MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tetromino_ | 2025-10-03 17:42:24+00:00
I don't know any details. But off the top of my head, I can think of:

- photography and modern printing, making it vastly easier to distribute high-quality copies of reference images to craftsmen

- electric lights, allowing work to be done at any time of day and year (extremely important factor in Northern Europe!)

- thermostats, allowing optimal heat/humidity for amber work at any time of year

- electric-driven tools (drills, saws, polishing equipment, etc.)

- better and faster-drying adhesives and paint

- personal protective equipment (e.g. masks and goggles), allowing craftsmen to work longer continuous hours without risking their health

- higher-quality and more ergonomic measuring instruments

- better and vastly more ergonomic optical equipment (jeweler loupes, microscopes, etc.)

... and there's probably lots more
by groos | 2025-10-03 17:42:53+00:00
Modern medicine is hardly logical where therapies are concerned. There is often not any coherent theory of why a therapy works and yet it may be commonly used in treatments. If you examine the literature supplied with your drugs, it often states "exact mechanism of action is unknown but yada yada". This is why there are double blind studies in medicine. Absent a theory, this is the only way to gauge the effectiveness of a therapy. Hence, if bathing in slightly radioactive waters has provided beneficial to people over a long period of time, you can't dismiss it as "appealing to tradition". It may need validation with a study but can't be ignored as just tradition.
by ndiddy | 2025-10-03 17:42:59+00:00
Agreed. If you look at what's in the S&P 500, 7.49% is nVidia, 6.33% is Microsoft, 4.88% is Google, 3.86% is Amazon, and 2.95% is Meta. That's over 25% of the S&P 500 in companies that will see their share prices fall heavily if there's yet another AI winter.
by bpodgursky | 2025-10-03 17:43:03+00:00
Raising a PR disaster for problems with iterative prototypes is how you end up with traditional defense contractors with decade-long waterfall development cycles designed for neurotic ass-covering rather than effective feature delivery.

Please don't sabotage national defense just for cheap shots at Palantir. This is the right way to develop defense tech. Make a prototype, see what works, iterate. Come on.
by AngeliqueB | 2025-10-03 17:43:25+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Edinburgh, UK | Remote or on-site | Web, UI/UX & Print Designer

Portfolio: https://angeliqueboudeau.org/#portfolio

Contact: hi@angeliqueboudeau.org

I’m a web & print designer who helps organisations involved in social and environmental causes. I’ve helped clients in the past with projects focused on thermal solar energy, household waste reduction, plant-based food advocacy and data science for social/environmental issues. My design process aims to understand your needs and challenges and create designs aligned with your goals and values.

---

Design services:

· Web design: responsive mobile/desktop designs that are lightweight and fast, where I can also arrange web development

· UI design: wireframes, mockups, clickable prototypes

· Branding: logo design, style guides, posters, booklets, slideshows and social media banners

· Included in all services: advice on sustainability, accessibility (WCAG), content/copy, and SEO

---

Skills: Figma, FigJam, Canva, Inkscape, GIMP, Scribus. Basics of Git, HTML, CSS, Linux, Visual Studio Code, Hugo, static websites. Fluent in French and English.

---

Contact me via https://angeliqueboudeau.org or hi@angeliqueboudeau.org with a short description of your project, and how you think I can help, then we can arrange a call to discuss next steps!
by mulmen | 2025-10-03 17:43:26+00:00
> Where's all the UX designers and researchers? Oh right, we've laid them all off or just spent too many years not listening to what they had to say and letting the rent seeking marketing and accounting folks drive the products.

I think this is too generous to UX designers. They still exist and are very much involved in shipping unusable trash. I have been through multiple UX design reviews as a user and every time the UX designers are flabbergasted when I show them how their product is actually used. They never have any concept of a real user doing a thing. It’s a widespread cultural failure in the discipline.
by ranadomo | 2025-10-03 17:43:42+00:00
This is an absurd statement to make about a DOD program. Securing communication is communication in the most adversarial environment imaginable. There are thousands of problems that only emerge once cryptographic authentication and authorization are enabled. This isn't a b2b sass app where you can just add an "auth layer" once the api is built out. It's passing mission-critical messages through signal-jamming and unimaginably hostile imitation scenarios. Many DOD programs are built as prototypes that don't ever factor security in the architecture, and then have massive problems and delays trying to implement it later. DOD cyber acquisition is run by the most incompetent clowns on earth. The only reason they don't know how terrible their software is, is because they're not capable of detecting how fundamentally compromised their systems are, and China and Russia are not exactly white-hats looking for a bounty.
by tracker1 | 2025-10-03 17:44:14+00:00
It's mixed bag... the designer of a given website has an intended look/feel and style... if you override that you can do as you like, but it's not like the author's intent should always simply be dismissed.

Beyond this, not every web developer expressly wants to burden a browser to a specific web font payload when they have a close/suitable match where this modern font stack is good enough in terms of design intent.

Third, if all else fails, the user sees their own selected default... I'm not sure that I understand the objection here... As long as appropriate semantic markup and the font is one that actually scales to appropriate px/pt then it should be fine. If the selected font/typeface doesn't, then it's on the user to select a better default/fallback.
by vessenes | 2025-10-03 17:44:27+00:00
Ed... I wrote him a long note about how wrong his analysis on oAI was earlier this year. He wrote back and said "LOL, too long." I was like "Sir, have you read your posts? Here's a short version of why you're wrong." (In brief, if you depreciate models over even say 12 months they are already profitable. Given they still offer 3.5, three years is probably a more fair depreciation schedule. On those terms, they're super profitable)

No answer.
by nitwit005 | 2025-10-03 17:44:40+00:00
> But, the Left's problem is that instead of trying to raise everyone up they're bringing people down. It was that way in the USSR, and it's that way here.

Both US political parties have pushed for educational reforms that have resulted in this sort of accusation.

There was a long running idea on the right that faltering education was a national security threat, and naturally parents want their kids to have a decent education. Things changed a bit after George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" ended up extremely unpopular, but you still hear some of the same talking points.
by Bolwin | 2025-10-03 17:45:30+00:00
Honestly the biggest way in which LLMs have changed society is in the desperate, almost pathetic way every every business leader, career influencer, advice guru insists that they must use AI, that you should "learn" AI, that AI is taking over.

Anyway, in terms cultural change, I think the emerging image and video models will be a lot more disruptive. Text has been easy to fake for a while now, and barely gets people's attention anymore.
by sfRattan | 2025-10-03 17:46:02+00:00
> When the next version of redis comes with a more restrictive license, or if features are removed, I just stick to a previous one. Maybe I fork it myself if it's really important for me. Probably, we will be many doing so, we will regroup, share our modifications and improvements. I've experienced this kind of colaborative maintenance of some dead project a couple of times in the past, and all te governance that was ever needed was a mailing list.

This situation is a one kind of sudden, unplanned migration. You seem to assess it as less stressful than I would. I'd also be concerned about security generally, duplication of effort to maintain the private fork, and potential retaliation if total secrecy isn't kept by the fork's maintainers.

Your reasoning makes sense for choosing software to use as an individual, but not when choosing software as an organization or when choosing software to integrate into software you distribute for others to use.

Your reasoning also makes sense for maintaining software that has a relaxed threat model (i.e. typically runs or can be made to run in isolation from any network). But the examples you pick (n8n, redis, elastic search) are most often used on perpetually networked computers where security a larger concern and I don't know that I'd trust a private, ad hoc group to keep a secret fork (in potential violation of a "fair" source license) up to snuff.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-10-03 17:46:31+00:00
I missed that, it’s been a few years since I’ve paid attention to MS hardware and it is very possible that my thoughts are out of date. I left MS with a rather bad taste in my mouth. I’m checking out the info on that chip and what I am seeing is a little light on details. Just TPUs and fast interconnects.

What I’ve found; MIAI 200 the next version is having issues due to brain drain, and MIAI 300 is to be an entirely new architecture so the status for that is rather uncertain.

I think a big reason MS invested so heavily into OpenAI was to have a marquee customer push cultural change through the org, which was a necessary decision. If that eventually yields in a useful chip I will be impressed, I hope it does.
by currymj | 2025-10-03 17:46:57+00:00
I don't think it diminishes him.

"Stella Maris" is a great novel that could only be written by someone who was very knowledgeable about math. As far as art that engages deeply with math and science, I don't know of anything comparable. Most artists would focus only on the human drama of discovery, without being able to engage with the subject matter.

However, I would consider "mastery" of a math textbook to be you have worked through almost all the chapters, can do a reasonable chunk of the exercises, and could TA the course without too much trouble.

While I don't know for sure, I doubt McCarthy achieved that level of understanding for all the yellow books he owned. I think buying a math textbook on an interesting topic and then not making it very far is a very common and human experience.
by ActionHank | 2025-10-03 17:47:07+00:00
It's opensource, so people would likely have caught this issue. It's opensource, so they can't just make some foolish, arbitrary licensing change to extort money from customers. It's opensource, so it is going to be a better engine in the long run.

Unity had a niche, their greedy execs killed that and Godot is one of the beneficiaries of that.
by afinlayson | 2025-10-03 17:47:49+00:00
I wouldn't write them off yet - but if their funding dries up and there's no more money to support their spending habits this will seem like a great prediction. Giving away stuff that's usually expensive for free is a great way to get numbers - It worked for facebook, uber and many others but it doesn't mean you'll become a profitable company.

Anyone with enough money can buy users - example they could start an airline tomorrow where flights are free and get a lot of riders - but if they don't figure out how to monetize, it'll be a very short experiment.
Ask HN: Any concrete drawbacks from using Vercel's AI SDK?
by dennisy | 2025-10-03 17:47:59+00:00
I have started multiple projects using AI / Agent frameworks and have always been disappointed in the end. My current project I am implementing everything from scratch and I am much happier, I know where all the state exists and I do not have to spend hours trying to find how to extract some data from the agent loop which I need.

However today I was researching what I would deem to be "good" open source code in this area to try and find some interesting abstractions and noticed that nearly all the projects[0][1] are using Vercel's AI SDK for connecting to LLMs. Right now I have my own internal interface and am implementing a few providers (ollama, openai, anthropic).

So I wanted to see what the view of HN is, am I being stupid - is the AI SKD truly a good bit of abstraction and I should leverage it to save time?

- [0] https://github.com/sst/opencode - [1] https://github.com/VoltAgent/voltagent
by cfmcdonald | 2025-10-03 17:48:06+00:00
Author here. Yes I could be more accurate here. It was called just "Apple Computer" in some contexts, e.g. this ad [0]. This manual calls it "Apple-1" on the cover [1], but "Apple Computer" in the contents. But you are definitely right that it was often called the Apple-1 in 1976 and into 1977.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I#/media/File:Apple_1_Ad... [1]: https://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/apple.applei.19...
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-10-03 17:48:16+00:00
> And I could not think of anything.

I've identified two approaches to this situation. One is to take the insult graciously, as though it's feedback:

"Careful: you could put someone's eye out with that!"

"Oh! Thanks for the reminder." (adjust the position of your head, as appropriate for your extremely large and dangerous nose)

---

The other is to take whatever they said, and exaggerate it. This produces really good comebacks. (It's important to insist upon this point, regardless of any evidence you might receive to the contrary.)

"Careful: you could put someone's eye out with that!"

"Oh, could I? Well, your entire face is bad."

If they respond with another insult, repeat the same strategy. They'll notice what you're doing after the second or third attempt, and then it will turn from "this person's bad at comebacks" into "this person's (pretending to be) bad at comebacks and it's funny".

"My face is bad? Is that the best you could come up with?"

"Your face is so bad that it makes everyone else's faces bad, too."

"But… that means your face is also bad."

"And whose fault is that? It's your fault. Specifically, the fault of your face. Which is bad."

"Still means you've got a big nose."

"Well you've got a small nose."

"No I don't. We've got the same sized noses."

"Thus invalidating your previous aspersion that my nose is unusually large. Who's bad at comebacks now?"

"Still you."

---

There's a third approach, if the insult is disguised as faux-concern: pretend you're taking it seriously, while exaggerating the characteristic they're concerned about.

"Hey, you having trouble seeing past that, mate?"

"Oh, no, it's alright: most of my vision is unobstructed." / "I've got some tape in my bag if I need it." / "It's no worse than binoculars."
by amelius | 2025-10-03 17:48:50+00:00
Yes, CUDA has a history. And it shows. CUDA has very bad integration with the OS for example. It's time some other company (Microsoft sounds like a good contender) showed them how you do this the right way.

Anyway, this all distracts from the fact that you don't need an entire "OS" just to run some arithmetic primitives to get transformers running.
by curiousguy | 2025-10-03 17:49:22+00:00
The point 2 is an important one, I used RSS for years but had to stop using it as I was way too anxious trying to read everything.

I started using again, but I have a few rules: all the feeds only refresh once week; and any news feed (like hackers news) that generates too much content is purged also once a week, so I only have the latest one week articles.

In my mind, my RSS feed for me is like an old school weekly magazine. This solve the FOMO feeling of missing something interesting, but I don’t feel like I need to read something as soon as is published.
by vessenes | 2025-10-03 17:49:25+00:00
I agree. I mean, I can get o3 right from the API if I choose, but 5-Thinking is better than o3, and 5-Research is definitely better than o3 pro in both ergonomics and output quality. If you read reddit about 4o, the group that formed a parasocial relationship with 4o and relied on its sycophancy seems to be the main group complaining. Interesting from a product market fit perspective, but not worrying as to "Is 5 on the whole significantly better than 4 / o1 / o3?" It is. Well, 5-mini is a dumpster fire, and awful. But I do not use it. I'm sure it's super cheap to run.

Another way to think of oAI the business situation is: are customers using more inference minutes than a year ago? I definitely am. Most definitely. For multiple reasons: agent round trip interactions, multimodal parsing, parallel codex runs..
by greenie_beans | 2025-10-03 17:49:32+00:00
i think we're on the same page there. my general thought is that all kids are capable of learning about different ways of thinking, which is what gifted education is all about. at what age level is a different issue.

from my memory, my mom taught units on photography, civil rights history, problem solving, reasoning, creative writing, deconstructing things to make something new, etc. i think most, if not all, students are able to grasp those things, though maybe that's my bias as somebody who got that sort of teaching both at home and in public school. sadly, all the non-gifted students only got the rote lessons that prepared them for standardized testing, but i suspect average students would maybe enjoy more school more if they had a more gifted-like education. gifted kids aren't the only ones who get bored by school.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-03 17:49:37+00:00
Both are still transformer LLMs at their core, and perform as such. They don't show a massive jump in capabilities over your average transformer.

Improvements in long context efficiency sure are nice, and I do think that trying to combine transformers with architectures that aren't cursed with O(n^2) on sequence length is a promising approach. But it's promising as an incremental improvement, not a breakthrough that completely redefines the way AIs are made, the way transformer LLMs themselves did.
by Svoka | 2025-10-03 17:49:38+00:00
You want to make an easy automation but doesn't want to write integration code for bunch of platforms.

n8n is good because of loads of easy to use and straightforward to configure with good documentation nodes. Like 'get message from whatsapp' trigger. I have a bot which gets messages from WhatsApp looks for URL in it, downloads a video and posts it to private video hosting, and then shares link in chat with friends.

All components are already there and you don't have to code really annoying infra around maintaining WhatsApp bot.
by tracker1 | 2025-10-03 17:50:15+00:00
I'd be pretty over the moon if the browser supported the following preferences... especially given the number of electron or otherwise browser embedded UI options..

system.font.primary system.font.header system.font.monospace system.colors.foreground system.colors.background system.colors.header system.colors.highlight system.colors.accent

It might be reasonable to have more than this, and the accent and highlight color may or may not be the same color... but it would go a long way towards matching the system defaults, with appropriate css variables injected as well.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-10-03 17:50:16+00:00
I defense of the application developer, it is very difficult to adopt set theory thinking which helps with SQL when you've never had any real education in this area, and it's tough to switch between it and the loop-oriented processing you're likely using in your application code for almost everyone. ORMs bridge this divide which is why they fall in the trap consistently. Often it's an acceptable trade-off for the value you get from the abstraction, but then you pay the price when you need to address the leak!
by yubblegum | 2025-10-03 17:51:00+00:00
I've come around to the possibility that there is a lot more here under the surface than what we general public/plebs are aware of. Hamas is Muslim Brotherhood. MB itself is the poster child of a movement hijacked by Western spook agencies.

They want a heroic victory for MB because the West knows there are going to be numerous billions of Muslims and they can't kill them all so the best thing is to 'control' the religion as they own and run MB.

October 7 completely undermined the non-MB resistance. Hamas jumped the gun, Israel 'stood down', and the axis of resistance was caught like deers in a headlight. They have been 'reacting' ever since and have been losing every step of the way.

Now the question is: Is Qatar/MB upset about all this? ...
by simonw | 2025-10-03 17:51:15+00:00
That's a good trick. In Django world I like pytest-django's django_assert_max_num_queries fixture: https://pytest-django.readthedocs.io/en/latest/helpers.html#...

def test_homepage_queries(django_assert_max_num_queries, client): with django_assert_max_num_queries(10): assert client.get("/").status_code == 200

Or django_assert_num_queries to assert an exact number.
by seemaze | 2025-10-03 17:51:34+00:00
>There's this popular idea that socially anxious folks are just dying to be liked

Really? I've never come across that idea. If fact, in my experience 'social anxiety' is almost always driven by the fear of failure, not the ambition of uncertain success.

I would counter that the opposite of 'social anxiety' - 'social vanity' - is more indicative of a deep desire to be liked.
by Telemakhos | 2025-10-03 17:51:37+00:00
Nobody ever talks about S/MIME, but it's the corporate version of PGP/GPG for mail. Apple made it dead easy to use S/MIME encryption. Most vendors do, because it's still a requirement for some government purchasing (DoD is moving away from it). I was honestly and pleasantly surprised how easy it was to use S/MIME with the built-in mail programs on macOS and iOS/iPadOS, and I'm a bit surprised that Apple didn't just automate an S/MIME key for every iCloud mail user.
by ryandrake | 2025-10-03 17:51:41+00:00
I'm blessed that I grew up in a time where there wasn't a persistent video and audio record of everything I did, every mistake I made, every shenanigan I pulled, every not-so-nice thing I said. Being able to learn and grow, and leave your past in the past is a feature of life, not a bug to be fixed. I feel hopeless for my kid who is growing up in a world where almost everything she does out in public is recorded by someone and something, and will be discoverable and searchable forever.
by everdrive | 2025-10-03 17:51:46+00:00
This doesn't feel like a very insightful article. Everyone is noticing the cultural splintering and the propagation of extremist beliefs, but I really seldom see insightful commentary which really explains why these things might be happening. Nor do I see very much commentary which provides useful ways to think about these phenomenon.

This article is no different, and mistakes modern problems for old-fashioned causes. "People got their ideas from the wrong sources" is really all this article offers and really doesn't scratch the surface why extremist ideas are propagating so much nowadays, or why culture is splintering and trust in institutions is so low.