MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by steveklabnik | 2025-06-08 16:36:55+00:00
I was recently considering a refactoring in a work codebase. I had an interesting discussion with Claude about the tradeoffs, then had it show me what the code would look like after the refactor, both in a very simple case, and in one of the most complex cases. All of this informed what path I ended up taking, but especially the real-world examples meant this was a much better informed decision than just "hmm, yeah seems like it would be a lot of work but also probably worth it."
by blither | 2025-06-08 16:36:59+00:00
> if the authors had allowed it to write code.

Yeah, and FWIW doing this through writing code is trivial in an LLM / LRM - after testing locally took not even a minute to have a working solution no matter the amount of disks.

Your analogy makes sense, no reasonable person would try to solve a Tower of Hanoi type problem with e.g. 15 disks and sit there for 32,767 moves non-programmatically.
by absurdo | 2025-06-08 16:37:52+00:00
I’m disappointed and confused as to why countries would impose things like 100% tariffs on vehicles, especially Chinese ones. Their labor force is massive and they can iterate and build much better machines than anyone else, so rather than a tariff helping the local economy, it’s going to cripple it in a relatively short amount of time due to lateral advancements in technology that facilitate every-day cars being built. Smaller countries don’t have the manpower to keep up. So what’s the point of this?

Not talking about US in this case.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-06-08 16:37:59+00:00
The question is how did a social media company end up so shitty it is now compared/it's behavior equated to insurance companies? Insurance companies are required to control payout, and people expect that. The level of stuff Meta does is not required, nor do people think/realize it is as hostile to them as an insurance company.

In the past, people aspired to work at cool tech companies. Devs aren't lining up to work at insurance companies. I never worked in the industry I went to school for because the only jobs when I got out of school were for weapons. At this point I feel the same way about social media, I would never work at such a 'make the world as bad as you can get away with' industry.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-06-08 16:38:25+00:00
The logistics company example is not really relevant. The critical point about the rule change is the fact that all software related expenses, including salaries or contract labor costs, must now be amortized over 5 or 15 years. What was previously deductible no longer is, and this changes the cash flow situation dramatically for a software-intensive business, for 5 years.

Sure, for heavily capitalized startups that are losing money, the rule change is not an issue. But for companies that manage to get to profitable status soon, even if it is only a small profit, the rule change can be devastating. A quick search for past HN articles about this will provide lots of example links to follow.
by mhandley | 2025-06-08 16:39:47+00:00
I came of age in the 8-bit era of the early 80s, rode the Internet wave of the 90s and early 2000s, kind of missed the mobile wave but spent that time developing ideas that would eventually turn out to be useful for AI, and now I'm having great fun on the AI wave. I'm happy to have grown up and lived when I did, but I feel that each era of my life has had its own unique opportunities, excitement and really interesting technical problems to work on. And perhaps most importantly, great people to work with.
by knuppar | 2025-06-08 16:40:07+00:00
Have you talked to homeless people?

My experience is from São Paulo and Seattle but entertaining this notion that it's a thought-out choice full of intention is wild. Most homeless people just want some shade of stability and would leave that situation any day any time if given resources.

They are not primates with 0 agency but most societies don't really give them a lot of options.
by rcarmo | 2025-06-08 16:41:06+00:00
They’re using standard PLA last I checked (I follow both their channels on YouTube, and Ivan Miranda - whose workshop is in the picture - got a massive shipment of it).

However, I wouldn’t print anything that needs to be outside in PLA, as it can’t tolerate UV.

They’re aiming to print a one-use kayak, btw. The pillar is just a test.
by al_borland | 2025-06-08 16:42:07+00:00
I couldn't wrap my head around PARA. The waters were too muddy between projects, areas, and resources.

Take travel for example. I have travel resources (packing lists, loyalty reward numbers, etc). I would presumably have a travel area, as it's something I'd like to be a semi-major part of my life long-term. But I'd also think whatever trips I'm currently planning are "projects". Does this mean 3 travel folders, in 3 different parents, so I have to go 3 places for one topic?

It all seemed so confusing.
by ben_w | 2025-06-08 16:42:39+00:00
> Ask 100 random people to draw a bike and in 10 minutes and they’ll on average suck while still beating the LLM’s here.

Y'see, this is a prime example of what I meant with ""Average human" is a much lower bar than most people want to believe, mainly because most of us are average on most skills, and also overestimate our own competence".

An expert artist can spend 10 minutes and end up with a brief sketch of a bike. You can witness this exact duration yourself (with non-bike examples) because of a challenge a few years back to draw the same picture in 10 minutes, 1 minute, and 10 seconds.

A normal person spending as much time as they like gets you the pictures that I linked to in the previous post, because they don't really know what a bike is. 45 examples of what normal people think a bike looks like: https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/

> Give em an incentive and 10 months and the average person is going to be able to make at least one quite decent drawing of a bike.

Given mandatory art lessons in school are longer than 10 months, and yet those bike examples exist, I have no reason to believe this.

> Ask a model for 10,000 drawings so you can pick the best and you get a marginal improvements based on random chance at a steep price.

If you do so as a human, rating and comparing images? Then the cost is your own time.

If you automate it in literally the manner in this write-up (pairwise comparison via API calls to another model to get ELO ratings), ten thousand images is like $60-$90, which is on the low end for a human commission.
by username223 | 2025-06-08 16:42:50+00:00
Interesting timeline, though the most relevant part was at the end, where Simon mentions that Google is now aware of the "pelican on bicycle" question, so it is no longer useful as a benchmark. FWIW, many things outside of the training data will pants these models. I just tried this query, which probably has no examples online, and Gemini gave me the standard puzzle answer, which is wrong:

"Say I have a wolf, a goat, and some cabbage, and I want to get them across a river. The wolf will eat the goat if they're left alone, which is bad. The goat will eat some cabbage, and will starve otherwise. How do I get them all across the river in the fewest trips?"

A child would pick up that you have plenty of cabbage, but can't leave the goat without it, lest it starve. Also, there's no mention of boat capacity, so you could just bring them all over at once. Useful? Sometimes. Intelligent? No.
by bob1029 | 2025-06-08 16:44:03+00:00
I've been using pen & paper lately.

The context switch between digital and analog is compelling. There is something satisfying about throwing a piece of physical paper away after pushing your commits.

I tend to hoard information, so having a medium that is highly constrained keeps me honest with what I hold onto over time. Not being able to do full text search over my notes means I prefer to keep no more than ~one legal pad active at any given time.

I also tend to get distracted with shiny technology tools. I can take my notes anywhere. I don't need an internet connection. I can fold the piece of paper and store it in my wallet.
by nerdsniper | 2025-06-08 16:44:58+00:00
Yep with applications hardcoding addresses and utilizing certificate pinning, there's nothing the device owner/homeowner/network admin/system admin can do to inspect or modify DNS over HTTPS traffic, other than uninstall the application or block the connection entirely. Increasingly, blocking connections breaks the app so you almost might as well just uninstall the app or block it from being installed on managed endpoints.
by hammerill | 2025-06-08 16:45:39+00:00
YouTube is on war with uBlock Origin. It detects the ad blocker and annoys you.

What could be a solution? In my case, stop using the web player. And use mpv instead.

But manually copying the URL and opening the mpv with it each time you want to play a video is a hassle. That's why there was someone who created a "Open in MPV" extension a long ago, but nowadays it's not available anymore because it's non-conformant to manifest V3 (I think).

I ain't a professional at creating web extensions so I asked another Google product (heh) Gemini to help me with it. It helped me through developing and debugging the extension and helping scripts.

I now share my Gist with you so that you could test this yourself. The installation is manual, I don't know if I'll actually publish this an extension to the store.

Tested on Linux and macOS. Windows test is coming soon.

UPD: As @LitCast fairly [pointed out](https://www.reddit.com/r/mpv/comments/1l6gr0h/comment/mwomns...), you could just use [External Application Launcher](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/external-applicatio...) extension instead.
by threemux | 2025-06-08 16:47:58+00:00
This doesn't represent a groundbreaking advance despite the framing of the article. They're getting faster speed by pushing a huge amount of power to the battery (1MW!).

Supplying this kind of energy at scale is not possible currently. So they could deploy a few of these around but they simply can't be ubiquitous. Not to mention charging curves make a big difference as do real-world conditions. Do you get full speed if it's below freezing? What about over 100 degrees F? Both are common in the US and well-handled by gas stations.

Oh, and finally, 5 minutes is still slower than filling up a car's tank.
Show HN: Ireact.to – Forever AMA link in bio
by nirkalimi | 2025-06-08 16:48:13+00:00
A free lightweight inbox for creators to collect ideas, feedback, content suggestions, and links from their community, all in one place.

Your audience submits and upvotes what they want you to react to next so you can focus on the most relevant, engaging, and high-impact content.

Great use cases include: - AMAs - React channels / creating reaction content - Getting suggestions on what video to make next - Feedback Collection - Stream interactivity - Collab requests - Community Challenges

Would love your feedback. This was super fun to make (and scratched my own itch :D)
by mlhpdx | 2025-06-08 16:48:33+00:00
I put my DNS service on a non-standard port. I’m the only one using it so standards be damned. Windows doesn’t allow setting a nonstandard port for DNS, but pretty-much everything else does.

Do ISPs do deep packet inspection to get lookup data? Maybe, but it increases the cost of doing so and makes the business aspect of it less viable. Perhaps a minor win.
by echelon | 2025-06-08 16:48:46+00:00
That sounds like a big deal until you realize that nothing was private back then.

Most internet traffic wasn't even over SSL. It wasn't enforced until 2018!

No CORS (first standardized in 2014), no cross-site protection (first standardized in 2012).

Everything was the Wild West.

Flash was fine and could have adopted the same mechanisms.

If Adobe (or the earlier owners) had open sourced the player and the format standard, they could have won and had the best authoring tool for the format.

To this day, Flash is the only downloadable binary bundle format that can still run on your PC after being downloaded. You can't download and SVG animation. It's a bundle of brittle web tech slop.
by wslh | 2025-06-08 16:48:56+00:00
Another limitation of LLMs lies in their inability to stay in sync with novel topics or recently introduced methods, especially when these are not yet part of their training data or can't be inferred from existing patterns.

It's important to remember that these models depend not only on ML breakthroughs but also on the breadth and freshness of the data used to train them.

That said, the "next-door" model could very well incorporate lessons from the recent Cloudflare OAuth Library issues, thanks to the ongoing discussions and community problem-solving efforts.
by ben_w | 2025-06-08 16:48:58+00:00
> If I understand correctly, you're proposing sex-selection (terminating males?) as a hack to theoretically produce more child-bearing women in the next generation,

Yes. Both my belief in the the technical possibility and my reason to doubt the cultural acceptability are on the grounds that it looks like the people were already doing so in the opposite (more male births) direction due to the one-child policy.

> who would, I assume, just reproduce promiscuously or form polygamous relationships?

I was assuming IVF, but whatever works really.
by vohk | 2025-06-08 16:49:23+00:00
I think there will be solutions, although I don't think getting there will be pretty.

Google's case (and Meta and spam calls and others) is at least in part an incentives problem. Google hasn't been about delivering excellent search to users for a very long time. They're an ad company and their search engine is a tool to better deliver ads. Once they had an effective monopoly, they just had to stay good enough not to lose it.

I've been using Kagi for a few years now and while SEO spam and AI garbage is still an issue, it is far less of one than with Google or Bing. My conclusion is these problems are at least somewhat addressable if doing so is what gets the business paid.

But I think a real long term solution will have to involved a federated trust model. It won't be viable to index everything dumped on the web; there will need to be a component prioritizing trust in the author or publisher. If that follows the same patterns as email (ex: owned by Google and Microsoft), then we're really screwed.
by nxobject | 2025-06-08 16:49:23+00:00
As I read (and appreciate) your documentation tips, I don’t even think they have to be labeled as AI-specific! ‘CLAUDE.md’ seems likely it could just as be ‘CONVENTIONS.md’, and comments to ‘AI’ could just as be comments to ‘READER’. :) Certainly I would appreciate comments like that when reading _any_ codebase, especially as an unfamiliar contributor.
by kalleboo | 2025-06-08 16:49:29+00:00
U.S. Code Title 39, and the United States Postal Regulatory Commission. The former basically defines the USPS as socialist redistribution to rural areas, and the latter is what actually decides what rates the USPS is allowed to charge.

> The Postal Service shall provide a maximum degree of effective and regular postal services to rural areas, communities, and small towns where post offices are not self-sustaining. No small post office shall be closed solely for operating at a deficit, it being the specific intent of the Congress that effective postal services be insured to residents of both urban and rural communities
by jackedinkhkt | 2025-06-08 16:52:12+00:00
Supplying even current kinds of fast chargers is not possible done naively; local charging stations split whatever their capacity is between the cars that are plugged in, but allowing for the potential of one or two of those 200kW cars if no others are adjacent.

Roughly the same total amount of energy is needed within the same period of couple days either way, having the capacity to charge faster when possible should be a good thing.

>Do you get full speed if it's below freezing?

I live somewhere where it's reasonably regularly -30F and no electric car does well neither charging nor distance despite claims of battery pre-heating and such. You have to pick a car for the environment it's going to be used in.
by budududuroiu | 2025-06-08 16:52:18+00:00
I’m almost done with my switch away from a fully Apple ecosystem and I feel great about my Framework laptop, GrapheneOS Pixel and cluster of servers in my closet.

I can’t help but wonder if mainstream adoption of open source and self hosting will cause a regulatory backlash in favour of big corpo again (thinking of Bill Gates’ letter against hobbyists)
by hinkley | 2025-06-08 16:52:39+00:00
Had a modular monorepo back when UML was still a thing people did. People were having trouble opening a TogetherJ project - it was taking 30 minutes. I dug into it, and I don’t recall how I timed it but I kept adding more submodules and the runtime went up ridiculously fast. I stopped at a project that took 18 hours to load. Started it before going home one day and timed it the next morning.

When I plotted the runtime, I got n^5 for the fitting curve. That’s the largest polynomial I’ve encountered in the wild. Second place has always been cubic.

Their response was that it had something to do with processing config files per module, and a suggestion to rearrange them as a workaround. They fixed the problem in the next patch and the load time went from 18 hours to a couple minutes.
by tim-kt | 2025-06-08 16:52:51+00:00
No, the integral cannot be "expressed" as a sum over weights and function evaluations (with a "="), it can be approximated with this idea. If you fix any n+1 nodes, interpolate your function, and integrate your polynomial, you will get this sum where the weights are integrals over (Lagrange) basis polynomials. By construction, you can compute the integral of polynomials up to degree n exactly. Now, if you choose the nodes in a particular way (namely, as the zeros of some polynomials), you can increase this to up to 2n+1. What I'm getting at is that the Gaussian integration is not estimating the integrals of polynomials of degree 2n+1, but it's evaluating them exactly.
by imiric | 2025-06-08 16:53:21+00:00
While it's debatable whether slime molds showcase intelligence, there's a substantial difference between its behavior and modern AI systems. The organism was never trained to traverse a maze. It simply behaves in the same way as it would in its natural habitat, seeking out food in this case, which we interpret as "solving" a human-made problem. In order to get an AI system to do the same we would have to "train" it on large amounts of data that specifically included maze solving. This training wouldn't carry over any other type of problem, for which we would also need to specifically train it on.

When you consider how humans and other animals learn, knowledge is carried over. I.e. if we learn how to solve a maze on paper, we can carry this knowledge over to solve a hedge maze. It's a contrived example, but you get the idea. When we learn, we build out a web of ideas in our minds which we can later use while thinking to solve other types of problems, or the same problems in different ways. This is a sign of intelligence that modern AI systems simply don't have. They're showing an illusion of intelligence, which as I've said before, can still be very useful.
by magicalhippo | 2025-06-08 16:53:54+00:00
Norway did something similar with oil[1]. Companies could get most of their oil search expenses covered by the state, to encourage finding new oil fields.

But if a company starts extracting oil from a field they have to pay heavy taxes on that oil.

[1]: https://www.offshorenorge.no/om-oss/nyheter/2019/01/leterefu...
by yurishimo | 2025-06-08 16:54:00+00:00
On your last point, I would say it depends on how big your car is. I've seen some larger pickup trucks take a hot minute to fill up here in Europe. Granted, these are much less common so it's not a big deal if a farmer needs to come fill up since there are generally plenty of other pumps available.

5 minutes is hugely impressive for our current day and we need to remember these moments as the tech continues to get better. This is just the beginning of EV infrastructure!
by leereeves | 2025-06-08 16:54:02+00:00
That's rarely the case with science reporting. The subjects that are sufficiently rigorous to allow no reasonable debate (the physical sciences) are rarely political enough to inspire unreasonable debate.

On the other hand, the subjects that are politically contentious are not rigorous and leave plenty of room for reasonable debate.

If anything, science reporting tends to err the other way, uncritically reporting sensational results that contradict one other, have not been confirmed, or fail to replicate.

I rarely see a popular science article that doesn't report the results of a single experiment as if they were instantly established fact.
by Propelloni | 2025-06-08 16:54:08+00:00
They missed that liberty and freedom is not a god-given right, but hard-earned privilege. They missed that liberty is not a personal property but a shared practice of pluralism. They missed that liberty is not absolute, but requires compromise and limitations so that we all can be free.

To be fair, those are not things that are taught in school. If they come up at all it is in some historical context, a battle someone else fought--and won. There is no mention that maintaining a liberal democracy requires effort and vigilance. Modern, ie. post-WW2, "fighting democracies" have built-in safeguards to oppose internal enemies of democracy, but if they are effective remains to be seen. The USA mostly does not even have such mechanisms and it shows.
by gf000 | 2025-06-08 16:54:43+00:00
This is more of a toy example for how a set of atomic changes can still end up in an inconsistent state, e.g. setting January the 31st and February 3rd in quick succession from two or more different threads may result in Feb 31st being visible from a third thread. This is not solved by Rust and your struct will even get the Sync trait automatically, which may be not be applicable as in this case.
by dunham | 2025-06-08 16:56:32+00:00
I was impatient waiting for supplies and did a practice swatch with some cheap cotton string and take-out chopsticks (round, pointed, but not as sharp as knitting needles). That was more difficult than the real deal.

There were mistakes making the actual project, occasional extra loops that I eliminated by knitting or pearling two at once in the next row (wherever I thought it was a good spot). And I think I did a row K3, P2K2, K3 instead of K3, K2P2, K3. Some rows were off by one because of the occasional extra loop. (I should have been reading the previous row.)

https://imgur.com/a/ljHNNri

It has already been repurposed as a blanket for my five year old's stuffed shark. (She now wants a glove because all I have to do is "make one for each side".)
by lazide | 2025-06-08 16:57:30+00:00
I don’t see any point in human history where what is being described matches any stable human behavior. So while not impossible, it is probably unlikely eh?

And think of what that would actually mean, and if you’d even want it - you’d be as likely to match up with a random Chinese 60 year old, or a 13 year old African tribe member, or 30 something European (while being one of those other two) or whatever.

I can’t think of any sane person that would be willing to mate with someone truly randomly. And if it wasn’t truly random, who gets to decide on the criteria? Because that is exactly where the moral hazard comes in.