MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NoLinkToMe | 2025-07-18 11:10:41+00:00
The current president of the world's most powerful country recently launched a personal coin, named after himself, held for 80% by him, earned him billions (estimated at approximately half his net-worth), hosts pay-to-play dinners the top 200 coin holders, and creates a mechanism for foreign states to pump the coin in exchange for political gifts.

Crypto's current era has never been more wild. It's actually quite insane.

The number of shitcoins is at an all-time high. Most crypto trading is of the gambling nature.

Bitcoin is getting relatively mainstream and not too wild, everything else is a shitshow. But even bitcoin for 99% of users is just a speculative asset, just more stable and mainstream. Virtually nobody is using it for transactions (except for illegal products), for banking, or as an inflation hedge. Even in high-inflation countries like Turkey, sub 1% of assets are held in bitcoin.

Poor journalism to make this wholly unsubstantiated claim about crypto's wild west era being over based on some new US legislation around stablecoins, even if the part about stablecoins was true.
by martinald | 2025-07-18 11:10:49+00:00
8GB RAM is not enough for a semi-decent model IMO. 12/16GB is better (4GB for model and 8GB for OS) and really if you were going hard on device you'd probably want more like 32GB (24GB for model + 8GB for everything else - you'd be able to run a 13b param model with larger context size with that).

Even still though people are used to the quality of huge frontier models, so it will feel like a massive downgrade on many tasks. The _big_ problem with all this is chained tool calling. It uses context SO quickly and context needs a lot of (V)RAM. This also completely undermines the privacy argument you make, because it will need to ask personal data if using OpenAI and put it in the prompt.

Yes I noticed Apple shipping higher RAM but it will take years for this to feed through to a sizeable userbase, and people are quickly getting ingrained to use an app like ChatGPT instead of OS level features. Even more so given what a flop Apple Intelligence 1.0 has been.

The key problem they've got is they've went hard on privacy (which means it is hard to square that with going all in on 3rd party APIs) but they've also been incredibly stingy with RAM historically, which really nerfs their on device options. Private compute is an interesting middle ground but their model options are incredibly limited currently.
by MonkeyClub | 2025-07-18 11:11:15+00:00
I believe GP's implicit point was that you also need to know even to ask the right question.

Granted, an autodidact programmer might have encountered the concepts, but a CS graduate must have.

In my case, I was an autodidact well before I went in for Electronics Engineering. Because of personal interest, I put in a lot of time into these things, and did get to know them, but didn't really hear once about them in EE.

I guess if one engages long and deeply enough, they'll get to a high enough level - they'll acquire "sufficient expertise", per PG's turn of phrase. Conversely, no amount of CS courses will get one any wiser if they don't pay attention.

Everything always depends.
by niclas-183 | 2025-07-18 11:11:52+00:00
Exactly what I thought. In the end it really isn't in most of the big corps interest to not see your data/query. They need/want to see it so why would they degrade their ability to do so if they can just say no and you will have to rely on using their services without FHE. For banking applications cool, everyone else debatable if it will ever be accepted.
by Aeolun | 2025-07-18 11:12:17+00:00
> The assumption that all negative experiences are from users who are "holding it wrong", while all positive ones are from expert users, is wrong.

I’m not sure about that. I feel like someone experienced would realize when using the LLM is a better idea than doing it themselves, and when they just need to do it by hand.

You might work in a situation where you have to do everything by hand, but then your response would be to the extent that you can see how it’s useful to other people.
by lproven | 2025-07-18 11:12:30+00:00
Buy a used Thinkpad. Their compatibility is superb, as many major Linux vendors develop on them. Better to buy older higher-end models than spend the money on newer models. Buy the highest-end model you can afford.

Don't use an ideologically-motivated distro that omits drivers and firmware because they are not Free enough. Use something fairly mainstream, like Ubuntu or Mint.

Update its firmware before you install.

Shrink the Windows partition but keep it, for things like firmware updates. Nuke the recovery partitions, though; they're junk.

Max out the RAM. Have 2 SSDs if they'll fit. OS on one, data on a physically separate one. Used RAM is cheap. Buy matched memory modules.

Avoid wireless anything if you can. Wired peripherals, wired network, wired audio. Wired stuff just works.
by storus | 2025-07-18 11:12:31+00:00
Maybe there is a reason why is your brain hesitating (e.g. low energy) and pushing it with LLMs would blow it up at some point in the future if the cause was not fixed in the meantime? Covid showed me (in a very accentuated way) that many of the times I was procrastinating was instead brain throttling due to low energy, protecting itself.
by satyrun | 2025-07-18 11:13:04+00:00
I have an asus laptop with intel graphics and any distro I have tried has just worked, flawlessly.

I also have a MSI katana laptop with RTX 4070 and that had been a disaster. Every distro I tried had some issue with the graphics card/drivers even after looking up what distros people were having success with.

Finally, installing Bazzite just worked. I don't play any games but Bazzite took my MSI laptop from feeling like a waste of money to absolutely awesome.
by s1mplicissimus | 2025-07-18 11:13:09+00:00
> But the average developer, writing most line-of-business CRUD systems, well, quite honestly they're not that strong to begin with.

This is a wild take. Developers don't usually get to pick the system they work on, resource constraints exist during development time. We make tradeoff decisions every day and pulling in a "cheap" dependency will often make the difference between a shipped, working piece of software and plain "nothing". You seem to be fairly little involved in actual software development, considering how generic and wrong this take is.
by sneak | 2025-07-18 11:13:12+00:00
In my experience, most normal utility users of crypto use USDT above all else. Surprisingly (to me), a lot of the usage is on Tron, too.

Remittances are a really big deal, and the permissionless nature of blockchains means there’s basically zero barrier to entry for anyone.

Sending BTC or ETH (fees aside) is just too much volatility for everyday users.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-18 11:14:14+00:00
That's conflating investment with production.

Here's a fun example: Suppose the investor was buying condos and speculating on real estate prices without renting them out. If you transfer money from the investor to the spender, the spender uses it to buy a condo for consumption because they want to live in it. The amount of production hasn't changed at all and the amount of consumption has increased by converting waste (a vacancy) into use/consumption.

Or suppose if you give someone more money they'll use it to buy a new phone. Then more phones have to be produced -- but the vast majority of the production cost of a phone is from amortizing the fixed costs of the R&D and buying the manufacturing equipment etc. The incremental cost of making another phone when those are all sunk costs is tiny. Meanwhile the gross profit from those additional purchases goes to the seller which they can use in lieu of investment to cover the incremental increase in the cost of production. It can even make the average price of the phone go down by allowing the fixed costs to be amortized over more units.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-07-18 11:15:25+00:00
Genuine question: could someone explain the real value of stablecoins?

I always hear hand waivy notions like “no middleman,” “faster settlement,” and “lower fees,” but it has to be exchanged to fiat somewhere to be spent right? And there are fees and settlement periods there?

Many fiat P2P services are instant as well - when i Venmo a friend, they see it instantly. When I transfer to my bank, that may take several days to settle. But exchanging USDC for USD and transferring off the exchange to my bank will also take several days.

People always say “it COULD be used this magic way,” but I’ve never heard anyone say, “it IS used this magic way.”

What is the killer use case I’m missing?
by b112 | 2025-07-18 11:15:26+00:00
This isn't a serious question, is it?

A human would immediately start learning, and understanding the differences. Forming new memories. People learn every, single day.

An LLM would never have a single new memory, nor understand a single change had happened. Without being retokenized via new data it trains on, nothing of its symbolic world view would even change in the tiniest bit.

Telling it so in a context window isn't the LLM learning, that's gone the second the context window is gone. In 5 years, 10 years, 1M years, that LLM would be precisely the same. It would view the world as 1850. Forever.

Meanwhile, being told "It's 2025!" would immediately update the human's expectations. They would see the changes around them, and start learning. Note that initial reaction isn't relevant here, a person would eventually deal with it, and move forward.

You have posted a link, in another response, where someone is working on dynamically updating an LLM. However that is not how current LLMs work, thus invalid in any attempt to refute how I describe LLMs currently.

Further, until we see how this works -- precisely, it may be a non-starter. It may not work as described. It may be hype. It may work, but still require retraining if large amounts of symbolic data needs to change.

There's a reason it takes massive farms of hardware to tokenize, and I'm skeptical that the quoted twitter link reforges all relationships. Again, we'll see.. and this is something required for an LLM to actually "learn" about changes to how tokens are weighted.
by phtrivier | 2025-07-18 11:15:50+00:00
Sure, I'm not expecting a tutorial on how to offshore my money. However, to follow you point: openai does not explain how they train _their_ models, but there is plenty of material out there about how models are trained "in general" (kharpaty's videos, for example.)

On the same vein, I perfectly expect off shoring practices to be kinda "secret and sensitive information", as they are basically "exploits" of tax code - but that does not mean that all cybersecurity books are "shill".

The people who implements offshoring have to learn from somewhere, so there is written tracks. It might even be taught in accounting schools, assuming that some part of it is in a gray area, "legally."

This is the kind of very high level info I'm interested in.
by tornikeo | 2025-07-18 11:16:01+00:00
Unfortunately, i don't have the cold hard data on what job complexity distribution looks like right now. But I don't think it's far fetched to assume that most days, most tasks people do are route and boring. Possibly a fraction of those tasks are amenable to AI-base acceleration. Who knows? But we do know (from that article) that people are hesitant to even try using AI.
by timschmidt | 2025-07-18 11:16:09+00:00
Kufu's pyramid was actively used. It's the only likely reason for the design of it's portcullis, which doesn't defend as well against entry as previous designs, and is equipped for repeated opening. Plenty of information on the topic here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItAQSrlG9WQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5Qe7xDf_ks
by Lockal | 2025-07-18 11:16:35+00:00
Some person on Twitter (self-proclaimed "Founder of Bedrock") is using ChatGPT to have fun, generate noise and get attention. Meanwhile, some other person (self-proclaimed "CEO of exodusorbitals") on HN hallucinates and/or defames that a person on Twitter:

* has some mental illness (sorry, no right to diagnose)

* it is somehow related to being "an OpenAI investor" (no, just a regular ChatGPT user)
by mcmoor | 2025-07-18 11:16:43+00:00
It's only a 1 bit signal that says "don't come here" isn't it? I've seen claims that lighthouse helps ships somehow navigate difficult waves and I'm always curious how exactly one high lamp do that. Saying that it "guides" is a bit of an overstatement isn't it? Like saying that a road sign saying "dangerous hole here" guides riders navigate the road.
by endymion-light | 2025-07-18 11:17:10+00:00
Not token - projects.

Honestly, is Bitcoin anything other than a speculative asset? It's useful in the sense that it's worth more money, but it feels more like a way of achieving a kind of gold mining in the digital age.

I suppose there's use from that angle, but i'm talking more about the actual projects (Helium, NFTs, etc) which all seem to fizzle into being far worse than what already exists.
by sehansen | 2025-07-18 11:17:55+00:00
Depending on how stringently you define "no extra electronics" you can get there with a 1st generation Hyundai Ioniq. The only things I need to use the touch screen for in daily life is navigation and choosing media.

Be aware that you'd need to live in a place with very good public charging infrastructure due to the ~220 km range. The infrastructure is there here in Denmark where I live and daily-drive a 2017 Ioniq.

All-in-all the Ioniq sold well enough that Hyundai release a facelift in 2020. And the most recent facelifts of the successor-Ioniqs (5 and 6) have moved back to a more button-based interface (AFAIK).
by bosmarcel | 2025-07-18 11:18:10+00:00
Hi everyone!

Thanks for the interest in fluent-state.

Just a quick note: for easy installation and trying out the demo, check out these links:

NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/fluent-state

Demo: https://stackblitz.com/edit/vitejs-vite-uh4kyzkf?file=src%2F...

The GitHub repo is still available here for source and issues: https://github.com/marsbos/fluent-state

Happy coding!
by JdeBP | 2025-07-18 11:18:42+00:00
Indeed. That was exactly what I was thinking when I read the article, from experience of PCI compliance as a matter of fact. And clearly from comments here a lot of people are thinking the same. It may be a fun "Look! OpenBSD can do something!" thing, but the reality is that defence against the dark arts goes a lot deeper, and (as ever) one often has to read more than one standard/specification. (-:
by jongjong | 2025-07-18 11:19:12+00:00
It would take an essay to explain it fully because it's a scam in almost every aspect including in the way it uses complexity to hide the mechanics of the scam... But I can point to a few things.

For example all money is created either by government or banks. Money moves fast; on average, each unit/dollar doesn't stay in the economy very long (in terms of how far it can travel) because it is quickly taxed down to nothing and ends up back in gov coffers. Each time it hops to a different person via a transaction, it gets taxed at say 30% (e.g. avg income tax)... How far from the gov or bank money printer can any newly created money travel before it's taxed down to nearly nothing? After just 6 hops, almost 90% has been taxed away... This creates an uneven playing field as communities which are further from a 'money printer' exist in an artificially scarce monetary environment. Read up on the "Cantillon effect".

But the system also scams most asset holders. As the money supply keeps inflating and pushing up asset prices, if you sell your asset, you have to pay a capital gains tax on it... Say you bought an asset and it went up in price 50% over 10 years but during this time inflation was also 50% (over that whole 10 year period)... You have to pay CGT tax on the price increase even though your real buying power has not increased... Tax is eating into your wealth even if it flatlined when measured in terms of buying power. BTW, does it ever get mentioned that inflation compounds? This means that people's loss of buying power compounds as well. This is especially bad for long 20 or 30 year contracts. Here I could go on a rant about gov treasury bills being a scam...

Don't get me started on how inflation errodes the true value of your employment contracts... Or how it pushes you up into higher tax brackets whenever you manage to negotiate a salary 'increase' (I put it in quotation marks because your salary increase is probably not actually an increase; even language has become a scam). You pay more tax whenever the fake fiat numbers get bigger, even if your real buying power has stayed flat.

Only big VCs, investors and founders who get crazy returns of 100x on their investments can beat inflation and the tax scam enough to actually make a profit in this system.

There are also big macro issues like how wars are used to prop up fiat currencies of certain powerful countries and to fill the pockets of weapons manufacturers.

Now let's not discuss the real reason why Africa cannot escape poverty and the unbelievable hypocrisy of blaming poor citizens for 'choosing' their predicament while western governments are actively helping to install and maintain corrupt dictators over there whilst publicly preaching the virtues democracy whenever it's convenient!

Literally everything has become a scam on top of a scam. As I said, even our language has become deceptive, often used unwittingly because the big fiat scam is redefining the very meaning of words like 'profit' and 'salary' from underneath us as a way to extract as much tax from us as possible.
by nullc | 2025-07-18 11:19:56+00:00
iblt has low space efficiency for small sets, small elements, and low failure rates (and on that note is only probabilistic in its success).

We implemented https://github.com/bitcoin-core/minisketch which has optimal size efficiency-- N bits of state will always correctly recover when there are N or fewer bits of set difference, even when the set elements are small (like 32 bits, for example).

So for example you can you and I can each have sets of, say, ten thousand 32-bit elements which are identical except for 10 entries, and I can send you a 320 bit (32*10) sketch of my set and from that you can always determine the 10 (or fewer) differences. The same element and difference size with IBLT would likely take thousands of bits to have a low failure rate.

The downside is that the minisketch approach has quadratic decode complexity in the size of the set difference, but this is not a big deal when the number of differences is small by construction or thanks to recursive subdivision.

For cases where the differences are large iBLT eventually wins out-- the two ideas can also be hybridized in a variety of ways. E.g. using minisketch to make multi-element buckets in an iblt analogous to blocked bloom filter or the normal practice with cuckoo filters.

Another related scheme is cpisync which was used for many years by SKS key servers. It has communications efficiency like minisketch, but cubic decode costs.
by skydhash | 2025-07-18 11:20:12+00:00
Natural language to formal language is not a matter of implementation details, it’s a matter of ambiguity where the definition of a term is contextual. Formalism is removing the dependency on context so that the semantic of a term or a proposition is embedded in itself.

Formalism is so essential that we we use it to create spontaneous form of programming language (that we call pseudocode) to express some idea clearly.
by sneak | 2025-07-18 11:21:50+00:00
Gold is useful also as a medium of exchange and store of value beyond a speculative asset.

Not everyone denominates their wealth in inflationary currencies.

The utility of things like gold and bitcoin is that no force on Earth at the moment has the ability to change policy and inflate them. Many people find that to be a big issue with fiat currencies. Those that don’t, of course, are not compelled to ever touch cryptocurrencies.

They are a purely opt-in alternative to people who find fiat currencies to be lacking for their use cases.

I’m personally not very interested in most random open source projects; they’re usually boring and uninspired. I’m not sure why we expect the bar to be any higher in crypto.

NFTs are a good example of something that get a lot of unnecessary hate. Nobody starts foaming at the mouth when rich people drop five or six figures on MTG or Pokémon cards (or Hermes bags, for that matter), but somehow NFTs are specifically bad?
by lotsofpulp | 2025-07-18 11:22:28+00:00
Health problems and healthcare is not that simple. Almost everyone will experience healthcare issues in their life, so the insurance becomes more of a subsidy mechanism to time shift costs from one population to another (which at some point becomes indistinguishable from taxpayer funded healthcare, just with a different administrator).

Also, legislation requires health insurance to pay for all healthcare, so there is no point paying to insure against specific ailments.
Ask HN: Cursor is using 269,738 tokens to edit 1200 token file
by sarpdag | 2025-07-18 11:22:38+00:00
I started to track my Cursor usage via https://cursor.com/dashboard?tab=usage.

The pricing and usage of tokens hugely changed recently. To test I gave a simple task to Cursor which would use a 192 line swift code, including comments. This file has 1213 tokens according to https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer .

Here is my prompt: "There is a bug when i click on a raw it plays the audio and it deletes it afterwards, even though without clicking the delete button."

The Cursor dashboard says it used 269,738 tokens, and records to usage accordingly. I am a pro plan user.

Is there anyone else having similar issues?
by wongarsu | 2025-07-18 11:22:40+00:00
For me the thing that atrophied basic math skills wasn't the calculator, which was invented decades before I was born, but the rise of the smart phone.

Sure, calculators are useful in professional life and in high school math and sciences. But you still had to do everyday math in all kinds of places and didn't always have a calculator at hand. The smartphone changed that

I feel that's relevant in two ways: just like with math, a little bit of manual coding is going to be a huge difference compared to no manual coding, and any study like the one you propose would be hugely complicated by everything else that happened around the time, both because of smart phones and the coinciding 2008 crash
by Amezarak | 2025-07-18 11:22:48+00:00
The article doesn't even go into this, but the primary cause of the issue is not climate change, but natural processes. The Mississippi river used to be undammed and untrammeled; envision a hose whipping around (in geological terms) spraying tremendous amounts of sediment over a very wide area.

Now, the Mississippi is tightly controlled. Most areas are no longer getting that sediment. So natural subsidence and erosion processes mean that "land" is sinking back below the water.

The solution (for this project) entailed reconnecting the Mississippi to the area, restoring sediment deposition. But this does have a lot of negative effects as well, because it impacts salinity levels and of course the Mississippi is also full of fertilizer and other substances.