MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kbelder | 2025-09-04 15:18:22+00:00
"The new diffusion-based image generator works by first using a digital encoder (that has been trained on publicly available datasets) to create the static that will ultimately make the picture. This requires a small amount of energy. Then, a liquid crystal screen known as a spatial light modulator (SLM) imprints this pattern onto a laser beam. The beam is then passed through a second decoding SLM, which turns the pattern in the laser into the final image."

Ok, I'm going to go read the paper now, but I have to say, this sounds like absolute nonsense.
by gwd | 2025-09-04 15:18:51+00:00
I mean, context is everything. Whether "dickhead" is unacceptable really depends on the culture of the workplace communication. If the response to someone calling you a "dickhead" is that you tell them twice to "fuck off", you're going to have a hard time making the argument that your workplace communication is expected to be explitive-free. And, "I only stayed here because of you two dickheads" is hardly toxic -- it's elegantly (by certain metrics) communicating an anguished sense of personal loyalty betrayed.

In another context, where "dickhead" was really out of place in the expected communication culture, and where it was really meant to be toxic rather than used to expressed an anguished sense of betrayed loyalty, "Mrs. Jones, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave the building. The personal effects from your desk can be collected from reception tomorrow" might be more tolerated.
Show HN: BuildKit 2.0 – Build AI tools with one prompt
by moekatib | 2025-09-04 15:18:57+00:00
BuildKit 2.0 is our attempt at making integrations feel like shadcn/ui: simple, composable, and copy-pasteable.

Instead of wiring APIs by hand, you describe what you want:

``` Create me a tool called fetchGmailEmails in my Vercel AI SDK agent using BuildKit ```

…and you've got a working Gmail integration in minutes with a single prompt.

* Works with Vercel AI SDK, LangChain, MCP servers * 25k+ actions across 150+ integrations

Links: [Docs](https://buildkit.picaos.com/integrations) | [Video](https://x.com/katibmoe/status/1963605221856178203)

We'd love feedback
by 0xfaded | 2025-09-04 15:21:27+00:00
Just a tidbit for remembering bayes rule:

P(A|B)P(B) = P(A,B) = P(B|A)P(A)

The familiar forms

P(A|B) = P(A,B)/P(B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B)

immediately follow
by lproven | 2025-09-04 15:21:38+00:00
It's a lovely little machine, and since November there is also a "core" you can load into the FPGA which turns it into a (heavily upgraded) Sinclair QL.

This makes it one of the more affordable ways to get new QL-compatible hardware, 40 years after the machine launched. It has lots of RAM, 16-bit colour graphics, sound, and more. It runs Aurora, one of the 2 FOSS forks of the QL OS.

Work is underway on enhancing the core further, possibly to a 68030 with 16MB of RAM and true-colour graphics (if I remember rightly!) and to improve integration of the upgraded capabilities with the OS and SuperBASIC.

There is some hope it might be able to run SMSQ/E, the other FOSS fork of the original QDOS OS, and that comes with a choice of desktop GUIs.

It's a deeply idiosyncratic OS (never mind predating Windows, it predates the Apple Macintosh) and I have not yet learned to drive it, but I like the idea that my 21st century Spectrum is now also a rather capable full-16-bit machine with a multitasking OS.

The QL is largely forgotten now except by enthusiasts, but it was arguably the first multitasking home/small-business microcomputer, and there is new QL-compatible hardware still on sale: the Q68 machine, also based on an FPGA.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/16/ql_legacy_at_40/

Neither Aurora nor SMSQ/E is seeing much development now, sadly, but then I believe they're in hand-written 680x0 assembly language, and they only run on a handful of long-obsolete hardware, basically QL clones and the Atari ST.

It's an interesting OS and I wish it had been more successful. I also wish that SuperBASIC had been ported to other OSes, since the source is available. I think I'd quite like SuperBASIC for Linux.
by squarefoot | 2025-09-04 15:21:42+00:00
In some places being fired after a clash with someone above your level counts almost as a gift. They know so many ways to make your life miserable without being it noticeable from the outside, so that if you don't wear a tough skin and can't manage the fine art of forgetting about work problems when you walk out of the office until the following day, leaving becomes the preferable option.
by maxsilver | 2025-09-04 15:21:42+00:00
Homes also generate property taxes and sales taxes (from the occupants inside of them). Cities nearly always make money selling to new homes -- low density suburbs are highly profitable for municipalities, even on utilities alone, both initially and over a 40 year time period.

Data Centers do not work like this. They don't generate any new sales taxes, they don't really generate much in the way of new jobs, and they often don't even pay property taxes at all (our biggest data center here, for example, got a sweetheart deal on a massive property tax exemption -- they literally don't have to pay any property tax at all)

Data Centers also don't pay standard price for their power -- they get 'industrial' power rates (locally here, our industrial power rate is much lower than what a home would pay for equivalent kwh usage, even after factoring in transmission differences).

If you just charged equivalent access (if industrial users had to pay to-the-penny exactly the same prices as a residential user, identical transmission fees, identical per-kwh prices, identical time-of-day usage surcharges, etc), it would go a long way to making the data center setup more fair for everyone.
by AlexandrB | 2025-09-04 15:22:10+00:00
Like any other industry, I don't care what the electricity cost of data centres is if they create actual value. This is no different than a factory that makes car parts - you need energy to make stuff.

I think the part the bugs me is how over-hyped AI is, and there's a fear that all this electricity is being used as part of fundamentally unsustainable business models that will not prove sustainable long term. If that's the case, and we're overbuilding data centres what's going to happen to those buildings once the bubble pops?
Ask HN: Why does PostHog work despite breaking the "startup focus" rule?
by fazkan | 2025-09-04 15:22:39+00:00
Startup advice usually says: focus narrowly, win a niche, build fanatical users.

PostHog seems to do the opposite. It’s not one product, it's a collection of somewhat related products. Each could be its own startup.

And yet, as an open-source project with a sprawling scope, PostHog has managed to grow and attract serious adoption, and on top of that VC money.

Why does this approach work here? Is it because analytics + product tools naturally bundle well? Is it community, execution, or something else?

Curious to hear from those of you who use PostHog day to day: does the breadth make it more valuable, or does it feel like too much under one roof?

From my personal experience, I have only tried session-replays, and surveys, and they missed the mark. I went with other products.
by d1sxeyes | 2025-09-04 15:22:41+00:00
No, it's not just that—even if the company's policies said so, they still might have been found to have unlawfully dismissed her...

The actual judgement is a trip: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/64ae81ed8bc29... (these are her in-laws!!!)

Anyway, main point is that points 129 and 130 basically say 'you can't dismiss someone for calling their boss a dickhead', and then 134-136 say 'and even your own guidelines say so'.
Show HN: Voice Prompting for Developers
by addcn | 2025-09-04 15:23:05+00:00
When we pair program, we’re not just talking—we’re selecting code, switching tabs, and pointing at elements in the browser. Most of the context lives on the screen, not in our words.

But current dictation tools don’t capture any of that. I’ve tried using them with Cursor and Claude Code, and they miss all the rich interactions that make pair programming work.

Talking to an AI agent should feel the same as pairing with a teammate. That’s why we built a Voice Prompting tool: it captures your on-screen actions and stitches them into the prompt at the right moment.

So instead of saying: “Refactor this class [select class in IDE] to…”

You get: “Refactor [MicManager @114 MicManager.swift]…”

It’s early days, but if you like how we're thinking, give it a try and let us know what you think!
by Barrin92 | 2025-09-04 15:23:15+00:00
>It's easy to look virtuous when you have other countries handle the 'immoral' military stuff,[...] Europe is a 24-year old trust fund kid working in a vegan commune

Europe has a higher industrial output than the US. In Unterlüß a town of 3500 people, Rheinmetall makes about 50% as many 155mm shells as the entire US makes annually. There's a reason your trust fund metaphor takes place in Brooklyn.

You might also want to remember that article 5 was invoked once, and it wasn't by Europe.
by Insanity | 2025-09-04 15:23:23+00:00
In terms of newer browsers, I started playing around with Zen after seeing a post about it on HN some weeks ago. So far, really liking that experience. It's not without bugs (i.e, 'compact mode' shortcut works about 50% of the time lol).

But, the UI is good (to me), and I like that it's based on FF rather than another Chromium shell.

I should say though, I don't consider myself a 'power user', and I'm not a web developer so never user the dev tools.
by seabass-labrax | 2025-09-04 15:23:38+00:00
I used to use GnuCash, but a small yet constant irritation for me was how the entry's date (that is, the date when I authorized the transaction) wouldn't always match the clearing date of the transaction as reported by my bank in their statements.

hledger, however, has support for adding 'posting dates' as specially formatted comments. What's really clever is how it automatically chooses which date to sort the reports by depending on the query!

For example, say I have a ledger that exclusively contains entries consisting of credits to a assets account (bank) and debits to an expense account (shopping). The date of the debit is earlier, because I acquired the goods at the shop. The date of the credit is later because it takes a while for the payment to clear between the banks. Some payments take longer to clear than others so the order isn't the same.

If I ask hledger for a report of all recent transactions that involve expenses, it will sort by the dates on the debit lines. But if I ask hledger for a report of all the recent transactions that involve assets it'll use the credit dates instead! This makes reconciliation with my bank statements so much easier and tidier whilst still keeping an accurate record of when I actually made the transactions.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-09-04 15:23:41+00:00
> No duh, the point is that you flex your mental muscles on the tasks AI can't do, like effective organization.

AI can do better organization than you, it's only inertia and legalities that prevent it from happening. See, without good education, you aren't even able to find a place for yourself.

> The most harmful myth in all of education is the idea that you need to master some basic building blocks in order to move on to a higher level.

That "myth" is supported by abundant empirical evidence, people have tried education without it and it didn't work. My lying eyes kind of confirm it too, I had one hell of time trying to use LLM without getting dumber... it comes so natural to them, skipping steps is seductive but blinding.

> I don't see the need for this kind of compulsory education, and it's doing much more harm than good.

Again, long standing empirical evidence tells as the opposite. I support optional education but we can't even have a double blind study for it - I'm pretty sure those who don't go to school would be home-schooled, too few are dumb enough to let their uneducated children chose their manner and level of education.
by crowcroft | 2025-09-04 15:24:16+00:00
How effective are Mistral's models at this point?

My perception using them is that they have comparable models to OpenAI and others when it comes to general use 'chat' tasks, but they don't match something like gpt-5 Pro or high thinking when you need something more powerful.

Perhaps the problem is that you need to be competing right at the frontier, or not at all. I put Cohere in a similar bucket.
by sixothree | 2025-09-04 15:24:44+00:00
> Most people have a warmth and agreeableness that comes out when you are there with them, talking about stuff.

I really hate saying this, but I live in the Deep South and people here can quite repulsive under the veneer of manners. The amount of hate, anger towards people different from them, and just rampant racism is quite difficult to deal with. And these are things that get exposed when having these conversations.

I do as you suggest. But I'm always ready to just walk away from a conversation. There's no winning with these people and the moral injury you sustain by being in their presence is awful
by bccdee | 2025-09-04 15:24:51+00:00
> We, as humans, have the ability to collapse (hint hint, quantum physics) from the ethereal to the physical world the thoughts we have.

Do thoughts exist in an ethereal world, or are they just arrangements of chemicals and charges in the brain? I've never seen "ether," and nobody's ever found a structure in the human body that interfaces with it. There are no structures causally implicated in quantum wave function collapse, either—the microtubule hypothesis is quite pseudoscientific, I'm afraid. "Do I have McDonalds today, or fish and salad" is a decision made at the cellular level, not the subatomic.

This feels like a very disenchanted worldview, but the missing mystery you're reaching for is phenomenology, not idealistic metaphysics. The evanescent world of thought encoded within the chemicals and charges of our brain has its own self-referential structure which pays dividends to direct experiential analysis, which this article does engage in.

Incidentally, metaphysics is a very broad branch of philosophy which encompasses both materialist and idealist conceptions of the world. You're talking specifically about manifestation/"the law of attraction," which was originally associated with the New Thought religious movement, although it's percolated out into broader pop culture through books like The Secret.
by orlp | 2025-09-04 15:24:53+00:00
> The creator of duckdb argues that people using pandas are missing out of the 50 years of progress in database research, in the first 5 minutes of his talk here.

That's pandas. Polars builds on much of the same 50 years of progress in database research by offering a lazy DataFrame API which does query optimization, morsel-based columnar execution, predicate pushdown into file I/O, etc, etc.

Disclaimer: I work for Polars on said query execution.
by thrance | 2025-09-04 15:24:59+00:00
> First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money.

Of course it does. Call the cleaning service, see if your money can't compel someone to come clean your house while you sit on your ass. Or more indirectly, try to picture the chinese kid making your shoes for a meager wage, and try to explain what, if not your money, is compelling them to do so this menial, repetitive and unfulfilling task for you.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-04 15:25:03+00:00
> Hamas has offered to return the hostages many times and Israel refuses to stop the killing

Offering and doing are different. Unilaterally returning the hostages is the winning move for Palestinians. It is not for Hamas’ leadership, however, so it won’t happen.

> Missing in your analysis is Israel’s primary goal: ethnically cleanse all of Palestine and enforce Jewish supremacy

This is like equating hard liners with Iran or Hamas with Palestine.

There are elements in Israel who want this. There are elements without who are okay with it. Nobody is particularly motivated to intervene because the burden is purely moral—there isn’t a unique industry or diaspora for Palestinians to call on.

Hamas and Likud benefit from the war continuing. (Their right wing elements are both exterminationist. They have been for years. Nothing new there.)
by meifun | 2025-09-04 15:25:52+00:00
I had am RM2 for years before upgrading to the Paper Pro. I love the Paper Pro. It provides me with an environment of deep thinking. It feels too big to carry all day long and I always felt even with the Type Folio I didn't want to damage the screen. I just ordered a Paper Pro Move to carry with me.

The one feature I miss is the ability to split the screen and have two items open at the same time. Like a PDF journal in one and taking notes on it in the other.
by cooper_ganglia | 2025-09-04 15:26:12+00:00
Novo is a success story, sure, but it's not uniquely dominant. Eli Lilly is more than 3x bigger in the same space, and J&J, Merck, Pfizer all rival or surpass it.

Pharma as a whole is still dwarfed by the trillion-dollar US tech giants that the EU has no equivalent of. One standout doesn't change the broader lag.
by bee_rider | 2025-09-04 15:26:25+00:00
I compared to air conditioners though, which would also be multiplied by that several hundred million factor (well, maybe the laptops get an additional factor of, like, 4 because a room can fit multiple people with laptops, and you don’t need an air conditioner in every season).

If we’re looking at choices a person can make, every choice is multiplied by millions when applied to the entire population of a country, so the 1W differences are swamped by the equally scaled 10W differences.
by noroot | 2025-09-04 15:26:25+00:00
I really like the new way the 'undo' works, it's much more intuitive! Especially combined with the redo it will give me even more confidence to play around.

The whole operation log was already so nice. It's saved me a few times when I did some stupid things, but also invited me to experiment and learn :).

I have been super happy to discover jj a few months ago. I am on the path to go from barely getting by with git ui's to be able to do vcs magic with jj.
by quectophoton | 2025-09-04 15:26:37+00:00
My 2 cents. I have been using Alpine Linux as my main Linux distro for... I don't know how long, but probably more than 5 years at this point.

My only issues have been:

* Nvidia proprietary drivers (when I was building a PC with an old GPU).

* DRM (Netflix).

* I think I also had problems with SQLite3 while trying to install the Twitch test server thingy inside an Alpine container.

Other than that it's just minor things, just like every distro has some things that are different but no big deal.

> I think that, if you have a very consistent usage of Alpine, where you are mostly doing the same thing and using the same tools, you could find a comfy workflow there.

Yeah, or in my case it's because I try to keep the host minimalist and clean, and do most of the dirty/experimentation stuff in Docker, just to be able to nuke it from orbit once I'm done.

It's also dumbproof to make your own native packages if you want, for example if you want to use fonts but you can't just `git clone` because they require a build step (!).

Apparently some people have had issues with DNS, but I've never had any. I don't know if it's because I always point to my Unbound instance for DNS, or if it's just been a coincidence.
by Ancapistani | 2025-09-04 15:27:19+00:00
I've been a reMarkable customer for quite a while now. I started with the reMarkable 2, then upgraded to the reMarkable Paper Pro. While I was using it consistently, it was a great device that allowed me to keep track of my notes in way I'd never been able to before.

They have some great features. Chief among them IMO is the ability to stream the tablet's screen to a desktop app, which you can then in turn share into a Zoom call and the like.

The issue for me is that as I began to spend more and more time in VR/AR - first with the Meta Quest 2/3 and Pimax Crystal, and then with the Apple Vision Pro - I simply stopped taking written notes while working. Now I mostly use it as a very fancy (and expensive!) eReader.

Couple that with the fact that most of what I was writing down as notes is now context that I shove in prompts and/or agent context files... I simply don't use it enough to justify keeping it.

They've fallen behind IMO with the rise of AI. This device would be amazing if they would automatically transcribe documents on the backend, feed them into a RAG, and allow access via a chatbot. They don't, though, and their API is undocumented and difficult to use. That kills it for me.

I should probably list it on eBay or Facebook Marketplace at this point, and put those funds toward something that gets more use.
by bwfan123 | 2025-09-04 15:27:29+00:00
> What does "loop on itself" mean in this context?

What it means is understood by looking at its converse - panic attack. Wherein, anxiety stirs some negative thoughts which stirs even more anxiety which stirs more negativity and so on until the system seizes - or that has been my understanding of it.

Here, positivity feeds joy which feeds more positivity etc..
by legitster | 2025-09-04 15:27:33+00:00
I've noticed recently that a lot of the 3D movies have been doing more to steal the look and feel of hand-drawn animation. More smudging, better textures, variable frame rates, more clever character design, etc. Obviously the Spiderverse movies were a love letter to traditional animation, but even kids movies like the Bad Guys and the most recent Puss in Boots look amazing.

It's no replacement for hand-drawn and animated movies. But on the other hand (pun semi-intended) our ability to draw by hand these movies will never go away, and we have the ability to make new ones anytime in the future that someone has the passion and energy to do it (commercial success be damned!). The important thing is that all of the tricks, shorthand, and other collective learnings of a century of animation has not gone unappreciated, and is being absorbed into the new medium. That's pretty neat!
by AbstractH24 | 2025-09-04 15:28:17+00:00
Here's an interesting thing to ponder - how would we be different if not for lockdowns making work from home somewhat normal?

The overnight disappearance of those loose connections you get in the workplace had a huge impact on my mental health. Life-altering. 5 years later, I split my time between remote tech consulting from an office I rent (to make sure I don't sit home all day) and a union-protected, but completely antiquated job from a career I left behind that I returned to mostly to be with people.

By 2025, things would have probably been the same both for society and me (lockdowns coincided with me turning 30), but the abrupt change was horrible.
by OrvalWintermute | 2025-09-04 15:29:02+00:00
The energy costs of certain parts of Maryland are about to skyrocket, or have already risen dramatically, driven by datacenter demand, primarily but not exclusively from Northern VA.

https://www.wusa9.com/article/tech/science/environment/data-...

https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/MDOPC/bulletins/3ea...

https://www.thebanner.com/economy/maryland-energy-cost-virgi...
by general1465 | 2025-09-04 15:29:43+00:00
Because chargers were enshitificated before they were widely deployed. I want to arrive on charger, connect the charging hose, wave a debit/credit card or my phone with NFC interface and start charging.

But noooo, you need to have an account with your debit card linked to it and use their half assed application or you won't be able to activate charger. And you should better pray that charger in your destination is actually operational and your car is compatible with the charger, which itself is fucking wild.

The whole EV industry essentially ignored lesson learnt for last 100 years using ICE cars - gas pumps, with somebody who can assist you if you don't know do exist for a reason!

Rivian CEO should go outside and try what is the average charging experience for an average customer.