be worse. People are spending all this time trying to get good at prompting and feeling bad because they’re failing.
by linguae | 2025-09-04 04:18:55+00:00
Étoilé was so promising….the idea of using OpenStep (via GNUstep) infrastructure in ways that went beyond NeXTstep or Mac OS X. It felt like an even deeper embrace of the Smalltalk influences of the OpenStep API to enhance the desktop computing experience. Étoilé wasn’t merely a clone of NeXTstep or Mac OS X; it was its own thing that could’ve been a compelling contender to KDE, GNOME, and even macOS.

Unfortunately Étoilé seems to have been inactive for a decade, and even Apple seems to be abandoning its Xerox PARC influences as the old guard retires and passes away (RIP Steve Jobs, Larry Tesler, and Bill Atkinson). Ever since Apple struck gold with the iPhone and derivative platforms, Apple hasn’t been the same.

I’d like to see the ideas of Smalltalk and Lisp machines revisited for the modern era as a model for workstation-class personal computing. Smalltalk and Lisp environments pride themselves on flexibility and malleability (though it’s understandable to rethink some of these things in an era where security is very important), while mainstream personal computing these days feel less like productivity boosters (remember “the bicycle for the mind”) and more like advertising platforms and anti-competitive, rent-seeking moats.
by abustamam | 2025-09-04 04:19:01+00:00
If Gmail blocks me from making an account, I could use Yahoo mail or whatever, for email. But Gmail is more than just email. It's an entire identity. I can't use an android phone out of the box without a Google account. I ~bought~ licensed some movies from YouTube and those would just go poof. All the sites I used Sign in With Google would essentially be lost to me since I can't use that Google account.

The logical answer might be to just not use Sign in with Google but some services don't even let you use username/PW, it's sign in with Google/apple/Github etc.
by soraminazuki | 2025-09-04 04:19:13+00:00
That's a lot of words filled with straw man analogies. Essentially, you're claiming that you can strengthen your cognitive skills by having LLMs do all the thinking for you, which is absurd. And the fact that the study is 3 months old doesn't invalidate the work.

> Who would be happy with a crummy essay if humans could learn telekinesis?

I'm glad that's not the professional consensus on education, at least for now. And "telekinesis," really?
by mrandish | 2025-09-04 04:19:18+00:00
> perhaps lead to other BASIC implementations being open sourced as well.

A good start would be for MSFT to also open source the related BASIC-68 and BASIC-69 versions.

> "The extended 8 KB version was then generalized into BASIC-80 (8080/85, Z80), and ported into BASIC-68 (6800), BASIC-69 (6809), and 6502-BASIC." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BASIC
by tobyhinloopen | 2025-09-04 04:19:29+00:00
> The last time I heard the phrase “continuous improvement” or “test-driven development” was before COVID.

I have prompt docs precisely on SOLID, TDD and all kinds of design patterns… but yes I see a lot of untested code these days.

AI has been incredibly helpful at analyzing existing, unknown to me, projects; basically for debugging and searching in these repo’s.
by juxtaposicion | 2025-09-04 04:19:58+00:00
I'm not sure I understand. Your model shows that different group buckets (eg 20-24yo vs 25-29yo) peak at different years (in your figure, 2022 vs 2024) despite being driven by the same dynamics. Is that expected? I (naively?) expected the same groups to rise, fall and have peaks at the same times.
by nsonha | 2025-09-04 04:20:58+00:00
I don't know about other protocols but for this one it's because AI vendors decided to ship their agents in the form of TUIs, which are not programmable. They need to be wrapped into something to be build on top of.

I actually prefer something like opencode which is one TUI to rule them all (albeit still lacking in some area), it also provides an an SDK that abstracts away the underlying model.
by thefirstname | 2025-09-04 04:21:10+00:00
I built Physics GPT – an AI-powered physics problem solver. It’s optimized specifically for physics, not just a generic chatbot. Some features:

Step-by-step solutions with clear reasoning

Image recognition for equations, circuits, and diagrams

Specialized circuit analysis for resistors, capacitors, inductors

Real-time AI responses with LaTeX math rendering

Covers classical mechanics, E&M, relativity, quantum mechanics, and more

Designed for students, educators, researchers, and engineers who need accurate, reliable physics solutions.

Live demo here: https://physics-gpt.org

Feedback is welcome!
by kragen | 2025-09-04 04:21:10+00:00
Yeah, I never got around to writing a GC for Ur-Scheme either—you could argue that it's also "half-finished" but it does successfully compile itself correctly. It's not so much the GC that matters as it is the ability to allocate on the heap without much ceremony. I should have thought of that before I posted, and I appreciate the correction.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-04 04:21:33+00:00
GNUStep is a good example that the bare bones language and compiler being open source it is not enough, when everything else doesn't come along.

Saying this as someone that used Afterstep and Windowmaker alongside GNUStep, and did seat a few times on the GNUStep room at FOSDEM.

Last time I checked was at the level of OS X Panther, and modern Objective-C still wasn't supported.