MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alephnerd | 2025-05-15 21:03:42+00:00
One thing I don't see mentioned in a lot of these conversations about Colombia and narco-conflicts in general is how it's often preceded by a significant regression in living standards.

Colombia itself suffered a significant stagnation after 2013, and during the pandemic, it's developmental indicators regressed by a decade. Colombia always had issues with narco-politics, but ignoring how economic players basically shifted from the white market to the black market is doing a disservice. A similar thing happened in Mexico in the aftermath of the Peso crisis and Brazil after Lava Jato.

Basically, relatively developed and industrialized countries seeing that capacity being applied into illicit goods.
by lxgr | 2025-05-15 21:05:22+00:00
> What coinbase needs are IRL offices where you can go and do things like account recovery, and where people trying to steal money can be caught and prosecuted

People getting locked out of their account (which can happen due to no fault of the user, e.g. by an overly nervous risk system) will be really happy to have to potentially travel to a different city to regain account access...
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-05-15 21:05:44+00:00
I wonder in NYC if elevated bike trails could be built economically that separate bikes from cars, or at least provide a "superhighway" for them. Maybe even a suspension scheme of sorts.

With e-bikes and e-scooter, I would actually argue that New York City should build underground tunnels, well, the overall goal of being able to enable these types of very efficient compact transportation to get from various parts of the major boroughs at an average speed of about 15 mph

I believe this will provide enormous livability benefits. Or you elevate the entire tunnel.
by pimlottc | 2025-05-15 21:06:23+00:00
Modern practice recommends using clean, ungloved hands for documents in most circumstances. Gloves reduce dexterity, making tears more likely.

https://ask.loc.gov/preservation/faq/337286

https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/handling-historic-colle...

https://info.gaylord.com/resources/for-the-glove-of-preserva...
by shakna | 2025-05-15 21:06:33+00:00
As a small example, one of the most severe forms of punishment, was to ban an individual from religious rites, and another was to ban them from the construction of anything considered a 'craft' - something that would take skill.

Neither of those punishments banned the individual from the tuatha. They weren't exiled. They were still allowed to speak and be heard. They were still allowed to buy and sell. But they were no longer allowed to worship, or to create.
by jordanpg | 2025-05-15 21:07:25+00:00
As the father of a 5 year old boy with a genetic degenerative muscular disease whose lifespan will depend directly on how fast these technologies progress, I have difficulty responding in a civilized manner to the pointless, cruel, and stupid actions of the Administration in this regard. Rage is the word.

It is breathtaking to consider how the members of the Administration and their children, parents, and grandparents have benefited from NIH-funded research in innumerable ways that they are shamefully unaware of, every time they visit the doctor or the ER.
by feraldidactic | 2025-05-15 21:07:52+00:00
"FINAL UPDATE - for now

Hi everyone. Thank you all for the response to this post. I was at a point of desperation last night and didn’t know where else to turn. The support, concern, and offers of help have been amazing.

I was finally able to have a conversation with my son. He’s still pretty exhausted and jetlagged and I’m sure in shock.

...

I will let you know, he made his way to the customs stand and handed his passport to the agent. He was asked the standard questions and then they put a yellow card in his passport and told him to go to another area.

He said he was in an area with about 10 other people. They would call people into a room one by one. They searched his bags several times. He was then told to go back out and sit down. There was a lot of waiting and watching other people come and go. He said the initial officer searching, appeared to be border control. In addition to searching his bags, they asked him repeatedly if anyone was waiting for him. He told them no his plans were to go to hotel to meet up with family.

After several hours, 2 FBI agents came in. They would ask him questions regarding his feelings towards the president, terrorists, and political memes he liked on Instagram. then send him back out to wait for long periods of time. They also asked him several times if anyone was there waiting for him.

..."
by rdtsc | 2025-05-15 21:07:56+00:00
> Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time?

No. Not for meetings. What is perceived as rude is making a big deal about it. You think it's a major social faux-pas, they think it's a "meh", and if you make a big deal about it and get offended now you're just being rude for no reason at all.

For personal and informal meetings, yes, being "on time" may mean annoying the host a bit. Why? Because when they say the party starts at 6pm, everyone should understand it as they should start showing up no earlier than 6:30pm etc.

I am not saying I agree or take side with any of these, just presenting it as both sides see it.
by _aavaa_ | 2025-05-15 21:07:59+00:00
> I think there is anger at the left for oppression during COVID.

Are we remembering the same history? Because I clearly remember COVID lockdowns and measures implemented and supported by the president in power at the time: Trump.

> out of touch with common sense

It is out of touch with science and reality too.

That people are believe this pseudo science is not a failing of the left, it is manufactured by the right.
by thorum | 2025-05-15 21:08:06+00:00
GPT 4.1 and 4o score very low on the Aider coding benchmark. You only start to get acceptable results with models that score 70%+ in my experience. Even then, don't expect it to do anything complex without a lot of hand-holding. You start to get a sense for what works and what doesn't.

https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-05-15 21:08:16+00:00
Computer science has nothing to do with physical computing devices. Or rather, it has to do as much with computers as astronomy has to do with telescopes. You can do it all on paper. The computing device doesn't afford you anything new, but scale and speed for simulating the mechanical work doing it on paper would. Electrons are irrelevant. They are as relevant to computer science as the species of tree from which the wood in your pencil comes from is relevant to math.

Obviously, being able to use a computer is useful, just as using a telescope is useful or being able to use a pencil is useful, but it's not what CS or software engineering are about. Software is not a phenomenon of the physical device. The device merely simulates the software.

This "centering" of the computing device is a disease that plagues many people.
by Animats | 2025-05-15 21:08:16+00:00
The U.S. Naval Institute has their own proposals.[1]

Everybody has to rethink sea power now that attacking ships from shore is working. The Moskva was sunk by a missile mounted on a truck. That was a wake-up call for the world's navies. China has a lot of anti-ship missiles mounted on trucks. Any naval ship in range of a hostile shore is in trouble today. The US will never again be able to send a parade of ships through the Taiwan strait as power projection.

It's also a big setback for the MAGTF concept, where a Marine unit is based from a group of medium-sized helicopter carriers and boat carriers. Those craft sit offshore and send out boats and helicopters. This works great against minor enemies with no air power. Against ones that can shoot ship-sinking missiles, or swarms of drones, it's not a good strategy. Houthi drones have become a serious threat. Ships go through a lot of expensive missiles shooting down cheap drones. Running out of missiles has become a serious problem. Underway replenishment of vertical launch tubes at sea is difficult, which means ships may have to return to a base to reload.

The Ukraine war, with large numbers of cheap drones and small missiles, has changed land warfare. There's no such thing as air superiority any more. If it flies, it will be shot at. No more flying helicopters over the battlefield with impunity. On the ground, nobody can move in the open. Tanks are easy to kill for anyone with the right weapons. Ukraine has turned into a war of attrition, where both sides keep steadily killing troops without accomplishing much. The side that wins will be the one that runs out of resources last.

All those problems are coming to naval warfare.

[1] https://www.usni.org/american-sea-power-project
by LawrenceKerr | 2025-05-15 21:08:30+00:00
If you're going to make the comparison with vaccines, and if history is any indication, the more realistic worry would be the other way around (since that's where the money is): that genetic modifications will be mandated, and that those who object will be discriminated against.

[And no, I am not anti-vax, nor anti-gene-editing.]
by genewitch | 2025-05-15 21:08:46+00:00
in context, i am specifically talking to “the US can't imagine itself without cars” point here and in my other reply upthread. I live ~36 hours from Los Angeles, driving at legal highway speeds, assuming no stops or delays. It's all about perspective. California is larger than germany. New York isn't a small state by any stretch of the imagination, unless you're comparing it to texas, alaska, or california. The car/public transportation stuff in the US is partly because of the ruralness of the country in general, plus culture. A lot of people have the idea that public transit is for the poors.
by ebiester | 2025-05-15 21:09:06+00:00
I get that it's frustrating to be told "skill issue," but using an LLM is absolutely a skill and there's a combination of understanding the strengths of various tools, experimenting with them to understand the techniques, and just pure practice.

I think if I were giving access to bash, though, it would definitely be in a docker container for me as well.
by gaadd33 | 2025-05-15 21:09:27+00:00
Empty storefronts in lower Manhattan have become more prevalent especially as Walgreens has been downsizing their Duane Reade locations and banks have reduced branch numbers. Historically I've heard that landlords try to hold out for high rent paying large corporations but in the past few years there are less and less of those tenants. Also I'm sure it's tied to the 10 year lease renewal/rent increase cycle.

Anecdotally, I notice a lot more foot traffic in Fidi than last year and far less traffic when I do need to take a taxi or uber. It seems like greater foot traffic would be a benefit for your friend's store unless it's a destination store that sells large products (furniture/appliances/etc).
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-15 21:09:36+00:00
This partly gets into the reason why exoatmospheric intercept is preferred. In order to maximize the useful coverage envelope, they need to maximize missile speed. Unfortunately, there is a speed threshold beyond which endoatmospheric terminal guidance becomes extremely challenging due to limitations imposed by material physics. If your terminal guidance is exoatmospheric, you can mostly avoid those issues.

That said, it is clear that the US has been leaning heavily into moving more defense to airborne missile carriers. For example, the SM-6 can now be launched directly from F-18s instead of destroyer VLS cells, which greatly extends the potential range of ballistic missile defense coverage. The B-21 Raider, while it can carry bombs, is essentially an extremely stealthy missile launcher with a very long range and loiter time.
by simonw | 2025-05-15 21:10:38+00:00
I'm very excited about tool use for LLMs at the moment.

The trick isn't new - I first encountered it with the ReAcT paper two years ago - https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/python-react-pattern - and it's since been used for ChatGPT plugins, and recently for MCP, and all of the models have been trained with tool use / function calls in mind.

What's interesting today is how GOOD the models have got at it. o3/o4-mini's amazing search performance is all down to tool calling. Even Qwen3 4B (2.6GB from Ollama, runs happily on my Mac) can do tool calling reasonably well now.

I gave a workshop at PyCon US yesterday about building software on top of LLMs - https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/15/building-on-llms/ - and used that as an excuse to finally add tool usage to an alpha version of my LLM command-line tool. Here's the section of the workshop that covered that:

https://building-with-llms-pycon-2025.readthedocs.io/en/late...

My LLM package can now reliably count the Rs in strawberry as a shell one-liner:

llm --functions ' def count_char_in_string(char: str, string: str) -> int: """Count the number of times a character appears in a string.""" return string.lower().count(char.lower()) ' 'Count the number of Rs in the word strawberry' --td
by AnimeMyPic | 2025-05-15 21:11:17+00:00
Hey everyone! I’ve been working on a side project called AnimeMyPic — it transforms real photos into anime-style art using AI (Naruto, Ghibli, One Piece, and now classic cartoons too!). I just added a few new features like style likes, usage stats, and a review system to make it more interactive. Would love your feedback — especially if you're into anime or visual AI tools.
by sudoforge | 2025-05-15 21:12:16+00:00
hrm... what's your current workflow like? if there's anything you think git-bug could be doing to make that workflow easier, would you mind hopping in our matrix channel [1], or opening an issue [2]?

[1]: https://matrix.to/#/#git-bug:matrix.org

[2]: https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/issues
by jonahbenton | 2025-05-15 21:12:50+00:00
Lot of work happened in the last 5-10 years in the web3 space around tech-enabled participatory governance, with some funding backdrop because it's on top of a crypto platform. ENS is kind of the poster child

https://docs.ens.domains/learn/protocol/

In terms of participation incentive models I like pointing people to slicing pie. The concept is simple enough and can learned from their free materials. Helpful mental model quantifying sweat "equity" where equity can be voting shares, or actual financial shares:

https://slicingpie.com/

In terms of governance policy that is specific to your domain- what are the incentives and measures and countermeasures to ensure good behavior from the different roles of participants particular to therapy- there are certainly codes of conduct in the therapy space but probably this is going to be new work for you.

I have read quite a bit in the anarchy space, including Graeber, and Chomsky's references and pull-outs from the moments during the Spanish Civil War when there was real movement here- regret to say that the prior thinking does not strike me as anywhere near sufficient to serve as models for the current shape of the world. A lot of new work has to get laid down for these to be real things.

Democracy is a fragile mechanism that as we see can collapse quickly under lots of limited resource regimes and when community trust is fractured. High trust does not scale. Low trust is needed to scale and professionalize.

But +1, think now is a good time for worker-controlled services to serve as a growing alternative to platform controlled services (just saw first Amazon therapy ad today, like, are you effing kidding me?)

Good luck.
by frollogaston | 2025-05-15 21:13:23+00:00
I can imagine it for some constrained use case, but taking your typical RDBMS that's powering a variety of business logic with complex queries, I dunno.

One interesting tradeoff Postgres and MySQL made for efficiency's sake was making xacts not fully ACID by default; instead they guarantee something that's good enough as long as you keep it in mind. Cockroach and Spanner are fully ACID, but that means even if you used those as a single-node DB, it ought to be slower.
by gottorf | 2025-05-15 21:13:26+00:00
I didn't bring it up, a commenter above did. I was adding color in response to another commenter saying that unpleasantries experienced (of various levels) in the NYC transit system is an outlier.

You and everyone else of course has their own barometer of what is an acceptable tradeoff. I'm not trying to convince you in particular that NYC transit is a good or bad experience overall; I'm explaining why it is reasonable for someone to come to the latter conclusion.
by simonw | 2025-05-15 21:13:52+00:00
"It used a deprecated package"

That's because models have training cut-off dates. It's important to take those into account when working with them: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/#a...

I've switched to o4-mini-high via ChatGPT as my default model for a lot of code because it can use its search function to lookup the latest documentation.

You can tell it "look up the most recent version of library X and use that" and it will often work!

I even used it for a frustrating upgrade recently - I pasted in some previous code and prompted this:

This code needs to be upgraded to the new recommended JavaScript library from Google. Figure out what that is and then look up enough documentation to port this code to it.

It did exactly what I asked: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/21/ai-assisted-search/#la...
by positr0n | 2025-05-15 21:14:07+00:00
> Think of Robinhood and how they gave users more expensive trades because they were paid for routing flow.

That's the opposite of reality. Most trades are cheaper routed to a PFOF market maker because they know it's just retail trades. Uncorrelated "dumb money" that isn't going to be steamrolling them with a $10m sale.

Also that would be obviously illegal and the SEC would jump down their throat. Brokers must give clients best execution.
by colechristensen | 2025-05-15 21:14:10+00:00
This is bad analysis.

The HN crowd should be very familiar with management frequently changing requirements especially when it's far too late in the process forcing reworks.

Instead of middle managers, shipbuilders have the whole Navy, the personal egos and career ambitions of captains and admiralty, Congress, and the ever changing president and party in power to deal with. The author suggests we don't start building a ship until the requirements are done... my sweet summer child they're never done. There are way too many cooks in the kitchen and that's the problem that needs to be solved, ships are being designed and redesigned by committee nearly endlessly. Most things are.

To make acquisitions cheaper this fiddling needs to be curbed, just saying "don't start building" misses the problem and the point.
by famouswaffles | 2025-05-15 21:14:28+00:00
I’m not arbitrarily defining it as a one-shot process. I’m pointing out how strained your “movie-script” (your words, not mine) comparison is.

>You can have an interview with a vampire DraculaBot, but that character can only "self-reflect" in the same shallow/fictional way that it can "thirst for blood" or "turn into a cloud of bats."

The "shallow/fictional way" only exists because of the limited, immutable nature of real scripts. A 'script' that does not have either of these properties would not necessarily produce characters that only reflect in a shallow manner.

Text that’s generated on-the-fly-while interrogating the user, calling tools, and updating its own working context-isn’t anything like a screenplay whose pages are fixed in advance.

There's no strawman here. You've decided that an LLM is not something you want to attribute a 'real' entity to and this is your rationalization for that.
by jokethrowaway | 2025-05-15 21:15:22+00:00
It's completely broken for me over 400 lines (Claude 3.7, paid Cursor)

The worst is when I ask something complex, the model generates 300 lines of good code and then timeouts or crashes. If I ask to continue it will mess up the code for good, eg. starts generating duplicated code or functions which don't match the rest of the code.
by paulpauper | 2025-05-15 21:15:58+00:00
All the "overflow/exchange" sites suck, not just the stack overflow. Too many questions being closed. I had a question closed in mathexchange because, I surmise, it was "too obvious" even though easier questions were asked as recently as 2021, even much more elementary ones. Moreover, my specific question had never been asked there before, and the point of math exchange is to ask easier questions, compared to mathoverflow.

But it's also possible it's pivoting to a Wikipedia-like model where it becomes a repository for answers, and less about contributions. In which case, this is not the same as it dying. As seen with Wikipedia, it can still get a lot of traffic and revenue even if few people contribute to it anymore.
by miki123211 | 2025-05-15 21:16:04+00:00
This explanation wasn't just about lawsuits.

Other things in a similar category are:

- negative media attention (media scrutiny increases proportionally to organization size)

- doing something that upsets an influential group and may have consequences for the rest of your business (think how big the outrage would have been if Apple, Google or Microsoft tried making an "Uber" app before Uber existed)

- bringing down the service which is being worked on, potentially breaking SLAs

- failing to meet customer / legal commitments, particularly in regards to internationalization, accessibility etc.

- security incidents, which are presumably a bigger deal, as your project is connected to the rest of your infrastructure

- getting cancelled online, which causes employees (unrelated to the project) to quit

- natural, random and serious consequences that result from the fact that your project needs the company to hire additional employees. E.g. there's a certain number of people willing to commit sexual assault or financial fraud in the population, and the more people you hire, the more likely it is that you get one of them.