MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by le-mark | 2025-11-25 12:47:12+00:00
That series strived for realism in that regard, and in using magnetic boots to work in zero gravity; which was admirable. That made the things that were not realistic stand out even more imo. The (unfortunately named) Epstein drive, a drive that consumes very little mass under constant acceleration allows for relativistic speeds in very little time (weeks). Their ships were flying from one side of the solar system to the other in weeks, but they couldn’t make interstellar flights? Also the effects of cosmic rays and hard radiation on reproduction makes the disaffected belter population seem impossible. That’s all fine of course, just inconsistent imo.

Shohreh Aghdashloo performance was a real treat though!
by innei_jiang | 2025-11-25 12:47:14+00:00
I’ve been building a reading app called Folo for the last couple of years. It pulls in RSS / websites / feeds and uses AI to help you keep up, instead of just showing a giant unread counter.

The tech part went okay. The business part… not so much. Here’s what I think we screwed up.

---

### 1. Staying free for too long

At the beginning we made everything free:

* no real limits * no clear plans about pricing * lots of new features “for the community”

It felt good. People were happy, we got nice feedback, usage grew a bit.

But we accidentally trained everyone to see Folo as a *free utility*, not a product that needs to pay for servers and AI. We also never communicated “one day this will cost money” in a clear way. That came back to bite us later.

---

### 2. Attracting the wrong “loyal” users

Because we were powerful + free, we attracted a lot of heavy users who:

* love trying new tools * hate subscriptions * are extremely sensitive to any limits

They were loud, active, and shaped a lot of the roadmap. But a big part of this group was basically “free forever”. Good people, just not the right fit for an expensive backend.

When we finally thought about money, our user base was already skewed towards people who would never pay.

---

### 3. A messy first pricing change

At some point the bills forced us to move. We introduced plans and limits in a hurry.

From a user’s point of view it looked like:

* sudden changes * some things they relied on moved to paid * not enough warning or explanation

Even if our reasons were valid, we communicated badly. Some long-time users felt betrayed, complained loudly, and new growth almost stopped. Not fun.

---

### 4. Building more features instead of saying “no”

Under pressure we did another classic mistake: trying to fix problems with *more features*.

* someone complained ⇒ we added a setting * someone said “I’d pay if it had X” ⇒ we started building X

We shipped a bunch of stuff, but it didn’t really help activation, retention or revenue. It mostly made the product heavier and the team more tired.

---

### 5. What I’d do differently next time

If I started a similar product again:

* *Pick a narrow target from day one* e.g. “devs who follow 50–100 feeds for work”, not “anyone who reads”.

* *Introduce pricing much earlier* even simple: small free tier, clear paid tier, expectations set from the start.

* *Over-communicate changes* announce in advance, grandfather some usage, explain in plain language.

* *Ship less, measure more* only build things that help:

* activation * retention * or clear paid value

---

We’re still running Folo and trying to clean this up, just slower and more carefully now.

If you’ve been through the “free too long, now what” phase with your own app, I’d love to hear how you handled it.
by dormento | 2025-11-25 12:48:11+00:00
Seems like you forgot a /s, otherwise, this would be so incredibly condescending.

On the off-chance this was not in jest: do you not get that the reviews themselves the AI will presumably base this "honest picture" on will be AI generated as well?

"Ah but do you think today's reviews are also not AI-generated?"

Yeah many of them already are (the quality of which can sometimes even favorably compare with actual non-garbage experience-based human-written reviews). Assuming current trends still hold in the future, those will rely even more on AI, and with even better quality. Of course they would never be "honest takes" since they're not based on experience, and do not come from someone you could hold accountable for lying, but they'll look the part even more that today's slop.
by rs186 | 2025-11-25 12:48:11+00:00
> I don't sit around all day complaining about Triumphs because I drive a Honda.

I mean, you could decide to complain or not complain, either is fine under a discussion thread of that specific topic. I have posted many comments like "I will never buy * because ..." on forums which I think is perfectly fine.

What matters is whether a comment contains valuable information and is contributing to the discussion. If others can use the information to form their decision, it's a net value add.
by chickensong | 2025-11-25 12:48:52+00:00
They're useful for context management. I use frequently for research in a codebase, looking for specific behavior, patterns, etc. That type of thing eats a lot of context because a lot of data needs to be ingested and analyzed.

If you delegate that work to a sub-agent, it does all the heavy lifting, then passes the results to the main agent. The sub-agent's context is used for all the work, not the main agent's.
by riazrizvi | 2025-11-25 12:49:18+00:00
No. The headline does not match the justification in the article. The organoid brain tissue is not hooked up to sensory mechanisms in its first months, I accept that, but they are under the influence of input-output training in their initial structure which would reasonably form some non-random pattern of weights, due to characteristics of the cells.

The question then is, 1) are these characteristics acting as some kind of evolutionary adaption that passes on preconfigured world recognition (asserted by the headline), 2) are they some kind of evolutionary adaptation that makes more effective thinking systems in the form of some specific cognitive structure (more likely IMO), ie they are random features that cause non-random neural structure that drive survival-selection.

Think about the process for (1) to occur. Some ancestor learned in their life to fear snake-like animals or crave mama’s nearness, what possible process could put that knowledge (neural structure of such specificity) into the way that animal generated its sperm or egg? On the other hand, it’s reasonable to assume some genetic encodings encourage specific neural structures even in very early stages, that these are random, but that evolution favored some vs others over the 500mm years animals-with-brains have been around.
by inejge | 2025-11-25 12:50:15+00:00
> I wonder how long the open-source ecosystem will be able to resist this wave.

This PR was very successfully resisted: closed and locked without much reviewing. And with a lot of tolerance and patience from the developers, much more than I believe to be fruitful: the "author" is remarkably resistant to argument. So, I think that others can resist in the same way.
Ask HN: Is starting a new project in C++ just a mistake in 2025?
by leo_e | 2025-11-25 12:50:32+00:00
We are a small startup building a specialized search engine. When we started, the logic was simple: "Performance is our main feature, so we need C++."

Six months in, the runtime performance is amazing, but our iteration speed is absolutely tanking.

It feels like we are paying a massive tax on every single feature. Just yesterday, I wasted an entire afternoon fighting CMake just to link a library that would have been a one-line go get or npm install in any other ecosystem. We also constantly deal with phantom bugs that turn out to be subtle ABI mismatches between our M1 Macs and the Linux CI runners—issues that simply don't exist in modern toolchains.

It’s frustrating because our "slower" competitors are shipping features weekly while we are stuck debugging linker errors or waiting for 20-minute clean builds.

I'm starting to wonder if the "performance moat" is a trap. For those who recently started infra projects: did you stick with C++? Did you bail for Rust/Go? Or do you just accept that velocity will be terrible in exchange for raw speed?
by locallost | 2025-11-25 12:52:19+00:00
I am somewhat sympathetic of this view because it appears to be rational. But I've heard something similar when the internet was becoming more and more mainstream 25 years ago. A similar rational opinion was that online communities help people connect and reduce loneliness. But if we look at it objectively the outcome was poor in that regard. So buyer beware.

Of course, I don't think anything should be banned. But the influence on society should not be hand waved as automatically positive because it will solve SOME problems.
by belorn | 2025-11-25 12:52:25+00:00
It should be added that in the 17th century, only 8% of the population (Europe) lived in cities. Germany today has a larger population today than the whole Europe during 17th century. London during the 17th century is kind of the worst case scenario with high population density and a port city with high amount people traveling in and out, but limited access to medicine and hygiene.
by easygenes | 2025-11-25 12:54:09+00:00
You can go further and replace the cheap Pi oscillator crystal with a proper TCXO, as others using them for NTD have done and documented: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/74482/switch...

That should give you 4-5x less drift than his results (though you could pair the techniques for even better figures)
by cess11 | 2025-11-25 12:54:25+00:00
Runtime instantiation.

From the link above:

"Instead of seeing a program as a monolithic structure, the code of a SIMULA program was organized in a number of classes and blocks. Classes could be dynamically instantiated at run-time, and such an instance was called an "object". An object was an autonomous entity, with its own data and computational capabilities organized in procedures (methods), and objects could cooperate by asking another object to perform a procedure (i.e., by a remote call to a procedure of another object)."
by thfuran | 2025-11-25 12:54:37+00:00
Locally, that’s a fait accompli. Car ownership has been ubiquitous in the US for decades. Traffic deaths per capita are increasing a bit in the US but are still below where they were in the 90s, and most developed countries have seen significant decreases. I don’t really know what the discourse is like in countries where traffic deaths might actually be increasing significantly from a tiny baseline.
by tim333 | 2025-11-25 12:54:59+00:00
There was quite an interesting discussion with Hinton explaining to Jon Stewart how he thinks of brain function, kind of anthropomorphising neurons as things that can see patterns and all they can do is go ping when they see one (https://youtu.be/jrK3PsD3APk?t=366) So if one in the retina say pings if it sees a line and then one behind might see a pattern of a horizontal line ping and a vertical line ping and ping for a cross.

Anyway I was thinking for that to work the neurons would have to kind of chat to each other like "here I am, who's receiving me" etc. Also some communication that if you are differentiating say crosses and circles, the cross neuron can say "hey I've got this one" so the other can go "ok, I'll do the circle then" so the neurons differentiate to recognize different things.

I guess some of that sort of communication system maybe goes on before there is sensory input so the neurons kind of know how they are wired?

One difference with the Hinton/Stewart talk is there he was saying all they can do is go ping, whereas the article has "firing off a complex repertoire of time-based patterns, or sequences" which makes sense - you'd have a job sorting it with simple pings.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-11-25 12:55:02+00:00
> Canada saw fast growth of cities back then.

It still does—Vancouver and Calgary have both almost doubled in population over the past 30 years [0] [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Vancouver#Demographics

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Calgary#Civic_...
by jlouis | 2025-11-25 12:55:15+00:00
In a modern image chain, capture is more often than not HDR.

These images are then graded for HDR or SDR. I.e., sacrifices are made on the image data such that it is suitable for a display standard.

If you have an HDR image, it's relatively easy to tone-map that into SDR space, see e.g. BT.2408 for an approach in Video.

The underlying problem here is that the Web isn't ready for HDR at all, and I'm almost 100% confident browsers don't do the right things yet. HDR displays have enormous variance. From "Slightly above SDR" to experimental displays at Dolby Labs. So to display an image correctly, you need to render it properly to the displays capabilities. Likewise if you want to display a HDR image on an SDR monitor. I.e., tone mapping is a required part of the solution.

A correctly graded HDR image taken of the real world will have like 95% of the pixel values falling within your typical SDR (Rec.709/sRGB) range. You only use the "physically hurt my eyes" values sparingly, and you will take the room conditions into consideration when designing the peak value. As an example: cinemas using DCI-P3 peaks at 48 nits because the cinema is completely dark. 48 nits is more than enough for a pure white in that environment. But take that image and put it on a display sitting inside during the day, and it's not nearly enough for a white. Add HDR peaks into this, and it's easy to see that in a cinema, you probably shouldn't peak at 1000 nits (which is about 4.x stops of light above the DCI-P3 peak). In short: your rendering to the displays capabilities require that you probe the light conditions in the room.

It's also why you shouldn't be able to manipulate brightness on an HDR display. We need that to be part of the image rendering chain such that the right decisions can be made.
by phantasmish | 2025-11-25 12:55:30+00:00
It’s just a very old-school luxury metal:

“Aluminium was difficult to refine and thus uncommon in actual use. Soon after its discovery, the price of aluminium exceeded that of gold. It was reduced only after the initiation of the first industrial production by French chemist Henri Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville in 1856.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aluminium
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-25 12:56:00+00:00
I do a test on multimodal LLMs where I show them a dog with 5 legs, and ask them to count how many legs the dog has. So far none of them can do it. They all say "4 legs".

Segment anything however was able to segment all 5 dog legs when prompted to. Which means that meta is doing something else under the hood here, and may lend itself to a very powerful future LLM.

Right now some of the biggest complaints people have with LLMs stems from their incompetence processing visual data. Maybe meta is onto something here.
by leo_e | 2025-11-25 12:56:09+00:00
As someone dealing with open-source compliance in distributed systems, the purity tests in these comments are exhausting.

Hardware is messy. IP licensing for sensors and radios is a nightmare. Getting a functional OS out with "only" a few binary blobs is a massive engineering and legal victory.

I'd rather have a working, 95% open ecosystem that I can actually hack on, than a 100% pure theoretical one that never ships. Kudos to Eric for navigating the legal minefield to make this happen.
by bookofjoe | 2025-11-25 12:56:27+00:00
Yes! I've always been interested in seeing what arcana and niches (like fonts) fairly predictably rise to the top here, kind of a Bizarro World third rail (not including AI and cryptocurrency, which seem to have/had their own subworlds).

In no particular order, after nearly 10 years of paying attention (the past five or so multiple times daily):

fonts

autism/ADHD

diet supplements/vitamins

surveillance and privacy

outages (e.g. Cloudflare)

Apple hardware/software (new)
by tensility | 2025-11-25 12:56:33+00:00
At the physical device layer (i.e. what a nand controller vendor programs to), a nand flash device that supports ONFI 2 SLC Mode can be configured to use (some of) its blocks in SLC mode rather than MLC/TLC/QLC/etc. This allows one to divide the array into high-reliability versus high-capacity regions.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-25 12:57:01+00:00
> There are far fewer dependencies for skills than for MCP.

This is wrong and an example magical thinking. AI obviously does not mean that you can ship/use software without addressing dependencies? See for example https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/slack-gif-cre... or worse, the many other skills that just punt on this and assume CLI tools and libraries are already available
by philipallstar | 2025-11-25 12:57:17+00:00
> As if anybody could viably stop using them.

It is as easy to not use them as it ever was. There has been no actual centralisation. Everything is done using open protocols. I don't know what more you could want.

Compare it to Windows where there is deep volume discounting and salespeople shmoozing CTOs and getting in with schools, healthcare providers etc etc. That's actual lock-in.
by fwsgonzo | 2025-11-25 12:57:48+00:00
I haven't bailed yet, but your problems is par for the course in C++. The only saving grace is libraries with simple/modern CMake rules, which is not always available. A typical offender is protobuf, which is really hard to statically link correctly on MinGW. Libraries that never graduate from custom makefiles are the worst offenders. With Automake being just barely above that again.

It is the biggest problem with C++ right now. We can't have nice things (no networking in the stdlib), and we also can't have nice packages (no networking in $pkg), so we end up with whatever appears on search for site:github.com and C++ whatever. It's really not that great. The only tradeoff is we really care about our deps, and won't pull in the world. So we're harder to target for supply chain attacks.

You shouldn't be waiting 20mins for CI builds though, unless you have a massive codebase and 10 platforms to build for. If you're making a Godot addon for every platform, I get it. I have that issue. But the 20mins are down from 50mins without ccache. Ccache is ~5 lines in the GA yaml.
by gpderetta | 2025-11-25 12:57:54+00:00
The biggest issue with printf is that it is not extensible to user types.

I also find it unreadable; beyond the trivial I always need to refer to the manual for the correct format string. In practice I tend to always put a placeholder and let clangd correct me with a fix-it.

Except that often clangd gives up (when inside a template for example), and in a few cases I have even seen GCC fail to correctly check the format string and fail at runtime (don't remember the exact scenario).

Speed is not an issue, any form of formatting and I/O is going to be too slow for the fast path and will be relegated to a background thread anyway.

Debugging and complexity has not ben an issue with std::format so far (our migration from printf based logging has been very smooth). I will concede that I do also worry about the compile time cost.
by nicbou | 2025-11-25 12:58:06+00:00
I'm building my own, as a long-term investment. I paid €10 per month for Wachete but it did not quite do the job. At some point one website was rate-limiting it, so I lost access to a lot of my watched pages. Above all, configuring things by clicking around was a waste of time. I have like 100 pages from the same website to watch.

In my case, once a month is fine.
by keiferski | 2025-11-25 12:58:13+00:00
I haven’t read the Asimov story, but it was probably based on this true event:

As a result, U.S. troops began asking other soldiers questions that they felt only Americans would know the answers to in order to flush out the German infiltrators, which included naming state capitals, sports and trivia questions related to the U.S., etc. This practice resulted in Brigadier General Bruce C. Clarke being held at gunpoint for some time after he incorrectly said the Chicago Cubs were in the American League[7][8][9][10] and a captain spending a week in detention after he was caught wearing German boots. General Omar Bradley was repeatedly stopped in his staff car by checkpoint guards who seemed to enjoy asking him such questions. The Skorzeny commando paranoia also contributed to numerous instances of mistaken identity. All over the Ardennes, U.S. soldiers attempted to persuade suspicious U.S. military policemen that they were genuine GIs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Greif
by Frieren | 2025-11-25 12:58:58+00:00
> If anything, AI may help us reduce preventable deaths. Even a 1% improvement would save hundreds of thousands of lives every year.

And what about energy consumption? What about increased scams, spam and all kinds of fake information?

I am not convinced that LLMs are a positive force in the world. It seems to be driven by greed more than anything else.
by fsloth | 2025-11-25 12:59:00+00:00
A slow compiler impedes developers velocity, not only taking longer, but breaking their concentration.

The whole point of a programming language is to be an industrial productivity tool that is faster to use than hand writing assembly.

Performance is a core requirement industrial tools. It's totally fine to have slow compilers in R&R and academia.

In industry a slow compiler is an inexcusable pathology. Now, it can be that pathology can't be fixed, but not recognizing it as a pathology - and worse, inventing excuses for it - implies the writer is not really industrially minded. Which makes me very worried why they are commenting on an industrial language.
by LudwigNagasena | 2025-11-25 12:59:11+00:00
> Before AI, being able to write cohesive essays about a subject is a good proxy to prove your understanding beyond simple memorization. Now it's gone.

Take-homes were never a good proxy for anything because any student can pay for private "lessons" and get their homework done for them.

> A lazy, irresponsible teacher who only cares about memorization will just grade students via in-class multi choices tests exclusively and call it a day. They don't need to worry about AI at all.

What stops a diligent responsible teacher from doing in-class essays?
by schmuhblaster | 2025-11-25 12:59:43+00:00
I've been experimenting with giving the LLM a Prolog-based DSL, used in a CodeAct style pattern similar to Huggingface's smolagents. The DSL can be used to orchestrate several tools (MCP or built in) and LLM prompts. It's still very experimental, but a lot of fun to work with. See here: https://github.com/deepclause/deepclause-desktop.