MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by qsort | 2025-07-10 17:08:23+00:00
It's really hard to attribute productivity gains/losses to specific technologies or practices, I'm very wary of self-reported anecdotes in any direction precisely because it's so easy to fool ourselves.

I'm not making any claim in either direction, the authors themselves recognize the study's limitations, I'm just trying to say that everyone should have far greater error bars. This technology is the weirdest shit I've seen in my lifetime, making deductions about productivity from anecdotes and dubious benchmarks is basically reading tea leaves.
by ether_at_cpan | 2025-07-10 17:08:39+00:00
In his bio he has the most succinct and accurate description of Perl that I've ever seen:

> Perl is a wonderful language once you get over the fact that a slightly quirky set of syntax and embedded regular expressions have a tendency to make it look like line noise in the wrong light. Once you're used to it, it's a hell of an expressive dynamically typed language with a huge set of libraries and classes available for it.
by less_less | 2025-07-10 17:08:44+00:00
Internally, most signature algorithms use hash functions. RSA-PSS, EdDSA and ML-DSA use them to provide something like randomness, and the security analysis of those signature schemes includes arguments assuming (in some very particular, technical ways) that the hash function outputs "look random".

Classical DSA and ECDSA do not use hash functions this way, but in my opinion they aren't stronger for it: they're basically assuming instead that some other mathematical function "looks random", which seems riskier than assuming that about a hash function. I've heard that the reason for this is to get around Schnorr's patent on doing it with hash functions, which has since expired.

The SHA3 and SHAKE hash functions (underlying e.g. ML-DSA) are explicitly designed to "look random" as well.

There are some signature schemes that try not to make such strong assumptions: in particular SLH-DSA targets properties more like first- and second-preimage resistance, target-collision-resistance, and so on.
by freedomben | 2025-07-10 17:09:07+00:00
Wow, this is a really terrific guide. It's quite long, but it's long because of it's breadth, not because of being overly verbose (IMHO). I particularly appreciate the clear explanations and large number of examples that really help make the concept more concrete. I think this is quite broadly useful even for people that don't work for Red Hat.
by taeric | 2025-07-10 17:09:10+00:00
Yeah, I suspected this likely did not hold up to volume constraints. It may have been the highest volume they could hit with all of the other constraints?

Put differently, give engineering an unsolvable constraint set, expect engineering to drop some constraints. That is a management problem, not an engineering one, necessarily. (Granted, I'm assuming they didn't silently drop said constraints...)
by laurencerowe | 2025-07-10 17:09:37+00:00
> Related: "province" originates from latin used by Romans to described conquered territory. This is the term founders of Canada in 1867 decided to use instead of "state"

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province this is a false etymology:

> In fact, the word province is an ancient term from public law, which means: "office belonging to a magistrate".

"State" is an overloaded term. In British English it usually refers to the top level political entity, e.g. "head of state" unless specifically talking about the US (except for the Secretary of State...)

I wonder if the word choice was influenced by the US civil war ending only a couple of years previously and wanting to make it unambiguous where the centre of power lay.
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-10 17:09:37+00:00
The momentum of the Earth-moon system is 3.61x10^34 kg.m^2/s, of which 80% is the moon orbiting and 20% is the Earth (https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/50502/how-much-of-...).

KE = p^2 / 2m

Energy in the Moon's orbit: 5.7*10^45J

Energy in the Earth's orbit: 4.4*10^42J

So the lower momentum of the Earth (with a square term) and its (much) higher mass (Moon is 1.2% the mass of Earth) make Earth over 1000 times less energetic. So it's just the Moon that matters here.

Assume every joule extracted is coming directly from that budget and the moving water wasn't going to hit Scotland and turn some into heat anyway. 15.9 TW is average human energy usage.

5.7*10^45J / (15.9 TW * 1 year) = 1.14 * 10^25

So if we generated ALL human power from this method and every joule was taken from the Moon's orbital energy that would otherwise not be taken, we can spin the system down in just over a ten million billion billion years.

This is actually a bit more than I expected, though I knew it would be a lot from basic common sense of 80 billion billion tons moving at 1km/s. So maybe I've flubbed a few (tens of) orders of magnitude? In particular, the 1000:1 Moon:Earth energy ratio sounds plausible when I think about it, but it still was a bit of a surprise.

In any case, I think it's OK.

Edit, OK, so that was bunk, the orbital energy is 3.8×10^28J, so we can unbind the moon and donate it to Jupiter in only 65 million years.
by bluGill | 2025-07-10 17:09:43+00:00
it is a prisoner dilemma where the defector controls when the final round is. If you know of a flaw you can win more long term by not exploiting it - but if someone else exploits it bitcoin becomes worthless. Thus if you know of a flaw there is pressure to exploit it first before someone else gets the benifits of defecting and ends the game
by darth_avocado | 2025-07-10 17:10:06+00:00
Have you never worked on projects where the management wants to do things a certain way but you know it’s just plain wrong. The only option sometimes is to let the slow rolling disaster unfold or risk your own job. Obviously this only applies where you aren’t risking people’s lives, but there is an entire subreddit dedicated for this. (r/maliciouscompliance)
by jamiek88 | 2025-07-10 17:10:18+00:00
Social risk is real. You have derailed this by applying it to your different situation but have taken on the emotional offense.

Giving your work business card to your kids is different than writing your number down. Again. For the fourth time.

Do you get it now?

It is social risky whether you like it or not and getting angry and offended on other grown adults behalf, again making it about you when it wasn’t when you don’t even do that.

Also it doesn’t work. He was literally complaining that it doesn’t work. We aren’t talking about you.

And he literally states there is a class list of numbers all parents have anyway! So there we go, does your mom have my number, yes she has all the numbers on the list, well give her my business card because I like to be the nail that gets hammered down.
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-07-10 17:10:22+00:00
I get that feeling too - the underlying tech has plateaued, but now they're brute force trading extra time and compute for better results. I don't know if that scale anything but, at best, linearly. Are we going to end up with 10,000 AI monkeys on 10,000 AI typewriters and a team of a dozen monkeys deciding which one's work they like the most?
by IshKebab | 2025-07-10 17:10:49+00:00
I wonder if the discrepancy is that it felt like it was taking less time because they were having to do less thinking which feels like it is easier and hence faster.

Even so... I still would be really surprised if there wasn't some systematic error here skewing the results, like the developers deliberately picked "easy" tasks that they already knew how to do, so implementing them themselves was particularly fast.

Seems like they authors had about as good methodology as you can get for something like this. It's just really hard to test stuff like this. I've seen studies proving that code comments don't matter for example... are you going to stop writing comments? No.
by megaloblasto | 2025-07-10 17:11:04+00:00
My ideal system involves teaching professors who work at a university, and state run research labs ran by PhDs that collaborate closely with universities, but remain distinct. Argentina has a similar system with CONICET and their public university system.

The support you are talking about with American students I think is a symptom of the cost of higher education in the US. If you are paying $50,000 a year, you're going to expect that the university will do most of the work for you, and honestly, I think that's fair.

Many American students have the attitude of "I paid for the degree, so give it to me", which I cannot fault them for, due to the ridiculous price tag and societal demand to get a bachelors.

In Argentina, on the other hand, where education is free, the attitude among the professors is "if you don't learn this material, you won't pass". I find that very refreshing and more of how an institution of education should actually operate.
I built a AI transcription app because my girlfriend needed one for uni
by ebukao | 2025-07-10 17:11:11+00:00
Last winter, my girlfriend was working on her university thesis and had to transcribe hours of interviews manually. I ended up helping her by running a local model of whisper and months later I decide to build a product out of it. It is a simple AI transcription tool that lets you upload audio or video and get clean, readable transcripts. It works well for thesis interviews, lectures, podcasts — anything spoken.

- Free plan for up to 30 minutes/month. - Supports audio and video files - Speaker Identification and labelling. - AI insight and summary. - Colorful tags to organize and filter your transcript - Upload custom vocabulary to help improve your transcription - Export to formats compatible with research tools like NVivo, Atlas.ti, MAXQDA, R / RStudio and SPSS - Built with privacy in mind (no training on your data) and many other features

The app is available on www.verbatimly.com

I’d love to get your thoughts — whether you're a student, researcher, or just someone who’s had to type out long interviews by hand. Let me know what works, what doesn't, and what would make it better.

Also, we are proudly made in Germany.

Happy to answer questions or help anyone get started!
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-07-10 17:12:15+00:00
For this, English speakers have the phrase "actions speak louder than words". They do things that affect a large number of people and it's reasonable to say those things are more important than the words that come out of their mouth because the guy who punches you in the face 5 times and says sorry each time probably doesn't really mean it. I don't think you're convincing anyone that words aren't important just because liars lie.
by HK-NC | 2025-07-10 17:12:22+00:00
Ive seen the blue sprites while in the mountains above the clouds. If you open an image editor, black background, select paintbrush, electric blue colour, and do a random fast squiggle followed by ctrl+z thats how they look. I only say this because images and video seem to not exist for them yet. Looks like a signature on the sky.
by mehulashah | 2025-07-10 17:12:34+00:00
Cool post. We did a similar evaluation for document segmentation using the DocLayNet benchmark from IBM: https://ds4sd.github.io/icdar23-doclaynet/task/ but on modern document OCR models like Mistral, OpenAI, and Gemini. And what do you know, we found similar performance -- DETR-based segmentation models are about 2x better.

Disclosure: I work for https://aryn.ai/
by qualeed | 2025-07-10 17:12:38+00:00
>Giving your work business card to your kids is different than writing your number down. Again. For the fourth time.

Do you get it now?

You must have skipped over the entire middle of my comment.

>making it about you

It's a conversation on a public forum, I do more or less the same thing, I'm chiming in with my experience, yes.

But this is obviously unproductive. You're right that I'm defensive over it, which is probably a sign for me to step back.

>Also he literally states there is a class list of numbers all parents have anyway!

Side note, but my kids have friends in other classes and I'm not allowed to see those class lists because my kid isn't in the class. I know, I know, I'm making it about me again. But, perhaps there are similar rules elsewhere.
by Apocryphon | 2025-07-10 17:12:40+00:00
I have to wonder if what's happened in the U.S. is something akin to involution [0] where increased scarcity in what were stable middle class environments leads to seemingly endless and fruitless competition. You used to hear stories about how students at Palo Alto High School work like first year investment bankers, leading to high rates of suicide. Seems like that's ubiquitous now.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26027673

"conditions in which a society ceases to progress, and instead starts to stagnate internally. Increased output and competition intensify but yield no clear results or innovative, technological breakthroughs." "more competitive with little corresponding rewards"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10605329
by dogleash | 2025-07-10 17:13:47+00:00
>You guys remember how 5+ years ago, an headline like this on HN would invariably prompt cries from the Americans

I remember it. I'm pretty sure it's always just been the sellouts that work for anti-consumer tech companies (and the wannabes). Sometimes they're rationalizing their career to themselves and us, othertimes they're aware and just saying whatever they think will keep the con running for as long as possible.

One of the things HN serves as is a no-risk place for scrupleless software businesspeople to practice how to swindle nerds with specious arguments.
by taeric | 2025-07-10 17:14:40+00:00
I think a lot of this should have fallen back to liability setting in the laws, then? I feel safe saying cops should not be ticketing people for kids being in the seat wrong. However, I can see your rates going up if you are found to be in violation of some of these rules during an accident?

Sucks, as this isn't as easy as saying it will be your responsibility and fault if the kid is injured. Odds are high this will just make a bad situation worse.
Show HN: I built an AI transcription app because my gf needed one for uni
by ebukao | 2025-07-10 17:14:40+00:00
Last winter, my girlfriend was working on her university thesis and had to transcribe hours of interviews manually. I ended up helping her by running a local model of whisper and months later I decide to build a product out of it. It is a simple AI transcription tool that lets you upload audio or video and get clean, readable transcripts. It works well for thesis interviews, lectures, podcasts — anything spoken. - Free plan for up to 30 minutes/month. - Supports audio and video files - Speaker Identification and labelling. - AI insight and summary. - Colorful tags to organize and filter your transcript - Upload custom vocabulary to help improve your transcription - Export to formats compatible with research tools like NVivo, Atlas.ti, MAXQDA, R / RStudio and SPSS - Built with privacy in mind (no training on your data) and many other features

The app is available on www.verbatimly.com

I’d love to get your thoughts — whether you're a student, researcher, or just someone who’s had to type out long interviews by hand. Let me know what works, what doesn't, and what would make it better.

Also, we are proudly made in Germany.

Happy to answer questions or help anyone get started!
by wmeredith | 2025-07-10 17:15:12+00:00
> and then you spend 80% of the time to get the rest of the 20% done

This was my pr-AI experience anyway, so getting that first chunk of time back is helpful.

Related: One of the better takes I've seen on AI from an experienced developer was, "90% of my skills just became worthless, and the other 10% just became 1,000 times more valuable." There's some hyperbole there, I but I like the gist.
by johnfn | 2025-07-10 17:15:24+00:00
I believe you that it was unintentional (and I'm sorry for implying that it was!), but I still think the carpenter was upset because you implicated him. Just to prove I'm not crazy here, I asked GPT as a neutral third party, which agrees:

https://chatgpt.com/share/686ff4e8-b7f0-800c-9bbf-bdc1e59500...
by encom | 2025-07-10 17:15:46+00:00
>Google Mail is «good enough»

I hadn't really used Gmail or Google products much, until I started at my last job, which was balls deep in the ecosystem. I loathed Gmail. One of the worst email "clients" I've used. After toggling a load of stuff in its settings it was usable, but dealing with email was a low point of my work day.

New job is Microsoft based, so Outlook, and I haven't used that in 20 years, so it will be interesting to see how enshittified it has become. I will have to run Windows on my work pc, which I'm not looking forward to.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-10 17:16:15+00:00
This comes up all the time on HN about terrible, failed software projects, and the same excuses get brought up. "But engineers are forced to build it!" "It's really the Manager's fault!" "It's really the PM's fault!"

The job of an Engineer implies a capacity for technical judgment and willingness to not do something if it's unsafe or doesn't make sense. Even if we're not official, licensed "Professional Engineers," we still need to make these calls and stop projects like this from happening. Whether it's building a ridiculous, unsafe bridge, or building ridiculous, defective software, if the engineer doesn't have the agency to stop it, who does?

Just letting it happen and letting it fail with a "malicious compliance" smirk on our faces is passive aggressive, and doesn't elevate our profession.
by astrobe_ | 2025-07-10 17:16:16+00:00
> No practical program can be written without effects, so they must be in a language somewhere.

Or rather, very few. It is like programming languages that trade Turing-completeness for provability, but worse.

In theory, one could imagine a program that adds 2 matrices in a purely functional manner, and you would have to skip on outputting the result to stay side-effect-free. Yet, it is running on a computer so the program does affect its internal state, notably the RAM in which the result is visible somewhere. One could dump that memory from outside of the program/process itself to get the result of the computation. That would be quite weird, but on the other hand sometimes normal programs do something like that by communicating through shared memory.

It seems that the notion of side effects must be understood relatively to a predefined system, just like in physics. One wouldn't count heat dissipation or power consumption as a side effect of such a program, although side-channel-attackers have a word to say about this.

(from your link:) > Both languages allow mutation but it's up to us to use it appropriately.

This is the crux of the problem. If you add a C example to your Typescript and Scala examples, people will throw you stones for that statement - out of instinct. The intent is to prevent accidental misuse. Mutation is "considered harmful" by some because it can be accidentally misused
by TheAmazingRace | 2025-07-10 17:17:09+00:00
I'm pretty sure I would have figured the usefulness out a long time ago if it truly was going to make a difference. Two decades is plenty of time.

On your comment on how prime numbers helped with WiFi. I say "cool... but I don't have to directly think about it and everything around it just works since it's transparent to me."

Again, some folks might value this for their own reasons, and that is their business. It's not my right or interest to tell people how to spend their money. But the downsides and the externalities of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency make it not worth it for me. I don't want to be my own bank. I want people smarter than me to manage it on my behalf.
by hoerensagen | 2025-07-10 17:17:48+00:00
China ist still adding coal plants but their capacity factor is falling.

In fact Chinas emissions have probably already peaked.

https://www.economist.com/china/2025/05/29/chinas-carbon-emi...

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-put-c...

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants
by chickenzzzzu | 2025-07-10 17:18:32+00:00
i went there on mobile and asked two questions. it went pretty well from a UI and response quality perspective. the data they showed me didn't show any obvious trends, but i suspect it's because i didn't specify a long enough list of technologies, and that some general terms were included like "machine learning" and "llm" which had an effect of hiding the trends i was looking for.

a great start and much more enjoyable than writing the sql or for loops myself :)
by graemep | 2025-07-10 17:19:01+00:00
> My mistake then, doesn't change the point of my remark, as the OP was Indeed asserting any distro.

It was supposed to be hyperbole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole

I took it as obvious that I was excluding specialised distros.

> so I am quite aware of the tweaking that never went away.

What tweaking? People tweak WIndows too.

As the comment further up this thread pointed out, you need to tweak Windows to make it " functional and unobtrusive operating system."
by darth_avocado | 2025-07-10 17:19:44+00:00
Over protection and coddling are definitely a cause of lower social skills. When I was a kid, parents with leave children with a babysitter who was essentially an older child, sometimes just by a couple of years. Other times the kids would just be wandering around by themselves while parents didn’t care until it was dinner time. “Parties” weren’t just alcohol induced sex fests like they show on TV. Often it was 10 kids bunched around a single computer with $5 worth of chips and soda trying to beat a boss fight. A lot of those things are not only frowned upon now, but as a parent, could land you in jail.

If you wonder why children no longer grow up with a different outlook to life, then that’s probably it.
by kenm47 | 2025-07-10 17:20:06+00:00
just want to add that this line from the article "Before passing data to the assistant, scan them for suspicious patterns like imperative verbs, SQL-like fragments, or common injection triggers. This can be implemented as a lightweight wrapper around MCP that intercepts data and flags or strips risky input." is exactly what we're building at maybedont.ai .... it's free and downloadable today. if you're running in to these things, give it a try and get in touch with us (founder here), we'd lvoe all the input.
by Leherenn | 2025-07-10 17:20:15+00:00
They're not really solutions if they're not achievable in practice though. Otherwise why not add nuclear fusion to the mix?

To give some example: Switzerland is roughly electricity neutral over a year, but there's a significant winter/summer imbalance of about 5TWh. To add enough storage to compensate this imbalance, you would need to:

- cover about 2% of the country in batteries

- build about a thousand pump storage stations: despite the Alps covering about 40% of the country, it's not clear if you would have enough valleys to flood

- hydrogen looks a bit more reasonable, if we don't look at the costs, you only need to store a few millions m3 of liquid hydrogen. The gas storage in Germany for instance are quite a bit larger than that, but hydrogen is also significantly harder to store.

And all of this is to use once a year essentially! None of it looks practical or affordable (a pump storage station costs a few billions a piece for instance).