MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jongjong | 2025-05-07 05:52:12+00:00
My experience is that as the prompt gets longer, performance decreases. Having such a long prompt with each request cannot be good.

I remember in the early days of OpenAI, they had made the text completion feature available directly and it was much smarter than ChatGPT... I couldn't understand why people were raving about ChatGPT instead of the raw davinci text completion model.

Ir sucks how legal restrictions are dumbing down the models.
by Grimblewald | 2025-05-07 05:53:31+00:00
> Any high-enough dimensional space means the distance between any two vectors tends towards 1

Yes, but, you forget the impact that the attention mechanisms have. While high-dimensional embeddings suffer from concentration of distance, attention mechanisms mitigate this by adaptively weighting relationships between tokens, allowing for task-specific structure to emerge that isn’t purely reliant on geometric distance. If we can effectively "Zero" many of the dimensions in a context sensitive way, suddenly much of this curse of dimensionality stuff simply stops applying. It's obviously not perfect, transformers still struggle with over-smoothing among other issues but I hope the general intent and sentiment of my comment is clear.
by metaphor | 2025-05-07 05:55:17+00:00
Bad faith argument, and certainly not the case for homeowners intending to leverage certain tax incentives[1].

When I tapped this two years ago, it was for a ducted heat pump system replacement where the only immutable requirement was that the system had to have earned the ENERGY STAR label. SEER2 rating was a mere secondary consideration that had no impact on credit qualification; 14.8 was my saddle point.

At the time, ductless mini-splits had to be ENERGY STAR certified and SEER2 > 16 to qualify.

[1] https://www.energystar.gov/about/federal-tax-credits/air-sou...
by pjmlp | 2025-05-07 05:56:21+00:00
Yes, from safety point of view Rust is much better option, however from the ecosystems I care about (language runtimes and GPU coding), both professionally and as hobby, C++ is the systems language to go, using Rust in such contexts would require me to introduce extra layers and do yak shaving instead of the actual problem that I want to code for.
by ammmir | 2025-05-07 05:56:53+00:00
Two months ago, I started exploring how LLMs can securely run arbitrary code. Since then, we've seen Manus and others build code inside sandboxes and I believe there are some YC startups in this space, too! I wrote a blog post [1] about building a simplistic version of this using Jupyter Notebook, but since then I've built a fully open source sandboxing server with more ergonomic HTTP endpoints (MCP should be next I guess?) and a half-decent UI for humans (see the demo video in the README).

A novel concept that I haven't seen implemented properly yet, perhaps useful for AI coding agents, is that a sandbox can be forked at any point. Similar to how you can fork a PostgreSQL database, you can fork a sandbox, which creates an independent sandbox with all of the changes in it. Technically, I tried to implement this with checkpoint/restore using CRIU, but ran into some issues with nesting beyond 2 levels deep and custom user namespaces for security. And it was difficult to use get CRIU to work with Linux programs that use shared memory segments, and other Unixy things. I ended up switching to file system diffs and using reflinks on XFS to get some Copy-on-Write semantics.

Features:

* Automatic HTTPS with unique URL per sandbox (no need to deal with ingresses or exposing ports)

* Static token auth or GitHub app auth

* Built-in UI

* Multi-tenant ready: each user gets their own network

* List, download, and upload files into sandboxes

* Fork sandboxes to create arbitrary depths of clones

It's still in early stages, but it should be usable. I'd love your feedback and ideas on where to take this :) Personally, I want to use this as a code execution backend for local AI agents.

[1] https://amirmalik.net/2025/03/07/code-sandboxes-for-llm-ai-a...
by pembrook | 2025-05-07 05:57:25+00:00
Sorry to be so blunt, but it’s extremely unlikely both your sisters would have a rare chronic condition related to Lyme that wouldn’t respond to the standard course of antibiotics. The hysteria around Lyme on the internet is ridiculous.

Unfortunately nobody wants to say it to your face, but among females, you can never rule out social contagion when confronted with extremely coincidental outcomes like this.

Or, it could be a genetic condition they both have being misdiagnosed as chronic Lyme via internet research.
by michaelmrose | 2025-05-07 05:58:29+00:00
>A minimal Linux install shouldn’t be 1GB

Why not this seems pretty arbitrary. Seemingly developer time or functionality would suffer to achieve this goal. To what end?

Who cares how many floppies grub would require when its actually running on a 2TB ssd. The actually simpler thing is instead of duplicating effort to boot into Linux and use Linux to show the boot menu then kexec into the actual kernal or set it to boot next. See zfsbootmenu and "no more boot loader" this is simpler and less bloated but it doesnt use less space
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-07 05:59:51+00:00
> When Pakistan was split from India, because of the Muslims voting against their own land that they have been living in for centuries, the lines are set and done

Lines are never "set and done for." We had a short period of global consensus around the unacceptability of taking territory by force. But between the superpowers' proxy wars, America's invasion of Iraq, China's annexation of Tibet and threats on Taiwan, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that precedent was always tenuous at best and, now, has certainly passed.

> Why should India cede more land?

Because New Delhi expects something of greater value in return. For example, one could see a China-mediated truce trading territory in J&K for settling boundaries in Andra Pradesh and/or a deployment of Chinese troops on anti-terrorist missions in Pakistan.

Nobody is saying India just give land to Pakistan for feelsies. It's engaging in a negotiation where that's on the table.

> Pakistan is on one of the most resource rich, fertile lands in the Indian subcontinent

Geopolitics isn't fair? (Also, India is richer than Pakistan. Both in population and GDP per capital.)

That said, this argument represents the pathos in India. India broadly isn't interested in peace if it comes at the cost of territory. It expresses a preference for certain things above peace.
by zdragnar | 2025-05-07 06:00:36+00:00
Just for kicks I thought I'd look around to see how my memory was, and I realized I was thinking of the yellow energy guide numbers.

Since there's no numbers attached to the energy star certification itself, it's a meaningless label that doesn't really tell what the difference is. With the energy guide labels, at least there's a point of comparison.

Even then, the difference between models of a few types of appliances I checked were typically in the 1-3% of the product cost range. The single biggest I could find online happened to be in TVs, where one brand's 65" was half the estimated annual electric cost of another- a savings of $20 per year! It'd pay for the difference in price between the models in 3 years, and pay for itself in 25!

Granted, I didn't see numbers for the likely worst offenders: central air conditioning and electric ovens.
by aw1621107 | 2025-05-07 06:01:59+00:00
> speaking of which, according to another C++ talk, something like 60% of rust crates are dependent on unsafe rust.

It's probably not the source of the stats you had in mind since it's discussing something slightly different, but the Rust Foundation built a tool called Painter [0] for this kind of analysis. According to that [1]:

> As of May 2024, there are about 145,000 crates; of which, approximately 127,000 contain significant code. Of those 127,000 crates, 24,362 make use of the unsafe keyword, which is 19.11% of all crates. And 34.35% make a direct function call into another crate that uses the unsafe keyword. Nearly 20% of all crates have at least one instance of the unsafe keyword, a non-trivial number.

> Most of these Unsafe Rust uses are calls into existing third-party non-Rust language code or libraries, such as C or C++.

To be honest, I would have expected that 60% number to be higher if it were counting unsafe anywhere due to unsafe in the stdlib for vocabulary types and for (presumably) common operations like iterator chains. There's also a whole other argument that the hardware is unsafe so all Rust code will depend on unsafe somewhere or another to run on actual hardware, but that's probably getting a bit into the weeds.

[0]: https://github.com/rustfoundation/painter

[1]: https://rustfoundation.org/media/unsafe-rust-in-the-wild-not...
by toast0 | 2025-05-07 06:02:00+00:00
New coffeshop owner most likely pays less than flipping burgers. I'd imagine for the first three years at least, it's going to be a loss, especially on a cash flow basis. If the business can survive long enough, it might work out.

OTOH, if it fails, you just go back to banking, right? No big deal; hopefully you had fun.
by distances | 2025-05-07 06:02:13+00:00
> Citation for dishwashers that don't wash. After switching back to dishwash powders (away from tablets -- which I learnt through a Technology Connections video basically don't work since it gets dissolved in the 10mins rinse cycle of most dishwashers) I've yet to have a bad dishwasher experience using powders which gets inserted into the wash cycle (and not the rinse cycle).

I don't understand how the tablets could be in rinse cycle but powder in wash cycle? They both go to the same container that fully flips open during the wash cycle. Or do you have a device that has some different compartment for powder?
by dingnuts | 2025-05-07 06:03:21+00:00
> But what will happen when the new generations grow up in a world with technology that can generate in seconds or minutes something they enjoy and keep them entertained?

This is why culture is important. Technology cannot in seconds generate a song you teach your child to play or sing with you in the tradition of your people.

We should get back to song readers and sing a longs and unearth the old songs of our histories and celebrate them together with our children.
by musicale | 2025-05-07 06:04:08+00:00
> in the modern day the games that exist on physical media are pretty much useless without their zero-day patches

Most single and local multiplayer Switch games are playable offline - which is to say, not useless - without any zero-day patches.

And patches to those games can often (usually?) be downloaded while you are playing the game. (Sometimes there are issues however - I seem to remember some game, maybe SMT5, changing its game save format in some way.)

But it is true that patches can improve performance or fix bugs, and it seems like there is pressure to hit a ship date and assume that bugs can be patched later. It's not entirely bad though - some games that are heavily criticized on initial release (No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk 2077) end up fixing bugs and other issues and becoming successful games.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-07 06:05:45+00:00
This is beginnings of AI discrimination. If an answer is written by an LLM but equal or superior in quality to a human answer why question or disparage it?

I don't know but it looks like you're probably a white guy. Your mannerisms and vibes make it look like you're white. Nothing wrong with this, just wanted to point it out. See what I'm saying.

It's like the blade runner movies.
by krainboltgreene | 2025-05-07 06:06:23+00:00
I agree with most of this except maybe the "soviet empire" bit. His recent mentions of it (within the last 3 years) has been about how the fall of the Soviet Union broke up the "historical russian" borders. For Ukraine specifically he compared himself to Russian Czar Peter the Great.

A long time ago he lamented the fall of the Soviet Union which is especially hilarious as he was very likely involved in and vultured on the remains of it's demise.

> Russia was drastically unprepared for a long war

He, much like all of military officials in NATO at the time, assumed it was going to be over after they landed in Kiev.

I also contest that the economy has suffered: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-economy-shows-s...

The only exception is the pipeline, but then who could have expected that the US would sabotage an ally's ability to heat it's citizens? (assuming you ignore the last 100 years of american doctrine)
by antfarm | 2025-05-07 06:08:55+00:00
FWIW, I started learning Elixir and OTP to overcome architectural bloat in future projects.

The Erlang ecosystem has many useful abstractions at just about the right level that allow you to build the simplest possible custom solution instead of reaching for a 3rd party solution for a component of your (distributed) system.

Building just the right wheel for the task at hand does not mean you have to reinvent it first.
by hgomersall | 2025-05-07 06:10:30+00:00
It existing is a necessary and desirable part of any rational system. If it didn't exist that system would either be too complicated as to not help those that need it and/or cost more to implement than is saved by eliminating the fraud. The correct amount of fraud is non zero: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
Show HN: YouTube Time Machine – browser extension to find forgotten videos
by thatinternetguy | 2025-05-07 06:12:00+00:00
I built this after reading about YouTube's 20th anniversary and learning that the median YouTube video has only 41 views. The extension searches for videos with default camera filenames (DSC_, IMG_, GOPR, etc.) that people uploaded without SEO optimization.

In YouTube's early days, people weren't trying to become influencers - they just wanted to share moments. These videos give an authentic glimpse into people's lives without the "like and subscribe" calls to action.

The extension only searches public videos. You can choose a camera model and date to see unfiltered snapshots of life that the algorithm has overlooked. The day and month of the date is used as the four digits. It's a reminder of what YouTube was before it became "the new Hollywood."

Built it in ~90 minutes with some AI assistance. Code is on GitHub if you want to contribute or modify.
by AnIrishDuck | 2025-05-07 06:12:15+00:00
> The LLM skeptics need to point out what differs with code compared to Chess, DoTA, etc from a RL perspective.

An obviously correct automatable objective function? Programming can be generally described as converting a human-defined specification (often very, very rough and loose) into a bunch of precise text files.

Sure, you can use proxies like compilation success / failure and unit tests for RL. But key gaps remain. I'm unaware of any objective function that can grade "do these tests match the intent behind this user request".

Contrast with the automatically verifiable "is a player in checkmate on this board?"
by todotask2 | 2025-05-07 06:13:47+00:00
> A lot of unnecessary bloat can be avoided by only including it when it looks like a user is visiting for the first time (and likely hasn't got the CSS files cached already

I’ve thought about that before but couldn’t figure out the ideal approach. Using a unique session cookie for non-logged in users isn’t feasible, as it could lead to memory or storage issues if a malicious actor attempts a DDoS attack.

I believe this approach also doesn’t work well for static pages, which are likely already hosted close to users.

One useful trick to keep in mind is that CSS content-visibility only applies in certain scenarios. One agency I came across using <iframe> for every section is a bad idea.

So my conclusion is mobile-first CSS is generally more practical and use PWA which I'm building now for site that has lots of listings.
by cantrecallmypwd | 2025-05-07 06:13:58+00:00
Yes and no. Internet "lawyers" will make arguments about how it must be or not be the case. Instead, a group of people together is more like a dynamic living organism that morphs into subsequent zeitgeists. There maybe apolitical structural/demographic reasons, circumstances, and/or infectious ideas that lead to major changes. Some are root causes and some are merely reflections.

Or in this case, a memetic infection on top of sliding value changes (polarity, illiberalism, aggressive patriotism) changing the underlying values causing various symptoms. A country is a collection of people who share some iota of proximity, values, and/or views, although "Network Staters" and "Free Staters" would have you believe differently.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-05-07 06:14:42+00:00
That just leads to abuse. Think about it.

Go get something out of Project Gutenberg that is popular, and not too long.

Translate it into 3-4 major languages. Give those away for free.

Even better, test your translations against actual public domain translations if they exist, and be transparent about WER for each language.

If you want this to be a business, you’re going to have to do some serious business-like things.
by justinator | 2025-05-07 06:15:35+00:00
Oh you. I actually grew up shooting many hand-made long bows gifted to me.

Then I became a climber where I "activate muscles not typically used in any other day to day scenarios and activate muscles beyond simply lifting/extending a dumb bell"

My pulling strength now is kind of incredible, especially for my weight. Finger strength too. I actually couldn't imagine a better crossover.
by Hilift | 2025-05-07 06:16:29+00:00
This isn't about consumers or decisions. Rick Perry stated in the 2012 election that he would eliminate several departments, including Energy, Education, and Interior. The Republicans don't want life centralized around a federal government. The current state of the debt will also make it very easy to jettison Medicaid. Nearly all state and local governments today are incentivized to solicit federal aid for education/medicare for ~30% of their budgets, which is a curiously fragile design.
by mcintyre1994 | 2025-05-07 06:16:48+00:00
I think most of that is about limiting artifacts (code it writes to be previewed in the Claude app) to the supported libraries etc. The trained model can answer questions about and write code in lots of other libraries, but to render correctly in artifacts there’s only a small number of available libraries. And there’ll be all sorts of ways those libraries are imported etc in the training data so it makes sense to tell it how that needs to be done in their environment.
by auszeph | 2025-05-07 06:17:56+00:00
Something I've felt is missing is a developer orchestration layer that makes it really easy to define the set of services like a docker-compose but just as easy to switch implementations between container, source, or remote.

Sometimes you need them all from source to debug across the stack, when you don't you might need a local container to avoid pollution from a test env, sometimes it is just fine to port-forward to a test env and save yourself the local resources.
by machomaster | 2025-05-07 06:20:07+00:00
> Also included in the FTC’s new FAQ are the types of fees that can be excluded, such as taxes or government fees, shipping charges, and charges for optional goods or services people may select to buy as part of the same transaction.

Most of those, especially taxes, should be included as well.

It's interesting how they put effort into the regulation, but then decided to put a little more, just to needlessly water it down and make it worsw.
by microtonal | 2025-05-07 06:20:38+00:00
LLMs will still hit a ceiling without human-like reasoning. Even two weeks ago, Claude 3.7 made basic mistakes like trying to convince me the <= and >= operators on Python sets have the same semantics [1]. Any human would quickly reject something like that (why would be two different operators evaluate to the same value), unless there is overwhelming evidence. Mistakes like this show up all the time, which makes me believe LLMs are still very good at matching/reproducing code it has seen. Besides that I've found that LLMs are really bad at novel problems that were not seen in the training data.

Also, the reward functions that you mention don't necessarily lead to great code, only running code. The should be possible in the third bullet point does very heavy lifting.

At any rate, I can be convinced that LLMs will lead to substantially-reduced teams. There is a lot of junior-level code that I can let an LLM write and for non-junior level code, you can write/refactor things much faster than by hand, but you need a domain/API/design expert to supervise the LLM. I think in the end it makes programming much more interesting, because you can focus on the interesting problems, and less on the boilerplate, searching API docs, etc.

[1] https://ibb.co/pvm5DqPh
by babyent | 2025-05-07 06:20:39+00:00
Hoping for a quick resolution and diplomatic victory for all people there. I’m scared of the geopolitical effects.

On a side note.. Can we get the Peace and Prosperity update next, ASAP? Let’s bring out the aliens issue and work on interstellar travel and galactic survival instead of terrestrial disputes.

I just want to live in a chill world. And for me that’s science and tech tree maxed out.
by gloosx | 2025-05-07 06:25:20+00:00
Windows historically allowed a dire situation with security, so no-one really freaking knows what software is safe and what not. Even monopoly they have on deciding what software is safe and what is not (extended validation certification procedure) is not helping anyone, because anyone can circumvent it with photoshop and 10$

Are you saying Microsoft shouldn't care about making a secure system and they can just outsource the subject to a third company which will upload .exe to their server and tell user to wait few hours before it can be launched?
by uecker | 2025-05-07 06:25:36+00:00
I have a plan for a safe C and also type-safe generic and bounds-checked containers. Here is some experimental (!) example: https://godbolt.org/z/G4ncoYjfW

Except for some missing pieces, this is safe and I have a prototype based on GCC that would warn about any unsafe features. va_list can be safely used at least with format strings and for union I need an annotations. Life times are the bigger outstanding issue.
by iamsaitam | 2025-05-07 06:26:23+00:00
That's not working in any IDE is it? The crux of the matter is the level of integration, with Cursor (and others) I can apply the suggestions via autocomplete and see git diffs with agent code. I'm not arguing if there's a moat or not for Cursor, but comparing Aider to Cursor is a vastly different UX.
by throw310822 | 2025-05-07 06:26:53+00:00
Yes, it claims that the terminal velocity of a banana is 240m/s, 840km/h. The terminal velocity of a person falling, depending on the position, is between 190 and 340km/h. 840km/h doesn't sound right. Maybe they mistook feet for meters, and it's really 240ft/s = 73m/s = 260km/h
by vuserfcase | 2025-05-07 06:26:58+00:00
>Oh but it is, used wisely.

Sufficiently advanced orange juice extractor is the solution to any problem. Doesen't necessarily mean you should build the sufficient part.

>One: it's a replacement for googling a problem and much faster

This is more to do with the problem that google results have gone downhill very rapidly. It used to be you could find what you were looking for very fast and solve a problem.

>I could ask an LLM to do it and then tweak the results. Five minutes for "good enough" and it really is.

When the cost of failures is low, a hackjob can be economical, like a generated picture for entertainment or a static error page. Miscreating a support for a bridge it is not very economical