MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by echelon | 2025-11-16 19:29:45+00:00
When we get local models for everything, I think AI could kill the internet and big tech.

In the fullness of time, we'll be able to generate everything locally. When that happens, why would we need middlemen?

Llama, Stable Diffusion, and Wan Video are a glimpse of what's to come with local AI. It'll get faster and higher quality.

At bare minimum, local agents will one day act like a filter in front of the internet and kill all the ads and bad content like hyper advanced ad blockers. No more rage bait. No more negativity. We'll be able to use AI to scrape the bullshit off the internet before it hits our eyeballs.
I've been building an HTML-first tool – sharing it in case it helps someone
by guseyn | 2025-11-16 19:29:47+00:00
Hi everyone! I’ve been working on a project called EHTML, an HTML-first approach to building dynamic pages using mostly HTML. It lets you handle things like templating, loops, conditions, data loading, reusable components, and nested forms — all without a build step or heavy JavaScript setup.

I originally built it to simplify my own workflow for small apps and prototypes, but I figured others who prefer lightweight or no-build approaches might find it useful too. It runs entirely in the browser using native ES modules and custom elements, so there’s no bundler or complex tooling involved.

If you enjoy working close to the browser or like experimenting with minimalistic web development, you might find it interesting. Just sharing in case it helps someone or sparks ideas. Cheers!
by y-c-o-m-b | 2025-11-16 19:29:58+00:00
The comment adjacent to mine links to several findings, including from the EFF, demonstrating doubt on your assertions here. Specifically the case of Texas using Flock data outside of their jurisdiction (on a national level even) to use against abortion seekers. You have no substantial comments to make on those or any of the other active discussions that have spawned on this platform over the past year? You're obviously reading them, yet you only remain "consistent" on a technicality.

What steps is Flock taking to address the privacy overreach? Do you have data sharing agreements with Palantir? If so, do they respect the same geofencing properties that your clients supposedly have full control over?
by mindslight | 2025-11-16 19:31:08+00:00
> Do the other people have to take part too?

Yes?

It's great that learning things was fun for you. I'm there with you myself. I had amazing lucid dreams the night after I learned Ocaml...

But this entire thread is about teaching children, many of whom need guidance, support, and unfortunately sometimes control to mitigate their attraction to easy-but-unhealthy activities.

Not everyone is going to be a programmer. But even if we're talking about structuring learning such that it's compelling on its own, then we're kind of assuming everyone is going to have a calling and also find it relatively young. That feels pretty naive.
by iLemming | 2025-11-16 19:31:10+00:00
> incredibly easy compared to getting them to edit some vim/emacs config

Yet, extending just about any functionality of Emacs for an experienced user is far simpler than in anything else - you can write some expressions in a scratch buffer and change the behavior of any command - built-in or third-party. Not only wouldn't you even have to restart anything - you wouldn't even need to save that code on the file system.

There's a strong correlation between perceived difficulty at the beginning and notable simplicity at later stages. Things that are seemingly harder to grok often open up avenues for clarity later. Conversely, things that seem easy to get into, later often become full of bottlenecks and complexity.

Imagine attempting to replace all the knobs, controls, buttons and switches in an Airbus A380 cockpit with a single touch-based display à la Tesla and claim it's now easier to train new pilots, but you've just made them dependent on a system they don't deeply understand, you've traded 6 months of training for a lifetime of brittle expertise.

I am forever indebted to my younger self for investing some time in understanding the grand ideas behind Vim and Emacs, and never, even once, have I regretted my choices. Rather the opposite - I regret wasting a big chunk of my life chasing popular trends aimed at "intuitive use", "easy start" and "it just works™". I would have never developed the true "hacker's mindset" without them.

Undeniably, there's an immense pedagogical value in tools that make it easy for beginners, but there's also a mental trap there. It's ingrained into human nature - the brain simply doesn't like the grit; it naturally gravitates toward comfort and minimal effort - it just wants to remain lazy. Yet there's a compounding effect of initial investment that pays off later. Sadly, we keep trying to find ways to dumb things down.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-11-16 19:31:10+00:00
I teach a 5th grade computer science class at my school. We just finished our "chatbot" project. I thought the kids some very simple Python syntax--assigning variables, concatenating strings, input, print, if, elif, else--and they made programs that could have a conversation with the user.

I suppose I could have done this without internet on air-gapped laptops. They do need laptops though, and the internet makes it much easier for them to submit their work for me to review after class.

I realize that a bounded computer science class probably isn't what you're talking about. However, my school has in fact really been trying to clamp down on technology use this year, and it has been challenging for the computer science department!
by almostbasic | 2025-11-16 19:33:58+00:00
Shameless plug alert: This is exactly why we made Verified Privacy AI. It lets you cryptographically verify that your AI interactions are never logged or stored. You'll see the model you're talking to, the system prompts, every detail. No hidden behaviors, just complete transparency into what's running your AI. We are launched with a very limited group of early users, but you can request an invite here: https://ai.vp.net
by anonymouskimmer | 2025-11-16 19:34:13+00:00
I plugged it into a couple of free readability analyzers and got 10th - 12th grade reading levels.

https://charactercalculator.com/readability-checker/

- Reading Level: 10th to 12th grade

- Reading Score: 59.00

- Reading Note: Fairly difficult to read

https://hemingwayapp.com/readability-checker

- Readability checker: Grade 10; OK. Aim for 9.

- 5 of 19 sentences are very hard to read.

- 6 of 19 sentences are hard to read.

There are some poor word choices[1], but yes, all in all this 7th grader is definitely writing above grade level. Hopefully his English teachers give him feedback pertinent to his demonstrated ability.

[1] - E.g. "That’s not to say a school’s system is necessarily completely ineffective. Last year, my school had left unblocked the spammy-sounding Unblocked Games 66."

would be easier to understand if re-written as:

"That’s not to say a school’s system is completely ineffective. Last year, my school failed to block the spammy-sounding "Unblocked Games 66.""
by righthand | 2025-11-16 19:34:28+00:00
I don't understand the proposed solution about data portability? Everyone is going to buy a Steam machine and run it from their home? My municipality is going to open up a datacenter for me to store my data?

What happens when data is shared between Meta + Google? Now it doesn't matter if my data is portable, every player has a copy. There is a need to first establish a data pool (not one but a whole city of people's with private data pools) first before big companies will come asking you for it. How do we get there if all of our apps are designed for us to dump data into their mega pool?
by graemep | 2025-11-16 19:34:46+00:00
Yes, "learning is fun" does not imply "fun is learning". I agree the latter is not always true so I would strongly disagree with "all fun is learning".

What I would say that there are enough fun things that provide learning that kids (especially younger ones - its difference once exams and qualifications start looming) can learn primarily through fun. Provide the environment and guidance and encouragement. Think about how many fun things kids do is learning. Playing games, making things, drawing. The TV series might be a documentary or produced by a different culture or be based on a book that is worth reading, or may be of cultural value in its own right. It may create an opportunity to talk to children about related topics (I am very much a fan of "conversational learning").

> The point is that getting to a place where learning a new programming language is fun requires developing a lot of skill and willpower

I am old enough that I learned because my parents bought me what was then called a "home computer" and it was fun to learn programming. I did not have much skill or will power at that point (I would have been about 10).

More generally, children can learn a lot without skill and will power. It needs opportunities and guidance and encouragement. I agree that sticking kids in front of a TV or giving them a tablet with a bunch of simplistic games will mean they do not learn.
by hluska | 2025-11-16 19:35:33+00:00
The Bluetooth spec only supports one battery status. AirPods have three batteries. Is 1 < 3 a satisfactory enough answer to you?

On the subject of the multi-trillion-dollar behemoth, Apple is a private company. If you have the capital, you can acquire a controlling interest and then they’ll work on whatever you like. Until then, you’re out of luck.
by summa_tech | 2025-11-16 19:35:53+00:00
Unfortunately, the symmetry provided by higher levels of your software stack is not always reflected by the lower levels. This causes your symmetry to be created as an abstraction. (Subroutines are more efficient to implement than co-routines on real hardware.) Abstractions are leaky and this, in turn, causes the superficial symmetry to merely mask the underlying asymmetry.

If done exceptionally well, the only visible evidence of the leak will be substantial performance disparities between seemingly symmetric features (well done! this is unusual).

If done with the normal level of software design quality, the evidence will show up as quirky behavior, imperfect symmetry, "well this one always works but the other one is not reentrant", etc.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-11-16 19:37:40+00:00
I think the line between accessory and non-accessory is really slippery. When the iPhone was released, I think it would have been correct to call it an accessory for your computer. When did that change, exactly?

Heck, I don't really think of my Apple Watch as an accessory. Mine has its own LTE connection; it does need to be connected to an iPhone during initial setup, but after that I don't think there's anything stopping me from giving my phone away and using the watch by itself. Many of the children I teach have an Apple Watch but don't own a phone yet.
by samuelknight | 2025-11-16 19:37:50+00:00
I look at LLMs with an engineering mindset. It is an intelligence black box that goes in a tool box with the old classical algorithms and frameworks. In order to use it in a solution I need to figure out:

1) Whether I can give it information in a compatible and cost effective way

2) Whether the model is likely to to produce useful output

I have use language models for years before LLMs such as part of speech classifiers in the Python NLTK framework.
by jeremy_flox | 2025-11-16 19:37:57+00:00
Both fair points. The README rebuild issue is a Nix hiccup we don't solve; our quantized catalog reduces cascading rebuilds from upstream churn, but input over-specification is still there.

On store bloat: Flox makes it clearer what's in use (explicit environments vs. implicit dependencies), but you still need nix-collect-garbage.

The store accumulates cruft, that's Nix reality, we haven't changed it.
by jorvi | 2025-11-16 19:38:03+00:00
They are, but Linux or BSD doesn't matter all that much when it is about the meta case of deciding the defaults.

Funnily enough I feel a BSD is much more suited to modems / routers, if it weren't for HW WiFi support. Yes, I know you can separate your routing and your access point onto different devices.

At any rate I'm just pointing out that that absolutionism is rarely the right answer. It's also pretty telling that people actually went through my comment history to downvote a few unrelated recent comments. People get angry when they have to adjust their assumptions.

As far as computing device goed, I prefer not lugging around a plastic brick. And one is bound to either lose or forget a dongle. In which case you get boned by OpenWRT's dumb default.

The reason for that default is that if they set up an open OpenWRT WiFi (or default passworded, think "OpenWRT2025"), in that split 5 minute window before you change it, some wardriver might login and mess with your network.

Obviously the chances of that are rather insignificant. And they could generate a default password based on the hardware. For the real security nuts they could tell them to build an image without default-on WiFi (currently they do the inverse).
by lowbloodsugar | 2025-11-16 19:38:21+00:00
Thank you for taking the time to reply, instead of just hitting downvote. I feel like if we argued over a beer we’d probably end up agreeing on a lot of things. But let’s start by disagreeing. :-)

> "Does this have one responsibility?" really isn't the right question to ask.

It’s a great question to ask. As a senior engineer, the answer might be “no”, but there’s a vast difference between code where the answer is “no” because someone made a conscious choice, vs code where nobody even asked the question. Here’s the thing: a compiler and linker can join ten classes into a single executable, but even a senior engineer cannot look at a single class with ten responsibilities and figure out what the fuck is going on. There’s a doc at my company that describes the core function of one particular service. The doc describes the simplest of systems and so you would be surprised to learn that 1) it took me two years of working one the product before I could write it and 2) nobody knew. The reason it took two years was because there were 10 different pathways, and every pathway was just a giant implementation, each written differently, and each, ultimately, doing the exact same fucking thing. But you’d never be sure just by looking at the code. In fact it very much looked like each of these things had very specific things that they did differently. Over two years, while also doing my job of keeping this thing running and adding features, I refactored the thing to be SOLID. In doing so, demonstrated that they all do the exact same thing. We haven’t finished refactoring everything, but we do now test all the pathways with a parallel implementation that verifies 80 classes and 500 instances at runtime with one class and ten instances.

I work on software that you and most people on planet earth with at least a mobile phone are using in one way or another. I have made many pieces of this system better by evolving a clusterfuck of cohesion into a system that is easy to reason about, maintain and evolve - by apply SOLID principles.

I’m currently working on a package used by over 1,000 services. The most pain has been caused by previous iterations ignoring the open-closed principle. As you say, “easy to modify and delete”. A stronger rule, which perhaps you’re alluding to, is don’t allow any extension at all, and just expose only interfaces. In that sense I could agree open-closed principal is moot, but it’s moot for taking its argument to the logical conclusion.

I am also a fan of DDD, and for the reasons you allude to: the second half of the book is more about communicating in a large engineering organization.
by stevenjgarner | 2025-11-16 19:38:32+00:00
Jevons paradox predicts that AI, by making many tasks dramatically cheaper, will increase total demand for those tasks and create new industries around them—just as cheap imaging increased radiology demand and cheap cloud computing created DevOps.

Gary Tan is right that AI will spark massive expansion in many fields. But commenters to the video correctly warn that Jevons paradox only holds until we hit demand saturation or broader system bottlenecks, and AI is unique because it simultaneously automates every link in every knowledge-based value chain.

As AI lowers the cost of cognition itself, humans — not compute — may become the limiting reagent. That means efficiency gains may create new opportunities in the short run, but long-term labor compression, industry consolidation, and economic restructuring are likely unavoidable. AI will expand the economy—but it may not expand the need for human workers at the same rate.
by silversmith | 2025-11-16 19:38:40+00:00
Groundwork most often is the work.

Just yesterday I was helping a family member install roofing. The roof was done up to slats, the roofing was big metal sheets, should be done in an hour. Except we spent good five hours on various little details before the first sheet was going up. And you cant exactly not do those, at least if you want the roof to stay there, and the weather to stay outside.
by ceejayoz | 2025-11-16 19:39:43+00:00
For (very fancy) cloth/paper bills like American ones, some counterfeiters wash the inks out of $1 bills to make $100 ones. Only possible if the $100s are the same or smaller size.

https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/counterfeit-currency-warni...

I believe the US made washing much harder with other techniques because of this in recent years.
by gnarlouse | 2025-11-16 19:39:50+00:00
> We’ve got OpenAI’s CEO dreaming of a day when “every conversation you’ve ever had in your life, every book you’ve ever read, every email you’ve ever read, everything you’ve ever looked at is in there, plus connected to all your data from other sources. And your life just keeps appending to the context.”

This isn't an inherently bad thing. If an AI could theoretically help you live your life better, nudge you in ways that stabilize your psychology and behaviors for the better of yourself, that's good.

The danger is an AI that decides to re-perpetrate the class division that our existing system does. Lesser fortunate people lose their upward mobility while being guided into subtle traps.
by willio58 | 2025-11-16 19:40:42+00:00
> Technical Debt: At scale, tech debt becomes exponentially more expensive. Budget 20-30% of engineering time for platform improvements.

Does anyone else struggle to meet this percentage of tech debt getting done in sprints? If I ever get close to those numbers, tech debt always seems first to go when the rubber hits the road and unplanned work enters the fray
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-16 19:40:44+00:00
Because they do different things.

Suppose you need 10GW of power for an absolute baseline. Enough to heat homes to a temperature that people don't freeze to death on a cold day, to keep power to hospitals and other critical services, etc. Then you need another 10GW on top of that to run aluminum smelters and heat homes to 80°F instead of 60°F and things like that.

If you have 20GW (average) of wind but you get an extended period of low generation and the batteries run down, people die. If you have 10GW (average) of wind and 10GW of nuclear and you get an extended period of low wind generation, the price of electricity goes up that week and people turn off their aluminum smelters and things but nobody dies. If you have 20GW of nuclear you can run the aluminum smelter 52 weeks a year instead of 51 but then people are paying more for electricity than they would with renewables in the mix, which isn't worth it.

So which one should we do?
by ido | 2025-11-16 19:40:48+00:00
I'll have to think harder to come up with the exact number, but I've had approximately 3 Android phones and 3 iPhones in my smartphone-career (changed phones more often in the beginning than at the end).

iPhones just last longer (and retain value a lot longer), even when compared to high end Androids (I did research online & bought the recommended brands at the time, like Google Pixel). I currently use an iPhone 11 (6 years old model at the moment, bought slightly-used a few years ago when it was a fairly new model) and have no plan to replace it anytime soon.

It is however very much a "rich people can afford to save money" boots-type situation.
by martin-t | 2025-11-16 19:41:04+00:00
A lot of bad people, especially those with money and/or power and also their sympathizers (temporarily embarrassed millionaires, flying monkeys, ...) would also object.

Inconveniently, those are also the same people in charge of the mega-corporations currently building AI.

---

I also disagree it would only take revising incentives. Such an AI would be shut down before it gets anywhere. You're right it wouldn't use nukes, probably[0], but it would most likely not succeed in staging a peaceful revolution. Not that violence is wrong in any way, it's just a tool like any other, but it does tend to cause collateral damage.

Even now a lot of people believe the current inequality and injustice cannot be solved via peaceful means. Whatever effects on the real world the AI would like to cause, it would need humans to perform most of the physical tasks - humans who need to be convinced and the most viral emotions are anger and hate.

[0]: It could also calculate that some power structures like the Chinese government are too entrenched and nuking a few major administrative centers and military bases is an acceptable price for the freedom of the rest of the population.
by buu700 | 2025-11-16 19:41:29+00:00
Agreed, I'm fully in favor of this. I'd prefer that every LLM contain an advanced setting to opt out of all censorship. It's wild how the West collectively looked down on China for years over its censorship of search engines, only to suddenly dive headfirst into the same illiberal playbook.

To be clear, I 100% support AI safety regulations. "Safety" to me means that a rogue AI shouldn't have access to launch nuclear missiles, or control over an army of factory robots without multiple redundant local and remote kill switches, or unfettered CLI access on a machine containing credentials which grant access to PII — not censorship of speech. Someone privately having thoughts or viewing genAI outputs we don't like won't cause Judgement Day, but distracting from real safety issues with safety theater might.
by anonymouskimmer | 2025-11-16 19:41:49+00:00
> If you can't bring enough material into the building within books and teacher's brains to teach, you're terrible and pointless.

The numbers are smaller and smaller, but there will still be kids whose only access to the internet is their parents' smartphones. When I personally mentored a couple of pretty bright high school student interns, one of whom scored above 1500 SATs and a 36 ACT, they both found it really helpful to look at Khan Academy / YouTube clips to better understand what I was explaining.

If the poorer kids don't have access to these explanatory videos, except when their parents are done with their phones, they will fall further behind than they otherwise would have.

Perhaps a compromise would be to limit internet access to the school library?
Show HN: Tsofa – The Simple, Offline Flashcard App
by AlSweigart | 2025-11-16 19:42:22+00:00
Anki, Quizlet, Brainscape... I dislike all these overcomplicated flashcard apps. I just want the software equivalent of index cards, so I created [TSOFA - The Simple, Offline, Flashcard App](https://inventwithpython.com/tsofa/). It's exists entirely in a single HTML file you can view in the browser. You can edit the flashcards directly in the file, using just text or HTML tags. [Check out this demo.](https://inventwithpython.com/tsofa/tsofa.html) It also supports a CSV string for the flashcard content so you can import flashcards from other apps. Otherwise, it's just a simple, free flashcard app: No server, no ads, no registration, no premium features to pay for, no dependencies, no build process, no cloud sync. You can suggest improvements or report bugs on [the GitHub repo](https://github.com/asweigart/tsofa-the-simple-offline-flashc...).