MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aaronbrethorst | 2025-10-13 03:31:34+00:00
The most remarkable details about solar panels I've heard recently came from the environmentalist Bill McKibben[1] on a podcast[2]:

I was standing in a cornfield in Illinois this time last summer, with a farmer who grew corn for ethanol and was converting much of his fields to solar arrays. He said, I can grow in this acre, and he pointed to an acre in a good farmerly way, he said, in this acre, I can grow enough ethanol to run my Ford F-150 pickup, most beloved vehicle in the American iconography. It’ll run 25,000 miles off the ethanol I can grow on an acre in a year. If I cover that same acre with solar panels, then I can produce enough electrons to run my Ford F-150 Lightning, the EV version of the same truck, I can run that not 25,000 miles, but 700,000 miles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_McKibben

[2] https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-podcast/why-is-this-happening/di...
by geraneum | 2025-10-13 03:32:23+00:00
Apart from the obvious, another aspect of renewables that I hope will make the world a better place is the potential to be fucking free from oil and gas. Imagine the geopolitical impact of that. But, here’s a lesson from WW2. Unless we can pack the energy produced by renewables into tanks, jets, aircraft carriers and such effectively (cost, scale, etc.) nothing is gonna get meaningfully better there.
by NiloCK | 2025-10-13 03:33:21+00:00
My on again, off again life's work has been a foss dev stack for interactive tutoring systems. Something like a general purpose Math Academy, with mechanics to permit UGC and courses that are both adaptive (to the user's background and demonstrated skill) and inter-adaptive (to the userbase's expressed priorities).

http://github.com/patched-network/vue-skuilder, docs-in-progress at https://patched.network/skuilder

I am using this stack now to build an early literacy app targeting kids aged 3-5ish at https://letterspractice.com (also pre-release state, although the email waitlist works I think!). LLM assisted edtech has a lot of promise, but I'm pretty confident I can get the unit cost for teaching someone to read down to 5 USD or less.
by keepamovin | 2025-10-13 03:33:24+00:00
A couple things:

- Getting into RTL SDR, ordered a dongle, should be fun, want to build a grid people can plug into

- Bringing live transcripts, search and AI to wisprnote

- Moving BrowserBox to a binary release distribution channel for IP enforcement and ease of installation. Public repo will no longer be updated except for docs/version/base install script, and all dev happens in internal with binaries released to https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox. Too many "companies" (even "legit", large ones) abusing ancient forks and stealing our commercial updates without license, or violating previous permissive's conditions like AGPL source provision. Business lesson is even commercial licensed source-available eats into sales pipeline due to violators who could pay but assume false impunity and steal "freebies" "because they can." No perfect protection, but from now enforcement will ramp up, and source access is only for minimum ACV customers as add-on. So many enhancements coming down the pipe so it's gonna be many improved versions from here

- Creating an improved keyboard for iOS swipe typing, I don't like the settings or word choices in ambiguity and think it can be better
by tomhow | 2025-10-13 03:35:00+00:00
Please quit it with these one-dimensional ideologically-charged utterances. Your account has been becoming predictable and tiresome in its content and style, and this is not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for. The purpose and ethos of HN is for curious conversation. We're here to learn and educate, not club each other over the head incessantly with blunt ideological instruments. You've been here for a long time. We presume you started participating here because you appreciate and value what it aspires to be. We don't want to ban you, but we need you to have a think about how you can make a more positive contribution to HN, more consistent with the spirit of its purpose.
by petesergeant | 2025-10-13 03:35:22+00:00
I'm working on a set of TypeScript libraries to make it really really easy to spin up an agent, or an chatbot, or pretty much anything else you want to prototype. It's based around sensible interfaces, and while batteries are included, they're also meant to be removed when you've got something you want.

The idea is that a beginner should be able to wire up a personally useful agent (like a file-finder for your computer) in ten minutes by writing a simple prompt, some simple tools, and running it. Easy to plugin any kind of tracing, etc you want. Have three or four projects in prod which I'll be switching to use it just to make sure it fits all those use-cases.

But I want to be able to go from someone saying "can we build an agent to" to having the PoC done in a few minutes. Everything else I've looked at so far seems limited, or complicated, or insufficiently hackable for niche use-cases. Or, worse of all, in Python.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-10-13 03:35:48+00:00
That's debatable, but it is also irrelevant, as the key to the argument here is that computation is by definition an abstract and strictly syntactic construct - one that has no objective reality vis-a-vis the physical devices we use to simulate computation and call "computers" - while semantics or intentionality are essential to human intelligence. And no amount of syntax can somehow magically transmute into semantics.
by qq99 | 2025-10-13 03:36:11+00:00
https://www.kyoubenkyou.com/

It's a few things:

- very fast Japanese->English dictionary

- hiragana / katakana / number / time reading quizzes

- vocabulary quizzes based on wordlists you define and build

- learn and practice kanji anki-style (using FSRS algo)

- the coolest feature (imo) is a "reader": upload Japanese texts (light novels, children's books, etc), then translate them to your native language to practice your reading comprehension. Select text anywhere on the page (with your cursor) to instantly do a dictionary lookup. A LLM evaluates your translation accuracy (0..100%) and suggests other possible interpretations.

I just revamped the UI look and feel the other day after implementing some other user feedback! I'm now exploring ads as a way to monetize it.
by slowmovintarget | 2025-10-13 03:36:28+00:00
There is no translation going on in that thought experiment, though. There is text processing. That is, the man in the room receives Chinese text through a slot in the door. He uses a book of complex instructions that tells him what to do with that text, and he produces more Chinese text as a response according to those instructions.

Neither the man, nor the room "understand" Chinese. It is the same for the computer and its software. Jeffery Hinton has sad "but the system understands Chinese." I don't think that's a true statement, because at no point is the "system" dealing with semantic context of the input. It only operates algorithmically on the input, which is distinctly not what people do when they read something.

Language, when conveyed between conscious individuals creates a shared model of the world. This can lead to visualizations, associations, emotions, creation of new memories because the meaning is shared. This does not happen with mere syntactic manipulation. That was Searle's argument.
by ajayvk | 2025-10-13 03:37:49+00:00
I have been building OpenRun, a declarative web app deployment platform https://github.com/openrundev/openrun. It is an open source alternative to Google Cloud Run and AWS App Runner, running on your own hardware.

OpenRun allows defining your web app configuration in a declarative config using Starlark (which is like a subset of Python). Setting up a full GitOps workflow is just one command:

openrun sync schedule --approve --promote github.com/openrundev/openrun/examples/utils.star

This will set up a scheduled sync, which will look for new apps in the config and create them. It will also apply any config updates on existing apps and reload apps with the latest source code. After this, no further CLI operations are required, all updates are done declaratively. For containerized apps, OpenRun will directly talk to Docker/Podman to manage the container build and startup. There are lots of tools which simplify web app deployment. Most of them use a UI driven approach or an imperative CLI approach. That makes it difficult to recreate an environment. Managing these tools when multiple people need to coordinate changes is also difficult.

Any repo which has a Dockerfile can be deployed directly. For frameworks like Streamlit/Gradio/FastHTML/Shiny/Reflex/Flask/FastAPI, OpenRun supports zero-config deployments, there is no need to even have a Dockerfile. Domain based deployment is supported for all apps. Path based deployment is also supported for most frameworks, which makes DNS routing and certificate management easier.

OpenRun currently runs on a single machine with an embedded SQLite database or on multiple machines with an external Postgres database. I plan to support OpenRun as a service on top of Kubernetes, to support auto-scaling. OpenRun implements its own web server, instead of using Traefik/Nginx. That makes it possible to implement features like scaling down to zero and RBAC. The goal with OpenRun is to support declarative deployment for web apps while removing the complexity of maintaining multiple YAML config files. See https://github.com/openrundev/openrun/blob/main/examples/uti... for an example config, each app is just one or two lines of config.

OpenRun makes it easy to set up OAuth/OIDC/SAML based auth, with RBAC. See https://openrun.dev/docs/use-cases/ for a couple of use cases examples: sharing apps with family and sharing across a team. Outside of managed services, I have found it difficult to implement this type of RBAC with any other open source solution.
by greenbeans12 | 2025-10-13 03:37:50+00:00
I’ve been casually getting into thrifting and realized pretty quickly that Lens is super limited in its functionality and is mostly a shopping app. I put a site together that is like a supercharged version of Lens for thrifters where you can get info on price, demand, and condition. Share function is borked atm tho

You can check it out at https://antiques-id-1094885296405.us-central1.run.app/.
by wzdd | 2025-10-13 03:38:27+00:00
GP's point is that buring something down is by definition something that requires a specific physical process. It's not obvious that thinking is the same. So when someone says something like "just as a simulation of fire isn't the same as an actual fire (in a very important way!), a simulation of thinking isn't the same as actual thinking" they're arguing circularly, having already accepted their conclusion that both acts necessarily require a specific physical process. Daniel Dennett called this sort of argument an "intuition pump", which relies on a misleading but intuitive analogy to get you to accept an otherwise-difficult-to-prove conclusion.

To be fair to Searle, I don't think he advanced this as an agument, but more of an illustration of his belief that thinking was indeed a physical process specific to brains.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-10-13 03:38:46+00:00
> The history of the brain computer equation idea is fascinating and incredibly shaky. Basically a couple of cyberneticists posed a brain = computer analogy back in the 50s with wildly little justification and everyone just ran with it anyway and very few people (Searle is one of those few) have actually challenged it.

And something that often happens whenever some phenomenon falls under scientific investigation, like mechanical force or hydraulics or electricity or quantum mechanics or whatever.
by vkou | 2025-10-13 03:41:32+00:00
> we might still be paying taxes in rice.

As long as the largest form of economic activity was agriculture, and access to hard currency was limited, people were paying taxes with food (or labour in their landlord's fields).

We pay taxes in money because we have a diversified economy, where 90% of us are not subsistence peasants, and the money supply & availability of banking is large enough that we (or our employers) have cash on hand.
by cjflog | 2025-10-13 03:41:59+00:00
Thanks for your interest!

Here is a Stripe link: https://donate.stripe.com/9B614o4NWdhN83l9r06c001

I'll add subscriptions as a more formal option on laboratory.love soon!

Disclaimer: I don't think I can have a 365-day refund with a recurring donations like this. The financial infrastructure would add too much complexity.
by cookiengineer | 2025-10-13 03:43:24+00:00
Currently I've been working on a CLI tool [1] for my WebASM UI library [2] with the idea that all the gluecode generating stuff is abstracted away in nice CLI wizards.

Essentially like yeoman back then, to bootstrap your webapp and all the necessary files more easily.

Currently I am somewhat stuck because of Go's type system, as the UI components require a specific interface for the Dataset or Data/Record entries.

For example, a Pie chart would require a map[string]number which could be a float, percentage string or an integer.

A Line chart would require a slice of map[string]number, where each slice index would represent a step in the timeline.

A table would require a slice of map[string]any where each slice index would represent a step in the culling, but the data types would require a custom rendering method or Stringifier(?) of sorts attached to the data type. So that it's possible to serialize or deserialize the properties (e.g. yes/no in the UI meaning true/false, etc).

As I want to provide UI components that can use whatever struct the developer provides, the Go way would be to use an interface. But that would imply that all data type structs on the backend side would have this type of clutter on them attached.

No idea if something like a Parser and Stringifier method definition would make more sense for the UI components here...or whether or not it's better to have something like a Render method attached per component that does all the stringifying on a per-property basis like a "func(dataset any, index int, column string) string" where the developer needs to do all the typecasting manually.

Manual typecasting like this would be pretty painful as components then cannot exist in pure HTML serialized form, which is essentially the core value proposition of my whole UI components framework.

An alternative would be offering a marshal/unmarshal API similar to how JSON does it, but that would require the reflect package which bloats up the runtime binary by several MB and wouldn't be tinygo compatible, so I heavily would wanna avoid that.

Currently looking for other libraries and best practices, as this issue is really bugging me a lot in the app I'm currently building [3] and it's a pretty annoying type system problem.

Feedback as to how it's solved in other frameworks or languages would be appreciated. Maybe there's an architectural convention I'm not aware of that could solve this.

[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/gooey-cli

[2] https://github.com/cookiengineer/gooey

[3] https://github.com/cookiengineer/git-evac
by ggm | 2025-10-13 03:43:58+00:00
Tommy Flowers was keynoted in my time as a student across the 70s and 80s, and was mentioned by Hodges when he toured his biography of Turing. (I saw him speak over a week at Leeds university) I grew up with people (obviously far older than me) who had worked with him. He's all through Hodges' book and from memory, he's in other histories of Bletchley.

He's well known in computing history circles.

The story of how the Post Office got involved in building out the systems used by GCHQ, and the post-war dumping of supplies into a research market bootstrapping the digital computer advances was well understood. ICCE (for example) the Imperial College numerical engine built in the 50s, was a relay machine made with war surplus post office relays, because valves were too expensive. The amount of relays coming onto the market post war was very probably a signal of technology transition inside the GPO. Why did they have so many relays surplus to demand? Telephony was surging! Strowger Switches (which use relays) were the backbone of telephone exchanges right up to the 60s.
by SllX | 2025-10-13 03:44:00+00:00
Why are they running everything through WhatsApp in the first place with no alternatives? Using WhatsApp as a convenience is fine, but if you’re doing it with no way to not use WhatsApp or obtain data through an alternate mechanism other than WhatsApp, that’s what is causing your problems.

Issues that threaten national security are issues that threaten a nation’s sovereignty, put it at risk of war, or compromise the security of high ranking politicians, members of a nation’s intelligence service, military assets, and other issues of that caliber. The potential to miss flights or health care appointments does not rise to that level, but if it’s an actual problem, then it’s something solvable without reaching for the anti-monopoly gun or national security gun and a good start would be governments not using WhatsApp as an exclusive mechanism for obtaining government services. The second step is governments mandating that businesses in healthcare or transportation and other such critical industries have alternative mechanisms for customers to reach them other than WhatsApp.
by vermilingua | 2025-10-13 03:44:21+00:00
Kari's Law [0] is relevant here. Not strictly applicable as this is not a MLTS (phone line multiplexer), but very much in line with the spirit of the law as it was adopted after a child was unable to dial 911 from a motel phone.

[0] https://www.fcc.gov/mlts-911-requirements
Ask HN: How do you visualize tensors?
by HardikVala | 2025-10-13 03:44:58+00:00
I constantly find myself having to print raw tensors (either by hand or dumping them to stdout), especially when reading pytorch / jax code, to understand the transformations, e.g. for something like,

`x = torch.randn(32, 3, 224, 224).unfold(2, 16, 16).unfold(3, 16, 16).reshape(32, 3, 196, 256).transpose(1, 2).reshape(32, 196, 768).view(32, 196, 12, 64).transpose(1, 2)`

How do folks visualize tensors to quickly understand data flow in complex NN's?
by tstrimple | 2025-10-13 03:45:10+00:00
Seems stranger to blame your failings on others. Maybe not actually. There is a whole lot of this going on. You're just one of the many at this point I guess. And it takes a real special kind of idiot to think that anyone in the past took a wholistic view on hiring. Just mind-numbingly stupid with zero basis in reality. It's always been nepotism first. I suspect you're just benefiting from it less.
by throw234234234 | 2025-10-13 03:45:46+00:00
This one is easy. The new consumers will be capital holders, not wage holders as the bottleneck to production becomes energy, resources, land, capital, etc rather than labor. Capitalism rewards scarcity and inefficiency/bottlenecks via a higher price per unit (i.e. higher profits), the efficient at a macro level get optimized away -> value delivered can be negative correlated to price as supply overwhelms demand. You can see it already happening in economic statistics and if you think hard in general experience comparing to previous decades (e.g. previously it was the personal computer that was seen as the big market, now it is SaaS, B2B and high net work individuals). There are whole reports, and market commentary on this trend - it is a result of wealth inequality and firms trying to sell to the people that are left with capital and scarce required desired resources - this has been happening outside of the AI space as well. Rich people as a market size compared to others has only been growing, and AI should accelerate this trend.

Its a big reason why there is a decent possibility that AI is dystopian for the majority of poor to upper middle class people. There will still be a market for things that are scarce (i.e. not labor) but the other factors of productions such as land, resources, capital, etc. People derive more income/wealth from these will win in an AI world, people who rely on their skills/intelligence/etc will lose. Even with abundance; there's no reason to think you will have a share of that.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-10-13 03:46:05+00:00
> we'd first need to establish that biological systems are reducible to strictly physical systems.

Or even more fundamentally, that physics captures all physical phenomena, which it doesn't. The methods of physics intentionally ignore certain aspects of reality and focus on quantifiable and structural aspects while also drawing on layers of abstractions where it is easy to mistakenly attribute features of these abstractions to reality.
by bfg_9k | 2025-10-13 03:46:09+00:00
Read Matt Levine's newsletter, it's a VERY simple business model built on financial engineering (it's rare they do something "novel"). But broadly, if you've got money in any sort of mutual fund, pension or retirement asset, the people managing your money WILL have some sort of allocation into PE funds. Even if you own a stock standard ETF like SPDR, PE funds like KKR are publicly listed.
by bfg_9k | 2025-10-13 03:48:04+00:00
Believe it or not, businesses don't exist to provide you a "good service" they exist to make money. So yes, they do in fact force firms to operate better when they attain a higher EBITDA.

Until the definition of why a business exists changes, you can purely measure a business success over how much money it makes for the owner, legally.

Should that be the case? No, I don't agree. But as it currently stands, that's how things are.
by randallsquared | 2025-10-13 03:49:41+00:00
> It only operates algorithmically on the input, which is distinctly not what people do when they read something.

That's not at all clear!

> Language, when conveyed between conscious individuals creates a shared model of the world. This can lead to visualizations, associations, emotions, creation of new memories because the meaning is shared. This does not happen with mere syntactic manipulation. That was Searle's argument.

All of that is called into question with some LLM output. It's hard to understand how some of that could be produced without some emergency model of the world.
by sjrd | 2025-10-13 03:51:08+00:00
I guess it's one way to look at it. I see it as: I want a reproducible locale, independent of the user's system. If I see US, I'm wondering if it was chosen to be English because the program was written in English. When I localize the program, should I make that locale configurable? ROOT communicates that it must not be configurable, and never dependent on the system.
by azianmike | 2025-10-13 03:51:57+00:00
A couple of months ago, I saw a tweet from @awilkinson: “I just found out how much we pay for DocuSign and my jaw dropped. What's the best alternative?”

Me being naive, I thought “how hard could would it actually be to build a free e-sign tool?”

Turns out not that hard.

In about a weekend, I built a UETA and ESIGN compliant tool. And it was free. And it cost me less than $50. Unlimited free e-sign. https://useinkless.com/
by jollyjerry | 2025-10-13 03:52:36+00:00
I like reading to my kids and try to read to them in English and Mandarin. My Chinese is conversational, but I have a hard time finding books for them because I’m not good at writing. Something like this with language learning tools would be awesome.

I also like making up stories when we go on hikes. Long, rambling stories about unicorns befriending spiders and flying to faraway lands.