MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dang | 2025-09-04 05:30:13+00:00
People feel different things, of course, and it's all valid. Nonetheless, there's a standard that we're trying to adhere to here, and comments like these are certainly below it - not a borderline call:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118703

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45115367

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45111401
by typewithrhythm | 2025-09-04 05:31:46+00:00
Appointing indian leadership is the single biggest sign of moving to an extraction phase for a company.

The idea is they think the current value of the institution and IP is higher than their ability to innovate, so the try to outsource and reduce labour cost as much as possible intending to do the bare minimum maintenance for as long as possible.

This gets compounded by every layer trying to get the most out of the company as fast as possible, hiring in a way that has no long term outlook.
by TheRoque | 2025-09-04 05:31:58+00:00
I find it weird to not have one, given the ubiquity of plugins in (neo)vim. These editor are self-proclaimed "super easy to extend/program", until now it was awkward to need a third party plugin manager to "extend" them (the vast majority of people use plugins and don't extend all the functionalities with their own code). Plus 0.12 is said to be "The year of Nvim OOTB": https://neovim.io/roadmap/
by floren | 2025-09-04 05:32:01+00:00
I'm still figuring out how to integrate this with my existing wearable system. I've been using a Vufine monocular display which is nice as a real HDMI screen but the wire is clunky. So far I'm experimenting with extending the Python code to read images from a directory and display them, newest first... from that I see a path to doing useful stuff with notifications, even turn by turn navigation.
by llbbdd | 2025-09-04 05:32:14+00:00
This will never happen and it's a bizarre, legacy fantasy, borne of a fixed imaginary ideal of what computing should be. Programming will continue to move in the direction of ease-of-use and every time I see an out-of-topic reference to Electron in this forum I feel insane, like I'm fighting upstream. You will not see this - you will see more Electron apps, because that is the modern way of building cross-platform apps, and if you genuinely don't understand why that is I don't know how to explain it to you. You won't see another version of those because nobody is going to waste their time building cross-platform native apps at a native layer to performatively impress posters on HN. You, and seemingly everybody else on HN, can continue to pretend that devex doesn't matter, but that's the difference I guess between caring about devex and shipping products.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-09-04 05:33:20+00:00
What the surface level take about calculators misses is that the average person can't do arithmetic in their head because they don't need to, but they also don't pull out a calculator in the many times a day it would be useful, like at the grocery store. People make horrible decisions with everyday home economics math and are taken advantage of.

The lesson isn't that we survived calculators, it's that they did dull us, and our general thinking and creativity are about to get likewise dulled. Which is much scarier.
by adityaathalye | 2025-09-04 05:33:32+00:00
Yes, if the log has no regular schema, and if the overall system has no regular design pattern.

This is the minimal "standard record" that one can use, for all facts pertaining to all domain entities in one's system:

system_time, valid_time, Entity, Attribute, Value, assert/redact

Now the problem is:

- For small-middle-heavy usage (anything that (reasonably) fits on one machine) how to use existing database technology, so that one can store and query this stuff sufficiently fast. This is what I'm trying to do with SQLite... partly because the "V" of E/A/V benefits from SQLite's "Flexible Typing" system. In SQLite parlance, E, A are TEXT, and V is NUMERIC.

- For at-scale usage (anything that needs many machines), how to make a data system from scratch to store log-structured information efficiently, and how to query it efficiently. See what the Datomic, XTDB, and RedPlanetLabs/Rama people are doing. Essentially: separate storage and compute, event-source everything, and build a system from scratch to use it efficiently and fast at scale.
by kfreds | 2025-09-04 05:34:05+00:00
Sure!

Regarding tracking concerns, masking your IP address is a necessary but insufficient first step to improving your privacy online. ISPs typically don't allow their users to do that per-device in a UX-friendly way. Protecting against browser fingerprinting is something that Mullvad Browser does quite well, thanks to it being a fork of Tor Browser.

As for circumventing geo restrictions, you're absolutely right. We make an effort to get it to work, but ultimately privacy and censorship is much more of a priority for us. That's why we don't advertise it.

Finally, the campaign isn't just about getting more customers. We started Mullvad for political reasons, and now we have the resources to spread that message further. Governments around the world are warming up to the idea of mandatory device-side mass surveillance and backdooring E2E encryption. We're trying to build public opinion against that.
by cik | 2025-09-04 05:34:30+00:00
This is the first time I've seen the product, and I was immediately excited.. until I saw the product.

Now, I don't know what it does that my $40 smart watch doesn't do, by passing my voice to google / alexa / <choice>. I like where this is going, I just don't think that this generation has even the same features, as what I carry on my wrist, sadly.
by photonthug | 2025-09-04 05:35:01+00:00
> General intelligence may not be SAT/SMT solving but it has to be able to do it, hence, backtracking.

Just to add some more color to this. For problems that completely reduce to formal methods or have significant subcomponents that involve it, combinatorial explosion in state-space is a notorious problem and N variables is going to stick you with 2^N at least. It really doesn't matter whether you think you're directly looking at solving SAT/search, because it's too basic to really be avoided in general.

When people talk optimistically about hallucinations not being a problem, they generally mean something like "not a problem in the final step" because they hope they can evaluate/validate something there, but what about errors somewhere in the large middle? So even with a very tiny chance of hallucinations in general, we're talking about an exponential number of opportunities in implicit state-transitions to trigger those low-probability errors.

The answer to stuff like this is supposed to be "get LLMs to call out to SAT solvers". Fine, definitely moving from state-space to program-space is helpful, but it also kinda just pushes the problem around as long as the unconstrained code generation is still prone to hallucination.. what happens when it validates, runs, and answers.. but the spec was wrong?

Personally I'm most excited about projects like AlphaEvolve that seem fearless about hybrid symbolics / LLMs and embracing the good parts of GOFAI that LLMs can make tractable for the first time. Instead of the "reasoning is dead, long live messy incomprehensible vibes", those guys are talking about how to leverage earlier work, including things like genetic algorithms and things like knowledge-bases.[0] Especially with genuinely new knowledge-discovery from systems like this, I really don't get all the people who are still staunchly in either an old-school / new-school camp on this kind of thing.

[0]: MLST on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC9nAosXrJw
by daemonologist | 2025-09-04 05:35:21+00:00
Very reminiscent of Spotify then.

I jest, but it does seem like all the music streaming services have major problems with their web(/desktop) apps. I guess the majority of users are on mobile and therefore that's where all the development effort goes.

(Actually, now that I think about it, I don't recall ever really having problems with Pandora. It's been a while though.)
by tibbar | 2025-09-04 05:35:31+00:00
It's an amazing rant, but he's still going off on tangents: what is worthwhile in life? And how horrible is Oracle? No really, let's just ROAST oracle. Wait that reminds us of Larry Ellison. He really is the worst, have you heard these stories?! Don't anthropmorphize him, he's a lawnmower!

If you look at the single slide that all of this is sparked by, you can see that these are just (amazing) rants. He's telling the story of Illumos, and that reminds him of the pure evil of Oracle and the meaning of life, and he keeps letting himself drift from the topic to savor those points over and over. He is very quirky, and thinks about things in very quirky ways, and he's just letting the whole audience enjoy that for a bit.

That's why this is such a great illustration of OP's point.
by akimbostrawman | 2025-09-04 05:37:07+00:00
She herself did not refuse for the first 20 minutes but instead the event organizer did it for her blocking access to her until getting arrested. it is not only obvious but the law which they where told numerous times that the actual alleged victim has to refuse not some self assigned party karens cops.

If your event needs multiple SA help teams that obstructs police maybe there is an issue.
by w10-1 | 2025-09-04 05:38:05+00:00
> rather how we continue to scale for language models at the current LM frontier — 4-8h METR tasks

I wonder if this doesn't reify a particular business model, of creating a general model and then renting it out Saas-style (possibly adapted to largish customers).

It reminds me of the early excitement over mainframes, how their applications were limited by the rarity of access, and how vigorously those trained in those fine arts defended their superiority. They just couldn't compete with the hordes of smaller competitors getting into every niche.

It may instead be that customer data and use cases are both the most relevant and the most profitable. An AI that could adopt a small user model and track and apply user use cases would have entirely different structure, and would have demonstrable price/performance ratios.

This could mean if Apple or Google actually integrated AI into their devices, they could have a decisive advantage. Or perhaps there's a next generation of web applications that model use-cases and interactions. Indeed, Cursor and other IDE companies might have a leg up if they can drive towards modeling the context instead of just feeding it as intention to the generative LLM.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-09-04 05:38:51+00:00
The state of Texas is well-known as the "Lone Star" state, and appropriately enough there is a small town in east Texas known as Etoile, Texas. This is not even that far from the border with Louisiana and some of the unsettled parts of that old French territory.

But they can really tell if you are from around those parts or not, since the correct local pronunciation of the word etoile is of course "yeetaw".
by zahlman | 2025-09-04 05:39:06+00:00
This isn't even correct for the one specific reference implementation you're presumably thinking of. It is just as much "compiled" as Java or C#, just that the compilation is often done on the fly. (Although IIRC C# does some additional trickery to pretend that its bytecode is "real" executable code, wrapped in a standard .exe format.) Presumably you've noticed the __pycache__ folders containing .pyc files; those are compiled bytecode. When you install Python, typically the standard library will all be precompiled (at least in part, so that those bytecode files can be created by an admin user now, and used by a standard user later). There is an interpretive REPL environment, but that works by doing the same bytecode-compilation each time.
by mikestew | 2025-09-04 05:40:29+00:00
Note that LiveScribe uses special paper with a patterned watermark. That differs from “any paper”, as requested.

That said, special paper isn’t a huge ask, and it increases accuracy immensely. I worked for a company that used this tech years ago, and it was impressive not only for text, but marking up maps, collecting data from forms, etc.
by cnst | 2025-09-04 05:40:43+00:00
I never have to use Chrome on any device besides ChromeOS; how exactly is it a monopoly when I can uninstall it once, and never see it on the same device ever again, even on Android, which is made by Google? How is it a monopoly when I don't even lose anything by replacing it with another browser, even on Android?

How exactly is Chrome the same as Edge or Brave or Vivaldi or Yandex Browser or Opera?

Why are there no browsers on iOS besides Safari, and how is that not a monopoly?

The "Internet Explorer" issue culminated with Microsoft attaining a market share that allowed them to stop all innovation and investment into the product, where the browser became substantially lagging behind the competition, as well as lagging substantially in standards compliance. Something that's currently an issue with Safari, not Chrome. (Please enlighten me if that's not the case — which exact standards does Chrome NOT support today? Else, how is supporting EXTRA experimental standards a bad thing?) Chrome and Blink, on the other hand, became market leaders not because they couldn't be uninstalled, but because of superior engineering; Blink is the only browser engine today where you can configure your gaming keyboard, for example. How's that NOT innovation?

Why do you have to keep redefining words according to some laws some politicians wrote, or misplaced analogies that turn things upside down, in order to sustain your points? The only Internet Explorer of today is Safari — severely lagging behind in most modern features, without any ability to be uninstalled or replaced on the iPhones and iPads. Again, I'm actually typing this in Firefox on desktop. As I said, I don't use Chrome, it's not even installed on my machines; because it doesn't have a monopoly in any way, on any device besides ChromeOS. (If you're curious on why I don't use Chrome or Blink on any desktop, it's because I cannot stand blurry text, and there's no way to disable blurry text in Safari, WebKit, Chrome or Blink, which have mandatory antialiasing, making all text super blurry and ugly; that's the actual monoculture we should be talking about.)
by LeFantome | 2025-09-04 05:41:40+00:00
Actually, GNUstep has always had an Interface Builder:

https://www.gnustep.org/experience/Gorm.html

My own take is actually that GNUstep spent too long trying to be an OpenStep successor instead of being a way to run Mac apps on Linux.

It took them ages to even clarify if it was a desktop environment or an SDK (and I am not sure it is even clear now).

There has never been a tonne of love for Objective C either. Pretty much the only reason to use it for most people has been because you had to for access to Apple APIs. Which would be the only reason to use it on Linux too.

It always amazed me that Darwin + GNUstep did not result in a macOS clone. Neither of them really went anywhere.

Have you seen Gershwin?

https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop
by llbbdd | 2025-09-04 05:42:27+00:00
Thank you - I do understand the IP argument, especially as it applies to e.g. Meta who may have obtained a lot of their training data illegally, which I think is a wholly separate legal question. I apologize also for referring to your comment as "bad-faith", I have seen the argument applied by other people and cast it onto yours, when I should have just said I didn't think it applied.
by sim7c00 | 2025-09-04 05:42:42+00:00
you are right to be worried about such practices. this is why i avoid these things entirely. its a bit more hastle but a lot less risk. once you have a good config u can just roll with that anyhow. but i guess in the same vein i dont use a lot of plugins.

the nr of times now people have been owned by rogue plugins via editors is rising each day...
by specproc | 2025-09-04 05:43:52+00:00
I'll respond to this one, as it's at the top and it started off unpleasantly personal. Do try and avoid making assumptions about the person you're speaking to, please.

I live in a post-Soviet country taking an autocratic turn, I have friends fleeing. I will probably have to leave myself and it's making me miserable. I do not mean to diminish their experience or the experience of anyone suffering under an authoritarian government.

If you'll read the context of the post, I was talking about how Western (predominately US) media portrays other countries, which is frankly dehumanizing for the most part.

I grew up thinking that war starts, life stops; that a different form of government radically and instantly transmogrifies every aspect of a society. We are a peaceful, normal, democratic society and everywhere else is war or repression. A primitive dualism which has not stood up to my experience.

This is what's implied in the news and the movies, and forms a basis for the acceptance of the Western versions of the shared problems I discussed. It is often exaggerated in a way that lines places up for a bomb-driven democratization process.

It also means that, as GP noted, we don't feel the problems coming along when they do.

Do you get where I'm coming from?
by opto | 2025-09-04 05:50:54+00:00
I think this is a good point because "cheating at the work I have to do, as quickly as possible, well enough to not get fired" is the actual use case for AI for 99% of people.

All the stuff you see in this thread about how kids are going to use AI to bootstrap an education for themselves even better than what their teachers give them (not sure why there's so much hostility towards teachers) is a fantasy.

HN obviously overrepresents kids who were interested in tech things who may do something like that. The vast majority of kids will use AI as a tool to blurt out essays and coursework they don't read, so that they can get back to their addiction to TikTok and Instagram.

As will, of course, everyone using it at work. This is already the case. This is what AI is for. "Do this for me so I can scroll more".
by steve1977 | 2025-09-04 05:52:09+00:00
That's usually not a problem. You can always schedule the reading of an element manually. And if you do that for the first repetition, it will not have any negative impact on the algorithm.

You can also put stuff in something called "pending queue" and then just pull it from there once you're ready for it.

Only for the subsequent repetitions the algorithm will take over. This is like reviewing notes basically.

Also, you can manually advance repetitions if needed, for example before an exam.

It works very well for me and I constantly have to (and want to) learn lots of stuff.
by h4ch1 | 2025-09-04 05:53:26+00:00
you're correct, I had mistakenly interpreted your comment as dates in file paths instead of dirpaths, and I would second this, it really gets unwieldy once you have 100k or even 500+ files in a single directory.

Apologies for the miscommunication.

Also

> I love to see when a page by posted just by looking at the URL.

would solve that with a URL path /2015/my-article-title; also creates a nice way to go to articles by year for example by simply navigating to the /2015 route
by porridgeraisin | 2025-09-04 05:53:42+00:00
I build neovim from source by myself, and maintain plugins as git submodules in pack/plugins/start (nvim automatically loads these at startup) and pack/plugins/opt (these are loaded manually) by myself. I have stuff like emmet, diffview.nvim, nvim-dap, etc loaded optionally when I want to use them. Status bar, LSP, Treesitter, and a few small tpope plugins are loaded on startup. I have a 500 line init.vim. I have a few local patches for some of the plugins.

This way, _nothing_ changes ever. That's how I want it.

I used to use astro.nvim (a few years back), then at one point I upgraded it and they had changed all the keybinds (even for basic shit like go to references IIRC), it was absolutely insane. I lost my shit and deleted the whole thing and moved to this setup. I will never use an nvim distro or update nvim plugins ever again. If I really want something I will git pull it myself (I'm looking out for nvim 12's ghost text feature for example). But in the general case, I'm done with any changes whatsoever. Not one byte.

I actually open-sourced my "approach" and documented it but I left it midway, if others are interested I might stop procrastinating and actually finish it.
by theshrike79 | 2025-09-04 05:53:52+00:00
It's fun to see Vibe Coders discover the basics of project management in real time without ever reading a book :)

That's what programming with LLMs is, it's just project management: You split the tasks into manageable chunks (ones that can be completed in a single context window), you need to have good onboarding documentation (CLAUDE.md or the equivalent) and good easy to access documentation (docs/ with markdown files).

Exactly what you use to manage a team of actual human programmers.
by devjab | 2025-09-04 05:55:36+00:00
You don't need sotware engineering to build successful software, until you do.

In my experience you don't need to know a whole lot about LLM's to work them. You need to know that everything they spit out is potential garbage, and if you can't tell the good from the garbage then whatever you're using them for is going to be terrible. In terms of software terrible is fine for quite a lot of systems. One of the first things I build out of university in the previous millennium is still in production today and it's horrible. It's inefficient, horribly outdated since it hasn't been updated ever. It runs 10 times a day and at least 1 of them will need to automatically restart itself because it failed. It's done it's job without the need for human intervention for the past many decades though. I know because one of my old colleagues still works there. It could've been improved, but the inefficiency cost over all those years is probably worth about two human hours, and it would likely take quite a while to change it. A lot of software is like that, though a lot of it doesn't live for so long. LLM's can absolutely blast that sort of thing. It's when the inefficiency cost isn't less than a few human hours that LLM's become a liability if you don't know how to do the engineering.

I use LLM's to write a lot of the infrastructure as code we use today. I can do that because I know exactly how that should be engineered. What the LLM can do that I can't, is that it can spit out the k8s yaml for an ingress point with 200 lines of port settings in a couple of seconds. I've yet to have it fail, probably because those configurations are basically all the same depending on the service. What a LLM can't do, however, is write the entire yaml config.

Similarily it can build you a virtual network with subnets in bicep based on a couple of lines of text with address prefixes. At the sametime it couldn't build you a reasonable vnet with subnets if you asked it to do it from scractch. That doesn't mean it can't build you one that works though, it's just that you're likely going to claim 65534 ip addresses for a service which uses three.
by fiddlerwoaroof | 2025-09-04 05:55:42+00:00
I like Pete Seeger’s paraphrase of his father: “Plagiarism is basic to all culture”. I think we underestimate the damage to society at large when “remixing” the work of others is legally fraught.

The mere reproduction of a previous performance is not additional work for the artist and so does not require compensation: to demand royalties undermines the fundamental structure of art for most of history.