MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2025-05-27 17:03:58+00:00
DuckDuckGo has not been infected yet, but for example also with Bing, if I make some search, a good part of the screen is wasted with some unwanted "Copilot Answer".

As expected, the "Copilot Answer" is not only useless for me, because I always want to see the original sources, but it is also unreliable.

Just today, I have made a search for the public holidays in some European country for the year 2025, and the "Copilot Answer" has presented a list with most of them. However, one holiday was omitted despite existing, and it was exactly the one in which I was interested, because I was not sure if it is a non-working day in that country and I did not know which is its date in 2025.
by ceejayoz | 2025-05-27 17:04:01+00:00
If you're genuinely interested, https://www.cdc.gov/covid/vaccines/pregnant-or-breastfeeding... cites plenty of specific studies.

For example:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-30052-w

> The risk of stillbirth was significantly lower in the vaccinated cohort by 15% (pooled OR 0·85; 95% CI 0·73–0·99, 66,067 vaccinated vs. 424,624 unvaccinated, I2 = 93·9%).
by skydhash | 2025-05-27 17:04:09+00:00
The hard part is not the ambiguous part and it never were. You just need to talk with the stakeholder to sort it out. That's the requirement phase and all it requires is good communication skills.

The hard part is to have a consistent system that can evolve without costing too much. And the bigger the system, the harder it is to get this right. We have principles like modularity, cohesion, information hiding,... to help us on that front, but not a clear guideline on how to achieve it. That's the design phase.

Once you have the two above done, coding is often quite easy. And if you have a good programming ecosystem and people that know it, it can be done quite fast.
by NoImmatureAdHom | 2025-05-27 17:04:26+00:00
"Noncitizens Have (Some) First Amendment Rights"

"It is well established that noncitizens have at least some First Amendment rights," wrote Judge William G. Young of the U.S. District of Massachusetts. "Although case law defining the scope of noncitizens' First Amendment rights is notably sparse, the Plaintiffs have at least plausibly alleged that noncitizens, including lawful permanent residents, are being targeted specifically for exercising their right to political speech."

So it seems less than clear.

From: https://reason.com/2025/05/02/immigrants-and-radicals-have-t...
by joshdappier | 2025-05-27 17:05:32+00:00
For all struggling web publishers: Your brand won't survive as a reference in someone else's AI snippet.

We've (https://dappier.com) been working on offerings to solve this for publishers, and help them thrive in an AI-first world. We enable:

- AI data syndication, by converting your content into AI-ready formats like RAG API & MCP and enabling devs to connect in real-time at a per-query basis

- deploying your own AI experiences. Our AskAI answer engine is totally customizable and has pre-set deployments based on best practices from leading social networks and news sites already deploying AI

- agentic ads - the ability to advertise within conversations, taking advantage of an opt-in network of agents to surface products and offerings wherever the relevant user is.

Please give us a try (https://dappier.com/demo to schedule a demo) and let us know what you think!
by nekochanwork | 2025-05-27 17:06:31+00:00
> Yet we never 'see' this in the article. It just restates it a few times without providing any proof.

I'm honestly shocked by the number of upvotes this article has on Hacker News. It's extremely low quality. It's obviously written with ChatGPT. The tells are:

(1) Incorrect technology "hype cycle". It shows "Trigger, Disillusionment, Englightnment Productivity". It's missing the very important "Inflated Expectations".

(2) Too many pauses that disrupt the flow of ideas:

- Lots of em-dashes. ChatGPT loves to break up sentences with em-dashes.

- Lots of short sentences to sound pithy and profound. Example: "The executives get excited. The consultants circle like sharks. PowerPoint decks multiply. Budgets shift."

(3) "It isn't just X, it's X+1", where X is a normal descriptor, where X+1 is a more emphatic rephrasing of X. ChatGPT uses this construct a lot. Here are some from the article:

- "What actually happens isn't replacement, it's transformation"

- "For [...] disposable marketing sites, this doesn't matter. For systems that need to evolve over years, it's catastrophic."

Similarly, "It's not X, it's inverse-X", resulting in the same repetitive phrasing:

- "The NoCode movement didn't eliminate developers; it created NoCode specialists and backend integrators."

- "The cloud didn't eliminate system administrators; it transformed them into DevOps engineers"

- "The most valuable skill in software isn't writing code, it's architecting systems."

- "The result wasn't fewer developers—it was the birth of "NoCode specialists""

- "The sysadmins weren't eliminated; they were reborn as DevOps engineers"

- "the work didn't disappear; it evolved into infrastructure-as-code,"

- "the technology doesn't replace the skill, it elevates it to a higher level of abstraction."

- "code is not an asset—it's a liability."

---------

I wish people stopped using ChatGPT. Every article is written in the same wordy, try-to-hard-to-sound-profound, ChatGPT mannerisms.

Nobody writes in their own voice anymore.
by joshhug | 2025-05-27 17:06:36+00:00
The part about dad joke square theory got me thinking about this classic scarecrow joke, which feels like an example from some higher order version of square theory:

"Why was the scarecrow given an award?"

"He was out standing in his field."

The fact that a scarecrow's job is to be "out standing in his field", and that excelling at one's job can be phrased as being "outstanding in his field" is an incredible linguistic coincidence.
by atonse | 2025-05-27 17:06:54+00:00
I've always wondered... Making agents edits (like vibe coding), all the tools I've tried (Cursor, Zed, VSCode) are pretty equal since most of the brains are in the underlying models themselves.

But the killer app that keeps me using Cursor is Cursor Tab, which helps you WHILE you code.

Whatever model they have for that works beautifully for me, whereas Zed's autocomplete model is the last thing that keeps me away from it.

What do Cline users use for the inline autocomplete model?
by belmont_sup | 2025-05-27 17:07:03+00:00
Responding to your gradual typing anti-pattern bit: Agree that dynamic language behaviors can be extreme but it’s also easy to get into crazy type land. Putting aside a discussion of type systems, teams can always add runtime checks like pydantic to ensure your types match reality.

Sorbet (Ruby typechecker) does this where it introduces a runtime checks on signatures.

Similarly in ts, we have zod.
by Shorel | 2025-05-27 17:07:13+00:00
I think the problem with Slashdot was that "Funny" was higher rated than "Interesting" or "Insightful", and it made the site a clown circus.

I'm not against memes and jokes, I like them. But I also like some actual intelligent discussion in between.

And that's why right now I visit Hacker News and it's been many years since I used Slashdot.
by brandall10 | 2025-05-27 17:07:14+00:00
Some years back I took on a embattled project, a dispenser/retriever for scrubs in a hospital environment that had a major revision stuck in dev hell for over 2 years. After auditing the state of the work I decided to discard everything. After that, we started with a clean slate of over 200 bugs w/ 45 features to be developed.

Product wanted it done in 6 months, to which I countered that the timeframe was highly unlikely no matter how many devs could be onboarded. We then proceeded to do weekly scope reduction meetings. After a month we got to a place where we comfortably felt a team of 5 could knock it out... ended up cutting the number of bugs down only marginally as stability was a core need, but the features were reduced to only 5.

Never once did I push back and say something wasn't a good idea, much of what happened was giving high level estimates, and if something was considered important enough, spending a few hours to a few days doing preliminary design work for a feature to better hone in on the effort. It was all details regarding difficultly/scope/risk to engender trust that the estimates were correct, and to let product pick and choose what were the most important things to address.
by SamBam | 2025-05-27 17:07:37+00:00
This is clever, and I want to spend some more time thinking about it. In a sense, I think this is basically saying that you can put the standard SAT-style analogy questions ("Lumen : Brightness = Inches : Length") in a square, and that most crossword clues could be represented as weird SAT analogies. Or maybe I'm stretching the analogy.

But I think that the "Diagonal" that the author suggests for the connection between "Donkey" and "Elephant" and "Party" isn't quite correct. The key is that both the Donkey and the Elephant are a "Party Animal." You can't ignore the "Animal" part, it describes them: they are each the animal that represents their party, the "party animal."

I'm not sure the correct way to represent this in "Square Theory," but it's not just linking "Party" to the animal in question.
by zahlman | 2025-05-27 17:07:38+00:00
>What comes after Stack Overflow?

Codidact (https://software.codidact.com), for those who actually care about the Q&A site model (although we're designed explicitly to allow for opening separate "sections" for things that don't work like Q&A). That is, if you're posting a question in order to frame useful, searchable information, and not simply to get help with a project.

Disclosure: I am a moderator there (actual moderator, not just someone entitled to edit posts - which we still do as a community, with the same kind of Creative Commons licensing arrangement).
by sunshowers | 2025-05-27 17:07:43+00:00
I use em dashes a bunch in both informal communication and more formal writing. Mobile keyboards have em dashes, and I also have the compose key turned on on Linux.

Recent examples on HN, all 100% human-written:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43923622

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43863882

For an example of more formal writing, this blog post of mine has 8 em-dashes across 6000 or so words: https://sunshowers.io/posts/monads-through-pbt/

I did ask Claude to review this post for clarity and flow, but not to generate any text.
by WalterBright | 2025-05-27 17:08:29+00:00
"Granted a patent for his turbojet engine in 1936, Ohain joined the Heinkel Company in Rostock, Germany. By 1937 he had built a factory-tested demonstration engine and, by 1939, a fully operational jet aircraft, the He 178. Soon after, Ohain directed the construction of the He S.3B, the first fully operational centrifugal-flow turbojet engine. This engine was installed in the He 178 airplane, which made the world's first jet-powered aircraft flight on August 27, 1939."

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/ww2/projects...
by hollerith | 2025-05-27 17:08:30+00:00
This conversation began as a conversation about Claude, which has access to 100s of 1000s of people with no training and no interest in learning about how to prevent Claude from doing damage to society. That makes it materially different from a library because even if an intruder can subvert a library running on servers serving 100s of 1000s of users, e.g., a library for compressing files is very unlikely to be able to start having conversations with a large fraction of those users without someone noticing that something is very wrong.

Although I concede that there are some applications of AI that can be made significantly safer using the measures you describe, you have to admit that those applications are fairly rare and emphatically do not include Claude and its competitors. For example, Claude has plentiful access to computing resources because people routinely ask it to write code, most of which will go on to be run (and Claude knows that). Surely you will concede that Anthropic is not about to start insisting on the use of a sandbox around any code that Claude writes for any paying customer.

When Claude and its competitors were introduced, a model would reply to a prompt, then about a second later it lost all memory of that prompt and its reply. Such an LLM of course is no great threat to society because it cannot pursue an agenda over time, but of course the labs are working hard to create models that are "more agentic". I worry about what happens when the labs succeed at this (publicly stated) goal.
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-27 17:08:31+00:00
> are determined not by elected officials but by bureaucrats and judges/lawyers who it turns out are often on the same side

"Fixing" that is an awfully slippery slope towards dictatorship though.

The entire reason that system exists -- to preserve competence and skills in government despite political leadership change and to provide independent checks on elected officials' power -- is because of historical abuses by elected officials.

Ergo, I'm enormously suspicious of suggestions about tearing down the barriers to change...

... because those barriers exist for a damned good reason.

Imho, people should talk more about adjusting the balance in the system, but preserving all the independent components, and less about vilifying specific pieces of the balance of power.
by nojvek | 2025-05-27 17:09:47+00:00
Motherduck is hosting duckdb in cloud. DuckLake is a much more open system.

Ducklake you can build petabyte scale warehouse with multiple readers and writer instances, all transactional on your s3, on your ec2 instances.

Motherduck has limitations like only one writer instance. Read replicas can be 1m behind (not transactional).

Having different instances concurrently writing to different tables is not possible.

Ducklake gives proper separation of compute and storage with a transactional metadata layer.
by terrib1e | 2025-05-27 17:10:35+00:00
Hey, really appreciate your interest! Funny enough, I’ve actually been thinking about expanding the platform to cover other types of real estate.

The biggest difference with hotels is that they operate more like businesses—you’re dealing with things like daily rates, fluctuating occupancy, and a lot more operational complexity. That makes the valuation process very performance-driven and dynamic.

With something like multi-family or storage, it’s more about stable leases, consistent rental income, and lower day-to-day volatility. The underwriting approach shifts accordingly—less focus on real-time performance, more on long-term cash flow and cap rates.

I’d love to hear more about what you’re working on or what you’d want to see in a tool like this. Sounds like we’re thinking in a similar direction.
by waterhouse | 2025-05-27 17:10:37+00:00
I learned how to type em-dashes on Mac (option-shift-hyphen) 10+ years ago and have been using them with some frequency since then. Picking 2023, here are some comments with emdashes that I personally typed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38796943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36916740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36125055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34487782
by cmod | 2025-05-27 17:10:45+00:00
Hacker News is the url I use to test most fussy connections because it's so light, and will load under even the slightest trickle of data. When I was doing research in Ghana, it was the only site I could get to reliably load for news in the field, and thus spent a month reading only HN (good luck getting the _New York Times_ to load without a gigabit connection). Appreciate how it stays — and has stayed — svelte and fast throughout the years.
by jodrellblank | 2025-05-27 17:10:46+00:00
I said, explain where I kicked any goalposts. You haven't, because I didn't. Ad-homs, against the author and against me, pre-deciding your conclusion, refusing to explain your objections, pretending "we could talk about it" while turning to insults to shut down any talking about it.

I get it, you're desperate to appear smart and superior, but arguing that lamely isn't doing it. Of course I'm not going to read your link, try and guess what misrepresentations you're coming up with, make some argument about them and their context in the wider post, only for you to ignore it and post some more nonsense in response. Or engage with you further.
by tdeck | 2025-05-27 17:11:22+00:00
Move out waste is a huge thing. At my alma mater in 2014 they had some program where you could leave things in the common room and they would be collected and supposedly donated. I remember spending extra time cleaning my (good quality) things that I couldn't bring with me, and then the next day seeing everything had just been bagged up and dumped into 2 large dumpsters.
by dekhn | 2025-05-27 17:11:39+00:00
My parents did (and still do this) at a little ivy in the northeast. I got some good stuff including an introductory Grateful Dead CD (this was ~35 years ago). My dad would joke that all the graduates would throw away their tie-dye shirts and go to work on wall street (not completely a joke). Now we have an entire closet filled to the brim with used water bottles and I have to periodically clean through tons of stuff including very old jars of tomato sauce.

When I later graduated from college I had to dump stuff, mainly because I didn't have a car, and was moving to a small apartment in the city ~70 miles away.
by eggbrain | 2025-05-27 17:11:53+00:00
Thanks Zak, appreciate your thoughts.

I hope to have some of the followup posts soon, although you are right that my idea is based around a centralized platform with ID Verification.

RE: How to solve for enshittification, I'd mention two things:

1. I think a good product can _stay_ good over time with strong centralized leadership, aka a "benevolent dictator". Think Steve Jobs at Apple, DHH at 37 Signals, etc.

- Once that power structure changes, however (new leader, etc), that can quickly fall apart, so it's definitely not a bulletproof solution.

2. If incentives from the start are built into your platform to make the "user" the biggest customer on your platform, incentives will make sure that you keep those users happy.

- If you have to choose between customers who give you $0/month and advertisers who will give you $1000/month, you'll eventually choose the advertisers to the detriment of the users.
by hangonhn | 2025-05-27 17:12:15+00:00
They also sold GE's profitable GE biotech division to Danaher where Larry Culp was the previous CEO. The proceeds was then used to shore up the finances of GE.

GE finance was spun off into Ally bank.

The other part of the turnaround though was the pension. Pension funds in a zero interest rate environment is a giant liability. That was a huge part of what drag down GE's finances for a while. Once the interest rate started to go back up again, the pension liability shrunk by a lot.

Overall, GE is in a much better position now then it was in the past two decades. I don't know why the post ends up on such a negative note. GE has been severely humbled but I think it's well positioned to grow again.

I've invested in GE twice, both during its downturns. This time I'm holding onto it because I think it's structurally in a better place than it was before.
by dkarl | 2025-05-27 17:12:18+00:00
I usually have a buffer that is kind of like a Jupyter notebook, and it accumulates a lot of stuff that may or may not turn out to be useful in the end. If I'm doing the work to keep things tidy as I go, so it's close to production ready at the end, then it isn't much different from traditional programming. It ends up just being TDD in one file instead of two.
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-27 17:12:24+00:00
Hard for it to stay that way when Microsoft's own teams start dogfooding it. Evidence points to even the Windows Team using GitHub Issues as their primary PM tool today.

The saving grace for now seems to be that Microsoft sees the "Advanced" PM tools in GitHub as value adds and is either rolling them out slowly to charge "Preview Customers" for as long as possible for that for that feature before making it public and/or putting them into GitHub pricing tiers such as "If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it" and "Offer you cannot afford to refuse".
by fabianlindfors | 2025-05-27 17:12:45+00:00
Certainly complicated! This is one of those places where I don't think Postgres compatibility is achievable or even desirable, schema changes in a distributed databases are a whole different beast (and very complicated in large Postgres deployments as well).

It will probably end up being something similar to online schema changes in Cockroach where the changes that can be made are limited for safety and run as a background job that can be tracked: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/online-schema-chan...

I've got a bit of experience with schema changes from building Reshape: https://github.com/fabianlindfors/reshape. I'm hoping to transfer over some concepts from there into pgfdb eventually!
by eutropia | 2025-05-27 17:12:52+00:00
datum: I'm ND, but I'm a good test-taker. There were plenty of tests for subjects where I didn't need to study because I was adept at reading the question and correctly assuming what the test-creator wanted answered, and using deduction to reduce possibilities down enough that I could be certain of an answer - or by using meta-knowledge of where the material from the recent lectures was to narrow things down, again, not because I knew the material all that well but because I could read the question. Effectively, I had a decent grasp of the "game" of test-taking, which is rather orthogonal to the actual knowledge of the class material.
Show HN: I made a version control for embeddings
by paulmon | 2025-05-27 17:13:14+00:00
With the emergence of LLMs, there are numerous models that documents can be embedded in.

EmbeddingBridge aims to ease the management of embeddings across models and having ownership.

A convenient aspect is storing in the remote for larger embeddings.

The project is still in its alpha stage and feedback/contributions are welcome.
by latchkey | 2025-05-27 17:13:24+00:00
No, this is great feedback. I don't think you're mistaken. It is actually curious to me why PyTorch 2.7 isn't available yet, it should be! I'll pass that feedback up to AMD.

As for WSL, that kind of makes sense, since they just added Windows support to ROCm and that is probably a work in progress.

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-pledges-rocm-support-for-win...
by ty6853 | 2025-05-27 17:13:46+00:00
Insanely wealthy international student seems to be a pretty common component of the competitive STEM universities.

I vividly recall every fall the crazy number of wrecks by fresh students after "Daddy gave me a Maserati" with no idea how to drive it -- always asian. And then in the spring a couple of the poorest international students would commit suicide when they flunked out and all their families savings back home were forfeit on the tuition.
by vessenes | 2025-05-27 17:13:48+00:00
Def a pain point. Anecdotally Claude code and aider both can be of some help. My go to method is: dump everything in the code base into Gemini and ask for an architecture spec, then ask for implementation from aider or Claude code. This 90% works 80% of the time. Well maybe 90% of the time. Notably it can deal with cross codebase interfaces and data structures, in general, with good prompting.

Dumping it at Claude 3.7 with no instructions will 100% get random rewriting - very annoying.
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-27 17:13:56+00:00
A big part of this is caused by (as I understand it, open to correction!) the UK's fundamental lack of free speech rights (by individuals and groups).

The UK has free(ish) speech, that usually works well enough in practice, for most things.

But at the end of the day if the UK government and/or security services and/or wealthy people want to really put their foot on suppressing speech... they have legal tools to do so.

The UK has never really squared the circle on free speech even and especially when it's inconvenient to power.

That's a binary right. Either you have it, or you don't.