MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fch42 | 2025-05-26 08:16:50+00:00
The space on tube carriages is used for ... passengers. Unlike long-distance trains (where the locomotive is a rather sizeable unit of its own and has pretty much an electric substation of its own in it), the parts of a tube train reserved for driver, engines, electrical distribution are comparatively tiny.

see https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transparency/freedom-of-informa...

Seems not trivial to just put extra batteries and the circuitry for regen breaking charging in.
by hummusisdata | 2025-05-26 08:17:05+00:00
I am now working on forming a new data strategy framework. I think that one of the biggest issues we are seeing out there is the rush to GenAI and create automation. However, in reality, people tend to ignore the data that is supposed to be used.

So I started my blog Cooking Data, and slowly, using Vibe Coding, I am building tools to translate the philosophical conversation into actionable tools. I am always happy to learn and discover how the team handles the data strategy and answers the business goals with it
by Dan-Q | 2025-05-26 08:17:09+00:00
My phone number is on my CV, and that's deliberate (I want a job!). It's in plenty of other places online too.

But none of them (except the Google Play one, which I'm fixing) are associated with the business or were provided for the purpose of sharing when people search for a business that I happen to be involved with!

(I'm sure you wouldn't want your phone number to turn up every time anybody searched for your employer, even if you were happy for your phone number to appear on your personal website, right?)
by michaelmrose | 2025-05-26 08:17:35+00:00
If you have 40k in debt and a $15 an hour job AND the expense of living in the a city you are well and truly fucked.

Forgive me for using the first link off google but using this it says it would take approx 20 years paying $300 a month to pay off $40k.

https://www.calculator.net/debt-payoff-calculator.html

You will have to somehow live on the remaining $1700 you take home after taxes and loan payment in cities where the rent for really shitty studios is about that and they want you to make 3x the rent to live indoors.

It's possible that you like most people who are living off much more than the minimum have no idea how ridiculously hard it is at the bottom.
by 35mm | 2025-05-26 08:17:48+00:00
Thanks for the feedback. I should probably make it more clear - there is no description field.

The block of text is the 'Likely to outsource' column. I use Perplexity Deep research to try to infer what services the company might need based on it's probable current challenges.

In this case it was: "Cloud infrastructure support to manage rapid scaling, pivoting, and new product integrations as part of business model transformation[3]., Specialized consulting (e.g., industry-specific financial regulations, fintech compliance, and go-to-market strategy) to facilitate entry into new verticals and optimize operational resilience[2]."
Ask HN: Anyone struggling to get value out of coding LLMs?
by bjackman | 2025-05-26 08:17:53+00:00
I use LLMs daily for stuff like:

- solving tasks that just require applying knowledge ("here's a paste of my python import structure. I don't write Python often and I'm aware I'm doing something wrong here because I get this error, tell me the proper way organise the package").

- writing self-contained throwaway pieces of code ("here's a paste of my DESCRIBE TABLE output, write an SQL query to show the median [...]").

- as a debugging partner ("I can SSH to this host directly, but Ansible fails to connect with this error, what could be causing this difference").

All these use cases work great, I save a lot of time. But with the core work of writing the code that I work on, I've almost never had any success. I've tried:

- Cursor (can't remember which model, the default)

- Google's Jules

- OpenAI Codex with o4

I found in all cases that the underlying capability is clearly there (the model can understand and write code) but the end-to-end value is not at all. It could write code that _worked_, but trying to get it to generate code that I am willing to maintain and "put my name on" took longer than writing the code would have.

I had to micromanage them infinitely ("be sure to rerun the formatter, make sure all tests pass" and "please follow the coding style of the repository". "You've added irrelevant comments remove those". "You've refactored most of the file but forgot a single function"). It would take many many iterations on trivial issues, and because these iterations are slow that just meant I had to context switch a lot, which is also exhausting.

Basically it was like having an intern who has successfully learned the core skill of programming but is not really capable of good collaboration and needs to be babysat all the time.

I asked friends who are enthusiastic vibe coders and they basically said "your standards are too high".

Is the model for success here that you just say "I don't care about code quality because I don't have to maintain it because I will use LLMs for that too?" Am I just not using the tools correctly?
by makeitdouble | 2025-05-26 08:18:47+00:00
TBF it's only expensive if you know how much the alternative costs, and have a reasonable path to switch to it. So for most small shops, it's just a cost of doing business, and they're small enough it doesn't cost astronomical sums yet.

Running an on-premise cluster requires enough expertise that it will mostly be for mature companies, and they'll have completely different priorities when choosing technologies.
by charcircuit | 2025-05-26 08:22:10+00:00
The demo shows pretty weak performance compared to other small models. It misunderstood my question due to picking an uncommon way to interpret it. After clarifying what I wanted it lost all context I had provided in the previous message. My benchmark query intentionally ambiguous and I use it to see how models handle ambiguity, handle information which can be outdated, and handle avoiding hallucination. Usually weak models will just hallucinate an answer, but this model was the first who want able to understand the question.
by NekkoDroid | 2025-05-26 08:22:17+00:00
> non-deterministic

Counterpoint: temperature = 0 /s

On a more serious note: I personally only found LLMs really interesting to double check my code if there might be something I overlooked in the general implementation (a different approach or so), never really for it to write code directly for me. I feel like this is just becoming less and less common nowadays and it kinda makes me worry for the quality of code that was already questionable at times...
by masklinn | 2025-05-26 08:22:20+00:00
> swapping isn't feasible compared to moving. You would still want to remove most items from a capsule when being lifted by crane.

Eh. If it had caught up it’s pretty reasonable that capsule design would have supported such a use case, by adding features to securely stow items as on ships or planes e.g. latches, strap hooks, etc…
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-26 08:22:28+00:00
It's possible, but I think it's more likely that the Google account that has made the Three Rings app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.org.threeri...) with a listed phone number (+44 7795...) also claimed ownership of the Three Rings website through whatever domain tools Google offers.

In that case, the developer provided Google with a way for Three Rings customers to reach them and they then published that number.

I don't know why the app's developers decided to use their personal phone number for their Google Play business contact information, but that seems like the most reasonable explanation to me.

If the author did not provide that phone number to Google Play, then he will need to also update his information there to get the phone number delisted, or it will be a matter of time before it appears on the Google Search page again.
by modeless | 2025-05-26 08:22:34+00:00
I don't believe the phone number in Google Play comes from Business Profile. Business Profile is a Maps thing. The way a phone number gets on the developer page of the Play Store is by you entering it into the Play Store developer console for that purpose.

Since it was published by you as public contact information for your business on Google, either a customer or one of the contractors Google employs to update phone numbers in Maps listings then added it to Maps.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-26 08:22:55+00:00
The problems here aren't different to restricting malicious or hacked employees, or malicious or hacked third party libraries.

You start with the low hanging fruit: run tool commands inside a kernel sandbox that switches off internet access and then re-provide access only via an HTTP proxy that implements some security policies. For example, instead of providing direct access to API keys you can give the AI a fake one that's then substituted by the proxy, it can obviously restrict access by domain and verb e.g. allow GET on everything but restrict POST to just one or two domains you know it needs for its work. You restrict file access to only the project directory, and so on.

Then you can move upwards and start to sandbox the sub-components the AI is working on using the same sort of tech.
by OgsyedIE | 2025-05-26 08:23:15+00:00
An argument in favor of AI consciousness (which I believe originates with Dennett) is that we already have examples, in the real world today, of things that are not conscious becoming things that are conscious. Gametes.

Sperm and egg cells, which are almost certainly not conscious, become babies in the right conditions, which are almost certainly conscious.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-26 08:23:34+00:00
In Portugual yes, you could easily find shops close by to universtities with folders containing endless lists of software, it was a matter to place your order and come back to pick up it later on.

During the 8 bit days all tapes were clearly copied, many of them even had B&W copies of the instructions, clearly cutted out with scissors.

However this is all gone, after our involvement into EU all these kind of stuff started to be cracked down.

It is still around if you look for it, e.g. cracked game consoles and cable TV boxes, but it will be clearly taken care of if found by authorities.
by yuvadam | 2025-05-26 08:23:39+00:00
Been building Namekit [1] — a simple tool that uses AI + a small proprietary model to generate domain name ideas and surface only the ones that are immediately available. I got tired of bloated name generators with useless suggestions, so I built something fast, clean, and actually useful — mostly for myself, but now for others too.

[1] https://namekit.app
by IshKebab | 2025-05-26 08:24:54+00:00
> And it's not like protobuf is inherently any better at that anyways -- if you want to access a record in the middle of the file, you've got to stream the whole file up to that point to get to at it.

Not true. Libraries may not commonly expose the functionality but Protobuf uses tag-length-value so you can very quickly skip to the part of a file you want. In the worst case it will still be orders of magnitude faster than JSON.

Your proposal sounds very complicated and fragile, and doesn't solve significant issues with JSON like zero-copy, storing numbers and byte arrays directly, etc.
by Dan-Q | 2025-05-26 08:25:39+00:00
For the business account.

I wanted to take control of the Google Business Profile (back then: Google My Business) listing. To do that, Google asked for a phone number they could call. I provided one, and then double-checked that they hadn't put it on the public profile (they hadn't).

They emailed me about once a year after that to suggest that I might like to put a phone number on the business profile. I declined. But I always checked, and sure enough: they hadn't put one on there. All was good.

Then one day, randomly, my phone number started appearing on the public profile/being served to search users. That's the whole story here.

I don't yet know how or why it started appearing. A few ideas have been posed here and elsewhere, including:

1. Some runaway automated process at Google, trying to "fix" the absence of a business phone number, took the one that was previously used to ID the business contact. (Some folks seem to think that this is what I'm claiming happened, but I'm only putting it forward as a possibility.)

2. Google "joined the dots" from the Google Play profile and the Google Business Profile. This currently seems like the most-likely explanation, to me. I'm getting the former corrected anyway; we'll see what comes out of it.

3. Some third-party Google user added it. That seems possible, but in my experience once you've verified and own a Google Business Profile, you get an email to confirm any "suggested changes" and I didn't see any such email.

4. Some kind of user error by me or by somebody else who has access to the profile. I obviously can't rule this out, but I've checked and I personally haven't even logged into it in over a year (and I've had emails since that confirm that a phone number wasn't listed), so it seems unlikely. Also, the message said that Google had updated the phone number (not me).
Show HN: SnapDone – An habit tracker with visual proof
by itzami | 2025-05-26 08:26:01+00:00
I built SnapDone with the intent of making myself accountable for my habits. The idea of it is simple: - you create a habit and suggest a prompt of what the photo you'll take should show - once you want to mark one as completed, you snap a photo, and the system will try to match the photo against the prompt
by n_ary | 2025-05-26 08:26:57+00:00
> Andy Jassy, the chief executive, wrote that generative A.I. was yielding big returns for companies that use it for “productivity and cost avoidance.” He said working faster was essential because competitors would gain ground if Amazon doesn’t give customers what they want “as quickly as possible” and cited coding as an activity where A.I. would “change the norms.”

Like what exactly is Amazon giving us here? I don't get it. Also, I want to see Andy Jassy start writing some codes or fixing issues/bugs for next 5-10 years and have those reviewed by anonymous engineers before I take any word from him. These marketers/sales sleezy dudes claim garbage about things they do not do or know how to do but media picks up everything they say. It is like my grandmother who never went to school starts telling me about how brain surgery is slow and needs productivity else more people will die and those doctors need to adapt. Shameless behavior of these marketing/sales idiots as well as the dark side of media has reached new extreme in this AI bubble.

Meanwhile, I can see from comments how a lot of HNers totally agree everything this salesy guy says as holy bible verse and my colleague is sending me freaked out texts about how he is planning to switch career as Amazon Super Boss is talking about vibe coding now but became calm after I told him, these dudes are mostly sales/MBA who never wrote code of fixed issues, same way our PO doesn't know the diff between var and const.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-26 08:28:15+00:00
Rule of thumb is parameter_count * precision. Precision can be anything [32,16,8,4] bits. 32bits is sometimes used in training (although less now I guess), and rarely in inference. For a while now "full" precision is 16bit (fp16, bf16), fp8 is 8bit, int4 is 4bit, and so on. Everything that's not "full" precision is also known as quantised. fp8 is a quantised version of the "full" model.

So quick napkin math can give you the VRAM usage for loading the model. 7b can be ~14GB full, 7GB in fp8 and ~3.5GB in 4bit (AWQ, int4, q4_k_m, etc). But that's just to load the model in VRAM. You also need some available VRAM to run inference, and there are a lot of things to consider there too. You need to be able to run a forward pass on the required context, you can keep a kv cache to speed up inference, you can do multiple sessions in parallel, and so on.

Context length is important to take into account because images take a lot of tokens. So what you could do with a 7b LLM at full precision on a 16GB VRAM GPU might not be possible with a VLM, because the context of your query might not fit into the remaining 2GB.
by HenryBemis | 2025-05-26 08:28:34+00:00
> In 2014, Google presented the one-click CAPTCHA and later, with reCAPTCHA v3, the “invisible CAPTCHA”. Similar services are offered by other companies like Cloudflare, Akamai, and others. They rely on analyzing everything they know about you and feeding it into a large machine-learning model to compare you with behavior...

> This requires the creation of extensive centralized profiles about the people visiting your site.

Very nice wording to avoid/workaround GDPR/EDPS attention. So, they compare "me" to a "behaviour". Notice the words.. not "my behaviour" to "ProfileType_004 behaviour". Because that would be "profiling" and GDPR don't like profiling! So..

On the second quote, again, they compare something vague to "centralized profiles" (what I wrote as "ProfileType_004" above (or whatever they are called in each vendor). Again, the ether is compared/matched to a profile, so.. they profile us :)

ufff...
by econ | 2025-05-26 08:29:52+00:00
The 80's:

Say you set a value for some reason. Later you have to check IF it is set. If the condition needs to be checked many times you replace it with the code (rather than set a value to check some place). If you need to check if something is still true repeatedly you replace the condition check with no-ops when it isn't true.

Also funny are insanely large loop unrolls with hard coded valued. You could make a kind of rainbow table of those.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-26 08:30:19+00:00
You're right, I mis-remembered - Postgres calls them "SIREAD locks" but they aren't actually locks. The model is based on aborting transactions.

The issue with this - and I'm not saying it's a bad feature because it's not and I'd like to have support for every isolation level everywhere - is that most apps can't tolerate transaction aborts. They need to be written to expect it and loop. Looping can easily turn into livelock if you aren't careful and there aren't great tools or known best practices for handling such a system.

You also have to be careful because such transactions are only strictly serializable vs other transactions run at the same isolation level. So if you accidentally allow in a mix of transactions you are still exposed to isolation anomalies.

So it's a useful feature but not something most apps can easily port to.
by simonask | 2025-05-26 08:30:42+00:00
Software development is not engineering, but it's also not completely arbitrary. It's a craft, and like all other craftspeople, you build intuition through experience, which guides decision-making.

It's a little controversial to say that it isn't engineering, but compare what we do to things like building bridges or constructing dams. The level of rigor in those fields is galaxies apart from almost all of software development. You _could_ apply it, and some organizations do, especially when lives are on the line, but the cost/benefit ratio is impossible to justify in almost all software development.

This isn't to say that "real" engineers don't also build intuition, but they have enormously higher accountability requirements. In some areas I would argue that software development _should_ have much higher accountability, but this also means a significantly higher cost. I think governments around the world are coming to realize that the money would be well spent.
by piva00 | 2025-05-26 08:30:47+00:00
> It says they are interested in more than just chilling on the beach.

Which is not necessarily a good thing, being more interested in reshaping the world even after it becomes clear their vision for the new world isn't making it better just leaves someone with lots of power and bad ideas, not a good combo.

I'd much rather have them chilling on the beach after being done with the limits of their competence.
by felipesabino | 2025-05-26 08:31:44+00:00
I decided to try the AI train and develop something without actually writing any line of code.

The result was very satisfying, https://rss.sabino.me - a rss new aggregator, with a summary to save some time on news that I do not want to read, but am mildly interested.

I will not say the same about the code quality tough
by jonathanstrange | 2025-05-26 08:32:13+00:00
It's not a choice. You're forced to pay for the pension system in Denmark and most other countries if you're employed. The only thing governments have to do is to use that money for actual pension funds instead of embezzling it, and to calculate the contributions on a reasonable basis with reasonable extrapolations about inflation, i.e., to properly finance these funds now and not abuse them for other purposes.

It's mysterious why they haven't done that despite the fact that the demographic problems were known to occur up to 40 years ago. But you see the same thing with housing prices and rents, forthcoming problems were already obvious 20 years ago in every country, yet only few have tried to deal with them in time. Maybe someone else can explain where this inertia comes from, I always found it strange.
by bob1029 | 2025-05-26 08:32:17+00:00
Why not look at it like a nuclear power plant and build a similar solution? You can reject gigawatts of power with one wet cooling tower.

If pumping water up and down that distance is infeasible, then make the primary coolant loop use a phase change refrigerant. Much easier to pump long vertical distances. Condensed fluid would flow down with gravity, evaporated gas would flow up.
by ayaros | 2025-05-26 08:33:03+00:00
Thanks!

The answer is neither; it isn't remotely imitating the Lisa's architecture, nor is it a skin over some other previously written JS code. To be clear: this is absolutely NOT a CSS skin.

The only CSS involved is used for the positioning of the canvas element on the page, and for the styling of the temporary UI elements which mimic the Lisa's hardware test screen (and those that display as a fallback if JS is disabled). When the system "boots" all those temporary elements are replaced with a single canvas element on which the UI is displayed.

I should perhaps have been less modest in my original comment in that all of the UI components are coded from scratch. This includes a hierarchical system for displaying objects on the canvas (not dissimilar to the the DOM), the windowing system, a typesetting system, multiple systems for displaying and storing image data, and much more. I've written what I hesitate to call a graphics engine, but I guess that's sort of what it is... it even supports 1-bit blending modes.

This was originally going to be more along the lines of a CSS skin, but I became so deeply frustrated with visual inconsistencies across browser engines and platforms that I ultimately decided to move all the logic I could into JS. The result is what you see now.
by speleding | 2025-05-26 08:33:33+00:00
In our case Google updated the company phone number from the Chamber of Commerce register. We don't provide phone support, but by law you have to have a phone number in that register (in the Netherlands). I put a voip number in there that goes straight to a voicemail, it tells people we don't offer phone support. So I removed it from the Google Business profile, but every once in a while they decide to "helpfully" put it back.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-05-26 08:34:08+00:00
Exactly that. Software development isn't about writing code, never was, it's about what code to write. Doesn't matter if I type in the code or tell an AI what code it should type.

I'll admit that assuming it's correct, an AI can type faster than me. But time spent typing represents only a fraction of the software development cycle.

But, it'll take another year or two on the hype cycle for the gullible managers being sold AI to realise this fully.