MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-06-30 22:19:48+00:00
> I consider the time complexity of the code I'm writing

First, I applauded you for doing this. This is very good practice and I want to encourage everyone to do it.

Second, it's important to remember that big O is very naïve, especially when you drop constant. You're size of n can make a big difference. O(n) is worse than O(n^2) for small n. When considering constants it's also reasonable to have O(n^3) algos be better than O(n)! This throws a wrench in analysis making it more time consuming.

But where the profiler really shines is *you don't write all your code from scratch*. So it tells you when to use a library and when to rewrite. The only other option is to painstakingly go through every library you use.

So the profiler is a big time saver. Big O for quick and dirty first pass and profiler for moving from alpha to beta and beyond.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not full of best habits either! I definitely don't do this for most personal projects nor most research code (which is most of what I write, though I profile a different thing...) but a profiler is the most cost effective way to write *production* code. It becomes exponentially more important as code size grows and team size grows. After all, not everyone is using your best practices. So you need practices that scale and work as you relinquish control.

Unfortunately, you need to profiler routinely. Luckily you can automate this and attach it to the CI pipeline so by doing that the cost isn't high
by currymj | 2025-06-30 22:20:23+00:00
this article contains some reasonable points about problems caused both by concrete advances in AI and by rhetoric about AI used to justify the decisions of the powerful. the focus is especially on AI-based end-user technology being sold to consumers and institutions.

it seems to miss the point that some members of the university community may actually do research on AI, and may not feel inclined to ask for approval from the “People’s Council” to get permission to think about concepts in statistics, computer science, or decision theory.
by comprev | 2025-06-30 22:21:22+00:00
DATs are partly responsible for the huge resurgence in the sale of brand new/unreleased "old school" dance music.

There's a vinyl record label called Deep Jungle [0] which specialises in sourcing unreleased (or very limited pressings originally) 90s jungle/drum&bass straight from the artists - for a fair price.

Each release has a backstory often involving getting boxes of DATs down from the attic! The music is remastered with modern technology.

Demand is high (literally selling out within minutes!) as the label covers both older customers (who went raving in the 90s) and the younger generation exploring older music.

[0] https://www.discogs.com/label/31362-Deep-Jungle
by timewizard | 2025-06-30 22:21:32+00:00
I understand they can do traffic analytics but with privacy extensions and the proliferation of IoT devices I don't think that level of analysis is going to be very fine. Probably just enough to bin houses into different size groups.

There are a multitude of pre-existing ways of achieving the same result. One would be simply looking at the ft^2 listed on the public tax documents for the given address.

So I was really assuming any useful analysis would require them to be the actual man in the middle by owning and controlling your router. In which case address family does not matter.
by m463 | 2025-06-30 22:21:55+00:00
I was thinking about this with respect to the new uncomplicated no-contract service with no caps they started offering:

https://www.slashdot.org/story/25/06/26/2124252/comcasts-new...

Apparently you can get 1/2gbit ethernet only modems without wifi. You don't save any money over using their equipment.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-30 22:22:09+00:00
Let's Encrypt was an EFF project to begin with. They're still the same people.

The DNS plugins only matter if you're trying to automate updating the DNS entry. The whole point is that you could have certbot spit out a DNS TXT record for the user to manually add to their DNS once, e.g. which contains the public key fingerprint of the certificate they want Let's Encrypt to renew on an ongoing basis, and then certbot would be able to renew the certificate as long as the DNS record remains in place.
Show HN: I turned Paul Graham's essays into per topic navigable knowledge maps
by kanodiaashu | 2025-06-30 22:22:19+00:00
Instead of reading Paul Graham's essays one by one, you can now explore them through interactive knowledge maps organized by topic.

I've always found PG's essays incredibly valuable, but there's a problem: they're scattered across 20+ years and 200+ pieces. You read "How to Get Startup Ideas" and it's brilliant. Six months later you read "Organic Startup Ideas" and realize they're deeply connected, but you've lost track of the specifics; the connections get lost.

So I organized his essential insights into 6 focused knowledge maps covering startup ideas, wealth creation, great work, programming, design, and writing. Each map shows you the big picture first, then lets you drill down to specific concepts and source material.

Key features: - Interactive hierarchical maps that show how concepts connect - AI Q&A to explore ideas and get insights from the source material - Clone any collection to edit, annotate, and build upon with your own research, and share with friends - Create your own knowledge maps using PDFs, URLs, or web search

The goal isn't to replace reading the original essays, but to give you a scaffold for understanding how his ideas fit together. Once you see the landscape, you can dive deeper into whatever interests you most.

Looking for feedback if you try it!
by NaOH | 2025-06-30 22:22:20+00:00
Related:

Why are rice prices still high? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44126639 - May 2025 (16 comments)

Japan plans to sell rice from emergency stockpiles to cut prices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42915690 - Feb 2025 (11 comments)

Why has Japan been hit with rice shortages despite normal crops? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41366304 - Aug 2024 (179 comments)
by simonw | 2025-06-30 22:22:21+00:00
"Relevant content to your LLM when asking a question" is last year's RAG.

If you look at how sophisticated current LLM systems work there is so much more to this.

Just one example: Microsoft open sourced VS Code Copilot Chat today (MIT license). Their prompts are dynamically assembled with tool instructions for various tools based on whether or not they are enabled: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/blob/v0.29....

And the autocomplete stuff has a wealth of contextual information included: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/blob/v0.29....

You have access to the following information to help you make informed suggestions: - recently_viewed_code_snippets: These are code snippets that the developer has recently looked at, which might provide context or examples relevant to the current task. They are listed from oldest to newest, with line numbers in the form #| to help you understand the edit diff history. It's possible these are entirely irrelevant to the developer's change. - current_file_content: The content of the file the developer is currently working on, providing the broader context of the code. Line numbers in the form #| are included to help you understand the edit diff history. - edit_diff_history: A record of changes made to the code, helping you understand the evolution of the code and the developer's intentions. These changes are listed from oldest to latest. It's possible a lot of old edit diff history is entirely irrelevant to the developer's change. - area_around_code_to_edit: The context showing the code surrounding the section to be edited. - cursor position marked as ${CURSOR_TAG}: Indicates where the developer's cursor is currently located, which can be crucial for understanding what part of the code they are focusing on.
by kube-system | 2025-06-30 22:22:40+00:00
Even if you do a walk around, under-inflated tires are typically not distinguishable from normally inflated tires. Especially on today's cars with shorter and stiffer sidewalls.

I had a rental Mercedes with a leak in a tire recently... a tire was at something like 15psi but looked visually the same as the other tires. I absolutely do a walk around on all of my rentals and take pictures, but I would have had no clue if it weren't for TPMS. I would have driven it until it failed.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-06-30 22:22:50+00:00
What about actively obtained data - models seeking data, rather than being fed. Human babies put things in their mouths, they try to stand and fall over. They “do stuff” to learn what works. Right now we’re just telling models what works.

What about simulation: models can make 3D objects so why not give them a physics simulator? We have amazing high fidelity (and low cost!) game engines that would be a great building block.

What about rumination: behind every Cursor rule for example, is a whole story of why a user added it. Why not take the rule, ask a reasoning model to hypothesize about why that rule was created, and add that rumination (along with the rule) to the training data. Providing opportunities to reflect on the choices made by their users might deepen any insights, squeezing more juice out of the data.
by foxyv | 2025-06-30 22:23:59+00:00
Aversion to risk taking is usually due to a cost benefit analysis. You don't take risks that you are unwilling to accept the consequences for. I call it the Chris Farley decision tree. Do I want to take the risk of ending up homeless in a van, down by the river. Except, good luck finding a van to live in now and it will probably be impounded.
by jasonjayr | 2025-06-30 22:24:34+00:00
I have and love my self-hosted immich install. If self-hosted could also use S3 storage, that allows me to use Garage (https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/garage) , which also lets me play games with growable/redundant storage on a pile of second-hand hard drives. IIRC it can only use a mounted block device at the moment, (unless there is a nfs-exposed s3 translator ....)

A lot of existing tooling supports the s3 protocol, so it would simplify the storage picture (no pun intended).
by alganet | 2025-06-30 22:24:45+00:00
Classifiers to classify things, traditional neural nets to identify things. Typical run of the mill.

In OpenAI hype language, this is a problem for "Software 2.0", not "Software 3.0" in 99% of the cases.

The thing about matching an informal tone would be the hard part. I have to concede that LLMs are probably better at that. But I have the feeling that this is not exactly the feature most companies are looking for, and they would be willing to not have it for a cheaper alternative. Most of them just don't know that's possible.
by storus | 2025-06-30 22:25:15+00:00
My point is that newer models will have those baked in, so instead of supporting ~30 tools before falling apart they will reliably support 10,000 tools defined in their context. That alone would dramatically change the need for more than one agent in most cases as the architectural split into multiple agents is often driven by the inability to reliably run many tools within a single agent. Now you can hack around it today by turning tools on/off depending on the agent's state but at some point in the future you might afford not to bother and just dump all your tools to a long stable context, maybe cache it for performance, and that will be it.
by baduiux | 2025-06-30 22:25:33+00:00
I‘m building Sticker, a simple note-taking app for Mac that lets you add markdown based notes to applications, files and other windows. The note is only shown when the connected file, window or app is selected / has focus. Currently, I use it myself to add notes to specific files and projects, e.g. adding a note to my tax folder for 2025 instead of creating a txt file or adding a ToDo to a specific workspace when opened in VS Code. The notes are completely file/markdown based and can be simply synced with other devices. This way, it’s also possible to edit the note outside of Sticker.
by quantified | 2025-06-30 22:25:39+00:00
With luck, they'll vaporize billions of dollars on nothing of consequence.

If they come up with anything of consequence, we'll have an incredibly higher level of Facebook monitoring of our lives in all scopes. Also such a level of AI crap (info/disinfo in politics, crime, arts, etc.) that ironically in-person exchanges will be valued more highly than today. When everything you see on pixels is suspect, only the tangible can be trusted.
by rvz | 2025-06-30 22:25:43+00:00
> Not really. Got some code you don't understand? Feed it to a model and ask it to add comments.

Absolutely not.

An experienced individual in their field can tell if the AI made a mistake in the comments / code rather than the typical untrained eye.

So no, actually read the code and understand what it does.

> Ultimately humans will never need to look at most AI-generated code, any more than we have to look at the machine language emitted by a C compiler.

So for safety critical systems, one should not look or check if code has been AI generated?
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-06-30 22:26:06+00:00
Legislation would be better, no question. Have you seen US politics, though? Not just lately, but for the past couple of decades. Electing knowledgable politicians who are willing to stay properly abreast of technology and work for the interests of their constituents is nigh impossible.

The ones that get into office are most often out of touch and in someone’s pocket because they grandstand on polarizing topics that information-deficient and single-issue voters flock to. I try to vote for candidates who I think will do good that way, and it makes some impact on the micro scale, but on the national scale it’s like trying to drain the Pacific Ocean with a thimble.
by idatum | 2025-06-30 22:26:21+00:00
> Some people rent VPSes. This helps keep their data safe.

This is exactly how I self-host Ente and it has been great.

Machine leaning for image detection has worked really well for me, especially facial recognition for family members (easy to find that photo to share).

I have the client on my Android mobile, Fire tablet (via F-Droid), and my Windows laptop.

My initial motivation was to replace "cloud" storage for getting photos copied off the phone as soon as possible.
by simonw | 2025-06-30 22:26:27+00:00
I would classify AnyTool as a context engineering trick. It's using GPT-4 function calls (what we would call tool calls today) to find the best tools for the current job based on a 3-level hierarchy search.

Drew calls that one "Tool Loadout" https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/06/26/how-to-fix-your-context....
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-30 22:26:27+00:00
I don’t think that this would be likely to pass Congress. Even if it were, if Comcast failed to uphold its obligations due to receiving a National Security Letter (NSL) then they would be hamstrung, unable to comply and unable to protest publically.

It’s almost a legal impossibility and would be a bad move geopolitically to give up this full take capability and it is not happening. It’s wishful thinking to believe otherwise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
by vel0city | 2025-06-30 22:26:32+00:00
This technology doesn't rely on you actually having a WiFi device on you. It can detect presence/motion by changes to the standing waves of the EM propagation throughout the room.

As the salty water meatbags move from room to room we change how the reflections and scattering patterns of 2.4 and 5GHz waves move. Studying these changes and some calibration, you can even determine small changes (like is the person on the left side of the room breathing, are they standing or prone, etc).

In their docs, they show using the WiFi connection from a printer to determine motion sensing and have the option to exclude pets.
by tmerc | 2025-06-30 22:28:00+00:00
Unless your car is very new, you have all the stuff you need to learn to change a tire in the trunk. Watch 2 short YouTube videos and go do it. It'll take you half an hour. You should use a torque wrench but if it was that critical, one would be in your trunk.

After that, look up your maintenance schedule, pick a job, then go figure out if you can.

When you get into bigger jobs, have a tow company and shop ready in case you run into problems. Mobile mechanics may also be an option.
by comprev | 2025-06-30 22:28:04+00:00
I've had 2 Audi TT mk1 over the years.

Love the design, easy to work on (not afraid of stripping the engine) and they're fun to drive. Plus it has a great commumity!

Still have loads of spare parts including the almost-unicor-status official roof bars :)

Platform/SRE/DevOps/etc by trade.
by refulgentis | 2025-06-30 22:28:11+00:00
This feels quite sad.

A whole person -- flattened into little bits gleaned from some text, glued together with assumptions and world-building -- dismissed as "blaming" and "giving up" "after one game"

The YouTube link in the other post has a top comment of "The best speech in all of gaming history delivered by what must be considered the Socrates of gaming.", to give you a sense of there may be more depth to this person than "giving up after 1 game".

If nothing else, it indicates the crowd perceives more depth, which will be enough to make you ponder if you missed something.

I suggest re-reading the article with a different set of assumptions -- when faced with a contradiction, first, check your premises -- it's likely the guy worried about declining programming skills and pointing out the ease at which he was dismissing JavaScript due to simple errors, is being self-aware and sarcastic.

Once you're freed via engaging with your own thinking, instead of rushing to do public judgement, it is a quite beautiful meditation of working on something that fails to get the mindshare you hoped for, and a all-too-familiar to all of us reminder of the cognitive dissonance required to be okay with that, even when you'll never be okay.
by cornichon622 | 2025-06-30 22:28:15+00:00
When you buy something on Le Bon Coin, if it's not conform to the description or outright broken, you can very easily get a refund from the platform itself up to 3 days after reception, even if the seller disappeared. I think it encourages people to buy used stuff by removing the main drawback which is "it may not work properly anymore".
by labrador | 2025-06-30 22:29:00+00:00
On the other hand, for my use case (I'm retired and enjoy chatting with it), having it remember items from past chats makes it feel much more personable. I actually prefer Claude, but it doesn't have memory, so I unsubscribed and subscribed to ChatGPT. That it remembers obscure but relevant details about our past chats feels almost magical.

It's good that you can turn it off. I can see how it might cause problems when trying to do technical work.

Edit: Note, the introduction of memory was a contributing factor to "the sychophant" that OpenAI had to rollback. When it could praise you while seeming to know you was encouraging addictive use.

Edit2: Here's the previous Hacker News discussion on Simon's "I really don’t like ChatGPT’s new memory dossier"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44052246
by tripdout | 2025-06-30 22:29:38+00:00
Well, no luck.

In the device tree I see (snippet):

qcom,msm-eud@1628000 { compatible = "qcom,msm-eud"; interrupt-names = "eud_irq"; interrupts = <0x00 0xbd 0x04>; reg = <0x1628000 0x2000 0x162a000 0x1000 0x3e5018 0x04>; reg-names = "eud_base", "eud_mode_mgr2", "eud_tcsr_check_reg"; qcom,secure-eud-en; qcom,eud-tcsr-check-enable; status = "ok"; }; qusb@162b000 { compatible = "qcom,qusb2phy-v2"; reg = <0x162b000 0x400 0x1b40268 0x04 0x162f014 0x04 0x162a000 0x04>; reg-names = "qusb_phy_base", "efuse_addr", "refgen_north_bg_reg_addr", "eud_enable_reg"; qcom,efuse-bit-pos = <0x19>; qcom,efuse-num-bits = <0x03>;

but `devmem 0x162A000 4 0x1` causes the system to lock up and I see the following in ramoops:

[ 433.720232] msm_watchdog f410000.qcom,wdt: Causing a QCOM Apps Watchdog bite! [ 433.727381] msm_watchdog f410000.qcom,wdt: Wdog - STS: 0xb01a6, CTL: 0x3, BARK TIME: 0x57fdf, BITE TIME: 0x6ffd6

I'm not at all sure on the interpretation of this, but the reading at the efuse_addr (so I guess certain ones can be read from EL0?) is 0x0e000000 which has bits 25-27 set and QFPROM fuses seem to have a blown value of 1 according to Qualcomm docs, so it might be fused out?
by notepad0x90 | 2025-06-30 22:29:52+00:00
Worth mentioning that unlike some ISPS Xfinity does let you use your own DOCSIS modems, which is the ideal way of using an ISP. ISP provided gateway's WIFI is not ideal for privacy, security and performance.

Comcast in general has a long history of snooping around and messing with users' traffic. Not that the alternatives are much better. Regular folks are screwed on this matter.

But perhaps for HNers setting up your own trusted WIFI AP and routing it (and all other traffic) through an internet gateway that routes your traffic over a secure channel (whatever that is for you, Tor, VPN services, VPN over your own cloud/vps,etc..) is ideal. It goes without saying, your DNS traffic should also not be visible to the ISPs.

Keep in mind that they sell all this data (including the motion data) not just to law enforcement but to arbitrary well-paying data brokers and other clients.
by charlesrobertd | 2025-06-30 22:29:55+00:00
Nice catch! You're the only one who spotted the similarity with Player Piano.

The first draft actually ended with this line: "Operating rooms without surgeons, computers without programmers, pianos without musicians." I took it out to make the reference less obvious, but after your message I added it back.

Each story I write includes a small tribute to a writer who's shaped the way I think, like Isaac Asimov or Kurt Vonnegut.

Thanks for reading!
by simonw | 2025-06-30 22:30:12+00:00
The stuff that's showing up under the "context engineering" banner feels a whole lot less alchemical to me than the older prompt engineering tricks.

Alchemical is "you are the world's top expert on marketing, and if you get it right I'll tip you $100, and if you get it wrong a kitten will die".

The techniques in https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/06/26/how-to-fix-your-context.... seem a whole lot more rational to me than that.
by geeewhy | 2025-06-30 22:30:44+00:00
ive beeen experimenting with this for a while, (im sure in a way, most of us did). Would be good to numerate some examples. When it comes to coding, here's a few:

- compile scripts that can grep / compile list of your relevant files as files of interest

- make temp symlinks in relevant repos to each other for documentation generation, pass each documentation collected from respective repos to to enable cross-repo ops to be performed atomically

- build scripts to copy schemas, db ddls, dtos, example records, api specs, contracts (still works better than MCP in most cases)

I found these steps not only help better output but also reduces cost greatly avoiding some "reasoning" hops. I'm sure practice can extend beyond coding.
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-06-30 22:31:18+00:00
There will likely be custom, large, and expensive models at an enterprise level in the near future (some large entities and governments already have them (niprgpt)).

With that in mind, what would be the business sense in siloing a single "Agent" instead of using something like a service discovery service that all benefit from?
by msgodel | 2025-06-30 22:31:29+00:00
This approach would be fine if users were empowered to add AI integration they wanted on their own.

They are not though. Absolute control over the platform means Apple has the responsibility to have more vision for the future than anyone else. They do not and will fail to satisfy their users. It will result in either a dramatic change of leadership and strategy and or drive the customers elsewhere.