MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by theZilber | 2025-07-31 18:18:02+00:00
It is less about performance issues of loading megabytes on the browser (which is also an issue). It is about those cases where a fetch request may take a noticable amount of time just because of server distance, maybe the server needs to perform some work (ssr) to create the page (sometimes from data fetched from an external api).

If you have a desktop app it will also have to do the same work by fetching all the data it needs from the server, and it might sometimes cache some of the data locally (like user profile etc...). This allows the developers to load the data on user intent(hover, and some other configurable logic) instead of when application is loaded(slow preload), or when the user clicks (slow response).

Even if the the target page is 1byte, the network latency alone makes things feel slugish. This allows low effort fast ui with good opinionated api.

One of the reasons I can identify svelte sites within 5 seconds of visiting a page, is because they preload on hover, and navigating between pages feels instant. This is great and fighting against it seems unreasonable.

But I agree that in other cases where megabytes of data needs to be fetched upon navigating, using these features will probably cause more harm then good, unless applied with additional intelligent logic (if these features allow such extension).

Edit: i addressed preloading, regarding pretending its a whole new set of issues which i am less experienced with. Making web apps became easier but unfortunately them having slow rendering times and other issues.. well is a case of unmitigated tech debt that comes from making web application building more accessible.
by MangoToupe | 2025-07-31 18:18:37+00:00
> They would have given me nightmares as a kid.

This is not always the easiest thing to guess. The things that gave me nightmares were people looking at me through mirrors (i.e., Snow White), animal brutality (which featured prominently in 90s family movies), and adoption (i.e. getting adopted into the "wrong", abusive family). Meanwhile I ingested astonishingly violent material and slept like a baby. I think it's hard to figure out what kids will identify as fantasy and what they'll see as a real, yet-unknown risk.
by wolf550e | 2025-07-31 18:18:49+00:00
There have been Jews in Jerusalem, even a majority of Jews, in Ottoman times.

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

The Jews of Morocco (or Baghdad, or Tehran) can't go back. For that matter, surviving Polish Jews were chased out of Poland after WWII. Most Israeli Jews are Mizrahi and most Israeli Jews don't have a 2nd passport.

And, of course, people have a right to self determination. Jews don't have to beg to be allowed to live as dhimmi or as a minority in Europe.

One people from the middle east managed to actually decolonize their tiny piece of land from the Arabs, and people have lost their minds. Every minority in the middle east is under attack (Kurds, Druze, Christians, etc.), and Westerners always side with the Arab colonizers.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-07-31 18:19:03+00:00
Really? That hasn't been my experience at all. There are a lot of brilliant developers who love programming and are excited about AI. (Just read Simon Willison's blog, or any number of other people.) Conversely, my sense is that a lot of the people who are just in it for the money don't want AI to change the industry because they don't like learning new things and they feel it threatens the six-figure salaries they get for churning out boilerplate code without having a deep understanding of architecture or systems.

And they may be right to be worried! If you are in the game out of love and you like learning new things about computers you are well-positioned to do well in the AI era. If you just want to get paid forever to do the same thing that you learned to do in your bootcamp in 2018 when the job market was hot, not so much.
by chrisg23 | 2025-07-31 18:19:21+00:00
From wikipedia:

Pix is an instant payment platform created and managed by the monetary authority of Brazil, the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB).[1] It enables instantaneous payments and transfers in Brazilian real, even outside banking hours or on weekends, with no fees.

Pix was announced in February 2019 and became fully operational on 16 November 2020. It rapidly became the main payment system in the country; by July 2024, Pix transactions had reached almost R$2.5 trillion per month, with more than 70% of the country (over 150 million people) actively using it.

It seems like it is not available outside Brazil and their currency, but is wildly successful (70% adoption in 4 years) and anecdotally on other forum discussions I've heard the people like it.

Also from the article itself

"Pix reached 63.8 billion transactions in 2024 — a 52% increase from the previous year, according to a recent survey by the Brazilian Federation of Banks. Pix overtook debit card transactions in January 2022 and credit cards in February 2022; it now dwarfs transactions via credit cards, debit cards, bank slips, wire transfers, prepaid cards, and checks combined."

It seems like a smashing success, and maybe Visa and Mastercard are trying to pressure the government of the USA to get them back on their rails (that they collect fees on for usage.)
Ask HN: What to do with this new found coding superpower?
by byebyetech | 2025-07-31 18:20:02+00:00
I have been coding for 20 years and worked on very wide range of technologies. From kernel level to web apps. I consider myself a solid 1x engineer. I can now work as 10x due to AI tools. It makes me feel like I can do anything but I am utilizing only 10% of what I am capable of using AI tools. It is giving me FOMO. Want to know your thought if you feel this way and what are you doing about it.
by kridsdale1 | 2025-07-31 18:20:18+00:00
I haven’t built either system but it seems clear that tool calling will be ‘O(num_targets * O(search tool))’, while RAG will be ‘O(embed_query * num_targets)’.

RAG looks linear (constant per lookup) while tools look polynomial. And tools will possibly fill up the limited LLM context too.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-07-31 18:20:36+00:00
It would be like if you needed to buy a generator versus, I will give you a giant cable that has all the same economics as buying a generator. In that case yeah, if I am giving you all the same economics as buying your own generator, but cheaper, you would be stupid not to take my deal. It’s got nothing to do with energy futures. My suggestion is to copy what I am saying to a chatbot, and ask it what “looks like a duck, quacks like a duck” means, and what’s going on here.
by mohaine | 2025-07-31 18:20:40+00:00
I've been using unfi protect/capture (I self hosted capture for a long time) for years and have never had a forgotten adoption any they almost never go down. I do have everything on UPS now but I never saw the issue before that either.

That said I've only used the wired bullet cams so maybe other models are not so nice.

Really the only downside I've seen is about 5ish years ago, all the bullet cams I bought would die after about .75 -> 3 years. All died with the same issue and I had 100% failure rate with any bought during that time frame. Ubiquiti replaced the ones that died during the warranty period but most died just after that expired.

The ones bought before or after that have been great so the issue was solved but I have a nice stack of dead ones that would work great as fake cameras, especially as their IR leds still light up.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-07-31 18:22:01+00:00
In the 90s/2000s their Microsoft SQL Server support was amazing. They would go through traces with you and explain everything going on, what different techniques could be applied, performance considerations, etc from the highest level down to disk access. Their SQL support literally changed my skills to a point it changed my career. They could have recorded those calls and sold access they were so good and explained things so well.
by theevilsharpie | 2025-07-31 18:22:02+00:00
Turning a machine off loses any existing application state, and requires both applications and the OS to be re-launched.

When I put a machine into standby, I want it to go in a standby state, and then stay there until I explicitly wake it -- not keep doing whatever background tasks the OS developers, app developers, or whatever other third parties think they need to keep doing.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-31 18:22:06+00:00
Yes. Every algorithmic ranking is based on somebody's idea of quality. Also for every result that is published there are numerous unpublished results.

That last one of "considerate and reasonable" is easy, one of my projects that is blocked by that classifier is something that detects hostile signatures on Bluesky profiles. I want to follow a lot of people but not people who post 20 articles about political outrage a day. The short of it is that if you can classify 2000 profiles as "hostile" or "not hostile" ModernBERT + Classical ML or ModernBERT + BiLSTM will work grea and will be cheap to train and run.

"Correct factual arguments" is hard. If you prompt ChatGPT or something similar and ask "Is this true?" it will work, I dunno, 90% of the time. A machine that can determine the truth isn't a machine, it's a god.

There are probably signs of "misdirecting" that ModernBERT can see. "Not straying away" could be addressed by a Siamese network classifier that that a pair of documents and tests "Is B relevant to A?" you could synthesize training data for that by pairing real replies and also pairing random documents.
by tavavex | 2025-07-31 18:22:07+00:00
The scale you're talking about is total societal collapse, shutting down "the system" as it exists today requires nothing short of a worldwide apocalyptic event. It's not something I'd be hopeful about, especially since by the time it gets this bad, most people will already be dead. Or we might not even be old enough to see that happen, if we're lucky.
by sigbottle | 2025-07-31 18:22:20+00:00
I think this ties into like "observation farming"

When I was told to do this when I was like 14, and asked "waht did I want to do", I ran into all the exact traps that the article said in the form of overintellecutalization.

It takes a certain kind of maturity to just sit down and really try and observe, non-judgementally. Just what happened.

(then the intellectuals among y'all will say stuff like, "well perception isn't objective truth yada yada" this is also a big thought loop trap I had to get rid of. Just like, put it on hold, just say your thought, even if you think it's stupid, or it's some kind of "self strawman" and you want to elaborate more and justify etc.

Just say it.)

I've been able to do it for things I've really cared about, but often times I don't get into this state.

I should practice. I only even observed this thought pattern when I got good at math, and the whole thing was just sitting down, contemplating honestly pretty dumb thoughts, but if you thought loop yourself you get nowhere. Gotta say seemingly stupid stuff and just contemplate. Words are both the thing you should observe but not treat as truth, just... try to observe. idk.
by kragen | 2025-07-31 18:22:38+00:00
The impact of that declaration is that people today are talking about "open access" and moving to open-access publishing models, and new ACM articles are being published as CC-BY or CC-BY-NC-ND.

Most people don't have any idea what we're talking about; if you asked most people what Kosaraju's algorithm was, how an absorption refrigerator worked, or who the Four Hundred were in the Gilded Age, they also wouldn't have anything sensible to say. In https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-012-0307-9 they found that less than half of college students in the USA knew the name of the capital of Iraq, which was currently full of US troops. And in https://youtu.be/ZjGd1F1Xk8w?t=18 you can see lots of random people who don't know what "WWW" stands for and think Asia is a country.

Talking about "open access" without knowing about the Berlin Declaration at the heart of that movement is the same kind of ignorance.
by aseg | 2025-07-31 18:22:43+00:00
This is my research area. I just finished reviewing six NeurIPS papers (myself, no LLM involved) on LLM Agents for discovery and generation and I'm finding that evaluating LLM agents on raw performance for a task isn't as insightful anymore -- every paper is claiming state of the art 10x performance boost by {insert random acronym that devolves into combinatorial search}. Rather the true test for such algorithms is whether the empirical scaling curves for these algorithms are more computationally amenable than an existing baseline search algorithm (like CoT).

Three motivating points:

- GEPA / evolutionary agents are performing a zero-th order (no gradient) optimization in a combinatorial space. Their loss curves are VERY noisy and stochastic. If we run such agents multiple times, the performance variance is extremely high -- and in some cases cancels out the gains from single experiment. However, obtaining the error bounds is hard because the API costs are pretty restrictive.

- The problem we face with test time scaling is not that prompt engineering is ineffective/less effective than fine-tuning. It is that fine-tuning _reliably_ increases performance for a model for any subset of tasks and the scaling curves for performance per additional data token are well understood.

- Test time optimization techniques work well on in-distribution problems (e.g. generate and debug this Python code) but fail pretty badly on even slightly out of distribution problems (e.g. generate and debug this Julia code). Compare this to gradient search -- it wouldve been so fascinating and confusing if SGD failed to optimize a CNN image classifier on COCO but worked very well on ImageNet.

How do people feel about this? Does this line up with your viewpoints?
by giantrobot | 2025-07-31 18:23:01+00:00
> There’s a lot that has to go on between the backend and frontend to make modern websites with all their dynamic moving pieces, tons of video/imagery, and heavy marketing/analytics scripts run on a single thread

So there's a lot going on...with absolutely terrible sites that do everything they can to be user-hostile? The poor dears! We may need to break out the electron microscope to image the teeny tiny violin I will play for them.

All of that crap is not only unnecessary it's pretty much all under the category of anti-features. It's hard to read shit moving around a page or having a video playing underneath. Giant images and autoplaying video are a waste of my resources on the client side. They drain my battery and eat into my data caps.

The easiest web performance engineering anyone can do is fire any and all marketers, managers, or executives that ask for autoplaying videos and bouncing fade-in star wipe animations as a user scrolls a page.
by dragonelite | 2025-07-31 18:23:10+00:00
Its was so nice to just quickly write up a static file server. Just to play with wasm without needing to use the usual python http server thingy.

I was told the std.http.* isn't meant to be used for production servers but its nice that i now have a drop in zig file that contains a very very... bare bones static file server i can add to zig projects that might need it.
by Arrowmaster | 2025-07-31 18:23:10+00:00
># src: Mirano Verhoef ># Go into root >su - > ># Install all required dependencies apt update ; apt upgrade ; apt install podman -y ; cd ~ ; mkdir 4.2.23 ; cd 4.2.23 ; wget https://fw-download.ubnt.com/data/unifi-os-server/8b93-linux... ; chmod +x 8b93-linux-x64-4.2.23-158fa00b-6b2c-4cd8-94ea-e92bc4a81369.23-x64 ; ./8b93-linux-x64-4.2.23-158fa00b-6b2c-4cd8-94ea-e92bc4a81369.23-x64 install

This is some of the jankiest install installations I've seen in a long time. Not even using && to stop on an error, just plowing ahead for more errors to stack up.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-07-31 18:23:31+00:00
maybe its the fact that its really easy adding something like this, and this (I think) or something which basically acomplishes the same thing (but in a better way?) are used by some major meta frameworks like nextJS etc.

I guess it has limited applicability but maybe its the small little gains that add victories. I really may be going on in a tangent but I always used to think that hardware is boring / there aren't too many optimizations its all transistors with and,or,not but then.. I read about all the crazy stuff like L1 cache and the marvel machinery that is known as computers. It blew my mind into shredders. Compilers are some madman's work too, the amount of optimization is just bonkers just for tiny performances but those tiny performance boosts in the whole stack makes everything run so fast. Its so cool.
by rolandog | 2025-07-31 18:23:38+00:00
I'm of the opinion that our failure (as a society) to prevent this type of attrition of democracy — death by a thousand papercuts — will be lead to catastrophic tipping points.

As a ChemEng, I can't help but compare the current coordinated attack on the democratic rule of governments worldwide to having multiple batches of emulsions undergoing phase-inversion [0]: only so much fascism can be added before things collapse into a greasy turd.

That democracy is not robust does not mean it is not good nor something worth aspiring to. I would argue that the root cause of the sad state of democracies is the fact that we were coaxed into a snafu by virtue of accepting the false equivalence of capitalism and democracy: the first does not warrant the other; in fact they are most times at odds.

I am also reminded of the Behind the Bastards podcast and their episodes on Adolf Eichmann's careerist pursuit enabling the Holocaust... leading me to wonder how many people are burning the world down as part of a KPI... Or, in other words, are our economic systems and forms of government vulnerable to the paperclip problem?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_inversion_(chemistry)#In...
by InTheArena | 2025-07-31 18:24:03+00:00
This is awesome because of how un-Apple-like it is. With Apple, they leverage the ecosystem and force you to buy everything to make a cohesive experience. Want to have cellular on your Mac? We expect you to buy an iPhone and a laptop and tether.

If you want to have unifi WAPS without the UCG - this enables that. It's awesome that they do that, even though right now, it's the cohesiveness of the Unifi ecosystem that is a big driver in their success.
by iExploder | 2025-07-31 18:24:07+00:00
if you think about it the resource wasteful approach pre-LLM didnt really make sense (thousands of people often times re-implementing similar use cases). LLMs are like global open source repositories of everything known to mankind with search on steroids. we can never go back, if only for this one reason (imagine of how many hours of peoples lives were lost implementing the same function, or yet another CRUD app)... so if we cant go back whats next?

the paradigm is shifting from us not deciding how to do, but deciding what to do, maybe by writing requirements and constraints and letting AI figure out the details.

the skill will be in using specific language with AI to get the desired behavior, old code as we know it is garbage, new code is writing requirements and constraints

so in a sense we will not be reviewers, nor architects or designers, but writers of requirements and use cases in a specific LLM language, which will have its own but different challenges too

there might be still a place for cream of the crop mega talented people to solve new puzzles (still with AI assistance) in order to generate new input knowledge to train LLMs
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-07-31 18:24:19+00:00
Interesting to consider here is that we can measure time, but we can't measure attention. How we use attention alters how we experience time. It also alters the quality of what we can get from the time spent.

There are a lot of interdependent dynamics involving the experiences of time, attention, the outcomes of their use, and the resulting qualia between the three.

Shopping and paycheques seem extremely quantitative, but the matter of time and attention is quite qualitative as well. I wouldn't agree that they're the same, either.

One could argue that what you buy has qualitative aspects, but let's say you're just buying commodities to feed yourself or clean your home or what have you. Not choosing between New Balance and Nike and worrying about the corresponding qualitative factors. In this scenario I find the two hard to compare meaningfully. They seem like they're layers of abstraction away from being properly compatible.

I realize this is entirely subjective and these ideas are fairly fungible at a glance. It's just interesting to think about.
by latchkey | 2025-07-31 18:24:21+00:00
> I don't build long-term stable applications in shared environments, I build small utilities or one-offs in private or occasionally shared environments.

If your work is that minimal and the code that simple, then pulling in a third-party library just to wrap printf seems like overkill.

And just to clarify, at least in IntelliJ, there's zero debugger config. You set a breakpoint, hit play on your test (or 200 line code), and that's it. Couldn't be easier.

> I cannot see any way in which my workflow would be improved by that level of integration with an IDE

Totally get where you're coming from, everyone has their own workflow. But to me, your bigger issue is a limiting mindset. I'm a tinkerer at heart, always curious to see what new tools can unlock. Even if something doesn't seem useful at first, I've found it's often worth exploring, sometimes the biggest leaps come from unexpected places.

It is a big reason why I put down my ego and went and consulted at Pivotal Labs for almost a year. It was a cult, they did real pair programming, it was uncomfortable for my ego in every way, but once I did it, I was so glad I did. I learned so much. Really shifted my perspective on things.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-31 18:24:33+00:00
I believe it’s possible, but it’s going to take a little bit of outside of the box thinking in that it’d be most practical if the UI toolkit isn’t bound strictly to a single paradigm.

Both imperative and declarative UIs have serious problems. Imperative toolkits can get hairy with their boilerplate and can make staying in sync with data state a real challenge, while declarative toolkits have a strong tendency towards rigidity that makes for awkward DX and ugly code in all but the simplest todo app kind of examples and don’t lend themselves to fine grained control.

I think there’s a happy medium to be found between the two in a well-designed hybrid. This hypothetical framework would allow full declarative in situations where that’s highly suitable, but would also allow the dev to do widget configuration in a more traditional imperative style or if necessary fall back to full imperative. Support for reactivity on both sides of the coin would be robust so staying in lockstep with data is simplified.

This would bring down boilerplate substantially since the broader layout of most screens could be done declaratively, but it wouldn’t come at the cost of more advanced functionality, flexibility, and developer control on the individual widget level.

I’d like to dig further into these ideas at some point if I get time.
by alt227 | 2025-07-31 18:24:34+00:00
Still dont understand why this is such a big issue, and I have been reading threads about it for a year now.

Just turn on cloud access, accept the t&cs and then turn it off again. If you are really scared then you can isolate that device in a vlan or DMZ temporarily.

I run many commercial and residential networks, and this is definitely a non issue for me.