MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by UncleEntity | 2025-04-17 19:25:17+00:00
> I don't know but it seems like LLMs are just adding small incremental improvements in the polish/iterating phase.

A couple days ago I was searching my hard drive for <something> and found this java file I downloaded a long time ago. This long, lost project idea from days gone by I never got around to doing anything with though I do remember making an attempt.

So, I got the robots to work. They analyzed the code and answered a whole slew of questions about how it compares to 'modern' implementations. They converted it to C, made improvements (which they also suggested) and added functionality (which I suggested) to the original code then wrapped it all up into a gimp plugin. If I ever get around to installing gimp-devel (or whatever the Fedora package is) I can get the bugs shaken out and upload it to the gimp plugin registry -- as was also suggested by the robots.

And this was all over the course of an hour or two until, quite honestly, I got hungry and went foraging for food. I would never spend the days to learn how gimp plugins work and, most likely, would just have just let the file sit on my hard drive for another decade before even looking at it again.

I have to disagree they are only good at small, incremental improvements. There's a bunch of papers I've collected over they years which only have the 'algorithmic code' I plan on letting them loose on which I either tried (and failed) to convert into actual code or didn't even try at all.
by joshdavham | 2025-04-17 19:26:24+00:00
Congrats on the launch!

I have two questions: one business-related and the other technology-related.

1. Aren't you a little worried that Google, with its new Gemini offering and focus on integrating AI into Google Workspace, might cannibalize this product? Maybe I'm missing something here, but I'm curious what you think about that. Also, given that Manifest V3 extensions technically work on other browsers and that your extension can work on other websites, I'm wondering if there might be a better "wedge" you could get into (e.g. Proton Mail on Firefox, etc).

2. Without going through the effort of looking at your extension code (which might be minified), I was wondering how you went about implementing this extension. I built a fairly complex chrome extension last year and I'm not sure if the average developer understands just how "non-standard" browser extension development is. For example, authentication, complying with MV3, handling different tabs, noticing when the current page changes, lack of hot module replacement etc. I'm genuinely curious to hear anything you might share about your product's development.

Cheers!
by sfink | 2025-04-17 19:26:44+00:00
I agree. NP, NP-complete, and NP-hard are all talking about how long things take. If something is uncomputable, then how long it takes doesn't seem very relevant or interesting.

"If Jimmy earns 5 cents a day and a watermelon costs $10, how long will it take for Jimmy to earn enough money to buy the color blue?"

Maybe the connection is that it feels like the halting problem could be solved if you had an infinite amount of time?
by learningcircuit | 2025-04-17 19:26:54+00:00
Local Deep Research is an open-source tool that enables deep, iterative research using AI without sending your queries to external services. It combines language models with specialized search capabilities to conduct multi-stage research that builds on initial findings. Key capabilities include:

Discovering connections between sources that simple search misses Producing structured reports with proper citations, not just collected snippets Integrating your personal document library as a research source Cross-referencing your documents with web sources in a single research flow Easily switching between search engines including PubMed, arXiv, and SearXNG Working entirely offline with local LLMs (via Ollama)

SearXNG integration is particularly powerful as it provides a high-quality, privacy-focused search experience without requiring API keys. The 0.2.0 release adds a redesigned UI, unified settings database, parallel search for faster results, and improved error recovery. With over 600 commits and 5 core contributors, the project is actively growing, and we're looking for more contributors to join the effort. Getting involved is straightforward even for those new to the codebase. More details: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalDeepResearch/ GitHub: https://github.com/LearningCircuit/local-deep-research
by ziddoap | 2025-04-17 19:27:00+00:00
>The the GP was using "emotional" to dismiss the kind of arguments

I'm dismissing arguments that are designed to appeal to (and manipulate) the emotions of the person listening. Such as the three examples I gave, which are, in almost every case, used to win an argument without having to consider any possible nuance of the situation.

Often, it's a completely thought-stopping appeal, because everything is simply countered with "so you don't care about children". Or, in your case, subtlety alluding to me being tolerant of CSAM (which was wildly inappropriate, albeit a great example of why I generally just don't talk to people who use those types of arguments).

Apparently that makes me galaxy-brained or whatever, though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
by byefruit | 2025-04-17 19:27:12+00:00
It's interesting that there's a price nearly 6x price difference between reasoning and no reasoning.

This implies it's not a hybrid model that can just skip reasoning steps if requested.

Anyone know what else they might be doing?

Reasoning means contexts will be longer (for thinking tokens) and there's an increase in cost to inference with a longer context but it's not going to be 6x.

Or is it just market pricing?
by mutagen | 2025-04-17 19:27:18+00:00
An elderly friend of mine who lives alone keeps his most used dishes in the dishwasher. Need a clean dish? Find one in there. Have a dirty dish? Put it in the dishwasher? Can't find a clean dish? Run the dishwasher.

Maybe not quite efficient from a water/energy/soap perspective. But efficient for his time and attention.
by mnky9800n | 2025-04-17 19:27:31+00:00
Yes but they have to be willing to do things that sacrifice other things in order to get ahead. And those sacrifices should be minimized in places outside of their control. Like a child of poor parents should not be penalized and be unable to afford school or take massive debt to do it. It is unacceptable to live this way. It is not fair. People should be given the option to pursue skills and knowledges without a financial burden. And because that is true, people need access to the best possible educational environment and I guarantee you that is not watching video lectures and it’s not plugging in answers into some dumb course management software. That is not a good use of anyone’s time. This is why students should be expected to show up and be present in class because so much of learning is done together. Online environments create a barrier between each other in this case.

I am sure there will be someone who will say, but I liked studying alone. Yes, I agree with you. Pursuit of knowledge by yourself is an important skill to have and a time that is meant to be enjoyed. And what I say to you is this, creating knowledge with others is also a time to be enjoyed and if you miss out on that you are missing out on some of the understanding your books cannot provide. And I would welcome you to work on teams which give you the opportunity to work in this fashion and see if you enjoy it. Because I found that I really do and I want to share that with others.
by cruzcampo | 2025-04-17 19:27:35+00:00
I can't help you, but I'd also be interested.

The hype cycle around AI feels unlike anything I've ever experienced. Like yes, obviously it's a useful tech, but it won't become a literal god-like figure as some of our industry leadership is convinced.

I'm not even convinced it'll become reliable enough to replace humans for most tasks. I'd love to find some fellow skeptics that still appreciate and report about the actual advantages of AI as a tool, not as a religious movement.
by 4rkal | 2025-04-17 19:27:44+00:00
Ever wake up to 200 new newsletter signups and think “Wow, I finally made it!”

Yeah… me too. Until I realized none of them verified their email addresses. Not a single one.

My newsletters got spammed a couple of months ago, so I decided to write an article about:

What this is

Why it's happening

How to stop it

If you’ve got a newsletter or any kind of public form on your site, this might save you a headache down the line.

Hope it helps!
by Nevermark | 2025-04-17 19:27:52+00:00
The social media business model is predicated on scaling up obvious and huge conflicts of interest. To scales unfathomable a couple decades ago.

Basic ethics, and more importantly the law, need to catch up.

Surveilling, analyzing, then manipulating people psychologically to mine them for advertisers is just as real a poison as fentanyl.

And when it scales, that mean billions of dollars in revenue, actual trillions of dollars in market value unrelentingly demanding growth, playing whack-a-mole with the devastating consequences isn’t going to work.

Conflicts of interest are illegal in many forms. Business models incorporating highly scalable conflicts of interest need to be illegal.

We could still have social media in healthier forms. They wouldn’t be “monetizing” viewers, they would be serving customers.

Facebooks army of servers isn’t required to run a shared scrapbook. All those servers, and most of Facebook’s algorithms and now AI, are there to manipulate people to the maximum extent possible.
by WaitWaitWha | 2025-04-17 19:27:58+00:00
I do want to note a tangential topic on social media harming children and young adults.

In my personal experience, kids and young adults particularly those who grew up immersed in social media (born after ~1995–2000), seem to struggle with recognizing appropriate, undistorted social cues and understanding the real-world consequences of their actions.

To Snapchat harming kids, I think it is more than just evil people doing "five key clusters of harms".

Even adults often expect the same instant reactions and flexible social dynamics found online, which blinds them to the more permanent, harsher outcomes that exist outside of digital spaces.

Anecdotally, the utter shock that shows on some people's face when they realize this is sad, and very disconcerting. (At an extreme think "pranksters", that get shot or punched in the face, and they are confused why that happened, when "everyone loves it online".)

How to fix this? the suggested solutions will not solve this problem, as it does not fit the "clusters of harms".
by andreimackenzie | 2025-04-17 19:28:52+00:00
> In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the prices for ad inventory.

This part doesn't make sense to me. Limiting bidders should drive the price down, because fewer advertisers are competing for the same potential ad impression. The article describes Google's influence as "Google controls the auction-style system," which is a bit more open-ended about the specific alleged practices.
by ein0p | 2025-04-17 19:29:03+00:00
What you need to do is unsubscribe entirely from all social media and stop reading news first thing in the morning. You have to remember that "Tobi" can't tell a pointer from a hole in the ground, and neither can Sam Altman. Nor can they tell you how any of the stuff they "build" actually works, or what its real capabilities are. Put simply, they're talking out of their ass.

I've been in this career for almost 30 years and there was no point in my career at which developers weren't going to "go away" real soon now (tm), replaced by "no code", or "visual programming", or those UML diagrams, or XML (remember that one?), or whatever the fuck. And yet we're still here, in greater numbers, and we make the most money you can make outside of Big Law and Wall Street. Something isn't lining up? You bet. You're probably just too young to have perspective.

This isn't the only field in which the claims of demise have been greatly exaggerated by people who have zero clue. The people who create this hype hope it will land on the younger generation which is less immune to it and/or has a shorter attention span. Preferably, on people who haven't been through a single major hype cycle before. Folks who have been around for a while eventually learn to smell at least some kinds of bullshit from pretty far away.

Full disclosure: I'm a researcher in this field (though not in coding assistance per se). Your profession is not in danger in the foreseeable future, assuming you do something that requires actual intelligence. Your tooling will get a lot better though, so you'll have to type a lot less boilerplate. But I'm assuming that's not the part you take any particular pride in anyway. I certainly don't, so I use ChatGPT quite liberally for things I'd previously use Stack Overflow for.
by nradov | 2025-04-17 19:29:29+00:00
Allowance for using faxes to send protected health information (PHI) as defined under HIPAA was essentially grandfathered in for practical reasons, not because it is at all a secure enough communications system for sensitive data. If faxing medical records had been banned then the healthcare system would have come to a halt, which would have been worse then the privacy risk. But if fax was invented as something new today it would never be allowed for PHI.

It's only recently that more secure alternatives to faxing have become practical, like DirectTrust Secure Direct Messaging.
by skrtskrt | 2025-04-17 19:29:30+00:00
DigitalOcean uses Ceph underneath their S3 and block volume products. When I was there they had 2 teams just managing Ceph, not even any of the control plane stuff built on top.

It is a complete bear to manage and tune at scale. And DO never greenlit offering anything based on CephFS either because it was going to be a whole other host of things to manage.

Then of course you have to fight with the maintainers (Red Hat devs) to get any improvements contributed, assuming you even have team members with the requisite C++ expertise.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-17 19:30:16+00:00
> how can a business owner make long-term investments of the scale that would be required to start manufacturing more products in the US?

It feels like Trump and his people fundamentally don't understand this. Standing up a factory can take _years_, and depending on what it is it can be a huge capital project with even longer payback periods. It's really hard to imagine _any_ significant capital investment in manufacturing in the US until they stop changing their mind every five minutes.

(It also makes the 90 day pause stuff look, ah, questionable; you're not getting all that much done in 90 days)
by edanm | 2025-04-17 19:30:23+00:00
The parent was contradicting the idea that the existing AI capabilities have already been "digested". I agree with them btw.

> And the progress seams to be in the benchmarks only

This seems to be mostly wrong given peoples' reactions to e.g. o3 that was released today. Either way, progress having stalled for the last year doesn't seem that big considering how much progress there has been for the previous 15-20 years.
by cush | 2025-04-17 19:31:42+00:00
I feel like the two types of dishwasher people are clearly delineated by those who have and have not watched the Technology Connections videos on dishwashers.

1. Powdered detergent people who sprinkle some soap in for the prewash

2. Tab people who attest that they need to pre-rinse their dishes before they put them in the dishwasher
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-17 19:31:47+00:00
No. No this is completely wrong framing.

Law needs to be enforced.

It's not enough to be against, that's what the Iranians did and it created a power vacuum filled by people worse than what they had. You must be for something.

There are still oaths to the constitution, but these people need mandate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_(politics)) to act.
by alt227 | 2025-04-17 19:31:52+00:00
Can you please point me to the text where Socrates chooses death over exhile?

I have read Apology of Socrates in its entirety[0] and a few text analysis and I can find no evidence of this. It seems to me that Socrates suggested a fine[1], and it was his prosecuters which argued for death[2]

[0] https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-source/plato-the-apology-of-...

[1] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

[2] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
by rossdavidh | 2025-04-17 19:32:41+00:00
The article reminds me of commentary I have read in the past on Elinor Ostrom, another innovative thinker who the left likes because she was female and opposed the status quo received wisdom, but feel uncomfortable with because she was very skeptical of Big Plans from the federal government or other remote centers of power. If want to advocate for Big Plans to achieve leftist ideals, then being told that Big Plans From The Center Of Power are the main source of the problem, is a difficult truth to accept.
by thecosmicfrog | 2025-04-17 19:32:47+00:00
Especially if you use a small amount of detergent in the pre-wash compartment. Most people (at least in Europe) just use a single tablet in the main wash section. I've seen a massive improvement by putting a teaspoon amount of detergent in with the pre-wash. The ever-wonderful Technology Connections sent me down this path.[1]

Without detergent in the pre-wash compartment, only water is used to pre-soak the dishes.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04
by rigrassm | 2025-04-17 19:33:55+00:00
Immediately had the same reaction, 15h is less than most of my books runtimes.

I checked out the FAQs on that page and apparently the 15 hours is just included with the Spotify premium subscription and that let's you listen to 15 hours of anything in their catalog.

Separate from that, you can also purchase books outright and it seems listening to those purchased books won't count towards that 15 Hours.

In that context, those 15 hours are actually kinda appealing to me since it would let you listen to more than the 5 min sample of a book you get on Audible before deciding to outright buy it or you could use that time to listen to a couple shorter books every month without having to purchase it.

Think I might have just convinced myself to look into it a bit more lol (I'm curious how good their catalogue is compared to Audibles)
by Jensson | 2025-04-17 19:33:56+00:00
> and I'm maybe 1% of the way through the roadmap I'd like to build with what exists and is possible to do today.

How do you know they are possible to do today? Errors gets much worse at scale, especially when systems starts to depend on each other, so it is hard to say what can be automated and not.

Like if you have a process A->B, automating A might be fine as long as a human does B and vice versa, but automating both could not be.
by ncruces | 2025-04-17 19:34:18+00:00
Virtual tables are fully supported by my CGO free driver: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3

You can have a look at a bunch of examples in my extensions folder: https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3/tree/main/ext

PS: The mattn CGO driver actually doesn't seem to support wrapping the xBegin/xSync/xRollback/xCommit methods. Mine actually does, although it's largely untested, as I haven't needed this yet.
by transformi | 2025-04-17 19:34:25+00:00
Bad day is going on google.

First the decleration of illegal monopoly..

and now... Google’s latest innovation: programmable overthinking.

With Gemini 2.5 Flash, you too can now set a thinking_budget—because nothing says "state-of-the-art AI" like manually capping how long it’s allowed to reason. Truly the dream: debugging a production outage at 2am wondering if your LLM didn’t answer correctly because you cheaped out on tokens. lol.

“Turn thinking off for better performance.” That’s not a model config, that’s a metaphor for Google’s entire AI strategy lately.

At this point, Gemini isn’t an AI product—it’s a latency-cost-quality compromise simulator with a text interface. Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic are out here just… cooking the benchmarks
by spiffytech | 2025-04-17 19:34:41+00:00
Some things won't matter, some will. I think it's changed over time as dishwashers and detergents got better.

The article mentions that newer detergents do better with unrinsed dishes. And I remember a commercial about a dishwasher that could eat a cake. My old model sure couldn't do that! If I wasn't careful I'd find hunks of food sitting inside after it ran. It also used to be that putting thin tupperware on the bottom rack was a sure way to melt it. Now I can't remember the last time that happened to me.

Things that used to provably matter... now don't.

On the other hand, I have a family member who loads the spoons in a big pile, and they stick together and don't get clean. Or, I had roommates who kept putting my good knives in the dishwasher, and the finish got ruined. That stuff still matters.

I like the article's conclusion: we can just get the answers, and update our knowledge. We don't have to treat this like a pre-internet argument, where we just went in circles repeating heresay.
by gr3ml1n | 2025-04-17 19:35:12+00:00
That isn't true. Dedicated bodybuilders, starting more commonly ~5 years ago, decided that PCT wasn't worth it. Instead of typical 16-20 week cycles followed by 4-6 weeks of PCT, they adjust the dose between supraphysiological and (generally) top-of-normal, i.e.: blast and cruise.

It's not because they couldn't recover, it's because they don't want to or see the point.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-04-17 19:35:45+00:00
But thats exactly what she marketed it as and made the claim it already exists, an agent for hire that can do everything a SWE can do.

If this truly exists they'd have no need to hire since it'd force multiply their existing developers.

What better marketing than being able to proudly claim that "OpenAI no longer hires those pesky expensive developers and you can too" because they can improve/multiply the productivity of their existing developers with their innovations.