MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Djihad | 2025-10-30 18:45:52+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm the founder and CEO of the platform shown in the video.

Our vision was to solve the "content treadmill" problem. Many of us have blogs with dozens of older posts. What if we could give that content a new life?

This short video shows our workflow for turning your own RSS feed into a fresh, long-form article:

1. It starts by generating a unique draft from a source feed. 2. Then, inside our AI Editor, the rewriter feature lets you take full control: expand on ideas, change the tone, improve the writing, and much more.

We believe the future isn't just AI automation, but powerful Human-AI collaboration, giving you new perspectives on your own ideas.

I'm here to get your honest feedback on this approach.
by immibis | 2025-10-30 18:45:57+00:00
This is also true, and also why I want it to be a relatively unopinionated base engine. Unfortunately technical advancements came alongside opinionated content. 1.8 brought creative mode and fast/tintable skylight updates - and hunger and very griefy endermen and a bucnh of worldgen structures. 1.0 brought itemstack NBT - to support enchantments and potions - and gave a sandbox game an official end. 1.3 brought client/server unification allowing singleplayer commands, open to LAN, greater mod compatibility, latency in singleplayer (maybe not actually good) - and villagers and villager trading and emeralds. 1.4 brought command blocks - and local difficulty and armoured mobs and withers. 1.5 brought analog redstone - and hoppers. I think 1.7 was only upsides though - texture atlasing and a new less-broken terrain pattern. That's where I stopped.
by stonogo | 2025-10-30 18:46:09+00:00
You're right, it is all about the problem domain. Unfortunately, there was a solid decade where that was not the typical advice, and OO was pushed (in industry and in education) as the last word in programming, suitable for all tasks. There's a generation out there who was taught programming as "instantiate a truck object that inherits from a car object" and another generation who was required to implement math using OOP principles instead of just doing math. Programming languages that did not have object models suddenly developed them, often incompatibly with the rest of the language. So, while I think that OO has its places, I understand why there's a lot of visceral response to it online.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-10-30 18:46:12+00:00
This would be fun to model. Lifetime earnings are higher for those who have more education, but there's potentially decades of servicing a potential mountain of non-dischargeable debt to consider (potentially decreasing post-college investment ability) too.

I don't know the first thing about student loans (interest rates, amortization periods). I never had one. I just search-engined 2025 federal student loan rates and I'm blown away by the interest rates. It looks like avoiding student loans at all costs is the way to go.

I wonder if spending a few years working (especially if your parents are able to continue to house you and pay for health insurance) and contributing to a 529 plan might meaningfully decrease the overall cost, albeit at the "penalty" of starting college later in life (at, say, 22 instead of 18).
by nharada | 2025-10-30 18:46:12+00:00
No matter how fast you run, you won't win a race where you're just going back and forth nonstop.

It really does feel like the US is completely hosed when it comes to energy (and thus, industrial relevance broadly). Every 4 years we make a bigger bet in the opposite direction of the last, and meanwhile the entire world moves on without us. At least now it feels like no matter what the US does we'll make progress on climate goals as a species, even if in 50 years the US is still building coal plants and criminalizing home solar.
by sebastiennight | 2025-10-30 18:46:15+00:00
- Your bank's platform will cost an arm and a leg; Interactive Brokers or Degiro are both available in Switzerland and you will save so much on fees (especially if you only buy and hold ETFs of which Degiro offers many with 0% fees) that it's the equivalent of faster returns on your money.

- There are many "getting started" guides available, I found Mister Money Mustache the most straightforward to my liking, but you're golden as long as you understand a couple of basics: 1. investing a high% of your income is more important than chasing returns (you seem to be there already), 2. don't trade, just buy the whole market (you mentioned Vanguard, they offer a "total market" ETF), 3. look for the lowest fees as long as you hold title to your shares (IB and Degiro do this ; eToro does not so if they sink, you're SOL), 4. don't time the market, just buy now and sit on it as it grows
Ask HN: Who wants to help build an open, AI-native operating system for SMBs?
by z61a | 2025-10-30 18:46:19+00:00
We’ve spent the past few years building AI voice agents for restaurants and small businesses.

The biggest pain we keep hitting: data and workflows are trapped in closed POS systems (Square, Toast, Clover, etc). APIs are slow, siloed, and politically controlled — making AI automation nearly impossible to scale.

So we decided to go deeper and build *OpenPOS* — an open, AI-native operating system for SMBs.

The idea: - Businesses fully own their data (menus, orders, staff, customers) - AI agents can access and coordinate workflows through open APIs - Developers can build connectors and extensions freely - Hardware and SaaS tools become interoperable by default

We published our vision here: [Why OpenPOS Exists: Freeing Business Data for the AI Era](https://foreva.ai/blog/why-openpos-exists-freeing-business-data-for-the-ai-era-foreva-ai-723/)

The repo is private for now while we stabilize the first release — but we’re building it in public and looking to connect with others who’ve felt the same pain or want to contribute.

If you’ve ever integrated a POS, built AI for SMBs, or care about open data, we’d love to hear your perspective.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-10-30 18:46:40+00:00
I used to have a pile of USB drives for this purpose, with various different images on them. I had a windows, linux and memory tester 86 plus and occasionally needed to flash something like clonezilla or gparted. Nowadays I have a fast USB4 capable flash drive which just does all this faster and a whole bunch more ISOs on it and does bios duty too.

One other small advantage is with secure boot you only need to register Ventoy once with a machine and then all the ISOs will boot, whereas with different USB sticks and images each has to be registered individually and some of them don't work with secure boot so you have to turn it off. Just another convenience.
by ndiddy | 2025-10-30 18:46:42+00:00
I think you can still get Paint Shop Pro and CorelDraw as a one-time purchase from Corel. I'm not sure how good the current versions are, but I regularly use Paint Shop Pro 8 from 2003 and enjoy using it. Of course, it's definitely a rug pull if your workflow is Affinity focused and you have a ton of Affinity format files around.
by cruegge | 2025-10-30 18:46:49+00:00
They're not infailable, though. For example, TeX's primitive for fractions is actually {a \over b}, LaTeX's \frac is a macro on top of that. The consequence is that while typesetting a formula, the engine does not know the current text size, since an \over further down the line may put the entire thing into a numerator. Dealing with this can be quite a pain when writing math macros.
by munchlax | 2025-10-30 18:47:16+00:00
I've replaced all my GPT disklabels with Sun disklabels because I refuse to let them talk.

UEFI still boots. Spec said it can boot from fat in an eltorito floppy image and sun disklabels sit in the second or so sector. Spec also said it abstracts the type of volume so all boot methods always work for all drives. ISO images don't use the first 4kB so it doesn't see there's disklabel at all

So now I can mount the ssd as iso9660 but there's also partitions on it of which the third spans the entire drive (of course, because that's the c partition)
by t43562 | 2025-10-30 18:47:18+00:00
I think this happens because in the ML world particularly, there's an unusually pressured situation.

Why are people not using the system python? Perhaps it's too old or not old enough for some library that they have to use. This suggests there's a lot of change going on at the moment and it's not all synced up. I also suspect that people are using a very great number of different modules that change incompatibly all the time and ontop of that they need binary libraries of various kinds which are quite difficult to build and have all their own dependencies that python cannot install itself.

Rust has the advantage that they can build a world more completely out of rust and not worry as much about what's on the system already.

I'm glad uv is helping people.
by Anonyneko | 2025-10-30 18:47:25+00:00
I can visualize an apple, somewhat vaguely, but I've never been able to hold a stable mental picture of anything for longer that a split-second. It just blinks out of existence the moment I "see" it, which makes it rather dysfunctional...

Not at all the case with sounds though, I can play back some of the music tracks I listened a lot to, flawed of course but still recognizable. My brain even starts doing it on its own at night, not letting me fall asleep.

Imagination is weird.
by Gibbon1 | 2025-10-30 18:47:25+00:00
I made a comment that got downvoted and flagged and then dang sent me a nasty gram.

"Chinese bat flu. Deadly enough to be a problem. Not deadly enough to be a solution"

Which is to say it's a real problem. The flu is a real problem, ask any nurse that works in a hospital. With vaccines Covid is 3X worse. But that's not enough carnage to break through most peoples normalcy bias. No ones getting enlightened, instead they'll get angry and lash out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
by redhed | 2025-10-30 18:47:31+00:00
I have the same thing, I can "walk" through my childhood home. I see how the living room was set up, I can walk from there to my bedroom and "see" everything. Honestly if I had good art skills I feel like I could draw it out pretty well. However I would in no way describe it as looking like I'm there at the real thing or looking at photograph, not even close really. It's kinda just a hazy construct in my mind.

I feel like that is where a lot of the miscommunication comes from, people who think others can close there eyes and be transported somewhere else by imagining it. That is unless I actually just have aphantasia.
by damnesian | 2025-10-30 18:47:33+00:00
> the new "free" software is a sales funnel into the paid subscription, and will also increasingly have that "second-class" feeling as new pro-only things are added to it

There's a plague of this on the entire industry now. Free apps abound, none of them will do exactly what you need, all of them will point you to the shiny unfree thing that will.
by mmastrac | 2025-10-30 18:47:39+00:00
I tried it on a low-complexity Rust PR I worked on a few months back and it did a pretty good job. I'd probably change where the highlights live (for example x.y.z() -> x.w.z() should highlight y/w in a lot of cases).

For the most part, it seems to draw the eye to the general area where you need to look closer. It found a near-invisible typo in a coworker's PR which was kind of interesting as well.

https://0github.com/geldata/gel-rust/pull/530

It seems to flag _some_ deletions as needing attention, but I feel like a lot of them are ignored.

Is this using some sort of measure of distance between the expected token in this position vs the actual token?

EDIT: Oh, I guess it's just an LLM prompt? I would be interested to see an approach where the expected token vs actual token generates a heatmap.
by rezonant | 2025-10-30 18:47:47+00:00
Yes but if someone asks me for a source that Paris is the capital of France, I will go find a legitimate source for that information to include in my response, not hallucinate a source and steadfastly claim it is real.

AIs not remembering the source for the original fact is not the problem, the problem is that asking them to make sure their claims are supported by sources does not preclude them from making up the sources themselves.
by toast0 | 2025-10-30 18:47:51+00:00
> Words matter -- the fact that this was rolled out as a "vaccine" gave a lot of people the initial impression that once they got the shot, they'd be immune.

If you're going to be upset about word choice, the thing to be upset about is that it has no connection to cows at all.

No vaccine grants 100% immunity. Some are more effective than others. It's hard to predict efficacy for a novel type of vaccination for a novel virus and there's no vaccines for other viruses in the same family.

Certainly, this could have been communicated better, but it's not like flu vaccines have 100% efficacy either and they've been around for decades.
Show HN: Theremin with MediaPipe and WebAudio
by cochlear | 2025-10-30 18:48:33+00:00
As a fun, Halloween-y exercise, I've taken a break from some of the other hand-tracking-based WebAudio instruments I'm working on to make something simple and easy: A MediaPipe + WebAudio theremin-like instrument you can play with in your browser.

What's a Theremin?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin

MediaPipe Hand-Tracking Docs:

https://mediapipe.readthedocs.io/en/latest/solutions/hands.h...

Messy Source Code:

https://github.com/JohnVinyard/web-components/blob/main/comp...
by hvs | 2025-10-30 18:48:45+00:00
Basically? It's a "sense" or "vibe". "There was a guy begging on the street" is what I remember. Not the actual words or a picture, just the "vibe" of that sentence. Definitely no touches, sounds, smells, or pictures.

My wife, who has a very visual and auditory memory, to the point that she can basically re-watch movies in her head, is still dumbfounded by this fact.
by jesse_dot_id | 2025-10-30 18:48:52+00:00
Bought the Affinity Studio license less than a year ago and I'm feeling incredibly ripped off right now. So much so that I'm going to cancel my Canva subscription. When you do things like this, Canva, you are sending a loud and clear signal to me that even though I paid a lot of money for your product, I am STILL just a product to you and not a customer, and thus can no longer trust any of your offerings.

I'm so sick of sellouts.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-10-30 18:48:55+00:00
> What I want from my typesetting language is "typsetting completeness". While there might be sane defaults, I want to be able to control every decision made by the typesetter by escaping and grouping things as needed. If the language doesn't have these features, by definition, it is not complete.

Then LaTeX is not complete. Macros don’t have to respect the grouping provided by curly braces in math mode, therefore you only have the illusion of control. Nobody in practice actually inspects the full package dependency chain needed to typeset a nontrivial document.

Here’s a proof of concept: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/748416/how-can-i-aut...
by wat10000 | 2025-10-30 18:49:06+00:00
I would argue that the decisions are still made, first at the individual level choices, then as the larger behavior that emerges from them. The strange part is that you can't point to any specific entity making those larger choices (aside from "the economy" or whatever) but I'd say they're still being made. This ultimately comes down to how you want to define "decision" though.
by gdulli | 2025-10-30 18:49:10+00:00
There used to be a much bigger scene around custom Windows installs and I hope it gets resurrected if/when the ability to create local accounts goes away. The desire for a tiny install is pretty niche at this point but I could see demand going up to preserve local accounts.

Or perhaps that won't be necessary because certain enterprise customers will insist on local accounts and it will be easier for pirates to just tap into that install path? One way or another, if/when local accounts go away I hope there's some option to work around it.
by bena | 2025-10-30 18:49:28+00:00
I mean, the issue is that we cannot know what is actually going on in someone else's mind. All we can do is describe it to the best of our ability. So there is some likelihood that things like inner monologues and aphantasia are simply different ways of describing similar things.

However, you present an interesting point of view. As someone who remembers being able to visualize but is no longer able to.

And while I feel you on the MRI thing, I don't think you could have known you'd lose the ability to visualize. But I think there would be some value in comparing you against people who both claim to be able to visualize and those who claim to not be able to. You would serve as a sort of marker. Someone who we could be relatively comfortable categorizing as you have distinct memories of being able to visualize and now have a different experience.
by jread | 2025-10-30 18:49:45+00:00
I'm working on graduate research evaluating AWS control and data plane performance.

EBS volume attachment is typically ~11s for GP2/GP3 and ~20-25s for other types.

1ms read / 5ms write latencies seem high for 4k blocks. IO1/IO2 is typically ~0.5ms RW, and GP2/GP3 ~0.6ms read and ~0.94ms write.

References: https://cloudlooking.glass/matrix/#aws.ebs.us-east-1--cp--at... https://cloudlooking.glass/matrix/#aws.ebs.*--dp--rand-*&aws...
by lsaferite | 2025-10-30 18:49:57+00:00
This is the exact issue in most grids TBH. Not sure I've seen one that has properly priced fixed costs with properly priced usage costs. My grid has the split, but the costs seem out of proportion. I'd say if the concern is low-income pricing, factor out fixed costs and rates so the the mean low-income prices stay the same. Mix that with only offering wholesale rates for customer backfeed and some reasonable controls about how much and when customers can backfeed.
by alwillis | 2025-10-30 18:50:22+00:00
> free is unsustainable

Canva makes $3+ billion (up from $1.5 in 2023) per year; they have 21 million paying customers out of 240 million users. "Only" 8.75% are paying customers.

They don't need huge uptake in AI subscriptions from Affinity.

So yeah, free is sustainable for the foreseeable future.
by abetusk | 2025-10-30 18:50:55+00:00
Bring a picture of an apple up on your computer screen and look at it for 30 seconds. There is a fidelity to that image that includes the color, texture, stem, shape, reflection, etc.

Now close your eyes and try to picture an apple for 30 seconds. Is the same experience as if having that picture in front of you? As in, can you picture, in your minds eye, an image of an apple as if you were looking at on your computer screen? On a scale from 1 to 5, where 5 is complete parity as if you were looking at it from your computer screen and 1 for no visualization possible, what is your ability to do so?

It sounds like you're a 1, as in you have aphantasia.

I know it sounds crazy but I think there really are people who can visualize that apple.

Note that inability to visualize doesn't mean you can't recognize or differentiate one apple from another. It doesn't mean you can't draw that apple from memory, in perfect detail. It doesn't mean you can't describe or recreate that image of an apple. It mean that you cannot literally have an image in your minds eye of that apple.

Here are some other articles of note:

"Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7856239/

"I can’t picture things in my mind. I didn’t realize that was unusual" https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2024/feb/26/what-is-aph...
by meanfield | 2025-10-30 18:51:03+00:00
There are literally thousands of wrappers for ffmpeg (other examples: imagemagick, ghostscript) that do exactly that. E.g. all commercial and dozens of open source video converters. So there is no lack of simple software for people who know little about the problem they're trying to solve (e.g. playing a downloaded mkv their shitty preinstalled video player doesn't accept), the problem is rather one of knowing that open source software exists and how to find it. Googling or asking an LLM does mostly present you software that costs money and is inferior to anything open source (and some malware).
by reenorap | 2025-10-30 18:51:04+00:00
PG&E instead of constantly upgrading and maintaining their distribution system, decided to pay out dividends and buy back stock, as well as pay their CEO $50 million per year. That's why their outdated equipment kept starting fires.

They took a risk by underspending on upgrading, and we as Californians are paying for them paying out their shareholders.
by immibis | 2025-10-30 18:51:16+00:00
Previously if you wanted to create a simple block type you would write something like this (very roughly and excusing HN not supporting code formatting):

public class MyBlock extends Block {public Icon getTexture() {return 0;} public String getTextureAtlasPath() {return "/mymod.png";}}

Later it was

public class MyBlock extends Block {Icon icon; public void registerIcons(IconRegistry r) {icon = r.register("mymod:myblock");} public Icon getTexture() {return icon;}}

You need a little bit more code and you have to know that "mymod:myblock" really means "/assets/mymod/icons/blocks/myblock.png" but it's not too bad. (Why not specify the actual path?)

But now it takes the Java class, plus about 5 different JSON files that are magically linked based on strings like the above (interpreted differently in each context), and if you want to simply set the icon in a few lines of code like before, you can't because all the code is specialized for handling JSON files. https://docs.minecraftforge.net/en/1.12.x/models/files/

You could argue it's better because it handles more block shapes, but the story for shapes isn't much better - you used to be able to write if(thingAboutItem) renderCertainWay(); but now you can write {"when":{"certain_condition":"true"}, "apply":{"model":"certain_model"}} and there's a whole bunch of code to write to map "certain_condition" to the condition you want, and woe betide you if your model isn't a bunch of textured axis-aligned cuboids. https://docs.minecraftforge.net/en/1.12.x/models/using/ https://docs.minecraftforge.net/en/1.12.x/models/advanced/ex...

If you know the inner-platform effect, it's the inner-platform effect: creating a poor replica of part of your programming environment in the quest for "configurability" or "no-code". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_inner-platform_effect https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39412321

Modding with data packs is harder than modding with Java used to be, and modding with Java now is also harder than modding with Java used to be, because of data packs.
by AaronAPU | 2025-10-30 18:51:35+00:00
I can’t generally “literally see” my mental images. But on a few rare occasions in my life, I did. I don’t know why, and it was brief, but at least I can easily believe now that some people do it all the time.

When it happened to me the few times it was an otherwise very mundane day and it felt very natural. It was overlayed onto whatever else I was looking at and could persist with eyes closed.

Honestly the experience kind of cheapened art for me to an extent since you either have that cheat code or you don’t.
by 8note | 2025-10-30 18:51:40+00:00
its complexity. assuming binary flags, the amount of different ways the tool might operate is O(2^n) if the tool isnt doing what you want, thats a gigantic search space for fixing it. hiding options, and putting sane defaults makes n smaller and exponentially reduces the search space.

people arent afraid of doing 2^n stuff, its just that we have a gut sense that its gonna take more time than its worth. im down to try 10-100 things, but if its gonna be 100 million option combinations i have to tinker with, thats just not worth it.