MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Tor3 | 2025-09-15 15:10:00+00:00
Yes, this is indeed strange for me, and, I would guess, most people (people not from the US). The only reason I even knew cake mixes exist is because a former Au Pair told me about it, years ago. Apparently her host family was shocked when said Au Pair made cake the "normal" way, i.e. with eggs, flour, sugar etc.

Baking cakes from scratch is easy. Even I could make an apple cake very quickly with a recipe (I quickly found one online, but I could as well just have used the recipe book from the bookshelf), and I had a nice cake ready shortly after, never having made an apple cake before. My wife said "I don't have the time, you do it". And I did.

Mix? Full of additives and whatnot, I bet. I won't eat that.
by lapcat | 2025-09-15 15:10:31+00:00
> No consistent ideology or underlying theory of government

> just blind support for your chosen side's leaders.

These are two different questions.

I'm not sure whether the political parties should have consistent ideologies. Even if they did, it's impossible for two or even three or four political parties to represent the diverse political views of over 300 million Americans. Each of the two major US parties have always consisted of shifting coalitions of interests.

On the other hand, loyal partisanship leads to the phenomenon that I described: inventing ideological terms as a kind of personal identity for the partisan, giving the pretense that their loyal partisanship is backed by consistent, stable views, when in fact the parties are demonstrably shifting coalitions of interests.
by virgilp | 2025-09-15 15:11:25+00:00
> Don’t bother predicting which future we'll get. Build capabilities that thrive in either scenario.

I feel this is a bit like the "don't be poor" advice (I'm being a little mean here maybe, but not too much). Sure, focus on improving understanding & judgement - I don't think anybody really disagrees that having good judgement is a valuable skill, but how do you improve that? That's a lot trickier to answer, and that's the part where most people struggle. We all intuitively understand that good judgement is valuable, but that doesn't make it any easier to make good judgements.
by ayoubb88 | 2025-09-15 15:11:26+00:00
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by jsbisviewtiful | 2025-09-15 15:11:31+00:00
I understand the sentiment about not wanting a smartphone but the amount of pocket space saved and efficiency of the device makes up for most of the shortfalls. In high school I wore cargo shorts/pants so carrying 4~ devices at a time was easier but nowadays I wear slim jeans or lightweight linen pants, mostly. Only needing my wallet and phone works too well when I don't have a bag. Definitely miss the quality of point and shoot cameras compared to a smartphone though
by Analemma_ | 2025-09-15 15:11:45+00:00
This is all true, but are they actually any worse than any other crypto exchange? I just take it as a given that a crypto exchange can lock me out and steal my money at any time with no legal consequence, and so I try to keep as little money in them as possible. And at least PayPal is older and likely to have more senior engineers and fewer vibe coders, and thus be less likely to lose everything because of an elementary security error.
by Findecanor | 2025-09-15 15:13:01+00:00
The word "jihad" has a wider meaning than "holy war". It would better be translated into "worthy struggle" — with "worthy" being very subjective.

Islam is in fact the largest religion (by worshippers) in the world today, so Frank Herbert's assumption that a culture derived from it would be dominant in a future society is just extrapolation.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-09-15 15:13:21+00:00
In the end neither Think Different or PC vs Mac had much of an effect on getting them any decent market share really. Those were the years when they were barely holding on.

Yes the iMac had big success, but mainly because it was an attractive piece of furniture.

iPad and then especially iPhone is what changed the formula completely. And with it they switched from focusing on a kind of "Think Different" model where they emphasized their oddity and uniqueness to being a luxury lifestyle brand instead.

They even dropped their historical "user friendly" mottos ("It Just Works" and "Computer for the rest of us") because those definitely didn't sound like slogans that high end luxury (or luxury wannabe) consumers would be attracted to.
by fwip | 2025-09-15 15:13:27+00:00
There's a few options out there that have noticeably better compression, with the downside of being less widely-compatible with tools. zstd also has the benefit of being very fast (depending on your settings, of course).

CRAM compresses unmapped fastq pretty well, and can do even better with reference-based compression. If your institution is okay with it, you can see additional savings by quantizing quality scores (modern Illumina sequencers already do this for you). If you're aligning your data anyways, probably retaining just the compressed CRAM file with unmapped reads included is your best bet.

There are also other fasta/fastq specific tools like fqzcomp or MZPAQ. Last I checked, both of these could about halve the size of our fastq.gz files.
by detourdog | 2025-09-15 15:13:29+00:00
Those luminaries have such dense ideas that practicalities require glossing over the details. Each one of their ideas has had mass adoption but the details are often lost in implementation. Each year it becomes more feasible for an individual to hold theirs ideals and produce a thing of quality. Mass production and the ease of distribution has never been more accessible. Their ideas will hit when the timing is right.
by cgadski | 2025-09-15 15:13:31+00:00
There's a lot of beautiful writing on these topics on the "pure math" side, but it's hard to figure out what results are important for deep learning and to put them in a form that doesn't take too much of an investment in pure math.

I think the first chapter of [1] is a good introduction to general facts about high-dimensional stuff. I think this is where I first learned about "high-dimensional oranges" and so on.

For something more specifically about the problem of "packing data into a vector" in the context of deep learning, last year I wrote a blog post meant to give some exposition [2].

One really nice approach to this general subject is to think in terms of information theory. For example, take the fact that, for a fixed epsilon > 0, we can find exp(C d) vectors in R^d with all pairwise inner products smaller than epsilon in absolute value. (Here C is some constant depending on epsilon.) People usually find this surprising geometrically. But now, say you want to communicate a symbol by transmitting d numbers through a Gaussian channel. Information theory says that, on average, I should be able to use these d numbers to transmit C d nats of information. (C is called the channel capacity, and depends on the magnitude of the noise and e.g. the range of values I can transmit.) The statement that there exist exp(C d) vectors with small inner products is related to a certain simple protocol to transmit a symbol from an alphabet of size exp(C d) with small error rate. (I'm being quite informal with the constants C.)

[1] https://people.math.ethz.ch/~abandeira//BandeiraSingerStrohm... [2] https://cgad.ski/blog/when-numbers-are-bits.html
by gnabgib | 2025-09-15 15:13:54+00:00
Please don't post job ads as submissions to HN.

A regular "Who Is Hiring?" thread appears on the first weekday of each month (or Jan 2). Most job ads are welcome there. Only an account called whoishiring is allowed to submit the thread itself. This prevents a race to post it first.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
by jollyllama | 2025-09-15 15:14:21+00:00
Yes, I lost interest at the point where entirely all of the on/off ramps to Bitcoin submitted to universal data sharing with the central government in the interest of greater profitability. At that point, "being your own bank" is gone, and the process is equivalent to withdrawing cash from a normal bank, and the value proposition of Bitcoin is limited to its features as a deflationary speculative asset.
by megamindapps | 2025-09-15 15:14:23+00:00
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By connecting habits, moods, and reflections in one place, EvoSoul creates a clear picture of your overall well-being. Whether you want to build consistency, manage stress, or simply reflect on your day, the app adapts to your journey and helps you stay mindful of both your progress and your inner state.
by ho_schi | 2025-09-15 15:14:40+00:00
The Garmin Edge run very well without a smartphone or even a computer. Bluetooth File-Sharing from/to Edge is built-in. And they can sync themselves via WiFi. I favor them over Wahoo because they work standalone :) And with Linux you can feed them via USB easily.

The fitness-trackers without a smartphone are more problematic. They’ve WiFi integrated but I think they sync only via Bluetooth and the smartphone? Syncing via Garmin Express should be possible only on macOS or Windows. I think they provide also USB access on Linux.
by Tepix | 2025-09-15 15:14:56+00:00
That's not the only study that concluded that your cognitive abilities decline when using LLMs. There have been at least eight. Here are two:

"The impact of digital technology, social media, and artificial intelligence on cognitive functions: a review" (2023)

Result:

AI/digital overuse causes "digital dementia" with impairments in memory, attention, and decision-making; multitasking and offloading reduce gray matter in key brain areas, worsening sustained focus and analytical abilities.

"From tools to threats: a reflection on the impact of artificial-intelligence chatbots on cognitive health" (2024)

Result:

Excessive AIC reliance parallels "use it or lose it" brain principles, leading to underutilization and cognitive atrophy; interactive chatbots deepen dependency, risking long-term decline in core skills like memory and problem-solving.
by Y_Y | 2025-09-15 15:15:00+00:00
As you compose fuzzy operations your errors multiply! Nobody is asking for perfection, but this tool seems to me a straightforward way to launder bad data. If you want to do a quick check of an idea then it's probably great, but if you're going to be rigorous and use hard data and reproducible, understandable methods then I don't think it offers anything. The plea for citations at the end of the readme also rubs me the wrong way.
by Lerc | 2025-09-15 15:16:16+00:00
I'm aware that it lets you do things in a single pass manner, but this is the instance where I think the cost for allowing that is too great.

I always thought there must be a better solution, like emitting the compiled function body first which just increments the offset whenever a space for a variable is required and emit the function entry after the function exit last, so you can set up the stack frame with full knowledge of it's use. Then the entry can jump to the body. Scoping to blocks would let you decrement the offset upon exiting the block which would result in less stack use which would almost always be more beneficial than the cost of the additional jump.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-09-15 15:16:20+00:00
Safari is one example of a native AppKit “unified” titlebar+toolbar, as is the Finder.

And yep, all those listed (VS Code/Cursor, Chrome, and Firefox) are examples of fully custom third party window chrome, which is why they’re so variable. A lot of cross-platform software does this. It’s worth noting that Firefox at least lets you toggle on the standard titlebar — right click the toolbar, click “Customize Toolbar…”, and toggle the “Title Bar” checkbox in the bottom left corner.
by SXX | 2025-09-15 15:17:00+00:00
Talking of cheap and powerful devices one can also look at Chinese UZ801 4G LTE (Qualcomm MSM8916) dongles. They cost like only $4-5 and pack quite impressive HW: 4GB eMMC, 512MB RAM, actual 4G modem sometimes with 2 sim switching support. Since it's actually old Android SOC there is even GPU and GPS in there. And a lot of work was already done on supporting them:

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Zhihe_series_LTE_dongles_...

https://github.com/OpenStick/OpenStick

So yeah if you looking for hardware platform for weird homelab projects that's can be it.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-15 15:17:33+00:00
When I use a phone app store I am always looking for a specific app by name and often having to avoid copycat apps, which often buy ads so they appear above the real app. One thing you notice about phone app stores is that they don't put the search box in a prominent place but hide it out of the way because they want you to click on chum links to chum apps. I'd never browse the app store for entertainment or go looking for "an app for that" because I know I'd just be disappointed.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-09-15 15:17:48+00:00
It doesn't even matter if someone is actually looking or not, what matters is that owner has the perception that others are looking, so will act on that.

You don't think many people are judgmental on appearances or at least think they are being judged?

That's the main reason why people get a better paying job, buy a fancier car, fancier clothes, nicer haircut, go to the gym, take Ozempic, etc so they can influence how they are perceived.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-09-15 15:17:58+00:00
> Also not ideal for security if you like to sleep/hibernate on a laptop.

Why not? I presume you're still running a lockscreen that will trigger on sleep/hibernate via whatever the equivalent of swayidle+swaylock is.

> Who am I kidding, how many laptops actually sleep or hibernate properly when running Linux anyway...

More than you think, though it does depend on hardware. I have no use for hibernation, but I couldn't tell you the last laptop I owned that didn't sleep fine on Linux.
by furyofantares | 2025-09-15 15:19:24+00:00
I'm sorry, but is producing 10 lists of 15 items each really 50 peoples' worth of work? The amount of effort this would take today without the use of a chatbot seems overblown. Or with the use of a chatbot, but fact-checked, for that matter.

edit: I'm not questioning how much work it was in the days of print. I think it's fairly false to paint it as if AI has much to do with the transition from high effort lists to low effort. I don't think it happened overnight that it went from 50 brains to 1, these lists have become easier to produce and far less valuable over the past few decades, I suspect the number of people involved had dwindled a lot before anyone used a chatbot to do it.
by const_cast | 2025-09-15 15:19:48+00:00
Homes are not low-risk or stable at all - you transfer the risk to your job.

If you lose your employment and you have a home, that's a much riskier situation than if you're renting. Because, if you cant find a job in time or in a very small location radius, you must sell.

The mobility of renting lowers the risk associated with extraordinary life events which requires relocation.
by marssaxman | 2025-09-15 15:20:10+00:00
This strikes me as the same sort of semantic game one plays when claiming that "humans are actually fish"; while technically true, this drains the term of its utility.

While I take your point about economy, in my kitchen it would actually take less time to make a cake from flour, sugar, butter, and eggs, because we always have them - whereas buying a Betty Crocker mix would require a trip to a grocery store, and not the convenient one around the corner I usually visit.

Nor are the results entirely fungible: I'd always prefer to avoid ingesting preservatives, artificial flavors, corn syrup, etc.
by iruoy | 2025-09-15 15:20:11+00:00
> It stands to reason that Apple wouldn't have developed this feature if they weren't using it. Where? We have no idea. But they must be using it somewhere. The fact that none of us have noticed exactly where suggests that we're interacting with webviews in our daily use of iOS without ever even realising it.

This is what stood out to me. I've never really suspected webviews and can't think of a place now.
by bonoboTP | 2025-09-15 15:20:11+00:00
People want to belong to a tribe. I think it's often quite a tossup where a young person ends up, depending on friends or whichever online circle accepts them best. It's also not rare for young people to flipflop between nominally widely opposing tribes before setting into one. People gradually learn all the opinions they are supposed to have on the various issues to truly belong to the tribe. It's not unlike learning the dogmas of a religion. It's much much more convenient socially to speak the same language and have the same cultural references and opinions to bond over and feel camaraderie about and curate a bubble of friends following the same opinion-setters, vs. creating one's own grab-bag idiosyncratic set of opinions that doesn't fit neatly into either well known combo-deal. You gotta support either this football team or the other one. People who start to lecture about how they like the goalie of the one team, but the striker of the other are just "not fun at parties", are kind of annoying and hard to relate to, especially online where people decide in a split second whether to upvote or downvote based on a fast pattern matching check to my tribe / enemy tribe.
Launch HN: Trigger.dev (YC W23) – Open-source platform to build reliable AI apps
by eallam | 2025-09-15 15:20:18+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Eric, CTO at Trigger.dev (https://trigger.dev). We’re a developer platform for building and running AI agents and workflows, open-source under the Apache 2.0 license (https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev).

We provide everything needed to create production-grade agents in your codebase and deploy, run, monitor, and debug them. You can use just our primitives or combine with tools like Mastra, LangChain and Vercel AI SDK. You can self-host or use our cloud, where we take care of scaling for you. Here’s a quick demo: (https://youtu.be/kFCzKE89LD8).

We started in 2023 as a way to reliably run async background jobs/workflows in TypeScript (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34610686). Initially we didn’t deploy your code, we just orchestrated it. But we found that most developers struggled to write reliable code with implicit determinism, found breaking their work into small “steps” tricky, and they wanted to install any system packages they needed. Serverless timeouts made this even more painful.

We also wanted to allow you to wait for things to happen: on external events, other tasks finishing, or just time passing. Those waits can take minutes, hours, or forever in the case of events, so you can’t just keep a server running.

The solution was to build and operate our own serverless cloud infrastructure. The key breakthrough that enabled this was realizing we could snapshot the CPU and memory state. This allowed us to pause running code, store the snapshot, then restore it later on a different physical server. We currently use Checkpoint Restore In Userspace (CRIU) which Google has been using at scale inside Borg since 2018.

Since then, our adoption has really taken off especially because of AI agents/workflows. This has opened up a ton of new use cases like compute-heavy tasks such as generating videos using AI (Icon.com), real-time computer use (Scrapybara), AI enrichment pipelines (Pallet, Centralize), and vibe coding tools (Hero UI, Magic Patterns, Capy.ai).

You can get started with Trigger.dev cloud (https://cloud.trigger.dev), self-hosting (https://trigger.dev/docs/self-hosting/overview), or read the docs (https://trigger.dev/docs).

Here’s a sneak peek at some upcoming changes: 1) warm starts for self-hosting 2) switching to MicroVMs for execution – this will be open source, self-hostable, and will include checkpoint/restoring.

We’re excited to be sharing this with HN and are open to all feedback!
by cluckindan | 2025-09-15 15:20:58+00:00
There are reusable vapes and reputable stores carry only those, but they are generally many times more expensive than disposable vapes, which are favored by smugglers (profit margins) and underage users (price point and potential seizing by parent/teacher/police).

Disposable vapes put young people in contact with career criminals and organized crime, who will be only too happy to oblige even if the customer has no money. The result is young people in debt to criminals, which has the exact same ramifications as getting in drug debt. Those young people can then be coerced to commit other crimes to cover their debts.
by thewebguyd | 2025-09-15 15:21:06+00:00
Its unfortunately common when it comes to Windows troubleshooting. "Just create a new user," "Just reinstall the OS," etc. There's an entire suite of tools made by a third party for migrating user profiles between accounts and machines because it is so common.

I spent the first half of my career as a windows admin and I'm glad to be out, working entirely on macOS and Linux now. macOS has its own warts, but I'll take it any day over Windows.
by unmotivated-hmn | 2025-09-15 15:21:08+00:00
What they offer is ubiquity and the turnkey nature. You can walk into any nearby smoke shop, get one and use it immediately. You don't have to carry around a bottle of liquid and extra coils and paper towels/napkins for the inevitable leak.

I stopped vaping a little while ago but when I did vape, there was no clear standard of pod systems. You sure could walk into a nearby smoke shop but it was unlikely that you'd find your ideal pod/coil/liquid.

It's hard to take back the convenience people have gotten used to. I think one idea could be that disposable vapes become recyclable vapes. They should cost $15 more and buyers should get back $10 when they return it for recycling. This is nicotine we're talking about so the buyer is always coming back anyway.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-09-15 15:21:24+00:00
I really wish there was a paradigm where we could track people down for death/bomb threats(/swatting)/CSAM, but where the police were genuinely prohibited from accessing the same information for anything less. I guess the missing link between CSAM and piracy is probably fraud/scams? It's pretty hard to argue that law enforcement should be allowed to track someone down for an implausible death threat but not for stealing tens of thousands of dollars from a senior citizen, but then it's harder to establish a clear line between fraud/scams and piracy. I guess with fraud/scams you can just track the cash and not the other vectors?

I dunno, I have similar feelings about license plate cameras and CCTV. I don't think there's any big mysterious reasons why I can, in five minutes, imagine a system that's actively protected from abuse, but somehow it's never what's proposed, I think it's because privacy advocates tend to be opposed to the people giving cops new toys so all the proposals for giving cops new toys have minimal input from privacy advocates. It's a bummer.