MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by camgunz | 2025-07-11 12:57:34+00:00
Can you say more than literally "you're using it wrong"? Otherwise this is a no true scotsman (super common when LLM advocates are touting their newfound productivity). Here are my prompts, lightly redacted:

First prompt:

``` Build a new package at <path>. Use the <blah> package at <path> as an example. The new package should work like the <blah> package, but instead of receiving events over HTTP, it should receive events as JSON over a Google Pub/Sub topic. This is what one such event would look like:

{ /* some JSON */ } ```

My assumptions when I gave it the following prompt were wrong, but it didn't correct me (it actually does sometimes, so this isn't an unreasonable expectation):

``` The <method> method will only process a single message from the subscription. Modify it to continuously process any messages received from the subscription. ```

These next 2 didn't work:

``` The context object has no method WithCancel. Simply use the ctx argument to the method above. ```

``` There's no need to attach this to the <object> object; there's also no need for this field. Remove them. ```

At this point, I fix it myself and move on.

``` There's no need to use a waitgroup in <method>, or to have that field on <object>. Modify <method> to not use a waitgroup. ```

``` There's no need to run the logic in <object> inside an anonymous function on a goroutine. Remove that; we only need the code inside the for loop. ```

``` Using the <package> package at <path> as an example, add metrics and logging ```

This didn't work for esoteric reasons:

``` On line 122 you're casting ctx to <context>, but that's already its type from this method's parameters. Remove this case and the error handling for when it fails. ```

...but this fixed it though:

``` Assume that ctx here is just like the ctx from <package>, for example it already has a logger. ```

There were some really basic errors in the test code. I thought I would just ask it to fix them:

``` Fix the errors in the test code. ```

That made things worse, so I just told it exactly what I wanted:

``` <field1> and <field2> are integers, just use integers ```

I wouldn't call it a "conversation" per se, but this is essentially what I see Kenton Varda, Simon Willison, et al doing.
by d4rkn0d3z | 2025-07-11 12:58:24+00:00
You come at this from and interesting psychology angle, so I can't tell if you agree, disagree, or something in between.

I think Einstein and GR is a perfect example. He simply did what had previously been unthinkable by making time a dynamic variable subject to transformation. He arrived there by fantastical thinking involving riding light beams and what not. I can go on about Maxwell, etc.. The common theme is not truth-seeking but curating fictions for predictive capacity.

Truth does seem dangerous while fiction seems innocuous and extremely useful.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-07-11 12:58:39+00:00
Your comparison is absurd. We're not talking about small numbers of recent immigrants without citizenship. We're talking about 5 million people (out of only about 14 million living under Israeli sovereignty) whose families have largely been living in the same place for hundreds of years.

They live their entire lives in a country that refuses them citizenship, and they have no other country. They have no rights. They're treated with contempt by the state, which at best just wants them to emigrate. They're subjected to pogroms by Jewish settlers, who are allowed to run wild by the state.

This isn't like you not having French citizenship during your gap year in France. This is the majority of the native population of the country being denied even basic rights. Meanwhile, I could move to Israel and get citizenship almost immediately, simply because of my ethnicity.
by refurb | 2025-07-11 12:58:47+00:00
Valid comment. In general retrospective studies aren't that rigorous, yet researchers love them (usually a quick and easy publication). They aren't easy to do well because controlling for confounding factors isn't easy - even if you think you know what you need to control for, data often isn't available, and even then, how you control for it can drastically change your findings.

Then layer on top the available data. I assume in this study they just tried to create a control group and an intervention group based on gabapentin prescriptions, then tried to see how many had a dementia diagnosis. So many ways the data can mislead! Differences between the control and intervention group when it comes to total exposure to drug, other medical interventions, diagnosis rates, family history, etc, etc. They are basically going in blind.

Retrospective studies can be useful in identifying potential signals. It's what we do for drug safety regularly. But it's not rigorous enough data to start making changes to medical care - you need a more rigorous study to confirm.

But what annoys me is the coverage these studies get. The average reader thinks "oh my god!", when they should think "interesting, but there is a good chance they are seeing a signal that isn't there".

A great example of the impact is the use of hormone replacement in menopausal women. It used to be very common until a study came out showing higher rates of uterine cancer (I believe). Use of hormone replace went way down, plenty of women suffered from menopausal symptoms for a few decades.

Then a massive (160 women) prospective, randomized, controlled study (WHI) were done and it was clear the safety signal wasn't there.
by chillingeffect | 2025-07-11 12:59:12+00:00
You subbed in "ends" for "purpose to is to validate." They're different. Without the seduction of violence and racism, fascism is a much less convincing argument.

Facism is a paranoid carnival that feeds on fear, scapegoating, and blood. That’s the historical record.

Fascism needs violence and racism as tools and moral glue to hold its contradictions together. It’s the myth-making and the permission slip for brutality that gives fascism its visceral pull, not some utopian goal of pure violence, but a promise of restored glory, cleansed nation, purified identity, and the righteous right to crush the other.

Fascism doesn’t chase violence like a dog after a stick. Im fact, it needs violence like a drunk needs a barstool. Strip out the promise of righteous fists and pure-blood fantasies, and the whole racket folds like a bad poker hand. Without the thrill of smashing skulls and blaming ‘the other guy,’ fascism’s just empty uniforms and a lousy flag collection.

Look at Mussolini: all that pomp about the Roman Empire while squads of Blackshirts bashed heads in the streets to keep people terrified and in line. Hitler wrapped his genocidal sadism in pseudo-science, fake grievances, and grand promises of ‘racial purity'...the point was never a coherent plan beyond expansion and domination.
by whatagreatboy | 2025-07-11 12:59:26+00:00
It's kind of true. I only use it for simple stuff that I don't have time for. For example, how to write a simple diagram in tikz. The Ai does the simple and busywork of providing a good enough approximation which I can tweak and get what I want.

For hard questions, I prefer to use my own skills, because AI often regurgitates what I'm already aware. I still ask AI in the off-chance it comes up with something cool, but most often, I have to do it myself.
by anonymars | 2025-07-11 12:59:59+00:00
My take: as long as the thing being described connotes some lower status, change the term all you want and it will still be "uncomfortable"

Negro, black, African American, person of color... it's not the term, it's the implication. Solve the fact that the treatment is that of second-class citizens and there won't be a need to create new terms.

("But that's hard and as an individual I feel powerless so instead I will use a different term I guess." Probably the same phenomenon causing people to direct energy against vaccines more than pollutants and chemicals)

"Disabled", "handicapped", "differently-abled" -- we've never needed to rename "tall", have we?
by mathiaspoint | 2025-07-11 13:00:02+00:00
You probably want to draw curves and polygons then fill them.

It's possible to imagine drawing extra thick lines by modifying the algorithm but the equivalent changes to a curve would leave gaps. I suppose you could figure out how eg boundary paths for beziers are calculated and transform your algorithm so each step draws to the boundary. It seems like more work for something less general than filling though.
by gadgetoid | 2025-07-11 13:00:06+00:00
Agreed. Click-to-select-related-pins is something I've been experimenting with on a cut-down Raspberry Pi Pinout [1]

And code gen is something I'm looking at with the RP2350A pinout [2] where the JSON export would allow someone to plug it into any tool they like. (KiCAD symbol gen, C/MicroPython init code, etc)

It's difficult to strike a balance between features/minimalism but I'm increasingly drawn to the idea of a full (STM32Cube-like if you're familiar with it) configurator for Pico/RP2 based boards.

1. https://pi.pinout.xyz 2. https://rp2350a.pinout.xyz
by analog31 | 2025-07-11 13:00:33+00:00
Yet paradoxically, the user knows instinctively. I know exactly when I'll get my next medical checkup, and when the test results will arrive. I know if a software app improves my work, and what it will cost to get a paid license.

The hard thing is occupations where the quantity of effort is unrelated to the result due to the vast number of confounding factors.
by wslh | 2025-07-11 13:00:53+00:00
Bitcoin (et al) is/are not fully decentralized in the sense that a core development team actively maintains and proposes changes, even minimal ones. While it's true that major updates require broad consensus and may be rejected by nodes if controversial, we should acknowledge that certain points of centralization exist, particularly around development and decision making. These often overlooked aspects now carry more financial consequences, especially as Bitcoin becomes more intertwined with regulated financial instruments and political power.

For example, now, many L2s around Bitcoin are fully depending , and influencing on a future change: enabling again the OP_CAT opcode [1].

[1] https://github.com/sCrypt-Inc/awesome-op-cat
by leshokunin | 2025-07-11 13:03:08+00:00
I’m laughing at the idea of someone there seeing this article.

Organizes a meeting: “we look like clowns”. Technical person explains the package being big. Non technical person asks to remove, hoping for some kind of correction story. Marketing people looped in to maybe come up with a way to float this story.

Fix is evaluated for in a couple of sprints from now. A simpler html page is shipped for the sprint. Everybody high fives about one month from now for the simpler html page.

Non technical manager feels like they delivered something and the org is sluggish but they can get things done.
by mannykannot | 2025-07-11 13:03:20+00:00
While there is no real doubt that most, if not all, of these suicides were a direct consequence of the appalling way this monumental failure and its investigation was handled, reporting the news responsibly has become a minefield in which any deviation from what is strictly known is liable to be exploited by those who do not want their role in events to become public.

As you want to call a spade a spade, can we agree that the software engineer who testified repeatedly under oath that the system worked fine, even as the bug tracker filled up with cases where it didn't, is undoubtedly among those who are morally (if not legally) culpable to a considerable extent?
Show HN: I built a daily, "Family Feud" style game
by hansy | 2025-07-11 13:03:36+00:00
Hey HN, I built a little game to test out a few technologies I wanted to try out. The object of the game is simple: find the most common answers to a prompt.

How it works:

- player first sees a "warmup" question; this is just a prompt for a future date; I collect answers for the question to feed into an LLM to generate the answers for it

- player moves onto actual game, trying to guess the most common answers; every user submission goes to the LLM to determine how similar it is to the predefined buckets/answers

Some interesting learnings while building this:

- the LLMs do a pretty decent first pass (both in creating the answers and judging them), however the last 20% of work is some serious fine-tuning to avoid hallucinations, strange inconsistencies, etc

- the answer creation LLM has a tough job; it has to take the responses and create workable buckets that (a) aren't too broad and (b) are different from each each, which is surprisingly challenging; It employs pair-wise cosine similarity (how similar two vectors points are to each other) and Jaccard similarity (how similar two sets of data are to each other); still lots of work to be done here as I still see buckets that are too encompassing and share sizable overlap with other buckets

- the judging LLM has answer normalization rules (e.g. plural -> singular, strip special characters, handle typos via Levenshtein distance, etc) and matching logic using cosine similarity plus determining if a guess is hypernym or hyponym in relation to the bucket -> we want answers to be more specific (e.g. guess == "truck", bucket == "vehicle" GOOD, guess == "vehicle", bucket == "truck" BAD)

Let me know if you have any questions or feedback!
by simonw | 2025-07-11 13:03:44+00:00
Elon obviously wants Grok to reflect his viewpoints, and has said so multiple times.

I do not think he wants it to openly say "I am now searching for tweets from:elonmusk in order to answer this question". That's plain embarrassing for him.

That's what I meant by "I think there is a good chance this behavior is unintended".
by sksrbWgbfK | 2025-07-11 13:04:22+00:00
Ironically it is still on the front page with a lot of people defending big businesses (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44529061). I do hope they don't mind having to jump through hoops to cancel their subscriptions, or they are part of the propaganda (which could be a real thing nowadays).
by tombennet | 2025-07-11 13:04:25+00:00
Hey, author here. I made this to help technically curious people understand what's really going on when they're handed a Bitcoin seed phrase (i.e. why it's not just a password). You can flip bits of entropy, explore checksum validation, and see how mnemonic phrases are turned into deterministic wallets. Feedback welcome. If anything breaks I’ll fix it fast.
by c0wb0yc0d3r | 2025-07-11 13:04:32+00:00
You need a publicly routable address in the mix. You would need a way of knowing that address.

I have that same feeling with the self hosting I do. To alleviate the small amount of stress it would bring me I rent a VPS that’s public on the internet. I configure a persistent keep alive, on the client I run locally to keep a connection to the server open, no port forwarding needed.
by soulofmischief | 2025-07-11 13:04:33+00:00
In an ideal world maybe, but in the real world, most doctors are conditioned by US propaganda and the War on Drugs. Their views are compromised.

Furthermore, I've had mixed experiences with health professionals. It took me 10 years across multiple clinics and states to get diagnosed with gout that I've had since at least my late teens. Laughed out of multiple doctor's offices because I'm a "healthy young male" even though each day and night was filled with excruciating pain and drastically reduced mobility. "Full test panels" that specifically did not test my uric acid, because no healthy young male has gout.

No mention of gout ever to me, of course. I had to self diagnose as the disease progressed due to lack of treatment. Got my diagnosis confirmed by a physician's assistant, because both doctors at that clinic were on vacation at the same time for like the third time that quarter. He ordered a uric acid test, and was surprised that I'd never been offered one.

Both doctors had literally laughed me out of the office over the previous months. But I was persistent and it turns out the physician's assistant there was both more thorough and more knowledgeable than either doctor, helping me finally begin a path to treatment. I was damn near about to kill myself from a decade of extraordinary pain. From my discussions with older, typical gout sufferers, my case is extraordinarily bad and most of them only experience mild pain.

It's equally as silly to place 100% trust in doctors as it is to place 0% trust in them.
by delichon | 2025-07-11 13:04:41+00:00
It will incentivize the bureaucracy to properly follow the rules around notifying the public about proposed regulations when doing this next time. It's a good thing for regulations to go through that process in order to politically help balance the power of the unitary executive. This rule can and likely will pass again with proper procedure. If you think that this administration has seized powers it should not have, you should appreciate that this ruling upholds at least a minor constraint on it.
by XCabbage | 2025-07-11 13:05:37+00:00
Sorry for your loss.

I agree with your final paragraph, disagree in part with your second, and disagree with your first.

To the second: I don't doubt there's an implication of wrongdoing baked into the etymology of "committed suicide" - after all, suicide is a sin in Christianity and was historically a crime in England, and I imagine when the term first arose there was an intent for it to be condemnatory. But I think modern usage of the term is generally not understood to inherently carry that implication. IMO sometimes, as here, terms become established as first-class citizens in the language, speakers and listeners consequently don't even think about their etymology any more, and consequently the connotations logically implied by their etymology just cease to be salient to the vast majority of people.

(I also don't think the -cide suffix implies wrongdoing. Homicide is not necessarily illegal or wrong, and then of course there are words like "fungicide".)

But in any case if the term is to be eschewed, there are alternatives that avoid the implication of wrongdoing in the word "commit", are already well-established in the language (thus avoiding confusion about meaning) and avoid the new set of distasteful/offensive connotations that "died by suicide has". "Took his/her own life" is one; simply "killed himself/herself" is another. That is - we agree on your third paragraph, even if we disagree on details along the way.

To your first paragraph - I am perplexed. Did you (or anyone else) really just read this term for the first time (whenever you first came across it) and intuitively understand it was simply a new term for "killed themselves"? I struggle to imagine anyone grasping what the term was meant to mean without going to Google to figure out how it was meant to differ from the usual "committed suicide" (or either of the other less common but still well-established terms above); certainly I did not.
by danso | 2025-07-11 13:05:40+00:00
My reply was to someone who asserted "I have never heard of Grok using actual slurs" — no conditions attached — which was surprising to hear b/c Elon Musk's stated goal was to have Grok be a non-woke chatbot, and it seemed much easier to convince Grok to use slurs compared to its other commercial peers.

But yes, I would say I was also "surprised" in the sense that you say because soon after the "MechaHitler" incident, there seemed to be revisions to Grok that clamped down on any prompt with a potential for displaying outright bigotry, so I did not expect my prompt to be successful on first try. Even now, I just asked it to render "a painting of the Seine, by a hypothetical Adolf Hitler who has won WW2 and has gone back to painting" — and halfway through producing a self-portrait of Hitler in Nazi regalia by the Seine, it suddenly shut down.
by pieds | 2025-07-11 13:06:13+00:00
No it wasn't. The question was that if regulation creates more competition with Apple what are the markets with this competition?

European companies compete with US companies, including Apple, in areas where there is competition. In music software, music streaming, engineering and finance software, services and so on.

Apple has around 33% smartphone market share in Europe. Where is the US competition? Google at 3%. The actual competition is non-US in Samsung and Xiaomi. You can argue that Google competes with the Play Store, but then there is no competition with the Play Store on Android from the US.

Big US tech companies don't compete with each other as much as one might think. Most of their revenue comes from dominating one area or platform, with little competition from the rest.

So therefor the common conclusion that Europe should be more like the US to have competition also doesn't make sense as the big US tech companies don't have serious direct competition in the US in their core businesses.

You can't compete with the big tech companies by creating a Google with 3% market share in smartphones to compete with Apple, a Walmart with 6% online retail market share to compete with Amazon, or a Microsoft with 4% search engine market share to compete with Google.
by rwmj | 2025-07-11 13:06:26+00:00
The actual answer to this is terrible. Courts had to trust the computer was correct. There was a common law presumption that a computer was operating correctly unless there is evidence to the contrary (and getting that evidence is basically impossible for the individuals being charged who were post office workers, not computer experts, and the source code was a trade secret).

This might change, partly in response to this case: https://www.gov.uk/government/calls-for-evidence/use-of-evid...

Quite interesting article about this: https://www.counselmagazine.co.uk/articles/the-presumption-t...
by bjelkeman-again | 2025-07-11 13:06:34+00:00
In IT it may be the case. In foodtech it is a problem. This may sound reassuring, as we don’t really want much of the stuff being sold in the US here in the EU. But, for new approaches regarding food production the EU regulatory environment is unfortunately a morass. There are lots of regulation which is neither fact or experience based, for example around insects, or ecological labelling.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-07-11 13:06:37+00:00
> Yes, they existed a long time ago and aren't wasteful as a way to generate "value".

Can you give me a literature reference for such a result, because this claim surprises me.

Of course Merkle trees existed long before - but they are just "cryptographically signed data structures", and thus don't solve the distributed consensus problem.

Of course eCash existed long before - but it depended on some central authority.

Of course distributed consensus algorithms existed long before - but they depended on the fact that all participants are trustable.

Thus, in my opinion Satoshi Nakamoto indeed made a really important scientific contribution for a quite specific algorithmic problem.
by ilitirit | 2025-07-11 13:06:58+00:00
> In that snippet are links to Postgres docs and two blog posts

Yes, that's what a snippet generally is. The generated document from my very basic research prompt is over 300k in length. There are also sources from the official mailing lists, graphile, and various community discussions.

I'm not going to post the entire outout because it is completely beside the point. In my original post, I expliclity asked "What is the qualitative and quantitative nature of relevant workloads?" exactly because it's not clear from the blog post. If, for example, they only started hitting these issues with 10k simultaneous reads/writes, then it's reasonable to assume that many people who don't have such high work loads won't really care.

The ChatGPT snippet was included to show that that's what ChatGPT research told me. Nothing more. I basically typed a 2-line prompt and asked it to include the original article. Anyone who thinks that what I posted is authoritative in any way shouldn't be considering doing this type of work.