MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by roadside_picnic | 2025-07-29 21:02:35+00:00
While I'm always happy to see more people using open models, I was hoping the "playing" would be a bit more about actually interacting with the models themselves, rather than just running them.

For anyone interested in playing around with the internals of LLMs without needing to worry about having the hardware to train locally, a couple of projects I've found really fun and educational:

- Implement speculative decoding for two different sized models that share a tokenizer [0]

- Enforce structured outputs through constrained decoding (a great way to dive deeper in to regex parsing as well).

- Create a novel sampler using entropy or other information about token probabilities

The real value of open LLMs, at least for me, has been that they aren't black boxes, you can open them up and take a look inside. For all the AI hype it's a bit of shame that so few people seem to really be messing around with the insides of LLMs.

0. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.17192
Show HN: I built an API to generate PDF invoices from JSON
by johnwisdom | 2025-07-29 21:02:53+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm Daniel. I built a simple and straightforward API: you POST a JSON payload with your invoice data, and it returns a secure, presigned URL to a generated PDF. The goal is to make invoicing a single, reliable API call so you can get back to your main product.

I also used this as a personal challenge to move away from my old LAMP stack background and build something new with Python/FastAPI, Next.js, and a serverless architecture on GCP and AWS.

For the HN community, I've set up a promo code: HEYHN100

If you sign up, you can redeem it in your dashboard for 100 free credits (on top of the 10 you get by default). The credits don't expire.

I'm here to answer any questions and would genuinely appreciate any feedback or technical critiques you have. Thanks for checking it out.
by rashempandit48 | 2025-07-29 21:03:46+00:00
Another fair point! The truth is, everyone’s ‘high energy’ is a little different. What my period of high energy is could be very different from yours. Its highly personalized hence we would require the user input here, what they think works best for them. Get their feedback on their energy levels through the day (asking them few times a day) and then sort of predict their high-productive hours for them to schedule their most important work during that time. Let me know if this sounds stupid or if it makes some sense.
by svachalek | 2025-07-29 21:04:07+00:00
Historically, all prices are negotiated. We ended up with a culture of flat pricing for efficiency, with only a few high value items like cars being negotiated. You walk into a car dealer and spend hours to determine exactly how much they can get you to pay for the car you want. But now with advanced automation, it's worth the complexity to extract the maximum value out of each customer again, even on small purchases of a dollar or two.
by SLWW | 2025-07-29 21:04:20+00:00
> The weakness here is that at some point you've defined the persona so strictly that it's ahistorical and more reflective of your own mental model.

That's a good thing to be aware of, using our own bias to make it more "likely" to play pretend. LLMs tend to be more on the agreeable side; given the unreliable narrators we people tend to be, and the fact that these models are trained on us, it does track that the machine would tend towards preference over fact, especially when the fact could be outside of the LLMs own "Overton Window".

I've started to care less and less about self-censoring as I deem it to be a kind of "use it or lose it" privilege. If you normalize talking about censored/"dangerous" topics in a rational way, more people will be likely to see it not as much of a problem. The other eventuality is that no one hears anything that opposes their view in a rational way but rather only hears from the extremists or those who just want to stick it to the current "bad" in their minds at that moment. Even then though I still will omit certain statements on some topics given the platform, but that's more so that I don't get mislabeled by readers. (one of the items on my other comment was intentionally left as vague as possible for this reason) As for the LLMs, I usually just leave spicy questions for LLMs I can access through an API of someone else (an aggregator) and not a personal acc just to make it a little more difficult to label my activity falsely as a bad actor.
by pitpatagain | 2025-07-29 21:04:30+00:00
> Maybe the lack of occult infections with shorter acting drugs makes everyone confident that they won’t happen with longer acting drugs?

Previous experience is definitely part of it. It's not just Truvada, this isn't the first long acting injectable prep. Cabotegravir (integrate inhibitor) was approved 4 years ago for this use and is given every two months, so there's already information from how that was studied, approved and what's happened with several years of actual use.
by pavlov | 2025-07-29 21:05:23+00:00
> “make income or wealth a protected trait you cannot discriminate on”

Seems like that would be problematic for progressive tax rates.

Honestly it’s pretty clever. “Wealth is a protected class” would fit right in with the modern right-wing rhetoric, continuing the inversion theme already established with “actually whites are the targets of racism” and “actually Christians are persecuted in the West”, etc.
by toast0 | 2025-07-29 21:05:35+00:00
If what you have (phone) and what you know (authentication) are both stolen, 2FA didn't keep your account secure. But it was still 2FA. They had to steal two things. Same as if it's a user entered OTP code, and you put your password into the phishing site, and then put your OTP code into the phishing site too; 2FA didn't help you, but it was still 2FA.
by mikameel | 2025-07-29 21:05:53+00:00
Pretend you know every song by shazaming the lyrics at a festival. Also connect your smart glasses to pretend harder.

https://karaokeval.lovable.app/ (yes the face can sing)

It's a wip but connect your smart glasses with our Mentra app and the lyrics will be streamed to your device (i.e. Even Realities G1).

Find out waht MC hammer said this? https://x.com/augmentedcamel/status/1949676429978783766
by usefulcat | 2025-07-29 21:06:45+00:00
Seems like there's a relatively simple solution for this: allow airline tickets to be resold.

Apart from the fact that this restriction massively benefits airlines, I've never understood why it's not allowed. No matter what, you still have to go through security and present your ID there, so the additional security benefit of knowing a traveler's identity at the time of purchase seems pretty marginal.
Ask HN: Why the fundamental skepticism around LLMs?
by smokel | 2025-07-29 21:07:09+00:00
There’s clearly a significant amount of hype surrounding LLMs, and many products in this space are undoubtedly oversold.

However, even here on Hacker News, I’ve noticed that some people reject LLMs on seemingly fundamental grounds, pointing out minor issues while disregarding any benefits.

What drives this level of criticism? I’d like to understand the underlying mechanisms that fuel such strong reactions.

Is it existential discomfort around intelligence no longer being uniquely human? Is it anxiety about potential job displacement? Or is it perhaps a concern about intelligence itself losing its perceived special status? Or are people simply trolling?
by gojomo | 2025-07-29 21:07:46+00:00
Grandparent testimony of success, & parent testimony of frustration, are both just wispy random gossip when they don't specify which LLMs delivered the reported experiences.

The quality varies wildly across models & versions.

With humans, the statement "my tutor was great" and "my tutor was awful" reflect very little on "tutoring" in general, and are barely even responses to each other withou more specificity about the quality of tutor involved.

Same with AI models.
by llamasushi | 2025-07-29 21:08:03+00:00
> Whole trip felt more like what i would imagine visit to mainland China would be like rather than a trip to a free western country.

Have you ever been to mainland China? I've lived in both places and honestly, day-to-day life in major Chinese cities often feels more "free" in practical ways - safer, cleaner, more technologically convenient.

What is freedom really? In Shanghai or Shenzhen, I can walk out at 3am to get noodles or take the metro without a second thought. In LA or SF, I'm constantly aware of my surroundings, checking who's behind me, avoiding certain areas. The surveillance cameras in China never made me feel as watched as the constant threat assessment you do in many Western cities.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying China doesn't have serious issues with political freedoms and surveillance. It absolutely does. But the lived experience is way more nuanced than "oppressive dystopia."

I used to have similar assumptions before actually spending time there. Western media coverage (cough propaganda cough) tends to focus exclusively on the authoritarian aspects while ignoring that for many people, daily life feels safe, convenient, and yes - "free" in ways that matter to them.

Instead of imagining what China might be like based on western news coverage, why not visit and see for yourself?

Extremely unpopular opinion on HN, I'm sure. But I have a compulsion to challenge stereotypes when the reality is so much more complex.
by Liftyee | 2025-07-29 21:08:28+00:00
Re: conflicts and politics etc.

I've anecdotally found that real world things like these tend to be nuanced, and that sources (especially on the internet) are disincentivised in various ways from actually showing nuance. This leads to "side-taking" and a lack of "middle-ground" nuanced sources, when the reality lies somewhere in the middle.

Might be linked to the phenomenon where in an environment where people "take sides", those who display moderate opinions are simply ostracized by both sides.

Curious to hear people's thoughts and disagreements on this.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-29 21:08:36+00:00
If there is a material difference in the product that causes you to no longer feel that it's the same as it was when you subscribed, it could be considered a bait and switch? I think as soon as you notice that this is the case, you should probably stop paying them though, otherwise you might seem to accept this state of affairs. If you had a long term contract that didn't have some kind of language that tried to prevent this from happening in the first place, you could probably get out from under that contract by saying that the deal has essentially changed out from under you, but I think a lawyer might make that argument much better than me.

I'm not sure what harm you think you're suffering from, and what a proper remedy might be, if you think it's illegal. I don't know if I would go that far, as there are all kinds of words most terms of service use to somehow make it so that you have already acknowledged and agreed to whatever they decide to do. So a lawyer will probably be helpful there as well.
by kazinator | 2025-07-29 21:08:58+00:00
The problem with your reasoning is that some humans cannot solve the problem even without the irrelevant info about cats.

We can easily cherry pick our humans to fit any hypothesis about humans, because there are dumb humans.

The issue is that AI models which, on the surface, appear to be similar to the smarter quantile of humans in solving certain problems, become confused in ways that humans in that problem-solving class would not be.

That's obviously because the language model is not generally intelligent it's just retrieving tokens from a high-dimensional statistically fit function. The extra info injects noise into the calculation which confounds it.
by xg15 | 2025-07-29 21:09:51+00:00
> Most Israelis do not hate Palestinians. There might be some.

There are enough incidents of needless cruelty or provocations, such as [1] or [2] - and in turn hatred against Israeli pro-peace groups that want to break the cycle [3]. I think those are hard to explain if there wasn't widespread, systemic hatred and dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society.

They also feature the only national-league soccer club where racism is official policy [4]

Also: The IDF prides itself to be a "citizens' army" that is deeply embedded into Israeli society. Yet at the same time, a substantial part of the IDF's activities is protecting the settlers in the West Bank, and generally maintaining the occupation there. If the settlers were really a fringe minority with no support in wider society, I'd expect to see some form of protest against that kind of duty. Yet, there isn't any.

[1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-07-28/ty-article-ma...

[2] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-05-27/ty-article/.p...

[3] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-08-03/ty-article/.p...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beitar_Jerusalem_F.C.
by bsimpson | 2025-07-29 21:11:04+00:00
It's a product decision.

Apple decided when the iPhone first came out to redo the whole UI stack to be touch-first. There are hardenings for security and battery preservation, but that's arguably the biggest difference between iOS and macOS.

Windows and Linux have tried to retrofit their ecosystems to also work on touchscreens. It hasn't gone well. Too many apps assume a mouse-equivalent pointing system.

Adaptive design has fared best on the web, but it's still not settled. See, for instance, the back-and-forth around density defaults for web apps like Gmail. Some people really like their pointer-friendly dense UIs with hover buttons, and that makes them really hard to use on a touchscreen.

Perhaps ironically, Apple is also in the best position to bridge the gap. Since they own the UI stack that renders most apps on Apple devices, they could do something clever like say "a button is 32px tall if there's a trackpad and 56px tall otherwise." Rules like that could produce an app that truly adapts to the user's primary modality.

The other systems have too many UI frameworks for that to work. Apple could only pull it off because ~everyone uses their component set (I think it's called UIKit). They also have a reputation of declaring the future and making the ecosystem catch up (going all the way back to adopting USB exclusively on the first iMac).
by Rendello | 2025-07-29 21:11:14+00:00
Well, don't do this at work. You might end up with (unexpected but predictable) results!

It reminds me of the time I was trying to find this meme about the NSFW Dutch phrase "neuken in de keuken" (sex in the kitchen) [1], so I Googled those words as best I remembered them and clicked the images tab, and (shockingly) it was all kitchen porn. I guess I forgot that people would look for porn in their native languages.

1. https://img.ifunny.co/images/67b2b1e1f9a27f263f9ed34c32a1166...
by ben_w | 2025-07-29 21:11:23+00:00
> ChatGPT will get better at chess over time

Oddly, LLMs got worse at specifically chess: https://dynomight.net/chess/

But even to the general point, there's absolutely no agreement how much better the current architectures can ultimately get, nor how quickly they can get there.

Do they have potential for unbounded improvements, albeit at exponential cost for each linear incremental improvement? Or will they asymptomatically approach someone with 5 years experience, 10 years experience, a lifetime of experience, or a higher level than any human?

If I had to bet, I'd say current models have an asymptomatic growth converging to a merely "ok" performance; and separately claim that even if they're actually unbounded with exponential cost for linear returns, we can't afford the training cost needed to make them act like someone with even just 6 years professional experience in any given subject.

Which is still a lot. Especially as it would be acting like it had about as much experience in every other subject at the same time. Just… not a literal Ahura Mazda.
by smithkl42 | 2025-07-29 21:11:48+00:00
Am I the only one who was surprised and kind of mystified by this sentence?

"You’d assume the lessening of antibiotics might be associated with improved health outcomes, especially since antibiotics are so overused."

It sounds more like something coming from Robert Kennedy, or one of those cranks who refuse to take antibiotics to treat strep throat, than from a mainstream researcher. Like, OF COURSE populations treated with antibiotics are going to do better in the period of a study like this. Under what plausible theory could you expect otherwise?

That's not to say that antiobiotics are an unmitigated good! I get that they have weird and complex downstream ramifications. It's just that those aren't the ramifications you'd expect to be able to measure from a study like this.
by asacrowflies | 2025-07-29 21:11:50+00:00
What does a mass extinction event have to do with rich vs poor? This all life, all species, the entire biosphere. Part of the problem is people can't seem to stop thinking in human social terms and not large scale system changing.... Mass extinctions like this don't leave species like humans unscathed .. the very chemical composition of the sea and atmosphere will be changed within 500-1000 years beyond what humans can adapt to except living in underground bunkers.

Thinking humans will be fine during a MASS extinction event....shows me that people don't know much about previous events.
by scarmig | 2025-07-29 21:12:57+00:00
Maybe. But, it's been over a year since I used StackOverflow, primarily because of LLMs. Sure, I could use an LLM to formulate a question that passes SO's muster. But why bother, when the LLM can almost certainly answer the question as well; SO will be slower; and there's a decent chance that my question will be marked as a duplicate (because it pattern matches to a similar but distinct question).
by msgodel | 2025-07-29 21:13:54+00:00
Nope. You can do push with XMPP just like everything else. The problem is that Apple demands open source client maintainers also personally maintain infrastructure with high availability to handle the push notifications rather than allowing them to delegate that to service operators where it belongs.

Apple is aggressively hostile to open source is the problem. IMO their behavior is why we don't have any nice open source chat apps like we did before the iPhone became popular.
by yellowapple | 2025-07-29 21:14:07+00:00
I've got a Pixel 9a expected to arrive today, specifically for it to run GrapheneOS. One of my old phones was a Nexus 6P running CopperheadOS (prior to the dispute that spawned GrapheneOS), and it was great back then. Looking forward to how things have progressed in the years since.

I wish GrapheneOS would support non-Pixel hardware, though, specifically my Fairphone 4. I get why that probably won't ever happen, but it feels like a massive regression in terms of repairable hardware to move away from that.
by bazzargh | 2025-07-29 21:14:10+00:00
I managed to get some decent results using this algorithm (not at my own computer so can't post code, yet):

- create a smaller greyscale copy of the image, and use sobel to calculate gradients (smaller to speed this up)

- set a gradient magnitude threshold, and add those points to a queue, largest first.

- for these points, add 2 squares, one either side of the queued point, in the direction of the gradient (ie you expect one to be light and one dark)

- add the squares to a location hash as they are placed. (I'm using a grid size slightly larger than my square tiles). The location hash is to speed up comparisons.

- skip placing a square if it would fall within a small radius of a previous square's centre (I used 0.5 of a square size). When looking up a point in the location hash, remember to look not for the point itself, but for the hash values for the corners of an axis-aligned square with your point at the centre; this is to catch overlaps when the point falls need grid lines.

- once all points in this queue have been processed or skipped, we start on a new queue, containing all squares placed so far.

- for each square in the queue, try to place a new square to its north, south, east and west along its alignment; as before skip these if they overlap too much

- any squares we place - jitter their position and angle slightly (otherwise it looks horribly unnatural)

- any squares we do place, add them to the phase 2 queue.

The first phase is quite slow, set the threshold high. Second phase placement is very fast. My squares all use a grey stroke the same grey as the background for the grout effect, and the squares are drawn using the colour of the point picked as the square's centre (I don't bother averaging). I have it rendering this interactively, using requestAnimationFrame, so it doesn't clog up the browser - I add about 50 tiles per frame

I'm looking at one it did of the mona lisa; it places the phase 1 tiles along her hairline and hand in a nice "vermiculatum" way, the phase 2 placement is less satisfying but with jitter it seems ok. Originally I'd thought about calculating where squares overlap and cutting tiles nicely but it was quicker just to _allow_ the overlap and so most of what you see are the whole tiles placed on top of partials. The overall effect isn't _quite_ like hand placed tiles but I like it better than a grid.

You can see a couple of output images here. https://hachyderm.io/deck/@bazzargh/114938616011157584
by 9dev | 2025-07-29 21:14:13+00:00
> Turns out literally every source that was recommended to me by some reputable source was considered completely non-credible by another reputable one.

That’s the single most important lesson by the way, that this conflict just has two different, mutually exclusive perspectives, and no objective truth (none that could be recovered FWIW). Either you accept the ambiguity, or you end up siding with one party over the other.
by cbrews | 2025-07-29 21:14:27+00:00
Apparently, following a recent serious data breach[0], HealthEquity is moving forward with an authentication change to deprecate username/password entirely in favor of Passkeys (webauthn resident key implementation).

This struck me as a bit of "news" given the security posture being taken here. I haven't seen any other institution force adoption of Passkeys as the primary authentication mechanism to access their services; I've mostly seen 2FA/MFA implementations with Passkeys as an optional/additional authentication mechanism. Like many folks here[1], I've been hesitant to fully adopt passkeys as a primary authentication mechanism until the credential exchange specification[2] (which allows users to export/import keys from one credential storage platform to another) is finalized and better supported across the different credential stores.

From this page:

Can I opt out of using a passkey? No. Once passkey login is rolled out to your account, you’ll need to use it to access your benefits—either through the mobile app or on the web. Traditional login options won’t be available.

[0] https://www.healthequity.com/breach

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42548719

[2] https://fidoalliance.org/specifications-credential-exchange-...
by hinkley | 2025-07-29 21:14:44+00:00
I'm somewhat fond of the 'bolo' design - several habs cabled together and spun.

While the cables are now a new 'single point of failure', Tethers, Inc had (has, as it turns out they have not gone under as I suspected) some pretty compelling ideas of how to avoid that by using a mesh instead of a cable, so micro-meteoroids couldn't sever the cable with one extra-lucky hit.
by vfclists | 2025-07-29 21:15:13+00:00
> I wish these language websites would put an example of some code right there on the homepage so I can see what the language "feels" like. I finally found some code in the tutorials https://tutorial.ponylang.io/getting-started/hello-world

+ 85 replies

The usual HN post where the threads which are tangential to the topic always rise to the top.

How much irrelevant dross to readers have to read through before they get to comments on the actual product?

Time to sit back and see if this one will also rise to the top or somewhere near.