MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freetime2 | 2025-09-16 05:04:28+00:00
The worst Apple era for me was the butterfly keyboard / touchbar era of Macs. They went too far in the pursuit of thin and light - removing ports, going with a keyboard design that felt bad to type on and was prone malfunction, and the touchbar, which I actually thought sounded cool at first, ended up being much less useful than a row of function keys.

I didn't feel betrayed by Apple, I just decided not to buy a new MacBook until they fixed their keyboard issues. I switched to Linux for a couple of years, and switched back once they released the M1 MacBook Pro. I'm perfectly happy with my Macs (I have 3) now.

I actually really like the current era of Apple where their motto seems to be give people what they want. MacBook Pros with HDMI ports and SD card readers. iPads finally getting viable multi-tasking support and a real mouse cursor (although iPadOS still sucks IMO). The iPhone 17 Pro is slightly thicker than the 16 Pro to allow for a bigger battery. Their storage and memory upgrade prices are still ridiculous, but at least Macs come with a usable 16 GB memory minimum now, and iPhones start with an honestly better-than-I-expected 256 GB storage.

It's not all perfect - especially on the software side. The settings menu on iOS is kind of a cluster. Apple Music has a terrible UX, as does the recent update to Photos. And I haven't tried Tahoe and Liquid Glass yet - but I'm definitely a little concerned.
Show HN: From Chatbots to AI Agents: The Quiet Revolution
by leoli123 | 2025-09-16 05:05:11+00:00
From Chatbots to AI Agents: The Quiet Revolution While everyone debates AGI timelines, a more immediate transformation is unfolding. AI systems are evolving from passive chatbots into autonomous agents that can plan, execute, and adapt. This shift isn't just an upgrade—it's fundamentally changing how we work. The Agent Difference Traditional chatbots respond to queries. AI agents complete tasks. Consider this scenario: asking ChatGPT to "help me plan a trip" gets you suggestions. An AI agent books flights, reserves hotels, and adds events to your calendar—checking your preferences and budget along the way. This isn't futuristic speculation. Tools like Anthropic's Computer Use, OpenAI's GPTs with actions, and specialized coding agents like Cursor are already demonstrating these capabilities. They can browse websites, manipulate files, write and execute code, and coordinate multiple tools to achieve goals. Why Now? Three technical breakthroughs enabled this transition. First, function calling allows AI to reliably interact with external tools and APIs. Second, improved context windows enable agents to maintain state across complex, multi-step tasks. Third, better reasoning capabilities let agents plan sequences of actions and recover from errors. The impact extends beyond convenience. A recent study found that software developers using agent-based tools completed projects 55% faster. Customer service departments report 70% reduction in response times when agents handle initial triage and information gathering. The Real Challenge The technology works. The harder questions are about deployment. Who's responsible when an agent makes a costly mistake? How much autonomy should we grant to systems that can't explain their reasoning? What happens to employment when agents can handle increasingly complex tasks? These aren't theoretical concerns. Companies are already grappling with agent governance. Some limit agents to read-only operations. Others require human approval for any action involving money or external communications. The most progressive organizations are experimenting with "agent teams" where multiple specialized agents collaborate under human supervision. Practical Steps Forward For individuals and businesses ready to explore agents, start small. Use agents for well-defined, reversible tasks like research, data analysis, or content drafting. Build confidence gradually before delegating critical operations. The transition from chatbots to agents represents the difference between having an assistant who answers questions and one who gets things done. As we navigate this shift, success belongs to those who learn to collaborate with agents rather than compete against them. The revolution isn't coming. It's here, running quietly in the background, completing tasks while we sleep.
by musicale | 2025-09-16 05:05:28+00:00
A sampler with a filter envelope is a type of subtractive synth.

Alchemy in GarageBand has many presets with adjustable filter envelopes (sometimes multiple) and volume envelopes, so it can work as a subtractive synth stand-in. However since it's based on Alchemy Player you don't seem to get the full patch creation power of Alchemy in Logic Pro.

GarageBand's "synth" (named) presets that I've tried appear to be subtractive, and sound great, but seem to limit user controls to filter cutoff and a single envelope for both volume and filter (possibly with configurable envelope amount). Some presets have slightly different controls though (for example an FM amount.)

Fortunately there are lots of great AUs, including free ones, for traditional virtual analog subtractive synthesis (and FM, and everything else.)
by defrost | 2025-09-16 05:06:15+00:00
> It is not at all simple to define biological gender in a such a way that there are only two of them.

It's ridiculously easy to do so, and commonly done .. the catch is that it's not all encompassing enough to cover all human births.

Richard Dawkins frequently weasel words his responses, clearly stating that there are only two reproductive (human) sexes ...

Obviously that doesn't cover all the human biological forms that are birthed, nor even does it cover the stages and ages of common human lives .. but it's easy and gets a lot of play.
by retrac | 2025-09-16 05:06:41+00:00
I think some younger people might have never really seen a CRT. And they're positively rare now. I encountered a CRT TV in the hospital waiting room recently and was a bit startled to see one. So for those only passingly familiar, if you get the opportunity, spend a bit of time experimenting with it visually. Jiggle your eyes, look away suddenly, and then back, and try oblique angles. Maybe you'll see what they mean about "you just can't recreate that glow".

It's hard to describe but the image is completely ephemeral. All display technologies involve sleight-of-hand that exploits visual illusion and persistence of vision to some degree, but the CRT is maybe the most illusory of the major technologies. It's almost entirely due to persistence of vision. With colour TV and fast phosphors the majority of the light energy is released within a few milliseconds of the spot being hit by the beam. If you had eyes that worked at electronic speeds, you would see a single point drawing the raster pattern while varying in brightness.

A bit of TEMPEST trivia: The instantaneous luminosity of a CRT is all you need to reconstruct the image. Even if it's reflected off a wall or through a translucent curtain. You need high bandwidth, at least a few megahertz, but a photodiode is all that's necessary. The resulting signal even has the horizontal and vertical blanking periods right where they should be. Only minor processing (even by old school analog standards) is required to produce something that can be piped right into another CRT to recreate the image. I'd bet it could be done entirely in DSP these days.
by fluoridation | 2025-09-16 05:06:44+00:00
I was asking specifically about chips and the like. I've seen that shit you mention in creams and pastes and other stuff like that and yeah, that's definitely deceitful and nobody likes that. That said, for me it's not about getting ripped off, but about making it difficult to tell when I'm about to run out, especially if it's some specialty product that I have to go out of my way to get.
by snickell | 2025-09-16 05:07:09+00:00
On an iPhone 12 mini, wishing I hadn’t upgraded to iOS 26 because now my phone is notably laggy. Word to the wise. I use swiping for input and would consider it now unusable due to extreme lag.

The physical aspect I can’t give up is I can hold the phone with my thumb on the bottom and my middle finger on the top and scroll with my index finger to read. Wish I could buy that capability on a new iPhone, maybe one even slightly smaller.

Time to go find out if there’s even a way to downgrade, oof this is slow.
by balamatom | 2025-09-16 05:07:56+00:00
>building, bundling, ES modules, the whole NPM ecosystem.

That's evolved hand in hand with the React monoculture over the past 10-15 years, maybe by way of a project called Babel.

Babel set out to provide progressive enhancement for the original ES5 to ES6 migration, and then in classic POSIWID fashion began to thrive on a suite of a la carte incompatibilities.

That experience is as much a contributor to the current automatism to to reach for (non-configurable) Prettier and Eslint, or more, than any rogue devs imposing fell coding styles.

So yeah, plenty of things in JS infra that look like they've been designed to be a pain in the ass (a.k.a. "behavioral nudge", towards TS, what else) and very much seem like the result of more inept moat-building in the then-newly ballooning field of frontend dev.

Readers might look up whan an import map is sometime, as well as where it is and isn't supported. How TS handled ES modules at the time Node16 changed their ESM support. Does ESM `default` correspond to CJS `module` or `module.exports`? Room for vendors to fuck up in innovative ways all round, this whole rotten ecosystem.

Readers are also advised to try Deno if they haven't yet. On Node, try Vite instead of Webpack. Most importantly, try Lit with JS, import map, no builder/bundler, and test suite with coverage. Work out what is most comfortable for you, work out exactly how much toolchain makes you the most productive, and afterwards don't forget to ask yourself why the React cultists want to stick everyone in a hairshirt if not a straitjacket.
by trimethylpurine | 2025-09-16 05:07:56+00:00
The actual rules went into enforcement in the very early part of Biden's term. They have to go back and forth with Congress, and since it involves the military, drafts would be secret or classified.

You can see, per Congress's orders, Trump's EPA would have authored the rules before Biden's term. They were ordered by the PFAS Action Act of 2019.

So while the rules weren't officially enforced during Trump's term, we can deduce that they were drafted and in motion under Andrew Wheeler's EPA, the same one Biden left in office into 2021!

That is to say, Trump's EPA guy wrote them and saw them into enforcement.

That all really is available from the citation I gave. The date is there. You can Google Wheeler's term. You can see when the rules went into effect. You for sure know rules take time to write.

You really didn't think to ask these questions? Honestly, I don't believe you.

You weren't trying to find that you were wrong like I recommended. You were trying to find that the citation by itself could be dead ended to disprove my point if you simply ceased your search.

Think about it for a few minutes and really be honest with yourself. I'm right, not just about you. That's just normal human behavior.

That's okay, but I don't think it's snarky to assume you're also human.
by pabs3 | 2025-09-16 05:10:30+00:00
It doesn't have to be, the PinePhone's modem runs a proprietary Linux distro, which you can replace with an open source Linux distro. That is only the ARM processor of it though, the Hexagon one is all proprietary.

https://github.com/the-modem-distro/pinephone_modem_sdk/
by maheart | 2025-09-16 05:12:03+00:00
Yes, I used SailfishOS as a daily driver since ~2014 until last year when I moved to the Furi FLX1. The FLX1 has been my daily driver since. SailfishOS is much more polished, but it's not fully FOSS, and it follows upstream much less closely. FLX1 is basically in-sync with Debian testing, with the exception of kernel.
by defrost | 2025-09-16 05:12:18+00:00
1994: The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

released in 1994 and became an international and critical success. *To Wong Foo* shares certain plot details with *Priscilla*, which also concerns two drag queens and a transgender woman on a road trip who manage to win over the locals of a small town. Despite the similarities, *To Wong Foo* had already been in production by the time *Priscilla* was released.
by tstrimple | 2025-09-16 05:12:31+00:00
I think rent and zoning make a huge fucking difference here. You cannot really have a tiny noodle shop under a home in the US where that's incredibly common in Japan due in large part to national permissive zoning. You've got to maintain a separate home and business property and have the means to acquire or rent both. That necessarily drives up cost of small retail business and tilts the economics far more in favor of very large companies like Walmart or chains like Panda Express.
by personjerry | 2025-09-16 05:13:16+00:00
I don't think we're gravitating towards complexity. It's much simpler:

1. We add more functionality to the base of what exists (e.g. HTML). More and more individual features. (e.g. selecting things in the DOM, animations, effects, interactions, tracking state)

2. At some point someone takes all the patterns in the latest wave of functionality and writes a library for them. Library is widely lauded or adopted (see jquery, React).

3. We think of new features building on top what is now the new norm, it's now table stakes. Rinse and repeat.

This is a common pattern in engineering, for example writing new entries to a DB, then at some point going back and compacting.
by kstrauser | 2025-09-16 05:14:20+00:00
That’s an entirely subjective thing, though. I’ve used Macs more than PCs and I can’t stand what feels to me like Windows’s abysmal window management.

I don’t say that to argue that macOS is better at it, just that I strongly prefer the Mac way as much as you prefer the way Windows does things, and that’s perfectly fine.
by kelnos | 2025-09-16 05:14:37+00:00
> I found a lot of reactions to these products to be weirdly optimistic. Either I’m becoming more cynical with age and general tech fatigue, or certain people are easily impressed.

I think it's both. There's a loud cadre of Apple fans who will always fawn over whatever comes out of Cupertino, no matter what. That group shifts its membership over time, but they're always there, and they're, well, always loud. Maybe some of us have been a part of that group in the past, or at least perhaps looking at things with less of a critical eye than we do now. But it's normal to shift your attitudes on things, and normal for those rose-colored glasses to fog up after a while.
by motorest | 2025-09-16 05:14:44+00:00
> Sure. The point is, people use React for everything, even static web sites, not only for creating reactive user interfaces. They do it because someone else told them so.

No, not really. There is more to picking up a tool than some rando's simplistic drive-by judgement. For example, say you have a React SPA managed by a team which built and manage their whole platform, from the CICD pipelines to the hosting solution. All your infrastructure was built around providing a React app and it's backing services. You are then suddenly faced with a need to implement a feature where a user after clicking on a link navigates to a page that just shows static text. Now think. If you implement that page with React then that's a one-point task. Just create a component, fill it with text, post a PR, done. What level of effort does it take you to implement that with another technology? If you go with the simplistic take that plain HTML is better, now you need to set aside time to sort out support for styling, sort out where and how to deploy those assets, work on a process to automate the deployment, etc etc. Now your simplistic drive for simplicity turned into something between a week and a month's worth of work requiring infrastructure changes and adapting deployment strategies, all of this requiring not-so-trivial QA and testing work.

What problems did you solved? Can you describe your system as simpler, and keep a straight face?
by TZubiri | 2025-09-16 05:15:26+00:00
Ugly? Sure. But isn't this the identity of Java? Taken away for almost no gain, there's literally no real issue stemming from requiring a verbose incantation to write a main routine, this is something you learn like day 1 on learning java, and it's something you write once in a blue moon, like 0.001% of the code you are going to write.

It reminds me of the attempt at removing Richard Stallman from the FSF, yeah, you could do that and fix a problem, but then what you are left with isn't really the same thing as it was before, it's now actually the same soulless thing as the rest of the competing things.

Saving grace is that obviously, you can still recite the incantation, it's not like public static void main(String[] args) is gone, just that you can skip it.
by foxglacier | 2025-09-16 05:15:36+00:00
https://homes.co.nz/address/auckland/mangere-east/16-fleming...

Estimated rent: $600/week Estimated mortgage repayment: $1000/week

If you get a 30 year mortgage, more than $600 of that will be interest near the start.

I didn't cherry pick this. I just clicked randomly on a big city until I found one with both estimates available.
by raooll | 2025-09-16 05:15:47+00:00
Big fan of Trigger.dev here

We’ve been using it for a while and I’m a super happy customer. The scheduled task feature has been a lifesaver—super simple and just works exactly as expected. Also want to call out the Dev mode: it’s an absolute gem, makes testing and iterating so much smoother than anything else I’ve tried.

Really appreciate the thoughtfulness that’s gone into the product—excited to see the upcoming MicroVM + checkpointing work land!
by willvarfar | 2025-09-16 05:18:25+00:00
I'm someone who wrote a lot of 'raw' Java and C++ without frameworks, which meant there was a lot less boilerplate and indirection etc. And for me, the big usability boon came about 10 years ago, around the same time for both Java and C++, when they started supporting lambda functions. I started passing code into algorithms and, although it sounds quite complicated, it simplified my programs substantially. Before that syntactic sugar gave the affordance I hadn't been organising my programs that way.

For the longest time Java had been very keen to be explicit, to the point of needing a log of cruft where it just felt like the compiler was checking you spelt every letter of the incantation correctly because both the compiler and you knew unambiguously what simple thing you were trying to achieve. But this tone changed in Java around the time the new entrants like Kotlin started taking over as what you develop in in a way that scala and clojure never managed. And suddenly all the get-out-of-your-way of lambdas saving you typing out classes and anonymous classes arrived and Java became a much nicer experience imo.
by nosefurhairdo | 2025-09-16 05:18:29+00:00
You don't have to use their hooks! Looking at your pastebin link, I would probably opt for something like a factory pattern instead: https://pastebin.com/PbnBqX4a

Just because you're in React land doesn't mean you can't still write regular old js/ts and hook in only when you need it. I imagine you'd do something quite similar in any other framework.
by kstrauser | 2025-09-16 05:18:46+00:00
If you really want to use such a thing, switch to Ice. It’s an open source thing similar to Bartender, before BT was bought by a shifty outfit. It still requires those permissions, but at least you can look at the code. I have a paid Bartender license. I liked it enough to pay for it, but don’t like the road it went down and stopped using it.

Tahoe lets you selectively remove app icons from the menu bar. I’m going to try that for a while and see if I can tolerate not using Ice anymore.
by manzout | 2025-09-16 05:19:06+00:00
Switching to Svelte could be a massive W for a small organization, they'll get inundated with a flood of highly motivated, skilled ex-React developers. Also if react is as probablamitc as people say (I'm veteran of the Angular/Angular.js transition wars so i don't know whats going on as much). If svelt et co. it helps a business not only achieve greater speed but maintenability long-run it's a competative advantage and should be exploited. much like how legacy c code is being handled due to its memory unsafeness. Would that happen?

Last tidbit Web Components are often suggested as a solution, they could lead to another layer of complexity. For instance, how do we manage complex, shared state across different web components that might be built with different tools like Lit or Stencil? How do components built by different systems pass information to each other without essentially creating an ad-hoc framework on top of the web components standard?
by bruce511 | 2025-09-16 05:19:19+00:00
>> some FOSS ordering system

I don't mean this cynically; but basically what you are suggesting is that some group of volunteers spend their time and effort to build out a substantial part of the business's infrastructure for free.

So basically, as long as they can get the critical business software part for free, the business becomes feasible.

The short answer is "this probably won't happen". FOSS isn't some magic wand that makes software appear.

And if there was someone determined to make this their pet project, they would need to work closely with a kitchen to understand their requirements. It would likely work well for that kitchen (until the free labor went off and got a real job) but would need a lot more work to become "generic" to the point where a second kitchen could use it. And more work for a third.

Building business systems, and keeping them maintained as the world changes, is a huge amount of work. (I've been building them for 35 years.) It's really not feasible to do it in "spare time".
by szopa | 2025-09-16 05:19:31+00:00
One consideration that that is missing: how familiar are LLMs with this technology? And from this point of view the app has sailed, I’m afraid we are stuck with the frameworks that are available today for eternity, for better or worse. And maybe that is not such a bad thing. I don’t do full stack programming in my day job, but I have this crazy idea that if I ever have a startup idea, I want to be able to code an MVP. So, every two years I do a deep dive and write a toy web app. I’m always learning something new on the frontend (fun!), while on the backend I just use Django, so it just works as it used to, except it usually gets more convenient in many small ways (boring). Sometimes there’s such a thing as too much fun.
by joules77 | 2025-09-16 05:20:01+00:00
No one is getting you physically and mentally tested every 3 months, cause of the time and energy your family and community has put it into raising you or keeping you alive and flourishing into the future.

The way Wall Street works has so many built up issues like some grand old legacy system. People are just stuck within its super structure are like circus animals within a circus. The circus animal (both left and right) don't change how the circus works. The circus will die out in its own sweet time. Just like any living organism/complex dynamical system. It's born - grows - peaks - dies.

Therefore don't waste time and energy getting too over attached to impermanent things, especially ones reaching the end of their life cycles.