MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Animats | 2025-09-01 07:01:36+00:00
By "computer" I mean what we call a computer today - a stored program general purpose electronic digital computer.

There were many early machines which checked some, but not all, of those boxes. IBM's electronic multiplier. The Harvard Mark I. The SSEC. Colossus. Reservisor. Western Electric Plan 55-A. General Railway Signal's NX. The Bell Labs Complex Calculator. The Automatic Odds option for racetrack totalizators. The Mathatron. All of those machines did something that resembled computation.

The late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s were full of strange special-purpose electronic digital hardware that didn't quite make it to a computer, because the parts count to get to a general purpose machine was too high.

Then came microprocessors, and it became cheaper to use general purpose microprocessors in dedicated applications. Now all those weird machines are forgotten.

Here's a brochure from Teleregister, which built custom special purpose systems for railroads, the military, airlines, stock exchanges, and such, from before WWII into the 1960s. There's no computer in those things, but a lot of electronics.
by Aachen | 2025-09-01 07:01:49+00:00
The author doesn't seem to understand that you don't need your PlayStation 5 to travel, pay your rent, or authenticate to government services. That's the fundamental difference and why it is valuable that Android is open

I agree that there is currently no expectation for Sony to open up their OS to run just any software (such as pirated games). Nobody said that. There should be an open widely supported mobile OS because that's fast becoming about as fundamental to modern life (in my country at least) as roads and electricity are

Android being so easy to make software for is what hooked me as a teenager, after failing to develop for my previous Symbian phone. Taking that away is possible now because the alternatives are all gone. Where are you going to migrate to without making major concessions in your life? You'll have to forfeit popular messengers that your family, friends, landlord, etc. are on; no more mobile banking; extra fees to use online banking at all; extra fees to legally use public transport; no downloading of episodes or music from streaming services for offline use; no phone calls depending on your country's 2G status; etc.
Ask HN: How much would you pay to get in front of 8,500 people?
by karanveer | 2025-09-01 07:02:15+00:00
Hi guys, I have a newsletter with 8.5k members and im looking if anyone would be willing to sponsor my newsletter.

I have never had a sponsor before, but I would be happy to my first go here on HackerNews, and happy to learn about this way of monetization and publicly discussing too.

Niche - TV ShowBiz News - Weekly Mails. Members - ~8.5k

Lmk what you guys think!
Show HN: I built an AI for divination practice
by kuzej | 2025-09-01 07:02:22+00:00
Hey HN,

For years, I've been studying divination systems like Tarot. My biggest frustration was the lack of objective feedback. How do you know if you're genuinely improving your interpretive skills, or just telling yourself a good story?

To solve this, I built a web app that provides verifiable practice against an AI.

The idea is based on an old training game. Here’s how it works:

The AI generates a secret (e.g., conceptually "hides" an object, or determines an outcome to a short story). You use your chosen divination method (Tarot, runes, astrology, anything) to figure out the secret. You get an immediate, black-and-white result: you were either right or wrong. This creates a tight feedback loop that forces you to be precise. It's a "gym" for your skills, away from subjective interpretation.

The platform is system-agnostic. It’s not about which tool is "real," but about providing a sandbox to test your ability to connect symbols to concrete outcomes.

I built this for myself because I'm an introvert and couldn't find a consistent practice partner, but I thought others in this niche might find it useful too.

You can try it here: https://shefu.space/

I'd love to hear your thoughts.
by brulenaudet | 2025-09-01 07:02:30+00:00
Hello everyone, wanting to have some fun this week, I created an API that allows you to easily access AI models (in this case, Google's) from the Shortcut app in order to analyze data from my apps and make the most of it thanks to the generative capabilities of advanced models.

It costs me nothing, and I think it might be good to share it so that others can build on it.

In README.md, you will find everything you need to get started and put your own microservice into production, which can be pinged from the application's HTTP request features.

You will simply be asked to have a free Cloudflare account and an API key obtained from Google's AI Studio.

Feel free to take a look and get back to me if you encounter any problems during deployment.

Here is the GitHub repo where you can find all the source code and run it by your own: https://github.com/louisbrulenaudet/genai-api
by the-mitr | 2025-09-01 07:03:39+00:00
I have a procrastination problem. but when the work really needs to get done one of the things that helps me is to set smaller time frames using the pomodoro technique. this way you do focused work for 25 mins, then take a break for 5 and so on. 25 mins may not look much at the beginning, but focused work in those 25 mins 4-5 times a day can actually get the work done much better than loitering around for 5-6 hours with no focus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
by josephg | 2025-09-01 07:03:51+00:00
> It is usability vs security.

I think a lot of it is "nobody has bothered building it yet" vs security.

Eg Qubes runs everything in Xen isolates - which is a wildly complex, performance limiting way to do sandboxing on modern computers. There are much better ways to implement sandboxing that don't limit performance or communication between applications. For example SeL4's OS level capability model. SeL4 still allows arbitrary IPC / shared memory between processes. Or Solaris / Illumos's Zones. But that route would unfortunately require rewriting / changing most modern software.
by taw1285 | 2025-09-01 07:03:59+00:00
Thank you for this article. I have yet to discuss with my doctor about this. But I have noticed several issues that are severely lacking for me compared to my peers:

1. My brain drifts away very easily. Even in an important work conversation, my brain just starts thinking about a completely different project or upcoming meeting. 2. I have a hard time remembering things/events that my spouse and others can easily recall (ie: which restaurants we have been to) 3. I can't seem to form an opinion on very basic things like do you like restaurant A or restaurant B better? do you like option A or option B? I can't decide or come up with any heuristics.

At first I chalk it up to I am being too critical about myself and others are having the same issue. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Can these all be rolled up in the same conversation with my doctor?
by fzimmermann89 | 2025-09-01 07:04:44+00:00
How foreign is the language - was it likely included in pre training to some degree? Does it use grammar, syllables, and logic similiar to one of the large languages? Your approach assumes there is an easy to learn mapping between context in your target language and concepts in a prettained llm.

Can you get more text written in the low resources language?

Are you ok to share the name of the language?
by com2kid | 2025-09-01 07:06:44+00:00
Because if part of my tests involve calling an OpenAI endpoint, I don't want to pay .01 cent every time I run my tests.

Because my tests shouldn't fail when a 3rd party dependency is down.

Because I want to be able to fake failure conditions from my dependencies.

Because unit tests have value and mocks make unit tests fast and useful.

Even my integration tests have some mocks in them, especially for any services that have usage based pricing.

But in general I'm going to mock out things that I want to simulate failure states for, and since I'm paranoid, I generally want to simulate failure states for everything.

End to End tests are where everything is real.
by madaxe_again | 2025-09-01 07:07:38+00:00
You typically don’t go back to the daily grind, as this kind of event often substantially changes your priorities.

I speak for myself, although I know I am not alone in my trajectory. About a decade ago I was ill enough for long enough with an uncertain enough prognosis that I was getting my affairs in order. At the same time a close friend died of an agressivo cancer, aged 32.

I decided to choose quality over quantity. Fuck my business, fuck my career, fuck stupid status games and absolutely fuck climbing the infinite pile of skulls.

Sold up. Put everything on 00 and gave the wheel a spin.

It’s been almost a decade. I still live in the woods, start my days with a coffee and birdsong and “ein heiliges ‘ja!’”, still have zero temptation to return to my life before.
by ipnon | 2025-09-01 07:09:10+00:00
The evolution of video games has stabilized. There is not much more to add to the standard "AAA" title. Hardware improvements made for the landscape in which creative utilization flourished, but it is sometimes now impossible to tell the difference between this generation of games and the last. All of the innovation will have to occur in indie games now, for which there is little pressure to have cutting edge graphics or mass market appeal.
by greatgib | 2025-09-01 07:09:24+00:00
Indeed, you are a not an expert, and you are doing the same as reinventing your own broken crypto. Please do not!

This has the appearance of anonymous when it is not.

First, the moment that a value, being it a nonce, a random value or whatever will be common on both side, there is no anonymity anymore.

Then, there is timing attack, where visiting a website, you then need to go to your bank. And the bank will sign at a specific time for a specific timeframe.

Then, the need to manually "copy" the signature. I guess you don't see what size, difficult characters this has to have, but totally impracticable. So in the end people would use that to pretend that it is possible with anonymity skipping that step.

Then, if the bank doesn't know the website where you went, gambling.com will know what is your bank.

And in a lot of countries, age limit might be different for some activities, like gambling allowed at 21, porn at 18, or even rules would not be the same by countries. So again, you will be leaking the country and potentially you will have to leak to the bank the activity that is intended.

And what do you do when banking app force you to have a certified Apple or Google spying approved phone? Bank already have too much power and responsibility and easily abuse of it, so it would be better to not give them even more.

So again, please refrain of inventing stupid solution like that, that can give the wrong impression to the bad persons that it is possible, justifying laws and co, when it is not possible without costing hardly on our privacy!
by Nevermark | 2025-09-01 07:10:52+00:00
> Is the resulting number constructible?

That's a good one.

I am going to say it absolutely is. Then acknowledge why others may feel very strongly that it isn't.

So that's quantum mechanics, which from a field theory standpoint is completely deterministic. It just appears non-deterministic to us, because we are also superpositions. We are quantum structures too. And our field would keep splitting in two, at each measurement/decision point, so our total quantum field would remain completely predictable.

But, it is true that each of our superpositions would have the experience of a completely random set of digits, going off to infinity.

But, despite it adding additional physics and not explaining any more, some physicists seem to still think that there is a real collapse, not just an already explainable experience of collapse, of quantum fields.

So, I think it is fair to say that if that was true, then truly unconstructible events would be happening. There would be no way to form an expression or algorithm to ever predict the flow of digits, even in principle.

So you nailed the best possibility for it that I can think of.

And this is a little circular, but between collapses adding a new phenomenon with no additional explanatory power (Occam's Razor be damned!), and the magic event decisions, are why I don't believe collapses happen.

Collapses don't just imply that a magical event decision is made whenever we set up some careful experiment with one particle, but that all possible event situations in space-time, even in us, are constantly being magically decided as we are exposed to information about them, all the time.

Given virtual particles are constantly frothing around even in empty space, this means that all of space-time is constantly flooding us with an unimaginable amount of magically created information. The magic bandwidth would be insane.

One magical fundamental physical constant seems implausible to me. But 10^(very very big number) of magical decisions animating all of our universe and us every pico-second? Well, that would just be ... unconstructible!
by nativeit | 2025-09-01 07:11:03+00:00
I think one of the big bummers about this kind of thing is that it’s not really something that could be planned or chosen for. We tend to change slowly and subconsciously through the things we prioritize and routinely practice, our brains and bodies adapt to our “normal”.

The times we tend to adopt changes quickly and consciously are most often with circumstance and external pressures, and the shortcomings implicit with such rapid adaptations can manifest as neuroses/complexes. In traumatic scenarios this might be something like PTSD, but it isn’t necessarily all downsides, either. People taking therapeutic amounts of MDMA or psilocybin (as in, occasionally, not “micro dosing” or whatever Elon Musk seems to be doing) might experience a durable improvement in subjective happiness and optimism.

Disclaimer: this is my own intuitive and wholly unqualified understanding of this, which was arrived at via discussions with behavioral therapists, but I’m an IT consultant, wtf do I really know about it?

I will say that I’ve found mindful meditation highly effective for treating mild to moderate PTSD. It isn’t fast to get started, but after a few weeks of training, you can deploy your own chemical Xanax directly within your own brain using breathing patterns. It really worked for me. I used the app “Headspace” to start out.
by maltelandwehr | 2025-09-01 07:11:19+00:00
How can we adapt that to LLMs? Do LLM providers pay for access to these articles?

Do I as a user have to do a micro transaction whenever an LLM generates an answer on one of those paywalled articles? Because as a user, I do not wish to read the quality journalist analysis, I wish for it to be part of the LLM answer that is tailored towards me.
by eska | 2025-09-01 07:11:26+00:00
Now imagine your solution is not on a distributed system and go through that list. Centralized logging? There is nothing to centralized. Secrets management? There are no secrets to be constantly distributed to various machines on a network. Load balancing? In practice most people for most work don’t use it because of actually outgrowing hardware, but because they have to provision to shared hardware without exclusivity. Caching? Distributed systems create latency that doesn’t need to exist at all, reliability issues that have to be avoided, thundering herd issues that you would otherwise not have, etc.

So while there are areas where you need to introduce distributed systems, this repeated disparaging comment of “toy hobby projects” makes me distrust your judgement heavily. I have replaced many such installations by actually delivering (grand distributed designs often don’t fully deliver), reducing costs, dramatically improving performance, and most importantly reducing complexity by magnitudes.
by lucideer | 2025-09-01 07:11:47+00:00
"Passkeys" is a new brand name slapped on an older open, interoperable technology, so it's difficult for me to be "against passkeys" as they haven't fundamentally changed anything.

Before the branding they were known as FIDO2 "discoverable credentials" or "resident keys".

Two things have changed with the rebrand:

1. A lot of platforms are adopting support for FIDO2 resident keys. This is good actually.

2. A lot of large companies have set themselves up as providers of FIDO2 resident keys without export or migration mechanisms. This is the vendor lock-in part (no export feature), but it's not a feature of the underlying tech itself.

Fwiw FIDO are actively working on some standard for exporting/importing keys so that's something.

If you want to use passkeys without lockin, just use Bitwarden or KeepPassXC - they all have full support. Or you can also store a limited number of passkeys on your FIDO2-compatible hardware key like Yubikey or the open-source Nitrokeys.
by kleiba | 2025-09-01 07:12:00+00:00
I'm not a dog person but I think that one is totally explainable: if you're walking your dog in the neighborhood and it just did its business on the side walk, sharp eyes will be watching you to make sure you pick up after Milo or Daisy.

But who likes to walk around with a bag of fresh dog goodies in their hand? So it seems to be only natural that once out of sight enough, mommy is just gonna drop that gift bag at the nearest occasion.
by mordae | 2025-09-01 07:12:27+00:00
Imagine Lenovo refusing to service your ThinkPad because you've compiled your own kernel.

Charging IC has NTC thermistor and battery absolutely must withstand the system running on 100% and then some.

As for battery lifetime, batteries are cheap, unless you glue them to an expensive assembly and force people to replace whole assembly as phone vendors do.
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-09-01 07:12:37+00:00
Finally, someone said it.

> 100 distinct code bases deployed to it

I've worked in a company, where the owner would spend money on anything except hosting. Admin guy would end up deploying a new app on whatever VPS that had the most RAM free at that time.

Ironically, consolidating this mess to "one big server", which was my ungrateful job for many months, fixed many issues. Though, it was done by slicing the host into tiny KVM virtual machines.
by dolphinscorpion | 2025-09-01 07:13:46+00:00
Bottom line, you will always get content, whatever that may mean.

But great content creators will want to be rewarded one way or another. Book writers get paid, movie makers as well, so why shouldn't those who share their wisdom in a blog post? If someone is making money off your content and you aren't, you will not be happy. When it's not even attributed to you, it's even worse.

SEO is a response to Google's incentives, and Google can fix it if it wants.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-09-01 07:13:57+00:00
> If I teach English as a foreign language, am familiar with the kind of mistakes non native speakers make when writing in English, and can easily identify texts written by non native speakers - that’s not confirmation bias.

And if you immersed yourself in the writings of non-native English speakers for a significant amount of time, then a paper written by a native English speaker was presented without you knowing who the author was, would you look for the same kind of mistakes in it that you have been finding?
by can16358p | 2025-09-01 07:14:56+00:00
Or:

One (a big entity with enough resources) should take this as an opportunity and create a new, third truly open alternative to iOS and Android (no, I'm not talking about an AOSP fork, I'm saying something totally new) and let iOS/Android have their thing as they want, letting consumers decide between the three instead of forcing vendors into ridiculous business decisions like forcefully opening their own platforms for others.
by AngryData | 2025-09-01 07:15:11+00:00
I agree, but the problem is that is actually socialism by definition and as soon as people hear the word socialism or communism they freak the fuck out because capital owners has made people believe that socialism or communism is the end-times and all will starve and die under a dictatorship. Yeah it doesn't really make sense that worker owned and/or controlled and straight up dictatorship control are mutually exclusive, but you aren't going to have too great of luck convincing people that they, and likely most of their family and friends, were completely duped for the last 90+ years and completely bought into the lie.

All that said, co-op businesses have seen slow but steady growth for decades now.
by WalterBright | 2025-09-01 07:16:08+00:00
> some types of manufacturing were done without even the aid of dimensioned drawings

A friend of mine ordered a set of dimensioned drawings for the P-51 Mustang. He was investigating the possibility of going into business making P-51s.

But when talking to people who owned P-51s, he was told that the drawings were made after-the-fact. The true design was encapsulated in the jigs and machinery developed for the factory floor, and they'd all been scrapped after the war.

The drawings were useless.

I'm pretty sure that P-51s are maintained these days by making replacement parts by hand and custom-fitted, a very expensive proposition.
by extraisland | 2025-09-01 07:16:27+00:00
> Huh? In what way does application sandboxing take away my freedom? What can I do today that I can't do with a sandbox-everything-by-default model?

I've just explained that sand-boxing causes issues with file access, clipboard sharing etc.

Every hoop you add in makes it more difficult for the user to gain back control, even if that is modifying permissions yourself. Most people will just remove permissions out of annoyance.

If you remove control, you remove people's freedom.

> In my mind, it gives me (the user) more freedom because I can run any program I want without fear.

Any security mechanism has a weakness or it will be bypassed by other means. So all this will give you a false sense of security.

The moment you think you are safe. Is when you are most unsafe.

> Cool! Yeah this is the sort of thing I want to see more of. The drag & drop problem is technically solvable - it just sounds like they haven't solved it yet. (Capabilities would be a great solution for this.. just sayin!)

I don't. It is a PITA. Eventually people just turn it off. I did.

The reality is that if you want ultimate security you have to make a trade offs. Pretending you can make some theoretical system where those trade off don't exists just isn't realistic.
by crote | 2025-09-01 07:17:15+00:00
Sure, but what about 3rd party docks which do have adequate cooling? And how is it a good user experience to just silently refuse to work?

If Nintendo genuinely cared about experience they'd just follow the standard and work with any dock, then pop up a notification if it notices that the device is overheating - perhaps even with a "We recommend the official dock" text.

The current behaviour is completely unacceptable and needlessly user-hostile. There's no way around it: their USB-C implementation is broken.
by Aachen | 2025-09-01 07:18:01+00:00
What worries me is that Google has a fairly legit argument to say "then Apple should as well". But we've accepted Apple's status for so long now, a lot of consumers are stockholmed into thinking giving away control is the only way to have a good phone (evidence: see any thread discussing that maybe Apple should allow other vendors to also use their smartwatch hardware to offer services in non-smartwatch-hardware markets that Apple also offers services in. Half the users seem like they're brainwashed by the marketing material they put out). I don't know that we can convince the general public anymore that 1984 is bad (thinking of Apple's own 1984 ad, specifically) and, without general public, there can theoretically also not be political will

I was part of this problem. I've accepted what Apple is doing because I had Android. I didn't think they'd come for me next so I didn't speak up