MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ankit219 | 2025-06-09 16:59:55+00:00
The paper is sloppy. The original point may have credence[1], but the way they went about showing it is borderline irresponsible. The first aspect is how they conflated the number of steps involved with difficulty level. Not even considering the solution space. Then, the solutions are long, models are trained to keep the answers concise, and they are measuring consistency across tries. (Eg: Tower of hanoi for 13 steps needs 80k tokens to just blurt out the answer. The model already knows there is literally one way to solve it - ergo search space is not that big - but the paper shows that it is not reasoning. (ofc it isnt, since the sonnet64k would run out of tokens even without reasoning). Then, you have the scenario when even a 0.999 accurate llm would mess up one token and goes wrong on one run. They cited that as an example of how LLMs get it wrong and conclude its memorization and pattern matching and not reasoning. Real world data and usage does not correspond to that.

[1]: Anthropic found that reasoning is not 100% accurate. Thats the premise of the paper, just the headline is super clickbaity.
by seventhtiger | 2025-06-09 17:00:04+00:00
I had to accept cookies once, not each time I look up a recipe or a new piece of information. That's comparable to having to install a browser.

I also didn't have to scan a hostile list of websites fighting for my attention to pick the correct one. It does that for me.

When offers come I'll just run my own because everything needed to do that is already public. I'll never go back to the hell built by SEO and dark UX for anything.
by magicalhippo | 2025-06-09 17:00:05+00:00
That might help a lot in Japan.

Here in Norway we just have had a handful of hydrogen stations, and of those two went out of business.

Meanwhile almost all new cars here are BEV, even out in many rural areas BEVs are 50% of new sales.

A local store can relatively easily and cheaply install a supercharger. Installing a hydrogen pump is presumably much more expensive as it requires more space and more complex equipment. And it needs refilling by truck, while electricty just flows.

And while EV chargers or cars can catch fire during charging, hydrogen can explode violently[1][2] when mixed with air (the one in Norway registered as an earthquake 30 km, 20 miles, away).

As I said perhaps it will find some niche uses, but widescale adoptation seems very unlikely to me.

[1]: https://norwaytoday.info/news/explosion-sandvika-hydrogen-ta...

[2]: https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/transport/safety-concerns-gr...
by illright | 2025-06-09 17:00:11+00:00
A very worthwhile mention is also Stable-TS: https://github.com/jianfch/stable-ts

Out of the box it can transcribe with Whisper or Faster-Whisper, but it can also align audio with an existing human-written transcript, providing time information without losing accuracy. This last feature was something I really needed, and my attempt at building it myself ended up much worse, so I'm glad I found this

I self-host it using Modal.com, as do some other commenters
by iLoveOncall | 2025-06-09 17:00:31+00:00
Just searching with extremely poor keywords is the most common problem I've noticed. It's a search engine, not an interpretation engine.

Also simply bad faith.

Check my response to this article and the thread of comments that ensued for a pretty recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43829655

I have never ever had a problem with search. If I can't find something on Google it means it simply doesn't exist.
by incomingpain | 2025-06-09 17:00:36+00:00
> I see that I was the one who didn’t get it.

Interesting how the article starts. She had a good heart and wanted to help fix a problem, but didnt consider the unintended consequences.

>Boys and men are less likely to turn to their communities for social connection and support. Less likely to go to college. More likely to die by suicide or overdose. Too often, instead of being met with care, they’ve been manipulated and handed division. Not just by podcast bros, but by a government that’s actively stoking the divide for their own political gain.

You're describing an existing divide and the republicans are seeking to help the situation. Why the rapid twist toward government stoking the divide? This is a problem well beyond 1 country.

>And while we’ve been distracted, our boys have been searching for connection and finding it in the worst places. Small men with loud voices who hold court over internet echo chambers, like Andrew Tate, offer them simplistic answers for all of their complicated fears and insecurities. Man up. Toughen up. Win at all costs. And those answers are harming boys and men. We failed to offer them belonging, so they’re grappling for control.

She still doesnt get it. Male relationships are simpler; they thrive on directness, loyalty and honesty. But social media labels that as against the rules.

When social media like reddit went wrong. You get the following problem.

>The issue at hand won’t be solved with better messaging, another podcast, or a new influencer to follow. We are not going to out-algorithm the “manosphere.

You cant out algorithm because you're applying female relationship rules to men and that's never going to work. This attempt to make men follow female rules was hilariously misguided and doomed to fail epicly. You've completely lost any audience on this subject. This is a dead subject for men now.

>We need schools that teach emotional literacy alongside academics. We need public investment in youth mental health. We need a “Men Who Nurse” and a “Guys Who Teach,” pipeline programs that can offer boys real pathways forward in fields that desperately need them.

your idea failed in the marketplace of ideas and your goal is the push it in schools anyway? You dont see the unintended consequences of this?

Men represent like 10% of nursing and 20% of teachers; but i very much doubt those 2 movements ever get the boost your girls who code ever got.

>And we need to tell our boys that the loudest voices with the simplest answers are often the most dangerous. Instead, real power listens, real might is judicious, and real leadership invites doubt. Often, real bravery sounds like, “I don’t know, but let’s figure it out together.”

This is your go-to strategy. Attack the 'manosphere' as dangerous and untrustworthy based on what?

Lets go back to how this started in how she didnt "get it"

She still doesnt get it. That's why Trump is in power and doing some batshit crazy stuff in her country.
by dang | 2025-06-09 17:01:22+00:00
Sure, YC is a business. But HN has so many people building software that there's also a community interest here—otherwise I wouldn't have suggested this thread.

pg used to do this kind of thing on HN from time to time, especially on internet freedom issues, so this is a bit of return-to-roots for the site. SOPA is the one I remember but there were others.
by Terr_ | 2025-06-09 17:01:56+00:00
I don't think that framing really tells us much, because there could be many reasons not to release that code that don't indicate it's an asset, such as (A) worries it might have still-relevant security issues, (B) costs of scrubbing other information like employee PII, or (C) the code is too useless to be worth the effort.

If the goal is to measure retained value, I'd ask how much a competitor would pay to acquire your 5-year-old code (for direct use, not for hacking you) without feeling cheated afterwards.
by tacocataco | 2025-06-09 17:02:00+00:00
> If you’re in your 30s-40s without kids and a dog, we’re of totally different mindsets.

I'm broke. As much as it pains me to be without a pet, I dont want to take on additional responsibilities if I am incapable of sufficiently giving the care these living beings need and deserve.

I've considered fostering, as they pay for many things the animals need. Perhaps in the future.
by loudmax | 2025-06-09 17:02:17+00:00
The OP is not equating contextual with insidious. They're pointing out, correctly, that contextual ads can be insidious. And if they're profitable, they probably will be.

A lot of the companies offering LLM services are in a race gain market share and build expertise. Right now, they can burn through millions of dollars of VC money, with the expectation that they'll turn a profit at some point in the future. If that profit comes from advertising, and critically, if users don't expect advertising in their free LLMs, because they didn't see ads in generated output in the past, that will be very insidious.
by neya | 2025-06-09 17:02:24+00:00
I can tell you this much - most people who are opposed to AI writing blog articles are usually from the editorial team. They somehow believe they're immune to being replaced by AI. And this stems from the misconception that AI content will always sound AI, soul-less, dry, boring, easy to spot and all that. This was true with ChatGPT-3xx. It's not anymore. In fact, the models have advanced so much so that you will have a really hard time distinguishing between a real writer and an AI. We actually tried this with a large Hollywood publisher in-house as a thought experiment. We asked some of the naysayers from the editorial + CXO team to sit in a room with us, while we presented on a large white screen - a comparison of two random articles - one written by AI, which btw wasn't trained, but just fed a couple of articles of the said writer on the slide into the AI's context window, and another which was actually written by the writer themselves. Nobody in the room could tell which was AI and which wasn't. This is where we stand today. Many websites you read daily actually have so much AI in them, just that you can't tell anymore.
by oxguy3 | 2025-06-09 17:02:43+00:00
I was recently editing the Wikipedia page for Google Bookmarks (2005-2021). I wanted to add a logo to the page, but I was having a lot of trouble finding a high-quality copy of the logo anywhere. Eventually I figured out that Google's old URL scheme for product logos was very guessable, and they had never taken it down: https://www.google.com/intl/en-US/images/logos/bookmarks_log...

They'll probably never stop serving those old URLs because who KNOWS where they might still be in use. One of surely a million examples of weird little legacy things Google is stuck with.
by bee_rider | 2025-06-09 17:03:12+00:00
I wonder about this kind of article. It is a big list of problems, so it seems like we’ll end up having a bunch of unrelated conversations here, which seems unfortunate.

But, to start chipping away… For the wealth inequality section, I gather the goal is to let people provide a signal based on how much they are willing to spend. Shouldn’t that be corrected for their wealth, because that shows how much they value the thing? If the art patrons are all 1B-aires, and the anti-lead-pipe folks are 100k-aires (just to make the math easier), we could do:

Art:

10*(sqrt(1M/1B)^2) = 1/100

Pipes:

100*(sqrt(100/100k)^2) = 1/10

Now we’ve got some measure of everybody’s preference, and can allocate the budget appropriately. Whatever the overall budgets is, 10x more for pipes than art seems… well, at least a lot closer to reasonable than ~100x more on art than pipes
by freeone3000 | 2025-06-09 17:03:53+00:00
Salaries are not generally considered “capital” - HR wording aside, you do not own your employees. It’s an immediate expense that may, or may not, produce something of value.

The IRS is using a theory of value where software (1) is a capital asset (okay, sure), (2) has a six-year deprecation schedule (uhhh why not 5 like everything else?), and (3) is valued at the exact cost of all inputs to it, including salaries (uh oh).

This is unlike how capital assets are valued for any other industry! And it has the effect that hiring a second lawyer is “cheaper” (for five years anyway) than hiring a second developer.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-06-09 17:04:57+00:00
> The writing isn't the point; the thoughts are

This is so, so wrong. The writing is the thoughts. A person's un-articulated bullet points are not worth that much. And AI is not going to pull novel ideas out of your brain via your bullet points. It's either going to summarize them incorrectly or homogenize them into something generic. It would be like dropping acid with a friend and asking ChatGPT to summarize our movie ideas.

The idea that writing is an irrelevant way to gatekeep people with otherwise brilliant ideas is not reality. You don't have to be James Baldwin, but I will not get a sense for what your ideas even are via an AI summary.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-06-09 17:05:01+00:00
if this is how you feel you haven't really used llms enough or are deliberately ignoring sporadically appearing data. github copilot for me routinely solves microproblems in unexplored areas it has no business knowing. Not always, but it's also not zero.

...and i encourage you to be more realistic about the market and what society "needs". does society really need an army of consultants at accenture? i dont know. but they are getting paid a lot. does that mean the allocation of resources is wrong? or does that mean theres something cynical but real in their existence?
by jessekv | 2025-06-09 17:05:13+00:00
My experience of the extension was bad.

The extension is a hack that allows them to redirect the searches from one of the available search engines to Kagi. So first you search, then e.g. the DDG page loads halfway, then the page flashes, you get redirected to Kagi. If you are lucky, you are signed in, and you wait for the Kagi results. If not, you sign in and type your search again.

On iOS, I made a shortcut that pops up a native text prompt for your search, then opens kagi using your session token. I recommend this over the extension.

On desktop Safari, you can additionally make Kagi your home page. Not as convenient as searching directly from the top bar but not bad either.
by mediaman | 2025-06-09 17:05:13+00:00
A lot of people don't know what this Section 174 is about, so here's a brief explainer.

Normally, when you have expenses, you deduct them off your revenue to find your taxable profit. If you have $1 million in sales, and $900k in costs, you have $100k in profit, and the government taxes you on that profit.

Section 174 says you can't do this for software engineers. If you pay a software engineer, that's not "really" an "expense", regardless of the fact that you paid them.

What you've actually done, Congress said, is bought a capital good, like a machine. And for calculating tax owed, you have to depreciate that over several years (5 in this case).

Depreciating means that if you pay an engineer $200k in a year, in tax-world you only had $40k of real expense that year, even though you paid them $200k.

So the effect is that it makes engineers much more expensive, because normally when a company hires an engineer, like they spend on any other expense, they can at least think "well, they will reduce our profit, which reduces our tax obligation," but in this case software engineers are special and aren't deductible in the same way.

In the case of the $200k engineer, you deduct the first $40k in the first year, then you can expense another $40k from that first year in the second year, the third $40k in the third year, and so on through the fifth year. So eventually you get to expense the entire first year of the engineer's pay, but only after five years.

The effect is that companies wind up using their scarce capital to loan the federal government money for five years, and so engineers become a heavy financial burden. If a company hires too many engineers, they will owe the federal government income tax even in years in which they were unprofitable.

These rules, by the way, don't apply to other personnel costs. If you hire an HR person or a corporate executive, you expense them in the year you paid them. It's a special rule for software engineers.

It was passed by Congress during the first Trump administration in order to offset the costs of other corporate tax rate cuts, due to budgeting rules.
by ycombiredd | 2025-06-09 17:05:40+00:00
I had submitted this with the title "How Gemini 2.5 Pro taught me not to fear writing CUDA kernels", because most folks know what The Google LLM is and what a CUDA kernel is, but nobody is going to know what my "stable label locator" is. Somehow the title has been changed so I will assume that someone or something changed it on my behalf to what they think is a more appropriate title and not try to change it back.

Anyway, if anyone even clicks on it with the new title and wonders wtf its about, hopefully the original title I mention above explains why you may or may not wish to read my article.
by mindcrash | 2025-06-09 17:06:02+00:00
Steam Deck, hardwarewise, doesn't even really matter that much to Valve anyway. It's all about the universal deployment of Steam through Linux and Windows and the amount of money that will potentially rake in.

Right now Microsoft, through the Xbox Play Anywhere strategy, and Sony, to a certain degree*, but especially Microsoft is _exactly_ doing what Valve wants and supporting Valve in what they want: get Steam deployed in as many households as possible in as many form factors as possible.

It never was about the hardware, but all about the service. You'll see.

*) By allowing previously Playstation exclusives onto Steam, which means that when you have a Steam compatible device you can play all the Xbox, Playstation and PC games you want. As an example, Stellar Blade -one of the best selling Playstation exclusives last year- will be released on Steam in a few days.
by westurner | 2025-06-09 17:06:18+00:00
How about this:

"New Quantum Algorithm Factors Numbers with One Qubit" (2025-06) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44225120

Or this one:

"How Close Is Commercial Quantum Computing?" (2025-06) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226205
by demosthanos | 2025-06-09 17:06:37+00:00
I posted a short explanation here [0] on the thread the other day, but the even shorter explanation is that "software development shouldn't be taxed" is not an accurate description of what repealing the change to Section 174 would do. This discussion has nothing to do with what work gets taxed (all profit is taxed no matter the industry) and everything to do with what counts as "profit".

The Section 174 changes altered the accounting method that software development companies must use for calculating their profit for tax purposes. Starting in 2022 software dev must be treated not as an expense but as an investment in an asset, such that you're now required to amortize the expense over 5 years instead of deducting it from your revenue the year you spent the money.

The gigantic problem with this change is that without the ability to expense software development expenses as expenses, a new software startup can very easily be considered profitable in their first year because only 10% of their software development-related expenses get to be counted as expenses.

And note that, contrary to what you say, most white-collar work is not treated this way, and software is further singled out from other R&D-type work in that it is the only type of work that is explicitly called out in the section as being required to be marked as R&D. So we're not asking for software to be treated specially, we're asking why it suddenly changed in 2022 to be treated specially in an extremely negative way.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44204565
by jsherwani | 2025-06-09 17:06:41+00:00
For folks that don't know the background on this, here's a layperson summary:

- A business is usually taxed on its profits: you deduct your revenue from the cost of producing that revenue, and the delta is what you are taxed on.

- In software businesses, this usually means if you spend $1M in software development to develop a web app, and it makes $1.1M in that year, you'd get taxed on the $100K profits.

- However, a few years ago, the IRS stopped allowing the $1M to be deducted in the year it was incurred. Instead, the $1M was to be amortized over 5 years, so now the business can only count $200K as the deductible expense for that year. So now it's going to be taxed on "profits" of $900K. Assuming the tax rate is 20%, that means the business owes $180K in taxes, even though it has a total of $100K in the bank after the actual expenses were paid. So it would have to either borrow to pay taxes or raise venture capital, meaning that VC-funded companies would be advantaged over bootstrapped ones!

- The letter's goal is to bring things back to how they were (and how they are for all other businesses): let businesses deduct their actual expenses from their actual revenue, and tax that actual profit.

I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant, this is just my understanding of this issue.

Edit: Switched the tax rate to 20%. The logic is still the same.
by MoonGhost | 2025-06-09 17:06:45+00:00
> The solution is always the same: use fine grained permissions, apply the principle of least privilege,

And one of the most important: keep it sandboxed as much as possible.

Also if the tool is directly accessible by 3d party and in turn has access to sensitive data it may be a good idea to split it. For example: 3d party in order to access some database requests login and password. Instead the tool should return some temporary token. After verification, of course. Which is much harder to misuse. Then token, though the tool, is used to access. In this case we split tool in two: one is user's frontend, and another hold all security things including logins and passwords.
by mxuribe | 2025-06-09 17:06:57+00:00
I'm not an expert on disaster recovery, but have to think of it for $day_job on occasion. The way i think about it is something along the lines of when (not if), disaster strikes, what needs to be saved vs what can wait a while to have it recovered...plus what level of effort are the different sets of activities worth. For example, if i host my public blog website on my machine at my home, and power goes out (thus making my blog unavailable during the power outage), am i ok with this, or do i need to ensure that it can be brought back up? If i feel that it needs to be brought back up during such a scenario, how much effort (which really means time plus money) do i wish to plan for? Obviously this is a vast oversimplification...but that kind of thinking has helped me bring up topics and questions in advance in order to plan for extreme scenarios...and you know what? Sometimes the things people think they "really need to be up/available" are not that important. Other times, sure, but then you commit, plan, test, and prepare for such truly essential activities. (And, of course, other times, whether the thing that needs to be recovered is important or not, you might be compelled by laws, regulations, contracts, etc...but that's a whole separate topic.)

So, again, start at the end - when disaster strikes - and consider what you think is worth keeping/bringing back up, and then plan backwards from there to make it so.
by shizzzz21 | 2025-06-09 17:07:05+00:00
> its TCO higher

https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Power-Play-The-Economics-...

In 2023, the estimated LCOE for advanced nuclear power was $110/MWh and is expected to stay similar until 2050.

For solar PV, the estimated LCOE was $55/MWh in 2023 and is projected to drop to $25/MWh by 2050.
by niam | 2025-06-09 17:07:14+00:00
May I ask why?

It's expressly the intention of democracies to hear from constituents (and conversely: groups of constituents). That we happen to call that feedback loop "lobbying", and that the term carries some societal baggage from corporations using/abusing it is unfortunate, but shouldn't be an indictment of what is otherwise a democratic function.

Some group FOO with a shared ill should be able to convene about it and petition congress about it.