MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lithocarpus | 2025-10-13 18:15:40+00:00
Ok. I wouldn't necessarily call it poison, but would say it's qualitatively a new kind of food that was never eaten until the last ~150 years and is a likely contributor to chronic disease.

You called potato chips junk food but seem unwilling to say what about them makes them junk food, compared to, for example, a boiled potato.

I assume junk food means unhealthy and a likely contributor to chronic disease.
by siglesias | 2025-10-13 18:15:44+00:00
First point: if you imagine that the brain is doing something like collapsing the quantum wavefunction, wouldn't you say that this is a functionally relevant difference in addition to an ontologically relevant difference? It's not clear that the characteristic feature of the brain is only to compute in the classical sense. "Understanding," if it leverages quantum mechanics, might also create a guarantee of being here and now (computers and programs have no such guarantees). This is conjecture, but it's meant to stimulate imagination. What we need to get away from is the fallacy that a causal reduction of mental states to "electrical phenomena" means that any set of causes (or any substrate) will do. I don't think that follows.

Second: the philosophically relevant point is that when you gloss over mental states and only point to certain functions (like producing text), you can't even really claim to have fully accounted for what the brain does in your AI. Even if the physical world the brain occupies is practically simulatable, passing a certain speech test in limited contexts doesn't really give you a strong claim to consciousness and understanding if you don't have further guarantees that you're simulating the right aspects of the brain properly. AI, as far as I can tell, doesn't TRY to account for mental states. That's partially why it will keep failing in some critical tasks (in addition to being massively inefficient relative to the brain).
by alexpotato | 2025-10-13 18:15:52+00:00
To give an illustration of how bad this can get:

At a past firm, I was trying to debug how a particular ENV var was getting set. I started out thinking it was something simple like the user's .bashrc or equivalent.

I quickly realized that there were roughly 10 "layers" of env var loadings happening where the first couple layers were:

- firm wide

- region

- business unit

- department

- team etc etc

I ended up having to turn on a bash debug flag so that I could see exactly where the var was getting set in the layer stack.
by ActorNightly | 2025-10-13 18:16:15+00:00
F22 has never been used in combat because nobody wants to go up against it. We deploy F22s and enemy is basically like "well we cant see it and it probably out turns any of our shit, so whats the point"

Drones are cheaper, but also not robust like human operated machinery. Great for bombing, not so great for air supreriority. UCAVs may be cheaper in getting missles off, but comms are easy to disrupt and ai capabilities arent there
by binarybard | 2025-10-13 18:16:29+00:00
Been working on Forvard https://forvard.org — a tiny desktop app to help people remember what they actually did at work.

It’s offline-first and totally local (no cloud, no tracking). You just drop in your accomplishments, metrics, or files as you go, and later it helps you summarize them (ML model that runs locally) for performance reviews, promotions, or interviews.

Basically built it because I got tired of trying to reconstruct a year’s worth of work from Slack and Jira the night before review time.

It’s a one-time $0.99 download for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Curious if others have tried building similar “career memory” tools or have thoughts on what’s missing.

Would love feedback from people who’ve struggled to keep track of their work accomplishments or prep for performance reviews!
Ask HN: How to resist taking ownership at work?
by anonyMusk | 2025-10-13 18:16:49+00:00
Context: I am fresh graduate working for a decacorn startup with over an year of experience working. I am fueled by curiosity - working on different things, not being dependant on others, and taking ownership of abandoned tasks. However, I hate working with lazy people who are entrusted with responsibility but never deliver. In such situations, how do I stay curious and learn, while not taking ownership of work which is supposed to done by such lazy persons?

More Examples - I was tasked with overlooking the tech implementation of a project since all other leads' bandwidth were reserved. But, I saw this as an opportunity to work across multiple teams, identify their blockers, communicate project timelines, all while working on my tasks. Everyone appreciated my work. - Another mission critical project comes. I apparently cannot lead since the new (2 quarters old) senior hire needs to be trusted with more work. (this guy/girl) is the laziest person i have ever met. Uses AI. Don't even try to understand what they did. Whenever I sit to review their code, every other line needs to be pointed. The review changes are so vast, that ultimately all of them are thrown under bus to meet deadlines. - Even while they lead, they are a lazy person. They don't plan stuff before hand. Now here comes the tricky part. Should I take ownership again? - My reservations are, this project is seen as them leading its completion. My contributions will be overlooked. But I also don't really appreciate sitting around waiting for disasters to happen.

If asked the same in interviews - A lot of you may have answered that sitting it out, escalating to managers should be my next step. But let's just be honest. These things don't work practically.

-I have indirectly told them multiple times, that they need to step up and understand before pushing garbage. No effect. They are two quarters old, no difference. Manager is well aware. Still the only reason to keep them is that the manager could justify his/her bad hire.

I now, it sounds like a rant, but I am genuinely concerned. If you are someone who loves building things with purpose, putting in extra stuff, going extra mile just for the love of it, how do you navigate working with someone who is such a vibe killer? Has anyone of you faced anything similar? Would really appreciate your thoughts.
by Modified3019 | 2025-10-13 18:17:40+00:00
For my home archive NAS boxes, Proxmox is just a Debian distro with selective (mostly virtualization) things more up to date, and has ZFS and a web UI out of the box.

I disable the high availability stuff I don’t use that otherwise just grinds away at disks because of all the syncing it does.

It has quirks to work through, but at this point for me dealing with it is fairly simple, repeatable and most importantly, low effort/mental overhead enough for my few machines without having to go full orchestration, or worse, NixOS.
by otterpro | 2025-10-13 18:17:43+00:00
I love this idea as I grew up with ancient dial up phones, and I miss actually holding a handset and dialing a number to make calls. However, gen alpha has grown up in completely digital era, and most interaction occurs on FaceTime (or other video chat), and I don't think we can ever go back even if we wanted to. My kids' grandparents WANT to see their precious little grandkids so we always use video calls, if it involves kids and grandparents.

I, on the other hand, want this to communicate with friends who want to do the same.
by dang | 2025-10-13 18:17:46+00:00
I believe you that you just meant this as an interesting example, and in that sense were engaged in curious conversation (generally what we want here). But the amount of provocation in the comment is so high, and the amount of information so little, that it ends up on the wrong side of "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). In other words: not gonna end well.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45569878.
by mindcandy | 2025-10-13 18:18:11+00:00
There are at least two reasons to buy Bitcoin:

1. You need it for use as a collateral asset for smart contracts. There are no crypto cops or crypto courts. Only collateral gives contracts teeth. There are many options here. Just like there are many options for collateral assets in traditional finance. But, BTC is the top dog for the role and the first choice of individuals and institutions trying to lay down the foundations of decentralized finance.

2. You are speculating that the growth of BTC's growth in value as a collateral asset will outpace the growth of other assets. This as played out well over the past decade.
by RealityVoid | 2025-10-13 18:18:17+00:00
No, this is not what causes this. Most ECU's have a BSP package and some drivers bought from vendors, then the tier1's build the whole thing to OEM specifications. OEM's then integrate the whole thing. Stuff starts to break when you put them together. Maybe a diag is slightly different or an ECU has slightly different timing, or one of the gateways doesn't like what a bootloader is doing, or you have some weird race conditions that fail at 1 out of 1000 cases.
by faxmeyourcode | 2025-10-13 18:18:31+00:00
This weekend I just cracked into nanoGPT (https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT), an older but fabulous learning exercise where you build and train a crappy shakespeare GPT with ~0.8M parameters on a cpu. Results are about what you'd expect from that, they suck, but you can start to feel the magic, especially if you're not a deep learning professional and you just want to poke around and hack on it.

I started writing up a blog post on my weekend with nanoGPT but it's not done yet... Would have been great to link to here lol oh well
by giobox | 2025-10-13 18:18:36+00:00
I assume you joke here but large parts of the car enthusiast community are considering this strategy for near term. 2010s is widely argued to be era of "peak car" in terms of vehicles that are well built with minimal complex extras added for compliance with emissions and over the top safety regulation (less lane departure warning systems to turn off...).

My own group of car buddies, pretty much all we do is shop and trade 2010s vehicles now, rather than buy new.
by mihaipo | 2025-10-13 18:19:25+00:00
Hi HN,

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The problem: AI tools write code fast, but teams still spend hours fixing style, context, and structure before merging. That review loop kills velocity.

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Integrates directly with GitHub (no IDE setup or extensions)

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Thanks for checking it out, Mihai, Alex, Shane, and Jay
by ejo4041 | 2025-10-13 18:20:23+00:00
This is really cool and I was hoping something similar existed earlier this year when looking into protein powders following the Clean Label Transparency Project report [1]. Basically they said about half of protein powders tested showed signs of heavy metals, but did not disclose which brands. I would be interested in funding testing for some specific brands as I am sure others would as well. I did a bit of digging on a few brands and found lawsuits against them for violating prop 65, sometimes multiple [2][3] from the same brand.

Some testing has been done on https://labdoor.com/ where they basically fund the testing with affiliate links, which I think could be another revenue source for your site. I did contact them in January and they said they would add the brands I requested to the list, it's just not crowdsourced the same way your site is. They received some form of backing from Mark Cuban [4].

(edit) To make this more clear - If you are looking for expansion or making it a little wider, allowing users to request other types of testing besides the plastics would be cool.

[1] - https://www.texashealth.org/areyouawellbeing/Eating-Right/Le... [2] - https://www.erc501c3.org/settlements/6f2zxji0o3m2k4jhcwgg7hd... [3] - https://www.erc501c3.org/settlements/k7p29rie5whpc5qek5kdha2... [4] - https://markcubancompanies.com/companies/labdoor/
by api | 2025-10-13 18:20:31+00:00
I always found this term utterly bizarre. It first showed up in the early days of the mobile "revolution" and felt astroturfed, since no developer would think we need a fundamentally new term for downloading software. It felt like something some dark patterns team came up with to discourage free installation of software on your own device.

Of course maybe I'm overthinking it. It's common for people deep in the bowels of an industry to invent pointless jargon, like "deplane" for getting off an airplane. Anyone know where the term "sideload" was coined or by whom?
by benatkin | 2025-10-13 18:20:34+00:00
This is more versatile than it seems at first glance. Under invariants, it shows that you have arrays/objects only being mutated, so you have stable references. You could use a WeakSet to observe new children of an item coming in. You also may not even need manage this directly - you could debounce and just re-render a UI component by returning a modified virtual DOM. Or if you had a visualization in d3, it would automatically notice which ones are new.
by antonvs | 2025-10-13 18:21:20+00:00
4% is huge. That’s one in every 25 people, about 325 million people in total. The United States contains around 4% of the world’s population, for example.

It’s more than the combined population of the top ten megacities (pop. > 20 million) in the world.

In addition to that, immigrants and refugees are having an outsized influence on politics, and on who gets elected, in many countries around the world.

It’s denying reality to say it “hardly matters”.
by elias_hbg | 2025-10-13 18:21:22+00:00
Im working on a simple website that converts PDFs into audio. I made it essentially because I didn't find a similar website offering the service at a sane price. Also the TTS services in Swedish (where Im from) is pretty limited... it relies on Google TTS. Have a try and feel free to comment if you have suggestions. https://pagevoice.ai
Show HN: A Minimalist Web Novel – Waiting for the Chamomile Tea to Get Cold
by ireliamain | 2025-10-13 18:21:30+00:00
I built a lightweight reading "platform" because I wanted to make something, both technical and creative. I've always loved writing stories, but my wife doesn't enjoy reading in English. That got me thinking about all the web novels written in other languages that I wish I could read without waiting for translations. So I started experimenting with a platform where anyone could publish community web novels and choose which languages to make available. It's not perfect, but I wanted to share teh story and the idea behind it. Hope you enjoy it
by palmotea | 2025-10-13 18:21:38+00:00
> This scenario I gave is one in which humans do still have a comparative advantage: we learn faster, so we can get working on new jobs and make a decent amount in each of them before any given AI has time to master the skills needed for that job's tasks by watching us.

That's pretty terrible outcome too. So what if you learn faster, if your "career" will only last 5-10 years and you have to start over. It would be a profoundly unstable and anti-human lifestyle.

> It will definitely be weird, but I suspect most or all the current big winners are likely to be very unsatisfied. Outside Context Problem.

That's probably true (say, the Waltons will be a lot poorer), but I think the end state remains the same. Maybe it's just Bezos, Musk, Altman, and two dudes TBD harnessing all the word's resources to build ziggurats to memorialize their own power. They key point is all the wealth will be focused in a very few individuals, with no economic need to spread the wealth around. It doesn't really matter if those individuals are an old or new set.
by bluGill | 2025-10-13 18:21:39+00:00
> The whole system is designed to be predictable instead of adaptable because that's what you need to do to do the same thing millions of times.

That final "millions" is the problem. Automation is great and easy when you will do the same thing millions of times. Sure it might cost half a million to program the robot (which itself cost half a million) - but that is $1.00 per part, and it goes down as you make more. When you are only building 10 though a million dollars is a lot of money and so you want humans - or robots that are "CAPABLE of plannings its own motion".

Costs have been going down. In high school I took the class on how to write g-code (I have one free period so I took shop for non-college bound kids for fun even though I was college bound - it was a great time that I highly recommend even though it was only for fun). These days almost everyone just uses their CAD/CAM and isn't even aware that the g-code is supposed to be a human readable programming language. (it probably isn't)
by the__alchemist | 2025-10-13 18:21:56+00:00
Anecdote from someone does a lot of graphics programming. (Building a molecule viewer/editor):

I've only needed matrices exactly once, when building the engine. It does a few standard transforms (model view matrices etc).

The rest is all len-3 Vecs, and unit quaternions. You can use matrices for these, but I'm on team Vec+Quaternion!
by api | 2025-10-13 18:22:16+00:00
The title also correctly describes the relationship between FOSS and cloud SaaS. FOSS is the bone yard and parts catalog that devs go to when building closed platforms to lock in users. It largely exists today to be free labor for SaaS and training data for AI.

I'm not there yet, but I am perilously close to tipping over into believing that making open source software today is actually doing harm by giving more free labor to an exploitative ecosystem. Instead you should charge for your software and try to build an ecosystem where the customer is the customer and not the product.

I stress today because this was not true pre-SaaS or pre-mobile. FOSS was indeed liberating in the PC and early web eras.
by bob1029 | 2025-10-13 18:22:19+00:00
> Noise from inverter fans

Not just the fans. The transformers, inductors, chokes, capacitors, etc can get extremely noisy as well. I have to plug my ears when I walk by the switchgear at my local Walmart's EV install because it is so loud.

Any system that relies on high rate of change of current over time is prone to these issues. Look at the prevalence of coil whine in gaming PCs and workstations now. The level of noise scales almost linearly with current up until you saturate the various magnetic cores. In a multi-megawatt installation of any kind that relies upon inverters, it is plausible that these electromagnetic acoustic effects could cause meaningful habitat destruction on their own.

Traditional synchronous machines (turbines) do not have this issue, but they are not something you want to live next to for reasons on the other end of the acoustic frequency spectrum. Infrasound from a turbine can travel for miles, especially during transient phases of operation. There were a lot of complaints on social media during the commissioning of a new natural gas generator unit in my area last year.
by Zarathruster | 2025-10-13 18:22:28+00:00
> Searle &co assert that there is a real world that has special properties, without providing any way to show that we are living in it

Searle described himself as a "naive realist" although, as was typical for him, this came with a ton of caveats and linguistic escape hatches. This was certainly my biggest objection and I passed many an afternoon in office hours trying to pin him down to a better position.
by treyd | 2025-10-13 18:22:46+00:00
> Is your "wandering" of this sort of pseudo-visual nature, or do you see actual visual images that could be drawn?

They're like if the abstract machines you talk about in CS theory classes were physical objects.

For example, thinking about a data processing pipeline, I might see the different components performing transformations on messages flowing through it. I can focus on one component and think about how it take apart the message to extract the structure it's trying to manipulate, interacts with its local state, etc. If something is active and stateful it feels different than if it's just a plain piece of data. I run the machine through its motions to understand where the complexity is and where things could break, comparing different designs against each other.

I'm thinking about a data format, I think about the relationships between containers, headers, offsets between structures, etc, like pieces that I can move around to see how their relationships change and understand how it would work in practice.

It's more than an image that can be drawn because the pieces are in motion as they operate. It's the same kind of "material" that mathematical objects are made out of when I'm thinking about abstract math. It's immensely useful skill for doing my job, in designing systems.

I actually struggle a lot with translating the systems in my head into prose. To me, certain design decisions are completely obvious and wouldn't need to be stated, so when we all understand the product goals I often to neglect to explain why a certain thing works the way it does, because to me it's completely obvious how it's useful towards achieving the product goals. So that's something I have to actively put more effort into.

I also really struggled when I took a real linear algebra class, since it was taught in a very blackboardy "tabular" style which was harder for me to visualize. I was unfamiliar with it due to being used to thinking about matrices in the context of computer graphics and game engines.
by iamnothere | 2025-10-13 18:23:00+00:00
> How many bazaar projects from even 10 years ago are still maintained?

Uhh, all the big ones in common use? GNU’s massive portfolio of software, Linux, multiple BSDs, Apache, Firefox, BusyBox, PHP, Perl, the many lineages of StarOffice, LaTeX, Debian, vim, fish, tmux, I mean this barely scratches the surface. Are you kidding me?

How many startups have failed over the last decade? I would argue that the norm is for any project to eventually cease. Only useful things with an active community (whether that community is for-profit or not) tend to last, until they are no longer valued enough to maintain. This goes for things in the physical world just as it does for software.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-10-13 18:23:09+00:00
Windows NT is younger than Unix. I'd say the smart money is on the Unix-derived line of operating systems outliving Windows NT by a considerable amount.

However ... the domain of operating systems is subject to weird constraints, and so it's not really appropriate to make some of the observations one might make in other domains. Nevertheless, I thought the point was that we want things to improve via replacement (a "bazaar" model), rather than stand for all time. We don't actually want technology "cathedrals" at all, even if we do appreciate architectural ones.