MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by the_king | 2025-04-10 01:57:12+00:00
I was excited to try this out because I've had a lot of trouble getting the Supabase integrations to work on Lovable and Bolt.new.

Sorry to say that Firebase Studio did an awful job. It did not successfully build even the first view of the app I asked for. It feels like I'm stepping back to release day of GPT-4.

Am I missing a switch to use the good Gemini 2.5 somewhere? I could tell from their response speed that I was not using a thinking model.
by churlee123 | 2025-04-10 01:57:13+00:00
Same core product. Now just $20/month.

Because InterviewCoder shouldn’t cost more than your standard LLM chatbot.

We’ve heard you — a ton of our users are students, and we want to keep it as accessible as possible.

Upcoming Features:

* Real-time audio intake + screenshots to make your interview experience even smoother.

* Smart auto-feedback to guide your thought process mid-problem —you'll have the option to not do the screenshotting yourself so you can focus on selling the interview.

* Smarter support for system design interviews.

Many schools have started banning InterviewCoder on public WiFi. If you’re having trouble accessing the site and want a cheaper alternative, try our new domain: interviewcoder.dev

We’re building something much bigger than just interviews —so stay tuned.
by codebje | 2025-04-10 01:58:30+00:00
The main advantage of recursive descent parsing is readability. Forget the machinery of the parser, which is (a) trivial enough that AI will generate correctly it for you with next to no prompting, and (b) widely available in libraries anyway. The win is writing a parser that reads like the grammar it implements, which means changes to your grammar are easy to apply to your parser.

Regexes are effectively write-only. If you change the grammar parsed by a regex, you're probably going to discard the regex and make a new one.
by cedws | 2025-04-10 01:59:20+00:00
Windows kind of has this in the form of UFW. You can have either a RAM or disk based overlay for your C: partition and all writes will go to the overlay, which can be wiped. Except there are specific paths which must be excluded otherwise Windows craps itself. You also have to set up the overlay after the sysprep phase which inits drivers and stuff.

https://cedwards.xyz/messing-around-with-windows-unified-wri...
by newtonsmethod | 2025-04-10 01:59:31+00:00
I agree, the effects of fluoride probably aren't in the top 5 things to be concerned about (although perhaps they are from a political perspective, with it becoming such a strong topic of debate for a variety of reasons). But do you assume that getting to n=10,000 is going to show little or no effect (e.g. having a level you define as little effect)? I'm not convinced the NTP data is extremely high quality and can't make much conclusion from it on the effects.

Also, for other commenters: the 2832 children number I believe comes from the supplemental content from the supplemental material for the NTP Fluoride Monograph: https://cdn.jamanetwork.com/ama/content_public/journal/peds/... (this url is very long because of some hashing measure, sorry: if it is no longer accessible, it is the supplemental content for doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2024.5542), on page 51 of the PDF. I have a small summary table of data I view relevant here:

The columns are:

* Studies used; Fluoride Exposure; Number of Studies / Number of Observations (number of Children)

* Estimate for slope in linear Model, given as increase in IQ points per mg/L increase (95% CI) (p value)

All studies; < 2mg/L; 8 / 10 (N = 3682); -0.18 (-0.40, 0.03) (p = 0.096)

All studies; < 1.5mg/L; 7 / 7 (N = 2832); 0.05 (-0.36, 0.45) (p = 0.816)

Low risk of bias studies; < 2mg/L; 4 / 5 (N = 1632); -0.33 (-0.53, -0.13) (p = 0.001)

Low risk of bias studies; < 1.5mg/L; 3 / 3 (N = 879); -0.32 (-0.91, 0.26) (p = 0.276)
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-04-10 02:00:21+00:00
> A lot of our “value chain” is bullshit.

No it isn't, productivity has to increase, that's why we constantly get rid of jobs that do not provide much value. People want more money, and the only way we get there is with more productivity (doing jobs that make more money).

> If and when China becomes twice as big an economy as the US, much of our “edge” in marketing, finance, and services isn’t going to mean squat.

China gets to 2X our GDP by doing what we basically did in the 90s, so you are definitely right! They will have their own marketing, financing and services. The only difference is that they won't need to outsource manufacturing to China (well, they are outsourcing it a bit now, but also investing tons in automation).

> E.g. how much “GDP” will evaporate overnight when American universities no longer have the cachet that comes along with being the best universities in America?

I don't know what you are ranting about, but I get the feeling that if I did know what you were saying here I would probably agree with you.
by setheron | 2025-04-10 02:00:50+00:00
Professionally for 10 years ? I would like to hear more.

I remember Target funded some earlier Nix work like lorri.

Interestingly, I found operating at this level to have been a necessity if I wanted to fix or write a derivation. Otherwise I would face random errors and be left clueless as to what the problem was.

Writing a derivation builder (nix pill) was illuminating.
by mdaniel | 2025-04-10 02:01:49+00:00
I draw attention to the fact that what's obvious to you isn't obvious to folks who haven't been thinking about this game and it's mechanics for as long as you have. That's why writing good instructions [for anything] is so important: you're in the best position to know what's expected by the game. What makes that process tricky is that it can be very hard to remember what it's like to be a new user and write for them but with the benefit of your expertise
by crazygringo | 2025-04-10 02:01:59+00:00
> That evidence would not prove what I said because as you stated, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

That's my point. The tiny number of people you can identify just got lucky.

> The smartest people understand this and they can accurately predict his moves.

No they can't. You can't predict the behavior of someone who isn't sane, as you put it. Their behavior is random and impulsive, not predictable.

People who predicted tariffs at these levels aren't smarter. Just "lucky". Or maybe not even, since during our exchange, Trump has suddenly and unpredictably rolled back most of the tariffs...
by fn-mote | 2025-04-10 02:03:03+00:00
> had to award them 0s for assignments, which was heartbreaking

You should feel nothing. They knew they were cheating. They didn't give a crap about you.

Frankly, I would love to have people failing assignments they can't explain even if they did NOT use "AI" to cheat on them. We don't need more meaningless degrees. Make the grades and the degrees mean something, somehow.
by pjscott | 2025-04-10 02:03:23+00:00
This depends on the implementation of the regex engine; most are potentially superlinear in time, since that’s the easiest way of doing it, and quite fast until suddenly it isn’t. I always check the algorithm being used before I use regular expressions in production. I was surprised how many use a recursive descent strategy!

(Also, BTW, you can deal with the exponential space issue by using an NFA instead of a DFA – it’s slower that way, but the memory space required is reliably linearly proportional to the size of the regex.)
by 1024core | 2025-04-10 02:03:32+00:00
> 3 hours before he announced easing tariffs, Trump tweeted that it's a good time to buy stocks. If he gave someone insider information, they could use that tweet as a cover.

Got a link to the tweet? I don't have a Twitter account.

Edit: apparently it is true, and it is on Truth social. Someone sent me a screenshot.

To the downvoters: what is wrong with you? It was an honest question.
by dkersten | 2025-04-10 02:04:20+00:00
”I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, build a car, build a toaster, design a transistor, make an ASIC, or write an OS. I do know how to write a web site.”

Sure. But somebody has to know these things. For many jobs, knowing these things isn’t beneficial, but for others it is.

Sure, you might be able to get a job slinging AI code to produce CRUD apps or whatever. But since that’s the easy thing, you’re going to have a hard time standing out from the pack. Yet we will still need people who understand the concepts at a deeper level, to fix the AI messes or to build the complex systems AI can’t, or the systems that are too critical to rely on AI, or the ones that are too regulated. Being able to do those thing, or to just better understand what the AI is doing to get better more effective results, that will be more valuable than just blindly leaning on AI, and it will remain valuable for a while yet.

Maybe some day the AI can do everything, including ASICs and growing crops, but it’s got a long way to go still.
by pests | 2025-04-10 02:04:25+00:00
How are they both describing the remote procedures and parameters tho? In order for the LLM to use a tool it needs to know its name and arguments. There has to be some kind of spec, in some or format, for it to use.

An existing Swagger/OpenAPI spec is not sufficient. You want to limit options and make it easy for an LLM to call your tool to accomplish goals. The complete API surface of your application might not be appropriate. It might be too low level or require too many orchestration steps to do anything useful.

A lot of existing API's require making additional calls using the results of previous calls. GET /users to get a list of ids. Then repeatedly call GET users/$id to get the data. In a MCP world you would provide a get-users tool that would do all this behind the scenes and also impose any privacy/security/auth restrictions before handing this over to an LLM.

We see similar existing systems like GraphQL which provides a fully hydrated resultset in one call. Tons of API's like Stripe (IIRC) that provide a &hydrate= parameter to specific which relations to include full details in-line.

I do agree MCP is overhyped and might not be using best principles but I do see why its going off in its own land. It might be better suited over different protocols or transports or encodings or file formats but it seems to at least work so until something better comes along we are probably stuck with it.
by forgetfreeman | 2025-04-10 02:04:55+00:00
"And I know economics well, and class 101 is free markets and specialization."

Then something must have changed with the introduction texts at some point because the one I had to slog through covered the concept of manufactured goods being inherently more valuable shortly after defining basic terms like "product", "value", and "manufactured goods". Literally 2nd chapter in the book.

"Who wants to return to an economy of decades ago?"

Literally everyone who works for a living making shit or who are stuck in bullshit service industry McJobs that aren't paying the bills. Also every small business owner in the country, although admittedly not all of them realize it.

"The US was much poorer then."

The oligarch class was certainly much poorer then, the same can't be said for the other 99.9% of the population.

"Services are much easier on people physically"

You might want to look into the long term health effects of poverty and stress before you float that statement. Additionally "I'm too soft to actually work" only becomes a compelling argument when you can prove the condition applies to a simple majority of working age Americans. Good luck with that.
by jeswin | 2025-04-10 02:05:28+00:00
Well, the contrarian opinion is that this (whatever he did) is a good thing - whether decentralisation happens into the US, Europe or wherever. It's one thing to recognise the problem, and another to attempt to change an uncomfortable status quo.

Every other approach attempted to date has been milder, and hasn't worked. But we'll see if he sticks to it.
by ctrlp | 2025-04-10 02:06:42+00:00
I would assume the opposite. People use it to sound dumb, not smart, so as to sound non-threatening, but also so as to sound non-assertive. It's used to defuse potential conflict or perceived disagreeableness. Generally the affect of a late-stage conflict-adverse institutionalism that punishes assertive or dominant behaviors. Uptalk is the "I'm showing my belly" of English affects.
by jumploops | 2025-04-10 02:06:53+00:00
This is awesome.

My wife built a matching game[0] for our toddler, because she doesn't like the flashy content and addictive nature of the games on the app store (and neither do I!)

It's very simple, but it's exactly what she envisioned.

Disclaimer: I work on the vibe code tool she built this with.

[0]https://toddler-matching-game.magicloops.app
by layer8 | 2025-04-10 02:07:05+00:00
Whenever I write a regex, I end up with a comments roughly ten times longer than the regex. That being said, regular expressions are often the right tool for the job (i.e. parsing a regular language, as opposed to a context-free language or whatever), just the syntax becomes unreadable rather quickly. I’m sure you could build a nicer regular-expression syntax in Haskell.
by vitorgrs | 2025-04-10 02:07:13+00:00
You actually talked about a point that I think most people forget. One thing is Japan or Korea being super good in tech.

Another thing is when you basically have 10 Japan or 20 South Korea, which is what China is with the 1bi population.

Which means not that they will have a lot of consumers, but way more competitive companies in general (if they continue growing as is).
by jlaternman | 2025-04-10 02:08:33+00:00
“We can change it so we and many other life forms can't live here any more but it will still be a planet and there will most likely still be some form of life here for millions of years to come.“

When people talk of destroying the planet, they do not mean obliterating its mass in a Death Star-like way. They’re just talking about destroying its ability to sustain life, and it seems clear we have the potential to trigger that change. It’s a small planet, and even if we had no knowledge of it, looking around in the universe suggests its ecosystems and atmosphere are fragile and can’t be taken for granted.
by pasttense01 | 2025-04-10 02:08:35+00:00
No. In rural areas dollar stores are the cheapest around. I guess you are not familiar with small town prices. In urban areas dollar stores are more expensive than Walmarts--but there is something to be said for getting in and out of a store in 5 minutes vs 20 minutes in a supercenter. But a Dollar General is still going to be cheaper than Walgreens.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-04-10 02:08:56+00:00
BRICs were making plans to introduce their own reserve currency as an alternative to the USD. Trump once threatened 100% tariffs if they did.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/aggressive-tariffs-f...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-threatens-100-...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-02/south-afr...

These developments are going to be interesting.
by mauvehaus | 2025-04-10 02:10:04+00:00
It's amazing what you find in buildings old enough to have seen all generations of electrical standards.

The oldest part of my sister-in-law's place dates to the 1790's (I know: in America 100 years is a long time; in England 100 miles is a long way) and it has receptacles that are a never-standardized bastard union of NEMA 1-15 and 2-15, which means you can't be quite certain if you've got an ungrounded hot and a neutral for 120v or two hots for 240v. God only knows why they were ever manufactured. I've never looked at their panel, but I assume it's a horror show.

I've seen live cloth-insulated wire in older homes I've lived in, and found a mystery fuse box in a triple-decker in Boston. As far as I know, I've never lived anywhere with live knob and tube, but I've definitely had it abandoned-in-place.

My all-time favorite was the house I had with a five-gang box populated with switches. I don't need to add that the multi-location circuit wired through that box was wired wrong.
by fn-mote | 2025-04-10 02:10:29+00:00
You are neglecting to explain why your assignments themselves cannot be done with AI.

Also, this kind of fatuous response leaves out the skill building required - how do students acquire the skill of criticism or analysis? They're doing all of the easier work with ChatGPT until suddenly it doesn't work and they're standing on ... nothing ... unable to do anything.

That's the insidious effect of LLMs in education: as I read here recently "simultaneously raising the bar for the skill required at the entry level and lowering the amount of learning that occurs in the preparation phase (e.g., college)".
by hdjrudni | 2025-04-10 02:11:42+00:00
Ya'all are very strict in your definitions then. My definition is "does it feel laggy" or "do I have to walk away and come back when this thing is done".

Basically like 24 FPS or higher is real-time. Even that'd be laggy for a game but not unplayable. I choose this specifically because that's what movies typically use and they're very watchable.
by neilwilson | 2025-04-10 02:12:14+00:00
Particularly when they ignore the largest data set we already have - the state pensions.

They are a basic income within a fixed exchange rate area by age rather than location. There are trillions of data points across decades of provision. With compulsory retirement and changes removing compulsory retirement.

The results are clear. People tend to stop working once they receive it, even if they have the option to continue.

An inconvenient truth.

And the result is that the age the pension becomes available has to be pushed higher to sustain it. Therefore the alternative time uses are insufficiently productive to be of help overall.

If it was a viable proposition there should be a virtuous cascade driving the pension age down, not up.
by acdha | 2025-04-10 02:13:21+00:00
Not many companies have the margins to shrug off 10%, and if there isn’t a cheap domestic alternative everyone in the market will be raising prices.

Take coffee, tea, or chocolate: Americans buy a ton of those, there’s almost no domestic production, and most of the market lives on tight margins. Trump’s tax hike means that the average consumer’s choices devolve to paying more or buying less.
by antasvara | 2025-04-10 02:14:23+00:00
I'm not saying that our ancestors were wrong. Hell, I live in a house that was originally built under similar conditions.

That being said, buildings collapse a lot less frequently these days. House fires happen at a lower rate. Insulation was either nonexistent or present in much lower quantities.

I guess the point I'm making is that the lesson here shouldn't be "we used to make our houses, why don't we go back to that?" It also shouldn't be "we should leave every task to a specialist."

Know how to maintain and fix the things around your house that are broken. You don't need a plumber to replace the flush valve on your toilet. But maybe don't try to replace a load-bearing joist in your house unless you know what you're doing? The people building their own homes weren't engineers, but they had a lot more carpentry experience than (I assume) you and I.
by tasn | 2025-04-10 02:15:43+00:00
I used to live in the UK (also lived in the US and Europe), and I HATE the UK plugs. They are too large and too complex (fuse in every plug, this silly shutter, etc).

European plugs (especially German style) are far superior, and European two pin plugs never fall off sockets. That is only a problem with US plugs.
by photochemsyn | 2025-04-10 02:16:01+00:00
I'm looking forward to the next installment on this subject from Anthropic, namely "How University Teachers Use Claude".

How many teachers are offloading their teaching duties onto LLMs? Are they reading essays and annotating them by hand? If everything is submitted electronically, why not just dump 30 or 50 papers into a LLM queue for analysis, suggested comments for improvement, etc. while the instructor gets back to the research they care about? Is this 'cheating' too?

Then there's the use of LLMs to generate problem sets, test those problem sets for accuracy, come up with interesting essay questions and so on.

I think the only real solution will be to go back to in-person instruction with handwritten problem-solving and essay-writing in class with no electronic devices allowed. This is much more demanding of both the teachers and the students, but if the goal is quality educational programs, then that's what it will take.
by pveierland | 2025-04-10 02:16:03+00:00
Nix derivations are pretty neat!

I've been building a Nix store navigator for MyNixOS v2. It can help you get a feel for how derivations are connected in Nix:

https://v2.mynixos.com/nix/store/lsk1c4v03y4lmpxdcwal99nm5nw...

PS: The controls to the upper right can be used to limit what is downloaded.
by jfarina | 2025-04-10 02:18:52+00:00
If they can perform well without reviewing the material, that's a problem with either the performance measure or the material.

And not watching lectures is not the same as not reviewing the material. I generally prefer textbooks and working through proofs or practice problems by hand. If I listen to someone describe something technical I zone out too quickly. The only exception seems to be if I'm able to work ahead enough that the lecture feels like review. Then I'm able to engage.
by refurb | 2025-04-10 02:20:23+00:00
That future is far, far off.

China’s per capita GDP is 1/7th that of the US.

To match the US GDP per capita would require China growing at 10%/yr for 35 years (while the US grows at 3-4% per year).

Thats 35 years of phenomenal growth, with no recessions, no “slow” years of only 5% growth (like the past 3 years). Assume an average of 7% growth (and US 3%) and now it takes 50 years to match the US per capita GDP.

This is why GDP growth of 5% is regarded as “bad” in China. They need double that.

And China needs to do this all the while having massive debt overhang, a world moving away from free trade (which their economy is highly dependent on) and a shrinking and rapidly aging population (by 2050 it will be 1 worker per retiree).

I don’t have a crystal ball, so who knows, but suffice to say if things stay relatively the same it’s going to be 2060-2070 before China is as rich as the US on a per capita basis.
by gerdesj | 2025-04-10 02:20:44+00:00
Have you actually ever stepped on one?

If you have, then why was it unplugged? A plug should be plugged in (in which case it is safe) or it is superfluous.

I've managed to struggle through to the age of 54 without treading on one of our thrusting tri-pronged plugs. It is surprisingly easy to avoid stepping on them.