MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by constantcrying | 2025-07-23 17:04:48+00:00
> The sad truth is that many of the homeless are out on the streets because they have completely burned through their support network, often due to drug addiction or refusing to be treated for severe mental illness.

Yes, absolutely. Pretending that these people are on the streets because of tough luck and that they can be helped by just putting them in housing is delusional.

Homelessness is almost always the cause of a more severe issue and if you are ignoring that much more severe issue you are at best masking symptoms. A meth addict, with zero non-addicts in his life, is not suddenly going to stop being an addict because he has a place to stay. And his real problem is the meth addiction and not that he has no place to stay.

>I think providing a place to live is only a small piece of the puzzle to solving homelessness.

The much more difficult puzzle pieces are how to deal with the underlying causes. Ignoring these real causes also does not help anyone.
by cookiengineer | 2025-07-23 17:05:04+00:00
Actually my journey was quite similar. I started to build a bindings and web components framework in Pure Go so that I can build user interfaces with webview/webview.

My apps just go:embed all their assets and spawn a local webview as their UI, which is quite nice because client and server use the same schemas and same validations for e.g. web forms and the fetch/REST APIs.

Server-side-rendered components are implemented using a web components graph whose components can be String()ified into HTML.

It's a bit Experimental though, and the API in the components graph might change in the future:

https://github.com/cookiengineer/gooey
by pxc | 2025-07-23 17:05:23+00:00
> I feel like I'm the exact opposite here (despite heavily mistrusting these models in general): if I came to the model to ask it a question, and it decides to do a Google search, it pisses me off as I not only could do that, I did do that, and if that had worked out I wouldn't be bothering to ask the model.

When a model does a single web search and emulates a compressed version of the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, I am disappointed, too. ;)

I usually want the model to perform multiple web searches, do some summarization, refine/adjust search terms, etc. I tend to avoid asking LLMs things that I know I'll find the answer to directly in some upstream official documentation, or a local man page. I've long been and remain a big "RTFM" person; imo it's still both more efficient and more accurate when you know what you're looking for.

But if I'm asking an LLM to write code for me, I usually still enable web search on my query to the LLM, because I don't trust it to "remember" APIs. (I also usually rewrite most or all of the code because I'm particular about style.)
by curious_nile | 2025-07-23 17:05:23+00:00
Hi HN, Abhishek here, co-founder of ProdE.ai

Every team has that one engineer who knows the entire codebase, but they're always buried in requests and meetings.

Today, our AI coding tools (Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot) are the ones needing that engineer's time the most. They're powerful, but when faced with complex multi-repo, microservice environments, they fail completely, hallucinate, and generate garbage code because they lack context.

So, we built ProdE. We think of it as the essential knowledge layer for AI-powered development. It connects to your repos and acts as a 'senior engineer brain' for your tools and your team.

How it works is simple:

1. Connect: You link your GitHub/Bitbucket/GitLab repos. 2. Learn: ProdE analyzes the code, structure, and history to build a persistent knowledge layer. 3. Integrate: ProdE seamlessly plugs into your existing AI tools via MCP. There's no new UI to learn; your current tools just start working better.

We do not train any AI models on your code ever, it is completely proprietary and hosted on GCP with servers exclusively located in USA.

To get your feedback, we're making it free for codebases up to 100k lines of code. For larger projects, the first month is on us. No credit card required.

Right now, we are focused on getting the experience right for Python, TypeScript and C#, with support for other languages on the roadmap based on demand.

We just launched and would love this community's honest feedback. What do you like the most? What did we get wrong? What are we missing?

You can check it out here: https://prode.ai/
by rramadass | 2025-07-23 17:05:45+00:00
I am afraid you have not really understood the mathematical theory and its mapping to programming. Relational Algebra doesn't just mean RDBMS/SQL but is a general algebra where algebraic Operations are defined over mathematical Relations i.e. over a Cartesian Product of one or more Sets.

As a first approximation; a) Type = Set b) Function = subset of Relation (i.e. set of Tuples) obtained from Cartesian Product of {input type set X output type set} c) Logical conditions define new relational sets where its members have a ordering relation d) A Program is a series of functions which prune and transform the tuples from the above cartesian product.
by dustingetz | 2025-07-23 17:05:53+00:00
you can negotiate in advance a buyout at the next fundraise event, like if he raises 2 mil you will get 200k in exchange for the 14. I will note that you should try not to anchor on the safe cap, it’s not an equity valuation, the company FMV is something like $900k even with the revenue, valuing your 15% at 135k which seems about right. The problem with this is the seed investor may not like it but maybe the remaining founder can dilute an extra 200k from angels to arrange the buyout w/o damaging perception of the round? idk, the right lawyer can help here
by alephnerd | 2025-07-23 17:06:06+00:00
> People have the right to be weirdos as long as they're not hurting anyone

That's my point. The symptom (becoming obsessed with virtual relationships) shouldn't be the end goal of remediation. If someone is doing so due to issues in their life, then those need to be solved.

> the whole idea that there's some kind of "special East Asian wisdom" is itself pretty racist.

It's not a comment on "special East Asian wisdom". Social and legal norms in much of Asia is Communitarian and Legalistic in nature.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-07-23 17:06:27+00:00
This depends very much on the soil composition. Some areas might have almost no radon, whereas others do. Here's a high-level view of radon probably by county (WA state), but you can find local maps that show it at the neighborhood level. We looked at the maps when buying our house, had it tested, and radon levels were high so we installed a mitigation system in our garage (which is the bottom level of our house).

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-08/documents/wa...
by techpineapple | 2025-07-23 17:06:28+00:00
So, nothing about my mental model of the world thinks that AI recursively self-improving (limitlessly) is possible but wouldn't a basic sort of math-y version of this be that most improvements AI can find in itself would be linear, but the marginal cost of improvements would be exponential?

I get that none of this stuff is like solid, but recursive self-improvement feels similar to a perpetual motion machine.

Base assumptions about the fundamental nature of the world have changed in the past (I like some of the examples in `sapiens`, even arguing that the idea of being able to improve our environment as a species was not believed for most of history) so I could be wrong, but fast takeoff feels like a fantasy.

I also think about cookie clicker math. A new technological paradigm may give us exponential improvement, but we eventually hit the next exponential. i.e. when you buy a big upgrade in cookie clicker, it can start making your current exponential (say if you're at millions of cookies) really fast, the wheel spins really fast until you hit about 1 billion in which case the wheel slows down to a crawl.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-23 17:06:37+00:00
No one, or at least no significant faction, has ever historically ever been against discrimination. Discrimination is making decisions.

People have been against making certain decisions on specific bases, limiting the acceptable conditions in which discrimiantion on particular bases is permissible, but literally no one has ever been against all discrimination on bases for which they sought limitations.

The change you perceive is entirely a result of you misunderstanding and oversimplifying to the point of utter nonsense the original position.
by 9rx | 2025-07-23 17:07:27+00:00
> Rather, capitalism has progressed at its logical conclusion - turning more and more things into capital.

In actuality, what we really have is feudalism — with us turning more things into land!!!

You can play that silly semantic game all day long, but the reality is that, in practice, intellectual property is not considered to be the same as capital. It has its own set of rules that are unique to it and, especially in the USA, it is considered something extra special in way that is entirely unlike capital. Actions speak louder than words.

Yes, it is capitalism because that's what we've decided to call it, but that is possible because the definition of capitalism has changed over time to accommodate. Take your time machine back in time and tell the people that capitalism is made up of the random ideas you came up with on the spot and they will look at you like you have three heads.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-07-23 17:08:18+00:00
I've found you have to be very careful with LLM as teacher since, especially when it's the one explaining, it is wrong more often then you might think, and there's no way to know.

The best use of an LLM I've found in learning is for when I explain to it my understanding of what I learned and have it critique what I've said. This has greatly reduced the amount of backtracking I need to do as I start to realize I've misunderstand a foundational concept later on when things stop making sense. Often simply having the model response with "Not quite, ..." is enough to make me realize I need to go back and re-read a section.

The other absolute godsend is just being able to take a picture of an equation in a book and ask for some help understanding it notationally. This is especially helpful when going between fields that use different notation (e.g. statistics -> physics)
by Mawr | 2025-07-23 17:08:21+00:00
True, but false. Accidents that you can do nothing about are vanishingly rare. Even the situation you bring up is not one of them. When stopped/stopping you should be checking your mirrors to make sure the car behind you is at least slowing down.

On the other hand, the parent brings up a great example - following distance from the car in front. One of the most basic concepts of operating any vehicle and his wife is apparently incapable of applying it.

The overall point holds - people are irrationally worried about the 0.0000001% edge cases they can do nothing about anyway instead of trying to improve their chances in the 99.999999% of cases where it's their actions that matter.
by tlamponi | 2025-07-23 17:09:21+00:00
If you want to package something from upstream git then you might want to check out https://optimizedbyotto.com/post/debian-packaging-from-git/ it is relatively new and uses a modernish tooling.

The policy manual serves as both ruleset but also explains lots of things w.r.t. packaging, as that's part of the ruleset: https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/index.html#

For actually uploading new packages to the archive you need to be "DD" (Debian Developer), which is a bit more involved process to go through. "DM"s (Debian Maintainer) is easier and can do already lots of things. It's also possible to start out by finding an existing DD that sponsors your upload, i.e. checks your final packaging work and if it looks alright will upload it in your name to the repositories.

You might also check out the wiki of Debian, it's sometimes a bit dated and got lots of info packed in, but can still be valuable if you're willing to work through the outdated bits. E.g.: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMentorsFaq
by lenkite | 2025-07-23 17:09:51+00:00
Because they had a good officer corps producing some ridiculous military geniuses in their age of empire. As an example, the Duke of Wellington (Arthur Wellesley) was a monster who was unstoppable in the military conquest of India. Many other British commanders failed battling Indian states, but he seemed to win just about every battle, at times being both outnumbered and outarmed.

I would go on to say that it wasn't for that man, it is likely the British conquest of India would have been confined to only a limited territory. Indian states were modernizing and militarizing rapidly (relatively for that era), so any delays in conquest would have made India a hard nut to crack.
by autoexec | 2025-07-23 17:10:13+00:00
I'm guessing it's a lot of children and lonely teens. They're already used to installing random apps to play around with while having zero awareness or concern over their privacy or how they can be manipulated and taken advantage of by the apps on their devices. I can see it starting out as curiosity or just mindlessly installing whatever the app store advertised to them and it ending up helping to fill a very real void in their lives.
by soco | 2025-07-23 17:10:33+00:00
Hmm so it seems technology is empowering the individual to the level of killing society? I mean it in the sense that we came to this development over millennia of social fueled evolution, and now technology allows us to get rid of all this "legacy". I'm only thinking loud here, but it seems conservatism should have a better target with this, or at least more close to reality, instead of only attacking the consequences with magical thinking.
by weatherlight | 2025-07-23 17:10:37+00:00
3 out of 5 of all the phone calls you've ever made was managed by a box somewhere running the Erlang VM (BEAM) which Elixir gets all its concurrency and parallelism from.

And no, Discord has not moved away from Elixir. While they have adopted Rust for certain parts of their infrastructure, Elixir remains a core part of their backend, particularly for real-time communication and chat infrastructure.
by subscribed | 2025-07-23 17:10:43+00:00
Except for the last one my friends have ghosted me before rise of the AI Friends Apps.

The remaining.... people from my circle are not friends.

People who I spoke with generally share similar concerns, of the friendships breaking down for no apparent reason, so I'd rather reject the alarmist tone from the article.

The correlation is not causation. For me, at least.
by seanwilson | 2025-07-23 17:10:49+00:00
> Tools like APCA improve contrast modeling, but they still don’t account for halation, ambient light mismatch, or eye strain.

Doesn't APCA advocate a maximum contrast? Best link I could find right now is https://github.com/Myndex/SAPC-APCA/discussions/106 but it lacks explanation. If it doesn't account for the above, any ideas what APCA means by maximum contrast then and why the above was overlooked?
Ask HN: Helping people medically with technology, what is the reality?
by ge96 | 2025-07-23 17:10:50+00:00
So whenever I see someone that is disabled, missing a leg, something like that, I genuinely feel bad for them. I wish I had magic powers and could just heal them you know.

With regard to tech, I know medical stuff has a lot of red tape. What is a realistic way to help people, I also realize some of this tech is advanced/not someone just a person can do.

Background is probably an issue too I could see.

Obvious/easiest is to donate money. But wondering about working in the field and would be the pay be decent.

Specifically about technology like motorized wheelchairs or robotic artificial limbs.
by princevegeta89 | 2025-07-23 17:11:16+00:00
+1 I've explored Atom when it was the hot thing, and more recently, an IDE called Lapce, which is built in Rust and doesn't use Electron. They've been great, but the lack of an ecosystem stares glaringly right at your face. I don't like Electron apps but VSCode gets the job done.

I have my entire set of plugins and things installed here and now the productivity that I get off this setup even exceeded my long-loved Jetbrains IDEs. I hope that will be temporary though, seriously. The only thing that I strictly dislike about VSCode is the number of high quality themes available - and there are not that many.

Recently stumbled upon VSCodium which is a clean VSCode fork that can work with any VSCode plugin, but I am yet to try it out.
by ARandomerDude | 2025-07-23 17:11:37+00:00
I don’t know who the “you people” in that comment refers to. I actually hope we never have another civil war. Historically, you’re much more likely to end up with the French Revolution, the current situation in Syria, etc. than a fresh, bright future. Many would die and everyone would suffer. Those who long for war (foreign or domestic) are evil, foolish, or both.

But my opinion doesn’t change the rationale for the 2nd Amendment.
by shayway | 2025-07-23 17:12:28+00:00
The source paper for both articles is paywalled, so maybe it has a better argument than the articles. But to call it theater or a publicity stunt is to imply it didn't have a point beyond public relations, which isn't the case.

Microbes can't be completely contained - easily, anyway - and we knew that perfectly well back then. But we also knew to minimize contact with potentially infected people. Put it this way: if there were lunar germs that the astronauts took back with them, would it have been better to skip the containment procedures, as inadequate as they may have been? Of course not.

NASA played up their ability to contain extraterrestrial microbes for sure. But the containment procedure itself was the best that could be done. If 'absolute isolation' is the bar to which containment is held, by that logic everything short of just not visiting other celestial bodies is theater.
by librasteve | 2025-07-23 17:12:30+00:00
not sure I hate you :-)

Raku has perl DNA running through it … both languages were authored by Larry Wall and the Raku (perl6 at the time) design process was to take RFAs from the perl community and to weave them together.

I do wonder why you consider Raku to be hollow? Sure it has suffered from a general collapse of the user base and exodus to eg. Python. This has slowed the pace of development, but the language has been in full release since Oct 2015 and continues to have a very skilled core dev team developing and improving.

There are several pretty unique features in Raku - built in Grammars, full on unicode grapheme support (in regexes), lazy evaluation, hyper operators, and so on that work well together.

Maybe unpopular, true. But hollow?
by pxc | 2025-07-23 17:12:32+00:00
For me, the sense of a greater degree of independence and freedom is also important. Especially when the tech world is out of its mind with AI hype, it's difficult to feel the normal tinkerer's joy when I'm playing with some big, proprietary model. The more I can tweak at inference time, the more control I have over the tools in use, the more I can learn about how a model works, and the closer to true open-source the model is, the more I can recover my child-like joy at playing with fun and interesting tech-- even if that tech is also fundamentally flawed or limited, over-hyped, etc.
by inanutshellus | 2025-07-23 17:12:35+00:00
Correct, you're thinking with modern-UI brain.

It's just a page template and the content of the particular page is a long list of images. No javascript to do fancy stuff. Just a collection of backgrounds the dude found.

Actually, this page is already "advanced" for a Geocities site, because the starry night pattern is for the left-gutter next to the site's content, and then there's an easy-on-the-eyes background behind the real content. Normal Geocities would just have one super duper beautiful and impossible-to-read-on background.

(Oh, and you wouldn't /also/ do that cool background on the right side too because... "who knows how to figure out a floating left side border image?! that's basically impossible.") ;)
by sdoering | 2025-07-23 17:12:57+00:00
Yeah, as I mentioned in another comment - I really wish I could have kept that 2014 model. Hands down the best laptop I've ever used.

Unfortunately when we got acquired, we had to return all secondary devices with no buyout option (they used to let us keep older machines, but corporate policy changed that).

These days I'm running an older Lenovo Yoga that's actually holding up pretty well. Since I don't game and stopped doing video work, it covers my needs just fine. Swapped in a 2TB SSD and replaced the battery after about 6 years - can't complain about that longevity.

When this one finally gives up, Framework is definitely on my shortlist. Also planning to grab a mini PC for NAS/home server duties in the next few months - been putting that off way too long.

The repairability aspect of Framework really appeals to me after years of dealing with machines you basically have to replace entirely when something breaks. Seems like a much saner approach.
by chisleu | 2025-07-23 17:12:59+00:00
It's 480B params, not 480GB. The 4 bit version of this is 270GB. I believe it's trained at bf16, so you need over a TB of memory to operate the model at bf16. No one should be trying to replace claude with a quantized 8 bit or 4 bit model. It's simply not possible. Also, this model isn't going to be as versed as Claude at certain libraries and languages. I have something written entirely my claude which uses the Fyne library extensively in golang for UI. Claude knows it inside and out as it's all vibe coded, but the 4 bit Qwen3 coder just hallucinated functions and parameters that don't exist because it wasn't willing to admit it didn't know what it was doing. Definitely don't judge a model by it's quant is all I'm saying.
by rendaw | 2025-07-23 17:13:02+00:00
I tried it for a job interview, and it was awful - because of no static typing. I spent most of my time tracking down dumb type errors, compounded by various language footguns (I can't remember exactly, but I think for example making a typo on a field name in a for loop condition is treated as "condition false" and so the for loop just doesn't do anything, no error).

It seems like the Elixir/Erlang community is aware of this, as is Ruby, but it's a rather large hole they have to dig themselves out of and I didn't feel particularly safe using the tools today.

I've heard a lot of good things about the Erlang runtime and I did really like Elixir's pipe operator, so it was unfortunate.
by tetha | 2025-07-23 17:13:12+00:00
> When we finally got pull-requests, we really felt thrown into the future. It was just great. But after a while I started to miss the direct conversations about code with fellow humans.

Why is this disjoint though?

Our newer colleagues are currently bringing in their first bigger contributions and changes to the config management. We're using short-ish lived feature branches of a week or two with pull requests.

This is good, because I can spend some time understanding what they are doing and I can prepare some ideas and examples for improvements, before we have a call to talk about these changes.

I'm also entirely willing to move my bigger changes into branches and a PR and spend some afternoon with the team to talk about good practices, like structuring commits, naming, ansible code structure, ... and see if other people enjoy that as well. Management wants more stability and broader understanding of our code bases, so moving slower and reading and discussing more code seems up that alley.