MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by okamiueru | 2025-09-14 08:55:33+00:00
I think that AI is a benefit for about 1% of what people think it is good for.

The remaining 99% had become a significant challenge to the greatest human achievement in distribution of knowledge.

If people used LLMs, knowing that all output is statistical garbage made to seem plausible (i.e. "hallusinations"), and that it just sometimes overlaps with reality, it would be a lot less dangerous.

There is not a single case of using LLMs that has lead to a news story, that isn't handily explained by conflating a BS-generator with Fact-machine.

Does this sound like I'm saying LLMs are bad? Well, in every single case where you need factual information, it's not only bad, it's dangerous and likely irresponsible.

But there are a lot of great uses when you don't need facts, or by simply knowing it isn't producing facts, makes it useful. In most of these cases, you know the facts yourself, and the LLM is making the draft, the mundane statistically inferable glue/structure. So, what are these cases?

- Directing attention in chaos: Suggest where focus needs attention from a human expert. (useful in a lot of areas, medicine, software development). - Media content: music, audio (fx, speech), 3d/2d art and assets and operations. - Text processing: drafting, contextual transformation, etc

Don't trust AI if the mushroom you picked is safe to eat. But use its 100% confident sounding answer for which mushroom it is, as a starting point to look up the information. Just make sure that the book about mushrooms was written before LLMs took off....
by te0006 | 2025-09-14 08:56:15+00:00
This brings back fond memories from the 8-bit era. Tasword II was a text processor for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum where the developers resorted to extra-narrow fonts to cope with the Speccy's very limited (256x192) screen resolution. The lower screenshot in [1] provides a glimpse of what seems to be a 3px wide font.

OP's 2px width are a bit too extreme for my taste though.

[1] https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/4000080/Timex/Tasword_...
by visarga | 2025-09-14 08:57:50+00:00
I see this step progression:

1. people having real problems, like employment, housing, health, or education access

2. they go online (or watch TV) finding all sorts of extreme takes and biases; these theories provide simple explanations and ways to pin the blame on others

3. they converge on identity based reasoning, where dialogue becomes impossible, tribal; their posts signal adherence to in-group and rejection of the out-group, no longer tied to reason

4. they vote against their own best interests, such as recent elections (Trump) and referendums (Brexit) or refuse the vaccine (10x higher death rate, observed in hindsight)

The thing that is different now is that we have social networks, and that the outcomes are so drastic they are surprising everyone. Could be a coincidence, but I don't think it is.

So it's: real problems -> toxic social media & tv takes -> identity politics
by synecdoche | 2025-09-14 09:01:08+00:00
I understand this view is unpopular, but nevertheless. For something to be systematic there needs to be some set of rules governing it. I have yet to see any evidence of discriminatory rules as part of any western company or government policy, except for affirmative action and equivalent policies which do have such rule sets, where some group is prioritised to the detriment of other.
by xanderlewis | 2025-09-14 09:04:17+00:00
I don’t think it is akin; Welsh is almost completely different to English with only a few modern words in common. Just try reading some Welsh as an English speaker. It’s unintelligible.

Catalan is very much a Latinate language, and anyone who speaks Spanish or Italian or French (or even English) can guess the meaning of a lot of words and understand the grammar quite easily.
by simianparrot | 2025-09-14 09:05:08+00:00
That's a really bad analogy, because even in digital art where you can pick your color from a color wheel on a monitor, understanding how primary colors combine to become different colors and hues is a _fundamentally_ important aspect of creating appealingly colored paintings, digital or physical. Color theory is about balance; some colors have more visual "weight" than others. Next to each other they take on entirely different appearances -- and can look hideous or beautiful.

This isn't me saying digital artists need to practice mixing physical pigment, but anecdotally, every single professional digital artist I know has studied physical paint -- some started there, while others ended up there despite starting out and being really good digitally. But once the latter group hit a plateau, they felt something was lacking, and going back to the fundamentals lifted them even higher.
by walterlw | 2025-09-14 09:05:26+00:00
Very impressive work. Was very saddened to see how Ukrainian Kyiv and Kharkiv stations were excluded. We have deep stations (like Arsenal'na at 105m that connects directly to the above-ground Dnipro station on a river bank), we have both Soviet-made and new stations. Also now they are doubly essential being used for both transportation and shelter during air raids by millions.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-14 09:06:13+00:00
Unfortunately, yes.

Maybe it'll die off in a generation or two, when cynical millennials and zoomers become the backbone of politics. But for now?

"Think of the children" is hilariously transparent to us, but it enjoys moderate support across population, and, much worse, it gets overwhelming support of geriatric politicians. Which is what makes fighting for liberties so hard.
by padjo | 2025-09-14 09:08:39+00:00
No offence but if you’re swing between two poles like this in such a short time you probably haven’t considered the topic deeply enough and for long enough.

Anonymity can be very powerful for marginalised groups and it can be abused by trolls. Its value is contextual and not some simple good/bad dichotomy.

Successfully integrating technology into society is, like most political topics, complicated, requires a nuanced understanding of issues and a willingness to find compromise and less than perfect solutions. Sadly the political system (and the side in power now particularly) is increasingly offering moral absolutes and simplifications.
by goku12 | 2025-09-14 09:08:51+00:00
> It works poorly when you don't have everything nailed down and might switch a lot of stuff around, or remove stuff that isn't needed, etc.

I do prototype applications in Rust and it involves heavy refactoring including deletions. Those steps are the easiest ones for me and rarely gives me any headache. Part of the reason are the interfaces that you're forced to define clearly early on. Even the unrelated friction of satisfying the borrow checker gently nudge you towards that.

The real problems are often caused by certain operations that the type system can't prove to be safe, even when they are. For example, you couldn't write async closures until recently. Such situations often require lots of thought to resolve. You may have to restructure your code or use a workaround like RC variables.

The point is, these sorts of assumptions often don't seem to hold in practice, at least in my experience. My personal experience doesn't agree with the assertion that prototyping is hard in Rust.
by peepee1982 | 2025-09-14 09:09:29+00:00
I found a study a while ago that measured the effect of defining personas, and the effect was significant, but not very big. I like defining roles because I think it makes setting boundaries a bit easier. When I assign the role of architect for brainstorming, I expect the model to be a bit less eager to immediately jump into implementation. I'll still tell it explicitly to not do that, so the effect is probably extremely small.

So far, I find it much more important to define task scope and boundaries. If I want to implement a non-trivial feature, I'll have one role for analyzing the problem and coming up with a high-level plan, and then another role for breaking that plan down into very small atomic steps. I'll then pass each step to an implementation role and give it both the high-level plan and the whole list of individual steps as context, while making it clear that the scope is only to implement that one specific step.

I've had very good results with this so far, and once the two main documents are done, I can automate this with a small orchestration script (that does not depend on an LLM and is completely deterministic) going through the list and passing each item to an implementation agent sequentially, even letting the agent create a commit message after every step so I can trace its work afterwards. I've had very clean long-running tasks this way with minimal need for fixing things afterwards. I can go to bed in the evening and launch it and wake up to a long list of commits.

With the new 6 dollar subscription by Z.ai which includes 120 prompts (around 2000 requests) every 5 hours, I can pretty much let this run without having to worry about exceeding my limits.
by mrspuratic | 2025-09-14 09:10:53+00:00
One of the first Spectrum emulators (JPP?) used a VGA text mode with 2 pixel high font where each character was its own ordinal, i.e. 65 was two rows of 01000001 pixels. That meant you could draw individual rows bytewise exactly as the Spectrum did, and just take care of the Y offset bit shuffle, and fake the colour clash.
by sschueller | 2025-09-14 09:11:35+00:00
Wow, very nice project.

The ones in Zürich are not actually metro stations. They where built to be, but then the city voted against a metro. The stations that were already built were converted into tram stations. There where some complications like that fact the the tram is almost too tall to fit. The pantograph is almost fully compressed when the tram enters the tunnel.

The trams also switch to the left side as the doors are only one side.

[1] https://cdn.dreso.com/fileadmin/_processed_/0/3/csm_Tierspit...

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramtunnel_Milchbuck%E2%80%93S... [DE]

EDIT: spelling
by amatecha | 2025-09-14 09:12:06+00:00
I don't know about whoever you're referring to but I actually just want to chat with cool people (and hear about what they're up to) and don't want to see any bigoted, ignorant bullshit. It has worked out so well that I have zero interest in any other "social networking" protocol/software whatsoever. In my circles I see exactly zero control freaks, probably because I only associate/interact with people who have respect for the agency of others. I just block/mute people who violate that agency (tho I've only had to do so once or twice) and the server I'm on generally correlates with that vibe.

The "public arena of ideas" has almost nothing to offer me. If I dare to peruse something like Reddit or Twitter I am immediately aware of the overwhelming averageness of the ideas and degree of insight generally at hand. Such places are poor venues for depthful, nuanced discussion, especially about any difficult topics, especially with the outrage-bolstering "algorithms" in full force, forcing divisive content in everyone's face.
by kokada | 2025-09-14 09:12:47+00:00
I am not saying that this was the reason I bought it, but I recently purchased a Radeon 9070 and I was surprised how little power this card uses in idle. I was seeing figures between 4W~10W on Windows (sadly slightly more on Linux).

In general this generation of Radeon GPUs seems highly efficient. Radeon 9070 is a beast of a GPU.
by mch17 | 2025-09-14 09:13:16+00:00
It's not just the boiling point. Food tastes less salty as well.

I once cooked a stew for friends at 8000 ft. I thought I had made a mistake because it tasted so bland. After the trip I had the leftovers at sea level and realized it tasted just fine. It gave me an appreciation for the fragile relationship between location and following recipes. (Humidity also changes taste)
by odogwu200 | 2025-09-14 09:13:47+00:00
I’ve been working on a project called AristoCarWare. It started from noticing how broken car financing has become: • Americans owe $1.65T in auto loans (nearly 9% of household debt). • Average monthly payments are now $745 for new cars. • Over 1 in 4 trade-ins are underwater, meaning people owe thousands more than the car is worth.

Instead of locking people into 5–7 year loans or rigid leases, AristoCarWare works directly with dealerships to turn their idle inventory into subscription offerings. The goal is to: • Give consumers flexibility (swap or exit without negative equity). • Help dealerships generate recurring revenue. • Make costs transparent — no hidden fees.

We’re building the platform as a B2B2C model: dealerships manage the fleet, and AristoCarWare provides the subscription software, pricing tools, and user interface.

Landing page: [insert link]

I’d love feedback from this community on: • How you see the future of mobility — ownership vs. subscription. • Pitfalls to avoid in building a marketplace that has both dealership and consumer sides. • Thoughts on positioning: Should this start ultra-focused (single city, a few dealerships), or wide from the beginning?

Thanks in advance — open to any thoughts, criticisms, or tough questions.
by another_twist | 2025-09-14 09:14:14+00:00
I guess one flaw in the argument about success leading to failure due to model providers eating the product layer, esp for B2B, is it ignores switching costs. B2B integrations such as Glean or Abridge which work with an existing infrastructure setup are hard to throw away and there's little incentive to do so. So in that sense, I dont think AI providers will manage to eat this layer completely without bloating themselves to an unmanageable degree. As an analogy, while Google / Apple control the entire mobile ecosystem, they dont make the most valuable apps. Case in point, gaming apps such as Fortnite who have made billions in microtransactions while running on platforms controlled by other behemoths. They are good investments too.
by lukan | 2025-09-14 09:14:59+00:00
"As long as they're done faithfully"

You mean they need to be true believers of Anu, Enlil and Istar? Yeah, that would likely help the spirit of restoration efforts..

"why did people cover up their beautiful wooden flooring with carpets?"

Don't carpets also provide good insulation? When you are cold and do not have automatic heating build into the ground ... most people appreciate warm feed over aesthetics.
by oblio | 2025-09-14 09:15:35+00:00
The thing is... Elbow grease makes the difference.

If you're just generating images using AI, you only get 80% there. You need at least to be able to touch up those images to get something outstanding.

Plus, is getting 1 billion bytes of randomness/entropy from your 1 thousand bytes of text input really <your> work?
by decimalenough | 2025-09-14 09:18:17+00:00
Here's a zoomable 3D model of the world's busiest train station, Shinjuku in Tokyo:

https://satoshi7190.github.io/Shinjuku-indoor-threejs-demo/

3.6 million passengers per day. Wikipedia:

The main East Japan Railway Company (JR East) station and the directly adjacent private railways have a total of 35 platforms, an underground arcade, above-ground arcade and numerous hallways with another 17 platforms (52 total) that can be accessed through hallways to five directly connected stations without surfacing outside. The entire above/underground complex has well over 200 exits.
by somenameforme | 2025-09-14 09:18:45+00:00
I think it's telling that for a guy who spent years debating and publicly speaking on highly charged topics that those are the worst the media has been able to drag up, and all taken completely out of context. For this to be the sort of comments that somebody wants to murder over, they seriously need to take a breath outside their echo chambers every once in a while.

For instance, due to said echo chambers you probably think the "If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?" is an edgelord hypothetical. In reality, it's referencing a real situation. The Biden administration turned the world upside down to try to get Britney Griner, a "WNBA, pot-smoking, black lesbian" released from Russia after she was arrested for bringing marijuana into the country. We ended up trading Viktor Bout, an international arms dealer who has since become a member of Russia's parliament, for her. At the same time we left Paul Whelan, a US Marine who was arrested in Russia for allegedly spying many years ago, just rotting away. He was eventually released in a multi-prisoner exchange after Trump took office.

People spoke of 'rage' regularly in this thread. Can you imagine how actions like this make people feel? Yet somehow there is far more self control from the segment of society negatively affected by these sort of things.
by austin-cheney | 2025-09-14 09:19:53+00:00
That article is silly. The defense secretary cannot arbitrarily fire people like this. He can have a 15-6 investigation opened though, but that is a long way from a firing. To arbitrarily fire an officer there has to be some immediate violation of law or gross harm with exigencies.

Where these immediate firings occur for senior officers is typically a failure of performance in a command position that results in some other greater failure, but this is beyond rare, even in combat.
by HPsquared | 2025-09-14 09:20:54+00:00
In that case it might be security updates to the kernel or even the microcode, making things slower

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabili...

So there is now software that has come out making it worse even running the same applications.

I suppose the same can be said of people with all the digital distractions we have now. The hardware might be the same but I certainly can't focus as well as I used to because the mind is full of irrelevant content.
by versteegen | 2025-09-14 09:22:12+00:00
Wow, that paper is absolutely damning.

> Design: 1.5 years (elapsed) to come up with a design they believed they could implement.

> Development: 3 person-years (3 people × >1 year each)

> (Note: By comparison, implementing the complete Java language from scratch took the same team 2 person-years.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-14 09:23:44+00:00
I can't rationalize how "prevents... except" isn't still just heuristics.

r/cpp is full of people with such heuristics, ways that they personally have fewer safety bugs in their software. That's how C++ got its "core guidelines", and it is clearly the foundation of Herb's profiles. You can't get to safety this way, you can get closer than you were in a typical C++ codebase and for Geoff that was important.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-14 09:24:26+00:00
Which means you need a return on the investment for it to work. Creating self sustaining industries that don’t need subsidies.

Tossing an absolutely mindbogglingly large subsidy to the 70 year old nuclear industry which never has delivered competitive products is not a good use of money. It is like saying we create value by going around breaking windows and paying people to fix it.

France’s problem is that if they don’t fix the spending issue on their own the bond market will do it for them. Maintaining the debt will be a larger and larger portion of the budget until the only option is solving the issue.

Cutting spending will lower GDP and push up debt as a percent of GDP. But it wasn’t real income when the debt you took on did not lead to productive outcomes. Just polishing a pig.
Show HN: Rallies – Investment assistant backed by real time data
by rallies | 2025-09-14 09:25:48+00:00
Hey folks,

Software engineer turned trader here. I absolutely love ChatGPT and Perplexity finance when it comes to doing any investment research and have been heavily using them for the past year. But there are also some big gaps like out-dated data, no charts, etc. Because both tools mostly rely on web search, there is an inherent limitation of delayed time data.

I've been spending some spare time over the last few months to see if we can build something to address both issues while keeping the core aspect of ChatGPT and perplexity intact i.e a chatbot interface but heavily rooted in real time data that's also super visual.

Launched https://rallies.ai 2 months back and have been iterating on it ever since. It uses an agentic framework to retrieve real time data on a query, and answers questions along with relevant charts.

Although this is a small change, the results look significantly better.

Would love to take any feedback. There's a lot more to do.

Also happy to answer any questions.
by yurishimo | 2025-09-14 09:26:42+00:00
If you can’t afford to live on 150k/year even in SF, that’s just poor financial planning…

It’s not like McDonald’s or Target don’t exist in SF. Those workers get paid way less than big tech and somehow they make rent every month. Yea, you might have to commute instead living within walking distance of the campus where you work, but that’s just being a responsible adult imo.
by larodi | 2025-09-14 09:28:46+00:00
Have you tried loading 500k features into QGIS? Well, try it and we talk again.

Govs used QGIS as alternative to pricey ESRI subscriptions, but come to realize that it is struggling even as a viewer. Happily latest versions allow simplification of features on the server side, but these are very new QGISs

also take a look here

https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Ao...
by DiabloD3 | 2025-09-14 09:30:45+00:00
Optimal viewing distance for most media (including text found in programs and websites made in the "Vista" and "Retina OSX" era to today, but also all movies and TV shows cut for modern 16:9 displays) is between 30 (SMPTE rec.) and 40 (THX rec.) degrees.

THX's recommendation is based purely on the viewing angle of the fovae (the inner part of the retina that is "high res"), and trying to optimize full coverage of it (ie, pixels on the screen should not fall outside of the fovae).

Microsoft, during Vista, and Apple, during the evolution of OSX, both standardized font sizes as a little larger to make all text sizes comfortable at the 30 to 40 degree range. 30 degrees is * 1.6 diagonal size, 40 degrees is * 1.2 diagonal size.

So, if you have a standard 24" 1080p monitor, that is 28.8 to 38.4 inches, not 20.

SMPTE and THX did not change recommendations for 4k, as the view angle of visual media (ie, the focal length in movies/TV shows) did not change, and text doubles in (pixel) size (but not apparent size) to accommodate it; ergo, do math as if you're on a 100% DPI display. Ergo, 24" 4k would be the same.

Also, for completeness sake, 27" 1440p are rare, but a bit more common with gamers, and their math works out to be between 32.4 and 43.2 inches. This is assuming you adjusted your DPI to 133% and/or you're purely focused on movies/TV and games; if you consume only text and stay at 100% and never view media, you may wish 24.3 to 32.4 inches instead.
Show HN: Borderlands 4 SHiFT codes aggregator, updated daily
by DearestZ | 2025-09-14 09:30:53+00:00
Hi HN, I just launched a simple website for quickly grabbing the latest Borderlands 4 SHiFT codes: https://borderlandsshiftcodes.org .

It's a small tool to help fans easily find active SHiFT codes, updated regularly. Saves you time hunting around Twitter or Reddit.

Feedback is appreciated—hope it helps some fellow vault hunters!
by dan-robertson | 2025-09-14 09:31:29+00:00
Not having access to land you had a right to farm (and therefore needing to be a tenant farmer of some kind or – even worse – a wage labourer) was pretty bad for a peasant. It was also hard/impossible to escape from on the back of one’s labour. It is in this sense that land (or associated rights) was worth significantly more than one could make through labour.