MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pretext-1 | 2025-10-15 19:36:51+00:00
A lot of small things. For example importing Live Photos. On macOS when you drag and drop an image and video file with the same name into the Photos app, the Photos app combines both into a single Live Photo. On iOS/iPadOS this does not work.

There is bigger things too. A proper web browser for example. Google Docs is barely usable in Safari on iPad with larger documents. The permanent banner at the top asking you to install the app is so annoying. The Google Docs app is somehow even worse. And it’s not just Google apps. Many iPad apps are just upscaled iPhone apps with lots of features missing compared to the web version. And don’t even think about support for multiple tabs or windows in apps.

For YouTube and Netflix my iPad Pro is great but anything beyond hurts. And this is the „Pro“ model. You can say maybe I’m too advanced for the „Pro“ but most users have _something_ besides of YouTube and Netflix they want to do and will feel these limitations sooner or later. It’s it not a laptop replacement and Apple wouldn’t want it to be.
by tptacek | 2025-10-15 19:37:07+00:00
I still have agents (Sketch.dev mostly) produce PRs offline for me! I'm very optimistic. This is the second most important thing to have happened in my career (#1: the Internet; #3: mobile; #4: not writing everything in C). Nothing has changed. But yeah, I still line-by-line audit everything the agent spits out, and I still take the wheel myself about half the time. If everything stopped right here and no further progress was made on any of this technology and my workflow remained the same, this would remain the second most important thing.
Show HN: TrueState – AI chatbot to analyse data with natural language
by emobill | 2025-10-15 19:37:30+00:00
Hi HN, we're TrueState, a Sydney-based team of engineers. Together we've built a platform that helps non-technical and semi-technical users analyse their data with AI.

Back in the pre-agentic IDE days, we found ourselves leaning heavily on ChatGPT for writing SQL queries, Matplotlib plotting code, and Pandas transformations. But a lack of sufficient context often meant we spent more time debugging than we actually saved.

As recovering consultants and enterprise data team members, we also were haunted by the ad-hoc requests from executives that ate up all of our time.

We envisioned an application that would let us interact directly with our data - a bot that could reliably compose, run, debug, and analyse our queries for us.

Enter the TrueState Analytics Agent. Built on top of our cloud infrastructure, in under five minutes anyone can register, upload a dataset, and start chatting in the browser.

TrueState brings business and data teams together in a shared context workspace - combining a chat interface for real-time insights with an analytics environment where analysts can query, visualise, build dashboards, and orchestrate pipelines that train models end-to-end.

Our goal is to let business and analytics teams move faster together - automating the repetitive work so analysts can focus on modelling and experimentation.

We’d love to hear what you think, and any feedback you have! We’re still a small team, so please be nice . Following the link will let you sign up with $20 in free credit to get started. Try the demo on the classic Titanic dataset, or upload your own data!
by palmotea | 2025-10-15 19:37:38+00:00
> One of our teams is in Bangaluru with ~100 folks and maybe 8 of them bother using anglicized names in calls/emails.

Also I've gotten the impression that at least a few my coworkers in Bangalore with anglicized names are Christian. I haven't pried to confirm, but in a couple cases their names don't fit the pattern of being adopted for working with foreigners (e.g. their last name is biblical).
by bigyabai | 2025-10-15 19:37:53+00:00
Depends on what you're comparing to. Many people will point to OpenGL and Vulkan as comparisons, which is fair. But those are just the Open Source alternatives, and Metal itself is a proprietary solution competing against other well-designed alternatives like DirectX and NVN.

I think Metal's ergonomics advantage is a much slimmer lead when you consider the other high-level APIs it competes with.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-15 19:38:07+00:00
> Bundling is a very classic example of an attempt to circumvent free market economics, using the greater importance of one choice to dictate a second choice.

Only when there's no competition and you can use that to abuse market power.

But competition for laptops is strong. Most consumers want their laptops to come with a charger, even if you personally don't. That's why they're sold that way.

Like, nobody says the free market is failing because Coke forces me to buy carbonated H2O along with their syrup at the grocery store. The market prefers it when they're bundled.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-15 19:38:24+00:00
> But it's not possible to keep maintaining 32-bit forever.

Apple had the money to support it, we both know that. They just didn't respect their Mac owners enough, Apple saw more value in making them dogfood iOS changes since that's where all the iOS devs are held captive. Security was never a realistic excuse considering how much real zombie code still exists in macOS.

Speaking personally, I just wanted Apple to wait for WoW64 support to hit upstream. Their careless interruption of my Mac experience is why I ditched the ecosystem as a whole. If Apple cannot invest in making it a premium experience, I'll take my money elsewhere.
by wat10000 | 2025-10-15 19:38:30+00:00
I think he's saying software is essential, not that it's the only thing. He contrasts the iPod with products from Japanese companies, which tend to make great hardware with crap software, and that software difference is why the iPod beat them.

Modern Apple is also quite a bit more integrated. A company designing their own highly competitive CPUs is more hardware-oriented than one that gets their CPUs off the shelf from Intel.
by zippyman55 | 2025-10-15 19:38:54+00:00
This helps to explain a lot to me. I had been on a pastor selection committee to obtain a new pastor for my church. Our previous awesome pastor had to leave when the church voted to become more conservative and this conflicted with his military reserve Chaplain obligation. We were incrementally stepping thru the process of identifying a new pastor when a very rich guy swooped in to help “plant a new church” and whoosh, next thing we knew, we had a new pastor and we had bypassed everything we had been doing. I left, for various other reasons. I hear growth has increased in the church, but my observations when I encounter still current church members, their nucleus of friends has not increased outside of the original contacts they had maintained before the new church. I always ask why we are helping these people when they have this large-scale church they belong to; and I wonder why there are never any new people who show up at these social events. I can’t say I hear complaints, but I wonder if there is an “enshitification” that can take place in these events as people work to increase membership.
by steveBK123 | 2025-10-15 19:39:16+00:00
I think the other problem with UBI, besides the fact that we can't afford it .. is that its probably actually bad for society.

Many problems come from an increasing lack of purpose in society. Getting paid to do nothing will not solve that for probably 99% of the population. Lots of idle time for lots of bored people is like pouring gasoline on a fire.
by bunderbunder | 2025-10-15 19:39:44+00:00
What's even more dangerous is when senior tech leadership used to be technical but haven't actually got their hands dirty in 5 or 10 years, and don't realize that this means they aren't actually holding all the cards when they try to dictate these kinds of tactical, detail-oriented technical decisions.

I see this a lot in startups that grew big before they had a chance to grow up.
by Aperocky | 2025-10-15 19:40:08+00:00
Why is this functionality needed in the first place? I want to write log, some kind of string, into some kind of files, with rotation, maybe even send it somewhere that expect logs.

Why parse whatever is in the logs, at all?

Imagine the same stuff in your SSH client, it would parse the content before sending them over because a functionality requires it to talk to some server somewhere, it's insanity.
by dijit | 2025-10-15 19:40:24+00:00
Ok, so.. I don't know how to say this without sounding insensitive, but I'm a pretty traditional looking (albeit perhaps short) British, blue-eyed, white guy.

I have seriously never had a positive interaction with the US border force. Wether it's the TSA or another associated organisation (since I've been pestered by people who are not TSA).

I've been detained, questioned, randomly selected, given contradictory rules by different people, had things randomly confiscated and even been insulted.

I'm not confrontational, and I don't believe I stand out.

I have had exactly ONE positive interaction (in 2011) whereby I had accidentally travelled with a pocket knife in my checked luggage and due to the fact I was not allowed to check my luggage on the return journey (due to the train being delayed going into Newark; seriously, I understand why Americans distrust public transport) - I told the TSA agent about it and he was kind regarding it, offering condolences, but obviously destroying the knife.

I'm not sure if I'm on some kind of easing program to disincentivise me in particular from visiting the US, but I could easily see that if I was anything other than what I am in terms of race/religion/looks/citizenship: that I would presume that this was the reason.

And, for context, I've been to the US on average twice per year in the last 15 years, so this is my experience from around 30 trips, and 60-ish interactions with the international air apparatus.

It's a pretty decent country once I'm in though, though I wouldn't want to live there.

EDIT: I'm not sure why the parent is being downvoted, his anecdote is the same as mine.
by alsetmusic | 2025-10-15 19:40:42+00:00
This is very cool. It's immediately going in the stash of links I label as tools. I'll share with a couple of other people who I know will appreciate it as well. Thanks for building and sharing!

It would be nice to have an export to csv option for the results of a given search. I saw that the HTML includes all models of devices rather than just what's being displayed. Automating the output to a file would be a nice-to-have feature.

However, I discovered that the table was formatted well enough that I was able to copy the results directly into a spreadsheet. The "Price per TB" header and the "Price" header were flipped, so I corrected them. But this means that I don't trust the spreadsheet to be without other errors (especially as some cells in the web page were blank or empty). If I see something in spreadsheet that grabs my interest, I'm going to assume that it's wrong until I confirm that it's right, but that's not a big deal if errors are few. Time will tell.

Thanks again! This is awesome, plus so minimal and lightweight. I love it.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-15 19:40:43+00:00
> This logical fallacy is a False Dichotomy (also known as a False Dilemma or Black-and-White Fallacy)

Fair enough. Saying "negative stereotyping of a whole group is racism" also permits neutral stereotyping not being racist.

That said, don't you see the problem with ruling out any negative stereotype? Populations have characteristics. Those characteristics can be judged positive, neutral and negative from a given perspective. Not every perspective that judges a population is racially animated. (And not all judging from afar is wrong. To say otherwise dismisses history and anthropology--which study people separated from us by the much-less bridgeable time--as practical fields.)

Dostoevsky and Turgenev consistently portrayed the imperial Russian peasantry in a baseline state of misery. That wasn't racism. It was--based on what I know--an accurate description of their state. I'm (in part) ethnically Indian. I don't think someone saying that Indians were despearate and divided when the East India Company landed would be speaking racially insensitively.
by bariumbitmap | 2025-10-15 19:41:33+00:00
The article argues that giving control of education back to the states was a mistake:

> States were given latitude to spend their funds as they saw fit, which, it seems, was a mistake. Instead of funding high-quality tutoring programs or other programs that benefited students, districts spent money for professional development or on capital expenditures such as replacing HVAC systems and obtaining electric buses. “The scientific term for this is that we didn’t get jack shit out of that money,” says Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education-policy think tank. “There are some studies that can detect small impacts, but they’re small. I think it’s also fair to say that a lot of the money was wasted.”

> Then, in 2015, Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, which returned responsibility for improving low-performing schools to the states. But according to Martin West, the academic dean of Harvard’s education school, “most states have not been particularly ambitious in the design of those systems.”
by robenkleene | 2025-10-15 19:41:36+00:00
What software do you find to be higher quality and why? That's the only valid way of even trying to have this conversation.

E.g., I'd rank something like VS Code "lower quality" because when I launch VS Code, I can see each layer of the UI pop in as it's created, e.g., first I see a blank window, then I see window chrome being loaded, then a I see a row of icons being loaded on the left. This gives an impression of the software not being solid, because it feels like the application is struggling just to display the UI.

> I also think you're confusing what I wrote. It's not a competition.

> I have just found that Apple's hardware on desktop has been stronger than their software, in my experience (periodic sporadic use, ~2006->now).

I disagree with this, the only way to make an argument that Apple has deficiencies in their software is to demonstrate that other software is higher quality than Apples. Otherwise it could just be Apple's quality level is the maximum feasible level of quality.

> unremarkable (notes, calendar, contacts!?) and awkward (pages, numbers, keynote).

This is laughable, Notes is unremarkable? Give me a break, and Keynote is awkward? Have you ever Google'd how people feel about these applications?

I'd argue a critic only has value if they're willing to offer their own taste for judgement.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-15 19:42:29+00:00
> I have seriously never had a positive interaction with the US border force. Wether it's the TSA or another associated organisation (since I've been pestered by people who are not TSA)

The trick is to pay to not interact. Global Entry, TSA PreCheck with Digital ID, et cetera.

And for the record, I'm dark-eyed and brown skinned. There are absolutely racists in the Trump administration. But they don't seem to have co-opted this element yet. Instead, it just presents the classic American preference for wealth.

(Note: I'm not endorsing the system. TSA PreCheck makes sense; the fee for it does not. Same for Global Entry.)
by sailingparrot | 2025-10-15 19:42:51+00:00
Its a DGX dev box, for those (not consumers) that will ultimately need to run their code on large DGX clusters where a failure or a ~3% slowdown of training ends up costing tens of thousands of dollars.

That's the use case, not running LLM efficiently, and you can't do that with a RTX5090.
by decimalenough | 2025-10-15 19:43:03+00:00
Most Western countries (except the US, as noted) now have legit visa free access to China. No e-visa, no ESTA, no advance notice, no nothing, just rock up and get stamped in.

https://www.visaforchina.cn/DEL3_EN/tongzhigonggao/327343163...

And to be clear, this is not the previous restricted "X hours transit, don't leave the city" thing, but a full blown 30 day entry permit valid for the entire country (minus Tibet), any port of entry, any port of departure.

Yes, this is a massive departure from their previous policy, but yes, it's real. Having also gone through the regular China visa process multiple times in the past, I could hardly believe it myself when I used it earlier this year.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-10-15 19:43:09+00:00
I'm curious why EV chargers seem to have so many more problems with vandalism than gas pumps. Is it just because EV chargers are typically not "manned" in any way? Or do we simply not hear about vandalized gas pumps because gas stations are so ubiquitous and themselves have more refueling points than a charge station to where occasional vandalism doesn't really affect the ability of people to refuel?

Or, option 3: culture war idiocy?
by keeda | 2025-10-15 19:43:43+00:00
Something the article glosses over is that we are the scariest monster in the woods because we are intelligent. We can "survive, adapt, control, kill, or wipe out" anything or anybody else because our intelligence lets us outsmart nature and other people.

And now we've created some form of intelligence that none of us really understands.

Whether it is "real" intelligence or a "stochastic parrot" does not matter if it shows similar capabilities as us. Worse, it's similar but different in ways we cannot explain! I mean, if it outperforms most humans on advanced tasks but then makes elementary mistakes that a 4-year old won't, isn't that weird?

"Weird" can be good or bad, and I usually like "weird"... but now we're rapidly giving it tools to affect the real world and exponentially expanding the scale at which it can operate. We don't know what weird compounded at that scale and capability extrapolates to. Whether it is a SkyNet or a Bond supervillain or an Asimov scenario, the potential risks are considerable and unpredictable.

It's fair to be concerned about another monster in the woods even if we created it ourselves, because we've equipped it with the same powers we possess without understanding how they work.
by swat535 | 2025-10-15 19:44:11+00:00
> They really have Monday morning and Monday afternoon mass? Friday afternoon? This seems like a lot more activity than the Catholic churches that I know.

Yes! For Catholics, there are daily Masses (and the Priest performs them, even if no one shows up!) in addition there is all of the other services they perform: Baptisms, Confessions, etc.

Then there is pastoral administration tasks, writing Homilies, etc.. then you have many important months where additional work is required..

You also have all other programs that Church organizes, including charity works, various community groups, etc..

I can't speak for Protestants however, since I'm a Catholic but if there are any hanging around here, they can clarify.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-10-15 19:44:44+00:00
My mother (75) is on her fourth ipad now. They are amazing devices for non technical users. My father bought her a laptop (some cheap windows thing) before she got her first ipad and asked here "are you happy with it". And she went "it's just a computer". She's not a gamer. Computers were for boring admin and banking stuff in her mind. Something that lives on a desk far away from the living room. Having to go there to browse the internet wasn't fun. She just had no interest in the whole thing. So he brought it back to the store and got an ipad instead. Life changing event.

Key feature: she can sit on the couch and use it. She does that all the time. It's a much more approachable device. She does everything on it. She plays a lot of bridge both on the ipad and in real life. So, she's even playing online games. Really fun when she randomly starts swearing at some dumb witted random co-player on the internet.

I'm not into IOS myself but I appreciate it for what it is and does. Steve Jobs nailed that one. I have a mac book pro but I have an Android phone. For me a phone is dumb read only device. Typing on it sucks. The screen is to clumsy and tiny for properly enjoying content, the camera is alright but I don't use that a lot. It's a device for reading hacker news and a few other things. I actually take most calls via my laptop. It even fails its primary job as a communication device for me.

Anyway, the key thing with this ipad is the built in apple phone chips. No more qualcomm. They can just put this thing in any device now. I'm not sure what's holding them back with their laptops. I'm guessing there's some Qualcomm IP and patents that might make that a bit expensive. But it's 2025. Why can't my laptop not connect to 5G networks without dongles, thethering, or other nonsense? The key blocker was always Qualcomm. Problem solved you'd think. Apparently, they are not going there yet. Maybe next year.
by paweladamczuk | 2025-10-15 19:44:47+00:00
I remember using my first Apple product years ago, it was an iPod touch 4th gen. The quality of the software on that thing was in a completely different league compared to anything I had used before.

I also installed the iOS 26 update recently. The competitive advantage of software polish that Apple had seems totally gone.

Add to that bugs in iCloud, AirDrop... I don't think I will be buying any more Apple devices for myself.
by janalsncm | 2025-10-15 19:44:56+00:00
Just because something works doesn’t mean it’s optimal. If you can get the same output with a cheaper or faster process, there’s a clear business justification.

However, you are right that engineer salaries have to be factored in. If expensive engineers are unfamiliar with an old process, it will take them a lot longer and the break even point will be pushed out farther.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-15 19:45:16+00:00
That's a lot of words to say "LLMs think very much like humans do".

Haven't you noticed? Humans also happen to be far, far better at language than they are at math or logic. By a long shot too. Language acquisition is natural - any healthy human who was exposed to other humans during development would be able to pick up their language. Learning math, even to elementary school level, is something that has to be done on purpose.

Humans use pattern matching and associative abstract thinking - and use that to fall into stupid traps like "1kg of steel/feather" or "age of the captain". So do small LLMs.
by mattmanser | 2025-10-15 19:45:24+00:00
I think it's hard as he's done a huge article about coding with agents, with no code examples.

You can go look at his GitHub but it's a bewildering array of projects. I've had a bit of a poke around at a few of the seemingly more recent ones. Bit odd though as in one he's gone heavy on TS classes and another heavy on functions. Might be he was just contributing to one as it was under a different account.

And a lot of them seem to be tools that wrap a lot of cli tools. There is a ton of scaffolding code, to handle a ton of cli options. A LOT of logger stmts, one file I randomly opened was a logger stmt every other line.

So it's hard to judge, I found it hard to wade through the code as it's basically just a bunch of option handling for tool calls. It didn't really do much. But necessary, probably?

Just very different code than I need to write.

And there are some weird tells that make it hard to believe.

For example, he talks about refactoring for useEffect in React but I KNOW GPT5 is really rubbish at it.

Some code it's given me recently was littered with useEffect and useMemo when it wasn't needed. Then when challenged it got rid of some, then changed other stuff to useEffect when again, it wasnt needed.

And then got all confused and basically blew it's top.

Yet this person says he can just chuck a basic prompt at his codex cli, running GPT5 and it magically refractors the bad useEffects?

How are we getting such different results?