MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xEF | 2025-06-09 08:38:05+00:00
The difference is the lawyers and judges do not make any money from the DDOS achieving the same goal. Really, what the law cares about is money. Greed, plain and simple. Yes, what people think/feel factor into this _only_ because when the constituency (read: supporters) are put in an emotionally agitated state, they can be manipulated to believe just about anything, which helps pass things like batshit crazy budget cuts to critical public infrastructure or fuel witch-hunts for imaginary enemies in order to build an enforcement arm.

I know plenty of lawyers that would absolutely disagree with your first sentence, "the law doesn't care about technicalities." Oh, but they do. Technicalities are their tools of exploitation.
Ask HN: Is anyone still programming the old-fashioned way (without LLMs)?
by philbo | 2025-06-09 08:39:01+00:00
There's so much content about AI-assisted programming now that I'm genuinely curious to hear from people who aren't using LLMs in their regular workflow.

I've tried Cursor and Claude Code and have seen them both do some impressive things, but using them really sucks the joy out of programming for me. I like the process of thinking about and implementing stuff without them. I enjoy actually typing the code out myself and feel like that helps me to hold a better mental model of how stuff works in my head. And when I have used LLMs, I've felt uncomfortable about the distance they put between me and the code, like they get in the way of deeper understanding.

So I continue to work on my projects the old-fashioned way, just me and vim, hacking stuff at my own pace. Is anyone else like this? Am I a dinosaur? And is there some trick for the mental model problem with LLMs?
by croes | 2025-06-09 08:39:47+00:00
> User-centric performance metrics

It’s still about performance.

How fast can I use it, how smooth can I use it, etc.

My point is about how good can I do what I want to do on a website.

For instance a shopping site can as fast and snappy as it likes, if I can’t find the right articles is useless. Amazon and ebay come to my mind who ignore even simple exact search terms just to show things I didn’t search for.
by fsiefken | 2025-06-09 08:41:08+00:00
Interesting take on customizing own's own local computing environment to ones life goals. Emacs is a good platform as it has everything and even runs on a raspberry pi or android termux. I understand trying to keep GenAI away, it can take away a bit of 'locos of control' and thinking for yourself. But as a pair programmer or 'sparring partner', digital assistant or a souped up rubber duck - it can be of added value.

For my ideal local computing environment I'd personally opt for a 'less is more' option, perhaps using a minimalist linux distro like artix, devuan or aosis. Having limited access to the internet, local oriented with zim files of wikipedia, devdocs, manuals and a library of epubs and pdf's, using dn - offline full-text search and archiving for a chromium based browser.

As an additional feature I want in to being able to run podman, wine and tabletop playground and vassal for solo boardgaming. Not sure if that can be done on a minimal OS. Also dynamically create an interacive fiction environment where it gives me improv and roleplay assignments.

Last but not least have the OS coach and guide me through buddhist, christian, sufi and bullet journal inspired philosophy with a lightweight LLM RAG system. Coaching me with focus - what's important in life - minimalist living and non-violent communication, holding space and self-care for myself and others.

The system should be portable, text and voice enabled :-) My own personal Jesus.
by PaulShin | 2025-06-09 08:41:12+00:00
That's the million-dollar question, and you've hit on the key puzzle piece. I believe the answer lies in distinguishing between two different stages of AI development: "Foundational Model Training" vs. "Product-Specific Fine-Tuning."

1. Foundational Model Training (The Big Tech Approach): To build a base model like GPT-4 or Gemini, you need an unimaginable amount of general, brute-force data. You need millions of images labeled "cat" or "dog," and billions of text examples. For this massive scale of generic data, using large, external teams of human evaluators is often the only feasible way. It's about quantity and breadth.

2. Product-Specific Fine-Tuning (The Markhub Approach): However, once you have that foundational model, the goal changes. To make an AI truly useful for a specific product, you no longer need a million generic data points. You need a thousand high-context, high-quality data points that are specific to your workflow.

For example, an external evaluator can label a button as "a button." But only a real designer using Markhub can provide the critical feedback, "This button's corner radius (8px) is inconsistent with our design system (6px)." This is the kind of nuanced, proprietary data that creates real product value, and it can only be generated "in workflow."

So, I think Big Tech isn't wrong; they're just solving a different problem (building the foundational engine). We, as application-layer startups, have the unique opportunity to build on top of that engine and solve the "last mile" problem by capturing the high-context data that truly makes a product smart.

You're not missing a puzzle piece at all you've just identified the difference between building the engine and building the race car.
by willguest | 2025-06-09 08:46:07+00:00
My guess is that you're either a dev or an orthopaedic surgeon, well-versed in managing the machinistic aspects of systems, but with little motivation to go beyond them.

There is decent experimental evidence to demonstrate that we are more than gene expression and the machine analogy you insist on is not a good one for understanding biological systems - see work by Michael Levin, as example.

There is a wider paradigmatic shift underway that moves from thinking about parts to processes. This refocus on relations rather than objects is very important and, for biological systems, points to a fundamentally social/collective aspect to their nature.

The machine metaphor also fails when you can no longer explain how the machine works. This is true in many areas of medicine (e.g. anasthesia) and, while we continue to believe (sometimes with enormous zeal) in the concepts that helped us in the past, we cling to them at the cost of building better understanding.

What you say isn't "wrong", but it is too limited to be a useful guide in asking new questions about things like immunotherapy treatments.
by Delphiza | 2025-06-09 08:46:44+00:00
Connecting EV charging stations to the grid is a significant problem. Balancing the peak grid maximum demand* against EV charging demand. While it may be okay to have a busy highway/motorway service station properly hooked up, it get's more difficult to apply that more broadly. How much charging capacity should a shopping centre provide? What about a occasionally-used sports venue?

I have worked with customers that have distribution centres in city locations to charge online-shopping vehicles overnight for the next day. All vehicles are plugged in and the software needs to charge different vehicles up at different times and rates, in order to spread the load.

It is far easier to dig a hole in the ground and fill a tank with delivered fuel - all the logistics for this already exists.

* Maximum demand is a well-known concept that relates to the maximum current draw in a 30-minute period, which is used to provide the necessary infrastructure from the electricity supplier.
by card_zero | 2025-06-09 08:48:33+00:00
Specifically, the partial pressure of carbon dioxide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_photosynthesis#Some...

"the efficiency of photosynthesis ... is usually below 1%, ... However, plants are efficient in using CO2 at atmospheric concentrations,"

This engineered tree would have to pump CO2 into itself.
by latexr | 2025-06-09 08:50:14+00:00
Blog posts, news articles, and other web texts have been using correct punctuation marks for a long time. I know because I’ve been noticing misuses (usually having switched or repeated characters for quotes) for over a decade.

Plenty of people care about typographic punctuation, and others use software (such as Apple’s OSs, markdown converters, publishing and editing tools) which auto-converts smart punctuation. Heck, tools for doing that are older than Markdown, and that is already two decades old.

https://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/

Look, nowhere have I said using an em-dash can’t be an indicator, my objection is people using it as the indicator. It’s become a meme. Too many people act like if the existence of a single em-dash immediately and conclusively proves it was written by an LLM. It does not.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-06-09 08:50:57+00:00
This guy genuinely doesn't seem to realise that two of his stated goals are in direct opposition: reducing global carbon emissions, and keeping his tech job. The most effective way for a union to achieve that first goal would be to forcibly shut the business down and disappear all the jobs that went with it, but something tells me that's not what he had in mind.

> Aren’t you worried you could get laid off and this junior compsci grad or an H1B takes your place for half your salary?

Yes, but frankly it's more important that they be allowed to compete with me on merit. Anything else is pure cronyism.

ETA: I'm actually sympathetic to the idea of unions. They're a power structure consisting of self-interested humans, no different in principle from the power structure of entrenched capital, but they're of value because they oppose capital, acting to prevent it from swallowing everything. But then I read an article like this, and am reminded of the type of person who tends to rise to the top of such organizations.
by ArtixFox | 2025-06-09 08:52:16+00:00
Only backend has been swapped out. The tests will be fast too yes.

There is no real need to add an interpreter. Having custom backend s means that while currently it is being used for debug, far in future it might be able to compete with llvm for speed.

Adding an interpreter would be useless as u would still need to write a custom backend.

The problem is llvms slowness for debug and release.
by Jugurtha | 2025-06-09 08:53:20+00:00
When I was in EE at university, I worked on heart anomaly detection and multi-phase flow classification for oil & gas. The papers I was reading used synthetic data with a nice noise dust sprinkled on it. Meanwhile, I worked on data from hospitals acquired on restless, sweaty, hairy, dudes with rusty, banged up electrodes and abused probes.

Needless to say, the data I saw on these papers looked nothing like the data I worked with, whether from hospitals or what I saw at Schlumberger in the Sahara.

The real world tends to be ... interesting.
by Barrin92 | 2025-06-09 08:53:47+00:00
>Kagi is objectively superior to Google/Bing at this point

I'm not entirely sure what "objectively superior" is even supposed to mean in the context of a search engine, or how this follows from having 50k users, but that ceases to be an even remotely plausible statement if you've ever attempted to get good non-English search results.
Show HN: Perspt – Fast terminal UI for AI chat
by vikrantrathore | 2025-06-09 08:53:54+00:00
Hey HN,

Born from curiosity and the desire to chat quickly with AI models directly from the terminal, this project represents our journey into systems programming with Rust (often with a little help from LLMs to write the code!).

What started as a learning exercise has grown into a fast terminal interface that supports multiple AI providers (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Mistral, etc.) and their latest models. It's built with Rust using the `genai` crate, featuring real-time streaming responses and markdown rendering directly in your terminal.

It's not perfect, but it's ours—and we hope it's useful to you too. We'd love to get your feedback, issues, or PRs!!

The README on GitHub has more details, a screencast, and setup instructions.

There’s full documentation and a “Perspt Book” we wrote as a practical way to learn Rust by building a terminal UI. The book even covers features and internals not implemented in the client yet, so treat it as a guided deep dive into Rust system programming. And since we love offline docs, there’s a downloadable PDF in the repo so you can read it anywhere.

https://github.com/eonseed/perspt/blob/master/docs/perspt.pd...
by jfernandezr | 2025-06-09 08:55:52+00:00
I remember when doing web development in 2001 in a company with massive traffic we had a total size limit imposed in each landing page or site, kind of what it's still required for ad networks.

It wasn't unusual to reject some designs due to weight. 500 Kb tops at the begging, so degraded backgrounds were a no-go.
by WJW | 2025-06-09 08:55:58+00:00
He isn't, of course. According to Jewish thought, God is perfect and therefore any loopholes in the rules were put there on purpose. If you have studied the holy texts deeply enough to find the loophole, that makes you more holy, not less. It's like an easter egg for true believers.

The true sinners are those who think that they know what God wants better than what He actually passed down as commandments. God knows what He wants and wrote it down exactly like that.
by decimalenough | 2025-06-09 08:56:40+00:00
The reason this was used in Wuppertal is that because the town is a steep valley with a river in the middle, so the best/only place to hang the track was over the river.

Wikipedia has the (not very long) full list of every "dangle-train" ever built: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_railway
by bell-cot | 2025-06-09 08:57:44+00:00
Whatever the high ideals of academia and science, I've heard far too many stories of academics & scientists behaving in a broad variety of bigoted, narrow-minded, and self-serving ways.

I'll blame human nature. If you lock up little groups in the grueling, narrow, resource-poor environments of academia & research, then they'll react like humans - trying to protect themselves and their little tribes by excluding "outsiders".
by iDon | 2025-06-09 08:58:06+00:00
The article asks what is the meaning of OpenAI's statement that "the UAE will become the first country in the world to enable ChatGPT nationwide."

My first guess would be that it will be a geo-fenced service, in particular UAE residents will have (subsidised) access to it and perhaps not to the global service, and it will have a system prompt designed and tuned in consultation with the UAE government.
by gyomu | 2025-06-09 08:58:42+00:00
That phrasing is misleading.

You can absolutely publish apps that target versions of iOS prior to iOS 18; eg all my apps are iOS 15+, I published one as recently as last week.

You can build an app with the iOS 18 SDK that target previous versions just fine (as long as your calls to APIs posterior to the version you’re targeting, if any, are wrapped in the proper macros) and submit them to the App Store.

So yes, you have to build your apps with the latest SDK to publish them - but that doesn’t restrict the target OS version in any way (ie I can build apps that target iOS 9 with the iOS 18 SDK).

Where it starts to be a pain for new apps built in 2025 is if you want to target pre iOS 13, as you’ll have to use the older AppDelegate mechanism, but still totally doable. (That’s getting deprecated with the next release, but deprecated APIs still build just fine).
by flohofwoe | 2025-06-09 08:59:46+00:00
> Thus wouldn't it be easier to just interpret zig for debug

The whole point of debug mode is debuggability, and hooking up such an interpreted Zig to a standard debugger like gbd or lldb probably isn't trivial, since those expect an executable with DWARF debug info.

PS: also acceptable debug-mode performance is actually very important, especially in areas like game development.
by illiac786 | 2025-06-09 09:00:04+00:00
I think the point we are trying to bring over is, we feel the way you wrote your statement implies you think no one is reviewing the output of LLMs and everyone is just blindly accepting it.

I disagree with this at least. Yes there’s a lot of people doing this, but I don’t think it’s the overwhelming majority, especially not when it comes to coding.
by ben_w | 2025-06-09 09:00:34+00:00
> With LLMs, suddenly we have a tool that can generate misinformation on a scale like never before.

And code, personalised lessons, essays, gardening advice, recipes, meme pictures, clip art, degree-level STEM, …

Even legal advice, to the extent that lawyers have to be reminded to pay more attention to the results to make sure it's not made something up. It can and does give medical diagnosis, but I have yet to see a news story where a doctor had to be reminded of the same.

Now, I don't claim that any given actor in this space is "nice" or "moral". Even saying the right words don't make it so, as evidenced by e.g. Musk signing the Pause AI letter while building his data centres and developing his humanoid robots.

People say Altman gives them bad vibes? Well, they said that about Musk and I didn't see it until way too late, so now I believe them about Altman.

But the tech is way broader than just propaganda. It's also propaganda.
by WJW | 2025-06-09 09:00:37+00:00
An omniscient God can't be outwitted by stuff in the small print. If there's a loophole in the small print, God put it there on purpose. If anything, He would be delighted that some of his followers read the holy books closely enough to find some of the easter eggs that He put in there.

The whole idea of "the spirit vs the letter of the law" is a secular one that came up as a result of imperfect human lawmakers. But when dealing with holy texts, that is obviously not required because axiomatically God doesn't make mistakes.
by j00pY | 2025-06-09 09:00:46+00:00
Near to where I live, there are the remnants of test concrete walls that were used to assess the best way to blow them up. Apparently people snuck over, took some samples of the concrete to recreate how it was made, and then constructed lots of sections of this wall—which they would then use to test their explosives against.

https://surreyhills.org/places-to-see/atlantic-wall/
by seviu | 2025-06-09 09:00:54+00:00
I just submitted a bug to Apple because of an api that crashes the simulator unless you target the latest version of iOS. On device you can target any previous version of iOS easily.

This is just one annoyance of many I encounter on regular basis.

They do go to great extend to allow you to support older versions, but they don’t make it always easy.

Last versions of iOS have been specially rough because SwiftUI has been constantly evolving, and keeping backward support is just a nightmare.
by dcminter | 2025-06-09 09:04:02+00:00
"We can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood you see."

-- from Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard

Ok, it's a play, but I have the script in book form and it's certainly a favourite quote so I dare say it will do.
by HenriNext | 2025-06-09 09:04:20+00:00
Claude Code was not designed from the ground up to be only an autonomous agent, but it can certainly act as one.

- It has non-interactive CLI functionality (with -p "prompt" option) in addition to the default interactive TUI, making it easy to integrate to workflows.

- It has turn-key GitHub integration (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code-action).

- It has internal task tracking system that uses ReadTodo/WriteTodo tools to write JSON task lists to `$HOME/.claude/tasks/`, and enabling it to stay on track better than most other tools.

- It has excellent and customisable context compaction.

- And it has flexible permission system that can be used to turn all permissions questions to auto-accept when running in sandboxed environments.

Together those features enable it to be just as autonomous as any GitHub AI bot action hype thing (even though that might not have been its original or primary use).
by hoppp | 2025-06-09 09:04:26+00:00
How? Keyloggers and spying?

What if the parents hate gays but their kid is in the closet seeking help?

Having uncontrolled access to information about sex and sexuality is a blessing not a curse. It saves lives.

And I bet its much better having kids at home jacking off to porn than them having sex with girls early. Urges are normal, porn is good.
by WJW | 2025-06-09 09:08:18+00:00
Just asked my wife about this, who grew up Jewish and also loves debating these things as she's a programmer. Apparently the rules describe certain activities that one is not allowed to do, which in practice block most people from doing their profession. Reading books is not on that list, but nowhere does it say that the book needs to be the Torah. So it would definitely be allowed to read research papers, as long as you don't take notes (because writing is forbidden). Even a book critic could be reading books during shabat without any issues.

Operating a particle accelerator (ie actually pressing the buttons) would probably be a no-go, but if you set it up beforehand and it runs through the weekend without interaction then that would be fine.
by imiric | 2025-06-09 09:09:00+00:00
That's an interesting way of looking at it, though I do disagree. Mainly because, as you mention, it would be silly to claim that water is intelligent if it can be used to solve a problem. That would imply that any human-made tool is intelligent, which is borderline absurd.

This is why I think it's important that if we're going to call these tools intelligent, then they must follow the processes that humans do to showcase that intelligence. Scoring high on a benchmark is not a good indicator of this, in the same way that a human scoring high on a test isn't. It's just one convenient way we have of judging this, and a very flawed one at that.

Anyway, cheers for the discussion!
by TYZILLA | 2025-06-09 09:09:11+00:00
Hello everyone! I am new to iOS apps and wanted to try something fun as a side project and build an app that makes my life easier. I had recently moved from the US to a different country and found myself using Google all the time to convert measurements. Then i'd have another tab to convert USD to the currency of the country i'm in and then if I wanted to check what time it was back in the US, I'd have to open the Clock app. It was annoying switching between all of these so I decided to create my own with all of these features. There are already some apps similar to mine on the market but I couldn't get used to the UI on them.

Its not as impressive as most of the other apps on this site but I hope some of you will find it useful, especially when traveling!

Would love to hear some feedback!
by flohofwoe | 2025-06-09 09:09:24+00:00
OTH LLVM caused an explosion of languages created by individuals which immediately had competitive performance and a wide range of supported platforms (Zig being one of them!).

The entire realtime rendering industry is essentially built on top of LLVM (or forks of LLVM), even Microsoft have switched their shader compiler to LLVM and is now (finally) starting to upstream their code.

The compiler infrastructure of most game consoles is Clang based (except Xbox which - so far - sticks to MSVC).

So all in all, LLVM has been a massive success, especially for bootstrapping new things.
by dgellow | 2025-06-09 09:12:41+00:00
My personal stats for this year

Date (UTC) AI Tokens AI Cost (USD) Searches Jun 2025 0 0.000 141 May 2025 0 0.000 743 Apr 2025 0 0.000 723 Mar 2025 0 0.000 621 Feb 2025 0 0.000 556 Jan 2025 10,692 0.000 1,189 Dec 2024 0 0.000 805