MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xferruccio | 2025-10-30 17:04:03+00:00
Our core product is an analytics product that lives on people's website, so we're able to tell what are the main pages that people are reaching with LLMs

For our in-app AI visibility product we use that information for finding prompts at topics that are being used to reach those pages

For this public tool instead we do a best guess of what are reasonable queries companies would want to show up for and run them against Google and ChatGPT
by Mawr | 2025-10-30 17:04:34+00:00
Yes, cars are flexible. They are jacks of all trades, but masters of none. At long distances, trains win handily. At short distances, bikes do.

> Need to move 3 or 4 people? Driving the car may be cheaper.

That's the issue―the average car occupancy is <1.5. Our goal should be to raise it, by offering alternatives to cars in cases where they're not appropriate.

> Are there many cases where people should take public transport or ride a bike instead of their car? Obviously yes.

Not many, most. Cars are a niche, they're only economical when transporting a few people with cargo over medium distances. Everything else is more efficiently covered by another mode of transport.

And "obviously", huh? Look outside. It's all roads.

> But once you have a car to cover the exigent circumstances it is easy to use them for personal comfort reasons.

You'd be surprised. The Netherlands is the best example of this―the Dutch own almost as many cars per person as Americans do, yet they cycle orders of magnitude more.

It's a matter of designing our built environment to make the most efficient mode of transportation for the situation the most convenient option.
by mopsi | 2025-10-30 17:04:37+00:00
> We want to make Affinity, and professional design, the default tool. And a huge part of that is free, forever.

Then please release it without any DRM or mandatory accounts, so that the binary will remain usable even when all the network infrastructure goes down.

This is the main reason for me to prefer old school offline desktop software. Once I've invested time and energy into learning something as complex as a photo editor, I really don't want it taken from me on a whim.
by fpoling | 2025-10-30 17:05:08+00:00
In 1908 philosopher John McTaggart published a paper on unreality of time. Modern take on that is that physics describes only B time-series with static time without any notion of time flow. The time flow requires A-series or dynamic time which nobody so far was able to reduce to static time of B-series and physical equations.

For example, if one takes a video of water heated in a bowl then thermodynamics can tell that at the beginning of the video the water is cold, that at a particular timestamp it should boil etc. But thermodynamics cannot explain why I see the water is bubbling with all movement. I.e. with thermodynamics the world is static 4D structure. It does not explain why consciousness perceives 3D slices of that one by one.
by JaggerJo | 2025-10-30 17:05:12+00:00
How does it render pixel data to the terminal?

I've stumbled over sixels [1], but movy seems to use something else that also enables color output and a higher resolution?

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

EDIT:

> It renders frames as ANSI half block characters..

Seems like the resolution looks better than it actually is in the screenshots. It effectively seems to be 2 vertical Pixels per character.
by dang | 2025-10-30 17:05:18+00:00
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political battle and ignoring our request to stop doing this.

(No, this is not because of your views; yes it works the same way for accounts with opposite views. It's because this is a failure mode for HN, and therefore an important line to draw.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-30 17:05:36+00:00
Also assumed by default we were talking about real-time, but then I saw Python/juPyter and a rendered videos, got a bit confused, then came across "46.4s/frame" for one of the examples and finally registered it wasn't about real-time.

I agree it doesn't have to be real-time to be valid, I think my mindset just goes to physics in video games which are usually real-time when I see contact solvers or most other things related to simulations.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-30 17:06:50+00:00
Some people just like to eat food, they don't want to learn how to cook it. You or I may think that's a tragedy, but I don't think e.g a dentist has an obligation to become fluent in the things that I'm competent in.

I'm no dentist, I go to dentists. I let them work, and try not to be too annoying. I learn the minimum that I need to know to follow the directions that they deliberately make very simple for me.

This will result in generations of generally dentistry ignorant people, but I am not troubled by this.

As technologically competent people, one of our desires should be to help people maintain the ignorance level that they prefer, and at every level steer them to a good outcome. Let them manage their own time. If they want privacy and control, let's make sure they can have it, rather than lecturing them about it. My grandmother is in her 90s and she doesn't want people reading her emails, listening to her calls or tracking her face. She is not prepared to deal with more than a couple of buttons, and they should be large and hopefully have pictures on them that explain what they do. It's my job to square that circle.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-10-30 17:07:26+00:00
Is there any chance of offering a local mode for AI features? It's fine if that's pay-gated, but an increasing number of mass market machines (Macs, mainly, but also workstations with Nvidia cards and AMD boxes like the Framework desktop) have inference capabilities sitting somewhere between competent and excellent and it'd be a shame if all that power just sat unusued. It'd be a nice boost for privacy, too.
by xnorswap | 2025-10-30 17:07:29+00:00
We're going full-circle, because LLMs are amazing for producing just the right incantation of arcane command-line tools. I was struggling to decrypt a file the other day and it whipped me up exactly the right openssl command to get it done.

From which I was able to then say, "Can I have the equivalent source code" and it did that too, from which I was able to spot my mistake in my original attempt. ( The KDF was using md5 not sha ).

I'm willing to bet that LLMs are also just as good at coming up with the right ffmpeg or imagemagick commands with just a vague notion of what is wanted.

Like, can we vignette the video and then add a green alien to the top corner? Sure we can (NB: I've not actually verified the result here) : https://claude.ai/share/5a63c01d-1ba9-458d-bb9d-b722367aea13
by MatthiasPortzel | 2025-10-30 17:08:01+00:00
> We really do want to make all design, including professional design, as widely accessible as possible

In the lead up to this launch, for the last month, Serif products were unavailable for purchase, leaving me unable to open the document that I created while on a free-trial. It would be dumb of me to create more documents in the proprietary affinity format, because there's nothing stopping you from deciding to do some other marketing stunt that involves removing my access to open my documents in the future.

I'm advocating for open source not as "moving the goal post" but as the ONLY thing that guarantees that I have the right and ability to continue running the software on my own device.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-30 17:08:21+00:00
Was Two Minute Papers always so sensationalistic or is that a recent change? I remember seeing the videos many many years ago, and don't recall him being so overly enthusiastic and borderline sensationalistic, like this video seems to be.

Even the title of the video is straight up clickbait ("The Worst Bug In Games Is Now Gone Forever") since the context is all wrong, the metrics on the top left even shows "time/frame: 3.38 min", how could that be useful for games? The problem with physics in games is in real-time simulations, not in cached/animated "physics".

Don't get me wrong, the simulations are impressive, and hopefully will have a big impact on simulation stability for real-time and not, I was just taken aback by the video.
by iamnothere | 2025-10-30 17:08:33+00:00
Nice to see abstention from Canada, Finland, Japan, South Korea, India, Iceland, Germany, Mexico, and Switzerland as well. Not everyone is on board with this (for good reason), it’s not just the big bad US ignoring the rest of the world.

Given the presence of some extremely authoritarian states on the list of signatories, the fact that the UK and France signed on seems to confirm my suspicions about the trajectory of freedom in those countries. And surprisingly Sweden! I feel like Mullvad users should be concerned.
by mfreed | 2025-10-30 17:08:36+00:00
Tiger Cloud certainly continues to run on AWS. We have built it to rely on fairly low-level AWS primitives like EC2, EBS, and S3 (as opposed to some of the higher-level service offerings).

Our existing Postgres fleet, which uses EBS for storage, still serves thousands of customers today; nothing has changed there.

What’s new is Fluid Storage, our disaggregated storage layer that currently powers the new free tier (while in beta). In this architecture, the compute nodes running Postgres still access block storage over the network. But instead of that being AWS EBS, it’s our own distributed storage system.

From a hardware standpoint, the servers that make up the Fluid Storage layer are standard EC2 instances with fast local disks.
by jameslk | 2025-10-30 17:08:40+00:00
80% of the supply chain for solar is based in China[0]. As long as this is the case, it is unlikely there will be as much demand in the US for it due to new Cold War and bipartisan efforts to tariff solar panels from China

The article seems to leave this important detail out, despite talking a lot about China

0. https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/ex...

EDIT: it looks like the article does mention it, I just missed it:

> The huge surfeit of production capacity in China, which produced about eight out of 10 of the world’s solar modules in 2024
by tensor | 2025-10-30 17:09:20+00:00
I think there are a lot of people like me who use it occasionally and won't bother with AI nor a subscription. To me this is a bad sign, as free is unsustainable. It's only a matter of time before they look at their metrics and realize "oh look, we have all these casual users who only use the free stuff, that's a new source of revenue!" at which point either the subscription now covers the app, or worse, they steal your shit for "AI training."

Hell, has anyone looked at the EULA for this "free" product? Maybe it's already doing that.
by JustExAWS | 2025-10-30 17:09:59+00:00
I think people who try to negotiate and walk away from a job that doesn’t pay enough is almost always the wrong idea if you don’t have a job.

Every month you don’t bring in income, you have to make 8.3% more just to make up for the month of lost income.

Even though it didn’t come to it when I was looking for a job in late 2023 and again in late 2024, I was willing to take the first job or contract that came along *and keep interviewing*. It is especially easy when I am interviewg and working remotely.

Honestly, most of my career and I’m now 10 jobs in, it’s been a tik tok between changing jobs to up skill and changing jobs for a pay bump or now just to stay remote and half to deal with as little bullshit as possible.
by fluoridation | 2025-10-30 17:10:30+00:00
Nah. That's a dumb UI. If you do cargo add whatever, it does something completely different from cargo install whatever, and there's no way to inadvertently use the wrong one. If pip install whatever leaves your project in a state that may be unusable for other people, but usable for you, that's just design that invites confusion and works-on-my-machine syndrome.
by nicce | 2025-10-30 17:11:04+00:00
It was a direct competitor for Android at that time. GUI was really nice. I don't think it was essentially worse than Android. There was the potential.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/31z13e/is_...

http://www.eedailynews.com/2010/05/android-vs-meego-two-appr...
by bigyabai | 2025-10-30 17:11:06+00:00
> but how would a company determine that at scale?

Two-way signature validation. Apple distributes unique developer IDs; make the dev sign the app locally before uploading it, like Google does for the Play Store. If those trojan horses still make it through Apple's manual inspection process, then they need to fire everyone working for the App Store and replace them with AI.

> If Apple aggressively took action against this with a high error rate

They need to take action. Apple's entire argument for an App Store monopoly is that they curate apps individually before they're uploaded to ensure a baseline of quality. When they stop vetting apps and allow the App Store to become like every other store, their argument in favor of monopoly control evaporates.

So yes, it would be anti-competitive censorship, but that's nothing Apple hasn't done before. The real issue is that their "premium" store interface is getting shown-up by the Google Play services. At the going rate there won't be anti-competitive behavior to complain about since Apple will be forced to accept competing storefronts - and they have no one to blame but themselves.
by zahlman | 2025-10-30 17:11:38+00:00
... And as I explained repeatedly in multiple other posts throughout the thread, you can also use virtual environments without activating them, in which case you are similarly not using environment variables.

The git model is based on automatic detection of the .git folder, by having it in a location determined by convention. Many higher-level tools in the Python ecosystem have provided analogous handling of virtual environments over the years. Uv is doing it now; historically pyenv was used for that sort of thing, for example.

But when I said "which is otherwise impossible on Linux", I was specifically referring to the setting of environment variables, because OP asked why an activation script had to be sourced, and the reason is because that's what "activation" is.

This is a model that enough people liked using many years ago, to become dominant. It creates the abstraction of being "in" the virtual environment, while giving you the flexibility to put the actual file tree whereever you want.
by ttamslam | 2025-10-30 17:11:40+00:00
> Are your agents good at testing other agents? e.g. I want your agent to ask our agent a few questions and complete a few UI interactions with the results.

I'd say this is one of our strong suits I think, specifically the UIs tend to be easy to navigate for browser agents, and the LLM as a judge offers pretty good feedback on chat quality and it can inform later actions. (I'd be remiss not to mention though that a good LLM eval framework like Braintrust is probably the best first line though)

> How do you handle testing onboarding flows?

We can step through most onboarding flows if you start from logged out state & give the context it'll need (i.e. a stripe test card, etc.) That said though, setting up integrations that require multi-page hops is still a pain point in our system and leaves a lot to be desired.

Would love to talk more about your specific case and see if we can help! founders@propolis.tech
by CamperBob2 | 2025-10-30 17:11:44+00:00
True, I was assuming that people would think a bit more abstractly, or at least a bit more generously, but sometimes I forget where I am. By "compsci" I mean everything from graduate-level theoretical texts all the way down to "101 BASIC Programs for the TRS-80."

In the old days, magazine articles would also present practical code alongside plaintext explanations of how it worked. There's still no shortage of tutorial content, although not as much in paper form, and even less on Stack Overflow.
by shahbaby | 2025-10-30 17:12:03+00:00
I tried this but it did not go well.

The problem is that being unemployed and having no income puts you in a bad position to build something of value.

Another problem is that job hunting is very time intensive, even more so than a full time job.

A better alternative, at least for me, has been to go all in on finding the next job first and only then start working on building something.
by fpoling | 2025-10-30 17:12:23+00:00
Well, I am puzzled that Rovelli is not aware about the great debate in modern philosophy about time series A versus time series B that was started in 1908 by a paper on unreality of time by John McTaggart. A consequence of that paper is that perception of the time flow cannot be reduced to a physical process like entropy increase etc. So far nobody was able to disprove that.
by acdha | 2025-10-30 17:12:27+00:00
> one piece of evidence I find very convincing is the observation that non-human primates exhibit the same sorts of gendered behavior with toys that human children do (females wanting to treat any kind of toy as a doll, males wanting to treat any kind of toy as a tool, etc.).

This is actually why I don’t think the differences are mostly social: there’s a lot of evo-psych speculation which gets widely referenced in casual discussion but when you look at the details turns out to be much weaker. For example, that famous Hines 2002 study about vervet monkey toy preference relied on grouping toys into categories based on human leanings: a police car was masculine while a cooking pot feminine despite no vervet monkey ever associating a pot with mother’s home cooking, and the effect went away when they used other groupings (e.g. animate or inanimate objects).

What’s especially missing in these cases are controlling for social differences (e.g. any claims about women being innately worse at engineering need to center an explanation for the much lower gap in Soviet states which made an effort for gender neutrality) and attempting to explain how very complex behaviors reduce to the trait being studied. For example, a male vervet monkey preferring a police car to a cooking pot is a considerable remove from a Google software engineer or CS degree and there is usually an enormous amount of hand-waving trying to connect the two.

When I worked for a neuroscience lab years ago, this came up in conversation a bit and basically everyone thought there were innate cognitive differences but that they’d be low-level and relatively small: e.g. testosterone makes a big difference for things like grip strength and there are clearly low level anatomical differences but higher-level cognitive abilities depend on many factors and the unusual plasticity of our brains is an enormous confound. This gets harder the more advanced the skill you’re talking about: e.g. a question like whether a group of boys performed better at 3-D rotations is due to biology or because they’ve been encouraged to play with building toys and games is a already a hard research topic but looking at things like success as an engineer or scientist is orders of magnitude harder because it combines a range of different skills and the metrics are harder to quantify.
by Retric | 2025-10-30 17:12:32+00:00
> Has storage been solved yet?

In general yes, grid solar + grid batteries are cheaper than any peaking power plants. So now 24/7 batteries + wind + solar generally outcompetes nuclear, coal, or natural gas on price as long as there’s no tariffs involved.

This isn’t enough to make batteries + solar viable in Alaska but long distance transmission lines could solve that issue cost effectively.
by mathgeek | 2025-10-30 17:12:34+00:00
> I have no idea how difficult it is to manufacture these items, or how it’s done; the work associated with their creation is purposefully obscured from view.

On the contrary, often these processes are easy to find via youtube or the ever reliable How It’s Made series. I’d argue that for most common items, folks just prefer to not know or at least not seek.

What _is_ obscured is the process of acquiring the resources.
by sbarre | 2025-10-30 17:12:39+00:00
> Free is unsustainable

This is not necessarily true when the free product is a sales funnel.

Canva's business model is not "desktop design application" but giving away these tools creates goodwill in the design community and gives them exposure and a lower-friction conversion funnel towards their actual paid products.

Since they're desktop apps, there's very little cost to them for the free users who never convert (unlike Figma or other cloud-based products that have operational/bandwidth costs for all users).
by churchill | 2025-10-30 17:12:40+00:00
If I setup a $10b trust fund to buy up Texan land, I can't unilaterally invade Texas and build my ethnostate on it after I've purchased, say, 6-7% of it. That's the percentage of Palestine the Zionists bought before expelling the indigenous people in the Nakba genocide.

Likewise, if you legally purchase double-digit percentages of Indian, Chinese, Brit, Australian land, it doesn't give you the moral or legal precedent to expel the natives from the rest of their land and declare it your state.
by jacobolus | 2025-10-30 17:13:15+00:00
A sliding-bead suanpan or soroban is a practical and very portable tool for doing basic sums and differences, but after working with my own kids I don't think it's as good as a teaching tool as a counting board is, and I expect it's probably not as effective for doing more advanced calculations either, compared to a flat counting board where counters can be positioned arbitrarily, and where it's easy to add as many additional counts as you want by just making some more lines on a new piece of paper.

The real advantages of a counting board are (1) it needs no special equipment beyond a pile of pebbles, pennies, buttons, or other tokens; (2) it can be easily modified to apply to different number systems or specific calculations (though it's perhaps not as conveniently flexible as symbolic writing); and (3) there are many different representations of any number, and the game of calculation is about starting the problem off immediately with one version of "the right answer" already on the board and then performing various meaning-preserving operations to simplify the representation until arriving at one which is convenient to interpret or compare. This seems quite different psychologically from the use of a soroban (disclaimer: I'm not an expert) which is more about performing a sequence of steps in a pre-determined algorithm to obtain a correct answer, with intermediate steps not showing a representation of the same number because the soroban has only one unique way to represent any particular string of digits. I think the more flexible and representation-agnostic tool better promotes an essential skill which only increase in use as people get to higher levels of mathematics and other technical subjects. The soroban might be better for an accounting tool but the inflexibility is a deficiency for a teaching/thinking tool.
by sjs382 | 2025-10-30 17:13:20+00:00
> Google (pre-Alphabet renaming) was the AI company before AI companies were called that.

I disagree. They're an advertising/attention company.

The jury's still out on whether their AI offerings will compliment their existing business or will cannibalize it. And in the case that it cannibalizes the advertising business, will they undermine/kneecap it to protect that cash cow?

It's been a while since they've been the "don't be evil" and "organizing the world's information"-mission Google.