MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by futureshock | 2025-06-04 11:33:20+00:00
I think the fantasy of going back hides the reality that new possibilities are always stretched out ahead. I have lived many lives. New careers, new cities, new countries, new friends, new families. By my count I’ve lived 14 iterations of life and counting. New lives are always beckoning. After awhile you get good a recognizing the ones worth stepping into.
by jvanderbot | 2025-06-04 11:33:31+00:00
Here's the thing: It may be that 2400 calories would take the average 40 year old male and only have him continue the socially acceptable weight gain of a few lbs a year. Or maybe the average (already overweight) male would maintain his weight at 2400 calories.

But in any sane world, that's like the 90th percentile of calories required when consumed with a carb-heavy american diet and I'd argue almost no sedentary person requires that much. Just plugging in the basal metabolic rate numbers gets something well below that.
by blacklion | 2025-06-04 11:34:30+00:00
It is hard to manipulate pairs of files without special container. For example, you want to attach chages to e-mail, changes cover 10 files + 1 removed file + 2 added files. Will you pack it to tar/zip with two folders `old` and `new` inside or what? Looks like pre-VCS era solution, when we did manaul "version control" by copying `project` to `project-19950112-final-for-sure` :)
by awongh | 2025-06-04 11:34:42+00:00
I guess that mostly proves my point in the sense that it's not most people's personal choices that determine if plastic ends up in the ocean- it's either incompetence or downright deliberately deceptive actions by someone else- it's crazy to think that we need to make chairs out of bottles because someone decided to ship the plastic to another country rather than actually deal with it properly.

In that sense, saying "recycle or it'll end up in the ocean" is like saying "eat your food because people are starving in africa". Not only are the cause and effect not related but then people ignore the true underlying causes.
by eisbaw | 2025-06-04 11:35:12+00:00
Why are diffs still so text-based? That should be a last resort. Typically when you edit a text file, your action has meaning beyond the primitive edit. You probably changed a variable name, moved a function above another. Replaced a whole chunk of stuff with other stuff, etc.

The problem with diffs is that they are not easily portable - because their intent is so (accidentally) low-level. Imbue diffX with semantics, and they can become more readable - by humans and AI alike.
by rustc | 2025-06-04 11:35:13+00:00
> Also, hard dollar caps are rarely if ever the right choice.

Depends on if you're a big business or an individual. There is absolutely no reason I would ever pay $100k for a traffic burst on my personal site or side project (like the $100k Netlify case a few months ago).

> It's better to set billing alerts and make the call yourself if they go off.

Billing alerts are not instant and neither is anyone online 24x7 monitoring the alerts.
by imiric | 2025-06-04 11:35:35+00:00
> Science is supposed to be immune to these kind of bullshit

You have misplaced confidence in the scientific method. It was never immune to corruption, either by those deliberately manipulating it for their personal gain, or simply due to ignorance and bad methodology. We have examples of both throughout history. In either case, peer review is not infallible.

The new problem introduced by modern AI tools is that they drastically lower the skill requirement for anyone remotely capable in the field to generate data that appears correct on the surface, with relatively little effort and very quickly, while errors can only be discovered by actual experts in the field investing considerable amounts of time and resources. In some fields like programming the required resources to review code are relatively minor, but in fields like biology this (from what I've read) is much more difficult and expensive.

But, yes, science is being flooded with (m|d)isinformation, just like all our other media channels.
by al_borland | 2025-06-04 11:36:29+00:00
My grandma seemingly didn’t ignore or tolerate mistakes. That’s why she ended up stopping. People tried to get her to crochet or knit toward the end of her life and if she made a mistake, she’d start ripping it all apart. When the mistakes became too frequent, that was it. Maybe that’s where I get it from, lol.
by jvanderbot | 2025-06-04 11:36:32+00:00
I'm about to say something that is easy to dismiss as bullshit, so feel free to, but you're right, people were healthier in terms of weight in the 60s, and right around that is when we changed dietary guidance to be carb-focused, low fat, etc. Since then, obesity has skyrocketed. The book Obesity Code covers this.

As sibling comments have pointed out, 3800 is availability, not consumption, so it's not an indicator of how much people do eat, just how much they could eat.
by xorcist | 2025-06-04 11:37:26+00:00
From the outside, it seems like what you really wanted to write was a diff tool, not a new patch format.

You already are user facing. Why interpret a user facing format behind the scenes? It makes no sense. The document speaks about specifying yet another diff format, but luckily, it does nothing of the sort but specifies a new patch set format. But those are by necessity VCS- and file format specific.
by rahen | 2025-06-04 11:38:14+00:00
I'm not sure anyone invoking "classic Unix" is pining for modem noise or line printers, though that seems to be how you're interpreting it. That’s more a caricature of early computing than what defines the Unix philosophy or what NetBSD preserves.

When I say classic Unix, I really mean "simple software":

- Text-first, scriptable interfaces where tools do one thing well and can be composed

- Human-readable configuration in plain files, no XML or opaque binary blobs

- Predictable, minimal system design where you can understand what’s happening under the hood without chasing abstraction layers

- Manual pages that matter, and a userspace that favors understanding over wizard-driven opacity

- A system that’s BSD-like in spirit: clean, coherent, documented, and built by people who care more about correctness and clarity than flash or trends

This is in contrast to modern Linux distributions where systems are often a tangled mess of systemd units, layers of more or less obscure daemons and processes, unpredictable behaviors, and YAML/JSON/XML-based abstractions that sit between you and the actual system.

So no, I'm not glorifying the past or pretending users in 2025 would enjoy a serial terminal setup from 1984. I’m saying that a clean, simple, consistent, modular Unix, in the traditional sense, is still valuable and NetBSD is one of the few OSes that still embodies that ethos.
by acdha | 2025-06-04 11:38:24+00:00
More precisely, when deploying the new service microservice it used less than half as much CPU to process more requests per second.

This is not “Java slow, Python fast” – I expected it to be the reverse – but rather that the developers who cranked out a messy Spring app somehow managed to cancel out all of the work the JVM developers have done without doing anything obviously wrong. There wasn’t a single bottleneck, just death by a thousand cuts with data access patterns, indirection, very deep stack traces, etc.

I have no doubt that there are people here who could’ve rewritten it in better Java for significant wins but the goal with the rewrite was to align a project originally written by a departed team with a larger suite of Python code for the rest of the app, and to deal with various correctness issues. Using Pydantic for the data models not only reduced the amount of code significantly, it flushed out a bunch of inconsistency in the input validation and that’s what I’d been looking for along with reusing our common code libraries for consistency. The performance win was just gravy and, to be clear, I don’t think that’s saying anything about the JVM other than that it does not yet have an optimization to call an LLM to make code less enterprise-y.
by os2warpman | 2025-06-04 11:38:44+00:00
>For some people, imagining unlived lives is torture, even a gateway to crisis.

I was either born without the gene or raised to not do this for myself but I do, quite often, dwell on the unlived lives of people I knew who were never given the chance to live their lives.

My best friend was murdered at school when he was 16. In the Army there are several guys I considered to be "old men" at the time who I am now decades older than.

Now I'm the old man.

Others have taken their own lives or had it stolen from them by drunk drivers or disease.

But me? I just happily (for the most part) stumble through my own life, knowing the past is immutable.

The utility of "what ifs?" seems very low when looking at the past.

The present is a different story, but the convoluted fantasies people seem to build in their minds about going back and marrying that person or taking that risk seem futile because anything you create in your mind is as real and likely to happen as a myriad other options and knowing how that path would have unfolded is impossible.

"I would have been happier/better off/more X if only I.." No. That is unknowable.

Yeah. Go back in time and invest in a sure bet. You got fabulously wealthy and Very Important but ended up dying in your comfy first class seat sitting next to the cofounder of Akamai on 9/11.

"No with my time machine only good things happen"
by nchmy | 2025-06-04 11:39:46+00:00
Why are community and competence mutually exclusive? Also, again, the main criticism was that the machines are simply not useful, practical or accessible - especially for those who live in areas that most need recycling initiatives. Rather than design larger, more effective machines from recycled materials (eg make shredder blades from leaf springs), it's all specialized alloys, laser cutting, etc.

As for the forum, its been a while since I've looked at any of their stuff. But I am quite certain that there was a period where the forum had disappeared. Someone even managed to copy/fork the forum. I can't find it right now though. I'll share it if I find it.
by owebmaster | 2025-06-04 11:40:01+00:00
> I think the fantasy of going back hides the reality that new possibilities are always stretched out ahead.

It also hides the incapability of many to do what they should to succeed. Most people already know what they should do different to succeed without going back in time but still they do not have the will power to do it and they probably would still not have if they had a time machine.
by zX41ZdbW | 2025-06-04 11:40:06+00:00
I'm also collecting this data, and it allows rendering beautiful heatmaps like here: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/59020

Try: ssh play@play.clickhouse.com

SELECT id, max(score) AS s, max(descendants), argMax(title, update_time), arrayStringConcat(arrayMap(x -> format('\x1b[38;2;{0};{1};{2}m\xE2\x96\x88\x1b[0m', least(greatest(sqrt(x / 10) * 255, 0), 255)::UInt8::String, least(greatest(sqrt((x - 10) / 50) * 255, 0), 255)::UInt8::String, least(greatest(sqrt((x - 50) / 250) * 255, 0), 255)::UInt8::String), arrayDifference(arrayFill(x -> x != 0, maxResample(now() - INTERVAL 2 DAY, now(), 3600)(score, update_time))))) AS bar FROM hackernews_changes_items WHERE id IN (SELECT arrayJoin(ids) FROM (SELECT ids FROM hackernews_top WHERE type = 'top' ORDER BY update_time DESC LIMIT 1)) GROUP BY id ORDER BY s DESC LIMIT 10
by Shmungus | 2025-06-04 11:40:16+00:00
Hi HN!

I’m excited to share this lightweight hallucination detector I built to help identify unreliable or “hallucinated” outputs from LLMs like GPT, Claude, and various local models.

It uses multiple methods — from spotting overconfidence and contradictions to scoring factual density and coherence — to give a hallucination probability score for any generated response.

It’s framework-agnostic, fast (~0.2s per response), and designed for both research and production use. Plus, it’s completely free under the MIT license.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, and if you find it useful for your projects. Happy to answer questions or discuss how it works under the hood!

Thanks for checking it out!
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-04 11:40:32+00:00
How would you add 0.(3) + 0.2 + 0.(142857)?

Computations are exactly the place where fractions shine over (repeating) decimals.

The disadvantage of fractions is that there is an infinite number of ways to represent each rational number - 1/3 is the same number as 2/6 or as 818171/2454513. Also, comparisons are harder as well. It's easy to tell that 1/3 is bigger than 1/7, but is 2/3 greater or smaller than 5/7? Here you have to do a computation to really tell.

Irrational numbers have a similar problem, btw. The square root of two is the same number as the fourth root of 8, but you can't tell this without performing some computations.
by pydry | 2025-06-04 11:41:41+00:00
>But it is insane to write tests first and then just write code to complete tests. It completely ignores the larger picture. It ignores how things will change and it has no context of what is good code and bad code

If you TDD outside in and tend to test from the edges of your stack, being conservative about moving your test coupling lower down the stack then it provides you with the freedom to change things underneath the hood and still have a body of tests that let you know you didnt break anything.

If you TDD inside out then yes you can and probably will create an enormous inflexible mess of tests that dont tell you if your code worked.

Sadly many tutorials teach it as "you want to write a class "Ball" you should write a test for that class first" which is wrongheaded.

Thats just writing tests badly though, it's not intrinsic to red-green-refactor.
by al_borland | 2025-06-04 11:42:31+00:00
> when on holidays their company ends up becoming a burden, not able to improvise, not able to stay in uncommon situations without a coffee brewer nearby for a couple days.

Exactly. This is why it was so memorable. They made their coffee problem my problem as well. Suddenly the entire morning was a frantic search for coffee. It’s not exactly the vibe I’m going for in the morning.
by srean | 2025-06-04 11:42:36+00:00
Checkout Kea parrots too

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kea#Cognitive_abilities

https://youtu.be/Yj718A7_s4A?si=yaiv4sZiY4xmzK0C. -- Kea doing probabilities and inferring from (biased) experiments
by incomingpain | 2025-06-04 11:42:51+00:00
I will happily lose more HN score to agree. AI is amazing.

Pycharm's AI i guess defaults to claude sonnet 3.5 even though 4 is available? Is that claude code? It has multiple options, i guess im happy with 3.5. It has ollama and lm studio options as well for those who need privacy. I got LM studio working yesterday but so far very bad; it desparately needs the ability to check the internet.

>Do I program any faster? Not really. But it feels like I've gained 30% more time in my day because the machine is doing the work.

I wonder if anyone has objectively tried to figure out if you code faster or not.

>While all this is happening, I've found myself reflecting a lot on what AI means to the world and I am becoming increasingly optimistic about our future.

I am so optimistic. The worker shortage of 2030 depends on no significant boost to productivity. But AI is going to be a significant boost to productivity.

AI is likely going to enable us to automate multiple industries. Could we eliminate food scarcity by fully automating food production?

>That's what makes this moment feel so strange — half revolutionary, half prelude. And yet, oddly, there are so many technologists who are holdouts. How could techies reject this change?

I think it's a silent majority situation. The techies are all working on new projects at lightning speed with AI; too busy to post on social media. Whereas those without AI are complaining about AI.
by jvanderbot | 2025-06-04 11:43:39+00:00
I have some advice!

I have this problem. I did three things. First, I joined a makerspace that had a woodshop. This seems like it should cure all your problems but it won't. There's limited storage, unpredictable tool availability, the motivational issues of driving to a new place to work, etc.

Second, I joined another makerspace out of town! Redundancy and the availability of friends in the area to work with helps. Plus, supporting makerspaces feels good and the cost is not much compared to other hobbies.

Finally, there are some very basic, not large tools that can get you through 90% of projects, including very nice looking bookshelves, desks, cabinets, etc:

* Circle saw + track guide for rip cuts

* Saw horses for adhoc tables

* Power drill (+ you'll want one for all kinds of useful things anyway)

* Nice drill bit set

* Pocket hole jig (saves you time and assembly space)

* Drill block (takes the place of a drill press in a pinch)

* Painting blankets to put stain / glue-ups on

All of the above can fit in a small area of a closet, available when motivation strikes. Far and away the biggest storage headache is wood, which you'll have to get creative about, but for restoration or even modification, you won't need much. And for smaller projects you'll probably use most of what you buy on the same day if you plan it out.

Upgrades (which a makerspace would provide anyway):

* If you have a little space (like a desktop), you can get a chop/miter saw which makes repeated precise cuts much easier

* A router + bit set (esp keyhole bit! This makes hanging this much easier)

* Shopvac for dust (+ shopvacs are super useful anyway)

That's really it. You can do almost all the projects you'd want with just those, from the living room, patio, backyard, driveway, garage, or a parking spot out front.

What I get from the makerspace is access to drill presses, router tables, and table saws. Table saws are a game changer and are the best way to level up your precision and cut accuracy, but require so much space that I could never justify it at home (and small portable table saws are not the same).

I'm definitely still learning, but the main lessons are that good wood ($), precise cuts, adding layers from trim / recessed boards, hiding screws, and tons of sanding will make anything look really, really nice.

EDIT: One last thing: You can easily practice woodworking fundamentals without space by making joints, practicing stain matching (try to get veneer plywood to match a stained board), or practicing right-angle, precise cuts.
by spacecadet | 2025-06-04 11:43:48+00:00
"Alternating between walking and running is much better than doubting whether you will continue or you will give up. Better to stay in the fight."

This is it. I use to roll with some ultras, we did some great weekend runs through Yosemite, Sierras, the high route, etc. Its mostly fast walking, especially up hill, then sprint your ass off down hill and when its flat and you feel high... have fun.
by pjmlp | 2025-06-04 11:45:00+00:00
We did a similar approach back in the day, when going through the Tiger language[0], on the Java version.

Our approach was to model the compiler IR into Assembly macros, and follow the classical UNIX compiler build pipeline, thus even though it wasn't the most performant compiler in the world, we could nonetheless enjoy having our toy compiler generate real executables in the end.

[0] - https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern
by brutus1213 | 2025-06-04 11:45:08+00:00
Amazon is the same I think? I live in constant fear we will have a runaway job one day. I get daily emails to myself (as a manager) and to my finance person. We had one instance where a team member forgot to turn off a machine for a few months :(

I get why it is a business strategy to not have limits .. but I wonder if providers would get more usage if people had more trusts on costs/predictability.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-06-04 11:45:33+00:00
I agree with you that comparing the rates of accidents is what's important.

It's especially important to think about what's in the denominator of these rate measurements. I think the right denominator is "per km driven". (Accidents per hour of driving is OK but penalises faster cars -- people usually need to move a fixed distance, from A to B, and a faster car travels that fixed distance in less time.) The numerator (fatal accident count) for Tesla FSD may indeed be just 1 (I didn't see this claimed in the article, but it seems the data is somewhat public, so presumably if there were more fatalities, they would have reported them), but the Tesla FSD denominator might be quite low too, which might make its rate comparable to or worse than the human one.

Of course, we'd need a much greater sample size for any confidence, so it would make more sense to compare non-fatal accidents, which are more common.
by tyleo | 2025-06-04 11:45:43+00:00
This is a hard situation. I don’t think minors should be exposed to porn. Hell, I think even social media has a drug-like effect best kept from minors.

Age verification is the most obvious solution but comes with the downside of potentially leaking private adult activity or information.

I suppose my POV is that the benefit here outweighs the good even if imperfect. Porn just isn’t a necessity even if some folks really enjoy it.

I don’t hold that POV strongly, I pretty much formed it while writing this comment. I’m be interested in hearing other perspectives.
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-06-04 11:46:08+00:00
Knitting is actually very nicely repairable. Home made sweaters were super popular here in the past, pretty much the only affordable way to get them. They survived for many many years, because you can always patch them, either visibly or invisibly. Even knitted socks, which get a lot of abuse, were patched and repatched.
by promhize | 2025-06-04 11:46:51+00:00
Hey HN!

Ornelle is a hiring platform we built to solve the coordination nightmare that comes with recruiting and the complexity of ATS platforms.

-

What it does

Ornelle acts as your recruiting coordinator. You define your hiring processes as workflows, and Ornelle handles the rest – from initial application to final offer. This includes:

- Review and approval coordination between team members - Automated candidate communication - Meeting scheduling and calendar management - Process branching, tracking and status updates - Application categorization and tagging

-

Why build this

We wanted to automate the coordination and operational part of hiring so that more team members can get involved in the hiring process, leading to better evaluation of both technical skills and most importantly team and cultural fit.

Also, Ornelle is the first well-designed and well-featured open-source hiring platform. Most existing solutions are either proprietary black boxes or open-source projects that feel like they were built in 2005.

We took inspiration from tools like Linear and Attio to make Ornelle clean, fast, and actually enjoyable to use.

The goal is to make Ornelle your intelligent recruiting partner. So, it already includes the essentials including automation, meeting scheduling & availability, candidate communication, career pages, API, candidates CRM, forms, granular permissions, video call integrations, saved views, advanced filtering and custom fields and a lot more is planned.