MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zpeti | 2025-07-04 07:43:57+00:00
> But the dream has died. It almost came true, and then it was immediately co-opted by a bunch of get-rich-quick grifters and a bunch of turbo-libertarians whose entire identities are defined by the Things that they Own and who want to cryptographically impose that on everyone else too because they’re mad that World of Warcraft nerfed warlock or something.

Oh come on. As someone who works with plenty of entrepeneurs, you don't get much more enthusiasm from anyone about what they are doing than them, who care about it as much. It's up there with professional sports and professional artists.

Just because things didn't get built that were the absolute dream of what things could be, doesn't mean people didn't care and didn't put in all their efforts to build things. Just because they didn't meet this couch critic's expectations doesn't mean people didn't put the effort in.

I really don't like this attitude. He's really unhappy about paypal and stripe existing? What exactly is the alternative? What alternate universe are they dreaming about? Perfection doesn't exist.
by kashunstva | 2025-07-04 07:44:28+00:00
> Calling immigration detention “concentration camps” makes no sense.

I don’t think you are paying attention to the abject cruelty in the administration’s own discourse about these facilities. The U.S. president describing with barely restrained delight his anticipation that escapees from the new facility in Florida would be eaten by alligators. I suppose if called out on it, he’d claim it’s a joke. I’m sure many regimes in history had their own euphemistic terms for facilities such as this; but purposeful cruelty is a cardinal feature of concentration camps in my view.
by zwnow | 2025-07-04 07:44:33+00:00
This sounds like a strawman tbh, I have worked retail for years and I do not know a single person enjoying retail work. Especially not cashiers. I can understand what you are on about, but do you think this is the majority of people? The issue is being able to support yourself which these mundane jobs hardly are able to. Personally I want these mundane things automated because I don't want to interact with people. I appreciate art though and I want to support human art. I appreciate everything from ancient architecture and stone cutting to renaissance paintings to basement drawings of amateurs. Art used to have character and now its all the same AI slop. Video games will become unplayable for me in the near future. Advertisements will be fully AI slop. Sure there are still artists out there, but they get overshadowed by AI slop.
by DonHopkins | 2025-07-04 07:44:53+00:00
We can't bust code like we used to, but we have our ways.

One trick is to write goto statements that don't go anywhere.

So I ran a bourn shell in my emacs, which was the style at the time.

Now just to build the source code cost an hour, and in those days, timesheets had hours on them.

Take my five hours for $20, we'd say.

They didn't have blue checkmarks, so instead of tweeting, we'd just finger each other.

The important thing was that I ran a bourn shell in my emacs, which was the style at the time...

In those days, we used to call it jiggle coding.
Ask HN: How do companies like OpenAI, Perplexity fine tune rich output?
by agaase19 | 2025-07-04 07:45:01+00:00
I see fine tune as one of the major ways companies like OpenAI, Perplexity, Claude companies differ when it comes to provide higher quality of answers (correct me if I am wrong).

One curious question is how do they fine tune rich data (markdown, html outputs, tables, graphs etc) at scale. Currently, performing fine tuning involves the laborious process of carefully editing inputs (prompts) and outputs one by one. Becomes more difficult as the data context increases and one has to carefully examine the input data and provide the right output including things like formatting, grammar, UI etc.

Considering such a wide variety of questions they are processing, it amazes me how are they doing it at scale. Any thoughts?
by forgotoldacc | 2025-07-04 07:45:02+00:00
Looking at the scale of a few years, the dollar has been insanely overvalued post-COVID.

Historically, the euro has generally been a good bit more valuable than the dollar. But in 2022, the dollar was more valuable than the euro at a point. Recently it's been bouncing around at nearly 1 euro=1 dollar.

Then there's the yen. Used to bounce around between 1 dollar = 100~110 yen. Recently reached 1 dollar = 162 yen.

The dollar losing its value is a return to the pre-covid norm. Lots of countries pumped money into the US to make money off skyrocketing stocks and high interest rates, and now they're pulling it back into their countries. It's a high that can't last forever. And if it did last forever, that would not be good for the world as a whole since it would mean every country is supporting the US at the cost of devaluing themselves.
by patrickhogan1 | 2025-07-04 07:45:12+00:00
This is spot on and cuts both ways. Much of the Japanese market's recent "performance" in US media is actually just yen weakness against the dollar. Strip out currency effects and the story looks very different. Same with European markets "performance" - we're often seeing monetary policy divergence rather than genuine outperformance in foreign markets.

Always check both local currency and USD returns when evaluating international markets.
by indigoabstract | 2025-07-04 07:45:45+00:00
I don't know what will come in the future, but to me it's obvious that any variation of LLMs, no matter how advanced won't replace a skilled human who knows what they're doing.

Through no fault of their own, but they're literally blind. They don't have eyes to see, ears to hear or fingers to touch and feel & have no clue if what they've produced is any good to the original purpose. They are still only (amazing) tools.
by lancewiggs | 2025-07-04 07:46:02+00:00
Look at London. Draw a line west. Compare climates. Now do the same for New York and go East. Ocean currents are what keeps London warm and NYC cool.

So this is a huge deal. I’ve been down to the Southern Ocean, lectured all the way by scientists.

North of the Antarctic is the only place on earth where the sea can rotate completely around the world without hitting a land mass, and it is deemed the engine of the world’s oceans. Those oceans are what have absorbed most of the excess CO2 that we’ve emitted, and a lot captured has been buried in deep ocean. But the ocean warms, and can capture less CO2, and bad days are ahead.

This news signals not just a slowing in that absorption for an area, which not just sends more CO2 into the atmosphere, but has more terrifyingly unknown downstream implications for other ocean streams.
by tavavex | 2025-07-04 07:46:32+00:00
I still think it's mostly puritanism. "Adult transactions" is a massive category of goods and services, and I'm willing to bet that John the average guy buying an overpriced subscription on generic porn website #729 and regretting it 20 minutes later is much more likely to trigger a refund or chargeback than someone commissioning an artist or buying goods (anything from real-life things to 3D models).

Yet, the payment processors will all reliably treat anything NSFW equally by suppressing it as much as they can. From banning individuals who dare do transactions they don't approve of to directly pressuring websites that might tolerate NSFW content by threatening to take away their only means of making money. If they only cared about refunds and profitability, they wouldn't ban individual artists - because the fact how these artists often manage to stay undetected for years suggests that many of their customers aren't the kind to start complaining.

It's quite fascinating how this is the one area where the companies are willing to "self-regulate". They don't process sales of illicit drugs because the governments above them said no and put in extensive guardrails to make these illegal uses as difficult as reasonably possible. Yet, despite most first-world governments not taking issue with adult content at large (for now), the payment processors will act on their own and diligently turn away any potential revenue they could be collecting.
by Chyzwar | 2025-07-04 07:46:34+00:00
> There are no issues with POP and multiple clients whatsoever.

POP3 in standard only have "Leave a copy on the server" but lack synchronisation mechanism.

> I suggest you to educate yourself on DKIM, DMARC, SPF and SMTP before making those statements.

You cannot use SMTP in real world without these protocols. Your messages would automatically land in spam folders of big providers. For example, if you want to send email to Gmail, you need SPF and DKIM [1]. Any half decent implementation of SMTP need to support all these protocols [2].

[1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126?hl=en

[2] https://github.com/stalwartlabs/stalwart

> It DOES have delivery tracking. Spam filtering is not a protocol feature and it shouldn't be. I suggest you again to educate yourself.

SMTP have extension for DSNs (Delivery Status Notifications) but crucially it does not provide information if/why email was classified as spam. This is a reason why many website registration form have “check spam folder”. SMTP deliverability is a hard problem both on protocol level and infrastructure on spam filtering[3].

[3] https://blog.paranoidpenguin.net/2020/02/self-hosting-email-...

> If you don't know how to build something doesn't mean it's left out to "hardcore graybeards". You got to admit you just don't know how and either learn or surrender to companies who know, offering the same for a buck. It's pretty simple.

I spend a significant amount of time investigating feasibility of building an email product and build some libraries for email protocols. It is not just my opinion but other HNs users including OP. Search HN for "self hosting email" for others people experience.
by close04 | 2025-07-04 07:46:40+00:00
The easiest way to check for integrity and ethics is if the startups YC finances routinely run afoul of YC's ethics code or the law.

If YC has no ethics code, that's your answer right there. If they do but it fails to mention basic things like lying, cheating, deceiving especially when done intentionally, bingo again. If breaking the law isn't an automatic termination of the collaboration, it takes you to the same conclusion. If YC explicitly supports the startups when knowing about these problems, or implicitly by skirting due diligence and turning a blind eye, or accepts startups having no commitment to an ethics code, then ethics or integrity are not core values, or even are completely absent.

There are more nuanced topics and methods but if it doesn't pass the smell test with the basic ones, it won't pass it with any.
by this15testingg | 2025-07-04 07:46:41+00:00
ahead of what curve? intrinsically human endeavors are drowned in noise. what is the point? if even drawing/writing/singing are not worth doing anymore both because effort and the experience itself is worthless, I might as well step in front of a tesla taxi so I can escape this world. human ingenuity is amazing, but this whole mess is embarrassing
by jorangreef | 2025-07-04 07:46:43+00:00
This is exactly why we chose Zig.

Andrew’s design decisions in the language have always been impeccable. I’ve never seen him put a foot wrong and would have made the same change myself.

This is also not new to us, Andrew spoke about this at Systems Distributed ‘25.

Also, TigerBeetle has and owns its own IO stack in any event, and we’ve always been careful to use stable language features.

But regardless, it’s in our nature to “do the right thing”, even if that means a bit of change. We call this “Edge” and explicitly hire for people who have the same characteristic, the craftspeople who know how to spot great technical quality, regardless of how young (or old!) a project may be.

Finally, I’ve been in Zig since 2018. I wouldn’t exactly call it “shiny new”. Zig already has the highest quality toolchain and std lib of anything I would use.
by badpun | 2025-07-04 07:48:00+00:00
You should set the microwave to much lower power and let it heat for much longer, so that the heat gets to transfer evenly across the mass of the food. It even says so in the instruction manual. If you blast with full power, leave the food for at least 2 minutes after it's heated for the heat to balance out across the food (again, it's in the manual).
by sunrunner | 2025-07-04 07:49:17+00:00
I always imagine that there's essentially a "knowledge debt" when doing almost any development today, unless you're operating at the lowest level (or you understand it all the way down, and there's also almost a level below).

The copy-paste of usable code snippets is somewhat comparable to any use of a library or framework in the sense that there's an element of not understanding what the entire thing is doing or at least how, and so every time this is done it adds to the knowledge debt, a borrowing of time, energy and understanding needed to come up with the thing being used.

By itself this isn't a problem and realistically it's impossible to avoid, and in a lot of cases you may never get to the point where you have to pay this back. But there's also a limit on the rate of debt accumulation which is how fast you can pull in libraries, code snippets and other abstractions, and as you said LLMs ability to just produce text at a superhuman rate potentially serves to _rapidly_ increase the rate of knowledge debt accumulation.

If debt as an economic force is seen as something that can stimulate short-term growth then there must be an equivalent for knowledge debt, a short-term increase in the ability of a person to create a _thing_ while trading off the long-term understanding of it.
by Abishek_Muthian | 2025-07-04 07:50:07+00:00
I like minimalist self-hosted websites, great choice making Postcard open-source!

May I ask what were your biggest hurdles building the project and what's the most requested feature from your users?

I myself have been building similar project called `Open Payment Host`[1] for couple of years now, but its focused on payments. Say a self-hosted alternative for Gumroad, Buy Me a Coffee, Ko-fi etc.

[1] https://github.com/abishekmuthian/open-payment-host
by eddiewithzato | 2025-07-04 07:50:16+00:00
LLMs will not be doing that. I wish they could, but they just spit out whatever without verifying anything. Even in Cursor which has the agent tell you to run the test script they generated to verify the output, it just says “yep seems fine to me!”.

AI at the current state in my workflow is a decent search engine and stackoverflow. But it has far greater pitfalls as OP pointed out (it just assumes the code is always 100% accurate and will “fake” API).
by lmm | 2025-07-04 07:50:47+00:00
> Do you have no code that could use translation (move code that looks like this to code that looks like that)?

Only bad code, and what takes the time is understanding it, not rewriting it, and the LLM doesn't make that part any quicker.

> they save dozens of hours on single sentence prompt tasks, even if you have to review them

Really? How are you reviewing quicker than you could write? Unless the code is just a pile of verbose whatever, reviewing it is slower than writing it, and a lot less fun too.
by badpun | 2025-07-04 07:51:15+00:00
A lot of people who are passionate about creative fields work jobs that are pretty mundane, e.g. painting drab environmental textures every day for the next iteration of Call of Duty, or cutesy barfy crap for the next Candy Crush Saga. The jobs are very rarely alligned with their own taste and interests, plus they're terribly dull because, as a specialist, you're constantly working only one specific kind of assignments.
by bawolff | 2025-07-04 07:51:46+00:00
> But after a few minutes it occurred to me that I just did free labor for a for-profit trading company. If they merged in my code then must have thought it had some value, and I decided to dedicate my time to saving this multi million dollar company some money.

If you're not ok with that possibility than you probably shouldn't be participating in open source.

And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with that. Its up to each individual to decide how they want to spend there time. There are pros and cons to open source, and you have to weigh how you feel about them yourself.

However, its not like this is some secret trick. Its the central tenant of Open Source (esp. When using that name instead of Free software). It should be very clear that this is happening. Its the entire point.

It kind of feels a bit like someone who doesn't like oranges, eats oranges, and then are surprised that they taste like oranges. By all means if you don't like oranges don't eat them, but if you knew you didn't like them why did you eat it in the first place?
by Arch-TK | 2025-07-04 07:53:22+00:00
> Is everyone else working on projects built exclusively out of lists of primes and rebalancing binary trees?

Yes that is actually roughly the take away here. LLMs are getting so popular in programming not because they are good at solving problems but because they are good at reproducing a solution to some minor variation of an existing problem which has already been solved many times.

Most of the work that most of the industry does is just re-solving the same set of problems. This is not just because of NIH but also because code reuse is a hard problem.

This is not to say that everything is the same product. The set or problems you solve and how you chain those solutions together (the overarching architecture) as well as the small set of unique problems you solve are the real value in a product. But its often not the majority of any single codebase.
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-04 07:54:13+00:00
The first time I had the "beginner" reflex was when I got an always on computer with an editor and storage.

Before that, I had an TI-99 4A at home without a tape drive and the family tv as a display. I mainly was into creating games for my friends. I did all my programming on paper, as the "screen time" needed to be maximized for actually playing the games after typing it in from the paper notebook. Believe it or not, but bugs were very rare.

Much later at uni there were computer rooms with Mac's with a floppy drive. You could actually just program at the keyboard, and the IDE even had a debugger!

I remember observing my fellow students endlessly type-run-bug-repeat until it "worked" and thinking "these guys never learned to reason through their program before running it. This is just trial and error. Beginners should start on paper".

Fortunately I immediately caught myself and thought, no, this is genuine progress. Those that "abuse" it would more than likely not have programmed 'ye old way' anyways, and some others will genuinely become very good regardless.

A second thing: in the early home computer year(s) you had to program. The computer just booted into the (most often BASIC) prompt, and there was no network or packaged software. So anyone that got a computer programmed.

Pretty soon, with systems like the Vic-20, C64 and ZX Spectrum there was a huge market in off the shelf game cassettes. These systems became hugely popular because they allowed anyone to play games at home without learning to program. So only those that liked programming did. Did that lose beginner programmers? Maybe some, for sure.
by EGreg | 2025-07-04 07:54:39+00:00
Yes, if you really want to show something as ambitious as a sum of a million rows, then you should absolutely move to an event-based, push-based architecture. Because once you’ve calculated the sum, the least work you would need to do is to periodically look at batches of UPDATES to rows, and update your sum based on that (rather than, say, running SUM again on the whole entire table). You can either pull a digest periodically, or — you can handle incremental updates by listening for pushes.

All the difficulties you cite, including the “optimizations” I mentioned, stem from not using push, and insisting on periodically polling something.

If you step back, your whole problem is that you are using a system that only has pull and not push architecture. You’re trying to put a bandaid on that core fact. You chose a relational database system that you refuse to build extensions for (as opposed to pretty much any other system) in order to insist “nyeh nyeh you havent solved cache invalidation”.

Caching is just one part of sync. The part that stores a non-authoritative, slightly out of date copy locally. And sync, or replication, is just one part of an eventually consistent system. I mean, even MySQL supports replication, so just hook your client up to that protocol (encrypted in transit) and boom, now you can update your cache.

Here’s the thing. If you use any network protocol that is open, eg HTTP, then yea it’s solved. Because you can have webhooks and just spin up a server to handle them, and update your cache. A row is removed? Decrement your sum. A row is added? Increment it.

You are just insisting that “no, our system has to be clunky and we refuse to implement webhooks / websockets / sockets / push / mysql replication client / updates of any kind, now solve it for me to be as good as a system which has push capabilities.”
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-07-04 07:55:04+00:00
> Really? How are you reviewing quicker than you could write? Unless the code is just a pile of verbose whatever, reviewing it is slower than writing it, and a lot less fun too.

Well, humans typically read way faster than they write, and if you own the code, have a strict style guide, etc, it is often pretty simple to understand new or modified code, unless you are dealing with a novel concept, which I wouldn't trust a LLM with anyway.

Also, these non-human entities we are discussing tend to output code very fast.
by Shorel | 2025-07-04 07:55:26+00:00
You are right about this.

Also, someone mathematically proved that's enough. And then someone else proved it empirically.

There was an experiment where they trained 16 pigeons to detect cancerous or benign tumours from photographies.

Individually, each pigeon had an average 85% accuracy. But all pigeons (except for one outlier) together had an accuracy of 99%.

If you add enough silly brains, you get one super smart brain.
by eviks | 2025-07-04 07:56:22+00:00
First, it is, you've just reduced the forest article claim down to a single tree to make it appear like your "solution" cuts it.

Second, speak for yourself, you have no clue about everybody's experience to make such a universal claim.

Lastly, the article talks about author's experience, not yours, so you're the only one who can gaslight the author, not the other way around
by lrvick | 2025-07-04 07:56:27+00:00
While it is a view that seems to piss off most, I am becoming convinced capitalism and socialism are both equally doomed paths if taken to their unchecked extremes.

An endless game of tug-of-war between the two is the best we can do, and right now it is pulled way way too far in the capitalist direction and needs to be yanked back hard.
by travisgriggs | 2025-07-04 07:57:39+00:00
> I think the main big thing that’s left for 1.0 is to resurrect async/await.. and that’s a huge thing because arguably very few if any language has gotten that truly right.

Interesting. I like Zig. I dabble periodically. I’m hoping that maturity and our next generation ag tech device in a few years might intersect.

Throwing another colored function debacle in a language, replete with yet another round of the familiar but defined slightly differently keywords, would be a big turn off for me. I don’t even know if Grand Central Dispatch counts, but it—and of course Elixir/Erlang—are the only two “on beyond closures/callbacks” asynch system I’ve found worked well.