MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dfe | 2025-12-09 01:38:36+00:00
Did people just forget the era of CD burning? Cassettes sucked.

Normal non-tech people were ripping CDs with iTunes. "Rip. Mix. Burn." was a nationwide if not worldwide advertisement.

All of this still works, if you have a CD drive.

If you're going to bother buying a cassette player... what's the allure for that over a CD-R and a basic CD player. CD players in cars are going away, but they're still around in houses and inexpensive small boomboxes.

But then... what's the allure of that over say any old audio player that takes SD cards or just a USB stick. A lot of modern cars and also stereo receivers and TVs will take a USB stick and play files from it. These players are incredibly prevalent and very easy to use. And loading the music from a computer or even a tablet is easy.

Of these three, cassette is the absolute least likely to be available anywhere.

You can still have the experience of making a playlist and even putting the files on a USB stick for someone. Importantly, they can actually play it on their own listening device.
by tecnovix | 2025-12-09 01:38:46+00:00
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by narrator | 2025-12-09 01:38:47+00:00
Wait till the robots arrive. That they will know how to do a vast range of human skills, some that people train their whole lives for, will surprise people the most. The future shock I get from Claude Code, knowing how long stuff takes the hard way, especially niche difficult to research topics like the alternate applicable designs of deep learning models to a modeling task, is a thing of wonder. Imagine now that a master marble carver shows up at an exhibition and some sci-fi author just had robots make a perfect beautiful equivalent of a character from his novel, equivalent in quality to Michaelangelo's David, but cyberpunk.
by proactivesvcs | 2025-12-09 01:38:59+00:00
There's a lot of it on the Fediverse tech circles. I find a lot of it through following the #Fediverse tag on Mastodon.

Bandwagon.fm: A federated platform for musicians and fans: https://bandwagon.fm/

Bonfire: A modular server for building communities with a wide variety of services: https://bonfirenetworks.org/

write.as: "Type words, put them on the internet." https://write.as/
by alexsmirnov | 2025-12-09 01:39:11+00:00
I've read book written by captain Kocebu, that was on duty to protect Russian holdings in Alaska. They visited San Francisco in 1805 and 1815, and several chapters described life of native people in the mission. He described harsh conditions, hard work, no freedom at all, and very high death rates. Shocking even for a early XIX century naval officer. Once a year, those people allowed to visit their tribes and relatives. And they always came back! So, the real hunter gathers, who had first hand comparison for both nomadic and agrarian life, prefer near slavery in mission to life in the wild.
Show HN: Namefi built WebGPU-powered in-browser LLM pure client-side infer UX
by xinbenlv | 2025-12-09 01:39:14+00:00
We've built a domain brainstorm experience with WebGPU-powered in-browser LLM pure client-side inference, seems working pretty well. Not on par with ChatGPT/Gemini for sure, but good enough for this use case.

A few benefits

1. Running on pure client side, privacy friendly 2. Free - no credits needed, no API keys, nothing. User device pays the computation 3. Interoperable - you can let it come up with direction of ideas.

QQ: What are a few ideas you think it could be used for? QQ: If on-device LLM becomes much more powerful, what are things it can do before they are less powerful?
by sothatsit | 2025-12-09 01:39:42+00:00
This tracks with my own AI usage over just this year. There have been two releases that caused step changes in how much I actually use AI:

1. The release of Claude Code in February

2. The release of Opus 4.5 two weeks ago

In both of these cases, it felt like no big new unlocks were made. These releases aren’t like OpenAI’s o1, where they introduced reasoning models with entirely new capabilities, or their Pro offerings, which still feel like the smartest chatbots in the world to me.

Instead, these releases just brought a new user interface, and improved reliability. And yet these two releases mark the biggest increases in my AI usage. These releases caused the utility of AI for my work to pass thresholds where Claude Code became my default way to get LLMs to read my code, and then Opus 4.5 became my default way to make code changes.
by adventured | 2025-12-09 01:42:16+00:00
It's astounding how subtly anti-AI HN has become over the past year, as the models keep getting better and better. It's now pervasive across nearly every AI thread here.

As the potential of AI technical agents has gone from an interesting discussion to extraordinarily obvious as to what the outcome is going to be, HN has comically shifted negative in tone on AI. They doth protest too much.

I think it's a very clear case of personal bias. The machines are rapidly coming for the lucrative software jobs. So those with an interest in protecting lucrative tech jobs are talking their book. The hollowing out of Silicon Valley is imminent, as other industrial areas before it. Maybe 10% of the existing software development jobs will remain. There's no time to form powerful unions to stop what's happening, it's already far too late.
by ibgeek | 2025-12-09 01:42:28+00:00
They are analyzing models trained on classification tasks. At the end of the day, classification is about (a) engineering features that separate the classes and (b) finding a way to represent the boundary. It's not surprising to me that they would find these models can be described using a small number of dimensions and that they would observe similar structure across classification problems. The number of dimensions needed is basically a function of the number of classes. Embeddings in 1 dimension can linearly separate 2 classes, 2 dimensions can linearly separate 4 classes, 3 dimensions can linearly separate 8 classes, etc.
by amenhotep | 2025-12-09 01:43:18+00:00
You appear to be talking about Conchita Wurst? He was 11 years ago and there's no need for the veiled transphobia, he was just a regular drag queen.

It really says a lot about you, to be frank, that this heady geopolitical topic comes up and the most relevant thing you can think of to talk about is the winner of bloody Eurovision in 2014.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-12-09 01:43:28+00:00
We ran out of cheap pure copper a long time ago. Now we're producing copper out of ores that contain a very small proportion of copper. If the price goes up we'll produce copper from ores that contain an even smaller fraction of copper.

Copper is 60 ppm of the crust. As long as the price keeps going up, we'll never run out.
by m0llusk | 2025-12-09 01:43:29+00:00
It will be interesting how this goes moving forward. Agents learn from massive scraping. With the newest tools and frameworks there is nothing but documentation and initial examples to scrape. And now that agent output is flooding everything it can be expected there will be a lot of feedback with automated learning early in development cycles.

Lots of applications have a simple structure of collecting and operating data with fairly well documented business logic tying everything together. Coding outside of that is going to be more tricky.

And if agentic coding is so great then why are there so still so many awful spreadsheets that can't compete with Excel? Something isn't adding up quite as well as some seem to expect.
by chimineycricket | 2025-12-09 01:43:58+00:00
Do you really believe Israel wants to stop occupying the West Bank?

Just this month Israel killed 2 brothers (children), because they were identified as a threat. They continue to expand settlements, and they bomb during ceasefires. Can you give me any example of Israel really attempting peace? 2005 disengagement, but they have the levers to keep Gazans on the brink of death, by bottlenecking food, water, etc. Just because it's called disengagement, doesn't mean it really is. Don't accept their propaganda at face value, or anyone's, obviously.

"Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas ... This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank."
by enthdegree | 2025-12-09 01:43:59+00:00
mtkclient does not seem to correctly interpret the usb output of the device past some part of the early boot process. Really, any of those messages formatted by mtkclient are unfaithful to the intended meaning. So yes maybe it is "just a checksum step" or maybe something else entirely. Last year I collected some UART logs on the device during bootup in a zip here:

https://github.com/bkerler/mtkclient/issues/1289
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-12-09 01:44:11+00:00
A lossy compressed version of it, at least.

But a lot of is also in blogs and (video) tutorials. As well as Stack Overflow.

And all very searchable.

The old brick-of-paper approach to tech manuals just isn't a thing any more. I don't particularly miss it.

It was, if you think about, usually a slow and inefficient way to present information - often better at presenting what was possible than how to do make it happen.
by socalgal2 | 2025-12-09 01:44:32+00:00
> Those places where you place your order, pay through something like a vending machine at the entrance of the place. The order goes back to the kitchen and, after you've sat down and waited a short time, your order is up.

I know those places but at this point the USA seems full of them, or at least LA/SF. They aren't the same style as the Japanese ones but there are tons of places in California where you can walk in and order from a touchscreen and they just call your number when your order is ready.
by websiteapi | 2025-12-09 01:44:35+00:00
funny how we have all of this progress yet things that actually matter (sorry chess fans) in the real world are more expensive: health care, housing, cars. and what meager gains there are seem to be more and more concentrated in a smaller group of people.

plenty of charts you can look at - net productivity by virtually any metric vs real adjusted income. the example I like are kiosks and self checkout. who has encountered one at a place where it is cheaper than its main rival and is directly attributable to (by the company or otherwise) to lower prices?? in my view all it did was remove some jobs. that's the preview. that's it. you will lose jobs and you will pay more. congrats.

even with year 2020 tech you could automate most work that needs to be done, if our industry wouldn't endlessly keep disrupting itself and have a little bit of discipline.

so once ai destroys desk jobs and the creative jobs, then what? chill out? too bad anyone who has a house won't let more be built.
by fraud | 2025-12-09 01:44:53+00:00
100% agreed. I use Claude Code to write 90% of my code at this point, but have found that it is genuinely worse than a junior at writing meaningful test cases. Most of the time it will make up interfaces or mock things incorrectly etc to the point where I just give up and write them myself. The bulk of the “tests” it writes test things which are meaningless (does the interface exist etc). This is with typescript + vitest with opus 4.5.
by wpm | 2025-12-09 01:44:55+00:00
"Summarises meetings, collects action items"

Yes, but...does it? How do you know it isn't missing key points raised in the meeting? Not collecting actionable items?

Summarising seems like the absolute lamest thing an LLM could do for me. Like I want a Reader's Digest of my life, written but a word guessing machine.
by sct202 | 2025-12-09 01:44:58+00:00
Kroger placed one of the sites in Orlando to also service Tampa and Jacksonville when they have 0 regular stores in the entire state. They were trying to use it to expand into the area, but I never saw very much in terms of advertising or promotions to drive demand but it could have also been that the robots were so bad that they couldn't attempt to market and push volume.
by jameslk | 2025-12-09 01:46:27+00:00
> Back then, me and other old-timers were answering about 4,000 new-hire questions a month.

> Then in December, Claude finally got good enough to answer some of those questions for us.

> … Six months later, 80% of the questions I'd been being asked had disappeared.

Interesting implications for how to train juniors in a remote company, or in general:

> We find that sitting near teammates increases coding feedback by 18.3% and improves code quality. Gains are concentrated among less-tenured and younger employees, who are building human capital. However, there is a tradeoff: experienced engineers write less code when sitting near colleagues.

https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...
by komali2 | 2025-12-09 01:48:05+00:00
Sf fire department has also a pdf with what you should have in an at home emergency kit. It's some simple things you can get in one trip to a camping store and Walgreens. https://sf-fire.org/media/794/download?inline

I also recommend SF people consider joining NERT: neighborhood emergency response team. Disaster after disaster should teach us the opposite of what you argue in terms of response: in fact it's more likely that the scale of people affected will quickly overwhelm resources, and the existence of choke points will severely limit movement of people and resources, especially if infrastructure is damaged and people are flooding out of the city. That can be mitigated by having locals trained to help facilitate emergency response efforts. It's less "pulling people out from under bookshelves" and more "help managing the bureaucracy of the fire department," forms on forms on forms! Though the training does involve pulling someone out from under a bookshelf. It's a week long and quite fun!
by therealjumbo | 2025-12-09 01:49:29+00:00
My hot take on a better excel: the two things excel sucks at: version control and syncing. On the backend, separate the data and the logic in the spreadsheet and put each into version control. Then use something like syncthing to share documents with colleagues. You might also need something like bitmessage for initial handshake. Now you have a spreadsheet you can collaborate on in real time over the Internet or LAN without screwing around with a server, a google account, a credit card etc.

There's two more things excel is horrible at: choice of extension language and being able to graduate your spreadsheet into a real program. You fix the extension language by using something like web assembly on the back end, and probably bundle one or more compilers to go from $lang to web assembly in order to be user friendly. Lastly you fix the last problem by virtue of doing all of the above. The second two features won't draw in new users much, so they're less important in the short run but make it a lot more sticky.

I'm not in a place in life to put much free time into that project, and ideas are cheap ...
by delichon | 2025-12-09 01:49:57+00:00
I'm an old guy, it's happened several times. The last time, a surgeon removed a tumor, found that it was malignant ... and then told me that it was no big deal, it was a kind of cancer that would not have caused serious problems. She said if she had to get cancer she'd pick this kind. I wish she had told me that before the surgery. I may have had it anyway, but maybe not. Wouldn't you value being fully informed more after that? Surgeons have as much of a conflict of interest when selling their own services as anyone else.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-09 01:50:55+00:00
This is a problem at a wide array of tech companies. Everyone wants to Meta, everyone wants to be Google.

Guys, we're building B2B enterprise software. The most important things our clients care about is this hunk of junk working. Changing it is probably bad, actually, because the users are using it 8 hours a day and they don't want to deal with annoying popups about new features and UI churn for the sake of churn.
by Molitor5901 | 2025-12-09 01:51:06+00:00
This is so interesting. I remember as a child my family would go to S&S Cafeterias, and Piccadilly. It was like the lunch line at school. Regrettably the closest I've gotten to an automat was when I taught in a prison, the classroom had vending machines of sandwiches, desserts, etc.

I think we still have automats. Ikea cafe for example, the cafeteria in the basement of the Natural History and Science Museum in Washington, D.C., any number of places where you get food, checkout, sit, eat, leave without interacting with anyone.
by jacobsenscott | 2025-12-09 01:51:08+00:00
Whenever I try and use a "state of the art" LLM to generate code it takes longer to get a worse result than if I just wrote the code myself from the start. That's the experience of every good dev I know. So that's my benchmark. AI benchmarks are BS marketing gimmicks designed to give the appearance of progress - there are tremendous perverse financial incentives.

This will never change because you can only use an LLM to generate code (or any other type of output) you already know how to produce and are expert at - because you can never trust the output.
by AIorNot | 2025-12-09 01:51:16+00:00
Interesting - I wonder if this ties into the Platonic Space Hypothesis recently being championed by computational biologist Mike Levin

E.g

https://youtu.be/Qp0rCU49lMs?si=UXbSBD3Xxpy9e3uY

https://thoughtforms.life/symposium-on-the-platonic-space/

e.g see this paper on Universal Embeddings https://arxiv.org/html/2505.12540v2

"The Platonic Representation Hypothesis [17] conjectures that all image models of sufficient size have the same latent representation. We propose a stronger, constructive version of this hypothesis for text models: the universal latent structure of text representations can be learned and, furthermore, harnessed to translate representations from one space to another without any paired data or encoders.

In this work, we show that the Strong Platonic Representation Hypothesis holds in practice. Given unpaired examples of embeddings from two models with different architectures and training data, our method learns a latent representation in which the embeddings are almost identical"

Also from the OP's Paper we see this on statement:

"Why do these universal subspaces emerge? While the precise mechanisms driving this phenomenon remain an open area of investigation, several theoretical factors likely contribute to the emergence of these shared structures.

First, neural networks are known to exhibit a spectral bias toward low frequency functions, creating a polynomial decay in eigenvalues that concentrates learning dynamics into a small number of dominant directions (Belfer et al., 2024; Bietti et al., 2019).

Second, modern architectures impose strong inductive biases that constrain the solution space: convolutional structures inherently favor local, Gabor-like patterns (Krizhevsky et al., 2012; Guth et al., 2024), while attention mechanisms prioritize recurring relational circuits (Olah et al., 2020; Chughtai et al., 2023).

Third, the ubiquity of gradient-based optimization – governed by kernels that are largely invariant to task specifics in the infinite-width limit (Jacot et al., 2018) – inherently prefers smooth solutions, channeling diverse learning trajectories toward shared geometric manifolds (Garipov et al., 2018).

If these hypotheses hold, the universal subspace likely captures fundamental computational patterns that transcend specific tasks, potentially explaining the efficacy of transfer learning and why diverse problems often benefit from similar architectural modifications."
by RHSeeger | 2025-12-09 01:51:48+00:00
> It's just not possible (and maybe not economical viable) to build enough software to make everything not suck.

Honestly, it's been my experience that there's no motivation to do this, either. Many of the people that buy the software are more interested in a shiny, new button than they are in making sure all the existing buttons do what they want. And they each want a _different_ shiny, new button... and too many (barely functional) features just makes a product worse.

> not economical viable

I think that's part of the key. Nobody wants to pay for great software
by billti | 2025-12-09 01:51:51+00:00
I didn't even notice who I was replying to at first - so let me start by saying thank you for Ghostty. I spend a great deal of my day in it, and it's a beautifully put together piece of software. I appreciate the work you do and admire your attitude to software and life in general. Enjoy your windfall, ignore the haters, and my best wishes to you and your family with the upcoming addition.

The project I'm mostly working on uses the wgpu crate, https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu, which may be of interest if writing cross-platform GPU code. (Though obviously if using Rust, not Zig). With it my project easily runs on Windows (via DX12), Linux (via Vulkan), macOS (via Metal), and directly on the web via Wasm/WebGPU. It is a "lowest common denominator", but good enough for most use-cases.

That said, ever with simple shaders I had to implement some workarounds for Xcode issues (e.g. https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/issues/8111). But still vastly preferable to other debugging approaches and has been indispensable in tracking down a few bugs.
by echelon | 2025-12-09 01:51:55+00:00
> And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared.

> I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did.

> But looking at how fast Claude is automating my job, I think we're getting a lot less.

This "our company is onto the discovery that will put you all out of work (or kill you?)" rhetoric makes me angry.

Something this powerful and disruptive (if it is such) doesn't need to be owned or controlled by a handful of companies. It makes me hope the Chinese and their open source models ultimately win.

I've seen Anthropic and OpenAI employees leaning into this rhetoric on an almost daily basis since 2023. Less so OpenAI lately, but you see it all the time from these folks. Even the top leadership.

Meanwhile Google, apart from perhaps Kilpatrick, is just silent.
by michaelt | 2025-12-09 01:52:08+00:00
> What benefit would such a restriction offer to the business?

You approve opex budget for the widget department because you know they can turn 10 cents of plastic into $1 of widgets, and you want them doing that in the forthcoming quarter. You're happy for them to spend a nigh-unlimited amount on inputs like plastic, so long as it's on things with a 90% margin.

But you don't want the department head spending their nigh-unlimited budget on things that don't get sold on with a 90% margin. So you don't let them charge the O'Reilly books to the nigh-unlimited part of their budget.