MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by david-gpu | 2025-07-09 12:08:52+00:00
A denser-than-air vehicle that could equal or exceed bird flight --sometines called an airplane-- is for mathematical reasons impossible, for two specific reasons:

1. Bird flight is a capability of a complex dynamic system -- the bird's musculoskeletal system and its brain.

2. Systems of these sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a machine.
by rijoja | 2025-07-09 12:08:56+00:00
Yes that is very true but social science is more of a social practice than computer science

If you run your organization badly, you'll run into problems sooner, than if you are in social science, where you just have to say all the buzzwords and they'll just rubberstamp you true

If you are arguing that my point is that computer science would be 100% falsifiable and social science is 0% falsifiable then you're argument is a bit of a straw man
by JohnMakin | 2025-07-09 12:09:03+00:00
This is the appropriate view, but the market’s gone all in on hype so we must deal with the consequences when the hype doesnt deliver. It was the same for me with the blockchain/web3 hype craze - I saw interesting game changing applications but nothing anywhere near what the market was going nuts for. the funniest thing is that hype train seamlessly transitioned to “AGI” without batting an eye or an ounce of shame.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-09 12:09:14+00:00
HTTP/JSON API works too, but you can assume it's what they mean by REST.

It makes me wish we stuck with XML based stuff, it had proper standards, strictly enforced by libraries that get confused by things not following the standards. HTTP/JSON APIs are often hand-made and hand-read, NIH syndrone running rampant because it's perceived to be so simple and straightforward. To the point of "we don't need a spec, you can just see the response yourself, right?". At least that was the state ~2012, nowadays they use an OpenAPI spec but it's often incomplete, regardless of whether it's handmade (in which case people don't know everything they have to fill in) or generated (in which case the generators will often have limitations and MAYBE support for some custom comments that can fill in the gaps).
by Gormo | 2025-07-09 12:09:20+00:00
> HTTP 200 status with an error in JSON is used instead of HTTP status codes

I've seen some APIs that not only always return a 200 code, but will include a response in the JSON that itself indicates whether the HTTP request was successfully received, not whether the operation was successfully completed.

Building usable error handling with that kind of response is a real pain: there's no single identifier that indicates success/failure status, so we had to build our own lookup table of granular responses specific to each operation.
by brap | 2025-07-09 12:09:28+00:00
So what I got from this article was:

1. They train on website data without permission

2. They require a lot of electricity

3. Kids use them to cheat on homework

And honestly this is where I stopped reading. I’m the biggest AI hater but none of these are good arguments against AI (I would argue that #3 is actually an argument for AI). If this is what you’re leading with then I’m not particularly interested in reading the rest.
by _heimdall | 2025-07-09 12:09:46+00:00
While I agree the model is a huge compressed database of written human text, I think its a stretch to call much of what was scrape off the internet as knowledge and I don't personally see it as using language as a query language.

I expect a query language to be deterministic, and I expect the other end of the query to only return data that actually exists. LLMs are neither of those, so to me they are impressive natural language engines but they aren't ready a tool for querying human knowledge.
by timmg | 2025-07-09 12:10:06+00:00
> The priorities are mutually exclusive: delegating scene data conversion to in-camera engine grants you the most simplicity and ease of use at the expense of control; the territory of technical details grants you the most ability to make the photos looks the way you want at the expense of simplicity.

The camera makes all those decisions even when shooting raw -- and there are stored in the raw file. So, by default, processing a raw file witout doing any tweaks will get you the jpeg you would have gotten.

My camera (Nikon) -- and I assume the others -- will even store both the RAW and the JPEG, so you don't even have to go through the automatic conversion step if you don't want to.
by sneak | 2025-07-09 12:10:25+00:00
1. He did it non-anonymously as a form of activism, which seems like an obvious bias toward martyrdom. An argument can be made that he chose fame over effectiveness, just like Assange did.

2. We don’t know if he would have gotten away with it or not. Mental illness killed him via suicide, not the federal indictment.

There are several EXTREMELY large pirate libraries in operation presently that anyone can use. They are actively getting away with it, likely because they are explicitly staying anonymous.
by pydry | 2025-07-09 12:10:47+00:00
This hype cycle is definitely more like the original hype cycle of the internet in the late 90s - back when "the high street was going to disappear", "we'd all be hanging out in VR" or that it would "democratize" well, anything.

Clearly a lot did change but most of the bolder predictions still ended up not coming true.
by jiggawatts | 2025-07-09 12:11:05+00:00
This kind of argument is nonsense. It boils down to: "This previously solved problem is unsolvable."

The previous solution is a biological brain, and the future solutions are mechanical, but that doesn't matter. Even if it did, such arguments involve little more than waving one's hands about and claiming that there's some poorly specified fundamental difference.

There isn't.
by Devilspawn6666 | 2025-07-09 12:11:09+00:00
In a non-interactive case, what is supposed to be reading a response and deciding which links to do some something with or what to do with them?

Let's say you've got a non-interactive program to get daily market close prices. A response returns a link labelled "foobarxyz", which is completely different to what the API returned yesterday and the day before.

How is your program supposed to magically know what to do? (without your input/interaction)
by eadmund | 2025-07-09 12:11:47+00:00
> This is more like people arguing over "proper" English, the point of language is to communicate ideas.

ur s0 rait, eye d0nt nnno wy ne1 b0dderz tu b3 "proppr"!!!!1!!

</sarcasm>

You are correct that communication is the point. Words do communicate a message. So too does disrespect for propriety: it communicates the message that the person who is ignorant or disrespectful of proper language is either uneducated or immature, and that in turn implies that such a person’s statements and opinions should be discounted if not ignored entirely.

Words and terms mean things. The term ‘REST’ was coined to mean something. I contend that the thing ‘REST’ originally denoted is a valuable thing to discuss, and a valuable thing to employ (I could be wrong, but how easy will it be for us to debate that if we can’t even agree on a term for the thing?).

It’s similar to the ironic use of the word ‘literally.’ The word has a useful meaning, there is already the word ‘figuratively’ which can be used to mean ‘not literally’ and a good replacement for the proper meaning of ‘literally’ doesn’t spring to mind: misusing it just decreases clarity and hinders communication.

> If my API is supposed to rely on content-type, how many different representations do I need? JSON is a given anymore, and maybe XML, but why not plain text, why not PDF?

Whether something is JSON or XML is independent of the representation — they are serialisations (or encodings) of a representation. E.g. {"type": "foo","id":1}, <foo id="1"/>, <foo><id>1</id></foo> and (foo (id 1)) all encode the same representation.
by dbspin | 2025-07-09 12:11:52+00:00
What would prevent an embodied AI - i.e.: some kind of deep learning system operating a robot full of sensors from representing such a 'complex dynamic system'?

And if the answer is nothing - what would prevent such an dynamic system from being emulated? If the answer is real time data, this can be fed into the 'world model' of the emulation in numerous ways.
by brudgers | 2025-07-09 12:12:08+00:00
What’s a fair exit package in this situation?

What is fair is to be open with your cofounder and investors.

Should I just keep the vested equity?

Should the other stockholders just dilute your holdings?

Is a cash buyout common or appropriate?

Probably less common that telling you to pound sand. Cash is the life blood of a company and giving you cash is very damaging to the startup.

To put it another way, you need to negotiate. To negotiate you need to care about the interests of the other people and in the case of a startup recognize that the vast majority of the work is in the future. And that there is no value in sunk costs. Good luck.
by smcl | 2025-07-09 12:12:09+00:00
I think what they're saying is that the whole "This is going to solve everything" hype around LLMs is a bubble. I think it's undeniable LLM technology will persist in some form as it definitely has uses. But I don't think it will be the trillion-dollar industry that is being touted, I don't think many of these companies will survive on their own without being swallowed up by some bigger FAANG entity (heavily dependent, as they are, on VC funding)
by linuxscooter | 2025-07-09 12:12:35+00:00
This is me also.

I know if I leet code ground myself into the dirt, I’d get better, and more importantly: faster.

But there’s never been any payoff to me full-time coding.. not when the pay is close to coding, and my role wants me to address test tech debt or Nice To Haves tooling, and (until Go) I had to do my 9-5 work in a scripting language…

There’s now more days behind me than ahead, and I no longer want to understand low level details and theories about the kernel or TTY.

All progress is built on abstraction. It has to be.
Show HN: I built a comprehensive French city directory
by toutoulliou | 2025-07-09 12:13:01+00:00
After 6 months of coding and data processing, I created a comprehensive directory for French cities and local businesses. The site aggregates data from OpenStreetMap and government sources to provide detailed information about local services, shops, and administrative offices across all French communes.

Key features: - Search by city name or postal code with geolocation - Detailed business listings with opening hours, contact info, and accessibility - Interactive maps showing local services - Categorized browsing (shops, restaurants, public services, etc.) - Real-time search with autocomplete -Mobile-responsive design

The platform currently covers over 35,000 French communes with verified business information. All data is sourced from open government datasets and OpenStreetMap, ensuring accuracy and regular updates. I built this to solve the problem of finding reliable local business information in France, where many existing directories are outdated or incomplete. The goal is to provide a single, comprehensive resource for local information.

Tech stack: Django, PostgreSQL, OpenStreetMap API, government data APIs, and modern frontend with HTMX for dynamic interactions.

Would love feedback on the user experience and suggestions for additional features!
by mattmaroon | 2025-07-09 12:13:16+00:00
Well, you can’t get to a GPS using Newtonian physics alone because of gravitational time dilation. The clock in space runs at a different speed than the clock on earth.

If they tried, scientists could perhaps have come up with some sort of fudge factor (like what I think they do with dark matter) and made it work, sure. But it would have been really confusing to them when they figured out that all the clocks in space run at a different speed than the same clocks on earth.

Relativity plays a big role in astronomy too. One of the big questions in physics in Einstein’s day was why the planets didn’t appear exactly where you expected given Newtonian laws. Becoming spacefaring without general relativity would have been difficult.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-09 12:13:50+00:00
Yes, unless they are 100% under international standards, or 100% open source, they are subject to export restrictions from the overloads contributors, as per the countries their headquarters are located on.

Some examples,

https://www.java.com/en/download/help/error_embargoed.html

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/nuget-org/policies/e...
by simonw | 2025-07-09 12:13:51+00:00
Author's conclusion here is pretty much where I'm at too:

> In the end, I see AI for what it is: a powerful but limited tool—not a revolution, not a replacement for human thinking, and definitely not something worth worshipping.

How much of a "revolution" it is depends on your field though. I think computer programming is still the field that is most impacted by potential productivity improvements from these tools.
by neallindsay | 2025-07-09 12:13:57+00:00
Ruby has been extremely slow and deliberate in rolling out frozen string literals. They added a magic comment to opt in to them on a per-file basis all the way back in Ruby 2.3—almost a decade ago.

https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2015/12/25/ruby-2-3-0-rele...

Most linting setups I've seen since then have required this line. I don’t expect many libraries to run afoul of this, and this warning setting will make finding them easy and safe. This will be nothing like the headache Python users faced transitioning to 3.
by jiggawatts | 2025-07-09 12:13:58+00:00
> Chatbots make you type whole sentences

I've noticed that I've solved quite a few problems simply by being forced to spell out the precise problem statement to an AI bot. I knew the answer as soon as I had finished typing the question out in full, and watching the AI confirm my suspicions was superfluous but gratifying.

I also now feel guilty for not providing the same level of detail to other people that I've tasked with something.
by rob | 2025-07-09 12:14:08+00:00
It doesn't, which is why all these solutions breakdown long-term compared to things like WP for small biz brochure stuff. 5 to 10 years from now when you're no longer talking to your client who has absolutely no technical experience, they're not gonna know that their website code is in some random GitHub repository that needs to be compiled with vite and then you need to magically wait for Netlify/etc to pull in your changes. They'll probably be fuming they have to find a developer that knows how to edit and manage that compared to something like WordPress which is used for the majority of those websites.
by codingdave | 2025-07-09 12:14:25+00:00
The instructions are not immediately obvious, and even when I found them, they were unclear. I didn't even try typing anything because the instructions were missing the basic premise of what you were trying to accomplish. Are you making up words that fit? Trying to guess pre-conceived words? Why is there a score? Is there some goal we are trying to achieve? I couldn't tell. So I just closed the page.
by homebrewer | 2025-07-09 12:14:26+00:00
How much of that is due to the difference in the amount of attention paid to each code base, do you reckon? If you're a security researcher, spending months of work on a browser with market share of more than 90% makes a lot more sense than on a browser with a market share of 2%, unless you're going after a specific individual who you know for sure uses that specific browser.
by JCM9 | 2025-07-09 12:14:33+00:00
The problem with this picture though is you’re spending 10 grand a month on a product someone else is losing 10 grand a month selling you. It’s beginning to look like a house of cards. The finances of many of these companies are on shaky grounds and they claim “profit” without accounting for the true costs of what they’re doing (eg not counting model training in the COGS when the useful life of a model in 2025 is very limited). When investors realize the returns won’t be there and shut off the free cash taps the party will be over.
by monsieurbanana | 2025-07-09 12:14:58+00:00
Because they want to control as much of the market as possible, everyone and their dog is using LLMs for work and mails and groceries.

That doesn't change their usefulness, if tomorrow they all increase the price x10 it will remain useful for many use cases. Not to mention than in a year or two the costs might go down an order of magnitude for the same accuracy.
by arp242 | 2025-07-09 12:15:23+00:00
If being able to create files and symlinks to them is a pre-condition for this, then it's not a serious security bug. If you have that kind of access then there are a million nefarious things you can do.

This is almost becoming a joke at this point, "assuming an attacker has access to the system, they can change things on the system".
by akkad33 | 2025-07-09 12:15:43+00:00
To me it's just a new way of representing information that makes information on the web easily accessible to people. So in a way it's a breakthrough just like Google was a breakthrough. Google's pagerank represented the web as a graph and you could easily go to related pages. Gpts embed concepts in a high dimensional space and there are links between them that makes it easy to query this knowledge représentation. So I don't think it will replace humans so much as disrupt the knowledge industry just like Google
by b112 | 2025-07-09 12:15:43+00:00
You must have experienced the last few decades differently than I have.

I've seen crash after crash, all softened with taxpayer bailouts, and economic recovery within a couple of years. Often, to "booming" economies, which just means "compared to during the crash".

Should your crash come to pass, it will be another part of the news cycle, 4% to 8% of people will be out of work for a few months to a year, and nothing will happen to the companies responsible.

In fact, they'll get bonuses for pre-crash performance.

This is how history has played out for decades.
by derdi | 2025-07-09 12:15:49+00:00
> Anybody who has tried to verify addresses

Why would one try to "verify" addresses that one knows nothing about?

> because the mailman "just knows"

The mailman does "just know", and the mailman is who the address is for. Web forms I have seen that have tried to "verify" my address have never done so in a way that made the address better for the mailman.

EDIT: I've long thought that web forms should not have separate "street", "street line 2", "number", "apartment", "whatever" fields. Instead they should offer a multi-line input field labeled "this will go straight on the address label, write whatever you like but it's your problem if it doesn't arrive". You'd probably still need separate fields for town/postcode for calculating postage. And of course it wouldn't work because the downstream delivery company would also insist on something it can "verify".
by nchmy | 2025-07-09 12:15:51+00:00
Why does "your program" need to know anything? The whole point of hypermedia is that there isn't any "program" other than the web browser that agnostically renders whatever html it receives. If the (backend) "program" development team decides that a foobarxyz link should be returned, then that's what is correct.

I suspect that your misunderstanding is because you're still looking at REST as a crud api, rather than what it actually is. That was the point of this article, though it was too technical.

https://htmx.org/essays is a good introduction to these things
by galangalalgol | 2025-07-09 12:16:31+00:00
It is tangentially related in that yaml became normal to use as a DSL within the devops world. As another post said, everything becomes a DSL eventually because people want to be "fully configurable" not realizing that is roughly the same thing as not being complete yet. But in this case the lack of direct acknowledgement of yaml as an interpreted language with an interpreter that doesn't think of itself as such and hence doesn't have a real sandbox, is what leads us to the present. People didn't use xml as a DSL as often because it was so flexible. That would be like using c++ as a DSL instead to write the interpreter for one.
by moconnor | 2025-07-09 12:16:57+00:00
> I use them myself... I don’t pay for them.

This seems to be a common disconnect. If you're using the free version of ChatGPT, you don't get to see what everybody else is seeing, not even close.

> None of the past “big things” were pushed like this. They didn’t get flooded with billions in investment before proving themselves

Oh, sweet summer child ^^ I assume Mert was not around to witness the internet boom and bust. Exactly this happened.

There is a lot of conflation in this article. It cites a lot of ethical concerns around the sourcing and training of data, expected job losses and the issues around that, but those are not reasons to doubt the _efficacy_ of AI. There are surprisingly few and weak arguments as to why the hype is not justified, presumably because the author hasn't used powerful models (see above).

It's possible to believe the hype is real and still to find AI unethical. But this article just mixes it all into a big pot of "AI bad" without addressing the cognitive dissonance required to believe both "AI is not very useful" and "AI will eliminate problematic numbers of jobs".
by Toutouxc | 2025-07-09 12:17:18+00:00
The question doesn't really make sense this way. Thread is more or less like Wi-Fi. It's a transport technology and protocol. It's HOW your devices can talk to each other. It's how they can say "I'm here and I can see 'AirPurifier324' over there."

Matter is a bit like HTTP. It's WHAT your devices say to each other. It's a way for them to say "Hi, I'm a lightbulb and you can change my color and brightness."
by monocasa | 2025-07-09 12:18:27+00:00
Windows didn't handle numa either until they created processor groups, and there's all sorts reasons why you'd want to run a process (particularly on Windows which encourages single process high thread count software archs) that spans numa nodes. It's really not that big if a deal for a lot of workloads where your working set fits just fine in cache, or you take the high hatdware thread count approach of just having enough contexts in flight that you can absorb the extra memory latency in exchange for higher throughput.
by sega_sai | 2025-07-09 12:18:43+00:00
To be honest, this is getting tiring, every day we have multiple articles on HN how AI is all hype, 'stochastic parrots' and so on. I think it is becoming fashionable among some people to be a AI/LLM sceptic.

Certainly there are people who overhype AI/LLMs. Also any discussion of AGI is a mere speculation at this point, but you can't deny that LLMs are revolutionary tools, and we are still learning their limits. I find it bizarre when people deny that.
by rijoja | 2025-07-09 12:18:43+00:00
> Why is the code like that? How are people likely to use an API? How does code change over time? How can we work effectively on a codebase that's too big for any single person to understand? How can we steer the direction of a codebase over a long timescale when it's constantly changing every day?

At which point you are studying project management theory, or whatever you call it
by solstice | 2025-07-09 12:18:43+00:00
Germany and France do. It can be a PITA when dealing with English texts... But then again when dealing with things in an international context you'll also encounter Chinese and Indian systems for large numbers.

Chinese:

1 yi 10 shi 100 bai 1000 qian 10000 wan 10 x 10000 shi wan (hundred thousand) 100 x 10000 bai wan (one million) 1000 x 10000 qian wan (ten million) 1 x 100.000.000 yì (hundred million) 10 x 100.000.000 shi yi (one billion)

Indian: no idea how it works in practice but it involves crore and lakh...