MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by reissbaker | 2025-09-04 09:35:14+00:00
Ed Zitron plainly has no idea what he's talking about. For example:

Putting aside the hype and bluster, OpenAI — as with all generative AI model developers — loses money on every single prompt and output. Its products do not scale like traditional software, in that the more users it gets, the more expensive its services are to run because its models are so compute-intensive.

While OpenAI's numbers aren't public, this seems very unlikely. Given open-source models can be profitably run for cents per million input tokens at FP8 — and OpenAI is already training (and thus certainly running) in FP4 — even if the closed-source models are many times bigger than the largest open-source models, OpenAI is still making money hand over fist on inference. The GPT-5 API costs $1.25/million input tokens: that's a lot more than it takes in compute to run it. And unless you're using the API, it's incredibly unlikely you're burning through millions of tokens in a week... And yet, subscribers to the chat UI are paying $20/month (at minimum!), which is much higher than a few million tokens a week cost.

Ed Zitron repeats his claim many, many, excruciatingly many times throughout the article, and it seems quite central to the point he's trying to make. But he's wrong, and wrong enough that I think you should doubt that he knows much about what he's talking about.

(His entire blog seems to be a series of anti-tech screeds, so in general I'm pretty dubious he has deep insight into much of anything in the industry. But he quite obviously doesn't know about the economics of LLM inference.)
by godelski | 2025-09-04 09:35:40+00:00
> The observable reality is that LLMs can do mathematical reasoning

I still can't get these machines to reliably perform basic subtraction[0]. The result is stochastic, so I can get the right answer, but have yet to reproduce one where the actual logic is correct[1,2]. Both [1,2] perform the same mistake and in [2] you see it just say "fuck it, skip to the answer"

> You cannot counter observable reality

I'd call [0,1,2] "observable". These types of errors are quite common, so maybe I'm not the one with lying eyes.

[0] https://chatgpt.com/share/68b95bf5-562c-8013-8535-b61a80bada...

[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/68b95c95-808c-8013-b4ae-87a3a5a42b...

[2] https://chatgpt.com/share/68b95cae-0414-8013-aaf0-11acd0edeb...
by qcnguy | 2025-09-04 09:36:31+00:00
This is a common problem with "your job is bullshit" rhetoric. It says a lot more about the speaker than the people whose jobs they're criticizing.

The most famous example is David Graeber, an academic who wrote a whole book on what he called "bullshit jobs". He claimed over half of all jobs were bullshit. But of the jobs he identified as such, most of them were actually valuable (receptionist, lawyers, programmers doing maintenance work). He just didn't understand why other people valued them. And, he was an activist deploying flowery rhetoric to make an argument for far-left politics, which is why nearly all the jobs he identified were in the private sector. Ironically, the most obviously bullshit job revealed by his work was his own, but for some mysterious reason academic activists were not identified as people with bullshit jobs.

Lots of people noticed this. Some even did studies on it! They found that the number of people who said in surveys their jobs were useless was only 20%, and of those 20% a lot of them had jobs that were objectively not useless. Instead it was cleaners, janitors, garbage collectors and similar who tended to feel their jobs were useless. Clearly "work is useless" is simply a proxy for "I feel like a loser" and not an objective evaluation of whether the work actually provides value to others.

People are pretty rational. When you find a lot of people doing something that looks irrational and there isn't a clear link to ideology or coercion, then it probably makes sense given information you don't have.
by myrmidon | 2025-09-04 09:36:41+00:00
I do not disagree with you entirely, but I feel this almost borders on self-delusion.

The sole purpose of ads is to (probabilistically) shift the targets spending behavior in favor of the one buying the ads, nothing more, nothing less.

While ads can have utility from the victims point of view (contain relevant information), this is entirely incidental.

If you want product updates or information, getting that from dedicated, independent 3rd parties is preferable in literally every situation I can think of.
by 11mariom | 2025-09-04 09:37:09+00:00
Is there any alternative with ~A5 size?

I take a lot of notes, schematics, etc in paper notes a5 and I was thinking about moving to digital world, but definietely not for the price of any remarkable device…

Got kindle for reading - and I just love it, got back at reading everyday, and that was problematic with standard, paper books.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-09-04 09:38:00+00:00
I have fully vibe coded several apps at this point (none professionally, but stuff I actively use in my life). One thing I don't think everyone understands is that it still takes time. I need to do countless rounds of testing, describing the exact problem I find, rinse and repeat again and again for hours and hours. I happen to enjoy this way of working and I do think it's faster than writing the code myself, but it's not fast.
by narmiouh | 2025-09-04 09:38:01+00:00
The way ads are run these days is almost completely wrong!

- Lies are ok

- Thrusting your product in a users face, doesn't care if the user cares, Just because I like golfing, doesn't mean every new golf ball brand needs to hit me up all the time.

- Product with Money wins, not necessarily the right product

- Most people are oblivious to their psychological drivers, Ad makers have learnt to exploit those to drive sales.

This is one area AI can be very helpful as it improves, I face a problem, I let my agent loose and it finds the right solution and thus right products, provides comparative data for me to choose without the products being thrust in my face everywhere I go (behavioral ads) or also when I don't need it.
by rorads | 2025-09-04 09:38:17+00:00
EDIT: I think the below is correct, but I’ve just seen in the main product landing page that for a certain benchmark it’s an order of magnitude cheaper AND faster than AWS glue, so that’s the target market by the looks of things.

——

I don’t think so - probably more in the realms of spark and, based on the roadmap, airflow.

For me it would be about doing big data analytics / dashboarding / ML or DS data prep.

My understanding is that Snowflake plays a lot in the data warehouse/lakehouse space, so is more central to data ops / cataloguing / SSOT type work.

But hey that’s all first impressions from the press release.
by unixhero | 2025-09-04 09:38:42+00:00
I meant such topics such as Nicolas Taleb's antifragile - where an organism cannot be fed unlimited calories to become resilient to the times ahead.

Another example is within engineering with scarce inputs. The result is often much more ingenious than when the inventor or engineer has no limitations whatsoever.

Trying to figure out what to read or what to watch when everything in the knoen universe is at your fingertips, is another challenge where scarcity helps. I do like where we have ended up, regarding this though :).

And so on...
by vasekrozhon | 2025-09-04 09:39:14+00:00
Hi, the author here. It was meant as a light joke, and I totally agree that we should not feel bad if an AI can predict the next letter better than us. Maybe I should rephrase it to something like "IQ test for AIs" to hint a bit more about what's to come -- this is what we train the AIs for to be intelligent.
by Anton_vasiliiev | 2025-09-04 09:40:12+00:00
The demand for digital betting solutions keeps growing, and many startups and enterprises are exploring sports betting app development to capture this market. But what really defines success in such a competitive space? Is it real-time odds integration, seamless payment gateways, advanced security, or user-friendly design that keeps players engaged? With regulations and compliance varying across regions, how can developers ensure scalability while also building trust with users?
by gizajob | 2025-09-04 09:40:22+00:00
Boomer harems lol that’s a new one on me but undoubtedly a thing.

My whole career in the UK I’ve noticed a similar thing in HR harems - in many places, particularly recruitment companies but it’s common everywhere, 90%-100% of the HR staff are women who then employ more and more women over men while having a generally poor understanding of the requirements for a role. I can’t help but feel like a group of women will have a natural disposition for adding extra women rather than men, while prioritising communication and networking over competencies like creative thinking, problem solving, generalism, and self-starting.
by bilekas | 2025-09-04 09:41:35+00:00
So this is kind of interesting, and I had a look at the spec.

> The data parameter is the BodyInit data that is to be transmitted.

However I couldn't find any information in the Spec itself about the size of the data until it said this :

> The user agent imposes limits on the amount of data that can be sent via this API: [...] If the amount of data to be queued exceeds the user agent limit [...] , this method returns false; a return value of true implies the browser has queued the data for transfer. However, since the actual data transfer happens asynchronously, this method does not provide any information whether the data transfer has succeeded or not.

Am I missing something or does this seem as unreliable as any other method for achieving this ?

How about, and this might be a crazy idea, letting the users leave without annoying them ?
by Shorel | 2025-09-04 09:42:20+00:00
I used it in an old EEE PC laptop because of its lower resource usage compared with Ubuntu.

Elementary is (or was at the time of testing) wasteful of screen real state, there are huge spacers on the toolbars and in a low resolution screen it's just ridiculous.

It could look good and also have sensible design. It only looked good and had IMHO bad design.
by kruffalon | 2025-09-04 09:42:36+00:00
Well, that's not entirely true, you just have to be a bit particular about when and how to start the conversation.

Things I find work most of the time in Sweden to get started is complaining about something mutually bothersome, annoying or scary that you don't have any power over, things like:

- A third party being rude. So if you notice that someone gets annoyed by someone else you can huff and puff a little over that.

- the weather, obviously and often!

- if someone hurts themselves or trips (doesn't have to be as big an injury as in the article)

- children are great conversation starters, regardless if they are cute, loud, awake, still or whatever. And this is one of the few positive topics that work.

The trick is also to not keep talking about the annoying thing, because that is quite boring!

If you get more courageous you can also just ask about a place, piece of public art or even the way to some random thing, in my experience (a whole life) swedes are very helpful :)

My favourite question is to ask people who clearly hope to see me go away about the names of places, I don't know why that topic works so well to tear walls down, but it does.
by fsflover | 2025-09-04 09:43:32+00:00
> I still have all the facts about my life

No, you don't. Google knows more about you than yourself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2840916, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584589
by rbanffy | 2025-09-04 09:44:10+00:00
It seems like the current emulation has 2 2SIO boards and the telnet port maps to them in sequence. The user id seems to come from the emulated physical port the user connects to. Being S-100, nothing really prohibits having 8 2SIO boards for up to 16 connections (provided their emulation allows us to set different IO addresses). It looks like the Interfacer 3 and 4 used a register to assign more than one user to a single UART IO address, allowing (on the 4) up to 32 terminals on 4 UART addresses.
by flir | 2025-09-04 09:45:03+00:00
There was a long history of the PM listening to it, and it set the agenda for the day. At some point after Thatcher that stopped happening (Blair, maybe? Definitely by Cameron), and it became a lot less important to politicos to appear on it.

But yes, the BBC was always the voice of the Establishment (which is fine) but it's definitely been neutered. You can see it in the documentary output very clearly.
by qcnguy | 2025-09-04 09:46:15+00:00
All three of those links are claiming right wing people are mentally ill.

Academics have all kinds of indirect theories for why people outside of academia don't agree with their politics. Ironically given the subject of the website, one thing they almost never do is just go outside of academia, sit down with people who disagree with them and talk to them as equals. They spam bot-filled websites like Mechanical Turk with surveys trying to prove things about the imaginary people in their own minds, and then publish "findings", but they don't actually talk to people.

The most obvious and logical explanation for why right wing people exist is that they disagree with left wing politics, believing them to lead to bad outcomes. Papers like those three are a dime a dozen, but one thing you'll never find is studies that just directly ask people disagree with common academic beliefs. Instead it's taken as axiomatic that leftism is moral and correct, so anyone who disagrees must have some other deeper psychological reason to disagree (loneliness, reading the wrong websites, not getting enough sex, whatever). Lots of non-replicable studies get produced, grants are awarded, and academics give lots of interviews to the NYT about their search for One Weird Trick to convert people to their worldview that doesn't involve any actual policy changes.

The professors doing such studies should look in the mirror. If they're saying social isolation and informational monoculture leads to extremism, then it's hard to find somewhere more isolated and monocultural than universities. But of course they lack sufficient insight to consider that.
Show HN: Prototyper – AI design platform with its own compiler and runtime
by thsvrrck | 2025-09-04 09:46:29+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m Thijs, new to the community and excited (and a bit nervous) to share what I’ve been working on: it's called Prototyper.

The motivation: I was curious how much more "taste" you could get out of an LLM if you built the entire infra yourself: tool calling, code execution, rendering—instead of layering on top of existing stacks. Over the past year I built a custom compiler, runtime, and design engine from scratch to see if this could make LLM-driven design genuinely better.

A few details:

- Own compiler + code runtime → no shadcn, no third-party UI kit, no external execution layer.

- Instant feedback (no compile/refresh lag).

- Deterministic design controls that integrate with llm-generated code.

Because we control the full stack, we can try things that I haven’t seen elsewhere, like inference tightly coupled with live code execution, or new approaches to integrating design controls with llm generated code.

It’s still early, and I’d love feedback from the HN community: is this approach actually better than what’s out there today? Everyone gets a free week to try it.

Happy to dive into the tech in the comments! :)

—Thijs
Show HN: I built a tool that turns cryptography papers into working Python code
by bowtieditaliano | 2025-09-04 09:46:42+00:00
Hey HN! I'm a cryptographer who's implemented dozens of papers over the years. Even with my background, turning a paper into code takes me days or weeks. Not just because the math is hard but because translating from academic notation to working code is tedious and error-prone.

Last month I was implementing a new commitment scheme and thought: why am I doing this manually for the 50th time?

So I built PapersToApp. Upload a cryptography paper PDF, select the algorithm page, get Python code in seconds. (Not production ready of course)

How it works technically: two passes: select the PDF page and send it to Claude API. The next stage is having multiple passes through the Claude API to get all dependencies straight. In the future will support even other topics such as machine learning or AI in general.

What makes this different: This is for people who already understand cryptography but want to experiment quickly: when I read a new paper, I want to test edge cases, try different parameters, see how it behaves. Now I can do that in seconds instead of hours or days. You can also use this as a tool to understand cryptography a little better or if you prefer to read code instead of math.

Example: Fed it a paper on truncated Schnorr signatures. Got back clean Python showing the signing/verification with the truncation step clearly implemented. What would've taken me hours of careful transcription took 5 minutes. Could immediately start testing how different truncation lengths affected security margins.

Current limitations:

* Cryptography/blockchain papers only * Python output only * Reference implementations, not optimized, not production ready * No free tier (7-day money-back guarantee, no question asked, just email info@paperstoapp.com with your registration email)

Built this for myself but figured others might find it useful. Especially helpful when you need to quickly prototype something from a paper for a larger system.

https://paperstoapp.com
by troupo | 2025-09-04 09:47:06+00:00
> It's wrong - both that it's general "current advice", and the advice itself when it does pop up.

Unless you actually care about the web and its users. Then it turns out it's a very wise advice.

https://w3c.github.io/webcomponents-cg/2022.html

Web Components Community Group: 2022. You are one of the authors:

--- start quote ---

It's worth noting that many of these pain points are directly related to Shadow DOM's encapsulation. While there are many benefits to some types of widely shared components to strong encapsulation, the friction of strong encapsulation has prevented most developers from adopting Shadow DOM, to the point of there being alternate proposals for style scoping that don't use Shadow DOM.

...

Selection does not work across or within shadow roots. This makes fully-featured rich-text editors impossible to implement with web components. Some of the web's most popular editors have issues that are blocked on this functionality

...

Shadow boundaries prevent content on either side of the boundary from referencing each other via ID references. ID references being the basis of the majority of the accessibility patters outlines by aria attributes, this causes a major issue in developing accessible content with shadow DOM.

--- end quote ---

Those are just the tip of the iceberg as these are very explicitly stated in the doc.

Then there's the issues of shifting the responsibility to both developers and consumers to handle Shadow DOM correctly.

Styling/themeing is still pain despite several different specs like shadow parts.

Don't use styles in your components too much, use Javascript to inject CSS into document and shadow trees or else there will be performance impact https://w3c.github.io/webcomponents-cg/2022.html#constructab...

Don't use too many shadow roots or there will be performance impact https://front-end.social/@5t3ph/115135994774490769 (linked in the sibling comment by @azangru)

You can't participate in forms until you write more JS for it, and still your submit buttons will be broken with no solution in sight.

etc. etc.

You don't have to take my word for it. Here's Nolan Lawson, emphasis mine:

--- start quote ---

https://nolanlawson.com/2022/11/28/shadow-dom-and-accessibil...

Shadow DOM is a kind of retcon for the web. As I’ve written in the past, shadow DOM upends a lot of developer expectations and invalidates many tried-and-true techniques that worked fine in the pre-shadow DOM world.

--- end quote ---
by vasekrozhon | 2025-09-04 09:47:37+00:00
Hi, the author here.

@JoshCole Thanks -- I also like that lecture by Ilya, added it to the resources now.

@0ffh -- Yeah I hope the page does not come across as me trying to claim some new revolutionary insights. People like Ilya have been talking about this years ago - I am just trying to package it into a hopefully more accessible format.
by rbanffy | 2025-09-04 09:47:43+00:00
> Using these tiny floats for classic engineering workloads

I think that's the idea. Back in the stone age, I did that with Apple II floats (40-bits) because I was hitting quantization problems in a Mandelbrot explorer program I wrote. Wrapping my head around it in BASIC was hard. You can only go so far when your abstraction level is that low.
by realA12l | 2025-09-04 09:47:54+00:00
David Chisnall (one of the main developers behind Étoilé) has been working full-time on CHERI for the last decade to bring hardware that enables Étoilé's vision.

> I’d spent a lot of the previous years on Étoilé, which was a project to build a user-focused desktop environment that was built out of composable components with end-user programming as a key focus. We were inspired by the STEPS project at VPRI, which tried to build an entire system in under 20,000 lines of code. Our rule was simpler: we aimed to keep individual components to under 10 KLoC, which is small enough that a single person can understand it. This meant that we needed to be able to both use expressive languages and build expressive DSLs. We were starting from an Objective-C base, which gave us a nice model for late-bound components but brought along a lot of C baggage.

> Unlike STEPs, I didn’t want to rewrite the world in high-level languages. I wanted to use things like libavcodec and libavformat as-is, but without bugs in them being able to destroy the invariants that higher-level software depended on. I’d tried building isolation mechanisms with the MMU and found it severely limiting. I’d also looked at Mondrian Memory Protection, but the table-based approach didn’t compose well with language-level abstractions. Early CHERI wasn’t the right thing either, but it was close enough that I felt I could evolve it into the right shape.

> Most of my fingerprints in CHERI ISAs are with that goal in mind. I want to be able to compile existing C/C++ libraries for a CHERI compiler and use them safely from higher-level languages and use them directly. I’ve written a bit about this before:

> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-dont-care-memory-safety-dav...

> I want to be able to have documents embed scripting-language programs that can directly call large native libraries and still have strong guarantees that my system won’t be compromised. The key point is this observation:

> Isolation is easy, (safe) sharing is hard.

> It’s trivial to fully isolate two components. Separate cores, sandboxed processes, or WebAssembly sandboxes can give this kind of isolation, depending on the degree of isolation that you need. Most interesting things are built from communicating components and keeping things mostly isolated, but able to communicate safely, is much harder. For example, Rust says FFI is unsafe, but if you wanted it to be safe except that objects passed from Rust to C may contain arbitrary bit patterns after the call, that’s harder. You can do it with deep copies, but that’s a lot of overhead and very hard to do in the general case. You can do it with CHERI fairly easily, including richer things like deep immutability (in CHERIoT, we can also provide shallow and deep no-capture guarantees).

https://lobste.rs/s/ttr8op/lobsters_interview_with_david_chi...