MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by khazit | 2025-09-29 23:52:22+00:00
I’m still working on Simple Observability:

https://simpleobservability.com

I built it because I needed two things:

- A super easy-to-install monitoring tool that doesn’t require bash scripts or config files

- A mobile-friendly, UX-first interface where I can check everything from my phone

It’s now pretty feature complete. I can see a full picture of all the servers and VPS I run straight from my phone.

Setup is one command, no config files, and everything else happens in the UI. There’s a catalog of predefined alert rules, and creating new ones is easier than anything else I’ve used.

There’s a free tier if anyone wants to try it!
by ibaikov | 2025-09-29 23:52:34+00:00
This is great. I thought about a different model even before plasticlist: make a subscription and test various products, but people will have a number of upvotes based on their sub streak. They vote for food to test, and then you show results to everyone subbed. Kind of like what examined does, but they do deep dives into medical topics for subs. I think this model will work better than the one you currently have. Awesome project anyways!

It is extremely weird to me that countries don't do that on taxpayers money and show the results publicly, this is what they should do.
by liu3hao | 2025-09-29 23:52:53+00:00
Hi HN, I am working on Circuitscript, a language based on python to describe electronic schematics/circuits: https://circuitscript.net/

Recently, I have released a simple IDE (called the Bench) to try Circuitscript online: https://bench.circuitscript.net/

The next steps are to create more schematics with Circuitscript as examples to test the limitations of the language and to generate PCB designs with KiCAD. The Circuitscript tool (currently only the desktop cli tool) is able to generate KiCAD netlists and this can be imported into PCBnew.

The motivation for creating Circuitscript is to describe schematics in terms of code rather than graphical UIs after using different CAD packages extensively (Allegro, Altium, KiCAD) in the past. I wanted to spend more time thinking about the schematic design itself rather than fiddling around with GUIs.

The main language goals are to be easy to write and reason, generated graphical schematics should be displayed according to how the designer wishes so (because this is also part of the design process) and to encourage code reuse.

Please check it out and I look forward to your feedback, especially from electronics designers/hobbyists. Thanks!
by johnnyanmac | 2025-09-29 23:53:05+00:00
Sadly a thing us devs are used to compared to more coporate jobs. We'll take the blame for a lot of issues leadership actively forced the development to go down. We don't set prices or DLC/MTX schemes, and can only push back so much on release dates (especially in the day of "we'll fix it with a Day One Patch").

As a dirty open secret: most "unexpected bugs" found day one are probably on some Jira sheet, been there for months, and were triaged as such to "will fix later". Only magically being prioritized after public feedback that QA teams already expected.
by linguae | 2025-09-29 23:53:30+00:00
I came to a similar conclusion as a computer scientist working in industry who ended up transitioning to a community college teaching career. I remember being inspired by the stories of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC as a high school student and undergrad, wanting to follow in the footsteps of researchers like Dennis Ritchie. However, the industrial research landscape has changed in the past 15 years. It's very difficult to find truly curiosity-driven places with long timelines and little pressure, and industrial researchers these days are pressured to work on projects with more immediate productization prospects. I've seen this firsthand at a few companies. The tenure-track at a research university route requires playing the "publish-or-perish" game, which is also a curb on freedom and is also filled with pressure.

Being a tenure-track professor at a California community college is a happy situation for me. I love teaching, and for roughly 8 months of the year I'm dedicated to teaching. Tenure at my community college is entirely based on teaching and service; I'm not required (or even expected) to publish. I also get roughly 4 months of the year off (three months off in the summer, one month off in the winter). I spent much of the past summer in Japan collaborating with a professor on research. The only serious downside is not being able to afford a house within a reasonable commute from work, but I had the same problem in industry; not everyone in industry makes FAANG-level salaries. In fact, my compensation is effectively a raise from my previous job when factoring in going from roughly 3 weeks of PTO per year to 4 months off plus 10 days worth of sick leave; I took a roughly 10% pay cut in exchange for greater freedom and roughly 5-6x the annual time off.

I've learned that being a hobbyist researcher with a stable job that provides summers off is quite a favorable situation, since I don't have to worry about my job security being tied to my publication and fund-raising counts. Most of my computer science research can be done on a mid-range laptop with an Internet connection and access to textbooks and academic databases; I don't need equipment that cost five- or six-figures (though it would be nice to have a GPU cluster....).
by transcriptase | 2025-09-29 23:54:19+00:00
I think there’s something to it.

Part of me thinks that when they do their “which of these responses do you prefer” A/B test on users… whereas perhaps many on HN would try to judge the level of technical detail, complexity, usefulness… I’m inclined to believe the midwit population at large would be inclined to choose the option where the magic AI supercomputer reaffirms and praises the wisdom of whatever they say, no matter how stupid or wrong it is.
by hagbard_c | 2025-09-29 23:54:21+00:00
> and costs about a tenth of what a self shaping inverter costs

I'm using a Fronius GEN24 Plus (10 kW) which can be used off-line/off-grid (called 'Full Backup', to use it you need some extra switching gear between the inverter and the utility hookup, which gear that is differs from country to country) and provides single-phase power in its default configuration (they call it 'PV power', basically a 3 kW single-phase connection which comes alive when the utility hookup goes down). While this inverter was slightly more expensive than the Chinese alternatives the difference was more in the range of 30%, not '10 times'.
by manofmanysmiles | 2025-09-29 23:54:34+00:00
I haven't shouted into the void for a while. Today is as good a day as any other to do so.

I feel extremely disempowered that these coding sessions are effectively black box, and non-reproducible. It feels like I am coding with nothing but hopes and dreams, and the connection between my will and the patterns of energy is so tenuous I almost don't feel like touching a computer again.

A lack of determinism comes from many places, but primarily: 1) The models change 2) The models are not deterministic 3) The history of tool use and chat input is not availabler as a first class artifact for use.

I would love to see a tool that logs the full history of all agents that sculpt a codebase, including the inputs to tools, tool versions and any other sources of enetropy. Logging the seed into the RNGs that trigger LLM output would be the final piece that would give me confidence to consider using these tools seriously.

I write this now after what I am calling "AI disillusionment", a feel where I feel so disconnected from my codebase I'd rather just delete it than continue.

Having a set of breadcrumbs would give me at least a modicum of confidence that the work was reproducible and no the product of some modern ghost, completely detached from my will.

Of course this would require actually owning the full LLM.
by davidmckayv | 2025-09-29 23:54:54+00:00
There's no contradiction. "True threats" is already a narrow exception defined by decades of Supreme Court precedent. It means statements where the speaker intends to communicate a serious expression of intent to commit unlawful violence against a person or group. That's it. It's not a blank check for the government to decide what counts as dangerous.

Brandenburg gives us the standard: speech can only be restricted if it's directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce that action. True threats, child porn, fraud, these are all narrow, well-defined categories that survived strict scrutiny. They don't support creating broad new regulatory authority to filter outputs based on "dangerous capabilities."

You're asking how I define true threats. I don't. The Supreme Court does. That's the point. We have a constitutional framework for unprotected speech. It's extremely limited. The government can't just expand it because they think AI is scary.

"This technology is different" is what every regulator says about every new technology. Print was different. Radio was different. The internet was different. The First Amendment applies regardless. If AI enables someone to commit a crime, prosecute the crime. You don't get to regulate the information itself.

And yes, I want the government to stay out of mandating content restrictions. Not because I trust corporations, but because I trust the government even less with the power to define what information is too dangerous to share. You say governments are meant to serve citizens. Tell that to every government that's used "safety" as justification for censorship.

The issue isn't whether we need any AI regulation. It's whether we want to establish that the government can force companies to implement filtering systems based on the state's assessment of what capabilities are dangerous. That's the precedent SB 53 creates. Once that infrastructure exists, it will be used for whatever the government decides needs "safety mitigations" next.
by ndriscoll | 2025-09-29 23:55:11+00:00
No, but society has no reason to grant monopolies on 50 year old publications (e.g. textbooks or news articles written or songs recorded prior to 1975), and the changes that were made to copyright law to extend it into multiple generations were actual rent-seeking. i.e. manipulating public policy to transfer wealth from others to you rather than creating wealth. Going with the original 28 year compromise from a time when publishing was much more expensive, anything prior to 1997 would be free for anyone to use for any purpose with no expectation of compensation. We'd all be far richer culturally if we had this base to freely build upon instead of having the last 100 years stolen.

Likewise much of the most important information to want to train on (research literature) was just straight up stolen from the public that paid for its creation already.

By contrast, the models being created from these works are obviously useful to people today. They are clearly a form of new wealth generation. The open-weights models are even an equitable way of doing so, and are competitive with the top proprietary models. Saying the model creators need to pay the people monopolizing generations-old work is the rent-seeking behavior.
by NoPicklez | 2025-09-29 23:55:44+00:00
I wish there was a website that collated this data and based on a standardised weight compared all risk factors. Drinking alcohol, eating fast food, not exercising, sitting all day, eating chocolate etc.

I've no doubt scientifically that drinking any alcohol increases my risk of something. But it would be great to see it in proportion to other risk factors. Everything is a risk, but somethings are a much greater risk that I might choose to avoid altogether.
by derefr | 2025-09-29 23:56:44+00:00
> The repair process for a modern phone involves swapping salvaged parts on to salvaged PCBs.

Right, but, knowing what the nominal in-line resistance is between any two pins on the board, will let you do some empirical tests to determine whether a given black-screen fault lies in the board itself, vs in one or more of the SMT components, no? (And so whether you should bother attempting to salvage the board, vs just scraping off the high-value parts and chucking it in the bin.)
by Chilko | 2025-09-29 23:57:51+00:00
> A solar panel's VoC should be its maximum possible output in ideal conditions (open circuit)

I think this is where the confusion arises - what do you mean by ideal conditions? Ideal conditions for solar generation are not necessarily at the same time as the highest voltage operating conditions. VoC tends to be specified at Standard Test Conditions which has light-levels representative of a sunny day (1000 W/m2) and a cell temperature (not ambient) of 25 degrees C, which is already a lot cooler than most panels would typically be at that level of irradiance. So really, the label is already specifying a voltage higher than what you would typically experience during times of max generation.

However, the max voltage could exceed this rating at times when there are cold ambient temperatures with enough light for the module to function, but not enough sun to meaningfully heat the cells. So in this scenario you may have maximum voltage, but you're far from maximum power nor at 'ideal conditions'.
by matiasmolinas | 2025-09-29 23:57:55+00:00
The release of Anthropic's "Imagine with Claude" is fascinating. It shows a model that doesn't generate code to build a UI; it uses tools to construct the UI directly. This feels like a major shift from the "AI as a copilot" paradigm to "AI as a runtime." This has been a core question behind an open-source project I've been working on with Ismael Faro, called LLMunix https://github.com/EvolvingAgentsLabs/llmunix . Our approach is to build an entire OS for agents where the "executables" are not binaries, but human-readable Markdown files. The LLM interprets these files to orchestrate complex workflows. The linked article is my analysis of these two approaches. It argues that while direct interpretation is incredibly powerful, an open, transparent, and auditable framework (like our Markdown-based one) is crucial for the future of agentic systems. Curious to hear what HN thinks. Are we moving towards a future where LLMs are the OS, and if so, what should the "assembly language" for that OS look like?
by agedclock | 2025-09-29 23:58:02+00:00
> The difference is that social media now exists. The fear of an embarrassing or compromising moment causing social embarrassment at an unlimited scale or affecting future employment prospects indefinitely is not based on nothing - we have all seen examples of this. Even an unlikely scenario is worth considering if the stakes are that high.

Realistically unless you are doing something absolutely unforgivable it will be forgotten about in a few days/weeks. At worst you will become a reaction emote.

Also going viral is a huge opportunity. Some viral people have ended up in commercials, podcasts etc.

Lets not pretend it is all negative.

> Then in the early 00s, the experience of going a little viral (just within your college Facebook community, before the word ‘viral’ was a thing) was actually pretty common and this started to make people just a little more guarded about being photographed. So those who got filmed doing something drunk/dumb would be more likely to go more viral, as it was now a rarer sight. And so on.

No this is a rewriting of history. What happened is that employers started looking through potential hires and/or current employees and quizzing them about getting drunk at a party a few years ago. This seemed to happen in the US more than other places, or maybe it was reported there more.

Then everyone with any sense made their profile semi-private (friends only) on Facebook.

Also a lot of the stuff that went viral was often clever marketing. There are advertising agencies where they have case studies detailing how they have done it.

Also there is a whole genre of streaming where people literally act outrageously in public, called IRL streaming. People have gone/are going to prison in hopes of going viral.

> It’s a recursive effect that made us all duller and more image-conscious and anxious in public. This process took a couple of decades to end up where we are now.

This is absolute nonsense. I am old enough to remember how people acted before social media in is largely the same while out in public. In fact I would say it was actually the opposite of what you claim.
by cush | 2025-09-29 23:58:23+00:00
You're kind of echoing exactly what I'm getting at though. The difference comes down to trust. Maybe today we don't trust that one of these LLM apps is up to the task of buying things, but there was once a time where people didn't trust that if you click a button on a website a product would show up at your door. Over time, we came to expect things like order received emails, status updates, and the best companies will show you where your product is on a little map as it arrives to your house. Now most shopping is done online. Convenience won. There are still barriers to shopping online like too much choice, selecting sizes, and very personal constraints. An agent can know you're in the market for a new phone and can help you pick out a new one, then keep an eye out for deals. Maybe your agent will know your sizes and buy shoes that always fit. It's really not that wild of a concept.
by realitydrift | 2025-09-29 23:58:41+00:00
The “workslop” idea captures something deeper than just bad AI output. It shows how the optimization trap rewards speed and polish even when substance is missing, which then widens the authenticity gap and erodes trust. It can be seen as a larger pattern called reality drift, alongside things like synthetic realness and filter fatigue. For anyone curious, there’s a working paper circulating that goes into this in more detail: https://figshare.com/articles/preprint/Workslop_and_the_Opti...
by linguae | 2025-09-29 23:59:40+00:00
Even for fields that can be done entirely with pen and paper, grad students and postdocs don't work for free, and often the only way a professor can keep up with a research university's publication expectations is to hire grad students and postdocs to contribute to research. Grants help pay for their stipends. Additionally, there are many universities that require their professors to raise grant money as a condition of tenure, since grant money is a significant source of revenue for research universities.
by pton_xd | 2025-09-30 00:00:17+00:00
> Merchants pay a small fee on completed purchases, but the service is free for users

Where's the money coming from to pay the fee? From my wallet, of course! At scale, this raises the price of purchases.

Another thought -- the text-only interface of ChatGPT is way too limiting. We need images (and video) generated on demand showcasing product suggestions. Showing an image of the user wearing some new shades is going to be pretty compelling...
by johnnyanmac | 2025-09-30 00:00:31+00:00
I believe the GP's point was not "games need to focus on cinematics and mind breaking graphics over gameplay". It was how you make brands based on people, not teams. Jane's Combat Simulator, American McGee's Alice in Wonderland, Sid Meier's Games (when Fireaxis had closer relations with them), Clive Barker's Undying.

We have indies who embody their games, but EA was doing this well before that. And AAA companies never really tried doing this since (though some directors did market themselves very well despite that. Like Kojima or Romero). It's a shame we have husks walking under a brand when all the personality has long left.
by derefr | 2025-09-30 00:00:38+00:00
> aren't going to correspond to anything you can buy

...on the open market.

However, if your repair shop exists just down the street from one of Apple's component supplier's factories, then knowing the part number of one of the ICs or other actives, might be enough to let you walk in there one day and submit a hand-written PO for a few boxes of said part (...as a cash transaction, of course.)
by philzook | 2025-09-30 00:01:01+00:00
I'm working on Knuckledragger, a proof assistant shallowly based upon z3py https://github.com/philzook58/knuckledragger

Yesterday I proved the infinitude of primes, which I was pretty happy with. https://www.philipzucker.com/knuckle_primes/ A trivial theorem in the scheme of things, but one for which z3 certainly can't do it on it's own.
by akudha | 2025-09-30 00:01:13+00:00
what possible harm could come to the people incidentally captured?

That is not the point. If someone doesn't want to be in someone else's photos or videos without consent, it is their choice. It is their face afterall. It doesn't matter why. They do not owe an explanation.

The polite thing to do would be to blur other people's faces (or remove people altogether) before adding our photos to the gajillion others already floating around on the internet.
by vkou | 2025-09-30 00:01:32+00:00
If he really wants to crack down on fraud, perhaps the government should unify all corporate financial transactions and chat records and feed it to AI.

Imagine what interesting things the tax authorities, the regulators, the enforcers of securities law could find that way.

And if they find a bunch of false positives, well, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, right?
by ux | 2025-09-30 00:01:35+00:00
Ah, someone reported this to me today, but I must admit I have no idea how to address the issue. Currently the canvas animations are stopped when out of context, but yeah they have to be loaded.

The code on the blog is pretty simple and naive (I'm not a webdev): https://github.com/ubitux/scripts/blob/main/share/blog/shade...

Any suggestion on how to address the issue is welcome.

Note: I don't have any Windows machine to test with
by regnull | 2025-09-30 00:01:39+00:00
I am a bit of a checklist nerd, so I wrote a web app do to checklists: https://checkoff.ai

As it is fashionable these days, it can create checklists with AI ("Fun things to do in Pittsburg"), you can create checklists from templates (some stuff you do every day), etc.

I also have an MCP server that allows you to plug it into your favorite LLM.
by eszed | 2025-09-30 00:02:36+00:00
Yup. Yup yup yup. Years ago (so I'm open to the idea that it's got better in the last decade or so - but if we're talking about Office, I will doubt your assertion) I used styles religiously, because I was a younger man who took pride in doing things The Right Way. Eventually, however, the number of times styles screwed themselves (or so it seemed) up eventually exceeded my patience, or my time available, to debug them. Now, I do it ad hoc, and haven't had page three look significantly different than page twelve in years.

If you want me to do it The Right Way, make sure that's a happy path, or I'm going to stop doing it.
by inerte | 2025-09-30 00:03:38+00:00
Emilia, a personal relationship manager. Every once in a while I meet extended family (wives of cousins or their children) or I meet a fellow soccer parent and I forget their names, or who's related to who.

I've used Monica HQ to keep track of this but thought I could tackle differently using AI. With AI you could ask questions like "who's everybody on my aunt's side? Like cousins and their family" and get a good answer.

Afaik other "relationship managers" out there are professionally oriented, for sales people. A lot of them talk about LinkedIn integration, for example.

Take a look at http://emilia-workers-website.inerte.workers.dev/ and if you're interested in Alpha testing, send me an email at inerte@gmail.com - I setup a Discord last week so early adopters can chat with me about.
by bobnarizes | 2025-09-30 00:03:46+00:00
Building https://fallinorg.com/, a Mac app that organizes your files.

It looks inside each file to see what it’s about, then moves it to the right folder for you.

Everything happens on your Mac, so nothing leaves your computer. No clouds, no servers.

It already works with PDFs, text, Markdown, and many other file types. Next I’m adding ePub, and later Microsoft Office and iWork support.

If you have messy folders anywhere on your Mac, Fallinorg can help.