MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by curiouser3 | 2025-04-22 18:43:40+00:00
>no one is vibe coding elixir

I did :) I made a browser-based MMO with Phoenix to test out liveview and learn the language: https://shopkeep.gg

And it was pretty annoying. Elixir doesn't really lend itself to vibe coding due to namespacing and aliasing of modules, pattern matching, all without static typing (I know, Dialyzer...). It also struggles to understand the difference between LiveComponents and LiveViews, where to send/handle messages between layers.

Without references to filenames, the agent perpetually decides "this doesn't exist, so I'll write it :)". I found it to be pretty challenging before figuring out I could force the agent to run `mix xref callers <Some.Module>` when trying to do cross-module refs.

(caveat: this was all with claude 3.5 sonnet)
by SoftTalker | 2025-04-22 18:43:58+00:00
> have them understand the “basics”…like what is the hard drive vs RAM (memory allocation) or what is a transistor (Boolean logic)

You must understand these things at least conceptually if you want to really understand how to write efficient programs. Maybe not at the level of how memory can electronically "remember" a 1 or a zero, or how a hard drive can magnetically do it, but at least the relative speeds e.g. register vs. cache vs. RAM vs. disk.
by ricardo81 | 2025-04-22 18:44:38+00:00
Love biology. I appreciate purist mathematician/logicians prefer chemistry and physics and it seems to be an inside joke in the professions that biology isn't on the same level when it comes to axiomatic things.

I'm a classic INTJ but left school and built biology-online.org 25ish years ago. I think it's had a couple of thousand years of reading hours. I sold it on thinking I lack the expertise the topic deserves (it ranked well on Google for lots of biological terms)

I love the lack of agency about biology/evolution, it found a way to create ourselves as well as the huge tree of life around us purely through biological/ecological pressures. And here we are. We owe a lot to how biology has expressed things over the past 4 billion years and will likely find out a whole lot more.
by jmyeet | 2025-04-22 18:44:47+00:00
I always figured that the cat's ability to eliminate vermin, particularly on ships, propelled their domestication and spread. This was simply too useful to early humans.

I'm reminded of the Russian silver fox domestication experiment [1]. What's interesting about that is how quickly the species adapts characteristics making them more desirable for humans.

[1]: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/russian-foxes-tameness-d...
by doctorpangloss | 2025-04-22 18:45:25+00:00
> Are they sustainable long term as a standalone business?

Was Meteor? They are exactly the same thing. And I really liked Meteor!

To me, the more money pouring in, the better. That said:

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRCVKYR...

(The Silicon Valley Economy cartoon)
by pllbnk | 2025-04-22 18:45:31+00:00
With my limited knowledge, I can't help but wonder, aren't current Transformer-based LLMs facing the five nines problem of their own? We're reaching a point where next token prediction accuracy improves merely linearly (maybe even on a logarithmic scale?) with additional parameters, while errors compound exponentially across longer sequences.

Even if a 5T parameter model improves prediction accuracy from 99.999% to 99.9999% compared to a 500B model, hallucinations persist because these small probabilities of error multiply dramatically over many tokens. Temperature settings just trade between repetitive certainty and creative inconsistency.
by 0_gravitas | 2025-04-22 18:45:41+00:00
Personally, I struggled a lot in my earlier CS/Informatics education, partly because I never felt like I understood what was actually happening/how we got here, everything was just factoids in a void. When I took a gap semester between my A.S. and B.S., I finally studied/explored a bit of the history and it put a lot finally in perspective.
by ksherlock | 2025-04-22 18:46:13+00:00
There is a proposal (https://github.com/tc39/proposal-signals) for standardized signals. Maybe that's not what you're thinking of. But if it is, there's a polyfill and other prior art (eg, preact-signals -- https://preactjs.com/guide/v10/signals/ -- which are not specific to p/react).
by eru | 2025-04-22 18:46:57+00:00
So quickselect needs multiple passes, and the heap needs O(n log k) time to find the top k elements of n elements total.

However, you can find the top k elements in O(n) time and O(k) space in a single pass.

One simple way: you keep a buffer of up to 2*k elements. You scan your stream of n items one by one. Whenever your buffer gets full, you pare it back down to k elements with your favourite selection algorithm (like quickselect).

As a minor optimisation, you can only add items to your buffer, if they improve on the worst element in your buffer (or when you haven't hit k elements in your buffer, yet).

As an empirical question, you can also experiment with the size of the buffer. Theoretically any multiple of k will do (even 1.1*k or so), but in practice they give you different constant factors for space and time.
by whstl | 2025-04-22 18:47:58+00:00
I completely disagree.

Backends are far messier (especially when built over time by a team), more expensive and less flexible than a GraphQL or PostgREST's api.

> I've only worked with Hasura, but I can say it's an insecure nightmare that forces anti-patterns

Writing backend code without knowing what you're doing is also an insecure nightmare that forces anti-patterns. All good engineering practices still need to apply to Hasura.

Nothing says that "everything must go through it". Use it for the parts it fits well, use a normal backend for the non-CRUD parts. This makes securing tables easier for both Hasura and PostgREST.

> Business logic gets pushed into your front end because where else do you run it unless you make an API wrapper. You're doing weird extra network hops if you have other services that need the data but can't safely access it directly

I'm gonna disagree a bit with the sibling post here. If you think that going through Hasura for everything is not working: just don't.

This is 100% a self-imposed limitation. Hasura and PostgREST still allow you to have a separate backend that goes around it. There is nothing forbidding you from accessing the DB directly from another backend. This is not different from accessing the same database from two different classes. Keep the 100% CRUD part on Hasura/PostgREST, keep the fiddly bits in the backend.

The kind of dogma that says that everything must be built with those tools produces worse apps. You're describing it yourself.

> I think the people who write this off as "backend engineers feel threatened" aren't taking the time to understand the arguments they're hearing

I have heard the arguments and all I hear is people complaining about how hard it is to shove round pieces in square holes. These tools can be used correctly, but just like anything else they have a soft spot that you have to learn.

Once again: "use right tool for the job" doesn't mean you can only use a single tool in your project.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-04-22 18:48:21+00:00
> I'm a classic INTJ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...

> Despite its popularity, the MBTI has been widely regarded as pseudoscience by the scientific community.[1][3][2] The validity (statistical validity and test validity) of the MBTI as a psychometric instrument has been the subject of much criticism.

> Many of the studies that endorse MBTI are methodologically weak or unscientific.[13] A 1996 review by Gardner and Martinko concluded: "It is clear that efforts to detect simplistic linkages between type preferences and managerial effectiveness have been disappointing. Indeed, given the mixed quality of research and the inconsistent findings, no definitive conclusion regarding these relationships can be drawn."[13][72]

>The test has been likened to horoscopes, as both rely on the Barnum effect, flattery, and confirmation bias, leading participants to personally identify with descriptions that are somewhat desirable, vague, and widely applicable.[10][73] MBTI is not recommended in counseling.[74]
by tutubuilds | 2025-04-22 18:50:55+00:00
Thanks for checking out the app, this is helpful feedback! To briefly respond:

1. Adding explicit info on which components are phonetic vs semantic is def smth we need to do!

2. Not sure if you have discovered the back of the card where we show all definitions and pronunciations. The purpose of the front card is to introduce a new learner to the character, so unless it is absolutely necessary we avoid enumerating to many meanings & pronunciations there, because it is intimidating and in my opinion unnecessary for initial learning.

3. App's vocabulary includes all words and characters. However the learning sequence includes only some characters (around 1000), which is probably what you are referring to. (In the Characters tab you can switch between main learning sequence and all HSK characters via a switch on the bottom)

4. Avoiding a quiz is a deliberate choice. It's very easy for a learner to mark which characters they know (just hold them down in Characters tab or anywhere else in the app), so making a person take a quiz before starting using the app felt like unnecessary delay.
by optymizer | 2025-04-22 18:51:09+00:00
This tsk-tsk is misguided. There's a time and place to shame companies for acting in bad faith, and we should do it, but I don't think it's the case here. It does not seem like damage control for intentional malice.

The TL on the project should have done better, but it was a good sign that they had originally taken the time to acknowledge Spegel's author's help. It's very likely that someone else dealt with the actual code and license text and didn't know any better.

The PR text is reviewed by lawyers. The default advice from lawyers is "do not admit any wrongdoing". They probably suggested that the license text be fixed silently with no apology. The PR department likely convinced them that a public apology would be good for optics and it doesn't seem soulless either.

They should have done better. They admitted that. They may or may not change their internal processes, but it's now in the record book. Case closed.

And the author of Spegel should not have used a different license if he wanted "more <<recognition>>". He wanted the recognition specified by the MIT license.
by jbs789 | 2025-04-22 18:51:15+00:00
As an observation, the quotations and the article itself doesn’t appear very thoughtful or well reasoned. It sounds more like a VC wanted a big deal (or at least to represent it as such) and made a bet, invited his buddies(?) along, and the company has seen a recent bump from “vibe coding”. Some allusion to Larry Ellison. Very light on information to form an opinion…
by lenerdenator | 2025-04-22 18:51:33+00:00
> Please do your due diligence and check local laws before attempting anything I do in this post. Transmitting radio signals can become legally problematic very quickly, and the band I specifically transmit on here (868Mhz) is illegal in the United States without a license. I'd rather you didn't have men in suits knocking on your door on my account. You've been warned!

Let's be honest here: the FCC is gonna have to see a helluva lot of problems coming from your transmissions before they bother to send the black Suburbans filled with men in suits to knock on your door. You're going to get a series of letters that basically say "please don't do that" if anything.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-22 18:51:35+00:00
No, I think they are saying you will be charged $2k for your grid connection and sporadic use, unless you are legally allowed to fully disconnect.

They are saying the cost for grid running to your house, and for the hydro dams that provide power on a cloudy day are basically fixed.

Net metering doesn't scale at population levels.
by beanjuiceII | 2025-04-22 18:52:02+00:00
I have an EV, a hybrid, and a few gas cars..i actually wish i never bought any of the electric vehicles its just a gigantic pain in the ass without much benefit. Charging takes too long and mileage is not as good in my colder climate, I thought EV would give me less headaches instead gave me more. No one even wants to buy them from me either...re-sale is low. I have not tried a tesla but maybe I should, but because people are insane I don't want to be some target for losers..so that's out for now.
by ssl-3 | 2025-04-22 18:52:21+00:00
Is AlphaGo an LLM?

Anyway, we were here:

> Weird you don't have this requirement for the OP spewing his urban myths above.

It isn't my purpose try to convince you that your apparent presumption that the output of a human and a machine are somehow equivalent and should be treated equally is wrong.

So I won't.
by daveguy | 2025-04-22 18:52:55+00:00
What I got out of that essay is that you should discredit most responses of LLMs unless you want to do just as much or more work yourself confirming the accuracy of an unreliable and deeply flawed partner. Whereas if a human "hallucinated a non-existent library or method you would instantly lose trust in them." But, for reasons, we should either give the machine the benefit of the doubt or manually confirm everything.
by square_usual | 2025-04-22 18:54:37+00:00
Well, you'd be betting that people would still be willing to buy at $1,500 or $2,000. When prices go up that much, demand tends to drop, and for what are essentially toys might even go down to 0. So you'd risk holding on to inventory, and with the 90 day reprieve and the market shocks you might be willing to bet that in a few months there might not be tariffs at all.
by JamesSwift | 2025-04-22 18:54:48+00:00
For what its worth, ActiveSupport::CacheStore is a really flexible api that gives minimal contractual obligations (read_entry, write_entry, delete_entry is the entire set of required methods), but still allows you to layer specific functionality (eg TTL) on top with an optional 'options' param. You could get the best of both worlds by adhering to that contract and then people can swap in eg redis cache store if they wanted a network-shared store.

EDIT: see https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/main/activesupport/lib/a...
by keybored | 2025-04-22 18:54:51+00:00
> It is "duck-typed", but it is checked at compile time. Unlike ducktyping in JS, you know whether or not your type is a valid argument just as you would for Java type bounds -- the compiler lets you know. Everything is also all spelled out, just in a different way.

At this point I will have to defer to Zig users.

But the wider point stands whether I am correct about Zig usability or not (mostly leaning on the aforelinked URLs). Plenty of things can be compile-time and yet have widely different usability. Something that relies on unconstrained build-time code generation can be much harder to use than macros, which in turn can be harder to use than something like “constant expressions”, and so on.
by lxgr | 2025-04-22 18:55:11+00:00
> open model weights fulfill much of the intent / "soul" of the open source movement

Absolutely not. The intent of the open source movement is sharing methods, not just artifacts, and that would require training code and methodology.

A binary (and that's arguably what weights are) you can semi-freely download and distribute is just shareware – that's several steps away from actual open source.

There's nothing wrong with shareware, but calling it open source, or even just "source available" (i.e. open source with licensing/usage restrictions), when it isn't, is disingenuous.
by aesh2Xa1 | 2025-04-22 18:55:30+00:00
Having read that document, the ISO 7730 model itself depends on stable temperatures. However, I think the key is simply to understand thermal mass; people can be in hotter air, but feel cold due to cold surfaces (e.g., floors or furniture), which heat more slowly (or lose heat more slowly) than the air itself.

Therefore, 1st: Heating/cooling cycles from your HVAC are fighting these objects because they don't mix at the same speed as other objects (e.g., the air itself), so you end up with gradients across objects; people rate this feels unpleasant.

2nd: Mechanical equipment tends to operate more efficiently under constant load compared to constant start and stop cycles.

With #1 and #2, you can just heat constantly to increase both the uniformity of heating across objects and also the efficiency of the mechanical equipment's energy conversion.

There's a 3rd point, which, really, is just a sneaky way of reframing #1 and #2, and that is that you can also lower your setpoint and still have a subjectively superior comfort perception compared to a cyclic system. It drives home the point to say "constant 68F feels more comfortable than intermittent 72F." But it also invites the complaint about constant versus intermittent energy use, right? So I think just detailing #1 and #2 is better.
by lazide | 2025-04-22 18:55:44+00:00
Saying ‘I don’t like their food’ == judgment. Saying ‘their food isn’t Thai food’ when it is == defamation. Saying ‘I found a cockroach in the food’ when you didn’t == defamation.

The issue in Thailand, is all three will get you in deep trouble if discussing the royal family, or other topics yes?

[https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defamation]
by Aloisius | 2025-04-22 18:55:46+00:00
We should have never permitted minors to apply for federal student loans.

Frankly, the direct federal student loan program was probably a mistake. We shifted everything from private loans with federal guarantees to direct federal loans because of the perception that it benefited banks over citizens, but all we ended up doing is shifting animosity from banks to the government.

Worse, the easy availability of student loans has made it easy for States to substantially reduce subsidies, shifting the burden onto students while jacking up rates along with private colleges.
by JoeDaDude | 2025-04-22 18:56:09+00:00
I'm just going to recommend the biology books written by Lewis Thomas. The books are collections of essays rather than science or text books. They blew my mind and opened up a deep respect for the field of biology and gave me a deep appreciation of life in all its forms, so many of which I didn't know existed.

Look for:

The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher

The Youngest Science

...and a couple of thers.
by FloorEgg | 2025-04-22 18:56:13+00:00
"The Richat Structure is the result of natural geological processes." - this is irrelevant

"Other than having concentric circles, it doesn't match Plato's description of Atlantis" - in what way? Be specific.

"and there is no evidence that any large city was ever there." - lol, there has never been a thorough archeological survey, and the surveys that have been done have turned up evidence that points to noteworthy human activity. What about the tens of thousands of axe heads found all concentrated in one spot?

Assuming that the city was destroyed in a significant flood, we need to assume the evidence will be hard to find, and therefore we have to look hard for it before we can say it's not there.
by adventured | 2025-04-22 18:56:14+00:00
All you're doing is listing that they utilized different strategies to grow faster. Which they all have in common with normal businesses.

PayPal grew by incentivizing usage. You say "bribe" to give it a negative connotation when it's not at all. Like a store giving away free samples. Or a freemium service plan. It's no different, the business is eating a cost to grow, and that technique is used a zillion times over across all commerce. PayPal was de facto spending money on marketing.

Your Clubhouse example isn't even a negative example, you're just trashing on them.

Slack grew by leveraging an advantage, like all businesses do and without exception. You might as well disqualify all founders of all businesses because they have any number of advantages, including being born with a superior mental capability (Joe Smith is a genius at math, it's totally unfair). The Slack founder advantage was earned, he had every right to leverage it. Before that he built Flickr with others and he wasn't nearly so famous then and Flickr was also a network example.

The premise you're floating is: guy that started a convenience store was able to get a loan/investment or otherwise had capital. It's unrealistic because he used an advantage someone else didn't have. Therefore not a valid business strategy.

Hotmail put a promo at the bottom of each email. Totally unrealistic that they leveraged their existing scale to grow even faster. What normal businesses can do that? (answer: most of them)
by square_usual | 2025-04-22 18:58:04+00:00
Are you sure you are looking at the exact same configs? I looked up both G16 and Zephyrous 14 and on Keepa.com their price hasn't moved that much. The notable exception is that their prices dropped quite a bit for Amazon's President's day sale, but both of those had prices hold steady (i.e. within the +-10% range) since then.
by Beijinger | 2025-04-22 18:58:25+00:00
It depends. In most Nibelungen texts, he doesn’t encounter a dragon, but rather a long lindworm with shiny armor.

In these accounts, someone slays the lindworm, but not through direct combat. Instead, he uses an invisibility cloak, takes the creature's treasure, and bathes in its blood. Later, he meets his end due to treachery. Clearly, this is a work of fantasy.

But what about the Roman historian's lament regarding the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest? Over 150 years later, and they’re still singing his tale... the song of Hermann the German. Unfortunately, that song hasn't survived. However, the Nibelungen texts remain, where Siegfried (Hermann) defeats a long worm with shiny armor (symbolizing the Roman legions), not through open battle but by ambush (the cloak of invisibility), seizing their treasure (the dragon’s hoard), and ritually killing their leaders (bathing in blood). And, just like Siegfried, he is ultimately undone by treachery.

The parallels are so striking that it seems highly unlikely to be a mere coincidence, especially since Roman writers noted that "his song" endured for an exceptionally long time. The Nibelungen texts IS THIS SONG!

I say the Nibelungen Tale is based on facts. And the same may be the case with Atlantis.
by alganet | 2025-04-22 18:58:55+00:00
There was a time ancient people broke their own legs, believing it would bring good luck.

It is true and written all across ancient records of that time.

Scholars don't fully understand why they would do such a thing. Many theories have been presented over the years. A ritual of passage, a demonstration of loyalty as bargain in exchange for a favor from a divinity, or simply a group ritual believed to reinforce the will of those within a social group.

Truth is, we will never know. Despite our best efforts, several parts of the original text describing the ritual were lost, only copies of copies remain.
Show HN: Converts any text into a podcast featuring customizable speakers
by kishore-jalleda | 2025-04-22 18:59:00+00:00
I built Unstruct.AI to transform how we consume content. The system converts any text into an interactive podcast featuring customizable speakers - yes, you can literally 'cast' recognizable personalities in your content.

Example: I transformed OpenAI's GPT-4o image generation blog post into a 4-minute conversation starring Sam Altman, Gabriel Goh, and Prafulla Dhariwal discussing the technology, with relevant visuals from the original post mapped to each segment.

The process takes seconds:

1. Upload content and images 2. AI generates the conversation 3. Map visuals to segments 4. Customize your 'cast' 5. Share or embed

Demo link in comments. Would love feedback on potential use cases and how you might use this technology.