MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by arjie | 2025-12-01 15:50:24+00:00
Oh I really enjoyed this one.

Got a quick insight about how penicillin works: interferes with cell-wall building which is a destroy and recreate process by preventing the recreate part.

Got a quick view into the scientific process and communication: Fleming focused on the insight - penicillium kills staphylococcus - and left out the circuitous detail. This is important so that the big win here is very clear.

And got an insight into human nature and memory: Fleming didn’t tell the accidental contamination story until much later. It could possibly be even an idea someone else might have come up with which then took root in his mind (ironic haha!)

The communication aspect reminds me of Mendel’s far too perfect ratios for his pea plants. That kind of “repeat till difference clear” statistics would be decried today but perhaps that was to communicate rather than to determine.

And finally, I really enjoy reading about human process innovation because I think it’s a big factor in how Humanity grows. The lab notebook has to be some kind of star performer here - Fleming’s notes allow us to look back like this.

When I experiment with things, I naturally lean to keeping notes on my test protocol, observations, and results. But not because of some personal genius. It’s just the standard way I was taught as a child in our science labs.

I won’t claim to the rigor of a microbiology lab but even just the process notes help a lot, which is useful since I’m just testing molecules on myself.
by soulofmischief | 2025-12-01 15:50:27+00:00
I think there are several lines. Phase changes happen relatively suddenly, when a system or subsystem reaches a critical threshold. The experience of "qualia" certainly involves many such phase changes as a complex, dynamical system grows in complexity while maintaining stability.

A sufficiently complex organism lacking eyes but having light-sensitive organs still experiences qualia if you define it the right way. But do they experience heartbreak like I do? It isn't an all-or-nothing situation, even if we don't yet know where these lines are.

This supports the idea that subjective consciousness emerges from complexity in systems that have sensory feedback loops. The simpler the system, the smaller the qualia space.
by DoctorOW | 2025-12-01 15:50:32+00:00
> To completely eliminate any threats, I’ve decided to stop using the current signature and switch to a new one. Because of this, the app’s identifier will also change. You don’t need to delete the old app (but it will no longer receive updates)

I'm curious if this is the best idea? Like, if you don't read all the GitHub releases thoroughly or miss the HN material, and instead you just auto-install updates, you downloaded a malware-infested version which will be on your device until you learn otherwise?
by stevefan1999 | 2025-12-01 15:50:37+00:00
> In my 6502 hacking days, the presence of an exclusive OR was a sure-fire indicator you’d either found the encryption part of the code, or some kind of sprite routine.

Correct. Most ciphers of that era should be Feistel cipher in the likes of DES/3DES, or even RC4 uses XOR too. Later AES/Rijndael, CRC and ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) also make heavy use of XOR but in finite field terms which is based on modular arithmetic over GF(2), that effectively reduces to XOR (while in theory should be mod 2).
by bluecalm | 2025-12-01 15:51:11+00:00
I think Apple makes really nice hardware but you can get better specs in as light (or lighter) frame elsewhere. I can compare AMD T14 Thinkpad to a Macbook. Thinkpad is faster, has more RAM (easy to get 64GB now), better keyboard. It's also louder, hotter and the screen is probably worse (mine is low end so it's significantly worse but idk how high end OLED compares). Macbooks have much better sound. Thinkpad runs Linux while Macbooks (the newest ones) still don't.

I think Apple is winning but not to the extent of being the only game in town.
by Tostino | 2025-12-01 15:51:38+00:00
For my home stuff I just use nginx-proxy-manager and haven't thought about it since I set it up a couple of years ago.

For work, I used to use certbot directly at my old place. Now I am building my new stuff on k8s, and I have the ingress manage my certs for me (likely using certbot or similar behind the scenes). Both have been extremely low setup effort and no ongoing effort.

I don't like giving Cloudflare my (or my companies/customers) data in exchange for being able to click a checkbox.
by Zaskoda | 2025-12-01 15:51:56+00:00
I am resisting the urge to detail my insane story with my most recent Dell XPS purchase. Long story short, I will never again buy a Dell laptop. I went months without my machine during a critical time. I kept getting it back in worse shape than it was before I sent it for repair. After months of pure insanity, I just accepted that I'll never have a properly function touchpad again. At least they finally got a working motherboard put in it. I'm feeling waves of rage and anger just thinking back to what they put me through. Never again. I won't even accept a Dell as a work laptop again. Never.
by visarga | 2025-12-01 15:51:57+00:00
Deep Research reports I think are above average internet quality, they collect hundreds of sources, synthesize and contrast them & provide backlinks. Almost like a generative wikipedia.

I think all we can expect from internet information is a good description of the distribution of materials out there, not truth. This is totally within the capabilities of LLMs. For additional confidence run 3 reports on different models.
by encyclopedism | 2025-12-01 15:52:09+00:00
What I'm trying to tease out is isn't an opinion alone. It's a generally understood problem in the scientific community. I'm highlighting it to illustrate the issues at hand.

> So you end up either needing to draw a line somewhere between mechanical computation and qualia computation, or you can relegate it to supernatural (a soul) or grey areas (quantum magic).

Quite literally the jury is still out. It is a hotly debated topic approached from various angles. Arguments are nuanced which is why you fill find ideas such as panpsychism thrown into the mix. I hate appealing to authority but in this instance it is more than warranted. Humans have grappled with this for centuries and the problem hasn't gone away.

Please see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
by UniverseHacker | 2025-12-01 15:52:12+00:00
The way hiring works is a reflection of company culture. If they can’t execute a hiring process that hires the most skilled and competent instead of the youngest and best looking, guess what kind of coworkers you will have to deal with?

Anyways, I am in my 40s- I am an amateur strength athlete and eat healthy and already look almost inappropriately healthy and youthful for a sedentary job- enough so that I feel sometimes I’m not taken as seriously because I don’t look like a stereotypical elder nerd.
by foldr | 2025-12-01 15:52:23+00:00
This seems to confirm that the headline claim is based on little more than a hunch. At least, you haven’t pointed to any pending legislation or official government announcements relating to a new legal definition of ‘subversion’.

So HN is having an entire discussion on the basis of one journalist’s irresponsibly sloppy headline writing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You may think that the journalist’s hunch is justified in this case, but to report that the government is planning something, when that is merely a somewhat informed guess at what the government may eventually do, is just bad journalism.
by 0xEF | 2025-12-01 15:52:53+00:00
I can't begin to describe how valuable your input has been through this whole thread about something you're quite possessive and passionate about, which surely places you in a position to aggressively dismiss any other possible way of looking at it! Wow, love learning about new perspectives on HN!

Wishing you best of luck in AoC, Life and Love but I imagine someone like you doesn't need it, being a complete toolbox and all.

P.S.: Tell your coworkers I'm sorry they have to put up with you.
by adastra22 | 2025-12-01 15:52:59+00:00
I’m sorry you don’t like it. But this has very strong old-man-yells-at-cloud vibes. This train is moving, whether you want it to or not.

Professionals use tools that work, whether they know why it works is of little consequence. It took 100 years to explain the steam engine. That didn’t stop us from making factories and railroads.
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-01 15:53:09+00:00
The GDPR is being neutered anyway because the EU caved in to Trump.

Not being chatcontrol compliant? That's a feature not a bug. Nobody wants that anyway. Just another stupid US lobby (Thorn).

A big organisation won't be able to run matrix for everyone no but that's the cool thing about it. People can run their own for smaller groups of people.
by vicnov | 2025-12-01 15:53:13+00:00
> we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that. Our reputation is everything, so being associated with that technology as it increasingly shows us what it really is, would be a terrible move for the long term. It is such an “interesting” statement in on many levels.

Market has changed -> we disagree -> we still disagree -> business is bad.

It is indeed hard to swim against the current. People have different principles and I respect that, I just rarely - have so much difficulty understanding them - see such clear impact on the bottom line
by Rendello | 2025-12-01 15:53:31+00:00
> "'This is not as offensive as it would have been years ago. We can see the humor,' said Public Safety Commissioner Keith Flynn, a former state trooper and state prosecutor who was named commissioner a year ago. 'If the person had used some of that creativeness, he or she would not have ended up inside.'"

I read (and re-read, and re-read) the book You Can't Win on recommendation of a HN user. It's about a thief from the late 1800s-early 1900s, and the crimes he and his thief buddies did were pretty creative. A lot of crime is more brute-force than clever, but people can do some pretty interesting things if they want something and don't care if they lose everything.
by pardon_me | 2025-12-01 15:53:43+00:00
> more like wash trading

This is it. I can see TSLA and a lot of bitcoin vehicles have done it too. Combined with the extent of tech companies proportion of total S&P500 market cap, along with expected energy price increases due to usage, will lead to a huge drop of worldwide confidence in US stocks once this bubble pops.

Governments who do not take enough action to stop this behavior inevitably lead to this. The US credit rating may be at risk entirely.
by brendoelfrendo | 2025-12-01 15:54:10+00:00
Why is supporting Yandex, who are involved in Russian politics and linked to the ruling regime, a neutral decision? That is very much a political decision, in the same way that working with US tech companies is a political decision. You need to decide what you're willing to tolerate and where your ethical lines are drawn; the alternative isn't neutrality, it's nihilism.
by melvinodsa | 2025-12-01 15:54:41+00:00
I am trying sentence-transformers/multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos-v1 for deploying a light weight transformer on CPU machine -its output dimension is 384. I want to keep the dimension low as possible. nomic-embed-text offers lower dimensions upto 64. I will need to test my dataset. Will comeback with the results.
Goconnect – A social network limited to 5-person dev squads
by BaldurSonOfOdin | 2025-12-01 15:54:51+00:00
My team and I built GoConnect. We found that most developer communities (Discord/Slack/X) eventually degrade into noise as they scale. To fix this, we built a platform engineered around a specific constraint: "Circles" are hard-capped at exactly 5 developers.

The goal is to replicate a private dev squad environment rather than a public town square.

We focused on three core engineering challenges:

The "Private Squad" Architecture We deliberately structured the database relations to enforce a strict hard cap. Once a circle hits 5 user_ids, the invite logic locks automatically. This ensures high-bandwidth collaboration without the noise of large servers.

AI Noise Filtering (Signal vs. Noise) We didn't want generic social feeds. We built a filtering pipeline using TensorFlow that actively scores incoming posts based on technical density and sentiment. Low-effort rants and memes are blocked before they hit the feed.

Spatial Audio We used WebRTC and the Twilio API to build "always-on" audio rooms. The challenge was syncing the audio state with the visual "hangout" mode while keeping browser performance high during screen sharing.

The Stack: Frontend: Angular Backend: Microservices using Node.js, .NET, and Python AI: TensorFlow Audio/Video: WebRTC / Twilio

The UI is designed to look "System Operational"—a terminal-inspired aesthetic to reduce eye strain and keep the focus on the code.

You can check out the live build here: https://goconnect.dev/

I’d love feedback on the strict 5-person constraint. Does that feel too restrictive for a community, or is it the right size for a working group?
by deepakarora3 | 2025-12-01 15:54:51+00:00
I would say yes. Having been a big fan of Dell and having used it's laptops for both professional and personal uses over many years, I have moved off it to Acer. Couple of reasons - the first is that there is a price premium which I cannot seem to justify and second is the teething / niggling issues which I have had to face in pretty much every Dell I have owned. Sometime, it will be too long a time to wake up from sleep or a random crash which requires me to fetch bitlocker key from my account so that I can boot it up again to driver update issues to the fan continuously running for no reason etc. I had, by chance, a good experience with Acer in the past and since then have purchased a couple fo them more and the experience has been seamless and pleasant. I do hope Dell ups its game as it was an iconic and innovative brand but there is less now to differentiate it from competition and so no reason for the premium to be charged.
by growt | 2025-12-01 15:55:05+00:00
Lost.js – Local, Offline, Shareable Tools

Lost.js is a lightweight, zero-dependency framework for building shareable "vibe coding" apps and prototypes.

A week ago my wife asked me for a "wheel-of-fortune"-style app as a fun way to choose random climbing routes. I thought that's something I could "vibe-code" myself in a few minutes. But then, as always, comes the user-management, db setup, backend development, etc. So this time I thought I'll do it differently and the result is lost.js: a framework (or toolkit, or maybe just template? I can't decide) that is small, has zero dependencies and no need for any backend. The data/objects are stored in local storage in the users browser. But they are shareable, via special URLs containing the whole data in compressed form in the URL hash. The lost-apps are all PWAs by design and work offline once they're cached.

So if you want to code a small tool, that lives in a browser lost.js can be your starting point and allow you to focus on the tool itself without worrying about backends or user-management or sharing.
by nathan_compton | 2025-12-01 15:55:39+00:00
>"Qualia", basically, is best understood as ideology. It's a word that works like "woke" or "liberal" or "fascist" or "bourgeoisie" to flag priors about which you don't want to argue. In this case, you want people to be special, so you give them a special label and declare a priori that it's not subject to debate. But that label doesn't make them so.

This is so dumb. Qualia is just the name for a specific thing which we all (appear) to phenomenologically experience. You can deny it exists or deny its utility as a concept, but fundamentally its just an idea that philosophers (and scientists, I have to add) have found useful to pose certain other questions about the human condition, minds, brains, etc.

Your XKCD actually seems to make the opposite point. I can do a non-rigorous experiment with just one subject (me) that suggests Qualia exists. Finding ways to make this rigorous is difficult, of course, but its an observation about the nature of the world that it feels like something to experience things.

My point isn't that qualia is a good concept. I tend to be somewhat deflationary about it myself, but its not an ideology.
by walterbell | 2025-12-01 15:55:54+00:00
Open Arm devices sadly live in the shadow of closed Apple Mac Mini perf and battery life, and Asahi is stuck at 2022 M2 SoC. Some older Arm Chromebooks have mainline Linux support and also run coreboot. Qualcomm and MediaTek/Nvidia are "maybe next year" Linux and closed firmware.
by 0x3f | 2025-12-01 15:55:59+00:00
Not saying you should change it if it's working, and I don't have a ready-made tutorial, but assuming you only need to serve static files I would:

(1) upload the files to an S3 bucket (GCS or Cloudflare R2 may also work, haven't tried); (2) point Cloudflare at the bucket via their Cloud Connector; (3) turn on Cloudflare Access.
by pardon_me | 2025-12-01 15:56:42+00:00
Along with this, hedge funds got the heads up, and being smart/efficient money, went and bought up a load of power companies. This means higher profits as energy prices increase.

They would be surely rushing to invest in power infrastructure and use the AI scare (military need) to push through legislation. If they aren't doing this, they must be predicting the demand won't follow through...
by wincy | 2025-12-01 15:56:58+00:00
By “directs to remote” does it mean the TV remote? I feel like I’m missing something here, it’s just saying “use the smart tv’s built in app”? Directing someone to the remote seems like an overcomplicated way of indicating this?

I’m so glad we use plex, have thought of making the jump to jellyfin though. I tried to use my MacBook Air to watch their excellent Michelin Stars show, but couldn’t watch it on 2/3 of my monitors because they don’t have HDCP built in. Modern disk drives are so cheap you can just download everything in 4K HDR, paired with an OLED display it’s absolutely breathtaking how good modern media can look.

So anyway, with the Michelin show I just downloaded it off a torrent site instead, which is a hilariously easier user experience and it’s caused by the very HDCP that is supposed to prevent piracy.
by soulofmischief | 2025-12-01 15:57:10+00:00
Instead of accusing me of "shifting jargon", point out exactly where this "jargon" changed and critically engage with that. Your response has done nothing to refute or critically engage with my argument. It's more retreating and vagueposting.

> you're just demanding we all accept it as a prior

At absolutely no point in this discussion have I claimed that machines are not capable of subjective conscious experience. I have, however, disqualified all publicly accessible modern models due to the lack of a sensory feedback loop. I certainly believe we can create machines which experience subjective consciousness and qualia; I do not believe in souls and divinity, so whatever is going on is physically based and likely reproducible with the right hardware.

So dispense with the straw man arguments, and please begin engaging more earnestly and intelligently in this discussion, as I am quickly losing interest in continuing to debate someone who showed up unprepared.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-01 15:57:22+00:00
I had a Dell laptop for work a while back where the MB died 3x in under 2 years... They replaced it all three times, and were a bit sus at the third one... but I literally left it in a locked drawer at work more often than I'd take it home.

The best experiences I've had with Dell hardware have been mid though... worse with HP, won'y buy their stuff at all any more.

I've had mixed to very good experiences with Lenovo... Even their cheaper IdeaPad options. My SO had an IdeaPad that lasted about 7 years, and she was pretty rough on it. Just replaced with another a few months ago. For what it's work, runs PopOS like a dream. On the down side are soldered ram, and shorter vnme drives that have apparently had higher failure rates, already have a replacement ready on a shelf.

My personal laptop is an M1 Air 16gb... it's been a pretty great little box, though with my vision what it is, has been very hard to actually use for much.
by jaramy | 2025-12-01 15:57:43+00:00
Hi everyone,

I'd like to share Aivition, a native AI image processing tool I built. It is a 1.8MB executable, written entirely from scratch in C++ without using any third-party or open-source libraries.

It is powered by three self-built, lightweight libraries:

A UI library implemented directly against the pure Win32 API.

A computer vision library that handles image decoding, encoding, and processing (like OpenCV).

An AI inference library that runs neural networks locally (like PyTorch).

I use it daily and hope it might be useful for others.

I'd be grateful for any feedback on performance, compatibility, or your general experience with it.
by theamk | 2025-12-01 15:57:53+00:00
Nope. The main problem with expertsexchange was their SEO + paywall - they'd sneak into top Google hits by showing crawler full data, then present a paywall when actual human visits. (Have no idea why Google tolerated them btw...)

SO was never that bad, even with all their moderation policies, they had no paywalls.
by afavour | 2025-12-01 15:57:56+00:00
I don't think we're really disagreeing here. You're saying "this is the way things are", I'm saying "I salute anyone who tries to change the way things are".

Even in the linked post the author isn't complaining that it's not fair or whatever, they're simply stating that they are losing money as a result of their moral choice. I don't think they're deluded about the cause and effect.
by DamnInteresting | 2025-12-01 15:57:58+00:00
> The market wants a lot more high quality AI slop

"High quality AI slop" is a contradiction in terms. The relevant definitions[1] are "food waste (such as garbage) fed to animals", "a product of little or no value."

By definition, the best slop is only a little terrible.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slop
by jaffa2 | 2025-12-01 15:58:31+00:00
All this app stuff is so annoying. I reverted back a while ago. Now when i want the radio on i just switch it on. With an actual switch. Same with my lights— an actual real switch! Theres no benefit to chaining all your behind someapp the needs updated installed, logged in passwords, managed, ooo you haven’t logged in for 90 days lets send you an email to update your password- bro i just want to increase my heating. Its all nonsense. Sooner people realise the better.
by hylaride | 2025-12-01 15:58:46+00:00
Linus Torvalds was recently on Linux Tech Tips to build a new computer and he insisted on ECC RAM. Torvalds was convinced that memory errors are a much greater problem for stability than otherwise posted and he's spent an inordinate amount of time chasing phantom bugs because of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA
by fwn | 2025-12-01 15:58:55+00:00
reMarkable still work really hard to force you into a subscription - or at least into using their very bad, non-zero knowledge cloud service. ... I don't know why but it is not obvious why this would be for the benefit of the user.

I own a reMarkable 2, but I fill it via RCU [1]. I will absolutely not buy into yet another opaque cloud offering in 2025.

edit: The project you linked looks interesting, though!

[1] https://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/
by daveoc64 | 2025-12-01 15:59:00+00:00
>By “directs to remote” does it mean the TV remote? I feel like I’m missing something here, it’s just saying “use the smart tv’s built in app”? Directing someone to the remote seems like an overcomplicated way of indicating this?

Yes, that's what it means.

Some other streaming apps encourage using their mobile app as a remote, so I would imagine they are making it clear that the app should not be used at all here.