MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by specialist | 2025-10-04 14:07:08+00:00
I feel ya.

> Unfortunately we need less inclusivity in city planing, that much is clear.

I don't think we need to go that far. :)

It's been long known the NEPA, CEPA, and other safeguards, were fully captured by bad faith actors and in much need of reform. Like closing legal exploits used to thwart any and all development, as you well know.

It's been kind of amazing how quickly YIMBYism has spun up and matured into a scrappy effective advocacy group(s). And we're starting to see progress, payoff, real results.

The recent CEPA reforms are already yielding positive results. eg By short-circuiting environmental reviews for redeveloping properties that are already in built-up areas. Real common sense "well, duh" type reforms.

There's no shortage of needful common sense reforms. I'm now confident these reform efforts will now accelerate. State-by-state, since federal action is currently closed off.

The biggly "abundance"-esque type challenges I worry about are structural and financial. Reforming public utilities, tackling regulatory capture, investment, green banks, industrial policy, etc.

In a nutshell, I want everything promised in the Green New Deal, times at least 4. (Which does account for inclusion, empowerment, environmental justice, and so forth.)
by flohofwoe | 2025-10-04 14:07:26+00:00
Is this a spam/fishing campaign?

I got a spam email from a google group without having subscribed to this group before from 3 hours ago, long before this news item made it to the HN front page (e.g. it's unlikely that somebody else made a typo that resulted in my email address).

In the unlikely case that there are any humans in the loop: please stop doing this sort of 'marketing'.
Show HN: LazyArchon – Terminal-Based Project Management TUI Built with Go
by ysaad | 2025-10-04 14:09:00+00:00
LazyArchon is a powerful, dedicated Terminal User Interface (TUI) for Archon (https://github.com/coleam00/Archon). If you use Archon to manage your projects and tasks, you know the power of its backend, but often a browser is overkill for simple, focused work. LazyArchon solves this by providing a lightning-fast, terminal-native client that allows you to manage your Archon tasks without ever leaving your IDE or command line. Key Features & Design Dedicated Archon Client: Seamlessly connects to your self-hosted Archon instance (e.g., on localhost:8181). It's built specifically to interface with Archon's projects, tasks, statuses, and features. Focused Workflow: Built with developers in mind. Zero distractions and a minimal interface to keep you in the flow state—no browser tabs, no notifications. Vim-like Navigation: Navigate between panels, projects, and tasks instantly using intuitive h/l/j/kkeyboard shortcuts. It feels like a natural extension of your terminal environment. Efficient Task Management: Use simple key presses to manage task status (Todo, Doing, Review, Done) and assign features to tasks. Tech Stack: Written in Go and leveraging the excellent Bubble Tea TUI framework for a single, cross-platform binary (Linux, macOS, Windows). Important Context & Current Limitations LazyArchon is an early-stage tool focused on efficient consumption and update of Archon data. It requires a running Archon API server. LazyArchon is the client; Archon is the project database/backend. Current functionality: It excels at browsing, filtering, and rapidly updating task statuses. What's next: We are prioritizing adding task creation forms, advanced editing, and a robust configuration system in the immediate future. We welcome your feedback on this approach to terminal-based project management. Check out the demo and source code below!

Tool Website & Demo: https://lazyarchon.yousfisaad.com/ Archon Backend (Required): https://github.com/coleam00/Archonhttps://github.com/coleam0... LazyArchon GitHub: https://github.com/yousfisaad/lazyarchon
by caymanjim | 2025-10-04 14:09:06+00:00
There's a reason life is carbon-based, and it's not random. It's the only element that works, due to abundance; ability to form many bonds; bonds that are just durable enough but not too durable. There's plenty of sci-fi about silicon-based life, but that's infeasible fantasy. And no other elements have any hope. If you have carbon-based life, you need water as solvent and medium.

It's a pretty safe assumption that all life requires water.
by dvt | 2025-10-04 14:09:16+00:00
> actual domain experts

Calling a VC a "domain expert" is like calling an alcoholic a "libation engineer." VC blogs are, in the best case, mildly informative, and in the worst, borderline fraudulent (the Sequoia SBF piece being a recent example, but there are hundreds).

The incentives are, even in a true "domain expert" case (think: doctors, engineers, economists), often opaque. But when it comes to VCs, this gets ratcheted up by an order of magnitude.
by ahsdgTra | 2025-10-04 14:09:28+00:00
Show the Ellison and Blair interviews to your students. They are not even hiding their agenda (interviews start at 9:29):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BLZ3pmQTZA

"Citizens will be on their best behavior." (almost exact quote)

"We will use these wonderful technologies to gather and connect data about everyone." (paraphrased)
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-10-04 14:09:28+00:00
I don't know how I would live my life without access to mainstream mobile apps. I have to use an app to pay for the laundry machine in my apartment building. At school—I'm a teacher nowadays—we use an app to mark student attendance during fire drills.

Freedom of speech should not require living in the woods secluded from society. It is the responsibility of all of us—especially major institutions—to work to preserve that. I can't do it on my own.
by davidferguson | 2025-10-04 14:09:41+00:00
I stumbled across the article about the ThunderScan in about 2012 when looking for info about ImageWriter II upgrades, and have been slightly obsessed ever since. It's such a brilliant idea - a higher resolution scanner, that was far lower in cost than its competitors, achieved by reusing the paper transport that most customers already had.

I'm lucky enough to own two working ThunderScans now (and one third one that I needed the software driver from). They work exactly as advertised, and it's a joy to see them zip across the page, digitising line by line.

The software by Hertzfeld is another joy to use. The scrolling, which Hertzfeld calls "inertial scrolling" in that article, is now familiar to us all who have used touchscreen devices. It's funny to think that the feature that wowed so many at the 2007 iPhone launch actually existed all the way back in 1984, designed by one of the key creators of the Macintosh.

I wish there were more creative hacks like this - I just know that if a company tried to do something similar today, the printer manufacturer would instantly roll out an update to break this functionality.
by ijk | 2025-10-04 14:10:00+00:00
Some of that is, or at least was, down to the training: extending the context window but not training on sufficiently long data or using weak evaluation metrics caused issues. More recent models have been getting better, though long context performance is still not as good as short context performance, even if the definition of "short context" has been greatly extended.

RoPE is great and all, but doesn't magically give 100% performance over the lengthened context; that takes more work.
by Spivak | 2025-10-04 14:10:25+00:00
If you expect people to take real-life inconvenience over an abstract perceived freedom you will be disappointed until the day you die. People buy computing devices to do things. If the device has freedom but can't do the things they want it's a really cool paperweight.

Streaming services which lock you into DRM won over the slightly inconvenient but free thing.

Your time will always better be spent getting government to make the convenient thing more free than trying to move a river by gathering people with buckets.
by spaceballbat | 2025-10-04 14:11:00+00:00
Looking at the last chapter of the essay, there was a lot of illegal activity by lucent in the runup to the collapse. Today, We won’t know the list of shady practices until the bubble bursts. I doubt Tom could legally speculate, he’d likely be sued into oblivion if he even hinted at malfeasance by these trillion dollar companies.
by howieburger | 2025-10-04 14:11:04+00:00
Government will just hijack the domain as they have with torrents and other things they don't like

Am working on a mobile app that requires in person keygen/sharing via Bluetooth, syncs selected data between devices once keys exchanged and new local IP is shared (over something like Signal; discovery is hard/expensive so I am going with a low tech manual option to notify peers how to reconnect)

Flood the field with alternatives to keep The Man on his toes and distracted.

The main problem with hyper normalized and streamlined society is it just makes it easier for The Man to spot and squash dissent. What is dissent when the people are peacefully not following orders by making passive surveillance difficult.
by hackthemack | 2025-10-04 14:11:24+00:00
I worked at a mom and pop ISP in the 90s. Lucent did seem at the forefront of internet equipment at the time. We used Portmaster 3s to handle dial up connections. We also looked into very early wireless technology from Lucent.

Something I wanted to mention, only somewhat tanget. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 forced telecommunication companies to lease out their infrastructure. It massively reduced the prices an ISP had to pay to get T1, because, suddenly, there was competition. I think a T1 went from 1800 a month in 1996, to around 600 a month in 1999. It was a long time ago, so my memory is hazy.

But, wouldn't you know it, the Telecommunication companies sued the FCC and the Telecommunications Act was gutted in 2003

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_car...
by osigurdson | 2025-10-04 14:12:00+00:00
People are doing real companies with Zig (e.g. Tiger Beetle) and important projects (e.g. Ghostty) without the 1.0 backward compatibility guarantee. Zig must be doing something right. Maybe this also keeps opinionated 9-5er, enterprise type devs out of it as well which might be a good thing :).
by rwallace | 2025-10-04 14:12:14+00:00
To clarify a couple of things:

I'm aware of the reasons Linux uses doubly linked lists. I'm still of the opinion this design decision made a lot of sense in the 1990s, and would make less sense in a new project today. You may disagree, and that's fine! Engineering is constrained by hard truths, but within those constraints, is full of judgment calls.

I'm not a member of the evangelical Rust community. I'm not proclaiming 'thou shalt rewrite it all in Rust'. Maybe you have good reasons to use something else. That's fine.

But if you are considering Rust, and are concerned about its ability to handle cyclic data structures, there are ways to do it, that don't involve throwing out all the benefits the language offers.
by popovicu | 2025-10-04 14:12:23+00:00
I was recently frustrated with the IDEs and tooling in general imposed by some of the hardware brands (the FPGA was especially kiling me!). I decided to explore would it be possible to program a microcontroller without annoying IDEs and expensive accessories, and I didn't want any pre-made development board either. So I got an AVR microcontroller, programmed it with mainline GCC only and flashed it with avrdude (another free and open source tool, easy to use) via AVR Dragon. The AVR Dragon bit I admit is a bit fancy, I just had it laying around, but even a spare Arduino can be used to program another AVR chip.
by ben_w | 2025-10-04 14:12:47+00:00
> By that I mean, those were the last consoles where performance improvements delivered truly new experiences, where the hardware mattered.

I hope that's where we are, because that means my experience will still be valuable and vibe coding remains limited to "only" tickets that take a human about half a day, or a day if you're lucky.

Given the cost needed for improvements, it's certainly not implausible…

…but it's also not a sure thing.

I tried "Cursor" for the first time last week, and just like I've been experiencing every few months since InstructGPT was demonstrated, it blew my mind.

My game metaphor is 3D graphics in the 90s: every new release feels amazing*, such a huge improvement over the previous release, but behind the hype and awe there was enough missing for us to keep that cycle going for a dozen rounds.

* we used to call stuff like this "photorealistic": https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ktyr1/unreal_yes_th...
by narmiouh | 2025-10-04 14:12:55+00:00
I think the fundamental issue is the uncertainty of achieving AGI with baked in fundamentals of reasoning.

Almost 90% of topline investments appear to be geared around achieving that in the next 2-5 years.

If that doesn’t come to pass soon enough, investors will loose interest.

Interest has been maintained by continuous growth in benchmark results. Perhaps this pattern can continue for another 6-12 months before fatigue sets in, there are no new math olympiads to claim a gold medal on…

Whats next is to show real results, in true software development, cancer research, robotics.

I am highly doubtful the current model architecture will get there.
by davedx | 2025-10-04 14:13:12+00:00
Think some of that (the dialog and friends) is the wrong way around: we wouldn’t have gotten all those nice DOM native components if libraries and frameworks hadn’t popularised them and driven adoption into the standards.

I am not sure I agree “the state of front end development” is due to “functional purism” either. React just provided a good abstraction that worked well for many people. It’s a meritocracy. If the abstraction that worked best (however we measure that) had been something more OOP then that would have been adopted.
by chasd00 | 2025-10-04 14:13:55+00:00
Tangent but I have a 2016 Toyota 4Runner. Great car and fits my family and needs perfectly. The key fob broke so I needed to get a replacement, I got a blank and had a locksmith cut and program the blank. He must have not done it right because it worked and then I got stranded cause it must have lost its pair to the car or something. Nothing wrong with the vehicle, the engine wouldn’t start because of the key. I do road trips through the desert SW and other remote places, if I have the key I need the car to start no matter what. I really don’t want my keys to require a battery either. I wish there was a way to bypass the rfid/BLE or whatever it is.
by alephnerd | 2025-10-04 14:14:03+00:00
Tom has had a fairly solid track record at Redpoint and now Theory in Data, Enterprise SaaS, and AI/ML. And it's not like we see many posts by engineers, doctors, or economists on HN either - most posts are listicles about the "culture" of technology, an increased amount of political articles growing increasingly tenuously related to the tech industry, and a portion of actually interesting technical content.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-10-04 14:14:18+00:00
95% (actual percentage) of Teslas sold are Model 3 or Model Y, so one can cut that sales figure in half and still reasonably compare to the sales of another model.

>And that’s without going into the various battery issues and the now conflicting electricity interests between EV and AI.

I do not understand what this means. Isn't the same gas used to power vehicles used to power turbines that provide electricity?
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-10-04 14:14:30+00:00
While I agree, one must be careful anyway. I'm ignorant in most fields, reasonably good at two, and quite good (but far from excellent) in one. So while there is a lot to learn in the former, when it comes to the latter, all LLMs, including SOTA models, give me a very high percentage of answers that are misleading, wrong, dangerously incomplete, only superficially correct, amalgamate of correct and incorrect bits etc. Knowing this first hand, repeatedly, on hundreds and hundreds of issues, I basically built a deep, methodological distrust towards LLMs answers. In the end, I assume the answer to be wrong, but I look for verifiable hints that could lead me in the right direction. This is my default working mode in my niche.
by madeofpalk | 2025-10-04 14:14:36+00:00
Not sure I agree with the tone of the article, but I do find that Javascript developers have a weird relationship with "functional programming". I see so much convoluted code with arr.reduce() or many chained arr.map().filter().filter().map(), that would just be so much simpler and easier to read if it was a classic for-loop. I suggest this to people and they scoff at the thought of using a for-loop in Javascript.

> Consider the humble modal dialog. The web has <dialog>, a native element with built-in functionality. [...] Now observe what gets taught in tutorials, bootcamps, and popular React courses: build a modal with <div> elements

The dialog element is new! Only broadly supported since 2022. I find it hard to fault existing material not using it. Things like dialog, or a better select, are notable because they were lacking for so long.
by xbmcuser | 2025-10-04 14:15:16+00:00
With all the major players like Amzn, Msft and Alphabet going for their own custom chips and restrictions on selling to China it will be interesting to see how Nvidia does.

I personally would prefer China to get to parity on node size and get competitive with nvidia. As that is the only way I see the world not being taken over by the tech oligarchy.
by JCM9 | 2025-10-04 14:16:02+00:00
To be clear when I said “finance folks” I wasn’t really referring to VCs. I’m talking more family office types that manage big pools of money that you don’t know about. The super wealthy class that has literally has more money than the King but would be horrified if you knew their name. Old money types. They’re well aware of the “dumb VC” vibe that just throws money after hype. The finance folks I’m talking about are the type that eat failed VCs for lunch.
by jackconsidine | 2025-10-04 14:17:01+00:00
The graph shoes interquartile range, so this wouldn't be a factor, but worth noting: baseball also changed its rules on extra inning games in the past few years which speeds things up. A runner starts on second base which reduces the 0-run extra innings that are responsible for the 19 inning game I remember as a kid. [0]

[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-jul-10-sp-alrdp...
by Y_Y | 2025-10-04 14:17:57+00:00
Seems to me like it would be a great opportunity to make a list of subversives, judt by exfiltrating their identity via the "app". Cooperation from the developer is optional.

There's precious little reason to distribute as an app, except for exploiting the user. If all you wanted to do was show things on a map then the web is already well set up for that. In fact the apps are probably just embedding a web browser anyway (haven't checked).

I'm no fan of ICE, but I wouldn't trust these developers either.
by warent | 2025-10-04 14:18:09+00:00
You’re getting a lot of negative feedback for whatever reason, but you’re absolutely right.

I for one remember reading about possible silicon/methane based life, etc. Actually, here’s a whole wikipedia article on what you’re talking about.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_bioche...

Perhaps HN folks will lose your scent now and direct their snark there
by falcor84 | 2025-10-04 14:18:33+00:00
I think I understand what you're saying, but disagree with the implication. If anything, I'm actually impressed by how the development of AI seems to me be making it more and more difficult for us to move the goalpoasts.

There obviously still are many opportunities for us to make fun of the capability of GenAI, but it's getting harder to come up with the "clever" (as you said) prompt. They mostly don't add supernumerary fingers any more, and generally don't make silly arithmetic mistakes on a single prompt. We need to look for more complex and longer-time-horizon tasks to make them fail, and in many situations, the tasks are as likely to trip up a human as they would an AI.

Indeed your comment reminded me of Plato's Dialogues, which mostly involve Socrates intentionally trying to trip up his conversation partner in a contradiction. Reading these didn't ever make me feel that Socrates's partner is not intelligent or really has a deep underlying issue in their mental model, but rather that Socrates (at least as written up by Plato) is very clever and good at rhetoric. Same in regards to AI - I don't see our ability to make them fail as illustrating a lack of intelligence, just that in some ways we are more intelligent or have more relevant experience.

And if you're concerned about making a prediction and all you can fall back of on is a "I know it when I see it" argument, then to me that is as strong a signal as can be that there's no hard line separating between artificial intelligence and human intelligence.
by mkovach | 2025-10-04 14:18:58+00:00
A summer afternoon, static on the radio, the low hum of an announcer calling balls and strikes like he’s reading scripture in a Midwest church. Baseball used to be stitched together with silence. You heard the game as much in the pauses as in the plays.

Then the voice came in. Once the game hit the airwaves, it slowed. Had to. The ball waited for the broadcast.

Out of the dead-ball fog came the home run. No more bunting, no more clever thefts of second. Now it was swing, admire, trot. Alongside the homers came the walks and the strikeouts. Fewer balls in play. More staring, less running. Time thickened, and the nature of the game was trending towards longer games.

World War II shaved minutes from the clock. With so many players overseas, the talent pool shrank. The games got shorter because they became simpler. When the talent came back, the games got longer, largely because, after 1947, the game was flooded with previously segregated talent and players who were returning from overseas.

In the 60s, pitchers took over. Dominance from the mound. ERAs dropped. Batting averages plummeted. In 1968 they called it the Year of the Pitcher, then called the rulebook to fix it. Scoring came back, and with it, longer games.

Television followed with commercial breaks and camera angles. The game had to pause for sponsors. The seventh-inning stretch now came with a soft drink.

In the 70s, the bullpen became a revolving door. Specialists. Situational matchups. Every pitching change added minutes. Coaches walked the mound like they were heading to confession.

And the game kept expanding. OPS rose. More runners meant more pitches. More strikeouts meant more throws. Every batter became a saga.

If you look at the graph, you can see a trend that matches well with changes in baseball. We could probably break down every high and low to describe the shift based on rules, personal changes, etc.

Then came the pitch clock. No more dawdling. No more meditative pacing between pitches. And now a reliever has to face at least three batters in an inning. No more one-pitch exits.

It’s not that baseball got lazy. It got layered, commercialized, optimized, and strategized, but it forgot about time management.

The graph shows an outline, with the trends representing a chapter in baseball history, which is very cool.
by prewett | 2025-10-04 14:19:37+00:00
But all your numbers (except maybe top 5% one) are completely made up. Strong beliefs don't prevent one from being completely wrong. Neville Chamberlain has a strong belief that he had ensured peace; Einstein had a strong belief that quantum theory's "spooky action at a distance" was incorrect. Both were wrong. Fifty years is a long time, and anything could happen. The last fifty years had the fall of Communism, the EU, China going from an impoverished countryside to a superpower, video phones in our pocket, social media upending communication and mental health, renewable energy displacing coal, Trump, etc.