MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by numbol | 2025-11-12 09:15:00+00:00
It seems that those two (actually three or four) ideas are parallel and not always compatible.

[please forgive my grammar]

1. There is noisy computers which can work despite or because some unreliable part. Neural netwroks are quite ok with it for example, so some people speculate that it will be possible to build specialized noisy circuits for specific networks. 2. There is stochastic computing, in which complicated numerical functions represented as probability density distributions (?) 3. And then there is probabalistic computing, when state randomly updated in accordance with some "temprature". 4. And finally there is randomized algoritms, which are closer to classical computer science but with some stream of input. Howver, people like Avi Wigderson who succesfully removed the "random" parts of those algoritms.

Plus there is funny things with non-associativity of floating-point numbers which can lead to non-determinism when the order of execution (summation for example) is arbitary, which can lead to funny results. But because neural netwroks are robust to noise to some degree, it will still work.

And the stuff which done by Avi Wigderson requires that computers work in determinstic way (except of that random stream), so it will not be very compatible with unreliable noisy computations. However, it seems that stochastic, probabalistic and noisy computations could be combined.
by whearyou | 2025-11-12 09:15:01+00:00
Israel’s always been strong at “terraforming”. I wonder what unexpected consequences will be encountered though.

Eighty years they drained the coastal lowland swamps making central Israel broadly livable - prior it was a morass eg Roman generals writing about the difficulty of transporting soldiers through the region, not catching malaria, etc.

Then they figured out it was causing all kinds of environmental problems, so they had to reintroduce swamp like terrain in some cases.

Everything is trade offs I guess.
by FrankyHollywood | 2025-11-12 09:15:16+00:00
Yes piracy is more necessary than ever!

In my student years I used DC++ just to watch free movies. With the rise of streaming I kind of forgot about it, until I got annoyed.

I don't like the Spotify. Most songs I like are available, but the 'playlist' experience is terrible. A lot of songs are actually part of an album. "Is an album like a playlist on a disk?" my kid asked. No it's not, a playlist is a randomly assembled list of songs, but an album are songs who belong together, they are the album.

And video streaming is the opposite. The experience is nice, but there is so much missing even if you have multiple streaming subscriptions.

Besides convenience there is politics, what if Trump wants a list of everyone who thumbed up 'The White House Effect' on Netflix?

So, after many years I took an old Raspberry 3 and started torrenting again. To my surprise piratebay is still active (although my old account doesn't work anymore, no clue how to provide new content).

I'm really happy, the Raspberry has a Samba fileshare. Just download the VLC app on your smart tv and you can stream anything you like.

I know there are more advanced solutions to torrenting, but I like this simple approach, and it makes me completely independent. Let's start sharing great content again!
by andriesm | 2025-11-12 09:15:33+00:00
Not all rich guys are part of the ORGANIZED RICH.

Some are, many/most aren't.

For some rich guys whole point of being rich is to be maximally independent.

Some billionaires are all kinds of weird flavor of Anarcho Capitalist (completely anti government), libertarian (small government), objectivist (suspicious of government and against overbearing regulations and mob control).

Not all, but many. I think there is an important distinction between independent minded successful people and crapitalists, the ones who collude with the government and enforce their fortunes via regulatory capture.

Not every rich person is obsessed with controlling the world and other people.

Many just want to live their own lives, and want as little as possible interaction with the government.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-11-12 09:16:23+00:00
Hard to tell.

The last time LeCun disagreed with the AI mainstream was when he kept working on neural net when everyone thought it was a dead end. He might be entirely right in his LLM scepticism. It's hardly a surefire path. He didn't prevent Meta from working on LLM anyway.

The issue is more than his position is not compatible with short term investors expectations and that's fatal in a company like Meta at the position LeCun occupies.
Show HN: Rtrvr.ai – Remote Control Your Browser with an AI Web Agent and MCP
by arjunchint | 2025-11-12 09:16:59+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Arjun, one of the founders of rtrvr.ai.

For the past year, we've been building and iterating on an in-browser AI agent. But a few months ago, we hit a wall in our approach and decided to tear everything down and rebuild from first principles. The result is what we're re-launching today.

The Problem/Insight: We kept coming back to a simple, nagging question: web agents by themselves are a nice to have but we kept getting requests on possible ways to integrate or call our agent from another agent. Users also kept asking to reuse their own existing chatbot subscriptions to power the agent.

The "Aha!" Moment with MCP: This led us down the rabbit hole of interoperability and we landed on MCP. Our core insight was this: what if we exposed the Chrome Extension itself as a Remote MCP server?

This simple idea completely changed our architecture and value proposition. It turns the user's browser into a controllable, sandboxed endpoint that any other AI can talk to with a simple copy/paste of a MCP url.

What this new architecture unlocks: Remote Control Your Browser: You can stay in your flow in Claude and tell it to perform tasks on your behalf in background tabs. No more context switching. Tell Claude to file that Jira ticket or scrape a site without ever leaving the chat.

Reuse Your Own Subscription (The "BYO-Sub" model): Since Claude is driving the action, you're using your existing subscription to power the agent for basic tasks. We see this as the future – our agent provides the secure execution rails, and you bring the brain you already pay for. Users can then upgrade to our more advanced, multi-step agent for complex workflows when needed.

Our Bigger Bet - The Agentic Web: We believe the future isn't a single "god agent" but a network of specialized agents that collaborate. By exposing the browser as a common execution layer, we're hoping to provide the "rails" for this future. We're already in talks with other agent platforms to build on this, enabling a more open and interconnected ecosystem.

We just launched on Product Hunt today and would genuinely love to hear the HN community's feedback. What are the security implications we haven't thought of? What are the unlocked use cases you see by giving an agent/app browser context? What's the next logical step for an open "Agentic Web"? All criticism and ideas are welcome.

Thanks for reading!

Links: Product Hunt Launch: https://www.producthunt.com/products/rtrvr-ai?launch=rtrvr-a...

Chrome Extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/rtrvrai-ai-web-agen...
by ramon156 | 2025-11-12 09:18:03+00:00
I'm not surprised that anything is better than LinkedIn Jobs.

Both sides have an awful experience. Today was the first time a company came back and explained why they aren't going further (apart from the "we're looking for someone with more experience", which in some situations makes no sense).

But even then, the reason they denied was "We're looking for someone with 3+ years of node experience".

Well, I have 2.5 years. Am I now too dumb to work? Nonetheless it's their call
by aa-jv | 2025-11-12 09:20:34+00:00
I had a great stickered laptop for a few years, lots of valuable stickers I'd collected at various hackathons and such, but .. Apple stole it!

I had to get the screen replaced, and no matter how hard I pleaded, Apple refused to give me the old screen back to hang on my nerd wall.

I remain convinced that some Apple tech has a collection of these screens, somewhere, on their own nerd wall.

Grrr...
by jeroenhd | 2025-11-12 09:20:43+00:00
You can make CAD programs with any toolkit as long as you have a GPU surface to render your actual CAD output to. You can do anything with this toolkit from weather apps to video editors, map analysis, and PDF editors.

You can check out the Avalonia demo reel to see what you can already do with the .NET GUI stack that MAUI now uses on Linux and on the web: https://avaloniaui.net/showcase
by NoLinkToMe | 2025-11-12 09:20:51+00:00
> that takes continual work, so the only way to make that possible is to somehow provide ongoing funding.

Not really, perpetuities have existed for a long time in finance, even longer has the concept of ‘time value of money’ existed.

You can turn $3m in revenue today into a US treasury bond portfolio that delivers $120k a year. That’s enough to pay for maintenance and minor development of new features.

You can also say: I’ll just charge 120k a year in fees infinitely. But it has the same present value (see time value of money) as 3m today. These worlds are interchangeable, only in the upfront world there is no risk that some of your customers walk away at some point making further upkeep untenable for the remaining customers.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-11-12 09:21:30+00:00
> LeCun failed to deliver anything that delivered real value to stockholders

Well, no, Meta is behind the main framework used by nearly anyone largely thanks to LeCun. LLaMA was also very significant in making open weight a thing and that largely contributed to avoiding Google and OpenAI consolidating as the sole providers.

It's not a perfect tenure but implying he didn't deliver anything is far too harsh.
by watwut | 2025-11-12 09:21:35+00:00
Although Israel is committing genocide, it is not a threat to worldwide stability. NK is not threat to world wide stability either, as evil they are, they are no where near to that. USA half switched alliance to Russia, so yeah. Current American leadership admires how Russia does things and wants to be more like them.

There is a reason why USA is currently seen as the biggest threat to stability - because USA is intentionally trying to make the world unstable.
by Ancapistani | 2025-11-12 09:22:07+00:00
> I'm asking, in all sincerity, what is one example of something you think is perfectly reasonable that you now have to avoid saying

At one point, one of my social media profile began with “Father, husband, […]” - basically a list of the things that are most important to me. I was berated online for this after responding to a post by someone by offering a suggestion to a technical problem. This was about a month before PyCon, and both I and that person were in attendance. They made reference to their “joke” in a very public way - at least two others who had participated in the thread online were there, and they laughed and continued to name the entire list that my profile contained.

To be clear - I was not inferring that they were making fun of me, this was in direct response to a question I had asked during the Q&A portion of a talk. They were loud enough that the speaker called for quiet because they were unable to hear the following question.

I attempted to file a complaint following the PSF process, and was told “since this happened off-site, there’s nothing we can do.”

The following day the same person referenced that someone had tried to attempted a complaint about them, calling it “fragile masculinity”.

There have been other instances, one of which was significantly more serious and resulted in a close friend of mine leaving software engineering as a career entirely. I will not share that one - there’s no benefit to doing so, it would hurt my friend if they were to be reminded of it, and it would very likely identify me.
by KaiserPro | 2025-11-12 09:22:31+00:00
Thats a good question. I wonder if the "virtual drum" was there to get over film holding issues (as in it physically bends the film) or that its a line scanner

personally I think that technology has come on enough to move on from the imacon/hasselblad: https://emulsive.org/articles/opinion/scanning-film-the-20k-...
by whstl | 2025-11-12 09:22:33+00:00
It is amazing how companies want this "marketing" but don't want to put the actual effort to make it possible.

A tech company I worked at once had a "sponsorship fund" to "sponsor causes" that employees wanted, it was actually good money but a drop in the bucket for a company. A lot of employees voted for sponsoring Vue.js, which is what we used. Eventually, after months of silence, legal/finance decided it was too much work.

But hey it wasn't an exception. The local animal shelter was the second most voted and legal/finance also couldn't figure it out how to donate.

In the end the money went to nowhere.

The only "developer marketing" they were doing was sending me in my free time to do panels with other developers in local universities and conferences. Of course it was unpaid, but in return I used it to get another job.
by enraged_camel | 2025-11-12 09:22:50+00:00
“It’s your call” specifically means all the decisions on the table are valid and fit the requirements and the employee is being granted permission to make a judgment call. Questioning that judgment call afterwards is shitty and leads to an erosion of trust because the employee will thereon second guess themselves and also try to avoid making any decisions (because they expect them to be overridden).
by austin-cheney | 2025-11-12 09:23:13+00:00
Like with everything else this is provable with numbers. What this is really about is having at least the appropriate amount of social intelligence for people who are otherwise individually productive. That’s it: productive people who know when to engage.

The way to solve for that is force additional business ownership onto the developers. When there is increased liability and increased risk of failure the developers will know exactly the right amount of feedback to provide, especially to each other, because are operating conditions are dictated by velocity and code quality baselines.

I am saying this as a software manager of people.
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-11-12 09:23:39+00:00
Not any patch. Sometimes there are patches that are not explicitly fixing defects, but for example they surface a boolean setting that some upstream library started to expose. That setting is exactly like a dozen other settings already there. It's made using the same coding style and has all requisite things other settings have.

Will you be still making a fuss over it?
by witcher | 2025-11-12 09:23:51+00:00
(author of the blog post here)

I think there's a learning around stability of devtools here. It takes time to get used to things, but once you do you are ultra productive. That's why IDE Git UIs are not ideal, because the graphics change so often, confusing you more than helping etc.

I got stuck to git gui / gitk for so long for this reason, I couldn't parse other UIs e.g. for diffs until I forced myself to have a less productive time to learn new UI.

I hope lazygit is stable - I think I might need to construct some stable config for visuals / colors to ensure this! (:
by larusso | 2025-11-12 09:25:56+00:00
Don’t know about the story telling as in a story about the past of the laptop. I have a lot of colleagues who come back with a full plastered laptop the second day they receive a new machine. I think that there is a culture of either leave you machines pristine or show you don’t give a f… how expensive it is. Sure the world is not black and white here so.
by rickdeckard | 2025-11-12 09:26:06+00:00
Yeah, it's a dilemma. Modern times are no longer suitable for industry-wide standards.

Up until the 2000s, industry standardization groups were formed by companies which acknowledged that they need to team up and cooperate with each other to establish a mutual standard across several market-segments.

Nowadays we have companies who participate in those standards but don't contribute their work back to it, in hopes to secure a competitive advantage with a closed ecosystem.

What happens instead, is that they force other equally-large players to develop another proprietary standard to match them, and now the standards body is unable to find common ground between all members anymore.

Apple is the most egregious example of this, extending the Bluetooth spec in proprietary ways and not contributing any substantial implementation of it back to the standard (proprietary fast-pairing, linking BT-pairing to the Apple-ID instead of the device,...)

In today's times, Bluetooth wouldn't even be a standard. There would likely be equivalent wireless specs from Apple, Google/Qualcomm and Microsoft/Intel, none of them would work properly with each other because each team has its own set of accessories to sell...
Show HN: Automate App Store Connect configuration – IAPs, subs, metadata
by semihcihan | 2025-11-12 09:28:43+00:00
I’m an iOS developer with several indie apps. Every time I created a new app, the worst part wasn’t coding — it was setting up App Store Connect.

Configuring in-app purchases, subscriptions, pricing, and metadata through the web interface is slow, repetitive, and error-prone. The site itself is sluggish and requires endless clicks. I’ve spent hours doing the same tasks across multiple apps — setting up similar subscription tiers, copying pricing, and managing localizations.

After doing this enough times, I wrote a command-line tool called StoreConfig to handle it.

It lets you describe your entire App Store Connect configuration in a JSON file — including: • in-app purchases • subscriptions • availability • pricing • metadata and localizations

You can fetch your current configuration from App Store Connect, edit it in JSON, and apply it back — either to the same app or a different one. It supports AI editing, version control and makes it very easy to share or duplicate setups between apps.

It’s similar in spirit to “infrastructure as code,” but for App Store Connect. Tools like Fastlane are great for CI/CD, builds, and basic metadata updates, but they don’t manage pricing, IAPs, or subscriptions — which is what StoreConfig focuses on.

We’re currently running a free beta for developers who want to try it and give feedback.
by camillomiller | 2025-11-12 09:28:56+00:00
LLMs get results is quite the bold statement. If they get results, they should be getting adopted, and they should be making money. This is all built on hazy promises. If you had marketable results, you wouldn't have to hide 20+ billion dollars of debt financing into an obscure SPV. LLMs are the most baffling piece of tech. They are incredible, and yet marred by their non-deterministic hallucinatory nature, and bound to fail in adoption unless you convince everyone that they don't need precision and accuracy, but they can do their business at 75% quality, just with less human overhead. It's quite the thing to convince people of, and that's why it needs the spend it's needing. A lot of we-need-to-stay-in-the-loop CEOs and bigwigs got infatuated with the idea, and most probably they just had their companies get addicted to the tech equivalent of crack cocaine. A reckoning is coming.
by zimpenfish | 2025-11-12 09:30:24+00:00
> "It will not connect to Apple Health"

FWIW the latest version of the app does export the previous day's averages to Apple Health (only when you open the app, mind, which can make it look like there's missing data.) I use BPExtract to read the PDF and export every reading to Apple Health but I'll definitely be giving your stuff a go as well (because automation >> manual every time.)
by JuniperMesos | 2025-11-12 09:30:25+00:00
Non-copyleft free software licenses such as the MIT license explicitly grant anyone the right to use the software for any purpose, including for things the original author doesn't approve of, and including building closed-sources apps and services. This is the point of open-source - the original author contributes their software to the open-source commons and then doesn't track who uses it for what. Recent attempts to create licenses that do impose restrictions on Software Freedom 0 are attempts to do ideological advocacy for various leftist causes by means of software licenses, and are not free.

Copyleft free software licenses such as the GPL explicitly grant anyone the right to use the software for any purpose, as long as they also extend this right to their own software. The intent of this license was to infect any novel software built upon GPL-licensed software, forcing it to become free as well; in practice any organization who wants to build a proprietary app or service simply avoids GPL dependencies (or blatantly violates the license terms). Empirically, software companies care more about avoiding being forced to release the source code of their own proprietary software more than they care about using the exclusively-GPL'd software commons as a dependency, and this isn't a problem the license itself can solve.
by netdevphoenix | 2025-11-12 09:31:13+00:00
Curbstone and Druckenmiller are the noteworthy ones from outsiders. Several Nvidia executives sold millions of their stock (possibly the world's most valuable stock) in the first half of the year and also sold millions of their nvidia stock last year which is roughly when most agreed that OpenAI was not likely to deliver anything groundbreaking anymore from their current transformer tech.

The Gpt-5 release just confirmed what most knew. And we know that the best time to leave is when the market can still get slightly hotter.
by left-struck | 2025-11-12 09:31:20+00:00
I’m slowly going more and more down this route but I’m curious about what you or others are using for banking apps and parking payment apps. I actually want to switch to graphene OS but there are always these rare corner cases.

Today alone I payed something like 20% extra because I didn’t want to download an app to pay for parking (other parking places won’t even accept payment without the app) and I had to download a closed source app to activate a sim card.
by natch | 2025-11-12 09:32:00+00:00
He is one of these people who think that humans have a direct experience of reality not mediated by as Alan Kay put it three pounds of oatmeal. So he thinks a language model can not be a world model. Despite our own contact with reality being mediated through a myriad of filters and fun house mirror distortions. Our vision transposes left and right and delivers images to our nerves upside down, for gawd’s sake. He imagines none of that is the case and that if only he can build computers more like us then they will be in direct contact with the world and then he can (he thinks) make a model that is better at understanding the world
by lll-o-lll | 2025-11-12 09:32:02+00:00
Uiua is super friendly. Like the friendliest language ever. It breaks your brain for sure, but in a pleasant way.

It is by far the easiest way to learn an array based language; thanks largely to the web based “Pad” and the clever text to symbol way of writing the code. Do some of the tutorial stuff, it’s fun and all inline on the web. Works great on mobile! Think of it like sudoku, but for programming. You can do real stuff with it also, but for me it’s just for fun.
by _gmkt | 2025-11-12 09:32:19+00:00
People buy iPads to try a single app. They hand over hundreds of dollars for a device they do not need, chasing the glint of a feature, the hollow promise of an interface. The tablet sits in their hands like a stone, and they call it freedom. All around them lie simpler paths, cheaper paths, open paths, and they step past them, blind to reason, eager to obey the whisper of marketing. It is a small madness, quiet and ordinary, but it is madness nonetheless.