MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dale_glass | 2025-06-09 13:07:12+00:00
I think the issue is that the classical search engine model has increasingly become less useful.

There's less experts using search engines. Normal people treat search engines less like an index search and more like a person. Asking an old school search engine "What is the capital of USA" is actually not quite right, because the "what is" is probably quite superfluous, and you're counting on finding some sort of educative website with the answer. In fact phrasing it as "the capital of the USA is" is probably a better fit for a search engine, since that's the sort of sentence that would contain what you want to know.

Also with the plague of "SEO", there's a million sites trying to convince Google that their site is relevant even when it's not.

So LLMs are increasingly more and more relevant at informally phrased queries that don't actually contain relevant key words, and they're also much more useful in that they bypass a lot of pointless verbiage, spam, ads and requests to subscribe.
by gruez | 2025-06-09 13:07:44+00:00
>At the very least there should be an ethics committee looking into it

What would the ethics committee be considering?

>possibly barring him from working in a related field for eg 5 years

So anyone who wants to be a political appointee either has to be a total outsider in the field they're supposed to be regulating, or take a 5 year pay cut? Given that political appointees tend to be partisan hacks anyways, this is only going to make that problem worse. It basically invites a repeat of Musk and DOGE.
by NiloCK | 2025-06-09 13:09:13+00:00
1. The N=1 positive result isn't the sole basis for expanded effort. The basis the is the compelling, research backed, causal mechanism that predicted the scheduling adjustment's success.

2. Does it? Speaking directly out of my butt here (not in healthcare, not an academic), but the OP spoke of pretty acute symptoms specific to a treatment plan. If the treatment program is at all common, then a very straightforward A/B split of non-intervention / intervention.

Heck, even a questionnaire of past patients cross-referenced with historical records of appointment times could go a long way to validate the hypothesis.

3. This degree of specialization is for insects. If literal MDs in the field are too atomized to even surface research proposals, then that feels like an awful waste of edge-research capability.
by macguillicuddy | 2025-06-09 13:09:18+00:00
Hey all! My team and I have been working on a fully integrated AI assistant for our Mattercraft tool. It's a 3D development environment for web content - our aim is to find an efficient and expressive intersection between the development experiences of game engines, and those of frontend web development. The AI assistant is a fully integrated 'Cursor-style' workflow that gets the benefit of additional knowledge and context that Mattercraft has about your project. Would love to get folks' thoughts! While Mattercraft itself is already general release, we're launching the AI assistant in a beta. If you'd like to try just drop me a line at connell <AT> zappar.com.
by roenxi | 2025-06-09 13:12:05+00:00
You doubt the seriousness of the Witch King of Angmar? The Pale King? The man leads a dark host of fell origin! He wears a ring of Power! His threats are clearly entirely credible, it is only a small step from posting on the Fediverse to a siege of the White City and the deaths of a multitude.

Yeah. For the life of me I don't see how someone could see a credible threat in that post. The man could actually murder Fink the same day and the post still wouldn't be evidence of a credible threat; it is just too silly. At best it is evidence he is deranged in addition to the trolling it turned out to be in this case.
by jurgenkesker | 2025-06-09 13:12:06+00:00
Yes, I would think that would work better indeed. As a augmentation or help tool. I would love to be able to say to MyFitnessPal that 'I ate this and that food, same as usual, and oh yeah drank this.' Just as a easier input interface. I wouldn't trust a pure AI solution without some proper database behind it.
by game_the0ry | 2025-06-09 13:12:14+00:00
> ...the latter basically greases a company's relationship with regulators

Its not just that. Its typical for lobbyist to go back into public service and influence policy on behalf of the companies they work for.

Think Dick Cheney + Halliburton and the Iraq War. Halliburton was guaranteed a great year, thanks to the former VP.

And business-friendly, anti-regulation regulators get regarded a but too handsomely at the expense of the US citizen that pays their salary. Example: Scott Gottlieb joining the board of directors at Pfizer after leading FDA. Don't forget that Pai worked for Verizon before joining FCC.
by ramchip | 2025-06-09 13:12:43+00:00
Like the article says... I feel it's counter-productive to picture an LLM as "learning" or "thinking". It's just a text generator. If it's producing code that calls non-existent APIs for instance, it's kind of a waste of time to try to explain to the LLM that so-and-so doesn't exist. Better just try again and dump an OpenAPI doc or some sample code into it to influence the text generator towards correct output.
by thearrow | 2025-06-09 13:12:51+00:00
Same. I was very skeptical when Macrofactor introduced this feature, but have since been incredibly impressed. The ability to give it text alongside a photo and then adjust the results (broken out by ingredients) are critical. I’ve also been taking pictures of food sitting on scales and it will take the measurement into account.

Seems like the Macrofactor team took their time developing this feature, as it felt like they were one of the last to roll it out, but the extra polish definitely shows and was worth the wait.
by carlosjobim | 2025-06-09 13:13:15+00:00
We were warned:

“You shall not make idols for yourselves or erect an image or pillar, and you shall not set up a figured stone in your land to bow down to it, for I am the LORD your God."

A computer chip is a stone (silicon) which has been engraved. It's a graven image.

Anything man-made is always unworthy of worship. That includes computer programs such as AI. That includes man-made ideas such as "the government", a political party, or other abstract ideas. That also includes any man or woman. But the human natural instinct is to worship a king, pharaoh or an emperor - or to worship a physical object.
by edanm | 2025-06-09 13:13:16+00:00
Note that I worked with Emacs already a few years ago, and it was Spacemacs specifically.

That said, VSCode is - much nicer looking, a lot of things come working out of the box that I had to work hard to make work in Emacs (even with Spacemacs), a lot of great plugins exist and are easy to add to VSCode.

Really it's the "great experience out of the box" and lack of weird edge cases where custom code/plugins interact with other custom code/plugins in ways that don't work well.

And the vim mode in Spacemacs was great, probably best in class, but the vim mode in VSCode is also pretty good. Missing a bunch of stuff but close enough.
by WhyIsItAlwaysHN | 2025-06-09 13:13:19+00:00
There's something I don't get in this analysis.

The queries for the LLM which were used to estimate costs don't make a lot of sense for LLMs.

You would not ask an LLM to tell you the baggage size for a flight because there might be a rule added a week ago that changes this or the LLM might hallucinate the numbers.

You would ask an LLM with web search included so it can find sources and ground the answer. This applies to any question where you need factual data, otherwise it's like asking a random stranger on the street about things that can cost money.Then the token size balloons because the LLM needs to add entire websites to its context.

If you are not looking for a grounded answer, you might be doing something more creative, like writing a text. In that case, you might be iterating on the text where the entire discussion is sent multiple times as context so you can get the answer. There might be caching/batching etc but still the tokens required grow very fast.

In summary, I think the token estimates are likely quite off. But not to be all critical, I think it was a very informative post and in the end without real world consumption data, it's hard to estimate these things.
by behnamoh | 2025-06-09 13:13:51+00:00
I disagree. A lot of open source software literally come with "it's what it is" clause in the license, meaning that the maintainer has ZERO responsibility towards you, the user. No promises were made, you take it as is or leave it. Just because the dev generously decided to open source the code doesn't give you, the user, any "rights" to inundate the dev with issues.
by Rochus | 2025-06-09 13:14:32+00:00
I'm a paying user and I use Perplexity permanently, and it is very useful for every topic I use it for. While ChatGPT and other AI models have incorporated web search capabilities, from my humble point of view, Perplexity maintains distinct advantages, particularly for users like me focused on research and accuracy. As a pro user I can also select from multiple models, including ChatGPT, but I more often use Perplexity's own models and Claude.
by woadwarrior01 | 2025-06-09 13:15:15+00:00
> I don't think it's being used in CalAI though.

They don't, but that doesn't stop them from lying about it on their homepage.

> Snap a photo with Cal AI, and your phone's depth sensor calculates food volume. Our AI then analyzes and breaks down your meal to determine calories, protein, carbs, and fat.

The grift must go on.
by bandoti | 2025-06-09 13:15:29+00:00
Funny I just entered “feather” into Merriam-Webster dictionary and there’s your word “barb”. Point being, people should use a dictionary/thesaurus before burning fuel on an AI.

1 a : any of the light, horny, epidermal outgrowths that form the external covering of the body of birds

NOTE: Feathers include the smaller down feathers and the larger contour and flight feathers. Larger feathers consist of a shaft (rachis) bearing branches (barbs) which bear smaller branches (barbules). These smaller branches bear tiny hook-bearing processes (barbicels) which interlock with the barbules of an adjacent barb to link the barbs into a continuous stiff vane. Down feathers lack barbules, resulting in fluffy feathers which provide insulation below the contour feathers.
Show HN: Extract-readmes: create libary.RM.md in READMEs/ for you and AI – MIT
by fred_terzi | 2025-06-09 13:15:35+00:00
I made this so I could get all my READMEs in node_modules in one place and that in resulted in way too many! So there is an ignore file to select what you want to keep. This way I can have AI reference READMEs without searching through node_modules. I'd love your feedback if it's useful to you!
by bluGill | 2025-06-09 13:15:37+00:00
You can get one if you are willing to pay for it. It means there is no reason to think that suit of armour will ever be cheap, and this advance while potentially lowering the costs won't lower it enough.

Then again iron suits of armour are not cheap (though cheaper than titanium), and are mostly useless in the real world - but people have them. If you have the money I won't object you to getting one.
by bko | 2025-06-09 13:15:57+00:00
So in your world model, whoever Ajit Pai sides with is the worst group?

Or is it just the group that's willing to pay the most (and I guess Ajit Pai is the most expensive lobbyist)?

Because the article quotes from groups like Spectrum for the Future, which is an industry group funded by cable companies like Comcast, which are the former bad guys.

I just want to understand a coherent world model in which you can confidently draw an opinion on a complex subject base on the actions of one guy that was in the news 10 years ago.

https://www.ntia.gov/sites/default/files/spectrum-for-the-fu...
by JonathonW | 2025-06-09 13:16:19+00:00
Soarin’ (in California and Florida, at least) originally used IMAX film projectors and OMNIMAX-style dome screens; it was updated to digital at around the same time as the ride film changed to the current “Soarin’ around the World” in 2016 (plus or minus a year; I think the digital conversion might’ve been a bit earlier in California)
by whilenot-dev | 2025-06-09 13:16:33+00:00
Just look for any company that offers data annotation as a service, they seem happy to explain their process in detail[0]. There's even a link to a paper from OpenAI[1] and some news about the contractor count[2].

[0]: https://snorkel.ai/data-labeling/#Data-labeling-in-the-age-o...

[1]: https://cdn.openai.com/papers/Training_language_models_to_fo...

[2]: https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-openai-contractor-la...
by Yizahi | 2025-06-09 13:17:11+00:00
It's not stigmatized, more like reverse. It's "normalized" and neurotypical people just dismiss it outright, as a "play-pretend illness". Also it become a "fashionable" diagnosis. People who don't have it pretend that it brings them closer to a focused genius Sherlock Holmes or similar characters, which is completely wrong in 99.9% of the cases.
by ffsm8 | 2025-06-09 13:17:54+00:00
nowadays, it's board is 3/5 American too

As of February 2025, the Board has the following members:

Dr. Gerald Pfeifer (Austria), Chair Ish Sookun (Mauritius) Jeff Mahoney (United States) Rachel Schrader (United States) Shawn W Dunn (United States) Simon Lees (Australia
by tim333 | 2025-06-09 13:18:34+00:00
Yeah, as mentioned in another comment ChatGPT said "not generally effective" which I guess it hallucinated. It's actually a tricky question because the answer isn't really there in a straightforward way on the general web and I only know for sure because me and someone I know tried it. Although I guess a pesticide expert would find it easy.

Part of the reason is clothianidin is too effective at killing insects and tends to persist in the environment and kill bees and butterflies and the like so it isn't recommended for harmless stuff like carpet beetles. I was actually using it for something else and curious if it would take out the beetles as a side effect.
by tim-kt | 2025-06-09 13:18:37+00:00
> [...] almost all methods of numerical integration (in any case all those that are useful and I am aware of) are equivalent to approximating the target function with another simpler function, which is then integrated using an exact formula.

The key property of quadrature formulas (i.e. numerical integration formulas) is the degree of exactness, which just says up to which degree we can integrate polynomials exactly. The (convergence of the) error of the quadrature depends on this exactness degree.

If you approximate the integral using a sum of n+1 weights and function evaluations, then any quadrature that has exactness degree n or better is in fact an interpolatory quadrature, that is, it is equivalent to interpolating your function on the n+1 nodes and integrating the polynomial. You can check this by (exactly) integrating the Lagrange basis polynomials, through which you can express the interpolation polynomial.
by dmm | 2025-06-09 13:18:38+00:00
Great article! Thanks for sharing your research into the history of these super interesting theaters and projection systems.

There is something I've wondered about though:

> While far from inexpensive, digital projection systems are now able to match the quality of Omnimax projection.

Are they really? The St Louis Science Center Omnimax was switched from the 70mm film system to "laser 4k" digital projection in 2019. I've only been to one show but it didn't seem particularly sharp, with large clearly visible pixels. It was very bright, with high contrast, though.

4k seems like a pretty low resolution for such a large screen?
by bendmorris | 2025-06-09 13:18:55+00:00
You can generate boilerplate without AI and whenever there's a significant amount of boilerplate needed there should be a (non-AI) generation tool to go with it. Deterministic code generation is a lot easier to have confidence in than LLM output.

>I don't know why someone would employ a dev working in such an inefficient way in 2025.

It amazes me how fast the hype has taken off. There is no credible evidence that, for experienced devs, working with AI coding tools makes you significantly more productive.
Show HN: I built an AI agent for TurtleBot3
by ponta17 | 2025-06-09 13:19:19+00:00
A week ago, I shared a project called Turtlesim Agent — an AI agent that lets users control the classic turtlesim turtle using natural language commands like “draw a triangle” or “make a red star.”

Now, I’ve taken the same language-to-robot-behavior idea and applied it to a real robot: the TurtleBot3.

TurtleBot3 Agent interprets natural language instructions and selects from a set of tools to move, read sensor data (like odometry, LiDAR, or camera), and make simple navigation decisions. For example:

“Move forward 0.5 meters” “Turn left and see if there is any obstacle” “If you find one, take a photo and come back”

If you're interested in LLMs + robotics, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

https://github.com/Yutarop/turtlebot3_agent

Previous Project: https://github.com/Yutarop/turtlesim_agent
by jcims | 2025-06-09 13:19:23+00:00
You were obviously on to something and it's frustrating yet completely expected to see all replies with pat dismissals that anything like this gets when there is some real potential innovation in healthcare.

Google 'chronotherapy' with some chemo/cancer/immunotherapy related terms and you'll find a ton of research being done. Given that most of it seems to have evolved in the last 8 years my guess is that the concept was 'vetted' by a nobel prize in 2017 for molecular circadian clock, so people feel safe putting their name on studies in this area.
by ta1243 | 2025-06-09 13:21:09+00:00
I don't understand when you consider the first attack by Germany on the UK? The invasion of Poland?

Even if you ignore early engagements in September 1939, from April the UK was involved in fighting in Norway - losing over 4000 troops in the process.

The war wasn't waged particularly well by France or the UK in 39/40, being too late to be involved in Finland and failing to successfully defend Norway, but it was certainly waged in Norway. The failures led to the fall of both Daladier and Chamberlain, but thousands of British troops had been killed before Churchill became Prime Minister.
by ericmay | 2025-06-09 13:21:43+00:00
When Americans were “resisting authority” by not wearing masks and keeping their businesses opened despite lockdown orders did you feel the same pride in anti-authority behavior then?

One person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist. Always has been and always will be that way. The winning side when there is one usually gets to write the history of who was what.

Do you still feel pride in American anti-authoritarianism today or do you think the US may have turned out to be governed more like the UK, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand complete with trust in government run healthcare had it not succeeded in rebellion?

Important to remember all of these things when you are being introspective of an issue like the protests ongoing in Los Angelas and elsewhere.

Anyway it’s hard to resist authority when you can’t find parking for the local protest.
by empiko | 2025-06-09 13:21:47+00:00
One thing that is making them cheap is the lack of moats. If anybody can provide the same service, the market will push the prices down eventuallt, as this is a model demand-supply situation. OpenAI has the advantage due to brand awareness, but that is more or less it for them. Most users would probably not notice if you would switch the product they are using. For this reason, I think that companies that already have some channels to get their products on users' screens - Google, MS, Apple - have theoretically the best position to control the market. But practically, they do not seem very keen to do so.
by DetroitThrow | 2025-06-09 13:21:58+00:00
>So in your world model, whoever Ajit Pai sides with is the worst group?

There was no value judgment made in the previous comment about which group is worst. The word 'mercenary' is pretty self explanatory here. It's a bit contrived and tedious to view any discussion of the news as an opportunity to invent each speakers' worldview in your head, before they even speak about it, eh?
by bluGill | 2025-06-09 13:21:59+00:00
Citation needed. This depends very much on the alloy, but I would expect titanium cars would be forced scrapped after 200,000 miles (most of my cars reached 200k miles before they reached 10 years old) by law because fatigue builds up in normal use and the car is liable to break apart. Aluminum has the same issues and commercial trailers track how much the trailers are used and scrap them.

Steel has the nice property that if you stay under certain stress limits fatigue doesn't built up over time and so you can keep using it as long as you care to (or until salt gets it).
by kentonv | 2025-06-09 13:22:00+00:00
> It's possible kiitos has (or had?) a higher standard in mind for what should constitute a senior/"lead engineer" at Cloudflare and how much they should be constrained by typing as part of implementation.

See again here, you're implying that I or my code is disappointing somehow, but with no explanation for how except that it was LLM-assisted. I assert that the code is basically as good as if I'd written it by hand, and if you think I'm just not a competent engineer, like, feel free to Google me.

It's not the typing itself that constrains, it's the detailed but non-essential decision-making. Every line of code requires making several decisions, like naming variables, deciding basic structure, etc. Many of these fine-grained decisions are obvious or don't matter, but it's still mentally taxing, which is why nobody can write code as fast as they can type even when the code is straightforward. LLMs can basically fill in a bunch of those details for you, and reviewing the decisions -- especially the fine-grained ones that don't matter -- is a lot faster than making them.

> How much did the entire process take and how much would you estimate it to take without the LLM in the loop?

I spent about five days mostly focused on prompting the LLM (although I always have many things interrupting me throughout the day, so I wasn't 100% focused). I estimate it would have taken me 2x-5x as long to do by hand, but it's of course hard to say for sure.
by gruez | 2025-06-09 13:22:11+00:00
>Lobbyists don't have to lobby for the same positions / organizations / goals their entire lives. They usually follow the money.

I think the parent comment is trying to dispell the not entirely unpopular perception that the revolving door involves some sort of quid quo pro. The typical telling is that while working in government they'll enact policies that are favorable to some company, with the understanding that the company will give him a cushy job as a "lobbyist" in exchange.
by dingnuts | 2025-06-09 13:22:11+00:00
You're misunderstanding the point of structural analysis. Comparing AI to divination isn't about making everything equivalent, but about highlighting specific shared structures that reveal how humans interact with these systems. The fact that this comparison can be extended to other domains doesn't make it meaningless.

The issue isn't "cached intuitions" about divination, but rather that you're reading the comparison too literally. It's not about importing every historical association, but about identifying specific parallels that shed light on user behavior and expectations.

Your proposed "resolutions" are based on a false dichotomy between total equivalence and total abandonment of comparison. Structural analysis can be useful even if it's not a perfect fit. The comparison isn't about labeling AI as "divination" in the classical sense, but about understanding the interpretive practices involved in human-AI interaction.

You're sidestepping the actual insight here, which is that humans tend to project meaning onto ambiguous outputs from systems they perceive as having special insight or authority. That's a meaningful observation, regardless of whether AI is "causally disentangled from reality" or not.