MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sleepybrett | 2025-11-05 18:18:41+00:00
I think it's fine if all the 'ai' is local.

I haven't read all of the documentation around this project but I hope it's in the same vein as the cannon cat and the apple-apple//gs (and other early computer systems with quick and easy access to some kind of programmable environment). (as an aside I think apple tried to keep this going with applescript and automator but didn't quite pull it off)

I think there is a weird trick though. General purpose computers a great and they can do anything and many people bog down their systems with everything as a result. I feel like past projects like Microsoft's Bob and the Canon Cat were also in this general thought pattern. Strip it back, give them the tools that they need and very little else.

I try and follow that pattern also on my work macbook. I only install what I need to do my job. Anything I want to try out gets a deadline for removal. I keep my /Applications folder very light and I police my homebrew installs with a similar zeal.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-11-05 18:18:46+00:00
You should never plan to use your safety margin!

That "extra" 400m of grass? That's for all the other things that can still go wrong even when you follow procedure. e.g., you're below V1 so you abort takeoff, close throttles and hit the brakes. You should be able to safely stop on the runway.

But now your brakes fail because maybe the reason you had to abort was a fire that also managed to burn through your brake lines, or it started to rain just as you were taking off, or...

Now that's where the 400m of safety margin comes in to save your ass (hopefully). It's "extra", you don't plan on using it.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-05 18:18:51+00:00
At this point we need both. If full time minimum wage can't afford an entry level studio apartments, then we're already in trouble.

For reference, that's $2100 or so of monthly take home pay for NYC's 16.50 minimum wage. Old wisdom would mean that this should make for $700 rental prices. But I'm sure few Gen Z are expecting rent to be 30% of income.
by atcon | 2025-11-05 18:19:48+00:00
You raise fair points. I'd also prefer a simpler solution for a human-only internet, but nothing has really worked so far. Bloomberg issued secure cards with fingerprint pads that you held up to the monitor to retrieve credentials to their system, so maybe a simpler physical authenticator could work at scale. I'm not sure how secure a pulsometer would be, but hacking an apple headset chip and retinal pattern seem harder.

Court: disagree in part. More judges are needed to address the severe backlogs, but as an example NYS judges oppose expansion (see [3] from previous post). A lot of calendar time is spent appearing before judges around a city (they're not all in one area) for motion hearings and the like despite all documents being electronically submitted. Also, there are frequent reschedulings when one party can't physically appear. Some state judges allow teleconference, but a lot don't. Appellate and federal courts rarely.

Checkups and social services: some secure way of monitoring client interactions and outcomes is needed. In Los Angeles, the homeless services agency has been criticized by a federal judge for incompetence [1] and more than half of the child-prostitutes in a notorious corridor were found to be "missing" from the foster system [2]. Maybe headsets are not the best answer, but govt agencies and social service NGOs need to record evidence of their efforts for accountability.

[1] <https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-03-31/los-ange...> [2] <https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/26/magazine/sex-trafficking-...>
by wk_end | 2025-11-05 18:19:49+00:00
I don't feel like this really answers OP's question, which is more about the user experience than the technical approach.

When, as a dev, I use Smalltalk, it opens up what's effectively a virtual machine on my desktop. The whole Smalltalk GUI runs inside its own frame, none of the controls are native, etc. And it's a development environment - I have access to a class browser, a debugger, a REPL, and so on. I can drill down and read/modify the source code of everything. Which is great as a dev, but may be intimidating for an end user.

Is that what the end user experience is like as well? I think that's what OP is asking. I've never used a Smalltalk application as an end user to my knowledge, so I can't say myself.
by samus | 2025-11-05 18:19:50+00:00
> No it's not. There are plenty of things that can't be 100% reliable no matter how well they're made. A perfect bridge is still going to break down and eventually fall apart. The best possible motion-activated light is going to have false positives and false negatives because the real world is messy. Light bulbs will burn out no matter how much care and effort goes into them.

All these failure modes are known and predicable, at least statistically
by bdangubic | 2025-11-05 18:20:09+00:00
> original Obamacare was too radical even for all the Dem senators

This statement alone is the craziest thing about our country (I don't disagree...). However, if you make something a centerpiece of your entire political life and then you do not deliver you have effectively failed. I am sure if Obama had a do-over he would either get this done right or punt and focus his tenure on something he could have actually delivered...
by mschuster91 | 2025-11-05 18:21:44+00:00
> The government should just set a higher safety standard and let the companies figure out the costs.

The problem is, it doesn't work out that way. We lost enough people to that madness - as soon as hundreds, if not thousands (see 9/11) of lives are at stake, IMHO the effort to ensure compliance with standards is so massive, the government could (and should...) do the damn job itself.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-05 18:22:34+00:00
I don’t see anything that looks remotely like a normative argument about what browsers should or should not do anywhere in my post that you are responding to, did you perhaps mean to respond to some other post?

My point was that the decision to remove XSLT support from browsers rather than replacing the insecure, unmaintained implementation with a secure, maintained implementation is an indicator opposed to the claim "XSLT isn’t going anywhere”. I am not arguing anything at all about what browser vendors should do.
by flomo | 2025-11-05 18:22:39+00:00
IMO XSLT was just too difficult for most webdevs. And IMO this created a political problem where the 'frontend' folks needed to be smarter than the 'backend' generating the XML in the first place.

XSLT might make sense as part of a processing pipeline. But putting it on front of your website was just an unnecessary and inflexible layer, so that's why everyone stopped doing it. (except rss feeds and etc.)
by gruntledfangler | 2025-11-05 18:22:48+00:00
I’ve worked at many bars and restaurants. The best ordering interface I ever used was at Pizza Hut circa 1999. It was a monochrome TUI (orange). It was ancient-looking even then.

The speed was incredible once you got proficient. Once you got the muscle memory down you could punch in any single pizza order in less than a second. Even something complicated like different toppings on the halves was NBD. Pizza Hut was always coming up with these ridiculous gimmicks and the system could accommodate them seamlessly. Just incredible.

This system probably quietly saved the company millions in its time.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-11-05 18:22:54+00:00
Apparently it had no Wayland support: https://discuss.python.org/t/feature-request-wayland-support...

So there’s another issues with GUIs, they might be fine on Xorg and have issues on Wayland (or viceversa). TUIs all work as long as your terminal emulator works.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-05 18:22:58+00:00
We don't have "used apartments". Your metaphor falls apart here. And land is limited and government controlled. So GM can't just roll up and produce new houses out of an assembly line.

Land is limited, meanwhile we've built cars for a century and maybe the last 40 yeses worth of cars are street compliant. The only thing comoarable for cars is showing what abundance can do for a market. Less people care about a 2026 Camaro being affordable if you can buy a used '05 camaro for $3000 (which is probably still and absurd price, but hey. That's less than two months of rent in CA)
by pplante | 2025-11-05 18:23:02+00:00
I watched Alien: Earth recently and was admiring the TUIs everywhere. The show takes place in 2120 and they kept up the aesthetics of the original movies. A future full of synthetic humanoids and interstellar ships kept the TUI. I do not remember tablets being in the series, however even those seem to use a similar TUI.

I look forward to my great grandchildren rediscovering the TUI.
by randerson | 2025-11-05 18:23:07+00:00
Your neighbor buying a Porsche was a choice they made. Nobody chooses to have a pre-existing condition. We're also talking about a luxury vs simple survival. I am not sure how you can compare them.

What insurers in some countries do is charge higher premiums for people who engage in high-risk behaviors, like smoking, drinking, or extreme sports. Those are all choices so it seems fair to charge a sin tax for them. Higher premiums would discourage risky behavior and improve the health of the country as a whole.
by rangerelf | 2025-11-05 18:23:09+00:00
I was looking for someone else that had done this, I had the same exact experience.

That said, anyone looking into a completely static typed language that has nice ergonomics, is easy to pick up but has enough depth to keep you busy for weeks on end, and is versatile enough to be used for anything, do yourself a favor and give Nim a try.

https://nim-lang.org/
by Scubabear68 | 2025-11-05 18:23:14+00:00
The image concept, in my opinion, is what really limited Smalltalk's appeal and distribution.

The image meant you basically got whatever state the developer ended up with, frozen in time, with no indication really of how they got there.

Think of today's modern systems and open source, with so many libraries easily downloadable and able to be incorporated in your system in a very reproducible way. Smalltalk folks derided this as a low tech, lowest-common-denominator approach. But in fact it gave us reusable components from disparate vendors and sources.

The image concept was a huge strength of Smalltalk but, really in the end in my opinion, one of the major areas that held it back.

Java in particular surged right past Smalltalk despite many shortcomings compared to it, partially because of this. The other part of course was being free at many levels. The other half of Smalltalk issues beyond the image one, was the cost of both developer licenses ($$$$!) and runtime licenses (ugh!).
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-05 18:23:16+00:00
Zohran Mamdani promises free buses for NYC. Here's a closer look at the plan and how it gets paid for. - https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/zohran-mamdani-new-york... - November 5, 2025

My brother in christ, this took less than ten seconds to Google ("Zohran Mamdani free bus plan").
Show HN: TRex – macOS OCR menu bar app, now with 100+ languages
by melonamin | 2025-11-05 18:23:20+00:00
Hi HN! I'm excited to share the latest major update to TRex, a free and open-source OCR tool for macOS.

TRex lives in your menu bar and extracts text from anywhere on your screen with a simple screenshot-like capture. Think of any PDF where you can't select text, images with text, or even YouTube videos – TRex grabs that text straight to your clipboard.

What's new in v1.9: Added Tesseract OCR engine alongside Apple Vision, giving you access to 100+ languages. TRex intelligently picks the best engine for your selected language. Apple Vision covers the common ones (English, Spanish, French, Chinese, etc.) while Tesseract fills in the gaps with everything from Afrikaans to Yoruba, including complex scripts like Arabic, Thai, and Cyrillic.

https://github.com/amebalabs/TRex
by slkq | 2025-11-05 18:23:24+00:00
Hi! I am Shawn, an experienced Full Stack developer familiar across both the frontend and backend having worked for a number of years across multiple startups, and am confident that I would be able to bring value and contribute as an engineer given my prior experience be it in a part-time or full-time capacity.

I’ve spent the last several years as a full stack engineer, working with both startups and big tech companies in the US, Europe and in Singapore. I thrive in environments where I can collaborate, solve complex problems, and see my work make a difference.

I would be more than happy to jump on a call and see if I can help contribute and add value to your team as an engineer.

---

Location: Bangkok, Thailand (Asia)

Remote: Yes (Asia or EU time zone)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Next.js, VueJS, NuxtJS, NestJS, Node.js, TailwindCSS, GraphQL/REST API, LLMs, Langchain, Langgraph, OpenAI APIs, Solidity, Rust, Docker, AWS, web3, Python, FastAPI

Website: https://developerlim.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ke-qin-lim-103a99342/

Email: slkq.dev@gmail.com
by kragen | 2025-11-05 18:24:19+00:00
Yes, I agree. I meant that you can edit code on the production web server so that the customer you're on the phone with sees their application start working. PG had the advantage that he could tweak the Lisp process for that specific user, reducing the risk of breaking the site for other concurrent users.

Database transactions bridge some of the gap between "change the code for the next request" and "stop at a breakpoint and change the code": as long as your request handler code keeps failing, it will abort the transaction, so the database is unchanged, so you can restart the transaction as many times as you want to get to the same point in execution, at least if your programming language is deterministic. By providing a snapshot you can deterministically replay from, it allows you to add log entries before the point where the problem occurred, which can be very useful.

Stopping at a breakpoint can be more productive, especially with edit-and-continue, but often it isn't. A breakpoint is a voltmeter, which you can use to see one value at every node in your circuit; logs are a digital storage oscilloscope with a spectrum analyzer, where you can analyze the history of millions or billions of values at a single node in your circuit.
by capitainenemo | 2025-11-05 18:24:23+00:00
Cool, although I feel if on one side you have Java, JavaScript, Python, Go and on the other Perl, PHP, C/C++, Ruby, Rust it's hard to say overwhelming majority in either direction.

Also someone below claims python byte arrays can be considered mutable strings, although I have no idea of the stringy ergonomics of that and whether it would be convenient to do - I try to avoid python too.
by RaftPeople | 2025-11-05 18:24:26+00:00
> that the original mainframe hardware has likely been virtualized at this point

The as400 is a mini-computer, the high end of this line overlaps the low end of mainframe.

When I did some consulting work out there many years ago, they had a network of the largest as400's that IBM makes, connected together in one image.

Regarding virtualization: It would have to be on IBM's power processors. IBM does offer cloud services running as400, I have no info on whether Costco is using that or not.
by wrathofmonads | 2025-11-05 18:24:29+00:00
What’s your take on older languages gaining new life in production because of ecosystem improvements? I’m thinking of Python, which for most of its 34 year history wasn’t always a go-to choice, but nowadays its ecosystem is being scaled with Rust and C++ libraries and tooling. I’ve noticed a similar trend in JavaScript, where Go and Rust are improving bundlers, type-checkers, etc. The way we deploy our software has also changed dramatically with Kubernetes, code running at the edge (thinking of Cloudflare Workers, AWS Lambda).
by virtualbluesky | 2025-11-05 18:24:42+00:00
It's the heat map of the error surface of the equation... Fairly well understood as a concept in the land of optimization and gradient descent.

Interesting, what's being visualized there is actually a failure mode for an unidentifiable equation - the valley where the error is zero and therefore all solutions are acceptable. Introduce noise into the measurements of error and that valley being too flat causes odd behaviour
by kotaKat | 2025-11-05 18:24:51+00:00
But how do you fight back not against municipalities - but corporations deploying these?

Sure, you might get your small town to remove them throughout their own land, but Lowes and Home Depot will still set up their own Flock cameras on their own contracts nationwide.

Lowes is responsible for ~8 Flock cameras in and out of my local shopping center.
by pksebben | 2025-11-05 18:24:55+00:00
Came this close to buying an AVP, before learning that they only mirror a single screen with no virtual monitors.

Like, guize, c'mon. Virtual desktop can do three. For 3.5k you gotta do better. I don't particularly need a virtual me in space as much as I need more screens that can do, like, actual work.
by chrismorgan | 2025-11-05 18:25:05+00:00
I wish more people would see this. They know exactly how to sandbox it, they’re telling you how to, they’re even providing and recommending a browser extension to securely restore the functionality they’re removing!

The security argument can be valid motivation for doing something, but is utterly illegitimate as a reason for removing. They want to remove it because they abandoned it many years ago, and it’s a maintenance burden. Not a security burden, they’ve shown exactly how to fix that as part of preparing to remove it!
by moosedman | 2025-11-05 18:25:11+00:00
The AI comments that I've seen seem mostly about keeping the bubble inflated which just makes feel rage at stock bulls. I'm trying really hard not to dislike / truly hate stock bulls but they make it really hard. Everywhere they go, everything they do, they seem to degrade the world for those around them and make it much harder for everyone else to have good human experiences.
by adamzwasserman | 2025-11-05 18:25:29+00:00
On "structural identity": You say code "fulfills the same ontological functions as structure, process, and self-awareness" but you haven't shown how. You've simply reasserted that it does. What makes a function call ontologically equivalent to consciousness rather than just... a function call? I would be interested in the reasoning behind your assertion. Or is it more of an intuition?

On the programming concepts: You claim Attribute = "Quality of Being" and Enum = "Symbolic Identity": but this is just relabeling, not arguing. I could equally claim:

Pointers = "Directed Intentionality" Garbage Collection = "Entropic Reconciliation" Race Conditions = "Ontological Uncertainty"

Why are your mappings privileged? What makes them more than arbitrary associations?

On transcendence: "When a system begins to model its own logic and rewrite its own rules": you mean reflection and metaprogramming? Those are well-understood capabilities that don't require invoking consciousness or transcendence. A Python __getattr__ hook doesn't make the code "aware." What distinguishes your 'transcendence' from what we already call metaprogramming?

On predictions: Your three predictions are either already false or undefined:

"Generate ethical behavior from internal logic": what counts as ethical behavior? How do we verify it emerged from internal logic vs. external constraints/training/design? "Self-descriptive meta-structures": we've had reflection since Lisp in 1960. Is Lisp conscious? "Meaning as runtime variable": this is too vague to falsify. Are you able to decribe this in more practical terms?

I was hoping for a testable (most likely using deductive/inductive reasoning) framework. This feels more like simply mapping technical terms to philosophical language and calling that philosophy. If this -is- intuition driven rather than argued/reasoned, that's fine. Intuitions can be valuable starting points. But then we should be clear that's what we're working with, not a philosophical framework that's already been established.
by tbocek | 2025-11-05 18:25:29+00:00
UDP-based protocols are well suited for P2P, since hole punching is straightforward if you have predictable port mapping, you cannot disallow it. In that spirit, we are currently exploring this with:

https://github.com/tbocek/qotp and https://github.com/qh-project/qh

The main idea is to have a simple encryption (ed25519/chacha20+poly1305) for encryption in the transport layer, on top of that then qh, where certs are use for signing content.

With out of band key exchange, you can establish a connection after you successfully punched a hole.

However, its not QUIC compatible in any way (https://xkcd.com/927)
by rangerelf | 2025-11-05 18:25:30+00:00
I kind of object to this take.

Nobody's talking about porting billions of lines of code, for all we know it's just for personal projects, or a learning experience.

This kind of replies is like killing an idea before it's even started, smells like the sunk cost fallacy.

OTOH I do understand the weight of a currently existing corpus in production, evidence is the ton of COBOL code still running. But still, your reply kind of sucks.
by basscomm | 2025-11-05 18:26:19+00:00
I think the fundamental disconnect here is that you're assuming that I am a developer. I'm not, I'm a lousy developer. It's not for lack of trying, programming just doesn't click for me in the way that makes learning it an enjoyable process.

XSLT is a good middle ground that gave me just enough rope to do some fun transformations and put up some pages on the internet without having to set up a dev environment or learn a 'real' programming language
by jesper-jayaswal | 2025-11-05 18:26:28+00:00
Location: Seattle, WA, US Remote: Yes (preferred)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: JSL/JMP, SQL, Python, R, Statistical analysis, AI powered analytics

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14typAgvgdmp0eLSeN36u3zYg...

Email: jesper.jayaswal@gmail.com

About me: Highly accomplished data analysis engineer with vast experience working in fast-paced environments in high-tech industry and academia. Expertise includes advanced data analysis, coding, product engineering, and process engineering. Startup experience. Solid project management skills leading engineering groups and technicians. Exceptional interpersonal skills with a collaborative, open-minded approach. Consistently recognized as easy to work with. Dedicated problem solver with innate ability to keep things moving along smoothly.
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-05 18:26:29+00:00
What do you watch on an 8K TV?

There's no content

Average bitrate from anything not a Bluray for even HD is not good, so you do not benefit from more pixels anyway. Sure, you are decompressing and displaying 8K worth of pixels, but the actual resolution of your content is more like 1080p anyway, especially in color space.

Normally, games are the place where arbitrarily high pixel counts could shine, because you could literally ensure that every pixel is calculated and make real use of it, but that's actually stupidly hard at 4k and above, so nvidia just told people to eat smeary and AI garbage instead, throwing away the entire point of having a beefy GPU.

I was even skeptical of 1440p at higher refresh rates, but bought a nice monitor with those specs anyway and was happily surprised with the improvement, but it's obvious diminishing returns.