MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pxoe | 2025-06-26 14:11:21+00:00
unefficient*, especially when putting actual video into gif format. most often those gifs are hideous (limited color palette etc) and huge (10+ MB for seconds of video), often either badly optimized (which would only make them look even more crunchy) or not optimized at all. gifs are just straightforwardly worse there (in quality and size). gifs are useful for having some graphics with transparency (if you don't mind crunchy one bit transparency), but there are much better formats (webp/webm, apng, etc) with much better 8-bit transparency too. seriously, people need to give it up and put video in a video format. like h264, which is gonna be widely compatible and likely hardware accelerated. (possibly performing better than huge gifs as well, hw accelerated or not)
by satisfice | 2025-06-26 14:11:32+00:00
LLMs make bad work— of any kind— look like plausibly good work. That’s why it is rational to automatically discount the products of anyone who has used AI.

I once had a member of my extended family who turned out to be a con artist. After she was caught, I cut off contact, saying I didn’t know her. She said “I am the same person you’ve known for ten years.” And I replied “I suppose so. And now I realized I have never known who that is, and that I never can know.”

We all assume the people in our lives are not actively trying to hurt us. When that trust breaks, it breaks hard.

No one who uses AI can claim “this is my work.” I don’t know that it is your work.

No one who uses AI can claim that it is good work, unless they thoroughly understand it, which they probably don’t.

A great many students of mine have claimed to have read and understand articles I have written, yet I discovered they didn’t. What if I were AI and they received my work and put their name on it as author? They’d be unable to explain, defend, or follow up on anything.

This kind of problem is not new to AI. But it has become ten times worse.
by trengrj | 2025-06-26 14:11:48+00:00
We added Muvera to Weaviate recently https://weaviate.io/blog/muvera and also have a nice podcast on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSW5g1H4zoU.

When looking at multi-vector / ColBERT style approaches, the embedding per token approach can massively increase costs. You might go from a single 768 dimension vector to 128 x 130 = 16,640 dimensions. Even with better results from a multi-vector model this can make it unfeasible for many use-cases.

Muvera, converts the multiple vectors into a single fixed dimension (usually net smaller) vector that can be used by any ANN index. As you now have a single vector you can use all your existing ANN algorithms and stack other quantization techniques for memory savings. In my opinion it is a much better approach than PLAID because it doesn't require specific index structures or clustering assumptions and can achieve lower latency.
by NeutralCrane | 2025-06-26 14:11:52+00:00
> An experienced dev will have more finely tuned evaluation skills and will accept code from an LLM accordingly. An inexperienced or “low quality” dev may not even know what the ideal/correct solution looks like, and may be submitting code that they do not fully understand. This is especially tricky because they may still end up submitting high quality code, but not because they were capable of evaluating it as such.

That may be true, but the proxy for assessing the quality of the dev is the code. No one is standing over you as you code your contribution to ensure you are making the correct, pragmatic decisions. They are assessing the code you produce to determine the quality of your decisions, and over time, your reputation as a dev is made up of the assessments of the code you produced.

The point is that an LLM in no way changes this. If a dev uses an LLM in a non-pragmatic way that produces bad code, it will erode trust in them. The LLM is a tool, but trust still factors in to how the dev uses the tool.
by mikewarot | 2025-06-26 14:11:58+00:00
61, got into computing just after toggle switches, punch cards and paper tape, thank goodness.

I was, however ready to swear on a stack of Bibles in 1981 when I picked my major, that there was no money to be made in software. It looked like shareware was going to take over the world and drive the cost to almost zero.

Moore's law was an awesome ride, and I think we've got at least a 100:1 improvement left in efficiency.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-26 14:12:10+00:00
I'm in a small non-tech business and already have 7 "vibe coded" apps used daily. Two of them are replacements for what would have been paid for software.

They wouldn't create a Xero replacement (although ironically I did vibecode a business order/finance tracking app for my own side hustle, fuck paying $30/mo when I just need the basics), they would vibecode any of the litany of small industry specific software packages they use.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-06-26 14:12:17+00:00
It's not a race; it is optimising the process for the input size, one's existing knowledge, and context-switch duration from an existing environment. If I had fifty PDFs, I'd look at scripting the result immediately. I had six, and I had Acrobat. I chose the GUI option, and it got me a decent result quickly enough.

A code analogy: it's a bit like how O(n^2) sort algorithms are the fastest for small n, and how most library sorts choose a different algorithm for different `n`. This is what I meant in my initial comment when I said

> Sometimes, the trade-off is not so clear.
by bredren | 2025-06-26 14:12:28+00:00
The parent claim was that devs don’t open-source their personal AI tools. FileKitty is mine and it is MIT-licensed on GitHub.

It began as an experiment in AI-assisted app design and a cross-platform “cat these files” utility.

Since then it has picked up:

- Snapshot history (and change flags) for any file selection

- A rendered folder tree that LLMs can digest, with per-prompt ignore filters

- String-based ignore rules for both tree and file output, so prompts stay surgical

My recent focus is making that generated context modular, so additional inputs (logs, design docs, architecture notes) can plug in cleanly. Apple’s new on-device foundation models could pair nicely with that.

The bigger point: most AI tooling hides the exact nature of context. FileKitty puts that step in the open and keeps the programmer in the loop.

I continue to believe LLMs can solve big problems with appropriate context and that intentionality in context prep is important step in evaluating ideas and implementation suggestions found in LLM outputs.

There's a Homebrew build available and I'd be happy to take contributions: https://github.com/banagale/FileKitty
by kayodelycaon | 2025-06-26 14:12:41+00:00
No more than any other meetup in public.

Any rules are more like do not wear bondage gear next to a playground at a local park.

(This isn’t as clear as you might think. No one really bats an eye at superhero costumes. A leather catsuit with a tail, chains, and pup hood does not have the same reaction.)
by anshumankmr | 2025-06-26 14:12:52+00:00
Its good for quickly developing something but for production, I do not think so.We used it for a RAG application I built last year with a client, ended up removing it piece by piece, and found our app responded faster.

But orgs think its some sort of flagbearer of LLMs.As I am interviewing for other roles now, HRs from other companies still ask for how many years of exp I have with Langchain and Agentic AI.
by vhodges | 2025-06-26 14:13:04+00:00
Some resources:

* https://www.mobile-solarpower.com/ * https://diysolarforum.com/

Note: You'll probably need a permit for the electrical work if it's more permanent and/or grid tied.

But watch the video at https://www.mobile-solarpower.com/mobile-48v-system.html for something similar to a Goal Zero or Jackery
by geor9e | 2025-06-26 14:13:20+00:00
I don't mean a dictionary entry. I mean a STEM question that's novel enough that there might not be examples on the internet. All the other LLMs with voice mode will make good attempts to answer. I'm sure Meta's underlying LLM will too, but they added some guardrail. It's like their system prompt says pretend your IQ is 2 digits, or that it's impolite to try to solve engineering issues. Very Harrison Bergeron like. This trait alone makes me rank it as the worst on the market.
Show HN: Zarvia – Visual workspace rethinking how teams organize information
by michaelfromaus | 2025-06-26 14:13:23+00:00
I built Zarvia to rethink how teams collaborate — beyond scattered chats and documents.

After years of frustration with messy group work and disconnected tools, I wanted a more structured, visual way to keep team communication and shared knowledge in sync.

Zarvia introduces a new paradigm: a shared visual workspace where chats, files, and links live together in a flow-style folder map. It gives fast-moving teams clarity and context — without the noise or complexity of traditional setups.

It’s early-stage and free to try: https://zarvia.co — would love to hear your thoughts.
by ytfghghvh | 2025-06-26 14:13:35+00:00
> It was certainly promoted on the project web site as a capable and portable toolkit for the purpose of parsing XML.

This is a garbage criticism. It’s perfectly adequate for that for almost everyone. If you are shipping it in a browser to billions of people, that’s a very unique situation, and any security issues are a you problem.

Not sure if this is intended to be a “show both sides” journalism thing but it’s a totally asshole throwaway comment.
by bwfan123 | 2025-06-26 14:13:47+00:00
code-reviews are not a good use-case for LLMs. here's why: LLMs shine in usecases when their output is not evaluated on accuracy - for example, recommendations, semantic-search, sample snippets, images of people riding horses etc. code-reviews require accuracy.

What is a useful agent in the context of code-reviews in a large codebase is a semantic search agent which adds a comment containing related issues or PRs from the past for more context to human reviewers. This is a recommendation and is not rated on accuracy.
by Traubenfuchs | 2025-06-26 14:16:28+00:00
Ambroxol has many interesting fringe applications.

It potentiates antibiotic effect in lung infections, including tuberculosis, treats painful hyperacusis, trigeminal neuralgia, neuropathic pain, parkinson, gaucher disease...

...and what's this? We have a surprise guest!

Ambroxol significantly reduces snoring and thus suddenly becomes a candidate for a medication half the population should take!

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314424871_Evaluatio...

It's one of those drugs that deserves way bigger interest than it gets.
by Avshalom | 2025-06-26 14:16:43+00:00
1. how many hours a day would you work if it meant not watching 6 of your 7 children die.

2. How'd you get those dried beans out of their pods? Where'd you get that pot? Where'd you get the water?

3. You didn't actually read the critique did you, you the wikipedia paragraph characterizing the critiques.
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-06-26 14:17:12+00:00
> That however doesn't change my thoughts on trying to ascertain if code submitted to me deserves a full indepth review or if I can maybe cut a few corners here and there.

How would you even know? Seriously, if I use Chatgpt to generate a one-off function for a feature I'm working on that searches all classes for one that inherits a specific interface and attribute, are you saying you'd be able to spot the difference?

And what does it even matter it works?

What if I use Bolt to generate a quick screen for a PoC? Or use Claude to create a print-preview with CSS of a 30 page Medicare form? Or converting a component's styles MUI to tailwind? What if all these things are correct?

This whole OS repos will ban LLM-generated code is a bit absurd.

> or what it's worth I do actually use the tools albeit incredibly intentionally and sparingly.

How sparingly? Enough to see how it's constantly improving?
by NeutralCrane | 2025-06-26 14:17:25+00:00
It isn’t, and that is a sign of a bad dev you shouldn’t trust.

LLMs are a tool, just like any number of tools that are used by developers in modern software development. If a dev doesn’t use the tool properly, don’t trust them. If they do, trust them. The way to assess if they use it properly is in the code they produce.

Your premise is just fundamentally flawed. Before LLMs, the proof of a quality dev was in the pudding. After LLMs, the proof of a quality dev remains in the pudding.
by naasking | 2025-06-26 14:17:54+00:00
> Generally, fertility rates are higher among poorer populations compared to wealthier populations.

Yes, but they were even higher in the past. Fertility has declined among the poorer classes much more than among higher income classes, probably due to the availability of contraceptives and abortion:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gs5lgb_bIAAYoo1?format=jpg
by rtkwe | 2025-06-26 14:18:09+00:00
> no building permit is required

This will be the main issue. No matter what you're going to be doing work inside the main service panel on your house adding new feeds and you'll need to install a transfer switch to disconnect your house in case of a power outage. Most electrical work inside a panel like adding circuits will require a permit in the US. Seems like your plan doesn't involve any of that though so you should be ok permit wise except maybe needing one for the pad and structure.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-26 14:18:19+00:00
I feel like the fundamental issue, and the things people really have a problem with, is that the speed and scale with which LLMs function completely breaks the use cases for which fair use was originally envisioned. IMO, existing copyright law is just wholly unsuited to deal with the consequences of AI.

That is, I don't think anyone (especially on this website) would have a problem if someone read a ton of books, and them opened a website where you can chat with them and ask them questions about the books. But if this person had "super abilities", where they could read every book that ever existed, then respond almost instantly to questions about any book that was read, and the person could respond to millions of questions simultaneously, I think that "fair use" as it exists now would have never existed - it completely breaks the economic model that copyright was supposed to incentivize in the first place. I'm not arguing which position is right or wrong, but I am arguing that using "if a human did it it would be fair use" is a very bad analogy.

As a similar example, in the US, courts had regularly held that people walking around outside don't have an expectation of privacy. But what if computers could then record you, upload you to a website, and use facial recognition so that anyone else in the world could set an alert to be notified if you ever appeared on some certain camera. The original logic that fed into the "no expectations of privacy when in public" rulings breaks down solely due to the speed and scale with which computers can operate.
by troyvit | 2025-06-26 14:18:23+00:00
I've been reading some sci-fi by Kate Elliott lately. While she gets around large distances with the usual FTL tech of sci-fi, in-system space battles hew a little more to physics, so that you get situations like, "Crap! The bad guys fired all their missiles at us! We have sixteen hours to decide what to do ...." Fun stuff.

I bet you're right about emergency situations. On top of that, people have been getting on boats and pushing off into the ocean for at least 25,000 years[1] when there was plenty of good land to keep them occupied. It's not that we're talking the same time scales, but rather the fact that they probably did it despite completely unknown time scales. It makes me wonder if the right philosophy or religion will come along that makes somebody try a generation ship for non-emergency reasons.

[1] https://teara.govt.nz/en/pacific-migrations/page-1
by pjmlp | 2025-06-26 14:19:13+00:00
Because this is throwing sand into people eyes, as we say back in Portugal.

Easy measures to assert governments are doing something.

Actually changing habits of whole populations, or doing real work changes the country infrastructure, access to transport for everyone, and green fuels and whatever, cost too much money, and possible votes, so what really matters isn't done, only the easy stuff, to assert something is being done.
by dspillett | 2025-06-26 14:20:48+00:00
> the rules the UK has for limiting paracetamol purchases to small amount per day are so fantastically stupid

Worse than that: it is effectively per day per shop. In a very short space of time I can buy two packs in Boots, two in Tesco, two in Sainsbury, ooh look another small Tesco I'll get two there as well, two from Savers, two from SuperDrug, …
by nzach | 2025-06-26 14:21:15+00:00
I agree with the sentiment of this post. I my personal experience the usefulness of a LLM positively correlated with your ability to constrain the problem it should solve.

Prompts like 'Update this regex to match this new pattern' generally give better results than 'Fix this routing error in my server'.

Although this pattern seems true empirically, I've never seen any hard data to confirm this property(?). And this post is interesting but seems like a missed opportunity to back this idea with some numbers.
by hirvi74 | 2025-06-26 14:21:27+00:00
I'm not convinced these tests measure what they claim to. Even assuming they do, IQ scores offer little practical value.

The human body and mind are always adapting, however subtly, to changing environments. So I wonder -- are IQ tests assessing abilities that may no longer be optimal today?

Homer likely had an exceptional memory, as did many ancient Greeks that participated in oral traditions. But how relevant is memorizing epics in the modern world?
by api | 2025-06-26 14:21:44+00:00
Yeah, I think a lot of that's just bad writing. Changing things for TV/film is common, but if you do it badly or ham-fistedly it's bad writing.

The Expanse is great. The show has uneven production quality if you look closely but the acting and writing are good and that matters more than VFX or sets. Definitely a fun watch. The books are better, but a lot of the detail in the books would be way more expensive to film properly (like more realistic space sequences or the Belters with their altered physiology).
by acedTrex | 2025-06-26 14:22:00+00:00
> Your premise is just fundamentally flawed. Before LLMs, the proof of a quality dev was in the pudding. After LLMs, the proof of a quality dev remains in the pudding.

Indeed it does, however what the "proof" is has changed. In terms of sitting down and doing a full, deep review, tracing every path validating every line etc. Then for sure, nothing has changed.

However, at least in my experience, pre LLM those reviews were not EVERY CASE there were many times I elided parts of a deep review because i saw markers in the code that to me showed competency, care etc. With those markers there are certain failure conditions that can be deemed very unlikely to exist and therefore the checks can be skipped. Is that ALWAYS the correct assumption? Absolutely not but the more experienced you are the less false positives you get.

LLMs make those markers MUCH harder to spot, so you have to fall back to doing a FULL indepth review no matter what. You have to eat ALL the pudding so to speak.

For people that relied on maybe tasting a bit of the pudding then assuming based on the taste the rest of the pudding probably tastes the same its rather jarring and exhausting to now have to eat all of it all the time.
by achrono | 2025-06-26 14:22:11+00:00
I wish an org like IEEE would be way more rigorous than what's revealed with the first paragraph:

>In April, Microsoft’s CEO said that artificial intelligence now wrote close to a third of the company’s code. Last October, Google’s CEO put their number at around a quarter. Other tech companies can’t be far off.

Take a moment to reflect -- a third of the company's code? Generative AI capable enough to write reasonable code has arguably not been around longer than 5 years. In the 50 years of Microsoft, have the last 5 years contributed to a third of the total code base? This itself would require that not a single engineer write a single line of code in these 5 years.

Okay, maybe Microsoft meant to say new/incremental code?

No, because Satya is reported to have said, "I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today [...] written by software".
by eyberg | 2025-06-26 14:22:54+00:00
(I'm w/NanoVMs).

Firecracker is a complementary technology and not competitive.

Our main software - https://nanos.org is a linux kernel guest replacement whereas firecracker is a VMM (host) replacement for something like qemu.

So the vast majority of our users deploy to AWS, GCP, etc. and those deploys are created as ec2 instances (but without linux). Some of our users/customers use firecracker for ephemeral workloads.
by Palomides | 2025-06-26 14:23:12+00:00
there's definitely room to improve user friendliness of mac emulation (minivmac's compile time config is so infuriating), but I think it's a bit unfair to compare to most of those emulators

vmware and virtualbox were backed by billion dollar corps

the 16 bit machines are much simpler than macs

game consoles had highly homogenous well documented hardware, and sold in much greater numbers (snes alone sold more than all macs from 1987 to 1995) so there's a larger community to draw devs and users from. writing a nes emulator is almost a weekend project now, it's so documented.
by singron | 2025-06-26 14:23:24+00:00
I think they skipped over a non-obvious motivating example too fast. On first glance, commenting out your CI test suite would be very bad to sneak into a random PR, and that review note might be justified.

I could imagine the situation might actually be more nuanced (e.g. adding new tests and some of them are commented out), but there isn't enough context to really determine that, and even in that case, it can be worth asking about commented out code in case the author left it that way by accident.

Aren't there plenty of more obvious nitpicks to highlight? A great nitpick example would be one where the model will also ask to reverse the resolution. E.g.

final var items = List.copyOf(...); <-- Consider using an explicit type for the variable. final List items = List.copyOf(...); <-- Consider using var to avoid redundant type name.

This is clearly aggravating since it will always make review comments.
by simonw | 2025-06-26 14:24:17+00:00
If you define "hallucinations" to mean "any mistakes at all" then yes, a compiler won't catch them for you.

I define hallucinations as a a particular class of mistakes where the LLM invents eg a function or method that does not exist. Those are solved by ensuring the code runs. I wrote more about that here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/2/hallucinations-in-code/

Even beyond that more narrow definition of a hallucination, tool use is relevant to general mistakes made by an LLM. The new Phoenix.new coding agent actively tests the web applications it is writing using a headless browser, for example: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/23/phoenix-new/

The more tools like this come into play, the less concern I have about the big black box of matrices occasionally hallucinating up some code that is broken in obvious or subtle ways.

It's still on us as the end users to confirm that the code written for us actually does the job we set out to solve. I'm fine with that too.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-26 14:24:27+00:00
Lifestyle is key here.

An older friend conveyed to me pretty much the exact same thing you are, that he cannot imagine having kids at 40 because you will not be able to keep up with them energy wise. You get old and your body really starts to give in.

Alright Geoff, thanks, but you are 54 and do zero exercise, have a diet of eating out at fast food and fast casual restaurants, a body type that would be described as "meatball", and a list of medical conditions which all scream lifestyle change.

Meanwhile at trail running meets, I bump into 60 year olds still giving some 35 year olds a run for their money.