MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by w10-1 | 2025-07-20 18:03:45+00:00
It's not illuminating to make inferences from freemium marketing shadows or feature comparisons, particularly if you want lessons you can apply today.

Follow the money.

Initially it was from VM licenses, from netscape for browsers, Oracle for databases, and Borland for IDE's (Borland also wrote the first JIT). But except for databases, they were non-exclusive, and JavaSoft's free offerings undercut their licensees.

Then IBM cut a 10 year deal while Microsoft's license went to court for trying to add features to get lock in. At this time IBM created a free Eclipse to undercut the IDE market (Borland), with SWT as an alternative to Swing to capture developers for leverage.

But the big money was in enterprise, so J2EE licensing was much more airtight for Oracle, BEA, et al. That was a successful and long-lived franchise that also drove storage and compute revenues.

But people hated the complexity and compute resources and Google and Apple both decided to build rather than buy, so we got Spring, Swift, Go, and the whole native and container ecosystem.

You have to be aggressive and strict in building a monopoly, but you should be gentle and forgiving in maintaining it. Both Microsoft and AWS learned this lesson.
by maxlin | 2025-07-20 18:04:11+00:00
Your previous link was of that old BBC vision test, comparing being safe from danger to being able to see obviously irrelevant details of a video.

And now you link that debunked Mark Rober video that literally doesn't even have FSD turned on, while giving the most ridiculous free wins to LIDAR. Talk about writing the tests for the exact limits of a specific system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhX_fgekpk0

You're really running out of steam :D
by foxglacier | 2025-07-20 18:04:15+00:00
I think FollowingTheDao has a point worth exploring and it's easy to be afraid of it because it sounds cruel and against modern individualistic thinking.

Genetic diseases that have survived a long time in our population may well have some positive selection pressure and may be good to the population overall. He gave the example of sickle cell, but I also recently read about a similar idea with schizophrenia. Suppose we eliminate the schizophrenia genes from the gene pool? We would also lose the benefit they provide - probably to people who don't quite become schizophrenic.

> I don't suppose you're claiming that this treatment (or other genetic treatments) result(s) in the vast majority of the patients dying?

I think he is claiming that but the vast majority is future generations who die from some other problems that this "bad" mitochondrial DNA was protecting the rest of the population against.

I'm not sure if he meant "a moral" or "amoral" but genes evolve to ensure their own survival and that might be done more effectively by killing a few babies with mitochondrial disease as a side effect of something else.

These unknown benefits of genetic diseases might simply be keeping mutations out. Mutations are going to happen anyway and maybe it's useful to the species for them to be fatal instead of just degrading performance in life which might accumulate over generations. Consider a program stopping with segfault vs silently continuing with corrupt memory.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-20 18:05:25+00:00
The difference being that all C++ compilers have an option to enable bounds checking on operator[]().

Additionally, until C++26, the way the standard is written, the legalese doesn't forbid the implementation to do bounds checking.

Now can you please enlighten us how to do the same with C arrays and strings, with bounds checking enabled, and why in 50 years WG14 has completely ignored the problem, including Dennis Ritchie proposal for fat pointers, until the government and industry pressure, and even now, I am quite curious if C2y will really bring any actual improvement.
by Frost1x | 2025-07-20 18:05:39+00:00
There’s not much hysteria in that highly processed foods tend to give less satiety relative to both their calorie density and nutrient content (since your digestive process and signals don’t trip the same way they do with whole foods).

That alone is a good enough reason to avoid highly processed foods in many cases. It’s not always true, but it’s more often true than not.
by mindslight | 2025-07-20 18:05:50+00:00
That might be fine if there were extremely strong regulations about the staffing/stocking/capabilities that must be provided as long as they continue to operate. For example the landlord should be getting notice that the hospital will not be paying the full amount of its rent before there is any reduction in hospital capabilities or effectiveness. And if the landlord wants to evict, that should probably require something like six months to a year's notice to allow notice to the public and orderly shutdown or moving.

But it probably just makes more sense to prevent the development of such wildly opposed incentives that necessitate that kind of highly detailed mediation. For example hospitals are public-facing institutions, they shouldn't be primarily operating out of rented buildings like some vape shop.
by gruez | 2025-07-20 18:06:02+00:00
The same argument can be used to justify any keeping any sort of zombie business around. The local sawmill has been loss making for years, but shuttering it would mean losing the main source of jobs for the area. That's arguably worse than losing access to healthcare, because most people can survive without access to healthcare, but most can't survive a month without a paycheck. So why not keep it around? Maybe the local/state/federal government should chip in as well to keep it running?

Of course, there's probably a reason why the business in question is faltering. Either it's being mismanaged, or the market conditions can't support the business any more. Letting it limp along might be the politically expedient thing, but it doesn't fix the underlying issue. Moreover, in the case of a market issue being the cause, not fixing it means there won't be competitors to take its place, which is basically a way to guarantee a "too big to fail" situation. To be clear, I'm not suggesting the area go without a hospital because the market conditions aren't right, it's that the government should fix the problem with rural hospitals (or whatever) rather than letting a bunch of zombie hospitals limp around.
by LeafItAlone | 2025-07-20 18:06:20+00:00
>I am afraid that in a few years, that will no longer be possible (as in most programmers will be so tied to a paid LLM

As of now, I’m seeing no lock-in for any LLM. With tools like Aider, Cursor, etc., you can swim on a whim. And with Aider, I do.

That’s what I currently don’t get in terms of investment. Companies (in many instances, VCs) are spending billions of dollars and tomorrow someone else eats their lunch. They are going to need to determine that method of lock-in at some point, but I don’t see it happening with the way I use the tools.
by kccqzy | 2025-07-20 18:07:04+00:00
I yearned for something like jj before I knew of magit. I was very used to the hg way of doing things and so git is a downgrade. But with magit I'm satisfied enough that I haven't felt a need to switch. Going back to typing commands in a terminal felt backwards. And magit makes a lot of things easy, like splitting commits (u on the hunk and then c e c -a c), moving commits from one branch to a new branch (A s), and moving commits from one branch to another (r s). What makes jj better than magit?
by zer00eyz | 2025-07-20 18:07:42+00:00
> Once it becomes economical to run a Claude 4 class model locally you'll see a lot more people doing that.

Historically these sorts of things happened because of Moores law. Moores law is dead. For a while we have scaled on the back of "more cores", and process shrink. It looks like we hit the wall again.

We seem to be near the limit of scaling (physics) we're not seeing a lot in clock (some but not enough), and IPC is flat. We are also having power (density) and cooling (air wont cut it any more) issues.

The requirements to run something like claud 4 local aren't going to make it to house hold consumers any time soon. Simply put the very top end of consumer PC's looks like 10 year old server hardware, and very few people are running that because there isn't a need.

The only way we're going to see better models locally is if there is work (research, engineering) put into it. To be blunt that isnt really happening, because Fb/MS/Google are scaling in the only way they know how. Throw money at it to capture and dominate the market, lock out the innovators from your API and then milk the consumer however you can. Smaller, and local is antithetical to this business model.

Hoping for the innovation that gives you a moat, that makes you the next IBM isnt the best way to run a business.

Based on how often Google cancels projects, based on how often the things Zuck swear are "next" face plant (metaverse) one should not have a lot of hope about AI>
by derriz | 2025-07-20 18:08:05+00:00
Well that’s a more specific criticism - that AWT sucked. I won’t defend Java GUIs from the period having worked on a 1990s Java AWT based GUI application. Although, SWT apps like eclipse were decent enough.

I think in the context of the time, Java was simply following the common least-common-denominator approach, common for cross-platform GUI toolkits at the time - tcl/tk was hot at the time as were commercial products like powerbuilder.

This approach was to only include features/funtionality which mapped directly to native for all supported platforms - Mac, windows and some X11 toolkit. There were convincing arguments for this approach at the time - you got native look and behavior from the same code for all platforms Java ran on, like with TK but it quickly came apparent that this approach was a technological cul-de-sac limited to simple dialogs and form-based GUIs.
by sofixa | 2025-07-20 18:08:29+00:00
> You see I even disagree with that. People don't accidentally discover the Guardian, NY Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro via Google, their muscle memory is trained to these publications because that's where they go to get their opinions and worldview validated

That's for daily news reading. If you search for news (like what happened with the Spanish/Iberian grid), you'd use Google. And you shouldn't use ChatGPT because it wastes a ton of resources to just hallucinate anyways, whereas a Google search gets you the direct links to the sources.
by labrador | 2025-07-20 18:08:31+00:00
I think we should require robotaxis to have the same abilities as professional drivers. I driven professionally in various jobs and consider it a skilled profession above what the average driver can do.

Some of the scenarios I've encountered truely tested my limits, such as someone trying to commit suicide by pulling out in front of my bus in Las Vegas, or various insurance scam accidents attempted on the bus because the bus company had deep pockets.

What you are casually asserting is that Tesla "eyeballs" and driving AI will duplicate the abilities of a professional driver real soon now. Count me skeptical. I wouldn't ride in a vision only Tesla without a safety driver and don't recommend anyone else do it either.
by llbbdd | 2025-07-20 18:08:40+00:00
Yes, and I used to live within walking distance to several, and this has been the case everywhere I've lived in the US. However I don't even really think of walkability to grocery stores as a good metric for urban planning - I've since moved and get groceries delivered instead. I don't need to own a car, there are fewer cars on the road doing specific tasks. Good urban planning is flexible around the reality that the physical world is hard to plan and change for.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-07-20 18:09:28+00:00
My point was LIDAR data removes the ambiguity of camera derived data, is not fooled by featureless area ambiguity, and it is computationally easier to handle sparse data.

Many high-end multi-beam lidar also embed things like basic Bicycle and Pedestrian object detection in the sensor front end. Things have improved significantly with sensors, but the risk is never 0.

The rate of death doesn't really override an expectation of product safety, and humans understanding other humans intent.

Have a wonderful day =3
by llbbdd | 2025-07-20 18:09:55+00:00
See my other comment here but this is exactly my point. On a bus with dozens of strangers I have 0 recourse. In a car with someone who at least had to provide some kind of ID, I have more power. Consider that strangers just being present is not likely to protect you.

EDIT: I don't think your original comment included the licensing bit (apologies if I just read it poorly), but it doesn't change my point. If you have to provide some paperwork, however illegal, however incorrect, it is a barrier to crime that public transit does not have, and is a paper trail.
by yieldcrv | 2025-07-20 18:10:08+00:00
We all noticed it was just impoverished and uneducated young women blaming their incompetency on the wage gap and patriarchal influences, while really all other women in their age range had closed it to the extent that they are even making up for the women that drag the wages down

Its pretty impressive overall, but extremely funny watching some women be left behind and not even know it
by im3w1l | 2025-07-20 18:10:23+00:00
Html tables are very different from excel tables. Fundamentally html tables were used because rows are a good way to split up the page vertically (you could have one row for the header, one for the content one for the footer). And columns are good for splitting it up horizontally (you could have one column for the side panel, and one for the content, and the last one for an obnoxious blinking ad).
by ack_complete | 2025-07-20 18:10:24+00:00
Even then, I've seen LLMs generate code with subtle bugs that even experienced programmers would trip on. For the Atari specifically, I've seen:

- Attempting to use BBC BASIC features in Atari BASIC, in ways that parsed but didn't work - Corrupting OS memory due to using addresses only valid on an Apple II - Using the ORG address for the C64, such that it corrupts memory if loaded from Atari DOS - Assembly that subtly doesn't work because it uses 65C02 instructions that execute as a NOP on a 6502 - Interrupt handlers that occasionally corrupt registers - Hardcoding internal OS addresses only valid for the OS ROM on one particular computer model

The POKE 77,0 in the article is another good example. ChatGPT labeled that as hiding the cursor, but that's wrong -- location 77 is the attract timer counter on the Atari OS. Clearing it to 0 periodically resets the timer that controls the OS's primitive screensaver. But in order for this to work, it has to be done periodically -- doing it at the start will just reset this timer once, after which attract mode will start in 9 minutes. So effectively, this is an easter egg that got snuck into the program, and even if the unrequested behavior was desirable, doesn't work.
by rhaps0dy | 2025-07-20 18:10:28+00:00
Sutton was talking about progress in AI overall, whereas Pinhasi (OP) is talking about building one model for production right now. Of course adding some hand-coded knowledge is essential for the latter, but it has not provided much long-term progress. (Even CNNs and group-convolutional NNs, which seek to encode invariants to increase efficiency while still doing almost only learning, seem to be on the way out)
by chii | 2025-07-20 18:10:57+00:00
unless if the company's output is pure, raw intellectual property, there's still going to be a need for some sort of input material. Investors' capital is always needed to provide the capital for such upfront purchases, not to mention plant and equipment purchases. Not to mention the running of said AI, even in the pure intellectual property case, would require upfront capital.

And if a single bootstrapped "investor" can support such a company, that's an even better world than today isnt it? It means everyone has a chance at breaking out with a successful company/product.
by Animats | 2025-07-20 18:11:05+00:00
Meanwhile, in China, there's a push from the top to improve quality.[1] Government policy previously favored production quantity and increased market share. Mission accomplished. Now there's overcapacity in many areas. So the new policy push is to increase quality to add value. The government is willing to let low-quality companies go out of business.

This is very obvious in China's electric vehicles. There used to be several hundred manufacturers, most producing really crappy cars. Now, there are fewer manufacturers, and the cars are much better. Ford's CEO on the BYD Shark: “It’s a great product. It’s sold well. They’re trying to sell in high volume in Mexico, but it’s also being localized in Thailand. If we want to be a global player in pickups, like we are now, we have to compete.”

Tools from China used to be total crap, and now they are at least OK.

There's a strong trend towards branded products from China, rather than white-label production. Brand reputation starts to matter.

[1] https://qualityinspection.org/cheap-and-crappy-to-excellent-...
by laborcontract | 2025-07-20 18:11:20+00:00
Generate multi-shot prompts of previous requests and successful outputs.

LLMs below Opus produce a surprisingly high rate of malformed bash commands that have to be corrected iteratively or just shown the right way from the beginning using aforementioned multishot prompting.

For claude web app the best way to have the agent remember things is to have it open up a running todo list in an artifact that you ask for it to frequently update.
by cgannett | 2025-07-20 18:11:58+00:00
Publix has a model similar to this and it seems to work well for them both as a former employee and a customer. Their stores and products are always nice and they pay above average for their sector. They are on the expensive side but also they have good deals when you look for them especially the BOGOs. I definitely had a better time working for them than I did when I worked for Sprouts which is publicly traded and aiming at a similar market segment. I think if we are going to stick with some capitalism we need to switch to models like Publix and away from models like Sprouts and Walmart.

People on both sides of the capitalism/socialism divide also always conflate "Current Way Stock Markets Work" with capitalism. We do alot of extra damage to the average person's health and well being with the WAY we do capitalism. The plutocrats use the heavily propagandized stick of "SCARY SOCIALISM" to give you a more shriveled carrot year after year and tell you you should be thankful you dont get beat with the "SCARY SOCIALISM" stick while they still hit you with the "NO HOUSE, NO FOOD, NO HEALTHCARE" stick if you can't sell your bodily capital for enough value to please them.

The extra damage is all this profit over anything else no matter the circumstance. Look at United Healthcare getting sued because the new CEO, even if it was purely out of self preservation, decides they are going to actually give people some of the coverage they paid for and not do quite as many dirty tricks to skim as many denials off the top as they possibly can. MANY SUCH CASES
by DonHopkins | 2025-07-20 18:12:04+00:00
XULRunner's initial release was in 2006.

OpenLaszlo was released in 2001.

Garnet was released in the early 90's.

Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad (aka Robot Draftsman) was created in 1963, and inspired the Visual Geometry Project in the mid 1980's and The Geometer's Sketchpad in 1995

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44627569

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenLaszlo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geometer%27s_Sketchpad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad
by geoka9 | 2025-07-20 18:13:40+00:00
> > I cannot understand how programmers don't mind adding a strong dependency on a third party in order to keep programming > > And how they don't mind freely opening up their codebase to these bigtech companies.

And how they don't mind opening up their development machines to agents driven by a black-box program that is run in the cloud by a vendor that itself doesn't completely understand how it works.
by leoc | 2025-07-20 18:13:42+00:00
> and had all the problems of a young language like poor library support for just about everything

I know you didn't say otherwise, but for anyone who wasn't there it should be emphasised that many of the deficiencies were core-language deficiencies not just library issues. Java people would blame the customers https://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/... https://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/... and a rush to market http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/javaorigin.html (in a self-congratulatory way, of course), but it's also pretty clear that the Java team itself had significantly overestimated how capable and sufficient core Java 1 was. In fact writing out the standard library was evidently an important learning experience there, one which gave birth to the Java-Hater's Handbook https://wiki.c2.com/?EffectiveJava . And before things eventually got better there was ofc lots of hype first about how Java was a shining jewel of minimalism, and then about how it was a fine language for plain everyday people who had no truck with fancy abstractions.
by fisherjeff | 2025-07-20 18:13:56+00:00
I’m lucky to schedule an appointment of any kind less than 8 weeks out, unless there’s a cancellation. Recently, it took me like six weeks to get an MRI to diagnose a broken pelvis.

I live in a rural area and there’s a hospital system here that owns basically all the providers - everything is all remarkably expensive and booked out way into the future. There’s a smaller independent provider that I recently looked into but they’re scheduling new patients out by more than a year!
by jacobr1 | 2025-07-20 18:13:57+00:00
Our team has pretty aggressively started using LLMs for automated code review. It will look at our PRs and post comments. We can adding more material for different things for it to consider- from a looking at a summarized version of our API guidelines, general prompts like, "You are an expert software engineer and QA professional, review this PR and point out any bugs or other areas of technical risk. Make concise suggestions for improvement where applicable." - it catches a ton of stuff.

Another area we've started doing is having it look at build failures and writing a report on suggested root causes before even a human looks at it - saves time.

Or (and we haven't rolled this out automatically yet but are testing a prototype) having it triage alarms from our metrics, with access to the logs and codebase to investigate.
Show HN: Loft CLI – Fine-tune and run LLMs (1–3B) on 8 GB MacBook Air, no GPUs
by dips2umar | 2025-07-20 18:14:15+00:00
GitHub: https://github.com/diptanshu1991/LoFT

I built *LoFT*, a lightweight CLI that turns any 8 GB laptop into a tiny LLM training and inference rig — no GPU, no cloud.

5 Commands: 1. `loft finetune` → Train LoRA adapters on CPU 2. `loft merge` → Merge adapters into model 3. `loft export` → Convert to GGUF (FP16) 4. `loft quantize` → Apply Q4_0 (4-bit) quantization 5. `loft chat` → llama.cpp CPU chat @ ~7 tok/s

Benchmarks on 8 GB MacBook Air: | Step | Time | Peak RAM | |-------------|--------|----------| | Finetune | 23 min (sample run) | 308 MB | | Merge | 4.7 min | 322 MB | | Quantize | 21 sec | 322 MB | | Inference | 6.9 tok/s | 322 MB |

Also ran a full 300-row Dolly finetune (2 epochs) in *~1.5 hours*, achieving *sub-1 loss* on CPU-only setup. No crashes, swap kills, or GPU needed.

Why this matters: - Makes local LLM customization accessible to devs without GPU access - Enables domain-specific agents (summarizer, support bot, Q&A) on commodity laptops - Everything runs via CPU (no CUDA, no cloud)

Would love feedback on: - UX improvements or edge cases - Adapter recipes you’d want (legal, summarization, customer support, etc.) - Cool things you’d build with low-RAM LLMs

MIT-licensed, 100% local. Feedback is very welcome.

– Diptanshu \