MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-06-29 13:50:37+00:00
What are your thoughts on people who self-medicate with caffeine due to their baseline ability to focus being reduced (which in modern society is cause for trouble)? That’s the reason for starting caffeine use for many.

My use is also light and fully legal, but personally I’m not sure that this is something that’s so binary. It seems more likely to sit on a spectrum, as most things do, and is largely dependent on the individual due to wide differences in brain and body function. It’s the same reason why the prescription drug that works wonders for one person and do nothing or worse, be detrimental for somebody else. We’re not all identical units of a particular model rolling off an assembly line somewhere, after all.

So I guess I would say that yes, we should be more conscientious of how substances (even those that are common) interact with our minds, but I have a hard time labeling them all as harmful. It’s just too broad of a brush.
by HighGoldstein | 2025-06-29 13:50:55+00:00
Op said "if you started with a high end card". The GTX 970 was Nvidia's mid-range at the time, and not a great one at that. A 980 Ti or Titan X can still perform reasonably well for a 10 year old card. Even with the 970, the real problem is its low VRAM (and the 3.5+0.5GB fiasco). The AMD RX 480 8G which was comparable but with much more VRAM can still run most games, even if you have to make some compromises.
by baobun | 2025-06-29 13:51:11+00:00
Sure, but the point is that AI-driven data pipelines with executive parts have been commonplace for well over a decade. What's a network of trading bots instructed by ML-models fed by market data and various signals if not agentic AI already? Price-settings systems for airline tickets? Spambots?

The word "agentic" doesn't bring anything new. We've always been doing this.
by ar-nelson | 2025-06-29 13:51:34+00:00
For everyone who's having a hard time parsing what Octelium does, I found this page to be the clearest explanation: https://octelium.com/docs/octelium/latest/overview/how-octel...

It's clearer because, instead of starting with a massive list of everything you could do with Octelium (which is indeed confusing), it starts by explaining the core primitives Octelium is built on, and builds up from there.

And it actually looks pretty cool and useful! From what I can tell, the core funtionality is:

- A VPN-like gateway that understands higher-level protocols, like HTTP or PostgreSQL, and can make fine-grained security decisions using the content of those protocols

- A cluster configuration layer on top of Kubernetes

And these two things combine to make, basically, a personal cloud. So, like any of the big cloud platforms, it does a million things and it's hard to figure out which ones you need at first. But it seems like the kind of system that could be used for a homelab, a small company that wants to keep cloud costs down, or a custom PaaS selling cloud functionality. Neat!
by Mistletoe | 2025-06-29 13:52:39+00:00
> Let’s say schizophrenia is associated with a 50% loss of reproductive fitness in 1% of the population (and there is no offsetting benefit in the rest of the population), then it would take roughly 180 generations to cut the rate in half and about 560 generations to reduce it to one-tenth of its original value (Mitteroecker & Merola, 2024). We’ve had a comparable number of generations since the Neolithic era, but as far as we know, the prevalence of schizophrenia has not decreased in the manner anticipated.

What if the number we experience now IS 1/10 of what it used to be? Would explain a lot of religious talking to God in the past.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-29 13:53:23+00:00
> you would have to contend with multinational corporations with full on clean rooms and state of the art equipment

Only if the technology stagnates (or other conditions where a capital advantage proves useless). If it’s a moving target you don’t need any of this. Just basic security measures the likes of which protect the source code of most closed-source software today from everyone but the likes of a handful of nation states.

> People would install iOS on Samsung phones and Oracle's database on third party commodity hardware

Some people might. Most wouldn’t. Certainly not the vast majority of the people willing to pay for apps and hence the market for devs.
by alkonaut | 2025-06-29 13:53:32+00:00
I don’t see how that applies to be honest. The default has changed to html a long time ago and that’s what people expect.

What would be great would be if clients detected when I send an email with only text and just chose to format it as plaintext then BUT importantly, that th e reverse happens in the reading client: it formats it the same regardless, so my text email doesn’t look strange. Needs to render with the same font etc.

it almost never happens that I send a plain text email though since my org like so many prescribes the use of an image as signature. Not to mention that 9 emails out of 10 contains other images anyway.
by geoctl | 2025-06-29 13:53:46+00:00
I admit that the "next-gen" word might sound cheesy. As I said in the other reply, the more correct definition for Octelium is: a unified zero trust secure access platform. However, as I said this is a term that nobody would relate to. It's a ZTNA/BeyondCorp platform but not in the rigid sense. It's also a WireGuard/QUIC-based remote access VPN but it operates at layer-7 to provide L7 aware access control, secretless access, dynamic configuration and routing as well as OpenTelemtry-native visibility and auditing via identity-aware proxies and policy-decision-points instead of just controlling access at layer-3. As I said, it's designed to be more like a generic Kubernetes-like architecture for secure remote access that can be used for many different use cases.
by barisbll | 2025-06-29 13:54:03+00:00
I recently did a deep dive into Chip Huyen's "AI Engineering" and one argument stood out as particularly crucial for teams building with LLMs today. It's the clear, principled distinction between Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and finetuning.

Many engineering teams instinctively reach for finetuning as a way to "teach" a model their private data. The thinking is that if you train it on your documents, it will "know" them. However, this is often a misuse of the technique. Finetuning is most effective at altering the form and behavior of a model—making it communicate in a certain style, adhere to a specific JSON schema, or follow a complex chain of instructions. It is an expensive and imprecise tool for knowledge injection.

The book argues that RAG is the superior tool for providing facts. By retrieving relevant information from an external knowledge base at inference time and adding it to the prompt context, you get several advantages:

Factual Grounding: The model is less likely to hallucinate because its context is bounded by the retrieved documents.

Traceability: You know exactly which source documents were used to generate an answer.

Up-to-date Knowledge: The knowledge base can be updated continuously without the cost of retraining/finetuning the model itself.

The core takeaway is that teams should default to RAG for knowledge-based tasks and reserve the more complex and expensive process of finetuning for tasks that require altering the model's fundamental behavior. This seems like a critical architectural decision that could save significant resources. Curious to hear how others are approaching this trade-off.
Show HN: SmartStepper – Multi-Step Form Library with Config-Based Flow
by milad_shirian | 2025-06-29 13:55:07+00:00
I just released SmartStepper v2 – a declarative and config-based way to handle multi-step forms in React.

It lets you define orchestration (next, previous steps), validation, and views via a single config object. No more if/else spaghetti or scattered state.

GitHub: https://github.com/Miladxsar23/smartstepper Demo: https://smartstepper-demo.vercel.app Docs: https://github.com/Miladxsar23/smartstepper#readme

Would love feedback, suggestions, or examples if anyone tries it!
by eru | 2025-06-29 13:55:36+00:00
Tax incidence is a non-trivial topic. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence

Basically, the people a tax is nominally levied upon don't necessarily bear the economic burden, and vice versa.

A silly example: do you think it makes a difference if your employer transfers your whole gross income into your account and you pay income taxes, or whether your employer pays the income tax first, and then transfers you the net amount?
by tolmasky | 2025-06-29 13:55:42+00:00
You’re thinking about it like a bug instead of a feature. When HTML5 was announced everyone expected it on your resume like every other buzzword. WebScript should be pitched like that: the hot new thing. Managers won’t be confused (or rather, no more confused than usual), they’ll be excited. And for the first time in tech history, people will actually have 5 years experience in a technology that was announced this year.
by BearOso | 2025-06-29 13:56:03+00:00
This wouldn't work well with Mesa, either.

On Windows, this is like telling game developers that they need to ship all the graphics drivers for their games. Let's skip the hassle for the developers' side. For the users, not only would that be a situation where you could no longer update your own drivers to fix problems, it would be a compatibility nightmare and likely introduce new problems because of interactions with the system drivers and kernel level.
by raincole | 2025-06-29 13:56:13+00:00
Yes, but I'm not "proving BB(748)=X in ZFC" in my previous comment.

I clearly stated:

> as long as we assume ZFC is consistent

In other words, I'm talking about proving BB(748)=X in ZFC+Con(ZFC), which is not fundamentally impossible. It's practically impossible simply because you need to reason out the sheer amount of TMs with 748 states.
by Diggsey | 2025-06-29 13:56:36+00:00
> This doesn't sound right to me.

Which bit?

> You can prove that ZFC is consistent. You could do it today, with or without the magic number, using a stronger axiom system.

Right but then just replace ZFC with that stronger system and you're back where you started - the point is that whatever the "strongest" system is that we've yet considered, BB(N) for sufficiently large N is stronger than that - and in all likelihood N can be much smaller than 748 for all such systems we've yet conceived, since we are not great at efficiently encoding things in turing machines.

> If an Oracle told you that BB(748) = 100 or whatever, that would constitute proof that ZFC is consistent.

The number alone is not the proof - you'd still need to actually run the corresponding turing machine to finish the proof.

> But it wouldn't negate the fact that BB(748) is independent of ZFC, because you haven't proved within the axioms of ZFC that ZFC is consistent, which is what makes it independent.

Normally when we say some predicate P is independent of some axiomatic system it means we could add a new axiom to the system (P or !P) that would produce a new system that is still consistent.

BB(N) being "independent of ZFC" is a very different statement - it doesn't mean we are free to pick different values of BB(N). It's easy to prove this:

1. Let's say there are two possible values of BB(748) - V1 and V2 such that V2 > V1 and both are consistent with ZFC.

2. Simulate every possible 748 state turing machine for V2 steps.

3. See if any one terminated after more than V1 steps.

4. If they did, then V1 is inconsistent with ZFC - contradiction. If they did not, then V2 is inconsistent with ZFC - contradiction (since at least one turing machine must terminate after exactly V2 steps).

This entire process takes finite time since there are finitely many 748 state turing machines and V1 and V2 are also finite.

So what does it even mean to say that BB(748) is independent of ZFC? BB(N) is not even a predicate so it definitely feels like a category error to say it's independent.

We certainly can't prove that a candidate value is correct within ZFC, but given any "overestimate" of BB(748) we can prove that it's wrong:

1. Let's say we have VC - an estimate of BB(748) that's too large.

2. Simulate every possible 748 state turing machine for VC steps.

3. If no turing machine terminated after exactly VC steps, then VC is wrong.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-29 13:57:35+00:00
> war crimes are just a label for anyone in opposition to Western domination

Eh, there is a broad consensus on what constitutes a war crime. But there is also broad precedent for these rules not applying to major powers. (China annexed Tibet in 1951.)

I’d also argue that recent history has almost rendered the term worthless, as activists label practically every civilian death as a war crime.
by steveBK123 | 2025-06-29 13:57:56+00:00
Agree they have a huge taste problem, but even besides that Apple has a huge incumbent problem now really.

Smartphones ate the world, and they ate the majority of profit in the space. We are now 20 years on and the software is no longer driving the urgency of the hardware upgrade cycle it used to. Apple gets the majority of its revenue from iPhones and related services. Note that services category includes all sorts of App Store extortion payment stuff that they are slowly losing court cases over.

iPhones are so big for them, no other product category created since is even in the same order of magnitude. Partially I think thats on Apple, but I look across the consumer electronics space and don't really see anything new categories they aren't already dominating anyway (tablet, smart watches, etc).

One "moat" they probably do have is that in the US at least, theres not a lot of other physical retailers to go try out consumer electronics. 20+ years ago Apple Store were filled with 3rd party products, now its all Apple everything.
by daneel_w | 2025-06-29 13:58:11+00:00
That's a depressingly shallow knee-jerk-y way of reasoning around something so fantastically open as the Internet... You're offering the deplorable solution of "let the money vote" instead of reason and restraint. The consequence if we had asked for money from the get-go would've been a corporate-ruled scenario where connectivity and Internet foothold were primarily in the hands of the businesses that had the most money. Smaller businesses, and non-profits in particular, would effectively have been shut out and innovation and growth in the Internet's most sensitive phase would have suffered greatly.
by reactordev | 2025-06-29 13:58:24+00:00
And yet they just voted to do the opposite. It’s not universal income that’s the solution, it’s breaking apart the monopolistic legislation that allows certain companies strangleholds on the markets. M&A shouldn’t be allowed if 65% of the majority of the market is owned by those two companies. Individuals with wealth should be capped and any excess should be used for low-income development programs.

We built a world for higher level thinking but ever since 2010, we’ve been failing to meet that standard.
by therealpygon | 2025-06-29 13:58:26+00:00
Just some feedback to share some problems I personally think you’re going to have and why I suspect you’ll face a healthy amount of skepticism. There is a lack of history of development that ends with a major initial commit of unknown origin, a lack of any public information, a company that does not appear (publicly) to exist, and a product that is going to solve every need that can be imagined by packing it with buzzwords and little to no evidence of security. When faced with those things, my next step would be to consider how much is original versus built on underlying technologies I know and trust; information that is lacking.

If you’re launching a business, I would suggest making sure the business looks legitimate; if it’s a pet project, trying to make yourself sound like a big business and then not having the footprint gives off “fake”/scam/caution vibes. If you’re a solo dev, drop all the fake business stuff and get rid of the buzz words and “it can do everything” marketing and focus on what it excels at as an open source project.

People are going to be skeptical (rightfully) that a solo dev/no name company is going to suddenly drop a product that rivals those of massive companies. Either massive shortcuts were taken, or there is a high chance that it will be insecure, which is not something you want from a VPN or any of the other things it claims to do. If you’ve built on existing secure technologies, you should emphasizing them because known names that have a security history are going to build a lot more trust than a no-name product.

If a software is hard to explain the purpose of to an average person in a single sentence, you have an uphill battle. Listing more features isn’t usually going to be the answer, regardless of how accurate you’re attempting to be. “It’s a VPN! and a PaaS! and a ZTNA! And an API Gateway! and AI!” It screams “please download me” rather than “I’m here to solve a problem“, which is why I wouldn’t even bother to try it; the opposite of what any project is going for.

My intention isn’t to just be critical, but rather to point out things that are likely harming your efforts.
by ljm | 2025-06-29 13:59:08+00:00
I genuinely believe that low-code workflow orchestrators like Zapier or IFTTT will be the first major victims of agentic LLM workflows. Maybe not right now but already it’s easier to write a prompt describing a workflow than it is to join a bunch of actions and triggers on a graph.

The whole hype around AI replacing entire job functions does not have as much traction as the concept of using agents to handle all of the administrative stuff that connects a workflow together.

Any open source model that supports MCP can do it, so there’s no vendor lock in, no need to learn the setup for different workflow tools, and a lot of money saved on seats for expensive SaaS tools.
by eru | 2025-06-29 13:59:58+00:00
I broadly agree with everything you say.

> Sure, but this isn't the infinite money glitch people seem to think it is. The loan and its interest have to get repaid with... money! That's first taxed! And anything purchased is... subject to taxation!

Interestingly, my broker lets me just pile up the interest and doesn't expect me to pay anything back, but only as long as my overall portfolio is worth comfortably more than my debt.

Of course, if I ever want to actually get at all my money, I'll need to pay the debt off.

Btw, leveraging your stock portfolio isn't all that different from a mortgage on your house. But people seem to be much more confused about the effects of the former than the latter. It seems to be easier for people to understand that a mortgage ain't an infinite money machine.
by GuardianCaveman | 2025-06-29 14:00:06+00:00
You have to keep a dog on a leash because it wants to explore the world around it. You can train a dog to be by your side no matter what which you definitely cannot do with a cat which definitely needs a leash no matter how hard you’ve worked for its approval.

Cats won’t alarm you if a stranger sneaks into your tribes living area or your apartment. I have a 10 pound mix and I guarantee you she would take on a thousand pound grizzly knowing it was fruitless but in order to protect her pack including me. A cat is going to just run away from things like that and yeah I’ve seen the cat saves toddler from bobcat stories but those are the exception and probably more related to territorial. Who do you want a person who was raised to be a loyal friend and would sacrifice themselves for you or a person who is fickle and hard to win approval of and even when you do win their approval they start eating you within a few hours of your death.
by baobun | 2025-06-29 14:00:30+00:00
> Test the protocol if you want

I was quite serious that I don't play with the devil in general. Call it religious if you will.

> But explaining terms with words, words with terms - I don't see the point

Then what are you here for and what's the intention? This is a discussion forum and you come with reasoning. Knowing truth is one thing. Being able to put it into words and actually formalize it without handwaving away the misty parts is the whole challenge.

You talked about doing real science and if you want it to be meaningful for others than yourself then words and terms are a prerequisite.
by a10r | 2025-06-29 14:00:34+00:00
You are absolutely right, and that's a crucial distinction to make. ShellCheck is a linter, not a security scanner.

Its role in vet isn't to find malware, but to act as an automated code quality check. A script full of shellcheck warnings is a red flag, which helps inform the user's final decision to trust it or not. It's one of several signals that vet provides.

Thanks for the important clarification!
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-29 14:01:05+00:00
> Even if it will win, having a state, means also to have an army

Sure. Hence why having such a referendum is important. Also, Lebanon has an army as does Egypt, and both are fine neighbours to Israel now.

> Do you have any idea about how many money the Western country put in Gaza for humanitarian and development projects?

Reparations would have to be distributed directly to individuals and be contingent on such a plebescite recognising Israel passing. If Palestinians decide to squander it again, yes, we’ll see another war, but at that point we can begin treating it like we did Nazi Germany versus the non-state with mixed attribution it has today.

> it will not happen until Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are part of the government

If Palestine gave up its hostages and sued for peace, I don’t think these fucks would have a say anymore.
by hliyan | 2025-06-29 14:01:07+00:00
Maturity/commoditization of technology (a good thing) can only be seen as problematic in a world where steady-state businesses with steady profits are seen as "stagnant", and only companies that delivers (or at least promises) perpetual growth are seen as successful. Apple has been wildly successful. There has to be a world in which such a company can benefit from a demand spike without betting its entire future on that demand continuing.
by octopoc | 2025-06-29 14:01:13+00:00
I agree with the overall point but I do think there's a better approach than langchain. Langchain is a framework, not a library. I think a library approach is better at this point because libraries can be composed, which supports fundamental shifts in the structure of the code using the library. Frameworks can't be composed--that's the whole point of having a framework. Agentic patterns are so early that frameworks are limiting and we should be choosing libraries instead.

For example, there was a paper recently (unfortunately I can't remember which it was) that talked about how if you support pausing generation and allowing the human to edit the generated text, then resuming, you can get much better results than if you force the human to respond to the AI as a separate message. That's something that is more difficult for a framework to adapt to than for a library to adapt to.

I'm building an agentic framework that is more on the library side of things, and it necessarily leaves control of the iteration in the hands of the developer. The developer literally writes a while loop to run the agent, offloading things like RAG and tool calling to different pieces of the library. But every part of the iteration is controlled by the developer's agent source code.
by karmakaze | 2025-06-29 14:01:45+00:00
My actual problem isn't with quality, it's speed. I either have to put in very specific prompts and wait for a good model to think, or iterate many times with a lesser one with incremental prompt refinement. Neither of these are effective uses for me. Programmers may be a minority but others who have specific uses with high bar demands must also exist. As far as I can tell from reading HN, programmers are a high value target so would be odd to not be well represented.

With the number of bad studies, it might be a better default to consider all posts not well-founded until repeat independent studies appear.

The small sample size probably is the major factor, that along with its subjective summarization.