MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
I vibe-coded an iOS camera app with album management with no experience with iOS
by dirtide | 2025-09-26 16:22:29+00:00
After a trip to Portland with my girlfriend, I went to airdrop our photos to her. I found myself scrolling through hundreds of photos, carefully filtering out unrelated ones. That's when it hit me—what if I could choose which album to save photos to before taking them? Then I could just airdrop the entire album.

That's why I built this app. It lets you manage all your albums (user-created, system, and shared) and their photos/videos in one place.

It took about 4 weeks to create and publish on the App Store. Thanks to various LLM tools, I was able to convert my idea into actual code using natural language. Gemini CLI was particularly helpful. Through this experience, I learned that in the current age of AI, as long as you have an idea, go for it. The only challenge left is learning how to work with LLMs effectively.

If this sounds useful, you can try it here: apps.apple.com/us/app/m-log/id6752276159 (it's free!)

The challenge is, I know I can’t realistically compete with the native Camera app in terms of raw performance or advanced features. And on the other side, my album management still isn’t anywhere near the Photos app. Currently it only supports moving photos around different albums, sharing, and deleting them.

So I’m at a crossroads: what should I focus on next (other than just “getting more users”)? My current thought is that the only way forward is to put it in people’s hands and learn directly from them — but I’d love to hear your advice on where to go from here.
by Bender | 2025-09-26 16:22:50+00:00
My suggestion has always been to use PGP or OTR for individual messages or individual files. dm-crypt plain with a random cipher/hash/mode combo for filesystems using a 240 to 480 character passphrase which can also be layered and chained.

This is just an alternative if people believe they are not permitted to encrypt something. The threat vector in this topic is fuzzy scanning local and remote. ChatControl uses fuzzy scanning. Encoding can do just as good a job of mitigating fuzzy scans as any level of encryption. Even manual intervention should take a lot of effort just as much as brute forcing a simple encryption password. If we are being honest encrypted files are most often protected by a weak password and the cipher/hash are already disclosed and the key space is usually small. LUKS for example discloses cipher, hash, mode making brute force just a factor of compute power. If an app is chain-encoding and the chain is shared out of band I suspect it will take orders of magnitude more compute time to cycle through every possible combination of encoding and compression.

For fun has anyone decoded my simple message in the thread?
by bongodongobob | 2025-09-26 16:22:56+00:00
Interestingly, this issue has caused me to refactor and modularize code that I should have addressed a long time ago, but didn't have the time or stamina to tackle. Because the LLM can't handle the context, it has helped me refactor stuff (seems to be very good at this in my experience) and that has led me to write cleaner and more modular code that the LLMs can better handle.
by kordlessagain | 2025-09-26 16:23:21+00:00
No, it's not. The limitation is believing a human can define how the agent should recall things. Instead, build tools for the agent to store and retrieve context and then give it a tool to refine and use that recall in the way it sees best fits the objective.

Humans gatekeep, especially in the tech industry, and that is exactly what will limit us improving AI over time. It will only be when we turn over it's choices to it that we move beyond all this bullshit.
by array_key_first | 2025-09-26 16:23:28+00:00
> Those examples have nothing to do with your specific political views.

Yes they do - as I've said, you can't invoke politics as a shield.

You can be fired for your beliefs. Politics are a belief. So you can be fired for politics.

If you're trying to say that you can just be an asshole in private - sure. If you share your political beliefs, it's no longer private.

Most companies don't want to hire people they think are assholes.

Ultimately, it's very simple human behavior. I don't want to work with people who suck. You don't either. Okay, so we must discriminate based on politics or other beliefs.

Hiring, in it of itself, is just discriminating. We're discriminating based on skills, personality, beliefs, and fit. That's what hiring is.

There's only a select couple of things we can't, or shouldn't, discriminate on. Politics isn't one of them. If you think black people need to be exterminated or whatever, there's no gun to my head making me hire you. No, I'm not gonna hire you.
by leakycap | 2025-09-26 16:23:32+00:00
Weird how the old ice cream shops still exist, even when the market magically produces hustle-and-bustle for the newest shops temporarily when they open

Almost like demand and markets can change/grow in response to what is offered

Human nature is to buzz around anything new more than stuff we already know, and of course that dynamic will surround new and exciting things

Like cutting edge AI
by mytailorisrich | 2025-09-26 16:23:51+00:00
If that's Labour's response to Reform UK then it is the most ill-thought-out, if not idiotic, possible:

There is a real issue with immigration in the UK.

People want actual action on immigration, not gimmicks, not lies. The Conservatives were annihilated because their voters caught up with the fact that they were lying (talking tough while actually pushing immigration higher).

Those Digital IDs would do nothing against illegal immigration considering existing right to work and right to rent legal checks. It is clear and people see it, so see previous point. "you need to prove you’re entitled to work/live here/claim benefits" is already the case and has always been the case. He is copying the disastrous Conservative strategy to talk tough while doing nothing and in fact actually keeping immigration up.

There have been previous attempts to introduce ID cards. People have always been generaly against them and the most against them are probably those already supporting Reform UK or the libertarians on both sides. So he's only eroding the little support he has left (progressist liberals) while strengthening the opinion of those already against him. I was looking at the readers' comments on The Guardian and there are overwhelmingly opposed to the proposal. So if even them turn against Starmer he is well and truly toast.
by greentec | 2025-09-26 16:24:09+00:00
Hello.

I teach students at a university. Recently, in my JavaScript class, I wanted to explain mouse and keyboard input in a visual way, but I couldn't find a suitable example.

So I created one myself, and I'm sharing it here in case it might be helpful to you as well.

Please test it out and let me know if you have any feedback.

Thank you.
by saghm | 2025-09-26 16:24:11+00:00
I think the issue is that there's clearly as need for a term for the category of "things that usually run Windows (but you can also probably put Linux on it, and like, even one of the BSDs if you're feeling adventurous)". PC isn't a great one from a linguistic perspective, but there's not an alternative I've heard that seems likely to catch on. There probably also should be a better term for "laptop/desktop", since as you mention "computer" itself is not really narrow enough if you're being pedantic, but at the end of the day, right now the only really differentiator we have is context. In the context here, it was honestly more clear clear what was meant by "PC" in the top-level comment than it was whether the person responding to it actually misunderstood or was trying to make a point.
Show HN: I solved my movie night headache
by joewebber | 2025-09-26 16:24:18+00:00
There we were, like every other Friday night. I was finishing my glass of wine while pushing away my plate, and out pops the dreaded question.

“What should we watch tonight?” She asks.

I saw it coming. In fact, I always see it coming. Do I have an answer? Never. But I know how our night will go.

We'll sit on the couch, open up the first streaming app, and start the dreaded doom scroll.

“This one?” I'd ask.

“No, we already watched it.”

“How about this?”

“I’m not into it.”

And so it goes through the apps one by one until we run out of time and settle for a re-run of Sex and the City or The Office. Typical. But this time, I did something different.

I pulled out my phone, opened an app I was working on that treats movie selection like a conversation instead of category browsing, and held my breath. What happened next was better than I ever could have imagined.

“Sweetheart, what kind of movie are you in the mood for?”

“Well, what about something that’s a mix of Top Gun, The English, Amsterdam, Ted Lasso, The Family Stone?”

Right. Let’s see how this goes.

I entered the prompt, hit return, and out popped 10 suggestions. The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Departed, A Beautiful Mind, The Prestige... Whoa. These are all great movies. But I didn’t stop there.

The 10 were great, but I wanted something newer. So, I refined the search. “Show me more that were released within the last 5 years.” Bingo.

Among the next 10 was a little gem named “The Marriage Story”. Movie night was a hit.

And so will yours. Not convinced?

Try it for free: watchnowai.com
by rayng | 2025-09-26 16:24:38+00:00
Magnus Carlsen (2021)

"... But had I started cheating in a clever manner, I am convinced no one would notice. I would've just needed to cheat one or two times during the match, and I would not even need to be given moves, just the answer on which was way better. Or, here there is a possibility of winning and here you need to be more careful. That is all I would need in order to be almost invicible."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcbHmHHwlUQ&t=313s
by ruszki | 2025-09-26 16:24:41+00:00
Different, but nobody could predict what would happen next. We know now how different it was, but we didn’t know back then how it would be different now. There were people/companies who were right, and more people who weren’t. I had good predictions, and bad predictions. I didn’t understand why people didn’t use their phone already like how they use smartphones now. You could do everything what you can do now (except things which were discovered since then, mainly ML stuffs). Browse the internet (it was always interesting how people didn’t know what was WAP), listen to music, read books, play games, run random apps (there was waaaay more freedom regarding this back then by default, people just didn’t know how). But still, we needed smartphones. That was the thing which crossed the line for normies, and for most of them only more than 5 years after iPhone was released. My prediction of convergence would have failed without the modern smartphone, which I couldn’t foresee. It was pure luck. We needed a breakthrough.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t predict anything with high certainty. You just don’t know whether the status quo will be disturbed. And when you need a status quo disturbance for your prediction, you’re in pure luck category. When your prediction requires lack of status quo changes, then your prediction is safer. And of course sorter the term the better. When ChatGPT came out, Cursor and Claude Code could be predicted, I predicted them. Because no changes in status quo was required and it was a short term prediction. But if there would have been a new breakthrough, then those wouldn’t have been created. When they predicted fully self driving cars, or less people checking X-rays, you needed a status quo change: legal first, but in case of general, fully self driving cars, even technical breakthroughs. Good luck with that.
by aabajian | 2025-09-26 16:24:54+00:00
Your belief is held by many, many radiologists. One thing I like to highlight is that LLMs and LVMs are much more advanced than any model in the past. In particular, they do not require specific training data to contain a diagnosis. They don't even require specific modality data to make inferences.

Think about how you learned anatomy. You probably looked at Netter drawings or Grey's long before you ever saw a CT or MRI. You probably knew the English word "laceration" before you saw a liver lac. You probably knew what a ground glass bathroom window looked like before the term was used to describe lung findings.

LLMs/LVMs ingest a huge amount of training data, more than humans can appreciate, and learn connections between that data. I can ask these models to render an elephant in outer space with a hematoma on its snout in the style of a CT scan. Surely, there is no such image in the training set, yet the model knows what I want from the enormous number of associations in its network.

Also, the word "finite" has a very specific definition in mathematics. It's a natural human fallacy to equate very large with infinite. And the variation in images is finite. Given a 16-bit, 512 x 512 x 100 slice CT scan, you're looking at 2^16 * 26214400 possible images. Very large, but still finite.

Of course, the reality is way, way smaller. As a human, you can't even look at the entire grayscale spectrum. We just say, < -500 Hounsfield units (HU), that's air, -200 < fat < 0, bone/metal > 100, etc. A gifted radiologist can maybe distinguish 100 different tissue types based on the HU. So, instead of 2^16 pixel values, you have...100. That's 100 * 26214400 = 262,440,000 possible CT scans. That's a realistic upper-limit on how many different CT scans there could possibly be. So, let's pre-draft 260 million reports and just pick the one that fits best at inference time. The amount you'd have to change would be miniscule.
by jerf | 2025-09-26 16:25:24+00:00
Hmm, at least in Haskell terms that would not be sufficient, if we define "IO" by the IO type, because some types of O, such as setting the value of IORefs, is definitely something that could be witnessed elsewhere depending on the flow of the IORef in question.

But I think in concept that maybe that's pretty close to the concept. Input from IO is arguably the definition of impure that we care about. But not all forms of Output are necessarily radioactive waste for purity. We might be able in practice to give ourselves a bit more wiggle room on that side without breaking all the benefits of purity, and gain substantial practical utility for a very, very small loss in theory. With some careful thought it's even possible the theory loss could be either "minimized or eliminated" or "strongly characterized and constrained". I don't know enough about the language in question to know what is in it, but a language that had first-class messaging of some sort ought to be able to define a form of output that is "you can send this message to this target any time you want without breaking purity", and the the code for the thing receiving the message could still itself be constrained by the effects system. (You could conceivably go so far as to insist that the resulting "exception handlers" rigidly form a tree that grounds out into code that uses none of these implicit handlers, though my gut says that will probably end up being more trouble than it is worth.)
by dathinab | 2025-09-26 16:25:27+00:00
yes, well for all new ones

but a bunch of years ago there was some blameless fan which worked somehow else (electric charges or similar???) and had the side effect of them emitting ozon

this is why if you google dyson+ozon you will find a lot of articles telling you in various details "no they don't produce ozone", because at least some dyson like fans did produce some amount of ozone in the past. Idk. if that also applied to some old dyson products.
by tptacek | 2025-09-26 16:25:41+00:00
Asking, not arguing, but: why can't they? You can give an agent access to its own context and ask it to lobotomize itself like Eternal Sunshine. I just did that with a log ingestion agent (broad search to get the lay of the land, which eats a huge chunk of the context window, then narrow searches for weird stuff it spots, then go back and zap the big log search). I assume this is a normal approach, since someone else suggested it to me.
by leakycap | 2025-09-26 16:25:51+00:00
No, the "rich" people I've provided tech support to are the juiciest targets and get hit regularly because avoiding malware/phishing/etc. doesn't even register on their daily thought process and everything is just something to get through to get to the next important thing

You would not believe what a person can manage to install on their MacBook nowdays... it used to be "Flash Player updates" that got them, now I don't even know where this stuff comes from
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-09-26 16:26:18+00:00
Thank you. Question, how large of clusters have you deployed spegel to? I run clusters which are well beyond the defined k8s limits and sometimes when we put stuff in there it blows up as it wasn’t ever tested at those scales (for example Cilium) https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/best-practices/cluster-larg...
by tomku | 2025-09-26 16:27:02+00:00
Top-level players regularly are in the 90-95% range aggregated over many games, with spikes up to 98-99%. If you have 98 or 99% accuracy over the course of an entire game (which happens sometimes!), it's either very short or you had significant sequences where you were 100% accurate. If that happened in one of my games it'd be clear evidence I was cheating, if it happens in a Magnus game it's him correctly calculating a complex line and executing it, which he does pretty often.

Edit: Even lower-level cheated games are rarely 100% accurate for the whole game, cheaters usually mix in some bad or natural moves knowing that the engine will let them win anyways. That's why analysis is usually on critical sections, if someone normally plays with a 900 rating but spikes to 100% accuracy every time there's a critical move where other options lose, that's a strong suggestion they're cheating. One of the skills of a strong GM is sniffing out situations like that and being able to calculate a line of 'only moves' under pressure, so it's not nearly as surprising when they pull it off.
by cameldrv | 2025-09-26 16:28:08+00:00
If you're counting all desktop/server computers, Linux has way more market share than all of the Unices ever did. It's probably even true for desktop Linux. If you count mobile phones, Android is a Linux derivative, and iOS is a BSD derivative. The fundamental issue for the workstation vendors was simply that with the P6, Intel was near parity or even ahead of the workstation vendors in performance, and it cost something like 1/4 as much.
by etruong42 | 2025-09-26 16:28:25+00:00
This post is so eloquent! This post describes a lot of ideas that I have been thinking about, and Tao has created a framework that lets me describe many of these thoughts.

I think people have been really underestimating the power of small organized groups, and I have been putting significant effort into invigorating the small groups around me.

Tao hints at some of the values of small groups, but I think he misses the irreplaceable value that small groups have. We as a society have conceptualized value itself into certain quantities, mostly in dollar amounts (time, money, income, wealth, assets, services, etc) that we have lost our humanity. I find it amusing that Tao describes "a sense of purpose" as a "softer" benefit, and I agree that this is the lens by which society implicitly sees "a sense of purpose" - a sense of purpose does not have a monetary value that can be assigned to it. Even so, what is all the money in the world worth without a sense of purpose?

Tao correctly points out that "large organizations" "offer substantially more economies of scale" and "provide significant material comforts", I wonder if humanity is ready to wonder if it really needs more material comforts at a global scale. Perhaps we can start paring down some of our global organizations into their core functions of providing material comforts and we can start invigorating small organizations to nourish our souls.

We spend so much time, energy, and mental anguish over challenges like war and political gridlock. Our natural inclination to consolidate power into large organizations to overcome these challenges may be counterproductive because these large organizations naturally dehumanize us. And when this dehumanized organization inevitably fail to achieve the original noble goals of e.g. strongarming Russia into peace with Ukraine, we naturally try to push for more power and use different forms of aggression or increase the magnitude of our aggression, not only to try to "conquer" the "problem" but also feel safe in our membership into a big and powerful organization capable of such aggression. This might also drive us to abandon "small organizations" for some "great cause". For example, look at all the time and energy we put into global political coalitions on social media rather than local causes.

Tao may be right that we need to fundamentally rethink how these different levels and sizes of organizations need to engage with one another. When we encounter a problem, even a big problem, a big organization sometimes is not only ineffective but they can be actively harmful.
by leakycap | 2025-09-26 16:28:55+00:00
SPA development is everywhere because you can charge a lot more for it, and web development has become commoditized in many other arenas

Sanity is available immediately if you are willing to be paid less. There are tons of simple, non-SPA, non-stack-on-stack projects out there, they just usually pay 1/10th the complex stuff.
by gall007 | 2025-09-26 16:29:13+00:00
I've lived in a communist country and I know how freedom of speech and freedom of press works. Well, it doesn't.

Without it, how can you trust official (or even unofficial) polls and reports? With such heavy surveillance and lack of real privacy, people rarely say what they actually think.

> "In every one of these categories, Chinese responses far outpaced those from Western nations."

I bet. Makes you wonder what would happen if they answered differently. I'm 100% sure the results are honest!

> (in US) "As a result, many people remain in jobs they find to be miserable just to keep their insurance, since without it they might not be able to afford life-saving treatments."

That’s almost funny - as if in China everyone has their dream job. Good thing Amnesty International and other organizations haven’t found any abuses or forced labor there; oh wait...

When it comes to movement, healthcare, and housing — it's striking that the hukou (户口) system still ties people to their birthplace. Sure, you can travel and even live elsewhere, but in practice you lose access to social benefits like healthcare or public schooling for your kids. This isn't some small exception - we're talking about hundreds of millions of migrant workers in cities who live as a "second category" of citizens. Formally free to move, but with limited rights.

Sorry, but the article reads more like propaganda than analysis - calling something "freedom" that, in reality, is not.
by rhetocj23 | 2025-09-26 16:29:58+00:00
I caught onto this very early.

Initially Id probably spend 1 hr a day conversing with chatgpt, mostly to figure out its capabilities and abilities.

Overtime that 1 hr has to declined to on average 5 mins a day. It has become at best a rubber duck for me, just to get my fingers moving to get thoughts out of my mind lol.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-09-26 16:30:26+00:00
I've never been in a self-driving car myself, but your position verges on moon-landing denial. They most certainly do exist, and have for a while.

Yes, they still need human backup on occasion, usually to deal with illegal situations caused by other humans. That's definitely the hard part, since it can't be handwaved away as a "simple" technical problem.

AI in radiology faces no such challenges, other than legal and ethical access to training data and clinical trials. Which admittedly can't be handwaved away either.