MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-13 08:02:35+00:00
> His argument is much narrower: consciousness can't be instantiated purely in language.

No, his argument is that consciousness can't be instantiated purely in software, that it requires specialized hardware. Language is irrelevant, it was only an example. But his belief, which he articulates very explicitly in the article, is that you couldn't create a machine consciousness by running even a perfect simulation of a biological brain on a digital computer, neuron for neuron and synapse for synapse. He likens this simulation of a brain, which wouldn't think, to a simulation of a fire, which can't burn down a real building.

Instead, he believes that you could create a machine consciousness by building a brain of electronic neurons, with condensers for every biological dendrite, or whatever the right electric circuit you'd pick. He believed that this is somehow different than a simulation, with no clear reason whatsoever as to why. His ideas are very much muddy, and while he accuses others of supporting cartesian dualism when they think the brain and the mind can be separated, that you can "run" the mind on a different substrate, it is in fact obvious he held dualistic notions where there is something obviously special about the mind-brain interaction that is not purely computational.
by wiseowise | 2025-10-13 08:02:48+00:00
> Electron is Flash for the Desktop.

Flash was awesome. It was proprietary, unstable, insecure, but in other regards it was much better than competition at the time.

Electron is open-source, stable and secure (as long as you stay up to date).

You’re making a compliment.

> * Non-native UI toolkit

That’s a drawback, not a plus. You can’t easily style the app with CSS the way you want it (VSCode, Obsidian).

> * Massive waste of resources (CPU, RAM, Battery, Disk). Consumption of 500 MB RAM for idle is the norm.

Nonsense. Obsidian is sitting at 115 MB right now, zero CPU.

> * Slow.

Define slow.

> * Often issues with autonomous, local operation.

???

> * Security -> Browser Engine

The only real drawback so far. Can be mitigated by staying up to date.

> It is always better to use a well-working application with your native UI-toolkit

It is always better to use whatever works best for you and solves your problems. Not OCDing around technology and not playing identity wars with crazy people online.

> Electron is used, when a company wants to save on developer.

Also a big plus. Features are being delivered to all platforms with less money spent. Win-win.

> All users pay with suffering from bad UI and their hardware resources. In this case it is something nobody asked for?

You need to seek therapy if you’re “suffering” from application using the toolkit.

P.S. Thunderbird performs worse than ANY Electron app I’ve ever used, and I’ve been using Electron since its inception.
by fsflover | 2025-10-13 08:02:49+00:00
> It can barely handle basic web browsing

I don't understand what you're talking about. SXMo (https://sxmo.org/) is fast on Pinephone. Even Phosh is pretty usable. Firefox with NoScript is more than good enough to browse web sites with pictures.

Also, Librem 5 is much faster than Pinephone, and I've been using it as a daily driver for quite some time already.
by grafmax | 2025-10-13 08:03:19+00:00
Let’s say any of these would take off. Let’s put aside the US’ inferior energy picture, industrial base, or key natural resource access that would block the US from making some of these a reality. What are these new techs going to be used for? Many of them: war. Both internationally and domestically - the US is already invading its own cities. Deepfakes are regularly shared among some social media echo chambers already, and LLM propaganda farms have anlready seen documented use. Even pharmaceutical breakthroughs will be used to extract higher prices for the shrinking number of Americans who can afford it. The trends are all here already with no sign of abating. AI isn’t going to address the structural cause of these problems: extreme wealth inequality. AI is a tool to make it worse.

I think holding on to these beliefs about AI must give some people a sense of hope. But a hope based on reality and is stronger than one based in denial. The antidote I believe is solidarity founded on our shared vulnerability before this bleak future.
by imtringued | 2025-10-13 08:03:33+00:00
The problem with generative AI is that its economics are more like steel. Metals used to be extremely valuable due to the amount of effort needed to extract them from ores, but eventually the steel industry matured and steel turned into a commodity with hardly any differentiation. You won't be able to back up your trillion dollar valuations if a competitor is going to undercut you.
by netsharc | 2025-10-13 08:03:49+00:00
I guess the convenience of money is that it doesn't even need to exist, they can just be numbers in an SQL table (other database types are available). Imagine needing to ship tons of rice when buying an RTX 5090. Or even buying a datacenter full of them. Nvidia or Apple would need giant silos for all the rice they have (or I guess there'd be Central Rice Storage, and a ledger to say who owns how many tonnes)

It's funny how too many of us are obsessed about keeping our number in the database as big as possible...
by pbarondadditude | 2025-10-13 08:03:50+00:00
Sounds great. Would everyone "accept" the result, or would it be worth adding a little LLM explanation of why the result should content everyone by explaining how the game retains elements or this other voted game and that other voted game, to try and make people go "ok, sure"? I'm not a huge gamer so maybe this is an obvious reaction they would get from their own experience when seeing the result without needing a LLM explanation.
by Defletter | 2025-10-13 08:03:52+00:00
Can't speak for everyone, but I think a substantial part of the shift from Maven to Gradle was the ability to write build scripts: you didn't need to write a plugin. I'm hoping that Maven (and Gradle) can take advantage of JEPs 458 and 512 to allow people to write build scripts for that Java projects in Java.

- https://openjdk.org/jeps/458

- https://openjdk.org/jeps/512
by tangrammer | 2025-10-13 08:04:27+00:00
Last week I presented "De-complecting clojure.spec" at Clojure South 2025, exploring how to evolve clojure.spec from a validation tool into a foundation for self-discoverable semantic services.

The key insight: by changing spec's registry from a 1-to-1 mapping (namespaced-keyword → spec) to a 1-to-N mapping (namespaced-keyword → {namespaced-keyword → value|spec}), we can create RDF-compliant semantic systems while solving Rich Hickey's "Maybe Not" problem of context-dependent requirements.
by Our_Benefactors | 2025-10-13 08:04:55+00:00
> Why don't you include Mexico in the USA? Or Venezuela

Because they aren’t part of the USA.

You didn’t address their point at all, which was to demonstrate that the USA is a rich country, and that both the top and bottom tiers are higher in wealth than top and bottom tiers in Europe. Even excepting Russia and other non-EU countries this holds true.
by nicman23 | 2025-10-13 08:05:05+00:00
bash scripts that make terraform configurations for scaling bioinfo work to n h100s/a100s spot vms with resistance to the vms getting terminated. i now have it for alphafold3 jobs but i need to make the same for boltz, gnina, gromacs (although spot vms do not make sense here), etc

next step is to make a simple login portal for non trusted persons to be able to submit work as this a uni project, mail the result / process.
by Symbiote | 2025-10-13 08:05:08+00:00
I am surprised to find Java's Locale.ROOT is not American.

DateFormat dateFormat = DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.DEFAULT, Locale.ROOT); System.out.println(dateFormat.format(new Date())); dateFormat = DateFormat.getTimeInstance(DateFormat.DEFAULT, Locale.ROOT); System.out.println(dateFormat.format(new Date())); NumberFormat numberFormatter = NumberFormat.getNumberInstance(Locale.ROOT); System.out.println(numberFormatter.format(12.34)); NumberFormat currencyFormatter = NumberFormat.getCurrencyInstance(Locale.ROOT); System.out.println(currencyFormatter.format(12.34)); 2025 Oct 13 10:12:42 12.34 ¤ 12.34

Even POSIX C is less American than I expected, with a metric paper size and no currency symbol defined (¤ isn't in ASCII). Only the American date format.
by jjav | 2025-10-13 08:05:21+00:00
> OK, I'll bite. Name 2 or more cars from 2010 that got better than 50mpg. I'll wait.........

Not 2010, which makes this so infuriating..

A 1986 Honda CRX HF was rated 51 MPG highway. That was an engine with stone-age technology, and it was possible.

Just imagine +40 years of incremental development with modern materials and modern engine control systems. What could a 2026 Honda CRX HF do in MPG if that development had been allowed to continue all these decades? Certainly above 60, probably above 80 MPG? Maybe above 100MPG.

Instead society is selling us 6000+lb monsters with worse mileage than back in the mid 80s.
by holowoodman | 2025-10-13 08:06:16+00:00
> Also, the most popular rain gauge manufacturer has shifted to tipping buckets to a tipping spoon design. [...] they no longer sell the tipping bucket design, so I'm guessing there is good reason they did that and there is some advantage (maybe in terms of calibration?)

Yes, tipping buckets are less exact than tipping spoons, especially in low-rain season. The bucket is never perfectly symmetrical and the mounting is never perfectly level, so one side of the bucket will hold more water than the other before tipping, leading to asymmetric tips.
by dangus | 2025-10-13 08:06:26+00:00
Not at all, since reading is super hard I’ll summarize it for you:

Other purposefully offensive media tends to have a layer of abstraction.

But in cards against humanity, players are just playing as themselves and saying things that are mean using a cheap “just joking” justification. There’s no gameplay mechanic that removes you from your role as your real self, so when players are voting on the best offensive combination they’re just voicing which punching down negative stereotypes they prefer most.

Let’s say that isn’t a big deal and doesn’t bother you, I’d still submit that it’s boring and lazy comedy like when some of the low-tier standup comedians depend too much on a very specific formula. Cards against Humanity’s reliance on saying literally random offensive stuff is not much different from Carrot Top’s use of prop comedy.

Not only that, the gameplay sucks because it’s just a game of chance. Whoever draws the “best” cards wins. The game is also a direct copy of Apples to Apples but turned offensive, so the game is also a product of the creators’ laziness.

Finally, the creator of game has received seemingly legitimate accusations of abusive behavior in real life.

Look, I’m not someone who prescribes to the idea that we need to be super serious and sensitive all the time, but the game fucking sucks. There are much better ways to have a raunchy good time with your friends.
by slightwinder | 2025-10-13 08:06:59+00:00
> I find it rather strange that so many email providers have to develop their own "app".

It's probably because people want easy access, and have all features supported flawlessly. Mail has come a long way, but there are always specific features not integrated well.

Also, most of those apps are more a thin wrapper around the web-interface, adding some interface-sugar for desktop-integration and serving as a playground for devs to test the web-apps offline-abilities.

> There are so many good clients out there, and I'd rather have 1.

I've yet to see any good client for me. They all are kinda flawed and limited, many suffering from age or not fitting modern demands. Thunderbird seems to be the only trustable Linux-compatible one which is still actively developed, and even this is app is lacking on many corners. Add-ons are supposed to fill and round up the corners, but without anyone developing them, what's the worth in having them?

Fastmail at least seems to work on developing the mail-standards, and having their own client is probably helping them in figuring out how well those improvements are working and where they are lacking.
by moritzmoritz21 | 2025-10-13 08:07:14+00:00
I am currently working on a small side-project focused on React Native apps to manage their version update and maintenance mode. - https://appcockpit.dev

Right now I am getting my first users and already getting great feedback. Many things on the roadmap.

Always eager to learn more about others pain points when it comes to React Native/mobile development. Let me know what you think!
by mlsu | 2025-10-13 08:08:06+00:00
I am working on a microkernel for arm-m33 microcontrollers. Targeting the RP2350 first.

It’s going to feature a synchronous IPC model where the inter-task ‘call graph’ is known at compilation. Function call semantics to pass data between tasks. Call() recieve() reply()

A build tool that reads TOML will generate the kernel calls so that tasks can be totally isolated — all calls go though supervisor trap so we have true memory isolation.

Preemptions are possible but control is yielded only at IPC boundary so it’s not hard realtime.

So that makes things super robust and auditable behavior at compile time. Total isolation means tasks can crash catastrophically without affecting the rest of the system. Big downsides are huge increase in flash usage, constrained programming model, complex build system, task switching overhead. Just a very different model than what I’m used to at $dayjob.

I want to basically find out, hey what happens when we go full safety!? What’s hard about it? What tradeoffs do we need to make? And also kinda like what’s a different model for multitasking. Written in Rust of course.
Show HN: Scryer – AI that analyzes your Shopify store daily
by prohobo | 2025-10-13 08:08:43+00:00
I built Scryer to address the problem of data overload in analytics. Small store owners have detailed dashboards filled with charts and tables, but they usually end up tracking one or two metrics they understand and ignore the rest.

So why not use an AI pipeline to collate data from different sources (Shopify API, web pixel, Lighthouse audits, page crawls, etc.) and extract meaningful insights?

I know there's AI fatigue... I wanted to build something different: proactive daily analysis that tracks issues over time instead of one-shot responses. When it finds a problem (like "your mobile speed dropped"), it keeps tracking it until you fix it, then marks it resolved. Not just regenerating the same alert every day.

Hopefully this can be useful enough to justify the price! It would cost way too much and take way too long to do this analysis continuously - that's why it runs daily instead of real-time.

Check out more of the technical approach here: https://scryerapp.io/blog/building-ai-analyst

Thanks!
by piva00 | 2025-10-13 08:09:05+00:00
Spotify needs to pay ~70% of the revenue as royalties, Netflix started their own productions to not have to disburse in royalties (and the quality suffered).

Netflix was the first ever streaming service I canceled the subscription without feeling I had lost anything, after more than 10 years as a paying subscriber their quality declined so much I didn't care about it at all. It's been 3 years and I never thought about subscribing again.
by jryb | 2025-10-13 08:09:21+00:00
Many (most?) of these are achievable with neovim and tree-sitter (a plugin that gives you access to the AST), and surely many other editors. I have plugins installed right now that do several of the things that are mocked up here. Many more are done with virtual text and not color, but I don’t see why you couldn’t use highlighting instead.

I agree with the broader point of the article that color is underused, but the state of the art has moved way past what the author’s tools are currently configured to provide.
by drcxd | 2025-10-13 08:09:37+00:00
Thanks for you opinion. I agree with your opinion that current LLMs are less helpful to senior/experienced developers. Of course LLMs can't solve complicated, advanced problems, otherwise we would see great advance in science and technology now.

However, there are a lot of trivial work in software development. For example, the behavior of a button, or editable text. Same to any kind of art, most developers in the industry are doing trivial or ordinary work, and few are solving challenging problems. What I mean is that those who do trivial work will be culled, or liberated, from doing that as a job, while the elite could remain there to solve unique, challenging problems.

Recently I have been working with coding agent to fix bugs and implement new features. I implemented my solution first and let coding agent come up with its own solution. Most of the time, the coding agent came up a better solution than mine. Most of the time, its solution was not worse than mine, and I would keep most of its code and only do some minor improvement. Most probably, I am not an experienced/advanced developer, since I seldom deal with advanced math/algorithms/architecture in my day-to-day work. Thus, it would be natural that we have different feeling to the same thing.

I am interested in Dijkstra's idea about natural language programming you mentioned, is that EWD667?

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-10-13 08:10:14+00:00
Renewables have been the unsubsidized cheapest energy source for a while now.

Recently unsubsidized renewables and storage started undercutting fossil fuels in major markets around the world.

This is what is so interesting with renewable energy. They are the first energy source since the advent of fossil fuels lowering the price floor of energy globally.

Removing the credits will like I said only shift the implementation period due to using tax money to tilt the scale in one way or the other.
by fluoridation | 2025-10-13 08:11:33+00:00
>a fabrication-time attacker can leverage analog circuits to create a hardware attack that is small (i.e., requires as little as one gate)

Huh... I'm no EE, but measuring the complexity of an analog circuit in gates seems odd to me. For starters, the added circuitry isn't just one gate. There's a few capacitors added as well. And something tells me if someone were to add a parasitic circuit like that, it'd have to link up all over the parent circuit to probe voltages. Obviously it wouldn't be noticeable in a finished product (much less in an IC), but I wonder how noticeable it would be at the design stage by other humans.
by aeonfox | 2025-10-13 08:12:52+00:00
I've been building a pretty visualisation of HN. You can see this Ask HN on this link: https://hackernews.life/?s=top&id=45561428&c=0

If you zoom out it's meant to look something like a thermal vent with cellular life. Rank and karma cause the cells to bio-illuminate. Each cell is a submission, each organelle is a comment thread, and every shape represents a live connection to the Firebase HN API. It also has features to search, filter, and go back in time as far as the backend has been running.

It's been a passion project of mine. My little Temple OS. And I'll keep adding little features that please me.
by Michael9876 | 2025-10-13 08:13:13+00:00
I'm a dev and also a private pilot. Currently I'm working on Pilot Kit: https://air.club/ , a mobile app born from my own frustration with the amount of tedious paperwork in aviation.

It's an all-in-one toolkit designed to automate the boring stuff so you can focus on flying. Core features include: automatic flight tracking that turns into a digital logbook entry, a full suite of E6B/conversion calculators, customizable checklists, and live weather decoding.

It’s definitely not a ForeFlight killer, but it's a passion project I'm hoping can be useful for other student and private pilots.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/pilot-kit/id6749793975 Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=club.air.pilot...

Any feedback is welcome!
by flohofwoe | 2025-10-13 08:13:20+00:00
Maybe climate change just doesn't affect most parts of the US as hard as parts of Europe?

E.g. see: https://www.euronews.com/green/2025/09/23/more-than-62000-di...

"Europe is the continent that is warming most quickly, at twice the global average,” says Tomáš Janoš, ISGlobal and Recetox researcher and first author of the study.

Historically you didn't need air conditioning in Europe to survive the summer, but that seems to change very quickly.
by wolfgangbabad | 2025-10-13 08:13:26+00:00
I agree. I don't mind VS Code or some app a person did eats 300 MB of RAM and is Electron if it does the job done. By the way good luck implement something like rtl, i18n, text select and right click context menus in you favorite C/Go/Rust/ImGui/ImmediateModeWhatever library.

Wanna switch between Arabic, Chinese, English in a textarea or input or the whole app? Trivial in Electron. Again, good luck with that in any other environment.

Electron is superior for any text/form apps. HTML/CSS/JS are truly magical if you dive deeper and for any form-like classical type of crud apps there is really no better option.

With our computers getting more RAM and disk space every few years - especially compared to AI needs, Electron is actually super lean compared to those AI llms models. Funny enough, LM Studio is an Electron app ;)
by ozgung | 2025-10-13 08:13:51+00:00
We created our own letters and our own rules. In 1928, long before code pages and computers.

The assumption that letters come in universal pairs is wrong. That assumption is the bug. You can’t assume that capitalization rules must be the same for every language implementing a specific alphabet. Those rules may change for every language. They do.

And not just capitalization rules. Auto complete, for instance, should respect the language as well. You can’t “correct” a French word to an English word. Localization is not optional when dealing with text.
by Fraterkes | 2025-10-13 08:14:46+00:00
For a lot of people the main advantage of electron was just being able to use the webdev stack for a desktop app. Tauri makes it less portable but is less bloated. Different tradeofs I guess.

Also: I think it’s kinda funny that Tauri is basically a very straightforward of example of trading developer comfort for benefit of the user, and you can’t imagine people using it.
by voidUpdate | 2025-10-13 08:15:11+00:00
> If capitalize() was an ambiguous name, what should its replacement be called? Can you think of a name that describes the function’s behaviour more clearly?

In c#, setting every letter to its uppercase form is ToUpper, and I think capitalise is perfectly reasonable for setting the first character. I'm not sure I've ever referred to uppercasing a string as capitalising it
by WJW | 2025-10-13 08:15:28+00:00
This is not unique to software. There's no "free&open ball bearing" design out there, let alone for a machine capable of making them, even though the modern world couldn't work without them. The only people caring about ball bearing design are technical minded people already working in the field.

Same as for a thousand other fields essential to operating the modern world. Nobody has time to learn them all, so we specialize.
by talonx | 2025-10-13 08:15:37+00:00
Working on my SaaS that monitors third-party status pages - https://incidenthub.cloud/ It's a one-person project I started last year.

My biggest technical challenge remains dealing with the immense number of different APIs (and not-APIs) in the different status pages out there. Marketing remains my biggest overall challenge as my background is engineering, but I've learnt quite a bit since I launched this.
by mikewarot | 2025-10-13 08:15:53+00:00
The problem with the Lytro was that the sensor/lens pair was just too darned small. If they had somehow scaled it up so that the sensor was about 4" in diameter, even if it meant using an interposing frosted glass plate or something to allow a smaller image sensor, the depth of field effects could have been fantastic. It would have allowed genuine and beautiful bokeh across almost any arbitrary focal plane, even pan/tilt, in software.