MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-07-16 23:09:56+00:00
> There is a very vocal movement these days that is trying to argue that we should do away with the ***traditional*** peer review process. Apparently that sometimes includes trying to redefine the very definition of "peer review" as the OP did. (emphasis my own)

Sorry, but I don't think you have an accurate image. You have it backwards.

"Peer review" is a very new thing. We're talking really about mid 20th century, with this format not really being common until the 70's. If anything, we're trying to return to the earlier version of the system[0].

The older review system didn't have these concepts of acceptance rates, novelty, and all of that. They would mostly publish if your work was void of errors, did not copy others, or was not essentially a small variation of another work and trying to take credit (I'd still consider this plagiarism).

We're fine with having conversations with reviewers, where we view this all as being "on the same team". A team trying to make the work the best work it can be. What we're not fine with is reviewers being set up as adversaries, who are looking for reasons to reject the works. That just creates perverse incentives.

Really, it's all about addressing the question:

What is the point of publishing?

I'd say that the primary goal is to communicate the a work. A secondary goal is to help works be visible. But this form of review cannot validate works and does a bad job at invalidating works. Nor can this form of review determine how impactful a work will be and we have a clear tendency to reject works that end up being highly influential.

We're checking the alignment of our current system with our intended goals. Even if we're wrong, I think it is obtuse to be outright dismissive. Should you not even ask the question? I'd argue that not asking the question is anti-scientific. Science requires challenging the status quo. If we don't, innovation slows to a crawl. You cannot rely on those before you having gotten everything right. Use the advantage of hindsight. Trust, but you must also verify (challenge).

[0] We believe that this is the better formulation. Did it have problems? Yes. Can they all be solved? No. Does a global optima exist where all problems can be solved with a different system? Also no. So the belief is that good intentions trying to solve these problems only ended up creating worse ones. The cure was worse than the poison.

> A 2003 editorial in Nature stated that, in the early 20th century, "the burden of proof was generally on the opponents rather than the proponents of new ideas."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarly_peer_review#History
by MiddleEndian | 2025-07-16 23:10:20+00:00
6" doesn't register as small to me at all lol. The HTC 8X was 4.3" and that was a "normal" sized phone for me.

I used the Palm Phone (PVG100) (3.3" screen) (basically the size of a credit card) [ https://www.ricklohre.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/dsc_097... ] as long as I could until it became too slow to use as software got slower and increasingly battery-hungry and I had to give it up last year.

Right now I have a Soyes S10Max, which has a 3.5" screen (same screen size as the original iPhone), but it's kinda chunky. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRZ47T53?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_...

The specs are more than strong enough to handle whatever I need on a daily basis. But I miss the slimmer size of the Palm Phone.

Right now I've pre-ordered this phone https://aiphor.com/products/bluefox-nx1-4-0-android-smartpho... with the 8gigram+128gig storage capacity. Has an even stronger cpu than the Soyes, but I am slightly worried about the resolution of 540x1168px because some elements may end up overlapping.

Even though it's 4", it has a tiny bezel so it's only slightly bigger than the Palm Phone, although a bit thicker cuz of a bigger battery. But still relatively slim, especially compared to the Soyes.

Front comparison: https://preview.redd.it/dtwnubx05scf1.png?width=3840&format=...

https://preview.redd.it/s2391amd7hbf1.png?width=320&crop=sma...

Will see!
by nwienert | 2025-07-16 23:10:22+00:00
My least favorite type of argument on this site is when someone takes a word with a specific meaning and warps it well beyond the reasonable interpretation just so they can claim they’re making a good analogy. It seems to happen every day here with AI.

Brute force and typical scientific research are such dramatically different things, I have to wonder if bots are getting into HN I almost can’t believe someone would try and argue that’s weird to see the difference.

“Oh you’re using your limbs to move through water? How are you not a dolphin?” lol
by stopachka | 2025-07-16 23:10:32+00:00
> as well as prompts if you're comfortable?

This made me wonder: can I share Claude Code's conversation history? Turns Claude stores them.

So I made a full-stack "snippet" app with Claude and Instant. You can:

1. Upload jsonl files 2. Share them in a nice UI

(Going meta) here's the first conversation I had with Claude in order to build it:

https://claude-code-viewer.vercel.app/view/c4ca91ac-9624-40f...

After I deployed, I asked it to fix the tool use UI:

https://claude-code-viewer.vercel.app/view/faf9b2cc-c3cf-4d0...

I used Instant's auth to gate uploads. Views are public, but limited only to the snippets you know (i.e have links for).

If you want to upload your own conversations:

1. They live in ~/.claude. Head on over and grab a file 2. Go to https://claude-code-viewer.vercel.app and sign up 3. Start uploading : )

Some notes:

* Be careful when sharing log files. Claude can include secrets in there. Some hackers may notice an adminToken in the convo. I rotated it before we pushed.

* It was fun to see Claude use the query language. It thought we had a `$startsWith` modifier. Right now we only have $like. But `$startsWith` is a great idea, we may just implement it real quick!
by pj_mukh | 2025-07-16 23:10:39+00:00
This is a red-herring. No one is suggesting loosening laws on whether a building will stay standing.

The red tape is literally on whether barn owls in Downtown Mountain View will be hurt by an apartment building. This is not a serious consideration and is blatant NIMBY value capture and should be stopped and removed.

What's more, if you don't build that apartment downtown, expect real environmental damage when wild flora and fauna is paved over to build another exurb and highways to connect it all AKA the last 50 years of North American housing policy
by Mawr | 2025-07-16 23:11:28+00:00
> For me, the benefit of languages with manual memory management is the significantly lower memory footprint (speed is no longer an issue; if you think Haskell and Go are good enough, try Java, which is faster).

... what? Speed is no longer an issue? Haskell and Go? ??? How'd we go from manual memory management languages to Haskell and Go and then somehow to Java? Gotta plug that <my favorite language> somehow I guess...

It seems to me you have a deep misunderstanding of performance. If one program is 5% faster than another but at 100x memory cost, that program is not actually more performant. It just traded all possible memory for any and all speed gain. What a horrible tradeoff.

This thinking is typical in Java land [1]. You see: 8% better performance. I see: 28x the memory usage. In other words, had the Rust program been designed with the same insane memory allowance in mind as the Java program, it'd wipe the floor with it.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/java/comments/n75pa0/java_beats_out...
by LucCogZest | 2025-07-16 23:12:21+00:00
We live and work in a world of fragments: notes in one app, PDFs in another, emails, web pages, tasks, meeting agendas—each siloed in its own container. What ties them together? Links.

But not all links are created equal.

We have URLs, app links, deep links—but these are partial, inconsistent, and often fragile. What’s missing is a unifying concept—something that captures what we want links to do across our digital workflows.

That’s where the concept of omni-links comes in. ...
by dylan604 | 2025-07-16 23:13:05+00:00
I don't think what tsunami.gov did is bad. It was an event that requires immediate notifications. They did. It also was quickly de-escalated and updated that it was no longer a threat. Great.

It's the knee jerk reaction to now over-notifying flood warnings in Texas that has me numb now. The entire Texas government should be embarrassed by the whole thing, but I know they are not which makes me even more embarrassed for them. So to look like they are doing something they've overreacted and now made it annoying instead of actually useful.

So, I guess if I had my druthers, I'd replace the Texas government with competent people. Instead, maybe for the better, I'm not in charge and we have gerrymandered elections. I'm avoiding using the word rigged elections to avoid getting lumped in with the 2020 crowd, but when you draw the districts in such a way, what else do you call it?
by int_19h | 2025-07-16 23:13:15+00:00
Three Body Problem is not even remotely close to hard sci-fi. The whole notion of "sophons" is ridiculous, for example, and the more the author tries to explain how it works, the more nonsense it ends up being.

If you want another example of actual hard sci-fi, I would suggest Lem's Tales of Pirx the Pilot. To give an example, I remember it being pretty much the first sci fi book that not only pointed out that laser beams are invisible in vacuum, but actually made it a major plot point of one of the stories.
by lucb1e | 2025-07-16 23:13:25+00:00
Thanks! CT logs do explain it. So it's not actually the DNS entry or vhost, but the sharing of the new domain in a well-known place. That's making a lot more sense to me! I can see how that happens unwittingly though

We also use CT logs at work to discover subdomains that customers forgot about and may host vulnerable software at (if such broad checks are in the scope that the customer contracted us to check)
by porkloin | 2025-07-16 23:14:13+00:00
I grew up in coastal AK and I can't remember more than one time that we faced evacuation orders. We had weekly tests of our tsunami alarm system, but I only ever heard them operated in a non-test that one time. I still keep a close eye on it every time there is an earthquake in the area that triggers a warning because I have family there.

In the last few years there has been a significant uptick in the number of alerts that trigger sirens, orders to evacuate to higher ground, etc. Talking to people back home, it seems like they're "warning-ed out" as you say and are beginning to tune it out.

A 7.3 magnitude quake absolutely can trigger a tsunami big enough to threaten your life, so the NTWC is 100% doing the right thing. I also agree that they need to be careful about perception, and careful about stoking panic. A few years ago, a pedestrian in my home town was struck and killed by a car driving to higher ground during a tsunami warning. There wasn't any tsunami activity that day, but the pedestrian is still dead.

It's impossible to completely attribute the death to the state of alarm/evacuation, but it's not hard to see how a driver and a pedestrian in that situation might be less than completely attentive due to the loud sirens, increased traffic to unusual areas, etc.
by zoklet-enjoyer | 2025-07-16 23:14:24+00:00
It's legal in many US states to ride motorcycles without a helmet. Skydiving is legal. All kinds of legal, risky activity. I can go out and have unprotected sex with anyone willing, as long as no money is involved, and catch and spread numerous diseases. I don't see substance use as any different than other risky behaviors that people lawfully engage in daily.
by godelski | 2025-07-16 23:15:06+00:00
Look at the history of Peer Review. What you see post 1950 is pretty different than what you see prior to that. I think this quote is the best one-liner, though I think everyone should dig much more into the question

> in the early 20th century, "the burden of proof was generally on the opponents rather than the proponents of new ideas.

That is, the reviewers had a higher burden than the authors. The bias is towards acceptance rather than rejection. In a perfect world we could only accept good papers and could reject bad papers, but we don't live in that world. So the question is "when we fail, which way do we want to fail?" Obviously, I'm on the side of Blackstone here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarly_peer_review#History
by int_19h | 2025-07-16 23:17:07+00:00
I don't remember which book it was in, exactly, but there is a conversation at one point with a Culture guy who is waiting tables, including cleaning them. He explains that a lot of humans actually do this kind of stuff, or, say, constructing spaceships, as a background from their "real" job-hobby (which is usually research or art) simply because completing things makes them happier, while cheerfully acknowledging that none of human labor in Culture is meaningful in the sense that it couldn't be done better and faster by machines. But it's still meaningful in a sense of giving people meaning.
by derefr | 2025-07-16 23:17:17+00:00
FYI: the pinch-to-zoom gesture from mobile browsers (from before websites were mobile-responsive) has also long been implemented for all modern desktop browsers. It's viewport zoom, which is far better than the font-scaling zoom you get by pressing Cmd-+, and makes this site easily readable.

(The much-less-well-known mobile double-tap-on-text gesture [it zooms-to-fit whatever element you tapped on to the width of the viewport] was also ported to desktop browsers. Though, on desktop with a touchpad, it's a two-finger double-tap — which I don't think anyone would ever even think to try.)
by gerdesj | 2025-07-16 23:17:20+00:00
If you think you can pontificate on DNS then I think you should be running your own service.

Note how root "." just works and has done for decades - that's proper engineering and actually way more complicated than running 1.1.1.1. What 1.1.1.1 suffers from is anycast and not DNS.

Cloudflare (and Google and co) insist on using one or more "vanity" IP addresses - that is very unfair of me but that it what it is, and to make it work, they have to use anycast.

The real issue is fixing anycast and not DNS.

Anyway, select two+ providers and set them.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-16 23:19:15+00:00
> the time component of the zoning, permitting etc is very costly due to how real estate projects are funded and evaluated

How is this not part of the cost of permitting and zoning! If you took those processes out, those financing costs wouldn’t exist.

Last time I did the math, San Francisco’s permitting process financed at going rates meant a price floor of over half a million dollars for an apartment. That’s before we’ve even built anything.
by zzo38computer | 2025-07-16 23:20:30+00:00
> I think Gemini is a step in the right direction for some things.

I also think so, although I have criticisms of it too (e.g. mandatory TLS; I think optional (except files that require authentication for access) would be better), but nevertheless it can be used.

> I usually mention my "tersenet" ideas when I see Gemini

I have seen TerseNet, and I mentioned it in my "small web" document. I think it is good that media and programs are not loaded automatically, although there are other problems with TerseNet in my opinion, such as text being limited to 5K.

> I think there is room for things like media and applications even on an idealized web. But they should not necessarily be combined along with information browsing and search into one thing.

I agree, it is helpful, and they should be separated.

I also made up a protocol and file format specification, in order to deal with the criticisms of the other ones. In addition to avoiding many things, there is also adding things which would be useful, beyond what WWW and others might do. So, it is not strictly a subset of the functions of WWW, even though many things are deliberately avoided.
by khurs | 2025-07-16 23:20:46+00:00
>No major player wants a smaller screen because it has downstream impacts on the pipeline of addictive material and ad pixels they can stuff into ocular nerves.

There are lots of phone manufacturers who have no ads business. They just make phones so why would they care?

Size is dictated by trouser pocket size/handbag size and usage. Editing photos and movies to upload onto social media is probably better on a big screen.

Also screen size is dictated by common panel sizes, as low volume will mean a higher price.

Folding screens and iPad Mini's existence suggests people want larger screen real estate.
by Nickste | 2025-07-16 23:21:36+00:00
Mike is doing an incredible job of finding ways to make it harder for attackers to abuse PyPI (see the PyPI quarantine project). At Safety (previously PyUp) we've been tracking a significant increase in malicious packages that compromise you as soon as you install them. We've extended our open-source CLI tool with a "Firewall" capability that aims to protect against some of these kinds of attacks (typosquatting, slopsquatting) while not requiring any changes to the tooling you use (e.g. pip, uv, poetry).

You can check it out with: pip install safety && safety init
by napowderly | 2025-07-16 23:22:15+00:00
Fair enough! We definitely need a better landing page, we are just coming out of a long period of building, will all be getting some much needed polish soon!

Here is one of our more recent demo projects you can check out that shows how a larger project is structured: https://github.com/atopile/nonos/blob/main/elec/src/nonos.at...

And an example of modeling a component: https://github.com/atopile/packages/tree/main/packages/archi...
by kensey | 2025-07-16 23:22:16+00:00
> I wish I could hammer one thing through the skull of every "AI SAFETY ISNT REAL" moron: if you only start thinking about AI safety after AI becomes capable of causing an extinction level safety incident, it's going to be a little too late.

How about waiting till after "AI" becomes capable of doing... anything even remotely resembling that, or displaying anything like actual volition?

"AI safety" consists of the same thing all industrial safety does: not putting a nondeterministic process in charge of life- or safety-critical systems, and only putting other automated systems in charge with appropriate interlocks, redundancy, and failsafes. It's the exact same thing it was when everybody was doing "machine learning" (and before that, "intelligent systems", and before that some other buzzword that anthropomorphized machines...) and not being cultishly weird about statistical text generators. It's the kind of thing OSHA, NTSB and the FAA (among others) do every day, not some semi-mystical religion built around detecting intent in a thing that can't actually intend anything.

If you want actual "AI safety", fund public safety agencies like NHTSA and the CPSC, not weird Silicon Valley cults.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-16 23:22:24+00:00
It's hard to get a solid grasp on what Apple pays for ARM, since their licensing is all conducted behind closed doors. It's worth noting that ARM (the ISA technology) is owned by SoftBank, a holding firm which Apple has invested in quite heavily. Some reports claim that they pay as little as $0.30 a chip: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-pays-arm-less-than-3...

x86 licensing costs are complicated. The basic old 16-bit architecture is very well-documented, and while it's proprietary it's still implemented in hundreds of products and clones. Modern 32-bit and 64-bit implementations have a lot more ISA extensions that would be costly to license and hard to develop on your own. As a result, modern x86 designs can really only be made by licensing Intel or AMD technology.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-07-16 23:23:03+00:00
The carrying cost of land is very low compared to any overall project.

The issue is that extended timelines drive down the IRR and add risk which is not the same as being expensive to carry.

> All of the local large projects around me are expensive because of massive amounts of red tape

This just isn’t true. There are projects that could be happening but aren’t because of red tape, but no, a project that’s happening is spending a tiny portion of its capital on red tape.
by 1718627440 | 2025-07-16 23:24:08+00:00
> just think of Gmail

>> How would that look like?

I wouldn't describe it as a hack, it uses the references in the messages themselves, as long as they are accurate it will work perfectly. This is the same way, Thunderbird knows if you have replied/forwarded messages.

> you actually see your own response

I do see the response, why wouldn't I that's what the feature is for. Not sure if there is a bug for you.
by zulko | 2025-07-16 23:24:10+00:00
This used to be one of my main hobbies, I listened to thousands of these and I am super grateful to the people scanning and hosting these collections.

Some software I wrote for piano roll analysis and transcription:

- Unroll: https://zulko.github.io/unroll-online/ - upload a piano roll midi file and have it quantized and converted to lilypond sheet music. More about the process in this blog: https://zulko.github.io/blog/2014/02/12/transcribing-piano-r...

- Pianola: https://zulko.github.io/pianola/ - upload a piano roll midi file, and it plays with the piano roll and keyboard animation (you can zoom on some parts, slow down etc).

Some transcriptions made with these tools:

- Hindustan: https://github.com/Zulko/sheet-music--hindustan

- Gershwin - Sweet and Lowdown: https://github.com/Zulko/sheet-music--Gershwin-sweet-and-low...

- Gershwin - Limehouse Nights: https://github.com/Zulko/-sheet-music--Gerhswin-Limehouse-Ni...
by int_19h | 2025-07-16 23:25:44+00:00
Since we're talking about cyberpunk specifically here, the Vinge recommendation that needs to be at the top of that list is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names. As literary quality goes, it's not as good as his later works, but it's still written by a computer scientist who clearly understands and loves what he does - not just as technology, but also as culture - and it shows. Features ARPANET, VR cyberspace, and hackers ("warlocks") vs NSA.
by jmyeet | 2025-07-16 23:26:52+00:00
Well that's one interpretation of those charts. Here's another:

Real income has barely increased since 1980, as in 10% or less.

You may look at that and say well that's good because it's real income but it isn't. There are substitution issues with CPI. The housing component is lagging, relies on "in-place" rent and doesn't really reflect quality or size or housing affordability (just rents).

Look at other measures, like homelessness increasing 18% in 2024, consumer confidence and how for the last 20 years people have flocked to any political candidate that promises meaningful change, from Obama to Bernie to Trump to Zohran.

HN in particular and tech in general is a bubble. It insulates you to a large degree from the median experience. We are profoundly privileged. But privilege convinces some that everything is meritocracy when each of us is profoundly fortunate to be where we are (eg being born in a Western country, having a relatively stable family life, having access to education, speaking English and so on).

It's why the ZIP code you were born in is possibly the biggest predictor of your success [1].

[1]: https://www.lisc.org/our-resources/resource/opportunity-atla...
by stopachka | 2025-07-16 23:27:04+00:00
It has been really interesting to see how non-technical people use agents. My girlfriend shipped a full-stack on the app store [1]. She was only familiar with basic HTML. Now she's building out an inspiration tracker that has file uploads, weekly todos, search, categories.

There's a lot more ideas and people who would love to put in effort to give to the world, then there are expert programmers to build them.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/go-deeper/id6745434359