MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fluoridation | 2025-10-20 16:18:36+00:00
>People are wholesale dumping their entire lives into various llms.

Not to be dismissive, but that's on them. You can control what you tell the bartender. You can't control what people whisper about you behind your back.

>Various advertising profiles know much more than you cutting off someone in traffic.

They "know" different things. Also, oh no! You mean to tell me advertisers are tracking me to optimize which ads get blocked by uBO? Woe is me! What ever shall I do? Try opting out of having a bad reputation in a small village.
by cyberax | 2025-10-20 16:18:43+00:00
This is the right move. 10 years ago, us-east-1 was on the order of 10x bigger than the next largest region. This got a little better now, but any scaling issues still tend to happen in us-east-1.

The AWS has been steering people to us-east-2 for a while. For example, traffic between us-east-1 and us-east-2 has the same cost as inter-AZ traffic within the us-east-1.
by flamesofphx | 2025-10-20 16:19:13+00:00
https://lobste.rs/about#invitations

Basically you get an invite from someone else there, you can still be in chats and read the news with out it... Which is good enough for me, so sorry can't send you an invite. So the easiest way would be to join a chat, make some friends then ask for invite, they have like a chain tree that also takes people invite quality into account, so the person that give you an invite need to trust you a bit.
by graypegg | 2025-10-20 16:19:22+00:00
Imagine yourself at 12yo, and just believe the axiom that saying 6 7 is funny. Your parents are telling you that interrupting math class in such a ubiquitous and constant manner is beyond the pale. They reach into their past, where "the thing banned at school" was actually acceptable and clearly different.

Maybe it depends on who you were as a kid... but if I'm who I was at 12yo, I'm going to keep doing it, and now it's way funnier. You're playing a hugely important role being the lame adult in many recess discussions. No offence.
by nxor | 2025-10-20 16:19:38+00:00
Are you European? I don't understand that use of hinder. You mean prevent from using? Then no, I don't think preventing normal people from using encryption will prevent criminals from using encryption, and didn't mean to imply that

I'm not referring to hinder meaning prevent, I'm referring to how "hinder someone to use" is not grammatical. https://www.merriam-webster.com/sentences/hinder
by quickthrowman | 2025-10-20 16:19:47+00:00
> I've always been curious how modern electric heating elements are assembled in a safe manner. I mean ones that use nichrome heating wire , inside a metal tube. The metal tube is packed with insulating material. Like how is the heating wire maintained in a position so it touches the smallish diameter metal pipe.

Probably in a very similar way to mineral insulated cables, if not the exact same process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral-insulated_copper-clad_...
by ignurant | 2025-10-20 16:19:47+00:00
For what it's worth, the last few years our we've sliced off a few custom client apps in Rails and it's felt like a great tailwind. We've been running a profitable BI app for around 15 years, but it's really hard to maintain. The dev team decided we want to rewrite it from .NET, Python, React into vanilla full-stack Rails. We were planning to rewrite it anyway to fix many old assumptions that turned out to be wrong and made maintenance a lot harder. It should also reduce the required coordination of backend API + frontend being that it's more cohesively developed together. But ultimately, we've enjoyed using an opinionated framework that has all the typical "web app" things batteries included and well-established. It helps discovery.

I think it works well for SaaS type offerings where you have a low number of high-value clients. We don't do high-traffic public sites. Perhaps my opinion would be different then.
by wrs | 2025-10-20 16:19:54+00:00
ContextProvider is for when you have some data that any random component might need, and you don’t want to clutter up the system by passing it through every component (this is called “prop drilling”). Or maybe you can’t pass it through some container component that you don’t control.

That consideration is orthogonal to what the useful data is. It could be a signal, or not. In other words, signals are not an alternative to context.
by pcoz | 2025-10-20 16:20:26+00:00
AI and The Art of Persuasion

***************

We built an AI script that models persuasion as navigation through two-dimensional space—advancing legal arguments while simultaneously managing emotional progression. The framework applies to any persuasive context: sales, negotiations, dispute resolution, even marketing.

Read how we translated abstract philosophy into practical AI that actually works: https://fleetingswallow.com/winning-small-claims-with-ai/

#AI #Persuasion #AIScripting
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-10-20 16:20:45+00:00
A text token generally represents a portion of a single word, while a vision token represents a portion of the entire page, which may include multiple words. This is where the "compression factor" comes from.

The number of bits to represent a text or vision token is the same, since they are both represented as embeddings of a fixed number of dimensions defined by the Transformer (maybe a few thousand for a large SOTA model).

Whether a vision token actually contains enough information to accurately extract (OCR) all the text data from that portion of the image is going to depend on how many pixels that vision token represents and how many words were present in that area of the image. It's just like considering images of the same page of text at different resolutions - a 1024x1024 image vs a 64x64 one, etc. As the resolution decreases so will OCR accuracy. At some point the resolution is insufficient and the words become a blurry mess and OCR accuracy suffers.

This is what DeepSeek are reporting - OCR accuracy if you try to use a single vision token to represent, say, 10 text tokens, vs 20 text tokens. The vision token may have enough resolution to represent 10 tokens well, but not enough for 20.
by nradov | 2025-10-20 16:20:48+00:00
I don't know about that. Regarding that particular example, anyone willing to interview with a "blockchain" company is very likely a scammer (or at least scammer adjacent) themselves. I mean there might be some legitimate use for blockchain technology but so far it's 99.9% scams and anyone unaware of that simply hasn't been paying attention for the past decade.
by spyckie2 | 2025-10-20 16:21:05+00:00
Ai can both be a bubble and also the greatest economic value add of this generation at the same time. It doesn’t have to be either or.

All bubbles (dot com, housing, tech, crypto, etc) have a lot of losers and a few big winners.

That is less a reflection on the market of the bubble and more a reflection of the number, skill and risk taking of the prospectors.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-20 16:21:07+00:00
> It's not a bubble yet.

Yes, it is.

> Many companies are already getting direct value out of AI.

Many companies were already getting direct value out of the internet during the dotcom bubble. Bubbles do not require the absence of real value being delivered by the bubble industry, they require levels of investment that are anticipate more real value that can be delivered on a time frame for existing valuations across the industry to be sustainable.

> The Dot com burst happened because there were lots of unsustainable business models.

There are lots of unsustainable business models in the AI space, too.

If you are looking at OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic (even though they, too, may be somewhat inflated), you are making the same mistake as looking at Google (ironically) during the dotcom bubble.

> I don't see them as equal.

They aren't equal, the AI bubble is much bigger.
Show HN: Excalidraw for Sticky Notes
by abhishekbasu | 2025-10-20 16:21:08+00:00
I got tired of having to manage my sticky notes, and I'm not a huge fan of Google Keep. Stickyflo is how I prefer creating/editing/moving notes around. While this ain't a fancy AI app, it does the job (for me, and hopefully for you too!).
Ask HN: Better Brain Entrainment?
by MichealCodes | 2025-10-20 16:21:08+00:00
Obligatory Photosensitive Seizure Warning -- It's on the app too.

https://brainentrain.web.app/

As a weekend project I built an app that uses color therapy, stereoscopic flickering, and binaural beats to hopefully entrain the brain to a desired frequency.

Currently I am oscillating the carrier wave within a harmonic range and from this updating the color frequency, pulse frequency, amplitude oscillation, and binaural frequencies.

Does HN have any ideas to take this to another level?

I am inspired by the MIT research here https://news.mit.edu/2022/small-studies-40hz-sensory-stimulation-confirm-safety-suggest-alzheimers-benefits-1213
by reorder9695 | 2025-10-20 16:21:16+00:00
That's not the point I'm making, I'm saying whoever in Mom & Pop Co. set up the website may well not understand the difference between the cookie types and even if they are using no tracking cookies and sharing no data, they may well put a cookie notice on their website anyway as they're so common they think they're normal, the law allows for huge fines, and they're doing it out of an abundance of caution.
by scrps | 2025-10-20 16:21:24+00:00
Security through obscurity mostly, I don't know who continues to push the advice to block ICMP without a valid technical reason since at best if you tilt your head and squint your eyes you could almost maybe see a (very new) script kiddie being defeated by it.

I've rarely actually seen that advice anywhere, more so 20 years ago than now but people are still clearly getting it from circles I don't run in.
by thatguysaguy | 2025-10-20 16:21:30+00:00
Back when BERT came out, everyone was trying to get it to generate text. These attempts generally didn't work, here's one for reference though: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.04094

This doesn't have an explicit diffusion tie in, but Savinov et al. at DeepMind figured out that doing two steps at training time and randomizing the masking probability is enough to get it to work reasonably well.
Show HN: Wyapy – Capture customer feedback and uncover what to improve
by tony31 | 2025-10-20 16:21:42+00:00
Hey HN!

I built Wyapy to help small businesses understand their customers better and get actionable insights without much work.

Wyapy lets you collect feedback right after an interaction (for example, from a receipt, email, or QR code) and automatically summarizes what people love or what’s not working. It uses AI to surface recurring issues, highlight wins, and suggest what to focus on next.

The idea came from watching local restaurants and small stores struggle with feedback (they either got random Google reviews or nothing at all). With Wyapy, they can see clear insights like “Slow service mentioned 6× this week” or “People loved the new dish”, simple, actionable stuff.

It’s live now: https://www.wyapy.com You can create a free project, share a feedback link, and see results right away.

You can also browse the demo projects I've created without login: https://dashboard.wyapy.com/demo Or you can see an example of a survey here: https://feedback.wyapy.com/?id=4d05ab51-8079-4346-b843-69e8c...

Would love any feedback on how I can make this more useful!
by nosianu | 2025-10-20 16:21:52+00:00
In East Germany, the GDR, you could buy C64 and C128 from private sellers advertising in the classified ads section of the major electronics magazine in the GDR. They usually received those devices from relatives in West Germany.

The price for a C64 was thousands of East German Marks, at least half a year of salaries (the salary spread was low, so that's engineers or workers or managers).

An Amiga cost 25,000 Marks towards the end of the GDR, which was about two years of salaries (income was from below 1,000 Marks to ca. 1,500 for high earners, much more than that was unusual). This put 16 bit computing at home or school out of the hands of almost everyone, unless they had generous relatives in the West who sent them one. Even at work, the 8-bit PCs were still much more common (e.g. PC 1715 - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_1715), with a CP/M clone OS.

But at least they were all available. Our own CAOS (Cassette Aided Operating System- https://www.mpm-kc85.de/html/CAOS_42.htm) 8 bit systems based on Z80 clone CPUs, KC-85 (1/2/3/4) where not too shabby, for work and serious stuff at least the later -3 and even more so the -4 lines were superior to the C64, easier to program, and much more usable screen (https://www.mpm-kc85.de/).

The state was pretty hands-off. My own school's physics teacher started a computer club in the 1980s and he spent thousands of public school money on exclusively Western computers, from ZX spectrum (the very first one) to Atari 800 XL, C64, C128, with both cassette and disk drives. That must have cost a lot. Still surprises me that nobody asked him to buy East German, especially since in the 8-bit range our own systems would have been perfectly fine for the purpose.
by mikkupikku | 2025-10-20 16:21:54+00:00
> On June 21, 1972, Jean Boulet of France piloted an Aérospatiale SA 315B Lama helicopter to an absolute altitude record of 12.440 kilometres (40,814 ft).[68] At that extreme altitude, the engine flamed out and Boulet had to land the helicopter by breaking another record: the longest successful autorotation in history.[69]

I just had to look that up. Absolutely incredible.
by adolph | 2025-10-20 16:22:31+00:00
yeah, kinda sorta epitomizes "strong options weakly held"

> certainly haven’t reevaluated their stance on anything

Brings to mind the idea of "simulated thinking:"

We have so many different schema that have been loaded into our brain on how to respond to different conversational gambits or events in our environment then we are in fact almost exclusively acting out of habit and almost not at all actually using the part of mind to truly, deeply contemplate what’s happening in front of us and the proposition is that that’s a trap, that we would find ourselves in simulated thinking it can be very, very effective in circumstances that are what’s called ordinary like say you’re in school. That can be extremely ineffective when you’re actually in a novel environment much worse than just a regular old habit mind because at least habit mind is more fluidly related to seeking mind.

0. https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/the-jim-rutt-show-transcript...
by quacked | 2025-10-20 16:23:19+00:00
I agree, but surely with some strict definitions, you could get within 5%.

I am intrigued by the same thing you are. How does it all count as economic activity? What percentage of the flower-arranging has to be done to ensure that the medicine-manufacturing can be done? It's such an endless chain--"I pay the credit card fee on my purchase of custom stationary to the credit card company and the credit card company rolls it up in its revenue projections and forecasts a more profitable Q3 so their stock price increases so the portfolio-holding lenders are more lenient with their loan terms so Pfizer takes out a larger loan to build a factory in Bangalore to run the manufacturing lines..."

If the custom-stationary buying stops, so does the factory-loan lending... and vice versa.
Show HN: Restring – a fast, smart web toolbox for JSON, JWT, Base64, and more
by kang_li | 2025-10-20 16:23:53+00:00
I just built Restring — a fast, modern toolbox for everyday dev tasks like formatting JSON, decoding JWTs, and converting strings.

I know there are plenty of similar tools out there, but I wanted something that felt instant and smart.

- Fast: Built with SvelteKit and plain HTML/CSS, with minimal dependencies and no UI bloat. The whole site is under 300 KB zipped and feels lightning quick. - Smart: It tries to detect what you paste (like JSON, JWT, or Base64) and routes you to the right tool automatically.

Currently supports: Base64, JSON, JWT, URL, Color, and DateTime.

I’ve used React, Vue, and Flutter before, but building this with SvelteKit was a joy — intuitive, minimal, and just works.

Would love feedback, especially on the auto-detection logic and ideas for other tools to add.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-20 16:24:01+00:00
The initial wish was that more people cared about Apple Vision Framework, I'm merely claiming that since most people don't actually have Apple hardware, they're avoiding Apple technology as it commonly only runs on Apple hardware.

So I'm not saying it should be excluded because it's can only used by relatively few people, but I was trying to communicate that I kind of get why not so many people care about it and why it gets forgotten, since most people wouldn't be able to run it even if they wanted to.

Instead, something like DeepSeek OCR could be deployed on any of the three major OSes (assuming there is implementations of the architecture available), so of course it gets a lot more attention and will be included in way more benchmarks.
by rjmunro | 2025-10-20 16:24:09+00:00
This. I wouldn't try to instantly failover to another service if AWS had a short outage, but I would plan to be able to recover from a permanent AWS outage by ensuring all your important data and knowledge is backed up off-AWS, preferably to your own physical hardware and having a vague plan of how to restore and bring things up again if you need to.

"Permanent AWS outage" includes someone pressing the wrong button in the AWS console and deleting something important or things like a hack or ransomware attack corrupting your data, as well as your account being banned or whatever. While it does include AWS itself going down in a big way, it's extremely unlikely that it won't come back, but if you cover other possibilities, that will probably be covered too.
by dcre | 2025-10-20 16:24:14+00:00
Numbers are always interesting, assuming they're real, but I just want to comment on the Cursor thing: Zitron has been insisting for 6 months that Anthropic screwed Cursor somehow by raising prices on them but the claim has always been gibberish. It's not that it's false, it's that it's impossible to figure out what Zitron claims happened. He cannot describe (here or in https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropic-and-openai-have-begun-...) what the bad change actually was. We know everyone moved to more usage-oriented pricing earlier this year. He cannot explain why this was a price increase for Cursor. He is unable to draw a distinction between a price increase for end users (it's not even clear that it was a price increase for the average end user) and a price increase for Cursor.
by leptons | 2025-10-20 16:24:15+00:00
I built my own 300bps modem as a teenager, to connect to my C64. Tech was a lot more fun back in the day. It was exciting every year to see the speed of modems go up, and up, and up. 300 bps, 1200bps, and then when I got a 2400bps modem the C64 built-in serial code was too slow, I couldn't transfer files because there were so many dropped bits. So I wrote my own serial port code in assembly language and hacked it into my favorite terminal software (CCGMS) and that fixed the problem. I think by the time I got a 9600 baud modem I probably had an Amiga.
by ben_w | 2025-10-20 16:25:23+00:00
Aye man, wey aye, went doon there worra bairn, didn’t ah? Cannae remember much like, was only a wee nipper at the time, knaa what ah mean? Me mam an’ da took us doon the Toon when ah was nowt but a little’un, like. Divvent really remember owt aboot it proper, but aye, been the once when ah was just a littl’ bairn, me. Proper yonks ago that was, pet!

(Translation: yes, once as a kid).
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-10-20 16:26:22+00:00
> a statistical study of the demise of 1,513 monarchs in 45 European monarchies over the period 600 to 1800. It reveals that almost a quarter (22 per cent) of all royal deaths were bloody - accidents, battle deaths and killings - and that 15 per cent of all deaths were outright murder.

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/killing-kings
by mossTechnician | 2025-10-20 16:26:29+00:00
If a company's revenue in January is $100 and it grows by 10% every month, the December revenue is $285. The year's revenue would be about $2,138, but ARR in December would be $3,423. That's 1.6x the actual revenue.

ARR could be a useful tool to help predict future revenue, but why not simply report on actual revenue and suggest it might increase in the next year? I have found the most articles to be unclear to the reader about what ARR actually represents.
by palmotea | 2025-10-20 16:26:34+00:00
> Our key insight is that many everyday social interactions may follow predictable patterns; efficient "scripts" that minimize cognitive load for actors and observers, e.g., "wait for the green light, then go." We propose modeling these routines as behavioral programs instantiated in computer code rather than policies conditioned on beliefs and desires.

Aren't there already materials (made for people with autism) that catalog these scripts and make them explicit?

Edit: e.g. https://suelarkey.com.au/promoting-social-understanding-soci...
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-20 16:26:52+00:00
I don't think anyone is expecting Amazon (or Google or Microsoft for that matter) to be taken out by the AI bubble.

I would expect to see OpenAI, Anthropic, and a lot of the little tool wrappers to get taken out though, or at least acquired for pennies on the dollar when it bursts.

But like the last one, it's going to be us, the tax payers, that are left holding the bag.
by nicoburns | 2025-10-20 16:27:19+00:00
There are ways to slim it down, but WebRTC and video playback would probably be one of the first things I'd remove if I were looking to do that!

The other obvious target is the JS engine. IIRC V8 is 90mb just by itself. I don't think SpiderMonkey is quite so large but definitely still in the 10s of megabytes. A slower simpler JS engine (QuickJS, hermes, etc) could be quite a bit smaller.
by username223 | 2025-10-20 16:27:28+00:00
Color me skeptical. We're running into the speed of light when it comes to transistor size, and the parallelism that made neural nets take off is running into power demands. Where do the exponential hardware gains come from? Optimizing the software by 2x or 4x happens only once. Then there's the other side: if Moore's Law works too well, local models will be good enough for most tasks, and these companies won't be able to do the SaaS thing.

It seems to me like models' capability scales logarithmically with size and wattage, making them the rare piece of software that can counteract Moore's Law. That doesn't seem like a way to make a trillion dollars.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-20 16:27:29+00:00
How many businesses can’t afford to suffer any downtime though?

But I’ve led enough cloud implementations where I discuss the cost and complexity between - multi-AZ (it’s almost free so why not), multi region , and theoretically multi cloud (never came up in my experience) and then cold, warm and hot standby, RTO and RPO, etc

And for the most part, most businesses are fine with just multi-AZ as long as their data can survive catastrophe.