MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TulliusCicero | 2025-04-20 17:18:34+00:00
> Instead, local money is now lavished on centrist and right-wing pressure groups — such as GrowSF, Abundant SF, Together SF, and Neighbors for a Better San Francisco — which have in the past four years fundraised over $50 million from conservative tech and real-estate elites.

Probably notable that this happened because the left wing managed to fuck things up so badly in its management of the city. For example:

* 8,323 homeless people in the city - https://www.sf.gov/data--homeless-population

* 846m homelessness budget for FY 2024-2025 - https://www.sf.gov/reports--september-2024--hsh-budget-fisca...

So, a tiny bit over $100k USD per homeless person and they're still not all sheltered (you can see the sheltered vs unsheltered breakdown in the first link). That's an incredible amount of money to not house people.

Of course, SF's famously anti-build-anything processes[1] and culture probably don't help when you're trying to provide housing, but ostensibly 'progressive' people are a big part of that unfortunately[2].

1 - https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/state-report-slams...

2 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00941...
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-04-20 17:18:43+00:00
> Even though hallucination levels have been going down with every generation.

Gonna need a BIG citation on that one, chief.

> Even though every test and benchmark we can come up with, LLMs do better with every generation.

Has it occurred to you the people making the tests and benchmarks are, more often than not, the same people making the LLM? Like yeah if I'm given carte blanche to make my own test cases and I'm accountable to no one and nothing else, my output quality would be steadily going up too.

The other day I tried asking Copilot for a good framework for accomplishing a task, and it made one up. I tried the query again, more specifically, and it referred me to a framework in another language. And yes, I specified.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-04-20 17:19:45+00:00
Somewhat related to this. What would recommend for a young kid 5 and up to get start in today's robotics. The issue today seems more like there is a lot.. which is kinda opposite to what when I was growing up ( if it existed in toy form, it was prohibitively expensive at best ).
by hn_acker | 2025-04-20 17:22:14+00:00
And I find the article's claims hard to believe. According to the American Library Association, which tracks attempts to ban books from libraries [1]:

> The most common justifications for censorship provided by complainants were false claims of illegal obscenity for minors; inclusion of LGBTQIA+ characters or themes; and covering topics of race, racism, equity, and social justice.

[1] https://www.ala.org/news/2025/04/american-library-associatio...
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-04-20 17:22:21+00:00
> Voluntary dystopia is the well find ourselves in, and as we drown, we’re a herd that lumbers on because algorithms own us. So, here’s a template to stand out for your own sanity:

> [...]

> Read longform — Feynman technique what you read with friends, provoke conversations in your friends’ whatsapp groups

Whatsapp groups? The author just spent an entire essay arguing against social media, and then says that we ought to prioritize interacting with people over social media? I don't think that this was well-considered.

It's easy to live life without social media, and only a little bit harder to live without a smartphone. Worth attempting, in any case.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-04-20 17:22:57+00:00
There is a small part of that wonders if it is by design given how much it exposes a person to the inner workings of the things they use daily, but then I bring myself back to reality. I sincerely doubt now there is a real long term plan at work here. At best it is all situational and reactive ( tactical, maybe, but not strategic thinking at work ).
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-04-20 17:23:45+00:00
Also, I was just watching brodie robertson video about how United Nations has this random search page of unesco which actually has anubis.

Crazy how I remember the HN post where anubis's blog post was first made. Though, I always thought it was a bit funny with anime and it was made by frustration of (I think AWS? AI scrapers who won't follow general rules and it was constantly giving requests to his git server and it actually made his git server down I guess??) I didn't expect it to blow up to ... UN.
by wavemode | 2025-04-20 17:24:55+00:00
The argument I mentioned:

> I don't buy the argument that it is some sort of new or esoteric thing for a compiler to allow this

Where I got it from:

> there are very few language that do not see software design as being hierarchical

> Circular references in languages that are hierarchical end up being very awkward.

> There are a small handful of languages that reject all things hierarchical, including the filesystem, but they are few and far between and most probably have never heard of them and they certainly aren't what you are going to find in production

My point being that it is not "awkward" at all for a language to allow circular references between modules. It is only awkward in languages that make it awkward (like Go does). In C (a language over 50 years old) and Java (one of the most widely used languages in the world) it's the most straightforward and natural thing in the world. So it's certainly not correct to say that it is "awkward" in all languages except ones nobody has ever heard of (aka "esoteric", the term I used in my comment).

So yeah I'm still not fully following how I failed to address your comment, or attacked a strawman. Based on what you're saying now, it's clear that you feel I have misunderstood the point you were trying to make. But I can say that it certainly was not based on a single sentence, or a lack of reading on my part. Probably just a confusion of terminology.

So, what did you actually mean?
by Jensson | 2025-04-20 17:25:08+00:00
> generally assume the AI isn't misreading, rather that it assumes you couldn't give it the riddle correctly, but it has seen it already.

LLMs doesn't assume, its a text completer. It sees something that looks almost like a well known problem and it will complete with that well known problem, its a problem specific to being a text completer that is hard to get around.
by svisa | 2025-04-20 17:25:12+00:00
Hi fellow figure skaters , we started an event that fits this venn diagram in 2020. Our organization (SVISA) was started by a group of techies in the SF Bay area to save local ice rinks. Here's some more info on our STEM Ice event & group:

www.robotsonice.org

www.sv-isa.org

If this interests you, join our mailing list, swing by, or dm me!
by 999900000999 | 2025-04-20 17:25:45+00:00
Sounds like it would attract a bunch of really strange people. I know as an adult I wouldn't want to live with a bunch of strangers so I can work on my app.

Think about it for a second, for one you're excluding anyone who has a family. This means that you're looking at inexperienced people, and furthermore they'd have to not put too much value on their own company. Why would I give up any of my equity for the equivalent of at most $4,500 in rent.

London is also a really bad choice for this type of thing due to cost of living. My plain right now is to go to a cheap Asian or Latin American country where I can live off 2k a month or so. Then work solo on my ideas and prototypes.

Probably not gonna turn into anything though.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-04-20 17:25:47+00:00
It was made for Radio Shack by Tomy, who made lots of battery operated toys in that era that were very complex and clever amalgamations of plastic parts. My sister had Tomy's 'Dream Dancer', which was obnoxiously loud, though you don't see that in the advertisements. She never got a second set of batteries once the Christmas day set gave out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K8ZP1pnP78
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-04-20 17:26:44+00:00
It is not just a question of popularity. Post 9/11 skillsets around chemical ( or other scary looking domains ) became vilified within general populace and then that vilification was normalized with shows like 24 ( which is a great show... it just sucks that people are unable to separate the world it presents from their world ). It does not help with the advent of red flag laws, where neighbors can effectively call cops on you if they see something that bothers them..
by simonw | 2025-04-20 17:27:43+00:00
Coining "Jagged AGI" to work around the fact that nobody agrees on a definition for AGI is a clever piece of writing:

> In some tasks, AI is unreliable. In others, it is superhuman. You could, of course, say the same thing about calculators, but it is also clear that AI is different. It is already demonstrating general capabilities and performing a wide range of intellectual tasks, including those that it is not specifically trained on. Does that mean that o3 and Gemini 2.5 are AGI? Given the definitional problems, I really don’t know, but I do think they can be credibly seen as a form of “Jagged AGI” - superhuman in enough areas to result in real changes to how we work and live, but also unreliable enough that human expertise is often needed to figure out where AI works and where it doesn’t.
by abetusk | 2025-04-20 17:29:11+00:00
A question I hadn't even thought to ask, thanks.

So, basically, the eigenfunctions of the Fourier transform are Hermite polynomials times a Gaussian [0] [1].

[0] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/728670/functions-th...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermite_polynomials#Hermite_fu...
by transcriptase | 2025-04-20 17:29:18+00:00
When solving a problem becomes a massive interconnected industry of NGOs who never have to show progress, and in fact get more funding the worse the problem gets, there’s little incentive to solve the problem.

The rational and effective solutions are decried as “punitive conditionality”, “gatekeeping”, “pathologizing”, “institutional violence” etc.

Much easier to pretend that doing more of the same ineffective things will magically start working someday and perpetually blame lack of funding.
by k2xl | 2025-04-20 17:29:27+00:00
There is a similar issue with image and video generation. Asking the AI to "Generate an image of a man holding a pencil with his left hand" or "Generate a clock showing the time 5 minutes past 6 o'clock" often fail due to so many images in the training set being similar (almost all clock images on show 10:10 (https://generativeai.pub/in-the-ai-art-world-the-time-is-alm...)
by purplehat_ | 2025-04-20 17:29:32+00:00
Remarkably, there isn’t a way to solve most integrals symbolically. We say that the set of “elementary functions”, i.e. ordinary looking symbolic functions, is not closed under integration. Even if you try to add special functions in you cannot feasibly make it closed under integration. I’ll try to write something more detailed later but in the meantime you should look up Liouville’s theorem and non-elementary antiderivatives.
by fsmv | 2025-04-20 17:31:07+00:00
It's not AGI because it still doesn't understand anything. It can only tell you things that can be found on the internet. These "jagged" results expose the truth that these models have near 0 intelligence.

It is not a simple matter of patching the rough edges. We are fundamentally not using an architecture that is capable of intelligence.

Personally the first time I tried deep research on a real topic it was disastrously incorrect on a key point.
by paddw | 2025-04-20 17:31:36+00:00
it claims to be open source because the weights are freely available, and whether or not that conforms to the definition some consortium of folks cooked up for what "Open Source" means, anyone who can put aside their feelings of ire for Meta for 2 seconds can tell that making the weights available is meaningfully different than keeping them locked up, and exposes most of the value to the public to use, for free.
by mystraline | 2025-04-20 17:32:13+00:00
Normally this would have been being laid off or fired, and you'd get unemployment.

But because the countries laws benefit the excessively rich, and the poor peoples' hard work to make the rich richer, means that these people have 0 protections whatsoever.

They are the second lowest economic class, the "can't even get W2 work". The lowest is 'homeless', who are already considered thrown away, societally speaking.
by ryao | 2025-04-20 17:33:07+00:00
I am #4 here:

https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/graphs/contributors

I would have preferred to see what would have been generated without my guidance, but since you asked:

* Explanations of how each sub-component is organized and works would be useful.

* Explanations of the modern disk format (an updated ZFS disk format specification) would be useful.

* Explanations of how the more complex features are implemented (e.g. encryption, raid-z expansion, draid) would be interesting.

Basically, making guides that aid development by avoiding a need to read everything line by line would be useful (the ZFS disk format specification, while old, is an excellent example of this). I have spent years doing ZFS development, and there are parts of ZFS codebase that I do not yet understand. This is true for practically all contributors. Having guides that avoid the need for developers to learn the hard way would be useful. Certain historical bugs might have been avoided had we had such guides.

As for the others, LLVM could use improved documentation on how to make plugins. A guide to the various optimization passes would also be useful. Then there is the architecture in general which would be nice to have documented. Documentation for various esoteric features of both FreeBSD and Linux would be useful. I could continue, but I the whole point of having a LLM do this sort of work is to avoid needing myself or someone else to spend time thinking about these things.
by pikwip | 2025-04-20 17:33:23+00:00
This one has a few satisfying phases: https://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/#5,3,4,2,2,0,2,1,...

a short film: https://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/#7,3,5,2,0,6,2,1,...

long time to reach NESS (if it does at all): https://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/#7,3,3,1,0,0,2,3,...

Cool glyphs: https://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/#4,4,0,2,1,3,1,0,...
by 9rx | 2025-04-20 17:33:23+00:00
> Where I got it from:

Which must mean that you only read the first sentence and dreamt up the rest, or didn't read it at all, else you'd know there was nothing said about circular imports being esoteric. In fact, the comment you originally replied to wouldn't work if they were esoteric.

> It is only awkward in languages that make it awkward (like Go does).

How could it be awkward in Go? It doesn't support circular references. It cannot be awkward – it isn't possible at all! This was already told in earlier comments, so how did you manage to get here not knowing that other than by not reading the comments?
by darshings | 2025-04-20 17:33:23+00:00
As an engineering manager, I feel pretty strongly that leadership should be cultivating a culture where they’re inviting people to challenge strategy/tactics, and their people feel comfortable challenging them. Part of that is recognizing the power dynamics at play, and consciously making room for other people to contribute to decisions. Realistically sometimes leaders have to take decisive action that doesn’t take into account all of the input they would ideally have received if the time was there, but in general I think one of the most important qualities of a leader is knowing when to shut up and let your team take the reigns.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-20 17:34:17+00:00
The thing is it doesn’t get across to the bad offenders. My train has adverts imploring you to not graffiti. I bet that has swayed literally zero people to stop marking up the traincar. And yet, someone had to make the useless sign, someone had to print it, someone had to install it on all the trains, and then someone has to replace it when that sign is then defaced.
by svg7 | 2025-04-20 17:35:35+00:00
> Yet I’m left wondering if ordinary San Franciscans will benefit from the boom, or if the city's newfound wealth will remain concentrated among an increasingly tiny class of digital oligarchs and venture capitalists

Thousands of engineers make a lot of money. I think writers like the author sometimes don't realize how much money the median senior engineer makes at Big Tech Of course, most of these said engineers probably came over from a different country, so not sure if this ticks the box for "ordinary San Franciscans"
by kkukshtel | 2025-04-20 17:35:59+00:00
I really liked Cline until I tried Claude Code. CC being sort of "closer to the metal" in terms of API access to Claude and effectivelly no mediating interface really introduced a major philosophical change in how I think about AI coding.

For Cline though, I think what it got right is realizing you can use the VS Code API and smart prompting in order to basically bootstrap an "agentic" tool. Cursor and Windsurf I think had these features a bit ago, but were also sort of hamstrung at the time by the models themselves. Cline benefited from smart prompting by its developers in confluence with model advances, making the value prop be really murky as to why I would use something like Cursor/Windsurf. However, VS Code now directly supports Cline-type behavior without Cline [0] so IMO I think a lot of these tools that are basicaly glamorized prompt wrappers aren't long for the world.

[0] https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilo...
by nickslaughter02 | 2025-04-20 17:37:17+00:00
> in a lot of shitty countries

In December 2024 all UN member countries voted in favor of "UN Cybercrime Treaty" which binds signatories to adopt a legislation to force you to give cops your passwords and other credentials.

https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n24/426/74/pdf/n24426...
by hbrav | 2025-04-20 17:38:01+00:00
Yeh, the quoted commentary is hyperbole. My homeland (the UK) has such a law. I do think that law isn't great. But my country isn't shitty, and it's certainly a democracy.

If we start being perfectionist, we pretend there's no difference between most nations in the rights their citizens have. And that's not even remotely true.
by hakimihsan | 2025-04-20 17:38:08+00:00
Problem: We realize that creating custom AI even for personal and internal use is still painful. It’s hard, time-consuming, and requires technical effort to build, prompt, deploy, and connect with relevant knowledge manually.

Solution: We let worker to create ready-to-use custom AI in seconds with no code to supercharge their productivity.

Insight: The real bottleneck isn’t AI capability, it’s the friction of building and deploying useful, custom, repeatable AI workflows. Prompt engineering is the new programming, and people need a faster, easier way to productize it.
by swalling | 2025-04-20 17:38:31+00:00
Lumping centrists who want to solve intractable livability problems with rich right-wing libertarians is the road to failure. Not everyone who wants to stop throwing mountains of money at nonprofits and ineffectual, corrupt city officials is a Peter Thiel/Elon Musk fascist. The more that the left continues to force ideological purity tests like this, the more it will fail.

It also seems silly to move to a city internationally known for a specific influential industry and then lament that influence. If you hate entertainment industry people, don’t live in LA. If you hate commercial fishing, don’t live in Dutch Harbor. You’re at least 10-20 years late to fight tech being influential in SF.

There are a lot of places to live in this world. Vote with your feet. Conservatives certainly have, migrating en masse to Texas, Florida, Idaho. If you want to see what a place that has actually swung hard right looks like, it’s not SF where the city government is still captured wholly by Democrats and the Board of Supervisors has anti-development NIMBYs and members of the Democratic Socialists of America.
by TulliusCicero | 2025-04-20 17:38:36+00:00
> Both the city’s public school system and transit systems are crumbling and underfunded, and its housing and homelessness crises remain existential.

Some quick googling indicates that SF has something like 3x the per capita city budget as San Jose, a city in the same metro area with similar average rent (according to Zillow). If its city departments manage to still be underfunded in spite of that, something is deeply wrong.
by AkshayS96 | 2025-04-20 17:39:07+00:00
Hey everyone!

I’m working on a new idea for a SaaS that helps small startups support and promote each other. The concept is simple:

You pay a small fee to show ads for your startup on other small startup websites. In return, your site can also host ads from other small startups (optional, of course). Think of it as an affordable and mutually beneficial way to get visibility without going through big ad platforms like Google or Meta.

This is not a traditional ad network — it’s more like a community-driven cross-promotion platform with simple controls, transparent pricing, and startup-friendly targeting.

I’m currently building the MVP and would love some early feedback!

If this sounds interesting, you can sign up for the waitlist here: [your waitlist link] I’d really appreciate your thoughts — would you use something like this? What features would you expect or want?

Thanks in advance!
by euroderf | 2025-04-20 17:39:25+00:00
> In my opinion, not allowing circular dependencies is a great design choice for building large programs.

I have a hobby project with maybe 20 packages involved. Circular dependencies were getting harder and harder to solve.

What worked in this situation was to separate the whole hairball into two layers. The packages in the app layer could import packages from the utilities layer, but not vice-versa.

This introduced enough structure to simplify the removal of circularities and prevent new outbreaks.