MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by maxbond | 2025-07-22 15:48:21+00:00
> [By] that definition any incorrect answer can be explained by “overfitting to training data”.

No it doesn't, for instance some errors would be caused by under fitting. The data could also be correct but your hyperparameters (such as the learning rate or dropout rate) could cause your model to overfit.

> Where do you draw the line between “overfitting to training data” and “incorrect data” ?

There's no need to draw a line between two explanations that aren't mutually exclusive. They can (as in this case) both be true. Overfitting is the symptom; dirty data is the cause.
by falcor84 | 2025-07-22 15:48:24+00:00
Not the parent, but I understood it as them saying that the model has as part of its training data many conversations that older versions of itself had with people, and many opinion pieces about it. In that sense, ChatGPT learns about itself by analyzing how its "younger self" behaved and was received, not entirely unlike how a human persona/ego is (at least in part) dependent on such historical data.
by Nevermark | 2025-07-22 15:48:56+00:00
I get the common cynical response to new tech, and the reasons for it.

We wish we lived in a world where change was reliably positive for our lives. Often changes are sold that way, but they rarely are.

But when new things introduce dramatic capabilities that former things couldn't match (every chatbot before LLMs), it is as clear of an objective technological advance as has ever happened.

--

Not every technical advance reliably or immediately makes society better.

But whether or when technology improves the human condition is far more likely to be a function of human choices than the bare technology. Outcomes are strongly dependent on the trajectories of who has a technology, when they do, and how they use it. And what would be the realistic (not wished for) outcome of not having or using it.

For instance, even something as corrosive as social media, as it is today, could have existed in strongly constructive forms instead. If society viewed private surveillance, unpermissioned collation across third parties, and weaponizing of dossiers via personalized manipulation of media, increased ad impact and addictive-type responses, as ALL being violations of human rights to privacy and freedom from coercion or manipulation. And worth legally banning.

Ergo, if we want tech to more reliably improve lives, we need to ban obviously perverse human/corporate behaviors and conflicts of interest.

(Not just shade tech. Which despite being a pervasive response, doesn't seem to improve anything.)
by hollerith | 2025-07-22 15:49:05+00:00
The Nix community has a poor record on security and supply-chain integrity in particular [1] whereas Google has a great record on security, and this announcement (of OSS Rebuild) was written by a member of the "Google Open Source Security Team".

[1]: "it means effectively a decision was made for NixOS to be a hobby distro not suitable for any targeted applications or individuals. It really sucks, because I love everything else about nix design. Instead I am forced to bootstrap high security applications using arch and debian toolchains which are worse than nix in every way but supply chain integrity given that all authors directly sign package sources with their personal well verified keys."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36268776
by hotpotat | 2025-07-22 15:49:24+00:00
The author got too big for their britches and was drunk on perceived power. No need to have many parallel agents going on. Focus on one project and implementing features one at a time and dogfooding and testing. Shipping any code, vibed or not, then saying it blew up is not the LLMs fault. I can’t believe I’m saying that. It’s the shipper’s responsibility to make sure it works. Of course if you are a manager and let your junior ship code it will blow up…

And yes I know AI is marketed as more. But it’s still people’s fault for swallowing the PR and shipping crappy code then complaining about the lies. Stop deflecting responsibility for your work
by AlwaysRock | 2025-07-22 15:50:08+00:00
I believe this has been talked about a lot. Musk wasnt thrilled about this change but Tesla is, like it or not, the most recognizable electric car company in America. If you are dead set on going electric you are likely going to at least look at what Tesla has to offer. Because of that, the tax credit going away will impact them far less than other companies that people have to go out of their way to learn about and search for.

Now does a lot of that change because people might not buy teslas because they dont like Elon? Maybe? Who knows.
by gabrielgio | 2025-07-22 15:50:35+00:00
My initial rant to your comment was about this:

> And I don't get why people keep trying to convince me that I do. It's about me, my opinion should have some value, right? :-)

I have no problem whatsoever if you don't like jj or use git or whatever else you like.

Let's paddle back:

- you are in post about jj

- you comment why you don't like jj

- I comment why I like jj

- you post that.

Like, what is your intention here? If you don't have good faith into trying to understand the tooling, how would it fit your workflow and deflects everything with "I know git, git works, don't tell me to use something else" what is your goal here?

My problem is not your opinion on the tool, is how you approach the debate.
by cooper_ganglia | 2025-07-22 15:50:56+00:00
Sure, it was a Democrat president enforcing laws passed by a Democrat-controlled House and Senate in 1990 and 1994, under at least one Democrat president.

There are no real "sides" when it comes to the U.S. and Israel. Every party bends the knee and kisses the wall. It’s one big club, and we’re not in it.
by dangus | 2025-07-22 15:51:07+00:00
I totally get the sentiment but I also see the flip side of it.

I just…don’t have the time. And a lot of lengthy mediocre experiences could really use a summary.

I’m not sure I’m even agreeing with the concept of compression culture being a real thing when we are seeing things like streaming shows with incredibly long runtimes taking over cultural popularity over movies. Something like Stranger Things should really be a movie or movie series rather than a show with 34 hour-long episodes.

I would pay extra money for a compressed cut of some of these media properties.
by csours | 2025-07-22 15:51:10+00:00
Sometimes I imagine that I am a time traveling space alien so I can get a bit of emotional distance from what's going on. I imagine that I can leave this time and place [technically, I am leaving this time and place, but no faster than anyone else].

If I was a time travelling space alien I would find it very funny that the Conservative Republican party is not conservative or republican in any recognizable way.

A party that pushes for a unitary executive cannot be republican.

An executive that carelessly breaks existing government functions cannot be conservative.

If I could say one thing to MAGA and have them hear and understand it, it would be this "Donald Trump is a politician". Understand that he is not a Savior. He is not a hero. He does not care about you any more than any other politician.

There are many ways to understand this administration; here are a couple that I wish people would use more often:

1. MAGA is a cluster of ideologies and special interest groups draped in a flag, wearing a crown. The cluster of ideologies and interest groups are not particularly well aligned. There are at least two distinct genres of America First. You have MAHA vs Corporate Interests. Traditional Hawks vs Isolationists. etc etc.

2. Trump uses psychological manipulation without shame. If your reply is that all politicians do this, see my one message above.

~~~

I've just re-read Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.

There's a lot there, and it's honestly a bit painful right now; one thing I keep thinking about is "God is Change". There's a lot of ways to interpret that, but the one that I keep thinking about is: In an information game, playing the game changes the game.

Political and economic moves change the game of politics and economics. When you plan your moves (IF you plan your moves), consider not only where you are going on the board, but also how the board will look when you get there.
by majormajor | 2025-07-22 15:51:25+00:00
Inflation was low until things opened back up around April 2021 when the vaccines rolled out. See table here: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...

That inflation was in large part a very-predictable bullwhip effect of what happened in 2020 and possibly could've been prevented by supply-side interventions in 2020, but voters were not punishing Trump for it in 2020. He lost votes for appearing generally inept in the face of a pandemic (probably nobody would do better) and in the face of police violence and protests (much of his base felt he should have been much more authoritarian from the federal level even then).
by ranger_danger | 2025-07-22 15:51:35+00:00
> The Internet Archive operates within the law

It most certainly does not. The archive is home to petabytes of pirated content, and Jason Scott himself has told people many times on many different platforms/interviews to intentionally upload copyrighted content, because "if we had to police everything, we would have no content... so upload first, then let the rightsholder deal with requesting takedowns".

All you have to do is click on the "software" link at the top of the page, and you can find just about any copyrighted app or game that has ever been released, on any platform, available to download instantly for free. Besides usenet, it's the largest centralized cache of pirated content on the planet.

It's one thing to claim Section 230 because you are a service provider and you don't control what your users upload, but it's entirely another thing to publicly acknowledge that you're aware that people do it, you encourage them to do it, AND you don't care.

And regarding archive.foo, just because they have many domains doesn't make it illegal... it means they have enemies who are guilty of the Streisand Effect. Enemies who are known to attack registrars, DNS providers, upstream ISPs/hosting providers and anyone else who will entertain a false flag attempt at claiming a ToS violation in order to get a site taken offline.
by qbit42 | 2025-07-22 15:51:36+00:00
I think formal systems like Lean are still extremely interesting. And I would imagine that, if these machines get good at standard "informal" proofs, that the overhead of formalization would be a lot less painful for them than humans (it is pretty tedious these days but even for humans the friction is decreasing).

Verified proofs allow you to collaborate with much less trust (for humans or machines), at least in the phase where you are trying to figure out what is true. They don't guarantee that a proof is insightful for "why" a result is true, but that is much easier to put together once you have a valid proof.
Show HN: Dev-Vault – A secure local vault for your development secrets
by felipevolpatto | 2025-07-22 15:52:13+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been working on a project called Dev-Vault, a tool to help developers manage their secrets and credentials locally in a secure and organized way. I built this because I often found myself struggling with scattered API keys, database passwords, and other sensitive information across different projects.

Dev-Vault allows you to: - Securely store secrets: All your secrets are encrypted and stored locally on your machine. - Organize by project: Keep your secrets organized by project for easy access. - Easy to use: It has a simple and intuitive interface to add, edit, and retrieve secrets.

I'm looking for feedback and suggestions from the community. Let me know what you think!

You can check out the project here: https://github.com/felipevolpatto/dev-vault
by Kurtz79 | 2025-07-22 15:52:33+00:00
I append this to basically every prompt as soon as Claude starts getting frustrated, to preserve my sanity:

"Don't apologize. Don't say I'm right. Don't say it's a good idea. Don't say something is fixed unless I say so. Don't say that the issue is clear now. Don't use emojis. Keep a detached, professional tone and focus on the matter at hand.".

Worth every token.
by Kon5ole | 2025-07-22 15:52:35+00:00
>Question to you. Why do you think Olkiluoto 1&2 took 5 and 7 years to build instead of 18?

I can only speculate, but I suppose two major reasons could be that Europe had several companies that could and did build reactors back then, and that o1 and o2 were much smaller than o3.

O1 and o2 were also built before we knew about things like Chernobyl and 9/11 of course.
by stanleykm | 2025-07-22 15:52:41+00:00
I have never heard the term “compression culture” before, but speaking as a human experiencing the world in 2025 the tendency to compress things is certainly understandable. There is a contradiction or a tension betweem me as a worker and me as a consumer. Both of which have an insatiable apetite for my time. I don’t see how anyone can blame people for demanding brevity when time is the most precious resource we have any autonomy over.
by topaz0 | 2025-07-22 15:52:57+00:00
Worth noting that the essay acknowledges that there are ways that people use this stuff and actually like it. Saying it's a scam is about those uses being orders of magnitude less valuable than the companies involved (and credulous media) claim, and even orders of magnitude less than the amount of money that they are actively investing in this stuff. Saying it's a bubble is not a claim that it will go away entirely and never be seen again, it's a claim that reality will eventually manifest and result in massive upheaval as companies go bankrupt, valuations plummet, and associated downstream effects.
by ThisNameIsTaken | 2025-07-22 15:53:02+00:00
Adding to the list of 'this is what I am using', I have switched both terminal and code editor to Maple Mono[1]. Which, looking at TFA, seems to be somewhat similar in spirit as Atkinson Hyperlegible, although I haven't used that.

Maple has many ligatures, I personally like the hypervisible [TODO]. Overall I find it very legible, even on small sizes, and pleasing also for writing e.g. in Markdown.

[1] https://font.subf.dev/en/ / https://github.com/subframe7536/maple-font
by baalimago | 2025-07-22 15:53:04+00:00
// TODO(<issue-tracker-id>): <Short description>

This format allow for quickly finding the place where the thing needs to be done, while keeping track of the issue in the issue tracker.

I often write the issue tracker ID's in my code to add additional context. It works especially well for bugs which are reproducable in programatic tests. Then I name the test specification after the ticket, so that it's known that this bug doesn't resurface as regression.
by pfortuny | 2025-07-22 15:53:28+00:00
> The thinking used to be that smoking was “almost the only cause of lung cancer,” said Dr. Maria Teresa Landi, a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health.

Well, that tells a lot: overfocusing on a single cause because it is obvious and major. Well, let us hope the medical science learns this lesson.

ETA: not that I blame them, it is a reasonable attitude but not so good in science.
by luckylion | 2025-07-22 15:53:34+00:00
> Leaving a power vacuum, like dismantling the UN, will just open the door for places like China to step in.

The UN has no power, so dismantling it cannot leave a power vacuum. The US abandoning its overseas policies, that'd leave a power vacuum, because the US has power and projects it. But the UN has no power - it's some UN member states that have power.

Case in point: the general assembly demanded Russia withdraw all military forces from Ukraine. But what are they going to do about Russia ignoring that demand? Nothing, they're powerless.
by mandevil | 2025-07-22 15:53:35+00:00
A friend got hired by a defense contractor to be the first developer on a new project! Greenfield developing! It turned out the project was here are 30,000 lines of Fortran77 written by two scientists who got Ph.Ds in Geology in ~1985, please make this do X, Y, and Z.

He left that job a week later. It never went on his resume or LinkedIn.
by crowcroft | 2025-07-22 15:53:39+00:00
Tailwind is just a different way of writing CSS.

UI libraries and websites all end up converging on a common set of ideas because of usability and readability, perhaps you're conflating Tailwind UI libraries with Tailwind itself. Tailwind doesn't inherently force a website to look a certain way any more than flexbox or CSS grids might.

I do agree in that if you're using Tailwind you're unlikely to be reaching deep into the full functionality of CSS for animation etc. but most websites aren't doing that whether they're using Tailwind or not.
by Liftyee | 2025-07-22 15:54:08+00:00
Although I thought the writer put forward an interesting point, ironically it felt like parts of the writing were overly flowery and repetitive. The paragraphs of similar metaphors got old quickly and started to feel GPT-like.

I do think that people's lack of ability to process nuance and our platforms' inability to convey it are real problems though. Not sure what the large scale solution is, but on a personal level I stay skeptical of conclusions that seem "too black/white" - the reality is likely to be somewhere in the middle.
by allthedatas | 2025-07-22 15:54:11+00:00
I also use a tiered strategy and FIXME for things that really need to be fixed or I have a solid idea what the next step would be to fixing it.

TODOs are something less solid than a FIXME and are also just about getting it out of your head so you can devote more mental energy to something else or just relax.

Maybe the idea is not fully formed yet, maybe you are not sure you really want to do it, maybe it is waiting on something else, but it needs to be captured or you will have to keep thinking about it lest you forget.

As soon as I write down a TODO (code or other) that was only in my head, I can relax a little more, because now it's captured for future reference.
by kjksf | 2025-07-22 15:54:27+00:00
I still intellectually can't parse the argument: yeah, we're in debt therefore it's fine to spend on stuff we don't need.

If you're ok with increasing debt to fund UN (and thousand other things) then come out and say so.

BTW: I would love to hear which wars did UN stop?

It seems to me that recently US, not UN, stopped Houthis from bombing ships, stopped India-Pakistan conflict, derailed Iran's nuclear plans and is making progress on Israel-Palestine conflict.

All I hear from UN is pro-palestine, anti-israel virtue signaling and zero action or even a realistic plan to help end those conflicts.
by ilaksh | 2025-07-22 15:54:49+00:00
I didn't say I thought it was objectively righteous. I didn't say anything about my worldview.

It seems objective that many civilians have been killed and a lot of land stolen.

But my point is that things that seem objective to one group of people might be objectively false to another group.

Which isn't to say that there is no real truth. Just that the premises people hold are so different that the worlds are not compatible.
by rdegges | 2025-07-22 15:54:50+00:00
Great article. This may be my all-time favorite deep dive post on RAG strategies.

It’s super interesting to me how the process of fully making audio/video searchable requires so much processing. Like, extracting the audio and video, transcribing the audio, chunking the video into 15-sec scenes and describing them visually, etc.

I wonder if as a test you could use the video descriptions, run them as a prompt through something like Veo, then stitch them together into something close to the original. Wild.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-22 15:54:53+00:00
I disagree, outcome matters more than incentives IMO. Every policy and regulation will create winners and losers. The incentives for doing so matter in they drive which policies get written, but you can't use those incentives to determine if a policy is ultimately good or not.

Back to the british railway example. You are correct that it was there to more efficiently extract wealth (bad). But that does not mean that rails aren't hugely beneficial to the population in general. Roads in the US exist primarily to aid in rapid shipping, that doesn't mean roads are a bad thing because a company like Amazon gets the majority of the benefit.

It's a basically non-existent politician that does something purely out of the goodness of their own hearts. In a democracy, it's the role of the electorate to try and remove politicians from power who refuse to provide benefits to the citizens as a whole.
by 0points | 2025-07-22 15:54:55+00:00
Modern cars should be equipped with a catalysator, making the majority of pollution to be Co2, worsening the global warming.

To some extent heavy metals are being distributed in the air by the wheels in heavily populated areas.

This can be greatly improved by limiting traffic in heavily populated areas. Trump removed such a rule from New York City recently for reasons I can not comprehend.

Many european cities have improved air quality successfully and hence increased life expectancy by limiting car traffic.

The majority of air pollution of particles however, is caused by the industry (the companies making those cars, among others).

In fact, you are a worse polluter of the earth today if you buy a new Tesla than if you kept driving your 1980s gasoline car due to the amount of pollution created by producing a single vehicle.
Show HN: Genesis – A language-agnostic project scaffolder and task runner
by felipevolpatto | 2025-07-22 15:55:00+00:00
Hi HN,

I'd like to share a project I've been working on called Genesis. It's a command-line tool written in Go that aims to unify how developers start and manage projects, regardless of the programming language or framework.

The main motivation was to have a single, consistent interface for common tasks. Instead of juggling npm run, make, rake, or shell scripts for different projects, you can just use genesis run <task>.

Key features: - Project Scaffolding: Initialize new projects from any Git repository that contains a template.toml file. You can create your own templates or use existing ones. - Task Runner: Define and run common tasks like build, test, or lint in a local genesis.toml file. - Language Agnostic: Works with Go, Rust, Python, Node.js, or any other stack. - Single Binary: It's a single, portable binary with no external runtime dependencies.

I just finished the first version and have a roadmap that includes a TUI and a plugin system. I'm looking for feedback from the community on the concept and execution.

You can check out the project and its source code here: https://github.com/felipevolpatto/genesis

Thanks for taking a look
by eapressoandcats | 2025-07-22 15:55:04+00:00
This was less true before Trump’s return. It’s frustrating that people said they wouldn’t support Biden/Harris over this and now instead we get essentially full-throated endorsement of genocide instead.

Like there were always practical limits to how much the US could constrain Israel, especially due to its relative popularity until recently. A bunch of activists didn’t recognize that and tacitly endorsed letting Trump win and now here we are.
by csours | 2025-07-22 15:55:06+00:00
Excuses and explanations can feel the same. I do not intend this to be an excuse, but a partial explanation. Before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, there was a feeling of a possibility of peace in some form; in this context, those laws could be viewed as the stick of a carrot and stick approach.

At this point in time, you can make your own determination about how that has worked out.