MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saghm | 2025-11-12 10:28:35+00:00
My wife developed an autoimmune condition a few years ago that causes her to need to see a specialist every few months. For some reason, the hospital we've been going to uses these automated blood pressure readers that literally need to get wheeled around because they're four feet tall with a digital display, and during one of the early visits she had because of one of these conditions, the device bugged out or something and it kept squeezing her arm without releasing the pressure, and the person taking the reading didn't know how to disengage it manually and ran out of the room to go and find someone to help them without taking the time to rip off the velcro band on my wife's arm or anything. Ever since then, I literally get stressed every time my wife's blood pressure gets taken from one of those devices even though I'm not even the one who's getting measured!
by itvision | 2025-11-12 10:29:04+00:00
I have no idea why this fair assessment of the status quo is being downvoted.

LeCun hasn't produced anything noteworthy in the past decade.

He uses the same slides in all of his presentations.

LLMs, while not yet AGI, have shown tremendous progress, and are actually useful for 99% of use cases for the average person.

The remaining 1% is for deep research into the deep unknown (physics, chemistry, genetics, diseases, the nature of intelligence itself), an area in which they falter.
by Xelbair | 2025-11-12 10:29:17+00:00
Vault, Keycloak, Flink are language agnostic or there exist bindings for most popular languages.

Documentation is vastly better compared to Java ones, it's like day and night, LINQ is vastly superior to anything that Java offered - but i haven't used java in a very long time. And every time i had to write java it felt like i went backwards in time by 5-10 years.

If i remember right Java's webserver beats ASP.NET in performance benchmarks but .net's one performance is good enough that it does not matter until you hit really big usercount - and at that point you usually have to rethink your architecture anyways.

But frankly .net is still mostly Microsoft Java but with better developer ergonomics in my opinion. It did shed a lot of overengineered OOP legacy from .net framework days though and we're seeing major performance improvements with every version.
by leekuanyew | 2025-11-12 10:29:21+00:00
Hey,

Cheating in exams has quietly become a global industry — from small university tests to national certifications and professional licensing.

We’re building https://trustexam.ai that protect the integrity of high-stakes exams and certifications — from universities to government licensing and professional testing.

Our focus now is on scaling this globally and using ethical “white-hat” research to understand how people cheat and how technology can rebuild trust in digital assessments. What’s the best way to make that impact worldwide?
by weedhopper | 2025-11-12 10:29:35+00:00
What an insightful comment! (sorry, couldn’t help it)

I agree about the silliness. God forbid i am a non-native English speaker and I have a bit of an of odd writing style in a real Brits eye. Or that I use ‘—‘ instead of ‘-‘ because usually typing two dashes converts to the long one on Mac (try even four, technology is crazy these days), and it just feels a bit nicer. OR that I adopt occasional use of ‘;’ because I feel like it (Yes. English is supposed to have short sentences. Unlike other languages. Beautiful. Sue me.)

I don’t care if they helped themselves with AI to improve writing or turn a bullet point into a sentence. It’s when the volume of text doesn’t justify the lack of content or value that I call bs and go to the next one. At this point it might as well be human generated content, but I don’t care, outcome’s the same.

Regarding the post — it’s a cute little article and the pelicans do seem be making a point with their funky shapes
by Arisaka1 | 2025-11-12 10:30:17+00:00
Every time I read about new .NET version improvements I always remember my attempt to get a job using this stack in my local job market (Greece), where .NET Framework is super prevalent, majorly used by classic companies that don't even give you a fair technical chance if you lack a degree, and the devs are considered to be a cost center.

I really, REALLY wish I was in another timeline where I could say in an interview "yes, I use Linux on my desktop and Rider for my IDE" without being seen as a traveler from outer space.

I enjoy working with modern C# way more than node.js but... that's it.
by CGamesPlay | 2025-11-12 10:30:21+00:00
Neither the hypothetical ice cream parlor nor Goodnotes is accused of doing that, though.

I don't know when the OP bought his app, but the pricing page from a year ago doesn't say anything about the lifetime purchase being a subscription at all, much less a subscription that includes every new feature in perpetuity.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240712162421/https://www.goodn...
by torginus | 2025-11-12 10:31:29+00:00
What does Meta even want with AI?

I suppose they could solve superintelligence and cure cancer and build fusion reactors with it, but that's 100% outside their comfort zone - if they manage to build synthethic conversation partners and synthethic content generators as good or better than the real thing the value of having every other human on the planet registered to one of their social network goes to zero.

Which is impossible anyway - I facebook to maintain real human connections and keep up with people who I care about, not to consume infinite content.
by madaxe_again | 2025-11-12 10:31:59+00:00
It just makes stuff so easy - I’ve been on an absolute spree lately, and have built out:

Ultrasonic tank & river level monitors, with temperature compensation and a battery fuel gauge - managing to make a 3000mAh battery stretch almost a year. Some of the river monitors use LoRa.

Remote control to stop/start the previously pull-start generator

Gas bottle level monitors

Made the coffee machine dangerous

And my current project is seeing if I can make solar/battery powered LED bulbs that I can hang on trees and use BLE to make them automatically turn on some distance ahead of you as you walk down the long path through the forest, and turn off once you’ve passed.

I only really got started a few months ago, and my approach is far more breadboards, DuPont cables and superglue, because I know damned well that the moment I go “ok I’m done let’s get a PCB” I’ll decide on a modification.

Anyway. I don’t have enough good things to say about ESPHome. I get to save thousands of euros, and have fun at the same time. What’s not to like.
by kergonath | 2025-11-12 10:34:37+00:00
Probably because the US are much more mentioned than other American countries. But that’s not really the point, though. People from the US are américains, they’re part of the group of people living in America (which, in French and when it is not qualified, refers to all of them, North, Central, and South).

The point is that nobody would object if you refer to someone from anywhere else in the Americas as américain. Like my lab mate from Buenos Aires or friends from Montréal. And we’re definitely not in Haiti.
by jsiepkes | 2025-11-12 10:35:53+00:00
> and fit the requirements

And that is where the friction is. A lot of these requirements are implicit.

For example; If an application is built around Protobuf / gRPC and you suddenly start doing JSON / REST you are going to need a really, really good reason for that. Since you are introducing a new technology, with all it's glory and all it's horror. So your judgment is going to be questioned on that and most likely the reaction will be; We are not going to do that.
by DepthSight | 2025-11-12 10:38:43+00:00
That's a fantastic quote, and in a traditional development world, I would agree 100%. Quality absolutely has to be designed in. However, what I've discovered through this process is a new paradigm that feels different. When you're working in a tight feedback loop with an AI, the "design -> build" cycle shrinks from weeks to minutes. You can "design in" a core principle, ask the AI to implement it, and then immediately ask it to "inspect" its own code for flaws against that principle. It's less like building a bridge and more like sculpting. You start with a block of marble (the AI's vast knowledge), and you iteratively chip away, constantly inspecting and refining. I agree that you can't "add" quality at the end. But I'm finding that with AI, the "beginning" is never more than 5 minutes away. It's a continuous process of "design-inspect-refine". I'm still exploring the limits of this approach, and your point is a crucial part of that exploration.
by netdevphoenix | 2025-11-12 10:38:56+00:00
The economy is a macrosystem. For a company to make profit, someone needs to buy. For someone to buy a service or a product, they need to have the money needed to buy. If AI replaces humans and UBI doesn't happen, costs might drop to near zero but so will revenue as virtually no one will be able to buy anything. So the economy will certainly collapse.
by Aachen | 2025-11-12 10:38:59+00:00
Being childlike is what makes us able to live in a society. We explore new things, don't stop learning, and forgive mistakes made along the way. Like wolves, who started being more like how they are in their puppy phase (playful, friendly, exploratory), thereby being possible to domesticate and now called dogs, we've domesticated ourselves (from the common ancestor we had with great apes) in that there was apparently an evolutionary advantage to be less physically imposing and more like, well, as we are today

(Based on what I remember from a books called Tamed by Alice Roberts)
by zamadatix | 2025-11-12 10:39:02+00:00
At 1.6T market cap it's very hard to 10x or greater the company anymore doing what's in their comfort zone and they've got a lot of money to play with to find easier to grow opportunities. If Zuckerberg was convinced he could do that by selling toothpicks they'd have a go at the toothpick business. They went after the "metaverse" first, then AI. Both are just very fast growth options which happen to be tech focused because that's the only way you generate new comparable value as a company (unless you're sitting on a lot of state owned oil) in the current markets.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-11-12 10:40:14+00:00
I once had a soldering course from a guy that is mainly known for creating a remote that could turn off any TV some years ago, really chill guy but also hillarious that he made a business out of a single gimmicky item like that.

I wouldn't be surprised if he lurks on here, if so, hi!

edit: it's the "TV-B-Gone" by Mitch Altman, who was at the forefront of creating hackerspaces - TIL they weren't as much of a thing in the US until 2008.
by ddrauh | 2025-11-12 10:43:24+00:00
This is a fantastic reality check on the "LLM introspection" hype. The author's killer insight was to add a simple control question: "Do you believe 1+1=3?".

Turns out, the steering vector that supposedly makes the model "introspect" also makes it agree that 1+1=3. The effect isn't introspection, it's just noise that breaks the model's ability to answer "No."

A great example of how easy it is to see ghosts in the machine without rigorous controls.
by everdrive | 2025-11-12 10:44:56+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.

I'm too busy right now, but I think my medium-term plan is to get a local bank and just use them locally like the old days. I'm stuck on iPhone for a variety of reasons, but I'd still like to get my app count down as much as possible. Plus if my phone falls into a river I'll still be able to do my banking. I think the convenience hit will be worth it.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-12 10:45:08+00:00
> (For what its worth, I probably have this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precordial_catch_syndrome)

Huh, that's interesting. That matches something that I get sometimes, usually after I've been driving a long distance or sitting at my desk doing mouse-heavy stuff for a long time. I put it down to poor posture.

It hasn't happened quite so much since adjusting the steering to track and centre properly so I'm not constantly pulling the car left away from the middle of the road, and raising my seat a bit by unscrewing the seat from its base, putting in about 8cm worth of wooden spacers, and screwing it back down with long studs and nuts instead of the daft wee screws, so it's not sitting at its "most extended" height.

I don't know, it might help you too.
Ask HN: A platform to manage personal and sensitive data for digital twins?
by krecharles | 2025-11-12 10:45:41+00:00
There are many digital twin companies that scrape public data to build models of individuals. But I want to include private data because I’m not famous so there is little content of me in the internet. I have exported my entire notion content and chatgpt history into a folder and I find that the cursor agent is able to surface interesting insights, i.e. the data is not just slob. I can’t just upload this data to a random company because it includes sensitive stuff (salary, insecurities, secrets, etc), yet I still want to provide digital twin companies with part of it because it is necessary to get a good representation of me. It feels like this problem needs some level of indirection.

Has anyone seen projects tackling this? Most projects I found are pre-LLM era and not that helpful tbh. I assume this has to be an open-source project where people could self-host due to how sensitive some data is, but I might be wrong.

I’ll be around for a few hours to discuss.
by ksala_ | 2025-11-12 10:46:09+00:00
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. You can’t be expected to get a subscription, but you also can’t be expected to charge for an upgrade.

Now, I hate subscriptions as much as the next person, but I can’t leave this blog without feeling that the op is a bit entitled.

For what it matters, my opinion is that GoodNotes is doing everything correctly. If you bought a 5 lifetime, you can still use it. It’s the same app (that’s interesting, there is a toggle to go between 5 and 6) so I’m assuming it’s still getting bug fixes for new os releases and similar. 5 was a free update to 4, and 6 was released in 2023 (!) so that license was good for a while. They offer discounts if you bought 5, so op point of it being cheaper on a subscription might be wrong. And according to their website they still offer lifetime licenses for 6, bar the AI stuff (which is probably an ongoing cost for them? No idea if it’s local or not).

Plenty of scammy apps and it would be nice to go back to owning things, but this is the same experience if not better to when you could buy software on a cd and keep it a couple decades ago.
by noelwelsh | 2025-11-12 10:46:22+00:00
Didn't Transmeta's technology end up in Apple's PowerPC emulator Rosetta, following the switch to Intel?

IIRC Transmeta's technology came out of HP (?) research into dynamic inlining of compiled code, giving performance comparable to profile-guided optimization without the upfront work. It worked similarly to an inlining JIT compiler, except it was working with already compiled code. Very interesting approach and one I think could be generally useful. Imagine if, say, your machine's bootup process was optimized for the hardware you actually have. I'm going off decades old memories here, so the details might be incorrect.
by artyom | 2025-11-12 10:46:30+00:00
Pretty sure the profit margin for these bags is 10x at least. Way better (and simpler) that dealing with expensive computer/phone hardware and it supply chain, even if their pricing is ridiculously expensive.

Marketing guys just know and exploit a very well known human weakness. It's annoying because it's Apple, but everyone has been doing this forever.

Non-standardized phone chargers? USB-C and its patent hell? HDMI and its licensing? There's plenty of examples for creating wasteful items without them being fashion ones.
by netdevphoenix | 2025-11-12 10:47:07+00:00
>the huge impact they're already having

In the software development world yes, outside of that, virtually none. Yes, you can transcribe a video call in Office, yes, but that's not ground breaking. I dare you to list 10 impacts on different fields, excluding tech and including at least half blue collar fields and at least half white collar fields , at different levels from the lowest to the highest in the company hierarchy, that LLM/Diffusion models are having. Impact here specifically means a significant reduction of costs or a significant increase of revenue. Go on
by latexr | 2025-11-12 10:48:46+00:00
> I'm simply trying to understand what direction you'd like Apple to go when dealing with countries like China and their rules

And I’ve explained multiple times (this will be the last) that your question is at best malformed and at worst a deliberate trapping because the complaint isn’t about one specific case but a pattern of behaviour.

Let’s say your cousin is an alcoholic and drug addict who beats his wife, defrauded your grandmother, amongst other behaviours. One day he pisses inside your car and you tell him this has to stop. Then his brother starts harassing you about how your cousin was drunk and didn’t think he could get to a bathroom in time and that’s why he pissed in your car, and “what did you want him to do, he really had to go” and “what would you have done if it was impossible for you to hold it in”. What you wanted him to do was not reach that point. It’s pointless to argue about the action he should’ve taken to specifically not piss in your car because that event in isolation is not the issue, it’s just another symptom of a bigger problem which has to be fixed. If it had been you, you never would have been in that situation to begin with so the hypothetical does not matter.

> Now you've turned to ad hominem.

An ad hominem is an argument “where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument”. I’ve done no such thing. Saying “you seem to be engaging in bad faith” says nothing about your motives or character, it only concerns a point in time. Like saying “you are drunk” VS “you are an alcoholic”. The former is not an ad hominem, it’s just a statement explaining why you believe it’s unfruitful to continue the conversation at that point in time.

We really can’t continue the conversation if you’re misattributing fallacies and don’t make an effort to steel man the argument. Hammering on the same point over and over after I explained multiple times how you’re misunderstanding it is not the way to a productive conversation. You’re stuck on a preconceived idea in your head which is not my argument, fighting a straw man of your own making.
by scq | 2025-11-12 10:49:02+00:00
One aspect of Transmeta not mentioned by this article is their "Code Morphing" technique used by the Crusoe and Efficeon processors. This was a low level piece of software similar to a JIT compiler that translated x86 instructions to the processor's native VLIW instruction set.

Similar technology was developed later by Nvidia, which had licensed Transmeta's IP, for the Denver CPU cores used in the HTC Nexus 9 and the Carmel CPU cores in the Magic Leap One. Denver was originally intended to target both ARM and x86 but they had to abandon the x86 support due to patent issues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver
by SparkBomb | 2025-11-12 10:49:37+00:00
It really depends where you are. In the UK half the places seem to use .NET in some form or another.

I am pretty language agnostic and I am reasonably competent programming in C# (I worked with C# and VB.NET for about 15 years), Go, Python, TypeScript and C++ these days.

The issue with a lot of places that do C#/.NET stuff is that they will typically ignore new tech until it is officially blessed by Microsoft. You can have a piece of tech that everyone is using and works really well and it will be ignored if it isn't blessed by Microsoft.

The other issue with .NET is all the Microsoft gumpf that tends to come with it even with the newer versions of .NET.

I am also in the weird place of being a Linux user. I've had job interviews that wanted to do live coding exercise/take home code exercise and they expect you to do everything in Visual Studio with SQL Server.
by digitalPhonix | 2025-11-12 10:49:45+00:00
> AUTHOR'S NOTE: This story is 100% fictional, except for all the parts about the EU AI Act having no enforcement teeth…

It’s a long parable to explain:

> FINAL THOUGHT: Somewhere in Brussels, right now, someone is discovering that "effective oversight" means nothing without the technical ability to enforce it. This story is for them
by maybewhenthesun | 2025-11-12 10:49:55+00:00
These kind of announcements always suffer from 'creator knowledge bias' and never define their terms ;-)

"What is the Avalonia MAUI Backend?

At its core, the Avalonia MAUI Backend enables you to keep your MAUI codebase while replacing the rendering layer with Avalonia."

Which tells me exactly nothing. what even is MAUI, maybe some polynesian deity? :-P

I know, I know, I can google stuff. But still...
by trashb | 2025-11-12 10:50:29+00:00
So to me it seems notifications of bugs is good, you want to create visibility of problems.

The problem is the pressure to fix the bugs in x amount of time otherwise they will be made public. Additionally flooding the team with so many bugs that they can never keep up.

Perhaps the solution is not in do or don't submit but in the way how the patches are submitted. I think a solution would be to have a separate channel for these big companies to submit "flood" bug reports generated by AI, and if those reports won't be disclosed in x amount of time that would also take the pressure of the maintainers, the maintainers can set priories to most pressing issues and keep the backlog of smaller issues that may require attention in the future (or be picked up by small/new contributors).
by arcticbull | 2025-11-12 10:53:34+00:00
I'm also not sure it even drives a ton of value in software engineering. It makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder. Typing out software in your mind was never the difficult part. Figuring out what to write, how to interpret specs in context, how to make your code work within the context of a broader whole, how to be extensible, maintainable, reliable, etc. That's hard, and LLMs really don't help.

Even when writing, it shifts the mental burden from an easy thing (writing code) to a very hard thing (reading that code, validating it's right, hallucination free, and then refactoring it to match your teams code style and patterns).

It's great for building a first-order approximation of a tech demo app that you then throw out and build from scratch, and auto-complete. In my experience, anyways. I'm sure others have had different experiences.
by hilbert42 | 2025-11-12 10:53:48+00:00
"…beyond 5 megapixels per frame is pushing beyond reasonable expectations with 35mm."

Well, as I mentioned elsewhere old fashioned Kodachrome resolves ~100 lines/mm and some newer color emulsion are considerably higher, and of course B&W ones have even higher resolutions.

Given that a 35mm frame is 36x24mm even Kodachrome achieves 8.64 megapixels. OK, let's allow for an overgenerous Kell factor of say 0.8, this figure will drop to ~6.9 megapixels. Given the ready availability of emulsions with higher resolutions, especially the best B&W ones then a figure well in excess of 5 megapixels is relizable in practice.

Of course, that doesn't take into account the image chain as a whole, lenses, displays, compression, etc. which would reduce the effective resolution. That said, these days the typical image chain can easily achieve much higher pixel throughput than 5 megapixels before bandwidth limiting so the effective Kell derating factor could easily be kept quite small.