MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by paulhodge | 2025-07-30 00:52:25+00:00
Yeah the outrage is a little artificial and definitely premature.

Some facts for sanity:

1- The poster of this blog article is Kilocode who makes a (worse) competitor to Claude Code. They are definitely capitalizing on this drama as much as they can. I’ve been getting hit by Reddit ads all day from Kilocode, all blasting Anthropic, with the false claim that their plan was "unlimited".

2- No one has any idea yet what the new limits will be, or how much usage it actually takes to be in the top 5% to be affected. The limits go into effect in a few days. We'll see then if all the drama was warranted.
by krisoft | 2025-07-30 00:53:21+00:00
You can argue until the cows come home. The point is that they claim without evidence that humans are not suspectible to this kind of distraction.

If they want to estabilish this as a fact there is a trivialy easy experiment they can conduct.

“Someone on hacker news strongly feels it is true, and is willing to argue the case with witty comments.” is not how scientific knowledge is estabilished. We either have done the experiments and have the data, or we don’t.
by beefnugs | 2025-07-30 00:53:37+00:00
I have no evidence of this but: I think this is the ultimate scam?

human: damn kids are using this to cheat in school

openai: release an "app"/prompt that seems really close to solving this stated problem

kids: I never wanted to learn anything, I just want to do bare minimum to get my degree, let my parents think they are helping my future, and then i can get back to ripping that bong

<world continues slide into dunce based oblivion>

It doesn't matter the problem statement: the 80% or less solution seems can be made and rather quickly. Such a huge percentage of the population judges technology solutions as "good enough" way lower than they should. This is even roping in people from the past who used to be a higher level of "rigorous correctness" because they keep thinking, "damn just a bit more work and it will get infinity better, lets create the biggest economic house of cards this world will ever collapse under"
by ay | 2025-07-30 00:53:48+00:00
My favourite story of that involved attempting to use LLM to figure out whether it was true or my hallucination that the tidal waves were higher in Canary Islands than in Caribbean, and why; it spewed several paragraphs of plausibly sounding prose, and finished with “because Canary Islands are to the west of the equator”.

This phrase is now an inner joke used as a reply to someone quoting LLMs info as “facts”.
by kazinator | 2025-07-30 00:53:49+00:00
The problem with your low-effort retort is that, for example, the brain can wield language without having to scan anywhere near hundreds of terabytes of text. People acquire language from vastly fewer examples, and are able to infer/postulate rules, and articulate the rules.

We don't know how.

While there may be activity going on in the brain interpretable as high-dimensional functions mapping inputs to outputs, you are not doing everything with just one fixed function evaluating static weights from a feed-forward network.

If it is like neural nets, it might be something like numerous models of different types, dynamically evolving and interacting.
by hatthew | 2025-07-30 00:54:14+00:00
My only significant gripe with phone cameras is that they oversharpen everything. Sharpening can subjectively make things look better as long as you don't zoom in too much, but has one significant problem: desaturation. In high-detail high-contras areas, e.g. the foreground grass, the sharpening pushes many of the pixels towards black or white, which are, notably, not green. This has the overall effect of desaturating these textures, and is the impetus for

Also, unless I am mistaken, the iphone camera doesn't have a fisheye lens, it has a wide angle rectilinear lens. This doesn't "create distortion that doesn't exist with the real camera", it simply amplifies the natural distortions that you get from projecting the 3D world onto a 2d plane. As others point out, this can be easily remedied by moving further away and zooming in.
by Avicebron | 2025-07-30 00:54:18+00:00
OpenAI's o3/40 models completely spun out when I was trying to write a tiny little TUI with ratatui, couldn't handle writing a render function. No idea why, spent like 15 minutes trying to get it to work, ended up pulling up the docs..

I haven't spent any money with claude on this project and realistically it's not worth it, but I've run into little things like that a fair amount.
by flkiwi | 2025-07-30 00:54:18+00:00
Phone cameras don't come close to any of my "real" cameras with my decades of experience shooting and composing ... but phone cameras absolutely obliterate anything I was shooting with a film camera as a beginner back when film was a thing. I have also arguably learned far more about photography with my phone, because of its portability and zero cost experimentation, than I have with ANY "real" camera.

But, perhaps most importantly, along the lines of what others have noted: you know, my phone camera may not be as good, but I have zero complaints about the impromptu photos of my kid growing up that I could never have caught with anything else.
by coryrc | 2025-07-30 00:54:44+00:00
Most fire engines in the US don't carry significant water, they're "pumper trucks" for boosting pressure from fire hydrants. 80% of US citizens live in urban areas with access to hydrants. They also carry lots of other gear too: https://rosenbaueramerica.com/fire-trucks/pumpers/

But you can do everything those do with an E-series cutaway ($200k fully outfitted?) and a pump pulled on a trailer. For a whole lot less than $2M.

https://www.ford.com/commercial-trucks/e-series-cutaway/2025...
by Nash0x7e2 | 2025-07-30 00:55:07+00:00
Built a demo around integrating Gemini Live with Stream's Video API for agent use-cases. In this example, I'm having the LLM provide feedback to players as they try to improve their mini-golf swing.

On the backend, it uses the Python AI SDK to capture the WebRTC frames from the player, convert them, and then feed them to the Gemini Live API. Once we have a response from Gemini, the audio output is encoded and sent directly to the call, where the user can hear and respond.

Is anyone else building apps around AI and real-time voice/video? Would be curious to share notes. If anyone is interested in trying for themselves:

Python SDK docs: https://getstream.io/video/docs/python-ai/basics/quickstart/ Github: https://github.com/GetStream/stream-py/tree/webrtc
by Terr_ | 2025-07-30 00:56:31+00:00
It's not bait, so it can't be "clickbait."

Nobody here is clicking out of a burning curiosity to resolve the PR-submitter's identity. We can reliably predict it'll be a random account that we've never seen before and will never recognize again.

Analogy: It's like someone linked "A kitten doing somersaults." I don't care which kitten is involved, I'll click because I anticipate cuteness and amusing acrobatics. Replacing it with "Miss Mittens (a kitten) doing somersaults" is unnecessary.
by handsclean | 2025-07-30 00:58:22+00:00
No. They’re not hard to detect because they’re good, they’re “hard” to detect because understanding code takes time, and you’re putting that work on the maintainer.

I find it hard to believe that people who don’t intuit this have ever been on the receiving end. If I fill up your email inbox with LLM slop, would you consider that I’ve done you a favor because some of it’s helpful? Or would you care more about the time you’re wasting on the rest, and that it’d take longer to find the good bits than to make them yourself, and just block me?
by archargelod | 2025-07-30 00:58:32+00:00
Using fully qualified imports is a Python tradition.

Python doesn't have a notion of public/private symbols (no, "__" prefix does absolutely nothing). It also doesn't have a good type system, so it can't have function overloading.

This is why you're required to qualify almost all imports in Python, to avoid name clashes.

Nim doesn't have this problem and also "fixes" a lot of other shortcomings[1] of Python.[2]

[1] - https://github.com/yugr/python-hate

[2] - https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Nim-for-Python-Programm...
by bbor | 2025-07-30 00:59:02+00:00
It's interesting and funny and indicative of a broader problem in open-source development, reaching not only technical projects but also stuff like Wikipedia. 90% of the reason I'm here is for the discussion, not literally for the links to news -- there's much better ways to curate news directly to my phone these days.

Plus, again: it's just downright funny. It starts funny b/c he's clearly well-meaning ("I do not think this can be directly merged into the project"), and then you get to the part where there's 300+ commits (20 of which are just "Updated project files") and you just can't help but crack a little smile!
by snapplebobapple | 2025-07-30 00:59:22+00:00
I think it's more than phone hardware is still really locked down/non standardized, so there aren't a lot of viable options to get alternatives on there without also being a hardware designer and having the bank to go with that. Need a big country to force a standardization on the hardware interface/bios and an opening up similar to what we have in pc components and this will get a lot more interesting. Sadly the chance of that happening is near zero and the interests of google and apple lie in more lockdown, not less.
by WalterBright | 2025-07-30 00:59:24+00:00
The reference says what happens with the greatly increased cost to develop a new drug, is the number of new drugs developed dropped dramatically. But the percentage that turned out to be effective stayed the same.

So, yes, we are worse off because of that, because we wind up with far fewer effective drugs.

A proper solution is for the patient, a legal consenting adult, to sign a piece of paper that says he understands that the FDA has not verified the drug to be effective.
by Swizec | 2025-07-30 00:59:50+00:00
> questionable value in making things like bridges modular

Aren't most bridges these days modular and made of prefab components assembled on site? Afaik that greatly sped up construction over the past few decades.

They're also modular in that there are built-in weakpoints designed to constrain failures without taking out the whole bridge. You can see that in action if you look at photos of the Bay Bridge after Loma Prieta. Collapsed sections, but most of the bridge stayed up.
by dlubarov | 2025-07-30 01:00:29+00:00
Occam’s razor suggests that he probably just meant what he said: that Israelis should remember the atrocities committed by Hamas and other attackers. There was nothing in Netanyahu’s speech, or even the Torah’s passages about Amalek, about “no uninvolved civilians”, so it seems like a stretch to say that Netanyahu deliberately conveyed that message as a subtext.

You say the chants occurred “shortly afterwards”, but wasn’t that in December? Whereas the speech you’re drawing a connection to was in October.

If we’re going to accuse people of the most heinous crimes, we should have much more solid evidence.
by wredcoll | 2025-07-30 01:01:46+00:00
> Wikipedia recognizes that it has happened

The main point I want to make here is the difference between what people said happened and what actually happened.

> I have been observing it for over a decade, longer than it had a name

Let's define what "it" actually is:

Someone receiving social shame/criticism with the stated intent to change behaviour.

If you look slightly more than a decade ago, it happened then also. And the decade before that. And the century before that. Pretty much as long as we have records with the appropriate level of detail, we can find examples of this.

So yes, people were publicly shamed in the last decade. They were publicly shamed the decade before that as well. There was absolutely nothing special about anything that happened "recently" other than some pundits deciding to invent a catch term and push a meme around the culture.

My issue is that the people who started this meme and pushed it the hardest, were doing so in an attempt to deflect or prevent themselves and their ideas from being criticized, and mostly they really deserved criticism.

It's certainly possible to be an "unwitting dupe" and continue to spread this meme, not knowing any better, but I'm not sure it's the most likely scenario.

As for your example, the evidence you've presented certainly makes him seem like an innocent victim of bullying him. I sympathize and wish it hadn't happened to him.

But you can't use this as some kind of statement to justify being against shame and criticism just because people use it immorally.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-30 01:03:40+00:00
Original title did not specify the state, so I have added it to reduce ambiguity for non-US readers, and to prevent confusion from ambiguity from folks who don’t know that St. Paul is the name of a place and not just a canonized saintly person. The original title is:

> St. Paul Hobbled by Cyberattack, Prompting National Guard Response

https://archive.is/cepOB
by bix6 | 2025-07-30 01:04:43+00:00
"For a benchmark, the Handbook of International Economics chapter by Costinot and Rodriguez-Clare (2014) indicates that the optimal tariff for the United States under plausible parametrizations is around 20%. Indeed, as long as tariffs don’t exceed 50%, they are still welfare-enhancing relative to completely open trade. In other words, increasing effective overall tariffs from currently low levels near 2% will actually boost aggregate welfare in the United States. Once tariffs begin increasing beyond 20% (on a broad, effective basis), they become welfare-reducing. Investment houses are now projecting that the projected effective rate of the tariffs proposed by President Trump will jump from 2.3% to 17%, just shy of this 20% level.15"

So we're looking at 20%+ across the board? Awesome.

How can they be welfare-enhancing at sub 50% but also welfare-reducing at 20%+?
by pjd7 | 2025-07-30 01:05:00+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYiFTBO67uU

https://innovation.ebayinc.com/stories/graphload-a-framework...

It looks like people are using it to build graph related models on it.

I am looking at it & considering doing something similar for graph data sets. As well as a transactionally safe key value store to store roaring bitmaps.
by jumpingMullet | 2025-07-30 01:05:44+00:00
The Grasshopper was good. An underpowered version of the hornet with a 380 instead of 540 motor. The longer run time on the old 7.2 battery was a benefit. Watching YouTube of the current cars, they are actually overpowered and in a way unusable. Many videos degenerate into how high can I jump this thing before it breaks.
by thih9 | 2025-07-30 01:06:21+00:00
My guess is they wanted to share some ideas; as in: what features could be added and what would an example implementation look like. They have no interest in deeper discussions or in forking the project.

To me a large PR with a disclaimer that it should not be merged seems a decent way of doing this and better than not sharing anything at all.

But I see how this could get distracting if more people do this. I assume this is a one time thing. In future I would recommend creating some fork with a note that it is not going to be maintained.
by romanhn | 2025-07-30 01:07:00+00:00
Posted about this in the past, but what really got FoundationDB on my radar was a demo at a developer conference, back in 2014-ish. They had the database running across a bunch of machines, with a visual showing their health and data distribution. One team member would then be turning machines on and off (or maybe unplugging them from the network) and you could see FDB effortlessly rebalancing the data across the available nodes. It was a very striking, impressive presentation (especially as we were dealing with the challenges of distributed Cassandra at the time).

The beginning of this video has some of that: https://youtu.be/Nrb3LN7X1Pg
by kibwen | 2025-07-30 01:07:16+00:00
No, in-place construction is something that all systems-level languages need to deal with due to the fact that the fundamental abstraction of "a function" inherently gives you limited control over how any arbitrary function returns its return value to its caller, which sometimes is highly relevant for maximum performance.

C deals with it via passing outparams, C++ deals with it via a bunch of machinery that literally has multiple entire Wikipedia articles dedicated to it ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placement_syntax and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_elision ), and Rust has historically sought for a solution that's less explicit than C's and less fraught than C++'s, so far to little success, because (to reiterate) functions don't particularly want to work that way.
by azhenley | 2025-07-30 01:07:43+00:00
I had an NSF grant for a similar project in 2019. Ask the dev questions about their code and validate their answers using program analysis.

The initial idea was applied to classroom settings.

An Inquisitive Code Editor for Addressing Novice Programmers’ Misconceptions of Program Behavior https://austinhenley.com/pubs/Henley2021ICSE_Inquisitive.pdf
by benatkin | 2025-07-30 01:08:13+00:00
It's quite boring to listen to people praising AI (worshipping it, putting it on a pedastal, etc). Those who best understand the potential of it aren't doing that. Instead they're talking about various specific things that are good or bad, and they don't go out of the way to lick AI's boots, but when they're asked they acknowledge that they're fans of AI or bullish on it. You're probably misreading a lot of resistance & skepticism on HN.
by EGreg | 2025-07-30 01:09:25+00:00
Why are some people always trying to defend LLMs and say either “humans are also like this” or “this has always been a problem even before AIs”

Listen, LLMs are different than humans. They are modeling things. Most RLHF makes them try to make sense of whatever you’re saying as much as you can. So they’re not going to disregard cats, OK? You can train LLMs to be extremely unhuman-like. Why anthropomorphize them?
by raincole | 2025-07-30 01:09:43+00:00
I'd share a little bit experience about learning from human teachers.

Here in my country, English is not you'll hear in everyday conversation. Native English speakers account to a tiny percentage of population. Our language doesn't resemble English at all. However, English is a required subject in our mandatory education system. I believe this situation is quite typical across many Asian countries.

As you might imagine, most English teachers in public schools are not native speakers. And they, just like other language learners, make mistakes that native speakers won't make without even realizing what's wrong. This creates a cycle enforcing non-standard English pragmatics in the classroom.

Teachers are not to blame. Becoming fluent and proficient enough in a second language to handle questions students spontaneously throw to you takes years, if not decades of immersion. It's an unrealistic expectation for an average public school teacher.

The result is rich parents either send their kids to private schools or have extra classes taught by native speakers after school. Poorer but smart kids realize the education system is broken and learn their second language from Youtube.

-

What's my point?

When it comes to math/science, in my experience, the current LLMs act similarly to the teachers in public school mentioned above. And they're worse in history/economics. If you're familiar with the subject already, it's easy to spot LLM's errors and gather the useful bits from their blather. But if you're just a student, it can easily become a case of blind-leading-the-blind.

It doesn't make LLMs completely useless in learning (just like I won't call public school teachers 'completely useless', that's rude!). But I believe in the current form they should only play a rather minor role in the student's learning journey.
by Nican | 2025-07-30 01:10:18+00:00
FoundationDB has been growing as my favorite database lately. Even though it is only key-value store.

Out of curiosity: what are the scale limits of FoundationDB? What kind of issues would it start to have? For example, being able to store all of Discord messages on it?

I see blog posts of Discord moving to Scylla and ElasticSearch, but I wonder if there would be any difficulties here.
by krackers | 2025-07-30 01:12:29+00:00
The paper showing that dropping positional encoding entirely is feasible is https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.19466 . But I was misremembering as to its long context performance, Llama 4 does use NoPE but it's still interleaved with RoPE layers. Just an armchair commenter though, so I may well be wrong.

My intuition for NoPE was that the presence of the causal mask provides enough of a signal to implicitly distinguish token position. If you imagine the flow of information in the transformer network, tokens later on in the sequence "absorb" information from the hidden states of previous tokens, so in this sense you can imagine information flowing "down (depth) and to the right (token position)", and you could imagine the network learning a scheme to somehow use this property to encode position.
by nebezb | 2025-07-30 01:12:41+00:00
He’s being downvoted because suggesting cursor pagination in an example describing sorting by price (descending) is plainly wrong. While neither is bookmarkable, cursor pagination is much worse. The UX went from “show me _almost_ the most expensive items” to “show me everything less expensive than the last item on the page I was on previously — which may be stocked out, more expensive, or heavily discounted today”. The latter isn’t something you’d bookmark.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-07-30 01:15:26+00:00
It depends on the maintainer, some of them have indeed found themselves unwilling to continue their work in part because of Project Zero.

> I just stepped down as libxslt maintainer and it's unlikely that this project will ever be maintained again. It's even more unlikely with Google Project Zero, the best white-hat security researchers money can buy, breathing down the necks of volunteers.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/913
by contingencies | 2025-07-30 01:16:12+00:00
AIS map of vessels in the area: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:166.7/cent...

A fairly small US fishing vessel is in relative proximity... https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:43...

Talked to the AI which said: MMI 4.5 in the context of an M8.7 quake, for your vessel: Danger level from shaking alone: Very low in open water. Danger from tsunami in the open ocean: Very low (unless extremely close to epicenter). Prime danger: If near shore, from tsunami run-up, NOT the shaking. Actionable advice: Remain in deep water until tsunami warnings have cleared; proceed to port only when officially safe. Monitor official maritime and tsunami alerts closely after any major earthquake.

That's interesting. Mental note, if piloting a vessel in a tsunami, head to deep water.
by makeitdouble | 2025-07-30 01:17:49+00:00
It was a nice analysis of wide angle lenses, what processing is needed to adjust for the physical limitations, and on processing picture.

From there:

> Real cameras capture shadow more accurately.

> professional cameras

That's saying that real cameras don't use wide angle lenses nor have an image processing pipeline, and professionals of the field have adequately labeled cameras.

This kinda makes the whole piece so shallow and weirdly ideological, when it doesn't need to be. People interested enough in the craft will spend time knowing their gear, the strength and limitations, and work with it.

Phone cameras now give more and more access to the underlying mechanisms and RAW formats. There's of course tons of photos I'd want to put in my wall coming from my phone, they're just really great for subjects that properly match the lenses strengths. iPhones or Pixel phones aren't perfect or ideal in all conditions, but what camera is ?