MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jawerty | 2025-11-09 23:08:43+00:00
Currently working on training language models steered towards certain "states of consciousness".

I have a model trained on publics datasets tied to brainwaves and/eye tracking and text comprehension (have this working well enough to experiment). Now I am training an adapter for various llm architectures to generate text steered to certain neural oscillation patterns (let's call them "states of consciousness" for brevity). I also have a 'rephraser' that rephrases text to elicit these certain states of consciousness. Overall experimenting with creating an suite of tools off my findings with how text relates to the eigenmodes of consciousness. My theory is once I do this I'll be able to do some...interesting things with "AI" agents. lmk if you want to talk about it if you're someone with knowledge in neuroscience/ML. My background is as a Software/ML Engineer so I could use additional thoughts. I do wish I could send a Github/docs which I will soon but this is currently a private project seeking investment for various research/public/private sector applications.
by tombert | 2025-11-09 23:09:32+00:00
Wouldn't private planes still necessitate air traffic controllers? I remember when I flew with my uncle in his small private plane [1] he had to fairly frequently chatter with the air traffic people over the radio to report his position and altitude and the like.

[1] Just a tiny two seat thing, I don't come from billionaires, it wasn't a cool private jet.
by Animats | 2025-11-09 23:09:38+00:00
As time goes on, Tesla's fiasco becomes more and more embarrassing. Waymos are all over the place in the cities they serve, doing pretty much what they're supposed to do. Nuro has some fully autonomous vehicles running around. Baidu's Apollo Go is deployed in 16 cities in China, although they use remote driving as a backup.

Tesla, though, is still hyping a technology that seems to have maxed out years ago.
by autoexec | 2025-11-09 23:09:40+00:00
> though certainly I’ve had pizza delivery people text me because they couldn’t find my house.

When you have a landline that still happens, but they call you instead of texting. It works great!

> the answer often seems to be a landline that you’re still available on. If you replace one phone with another, what’s the difference?

There are huge differences. Most of the problems with smart phones aren't "You can call people or get calls". A landline still allows you to make and take calls but avoids every other evil cell phones introduce into our lives. When you're available on a landline it's on your own terms, in a very specific place. Even having both a desktop PC/laptop and a landline, meaning you can take calls and look something up on the internet, is vastly less abusive and harmful than a smart phone.

What changed with the smart phone wasn't that you could go online, it's that the device itself is designed to collect every scrap of personal information it can and then funnel it to other people. It's designed to be as addictive, intrusive, and demanding of your attention as possible. It follows you everywhere, all of the time. It cuts us off from the places we are and the people we are with. Being away from a smartphone fills people with a level of anxiety that never existed with laptops and landlines and that isn't by accident.

abstaining from phones entirely or even setting boundaries and limits to reduce the harms they cause is realistic as evidenced by the people who do it successfully in reality. That doesn't make it easy, or even ideal in some situations, but it might be worth trying just to see where the pain points are and how they can be managed. You might be surprised at how much more capable you are at functioning without one than you thought.
by dathinab | 2025-11-09 23:09:51+00:00
yes but Musk has claimed he could trivially re-implement the system with more or less only using AI

putting aside weather that is true or not and just assume it to be true for the later argument

then it is the perfect chance to replace a public service the country depends on by a billionaire controlled private company

thats how you convert a country to an oligarchy, bit by bit replacing essential parts with entities privately owned and (most importantly) controlled by a few people so that a country "has to" depend on them to function and they can use it as leverage to force through their interests

to be fair, this might not be the intend here. A lot of the shutdown seem more blind ideological driven then well calculated, but it's a potential danger anyway
by Loughla | 2025-11-09 23:10:35+00:00
All I can say is good luck. We spun up a co-op isp to take advantage of fiber grants for rural areas about a decade ago.

Maybe it was because of the grants, but it was a fucking nightmare getting off the ground even though we had nearly 90% of the population in three counties on board for the co-op. The red tape and regulations (in our state at least) made it clear that government runs for urban and suburban interests and actively undermines rural needs. I'm talking government in bed with large providers who had exclusive rights to run "high-speed" Internet to our towns and farms, even though they had never and were never planning on anything above dsl for most people and cable for the ones in town.

If I was more charismatic (and wasn't 1000% sure there were pictures of me doing drugs when I was in college), I would consider a run for state office, because it's a shit show for small towns here.

And that's the story of a) when we got sued by a large provider that I hope goes out of business and burns to the ground, and b) the last time I volunteered on a large project and why I will never take the lead on anything bigger than the Lion's Club pancake breakfast now.
by retrochameleon | 2025-11-09 23:11:54+00:00
I'm a heavy gamer. I like lots of strategy games. Sometimes I look at our country like a strategy game: where we are investing resources, infrastructure planning and investment, active problems or threats and how they are being prioritized and handled, managing citizen happiness, etc.

The last 10-20 years feel like a massive lost opportunity to invest in some of these improvements and forward-thinking planning. In the last few years, it feels like catastrophic decision after decision.

I can't help but look at the state of America and feel like I'm looking at an inexperienced amateur player taking a relatively strong game position and slowly throwing it away. Crumbling infrastructure, weak citizen cohesion and education, intentional weakening of our own national and cyber security in more than one way, not to mention all the harm being done to our reputation and relationships with other countries.

It feels like we are in a weaker position then ever: militaristically, economically, scientifically, and so on. Meanwhile the threats of China and Russia and what could happen in the next few years are quite concerning.

I'm pretty pessimistic right now. I know the world and the US is not as simple as a strategy game, but tons of principles from strategy games well-understood by experienced players sure could help with more wise use of resources. Attention and time are also incredibly valuable resources that feel like they are being thrown away right now.

Getting into a major conflict could help unify The People and put focus on more important problems in the country, but as far as I'm concerned, I think all the other NATO countries would be the ones holding the war effort together. I'm just ranting at this point though.
by throw0101a | 2025-11-09 23:11:55+00:00
If markets are not efficient, that means prices do not reflect the information available about various financial instruments (e.g., stocks). So if information is not being properly disseminated and processed, it means it should be easy to swoop in and outperform The Market™:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grossman-Stiglitz_paradox

This is how some folks (see The Big Short) were able to make a killing leading up to the GFC: they properly processed the information and traded on it.

And yet if you look at something like the SPIVA reports, yes there are some funds that may outperform the market in a single year, but the numbers drop quite quickly for being able to outperform over 3/5/10/15/20-year horizons.

If you personally believe markets are not efficient, and prices are not accurate, then perhaps you should take up day trading. (I am not sure anyone is saying markets are perfectly efficient, or efficient-ish all the time: certainly not Fama or French, who won the Nobel for work on the topic; shared with Shiller).
by coolius | 2025-11-09 23:12:25+00:00
I'm going all in on my side project CodeBrew, a Java IDE for iPad. Currently working on OpenGL support for 3d graphics, as some schools requested the feature. Also I'm finally pitting some work into aquisition, which has turned out to be much more fun than I anticipated.

Go check it out, its free to try, with a one-time purchase full version:

https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6475267297?pt=11914...
by perfmode | 2025-11-09 23:12:28+00:00
The shutdown impacts Federal FAA controllers (at major centers/towers) who are considered essential and must work without pay.

However, many smaller FBO-serving towers are staffed by Contract Controllers, who are employed by private companies holding FAA contracts.

These contract controllers generally continue to receive their pay during a shutdown, shielding them from the immediate financial crisis affecting their federal counterparts.
by skrig | 2025-11-09 23:13:34+00:00
I'm working on boiling the ocean - we're building a new CRM to compete with some of the big players. I tried very hard to avoid doing this, but I've helped enough business owner friends set up CRMs to realize there's MUCH to be desired. My goal is to create a CRM that people rave about - something that is very rare. Pretty much everyone I help views CRMs as a necessary evil. Our bold challenge is - can we make a CRM that is delightful to use?

Of course we have to slap "AI" on it in this market, but we plan on adding AI features that are actually thoughtful and not just a glorified chatbot.
by bonsai_spool | 2025-11-09 23:13:44+00:00
I disagree with your framing around embryos being human (largely because we're using our current scientific understanding to change what was intuitive into some abstraction that, itself, we don't understand - consider that pregnancy may be much more common than we know, but that otherwise 'normal' acts may harm these otherwise unknown pregnancies. Do we then prescribe the behavior of women after every sexual act they complete? But a mother causing the unintentional death of her progeny has always been wrong and socially punished.).

I do agree that we don't consider the morality of what science is allowing us to do and I appreciate your arguments.
by rpdillon | 2025-11-09 23:14:18+00:00
I'm proud of my decisions and I'm not here to defend them. I'm here for the conversation because I'm interested in the topic.

I vetoed Minecraft and replaced it with MineTest because Minecraft has the hypixel community, which is essentially an MMO that's built inside of the world of Minecraft and dominates the Minecraft playerbase. I was worried that my 11-year-old would be too young to deal with a massively multiplayer game like that, so I prohibited Minecraft for him. The original joy of Minecraft when I first bought it off of Notch's site in 2009 was that you could build things and exercise creativity. I found that in the MMO versions of Minecraft, this is less of a focus. So instead I host a docker container with a minetest instance that we can all build in together.

I also vetoed Roblox because I feel that the entire economy in that game is going to be a net negative, particularly the aspect where kids beg their parents to use real money to buy them Robux.

But to your point, the list of things I veto is pretty small: I'm socially very liberal, and so the main thing I'm trying to filter for is games that are exploitative of their playerbase in some way. In the case of Battlefield and Fortnite, since I used those examples earlier, these are both games that my kids have independently decided they are not interested in; I think some folks read my original comment that I had removed Battlefield and Fortnite from my household. But if you look at my phrasing, I used the passive voice because it was basically a group decision to never really pick them up. I'm using weasel language because they sometimes go over their neighbor's house and have experience with those games, so I don't want to make it out like they've never played them at all.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-11-09 23:14:26+00:00
Is it really hard to understand that the infrastructure for remote work, which I think everyone would agree got a major upgrade during the pandemic, would also make it much easier for companies to outsource software dev work?

Pre-2015 or so, yes, of course there was outsourcing, but it was honestly a major PITA in most cases. Most communication was done in conference calls, very little group video communication, lots of async chats, etc.. Any type of work where you needed a fairly frequent black-and-forth with various team members was rarely outsourced - the type of work that was outsourced was the type that was more likely to have static requirements.

But now, though, there is basically no difference working with a colleague who's working from home in the same city vs. working from home thousands of miles away (as long as there is good timezones overlap). And that is a change that only happened around the beginning of the pandemic, and I've personally seen companies much more willing to outsource because of it, and they're outsourcing a much wider type of work (e.g. brand new dev work that is frequently updated based on usage metrics) than they would in the past.
by user68858788 | 2025-11-09 23:14:26+00:00
A quick search shows that there are over 20,000 ATCs employed in the United States. (I'm not confident in the sources I found - anyone know where to get reliable stats for things like this?)

Is the number of retiring ATCs higher than normal? I assume it is, but the article doesn't mention the baseline. It's hard for me to understand the scale of the issue from this article alone.
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-09 23:14:33+00:00
> Linux is not empowering- it is just a windows that works less.

As a child, I couldn't stand Windows. Nothing works, you just want to do that, but there is always some stupid error message, that tells you nothing. And it never does what you tell it to do, it always does some random mess, that you do not yet know what it even is, or how to fix it.

As a child you need to see causality and have a predictive system, so that you can form a mental model and understand things, or even have the ability to form a question to ask the adults. You do not need a system, that is it's own child and is always mulish yet things it is the smartest thing in the world.
by MiddleEndian | 2025-11-09 23:14:44+00:00
https://www.miscbeef.com/octopoda

Multiplayer QWOP-like where you control one leg of an octopus.

I'm further ahead in the development than shown here, hopefully have the finished thing out with support for multiple games within a month or so (would be faster if I didn't have a job lol)
by tombert | 2025-11-09 23:14:45+00:00
Somehow the Republicans have managed to convince their constituents that somehow stuff that will objectively fuck them over is actually not fucking them over. It's impressive in its own way.

I have seen people who still don't seem to understand the (extremely) simple "there's no such thing as a free lunch" part of economics and genuinely still think that the tariffs are going to be paid purely by China, because apparently they don't realize that for-profit businesses bake all overhead (including taxes and tariffs) into the total cost. It really isn't that complicated, but I guess the distortion field around "owning the left" makes them turn off this logic.
by tonetegeatinst | 2025-11-09 23:14:57+00:00
Imec has done work on transistor based memory that removes the capacitor part of the memory cell which would shrink cell sizes. While they have working prototypes and have scaled the tech, it uses technology from LCD panel manufacturing iirc which means it would require work to integrate into fab workflow for memory.

In other news, us datahoarders and folks who have to purchase drives in bulk (large scale businesses like a university or company that has its own in house IT department) feel the prices the hardest.
by acdha | 2025-11-09 23:14:59+00:00
There’s a really good podcast episode here:

https://engineered.network/causality/episode-33-737-max/

Basically they were looking for an edge against Airbus and a really big one was being able to promise that pilots wouldn’t need a separate certification from the existing 737, which is where that MCAS software came in trying to make the new hardware behave like the existing planes. The allegations about Southwest in particular got the most attention in this lawsuit:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/legal...
Show HN: Hikugen – minimalistic LLM-generated web scrapers for structured data
by goncharom | 2025-11-09 23:15:09+00:00
Hey HN! I wanted to share a little library I've been working on to leverage AI to get structured data from arbitrary pages. Instead of sending the page's HTML to an LLM, Hikugen asks it to generate python code to fetch the data and enforces the generated data conforms to a Pydantic schema defined by the user. I'm using this to power yomu (https://github.com/goncharom/yomu), a personal email newsletter built from arbitrary websites.

Hikugen's main features:

- Automatically generates, runs, regenerates and caches the LLM-generated extraction code.

- It uses sqlite to save the current working code for each page so it can be reused across executions.

- It uses OpenRouter (https://openrouter.ai/) to call the LLM.

- It can fetch the page automatically (it can even reuse Netscape-formatted cookies) but you can also just feed it the raw HTML and leverage the rest of its functionalities.

Here's a snippet of what it looks like:

from hikugen import HikuExtractor from pydantic import BaseModel from typing import List class Article(BaseModel): title: str author: str published_date: str content: str class ArticlePage(BaseModel): articles: List[Article] extractor = HikuExtractor(api_key="your-openrouter-api-key") result = extractor.extract( url="https://example.com/articles", schema=ArticlePage ) for a in result.articles: print(a.title, a.author)

Hikugen is intentionally minimal: it doesn't attempt website navigation, login flows, headless browsers, or large-scale crawling. Just "given this HTML, extract this structured data".

A good chunk of this was built with Claude Code (shoutout to Harper’s blog: https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/.

Would love feedback or ideas—especially from others playing with codegen for scraping tasks.
by saulpw | 2025-11-09 23:15:19+00:00
That's fair. I also made a snappy response because I get frustrated on the other side, when proponents say 1) "you're using it wrong" or 2) "it'll get better" or 3) "I don't understand why people are resistant". In that last case, there's two interpretations of resistance, the one in which someone doesn't overcome their initial knee-jerk response, and another one when someone develops a more warranted resistance after exploring it. The first kind is potentially conservative, or ideological, or fearful, or lazy, which I think is what you take issue with. The second kind is more balanced and reasonable. Do we need a better descriptor to differentiate the two?
by krackers | 2025-11-09 23:16:07+00:00
>finance/accounting to be vulnerable

Aren't there certifications and stuff? I'd think that from a regulatory and legal compliance perspective it'd be better to have Americans handling the books. Say someone turns out to be cooking the books, if that person is halfway across the world good luck prosecuting them (unless your company is wealthy enough to the point where you can mobilize law enforcement to do your bidding)
by daemonologist | 2025-11-09 23:16:09+00:00
Couple things to avoid finger injuries: go easy on one- and two-finger pockets, use an open crimp whenever possible (all finger joints are bent the normal direction, and your palm/thumb aren't really involved), and don't bother with the hangboard or campus board for the first ~year.

I wouldn't worry about it too much though - almost all of the people I know with finger injuries were trying to push into really being competitive climbers, not just doing it casually for fun/fitness.

Oh also to keep from tearing your skin don't climb tired. (That won't keep you from typing, it's just painful.)
by pornel | 2025-11-09 23:17:05+00:00
If you're a junior now, and think your code is worth stealing, it's probably only a matter of time before you gain more experience, and instead feel sorry for everyone who copied your earlier code (please don't take it personally, this is not a diss. It's typical for programmers to grow, try more approaches, and see better solutions in hindsight).

The lazy cheaters only cheat themselves out of getting experience and learning by writing the code themselves. It doesn't even matter whether you publish your code or not, because they'll just steal from someone else, or more likely mindlessly copypaste AI slop instead. If someone can't write non-trivial code themselves to begin with, they won't be able to properly extend and maintain it either, so their ripoff project won't be successful.

Additionally, you'll find that most programmers don't want to even look at your code. It feels harder and less fun to understand someone else's code than to write one's own. Everyone thinks their own solution is the best: it's more clever and has more features than the primitive toys other people wrote, while at the same time it's simpler and more focused than the overcomplicated bloat other people wrote.
by jameskilton | 2025-11-09 23:17:15+00:00
Americans today are incapable of envisioning a better future and incapable of envisioning a worse one! We as a society are now only able to focus on what problems exist now, and to demand that they are fixed tomorrow.

There are a lot of problems that can be solved over decades, but we can no longer even fathom such a thing, much less put together the will power to see such projects through.
by gambiting | 2025-11-09 23:17:21+00:00
>>it was also used by someone else born in the same hospital, same ward on the same day, on the same morning as me. That was endlessly irritating

How so? Other than a funny coincidence, how would that ever come up anywhere in anything unless you both lived in a tiny community where everyone knows each other. I just don't understand how someone born on the same day as you having the same name was "irritating".
by yencabulator | 2025-11-09 23:18:07+00:00
> With the opening of the Fishers, Indiana, store, Fry's made a "race track" theme with various hanging displays, including "stop" and "go" signs.

https://www.liquisearch.com/frys_electronics/history/store_t...

The Burbank Fry's UFO was definitely noticable.

https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/to-all-the-frys-i-loved-befor...
by merelysounds | 2025-11-09 23:18:09+00:00
Nonoverse[1], an iOS puzzle game about nonograms (image logic puzzles).

So far all levels have been handmade pixel art. I’m now testing machine generated puzzles with random “pixels”. This is an interesting challenge because I still want levels to be solvable and fun. I recently released 15 new puzzles like this and I’m preparing a new update with more.

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/app/nonoverse-nonogram-puzzles/id6748...