MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gremlinunderway | 2025-12-08 17:54:28+00:00
Given this is a UI-focused repo, you really should be including some videos/gifs or at least some static images in your readme without having to run the demo. Like, I just dont get why you wouldnt? Its baffling to be quite honest. Especially given the advertisement of it being cyberpunk inspired. It's also actually quite good-looking having just loaded the demo, so you're doing it a disservice for not actively bragging or communicating how good it looks.

I'd also recommend more docs / tutorials on how to use the platform. Readme is great but when you click Documentation link you're just redirected to the readme which isnt useful and makes it seem like there is actual docs available.
by zahlman | 2025-12-08 17:54:46+00:00
What you propose would have, among other things, broken the well established expectation of random access for strings, including for slicing, while leaving behind unclear semantics about what encoding was used. (If you read in data in a different encoding and aren't forced to do something about it before passing it to a system that expects UTF-8, that's a recipe for disaster.) It would also leave unclear semantics for cases where the underlying bytes aren't valid UTF-8 data (do you just fail on every operation? Fail on the ones that happen to encounter the invalid bytes?), which in turn is also problematic for command-line arguments.
by zargon | 2025-12-08 17:55:26+00:00
I'm grandfathered in at $200/year from the Safari days. The main advantage of the subscription to me is being able to evaluate several books on a topic to pick the one that is the best fit for what I need.

If I knew which books were best in category, it would be cheaper for me to just buy those specific books (or video courses, for things like Blender).

But if I had to pay the current $500 price, I wouldn't be a subscriber.
by Sevii | 2025-12-08 17:55:43+00:00
It's being treated like a gold rush but I don't think it really is. This is like dotcom 1.0 all over again. They didn't know what the best use cases for the internet were but they still poured billions into it. The gold rush didn't come until the 2000s when social media took off.

Normally you get a frontier exploration phase where fringe people experiment with the new technology and try to figure out what it's good for. It feels like we just skipped that step entirely.
by akrymski | 2025-12-08 17:56:06+00:00
Distributed ledgers were not a Bitcoin invention. Proof of Work was - largely a waste of electricity. There's no reason why SWIFT or any other institution can't have far more efficient real-time payments. It's already the case in most countries (UK & EU).

Distributed technologies have largely been useful to actors that wish to remain anonymous (Napster, Tor). Money transmission probably shouldn't be (if we want to avoid scams as a society).

Anonymous cash is good, but BTC is not really digital cash either - it doesn't work in a warzone without internet for example. Any real alternative to cash would have to work offline. And any real alternative to bank transfers would have to be regulated.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-08 17:56:18+00:00
> When done properly is going a lot of heavy lifting there.

Not really. There are common practices for it. Yes it hits HN when deanonymization can happen at a well-known company, just like it hits HN when there's a security vulnerability that gets patched at a well-known company.

But "it's the little bad can become big bad" is what's doing the heavy lifting in your argument. No, that's not how it works. There's no universe in which aggregate data can be deanonymized to anywhere close to what all of the individual profiles would be. It's a completely false equivalenace, period.
by lokar | 2025-12-08 17:56:28+00:00
IME, these discussions always reduce down to one set of irreconcilable differences:

Does a government have the legitimate right to impose taxes on its people, and to sanction criminals (and criminal activity) via control of the Financial system?

Anti-crypto people say yes (and in fact the government has a responsibility to fight tax evasion).

Pro-crypto people seem (I’m not one of them) to say no, that people have the right to access to technology to evade these government functions.
by dboreham | 2025-12-08 17:56:41+00:00
People here are mostly too young to remember but the original Microsoft business model was this:

Find a software market currently addressed by high price products; create a reasonably good product for that market; sell it for significantly less than the incumbent. Sell much higher volume of said product than the incumbent, thereby make much more profit. Repeat/rinse.

The Windows lock-in, embrace extend etc came after this. You can't lock in customers if they didn't already willingly buy your product.
by lacoolj | 2025-12-08 17:57:27+00:00
Cool so not only do the prices of the food not drop (because Uber's crazy fees to the restaurant), but we also get to suffer through (more) ads, and they will now be targeted? And Uber makes even more off it all while making no improvements to the user and/or provider experience?

I just realized taxis still exist and most restaurants offer their own delivery service (or pick-up!)

It's been real Uber. GL HF
by n7ck | 2025-12-08 17:57:31+00:00
The second most useful by far is Indeed, where we post an internship opportunity for participants interested in doing 10 sessions over 10 weeks. Other things that work pretty well are asking professors to send out emails to students at local universities, putting up ~300-500 fliers (mostly around universities and public transit), and posting on Nextdoor. We also just texted a lot of groupchats/posted on linkedin/ gave out fliers and the signup link to kind of everyone we talked to in cafes and similar. We take on some participants as ambassadors as well, and pay them to refer their friends.

We tried google/facebook/instagram ads, and we tried paying for some video placements. Basically none of the explicit advertisement worked at all and it wasn't worth the money. Though for what it's worth, none of us are experts in advertising, so we might have been going about it wrong -- we didn't put loads of effort into iterating once we realized it wasn't working.
by quantummagic | 2025-12-08 17:57:38+00:00
We seem to be talking past one another. All I was talking about was the facts of how these systems perform, without any reverence about it at all.

But to your point, I do see a lot of people very emotionally and psychologically committed to pointing out how deeply magical humans are, and how impossible we are to replicate in silicon. We have a religion about ourselves; we truly do have main character syndrome. It's why we mistakenly thought the earth was at the center of the universe for eons. But even with that disproved, our self-importance remains boundless.
by frickinLasers | 2025-12-08 17:57:48+00:00
As someone who is essentially financially illiterate, what does this mean, "allocate resources efficiently?" Nobody's investing in companies that promise to cure world hunger or alleviate childhood suffering. They're investing in technologies that can extract the most wealth from the population, regardless of externalities. Is that desirable?

Then again, I can't fathom what people would be doing with their money if the stock market weren't there. I imagine they might naturally wind up with some sort of...stock market.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-08 17:58:00+00:00
> Bitcoin, and really all crypto 'currencies' were never meant to be currencies at all.

To be fair, there is a significant amount of disagreement about what a "currency" is supposed to be, and there is a large subset of people who believe that the desirable traits in a currency are exactly those things that make it function well as a speculative asset (notably, on average over a long time, value with respect to goods is at least flat and preferrably increasing) while simultaneously not thinking the things that another large group of people sees as desirable for a currency (e.g., lack of extreme short-term volatility) are important.

I can't speak to the original designer of Bitcoin, but I wouldn't be surprised if it and most cryptocurrencies were designed to be currencies, just by people who have a very specific (and, IMV, wrong) idea of what a currency ought to be.
by belval | 2025-12-08 17:58:02+00:00
I feel like the case for Microsoft inability to execute in a lot of verticals should really be studied, not saying this as a sound bite, I'd genuinely like to know how that is possible.

Their investment in OpenAI, giving them what was, at least ~1-2 year ago if not now, the best possible LLM to integrate in the office suite yet they are unable to deliver value with it.

Their ownership of Xbox and Windows should have allowed them to get a much better foothold in gaming yet their marketplace is still, to this very day, a broken experience with multiple account types. It's been 10 years.

The counter point is Azure obviously which still has great growth numbers, but that's a different org.

From the outside, it just seems like they should be doing better than they are. They have much better business integration than Google and Amazon. The fit is obvious and people are borderline hooked on excel. Why aren't they dominating completely?
by zahlman | 2025-12-08 17:58:09+00:00
Why would I ever risk inflicting a stack trace like

Traceback (most recent call last): File "x.py", line 2, in <module> foo.encode() UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

on a user of Python 3.x where it isn't possible? (Note the UnicodeDecodeError coming from an attempt to encode.)
by furyofantares | 2025-12-08 17:58:10+00:00
> Like, I have a 'Copilot' button prominently displayed in my New Outlook on MacOS (the only platform where the app-with-that-designation is sort-of usable), and it's a dropdown menu, and it has... zero items when expanded.

I guess that's worse than the Gemini button in Google Sheets that asks me to subscribe to AI services. I have multiple times been in a sheet and thought "asking an LLM how to do this thing I want to do right here in this product would actually be great if it works", remembered there was an AI-looking button in the top right, clicked it, and nope'd out of the subscription.

I just want to know if it works or not before I buy it.
by imtringued | 2025-12-08 17:58:34+00:00
This is nonsense. If the lock hasn't been acquired, you don't spin to begin with and if the lock has been acquired and the lock is being released shortly after, the spinning avoids a context switch. If the maximum number of retries has been reached, the thread was going to sleep anyway and starts scheduling the next thread (which was only delayed by the few attempted spins). This means in the worst case the next spin will only happen once all the other queued up threads have had their turn and that's assuming you're immediately running into another acquired lock.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-08 17:59:01+00:00
Nano is also another interesting one or litecoin etc., basically just having low gas fees I guess and being more efficient but I don't like shilling these products because I personally am a stauch believer in stablecoins and there are stablecoins like USDC's on chains like polygons which can satisfy the function "good enough" for me where they have trust etc. which I don't wish to replicate

There are still some 0 gas fees innovations happening in stablecoin marketplaces which is going to be interesting to see how that pans out.
by evanjrowley | 2025-12-08 17:59:14+00:00
The Ukranian SS division began voluntarily. Why would a forcibly drafted unit continue to be immortalized today by Ukraine's Azov? Look up Dmytro Paliiv and why a street there was named after him - as recently as 2017.

It seems the world is not as black-and-white as you want it to be. Sympathies should be shifted from irresponsible leaders and over to people who are trapped in this unfortunate war. Kenyans included.
by iLemming | 2025-12-08 17:59:19+00:00
Like I said: "writing my WM config".

So, for example, I would write in my editor an expression to get the list of windows on the current display, then I can immediately map/filter through them, group, sort, read any parameters, etc. Then without missing a beat I can apply some transformations - programmatically move any window, resize, etc; on the fly, like playing a fucking video game.

Compare that to "more traditional" approach of issuing commands, then piping them to jq or something, then figuring out where the stuff is, then writing that into a file, then having your WM to pick up those changes, often you'd completely lose the state, then you'd have to go back to the script files, etc. I, don't have to save anything anywhere until I'm sure that shit works - I simply eval things on the go - I can "touch, grab and interact" with entities immediately after querying their info, there's no physical, mental or contextual separation here - I don't have to write something in the terminal, then something in one of my scripts, some parts in some other file, etc. - everything controlled directly from my editor.

Here's more practical example. Hyprland has something called Hyprsunset to deal with color temp and gamma. I wrote an extension that changes display color temp based on time of day - it's a simple clojure.core/async go loop, it reads from a hashmap where specific hours map to temperatures and then checks every 10 minutes; if it's time to apply new color, it does. That took me just a few minutes to whip out with a connected Lisp REPL. I'm pretty sure, it would've taken me far longer without it. The way how the "true" REPLs work (which e.g., Python one is not) simply is shockingly crazy awesome for rapid prototyping. Why more programmers don't do this is a complete mystery to me - getting into Lisp is not even that difficult, Clojure for example is far more simpler and more straightforward than even Javascript and Python. These days, you don't even need to know Emacs - install Calva for VSCode - that's all you need, it has quickstart guide and all.
by kayhantolga | 2025-12-08 17:59:31+00:00
As a .NET developer who actually likes some Microsoft products, I can say this: the Copilot series is the worst thing they've shipped since Internet Explorer—and honestly, it might overtake it. The sad part is they had a huge head start before competitors gained access to powerful models, yet this is what we got.

If you haven’t seen how bad it is, here’s one example: Copilot Terminal. In theory, it should help you with terminal commands. Sounds great. In practice, it installs a chat panel on the right side of your terminal that has zero integration with the terminal itself. It can’t read what’s written, it can’t send commands, it has no context, and the model response time is awful. What’s the point of a “terminal assistant” that can’t actually assist the terminal?

This lack of real integration is basically the core design of most Copilot products. If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid them, good for you. If your company forces you to use them because they’re bundled with a Microsoft license, I genuinely feel your pain.
by bgro | 2025-12-08 17:59:32+00:00
IBM isn’t really a tech company anymore. More of a legal trolling company that cosplays as tech.

They seem to primarily benefit from kickbacks in the form of both leasing and technical contracts for things like opening offices in a location for tax benefits or to promote local economy.

Then they see how far they can cut back their end of the contract after the first few months (e.g. Maybe we agreed to have 500 employees in an office, but since nobody is allowed in, we think we can get away with 100 employees.) Then this turns into trolling about how the contract never defines what in office means so can we offshore… Too much undefined confusion, so I guess we get to break the contract but keep what the mayor paid us… Then they just shut down the office and move on to the next location.

It seems like the local government must be in on these schemes for leasing. Otherwise this wouldn’t be going on for decades as it has been.

The other part of business, technical contracts, is similar except instead of leasing it’s providing some sort of infrastructure coverage for something big. It starts off with good faith fulfilling the contract. Then a few months later it’s like well we have a US military contract that demands US employees but US employees are too expensive. What if we offshore but all the traffic is technically going through a single US employee’s computer which is what the contract technically demands.

Then it turns into well we have offshore people working on this anyway, why not just give them direct access and we’ll have a US person overseeing them. Lay everyone else off.

Then they see how long they can get away with this until someone gets mad. Then they take one step back to see how close to the technical contract they can get while threatening to abandon the whole thing at the same time.

Along with this sort of atmosphere and attitude for the law, it seems we see them constantly doing everything possible to constantly fire old people or anyone else that has legally protected status. So you’ll get statistical analytics on ways to fire protected people based around the constant performance reviews with statistics being used to see how close groups of protected people can be removed without statistically breaking the law. Whatever that algorithm is.

That plays into just straight up cutting people, but it also goes into a lot of other subsystems of skirting the law, like if old people can’t relocate as easily then hopping offices and forcing people to relocate 5000 miles is a way they can be eliminated. Part of this might be moving people onto new teams and then saying that team has to be in office for some made up reason, and then firing them for not relocating or using some made up metric like badging timestamps to get them, or some other technicality like leaving for lunch 5 minutes early despite being a salaried employee which is reported as hourly because of tax trolling.

I don’t know how IBM still exists because from my perspective it’s pretty clear they’re breaking or at best on razor thin gray line on ice on just about every possible law you could break.
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-12-08 17:59:35+00:00
Absolutely! There are so many scenarios where they could actually add some value, and they're fulfilling, like, exactly none of those?

Even in Visual Studio Enterprise, their flagship developer product, the GPT integration mostly just destroys code regardless of model output. I truly cannot fathom how any of that made it past even a cursory review. Or how that situation would last for over 6 months, but, yet, here we are.

And, again, it's fine with me: I'll just use Claude Code, but if I were a Microsoft VP-or-above, the lack of execution would sort-of, well concern me? But maybe I'm just focused on the wrong things. I mean, Cloudflare brought down, like, half the Internet twice in the past two weeks, and they're still a tech darling, so possibly incompetence is the new hotness now?
by pseudosavant | 2025-12-08 17:59:57+00:00
I was hoping for a real look at weaknesses in Microsoft’s AI products. They ship lots of “AI features,” but only Copilot and Azure’s ChatGPT hosting see broad use. Instead, the article mostly reads as anti-MS/OpenAI without much detail.

From my experience, Microsoft’s GPT-5 integrations in Word, PowerPoint, and their ChatGPT clone struggle with basic tasks. Copy/pasting from ChatGPT still works better.

To be fair, building solid AI features is hard when model capabilities change so quickly. Reasoning and tool use only became reliable in the latest models, and when these Office features were planned, GPT-5 didn’t exist.
by alphazard | 2025-12-08 18:00:11+00:00
> Ok, if that's really your thinking then you need to lay out: here's an impossible-to-ignore thing we can do with this, and this is how, and this is why this wouldn't be possible without this thing.

These technologies can be used by people to coordinate amongst themselves whether the outgroup likes it or not.

If you google "network state" you will find things that you might like, and things that you might not like. It's not up to you whether other people create these things. You can only control your own participation.

Cryptography is really the study of incredibly rigged games, games that one side almost always wins, even when both players play perfectly. If human society is a game where humans try to coordinate with other humans to be better off, sometimes at the expense of other humans, then distributed ledgers have totally changed the meta.
by mritchie712 | 2025-12-08 18:00:16+00:00
Cursor promises to do this[0] in the product, so, especially on HN, it'd be best to start with "why this is better than Cursor".

> favorite doc sites so I do not have to paste URLs into Cursor

This is especially confusing, because cursor has a feature for docs you want to scrape regularly.

0 - https://cursor.com/docs/context/codebase-indexing
by onraglanroad | 2025-12-08 18:00:19+00:00
Competition creating better products isn't an idea that defines capitalism though: the same would apply to cottage industry.

Capitalism is defined by having the capitalist, who provides capital, and without the ability to sell their share of stock it's difficult to see what the value would be. So you kind of require stock markets.

Edit: which is why it's odd to call China communist. They have 3 stock exchanges. They're really a capitalist single-party state.
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-08 18:00:21+00:00
For the purposes of a simplified discussion it’s true enough. It’s also true enough in the commercial context for the biggest players. For example, Coke and Pepsi spend similar amounts of advertising and the market share isn’t really changing. But that’s also because the products are very mature and in repeated games the players are likely to reach a stale mate (and the talent pool for the advertising teams is largely the same).

Political contexts are obviously different because it’s constantly one off contests and the teams behind it constantly change. So yes, obviously efficacy of advertising matters. But I don’t see how my simplification meaningfully changes the point that money significantly impacts voting at scale in our society. This wasn’t the gotcha I think you thought it was.