MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by justarandomname | 2025-11-17 01:48:54+00:00
This is kinda how I've felt for months. I don't have any interest in continuing existing open source projects and don't want to create any new ones.

What's the point?

All of my personal projects for the past few months have been entirely private, I don't even host them on Github anymore, I have a private Forgejo instance I use instead.

I also don't trust any new open source project I stumble upon anymore unless I know it was started at least a year ago.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-11-17 01:49:16+00:00
Sure, it certainly could be difficult. But this is often because of information assymetry — the purveyors are making big claims about the dragon in their garage. [1]

If your intuition told you that there ought to be some evidence for grand claims, you would be right to be suspicious of the continuing absence of suitable evidence.

[1] _ http://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/110/Sagan.pdf
by anon7000 | 2025-11-17 01:50:12+00:00
Plenty of people use “it’s not X, it’s Y”

As someone who uses em-dashes a lot, I’m getting pretty tired of hearing something “screams AI” about extremely simple (and common) human constructs. Yeah, the author does use that convention a number of times. But that makes sense, if that’s a tool in your writing toolbox, you’ll pull it out pretty frequently. It’s not signal by itself, it’s noise. (does that make me an AI!?) We really need to be considering a lot more than that.

Reading through the first article, it appears to be compelling writing and a pretty high quality presentation. That’s all that matters, tbh. People get upset about AI slop because it’s utterly worthless and exceptionally low quality.
by redhale | 2025-11-17 01:50:53+00:00
> 3. This effect is _significantly_ stronger than putting info about available API/cli into CLAUDE.md.

What? Why?

> unlike cli tools or APIs you don't have to constantly remind it what MCPs it has available

I think I'm missing something, because I thought this is what MCP does, literally. It just injects the instructions about what tools it has and how to use them into the context window. With MCP it just does it for you rather than you having to add a bit to your CLAUDE.md. What am I misunderstanding?
by com2kid | 2025-11-17 01:52:19+00:00
I generally agree but look at the qualifications for weight loss drugs in the US vs the UK.

Getting approved for weight loss drugs is possible in the US without a ton of work. BMI of 24 and you snore a lot? Possibly covered. High cholesterol and some extra weight? Approved.

There are some things the American healthcare system does very well. Not many, but on occasion things work.
Show HN: Turn storybook.js stories into product videos
by mox-1 | 2025-11-17 01:52:31+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m writing as part of a duo - both of us have a background in motion design, but have more recently been working as software developers. We’ve been trying to mash those two worlds together into something useful.

Both of us have dabbled in enough indie SAAS projects over the years, to know how marketing is usually the bottleneck to the success of an app. With all these nifty AI tools popping up all over the place, we found ourselves thinking: "why isn't there a tool that can turn a finished software product into a sleek, polished product video that can be used on marketing pages?" Furthermore, why can't those videos stay in sync with the state of the code, easily re-renderable whenever the UI evolves?

Since StorybookJS is a fairly mature ecosystem, our approach has been to use it, not as a static showcase of small components, but as a basis for a living catalogue of real UI states and flows that we can capture as clean, cursor-free clips. From there, storyish (that's our product name) strings those clips into an initial product video timeline (using a bit of AI to draft the first cut), which you can then tweak and export for your launch page or ads. The idea is that, so long as you have instrumented your code with storybook, you can quickly make a product video on that basis.

The beta is working well and we are close to opening it up to the first batch of users. We are looking for an early cohort of testers that can provide thoughtful feedback and have an influence on the roadmap, default templates, and overall direction of storyish before we open it up more broadly.

If that sounds like something you would be interested in, please do take a look at https://storyish.io
by mk_stjames | 2025-11-17 01:52:50+00:00
Really cool, I figured that was the case and I'd be in the same boat.

I have an ice40UP5k board but I quickly ran out of block ram and LUTS whenever trying to use it for anything substantial, but seeing this project has me itching to start something around one of these icesugar pro boards. yosys & nextpnr support made things really damn easy when I was working with the ice40.
by deaddodo | 2025-11-17 01:53:33+00:00
This is most useful for retrocomputing, and that’s gonna be the target demographic.

While it’s true that industrial and manufacturing sometimes have really old hardware, that’s usually less due to them not having newer options and more due to preferring something tried and true (it “just works” for their workflow) or the sheer economics of upgrading; in most of those cases, there’s already a flow for interfacing with newer technology (FTP or USB 1.0/2.0 commonly). So this device wouldn’t offer much benefit, if any.
by rule2025 | 2025-11-17 01:54:05+00:00
Lithium iron phosphate batteries are very practical. Chinese BYD has developed blade batteries using this type of battery and has become the global sales leader in new energy vehicles. However, this battery faces range limitations and the issue of how to improve charging speed. Solid-state batteries should be the next big thing, but mass production may not be feasible yet. At least, it might take 3 more years for commercialization, and that's still an optimistic prediction.
by tw1984 | 2025-11-17 01:54:22+00:00
if he didn't intentionally mislead the public, he should have be open about it and acknowledge the fact that he was utterly wrong.

given the fact that he made such "prediction" largely to secure funding for his company, he should probably make compensations to his investors. he didn't do anything.

the best he could do is to bad mouth competitors who choose to release open weight models on par with his.
by ineedasername | 2025-11-17 01:54:47+00:00
>Where an incident pool remains stable (eg, in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.

Precisely. Sustainable tech and research must focus on long term disease development, and not merely those already available to the medical industrial complex for continuous revenue. When was the last time we developed a truly new and novel lifelong, chronic but not overly debilitating illness with profitable methods of providing minor alleviation of symptoms? Diabetes is mostly tapped out, cancers are too unpredictable.

Frankly? Covid-19 was a squandered opportunity. There was ample raw material to work with truly innovative medical developments in both pharmaceuticals and medical equipment: long term wearable ventilators with expensive filters that must be regularly replaced; new over the counter medications with rapid half lives for maximum daily dose consumption— heck, bring back otc cough medicine with opioids! Damned effective and great stickiness of user base with only minor churn even after the cough is gone! Instead? Vaccines. Such a waste. The only saving grace there is the massive boost the anti vax community got out of it, so I can at least cross my fingers on a measles come back tour.
by apparent | 2025-11-17 01:55:10+00:00
This reminds me of the new-ish treatments that promise to regrow tooth enamel or prevent the growth of bacteria that causes cavities. These won't get widespread adoption until the American Dental Association or whatever says they're safe/effective, but there's a clear conflict of interest because it would have a huge negative impact on their members' business model.

There's money to be made selling a cure, but the creative destruction that it can bring will mean entrenched interests will fight tooth and nail (pun intended) to delay it.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-17 01:56:06+00:00
> As long as the value created is more than the cost of the treatment, then it's a net-gain for the economy even if it's a net loss for that singular business.

This is precisely the type of work that is best funded through government: Work that can be net positive for the populace but doesn’t have a viable business model attached.

There’s another layer to consider even with government-driven efforts: Resources are never infinite. The number of potential R&D opportunities exceeds available research dollars and even human personnel many times over. There comes a point when you need to allocate finite resources to the efforts that provide better cost to benefit ratios. I don’t think it’s helpful to go full hardcore utilitarian, but the reality can be that the cost of coming up with a cure for a rare genetic condition that impacts only a small number of people might be better spent on research toward a drug which incrementally reduces heart disease, for example.

Finding permanent cures for rare conditions is a heart-warming idea, but in reality it’s a lot harder and more expensive than most people assume. Likewise, when people become enamored with these ideas of finding permanent cures for rare genetic ideas they can be missing the big picture that it may not be one of the better uses of that money even if you took raw capitalism and investment dollars out of the picture. There are so many more opportunities for widespread health improvement in the boring conditions and even lifestyle diseases than in hypothetically curing the rare genetic conditions. It may not feel as heart-warming to talk about things like reducing obesity, but we’re witnessing an incredible society-wide health improvement with GLP-1 drugs that is orders of magnitude more benefit across society than something like curing a rare genetic disease.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-11-17 01:58:09+00:00
this construction is familiar to anyone who has taken a course on writing post middle or high school.

The formal version is "not only... but also" https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/..., which I personally use regularly but I often write formally even in informal settings.

"not just... but" is just the less formal version.

Google ngrams shows the "not just ... but" construction has a sharp increase starting in 2000. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=not+just+*+but...

Same with "not only ... but also" https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=not+only+*+but...

Like many scholarly linguistic construction, this is one many of us saw in latin class with non solum ... sed etium or non modo ... sed etium: https://issuu.com/uteplib/docs/latin_grammar/234. I didn't take ancient Greek, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's also a version there.

More info

- https://www.phrasemix.com/phrases/not-just-something-but-som...

- https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/not%20just

- https://www.grammarly.com/blog/writing-techniques/parallelis...

- https://www.crockford.com/style.html

- https://englishan.com/correlative-conjunctions-definition-ru...
Show HN: I DON'T want to upload my private files to AI
by cando_zhou | 2025-11-17 01:58:37+00:00
Hi HN,

For the past few years, I've been obsessed with a problem: my hard drive is a treasure chest of knowledge (PDFs, docs, notes) from the last decade, and I want to use modern AI to actually use it.

But every solution forces a trade-off: either convenience (upload everything to the cloud) or privacy (let my files sit dormant locally).

I got tired of this "hold your nose" compromise.

With capable SLMs (Small Language Models) exploding and on-device compute (Apple Silicon, NPUs) finally catching up, I believe privacy and intelligence is no longer a false choice.

So I (and my team) built KnowledgeFocus (Apple Silicon chips only)

It's an open-source (Apache-2.0) knowledge engine built with Tauri (Rust + Python + TS), and it's 100% local-first.

In v0.6.4, it focuses on one thing: unlocking your local file 'treasure chest'.

- Scans & Indexes: It scans your designated local folders (PDFs, .md, .txt, .docx, etc.).

- Auto-tagging: Uses a local model to auto-tag files, so you can aggregate and discover them.

- Local RAG: You can 'chat' with all your local files. It runs RAG 100% on-device. No data (vectors included) ever leaves your machine.

Website (Download): https://github.com/huozhong-in/knowledge-focus

This is just the first step of our "Data Workbench" vision.

I have a lot more thoughts on 'local-first agents', 'data aggregation' (like pulling in your cloud AI chat logs to store them locally), and building a real 'second brain' for knowledge workers.

I'll be in the comments to expand on these ideas and our future roadmap.

I'm here for all the feedback—especially the critical kind. Thanks, HN.
by roywiggins | 2025-11-17 01:59:01+00:00
In this case I'm building a batch workflow: images come in, images get analyzed through a pipeline, images go into a GUI for review. The idea of using a VLM was just to avoid hand-building a solution, not because I actually want to use it in a chatbot. It's just interesting that a generalist model that has expert-level handwriting recognition completely falls apart on a different, but much easier, task.
by vips7L | 2025-11-17 02:00:23+00:00
Java’s collectors vastly outperform Go’s. Look at the Debian binary tree benchmarks [0]. Go just uses less memory because it’s AOT compiled from the start and Java’s strategy up until recently is to never return memory to the OS. Java programs are typically on servers where it’s the only application running.

[0] https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
by socalgal2 | 2025-11-17 02:01:40+00:00
> ~public~ transit is not a good business model.

~public~ transit can be a good business model if it's setup correctly. The majority of Japan's 100 train companies are setup such that they own both trains and complementary interests. Office buildings, shopping centers, super markets, apartments. The better their trains are the better their other businesses do by delivering people to them. The better their other businesses are the more people want to use their trains.

https://ir.tokyu.co.jp/ja/ir/news/auto_20251111595684/pdfFil...
by whoknowsidont | 2025-11-17 02:02:17+00:00
>This effect is _significantly_ stronger than putting info about available API/cli into CLAUDE.md.

No it's not.

Honestly this conversation is extremely weird to me because somehow people are gravely misunderstanding what MCP even purports to do, let alone what it actually CAN do in the most ideal situation.

It is a protocol and while the merits of that protocol is certainly under active discussion it's irrelevant because you keep adding qualities about the protocol that it cannot deliver on.

Just same facts to help steer this conversation correctly, and maybe help your understanding on what is actually going:

* All LLM's/major models have function & tool calling built in.

* Your LLMs/models do not have any knowledge on MCP, nor have they been trained on it.

* MCP exists, at least the claim, is to help standardize the LIFECYCLE of the tool call.

* MCP does not augment or enhance the ability of LLM's in any form.

* MCP does not allow you to extend agents. That's an implicit feature.

* If you have access to "X" (using your example), you don't need anything that obeys the MCP standard.

MCP at best is for developers and tool developers. Your model does not need an MCP server or client or anything else MCP related to do what is already been trained to do.

>I would personally prefer some other method but having a way to make agents extensible is extremely useful.

They already are. MCP does not help with this.
by kevincox | 2025-11-17 02:02:21+00:00
My main complaint about GCs is that they only clean up one type of garbage, memory. Maybe you can increase your file descriptor limit and let them deal with some other resources via finalizes. But they aren't tuned for that and there will be some types of resources (locks, temporary files, worker threads, subprocesses, ...) that you need to manage on your own. So now you have at least two forms of resource management in your program.
by kylecazar | 2025-11-17 02:02:56+00:00
My first programming book was K&R as well. It was an excellent introduction to programming.

You might think that coming from K&R, I wouldn't have liked my second and third books, which were two of the first Head First series. They took essentially the opposite approach from K&R, but I enjoyed them too and learned quite a bit. Something about the content lended itself to a more visual approach to the material (maybe the nature of OOP).
by gerdesj | 2025-11-17 02:03:29+00:00
I gather that several southern american nations have some serious issues with Lithium mines nicking water. Search: "lithium mines water southern america"

You could look at this: ...

https://www.bmwgroup.com/content/dam/grpw/websites/bmwgroup_...

... and read the Conclusion, and note that the study was not too fussed about delivering bad news. That Conclusion is a masterclass in hiding stuff. You will actually have to read the entire paper and its all a load of fluff. Shame really.
by up-n-atom | 2025-11-17 02:03:36+00:00
I maintain multi OS documentation at pon.wiki and it’s just easier for me this way as it’s distraction free, synced to a NAS. I could setup a VM or another system but I’ve always maintained a separate disk as it’s economical with licensing.

At 1 point I was using https://looking-glass.io/ but half of my time is spent doing digital art and couldn’t part with the discrete gpu full time.

I had to take screenshots and that was as frustrating where it just works in macOS and all Linux DEs but Microsoft broke that as well.
by analog31 | 2025-11-17 02:04:25+00:00
Obligatory Dr. Strangelove reference:

*You don't think I'd go into combat with loose change in my pocket, do you?"

But I must admit that I never formed the habit of bringing change with me when I go somewhere. So it piled up at home. The quarters were easy: They got saved for parking, laundry, etc. But I ended up with a sack of pennies that I finally cashed in at the bank.
by flufluflufluffy | 2025-11-17 02:05:50+00:00
I’ll never understand this. A company puts in an immense amount of time money and effort into creating a product, and because it doesn’t work the way you want it to, it’s an assault on your freedom. Whaaa?!?! You can see things and ask things and learn things without using an AI company’s product, you know like, interacting with real people in the real world.
by anon7000 | 2025-11-17 02:06:04+00:00
Exactly, just today I set up a cloudflare tunnel to a docker compose service running on my home server. I didn’t want to expose the server directly to the internet, and I want to share this service on a certain domain with broader family.

I have a server at home that works well. I don’t reaaaally want to pay an extra $30-$40/yr and have an extra thing to manage when the CF tunnel works fine for free. I like Tailscale more, but I want to share this with family who won’t install TS and also want to use a specific domain.
by gus_massa | 2025-11-17 02:06:52+00:00
Similar story, but much cheaper phone :) More details in

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740274

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45868064

(Today I found how to disable the annoying weekly use time report, or at least that's what I think, fingers crossed.)
by polpo | 2025-11-17 02:07:17+00:00
Fun seeing this posted - I'm the creator of the project. While it's meant to be a generic IDE/ATAPI emulator the two main use cases I envisioned for the project are in the area of retro computing: CD-ROM under MS-DOS and Windows 9x, where software-only virtual drive emulation options are lacking or nonexistent, and IDE hard drive emulation on early IDE machines where the drive geometries are fixed.

Since the project has been announced, lots of people have come out of the woodwork with other fun potential use cases, such as CD-ROM replacement in arcade cabinets and the Dreamcast, and hard drive replacement in multitrack recorders and samplers.
by Rochus | 2025-11-17 02:08:33+00:00
My statement refers to this claim: "I'm 99% sure this is written by an LLM."

The hypocrisy and entitlement mentality that prevails in this discussion is disgusting. My recommendation to the fellow below that he should write a book himself (instead of complaining) was even flagged, demonstrating once again the abuse of this feature to suppress other, completely legitimate opinions.
by stephen_g | 2025-11-17 02:09:34+00:00
Is that a federal law or state law? Whichever jurisdiction it is, surely you'd only need a one-clause amendment to add an exception for rounding cash transactions by up to two cents to account for the discontinuation of pennies... I just can't imagine that taking more than a few weeks to resolve, surely your political systems in the US haven't become that dysfunctional where this couldn't be fixed that quickly?
by thrance | 2025-11-17 02:11:10+00:00
Flexible, I get. Safe, affordable and clean? Nothing moves more people more efficiently than subways. Take it from a Parisian who owns a car but never feels the need to use it, I've never felt such freedom.

Cars are noisy, take a lot of space, are crazy expensive, dirty (even electric ones leave tire particles in the air) and are involved in 99% of road incidents. Them being self-driving wouldn't fix any of these issues. Maybe they'd be a little safer? But even that is doubtful.

I understand US transportation is in a dire state right now. This shouldn't be a reason to make it worse, quite the contrary IMHO.
by refactor_master | 2025-11-17 02:11:54+00:00
IO and global state is also just inputs that can be part of arrange-act-assert. Instead of mocking your database call to always return "foo" when the word "SELECT" is in the query, insert a real "foo" in a real test database and perform a real query.

Again I've heard "but what if my database/table changes so rapidly that I need the mock so I don't need to change the query all the time", in which case you ought to take a moment to write down what you're trying to accomplish, rather than using mocks to pave over poor architectural decisions. Eventually, the query fails and the mock succeeds, because they were completely unrelated.

So far I've only seen mocks fail eventually and mysteriously. With setups and DI you can treat things mostly as a black box from a testing point of view, but when mocks are involved you need surgical precision to hit the right target at the right time.
by theamk | 2025-11-17 02:13:35+00:00
This feels very 2000's. eDonkey, Perfect Dark, Opera Unite....

Turns out, other than piracy, there are no legitimate uses. The existing technologies are good enough.

P2P is cool if you have a desktop, but you cannot host from laptop or phone that spends most of the time sleeping (unless you want your battery to die real fast). The solution is hosting providers - which are already decentralized (and federated, if you squint hard enough)

Web of trust never took off - turns out people don't trust their friends' friends' much, some sort of centralized authority works much better.

_Cryptographic_ identities have huge problem of it's own - there are many people who don't have any persistent data on their PC - for example, they have only one laptop/phone, they don't back it up, and it breaks regularly. If your system requires one to keep a secret key for decades, it automatically excludes a very large fraction of computer users.

Publicly accessible versioning and immutable content sound cool for readers, but have very few upsides (and many downsides) for writers. And it's writers who select publishing technology.

People has been proposing those things forever. No one needed them back then, and no one needs them today. Just look at which decentralized social networks are actually winning (like Mastodon) - it's pretty much opposite to what's described in your comment.