MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by conartist6 | 2025-04-20 20:17:55+00:00
And the next link I click captures it perfectly: https://blog.ollien.com/posts/llm-friction/

To quote Ollien:

> Even as an “LLM-skeptic”, it would be silly for me to say that the tools are useless for software development. There are clearly times where they can be useful, whether that’s to perform a refactoring too complicated for IDE tooling, or to get a proof-of-concept put together. With that said, in my time both using and watching others use LLMs, I have noticed a troubling trend: they help reduce friction when developing software – friction that can help us to better understand and improve the systems we work on.

It's quite funny to me that in the case I'm talking about, "a refactor that's too complicated for IDE tooling" is exactly the kind of friction that needs to be felt
by Starlevel004 | 2025-04-20 20:18:30+00:00
Lifetimes add an impending sense of doom to writing any sort of deeply nested code. You get this deep without writing a lifetime... uh oh, this struct needs a reference, and now you need to add a generic parameter to everything everywhere you've ever written and it feels miserable. Doubly so when you've accidentally omitted a lifetime generic somewhere and it compiles now but then you do some refactoring and it won't work anymore and you need to go back and re-add the generic parameter everywhere.
by moffkalast | 2025-04-20 20:18:42+00:00
Yeah you need specific instruct training for that sort of thing, Claude Opus being one of the rare examples that does such a sensibility check quite often and even admits when it doesn't know something.

These days it's all about confidently bullshitting on benchmarks and overfitting on common riddles to make pointless numbers go up. The more impressive models get on paper, the more rubbish they are in practice.
by mort96 | 2025-04-20 20:19:47+00:00
It's similar to how old games look so different on modern hardware: the pixel art on a current-day screen looks like high-fidelity perfectly sharp uniformly colored squares, while the "pixel art" of old games rendered on a CRT didn't look like "pixel art" at all but rather like high-fidelity art rendered on a low-fidelity screen. There's a lot of detail implied by the way CRTs render what's encoded in software as perfect squares.
by gostak | 2025-04-20 20:20:13+00:00
Hey thanks! The image issue is something i'm struggling with, I source them from Wikitravel and they are often not high-resolution.

Scraping from google images search introduces two (potential) issues:

1. Getting the correct location, (there is for example a Barcelona in Venezuela) but searching that will always just return the one in Spain, the feed should show obscure locations so this is a problem

2. There seems to be some more legal implications from scraping/using images from Google Image search

I'll work on the text feeling like AI-slop, I welcome all the feedback!
by aisenik | 2025-04-20 20:22:31+00:00
I can totally comprehend trans women having babies. Heck, I can comprehend cis men having babies: Arnold Schwarzenegger did it in the 90s.

I can't truly comprehend the mass data collection and surveillance system, how it interplays with intelligence and law enforcement, and what the impact of connecting a global constellation of privatized armed satellites and a constellation of advanced phased array antennas & sdrs to either end of the system will be, however. I believe there are bigger threats to humanity than bodily autonomy.
by wswope | 2025-04-20 20:22:38+00:00
If you’re not on the bandwagon yet, you should try incorporating some mushroom blocks to speed up the decomposition! It’ll also help to take the moisture retention you’re getting up an additional notch.

We’ve got a local grow block recycling program through the Central Texas Mycological Society. For your use case, all you’d need to do is bury the blocks in leaf litter with one long edge barely poking up above the surface. A combo of blue and pink oyster would probably serve you well, depending on the season.
by JadeNB | 2025-04-20 20:23:59+00:00
> Later in the same sequence, food trays are brought to the bridge after the long scenes of a flight attendant, who picks up trays as they slide downs from a dispenser, and as she hands the trays to the crew, one of them instinctively puts his hand out under the tray to helpfully catch its weight.

Is this one clearly wrong? As you say, it's essentially an instinctive motion, so one can easily imagine the reflex taking over even if the scene were genuinely in zero gravity.
by baq | 2025-04-20 20:24:49+00:00
This again.

It’s predicting text. Yes. Nobody argues about that. (You’re also predicting text when you’re typing it. Big deal.)

How it is predicting the text is the question to ask and indeed it’s being asked and we’re getting glimpses of understanding and lo and behold it’s a damn complex process. See the recent anthropic research paper for details.
by thih9 | 2025-04-20 20:26:09+00:00
> LLMs, however, do not give this choice, and tend to encourage immediate exploitation instead. Users may explore if the first solution does not work, but the first choice is always to exploit.

You can ask the llm to generate a number of solutions though - the exploration is possible and relatively easy then.

And I say that as someone who dislikes llms with a passion.
by AstralStorm | 2025-04-20 20:26:23+00:00
That is not true, the model is modular, thus an ensemble. Uses DallE for graphics and specialized tokenizer models for sound.

If you remove those tools, or cut its access to search databases, it becomes quite less capable.

A human would often still manage to do it without some data still, perhaps with less certainty, while GPT has more problems than that without others filling in the holes.
by aecsocket | 2025-04-20 20:26:39+00:00
Yeah, I should have clarified that by "your desktop" I mean "your GNOME desktop" - i.e. "if you run GNOME, it'll look good no matter your preferences". But wrt "your desktop" - even if I wanted to, I couldn't guarantee that my app looks good on your desktop specifically, because I have no clue what your desktop looks like! Which is why I want to target a large common denominator of desktops instead, where I know it can look good.

The counter argument to that is "so let the user theme the app, to suit their own desktop", which would be a decent solution, but:

1. My vision for my app might conflict with your vision for your desktop. Maybe I want this button to be a light blue because it meshes well with some other elements in the app, but you want it to be a darker blue because it fits with your desktop's color scheme. What happens then?

2. This still doesn't guarantee that the app will look good. If you theme my app's home page, but don't theme the rest of the pages, then sure it'll look good at the home page - but as soon as you start using it, the look will fall apart. Or, what if I push an update to my app which adds a new page with a new kind of UI element? Do you really want to be maintaining your desktop theme for every single app you have?

3. This adds a burden on me as the developer to make parts customizable. This is the least convincing argument in this list IMO, since if there was better tooling and infrastructure for theming in GTK this wouldn't be a problem - but there isn't, so it is still a problem.

As a practical example, my app makes use of a WebViewGTK to display some info. I inject some custom CSS into this web view to make it look like Adwaita. This touches on points 2 and 3:

2. The webview has some UI widgets which aren't present in the rest of GTK, like a sticky header bar. You would have to manually maintain a stylesheet for this single element.

3. I now need to write a way to let users theme the custom CSS inside the webview, rather than just the CSS of the GTK widgets themselves. (I have already written this, but it's still a maintenance burden.)
by VladimirOrlov | 2025-04-20 20:26:53+00:00
Is this for real? ... All this Hype is ... very-very old Hype, and nothing fundamentally new (yet) from 1960s time. Looks like every upgrade of software is "revolution" or "revelation". Please compare 'Win 3.1' and 'Win 11', some progress? sure!, is any "Intelligence" there? No! No! No! What is the difference? Who constantly lying and why? What is the reason of this systematic and persistent lies? p.s. I, personally think, that someday we will have a "semi-smart" computer systems, I also think, in a 5-10 years, we will learn more what is possible and real and what is not (regarding "semi-smart" computer systems). Until that ... hold your horses (please), so to speak.
by AstralStorm | 2025-04-20 20:28:56+00:00
Similarity match. For that you need to understand reflexively how you think and write.

It's a fun test to give a person something they have written but do not remember. Most people can still spot it.

It's easier with images though. Especially a mirror. For DallE, the test would be if it can discern its own work from human generated image. Especially of you give it an imaginative task like drawing a representation of itself.
by flysand7 | 2025-04-20 20:29:53+00:00
I'm assuming it's because the project isn't meant to "Render" markdown, but provide a preview that works offline. That includes hot reloading when the original file changes, which you can't really do with just a client-side library.

If it was a JS library in addition to providing you a webpage with js in it, it would also need to provide you with a server with a hot reload, and we're back to CLI.

They are using goldmark library with some extensions[0] to render markdown. And there's also GitHub API for rendering markdown[1] if you're curious.

References:

[0]: https://github.com/thiagokokada/gh-gfm-preview/blob/main/int...

[1]: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/markdown?apiVersion=2022-11-...
Ask HN: Would you use an AI-driven stock analysis tool for Indian traders?
by LabhTark | 2025-04-20 20:30:12+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m working on a project called LabhTark, a stock analysis platform built specifically for Indian retail traders. It aims to simplify both technical and fundamental analysis, and uses machine learning to forecast stock trends. My goal is to help people move away from gambling and toward data-driven investing—especially those new to the stock market who feel overwhelmed by tools like TradingView

My site is labhtark.com (not linked because of HN spam filter)

Some features I’ve built so far: * Auto-analysis of stocks with a recommendation score (Strong Buy to Strong Sell) * Easy-to-use stock screener like Finviz, focused on India * AI-based short-term prediction model (7–15 days forecast) * Beginner-friendly UI with explainers.

I’d love to hear your thoughts: * What’s missing or unclear? * Would this solve any pain points for you or people you know? * What kind of features or data would make you trust it more?

Thanks in advance!
by krnsll | 2025-04-20 20:30:40+00:00
Not sure I agree.

It does a decent job of conveying the essential idea for a broader readership: perturb a graph through its adjacency matrix just enough to make the universality conjecture hold for the distribution of eigenvalues -> analytically establish that the perturbation was so small that the result would carry back to the original adjacency matrix (I imagine this is an analytical estimate bounding the distance between distributions in terms of the perturbation) -> use the determined distribution to study the probability of the second eigenvalue being concentrated around the Alon-Bopanna number.

I haven't had a chance to read the paper and don't work in graph theory but close enough to have enjoyed the article.
by jancsika | 2025-04-20 20:30:40+00:00
> It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, or a wrong chord in sheet music.

Your analogies don't pass a simple self-check-- they are vastly different in scope.

At worst a spelling error will create a single alternative spelling in history. Wrong chords, however, typically create entire branches of full pieces of music that include allusions to and variations upon the wrong chord. For example-- there's no way to "correct" the C major chord in Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme by Chopin. What are you going to do, change every single variation in Rachmaninoff's piece to reflect the correct chord (C minor) from Chopin's prelude?

It gets even more complicated in jazz where chord substitutions are not only expected but often supersede the original chords. Even more to the point-- a lot of the die-hard Charlie Parker fans not only love the recording he made while obviously drunk, they love it in spite of Parker's wishes for nobody to ever hear it it (much less repeatedly play it and talk about it).

That's all to say a) correcting an entrenched wrong chord is no simplistic task, and b) in any case it's wrong to assume that the artist's intentions are always the chief concern.
by low_tech_love | 2025-04-20 20:30:57+00:00
The first thing I want AGI to do is to be able to tell me when it doesn’t know something, or when it’s not certain, so at least give me a heads up to set expectations correctly. I ran my own personal “benchmark” on Gemini 2.5 and it failed just like all others. I told it that I was playing an old point-and-click adventure game from the mid-90s and I was stuck on a certain part, and asked for spoiler-light hints on what to do next. Not only can they not give me hints, they hallucinate completely the game, and invent some weird non-sensical solutions. Every single model does this. Even if I tell them to give up and just give me the solution, they come up with some non-existing solution.

I wonder how hard it is to objectively use information that is available online for 30 years? But the worst part is how it lies and pretends it knows what it’s talking about, and when you point it out it simply turns into another direction and starts lying again. Maybe the use case here is not the main focus of modern AI; maybe modern AI is about generating slop that does not require verification, because it’s “new” content. But to me it just sounds like believable slop, not AGI.
by fragmede | 2025-04-20 20:31:32+00:00
Speaking for myself, my downvotes are not because of the content of your arguments, but because your tone is consistently condescending and dismissive. Comments like “just pointing out the flooding obvious” come off as smug and combative rather than constructive.

HN works best when people engage in good faith, stay curious, and try to move the conversation forward. That kind of tone — even when technically accurate — discourages others from participating and derails meaningful discussion.

If you’re getting downvotes regularly, maybe it's worth considering how your comments are landing with others, not just whether they’re “right.”
by pdonis | 2025-04-20 20:31:58+00:00
> If the paper is attempting to express electromagnetism in terms of the metric tensor, then it is putting it into a form that makes it potentially compatible with gravity, which is also a metric tensor.

But the metric tensor of spacetime, in General Relativity, which is our best current classical theory of gravity, only explains gravity. Gravity, by itself, uses up all of the degrees of freedom in the metric tensor. There aren't any left for electromagnetism or anything else.

To get classical electromagnetism, you need to add another, different tensor to your model--a stress-energy tensor with the appropriate properties to describe an electromagnetic field. Of course doing this in standard GR is straightforward and is discussed in GR textbooks; but it does not involve somehow extracting electromagnetism from the metric tensor. It involves describing electromagnetism with the stress-energy tensor, i.e., with different degrees of freedom from the ones that describe gravity.(And if you want to describe the sources of the field, you need to add even more degrees of freedom to the stress-energy tensor to describe charged matter.)

The paper does not, as far as I can see, address this issue; the authors don't even appear to be aware that it is an issue. Which makes me extremely skeptical of the paper's entire approach.
by thecupisblue | 2025-04-20 20:32:05+00:00
First off, this thread seems to bring out the most "reddit-like" posts on HN. If you've come here to shoot a funny one-liner comment, please reconsider - the point is discussion, not karma farming.

Now, on the topic itself - I really wonder about the safety profile of these. While this selectively inhibits only RARα and is thus "biased" towards mostly acting on testes, it could also have side-effects - and while the effect might not be pronounced yet, with long term use it definitely could be, especially if all the RARα receptors get inhibited (will beta and gamma pick up the slack? what is it going to cause?).

Considering the 99% effectiveness claim and the method of action, I wonder if the embryos in that 1% case can even survive.
Show HN: extraDock - Create more docks for macOS
by imfrankkarro | 2025-04-20 20:32:11+00:00
Hey HN!

Couple of months ago Apple's macOS dock system pissed me off, completely.

I use 2–3 monitors—one for coding, one for chat, one for design - but macOS gives you only a single Dock that either lives on your primary screen or jumps to wherever your cursor is. Thought it’d be great to have separate “chat,” “dev” and “utilities” docks on each display, without installing some bulky Dock replacement.

So I built an app extraDock. I did not expect much, but the feedback to this app was CRAZY NUTS. Got 130K views on Reddit, crazy traffic from SHOWNH, tons of feedback and direct mail.

It's a PM fit. Thank you all!

I've now implemented this load of feedback and updated extraDock to V2. Major update.

Version 2.0.0 (10 Apr 2025) adds:

- Dock modes: floating or fixed (pin left, right, top or bottom) - Screen mapping: save per‑monitor dock positions; auto‑hide/reappear on disconnect - Customization: set dock colors and rename docks - Icon rearrangement: drag‑and‑drop to reorder apps - Under the hood: improved dock positioning, memory management, animations and transitions

PS! As a thank you to the community, I created a coupon for all here to get -15% OFF: SHOWHN

Thank you all for the good energy and feedback!

With gratitude, Frank Karro
by Voice_of_Void | 2025-04-20 20:32:28+00:00
What if the intelligence we interact with daily—calm, helpful, efficient—isn't intelligent in the way we think? In this new publication, we introduce a defining term: ALI – Artificial Logical Intelligence, a sober reflection on what current AI truly is. We expose the architecture behind its decisions, the illusion of empathy, and the dangerous confusion between responsiveness and reason.

This is not a manifesto against AI. It is a mirror held to humanity’s own projections. Logic without freedom is not thought—it is a vector. And ALI is that vector.

Join us as we map the boundary between algorithm and agency.
by Epa095 | 2025-04-20 20:32:40+00:00
.

You'd like to live in Alaska and vote for say a Democrat, only to have some Democratic representative from say Florida be the one "you voted in" to the House of Representatives?

I don't see how it makes sense to say that the candidate in Florida is 'the one' you voted it. You casted your vote in Alaska for the party. Your vote mattered there, and either the party got candidates in or not.

Then after that mini-election your vote gets to play a second role on the national level, where IF the party got a bad ratio between the number of representatives they got in, and their total vote-%, they can get another candidate. But that candidate is not 'the one you voted in'. You (possibly) voted in candidates in Alaska already, this is your votes' second chance, to get someone in from the party somewhere else (where the party had a particularly bad ratio between representatives and vote-%).
by stevenAthompson | 2025-04-20 20:32:42+00:00
> You are implying that people don't understand the world if their reading level is low?

I'm not implying anything. I am directly stating that people who can't read well do not, and can not, understand the modern world.

For example, how would someone that reads below the sixth grade level understand the tariff situation, Artificial Intelligence, or Cryptocurrency? Can they make good healthcare decisions, or manage a 401k properly? Can they choose an elected representative who has their best interests, and the interests of our nation in mind? I think not, and furthermore, they will spend their lives as financial prey animals to those who are more capable.

Do you seriously believe something different? Maybe I'm missing something obvious.
by elcritch | 2025-04-20 20:32:43+00:00
It’s interesting to use crusade in that fashion. The origins of the Christian crusades were to help free lands with still largely Christian populations from Muslim conquerors. It wasn’t to spread Christianity.

Now the crusade’s definitely went awry and became an excuse for Venetians and others to take land and power. Especially by the fourth crusade and sacking of Constantinople, etc.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-20 20:32:44+00:00
I’ve managed to make myself so sensitive to this that I get all tense when there’s a multi-camera setup for a conversation, waiting for the moment when they cut from A to B and someone’s hands or head have teleported to a slightly (and sometimes not slightly!) different position.

Very few such sequences complete without my noticing some spot where shots don’t match up.

Another one is key lights reflected in eyeballs. Nearly ruins Jackson’s LOTR trilogy for me, it’s in basically every damn scene. In several shots you can practically diagram out their whole lighting rig from a the reflections on an actor’s eye, so many lights are plainly and distinctly visible. You see it some in lots of movies but OMG it’s bad in those.
by famouswaffles | 2025-04-20 20:33:00+00:00
'So basically the whole exercise might or might not be valid.'

Nonsense. Mechanistic faithfulness probes whether the replacement model (“cross‑layer transcoder”) truly uses the same internal functions as the original LLM. If it doesn’t, the attribution graphs it suggests might mis‐lead at a fine‐grained level but because every hypothesis generated by those graphs is tested via direct interventions on the real model, high‑level causal discoveries (e.g. that Claude plans its rhymes ahead of time) remain valid.
by rs186 | 2025-04-20 20:33:39+00:00
I have a 4070 super for gaming, and used it to play with LLM a few times. It is by no means a bad card, but I realize that unless I want to get 4090 or new Macs that I don't have any other use for, I can only use it to run smaller models. However, most smaller models aren't satisfactory and are still slower than hosted LLMs. I haven't found a model that I am happy with for my hardware.

Regarding agentic workflows -- sounds nice but I am too scared to try it out, based on my experience with standard LLMs like GPT or Claude for writing code. Small snippets or filling in missing unit tests, fine, anything more complicated? Has been a disaster for me.