MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dahart | 2025-09-02 14:14:40+00:00
> I cannot help but conclude that Searle argues that ‘understanding’ is only something that humans can do, which means…

Regardless of whether Searle is right or wrong, you’ve jumped to conclusions and are misunderstanding his argument and making further assumptions based on your misunderstanding. Your argument is also ad-hominem by accusing people of believing things they don’t believe. Maybe it would be prudent to read some of the good critiques of Searle before trying to litigate it rapidly and sloppily on HN.

The randomness stuff is very straw man, definitely not a good argument, best to drop it. Today’s LLMs are deterministic, not random. Pseudorandom sequences come in different varieties, but they model some properties of randomness, not all of them. The functioning of today’s neural networks, both training and inference, is exactly a book of static rules, despite their use of pseudorandom sequences.

In case you missed it in the WP article, most of the field of cognitive science thinks Searle is wrong. However, they’re largely not critiquing him for using metaphysics, because that’s not his argument. He’s arguing that biology has mechanisms that binary electronic circuitry doesn’t; not human brains, simply physical chemical and biological processes. That much is certainly true. Whether there’s a difference in theory is unproven. But today currently there absolutely is a difference in practice, nobody has ever simulated the real world or a human brain using deterministic computation.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-09-02 14:14:58+00:00
Some of the Anthropic guys have said that the core thing holding the models back is training, and they're confident the gains will keep coming as they figure out how to onboard more and more training data. So yeah, Claude might suck at reading and writing plumbing diagrams, but they claim the barrier is simply a function of training, not any kind of architectural limitation.
Show HN: Mbzlists – Create and share universal playlists along with stories
by lepisma | 2025-09-02 14:15:16+00:00
I like having human context around song playlists, but I couldn't find a seamless way to maintain that alongside playlists on major listening platforms. So I made mbzlists where you can create playlist blogs with songs, rich text, and images all together.

The system is built around an extension to the XSPF format (https://xspf.org/) and uses MusicBrainz for universal track identification. These lists (and individual songs) can be shared and played on any platform (currently supports Spotify, YouTube, and Subsonic-compatible players). You can also self-host the app, download the playlists to work with them locally, or generate and host a static page like this https://docs.mbzlists.com/format/output

Here is a small write-up with more details: https://lepisma.xyz/2025/09/02/annotated-playlists/

Source Code: https://sr.ht/~lepisma/mbzlists/ Documentation: https://docs.mbzlists.com/
by aklemm | 2025-09-02 14:15:18+00:00
Off the top of my head, I do several things:

1) tell stories of how I came to enjoy something I previously had not

2) don't make anything contentious...respect preferences while insisting they can change those preferences if they want to

3) help them gain competence quickly in anything they may not love at first

4) exposure and enthusiasm about lots of things

5) never trashing things and never ever shitting on other people's likes.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-09-02 14:15:23+00:00
This might be of at least some value to augment training LLMs? I spent a lot of time in the 1980s and early 1990s using symbolic AI techniques: conceptual dependency, NLP, expert systems, etc. While two large and well funded expert system projects I worked on (paid for by DARPA and PacBell) worked well, mostly symbolic AI was brittle and required what seemed like an i finite amount of human labor.

LLMs are such a huge improvement that the only real use I see in projects like Cause et, the defunct OpenCyc project, etc. the only possible practical use might be as a little extra training data.
by Ericson2314 | 2025-09-02 14:15:44+00:00
We're still talking about different things here. I'm saying the entire "VCS scans file system to sync state" is the wrong algorithm. It's unecessary work because there are two sources of truth.

Forgot the constant factors of FUSE, and imagine an in-kernel git implementation. If you have a Merkel CoW filesystem, then when (ignoring journals) you modify child files, you need to update parent directories on disk anyways, this is a great time to recompute VCS hashes too.

"git status" is, if the journal is flushed and hashes are up to date, always an O(1) operation.
by pflenker | 2025-09-02 14:15:46+00:00
To be unfairly cynical here, the sentence you quoted sounds to me like "I chose to not have a front door. I didn't give it much thought at the time, but knew that I wanted my home to be available for people to learn from my interior design choices and decorations. Then I discovered that people walked in, started to eat out of my fridge, leave dirt everywhere and carry off some of my chairs, and it hurts".

The fault here lies not with the persons who use the maintainer's code exactly in line with the license, no matter what other _intentions_ he might have had.
by curionymous | 2025-09-02 14:15:57+00:00
I mean detaining jews were also "legal" at one point in time. So, let's just base our morals on what's legal and defend people who abuse the laws to do more heinous stuff, so we can hide behind "Generally I'm against it, but it's legal, so nothing wrong is going on here".

That'll surely make things work out great. right?
by NiloCK | 2025-09-02 14:16:00+00:00
Apologies if I was unclear, but I'm not worried about being understood. It's rare for me to write on the topic.

My frustration is that I always have to guess at writers intention, and that the broader dialogue is confused by this lack of clarity.

This thread exemplifies it - people accused the BearBlog author of being a hypocrite because he says things like "It hurts to believe in open-source and then be bitten by it."

A more charitable read than the hypocrisy accusation is that the BearBlog author never believed in Open Source as intended by the OSI or MIT license, but rather believes in open source as colloquially used, for purposes of software legibility.
by microtonal | 2025-09-02 14:16:04+00:00
But that didn't require deep insight. Both were already really popular and clearly a threat to Facebook. WhatsApp was huge in Europe before they bought (possibly other places as well).

Buying competition is par for the course for near-monopolies in their niches. As long as the scale differences in value are still very large, you can avoid competition relatively cheaply, while the acquired still walk away with a lot of money.
by jimz | 2025-09-02 14:16:07+00:00
No because a) "illegal immigrant" is not a term with a meaningful legal definition in the first place and b) Although sss.gov says undocumented immigrants need to register under their FAQ, their chart of acceptable documentation effectively excludes the exact population. https://www.sss.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Documentation...

But since those who entered without inspection have almost no way to show when they actually entered, full stop, and ICE doesn't actually have a comprehensive and reliable way of tracking the population that wouldn't run afoul of the Constitution, it's basically a violation that is effectively performative. The people this targets are not eligible for any benefits whatsoever on the federal level for themselves anyway (but still have to pay taxes) and cannot naturalize so there's no carrot and no viable stick. It's a rump piece of legislation.
by mystraline | 2025-09-02 14:16:24+00:00
We have enough food production to feed 30 billion people, and throw away massive amounts.

We have plenty of land and housing could be inexpensive or free for all.

Sunlight, wind, and tidal is literally 1kW/1m^2 free energy.

Pirates already can watch anything, listen to petabytes of music, access nearly every book including academic papers.

We really could be living in post-scarcity world. But its the oligarchs and billionaires who want to keep the spoils for themselves. And in the USA alone 8 billionaires own as much resources as the bottom 60% does.

Simply put, material scarcity is a fucked mindset. And we could grow past that - in fact I think we have to.
by Sean-Der | 2025-09-02 14:16:28+00:00
If you are looking to do interesting projects that involving networking, cryptography or real-time media we would love to have you!

Pion is a open source collection of Go software that lets you build real-time media applications. No corporate entity behind it, just developers enjoying their craft! Lots of opportunities if you are looking to learn or want to build something interesting but can't find the right problem.
by cosmic_quanta | 2025-09-02 14:16:39+00:00
This was a great read. I find myself becoming the grumpy complainer as I age, but as the post says, the torture is mostly in my head. It's good to keep that in mind; I can't always control my environment, but I can always control how I experience it.

I also enjoyed the writing style, and wandered onto another post. First sentence:

> I’ve always seen cathedrals as presenting a kind of implicit argument to atheists. Something like: God must exist, because otherwise it would have been insane for people to build [a cathedral]

This is my new favourite writer
by baud147258 | 2025-09-02 14:16:42+00:00
While not on the same scale as Toronto's underpass, the Université Laval in neighboring Quebec has an underground walkway linking many of the building, including some of the dorms. Once when I was studying there I went to class in slippers from my dorm, without stepping outside. Though even during winter I didn't use them much, I found a bit too depressing to stay cooped up inside all day long, plus a few parts were very crowded.
by nickserv | 2025-09-02 14:16:43+00:00
Interesting that you say the 'o' to explicitly indicate the 24h format.

In France we just say "let's meet tomorrow at 8 hours" for example, to which the person has to ask something like "Wait, do you mean at 8 hours or 20 hours?"

It's usually obvious from the context, but not always.
by JCM9 | 2025-09-02 14:17:10+00:00
Except they’re struggling here. The performance of their offerings is consistently behind competitors, particularly given their ongoing networking challenges, and they’re consistently undercut on pricing.

For Amazon “renting servers” at very high margin is their cash cow. For many competitors it’s more of a side business or something they’re willing to just take far lower margin on. Amazon needs to keep the markup high. Take away the AWS cash stream and the whole of Amazon’s financials start to look ugly. That’s likely driving the current panic with its leadership.

Culturally Amazon does really well when it’s an early mover leader in a space. It really struggles, and its leadership can’t navigate, when it’s behind in a sector as is playing out here.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-09-02 14:17:12+00:00
I see what you're saying, but I don't agree with this characterization.

(1) Internet: Netscape came out in 1994, and the internet tidal wave memo was 1995 and internet explorer came out the same year. Windows was rewritten with a focus on the networking stack, with Windows NT coming out in 1993 before the web boom. The internet's value is based on network effects and while you are right that they weren't first to market, they embraced it quickly and if they hadn't it likely would have been disastrous.

(2) Stock price: if you bought MSFT in October the year the iphone came out in 2007, you would take 6 years to break even. If you bought at the top in 2000 you wouldn't break even until 2016. This is a company that was limping along. During the mobile phone boom you'd have been better off putting your money in treasuries than in MSFT.

Yes they survived and were able to do well later. But my original point still stands: if you were running MSFT and wanted to be successful you would have embraced the internet and mobile. Deliberately sitting out a major technological innovation is not a recipe for success because the risk of ruin is very high. And the risk of becoming IBM is even higher.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-09-02 14:17:13+00:00
I wonder if it addressed something practical and meaningful...like implementing a spell check that at least covers all of the English language. Maybe then they can start working on the 5 year trek to also make the spellchecker somewhat competent.

Or maybe we'll just keep packing features, because everyone here knows, features are what save products! Not usability!
Show HN: Django REST Framework MCP – Expose Your Django APIs to AI Agents
by skierzp | 2025-09-02 14:17:28+00:00
I wanted Claude to interact directly with my Django app data, so I built a library that exposes Django REST Framework APIs as callable MCP tools with just a few lines of code.

@mcp_viewset() # <-- Just add this decorator to any ViewSet! class CustomerViewSet(ModelViewSet): queryset = Customer.objects.all() serializer_class = CustomerSerializer

I've been using Claude Desktop to do admin tasks and it's supercharged my workflows:

- "Deactivate josh@gmail.com's account" -> tools/call `deactivate_user` - "Extend jack@teams.com's free trial by 1 week" -> tools/call `update_plans` - "How many new users joined week-over-week the past 3 months" -> tools/call `list_users` -> LLM synthesizes the returned data into chart!

It automatically generates tool schemas from your Django serializers and works with any existing auth/permissions (or you can set up MCP-specific rules).

It's still in alpha (v0.1.0a3), but definitely stable enough for real use. There's a demo Blog Django app set up in the repo to showcase, but I'd really love more feedback from folks trying it with real Django apps.

GitHub: https://github.com/zacharypodbela/djangorestframework-mcp PyPI: pip install django-rest-framework-mcp
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-09-02 14:17:28+00:00
This is my exact feeling. Louis Rossman talks so much about this (YouTube). I think the only secure device now is a dumb phone.

I am really learing to live life without the internet anymore. Between the lock in, the privacy risks, and just the hassle, it is easier to act like I am living back in the 1990's and just get used to the "inconvenience" of life without a smartphone. I can leave my smartphone in a faraday bag and just pull it out when I need it, or just wait to be in wifi. (I am homeless living in a minivan so this makes it much harder for me.)

I just do not know how much this will effect GrapheneOS or I would get a Pixel 9a. It seems like it will not, at least for the older phones.

At least we still have linux (for now).

But more and more computer technology is looking like a trap.

If anyone has any recommendations for a dumb phone that will work with AT&T please let me know.
by jhatemyjob | 2025-09-02 14:17:29+00:00
I feel like adding more laws for this kind of stuff won't really stick. Like a pie-in-the-sky sort of thing. We can hem and haw about what the government should do all we want but like... I mean, the Digital Markets Act certainly made a HUGE impact. And the GDPR is definitely a net positive for society.

I think the thing you brought up at the beginning is the most practical path forward, someone with the technical know-how and business acumen needs to start a company. Apple and Google are quite weak now, and there are lessons to be learned from the Librem 5 and PinePhone. If enough people try, someone will eventually break through.
by throwaway7783 | 2025-09-02 14:17:36+00:00
I'll repeat what I said above. It's for availability (aka I don't want my customers screaming at me if the machine goes down). And no , scaling out was not our first solution, scaling up was. I have considered going bare metal so many times, but the number of things we need to build/manage by ourselves to function is too much right now.

Hopefully when we can afford to do it, we will.
by kratok | 2025-09-02 14:17:37+00:00
Location: Greece Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Role: Product Manager Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/romanzadyrako/ Email: roman.zadyrako@gmail.com

10 years of experience in product, from 0 to acquisition in SaaS. 2x founder. Angelpad, 500Startups. User onboarding geek (see https://onboarding.pro). Love automating things.
by stdbrouw | 2025-09-02 14:17:55+00:00
If there is an ideal amount of some personality trait then for most people the advice would be "do more of this" even though for some others it'll have to be "do less of this" depending on where you're coming from. When I was young I definitely did a bit of over-socialization (everybody seems to like music festivals so I guess I must like them too if I don't want to be a weirdo?) but as you can see in the comments to this post, as we get older it's easy to get into a pattern where anything you're not familiar with is instantly met with suspicion or derision, and a lot of people don't like this about themselves, which is why this blogpost resonates with them.

Also, "liking something intrinsically", what does that even mean?
by chadcmulligan | 2025-09-02 14:18:22+00:00
Its way more than this, today I got it to write some code, and a bit was wrong, I told it why it was wrong and it said oh ok, and toddled off and fixed it - in all the places that were wrong. This is way more than an encyclopaedia could, lossless or not.

The more I use it, the more surprised I am at its capabilities, it really is like a beginner dev, but one that doesn't learn from its mistakes (yet anyway). I find myself asking it to do more and more.
by IAmGraydon | 2025-09-02 14:19:01+00:00
If the world could just internalize this simple fact - it's a search engine of all of the knowledge it has ingested, with a human-language interface (and quite a good one at that). It doesn't think. It isn't intelligence. Calling it "AI" from the beginning was a grift from the companies developing the tech.

Since late 2022, I've used LLMs extensively for coding, copywriting, research, and everything in between and I've slowly gone from "this is amazing" to "this is extremely useful but probably extremely overhyped" to "this might not actually be all that useful at all". Where accuracy matters, fact checking these things takes as much time as just doing the work manually. I think its most useful application is as a tool for spammers and bots, and that doesn't exactly bode well for the companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the tech.
by skyriser | 2025-09-02 14:19:15+00:00
Location: Montreal, Canada Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: iOS/macOS (UIKit/AppKit/Objective-C/Swift/SwiftUI), Stock/Forex/Crypto APIs Languages: English, French Resume/CV: http://chriscomeau.com/resume Email: chris.comeau@skyriser.com
by moregrist | 2025-09-02 14:19:20+00:00
> Lossy compression does make things up. We call them compression artefacts.

I don’t think this is a great analogy.

Lossy compression of images or signals tends to throw out information based on how humans perceive it, focusing on the most important perceptual parts and discarding the less important parts. For example, JPEG essentially removes high frequency components from an image because more information is present with the low frequency parts. Similarly, POTS phone encoding and mp3 both compress audio signals based on how humans perceive audio frequency.

The perceived degradation of most lossy compression is gradual with the amount of compression and not typically what someone means when they say “make things up.”

LLM hallucinations aren’t gradual and the compression doesn’t seem to follow human perception.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-09-02 14:19:24+00:00
I tried Dvorak for a while but gave up after I realized:

1. Not only are the key positions for typing different, but all the keyboard shortcuts I know needed to be re-learned too, and were often in much worse locations (as just one of many problems, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V are no longer next to each other)

2. I still need to be good with QWERTY because basically everything uses it.

It's a shame, because it does seem more efficient (you can type a lot of words without having to move your fingers from the home row), but I just felt like it was too much work for too little gain.
by skyriser | 2025-09-02 14:19:44+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Montreal, Canada | Remote/Freelance Technologies: iOS/macOS (UIKit/AppKit/Objective-C/Swift/SwiftUI), Stock/Forex/Crypto APIs Web: http://chriscomeau.com Resume/CV: http://chriscomeau.com/resume LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christiancomeau GitHub: https://github.com/chriscomeau Languages: English, French Email: chris.comeau@skyriser.com
by throwaway7783 | 2025-09-02 14:19:52+00:00
Maybe I'm dumb. I am not even taking about distributed systems here. I'm taking about basic high availability configuration. Two web servers, two (or three) db server instances for HA. I have had paying enterprise customers from day 1, and I don't want them screaming at me for systems going down.

And as soon as you have two of anything, all the above start mattering.

If none of this actually is an issue for you and your customers, I'll say your are very lucky.
by AstroBen | 2025-09-02 14:20:38+00:00
> It definitely needs people with more experience to set up everything

I mean it's not just the experience - it's the upfront time cost and then ongoing maintenance.. and for what? It's really easy to underestimate how much effort this will be

Having done both I genuinely think Rails is a 10x productivity boost over stitching your own mishmash of libraries together in Node

The only lack of flexibility you run into is if you really disagree with the fundamentals of the framework. If you hate the ActiveRecord pattern for example you need to stay away

"shit breaks once complexity comes in" is a skill issue
by robenkleene | 2025-09-02 14:20:51+00:00
On the IDE marketshare question, the Stackoverflow Developer Survey asks questions like this and I always jump to that section. Here's my comment on HN summarizing the most recent survey https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44725015

I also wrote about VS Code's early rising with a focus on marketshare here https://blog.robenkleene.com/2020/09/21/the-era-of-visual-st...

I also think your observation about VS Code's rise forcing JetBrains into a corner is spot on.

On a side tangent, I find it odd that the whole VS Code phenomena is under analyzed. Before VS Code, text editors and IDEs were one of the healthiest software categories around, with the market leader hovering around 35%, which is great for competition enforcing quality (DAWs are still like this today). Now text editors have become more like the Adobe suite, where there's in 800 lb gorilla doing whatever it wants and everyone else is competing over scraps (if you say VS Code is actually good though, Photoshop was amazing when it made its rise too). Developers just let this happen to their core tool without anyone really talking about?
by cornstalks | 2025-09-02 14:21:26+00:00
The page does say it, though it might be easy to overlook if you don't understand the significance of the statements:

> Zero setup

> Direct to gameplay

> Distraction-free gaming

> Use SD cards or other external media as carts

The 90s gaming console experience was:

1. Grab your game cartridge.

2. Insert cartridge into console.

3. Turn on console.

4. Play the game.

There are no steps between 3 and 4. The console booted directly into the game. It was fast and there was no messing with multimedia experience stuff (like Xbox or PS later introduced).

I have no experience with Kazeta but this is what I would expect from its homepage.