MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-10-12 23:21:55+00:00
"FOSS won so decisively on the supply side" because it's basically giving away something that would ordinarily cost money. Anyone can "win" by giving away something of value away for free; it's not a victory that's worth anything.

What those adopters are not doing is opening their own source code as FOSS or contributing back to FOSS. That means that there isn't a path to future success.
by what-the-grump | 2025-10-12 23:23:21+00:00
I just don't think so, these exceptionally intelligent people are masters at pattern recognition, logic, hyper-focus, task completion in a field. Every single thing will tell them don't go against the flow, don't stick your neck out, don't be a hero, don't take on risk. Or you will end up nailed to a cross.

To me this is an insane position to take or to expect from anyone, its some just world fallacy thing perpetuated by too much Hollywood.

I am going to flip the script for a minute. I am a killer, driver, pilot, mechanic one the best ones out there, I beat the game, I won. So let me just stop and change the world, for what?
by mmh0000 | 2025-10-12 23:23:25+00:00
I did something similar with Whisper a year or so ago.

9 years ago, when my now wife and I were dating, we took a long cross-country road trip, and for a lot of it, we listened to NPR's Ask Me Another (a comedy trivia game).

Anyway, on one random episode, there was a joke in the show that just perfectly fit what we were doing at that exact moment. We laughed and laughed and soon forgot about it.

Years later, I wanted to find that again and purposely recreate the same moment.

I downloaded all 300 episodes as MP3s. I used Whisper to generate text transcripts, followed by a little bit of grepping, and I found the one 4-second joke that otherwise would have been lost to time.
by techblueberry | 2025-10-12 23:23:30+00:00
I’m watching Ken Burns Documentary on the Dust Bowl, and interesting that one of the causes of the dust bowl was a wheat hype cycle in western Oklahoma with all sorts of folks theorizing that because they were able to re-form the grassland to wheat land and grow wheat it would somehow cause more rains to come (to an area that is known for droughts) and it was thought the growth would go on forever. Turns out the grasses they replaced had roots like 6 feet deep that kept the soil in place and prevented events like the dust bowl during dry spells.

Basically the hype cycle is as American as Apple Pie.
by toss1 | 2025-10-12 23:23:37+00:00
Explanation of reason and reasoning paths is a product of manipulating language.

Most ideas, even in the reasoning fields, are generated in non-linguistic processes.

Of course, some problems are solved by step-by-step linguistic (or math) A, then B, then C steps, etc., but even for those types of problems, when they get complex, the solution looks more like follow a bunch of paths to dead ends, think some more, go away, and then "Aha!" the idea of a solution pops into our head, then we back it up and make it explicit with the linguistic/logical 'chain of reasoning' to explain it to others. That solution did not come from manipulating language, but from some other cognitive processes we do not understand, but the explanation of it used language.

LLMs aren't even close to that type of processing.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-12 23:24:17+00:00
> If a language ships toUpper or a toLower function without a mandatory language field, it is badly designed too. The only slightly-better option is making toUpper and toLower ASCII-only and throwing error for any other character set.

There is a deeper bug within Unicode.

The Turkish letter TURKISH CAPITAL LETTER DOTLESS I is represented as the code point U+0049, which is named LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I.

The Greek letter GREEK CAPITAL LETTER IOTA is represented as the code point U+0399, named... GREEK CAPITAL LETTER IOTA.

The relationship between the Greek letter I and the Roman letter I is identical in every way to the relationship between the Turkish letter dotless I and the Roman letter I. (Heck, the lowercase form is also dotless.) But lowercasing works on GREEK CAPITAL LETTER IOTA because it has a code point to call its own.

Should iota have its own code point? The answer to that question is "no": it is, by definition, drawn identically to the ascii I. But Unicode has never followed its principles. This crops up again and again and again, everywhere you look. (And, in "defense" of Unicode, it has several principles that directly contradict each other.)

Then people come to rely on behavior that only applies to certain buggy parts of Unicode, and get messed up by parts that don't share those particular bugs.
by jay_kyburz | 2025-10-12 23:25:59+00:00
Having a local AI might kick start consumer interest in hardware again. I haven't thought about buying a beefy PC in 10 years, but I was wondering how much I would have to spend to run a cutting edge LLM here at home.

(It might be too expensive to pay for LLM subscriptions when every device in your house is "thinking" all day long. A 3-5k Computer for a local llm might pay itself off after a year or two. )
by tim333 | 2025-10-12 23:26:02+00:00
You don't need to listen to those guys. The basic idea is quite simple. If human brains are basically biological computers, as electronic computers steadily improve and some point they'll surpass the biological ones. That point roughly is the singularity or whatever you want to call it.

It occured to me as a teenager and I wrote an essay on if for my uni admissions exam back in 1981 but it's not rocket science and the idea goes back at least to John von Neumann who came up with the 'singularity' term in the 50s.
by reactordev | 2025-10-12 23:26:34+00:00
>Being a good fiction consumer requires offering the benefit of the doubt up to a reasonable/personal limit of suspension of disbelief.

Yup, here for it.

>The missing piece with that show is inconsistent and shallow character development.

To say the least. The whole series reeks of a movie stretched out to a series for TV. And the ship landing in the city? Right, how convenient… it’s just terrible writing. Made for teens so they can #metoo when we talk about how utterly terrifying that universe is.
by nzeid | 2025-10-12 23:26:41+00:00
It's tricky. From everything I know first hand and reading, both piracy and streaming never had a net negative impact on the artists themselves. This was often only a concern for labels.

I don't want this to come off as backpedaling - the original comment I was responding to said that if the artist became unavailable on streaming services, then they would not engage with the artist. As it turns out, artists don't rely on these people for income.

Both streaming services and piracy have the knock-on effect of increasing concert and merchandise sales (through reach), which have much higher margins for artists. I've obtained studio grade LP's from several artists entirely for free, as they have the expectation that we'll be paying them in person at concert. If the only way you support your artist is through a streaming service, then your specific engagement doesn't matter.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-10-12 23:27:12+00:00
There is no relationship between a rich guy being able to buy numerous parcels of land on Hawaii and live there, and whether the constitutional order of the country constitutes a democracy or not. These facts just have nothing at all to do with each other. Democracies don't in general ban rich people from buying land and living places, and rich people can buy land and live places under non-democratic political systems too.

I have only used Salesforce briefly, and over a decade ago, and I honestly wasn't impressed. But there are all sorts of products made by companies that I personally don't like or have no use for, and this also has extremely little relationship with whether other people find them useful enough to pay for. If you have an argument that Salesforce the company is doing something untoward to make money, then make that argument. But I have no reason to think that Salesforce isn't doing the same thing that many other successful companies have done, which is selling a product that many people want, and earning a lot of money for their shareholders by doing so. None of this seems like a broken system to me.
by makeitdouble | 2025-10-12 23:29:10+00:00
I think it's fair to put it as a failure, as the overtone window moved so much it now sounds normal that regulation, liability or econ interfere with openness.

The very fact "right to repair" had to be coined, proclaimed and we're fighting for it is a regression from the early days when repairing a radio wouldn't be violating some clause.

Of course, the openness was more accidental or pragmatic than really intended, and we saw companies slowly put up the barriers as they found technical and legal ways to do it (like forbidding plugging third party phones to the network for instance). If it's a frontier, IMHO it would be more akin to the battlefields front lines than anything else.

Put another way, the battle has always been social and legal.
by sab_hn | 2025-10-12 23:29:29+00:00
Just deployed the very first version of https://endless-chinese.com

I have been trying to study Chinese on my own for a while now and found it very frustrating to spend half the time just looking for simple content to read and listen to. Apps and websites exist, but they usually only have very little content or they ramp up the difficulty too quickly.

Now that LLMs and TTS are quite good I wanted to try it out for languages learning. The goal is to create a vast number of short AI-generated stories to bridge the gap between knowing a few characters and reading real content in Chinese.

Curious to see if it is possible to automatically create stories which are comfortable to read for beginners, or if they sound too much like AI-slop.
by westurner | 2025-10-12 23:30:16+00:00
Refactoring terminology,: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44934531

"You did this with an AI and you do not understand what you're doing here" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45330378

"Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45423917

Test case to build understanding about safety and model and agent and PEBKAC inadequacy:

Generate a stop light.

Generate a stop light with unit tests.

Also, test that there can never be multiple lights on at once, in software, and then in hardware

(Nevermind that nobody will understand a new different stop light and the impact; the exercise is to also try and code one that's sufficient (that's validateable per customer specifications, and ideally verifiable per a sufficient formal specification))

Run the tests and improve test coverage by parsing the exceptions and variables in the test output

What is AI slop, and why should projects do PR review on slop when the contributor could've asked an LLM to review their code? GitHub has optional auto-review of all PRs IIUC?

As a senior engineer looking at a handful of vibe-coded prototypes of apparently sufficient but lurkingly technical debt-y projects, should I spend my time vibe-coding more on top or should I step back and return to sound engineering and software development methods to increase the value of and reduce the risk of these cool demos it auto-generated from really short prompts?

Explain each layer of this stack; and then update the AGENTS.md
by shadowgovt | 2025-10-12 23:30:45+00:00
You can run it, I'm just under no obligation to let your machine send signals to my machine that my machine will respond to if you are running software I do not trust.

And that's the complexity of this era of computing. We just got finished convincing people that it made sense that they should have the right to run whatever software they wanted on hardware they owned... And then immediately the technology shifted so that most things no longer get done using exclusively hardware that you own. The RMS four freedoms approach is only chipping away at the larger problem: capitalism (I mean that literally in that the problem is that the machines that do the work, the capital, are owned by a tiny ownership class).
by JuniperMesos | 2025-10-12 23:30:45+00:00
The existence of billionaires does not signal policy failure. Billionaires were not responsible for any world wars, genocides, famine, climate catastrophes, or substandard medical care; these are all ancient human ills, and indeed the same policies that lead to the existence of billionaires have also lead to the average human being on the face of the earth being less likely to die painfully from any of these things, compared to the vast majority of human history.
by pheggs | 2025-10-12 23:31:03+00:00
I am quite convinced a lot of open source is not open for ideology reasons but rather are a result of competition and the market itself.

When the competition publishes its software for no price, the next way to make it even better is by improving the license. And if thats not enough you can even pay users to use your software, just like brave does (or did) through ads.

Now theres software which has less competition. Usually this is software that requires large amounts of investments, often coupled with hardware. Smartphones are the perfect example for this.

Also, software which is tied to hardware that you have to buy has less pressure, because there's a price anyway for the hardware. So you wont suddenly have some competition offering the same thing for free.
by PessimalDecimal | 2025-10-12 23:31:13+00:00
Private equity firms seem like the villains many imagine investment bankers to be. Like, actually cracking the bones and sucking the marrow of the little guys in small businesses. Discharging pension obligations, offshoring, cutting corners.

But maybe that's an unfair point of view. Is there a steelman case to be made for PE?

I listened to https://freakonomics.com/podcast/are-private-equity-firms-pl... but didn't come away with a rosier view of them.
by dmurray | 2025-10-12 23:31:20+00:00
Building the wheels and frame out of plastic is a fun gimmick, but they're selling this as a low maintenance option that "doesn't rust or require lubrication".

If they really have an all-plastic drivetrain that competes with carbon steel, that seems like a wonderful advance in materials science or mechanical engineering and we'll soon be seeing plenty more applications of this miracle material.
by Gigachad | 2025-10-12 23:32:42+00:00
It doesn’t though. There is no transaction between you and Taylor Swift.

If you listened to less music than the average person then some of your fee went to the people who listened to more music, and the other way round if you listened to more music. Which is going to average out in the end anyway, while massively simplifying the accounting. Spotify can also tell artists exactly how much they are getting paid rather than having to wait for the end of the billing period to work it out. Only to come to roughly the same amount anyway.

There is no tracing routes with a pooled fund. Only inputs and outputs. And the outputs would seem to be pretty much identical in the pooled system vs individual pools per user.
Show HN: Tired of ads and trackers when reading news online?
by berna2103 | 2025-10-12 23:33:12+00:00
Got tired of all the ads, cookies etc when reading my news on my phone or web browser. Created a service that access my favorite rss news feeds and delivers them to my kindle directly, no ads or distractions. The news articles are also summarized for when I don't have enough time to consume my news.
by reactordev | 2025-10-12 23:33:27+00:00
That’s not what the H stands for though… but I get what you’re saying. Because they opened in order, closing in same defined order should be allowed and thus we have all that peeking code to check to see if the next tag is that so we don’t error out and now we no longer conform to XHTML. Because non-engineers are writing HTML. It’s like putting the tires on before the brakes, but brakes after, and expecting it to work.

However because you can be both bold and italic, these should just be flags and that’s how they are now which is why b or i can be closed before b or i. I doubt they are just flags in the code of the browsers though because tags support styles and stuff.
by echelon | 2025-10-12 23:33:45+00:00
Yaml has terrible footguns. I'd rather we keep experimenting and find a new optimum.

Toml fixes some issues with shallow Yaml, but sucks at deeply nested data.

Maml looks nice at cursory glance. It seems to do nesting, numerics, comments, and strings right.

We're really close to having a great format. I'd like to see more attempts before accepting what we have as permanent.
by belorn | 2025-10-12 23:34:07+00:00
Winning does has many different outcomes, only some which is similar enough that the historical records will see it as such. A comparison I would make is the war on encryption that was won. It is no longer illegal to sell encryption. The question becomes how much of a victory that is if then government impose laws that dictate backdoor, like say chat control.

What did that NSA official said. They lost the battle over control of encryption, but won the war against privacy?
by ianbicking | 2025-10-12 23:34:11+00:00
I'm doing some experiments in LLM (historical) fiction writing. I feel like we can get pretty good writing out of an LLM (especially Sonnet) with enough prompting, reasoning, and guided thinking. Still with a human as producer and guidance.

I'm trying to use this to create stories that would be somewhat unreasonable to write otherwise. Branching stories (i.e., CYOA), multiperspective stories, some multimedia. I'm still trying to figure out the narrative structures that might work well.

LLMs can overproduce and write in different directions than is reasonable for a regular author. Though even then I'm finding branching hard to handle.

The big challenges are rhythm, pacing, following an arc. Those have been hard for LLMs all along.
by zeta0134 | 2025-10-12 23:35:11+00:00
Now that I can finally test on hardware, I completely rewrote input handling. I can now support original NES controllers, but also SNES and the Power Pad dance mat, for anyone crazy enough to try that. The hardest part was working around a particularly nasty hardware bug: if you try to read the input ports on even cycles while one of the sound channels is playing, the data becomes corrupted. Perform the exact same read on an odd cycle and it works every time.

The solution? Have the cartridge keep track of CPU parity (there's no simple way to do this with just the CPU), then check that, skip one cycle if needed... and very carefully cycle time the rest of the routine, making sure that your reads land on safe cycles, and your writes land in places that won't throw off the alignment.

But it works! It's quite reliable on every console revision I've thrown it at so far. Suuuper happy with that.
by angoragoats | 2025-10-12 23:35:14+00:00
Bye. Thanks for not responding to any of my questions, and instead only responding to the posts where I call you out for seemingly defending a self-admitted racist. I sincerely hope that in the future you can fix your heart.

Edit: just saw the comment in your profile about wanting karma <= 0. Nice trolling! I’ll keep the rest of this post up to remind future me not to engage with those who aren’t serious.
by someuser2345 | 2025-10-12 23:35:39+00:00
I can't agree about the "it just works" part. About a year ago I build a new PC, and I tried installing Mint on it. I ran into two issues that I was never able to resolve:

1. The WiFi just would not work; I couldn't see any networks. 2. I have 2 monitors, and one monitor would display 80% of one screen, and 20% of the other. I suspect that it was because the monitors had different refresh rates and resolutions.

I then tried installing Windows, and everything did just work.
by olooney | 2025-10-12 23:36:01+00:00
I found a neat way to do high-quality "semantic soft joins" using embedding vectors[1] and the Hungarian algorithm[2] and I'm turning it into an open source Python package:

https://github.com/olooney/jellyjoin

It hits a sweet spot by being easier to use than record linkage[3][4] while still giving really good matches, so I think there's something there that might gain traction.

[1]: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/embeddings

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_algorithm

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_linkage

[4]: https://recordlinkage.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
by zbentley | 2025-10-12 23:38:11+00:00
Not sure what I think about the theory of cryptocurrency being promoted as a tax dodge (for the wealthy) pending massive income tax hikes (on everyone else) to finance national AI spending. I'm not sure that passes the "why isn't this already happening, then?" test (crypto's being used as tax liability laundering, sure, but tax code restructuring doesn't seem to be in the offing) but it's interesting to consider.

I remain puzzled as to what it means to "win" at AI/have AI succeed in the macro, though--something that comes up in this article and others. Does that mean widespread automation of labor (at which point, whither goeth consumer spending)? Or like ... sci-fi bullshit a la Terminator and AI oppression? Or just a big-but-still-marginal productivity windfall in a bunch of industries (with concomitant unemployment/labor imbalance)?

Like, if (big if) the existential macroeconomic threat described here is real, the implication is that there will be an economy to save. In the future described by the AI boosters, will there be?
by neilv | 2025-10-12 23:38:45+00:00
With branding like "free software", it could have have lost the battle for hearts and minds for that reason alone, if not for all the other reasons.

Of course the public thinks "free software" is software for which you do not pay money.

And everyone immediately goes on their way with their downloads, without you getting the chance to give your hour-long spiel on "I'm glad you asked what I mean by 'free software'."

Because no one would ever ask what "free software" means, because they already know what it means.

It is the advocates who are terrible at advocacy who keep trying to give a term new meaning, and failing for a few decades to get the public to understand or pay attention.

You could even say that's the philosophical/awareness barrier, right there: people thinking in terms of free software, rather than in terms of Free Software(tm)(R).

(If you liked this comment, please subscribe to my newsletter about renewable clean energy, called Burn Fossil Fuels. My team has been working to get the message out, with a clever bit of wordplay there, in which we actually mean more the opposite of what we're saying. This is all explained in our hundred-page manifesto whitepaper, and we are also available for speaking engagements, at select events where we can preach to the choir.)
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-12 23:39:29+00:00
Speaking as one of the less-technically inclined HN users all I know is Linux has never been easier to install for even the slightly motivated and while there are lots of gaps, you really can run a lot of key tasks on FOSS without much fuss.

If someone wants to “break free” of Mac/Windows and regain some semblance of privacy and control, it’s never been easier. Not easy, to be clear. But compared to when I was in college (late 2000’s) it’s sooooo much easier.
by jay_kyburz | 2025-10-12 23:41:14+00:00
I'm trying to avoid getting into the habit of asking LLMs about current events, or really any events. Or really facts at all.

I think LLMs work best when you give it data, and ask it to try make sense of it, or find something interesting, or some problem. To see something I can't see, then I can go back and go back to the original data and make sure its true.