MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Hilift | 2025-09-30 07:39:43+00:00
The UK was in a really interesting position. The British empire was the largest in history, and it occurred during a time of great advancement during the industrial revolution. Liquid fuel wasn't new. The owner of two of the three ships holding 90k lbs of tea in the Boston Tea Party, Joseph Rotch (1704–1784), held a monopoly on whale oil. His existence was probably illustrative and educational for those who followed in railroads and petroleum.

Churchill did not know it at the time, but he was the peak of the empire. Physically the empire was untenable, but in business there was a new world of influence. I sometimes compare early Churchill to the business adventures of Averill Harriman and Prescott Bush.

https://nha.org/research/nantucket-history/history-topics/ro...
by didibus | 2025-09-30 07:39:54+00:00
Not sure it competes with Amazon/Walmart, those would probably end up the places where the agent would purchase from. They're not becoming a marketplace for merchants, this is just a protocol so that the AI agent can place a purchase on any site that supports it.

Also, OpenAI is not handling the transaction, Stripe is, but it doesn't have to be Stripe, just that Stripe co-developed the protocol with OpenAI and is first to have it available.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-09-30 07:39:58+00:00
For something to be unconventional, there needs to be the understanding of conventionality. The web is built on Hyperlinks and UI/UX are its languages of interaction, whose patterns have been learned throughout years. The big challenge in advancing that language is to not interrupt established patterns, so the interaction won't be perceived as broken. Turning a Hyperlink into a two-click experience is quite a statement, so people respond.

Besides, "amazing art stuff"? Please, it's an aggregator that links to experiments in interaction design.
by lnsru | 2025-09-30 07:40:06+00:00
Please don’t spread misinformation. Every current Chinese inverter (Sungrow, Goodwe, you name it) can provide emergency power with or without installed battery. My all PV installations (10-20 kWp panels with 10-30 kWh batteries) provide emergency power for whole house. Battery has lower power than the grid connection, but clients agree to don’t charge their EVs during blackout. Starting cost 10000€ for 10 kWp panels and 10 kWh battery if installation is easy on single flat roof.
by VSerge | 2025-09-30 07:40:26+00:00
On the topic of "24. A Sony Walkman-style device that you can give to children so they can ask questions to an LLM...", I would strongly caution against this:

- short of AGI, what a child will hear are explanations given with authority, which would probably be correct a very high percentage of the time (maybe even close to or above 99%), BUT the few incorrect answers and subtles misconceptions finding their way in there will be catastrophic for the learning journey because they will be believed blindly by the child.

- even if you had a perfect answering LLM who never makes a mistake, what's the end result? No need to talk to others to find out about something, ie reduced opportunities to learn about cooperating with others

- as a parent, one wishes sometimes for a moment of rest, but imagine that your kid just finds out there's another entity to ask questions from that will have ready answers all the time, instead of you saying sometimes that you don't know, and looking for an answer together. How many bonding moments will be lost? How cut off would your kid become from you? What value system would permeate through the answers?

A key assumption here for any parent equipping their child with such a system is that it would be aligned with their own worldview and value system. For parents on HN, this probably means a fairly science-mediated understanding of the world. But you can bet that in other places, this assistant would very convincingly deliver whatever cultural, political, or religious propaganda their environment requires. This would make for frighteningly powerful brainwashing tools.
by fabian2k | 2025-09-30 07:41:56+00:00
For a CMS I'd usually suspect the major bottlenecks to be in the DB queries. Especially when the language is already pretty fast by default like C#.

You really need to measure before going to low level optimizations like this. Odds are in this case that the overhead is in the framework/CMS, and you gain the most by understanding how it works and how to use it better.

Span<T> is really more of an optimization you should pay attention to when you write lower level library code.
by ddahlen | 2025-09-30 07:42:06+00:00
Working on orbital dynamics code for my PhD in astronomy, written in rust, it can accurately calculate the positions of all asteroids/comets to within a few meters. Today I am adding a new numerical integration method which should enable me to predict orbits from observations.

https://github.com/dahlend/kete

I'm working on modeling the motion of observed dust particles coming off of comet 67P, here is are some example 3d plots:

Example of rocks ejected from one position and their possible motions: https://dahlend.github.io/67p_beta_dust.html

Trying to determine possible orbits from a set of observations (the straight lines): https://dahlend.github.io/67p_dust_orbit.html

Shout out to pyvista for making these great 3d plots possible, a little less ergonomic than matplotlib, but it can export directly to html.
by johnisgood | 2025-09-30 07:42:24+00:00
In that case, I agree with you with everything and I do actually try to do it the way you mentioned.

And I am expert programmer (I would like to believe) and I use LLMs just to get some refresher of my options and whatnot, and I choose where the project goes, with my knowledge. All my prompts are very specific, which requires knowledge.
by lukan | 2025-09-30 07:42:59+00:00
"Governments influence economics all the time in subtle and not so subtle ways."

They do. Influence, but not control.

So .. au contraire.

The demand to just "control" the market is a really low effort populistic approach to me, that refuses to analyse deeper.

Economy is made up of people. Who have a free will and act out of various motives. So if one instance is controlling the economy it means this instance is controlling all the free will of those people. History shows it can be done, but for a hefty price and I was born into such an experiment I consider failed all in all.

So I am not a free market fanatic, but I see the growing authorian tendencies very critical.

Btw. next time you come to criticize me, maybe check the guidelines yourself first.

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
by didibus | 2025-09-30 07:43:07+00:00
True, but it was probably to OpenAI's best interest. It would be easy for competing models to partner with stores and offer their competing protocol, and now models would have to make deals and if a user wanted to be able to use it to buy from websiteX you might need to go use the competitor's LLM, etc. Not sure that would have been a smart move for them.
by vanrohan | 2025-09-30 07:44:09+00:00
Currently working on: https://postply.com

Postply uses full-context to generate better replies on X, Instagram, Facebook & LinkedIn. It supports custom reply profiles and styles for support teams and social media managers. There are clearly a lot of AI replies on social media already, but they are really generic and bad. With Postply.com I'm hoping it will help people generate better and more meaningful replies.
by merelysounds | 2025-09-30 07:44:28+00:00
I was curious about differences between EUPL and GPL Affero, I found the following:

> the EUPL could therefore be described as an “affero-like” licence (AGPLv3).

> The EUPL covers SaaS (Software as a Service): if an internet service provider modifies the licensed software to distribute online services (as Google does), this is “software distribution”.

https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/ne...
by matsemann | 2025-09-30 07:44:37+00:00
For me it's always been the opposite: I want to buy a charger, sd card or whatever. I don't want to wade through the 10 000 items on Amazon and make a decision on if the seller is trustworthy or not. Much easier to just buy it from somewhere else and skip all the mental load.

Bonus point is I don't end up with fake sd cards from Amazon's comingling (so no, being vigilant in which seller you buy from on Amazon didn't help anyways)
by ssivark | 2025-09-30 07:44:50+00:00
> Here's the Unitree G1, starting out at US$22,000, less than a Toyota Corolla.

The sticker price might look cheap, but what I've heard from people actually looking to buy (even in large quantities) is that by the time you assemble the hardware and the tooling and the dev kit, the cost is $80-100k per robot.

> This is roughly the same content Brooks posted himself a few years ago, and was covered on HN last week.

That Brooks' post is his latest one, from a few days ago.
by steve_gh | 2025-09-30 07:44:50+00:00
Looks very interesting. It clarifies a lot of things that for example the GPL leaves unsaid, due to the different legal framework. And it is good that it explicitly calls out the legal jurisdiction it sits under (EU).

It's good that it has been written in multiple languages to aid acceptance across the EU.

What I like most of all is the listing of compatible licences.if I understand correctly this would enable you to combine GPL and EUPL software and publish the new software under the GPL. Would be nice to see reciprocation so the new software could also be published under the EUPL.
by Perenti | 2025-09-30 07:44:59+00:00
I wonder how much extra work is required to make a vertical panel stay up in a 200kmh cyclone (hurricane for the Americans, typhoon for the Asians)? I saw a flying cow once during Cyclone David, and that wasn't a particularly strong storm. I guess they could be attached at the sides to some other strong structure, but doing that without getting shade on the panel could be tricky.
by cryptography | 2025-09-30 07:46:37+00:00
Building SupaBird.io - reverse-engineering viral X content so you don't have to guess what works.

Here's the catch: most creators study top accounts but can't replicate their success. They miss the patterns.

Analyzed 1M+ tweets from top performers and built AI that doesn't just copy - it adapts their winning frameworks to your voice and niche.

One user went from inconsistent posting to systematic growth. The content quality jumped. The engagement followed.

Not promising follower counts. Promising you'll finally understand what actually converts on this platform.
by tedggh | 2025-09-30 07:46:47+00:00
The MCAS system is probably not the best example here because it doesn’t take expert knowledge on MCAS to catch lack of redundancy and poor documentation in the design of a system so critical. This one of the reasons patterns, processes and standards exist. I did this for a living and consulted for many companies in processes my team had no domain experience with, still we were able to catch process gaps. MCAS IMO was a flaw easy to flag for any competent auditor.
by rsynnott | 2025-09-30 07:47:13+00:00
> The big cities is where the most crime happens.

I mentioned London, specifically, not big cities in general. London's crime rate is pretty much the same as England's as a whole, and many English towns and cities have much higher crime rates.

> This isn't true at all.

In what way? The only place on the island of Ireland which appears at all in the lists of heavily CCTV'd countries is Belfast, which is in Northern Ireland (part of the UK, not Ireland). Dublin (a much larger city) does not feature. Irish gun laws are generally stricter than British gun laws; in particular being allowed to have a gun for self-protection is simply not, in practice, a thing.

As far as I can see, the evidence for high surveillance in western countries being, essentially, a regional insurance company fetish far outweighs evidence that it is linked to _gun availability_.
by matsemann | 2025-09-30 07:47:27+00:00
But it could also destroy their brand. Right now I think most people somewhat "trust" LLM recommendations (just glossing over the hallucinations). But more and more results in the future will either be sponsored products, or spam bots having poisoned the data set by having spammed reddit and the likes.

So I'm afraid of a steep enshittification of this use.
by ponector | 2025-09-30 07:47:31+00:00
>> child will hear are explanations given with authority, which would probably be correct a very high percentage of the time (maybe even close to or above 99%), BUT the few incorrect answers and subtles misconceptions finding their way in there will be catastrophic for the learning journey because they will be believed blindly by the child.

Much better results than asking a real teacher at school, though.
by rcxdude | 2025-09-30 07:48:46+00:00
>But, that's not necessary to enforce a process of quality. It can be done by enforcing that the company must establish and document the processes to ensure quality, including which experts need to sign off on what. Then the FAA needs to hold the engineers who sign off professionally responsible and their managment legally liable if any circumvention is discovered down the line.

Having seen how quality processes work, it's really not a substitute for competent oversight. You can have a crap design and get all the paperwork is completely 100% in order, in fact the paperwork then makes it a lot more time consuming and expensive to fix the design!
by laurencerowe | 2025-09-30 07:49:33+00:00
I’ve never done a PhD (though have worked as a software developer in a research lab) but I feel I’ve had the most freedom to push the state of the art in the tech I work on in open source while funding myself through consulting.

My fear of going the startup route is that it ends up more like being a PI and having to chase funding and so much of the success lies less in the tech and more in the execution of how you sell it.

So go for funding and get the money to hire a team to do the fun stuff or do the fun stuff yourself on the side…
Show HN: Imagetextedit.com, Edit Text in Images
by demegire | 2025-09-30 07:49:36+00:00
Existing tools to edit text in images don't work that well/aren't user friendly. So I made a better one. See the comparison here: https://x.com/demegire1/status/1967669959368249555

Use HACKERNEWS50 for a 50% discount on all plans!
by TrackerFF | 2025-09-30 07:50:10+00:00
Looking back, we only had two guys in our class that went for Ph.D - both ended up doing a Ph.D in ML, coming from electrical engineering. This was back when ImageNet changed the scene. Both were extremely sharp. One of them ended up leaving for industry after 5 years postdoc, the other publishes like a machine, had stints at some really prestigious schools (Stanford, CMU) - but as far as I can find, still postdoc 10 years after getting his Ph.D

So while this is only N=2 sample size / anecdotal, it would seem to me that even in red hot fields like AI/ML you'd be better off finding some good company / private research group that matches your interest, and go for that. Probably going to get paid 5 times more, and not have to think about research grants and tenure track.
by Animats | 2025-09-30 07:50:50+00:00
The comment about humanoid forms raising expectations comes from Rethink's hype and failure. Rethink tried to solve manipulation and failed.

The Rethink hype video, with their cute little face on a screen.[1]

What the Rethink robot could actually do: take PC boards off a conveyor and put them in a fixture.[2] That's a routine robotic load/unload task. Like this one with Fanuc robots.[3]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4mULTknb2I

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnzmxJS4Rp4

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za5z1lb0hdU
by alexriddle | 2025-09-30 07:51:27+00:00
Usually it would be either the full day (ceremony, meal and ‘evening party’ which we commonly call the reception) or just the reception. No one is being asked to skip the middle part of the event.

Less than 20% of weddings are religious (and a smaller subset of this will be in churches), and I don’t really hear of anyone just turning up at the ceremony of someone they don’t know.
by Hilift | 2025-09-30 07:52:08+00:00
"The Butlerian Jihad was a cataclysmic, millennia-long holy war that completely eradicated artificial intelligence, computers, and sentient robots from human civilization. Taking place over 10,000 years before the events of the original novel, the Jihad was a violent reaction to humanity's over-reliance on and eventual enslavement by "thinking machines". The ban on advanced AI became a foundational law of the Galactic Imperium."
by serbuvlad | 2025-09-30 07:53:04+00:00
Once again, the EU coming 30 years later to do something everyone else is doing, and everyone will credit them for some odd reason.

In the 90s, there were dozens (hundreds?) of phone charging ports. A couple of years ago, there were only two. The dozens -> 2 simplifications occurred on the purely free market. And the EU mandated a simplification from 2 -> 1 and gets the credit for the entire simplification.

What is the point of this license? Either the GPL is invalid in the EU, in which case why aren't companies moving to the EU to infringe on the GPL? Or it is valid, in which case a a bunch of EU lawyers were given a bunch of MY money to do nothing of value to anyone.
by kakacik | 2025-09-30 07:53:08+00:00
Smoking is one of those harmful activities where state has some incentives to not be too proactive in preventing people from doing it. Eases a lot of social security costs down the line (vs cancer treatments, but many go out quickly via heart attack or stroke, just like my uncle did).

Quickest fix would be total ban (with addicts moving en masse to black market). Not practically possible in regular democracies.

Its up to people themselves for the most effective care. Easy talk about addiction which is ranked around cca heroin addiction in terms of how difficult it is to shed it. One always pays for one's mistakes, here its actually the offsprings...
by tuyiown | 2025-09-30 07:53:31+00:00
> They're only as dangerous as the capabilities you give them.

As long as the supply chain is safe and the data it accesses does not generate some kind of jail break.

It does read instructions from files on the file system, I pretty sure it's not complex to have it poison its prompt and make it suggest to build a program infected with malicious intent. It's just one copy pasta away from a prompt suggestion found on the internet.
by mooler_z | 2025-09-30 07:54:10+00:00
----- THE PROBLEM ----- You find gold. Then the algorithm steals it. Everyone finds amazing videos while scrolling social media, but they disappear forever. Bookmarks get buried, you can't search by what was said, and great content gets lost in the endless scroll.

---- The solution ---- Unreel is your personal video knowledge vault: - Save and organize videos effortlessly - Make them eternally searchable - Revisit and share inspiration whenever you need it
by numpad0 | 2025-09-30 07:54:55+00:00
fyi: for chatboxes that may take CJK inputs, you MUST use "shift+enter to send" pattern. There is a reason why most multinational chat/LLM app providers always do that instead of simple enter to send even for single-line chatboxes; because plain enter to send breaks input for CJK users.

Specifically, Input Method Editors needed for CJK inputs(esp. for C and J), to convert ambiguous semi-readable forms into proper readable text, use enter to finalize after candidates were iterated with spacebar. While IME engines don't interchange between different languages, I believe basically all of them roughly follow this pattern.

Unless you specifically wants to exclude CJK users, you have to either detect presence of IME and work with it so that enter do nothing to the app unless conditions are met. Switching to shift+enter works too.

1: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8405

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY6cg7w2eQU

3: https://youtu.be/sYAnawy_VoA?feature=shared&t=282

4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmoeZ_W3WXo
by arondeparon | 2025-09-30 07:56:13+00:00
It's been a while since I've used CloudWatch myself. How would you expect this? IE would you lean more towards having a lambda/firehose that forwards events to to the API (which is [public](https://tailstream.io/docs/api) by the way!) or would you expect some kind of agent / connector to run that automatically pulls the logs from CloudWatch?
by strnisa | 2025-09-30 07:57:02+00:00
I'm working on Small Transfers (https://smalltransfers.com/), a payment platform that makes it very convenient for SaaS / API makers to provide a pay-as-you-go model to their customers.

You can charge as little as 0.000001 USD per request. The platform uses our own system for tracking usage, which is settled through Stripe. No crypto, tokens, or wallets.

If combined with subscriptions, the pricing can work similarly to mobile plans, where monthly plans become cheaper above a certain usage threshold.

Looking for more developers to try it and share feedback.

Resources: integration guide (https://smalltransfers.com/merchant/docs/integration-guide), a quick walkthrough (https://youtu.be/WQW5fiUFNRk), a Next.js template (source code: https://github.com/smalltransfers/nextjs-starter, live demo: https://nextjs-starter.smalltransfers.com/), an AI template (source code: https://github.com/smalltransfers/ai-starter, live demo: https://ai-starter.smalltransfers.com/).
by 0rdinal | 2025-09-30 07:58:03+00:00
From my experience, junior's tend to churn out after around three years. There are often factors that go beyond whether they felt they were treated well. Looking at it holistically, younger people tend to want to move around more. It is no surprise to me that the average tenure of a junior employee is about the same length as a degree - separating life stages in to 1-3 year periods is a mindset embedded into young people throughout their education.

I would wager that perception plays heavily into this too. It can be difficult to shake a perception of "being a junior", especially when the path to seniority is unclear or poorly defined. Plus, the "two years and disappear" ethos of job hopping for quicker compensation capitalises on companies' conservative promotion criteria (and more liberal hiring criteria). Loyalty is rarely rewarded in these cases.
by cryptography | 2025-09-30 07:58:26+00:00
Here's what nobody talks about: the author was RIGHT about the structural problems.

But completely wrong about the solution.

The PhD glut? Real. The postdoc treadmill? Absolutely real. The funding crisis? Still here.

But here's what changed:

The same skills that make you survive a PhD—deep research, systems thinking, hypothesis testing, data analysis—became the EXACT skills the market desperately needs.

2025 reality: - AI companies hiring PhDs at $300K+ base - Biotech startups led by former academics - Data science roles requiring scientific rigor - Deep tech ventures solving real problems

The trap wasn't the PhD. The trap was assuming the ONLY path was tenure-track academia.

The researchers who thrived? They took their training and built different careers: → Industry R&D leadership → Technical founding teams → Quantitative roles in finance → Policy and strategy positions → Scientific consulting

The irony: that essay discouraged a generation from science right before scientific thinking became the most valuable skill set in the economy.

The lesson isn't "don't get a PhD."

It's "don't limit yourself to one narrow definition of what a scientist does."

The best training for solving hard problems is still solving hard problems.

You just get to choose which ones.