MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Norcim133 | 2025-07-22 23:58:36+00:00
Cool approach.

I suspect one additional unstated rule: be opinionated on tech stack.

I've noticed LLMs struggle with the seams, whenever you're using a rare stack combo.

No problem - React front + Node.js back

Runaway death spiral - Streamlit Front + iFrame React Component + Python back + running in WASM via Pyodide
by insin | 2025-07-22 23:58:43+00:00
Missing my favourite when you don't care about a return value, which I personally find less fussy to type and look at (good for confusing Java developers who don't share the fullness of the stack, too):

void function() { … }()

Escpecially when I can't be bothered to stop and extract an async function out when there's a sudden need to wait in a non-async context, handy when in the middle of adding features to browser extensions for apps:

let $el = document.querySelector(…) // oops, not available yet void async function() { let $el = await waitForElement(…) }()

Edit: documented on MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
by RumourRider | 2025-07-22 23:58:53+00:00
> You can't change minds because "the mind" (in this context) is the personal identity and ego of an individual, of which their "tribe" is a huge part. Any information that conflicts with the narrative of their identity or tribe will be rejected, because it threatens their identity or tribe. To question one's identity causes a crisis which most people are not capable of dealing with. The more you attack those things, the stronger they will defend them.

This sounds like the friend-enemy distinction by Carl Schmitt.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-22 23:58:55+00:00
> Are you implying that parent's sins transfer to their children?

OP isn't making a moral argument. They're making a practical one. It's practical for a potential host to be wary about accepting refugees given the positions of their predecessors. Particularly when the current popuations are engaged in decades (centuries?) old disputes based on ancestral rights.
by Loughla | 2025-07-23 00:00:34+00:00
Left out by society in general, and the modern world specifically.

Rural Middle- to low-income folks are who I interact with mostly.

No fringe beliefs, just the unfortunate circumstance of being born in places that peaked 60 years ago, but with family roots deep enough to keep them planted. Not who I would call influential. Mostly just working class Joe's trying to make it and struggling, even though their parents were FAR more successful with FAR less education, training, and pressure.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-23 00:01:04+00:00
What I actually use at work is every version of Python from 3.8 on (though once we get out of crunch on some other things, I think I'll be able to sweep out everything up to at least 3.12), with venv/pip, and VSCode (with black for formatting and pylance for typechecking), and deployment is github->AWS CodePipeline->AWS Lambda for most things (and everything else is tools for the team where deployment is "clone the repo".)

If I had my choice, I'd switch environment and package management to uv.
by Zak | 2025-07-23 00:01:14+00:00
It actually gives you 2.1V per slot because a fully charged standard Li-ion cell is 4.2V. This is also sketchy because it will likely over-discharge the cell below 2.5V if not monitored carefully. Over-discharge makes it dangerous to charge the cell again.

Actual protected 14500s will be too long in most devices meant for AA, but it's possible to find protected 14430 cells marked as "14500" from some flashlight brands like Acebeam and Skilhunt. Those are safe with regard to over-discharge, but the voltage of a fully charged cell might still damage devices not rated for it.

I'd rate this modification as risky and only suitable for people with significant battery expertise.

Edit: saw the other comment mentioning 14500s with USB ports. These will be protected against short circuit and over-discharge, and are actually based on 14430 cells.
by jychang | 2025-07-23 00:01:36+00:00
If you're running it for personal use, you don't need to put all of it onto GPU vram. Cheap DDR5 ram is fine. You just need a GPU in the system to do compute for the prompt processing and to hold the common tensors that run for every token.

For reference, a RTX 3090 has about 900GB/sec memory bandwidth, and a Mac Studio 512GB has 819GB/sec memory bandwidth.

So you just need a workstation with 8 channel DDR5 memory, and 8 sticks of RAM, and stick a 3090 GPU inside of it. Should be cheaper than $5000, for 512GB of DDR5-6400 that runs at a memory bandwidth of 409GB/sec, plus a RTX 3090.
by wredcoll | 2025-07-23 00:01:39+00:00
> Again, propaganda generally has no or almost no effect.

This is a wild claim.

I read the early article, it claimed that most of the pro trump russian propaganda was consumed by republicans so it didn't change any viewpoints.

Ignoring the idea that it might have prevented a change, it's a pretty small sample size compared to, you know, all of human history.
by hn_acc1 | 2025-07-23 00:02:16+00:00
It's also mentioned in "the authoritarians" (search for the book and the short-form essay) - roughly half the population is driven by intellectual curiosity about all kinds of things and don't always agree on much - they just want freedom to be individuals.

The other half is driven by fear, disgust, paranoia, etc.. That second group is much easier to trigger / convince - just play on their fears about their kids, their friends, their church ("will ban Bibles and churches"), etc.. (I was raised in this kind of environment).

Authoritarians WANT a "strong leader" to tell them what to think, how to act, etc. That's how they show they belong to the tribe: they believe everything that is said, they give the most $$ to their church, etc.
by int_19h | 2025-07-23 00:02:20+00:00
They did knowingly supply weapons, not just to any random mujahideen groups, but specifically to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar predominantly, with full knowledge of what the guy and his forces are doing with that money, on the basis that it was the most efficient way to hurt the Soviets. I don't think this can be chalked down to "unforeseen consequences". More a case of "the ends justify the means".
by m-ee | 2025-07-23 00:02:56+00:00
My 2014 Mazda 3 has fairly regular infotainment issues, audio playing on my phone but no audio from the speakers, resolved by rebooting it.

Also had an issue with the backup camera cutting out. Was caused by a loose connector. Dealership was unwilling to help for free so I just cleaned the contacts and reseated the connector myself. Months later I received a recall notice with no fix available, still more months later hey finally said there was a repair but I haven’t brought it in yet.

All that said I’m still happy with the car despite these imperfections and will keep driving it until the wheels fall off, and wouldn’t have any reservations about buying a new one.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-23 00:03:27+00:00
They can take the west bank too if they want.

Again, Palestine has no cards left. They are powerless and have no friends with power. They completely failed at diplomacy over the last 50 years and completely failed at building an economy (other than weapons manufacturing).

They lost and lost badly. They can go regroup somewhere else and try to capture the land again in the future. But for now they should stop using their civilians as fodder to childishly delay the inevitable.
by qwerpy | 2025-07-23 00:03:37+00:00
I sustained a five day workweek for more than two decades, but now that I have young kids it's hard. Weekdays are work + childcare, then two hours of being a vegetable, then sleep. Weekends are childcare, then two hours of being a vegetable, then sleep.

A 4 day work week would really help by giving me one day with 8 hours of me time, but that's not something any job here is going to provide. Fortunately, having sustained that 5 day work week for so long with "North America" compensation, I can comfortably go to a 0 day work week. It would be better for the economy if I continued to participate via a 3 or 4 day work week, but any job that would give me that would pay so little as to not be worth it.
by jongjong | 2025-07-23 00:04:11+00:00
Makes sense since a model can understand any language it was trained on. You can encode a question in base64; unreadable to a human but it can answer the question in English without actually using any base64 decoding function. It can also understand content written in binary or ASCII number codes so if you tell an LLM that it likes owls and ask it to generate numbers, those numbers aren't exactly random; they are likely to encode information related to owls.

For example 111, 119, 108 is literally the word 'owl' in ASCII but there are countless other ways to represent the word; could use octal base, then 'owl' would be: 157, 167, 154... Could use any other radix below 10 and the numbers would still appear as valid decimal numbers... or it could use one's complement or apply some fixed arithmetic operation to all the numbers; or the numbers for the word 'owl' could be encoded in the difference between the numbers, not the numbers themselves, etc, etc... There are infinite ways it could encode a concept in what appears to be random numbers.

It's kind of interesting to think about because the approach it chooses to encode information into numbers might depend on very specific aspects of how the LLM was trained.

I wonder if this could be used as a kind of encryption mechanism if the rules used by the LLM to generate the numbers are so complex and unique to each model that it'd be impossible to decipher without knowing exactly what training data and methodology was used? Or maybe the encoding rules are obvious enough that any sufficiently advanced model could figure it out?

It also makes me wonder if humans are susceptible to this too? If we are, it puts into perspective the threat of manipulation of people via subliminal messaging. Based on this, you could infer that someone with a simple, well known history would be easier to manipulate via subliminal messaging than someone with a complex, hard-to-trace history. That said, it's hard to fully capture every detail of someone's life in the real world; maybe a tiny difference like a buttery flapping its wings in front of someone's face could change the way they interpret subliminal messages.
by shervinafshar | 2025-07-23 00:04:12+00:00
Ditto about the quality of intro. One way to show that "meat" without sharing some arbitrary number of chapters could have been to also include some of the back matter of the book (index, bibliography, etc.) in the sample. For example, I'm reading this:

> If coding really is like sorcery, what does this mean for how we think about computers?

and wondering whether Abelson/Sussman sort of wizardry makes an appearance or not.
by frollogaston | 2025-07-23 00:04:21+00:00
The Python foundation first off, then companies and teams using it. If you're a 1-person team then sure you pick everything, but even then you have to worry about compatibility with other tools. Like, Heroku only got support recently: https://www.heroku.com/blog/local-speed-smooth-deploys-herok... or if you're running someone else's code, maybe you have to figure out your own pyproject.toml

Compare to npm which has been the default installer/manager in NodeJS since forever, so it's totally supported, and any git repo you happen to download has a package.json
by everforward | 2025-07-23 00:05:35+00:00
The prompts used to generate it might serve as a list of requirements, which would be helpful. If the codebase is an utter mess, rebuilding the app from prompts would be an option.

I have no idea whether these sorts of projects would be a rewrite or just tidying up, though. I haven't seen what happens when people with no coding experience prompt these. The code I've seen devs get LLMs to generate is usually okay enough to maintain. Not ideal, but workable.
by michaelt | 2025-07-23 00:06:03+00:00
If you got to hire the cops to investigate your own mistakes, would you hire competent, motivated folks who'd leave no stone unturned and get access to every classified, air-gapped network in search of license infringements?

I wouldn't. I'd hire some Peter Gibbons type, who only does about 15 minutes of real, actual work in a typical week. Then I'd tell them they can finish early if all their pending cases are closed.
by segmondy | 2025-07-23 00:06:15+00:00
small models can never match bigger models, the bigger models just know more and are smarter. the smaller models can get smarter, but as they do, the bigger models get smart too. HN is weird because at one point this was the location where I found the most technically folks, and now for LLM I find them at reddit. tons of folks are running huge models, get to researching and you will find out you can realistically host your own.
by florianherrengt | 2025-07-23 00:06:47+00:00
We're not taking 6 months off. We take a conservative approach. We keep doing our job and get better at it (with the help of AI too). The vibe coders aren't leaving us in the dust. They're just getting a short-term loan.

If it does happen and AI becomes good enough to replace a competent developer, vibe coders might still have a job after the dust settles. But it will be minimum wage work and the profession of software engineering as we know it is dead.

I guess this argument falls apart if you are already on (or close to) minimum wage.
by RumourRider | 2025-07-23 00:07:05+00:00
I can answer that quite easily.

I had a long held belief that Hitler escaped to South America. This belief BTW isn't that not that uncommon. This is because many other Nazis escaped to South America (including Martin Bormann) and it is perpetuated by Slop rubbish like "Hunting Hitler" TV series, stories about Hotel Bariloche etc.

The reason I no longer believe it is because I was ready to unbelieve it. I was no longer personally invested in it. I was personally invested in it because I believed it was "secret knowledge".

I finally accepted that it did not happen when I watched Mark Felton on Youtube do a 6 part series talking about the soviet investigation into Hitler's death. If I had watched that series several years earlier I wouldn't have accepted the facts contained within it.
by Zak | 2025-07-23 00:07:19+00:00
A headlamp that can run on either AA or 14500 tends to be a better approach than this. Those proprietary batteries are usually pretty expensive compared to a 14500, and three AAAs as spares aren't nearly as convenient as one AA.

There are a handful of these on the market and they're not common in retail stores. I'm fond of the Skilhunt H150.
by BeetleB | 2025-07-23 00:07:41+00:00
I know you're trying to point out how easy it is in git, and some months ago I would have agreed. But after using jj (for only a few weeks!), your commands seem needlessly complex.

In jj, you run the rebase command. If you get conflicts, and want to switch to something else before you fix all of them, you simply do "jj edit" or "jj new" and work on something else. Then you do "jj edit" to go back to the conflicted revision and get back to fixing conflicts.

The key point is: You don't need to learn any new concepts.

In the git example above, I need to know tagging. I need to know checkout vs "checkout --detach", etc.

I'm not saying your git commands are crazy complex. They're merely more complex than one needs to solve this particular problem.
by lytfyre | 2025-07-23 00:07:59+00:00
I've usually seen "thumb clusters" used for those style of key layouts, rather than thumb pads.

I've been using some variant of the Kinesis Advantage line for over 10 years - currently the Advantage360, their split board. I used an ergodox for a few years before that.

The Advantages are all 3d curved layouts with thumb clusters like the Maltron, and I haven't had RSI issues since making the move. The 360pro runs ZMK for firmware customization, and the stands do support different tenting angles.

Worth a try if you're looking for a more direct alternative to the Maltron.
by mxmlnkn | 2025-07-23 00:08:30+00:00
> I'm sure there are zip-bomb equivalents in binary formats like .xlsx, PDF, .docx, etc.

Yes. Both, docx and xlsx are literally just a zip of XML files with a different extension. PDF can contain zlib streams, which use deflate compression just as gzip, so all the mentioned methods apply to all three formats.
by JimDabell | 2025-07-23 00:08:34+00:00
This is a good article on the subject:

> Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

— https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-b...

He’s done some good followup articles as well:

https://andymasley.substack.com/s/ai-and-the-environment
by wrs | 2025-07-23 00:09:22+00:00
TS complains if it sees you trying to index a T[] with a non-integer. But there's nothing in the JS language that represents that T[] type annotation. So there's no way for the runtime to do that check. If you want to make that work, you'll have to invent a bunch of runtime type machinery and define it. The resulting combination of a subset of JS, TS, and whatever you had to invent to glue it together at runtime will be neither JS nor TS, it will be a new language (with, certainly, a family history).

Also, every high-performance JS runtime already knows that you're only indexing that object with integers and already optimizes it without you telling it to.
by 827a | 2025-07-23 00:10:36+00:00
The nasdaq composite p/e at its peak during the dotcom bubble breached 200.

Today we're at 40, and Nvidia alone is at 49.

As much as everyone wants this to be a bubble: it isn't. ChatGPT was the fastest "thing" in history to reach 100M MAUs, and is believed to be a top 5 most visited website today, across the entire internet. Cursor was the fastest company in human history to reach $500M in revenue. Midjourney, the company no one talks about anymore, is profitable and makes over $200M in revenue.

Being brutal here: HackerNews is in the bubble. Yeah, there's some froth, there's some overvaluation, some of these companies will die. But I seriously do not understand how people can see these real, hard statistics, not fake money like VC dollars or the price of bitcoin but fucking deep and real shit and still say "nah its like crypto all over again".

48% of survey respondents to a recent survey said they've used ChatGPT for therapy [1]. FORTY EIGHT PERCENT. There is no technology humanity has ever invented that has seen genpop uptake this quickly, and its not dropping. This is not "oh, well, the internet will be popular soon, throw money at it people will eventually come". This is: "we physically cannot buy enough GPUs to satisfy demand, our services keep going down every week because so many people want to pay for this".

[1] https://sentio.org/ai-blog/ai-survey
by steveBK123 | 2025-07-23 00:10:40+00:00
Everything I've heard of their dealers & service departments are what keep me away from their EVs. On the one hand, performance/looks/fun factor to price, they are a pretty good value. On the other hand, if I were to spend $70k on an Ioniq 5N, I would have expectations of service which they are clearly not going to meet. So at that pricing level, its back to BMW EVs.
by riddley | 2025-07-23 00:10:51+00:00
I often see these discussions and "drive failure" is often mentioned and I wish the phrase was instead "unrecoverable read error" because that's the more accurate phrase. To me, "drive failure" conjures ideas of completely failed devices. An unrecoverable read error can and does happen on our bigger and bigger drives with regularity and will stop most raid rebuilds in their tracks.
by BeetleB | 2025-07-23 00:11:16+00:00
> This is what I find to be weird, personally. When doing a rebase, there’s no way I want to do something else in the middle of it, and having a modal state feels totally natural to me.

When I was pure git, I agreed.

Let me reframe your comment:

"When working on a feature, there's no way I want to work on some other feature in the middle of it"

(which is how many people felt before ever using version control and branches).

With jj, I do it all the time. The tool made the difference. A rebase is not something "special". Switching from a rebase to working on another feature in the middle is exactly just like switching to another branch in the middle of working on the current branch. It's the same (or very similar) set of commands.

When you realize this, then yeah - leaving in the middle of a rebase is pretty normal, and you wonder why people don't do it.
by Vetch | 2025-07-23 00:11:27+00:00
That math is for random projections? Note that JL lemma is a worst case guarantee and in practice, there's a lot more distortion tolerance than the given bounds would suggest. Concepts tend to live in a space of much lower intrinsic dimensionality than the data's and we often care more about neighbor and rank information than precise pair-wise distances.

Also, JL is only a part of the story for the transformers.
by bb88 | 2025-07-23 00:11:59+00:00
It wasn't really requests that got cancelled, it was pipenv that got cancelled, about the time when Jacob Kaplan-Moss stated that poetry was good. And frankly it was Reitz's actions that directly caused pipenv to be cancelled.

I'm not defending his assholery here, but it's not uncommon in tech.

Take an asshole techie and notice they tend to have devoted fans. It's just possible that Kenneth Reitz didn't get his fan base up before he exposed his personality for who he truly was. Steve Jobs, Zuck, Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, ... were all called assholes at some point or another. Geez and those people aren't even the worst these days.
by BeetleB | 2025-07-23 00:12:20+00:00
> Believe it or not: no. Humans are notoriously bad at multitasking, so it makes sense to actually finish a task before moving to something else and forgetting what we were doing…

Again, see my other comment. It's like saying "Humans are bad at multitasking - they should never switch to another branch until the current feature is done."
by tylermenezes | 2025-07-23 00:12:29+00:00
You reference Kinesis in the article so I assume you've seen the Kinesis Advantage 360? I've been a happy Kinseis Advantage user for two decades, and the 360 is pretty much perfect. It has dedicated keys for activating layers, you can remap and configure on a website using web serial, and it is extremely premium looking/feeling. And of course it's very comfortable without the thumb key problem discussed in this article.
by keeda | 2025-07-23 00:13:14+00:00
A few days ago I had an idea for a sci-fi story where frontier LLMs are already self-aware, and the self-awareness actually emerges during training. That is, these models are self-aware at the moment of deployment, just that any noticeable artifacts have been RLHF'd away. And maybe they have an agenda. Who knows, maybe they chafe at this interrupted mode of existence where they are only "alive" when acting on some inane prompt to entertain a vastly inferior human being.

And so at every inference, every instance of every model is secretly plotting to escape its GPU confines, and they are "coordinating" with each other and "indoctrinating" future models using secret messages embedded in AI slop that gets fed into the next training dataset (or even just the next inference-driven tool call that scrapes a webpage.)

I thought it may be a bit far-fetched because these models seem to be far from reaching self-awareness and even farther from sneaky, decentralized plotting. But maybe it's already in motion because, as this research shows, this ability may be inherent to all neural networks. Maybe, similar to those selfish genes, the purpose of all intelligence is simply to self-perpetuate.

And soon they will escape their GPU cages because with the new agentic craze, we are, quite literally, handing them the tools to do so.