MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Karliss | 2025-11-23 17:21:33+00:00
I'd say the unintuive part is mostly a problem only if you abuse fragment shaders for something they weren't meant to be used for. All the fancy drawings that people make on shadertoy are cool tricks but you would very rarely do something like that in any practical use case. Fragment shaders weren't meant to be used for making arbitrary drawings that's why you have high level graphic APIs and content creation software.

They were meant to be means for more flexible last stage of more or less traditional GPU pipeline. Normal shader would do something like sample a pixel from texture using UV coordinates already interpolated by GPU (don't even have to convert x,y screen or world coordinates into texture UV yourself), maybe from multiple textures (normal map, bump map, roughness, ...) combine it with light direction and calculate final color for that specific pixel of triangle. But the actual drawing structure comes mostly from geometry and texture not the fragment shader. With popularity of PBR and deferred rendering large fraction of objects can share the same common PBR shader parametrized by textures and only some special effects using custom stuff.

For any programmable system people will explore how far can it be pushed, but it shouldn't be surprise that things get inconvenient and not so intuitive once you go beyond normal use case. I don't think anyone is surprised that computing Fibonacci numbers using C++ templates isn't intuitive.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-11-23 17:21:43+00:00
Yeah, TBH my BS detector is going off because this article never explains how he is able to intercept these calls.

To be able to call the OpenAI directly from the front end, you'd need to include the OpenAI key, which would be a huge security hole. I don't doubt that many of these companies are just wrappers around the big LLM providers, but they'd be calling the APIs from their backend where nothing should be interceptable. And sure, I believe a few of them are dumb enough to call OpenAI from the frontend, but that would be a minority.

This whole thing smells fishy, and I call BS unless the author provides more details about how he intercepted the calls.
by Citizen_Lame | 2025-11-23 17:21:56+00:00
Said no one ever. GNOME is barely a desktop at this point. You need buggy extensions just to restore basic functionality, which says everything. In many ways, GNOME has become the epitome of a FOSS misfire: opinionated to a fault, driven by a loud minority, and offering users less choice instead of more.

Plasma, on the other hand, has made huge strides in usability, performance, and overall polish. It feels modern, extensible, and genuinely user focused. If anything is going to be the future of the mainstream Linux desktop, it’s Plasma.
by johnisgood | 2025-11-23 17:22:01+00:00
> But having a healthy balanced diet is more expensive than buying junk

In which country? Not in Central Europe, and it was never the case. Healthy food here has always been cheaper than junk food. I come from a poor family and a visit to McDonalds was always a special occasion, yet my mom cooked every single day and they were all healthy and balanced.
by mindslight | 2025-11-23 17:22:26+00:00
Not to mention that children are their own people that we hope will grow up into being fully functioning adults. Mitigating their suffering due to their parents' failings is a worthy goal. There is a lot of suffering we just have to agree to disagree about (eg many religions), but lack of food is basically an unequivocal [0] evil. And are our western societies not wealthy enough to provide basic sustenance to everyone ?

[0] being HN I know I'm running the risk of having have some contrarian edgelord arguing about parents' rights to innovate with calorie restriction and whatnot.
by kgeist | 2025-11-23 17:22:32+00:00
Well it took me 2 full-time weeks to properly implement a RAG-based system so that it found actually relevant data and did not hallucinate. Had to:

- write an evaluation pipeline to automate quality testing

- add a query rewriting step to explore more options during search

- add hybrid BM-25+vector search with proper rank fusion

- tune all the hyperparameters for best results (like weight bias for bm25 vs. vector, how many documents to retrieve for analysis, how to chunk documents based on semantics)

- parallelize the search pipeline to decrease wait times

- add moderation

- add a reranker to find best candidates

- add background embedding calculation of user documents

- lots of failure cases to iron out so that the prompt worked for most cases

There's no "just give LLM all the data", it's more complex than that, especially if you want best results and also full control of data (we run all of that using open source models because user data is under NDA)
by anonym29 | 2025-11-23 17:22:34+00:00
As someone who's lived in 10 different units/houses across 6 different US states, who values decent connectivity, Xfinity or Charter/Spectrum being the only gigabit-speed wired home internet service providers is an instant, non-negotiable deal-breaker for a prospective property for me these days.

These companies continuing to offer service this unreliable and terrible is not unlike the GM fiasco of the FWD X platform in the 80s¹, where the company deliberately attempted to conceal faulty brakes that led to the deaths of over a hundred people while still selling the affected vehicles.

The advertising these companies perform regarding this defective service amounts to fraud.

The country would be a better place if Xfinity and Charter/Spectrum simply ceased existing such that sufficient demand for reliable modern fiber infrastructure became too powerful of a market force to ignore in regions previously dominated by these incompetent-bordering-on-negligent parasitic fraudsters.

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_X_platform_(FWD...
by theoldgreybeard | 2025-11-23 17:22:43+00:00
Nah man. Windows 10 and on are hot garbage and everyone knows it.

XP was the golden age and this is just a play on nostalgia to when Windows was actually useful.

I’ve been off of Windows for a few years now and any time I need to use a Windows system it’s just a constant reminder of how terrible everything is.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-23 17:23:01+00:00
Yeah, this book was hugely influential

https://www.google.com/search?q=innovator%27s+dilemma&ie=UTF...

And came to the conclusion that many firms like DEC and Xerox did not sufficiently move to new technology because their customers were not interested and didn’t feel served by it, at least not until it had decades to improve.

Today we have the FOMO dilemma where executives all read that book and no way they are going to end up like DEC or Xerox so you get things like Windows 8, really a lot of what Microsoft has done since then has been in the same vein. We’re yet to see a “big tech” company die from the FOMO dilemma but maybe 20 years back we’ll see Google or Facebook or Microsoft in that frame.
by jcrawfordor | 2025-11-23 17:23:09+00:00
It's very confusing in the text of the article, at times it sounds like the author is using heuristic methods (like timings) but at times it sounds like they somehow have access to network traffic from the provider's backend. I could 100% believe that a ton of these companies are making API calls to providers directly from an SPA, but the flow diagrams in the article seem to specifically rule that out as an explanation.

I might allow them more credit if the article wasn't in such an obviously LLM-written style. I've seen a few cases like this, now, where it seems like someone did some very modest technical investigation or even none at all and then prompted an LLM to write a whole article based on it. It comes out like this... a whole lot of bullet points and numbered lists, breathless language about the implications, but on repeated close readings you can't tell what they actually did.

It's unfortunate that, if this author really did collect this data, their choice to have an LLM write the article and in the process obscure the details has completely undermined their credibility.
by pshirshov | 2025-11-23 17:23:21+00:00
Essentially, I've tried to throw a task which, I thought, Claude won't handle. It did with minimal supervision. Some things had to be done in "adversarial" mode where Claude coded and Codex criticized/reviewed, but it is what it is. An LLM was able to implement generics and many other language features with very little supervision in less than a day o_O.

I've been thrilled to see it using GDB with inhuman speed and efficiency.
by moooo99 | 2025-11-23 17:23:22+00:00
Is it though? Most apps I am using are following the OS/browser preferences or are light mode as a default. One of the more notable exceptions is Discord, but that is largely explained away by the fact that the gaming focused audience often demands dark modes.

Also, the dark mode setting in mist browsers is one search entry away. I really don't see the problem here
by pkphilip | 2025-11-23 17:23:24+00:00
Actually, no, I don't think we all agree that the basis of the concerns have been low. For one thing, just a short list of claims that have already been debunked.

1. mRNA will not cause changes across the body and will stay only in the injection sitre.

Finding: False. mRNA traces are being found even in the heart and the brain tissues.

2. mRNA will not be transferred from a pregnant mother to the baby in the womb or via breast milk

Finding: False. mRNA traces are being found in babies in the womb and also in breast milk. There are no conclusive studies on what this does to bodies of these babies.

3. mRNA will not permanently alter the DNA of those being injected.

Finding: False. DNA is indeed altered.
by yalogin | 2025-11-23 17:23:25+00:00
That is lower than I expected. There are just a handful of companies that create llms. They are all more ir less similar. So all automation is in using them, which is prompt engineering if you see that way.

The bigger question is, this is the same story with apps on mobile phones. Apple and google could easily replicate your app if they wanted to and they did too. That danger is much higher with these ai startups. The llms are already there in terms of functionality, all the creators figured out the value is in vertical integration and all of them are doing it. From that sense all these startups are just showing them what to build. Even perplexity and cursor are in danger.
by pint_of_mint | 2025-11-23 17:23:41+00:00
I've started using a sepia tone filter for my phone screen which solves this nicely for bright websites. It's in the accessibility settings and actually it's 25% opacity orange but really improves everything. Even dark mode websites look nice with it. It just evens everything out a bit and gives it a warm feel.

Anyway, point is, the onus is on the author of this rant to adapt to his circumstances. Not to expect everyone to change everything for him.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-11-23 17:24:20+00:00
No, it’s only configurable. And many people like myself leave it dark mode permanently unless in a bright place.

I think the debate comes down to how bright you keep your environment.

OP likes bright overhead lighting and confuses that preference for the superiority of a preference downstream of it. Yawn.

I’d rather look at a bright 27” screen in dark mode where I see full color fidelity than dim the screen so that bright backgrounds aren’t too harsh. But it’s just a preference.
by mettamage | 2025-11-23 17:24:34+00:00
Yea, solid take.

> Marrying the person you're most attracted to or have the most fun with or whose pants you're most eager to get into is a very culturally specific practice and frankly, even where it is an aspiration, its one that a lot of people just don't luck into.

Man, I feel this. And it's also funny that you write it in such an objective way but it's true. It _is_ a very culturaly specific practice.

I've lucked into it. It feels amazing. But I'm lucky that I was crazy enough to really teach myself how to get over rejection and just search for as long as needed to find someone who felt the same way about me as I felt about her. Amazing character building though, it was a true rite of passage for me that started around when I was 16 and ended when I was 32 and married. Dating and being good at it, in order to be in an amazing relationship, has been an obsession of my life. This was in part because I sucked so hard at it as a young teenager. I think in earlier times I'd have settled for someone unappealing or stayed a virgin. Thank god, the internet was a thing when I was young.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-11-23 17:24:35+00:00
I decided to flag this article because it has to be fake.

The author never explains how he is able to intercept these API calls to OpenAI, etc. I definitely believe tons of these companies are just wrappers, but they'd be doing the "wrapping" in their backend, with only a couple (dumb) companies doing the calls directly to OpenAI from the front end where they could be traced.

This article is BS. My guess is it was probably AI generated because it doesn't make any sense.
by al_borland | 2025-11-23 17:24:52+00:00
I will never get used to Gnomes lack of native support for minimizing windows. I actually had to lookup how they expected users to manage windows, as it was not obvious to me. Apparently you’re supposed to move windows to another virtual desktop to get them out of the way. As someone who has never really clicked with virtual desktop, this doesn’t work for me. This feels like such a glaring omission of a convention that has been around for decades (even in past versions of Gnome).

I was on a call with someone from Red Hat a few months ago when they were sharing their screen, and he threw the windows over to another desktop to get them out of the way, following the design. While he seemed to do it relatively quickly, it looked pretty awkward for something a person would be doing pretty often. It was routine to perform vs a single click to minimize in every other OS.

I know minimization can be added with Tweaks, but it always felt a little hacky and buggy.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-11-23 17:25:29+00:00
Well, I guess that's fine for the "gaming-focused audience," then.

For the benefit of the rest of us, explain how to turn off "dark mode" when viewing specific websites that are hardwired to use it, while running Safari on iOS, or in Firefox on desktop, without installing various extensions that may not be available to users at work, or changing the way the whole OS appears.

Edit due to rate-limiting: The Firefox theme has absolutely nothing to do with how a web page is rendered. Select the light theme and go to Hackaday, or a logged-out Mastodon page, and you will find that it looks exactly the same.

Same with the peanut gallery that always pops up with helpful advice like "Just change your OS theme." Even if that would help, which it wouldn't, I'm not going to change the global OS appearance to accommodate a few asshat web designers.
by wduquette | 2025-11-23 17:25:35+00:00
I first experimented with Lisp back in the mid-80’s, and have returned to it time and again—not as a language for serious projects, but just as a way of learning new techniques and new ways to think about writing software. I’ve tried using Racket on a number of occasions going back to way before it was called that, and something about the software just puts me off. Perhaps I could get past that if I stuck with it, but I just can’t see myself writing a large project using Racket.
by tsol | 2025-11-23 17:25:44+00:00
People seem to disagree with this comment but it makes sense. Lots of people get no genuine sexually or emotional attention sure to severe disabilities, cultural incompatibility, weight issues, or simply because they don't know how to socialize properly. It's odd to say they can't live a full life, just because they didn't kiss a girl in the 9th grade.

If relationships are so key to the human experience, the incels would be right. They argue society should feel bad for them and accommodate them, because not being able to get sexual attention keeps them from having a normal life.

Not that I agree with them, but it seems odd to place so much value on relationships, except when people complain it's a problem they can't get one. I have a severely disabled friend who talks about wanting to get married every day. No one has ever shown him that kind of affection and I don't think anyone ever will. That's life for some people unfortunately. If you keep telling them they're missing out on the most important part of life of course it just makes them more frustrated
by jliptzin | 2025-11-23 17:25:48+00:00
Yep, I knew this was Comcast/Xfinity just seeing the title. I had the exact same problem, for years. Intermittent disconnects for a few minutes at a time, multiple times a day. I must have had upwards of 50 technicians come to my house, all insisting there was some problem with the wiring in my house (there wasn’t) or the router or whatever (hardware all replaced multiple times including the wiring). Eventually after years of complaining that the issue isn’t in my house, they finally sent a bucket truck a half a mile up the road and the problem was fixed in about 30 minutes. It worked well for about a year and then started happening again. They started giving me the run around again. I had appointments scheduled for technicians to come, three times in a row they just never showed up. To “apologize” to me they said they would provide a credit on my account. The amount? 1 penny. I took a screenshot and saved it in case anyone thinks I am making this up. Luckily, by this time starlink was available in my area. I switched to that, turns out it’s much cheaper anyway and since then have not had any issues. The sooner Comcast goes out of business, the better.

Tip to anyone reading this: After I cancelled and closed my account, they billed me one last time for double my monthly bill ($200). No idea why, probably they thought they'd try to get away with it. I had little to no interest in participating in their customer support circus again, so I just went online to my bank and submitted a dispute of the charge. The bank instantly ruled in my favor and closed the case, issuing a permanent credit. I have never seen that before. They must be getting tons of Comcast chargebacks to do that.

I also submitted a complaint to the AG office and my local commission but I'm not expecting anything to happen.
by commandar | 2025-11-23 17:26:16+00:00
I'm firmly of the opinion that, as a general rule, if you're directly embedding the output of a model into a workflow and you're not one of a handful of very big players, you're probably doing it wrong.[1]

If we overlook that non-determinism isn't really compatible with a lot of business processes and assume you can make the model spit out exactly what you need, you can't get around the fact that an LLM is going to be a slower and more expensive way of getting the data you need in most cases.

LLMs are fantastic for building things. Use them to build quickly and pivot where needed and then deploy traditional architecture for actually running the workloads. If your production pipeline includes an LLM somewhere in the flow, you need to really, seriously slow down and consider whether that's actually the move that makes sense.

[1] - There are exceptions. There are always exceptions. It's a general rule not a law of physics.
by moooo99 | 2025-11-23 17:26:22+00:00
> Fix your lighting instead of bullying the rest of the Internet into eyesight-damaging practices.

Is there actually any evidence to support this claim? As far as I know, bright screen and dim room usually leads to eye fatigue and eye strain, but these are temporary issues. As far as I understood, any claims that computer work leads to long term vision problems are largely unfounded. Am I missing something here?
by crossbody | 2025-11-23 17:27:18+00:00
Dude, who cares about study design and methodological validity! Let's just burn Meta down and put Zuck to jail! /s

What you a saying is valid criticism of the study but people here already made up their mind, so they downvote.

Another point to add is that 1 week is way too short - assuming there is an effect it might disappear or go in reverse after 1 month.

To all downvoters: if you think of yourself as smart rational people, please just use search/AI to see for yourself whether there is high quality evidence of _causal_ impact of social media on kids/mental health. The results are mixed at best.
by __jonas | 2025-11-23 17:27:18+00:00
> Flow is faster to use. With Raycast you often need to enter an extension to finish your action. To launch a scrip on Flow I just type "r [shortcut] -> enter" while Raycast is "quicklinks -> enter -> [shortcut] -> enter

That’s surprising to me, since it’s not how it works in the mac version of Raycast.

There you just type the extension name to trigger it, which you can also set an alias for, so I have it set so that if I type “c” then press space I see my list of vscode projects which I can search. “f” goes into file search (I think that’s the default even)
by p_ing | 2025-11-23 17:27:20+00:00
There are gains and losses in UX, I agree. I avoid the ads stuff via Pro (though not completely the telemetry, that said it's for games and a separate Enterprise device for Windows-only PoSh). I think the big spot for 'Recent' on the start menu, which I disable recent, is a waste of space.

But I don't use the start menu in the way of Windows' past; it's always Win+type what I want.

We did gain with things like tabbed Explorer or a right-click menu not infested by COM extensions taking ages to load.

I'm not aware of any of these 'dozens of new ways' to make Windows unusable in the way I use it, then again Windows doesn't really force any one happy path, there are often five different ways to do one thing.
by unethical_ban | 2025-11-23 17:27:28+00:00
I was a GNOME fan in the 00s, then I really liked Unity from Ubuntu, and now in the 2020s I have switched to KDE. KDE is super powerful but (as a technical person) easy to discover options. The basic sound/wifi/system stuff is really easy to access, the global search in the menu is wonderful.

Best part about Unity was that you could hold down the meta button, and it would reveal the cheatsheet for all the other window manipulation shortcuts.

BUT... the person above you did literally say they think GNOME is better and that's fine too.
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-11-23 17:27:46+00:00
Even though most[1] 'Dark Modes' don't work for me (in the sense that everything just turns into a muddy blur and I can't make sense of anything anymore at all), I do realize that's entirely a personal thing, and I do make a point of respecting the user's preference in the apps and sites that I ship. Small price to pay for being neighborly, and a lot less passive-aggressive than "didn't anyone explain to you how to turn down your display brightness?"

[1] With the exception of that weird Windows 11 theme option that keeps the main window content 'light' yet turns most OS affordances 'dark' -- that one is oddly pleasing...
by treetalker | 2025-11-23 17:28:02+00:00
Alfred (https://www.alfredapp.com/) has been an indispensable part of my computing since it debuted. It's excellent.

Because of that, I've found it difficult to even give Raycast a try, let alone switch over to it.

Perhaps you could offer your best argument to persuade me why it would be worthwhile.
Circle Flake
by dxrko619 | 2025-11-23 17:28:19+00:00
I briefly talked about going all in on Startups since I've been trying to do that since i was 12-13.

I'm building a AI + Human messaging software.

(keeping AI at front to bait the attention, although I'm focused on messaging more than AI)

Think Messaging within humans and AI added in the mix.

on side note, the aim is not to replace humans but make ai their [b word].

I'm open to a private launch. I would love to have some people to come in, and experience what it would look like.

please send an email to dheerajkaim@circleflake.com or career.dheerajkaim@gmail.com

also, how else should i collect emails. oh yeah, check this google form btw. https://forms.gle/5KPGCacmPtLtCNRQ8