MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by numpad0 | 2025-10-16 22:27:42+00:00
I don't see why that would be so hard. This is potentially easier than reliably shooting guns at people.

That machine will look like a bean bag couch in rough shape of a giant human hand, with few of cooperative work robotic arms. The couch part hugs and secures all limbs of the baby to into the party escort submission position, then the cobots move in to find the disassembly markers on the diaper to tear it open to remove it. Then a showerhead, then a hair dryer, then baby powder sprayer can be brought out and ran to clean any residues and take care of rashes. Finally, the new diaper can be brought in, baby wrapped, and the double sided tapes on it lightly pressed on to secure it.

The entire machine would probably cost less than 10 million USD per unit if mass produced at reasonable scales, and most technological elements needed in such machines would be readily available.
by westurner | 2025-10-16 22:27:51+00:00
"Walks in Rotation Spaces Return Home when Doubled and Scaled" (2025) https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/xk8y-hycn :

> Abstract: The dynamics of numerous physical systems, such as spins and qubits, can be described as a series of rotation operations, i.e., walks in the manifold of the rotation group. A basic question with practical applications is how likely and under what conditions such walks return to the origin (the identity rotation), which means that the physical system returns to its initial state. In three dimensions, we show that almost every walk in SO(3) or SU(2), even a very complicated one, will preferentially return to the origin simply by traversing the walk twice in a row and uniformly scaling all rotation angles. We explain why traversing the walk only once almost never suffices to return, and comment on the problem in higher dimensions.
by Izikiel43 | 2025-10-16 22:29:00+00:00
WA state added a law to override local zoning regulations in order to encourage density. I have seen new multi apartment construction in Ballard, Cap Hill, and some other places, but there is a construction backlog going on for years. Also, the problem in Seattle, same as SF, is that there are too many SFHs vs multi apartment buildings/townhomes. It will take several years until offer surpasses demand.
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-16 22:29:16+00:00
It's not just wages, it's every single avenue on which the government is forcing them to incur some cost and in every case it favors the big chain that has more locations, more meals, more everything to amortize the costs over. It was ignorable with some mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance when times were good but now that they aren't it's more obvious. Normally it's worth blaming rent to some extent but commercial RE is crap right now so that ain't it
by Arainach | 2025-10-16 22:30:57+00:00
Over an over, this isn't true. Look at GE under Jack Welch. They sold off everything that made them great, but it sure looked like they were profitable, so the stock soared right until everything went to hell. Look at all the companies that have copied their pattern over and over to this day. Everything is about manipulating the perception of the market right now, not the perception of the market - or even the existence of the company - in a decade.

Long-term oriented markets wouldn't be dumping so much money into high-frequency trading. Instead of reducing latency, a long-term focused market would increase the minimum latency to disable that kind of nonsense.
by omnimus | 2025-10-16 22:31:28+00:00
I am not sure you can say Livewire is a copy. The name suggests that is the case but both projects were started at similar time Livewire is afaik even older project than Liveview (Hotwire is youngest - in a way). They both take different approaches because PHP/Elixir have very different characteristics.

I think Livewire is still pretty great. Since PHP can't do websockets easily they focus on http and in most cases thats just fine. Liveview websockets can be an overkill.
by behnamoh | 2025-10-16 22:31:39+00:00
Elixir is still confusing, not the language, but the ecosystem, tooling, and philosophy. Is it dynamic or static? Is it compiled or not? If it's not, then why do we have Elixir scripts, which have different file extension? If it uses BEAM and you'd inevitably need to know Erlang when you hit the edge cases, then why not just learn Erlang? If it solves concurrency the "right way" due to supervision trees, why not use Python libraries that also implement the actor model, making Python code concurrent the "right way"? I just don't know which niche applications Elixir targets and excels at.
by cpeterso | 2025-10-16 22:31:47+00:00
Maybe Figma needs a prototyping mode that actually looks like rough whiteboard drawings or index cards. Later you can refine the designs, retaining history linking back to early prototypes.

Using rough drawings is useful for user research. Users are less likely to criticize or suggest big changes if you present a polished design, even if it is just a mock up.
by pattobrien | 2025-10-16 22:31:51+00:00
MCP Prompts are meant to be user triggered, whereas I believe a Skill is meant to be an LLM-triggered, use-case centric set of instructions for a specific task.

- MCP Prompt: "Please solve GitHub Issue #{issue_id}" - Skills: - React Component Development (React best practices, accessible tools) - REST API Endpoint Development - Code Review

This will probably result in:

- Single "CLAUDE.md" instructions are broken out into discoverable instructions that the LLM will dynamically utilize based on the user's prompt - rather than having direct access to Tools, Claude will always need to go through Skill instructions first (making context tighter since it cant use Tools without understanding \*how\* to use them to achieve a certain goal) - Clients will be able to add infinite MCP servers / tools, since the Tools themselves will no longer all be added to the context window

It's basically a way to decouple User prompts from direct raw Tool access, which actually makes a ton of sense when you think of it.
by Nevermark | 2025-10-16 22:33:13+00:00
Any economic overhang, then hangover, in AI investment won’t last long.

Because AI as a technology will continue to improve and cross further major usefulness thresholds.

AI is like the web in that respect. Only more so.

And as the article does a great job of arguing, economic reversals won’t slow creative progress. Just shift it from over funded enterprises to many smaller actors getting the resources they need at better prices.
by 1oooqooq | 2025-10-16 22:33:24+00:00
you're repeating google marketing.

I was in perf engineering at the time. we would switch between a handful of string concatenation methods every browser release. it wasn't much about real performance, but just shifting trade-offs in the jit. but google PR team was very good at running in front of the changes and pointing their overly optimized way to magazines. so they would run an array concat test that was much faster while being much slower in plus sign concat, but they often left that out. anyway, everyone drank the coolaid. 100% of the v8 performance over spider monkey was not attaching debuggers and dev tools. and sadly, mozilla had to follow. nowadays we are mostly back to square one (still some niceties from dalvik missing).

true performance improvement came much later than that.
by underlipton | 2025-10-16 22:33:28+00:00
Conspiracy theory: they are vulnerable. Almost everyone is, because almost everyone is party to the credit/money-printing grift that has kept markets from collapsing since (depending on your perspective) 2015/2019/2022. Especially the big, "healthy" companies.

They're going private because it would allow them to mask their losses in a coming recession.
by Flamingoat | 2025-10-16 22:33:59+00:00
It was horrendously bad. If you had more than 10 tabs open it was painful. I was using it at the time on a relatively high spec machine for the time (Core 2 Quad) and 8GB of ram.

I was so happy when Chrome came out. Over the years I've tried going back to Firefox and I've gone back to either Chrome, Ungoogled Chromium or Brave.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-16 22:34:07+00:00
Developers and corporations don't really matter. Trading their freedoms for ours is completely fine. We, the users, are the ones who matter. It's all about us. No, the developer cannot tivoize the software, because that harms us. No, the developer can't isolate it in a server, because that harms us. They should probably be glad Stallman is in charge... My definition of "harms us" is far more expansive and extreme than his.

And if the corporations don't like it, why don't they just... buy the developers out like the good capitalists they are? They want the software so badly? Contact the guys who wrote it and and get down to business. Make them millionaires and I'm sure they'll have no issues giving them special permission to violate the AGPLv3. They are the copyright holders, they can do whatever they want. I even emailed Stallman to confirm that he thinks it's an ethical practice, and he does. The emails are literally recorded in the commit messages, just get in contact and talk business.

If they won't do that, then let them pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for their own full time developers to write their own version. I'm sure their lawyers will also advise them not to even read our free software source code since it can taint the final product. Works for me. If they won't contribute back on our terms, if they won't pay us, then they should get literally nothing. That's leverage.

The article you linked is not convincing at all. Who said we're "gifting away" our free software? We're not. We're publishing it so that fellow hackers can enjoy it freely. People who are like us. I for one don't really want corporations taking advantage of this generosity at our expense. Either they become one of us, or they pay for it, or they leave empty handed.

People really need to stop feeling sorry for trillion dollar corporations. Won't you think of the poor billionaires with nothing to their names? Give me a break. I care a lot about individual hackers who code for a higher purpose. These are the people I want to help. You'd have to pay me big bucks to spare even one second of thought towards some billionaire technofeudalist organization.
by arjie | 2025-10-16 22:34:10+00:00
Ah, in my case, I want to just talk to a video-editing Claude, and then a sys-admin Claude, and so on. I don't want to go through a main Claude who will instantiate these guys. I want to talk to the particular Claudes myself. But if sub-agents work for this, then maybe I just haven't been using them well.
Show HN: TechRex – client-side PDF editor (no upload, no watermark)
by Maaz-Sohail | 2025-10-16 22:34:26+00:00
Hi HN — I built a client-side PDF editor because I got tired of “free” tools that upload files and add watermarks. This runs entirely in the browser: edit text, add images/logos, sign, merge/split. No upload, no watermark, no signup.

How it works (tech): WebAssembly + Canvas + Web Workers. Text edits operate on glyph runs; when metrics don’t match exactly we do a subtle white-out behind the run and draw new text over it (preserves layout). Signatures use velocity-aware smoothing (Catmull–Rom → cubic Beziers). Export dedupes XObjects to avoid file bloat. Mobile Safari gets tiled rendering to keep memory stable.

Perf (measured): ~1.2s FCP / ~1.5s LCP on mid-range Android for the landing UI; TBT ~0–30ms during typical edits.

Privacy: default is offline—no network calls during edit/export. Any optional cloud action is explicit and TLS-only. No watermark, no usage caps.

Gaps: no full OCR yet; no global find/replace; batch stamping per-page for now.

Try it: https://pdffreeeditor.com/

Direct editor: https://pdffreeeditor.com/editor/

Script-light mode (disables analytics): https://pdffreeeditor.com/?lite=1

I’d love feedback on weird fonts, RTL, giant scans, or perf gotchas. Happy to share more internals and ship fixes live in the thread. — Maaz
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-10-16 22:34:33+00:00
Calibre handles kindle too (if you already have that). You "obtain" the books one way or another, and calibre converts them to a proper format and copies them directly to your kindle (via the usb cable).

Pirated books have no DRM, usually come in an open .epub format, which can be converted to whatever your reader requires, and you end up actually owning them, even if amazon decides to abandon the kindle ecosystem.
by coobird | 2025-10-16 22:34:36+00:00
Hi, author of Thumbnailator here.

Just FYI, Thumbnailator itself doesn't delegate processing to native processing -- it's just a wrapper around Java's Image I/O[1] functionality. In other words, it delegates the compression/decompression to loaded Image I/O plugins, hence, whether native processes are used depends on those plugins.

In terms of cross-platform support, the default Image I/O plugins that come with Java shouldn't be much of a concern. For 3rd party ones, IIRC there are some that will use native libraries, while others are pure Java. One good library on the Image I/O plugins front is TwelveMonkeys ImageIO[2], which provides plugins to support a wide variety of image formats.

1: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/image...

2: https://github.com/haraldk/TwelveMonkeys
by bigiain | 2025-10-16 22:34:46+00:00
Most of the time I'd choose to hide posts tagged AI. (No disrespect to people posting/discussing AI, it's just not a topic that I have much intellectual curiosity for.)

Unfortunately sometimes I'd choose to sort by "drama", and get my rant on about the latest Ruby shitfight, or whatever Matt/Automattic or Elon/Grok/X are doing. And me giving in to that temptation would probably make the site objectivity worse, so perhaps it's better the way it is?
by bsder | 2025-10-16 22:35:37+00:00
> You can barely set up a taco truck here.

We have a ton of these food trucks all over Austin. Most of them ... just aren't very good. So, apparently, regulations aren't too onerous.

And a food truck isn't exempt from the fact that ridiculous commercial real estate prices cause people to be too spread out to be able to service in walking range.

And the regulations got tighter because these trucks were blowing up and killing people. I haven't heard about one exploding in a while, so apparently the regulations had an effect.
by pelzatessa | 2025-10-16 22:35:45+00:00
What I wish for would be some kind of frontend for viewing hacker news (specifically the comment section) in a way that imageboards behave. I've never adapted to the reddit-style comment system for two reasons:

1. nested/indented comments are confusing. Perhaps it's connected to how I don't like programming languages that rely on indents for defining blocks of script instead of curly brackets, but I think that the reasons are unrelated. When you have a large tree of comments, it's simply hard to keep track which comment replies to which. It's easy when you have a couple comments, but I simply can't process a large tree of, say, 20 comments, I'll forget the context of the parent by the time I read the 5th one. Also sometimes it's hard to recognize if the next comment is indented 1 or 2 times to the left. I don't know why is this design so popular, someone even wrote a frontpage for 4chan that displayed its posts in this manner. I'd love to have a frontpage for hackernews that displayed its posts like on an imageboard! if you know such, please let me know. At least HN provides the next/prev/parent buttons, but they lack the onhover rendering of the post like on 4chan. These buttons also don't exist on hckrnws.com frontend which I tend to use, but it's a minor nitpick.

2. upvotes. I really like the 4chan way of bumping and making comments with a lot of replies the ones that stand out instead of those that a lot of people agree with. I think it encourages more diverse opinions. But on the other hand, perhaps the upvote system is somehow key to the pretty high level of discussion on HN, can't really tell.
by Retric | 2025-10-16 22:35:53+00:00
Zero failure rates not just 0.000…1 are a very different and unrealistic bar. Software must be treated as actively malicious from a hardware standpoint from multiple bit flip errors etc. So it comes down to designing hardware capable of the task that’s also incapable of causing harm even with hardware defects etc.

Meanwhile it must also be strong enough to move and restrain a range of infants which is a level of force capable of harm without any possibility to fail deadly.
by pfisch | 2025-10-16 22:36:07+00:00
I'm not sure, but this seems like a form of anti-social behavior that destroys value for everyone except the people plundering the company. It is almost like piracy and we should honestly try to figure out a way to not allow large companies to be destroyed in this manner.

We just shouldn't let people buy profitable companies because they think they can make a return by destroying the business and then bleeding out a small profit once the company had been gutted. It isn't good for the economy, the employees, or really anyone except the plunderers.
by Flamingoat | 2025-10-16 22:36:19+00:00
> you're repeating google marketing.

No I am not. I remember this clearly and all my friends were complaining about it before chrome was released. I just checked the dates. Firefox 3 was released a whole year before Chrome.

I really don't appreciate it when people tell me that I have been swayed by some big company, when my friends and I were complaining about it before we even knew that Google had a browser.

Firefox used to just completely lock up. Wouldn't load a tab. Chrome didn't with the same number of tabs. I am not talking about JS perf speed or anything like that, I am talking about the browser just not locking up when using more than few tabs.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-10-16 22:36:54+00:00
I hate Amazon's decision to do this. It doesn't even make business sense. You can't tell me they're making that much profit off of Kindles that it makes sense. The book sales have got to be worth more than that in the long run.

A lot of authors only ever offer on Amazon now, which leaves those of us without Kindles (I love my Kobo) in a difficult spot.

Frankly I would write it as anti-competitive. How are other e-reader companies supposed to survive when Amazon owns all the e-books and can just decide that only their e-readers are allowed? No one else has even a fraction of the market.
by randycupertino | 2025-10-16 22:36:55+00:00
Absci's (ABSI) crown jewel, ABS-201, is supposed to regrow hair better than minoxidil, and they’re partnering with AMD and Oracle for AI-based drug development and AI-designed antibodies. If they actually work in humans it will be huge. Their valuation hangs entirely on whether their first clinical programs (ABS-101 and ABS-201) validate the tech, otherwise yet another AI drug hype that never cleared clinical trials. Watching this one!
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-10-16 22:37:42+00:00
> perhaps in a not common use case

> Balsamiq easily lets be draw something up on my computer that looks obviously like it's "hand drawn style" and make is clear both to me while creating wireframes and to everyone else when I shard them that it's not intended to be high fidelity.

I thought this was the core value proposition of Balsamiq.
by tptacek | 2025-10-16 22:37:54+00:00
If there is a thing a reasonable person can do with pork belly, I have done it. I think you have the higher evidentiary burden here, regardless of our respective experience. You can check Ruhlman's Charcuterie and Salumi books, you can check AskCulinary, you can check the food Stack Exchange, you can just notice that literally every packaged bacon product, whether or not it claims to be cured, is in fact cured (usually with celery powder), or, of course, you can just take some sliced pork belly and make a 5% pink salt/salt mix and throw it in a zip in your fridge overnight and see.

I get that you like smoked pork belly. I do too. I don't even object to you calling it "bacon". All sorts of things that aren't American bacon are called bacon. But nitrites are absolutely part of the distinctive flavor of American bacon.

The whole thing is silly, because we can just point to ham and corned beef, two products where the debate doesn't even make sense; we only see it with bacon, and we only see it because vendors lie about whether their products are cured.
by noduerme | 2025-10-16 22:38:23+00:00
You may be able to deduce that percentage from the percentage of humans who make art, and the percentage of art that contains original elements. (Whether it's aesthetically pleasing has no bearing on whether it is art).

All art is derivative to some extent, because all artists have absorbed cultural influences and have seen prior art. But some art contains elements and ideas which are not synthesized from prior art. You can prove this. If art were only synthesized from prior art, then there would never be any addition to its vocabulary. There are conceptual "breakthroughs" which cannot happen just by looking at and iterating upon existing art.

If an AI had been trained only on classical Greek sculpture, it could not invent Cubism or Impressionism or Surrealism. Not just that: It would have no reason to invent these schools of art. The only impetus it might have would be if a human asked it to invent a school of art; and then it could only draw upon its training data.

That's why to call AI output "art" is to fundamentally misunderstand what art is. Art is not the final result or product. An aesthetically pleasing painting is not automatically art, outside the limited commercial sense. Art is the intention of the artist and the unique characteristics of the artist made manifest in the creative process which required discovering something new. The actual output, the thing on the canvas, is just evidence of that process, it is not the art itself.

More often than not, this is also a physical process involving trial and error with real materials in a world that is many orders of magnitude more complicated than what AI currently understands.

An equation on a blackboard is not a mathematical proof, it is the residue of the logic of the proof. In the same way, a painting is the residue of art. A sculpture is a residue of the artistic process by which a person learned to turn a shapeless mass into an imagined 3D object.

This is why AI can only make simulacrum of the final result of art, the same way it can simulate coming up with a proof for an algorithm. But as we frequently see when we ask it to analyze or create an algorithm, it cannot provide a true proof, because it cannot think of failure modes unless we explicitly point them out, nor can it think of concepts that are not in its existing canon of knowledge.

Maybe with AGI this will change. But passing a Turing test and making pictures doesn't mean it can actually create anything like art.
by dathinab | 2025-10-16 22:39:37+00:00
I think lifetimes are best thought of as constraints.

Like `x: Foo<'a>` means "x is constrained by lifetime 'a" as in "x is only guaranteed to be soundly usable if 'a is 'alive'".

With the implicit context of "you are only allowed to use things which are guaranteed to be soundly usable".

And that "moving" is distinct from lifetimes (i.e. if you move x out of scope you just don't have it anymore, while a 'a constraint on x limits where you _can_ "have" it).

Then `'static` basically means "no constraint"/"unconstrained".

So a `x: X + 'static` mean x has no constraints, as long as you have it you can use it.

Where `x: X+'a` (or `X<'a>`) would mean you can _at most_ have x until 'a stops being "alive". (This doesn't mean the data behind X doesn't life longer, just that in that specific place you can't "have" it at most while 'a is alive).

So then if we look at `&'static A` we have a type which 1) is always copied instead of moved, so you always have it while you can have it and 2) you can always have it. As consequence it must life for the whole program execution. Not because `'static` says "until end of program" but because a unconstrained &reference can only be sound if it exist until the end of the program!!