MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by reuven | 2025-12-08 16:43:18+00:00
While working on a PhD in technology and education, I thought that it might be worth creating a SaaS for people to teach whatever they want. This was back in early 2008, when such sites didn't exist. I assembled a team, and we made some progress, and even got a commitment from one funder. But I didn't really understand how to manage the team, and everyone was working very part-time on the project, and we didn't really have anything serious we could show, even after a few months. And the funder was only willing to invest if we found a second investor, which we didn't. So we ended up abandoning the project.

I think that we had some great ideas, including guiding instructors in the creation of online classes using the best proven pedagogical tools and theories. You could connect lessons to standards (if you were in a school, or wanted to be associated with one), or could do it free-form, or could use templates of various sorts.

I ended up finishing the PhD, so I can't complain too much! And as I wrote, I was probalby not a good person to run a startup; I'm much happier with my life as a bootstrapped freelancer. But it was hard to realize that I spent a year or so working on this with very little to show for it -- especially knowing that it might have thrived under a more experienced leader.
by AnonHP | 2025-12-08 16:43:19+00:00
Wow, I hadn’t heard about this before. I like that it’s FOSS with AGPL 3. The OnlyOffice screenshots of the spreadsheet application look beautiful (compared to the ugly LibreOffice Calc ones). It says that it works with ODS files (which LibreOffice Calc uses).

Any gotchas to be aware of with OnlyOffice?
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-12-08 16:43:27+00:00
Hmm, yes, but, and it is not a small but, do people -- including full blown internal monologue people - think thoughts akin to:

move.panic.fear.run

that effectively becomes one thought and not a word exactly. I am stating it like this, because I worry that my initial point may have been lost.

edit: I can only really speak for myself, but I am curious how people might respond to the distinction.
by lostlogin | 2025-12-08 16:43:30+00:00
> A bunch of 7.X earthquakes in the ocean are not going to be hugely destructive.

New Zealand’s 5th most deadly disaster was Christchurch’s 6.2 which killed 185 people. It was a shallow aftershock from a larger, less destructive quake.

The damage was huge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Christchurch_earthquake
by qeternity | 2025-12-08 16:43:32+00:00
> Reminder that infrastructure is ~3% of the budget, the military is ~13%. Almost all of the rest are benefits, either health or money, for old people or various poverty reduction schemes. Or debt.

The US Government is an enormous welfare program with a military on the side.

Whenever people talk about the rich paying their fair share, they simply fail to grasp the enormity of the problem. There is no taxing your way out of this problem.

Society's expectations have far outpaced our fiscal strength.
by ctoth | 2025-12-08 16:43:40+00:00
Wait, what?

Have you read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? It's ... about the AI helping people overthrow a very human dictatorship. It's also about an AI built of vacuum tubes and vocoders if you want a taste of the tech level.

If you want old fiction that grapples with an AI that has shitty locked-in goals try "I have no mouth and I must scream."
by Zak | 2025-12-08 16:43:46+00:00
I'm still having good results with root, Magisk, and Play Integrity Fix. That does involve some knowledge and effort though, so what I point others to is Mullvad DNS, which is free: https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls

Don't forget to give apps that fuck with you in the name of security 1-star reviews!
by sloaken | 2025-12-08 16:43:48+00:00
I like the classic as it provides actionable information.

Although knowing the date is nice, especially to indicate an application is dead end. But I rarely need that. When I first download it, and when I wonder ... hmm is this product ever going to be updated.

I am not sure what the value of putting the year in the version.

For my own home projects, and work pre-release, I always list the build date on the screen. Saved me more than a little frustration.

You could combine them. Either Year.Major.Minor.Patch, or the other way around. But like I said before not sure of the value.
by Arelius | 2025-12-08 16:44:05+00:00
Copyright isn't some axiom, but to quote wikipedia: "Copyright laws allow products of creative human activities, such as literary and artistic production, to be preferentially exploited and thus incentivized."

It's a tool to incentivse human creative expression.

Thus it's entirely sensible to consider and treat the output from computers and humans differently.

Especially when you consider large differences between computers and humans, such as how trivial it is to create perfect duplicates of computer training.
by marscopter | 2025-12-08 16:44:16+00:00
It depends.

Suppose we are a design agency which build merchandise shops for sports teams. We have specific market knowledge, research, and experience in tailoring these shops to improve the experience for sports fans.

Out of the blue, a logistics company contacts us to help them build a merchandise shop. Could we do this? Sure, but it would require a lot of upfront work and given that it's not our area of expertise could possible result in a subpar experience for both us and the logistics company.

Given such, it's reasonable disqualify such clients. We can do this through our sales process, but by adding a simple "painful" field (e.g., "What sport does your team play?") you encourage such clients to disqualify themselves.

It saves us the work and effort. And it means the clients who get through the form are more likely to be the type of client we want.

There will always be a balance because our ideal clients will always be vaguely defined to some extent. This means some legit clients might get disqualify unnecessarily (e.g., a lacrosse team because we didn't think to include that in the list of sports), but it also means the quality of leads and/or inquiries which come through the forms would be higher quality.
by DoneWithAllThat | 2025-12-08 16:45:13+00:00
When using an LLM for anything serious (such as at work) I have a standard canned postscript along the lines of “if anything about what I am asking is unclear or ambiguous, or if you need more context to understand what I’m asking, you will ask for clarification rather than try to provide an answer”. This is usually highly effective.
by diob | 2025-12-08 16:45:27+00:00
Yeah, they acquired the company I worked at and left us alone for a year or two. Each year would get worse though, and each year we swapped nearly all bureaucratic things around. Always a different way to do performance reviews goals, etc.

A lot of the successful projects at the original company are now dead.

It's also weird being in IBM, because if your "contract" ends they put you on the bench. Then you basically have to job hunt within IBM, and if you can't find anything within a month or so you are out. It's super weird.
by lkbm | 2025-12-08 16:45:30+00:00
Yeah, seems like current models might benefit from a more email-like UI, and this'll be more true as they get longer task time horizons.

Maybe we want a smaller model tuned for back and forth to help clarify the "planning doc" email. Makes sense that having it all in a single chat-like interface would create confusion and misbehavior.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-12-08 16:45:34+00:00
maybe this is also part of the problem? Once I learn the idiosyncrasies of a person I don't expect them to dramatically change overnight, I know their conversational rhythms and beat; how to ask / prompt / respond. LLMs are like a eager sycophantic intern how completely changes their personality from conversation to conversation, or - surprise - exactly like a machine
by steveklabnik | 2025-12-08 16:46:01+00:00
I wrote a very popular tutorial for jj, and I didn't use workspaces until a few weeks ago. They're useful for the same reasons git worktrees are: most recently, people use them for doing work with multiple AI agents in parallel, but historically, I've seen people use them for things like "this project's build takes 30 minutes so I want to work on something else while I wait for that".

> I don't see how creating a worktree in a new folder and opening a new editor is more convenient than creating a branch at a certain commit.

Worktrees are about being able to work on multiple branches at the same time, fundamentally. When you want to be doing something on one branch and something else on another branch simultaneously.

That does mean it's, IMHO, a fairly niche feature.
by SirMaster | 2025-12-08 16:46:12+00:00
I don't see how you jump form this to that.

I made a singular choice once to put less than 1% of my yearly income into 1 thing that seemed to have some potential.

Back then it was the only crypto. I put in knowing full well it could go to 0, but the potential of where it could possibly go seemed well worth the tiny risk to an essentially insignificant sum of money to me.

There are other cryptos but they aren't the original or anywhere near the biggest, so they are not the same in my eyes. So those are actual legitimate reasons why I would not choose to perform that same risk again with a different crypto.
by Dilettante_ | 2025-12-08 16:46:47+00:00
We are actually completely in agreement that crypto-hustlers and such are entirely full of hooey and nobody deserves any payout whatsoever. I'm only arguing from a point of "government bad" idealism.

>realistically we're not seriously going to entertain stripping all controls from the financial system because we don't trust the government to do a reasonable job

I kind of am. What I'm seeing happen is the opposite: The government stripping more and more agency from the individual because it does not trust its citizens do do a reasonable job(of anything). Every sector freed from the Leviathan, every tiny bit of life that can proceed without being subject to gov't interference is a huge win for me. Again, this is essentially a position born from my seeing what happens when "safety over liberty" goes too far.

>negligible value generated

Depends on what you value. I happen to like drugs and gambling. On the other hand, giving someone who falls for a hustle the ability to get their money back is something that I personally do not value at all.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-08 16:47:16+00:00
Reminds me that people used to get email very slowly via dial-up using UUCP. Email might take several hours to deliver because of the hops involved needed to wait for the schedules of each dialing system in the path. RIP !paths.

In the late 90's, I also discovered IBM's AIX with the web browser package(s) installed phoned home unknown telemetry to Big Blue because it was that traffic that forced an ISDN dial-on demand IPv4 connection to come alive when no one else was in the office and no cron jobs were running, jacking up our phone and ISP bills.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-12-08 16:47:30+00:00
An objective and grounded ethical framework that applies to all agents should be a top priority.

Philosophy has been too damn anthropocentric, too hung up on consciousness and other speculative nerd snipe time wasters that without observation we can argue about endlessly.

And now here we are and the academy is sleeping on the job while software devs have to figure it all out.

I've moved 50% of my time to morals for machina that is grounded in physics, I'm testing it out with unsloth right now, so far I think it works, the machines have stopped killing kyle at least.
by rixed | 2025-12-08 16:47:50+00:00
I think we are too quick to believe this move is motivated by the threat of Russia suddenly unleashing hordes of tanks over Europe, so here is some data. Let's compare Russia's forces with that of Germany+Poland+UK+France+Italy+Spain (EU countries with a large population):

Total population: RU=140M, EU=370M Population available for mil: RU=70M, EU=170M Present active mil: RU=1.3M, EU=1M Reserve: RU=2M, EU=1.4M Paramil: RU=250k, EU=380k Combat Aircrafts: RU=4k, EU=4k Tanks: RU=5.7k, EU=2k Armored Vhc: RU=130k, EU=340k Artillery: RU=16k, EU=2k Large combat vessels: RU=100, EU=80 Subs: RU=60, EU=40

The economics is more hairy to compare directly because there are so many parameters. The most stringent ones seems to be that RU has a lot of fiul, gaz and coal and an industrial network spread accross a vast land that's not easy to target, and of course a seemingly good relationship with China. Apart from that, I don't think the EU is partcularly weak as far as finance and manufacturing are concerned.

Looking at those numbers, I do not believe that the sentiment that "Russia is going to invade the EU unless massive expenses in weaponry" holds a lot of water.

The tremendous amount of efforts and finance that's been thrown at the military during the cold war was not aimed at invading the other side.

I would even add that spending that much on the military is probably what the strategists in the Kremlin are hopping EU will do. After all, if they know the history of their own country, they must know what caused the fatal financial crisis that brought down the USSR in the 80s.
by encyclopedism | 2025-12-08 16:47:52+00:00
I couldn't agree with you more.

I really do find it puzzling so many on HN are convinced LLM's reason or think and continue to entertain this line of reasoning. At the same time also somehow knowing what precisely the brain/mind does and constantly using CS language to provide correspondences where there are none. The simplest example being that LLM's somehow function in a similar fashion to human brains. They categorically do not. I do not have most all of human literary output in my head and yet I can coherently write this sentence.

As I'm on the subject LLM's don't hallucinate. They output text and when that text is measured and judged by a human to be 'correct' then it is. LLM's 'hallucinate' because that is literally what they can ONLY do, provide some output given some input. They don't actually understand anything about what they output. It's just text.

My paper and pen version of the latest LLM (quite a large bit of paper and certainly a lot of ink I might add) will do the same thing as the latest SOTA LLM. It's just an algorithm.

I am surprised so many in the HN community have so quickly taken to assuming as fact that LLM's think or reason. Even anthropomorphising LLM's to this end.
by tanya-donska | 2025-12-08 16:48:36+00:00
You want someone who can do UX design work. But you don’t want to pay junior designer rates ($50-70K). So you call it an internship ($0-20/hr, or free with “great exposure”).

The requirements give it away. Let’s decode:

“2+ years experience” Translation: We need someone who can work independently because we have no one to mentor them.

“Portfolio demonstrating shipped products” Translation: We need production-ready work immediately, not someone learning the craft.
Ask HN: Are there any viable Android phones for a power user to buy nowadays?
by gooob | 2025-12-08 16:49:38+00:00
i have a pixel 4, and it looks like i might be stuck with this phone forever if things keep going in the same direction (hopefully they don't). the pixel 4 isn't bad, but even on this i don't have the level of customization that i had back in the day with cyanogenmod etc. on my note 3 or epic 4g touch.

here are some requirements that i can think of:

- not huge. small enough to use with 1 hand - able to root and install custom OS without too much difficulty/annoyance (the manufacturer doesn't actively try to stop you from modifying your own device) - able to use mint mobile - has a trackball (like the htc hero, that thing was fuckin awesome) - possibly some hardware buttons
by lostmsu | 2025-12-08 16:49:51+00:00
> But raising kids, I can clearly see that intelligence isn't just solved by LLMs

Funny, I have the opposite experience. Like early LLMs kids tend to give specific answers to the questions they don't understand or don't really know or remember the answer to. Kids also loop (give the same reply repeatedly to different prompts), enter highly emotional states where their output is garbled (everyone loves that one), etc. And it seems impossible to correct these until they just get smarter as their brain grows.

What's even more funny is that adults tend to do all these things as well, just less often.
Show HN: Tampermonkey/Stylus but with prompts instead of code (open source)
by alentodorov | 2025-12-08 16:50:03+00:00
I’ve built a browser extension that allows you to personalize websites just by prompting. It takes your request and uses openai’s codex-mini to generate the JS and CSS needed to apply the change.

It can do all sorts of things: stop autoplaying videos, replace links with archive.is on newspapers, dim sidebars, or add small QOL features like editing the responses in chatgpt so it’s easier to copy/paste. Earlier today I asked it to add a “cost per 100 requests” column on OpenRouter’s activity page—decimals makes it hard for my ADHD brain to process.

Technically, you can do this with developer tools and user styles but i’ve been impressed with codex’ ability to take my vague requests and turn it into working styles with just 10% of the source page for context.

With an Apple dev account you can use it on mobile via Safari extensions.
by general1465 | 2025-12-08 16:50:16+00:00
> Seems that you might be the only one not to have noticed how unreliable Turkey is and the clashes that have been and are occurring within NATO and outside.

it is called agency and interest. It turns out that every country in the world has agency and interest which may not be compatible with your world view.

> In any case, Turkey is only a regional ally and not "the Western World", another aspect that seems to elude replies to my comment.

You were talking about Europe, not about Western world, so please stop moving goal posts.
by fluidcruft | 2025-12-08 16:51:34+00:00
I didn't get downvoted yesterday but I got pretty far strongly hinting Claude should use very basic image processing approaches and it went for opencv very successfully. It was very fast on the image layout but failed pretty hard on the footer. This morning I decided to walk it through basic image processing for text detection and word building and that went pretty well but I didn't tell it what we were doing and it was too much me telling it what to do. It did sort of realize what we were doing at one point. I was thinking about trying again with just a nudge to think about using basic OCR image processing techniques to detect words and lines and see what Claude comes up with. Was also wondering what it would do if I just told it to use tesseract or paddleocr.
by thorn132 | 2025-12-08 16:51:38+00:00
My iced apps startup much faster than the Qt(Pyside) and Electron apps they replaced, and run faster too. Similarly, memory usage is much lower, and shipping a single 25MB binary to customers is preferable to bundling some multi-GB runtime environment. So in practice I'm glad development focuses more on completing the framework before playing performance metric golf, even if minimizing startup time and memory usage would be nice.

The 'lack' of documentation was only a problem for me when I was doing a cursory comparison of UI frameworks. Once I seriously started learning iced, the resources available, including the community on discord, was plenty to start being productive on making real apps within a week or two (and I had very limited Rust experience before that).
by SirMaster | 2025-12-08 16:51:53+00:00
You don't think a $1000 gamble on this new paradigm of blockchain crypto was a sound decision? When the sum I was putting in was otherwise an insignificant sum to me.

I bought in fully knowing it could go to 0, or maybe it could be worth a ton in 10+ years. To me it seemed like the chance it would blow up was well worth the tiny risk of losing a pretty meaningless amount of money to me.

I am not even otherwise a gambler. I have never gambled at a casino or on sports or anything like that. And my stock investing is all index funds. This was the only singular "crazy gamble" I had ever made and I knew full well it was crazy. But the potential in my mind around the tech and the potential hype around it seemed to greatly outweigh the tiny risk.
by dillydogg | 2025-12-08 16:51:53+00:00
I think the most straightforward way to a solid Emacs config is to use emacs-bedrock [1]. It's a very well curated set of packages that enhance the basic experience. It does leave you with plenty of room to fiddle, which is the beauty of Emacs to my mind. I personally use doom because I built my config on it for years, and am happy with my current setup, but if I started again I would go with emacs-bedrock to keep it more minimal.

[1] https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock
by Jonovono | 2025-12-08 16:52:03+00:00
Not sure if there will be much interest for this here. But i've been building this because I never know what to wear, and shopping sites don't really help. I may find a shirt I like but then I still have to figure out what to wear with it that would look like.

So I made this where a have outfits generated that should follow basic fashion rules and color theory. You say where you are going, weather and other details and it will generate an outfit that you can then swipe on like Tinder to refine it. Once you are happy with the outfit, you can shop the complete look!

I've done a bunch of optimizations to get outfit generation to be ~3s (sometimes slower as i'm trying different models).

Anyways, thought i'd share this here as i'd love feedback if anyone else has this problem. For myself, it's made some outfits that I really like!
by steveklabnik | 2025-12-08 16:52:41+00:00
It depends on what you mean by "feature parity." jj has some features git doesn't, and git has some features jj doesn't. That's likely to be the case into the future, for sure.

There's also like, some features of git aren't features in jj, but that doesn't mean you can't do that stuff with jj, it just works differently. The index or stashes, for example. In a literal sense, that's not parity, but in a logical sense, it is.
by latexr | 2025-12-08 16:53:34+00:00
> Is this a lot or a little?

Seems to me that failing any inspection is bad. 4300 in three years and in half the country is clearly a lot. That’s almost four failed inspections per day, double the number of mass shootings (which is also too high and even one is bad).

Also, the paragraphs immediately following what you quoted provide more context. Over 50% error rate is obviously a lot, as is failing 28 inspections in a row.

> The article's thesis is that these stores are uniquely bad.

Is it? Seems to me the thesis of the article is how this broken system is punishing poor people even further: “As the cost of living soars across America, the customers bearing the burden are those who can least afford it”. Which parts specifically make you believe that the thesis of the article is that these stores are uniquely bad?
by hypeatei | 2025-12-08 16:53:57+00:00
Doesn't work for who? If you stop using their service then you're not subject to getting your data sold by them because that data simply won't exist. There is no inherent need to get tech companies to "stop advertising" on a societal level.

It gets trotted on a lot here because the overarching narrative on HN is that regulation is an answer to everything when it's easier to just... not use the thing if you don't like it. Rather than creating a mountain of regulations that only big business can comply with, I think it's better to choose what you do with your money as a consumer.