MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dang | 2025-06-28 10:41:40+00:00
With lots of HN threads over the years!

AI code is legacy code? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43888225 - May 2025 (170 comments) (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43889200)

Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" and LLMs replacing human programmers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43818169 - April 2025 (129 comments)

Programming as Theory Building (1985) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42592543 - Jan 2025 (44 comments)

Programming as Theory Building (1985) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38907366 - Jan 2024 (12 comments)

Programming as Theory Building (1985) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37263121 - Aug 2023 (36 comments)

Programming as Theory Building (1985) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33659795 - Nov 2022 (1 comment)

Naur on Programming as Theory Building (1985) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31500174 - May 2022 (4 comments)

Naur on Programming as Theory Building (1985) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30861573 - March 2022 (3 comments)

Programming as Theory Building (1985) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23375193 - June 2020 (35 comments)

Programming as Theory Building (1985) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20736145 - Aug 2019 (11 comments)

Peter Naur – Programming as Theory Building (1985) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833278 - Jan 2016 (15 comments)

Naur’s “Programming as Theory Building” (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7491661 - March 2014 (14 comments)

Programming as Theory Building (by Naur of BNF) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121291 - Feb 2008 (2 comments)
by diggan | 2025-06-28 10:42:26+00:00
> if we were at a point where we'd have models developed and produced in the EU, as well as other parts of the world.

But we have models developing and being produced outside of the US already, both in Asia but also Europe. Sure, it would be cool to see more from South America and Africa, but the playing field is not just in the US anymore, particularly when it comes to open weights (which seems more of a "world benefit" than closed APIs), then the US is lagging far behind.
by soueuls | 2025-06-28 10:42:58+00:00
I used AI to write press releases in every languages I know there are victims.

I am trying to look for someone who can help me shoot / edit short videos, and I will try to use Heygen to translate them.

Posting on TikTok might be useful, but usually the content can only be seen from the country you are posting.

Do you know of any tools where you can feed a bunch of content / documents / pictures / etc and it generates many pages ranking on their names / brand / company / etc?
by fakedang | 2025-06-28 10:43:18+00:00
As someone who does business in Dubai, huge no!

The key is in the top part of the statement - prestige. Your local partner wants to be seen as investing/using the latest and biggest technologies, whether it's AI, Salesforce (even for 100 person companies), AWS/Azure (even for tiny use cases that could be done via Office automation), Workday, Oracle and SAP, etc. The locals want to be affiliated to those technologies as it's a matter of prestige for them, even if they won't even be touching that tech with a long pole in reality. You make money in Dubai selling solutions, not SaaS, selling association and media presence.

As for Dubai's data infrastructure, government mostly works with Azure and uses the Indian WITCH companies as their implementation architects.

EDIT:- sometimes it gets so hard trying to convince the local partners and company execs why they don't need to use the "name brand" Salesforce CRM or the " hotshot" Oracle database, but huge caveat - if the top leadership of the company is young (think millennial scion of the founder), there's a huge chance they too will see it as futile and agree with you to swap to something more modern. Younger middle management locals are still the same - they care about the prestige factor more than actual results.
by randomname93857 | 2025-06-28 10:44:46+00:00
We do see the signs and reports, you just have to look. LLMs are being adopted to warfare, with drones or otherwise, there is progress there, but it's not currently at the level of "substantial difference". And 5 years is huge time from progress perspective in this domain - just try to compare LLMs of today with LLMs of 2020.
by tialaramex | 2025-06-28 10:45:51+00:00
There are a few interesting trends in that list. One of them is that there's an increasing amount of Rust. People are going to write many of the high level bugs (e.g. logic mistakes) in any language, but if they're not using your language they won't write any in your language. Lots are written in Rust.

But another is that the kind of things even reported is different. There's a case a while back where C++ and Rust have identical APIs which make an identical promise. The obvious way to implement that API on popular platforms introduces a TOCTOU race, and so that race was present in Rust's stdlib and in all three popular C++ standard library implementations. Rust reported the TOCTOU race and its fix, there's a CVE number. The three C++ libraries just decided it's a QOI issue and silently made equivalent changes over the next few months or years.

In C++ the argument goes like this: C++ says that if any other programs are running on your computer, all filesystem access is Undefined Behaviour. Simply do not run more than one program per computer, then there's no TOCTOU race, no bug. Rust says duh, obviously multi-processing has been a thing since the 1960s so we have to assume other programs may be running, the TOCTOU race is a bug and must be fixed.
by diggan | 2025-06-28 10:48:12+00:00
> I'd hate to lose the ability of just going back 20 years later and read my own thoughts and ideas, to meet the person I was at that point.

Yeah, my "second-brain" doubles as a journal too, and I have written notebooks from when I first arrived in my "real home country" with basically nothing, and it's always a pleasure to go back to read through and realize (again) how different my life is now.

It's really easy to lose track of our own progress day-to-day, and being able to analyze your past perspectives and situations is like a hack to instant happiness.
by t0lo | 2025-06-28 10:48:23+00:00
I think people understand there's a time and a place for important political discussion on an otherwise tech community, especially because the quality and insight tends to be better than other places.

I don't have any delusions about ycombinator seeing some of the things it has supported recently, but in this laughably dumbed down world you take what you can get.

As for new communities I believe in being selective and restrictive- based on location, education, or interest and think it's the only way we can get smart communities again. Think how the tech barrier and slow adoption in the 90s/2000s resulted in a smart bubble online, and how covid was the death knell for distinct non homogenous smart online spaces because it brought everyone further online. It's discriminatory but look what we've become.
by dogcomplex | 2025-06-28 10:49:10+00:00
Anyone interested in this from a history / semiotics / language-theory perspective should look into the triad concepts of:

Sign (Signum) - The thing which points Locus - The thing being pointed to Sense (Sensus) - The effect/sense in the interpreter

Also known by: Representation/Object/Interpretation, Symbol/Referent/Thought, Signal/Data/User, Symbol/State/Update. Same pattern has been independently identified many many times through history, always ending up with the triplet, renamed many many times.

What you're describing above is the "Locus" essential object being pointed to, fulfilled by different contracts/LLMs/systems but the same essential thing always being eluded to. There's an elegant stability to it from a systems design pov. It makes strong sense to build around those as the indexes/keys being pointed towards, and then various implementations (Signs) attempting to achieve them. I'm building a similar system atm.
by Quekid5 | 2025-06-28 10:49:27+00:00
> Tbh the collections being mutable isnt really an issue since it gets the job done and reasoning about these things isnt that hard.

Have you worked in language with immutable collections by default? It's night and day -- no more defensive copies, no more weird ImmutableList wrappers (Guava) which will (interface-wise) say they're mutable but will throw at runtime, no worrying about multithreading, cheap subsequences, etc. etc.

The difference is so stark that I would literally choose a worse[0] language(!) over a better one if it had immutable collections by default.

EDIT: Since you mentioned Java in a sibling comment -- give Scala a try and try working with the collections there.

[0] Within reason, of course :)
by jan_Sate | 2025-06-28 10:50:02+00:00
I don't get why the US thought that it'd be a good idea to vet social media accounts for visa applications. If someone's having ill intent, one could easily create a burner account and fill in some random content for the sake of getting thru the visa application. Or they could even just purchase an account somewhere on the internet.

Sad to see what US has become.
by cpcallen | 2025-06-28 10:50:47+00:00
Not to disparage Stijn's efforts, but he's about a quarter century late to the AR ad-blocking game: when Steve Mann came give a talk at the University of Waterloo whilst I was an undergrad there (circa 1997–2000), one of the applications of his wearable computer that he demonstrated was the ability to recognise and block ads on posters and billboards.

Of course at the time the computing power needed just to do the image tracking was far in excess of what could be carried on his person, so it involved a (possibly pre-WiFi) radio link to a lab network of graphics workstations, and as far as I know the software wasn't doing any kind of AI ad identification, but only matching pre-tagged ad images (or maybe just tracking the physical locations of the user vs the known location of the ads, via GPS + INS + video tracking).

It was nevertheless an exceedingly impressive demo that it has taken quite some time to make a significant improvement on.
by diggan | 2025-06-28 10:51:07+00:00
> In this case, the author wrote the notes. If they say it has no value, they probably know what they’re talking about.

Well, yeah, if they say it has no value, then obviously it has no value to them, no one could claim otherwise.

I guess the context in this thread kind of shifted to it might still be valuable to someone, even if it isn't valuable to them. There been a lot of cases in history where very smart people judged their own journals to not be very valuable (to them) so they think nothing of it, then 100 years later someone discovers the journal together with a ton of valuable (to the world) nuggets in it.
by WJW | 2025-06-28 10:51:16+00:00
China doesn't want Taiwan for the chip making plants, but because they consider its existence to be an ongoing armed rebellion against the "rightful" rulers. Getting the fabs intact would be nice, but it's not the main objective.

The USA doesn't want to lose Taiwan because of the chip making plants, and a little bit because it is beneficial to surround their geopolitical enemies with a giant ring of allies.
by numair | 2025-06-28 10:51:39+00:00
> The Information reported on Thursday, citing two people with knowledge of the situation.

I miss the old days of journalism, when they might feel inclined to let the reader know that their source for the indirect source is almost entirely funded by the fortune generated by a man who worked slavishly to become a close friend of the boss of one of DeepSeek’s main competitors (Meta).

Feel bad for anyone who gets their news from The Information and doesn’t have this key bit of context.
by dang | 2025-06-28 10:51:57+00:00
Oh, I see. Let me try to be clearer.

It's not the case that "for each post that doesn't break the guidelines, you're allowed one that does", and that's not what I was doing. When I said HN moderation has worked the same way for over a decade, I didn't mean that the description you gave was accurate—it isn't. (Nor, I assume, did you mean it to be, since you were being sarcastic.)

I meant that what I was doing in the GP comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403362) was standard practice. As you can see from https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., it goes back a long time.

We try to persuade users to follow the site guidelines, and tend to give warnings and make requests before banning accounts, especially if they are active participants who have been around for a while. We don't rush to banning such users; we try to explain the intended use of the site and convince them to honor it. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.
Show HN: Faceghost – Hide unwanted posts from your FB timeline
by castwide | 2025-06-28 10:52:49+00:00
Here's a simple browser extension to hide Facebook posts from people and pages you don't follow. The post gets replaced with a small notification that says "Ghosted."

The biggest problem I've had with it is that sometimes it ghosts a few dozen posts in a row (NB: no false positives), in which case I close the tab and do something else.
by lukan | 2025-06-28 10:53:49+00:00
To be honest, I do prefer drug dealers over Hamas islamists in general. And where exactly is the proof the gangs are connected to ISIS?

"The basis for Lieberman’s allegation of ties to IS was unclear."

It is easy to throw dirt and hope something sticks, but the main thing speaking against his group seems Netanjahu's support in my opinion. But otherwise I don't see the scandal so much here. Especially not compared to the scandal of intentionally targeting civilian population and indiscriminate killing of starving people like the article states.

Edit: But I just read

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerem_Shalom_aid_convoy_loot...

And well, that is indeed better to show who we are dealing with, ruthless criminals who loot and shoot a UN aid convoy for profit.
by hopelite | 2025-06-28 10:54:22+00:00
China will not go to war in or over Taiwan sort of the USA doing its common narcissistic psychopathic thing of instigating, orchestrating, and agitating for aggression. It seems though that some parts of the world have started understanding how to defuse and counter the narcissistic, psychopathic abusive cabal that controls the USA and is constantly agitating for war, destruction, and world domination due to some schizophrenic messianic self-fulfilling prophecies.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-06-28 10:55:10+00:00
That seems like it'd be easy to avoid if you're a small operator. Set up some embarrassing porn site, scrape user details and sell them to a separate company (likely controlled by yourself). Then close the porn business as soon as there's any chance that you'll face investigation and instead work on getting individuals to pay you for not publishing their embarrassing kinks.
by spwa4 | 2025-06-28 10:55:52+00:00
This is moral absolutist thinking. Either you're 100% good or 100% evil and there is nothing in between.

Under that thinking, of course, everyone (except, of course, the speaker and friends) is evil and can be accused and held responsible, for their "moral failings".

Oh and you ESPECIALLY don't get to defend anyone with practical arguments, for example, that it is a lot harder for a government that does not have tons and tons of (to them) free natural resources money, like Saudi Arabia (they don't even extract it themselves) to avoid moral problems, and problems in general than it is for, say America. That a country that has to do things itself, just to make a random example, defend it's shores against drugs (and shoot at people who try to ...) has to make a lot of moral compromises (like, perhaps, shooting at criminals trying to flee in a boat) that Saudi Arabia doesn't have to make.

Many countries, like Saudi Arabia, always get a free pass, because "you can't expect them to adhere to ..." when in fact it would be SO much easier for them to have a perfect human rights record, no poverty, extremely liberal societies, ... than it is for the US (because incomes in Saudi Arabia largely does not derive from having Saudi Arabians work, so there's no need to force them to. America shoots at people so Saudi Arabia can export it's oil, ...)

The fact is most non-Western governments (like Saudi Arabia, but they're middle of the boat at best in evilness) don't have the interests of people in mind at all. Regardless if "people" means Saudi Arabian people, people who live in Saudi Arabia including foreignors, or women, or children for that matter. AT BEST, they are like Western companies, at worst ... you can imagine. That a government with the financial means of Saudi Arabia fails here should be 10x worse than similar failings on, for example the US's part (but same for, say, Denmark). But the root cause is simple: the Saudi government is not there to benefit the people there, it benefits itself only.

In other words: these dictatorships are MUCH worse and have MUCH more serious moral failings than the US.
by diggan | 2025-06-28 10:56:38+00:00
> I find it wild to suggest an LLM would be better at scouring data for gems than the person who wrote them

I mean, "an out there" idea sure, but wild? There are plenty of cases where people underestimated their own worth and value, and the potential impact of their ideas.

Sometimes it's valuable to have outsiders perspective on things. Old war veterans might not think twice about their love-letters between them and their partner, but taken together with a large collection of letters, historians can build new perspectives that we weren't able to see before.

> They have no idea what is valuable there.

Of course an LLM wouldn't know what is "valuable". It would require a person to have an idea of what could be valuable, and program the LLM to surface based on that, together with more things.

For example, I could imagine if I setup an LLM with the prompt "Highlight perspectives that you think are conflicting with other stated perspectives" to go through my own second-brain, it could reveal something I haven't considered before, granted it'll be able to freely query the db and so on.
by diggan | 2025-06-28 11:01:44+00:00
> Western internet influencers hype up Chinese open-source software industry for clicks while Chinese open-source developers are struggling.

That kind of downplays that Chinese open weights are basically the only option for high quality weights you can run yourself, together with Mistral. It's not just influencers who are "hyping up Chinese open-source" but people go where the options are.

> there is no commitment to open-source

Welcome to open source all around the world! Plenty of non-Chinese projects start as FOSS and then slowly move into either fully proprietary or some hybrid-model, that isn't exactly new nor not expected, Western software industry even pioneered a new license (BSL - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License) that tries to look as open source as possible while not actually being open source.
by nkrisc | 2025-06-28 11:02:24+00:00
Notes should be for things you can’t remember. How long did I bake that loaf of bread that turned out great? I’m not carrying that detail around in my mind with me unless I’m a baker and baking thirty loaves a day. Only then does become a permanent resident in my brain through pure repetition.

Thinking and processing and making connections is a dynamic and amorphous experience that can’t be put into static notes. It’s always changing, based on your mood, recent experiences, and new knowledge acquired.

Write down things you can’t remember, but keep the thinking in your head.
Ragged – Leveraging Video Container Formats for Efficient Vector DB Distribution
by loaderchips | 2025-06-28 11:02:33+00:00
Hello HN community,

Longtime lurker and really happy to be writing this post. I'm excited to share a proof of concept I've been working on for efficient vector database distribution called Ragged. In my paper and PoC, I explore leveraging the MP4 video container format to store and distribute high-dimensional vectors for semantic search applications.

The idea behind Ragged is to encode vectors and their metadata into MP4 files using custom tracks, allowing seamless distribution through existing Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). This approach maintains compatibility with standard video infrastructure while achieving comparable search performance to traditional vector databases.

Key highlights of my work include: - A novel encoding scheme for high-dimensional vectors and metadata into MP4 container formats. - CDN-optimized architecture with HTTP range requests, fragment-based access patterns, and intelligent prefetching. - Comprehensive evaluation showing significant improvements in cold-start latency and global accessibility. - An open-source implementation to facilitate reproduction and adoption.

I was inspired by the innovative work of Memvid (https://github.com/Olow304/memvid), which demonstrated the potential of using video formats for data storage. My project builds on this concept with a focus on CDNs and semantic search.

I believe Ragged offers a promising solution for deploying semantic search capabilities in edge computing and serverless environments, leveraging the mature video distribution ecosystem. Also sharing indexed knowledge bases in the form of offline MP4 can unlock a new class of applications.

I'm eager to hear your thoughts, feedback, and any potential use cases you envision for this approach. You can find the full paper and implementation details [here](https://github.com/nikitph/ragged).

Thank you for your time fellows

Nikit
by dang | 2025-06-28 11:02:53+00:00
As I said in the GP comment, I believe we have to try, because it would be inconsistent with the intended spirit of this site not to.

I don't agree that it isn't relevant to HN. The central value of this site is intellectual curiosity, construed broadly (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). If you try to define that in a way that detaches from larger human concerns, you make it smaller. Curiosity doesn't benefit from that.

There are many reasons to be unhappy with these threads and how the topic lands on HN generally. I am by no means happy—I just don't think that the alternative is better. Curiosity ultimately has to do with relating to what's real and true. You can't impose a narrow view of on- and off-topcicness on that.

Trying to keep HN true to those values is subject to a thousand constraints, some obvious, many not. That means the problem can never be solved—not to everyone's satisfaction, nor even to anyone's satisfaction. Therefore we all have a certain amount of dissatisfaction to tolerate.
by dachworker | 2025-06-28 11:04:16+00:00
Maybe they also do that, but I work with a class of problems* that no other model has managed to crack, except for R1 and that is still the case today.

Remember that DeepSeek is the offshoot of a hedge fund that was already using machine learning extensively, so they probably have troves of high quality datasets and source code repos to throw at it. Plus, they might have higher quality data for the Chinese side of the internet.

* Of course I won't detail my class of problems else my benchmark would quickly stop being useful. I'll just say that it is a task at the undergraduate level of CS, that requires quite a bit of deductive reasoning.
by dcminter | 2025-06-28 11:05:19+00:00
Hmm, I'm barely even a dabbler, but I'd assumed that the seed in question drove the (pseudo)randomness inherent in "temperature" - if not, what seed(s) do they use and why could one not set that/those too?

To your second part I wouldn't make that assumption - I can see how a non-technical person might, but surely programmers wouldn't? I've certainly produced very different output from that which I intended in boring old C with a mis-placed semi-colon after all!