MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Launched a product to reduce context switching
by monishobaid | 2025-10-30 09:31:36+00:00
We are launching Berri, our always-on-top productivity companion that transforms how you work.

Instead of constantly Alt+Tabbing between apps and losing your flow, Berri floats above everything else, giving you instant access to your essential tools

Download: https://www.berri.in/ Demo video: https://youtu.be/lE_jtEgduYQ

Why Berri?

Instead of constantly Alt+Tabbing and losing focus, Berri gives you instant access to:

Smart Notes - Rich text editor with search so you can jot anything down instantly

Clipboard History - Never lose anything you've copied again

File Browser - Access files without opening Explorer/Finder

Smart Screenshots - Rename, drag and drop screenshots as you click them. Extract text using OCR

Web Browsing - View all your favourite websites in a secure way

Berri is designed to be non-intrusive. Hide it instantly with a single shortcut, resize it to a tiny pill. It's there when you need it, invisible when you don't.

Why we built this?

We got tired of breaking our flow state every time we needed to reference something, take a note, or check a file. Berri keeps everything you need floating right there while you work.

Privacy first Everything stays local on your device

No cloud, no accounts, no tracking

Incognito mode that hides Berri while screen sharing

Available for macOS only for now

What's next?

This is v1.0, but I have big plans based on your feedback:

AI powered workflows

Plugin system

Cloud sync (optional)

Mobile companion

I'd love to hear your thoughts, feature requests, or bug reports. Join us at r/berri_app for discussions!

If you find it useful, sharing with others who might benefit would mean the world to me.

Thanks for giving Berri a shot!
by teekert | 2025-10-30 09:32:20+00:00
The new version of the app specifically adds off-line mode (I'm in the Test-flight group), which is nice atm, it just works, even though I can't access the webapp (ok now, 10 min later, I can).

The new version has been solid! Only issue I have is with the swiping gestures not being 100% yet (they don't discriminate between swiping in from left [back to overview] and swiping left [next/prev mail]).
by jagged-chisel | 2025-10-30 09:32:45+00:00
I take issue with the “stronger” characterization. Maybe I have a vocabulary problem. However…

Your own perception of the physical world is, by necessity, solipsistic. Your own experience of the physical world is in your own mind. Without that perception, you can’t say it exists.

We know that it’s possible to have this experience of perception without the physical world, as long as your mind exists. In other words, this could all just be a simulation being dumped into your mind without the physical world as you “know” it existing. Hence, idealism.

Whether one is stronger (or more true?) than the other really doesn’t affect how you function within reality - you’re constrained by what you perceive as the physical world.
by vindex10 | 2025-10-30 09:33:37+00:00
some packages that I use for development need to be part of the virtual env. for example ipdb.

so i do uv pip install ipdb.

but then, after uv add somepackage

uv sync happens and cleans up all extras. to keep extras, you need to run uv sync --inexact. But there is no env var for `--inexact`, so I end up doing the sync manually.
by CGamesPlay | 2025-10-30 09:33:49+00:00
I recently made a list of "features I actually use in iTerm 2", while I was looking at alternatives that were cross-platform. The extensibility that WezTerm and others (Kitty takes the cake, it seems) looks promising, but after reading the docs, I don't think any of the trendy terminal emulators can do these two specific features:

1. Custom escape sequences that trigger my own code. iTerm 2 and Kitty support this (Kitty calls them "kittens"), but I don't think any other terminal emulators do. WezTerm appears not to. User variables do come close, but are not quite the same, since a user variable is "declarative" and this behavior is "imperative".

2. Show timestamps for each scrollback line. This is a feature you don't miss until you need it, but I use it, for example, to match log output timestamps to the time I ran a command in mysql console on a remote server.

I don't really care about streaming 134.55 MB/s of text to my terminal emulator; I do care about features that make me productive.
by Someone | 2025-10-30 09:33:58+00:00
FTA: “The implementation of Green Tea has a special case for pages that have only a single object to scan. This helps reduce regressions, but doesn’t completely eliminate them.”

Also FTA: “One surprise result of this work was that scanning a mere 2% of a page at a time can yield improvements over the graph flood.”

⇒ I think you’d have to try and get two objects on each page, and they would have to be small (you’d have to be able to fit over 100 objects in a page to have 2 live objects be <2% of all objects in the page)
by tim333 | 2025-10-30 09:34:38+00:00
I was watching the OpenAI livestream yesterday.

Sam was saying they have a $1.4 tn financial obligation to build 30 GW worth of data centers https://youtu.be/ngDCxlZcecw?t=1179

That's a lot of money to raise given they have no earnings.

He also says they are talking about being able to build 1 GW a week at a cost of $20bn/GW

I find it all a bit worrying. Weren't we supposed to be careful with energy use to reduce CO2 emissions? Could the billions maybe better deployed to schools hospitals, housing and the like rather than chatbots?

Rather than a fictional paperclip maximising AI eating the world we have a chatbot maximising Altman trying to do so?
by graemep | 2025-10-30 09:34:40+00:00
> For example there's a reason the dark ages are called dark. Most people of the time (except the few educated) didn't know there was something better in another time and another place. They probably thought that's as good as anyone's ever had.

I am pretty sure you are wrong on multiple counts there.

1. The "dark ages" were called dark because of a lack of written records, after the collapse of the Roman Empire and its centralised systems and imperial bureaucracy.

2. A lot of people did know there had been a different age before. Even if not literate they would regard the literate as the source of knowledge and every village would have some literate people.

3. Life was better for many people. An obvious example was the decline of slavery ( a huge proportion of the population of the Roman Empire) but the descendants of slaves were not the only people who benefitted from the removal of imperial power, and heavy imperial taxes, etc.

https://www.medievalists.net/2023/06/middle-ages-dark-ages/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
Ask HN: Would open-source devs accept financial compensation for AI training?
by i-con | 2025-10-30 09:34:57+00:00
Moin HN,

I guess we can be sure that LLMs are massively trained with open-source code. And while IANAL, I'm convinced that the training is not covered by any open-source license I know (except those that mimic public domain maybe). The FSF also raised concerns about this lately because at the very least copyright attribution would go missing. And copyleft licenses are completely ignored.

There's a precedent for the use of unlicensed, copyright-protected work: private copying levies aka. blank media taxes. Not as old as copyright itself but as old as the audio cassette ;) The idea was that musicians would lose income because of private copies of their works, and should be compensated. So for every blank cassette sold a little amount of money goes to "copyright collectives" that then spread it among their members. Today such levies exist in many copyright-friendly countries, for digital media and devices.

I don't know how feasible it is to establish something similar for open-source code. However, I know things are being seriously discussed right now for other creators, e.g. journalists, musicians... But more importantly, I wonder: Is this something other open-source devs would want? Personally, I'd prefer getting paid with more contributions not money (as a firmware dev, I'd prefer hardware documentation :D ). But if somebody else found an unexpected (IMO sometimes cool) way to monetise our work, creators should get paid. Not just open-source devs, all creators. But right now it seems everybody else is lobbying and open-source developers are left behind.

More detailed questions (don't try to answer them all):

* Would you accept financial compensation for AI training?

* Would you accept financial compensation for AI training if you have to join a copyright collective?

* Would you accept financial compensation for AI training if you have to join a copyright collective, and AI training with open-source code would be legalized explicitly?

* What kind of services / products should be taxed? Code generating service? Code generating agent? Device capable of running a suitable LLM? Any device with a GPU? Any device with an NPU? (Device with) AI OS that creates its apps on demand?
by Yizahi | 2025-10-30 09:35:18+00:00
After hearing it from multiple different people, I've discovered that apparently many people are watching video content in background. And I don't mean music or podcasts style content with no graphics, but actual TV shows, anime, movies etc. And apparently they do that while doing something else demanding attention, like work, gaming, reading(!) etc. I have never managed such a feat, but it seems it is popular nowadays. That may be the reason, I guess.
by bombcar | 2025-10-30 09:35:38+00:00
It's sad the number of stores I've seen where they just shut down when they can't use the checkout machines; the clerks aren't allowed to do math even if they could.

Whereas the smaller, owner-run stores have more leeway; the local tiny grocery "sold" all freezer/refrigerator food for cheap/free during a power failure. The big Walmart closed and threw everything away the next day.
by immibis | 2025-10-30 09:35:38+00:00
In reality, Minecraft gets less Minecrafty in every update, and your baseline is whenever you bought it.

I bought the game after they added fences and fishing rods and before the Nether. The nether ruined the game, beds ruined the game, hunger ruined the game, potions, enchantments, villager trading, and hoppers ruined the game, but redstone and minecarts and dungeons didn't ruin the game because those were added before I bought it, see? If you bought it today, you wouldn't think hunger ruined the game, you'd rather think I took away a good feature if I showed you a version without hunger.
by davedx | 2025-10-30 09:35:50+00:00
I’m kind of agreed on this but — many times now I’ve also wanted static site components in my app too, and in a standard express+react app that gets awkward.

I think there must be a better way. I don’t think it’s next.js and I’m not convinced it’s Astro either. There’s still room for new ideas here, surprisingly
by lxgr | 2025-10-30 09:37:16+00:00
Couldn't agree more.

Arguably this article is missing one of the biggest benefits: Being able to make Python scripts truly self-contained by including dependencies via a PEP 723 inline header and then running them via `uv run <script.py>` [1].

It's made Python my language of choice for one-off scripts easily shareable as gists, scp-able across systems etc.

[1] https://pybit.es/articles/create-project-less-python-utiliti...
by jack_tripper | 2025-10-30 09:40:01+00:00
>We used to have similar views on free speech up until WW2

WW2 in Europe and the fascism and nazism that came to power and lead to it, wasn't due to European countries having too much free speech, but the contrary, they had not enough to act as a blowoff valve, so the people lashed out by electing stronger autocrats opposing the status quo to kick out the previous autocrats as revenge to the establishment. Same mindset that got Trump elected twice.

It's not like pre-Hitler and pre-Mussolini Germans and Italians were living in a golden age of freedom and prosperity, and then suddenly out of the blue with no warning, Hitler and Mussolini just randomly came to power for no reason because their people had too much free speech and one day decided to throw it all away for shits and giggles.

And today, history in Europe is repeating itself again, with unpopular governments failing their voters, trying to prevent the rise of right wing with censorship, which in turn further radicalizes the people against those in power, leading the rise of the right wing just like in pre-WW2. Nothing was learned, we're doomed to keep repeating the same mistakes every 100 years or so.
by lorinab | 2025-10-30 09:42:02+00:00
For teams looking to stay on-prem or move off Atlassian’s stack, we’ve been working on integrating XWiki (for structured documentation) and OpenProject (for project management).

Both are open-source and can be self-hosted, with integrations for linking tasks, requirements, and project docs. We’re hosting a live demo + Q&A on Nov 19 showing how it works in practice.

[For full disclosure] I’m part of the XWiki team, and I'd be happy to answer any questions about this.
by quitit | 2025-10-30 09:42:33+00:00
It does sound paradoxical, but it's the difference between steering information to things that serve you, versus having others steer the information you see to things that serve them.

Reddit right now is in a very bad place. It's passed the threshold where bots are posting and replying to themselves. If humans left the platform it would probably look much the same as it does now.

The result is a noticeable uptick in forums moving to discord or rolling their own websites. Which is probably a good thing for dodging the obvious commercial manipulation, propaganda and foreign influence vectors.
by LeonM | 2025-10-30 09:43:43+00:00
I don't understand your sentiment against Cloudflare here.

Cloudflare also delivers a rather large portion of said public infrastructure free of charge. They also released a few of their own projects as FOSS, and regularly contribute.

Granted, the centralisation part worries me too, but it feels like a bit of a cheap shot against CF just because they are a large player.
by rcxdude | 2025-10-30 09:43:48+00:00
No, they're not showing just math and circuits, they're also showing a very splashy and snazzy front page which makes all kinds of vague, exciting sounding claims that aren't really backed up by the very boring (though sometimes useful) application of that math and circuits (neat how the design of those circuits may be).

If this was just the paper, I'd say 'cool area of research, dunno if it'll find application though'. I'm criticizing the business case and the messaging around it, not the implementation.

Two important questions I think illustrate my point:

1) The paper shows an FPGA implementation which has a 10x speedup compared to a CPU or GPU implementation. Extropic's first customer would have leapt up and started trying to use the FPGA version immediately. Has anyone done this?

2) The paper shows the projected real implementation being ~10x faster than the FPGA version. This is similar to the speedup going from an FPGA to an ASIC implementation of a digital circuit, which is a standard process which requires some notable up-front cost but much less than developing and debugging custom analog chips. Why not go this route, at least initially?
by Mindwipe | 2025-10-30 09:43:52+00:00
It's incredibly fragile at the CDN level if deployed at scale for a start.

You'd see playback issues go up by 1000%.

In the nicest possible way, it is pretty clear that this article was written by somebody who has only ever looked at video distribution as a hobbyist and not deploying it at scale to paying customers who quite reasonably get very upset at things not working reliably.
by d4rkn0d3z | 2025-10-30 09:44:57+00:00
I have a degree in theoretical physics and a gold medal, which is to say I have endured the requisite intellectual beatings. Often the best interpretations of physical theory are unpalatable to the average person. The idea that there is in fact no objective physical reality is the most egregious offender in this regard. However, it is nonetheless the best conclusion that one can draw given strict adherence to what the mathematical formalism of QM provides. There is simply no physical machinery to support an objective reality, period.

Now, that being said, the remarkable part is that the forgoing conclusion does us zero harm. We can still have the logical predictive fiction that an objective reality exists. What staggers the mind is the corollary that no human has ever erected a truth. Moreover, every intelligent species that ever endeavors to ask these questions will find the same non-answer.
by Yizahi | 2025-10-30 09:45:52+00:00
Maybe it can do it, but it is certainly not guaranteed. Just this month I've asked Gemini 2.5 Pro to "explain to me topic _ in deep technical detail". It produced a decent text, but with zero references or links, despite this topic is being a public open standard. Since I needed text and not knowledge, it was fine for me, I've verified data myself. But a person looking to learn from this techno-parrot would be hoping it gets lucky and not fed with too much llm-slop.
by generichuman | 2025-10-30 09:45:59+00:00
That doesn't give you independence from the libc, does it? By extension you lose distro-independence too (not sure if Detour supports musl-based ones, need to run tests).

Agree that IPC will be more secure and stable though.

I imagine Detour is mostly targeting closed source projects trying to run on as many distros as possible.
by adrian_b | 2025-10-30 09:46:25+00:00
The article linked by you uses magnetic tunnel junctions for implementing the RNG part.

The Web site of Extropic claims that their hardware devices are made with standard CMOS technology, which cannot make magnetic tunnel junctions.

So it appears that there is no connection between the linked article and what Extropic does.

The idea of stochastic computation is not at all new. I have read about such stochastic computers as a young child, more than a half of century ago, long before personal computers. The research on them was inspired by the hypotheses about how the brain might work.

Along with analog computers, stochastic computers were abandoned due to the fast progress of deterministic digital computers, implemented with logic integrated circuits.

So anything new cannot be about the structure of stochastic computers, which has been well understood for decades, but only about a novel extremely compact hardware RNG device, which could be scaled to a huge number of RNG devices per stochastic computer.

I could not find during a brief browsing of the Extropic site any description about the principle of their hardware RNG, except that it is made with standard CMOS technology. While there are plenty of devices made in standard CMOS that can be used as RNG, they are not reliable enough for stochastic computation (unless you use complex compensation circuits), so Extropic must have found some neat trick to avoid using complex circuitry, assuming that their claims are correct.

However I am skeptical about their claims because of the amount of BS words used on their pages, which look like taken from pseudo-scientific Star Trek-like mumbo-jumbo, e.g. "thermodynamic computing", "accelerated intelligence", "Extropic" derived from "entropic", and so on.

To be more clear, there is no such thing as "thermodynamic computing" and inventing such meaningless word combinations is insulting for the potential customers, as it demonstrates that the Extropic management believes that they must be naive morons.

The traditional term for such computing is "stochastic computing". "Stochastics" is an older, and in my opinion better, alternative name for the theory of probabilities. In Ancient Greek, "stochastics" means the science of guessing. Instead of "stochastic computing" one can say "probabilistic computing", but not "thermodynamic computing", which makes no sense (unless the Extropic computers are dual use, besides computing, they also provide heating and hot water for a great number of houses!).

Like analog computers, stochastic computers are a good choice only for low-precision computations. With increased precision, the amount of required hardware increases much faster for analog computers and for stochastic computers than for deterministic digital computers.

The only currently important application that is happy even with precisions under 16 bit is AI/ML, so trying to market their product for AI applications is normal for Extropic, but they should provide more meaningful information about what advantages their product might have.
by liampulles | 2025-10-30 09:46:36+00:00
I think Python has a place in many developers toolkits. I've never met anyone who hates Python (though I'm sure they exist), whereas for pretty much any other language one could mention there are much more polarizing viewpoints. (as the saying goes "Python is everyone's second favorite programming language").

The Python team needs not feel any pressure to change to compete, Python has already done quite well and found its niche.
by lurk2 | 2025-10-30 09:47:17+00:00
This situation was a lot more common than people might think. If you bought the game before Notch introduced the EULA (late 2011 if memory serves), what they did was also probably illegal, since they didn’t have the legal boilerplate in place that would allow them to brick the game the way that they did. There was a streamer trying to start a class action over it a few years ago, but I don’t think anything ever came of it.
by plopilop | 2025-10-30 09:47:55+00:00
You can defend a lot of atrocities by arguing "for the greater good" and comparing to uchronic hypotheticals. I could as well argue that without Rome, the greek democracies would have been much more prevalent, and lead to modern democracies much sooner. Or that a world leader would have emerged, leading the ancient world to endless peace and prosperity.
by cess11 | 2025-10-30 09:47:56+00:00
Elisabeth and Bernhard were rabid nationalists and antisemites long before the NSDAP. They established their vegetarian-antisemitic-'Aryan' colony in Paraguay in 1887, two years before Adolf Hitler was born.

It failed for financial reasons and the rather harsh environment. They ditched the vegetarianism and started selling meat to get some money, spiraling into alcohol and morphine abuse. In 1889 Bernhard killed himself with strychnine, after which Elisabeth started her career as a fake chronicler by writing a book aimed at creating a much nicer and 'Aryan' image of Bernhard and the colony than the truth would have allowed.

As you allude to, Friedrich Nietzsche poured buckets and buckets of abuse over people like his sister and other german nationalists, refusing for the entirety of his life to identify as german, and towards the end of his life he even claimed to be a polish nobleman, free of the tainted blood of the germans.
by movpasd | 2025-10-30 09:48:23+00:00
I suspect Minecraft was large enough to support an effective modding community from the start regardless of official support, so that there was always some kind of third-party unofficial mechanism (ModLoader, then Forge, then now Fabric and Quilt). Mojang probably punted it down the priority list because of that, or didn't want to impose a structure and kill those ecosystems. Technically speaking, Java is reasonably easy to plug stuff into at runtime, so that was never a barrier.

The original issue with official modding support, from my perspective, has always been a legal one. But the Mojang EULA explicitly allows modding now. So I would see this decision as one in a long line of decisions by Mojang to both normalise the legal relationship with modders, and beyond that giving a "thumbs up" to the community.