MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CuriouslyC | 2025-10-12 23:06:19+00:00
This is actually an interesting question! If you look at OpenAI's change in behavior, I think that's going to be the pattern for venture backed AI: piggyback on open science, then burn a bunch of capital on closed tech to gain a temporary advantage, and hope to parlay that into something bigger.

I believe China's open source focus is in part a play for legitimacy, and part a way to devalue our closed AI efforts. They want to be the dominant power not just by force but by mandate. They're also uniquely well positioned to take full advantage of AI proliferation as I mentioned, so in this case a rising tide raises some boats more than others.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-12 23:06:45+00:00
My intuition is that ChatGPT has the mindshare of the "normal user" userbase, which is powerful. Ask Apple. You can still squander a lead like this, but not easily.

GPT-5 was in no small part a "cost down update" for OpenAI - they replaced their default 4o with a more optimized, more lightweight option that they can serve at scale without burning a hole in their pockets. At the same time, their "top end" options for the power users willing to pay for good performance remain competitive.

The entire reason why OpenAI is burning money is "their investments to remain competitive". Inference is profitable - R&D is the money pit. OpenAI is putting money into more infra, more research and more training runs.
by scrubs | 2025-10-12 23:06:58+00:00
Did you read the article? The customers hired an outsider because they were unable to conceive of what to do. Not having indexes? Are you kidding me? Thats not a flex of "we're strategic long term thinks keeping our eye on the real problems." It's stupid. The article is right: bad engineers defer what they think is noise too long until it becomes a major problem, and an outsider had to set them straight.
by OfflineSergio | 2025-10-12 23:07:04+00:00
Currently working on the web reader of WithAudio. Just add with.audio/ to begining of a public URL and get the text and audio in your browser. It runs the TTS in your browser so its free and unlimited.

You can read more about it and watch a demo: https://blog.with.audio/posts/web-reader-tts

I buit this to get some traffic to my main project's website using a free tool people might like. The main project: https://desktop.with.audio -> a one time payment text to speech app with text highlighting and export mp3 and other features on MacOS (ARM only) and Windows.
by savgore | 2025-10-12 23:07:05+00:00
Our waitlist is open for https://flatm8.co.uk - the platform for anonymous reviews of Landlords and Estate Agents in Britain and Ireland.

We’re working directly with partner housing unions and charities in Britain and Ireland to build the first central database of rogue landlords and estate agents. Users can search an address and see if it’s marked as rogue/dangerous by the local union, as well as whether you can expect to see your deposit returned, maintenance, communication - etc.

After renting for close to a decade, it’s the same old problems with no accountability. We wanted to change this, and empower tenants to share their experiences freely and easily with one another.

We’re launching in November, and I’m very excited to announce our partner organisations! We know this relies on a network effect to work, and we’re hoping to run it as a social venture. I welcome any feedback.
by toast0 | 2025-10-12 23:07:28+00:00
They don't make a whole lot of movies where all the characters just follow the rules, cause it wouldn't be fun to watch.

Xenobiologist is tired of eating with the rest of the crew and eats in the lab instead seems reasonable. We didn't see the leadup to see the deviance normalized, we just get to see the end of it.

Alien:Earth isn't the best writing, obviously, but we're how far into the series, the writing just has to be enough plot to get to the xenomorph rampage scenes. It's like plot in a video game or an adult film; you have to have it, but it doesn't matter.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-12 23:10:33+00:00
> "Winning" doesn't have to mean owning every transistor

It absolutely does.

Corporations are pushing remote attestation now. They can detect if we "tampered" with our devices now. They discriminate against us for it. Installed your own open source software? All services denied. Can't even log into your own bank account.

We're marginalized. Second class citizens. There is no choice, it's either corporate owned computers or nothing. What good is free software if we can't run it?
by some_furry | 2025-10-12 23:10:43+00:00
Cryptography stuff!

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COCKTAIL-DKG - A distributed key generation protocol for FROST, based on ChillDKG (but generalized to more elliptic curve groups) -- https://github.com/C2SP/C2SP/pull/164 | https://github.com/C2SP/C2SP/issues/159

-----

A tool for threshold signing software releases that I eventually want to integrate with SigStore, etc. to help folks distribute their code-signing. https://github.com/soatok/freeon

-----

Want E2EE for Mastodon (and other ActivityPub-based software), so you can have encrypted Fediverse DMs? I've been working on the public key transparency aspect of this too.

Spec: https://github.com/fedi-e2ee/public-key-directory-specificat...

Implementation: Coming soon. The empty repository is https://github.com/fedi-e2ee/pkd-server-go but I'll be pushing code in the near future.

You can read more about this project here: https://soatok.blog/category/technology/open-source/fedivers...
by 827a | 2025-10-12 23:10:52+00:00
Eh, this I cannot abide with. There are dozens of hosted model providers, from the foundational providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) to cloud re-hosting (Azure, GCP, AWS) to routing proxies (OpenRouter, Vercel, etc). There are huge open source models that are quite competitive (Qwen3-Coder). There are smaller open source models that can run on your laptop and easily help with function writing. There are walled garden, highly integrated tools (Claude Code, Codex) and there are plug-and-play bring your own API key or model tools (Charm Crush, etc). The ecosystem is vast, and every facet of it appears to be getting better.
by davnicwil | 2025-10-12 23:10:56+00:00
maybe a decent definition could be compute as close to the user latency-wise as practically possible while having full access to the necessary data.

For certain things this will be able to go as far as the device if you're only ever operating on data the user fully owns, other things will need data centers still but just decentralised and closer to the user via fancier architectures ala the Cloudflare model.
by prisenco | 2025-10-12 23:10:58+00:00
I'm working on a design system. I'm a software eng not a designer, but I started one a long while back because I wanted to get a sense of what designers go through. I've dropped it and came back a half dozen times but now I'm finishing it up.

It's been a great project to understand how design depends on a consistent narrative and purpose. At first I put together elements I thought looked good but nothing seemed to "work" and it's only when I took a step back and considered what the purpose and philosophy of the design was that it started to feel cohesive and intentional.

I'll never be a designer but I often do side projects outside my wheelhouse so I can build empathy for my teammates and better speak their language.
by subjectivationx | 2025-10-12 23:11:53+00:00
I love chatGPT5 and Claude but they aren't as big of a deal as going from no internet to having the internet.

That I think is the entire mistake of this bubble. We confused what we do have with some kind of science fiction fantasy and then have worked backwards from the science fiction fantasy as if it is inevitable.

If anything, the lack of use cases is what is most interesting with LLMs. Then again, "AI" can do anything. Probabilistic language models? Kind of limited.
by hgs3 | 2025-10-12 23:11:53+00:00
> It would be much more interesting to see a language which experiments with what is fundamentally representable

You might checkout my project, Confetti [1]. I conceived of it as Unix configuration files with the flexibility of S-expressions. I think the examples page on the website shows interesting use cases. It doesn't have a formal execution model, however, for that you might checkout Tcl or Lua.

[1] https://confetti.hgs3.me/
by electroglyph | 2025-10-12 23:12:56+00:00
i haven't seen any mention of lasers here, so i'll add my laser anecdote. I have a very active German shepherd rescue. I made the mistake of introducing him to the laser pointer which I used to exercise my previous dog, a doberman. Now he lives and breathes for laser. He nags me all day long. He sometimes sees laser dots where there aren't any. His appetite for laser can never be satiated, heh
by SOTGO | 2025-10-12 23:13:44+00:00
I get that the author wanted to explore constraint solvers, but why can't you use a greedy algorithm for this problem? Sort the inventory slots by how much bundle space they consume, and insert the cheapest slots. The only way I see this failing is with multiple bundles, but in practice in Minecraft (which is admittedly not really part of the constraint problem) bundles only help when you have many distinct items but a large number of items occur only a few items. In that case it isn't hard to find combinations that fill each bundle completely by only inserting all of a given item (as opposed to inserting only part of an inventory slot) since many items will have only 1 or 2 copies.
by ofalkaed | 2025-10-12 23:13:53+00:00
What do you want to bet and which assertion are we betting on?

Haiku has stayed out of the open source drama and focused on its goals; slowly and steadily working towards them even when the goalposts move. The big thing is their determination and staying focused on the user experience in a way Linux has not and can not without a single distro wining which is not going to happen. When it comes to the desktop, Haiku is offering everything Linux doesn't.
by ebcode | 2025-10-12 23:14:12+00:00
A “code index” tool that finds symbols in a codebase and creates a single table sqlite database for querying. It’s my second month using Claude Code, and I see a common pattern where Claude tries to guess patterns with grep, and often comes back with empty results. I’m writing the tool to prevent these fruitless searches. Using tree-sitter to parse the AST and add the symbols and what they are (function, class, argument, etc) to the db. I have it working with TypeScript, and am working on adding C and PHP.
by Rebles | 2025-10-12 23:14:14+00:00
after using both for the past 5 years, I'd say the main difference between peotry and uv is user experience and documentation. Poetry fought me every step of the way w.r.t. pip migration, venv, poetry updates. uv just worked in these areas, which meant I was updating packages much more frequently, which increased my experience and confidence in uv for a virtual cycle.
by mmh0000 | 2025-10-12 23:14:14+00:00
Have you seen the "average" users of LLM? They mostly don't care about hallucinations. It's like that joke[1] "Computer says no", it doesn't matter what is true or real, only that the computer said it, so now that's true in their mind.

Personal anecdote: I work with beginner IT students, and a new, fun (<- sarcasm, not fun) thing for me is the amount of energy they spend arguing with me about basic, easily proven Linux functionality. It's infuriating, the LLM is more believable than the paid professional who's been doing it for 30 years...

I find it highly doubtful that hallucinations, if unsolved, will have any real negative effect on LLM adaptation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_says_no
Show HN: Cycling app designed to sync video playback with real-time cycling data
by richbl | 2025-10-12 23:14:52+00:00
As the weather here in the Pacific Northwest is getting a big damp, here's an app called BLE Sync Cycle (currently Linux-based) that I wrote that allows me to interactively cycle indoors in front of a big-screen TV/monitor (similar to Zwift or Rouvy).

Additional details on the GitHub site: check out the project wiki (https://github.com/richbl/go-ble-sync-cycle/wiki) and roadmap (https://github.com/users/richbl/projects/4).
by daxfohl | 2025-10-12 23:14:59+00:00
Blackberry. Back in the Blackberry days I never pined for anything resembling a smartphone. Other than built-in GPS, I'm not sure my life is improved or worsened by having a computer on my person 24/7.

That wasn't the case pre-internet or pre-cellphone, when I remember pining for something resembling those technologies.
by zzo38computer | 2025-10-12 23:15:00+00:00
In many cases you shouldn't need a computer, and for many where a computer is helpful, a very simple one should be possible which can use less power and with small enough ROM and RAM, and not needing any Wi-Fi and stuff like that. You also should not rely on computers too much even in the circumstances where they are helpful.

I do think that different computers (and other stuff) can be made which do not use proprietary software (and which do not use excessive software; I think it is also important, for a different reason). Free open specifications can also be made, too. Many people don't, but it can be done (although in some cases it is difficult, for various reasons).
by charcircuit | 2025-10-12 23:15:04+00:00
Hardware verification doesn't prevent hardware failures. There is a reason RAM comes with ECC. It's not because RAM designers are too lazy to do formal verification. Even with ECC RAM, bit flips can still happen if multiple bits flip at the same time.

There are also things like CPUs taking the wrong branch that occasionally happen. You can't assume that the hardware will work perfectly in the real world and have to design for failure.
by jamesponddotco | 2025-10-12 23:15:39+00:00
While working on Shelvica, a personal library management service and reading tracker, I realized I needed a source of data for book information, and none of the solutions available provided all the data I needed. One might provide the series, the other might provide genres, and yet another might provide a cover with good dimensions, but none provided everything.

So I started working on Librario, an ISBN database that fetches information from several other services, such as Hardcover.app, Google Books, and ISBNDB, merges that information, and return something more complete than using them alone. It also saves that information in the database for future lookups.

You can see an example response here[1]. Pricing information for books is missing right now because I need to finish the extractor for those, genres need some work[2], and having a 5 months old baby make development a tad slow, but the service is almost ready for a preview.

The algorithm to decide what to merge is the hardest part, in my opinion, and very basic right now. It's based on a priority and score system for now, where different extractors have different priorities, and different fields have different scores. Eventually, I wanna try doing something with machine learning instead.

I'd also like to add book summaries to the data somehow, but I haven't figured out a way to do this legally yet. For books in the public domain I could feed the entire book to an LLM and ask them to write a spoiler-free summary of the book, but for other books, that'd land me in legal trouble.

Oh, and related books, and things of the sort. But I'd like to do that based on the information stored in the database itself instead of external sources, so it's something for the future.

Last time I posted about Shelvica some people showed interest in Librario instead, so I decided to make it something I can sell instead of just a service I use in Shelvica[3], hence why I'm focusing more on it these past two weeks.

[1]: https://paste.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/de80132b8f167f4503c31187...

[2]: In the example you'll see genres such as "English" and "Fiction In English", which is mostly noise. Also things like "Humor", "Humorous", and "Humorous Fiction" for the same book.

[3]: Which is nice, cause that way there are two possible sources of income for the project.
by tim333 | 2025-10-12 23:15:54+00:00
>people were not predicting the dotcom bubble

I don't know if you were there at the time but saying wow what a bubble was much of the conversation back then. I don't know if it was predicting it as saying gosh just look - you can take any company and put ".com" in the name and the stock goes up 5x, it's nuts.
by tolerance | 2025-10-12 23:16:42+00:00
As a quasi-tech person I can’t imagine what more can be (or what isn’t being) achieved within reason by FOSS. And when it comes to Life’s Big Problems™ showing me someone playing Snake on an ULTRAK 435 Digital Pitch Counter doesn’t instill me with confidence that free software is as big a solution as its proponents would like to think.
by nebula8804 | 2025-10-12 23:17:28+00:00
Its a lost battle not a lost war. You have to adapt for the circumstances of the time. Today that seems to be using a device that is closed but gapped only to get the essentials done(government services, banking etc.)

For everything else continue to use and improve the open offerings.

In the meantime, keep fighting and supporting organizations to get laws pushed to ensure open devices can access essential services. (Administrations change, whats dire now may be hope tomorrow).

I've come to realize that a lot of closed digital services are just fluff and not needed. So I try to accept that I dont need them. Its a journey.
by okanat | 2025-10-12 23:17:52+00:00
Even Linux hasn't "won" in those areas. It has just replaced what we would call a common API layer or a communication standard. The virtualization products are still proprietary. Servers and their firmware are too. People needed a Unix-like OS that hasn't been riddled with patent issues and wasn't outrageously expensive. They needed it because they were also price-sensitive or outright cheap. They didn't want to change APIs or modularize their software. Linux was there. Startup culture happened which demanded cutting all the costs you can. Linux was free of charge. Linux wasn't the best OS for the job sometimes. But it was there and it was gratis. So it became the middleware for Unix-compatible software.

We have open standards and even open/free software for anything that companies aren't making money out of. FOSS by itself cannot make money. In places where software matters the most or, if the software hides the trade secrets the most or, if it is the main money maker, creating FOSS is economically infeasible.

For FOSS to win, we need to change the economic and legal system. Current capitalist system in many West-aligned countries is actively hostile against sharing in any kind, except the ones that profit the biggest players in their non-critical areas. In a market where the first one to market gets to buy all competitors, in a market the one that has the biggest secrecy wins and gets all the money from investors like Y-Combinator, there cannot be any truly FOSS software-only products. They need to do rug pulls to support the exponential growth. Startup culture is fundamentally anti-FOSS. It is pro-FOSS in only consuming. Even a startup releasing some middleware can be interpreted as mishandling investment.

We need to make sure our governments support FOSS infrastructure and FOSS user-facing software. They need to be equal employers and competitors to Big Tech or they need to directly support smaller competitors for decades. Otherwise, I am afraid, FOSS cannot win.
by killerstorm | 2025-10-12 23:19:36+00:00
I believe every ambitious programmer makes a configuration language at some point, but most either keep it to themselves.

When I was a teen I made something called Nabla:

* XML-like syntax * Schema language * Compact binary representation * Trivial parser for binary representation * Optionally, simple dynamic programming language on top

Initially made it for my 3d engine scene serialization format, but then used everywhere some non-trivial data format was needed (e.g. anything with nested data structures).
by jiffylabs | 2025-10-12 23:20:07+00:00
Working on an AI governance and security platform that gives security and GRC visibility into what AI tools people are actually using but also what is going into them.

https://jiffylabs.ai/

It's a browser extension right now and the platform integrates with SSO providers and AI APIs, to help discover shadow AI, enforce policies and creates audit trails. Think observability for AI adoption but also Grammerly since we help coach endusers to better behavior/outcomes.

Early days but the problem is real, have a few design partners in the F500 already
by movedx | 2025-10-12 23:20:21+00:00
Well said.

“When you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man.” — Star Trek: Insurrection.

A month ago I watched animatronic dogs herd sheep around a paddock just minutes after some Border Collie did the same thing. What came to mind straight away was: that’s not a problem that needs solving. Yet here we are, injecting technology into every nook and cranny we can and ultimately all it’ll do is free us from our own freedom as people and enslave us to the rich, who will own all the tech and knowledge to support those animatronic dogs.
by oakmad | 2025-10-12 23:21:00+00:00
I never had good vibes with an employer sponsored plan. I had the same employer for eleven years in TX. Every year the insurer changed. Every year there was the paper work and trying to decipher what was included and what the copay might be. There also weren’t good vibes from the providers and the way they’re forced to operate.

Yes I agree, I pay for healthcare as part of my taxes, essentially the same amount as the guy sitting next to me. To be honest it doesn’t feel any different to paying taxes in the US.
by huevosabio | 2025-10-12 23:21:13+00:00
A monster trainer game where you can _actually teach new, creative moves_ to your monsters: https://youtu.be/ThOCM9TK_yo

Basically, think of it as "Pokemon the anime, but for real". We allow you to use your voice to talk to, command, and train your monster. You and your monster are in this sandbox-y, dynamic environment where your actions have side effects.

You can train to fight or just to mess around.

Behind the scenes, we are converting player's voice into code in real time to give life to these monsters.

If you're interested, reach out!
by bpt3 | 2025-10-12 23:21:33+00:00
Take a look at how the median American lives compared to the median resident of nearly every country on earth. If that's suffering, I'm not sure what to call life elsewhere.

And to this specific comment, wages outpaced inflation since the 1970s for everyone but the poorest households (I believe the bottom 10% are the exception, who I would probably agree are suffering in some sense). Working class real wage growth actually outpaced white collar real wage growth for a couple years post-COVID, for the first time in a long time. Also, wage measurements don't normally measure total compensation, notably health insurance which has been increasing much faster than wages or overall inflation for decades.

Also, there's no reason to expect wage growth to match productivity growth. Productivity gains are largely due to company investment, not increased effort from workers, and household expenses are not positively correlated with productivity metrics.
by andy99 | 2025-10-12 23:21:47+00:00
I bought a Nokia phone a couple years ago and tried it for a month. I went back to a smartphone, despite my general dislike of them.

- Unlike the author I really like having maps, and also notifications about police, hazards, traffic, etc

- I found the texting completely unusable. It might have been the particular phone but it was so inconvenient as to be almost impossible. And I used T9 regularly when I was younger.

- I do like to be able to read my emails, even if I don’t care about immediately replying

- I found the web browser sufficient for basic stuff

- there’s a whole class of travel related stuff that would make it very hard to just have a dumb phone