MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zby | 2025-10-13 09:53:20+00:00
I am wrapping up https://github.com/zby/DayDreamingDayDreaming - it is a project to show that https://gwern.net/ai-daydreaming can work.

It is hard to show that AI can reimplement for example special relativity - because we don't even have enough text from 19th century to train an LLM on it - so we need a new idea something that was invented after an LLM was trained. I took the Gwern's essay and checked with deep search and deep research which ideas from that essay are truly novel and apparently there are some so reinventing them seemed like a good target: https://github.com/zby/DayDreamingDayDreaming/blob/main/repo... https://github.com/zby/DayDreamingDayDreaming/blob/main/repo...

So here it is - a system that can reliably churn essays on daydreaming AIs. On one level it is kind of silly - we already knew that infinite monkeys could write Shakespeare works. The generator was always theoretically possible, the hard part is the verifier. But still - the search space in my system is much smaller than the search space of all possible letter sequences - so at least I can show that the system is a little more practical.

Here are some results: https://github.com/zby/DayDreamingDayDreaming/tree/main/data...

You can modify it to reinvent any other new idea - you just need to provide it the inspirations and evals for checking the generated essays.

I am thinking about next steps - maybe I could do it a little bit more universal - but it seems that to build something that would work as needed would require scale.

I kind of like the software framework I vibe coded for this. It lets you easily build uniform samples where you can legitimately do all kinds of comparisons. But I am not so sure about using Dagster as the base for the system.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-13 09:53:49+00:00
> USA also got a household that barely lives on its debts

So did every empire in history.

> Richest nation? Probably china already

If you’re not guessing, the answer is a clear no. (The best source on this might be the CCP. They don’t claim parity because Beijing isn’t delusional.)

More fundamentally, the question was on budget constraints. Credit and cash buy the same infrastructure, healthcare and open-source software.
by tock | 2025-10-13 09:53:58+00:00
Funny enough Europe uses the same excuses against America. That the reason America is far ahead of them is because of slave labour, no universal healthcare, etc

> Not caring about intellectual property, including your own work that might get sucked up into AI models

But this is particularly funny. Which American AI company has respected anyones IP when it comes to AI? Aaron Swartz is rolling in his grave seeing OpenAI.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-10-13 09:54:29+00:00
I used SHR (initially Om2007.2, but switched after a few months as it wasn't maintained anymore). Echo could be eliminated by configuring Calypso modem's DSP and IIRC FSO distros did it by default at some point. Buzz and not waking up to ring (the infamous bug #1024) were hardware issues on early units and could be fixed pretty easily by anyone who knows how to use a soldering iron (I didn't back then, so a friend did it for me). There was a software workaround as well, though at a cost of elevated power usage in suspend. I don't remember exactly how long it lasted on battery, but it sure did last a day at school. A quick search through my e-mail archives shows people on mailing lists talking about 100 hours in suspend with modem deep sleep fixed and about 70 hours with it disabled (though I can see someone complaining in one mail that they couldn't reach more than 50 hours), but of course it could quickly burn through the battery when under active use - especially with Wi-Fi on, as I remember its power saving mode to be quite flaky.

Freerunner was the roughest of these devices, but that was more than 15 years ago. Things have changed meanwhile ;)
by MASNeo | 2025-10-13 09:54:58+00:00
Great idea. I had been thinking about pretty much the same but perhaps targeted at executives and perhaps including AI/Cloud.

I usually feel to many people wildly through around terms they hardly understand, in the belief they cannot possibly understand. That’s so wrong, every executive should understand some of what determines button line. It’s not like people skip economics because it’s hard.

Would love to perhaps contribute sometime next year. Stared and until then good luck - perhaps add a donation link!
by anonzzzies | 2025-10-13 09:55:21+00:00
If there is anything that really gives me the nostalgia vibes, it's basic listings. So many good memories typing over listings and changing them to enhance or cheat. It was very educational as a child. Mags like this [0] fill me with joy even though it makes no more sense. At least I got to live it fully (my nostalgia vibes go from 1980-1988 around; after that it was more study/work; I was 14 in 1988 and teaching the computer classes at my high school as the teachers didn't understand anything).

[0] https://archive.org/details/msx-gids-nr.-08/mode/2up
Looking for Work and Community Resources
by wildlogic | 2025-10-13 09:55:21+00:00
Hey HN,

I got badly hurt a couple years ago when I fell 20 feet directly onto a 3 inch PVC pipe and got impaled. I was stuck in bed for 6 months, lost my job of 8 years and my wife of 12 years. I gave up the house to my spouse in the divorce, and moved into a van which was pretty quickly and unceremoniously stolen from me at gunpoint. I've been living outside on the street for the past nearly 2 years after 16 years working 9-5 as a developer and I'm really dreading the upcoming winter.

It's a cold and rainy fall, but I still spend my days in the library coding. I've managed to hang onto a laptop for over a year, but by now I don't even have a change of socks let alone a change of clothes. Recently I made a cool puzzle game <https://geonot.github.io/korokoro> and a font <https://geonot.github.io/retrocide-mono>. I'm adept with most programming languages and paradigms, and while I spent most of my career in DevOps, I'm also a cybersecurity expert with a Defcon Black Badge in CTF, a low-level systems developer with hardware experience and a competent full-stack web developer.

I've worked in all sorts of environments from bringing fledgling startups through IPO or multi-billion buyout to long tenures as a Principal Engineer at Oracle and most recently as an AI DevOps Engineer at NVIDIA.

I'm looking for any sort of remote contract work or gig - if you have any app ideas that you haven't found the time to code up, small business websites needing development or modernization, or APIs that need integrating, I'd love to help for the low.

I'm also looking for any sort of help or resources in the pacific northwest, be it housing, food, clothing, anything, I would greatly appreciate any advice or help. I spent a lot of time and a good amount of my salary helping people in need when I was fortunate enough to have disposable income, and now I'm the one in need.

Despite my situation, I'm easy to communicate with and still extremely productive technically. I'm not looking for anything unreasonable in terms of compensation, so hopefully getting a principal engineer / architect for a few bucks an hour is compelling enough to someone on here that needs some technical work done.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate your time and wisdom! I've been reading HN every day for 15 years, and I've gotten an immense amount of knowledge and inspiration here, so thanks a lot.

digiphilo at gmail dot com
by sigwinch | 2025-10-13 09:57:49+00:00
Panels can endure hail as well as cars and roofs, so we’re talking catastrophic hail; where we’ve seen economic losses as bad as tornadoes.

So, I’d worry about wind wrecking and broadly casting those slivers.

Rather than pick them up, maybe consider further crushing them into the ground. While that’s not good for farmland, the area under the plume of a coal plant is already broadly contaminated.
by psychoslave | 2025-10-13 09:57:55+00:00
No way to confuse with JSON, where you would instead expect // or /* */ for a comment facility which align with Javascript.

Also """ for multiline string, I only encountered that in Python. But apparently Java, Kotlin and Swift also do that now. In js, backquote already do the trick.

And the project is targeting more on configuration file, where TOML or YAML indeed are already competitors just as historically valid as JSON.
by sbuk | 2025-10-13 09:57:56+00:00
Blender is an interesting case. It's seeing wider adoption in studios generally - an Oscar win has helped and the recent Blender Conference had talks from Framestores vizdev[1] and Paramounts in-house teams[2]. Blender 5.0 is around the corner, which is adding more and more industry standard features[3][4], though recently there was a discussion about pulling away from the VFX Reference Platform[5][6], which they have walked back from[7]. It's not there yet, but it's gaining mindshare rapidly. Enshittification in DCCs is interesting. Arguably the two dominant companies, Autodesk (Maya, 3ds Max) and Maxon (Cinema 4D) are on that path, whereas SideFX (Houdini) is kicking ass!

[1] https://youtu.be/BtZ-ien0WOk

[2] https://youtu.be/DJu7C6tVM8o

[3] https://youtu.be/UiIJytlTFPc

[4] https://landscape.aswf.io

[5] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-and-vfx-reference-plat...

[6] https://vfxplatform.com

[7] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/vfx-reference-platform-stateme...
by amterp | 2025-10-13 09:58:28+00:00
Working hard on Rad, which is aiming to be a Bash-replacement for writing CLI scripts. The goal is to allow users to write maintainable scripts with declarative argument parsing, built-in JSON processing, HTTP requests, and interactive prompts - all in a familiar, readable syntax (Python-like!). Here's an example of the declarative approach to script args:

args: username str # Required string password str? # Optional string token str? # Optional auth token age int # Required integer status str # Required string username requires password // If username is provided, password must also be provided token excludes password // Token and password cannot be used together age range [18, 99] // Inclusive range from 18 to 99 status enum ["active", "inactive", "pending"]

Rad does all the arg parsing for you (unlike Bash), including validation for those constraints you wrote, and you can get on with writing the rest of your script is a nice, friendly syntax!

Very keen for feedback so if any of that sounds interesting, feel free to give it a go!

https://github.com/amterp/rad
by saispas | 2025-10-13 10:00:22+00:00
Unless I've misunderstood what you're asking for (in which case, apologies…) then there's a setting in `Settings > Desktop & Dock > Mission Control` to govern this behaviour.

Turn off `When switching to an application, switch to a Space with open windows for the application` and then you'll be able to create a new Safari window in the current Space, not the 'existing Safari space'.

The specific path is for Tahoe, but the setting itself has been there for a long time, I think.
by spwa4 | 2025-10-13 10:01:25+00:00
You don't answer ... what exactly is wrong with stating that Putin is an incredibly successful communist? He started out as a violent enforcer of communism, card carrying enforcer of of the Communist party, and climbed the ladder, and has been incredibly successful doing so. He's a murderous asshole of course, but how does that change what he managed to do. There are few people who can present a better claim to being communists, don't you think?

You're also right, of course, that he's extreme right. So are other successful communists. Chavez was never anything but the leader of criminal gangs, as is Maduro. Khamenei in Iran is also extreme right of course, not even that different (his power also mostly comes from control over criminal gangs, and obviously the members of his gangs are about as muslim as bikini-clad pigs having a barbecue on a beach). There's other kinds, like UN's Guterrez or Jose Manuel Barosso, much less successful than Putin, but another violent enforcer of communism, now non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International. But again, is there even a single socialist in your entire country that can make a better claim to being a communist than him?

Makes you wonder how loyal current well known leftists are to leftism. Greta Thunberg, to stay on the Gaza issue, has made millions of dollars on her "green-left" activism. About 10 times the absolute maximum she could have earned as a politician (ie. 10 times what the prime minister of Sweden makes). And of course Nicolas Maduro is a billionaire. Putin, if you wanted to quantify it, can probably claim to be the world's first trillionnaire. So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that they also have somewhat less complete faith in communism.
by jll29 | 2025-10-13 10:02:51+00:00
Hardware and software are of course equivalent, as every computer science (but not every philosopher) knows.

D.R. Hofstadter posited that we can extract/separate the software from the hardware it runs on (the program-brain dichotomy), whereas Searle believed that these were not two layers but consciousness was in effect a property of the hardware. And from that, as you say, follows that you may re-create the property if your replica hardware is close enough to the real brain.

IMHO, philosophers should be rated by the debate their ideas create, and by that, Searle was part of the top group.
by dvt | 2025-10-13 10:03:59+00:00
As someone that studied philosophy, his work is cited often and is absolutely instrumental in modern theory of mind. His work has seen a resurgence recently due to the explosion of LLMs. I've read 2 or 3 of his books, and he was a brilliant mind with clear & concise arguments. I met many of his collaborators at UCLA, but sadly never the man himself. Either way, his work has had a profound effect on me and my understanding of the world.

Rest in peace.
by antisol | 2025-10-13 10:04:03+00:00
I have to second this. I've bought two of these devices over the years: first the Neo Freerunner and then a Pinephone Pro.

I spent over two years persisting, trying to get the Freerunner to a state where it was usable as a phone. Openmoko were more interested in rewriting from scratch and making sure it had pretty animations than things that some might consider more important, like working power management and phone calls.

For a long time I called the Freerunner "the worst phone ever made"...

...but then I bought a Pinephone. Which couldn't even play mp3s without stuttering - something even the freerunner could manage over a decade earlier. Don't get me started on the "quirkiness" of trying to use it to make and receive calls. Also the keyboard attachment I bought with it never worked. I tried multiple distros and whatnot, but I didn't get to spend a huge amount of time experimenting, because less than a month after I started to try actually using it, I dropped it, and it was so fragile that the screen was destroyed, despite me having bought a screen protector for it.

I've looked at a lot of these devices over the years and been tempted many times. I was very put off by the freerunner experience. The pinephone experience was actually almost impressive that it managed to be somehow worse.

I've just been scanning the postmarketos wiki looking at how that works with a few different devices. The number of devices that have some feature like calls / gps / camera / etc "partially working" is dismaying, particularly for open devices like the pinephone and librem.

Personally I switched to using lineageos on phones a long time ago. It's not ideal but at least it's usable as a phone.
by rsynnott | 2025-10-13 10:04:19+00:00
As a general rule of thumb, probably never trust anything an LLM says; they're bad at things.

(I'm particularly unsurprised that they'd get confused about _London_, because, well, what is a London anyway? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London . Even _human_ writers sometimes get confused about stats for London.)
by skrebbel | 2025-10-13 10:04:33+00:00
I'm pretty sure the GP was talking about their subscription payments to Fastmail.

But I admit that you got me curious, do you really expect a substantial increase in power consumption due to Fastmail getting a % of their customers to run Electron instead of Thunderbird? I'm really bad at this kind of back-of-the-envelope math but I struggle to imagine that it's substantial.

Like wouldn't one kid in Nebraska playing an AAA game in anger for half an hour, on one computer, once a day, use more energy than all those electron installs combined?
by decimalenough | 2025-10-13 10:05:47+00:00
Taller than the Chinese average, perhaps, but northern Chinese are generally much taller than southern Chinese. Guess what's next to northeastern China? That's right, Korea.

Thais don't have big meals, but they do snack incessantly, which makes up for it. And overcatering for guests is a pan-Asian or arguably a global phenomenon.
by ozgung | 2025-10-13 10:06:33+00:00
> I just want to understand why the Turks decided to change this letter, and this letter only

Because Turkish uses a phonetic alphabet suited for Turkish sounds, based on latin letters. There are 8 vovels come in two subsets:

AIOU and EİÖÜ.

When you pair them with zip(), pairs are phonetically related sounds but totally different letters at the same time. Turkish also uses suffixes for everything, and vowels in these suffixes sometimes change between these two subgroups.

This design lets me write any word uniquely and almost correctly using the Turkish alphabet.

Dis dizayn lets mi rayt ani vörd yüniğkli end olmost koreğtkli yuzing dı törkiş alfabet.

Ö is the dotted version of O. İ is the dotted version of I. Related but different. Their lower case versions are logically (not by historical convention): öoiı. So we didn’t just wanted to change I, and only I. We just added dots. Since there are no Oö pair in any language our OoÖö vovels didn’t get the same attention. Same for our Ğğ and Şş.

I hope this answers the question.
by miroljub | 2025-10-13 10:07:22+00:00
Fine. But then, let's not pretend that Brendan was a bad person or that he did something wrong. They fired him because they didn't like his personal views, not because he was a bad CEO or technically incompetent person.

And it's my right to lose trust and stop using Mozilla products for prioritizing woke issues instead of technical excellence.

Mozilla losing money and market share is the direct consequence of their decisions. Finally, it's a free market, and their customers/users voted with their feet. I could only smirk and remind them of the proverb: "go woke - go broke".
by ManlyBread | 2025-10-13 10:07:35+00:00
A lot of of OSS is subpar or even terrible and end users have low tolerance for this kind of stuff.

GIMP is a great example. For decades anyone asking about "open-source Photoshop" would be redirected to GIMP even though GIMP is nowhere near as good as Photoshop. Years pass and some simple things that are a no-brainer in Photoshop are still a nightmare to do in GIMP. Text stroke is one of such examples, there's no easy way to do it with GIMP and the method you can see online looks bad and can't be easily changed afterwards. Why? Or something as simple as picking a size of a brush - why is selecting small sizes such a pain while selecting gigantic brushes that hardly anyone uses is not? Shouldn't it be the other way around?

Desktop Linux is an another example. It's always presented as an alternative to Windows (or even better than Windows) and when someone tries it out and it doesn't work for them the end user gets blamed for using the wrong distribution, having wrong hardware, not being able to solve issues right away despite being a beginner or even hit with the legendary "works on my machine". It's always the user who is in the wrong and never the software.

All of this gives OSS a bad name. There are always a bunch of small, annoying problems that affects end users and which often go unfixed for years. Whenever one of these end users brings up these problems they either get told to use a bizarre workaround or get a snarky response about submitting a PR or something. This kind of contempt towards the end user seems to be surprisingly common in OSS circles.

I don't think this is fixable. It would require the OSS community as a whole to change and this will never happen.
by jasonlernerman | 2025-10-13 10:07:43+00:00
I'm making a Chrome extension a day for a month.

Basically the title explains it, I challenged myself to making a chrome extension a day for a month. I've been posting my progress on reddit, and my first two extensions have just been accepted to the chrome store (I'm only done day 3 so far, those were quick reviews!). For those interested:

Day 1: Minimal Twitter

Day 2: No Google AI Overview in Google Search

Day 3: No Images Reddit (Not Published, yet!)

I'm posting daily, I would love to hear thoughts on the extensions!!

https://x.com/uithoughts
by self_awareness | 2025-10-13 10:07:59+00:00
Only in abandonware software private APIs stay the same. In current, living technologies, they always change. Apple can simply issue an update to all consumers of the API so that they start using different symbols. If you have the energy to play this game, then it's fine. Just remember that Apple doesn't have any problem with killing the whole kernel extension market (this among lots of other things).

At my work I'm also forced to use private APIs on macOS and it's always a mess. Each update is a source of stress. Sometimes there's no work to be done, sometimes I need to spend a month to figure out what's happening.

I generally discourage people from using private API and I always say that if the platform doesn't allow doing some kind of software using public API, then don't do this software for this platform. Select a different platform. Use feedback forms to request functionalities. But using private APIs is asking for trouble. Again, if you want to play the game then it's fine. But if you offer software for users, then you're in some way responsible for those users as well.
by whyoh | 2025-10-13 10:08:08+00:00
>disables their OS unless they turn on iCloud on their Mac -- then you can claim equivalence

What do you mean? Windows doesn't do that. Contrary to what the blog post claims, you can easily uninstall OneDrive (unlike iCloud).

And using Windows without an online account is possible, although the process is cumbersome enough to deter the average user.
by seanwilson | 2025-10-13 10:08:48+00:00
The general idea is:

- Drag the hue and saturation curves to customise the tints/shades of a color. Look at the UI mockup as you do this to make sure the tints/shades look good together.

- The color pairings used in the UI mockup all initially pass WCAG contrast checks but this can break if you tweak the lightness curve of a color. The mockup will show warning outlines if this happens. Click on a warning and it'll tell you which color pairs need to have their lightness values moved further apart to fix it.

- Once you're happy, use the export menu to use your colors in your CSS or Figma designs. You can use the mockup as a guide for which color pairs are accessible for body text, headings, button outlines and so on.

Does that make more sense? You really need to be on desktop as well because the mobile UI is more of a demo.
by wongarsu | 2025-10-13 10:09:23+00:00
Rust and Python have very compatible ideas on a lot of topics. For example both think that a developer writing normal code should not have to worry about null pointers or be able to cause a use-after-free. It's just that Python achieves that with runtime costs and Rust with compile-time costs and a complex type system. So developers of one liking the other makes a lot of sense to me. And pyo3 is an extremely convinient way to call between the two languages