skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a keyboard from my first 386/33 computer. It can be connected to my current Mac through a sequence of adapters: DIN5 -> PS/2 -> USB-A -> USB-C.

I am looking forward to extending my sequence of adapters in the future.
Didn't those adapters exist in both directions? Green in one and violet in the other? I have the feeling if I started to dig in my treasures I should still find some. One way to avoid e-waste is not to throw anything away...
Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
I had one minor quarrel with this article: The use of spaces (of any kind) before and after the em dash or any dashes.

Personally, I am fond of using either a hair space or a thin space before and after the em dash. Not a full space!

To explore the various options, I wrote a little program to print the various combinations of dashes and spaces. I think what looks best depends a lot on what typeface you're using. But let's see how they look in the Verdana font used here. You should be able to paste this into your favorite word processor to see it in other fonts:

ASCII 0x2D hyphen-with no spaces

ASCII 0x2D hyphen - with U+200A hair spaces

ASCII 0x2D hyphen - with U+2009 thin spaces

ASCII 0x2D hyphen - with 0x20 full spaces

Unicode U+2010 hyphen‐with no spaces

Unicode U+2010 hyphen ‐ with U+200A hair spaces

Unicode U+2010 hyphen ‐ with U+2009 thin spaces

Unicode U+2010 hyphen ‐ with 0x20 full spaces

Unicode U+2013 en dash–with no spaces

Unicode U+2013 en dash – with U+200A hair spaces

Unicode U+2013 en dash – with U+2009 thin spaces

Unicode U+2013 en dash – with 0x20 full spaces

Unicode U+2014 em dash—with no spaces

Unicode U+2014 em dash — with U+200A hair spaces

Unicode U+2014 em dash — with U+2009 thin spaces

Unicode U+2014 em dash — with 0x20 full spaces

It looks like HN is really mangling this. Hair spaces are rendered wider than thin spaces?

If anyone wants to experiment, here is the Python code:

from dataclasses import dataclass

@dataclass
class Character:
char: str
name: str

DASHES = [
Character( "-", "ASCII 0x2D hyphen" ),
Character( "\u2010", "Unicode U+2010 hyphen" ),
Character( "\u2013", "Unicode U+2013 en dash" ),
Character( "\u2014", "Unicode U+2014 em dash" ),
]

SPACES = [
Character( "", "no" ),
Character( "\u200A", "U+200A hair" ),
Character( "\u2009", "U+2009 thin" ),
Character( "\x20", "0x20 full" ),

]

for dash in DASHES:
for space in SPACES:
print( f"{dash.name}{space.char}{dash.char}{space.char}with {space.name} spaces\n" )
Very cool! I definitely want a spectrometer at home now! edit: looks like it's more of a DIY project than a commercial thing. Maybe DIY spectrometer is my next project then!
Big-Tech, yes. But not everyone is big tech.
No. But yes: Get rid of Siri, Make Preference pane alphabetically ordered, Get rid of Spotlight and buy Alfred, Disable notifications by default.
LLMs are an incredible technological breakthrough which even their creators are using completely incorrectly - in my view, half because they want to make a lot of money, and half because they are enchanted by the allure of their own achivement and are desperate to generalize it. The ability to generate human-style language, art, and other media dynamically on demand, based on a prompt communicated in natural language, is an astonishing feat. It's immensely useful on its own.

But even its creators, who acknowledge it is not AGI, are trying to use it as if it were. They want to sell you LLMs as "AI" writ large, that is, they want you to use it as your research assistant, your secretary, your lawyer, your doctor, and so on and so forth. LLMs on their own simply cannot do those tasks. They is great for other uses: troubleshooting, assisting with creativity and ideation, prototyping concepts of the same, and correlating lots of information, so long as a human then verifies the results.

LLMs right now are flour, sugar, and salt, mixed in a bowl and sold as a cake. Because they have no reasoning capability, only rote generation via prediction, LLMs cannot process contextual information the way required for them to be trustworthy or reliable for the tasks people are trying to use them for. No amount of creative prompting can resolve this totally. (I'll note that I just read the recent Anthropic paper, which uses terms like "AI biology" and "concept" to imply that the AI has reasoning capacity - but I think these are misused terms. An LLM's "concept" of something bears no referent to the real world, only a set of weights to other related concepts.)

What LLMs need is some sort of intelligent data store, tuned for their intended purpose, that can generate programmatic answers for the LLMs to decipher and present. Even then, their tendency to hallucinate makes things tough - they might imagine the user requested something they didn't, for instance. I don't have a clear solution to this problem. I suspect whoever does will have solved a much bigger, more complex than the already massive one that LLMs have solved, and if they are able to do so, will have brought us much much closer to AGI.

I am tired of seeing every company under the sun claim otherwise to make a buck.
It's wild how these kinds of glitches used to be outliers, and now they're starting to feel... normal?
It remains proportional to the earned prestige of the speaker.
AI is not a toddler. It's not human. It fails in ways that are not well understood and sometimes in an unpredictable manner.
Fearing Trump cuts, California Democrat proposes creating state's own NIH
Tangential, I want to whip up simple apps (or instructing an LLM to do so) but its simpler to do formatted text/tables, inputs, graphs etc in a single HTML file+JS. Which library should I adopt? Seems Marimo is the closest, but are there lighter web popups, graphs, inputs etc?
It does an ok job with C# but it’s generally outdated code I.e [required] as an annotation rather than as a keyword. Plus it generates some unnecessary constructors occasionally.

Mostly I use it for stupid templates stuff for which it isn’t bad. It’s not the second coming but it definitely speeds you up
"Reinventing the wheel over and over" has been a trillion dollar business. Maybe it won't be for long.

Is that "bullish on LLMs" or not?
I really enjoy the affinity suite.
Why not go the other way, what are you missing if you don’t learnt four kingdoms. Why should that be taught at all.

One obvious reason it should not be taught, if it is wrong then it kills curiosity and imagination by giving us a neat story we think is true. In a way it has the same negative effect religion can have but to a smaller degree. Why does the earth exist, because god made it kills all spirit of enquiry. This is the same problem I have with the big bang. This is another theory that kills inquiry.
Similar example:
https://wiki.osdev.org/%228042%22_PS/2_Controller
I saw this on bsky a few days ago and was fascinated, so glad to see it made its way here! I had this question that went unanswered, so hopefully there's some experts/fellow musers here:

Why grow up if you don't need photosynthesis?

From my perusal of The Literature (AKA an amazing Wikipedia article + the paper discussed in this link), we have a few strong theories about the prototaxites:

1. They fed off decaying matter in the soil through a vast network of mycelia/roots, and didn't photosynthesize.

2. They grew large, trunk-like protrusions, but without any branches or leaves (that were fossilized, at least). Like, way, way taller than the bugs, moss, and short weird proto-grass around at the time.

3. These protrusions were regularly burrowed into by aforementioned bugs, which surely was a major health risk.

4. Even before this analysis, they've always been something of an oddball compared to contemporary life -- so everything's on the table, so to speak.

Given those facts, I'm pretty stumped as to what evolutionary pressures might have driven them to grow upwards. At first I considered spore (seed?) dispersal, but mushrooms seem to get along just fine without towering above everything else, and I don't think wind speeds were way lower or anything. Anyone here have any better guesses?
"Waymo is already full self-driving cars"

they are neither FSD nor having cars at the moment
Nuclear is a total disaster recently. Enormous cost overruns, delayed operation. What reason in hell is there to pour money into that instead of wind? Wind works. Every turbine built adds power - no need to wait decades for the next screwed up nuclear install.

I'm a fan of the SMR idea although it turns out that it's less economic than people thought at the smaller sizes anyhow. I'm also very interested in the fusion startups............BUT we have to solve the climate problem now -- yesterday if it were possible.
I wonder how old codebases are managed at Sega. Is there a server somewhere where you can see the code and assets for all the various games they've published going back to the 80s? 90s? Is it walled off? In cold storage? Could some junior dev decide to go check out the original GBA Sonic code just for fun?
I look forward to good standard integrations to assign a ticket to an agent and let it go through ci and up for a preview deploy & pr. I think there's lots of smaller issues that could be raised and sorted without much intervention.
Absolutely agree. This week, I can't get Chrome to connect to local servers.

ERR_ADDRESS_UNREACHABLE it says.

Yes, I said Yes to the new permission. Yes the check mark is on in Privacy, I mean all 20 of them that say "Google Chrome". Yes I toggled it off and on. Yes I rebooted. Still have to use a different browser to access my own local server because there is a new privacy feature that... doesn't work.
For me, the best part of the article, this applies in so many places in life. And of course, I am guilty too.

“The whole point about aviation safety is that you have to have the humility to understand that you are imperfect, because everybody screws up. Everybody makes mistakes,” said Lt. John Gadzinski, a retired Navy F-14 pilot who flew combat missions from aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf. “But ultimately, if you can’t admit when you’re wrong, you’re going to kill somebody because your ego is too big.”
Likewise, blank page. Mobile Firefox + ad blocker.
This has always been my own mantra too, but then I never represented an enterprise buyer so maybe it is effective to screen out buyera like me, but I can imagine even as an "large enterprise level buyer" I would not want to deal with this. It just smacks of dishonesty when you will not provide ANY pricing indication whatsoever. I am surprised "contact us for pricing" still works in current year? I assume it does, because one still sees it sometimes. Maybe if almost everyone started shunning this (and I expect those in younger generations than me probably will!) this tactic will die out. I can sortoff understand it for cases where you want yo relicense your product/data to become part of someone elses product/service and these deals might be custom negotiated. But for normal use of a product or service? hell no!
Apple used to obsess over details like these. Now it feels like they're hoping we won't notice.
I was part of preparing an offer a few weeks ago. The customer prepared a lot of documents for us - maybe 100 pages on total. Boss insisted on using chatgpt to summarize this stuff and read only the summary. I did a loner, slower, reading and cought on some topics chatgpt outright dropped. Our offer was based on the summary - and fell through because we missed these nuances.
But hey, boss did not read as much as previously...
Percentage of parents financially supporting adult children reaches 3-year high
2 years might be OK, but not 2 days as in this case.
I usually cook something healthy for 2-3 days. Yesterday I just made a stew of broccoli with potatoes (with seasoning and whatnot) and it tastes quite nice, and it was very easy to do so. It was my first time, did not even need to check the recipe. You just make it as you would any stew, you just boil the vegetables in seasoned water, then after it is soft, you can turn it into a stew by mixing oil + garlic + flour, heating it up a bit, and then putting it all into the boiling vegetables. I am sorry if this explanation may not be adequate, however, but I hope you know what I mean. The last thing we put into the boiling veggies is called "rántás" in Hungarian, but I am sure the translator would bork on this, because "rántott" is an adjective, and probably the past tense of "rántás", but they mean two very different things.
this site really needs a blurb. what is it, what makes it interesting, etc.
A bunch of comments here seem to be missing a point : the author is (at least was ?) a scientist.

Her primarily work interest is in the truth, not the statically plausible.

Her point is that using LLM to generate truth is pointless, and that people should stop advertising llms as "intelligent", since, to a scientist, being "intelligent" and being "dead wrong" are polar opposite.

Other use cases have feedback loops - it does not matter so much if Claude spuits wrong code, provided you have a compiler and automated tests.

Scientists _are_ acting as compilers to check truth. And they rely on truths compiled by other scientists, just like your programs rely on code written by other people.

What if I tell you that, from now on, any third party library that you call will _stastically_ work 76% of the time, and I have no clue what it does is the remaining X % ?(I don't know what X is, I haven't hast chatgpt yet.)

In the meantime, I still have to see a headline "AI X discovered life-changing new Y on its own" (the closest thing I know of is alpha fold, which I both know is apparently "changing the world of scientists", and yet feel has "not changed the world of your average joe, so far" - emphasis on the "so far" ) ; but I've already seen at least one headline of "dumb mistake made because an AI hallucinated".

I suppose we have to hope the trend will revert at some point ? Hope, on a Friday...
Trump is such a polarizing figure that people who are actually competent don't really want to work for him (and yes Elon Musk is not one of the competent ones- he is biased at best). He has no choice but to value loyalty over competency. It's a pity.

He's more unhinged day by day. He's taking big risks. He's betting tariffs will benefit US manufacturing but it's more likely to increase inflation. He's betting crippling universities and NIH/NSF and such will fix science somehow, but in reality it's more likely to drive competent researchers out of US.

Growing up we considered US government and it's officials as examples putting county above loyalty and wanted our own country's politicians to follow suit. The tables are turned and the highest offices in the US government are following third world country politics playbook.
Did you really think that people on HN, who I assume are very informed, wouldn't fall for popular disbelief? How can this happen?
TKey SSH CA
The tear-down/build-up dichotomy sidesteps the fact that the tear-down side consists of wealthy oligarchs tearing down the government, when what we need is the opposite. There are many entrenched interests that support the status quo, and politicians are only one such group. The article alludes to this with the thing about the firefighters union, but then seems to go right on with the idea of persuading the elected officials, rather than recognizing a need to dismantle the apparatus of "highly engaged stakeholders" who feed into politics. There is a lot that needs to be torn down.

That said, I agree that shifting politicians against the status quo is part of the solution. I do get a sense that things are moving in that direction. At least now it's becoming politically difficult in CA to not at least make some gestures towards supporting housing affordability. And every failure to back those gestures up with action leads to increasing pressure. The balance hasn't shifted yet but it's teetering more than it has for a while.
A lot of developers (including myself) don’t want to notarize/sign their binaries that they want to run on their own machine(s).
The allure of lucre and status convinced us we were better off making more addictive dopamine machines than bettering the human condition.
Hah, it's a great answer, I did not even think that far, thinking of the ease of installation, updates and command line use, as well as configuration.

But indeed. MySQL's great weakness and great strength is that it's a somewhat limited SQL engine over a variety of storage backends. It can not be too smart, due to the sheer variety of what it supports.

The side effect is that it is quite predictable.
I would think the PS/2 -> USB-A adapter in this chain is a smart one.
Unfortunately we needed large scale climate engineering a decade ago.

Oil is a key driver of economic activity, how would we ever convince governments, businesses, and finally individuals to cut their earnings before they “get theirs”. Sure we can get a significant portion of individuals to live a net-zero life, but there are far too many people who don’t care since everything seems normal if you are not paying attention.

I want carbon neutrality, but I have no hope to achieving this before we face large scale ecological collapse (look at the GBR).
About half of the buildings in Australia still use single-pane windows.
That's again an oversimplification. It's not black or white, it's more complex. And that shouldn't be passed onto the general population, but to the companies that have been exploiting the resources as if they were infinite. They have become megamagnates and megacompanies, and now that we ask for solutions, it should not be "ha, ok, pay more".
You are mixing a point and the issue, largely heterogeneous: Claude being a champion in producing good code vs LLMs in general being delirious.

If your junior developer is just "junior", that is one matter; if your junior developer hallucinates documentation details, that's different.
Company I used to work for used AP for things like press releases and, I think, official blog posts and Chicago plus a couple different tech style guides for everything else.

Basically, we didn’t like some things in AP but we wanted to make it easy for journalists to copy/paste.
1923 Germany not being fascist is irrelevant to my point.

My point is that during the time period where USA was considered fascist-fighting heroes according to the mainstream account, they themselves had many views that were considered normal back then but strongly “fascist” today. I guess the definition of fascist must have changed?
This is one of the most satisfying DIY reads I've seen in a while. I love how you approached this as a software dev and essentially built a full stack for hardware iteration.
You forget the large group of people that proudly declare they invent AGI and they can make everyone lose jobs and starve. complains are for them, not for you.
I don't understand why you think your question should have a simple answer. 'Race' is, very obviously, a coarse division of human genetic diversity into a few clusters. That doesn't imply everyone fits neatly into one of the clusters. Saying someone belongs to race X is just a way of saying they are more similar to that genetic cluster/area than any other. Or to some point between two clusters, e.g. they are race (X + Y)/2 (Amerindian-Caucasian, for example).

Try applying the same logic to any other concept - it is nearly always the case that concepts in language do not perfectly describe the underlying reality. Yet we're not stupid enough to then claim that means the underlying reality is meaningless.
P2P in-game voice chat? Sweet.
I believe Section 8 also comes with regular inspections. Some locales do regular inspections anyway, but many don't.

Some Section 8 tenants have complex interactions with their neighbors and their environment, and I think eviction of Section 8 tenants is harder too.
It doesn't matter how many suits are pending, it matters how many win and how stiff the penalties are.
You're building other features?

Or you don't believe how quickly it could be done?

Just use github.com/different-ai/embedbase. Full-stack RAG directly from a PDF into some javascript widget window. Ingest a PDF and chat with it in like 2 lines of code. It's almost no work at all.

Your website is (down now but) made with lovable so you're vibe coding this? Or just your landing page?
Ask HN: How does GPT-4o image generation work?
I'm curious. can anyone explain to me in simple terms
Finalizers are tricker than you might think. Part 2
I pay our lawyer quite a lot and he also makes mistakes. What have you not - typos, somewhat inconcise language in contracts, but we work to fix it and everything's ok.

People are looking for perfect instead of better.
To add to this: the keyboard matrix scan controller on laptops is usually located inside the Super I/O chip and connected to the CPU/southbridge via LPC or eSPI. Since LPC/eSPI peripherals are mapped to I/O ports, implementing an 8042 controller means that the keyboard can work even without setting up a much more complicated USB host stack.
> It's an interesting problem I'm not sure what the solution is.

The solution is to make the rules different for small landlords.
"HN doesn't like blockchain"

HN not believe blockchain same way Apple,Microsoft,Google etc does
Totally makes sense that things like seamless edge blending and fine-tuned collimation end up being the biggest challenges
That was the bigger problem, IMO, in that even once PDO existed and the MySQL extension was "fixed" to have prepared statements, so much of the documentation still did it wrong.

And yet similar classes of bugs still pops up today, even with what I would've assumed to be safe defaults? I'm guessing its non-standard databases or DB clients or something?

This case is more just a pure lack of sanitisation, but it's fascinating to see in 2025 still :)
Time to settle on wine as portable API. Bloatware is custom drawn anyway, so a drawing context is all environment they need.
Software Eng Intern – Structured Labs (YC S23) Is Hiring
I thought it was because of my MacBook pro still being an Intel One and thought that nobody at Apple cares about that anymore. But it seems also the M family suffers from it.

Mine doesn't really sleep. It's always warmish despite all my best efforts to make it actually sleep. It's always plugged in, so no biggie, but it's annoying as hell.

Reddit wisdom says it's because of my usb peripherals, but it's just a webcam, mouse, keyboard, and a yubikey.
I let Claude build them (which it does in React). Then I copy and paste them into o3-mini-high and ask it to port to raw html and JS. It pulls in some chart libraries and goes to town. Give it a crack and see.
The ketamine treatment?
Paint.net isn't free software, it's proprietary freeware. It used to be free a long time ago, but the author is a tool and made it closed source because people were creating other versions of it.
<script src="https://cdn.gpteng.co/gptengineer.js" type="module"></script>

https://github.com/AntonOsika/gpt-engineer

I believe I have identified the culprit.
Something I found annoying at a previous big-tech work, was how the focus on top-level metrics (read, revenue-linked metrics) meant we couldn't fix things.

There were a lot of smart people, very interested in fixing things— not only because engineers tend to like fixing things, but also because we, and everyone around us, were users too.

For example, many things related to text input were broken on the site. Korean was apparently quite unusable. I wanted to fix it. A Korean manager in a core web team wanted to fix it. But we couldn't because the incentive structures dictated we should focus on other things.

It was only after a couple years, and developing a metric that linked text-input work with top-level (read, revenue-linked) metrics, that we were able to work on fixing these issues.

I find a lot of value in the effort to make incentives objective, but at a company that was already worth half a trillion dollars at the time, I just always felt there could be more room for caring about users and the product beyond the effects on the bottom-line.