MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ammmir | 2025-04-28 15:55:37+00:00
Last month, I started playing around with code sandboxes and how LLMs might interface with them and wrote a little blog post about it [1]. I then took the code and vibe coded my way to a multi-tenant (untested!) sandboxing server that lets you run arbitrary Docker containers and provides a simple HTTP interface and UI. A cute, novel idea is that you can fork containers easily, as seen in the video in my repo:

https://github.com/ammmir/sandboxer

It may not be useful, but it's been fun, and I've honed my gut-level experience in Docker, Podman, Linux namespaces, Checkpoint/Restore, CRIU, and more. The ultimate goal is to hand each AI agent iteration a sandbox of its own (forked from the previous iteration), and have it build apps in private sandboxes. You'll be able to view intermediate progress as the app is being built (or failed rabbit holes), since each sandbox gets a unique URL automatically. Like, imagine if each commit of your git repo had its own URL to preview the app!

[1] https://amirmalik.net/2025/03/07/code-sandboxes-for-llm-ai-a...
by JohnMakin | 2025-04-28 15:55:38+00:00
There's another outstanding use of obituaries - genealogy research.

My paternal grandfather had some issues with his racial lineage and left home at a very early age after his dad died to join the military to fight in Korea. For whatever reason he ended up adopting a name he was not born under - his father's - and kept it a secret his whole life and didn't tell a soul. it wasn't uncovered what he had done until decades later when his mother died and his birth certificate was found in her belongings.

When trying to figure out who his dad's family was, where no one in the family really had any idea and in the past they had a lot of incentive to hide their ancestry and keep their records inaccurate/incomplete (this was during one-drop law times, where people would hide marriages and assume fake identities all the time to avoid persecution). I was stuck for months until someone mentioned using newspapers.com archive to try to see if anything came up (not a plug, this service is genuinely amazing).

Jackpot! Public records often lie, but obituaries rarely do. I was able to piece together his paternal side's relatives via obituaries (who leave surviving relative names quite often) and found his precise lineage all the way back to the 1850's and before emancipation, something that is typically quite hard to do. Could not have possibly done it without obituaries.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-04-28 15:55:45+00:00
>Most of these people are just generally reckless

That is not a good take if you include the fact that reckless driving in Virginia is already the lowest bar in the United States. 86 MPH is a criminal act. If you are caught doing 86 MPH you are literally put in handcuffs and go to jail.
by xpe | 2025-04-28 15:55:52+00:00
> Theories are developed by doing the work and LLMs do not do the work. They ingest the output of work.

This is often the case but does not _have_ to be so. LLMs can use chain of thought to “talk out loud” and “do the work”. It can use supplementary documents and iterate on its work. The quality of course varies, but it is getting better. When I read Gemini 2.5’s “thinking” notes, it indeed can build up text that is not directly present in its training data.

Putting aside anthropocentric definitions of “reasoning” and “consciousness” are key to how I think about the issues here. I’m intentionally steering completely clear of consciousness.

Modern SOTA LLMs are indeed getting better at what people call “reasoning”. We don’t need to quibble over defining some quality bar; that is probably context-dependent and maybe even arbitrary.

It is clear LLMs are doing better at “reasoning” — I’m using quotes to emphasize that (to me) it doesn’t matter if their inner mechanisms for doing reasoning don’t look like human mechanisms. Instead, run experiments and look at the results.

We’re not talking about the hard problem of consciousness, we’re talking about something that can indeed be measured: roughly speaking, the ability to derive new truths from existing ones.

(Because this topic is charged and easily misunderstood, let me clarify some questions that I’m not commenting on here: How far can the transformer-based model take us? Are data and power hungry AI models cost-effective? What viable business plans exist? How much short-term risk, to say, employment and cybersecurity? How much long-term risk to human values, security, thriving, and self-determination?)

Even if you disagree with parts of my characterization above, hear this: We should at least be honest to ourselves when we move the goal posts.

Don’t mistake my tone for zealotry. I’m open to careful criticism. If you do, please don’t try to lump me into one “side” on the topic of AI — whether it be market conditions, commercialization, safety, or research priorities — you probably don’t know me well enough to do that (yet). Apologies for the pre-defensive posture; but the convos here are often … fraught, so I’m trying to head off some of the usual styles of reply.
by Marsymars | 2025-04-28 15:56:11+00:00
I'm not entirely sure what your question is - are you asking how Google/Facebook are proxies for physical thing?

Google, at its core, provides a service that helps you do physical things more quickly. If I need to replace the cruise control buttons on my car, I could go to the library and source a manual, or I could just search Google.

Facebook marketplace increases the efficiency of trading physical goods.

The Facebook feed is probably most akin to cigarettes.
by shkkmo | 2025-04-28 15:56:54+00:00
Tickets can be disputed and many people make a livelihood without a vehicle.

I think current penalties for reckless driving are far too lenient. Driving is not a right, but a privilege. If someone chooses to use that privilege irresponsibly, they should lose that privilege.

Personally, I would advocate for a license revocal process that happens much quicker than what we do now and provides a mechanism for regaining access to that privilege through a rigorous process of eduction and community service.
by Ingon | 2025-04-28 15:57:00+00:00
Still working on Connet[1] and the associated Connet.dev[2], which is a p2p reverse proxy with NAT traversal (and hosted version of it). Currently, adding support for defining multiple points of ingress, next will be adding support for PCP port forwarding.

[1] https://github.com/connet-dev/connet

[2] https://connet.dev
by lgas | 2025-04-28 15:57:05+00:00
> In effect, RLS automatically applies a where clause preventing developers inadvertently accessing the wrong data.

Right, but this assumes that you have a) remembered to enable RLS for every table where it matters and b) configured appropriate rules perfectly for every table. And there are tons of things you can mess up in the rules.

With per-tenant instances none of those things can happen.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-04-28 15:57:07+00:00
We need a better mechanism than this for testing the abuse system, because I use proton mail and though I have a gmail, I don't want to use it anymore... I know Oauth is convenient, but please for everyone's sake, can we guys not either add literally every single Oauth / I think one of the best options is probably matrix OAuth with a captcha and rate limits

https://account.matrix.org/

Seriously, I don't mind a sign in option, I just don't want to be forced to use gmail / inferior privacy solution to use your app, no offense.

> Please add more Oauth solutions > I am investigating what can be the most universal Oauth solution while still preventing spam unlike emails, sounds interesting enough of a problem,IDK
by tomaytotomato | 2025-04-28 15:57:14+00:00
Working on my Java NLP library that can figure out what geographical location is from a piece of free text.

e.g.

"san francisco ca united states" - San Francisco, California, America

"california, san francisco" - San Francisco, California, America

"glasgow, kentucky" - Glasgow, Kentucky, America

"glasgow, UK" - Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom

It started as a project when I was scraping websites, and some data had inconsistent ways of writing a location or address.

The library is called location4j - https://github.com/tomaytotomato/location4j
by Amezarak | 2025-04-28 15:57:37+00:00
They are there because the British government made a deliberate policy decision to bring them there. It is perfectly reasonable to ask if this policy decision was in the best interests of the populace at large. Immigration (and emigration) are not sacred cows above political debate. Nor did the existence of the British Empire necessitate it; that's simply a post-hoc rationalization of the policies that British politicians implemented.

I realize that in England you are not allowed to think in these terms - it's all unmitigated good and beyond the pale to even consider it as anything but the just deserts of...whoever, but that doesn't actually make it so.

I also don't think it's productive to pretend British is not an ethnicity as well as a nationality. Being born in England does not make you ethnically English and isn't racist to say so, anymore than being born in India made Kipling Indian. Even in terms of culture or nationality it seems pretty meaningless when you don't have strict assimilationist policies.
by slippybit | 2025-04-28 15:57:43+00:00
> maybe a computer will never, internally, know that it has developed a theory

Happens to people all the time :) ... especially if they don't have a concept of theories and hypotheses.

People are dumb and uneducated only until they aren't anymore, which is, even in the worst cases, no more than a decade of effort put in time. In fact, we don't even know how crazy fast neuro-genesis and or cognitive abilities might increase when a previously dense person reaches or "breaks through" a certain plateau. I'm sure there is research, but this is not something a satisfyingly precise enough answer can be formulated for.

If I formulate a new hypothesis, the LLM can tell me, "nope, you are the only idiot believing this path is worth pursuing". And if I go ahead, the LLM can tell me: "that's not how this usually works, you know", "professionals do it this way", "this is not a proof", "this is not a logical link", "this is nonsense but I commend your creativity!", all the way until the actual aha-moment when everything fits together and we have an actual working theory ... in theory.

We can then analyze the "knowledge graph" in 4D and the LLM could learn a theory of what it's like to have a potential theory even though there is absolutely nothing that supports the hypothesis or it's constituent links at the moment of "conception".

Stay put, it will happen.
by somelamer567 | 2025-04-28 15:57:49+00:00
> Apart from nuclear war

> It's also funny when war mongers online talk about cowardice

> Why dont you go volunteer in Ukraine if you're such a non coward?

This is an impressive feat. You've managed to package not one -- not two -- but THREE Russian propaganda talking points into a single paragraph. I believe I've just witnessed the second coming of Alexander Pushkin.
by tumsfestival | 2025-04-28 15:57:54+00:00
Your problem is that you fail to understand that autism isn't a disease, it's a neurodivergence, their brains are just wired slightly differently. Many autists live their whole lives without even suspecting of their conditions, and most of those who are aware of it live absolutely normal lives. The only way we could potentially "cure" autism is if we somehow altered peoples' brains while in the womb, if that's not eugenics I don't know what is.
by tomrod | 2025-04-28 15:58:26+00:00
> It's called the "null hypothesis." It's the gold standard of scientific experimental design.

I think this definition is tying too much epistemic certainty on the part of the scientist towards the null hypothesis versus the alternative hypothesis being tested, hence my disagreement to what I consider a view lacking nuance. In short, if the scientist has no reason to doubt the null hypothesis then there is no reason to test. So the scientist must first be willing to allow the null to be proven unlikely / rejected.

I don't think we're going to see any further agreement this deep in the semantics, so let's move forward understanding each other to be in general agreement on the metaphysical construction of the scientific method.

> And in science, we assume such things are not real until positive evidence leads us to a different conclusion

We assume them to be untestable, not necessarily false. Just unable to be tested. The scientific method only has three states: untested, agrees with available evidence, or rejected by available evidence. If no evidence, then untested.

String theory is a great example of this. Wonderfully mathematical and logical, but we haven't figured out how to test major components of it specifically yet that would distinguish it from alternative theories.
by hwpythonner | 2025-04-28 15:58:37+00:00
I'm a software engineer by background, mostly in high-frequency trading (HFT), HPC, systems programming, and networking — so a lot of focus on efficiency and low-level behavior. I had played a bit with FPGAs before, but nothing close to this scale — most of the hardware and Python internals work I had to figure out along the way.
by nunobrito | 2025-04-28 15:58:58+00:00
Because to buy that much monero so fast is only possible with bitcoin, which is traceable by governments and interested parties.

An estimated 305 million USD of monero were purchased this morning before the grid shutdown. That was a +50% increase on the monero price, something that never happened before in the last 11 years of the coin.

Quite a record. Quite a coincidence.
by iamwpj | 2025-04-28 15:59:00+00:00
I was self taught for 10 years in the field and found a program that offers a Master's degree with work experience accounting for the undergrad. I didn't take calculus or stats in my undergrad and that has caused some headaches in completing the degree, but the amount of stuff I was exposed to in such a short period of time was incredible.

Very quickly into the program I was stuck by just how unethical it was for me, with no experience and certification to make guarantees and promises to an employer who didn't know better. In most fields the knowledge worker could be held liable for making this kind of "contract" (think lawyers, electricians, doctors, etc.).

You can be driven and motivated. You might have learned a ton on your own. You cannot know what you don't know. People in these comments will trip over each other to explain that education is subjective and you won't use any of that stuff in the real world. They have stories about wasted classes and dusty academics. The reality is much more boring.

* Lectures are very effective ways of provide a curated bit of information.

* Structured practice and verification (homework and grades) are quick ways to ensure that the start of learning has occurred.

* Working with your peers will likely expose strengths and weaknesses in your existing understanding of the subject matter. This often helps everyone involved.

* Reading academic publications and textbooks helps to standardize the shared understanding of the subject and ensures that future efforts to expand the field or solve hard problems are more effective.

You said in your post that you're not sure where to go with your career and your opportunities aren't evident to you --- go to school and give yourself some deeper knowledge. It'll help you figure out how to navigate the field.
by jekude | 2025-04-28 15:59:00+00:00
Technically there is unsanctioned access (someone reverse engineered the real-time APIs [1] which I ported to Go). I think the FDA does not want easy access to real-time values so that folks can't easily recommend insulin dosing without oversight. I am personally of the opinion that it is our right to have programmatic access to the real-time data and do with it what we please.

Would love to get in touch to hear more about your long-term vision for the project!

[1] https://github.com/gagebenne/pydexcom
by incomingpain | 2025-04-28 15:59:01+00:00
Reddit got big because they stood in favour of free speech against Digg's censorship.

Would anyone dare even jokingly argue that reddit stands for free speech today? Reddit declined bigtime but something happened that Digg never had. Bots creating the illusion the site isnt dying. This has obviously created the 'dead internet theory'

Reddit's 'sociality' has been gone for many years. I don't know who operates the bots but few months ago when i checked, the majority of people on reddit were bots.

Then again it's no better on X or facebook. The bots have taken over for what goal? It's not immediately obvious to me. I dont even think its intending to keep reddit alive. Law enforcement and Government no doubt significant portion of the bots. Seeking speech criminals; which is fair. Ive seen many arrest videos of people who had made death threats on social media
by fedeb95 | 2025-04-28 15:59:04+00:00
the reason this works is the same as why HN is a good news source (with its limitations). No sponsored likes, just as people pay to submit obituaries. High range of topics, even if HN is narrower. So, it tells more about your usual search engine than about obituaries. For instance, that's why I prefer duckduckgo to google.
by katabasis | 2025-04-28 15:59:14+00:00
The modern internet is filled with content designed to track, mislead, and manipulate users (especially young users who don't have a full set of critical thinking skills). I think it is totally appropriate to want to give families (not the state, FWIW) the tools to take back some control.

Giving kids accessed to a curated experience online sounds much more feasible than keeping them offline all together, but most parents don't really have the technical know-how to do this themselves (and tech giants like Google, FB, etc. are not interested in providing these capabilities).
by throw0101a | 2025-04-28 15:59:25+00:00
> There is a real danger that obituaries of people in the early 21st century will become inaccessible to future generations due to obituary rot:

When my father died we got a 'complementary' online posting from the funeral home for ~1 year (for funeral/service details), but I also made the effort to pay to put one in the newspaper for posterity.
by babyent | 2025-04-28 16:00:13+00:00
Vercel is honestly meant for enterprise. The free/cheap tier is a cool toy. Vercel replaces the need to build out an expensive dedicated UI deployment/tooling team (like when your org has like 50 product teams working on a large enterprise saas).

Anyone else should just stick to vite react starter SPA and actually make money first. If they need SEO, they can use something simple too.
by mandmandam | 2025-04-28 16:00:22+00:00
The comment pointing out that this story is flagged is itself flagged, for some reason.

Since you might have showdead off, I'll repeat the point.

And to add to the point, this isn't a snapshot. It's a trajectory. Look at my favorites for a list of good, important stories which were flagged here lately.

Look at PG and Garry Tan's Twitters, where they praise the DOGE team. Look at the point-blank refusal of the mod team here to permit a discussion on these false flags in their own thread, rather than just in comments. You don't need to be a savant to notice the pattern here.
by analyte123 | 2025-04-28 16:00:27+00:00
The "theory" of a program is supposed to be majority embedded in its identifiers, tests, and type definitions. The same line of reasoning in this article could be used to argue that you should just name all your variables random 1 or 2 letter combinations since the theory is supposed to be all in your head anyway.

Indeed, it's quickly obvious where an LLM is lacking context because the type of a variable is not well-specified (or specified at all), the schema of a JSON blob is not specified, or there is some other secret constraint that maybe someone had in their head X years ago.
by quesera | 2025-04-28 16:00:29+00:00
> Currently I usually start by laying out as much detail about the problem as I can

I know you are speaking from experience, and I know that I must be one of the people who hasn't gotten far enough along the curve to see the magic.

But your description of how you do it does not encourage me.

It sounds like the trade-off is that you spend more time describing the problem and iterating on the multiple waves of wrong or incomplete solutions, than on solving the problem directly.

I can understand why many people would prefer that, or be more successful with that approach.

But I don't understand what the magic is. Is there a scaling factor where once you learn to manage your AI team in the language that they understand best, they can generate more code than you could alone?

My experience so far is net negative. Like the first couple weeks of a new junior hire. A few sparks of solid work, but mostly repeating or backing up, and trying not to be too annoyed at simpering and obvious falsehoods ("I'm deeply sorry, I'm really having trouble today! Thank you for your keen eye and corrections, here is the FINAL REVISED code, which has been tested and verified correct"). Umm, no it has not, you don't have that ability, and I can see that it will not even parse on this fifteenth iteration.

By the way, I'm unfailingly polite to these things. I did nothing to elicit the simpering. I'm also confused by the fawning apologies. The LLM is not sorry, why pretend? If a human said those things to me, I'd take it as a sign that I was coming off as a jerk. :)
by vel0city | 2025-04-28 16:01:03+00:00
Unless it's a really massive swing it'll be a gamble if it will actually break even. A useful battery install for a home is at least several thousand dollars. I'll install $10k worth of batteries and manage to arbitrage $30/mo off my electrical plan, excellent! I'll break even in 28 years, wonderful! Will the batteries still have a meaningful charge after 28 years of use? Who knows! Meanwhile I'll miss out on the opportunity cost of that $10k over that same period.

And once again, another point for growing the wealth gap. Poor people who can't afford the thousands of dollars for installing the batteries get shafted by such things instead of us assuming the grid operators will just smooth these prices out for us.

Once again in the end I'd just prefer if there were actors on the grid running massive batteries able to arbitrage the extreme spot prices and sell me electricity at a reasonable rate all the time instead of me having to actively min/max every dang thing every moment in my life.
by tonyonodi | 2025-04-28 16:01:34+00:00
I launched my web-based notepad calculator, https://numpad.io/, a few years ago.

Right now I'm working on a version 2 that has user accounts, multiple documents, markdown support, and document exports. Everything is local-first and it uses CRDTs to sync documents.

It looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/Plk1DQ4.png the calculator is mostly the same for now, with a few improvements. It's unstable right now, so I don't want to publicise the dev url, but if you'd like to become a beta tester email me at contact@numpad.io
by tonyedgecombe | 2025-04-28 16:01:51+00:00
>The problem here is that I could go to the police, report Tony Edgecombe as he told me at the coffee machine that devs who use 4 spaces instead of tabs are pure human scum who should be deported, and it will be written in your file. You then have no way to erase it.

The police would laugh at you before they sent you on your way.

Dig a little deeper on any of the examples you see posted here and you will find people inciting violence or racial hatred. We have had laws against this stuff for fifty years.

>Pro-Palestine liberals discovered this at their expense after the Trump election and the recent crackdown on their movement.

We aren't the US.