MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wtallis | 2025-09-07 07:27:52+00:00
> answered complaints about Windows being bad for development by embedding an OS that is good for development and calling that an innovation

Well, they actually did it twice in recent history: WSL 1 was relatively innovative, integrating Linux application compatibility into the Windows operating system itself. But that turned out to still be bad for development because it meant Linux software was now subjected to the performance problems of the Windows IO stack. So they responded with WSL 2, an ordinary Linux VM. And separately they also introduced the "Dev Drive" feature to let you create a filesystem that bypassed the worst parts of the Windows IO stack.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-09-07 07:29:02+00:00
I'm sorry but this is one of the most incorrect things I have ever read. If I could downvote it twice I would.

It's true that Japanese tend to be more strict about accurate production of phonology than many other language speakers but speaking and writing are huge enablers of becoming better. It's really not that hard to unlearn bad pronunciation especially in an immersive context. Also most Japanese have a tendency to gently correct a speaker if you use the wrong phrase, particle, or construction.

Obviously if you've been self-learning your first few conversations with real people are going to be rough and so maybe avoid dense topics like Japanese attitudes on the JSDF. But if you end up in a light conversation circle where you talk about your favorite foods you'll be fine.
by johnisgood | 2025-09-07 07:31:00+00:00
I am sorry it made you feel fuzzy. I did not say it works for everyone. My grandma gets delirious from Tramadol, for example. Many people are just simply pain-free on it without getting "high", let alone delirious. I personally do not experience these mental symptoms of opiates so I have no first-hand experiences. I know what euphoria is like, I have taken MDMA, but opiates works more peripherally for me, even the ones that are supposed to pass the CNS greatly.

Of course, I think, ultimately it is for you to decide whether it is worth the risk (feeling fuzzy) or not. It is not for me to decide what works for you. :)
Show HN: Uxia: AI-powered user testing in minutes
by borja_d | 2025-09-07 07:31:10+00:00
Hi HN,

As PMs (Google, Gopuff, Shiji), my cofounder and I ran hundreds of user tests over the years. And every time it felt broken: It could take 2–5 days just to get enough usable results

We spent hours watching recordings to extract a handful of insights

“Professional testers” rushed through tasks for pay, creating biased feedback

Platforms often started at €10k+ per year, with hidden fees on top

The result: slow iteration cycles, unreliable feedback, and user testing that often felt like a tax rather than a tool. We started asking: what if AI could help? Could synthetic users replicate realistic human behaviors?

Could we simulate thousands of testers instantly instead of recruiting them?

Would that make user testing accessible to any team, not just those with big budgets?

That exploration led us to build Uxia, an AI-powered user testing tool that: Delivers actionable insights in ~5 minutes, not days

Uses AI profiles to simulate thousands of behaviors

Offers flat pricing → unlimited tests, unlimited users, no hidden costs

You can upload a prototype, design, or flow and see where synthetic testers get stuck, what paths they take, and how they interact — all without waiting on recruiting or biased feedback loops. Of course, we know this approach isn’t perfect. Synthetic users won’t fully replace human intuition, but we think they can remove friction from the early stages of iteration and help teams test much more often. We’re also on PH today if you want to support the launch). We’d love your feedback:

Where do you think AI-driven testers could work well, and where would they fall short?

Would you trust synthetic feedback enough to guide real product decisions?

If you’ve struggled with user testing, what’s the one thing you wish could be different?

Thanks for reading, and happy to answer anything, we’ll be around all day.
by scott_w | 2025-09-07 07:32:02+00:00
> Isn’t 996 paid more than 955?

Not necessarily.

On-call is not the same either, there’s pay for being available then there’s pay for being called, so they’re not comparable at all.

> especially if you’re not in a life-critical industry

Most on-call isn’t in life critical industries. My dad had to drive to Leicester through the night with a generator in the bed of a pickup so the Walkers factory there could get back to making crisps. I’m sure Britain would have survived a slight reduction in supply of salt and vinegar crisps, so again, your idea that on-call should only exist for critical industries is an idea that seems to only exist in the heads of a relatively small number of software engineers. And I’ve no idea how you came to this conclusion.
by dmoy | 2025-09-07 07:32:53+00:00
Sure, but even Berlin doesn't have Tokyo level of public transit.

By my comment I mean that the things GP list aren't the only things that separate SF public transit and Tokyo public transit. You'd also need crazy high population and density too.

I don't disagree with GP's list of things, I just think they're not exhaustive. They might be sufficient to get SF to Berlin level of public transit.
by tomhow | 2025-09-07 07:33:09+00:00
As defrost wrote, it's best to email us about matters like this if you want to be sure we see them in a timely manner.

We've taken the [dupe] tag off your post and put it on todsacerdoti's instead. That said, they did submit the article to HN first, and by default the first to submit a URL will be the one that gets the points, unless we intervene, so the best way to prevent this is to submit your post to HN as soon as you publish it.

There have been a couple of discussions complaining about todsacerdoti's activities. We haven't seen a reason to ban them, on the basis that if we did that, articles that they would have posted may not get posted by anyone, and that would be a net loss for HN. At the same time, we don't love that they take karma and posting kudos away from other people who have a greater claim to it, which certainly applies to the author of the original article. So we'll need to think more about how to handle this.

I understand that what todsacerdoti does is scrape Lobsters for popular posts and autoposts them to HN. Which raises the question of why your posts are being submitted to Lobsters before HN :) But maybe that's not all they're doing. I don't know details, just going on what others have written in comments here.

If you (or anyone) ever feels like they've been sniped by todsacerdoti, you can email us and we'll consider making your post the primary submission for that article. And we'll keep thinking and talking more about how to handle high-volume auto-submitters like this, as we can see that there are downsides to their activities – and annoyance to other community members is a significant downside.
by userbinator | 2025-09-07 07:33:39+00:00
It's good to see that there still are some modders left in the community; there are others creating unofficial "distros" of Windows with most of the crap stripped out, and often useful additions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34654649

From my experience, Windows has always been somewhat modular (see 98lite for an early example), so it's not too difficult to pick and choose what pieces you want, but the main worry is that one of these hostile features is a dependency of a core component.

but do keep in mind that there is a risk associated with customizing your Windows installation in unintended ways

Of course there is this obligatory FUD from the Microsoft-fansite. In contrast to the risk associated with letting Microsoft absorb all your data and take control of your computer?
by ttctciyf | 2025-09-07 07:33:53+00:00
"Hallucination" is a euphemism at best, and the implication it carries that LLMs correctly perceive (meaning) when they are not hallucinating is fallacious and disinforming.

The reification of counterfactual outputs which are otherwise indistinguishable from the remainder of LLM production etiologically is a better candidate for the label "hallucination" IMO.
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-09-07 07:34:27+00:00
Not the same person but I think the "structure" of what the ML model is learning can have a substantial impact, specially if it then builds on that to produce further output.

Learning to guess the next token is very different from learning to map text to a hypervector representing a graph of concepts. This can be witnessed in image classification tasks involving overlapping objects where the output must describe their relative positioning. Vector-symbolic models perform substantially better than more "brute-force" neural nets of equivalent size.

But this is still different from hardcoding a knowledge graph or using closed-form expressions.

Human intelligence relies on very similar neural structures to those we use for movement. Reference frames are both how we navigate the world and also how we think. There's no reason to limit ourselves to next token prediction. It works great because it's easy to set up with the training data we have, but it's otherwise a very "dumb" way to go about it.
by borja_d | 2025-09-07 07:34:35+00:00
Great question. Synthetic users are best for early iteration cycles: spotting usability friction, validating flows, stress-testing designs. They’re not a replacement for real human intuition (e.g. emotions, motivations). Our vision is that they complement human testing: use synthetic users to test 20 times during a sprint, then validate the final version with real humans.
by masonremaley | 2025-09-07 07:35:34+00:00
After publishing this I wrote another crash reporter for a freelance client, but it was much more involved because that project doesn’t ship debug symbols to users so we had to do symbol resolution server side, which precludes using the closed source platform specific tools for this on macOS, iOS, and Windows. On Linux it’s easy of course.

I’m going to do a followup post at some point with what I learned from that project because it was much bigger. The TLDR is that IMO there’s a gap here I’d love to see an open source project fill. I don’t have time to start it right now, and my recommendation if you don’t want to get too in the weeds is to ship symbols with your executable and bypass a lot of the work.

(Edit: This didn’t answer your direct question sorry. I looked at both Crashpad and Breakpad when I started the second crash reporter and decided against both, but I don’t quite remember why.)
by stodor89 | 2025-09-07 07:35:50+00:00
> Which EU country reacted against Uber's predatory pricing when it was actually happening?

Bulgaria kicked out Uber for not obeying taxi regulations.

Sounds unrelated? Well it used to be a socialist dictatorship and laws are still written in a ham-fisted-yet-vague* way so that (1) you can't realistically obey them and (2) they can be used against anyone state authorities (or their friends) don't like.

So what's the actual reason? Uber was on its way to price taxi companies out of the market by offering better service at a price of €0.25/km.

* If you're from a developed country and this sounds like what your government is currently doing, you should start panicking.
by mpweiher | 2025-09-07 07:36:12+00:00
Yeah, in my experience, just MV is largely just fine.

I like the term "GluePuppy". It absolutely is a crucial part, or parts.

Basically, it defines the architecture of the system, pulls all the objects together and connects them to create a useful system.

It doesn't help that we don't have linguistic support for "glueing things together", we only have procedure calls. So that's one of the issues I am addressing with Objective-S, actual linguistic support for "glue". And yeah, please don't put the rules/distinctions over designing a clean system.

That was a thing I discovered only recently when working with two teams, one Android and one iOS: developers in general, and particularly good architects, want to build these uniformly recursively decomposed modules.

You can't do that with a good OO architecture, because you absolutely need the GluePuppy to tie things together. That one is different from the other modules. If you don't allow for a GluePuppy, but instead insist on uniform modules, you inescapably get procedural decomposition instead of OO decomposition. If you are in an OO language, that means singletons everywhere, because every module needs to know about its dependencies. And that gets you into a world of hurt when you want to do what OO is supposed to be good for, handle variation.

Embrace the GluePuppy! It loves you and wants to make your life simpler.

The "lets-use-the-call-tree-to-mirror-the-view-tree" fashion also has to do with this, IMHO, because our languages only have support for writing down procedures. So if you can get your view-tree expressed by the call-tree, you get to write it down directly in the code, rather than constructing it indirectly, with the view-tree being a hidden side effect.

That is a clear benefit, but the costs are pretty horrendous.

How about we extend our languages so that we can also write down those view hierarchies directly in the code, and at the same time using a format that can also be read/written as data (down LISPers, down)?
by robocat | 2025-09-07 07:37:07+00:00
> home geothermal

More than 900 shallow wells have been drilled at Rotorua for space and water heating for private homes, hospitals, schools, motels, hotels, and other commercial and industrial uses. At peak use, around 430 wells were operating. Currently fewer than 300 production and injection wells are operating, for approximately 140 consents takes. About 90 of the wells are less than 200m deep and typically recover geothermal fluid at temperatures of 120 to 200°C.
by microtonal | 2025-09-07 07:38:07+00:00
I feel like both Intel and AMD are not doing great in the desktop CPU stability department. I made a machine with a Ryzen 9900X a while back and it had the issue that it would freeze when idling. A few years before I had a 5950X that would regularly crash under load (luckily it was a prebuilt, so it was ultimately fixed).

When you do not have a bunch of components ready to swap out it is also really hard to debug these issues. Sometimes it’s something completely different like the PSU. After the last issues, I decided to buy a prebuilt (ThinkStation) with on-site service. The cooling is a bit worse, etc., but if issues come up, I don’t have to spend a lot of time debugging them.

Random other comment: when comparing CPUs, a sad observation was that even a passively cooled M4 is faster than a lot of desktop CPUs (typically single-threaded, sometimes also multi-threaded).
by mpweiher | 2025-09-07 07:38:38+00:00
> so M was data,

M is the Model. That means the data and all the things you might ever want to do with the data. So any interaction you might want to do from the view is (ideally) a single message-send to the model.

> V was presentations of the data

And editing the data.

> C was interaction on the M and maybe V.

> It only got confusing when I got more experience.

:-)
by sim7c00 | 2025-09-07 07:38:55+00:00
Brian: We are all different! Guy: I'm not!

its always just some cheesy hacker words put to seem mysterious or whatever -_-.

we are legion, we are one etc. anything like that fall apart quickly if you attach identity to something doesnt it.

i guess by being anonymous online some forget they are not anonymous irl. a lot of being alone with the terminal ^^>

gotta read between all the fluff tho.
by gshulegaard | 2025-09-07 07:38:56+00:00
When I lived in Portland you technically _could_ pay TTP, but I don't quite count it because Hop pass accrual meant if you used TriMet regularly you needed a Hop card anyway. Just out of curiosity I checked around and it looks like they extended that functionality to regular bank cards around two years ago [1]. Which is awesome as now the only reason to get a Hop pass is for people that qualify for reduced fares or are unbanked (which makes sense).

> The multi-stage turnstiles at the RER stations… ugh.

Ah yes, had one of many, "I look like the tourist I am," moments navigating those visiting the Versailles.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/1awweix/trimet_ex...
by DiscourseFan | 2025-09-07 07:39:20+00:00
Actually, for me, on account of the particular circumstances of my career, I actually have close friends all over the world, and its easier for me to fly out to the various cities where they live, that I am now quite familiar with, than to tie myself down to one particular place. I mean certainly traveling was lonelier when I was younger, but now it feels more like I live in one giant city composed of all the great metropolies of the world.
by devjab | 2025-09-07 07:40:32+00:00
> Contrast this with what it takes for an engineer to use a common, free tool: They can just use it. No approval process.

As far as IT operations goes, it's usually easier to get approval for paid products since they come with support and are viewed as more "trustworthy". At least in my experience.

I've never worked in a 300+ organisation where you could "just use" things. I have worked in places where they gave some of us local admins (I've been a domainadmin in a few places too), but there is usually a large bureaucracy around software regardless of licenses. Where I work right now, licensing is a minor part of it for companies with good payment systems (like Docker) where it'll automatically go on the books and be EU tax deducted. Compare that to GitKraken where you need to create an IT owner account inside their system, and then distribute the annual licenses manually after you pay for them with a credit card that you will then need to manually submit for tax deduction.
by mdp2021 | 2025-09-07 07:41:15+00:00
The right to access knowledge remains human oriented even when the reading is automated.

It does not matter that your screwdriver does not have rights: you will be using it for the purpose consistent with the principle of your freedom and encouragement to fix your cabling. You are not required to "hand-screw them drives".

In context, for example, you can take notes. That has nothing to do with the "rights of the paper".

Nothing forbids an automated reader by principle - especially when the automated reader is an intermediate tool for human operation.
by thijsr | 2025-09-07 07:41:47+00:00
When you can modify the microcode of a CPU, you can modify the behaviour of the RDRAND/RDSEED instructions. For example, using EntrySign [1] on AMD, you can make RDRAND to always return 4 (chosen by a fair dice roll, guaranteed to be random)

[1] https://bughunters.google.com/blog/5424842357473280/zen-and-...
by estimator7292 | 2025-09-07 07:42:07+00:00
We've shown people so many times and so forcefully that they're now actively complaining about it. It's a meme.

The problem isn't getting your Killer A I App in front of eyeballs. The problem is showing something useful or necessary or wanted. AI has not yet offered the common person anything they want or need! The people have seen what you want to show them, they've been forced to try it, over and over. There is nobody who interacts with the internet who has not been forced to use AI tools.

And yet still nobody wants it. Do you think that they'll love AI more if we force them to use it more?
by devsda | 2025-09-07 07:43:31+00:00
"An X country's covert operations team landed on country Y's shores, opened fire on a boat in which an innocent fisherman lost lives and left"

If X is Iran/Russia/North Korea/<current choice> and Y is US/UK/Canada etc, the whole *mainstream* media would be calling for war. But in this case, its just called a failed operation. Even if it was an allied country and the SEAL was caught, US would threaten the country with war to get the person back.

US has always been an agressor to small countries, big countries, allies i.e rest of the world. Americans can accept the fact or stay in denial but it doesn't change other countries' experience or how they feel about it.
by defraudbah | 2025-09-07 07:44:06+00:00
it references a The Staff Engineers Path, i think staff is a new senior and it's easy to get to it and hard to jump over when joining a new company. I don't really care abount one more level raise from being engineer X3 to X4, I want to get to X7 or be self employed, getting raise at a job is super easy you just kinda work there
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-09-07 07:44:08+00:00
No, I think it's very important to understand that local times in the future do not identify a point in time and that local times are not necessarily tied to any particular location.

If I set my alarm clock to 7am, I want it to always wake me at 7am local time regardless of where I happen to be on that day.

If I make an appointment for 7 Sep 2026 at 3pm I'm going to turn up at whatever time counts as 3pm on that date. The government might scrap DST, so the exact point in time is currently unknown.

Many uses of local time cannot be expressed correctly if you are forced to specify a timezone.
by RossBencina | 2025-09-07 07:44:28+00:00
> if all or almost all of your controllers match up to precisely one view, then you're burning design budget on a distinction that is buying you nothing.

Could you give an example? I've never understood how one could possibly reuse a Controller independently of a View. At a minimum any kind of mouse-based direct manipulation requires the Controller having access to the displayed geometry in order to implement hit testing. E.g. how is a Controller supposed to update the selection range in a text editor without screen-coordinate character extent information from the view, or a drawing editor Controller accessing scene graph geometry for object selection, control handle manipulation, etc.
by johnisgood | 2025-09-07 07:44:55+00:00
This does not fill me with much hope. What am I even ought to buy at this point then, I wonder. I have a ~13 years old Intel CPU which lacks AVX2 (and I need it by now) and I thought of buying a new desktop (items separately, of course), but that is crazy to me that it freezes because of the CPU going idle. It was never an issue in my case. I guess I can only hope it is not going to be a problem once I completed building my PC. :|

On what metric am I ought to buy a CPU these days? Should I care about reviews? I am fine with a middle-end CPU, for what it is worth, and I thought of AMD Ryzen 7 5700 or AMD Ryzen 5 5600GT or anything with a similar price tag. They might even be lower-end by now?
by devjab | 2025-09-07 07:45:18+00:00
Around here it's usually a lot harder to get open source software approved with IT because they tend to dislike products where they can't call a compant. Licensing is easier of course, but for a lot of software licensing is virtually automatic. With Docker it's billed by the amount of people in the Docker AD group, and it tells EU tax deductable automatically.

Not that this should be an argument for docker. The idea that having someone to call makes a piece of software "safer" is as ridiculous at it sounds. Especially if you've ever tried "calling" a company you buy 20 licenses from, and when I say call what I really mean is talking with a chatbot and then waiting a month for them to get back to you via email. But IT's gonna IT.
by elric | 2025-09-07 07:45:36+00:00
> Ten years ago if you were blogging on Tumblr or Wordpress you were writing to an audience in an attempt to promote something.

Really? That wasn't my experience at all. Neither in the blogs I read, nor the blogs I wr[oi]te. Most blogs have always seemed like a work of passion to me, especially the ones hostes on platforms like WP.