MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-16 15:59:12+00:00
Except it's not what happened, per the article. Instead, they walked down the logits, which is more like asking someone to give 10-20 best guesses for next word, and should one of them match the secret answer, telling them which one is it and asking them to go on with the next word. Seems like a substantially easier task, and most of information is coming from researchers making a choice at every step.
by fayten | 2025-06-16 15:59:14+00:00
I always love seeing more done in the web component space. I think Lit has the no build process captured pretty well and they include things such as a router.

I do prefer the style of of your components more, where you separate out the script and styles with html tags. I don't know if one way or the other is superior for performance, I but just like the separation verse the templated strings in Lit.

With build tools being so straightforward now-a-days, I struggle to see the value in the build less approach. One use case I can think of is maybe a constrained environment where the application contains some kind of customizable user components fully in the browser like a reporting WYSIWIG of some kind.

Is there a particular reason you prefer this approach?
by somat | 2025-06-16 15:59:19+00:00
Speaking of ipsec, ipsec was supposed to be "the" encrypted interchange on the internet, basically used for random secure connections like we use tls today.

I like to imagine an alternate past where ipsec "won" and how that would affect our expectations of secure connections. One thing different is that the security would handled at the os level instead of the application level, on the one hand this is nice all application get a secure connection whether they want one or not, on the other hand the application has no idea it is using a secure transport and has no way of indicating this to the user.

Anyhow the opportunistic connection employment of ipsec never really got implemented and all we use it for anymore is as a dedicated tunnel. one that is fiendishly difficult to employ.

I think the primary problem with ipsec is that it tried to be too flexible. this made setting up a ipsec link a non-trivial exercise in communication, and the process never got streamlined enough to just be invisible and work.
by upghost | 2025-06-16 15:59:35+00:00
You made my day. I am a long time lisp developer who held a similar view of Prolog for a very long time until for various reasons I stumbled on these videos, and then realized there was a whole aspect to the language I was unaware of that went beyond the logic. Really great community developing around this stuff particularly with Scryer and Trealla that are very active if you are interested in discussing any of this further.

The fact that we were able to have this exchange was great. I appreciate your points and look forward to incorporating your work into mine!
by joshstrange | 2025-06-16 15:59:49+00:00
> Yeah... My company is making these tools mandatory and I suspect they are collecting metrics to see who is using them and how much

I'm sorry to hear this. I have encouraged the developers I manage to try out the tools but we're no where close to "forcing" anyone to use them. It hasn't come up yet but I'll be pushing back hard on any code that is clearly LLM-generated, especially if the developer who "wrote" it can't explain what's happening. Understanding and _owning_ the code the LLMs generate is part of it, "ChatGPT said..." or "Cursor wrote..." are not valid sentence starters to question like "Why did you do it this way?". LLM-washing (or whatever you want to call it) will not be tolerated, if you commit it, you are responsible for it.

> It's been very stressful and overall an extremely negative experience for me, which is made worse when I read the constant cheerleading online, and the "You're just using it wrong" criticisms of my negative experience

I hate hearing this because there are plenty of people writing blog posts or making youtube videos about how they are 10000x-ing their workflow. I think most of those people are completely full of it. I do believe it can be done (managing multiple Claude Code or similar instance running) but it turns you into a code reviewer and because you've already ceded so much control to the LLM it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking "One more back and forth and the LLM will get it" (cut to 10+ back and forths later when you need to pull the ripcord and reset back to the start).

Copilot and short suggestions (no prompting from me, just it suggesting in-line the next few lines) are the sweet spot for me. I fear many people are incorrectly extrapolating LLM capability. "Because I prompted my way to a POC then clearly an LLM would have no problem adding a simple feature to my existing code base" - Not so, not by a longshot.
by freedomben | 2025-06-16 16:00:34+00:00
Also victims are nearly always emotionally involved, and emotional-based decisions aren't generally good. Punishments would be much more severe if it were up to the victims.

If victims determined the sentences, I expect people would spend a lot more time in prison, way more than a non-emotionally involved and wronged person would think fair.

IMHO letting victims set the sentence would be the worst way to do it.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-16 16:01:02+00:00
I've been saying this for years but nobody listens. I mean, you have kids because you feel lonely and take a lover. From an evolutionary psychology viewpoint people should be less interested in having children if they feel crowded. The literature is ambivalent on the topic though:

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/225997

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1340041/

https://www.milbank.org/wp-content/uploads/mq/volume-54/issu...
by oersted | 2025-06-16 16:02:01+00:00
I agree it’s not black and white, but let’s be reasonable. When you sell to an addict the drug they crave, knowing full well that they will take it, and you switch it with deadly poison, just because it’s cheaper? I mean, it is hard to argue that it is not an act of both fraud and premeditated murder, at the very least gross negligence. Is the addict responsible for the risk they were obviously taking? Well sure, not that they have much of a choice at that point, but there’s always a choice, and mostly they got themselves into that situation, and they are committing a crime too. Still that doesn’t take much blame away from the dealer.

It’s like saying: it’s your fault that you got shot for being in the wrong neighborhood at night. Were they knowingly taking a risk? Sure, but the murderer is still a murderer.

And we long got rid of the concept of “outlaw” where if you commit a crime any subsequent crime on you is fair game. That’s rather barbaric.

EDIT: I was assuming that it is obvious that no one takes such synthetic opioids on purpose. They are known not to be much fun and very dangerous. They are mostly used as a cheap filler in other more mainstream drugs, most notably in fake branded prescription drugs.
by xp84 | 2025-06-16 16:03:29+00:00
“Can’t” is relative. I suspect there are a lot of people who pay for at least one streaming service that isn’t YouTube, but spend more hours watching YouTube in a month than they do watching that service. And of course there’s also the age-old comparison that if someone goes to Starbucks more than twice in a month, they probably spend more there than you would on YouTube Premium, and does that provide the person with as much value as YouTube does?

In my opinion, it’s rarely about “can’t” when we’re talking about 12 bucks a month or whatever. It’s about the psychology: when a free tier exists, people reframe it in their heads that paying for that thing is an extravagance. Relatedly, removing the free tier altogether also has dangerous effects, as people immediately jump to “I can’t believe you’re taking away the free thing I used to have” outrage, while nobody complains about not having free access to say, HBO.
by qingcharles | 2025-06-16 16:03:48+00:00
I've got a lot of experience working with prisoners. I've almost never seen any rehabilitative programs of any value at all. Mostly the programs I see are "learn to mop floors."

I just helped someone to complete a year-long paralegal course and qualification while inside. The Illinois prison system has now banned this since (a) it came with the option of facilities awarding a 6 month reduction in the length of a non-violent sentence, (b) required the facility to allow someone to proctor the final exam.
by squigz | 2025-06-16 16:04:08+00:00
As a simple fellow programmer, I don't want swear words in code I'm working on either? If it's in the code itself, you should be using better names. If it's in comments, I want information without extraneous modifiers. Not to mention, what one person thinks is an innocent swear might be considered very harsh by others.

There's just no good reason for swear words to be committed. You want to swear about the code, do it in a chat room or something.
Show HN: A server that gives AI tools like ls/diff/cat to explore github repos
by baobaoyc24 | 2025-06-16 16:05:21+00:00
Hi HN,

I want to share a recent project that was born out of a personal struggle.

Roughly two months ago, I was trying to contribute to a large open-source project to gain more experience. The repo was just too big for a first-timer, and I felt completely overwhelmed. I wanted to use an AI assistant to help me navigate, but I had no good way to provide the necessary context.

So, I built a tool to solve this: a self-hosted mcp server that gives an AI client a set of tools to explore and understand GitHub repos on its own.

My first attempt was naive: I used a library to ingest the whole codebase into a single text file and dump it to the AI. As you can guess, this immediately exceeded the context window limit for any reasonably sized project.

The better approach, and the one this tool uses, is to let the AI explore the code on demand. I gave it tools to fetch a directory tree, get the content of any file or folder, diff any two branches/commits/tags, and pull context from issues/PRs. This works surprisingly well, even on a massive repo like VS Code's (>27M tokens).

Ironically, I only recently learned that GitHub has its own official server for this! Luckily, my version has some capabilities that theirs doesn't (yet):

1. Get a clean directory tree: It uses the Git tree object to create a readable tree structure, which helps the AI (and humans) understand the project layout faster.

2. Get a diff between any two points: This isn't limited to PRs; you can compare any two branches, commits, or tags.

3. Get raw repo contents: It can fetch file contents as plain text or folder contents in the tree format, ready for AI to process directly.

Any feedback is highly appreciated!

Try it out: https://github.com/baonguyen09/github-second-brain Demo Video: https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ecb05256-8bb0-427...
by ashton314 | 2025-06-16 16:05:36+00:00
There's an old article from The Atlantic [1] that makes the case that the ballpoint pen killed cursive: they require much more pressure to write with compared to rollerball or fountain pens. Like the author, I started using a fountain pen and it makes so much more sense why you would write in cursive with that thing.

If you like taking analog notes, I highly recommend getting yourself a starter fountain pen and some good paper (emphatically not Moleskin—those work best with pencils; too much bleed with fountain pen ink) and enjoy hand writing as it was meant to be. ;)

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/08/ballp...
by johnea | 2025-06-16 16:05:54+00:00
Thanks for your reply tom!

When I re-read my comment, I realize it's not completely clear: its definitely not my impression that moderation, or HN platform administration, are flagging these articles.

My impression is that a portion of the user community is.

In my interactions with moderation, I've always received even handed and personal replies. This, I feel, is one of the greatest aspects of HN.

While the majority of posts are technical, many many of the links on HN are non-technical. This seems to me to be an important feature. Tech doesn't exist in a bubble, it's part of broader society, and major breaking news impacts tech workers, tech products, and the viability of startups and the products they'll offer.

The tech communities ability to exchange comments on these broader issues is one of the most striking features of HN, and a great deal of users participate.

Moderators are certainly the most knowledgeable about the flow of threads and user affinity, I only have my outside impression. But it seems that threads describing certain events are flagged out of use much more frequently.

To me, it doesn't seem like a broad response of removing non-technical links, but more specific-topic motivated.

I don't know the exact details of when a flagged article becomes unavailable for comments, but it often seems that when one demographic is flagging the comments, others are eager to exchange discussion.

If there is a user <flag> link, that can make comments unavailable, wouldn't it be helpful to also include an <unflag> link?

I read quite a few news sites everyday. but I find links to non-technical news on HN that I didn't discover anywhere else. The community at HN is not only technical, but broadly knowledgeable about many many topics. This is a great feature of the site.

I'd just like to be able to comment on some articles that others don't seem interested in. I don't think I'm alone in that regard.

Moderation removing articles that are blatantly spam, ad hominem, or otherwise offensive is obviously needed, but letting the community converse on non-technical topics, even if a portion of the community is not interested, doesn't seem like a divergence from the core mission.

My comment is already too long, but I want to say again: Thank You for the efforts of the mods! and Thank You for all of your responses, which have always been thoughtful, and individually crafted.
by Spivak | 2025-06-16 16:05:58+00:00
Out of scope—pledge is designed to allow developers to sandbox their own programs to deal with compromises. If someone finds a bug with your program that tricks it into opening an arbitrary file then pledge just saved you.

These sandboxing tools aren't designed to make it safe to run arbitrary untrusted code. If you want that then you're looking at a VM- either a full VM like firecracker or a software VM like V8.
by vondur | 2025-06-16 16:06:19+00:00
I've read that back in the day chemists used to nearly bathe in this stuff. Now it's rarely used in instructional chem labs. Heck as an undergrad in the 90's we were using Potassium Dichromate as an oxidizer. I spilled some on me and it ate through my lab coat and shirt beneath it. Probably should have had an apron on too...
by forrestthewoods | 2025-06-16 16:06:34+00:00
Yes bump allocators are very fast. (It would have been helpful if the blog post explained what type of allocator it was benchmarking).

But you can’t take a random Python GC’d workload and slap it on a bump allocator and call it good. A consequence of bump allocators is you can’t, ahem, freely free objects in the middle. And pushing onto alternating lists/vec/etc is notoriously tricky.

Workload always matters. Always.
by kylehotchkiss | 2025-06-16 16:06:36+00:00
Do you always tip uber/lyft drivers? I usually only will if they get out of the car and help me load or unload a heavy (40+ lbs) suitcase. If they just push the trunk open button, I'm neither giving a 5 star review nor a tip ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by ryandrake | 2025-06-16 16:06:52+00:00
I don't know. I'm not a sociologist but it seems like we (at least the USA) have lost the concept of shared behavioral norms, and even where we haven't, public/private shaming is no longer an effective way to enforce those norms.

Maybe I'm longing to go back to an episode of Happy Days that never really existed, but I kind of remember a time where if you were sitting out on your porch and someone walked by and threw trash on the sidewalk in front of you, you could tell them "I saw that! How dare you throw trash down and litter in this neighborhood!" and chances are, they'd show a little remorse and maybe reverse their decision. Now, it's "Fuck off, Karen! Mind your own business! I can do what I want and you can't stop me!" And we just kind of start accepting bad behavior from strangers.

"I don't give a fuck, and you can't tell me what to do" has become this awful national motto.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-06-16 16:07:11+00:00
That's really unfortunate. I work with people who were formally justice-involved every day and their educations have been an aid to them personally and professionally. A felony or a "bad" misdemeanor (e.g. domestic violence) isn't the end of the world, even in the modern US. People can and do overcome the consequences of their mistakes and thrive.
by qoez | 2025-06-16 16:07:42+00:00
I always had the impression it was the other way around, non autistic 'normal' people personifies non human objects. Anyway I always had a pet theory that the reason some people are fooled into thinking LLM text output is a real human with feelings, and some aren't, comes down to this difference in brains. (Personally I never feel like the LLM is a real human and I'm kind of autistic too.)
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-16 16:07:46+00:00
It doesn't let you recover the text without knowing it in advance, so no.

You can't in particular iterate it sentence by sentence; you're unlikely to go past sentence 2 this way before it starts giving you back it's own ideas.

The whole thing is a sleigh of hand, basically. There's 42% of the book there, in tiny pieces, which you can only identify if you know what you're looking for. The model itself does not.
by qingcharles | 2025-06-16 16:07:54+00:00
This place is an absolute rarity. Almost zero jails or prisons have any access to the Internet at all. Many of the places I know won't even allow a print-out of any information from the Internet (e.g. Wikipedia, Facebook etc) and won't allow any books about computers for security reasons.

Commissary is generally "gas station" prices in jails and prisons.

Some of the inmates I work with right now have tablets that allow music streaming from a small catalog, but I think it is $3/hour to listen to it.

Obviously the families and friends of the loved are the ones burdened with paying for all of these, unless you can get an in-prison job that pays, e.g. dealing drugs is probably the highest paid, sadly.
by beckford | 2025-06-16 16:08:23+00:00
I usually structure teaching the same way done in https://www.writethedocs.org/videos/eu/2017/the-four-kinds-o.... So "the Quick Walkthrough Guide will explain what dk scripts are and give you small examples to run" is simply a learning-oriented tutorial which is mostly about giving students confidence and visual feedback. And simultaneously it an explanation of nothing (the video has a great explanation for why to do that). So, I agree that an explanation of threads + Internet + cross-compilation would quite nuts, but for an experienced developer I'd expect to see a meaty example (take a look at https://ziglang.org/ for comparison).

One concrete action may be to make two distinct Quick Start guides ... one for the experienced and one for the inexperienced students though. Is that your thinking?
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-16 16:08:26+00:00
Hm, OK. Is there some reason that dev containers and running agents inside it won't work? I've been looking at AI sandboxing lately and can't quite decide if there's really a problem to solve here, or whether giving the agent a container regardless of platform is what makes the most sense. I guess it depends on whether you're developing apps that can run containerized - most devs do I imagine, but if you're writing mobile or desktop apps then a different strategy would be needed.
by xp84 | 2025-06-16 16:08:40+00:00
That is the absolute beauty of the targeted ad situation, isn’t it: you can generate leads for mortgages or expensive enterprise SaaS services, that are happy to pay super high acquisition costs, maximizing revenue from your rich users, and with the same ad inventory, maximize the revenue from your poor users by advertising App Store casino games for children, payday loans, etc. You can see why Meta doesn’t bother offering a paid service here.
by imtringued | 2025-06-16 16:08:42+00:00
I didn't use it for exams, but I once went to a regional clothing store known for being extremely cheap and poor quality and I bought a 1€ mechanical pencil there. Surprisingly, that mechanical pencil had an amazingly well engineered metal collet instead of the usual plastic ones. I've used that pencil for years and my only complaint is that if you don't tighten it enough, it'll unscrew itself and snap your lead.
by sctb | 2025-06-16 16:08:56+00:00
I don't have access to the full text, but based on the abstract I think it's likely that I relate to this phenomenon (I am autistic).

My experience is not so much the attribution of human characteristics to non-human objects, but I understand why this might be the only accessible language of expression. For me, if a useful object is damaged or otherwise loses its usefulness through neglect or malice, I experience something like an emotional response. A good example would be a dull knife. There's something "sad" about an object whose nature or purpose it is to be sharp to lose or lack that sharpness.

Or perhaps a more subtle example would be a room whose contents are haphazard or in disarray. In that situation I would sense a lack of care or attention and there might be an emotional feeling that these objects had not been respected or appreciated.

It's (usually) easy for most people to care about other people. It's a little less easy, though still pretty common, for people to care about animals. The further away from recognizably human you get, the less people seem to care: e.g. insects, plants, bacteria, viruses, etc. For me there is something that "scales" down all the way to inanimate objects.
by prmoustache | 2025-06-16 16:09:13+00:00
In my own case CD's, MP3 and cassette use have overlapped. MP3 players were expensive, Discmans were too big to fit in a small pocket. So walkmans were still useful. I used to record tunes and mixes from the radio at the time too as it was super quick to hit record on the ghettoblaster when listening to the radio provided you had a tape ready. So yes I was still using and listening to cassettes in the early 2000's.
by dijit | 2025-06-16 16:09:36+00:00
at 250.000 users they're going to hit specific limits very quickly, and frustratingly, proper sysadmin skills are (I think) nearly completely eroded from our industry.

This leaves us with expensive offerings despite a pretty static load (a-la; cloud).

Back in the day, burgeoning sysadmins would have cut their teeth on projects like this, but sadly they'd need someone quite senior at this point to avoid major pitfalls.

I'm not even sure myself how I would prevent the abuse of uploaded images; both in terms of rate limiting new accounts and the potential harmful material that might be shared. -- And I am one of the sysadmin types who cut their teeth on problems like these.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-06-16 16:10:16+00:00
Just out of curiosity (not knowing anything about butyllithium other than what I've read on 'Things I Won't Work With'), is this answer from o3-pro even close?

https://chatgpt.com/share/685041db-c324-800b-afc6-5cb2c5ef31...