MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by filoleg | 2025-04-10 17:34:26+00:00
> I can't claim to have ever used gemini, but last I checked it still can't cite sources, which would at least assist with validation.

Yes, it can cite sources, just like any other major LLM service out there. Gemini, Claude, Deepseek, and ChatGPT are the ones I personally validated this with, but I bet other major LLM services can do so as well.

Just tested this using Gemini with “Is fluoride good for teeth? Cite sources for any of the claims” prompt, and it listed every claim as a bullet point accompanied by the corresponding source. The sources were links to specific pages addressing the claims from CDC, Cleveland Clinic, John Hopkins, and NIDCR. I clicked on each of the links to verify that they were corroborating what Gemini response was saying, and they were.

In fact, it would more often than not include sources even without me explicitly asking for sources.
by pizza | 2025-04-10 17:34:38+00:00
But isn't it actually more like, COBOL lets you talk in COBOL-ese (which is kinda stilted), whereas LLMs let you talk in LLM-ese (which gets a lot closer to actual language)? And then since the skill cap on language is basically infinite, that this becomes a question of how good you are at saying what you want - to the extent it intersects with what the LLM can do.
by dastbe | 2025-04-10 17:34:51+00:00
?

s3: https://aws.amazon.com/pm/serv-s3

s3 express: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/express-one-zone/

cross-region replication: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/replic...
Show HN: chart2txt, LLM-readable astrology charts
by Nav_Panel | 2025-04-10 17:35:12+00:00
Working on a larger astrology project, I realized there's no good way to get text descriptions of an astrology chart in a form designed for LLMs. Astro.com can generate descriptions, but it's unintuitive.

I decided to build a small js library that could handle the conversion: https://github.com/simpolism/chart2txt -- the chart2txt site was designed as a usage example.

In working on the example, I also realized there was no simple API that outputs basic astrology data (i.e. convert a birth time + place into planet + ascendant positions). So, I built that too to support the example app, using the standard swiss ephemeris library: https://github.com/simpolism/simple-astro-api

Here's an example prompt once you have your chart text: "In a paragraph or two that doesn't reference specific planets or astrological jargon, synthesize the astrology chart below to explain the personality of the native:"

Then, you can ask further questions. It's also fun to try against different LLMs and see how the results change! My overall thesis is that astrology is a symbolic language, so a chart reading is not dissimilar from a translation, and thus we should expect LLMs to be pretty good at it. I don't have much interest in debating whether astrology is "real" or "true", though, as all we're doing here is a play of historical symbols.

Hope you enjoy! Let me know about any bugs, issues, feature requests, etc!
by mauvehaus | 2025-04-10 17:35:38+00:00
The Co-op food stores in Hanover and Lebanon NH did a March madness cheese bracket. We hosted a small bracket party with a selection of unfamiliar cheeses for friends to try while filling out our brackets.

It was weirdly fancy (eating good cheese), and weirdly not (I don't think of March madness brackets as a particularly refined thing). It was all delicious though!
by 5555624 | 2025-04-10 17:35:44+00:00
In Virginia, it;s the opposite -- you need to request a REAL ID. "A REAL ID is an optional, upgraded version of your driver’s license or ID card that has a star in the right corner. ... Since REAL ID is optional in Virginia, you may not need one if you already have another federally accepted form of ID, like a valid U.S. passport or military ID, or don’t travel by plane."
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-04-10 17:36:55+00:00
I think the lessons people most fail to learn concern why someone like Trump could be elected into office in the first place. It's easy to sigh with contempt at the current leadership (and there is plenty to detest), but it is more difficult to examine the failures of the political establishment, to examine the failures of the liberal order, and to examine how these failures create a situation that allows for the proverbial poison that lurks in the mud to hatch out. It is especially difficult for such an establishment to do so as that would require self-criticism. Note that I am not legitimizing the poison, but as often happens, excesses and errors committed in one direction often produce excesses and errors in the other, as if to counterbalance. It doesn't mean all poison is the product of an opposing poison. There is no legitimacy to Hitler (who was driven by and preyed on German narcissism and insecurity, as well as economic factors) or Stalin (who preyed on class envy).

And it is also lazy to put all reaction to these failures into the same bucket. MAGA is not the same as much of what falls under "postliberalism"[0]. There are serious thinkers who are responding, within a broader tradition, to the collapse of the liberal order by examining its causes and looking at possible exits from the situation.

[0] https://www.postliberalorder.com/
by famouswaffles | 2025-04-10 17:37:03+00:00
>which is exactly what you'd expect for a sound set of defeasible relations.

This is a leap. While a complex system of rules might coincidentally produce behavior that looks statistically optimal in some scenarios, the paper (Ernst & Banks) argues that the mechanism itself operates according to statistical principles (MLE), not just that the outcome happens to look that way.

Moreover, it's highly unlikely, bordering on impossible, to reduce the situations the brain deals with even on a daily basis into a set of defeasible statements.

Example: Recognizing a "Dog"

Defeasible Attempt: is_dog(X) :- has_four_legs(X), has_tail(X), barks(X), not is_cat(X), not is_fox(X), not is_robot_dog(X).

is_dog(X) :- has_four_legs(X), wags_tail(X), is_friendly_to_humans(X), not is_wolf(X).

How do you define barks(X) (what about whimpers, growls? What about a dog that doesn't bark?)? How do you handle breeds that look very different (Chihuahua vs. Great Dane)? How do you handle seeing only part of the animal? How do you represent the overall visual gestalt? The number of rules and exceptions quickly becomes vast and brittle.

Ultimately, the proof as they say, is in the pudding. By the way, the CyC we are all talking about here is non-monotonic. https://www.cyc.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/First-Orderiz...

If you've tried something for decades and it's not working, and it doesn't even look like it's working and experiments with the brain suggest probabilistic inference and probabilistic inference machines work much better than the alternatives ever did, you have to face the music.
by AndrewStephens | 2025-04-10 17:37:12+00:00
Good question, it is not bad to enjoy attention for a project you worked on.

But I feel that, if unchecked, that same impulse can lead to deliberately doing projects specifically for validation which leads to low quality click-bait and vapid self-promotion. I think a healthy indifference for the public at large is a good thing.

That is one of the reasons I got rid of detailed, real-time analytics in favor of a simple hit counter (the other is privacy). If I really stuck to my principles I wouldn't even do that but I am a hypocrite.
by colordrops | 2025-04-10 17:37:32+00:00
If you are on NixOS for your home server, take a look at my project that does most of the work for you. Bundles router, DDNS, firewall, vpn, ad blocking, and all the apps into a single integrated service if your machine has two ethernet ports. Even if you don't use it directly, the services are broken out into modules which can be referenced for your own setup:

https://homefree.host
by pogue | 2025-04-10 17:37:37+00:00
There are A LOT of people that are extremely anti-AI that I speak to frequently. One thing you didn't mention in your article is the power consumption used by AI and that's a very valid concern as well.

I think many people are very turned off by the incessant hype being pushed by so many companies for AI. It seems like every company needs to include those two letters in whatever next product they release on the market to increase interest in it from both investors and some consumers alike.

But there's definitely a large section of the population that are highly skeptical about it in general and are very cognizant of the constant hype and it's starting to turn a lot of people away from it.

The other main thing is the slop [1] people see on social media and elsewhere. People can immediately tell an AI image from a non-AI one (at least currently, I'm sure that will change as it advances). For many folks, it demonstrates laziness and even theft from other human artists, based on what they've read and understand from it. On Bluesky, for example, there is a popular community labeler that people subscribe to that hides accounts that post or have posted AI images, have AI generated profile pictures and etc.

At this point, I'm quite convinced that certain companies could even benefit from including that they don't use AI in their marketing materials and would be successful for standing that ground.

I'm not anti-AI. I think it's quite interesting and has some very valid use cases. I'm sure many people use it in secret and tell other people they're against it. An interesting discussion I remember seeing from Twitter is a user said that there would be some sort of digital divide in the future for people who use technology but are AI "luddites" and refuse to use it. He referred to them as the "digital Amish".

Good article though!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop
by threatofrain | 2025-04-10 17:37:47+00:00
It's the reverse direction which always warrants us fulfilling a causal chain. If we see something then we should be able to talk about it, even if there's an army of meta-commentators producing downstream effects. For example, we should be able to talk about an ongoing bank run even if it tilts the outcome, just as we should be able to talk about the plain observations of race in front of our faces.
by kstenerud | 2025-04-10 17:38:37+00:00
Answer: No.

Why? Because the moment you suffer catastrophic wealth destruction, you're fucked for life, with the tax based on your "to-date" income hanging around your neck like an albatross.

Imagine a 6-figure earner reduced to flipping burgers, and now sentenced to paying a punishing chunk of their $1000 a month to the taxman for the rest of their lives.
by mentalgear | 2025-04-10 17:38:43+00:00
To assess the env impact, I think we need to look a bit further:

While the single query might have become more efficient, we would also have to relate this to the increased volume of overall queries. E.g in the last few years, how many more users, and queries per user were requested.

My feeling is that it's Jevons paradox all over.
by manter | 2025-04-10 17:38:53+00:00
I think D1 actually requires multiple round trips, so the higher figures start to make some kind of sense.

I read a blog post about this but can't find it now. I did find this [release note](https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/platform/release-notes/...) though.

They describe removing _at least_ two round trips back to the DC hosting the D1 instance.
by pizza | 2025-04-10 17:39:15+00:00
My guess: by measuring the minimality of the amount of energy spent restoring neuron depolarization capability by way of efficient clearance of metabolic waste (and wider network adaptivity) of thalamo-cortical circuits. The hypothesis being: 'for a neuron to struggle to repolarize = thinking feels and works bad'

How to improve it? Good hydration, good vascular system architecture, good sleep, good hemodynamics, low tension, low inflammation, good glymphatic drainage during sleep, good interspersed periods of rest between thinking, good perception of one's own fatigue so you don't burn yourself further with more activity - or even better, so you know how to make yourself feel at ease and comfortable to think, etc.

https://neurosciencenews.com/thalamus-conscious-perception-2...
by verelo | 2025-04-10 17:40:00+00:00
My 100% favourite part of this write up is the mention of "piano piano".

In 2018 i was renovating my house in Little Italy Toronto (Canada). There was this 91 year old Italian woman, Assunta, living alone in the house next to mine. She was always curious (or nosey?), but only spoke Italian, so we struggled to communicate. She would always say in broken English encouraging statements like "You make it nice", "lot of work, you do so good" to which I would say "thanks" and often talk about the amount of work ahead of me. She would always follow up with "eh, piano piano...".

I had no idea what she meant until one day I Googled this term and i learnt it essentially means "slowly slowly" or "take it slowly".

Assunta is gone now, but she was a lovable character. I think my dog misses her treats, and I miss the snacks she would bring me when I was working on the house.
by nickvec | 2025-04-10 17:40:11+00:00
> Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb.

Did not think I would be relating to Jon on a Thursday morning.
by SirMaster | 2025-04-10 17:40:34+00:00
What constitutes "being asked many times". Is it a statistical significance in the general population? I don't know anyone who is even remotely thinking about or concerned about this.

If you read farther they say: "When I asked each of our guests whether Americans would still be welcome in their country, they all said the same thing: Yes, of course! Why on earth wouldn’t Americans be welcome here? Some of them seemed perplexed, even offended, by the premise of the question."
by onethumb | 2025-04-10 17:40:37+00:00
Yep, I love Apple, follow them closely, own a Mac Studio with an M3 Ultra and a MacBook Pro with an M4 Max, and it's still confusing. :)

I mean, surely a Mac Studio with an M4 Max must be the best, right? It's an entire CPU generation ahead and it's maximum! Of course, it's not... the M3 Ultra is the best.

Naming things is hard.
by immibis | 2025-04-10 17:41:01+00:00
I used it. Once you get over the novelty you realize that all the songs are basically the same. Except for https://www.immibis.com/ex509__immibis_uc13_shitmusic.mp3 which you should pay attention to the lyrics in.

> they are arguably no worse than 99% of what the commercial music business has been pumping out for years

Correct, and that says a lot about our society.
by WillPostForFood | 2025-04-10 17:41:19+00:00
We actively pursue fiscal policy to promote inequitable wealth distribution

But you don't see free trade as a policy promoting inequitable wealth distribution? As designed, free trade is literally moving jobs overseas for lower wages. The primary benefit is higher profits for big companies, and the primary loser is middle to lower class that loses jobs. The best case argument is that the people who lose jobs, and end up underemployed, enjoy cheap imports.
by akshaysg | 2025-04-10 17:41:46+00:00
Hi HN!

You might have seen our previous post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42935218. Since then, we've upgraded Haystack Code Reviewer to break down a pull request into logical chunks and lay them out on an infinite canvas. It walks you through the changes as a structured visual story, helping you focus on architecture, intent, and maintainability instead of chasing nits. We hope that this new version of Haystack Code Reviewer makes code reviews less of a last-minute, unwanted chore. And if it doesn’t, we would love to hear about it!

We built Haystack because code reviews today are fundamentally broken.

The typical line-by-line diff format forces reviewers to focus on individual changes to catch bugs, style issues, and bad variable names, rather than the bigger picture of what the code is doing and why.

However, we don’t think that’s what code reviews are for. Tests (and angry users) catch bugs. Linters catch style issues. And nitpicks almost always bog down the review and make it take longer for the code to merge.

I believe that the point of a code review is to help teammates understand how the author is trying to achieve their goal, whether that’s a bug fix, a new feature, or a refactor. A good review requires understanding the narrative behind a change, determining whether the structure of a pull request reasonably fulfills that narrative (interface changes, new data structures, etc.), and deciding whether the team is OK with maintaining this new shape of the codebase.

The current pull request interface makes this hard. It's just a wall of unordered diffs that you're left to piece together by jumping between files. When reviewing a pull request from a teammate, We found ourselves spending more time reconstructing the big picture of the changes than reviewing the code itself.

With Haystack, we're trying to fix that!

If you’re interested:

1. Take a look at the demo playground https://haystackeditor.com/playground

2. Watch a walkthrough https://youtu.be/K_qLwXFwr8I

3. Try it at https://haystackeditor.dev
by gwbennett | 2025-04-10 17:42:27+00:00
yes, I read the book before I got to the boat when I was at nuclear reactor prototype training in Idaho. Read it on the long bus rides back and forth to the site. Yes, it was good and pretty operationally accurate. All the sub lingo etc, is accurate. Some of the actors on the bridge of the Dallas were active duty sub sailors at the time.
by famouswaffles | 2025-04-10 17:42:47+00:00
>My intuition for this comes from our inability to be confidently precise in our probabilistic rationalizations: I don't know about you, but I don't know whether I'm 57.1% or 57.01983% confident in an expression.

LLMs are probabilistic and notoriously unable to be confidently precise in their probabilistic rationalizations.
by jihedbz | 2025-04-10 17:43:26+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm excited to share Locally, a tool I've been building to simplify local development workflows. As my projects grew in number and complexity, I found myself juggling multiple terminals and constantly checking for outdated dependencies across different frameworks.

Locally solves this with a unified interface built with Rust and Tauri, providing:

Central project management across React, Angular, Next.js, and Vue Visual dependency tracking and updating Package installation via a clean UI rather than the terminal Multi-platform support (Windows, macOS, Linux) I chose Rust for the backend to ensure it stays lightweight and performant, even when scanning large projects. The Tauri framework keeps the app resource-efficient compared to Electron alternatives.

The project is still under active development, but I wanted to share it early to get feedback from fellow developers. You can check out screenshots and more details on the GitHub repo: https://github.com/Jihedbz/locally

I'm particularly interested in hearing which additional features would be most valuable to your workflow. Would you use something like this?
by cassianoleal | 2025-04-10 17:43:29+00:00
> the shutter just works with minimal resistance

11 years living in the UK. I don't think even once I thought of it as _minimal resistance_. At best it requires a firm push. At worst, a couple of hammerings with the side of the fist.

Note that I don't mind the ground pin or having things grounded by default. Even if it wasn't more or less essential due to the mind blowing lack of safety of the ring circuit, it's still a nice and cheap enough extra bit of protection.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-04-10 17:45:28+00:00
Sunbird was almost what I wanted, back in the '04 timeframe, but it seemed unstable. I lost some appointments when they never made it up to the server. I used CalDAV with Sunbird using a DAViCal server.

Sunbird was abandoned. I haven't looked recently to see if there's a reasonable replacement that might run on Windows.
by kjellsbells | 2025-04-10 17:46:14+00:00
Italian cuisine seems to have a deeper understanding of bitter flavors than other common Western cuisines. They understand bitter vegetables like chicory and agretti, they understand bitterness in chocolate, and the coffee I had there always had the faintest hint of bitterness that enhanced rather than detracted from the flavor.

It probably also helps that they are downing a demitasse in a minute or two instead of a giant venti size beast that lasts for an hour.
by manter | 2025-04-10 17:46:22+00:00
D1 is built using Durable Objects - so in theory DO could be faster.

AFAIK when you call D1 it's Worker > D1 (Durable Object) > local storage.

So using DO directly would just be DO > local storage.

I believe the connection between worker and D1 is the painful part, requiring multiple round trips.
by yoyohello13 | 2025-04-10 17:46:38+00:00
I love how this turns the comic into psychological horror.

Super Eyepatch Wolf actually did a really interesting analysis about how Garfield entered the horror genera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2C5R3FOWdE. I click on the video randomly out of curiosity, but I got really sucked in.
by jcranmer | 2025-04-10 17:47:35+00:00
I don't have much experience with writing a custom gcc backend, but my experience with LLVM is that its model ends up being a somewhat poor fit for smaller or weirder architectures. For example, LLVM has this annoying tendency to really aggressively promote the size of everything--if you have a 32-bit core with 64-bit memory indexing, LLVM tends to make anything that eventually becomes a memory index a 64-bit computation, even if it would be more efficient to keep everything as 32-bit.
by salomonk_mur | 2025-04-10 17:47:39+00:00
They buy a company, not a repo.

They buy the team, the know-how, the customers, the brand. The repo is open source up until now, but they can create a paid offering with premium features over the open source code. They can also offer specialized hosting for that solution (which is a very clear advantage of joining with cloud flare)
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-10 17:47:45+00:00
Was show shocked/disappointed when I went to China. It was such a more welcoming experience every time I have come back to the USA. I expected China to be the one that felt more authoritarian. Coming back from the border with Canada after camping it was known that if you simply annoyed border patrol they would make you unpack all of your camping gear and waste 3-4 hours (I'm talking about known among young families with kids that just want to go camping).

From my experience as an American I have never had the kind of hostility, the power trip, the 'why are you worthy to be here' that I receive coming home be experienced in any other nation.
by SubjectToChange | 2025-04-10 17:48:06+00:00
GCC still for Linux distributions using glibc or any other library with many "GCCisms". Also, I'm not sure whether or not Clang is ABI compatible enough for enterprise customers with some rather extreme backwards compatibility requirements. Still, I can imagine a future where glibc can be built with Clang, possibly even one where llvm-libc is "good enough" for many users.
by pera | 2025-04-10 17:48:26+00:00
It's for sure less questionable than the current proposition of letting a handful of billionaires exploit the effort of millions of workers, without permission and completely disregarding the law, just for the sake of accumulating more power and more billions.

Sure, patent trolls suck, so do MAFIAA, but a world where creators have no means to subsist, where everything you do will be captured by AI corps without your permission, just to be regurgitated into a model for a profit, sucks way way more