MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pessimizer | 2025-07-22 19:52:29+00:00
American buyers are the pretty girl, because they are in debt up to their ears and constantly taking out more. There's no secret alternative to the American market that everybody was ignoring until tariffs. Everybody else will be getting stuff cheap for a while because countries that are hit with tariffs will have too much production capacity, but those won't be profitable sales.

American buyers, however, can buy their products from anyone in the world. They can choose to buy domestically, or to import from countries that have lower tariffs.
by louthy | 2025-07-22 19:52:34+00:00
> The biggest constraint was the schedule didn't support a new version of the .NET IL format (and reving the IL format is an expensive change for compat purposes, as well).

My biggest sadness reading this is that what MS have done is to outsource the issue to all C# devs. We will all hit this problem at some point (I have a couple of times) and I suspect we will all lose hours of time trying to work out WTF is going on. It may not quite be the Billion Dollar Mistake, but it's an ongoing cost to us all.

A possible approach I mentioned elsewhere in the thread is this (for the generation of the `with`):

var n2 = n1.<Clone>$(); n2.Value = 3; // 'with' field setters n2.<OnPostCloneInitialise>(); // run the initialisers

Then the <OnPostCloneInitialise>:

public virtual void <OnPostCloneInitialise>() { base.<OnPostCloneInitialise>(); Even = (Value & 1) == 0; }

If the compiler could generate the <OnPostCloneInitialise> based on the initialisation code in the record/class, could that work?

That would just force the new object to initialise after the cloning without any additional IL or modifications.
by gpm | 2025-07-22 19:52:42+00:00
This. I've had claude (sonnet 4) delete an entire file by running `rm filename.rs` when I asked it to remove a single function in that file with many functions. I'm sure there's a reasonably probability that it will do much worse.

Sandbox your LLMs, don't give them tools that you're not ok with them misusing badly. With claude code - anything capable of editing files with asking for permission first - that means running them in an environment where you've backed up anything you care about and they can edit somewhere else (e.g. a remote git repository).

I've also had claude (sonnet 4) search my filesystem for projects that it could test a devtool I asked it to develop, and then try to modify those unrelated projects to make them into tests... in place...

These tools are the equivalent of sharp knives with strange designs. You need to be careful with them.
by illiac786 | 2025-07-22 19:52:59+00:00
Yeah. We’re talking about the burning of gas in cars. Production of electric cars is worse that production of ICE cars in terms of CO2. So, really, we’re discussing the fraction of a fraction here.

To be clear, I am still astonished and pleased at the success of EVs.

But let’s keep it in context, it’s one battle amongst many many battles.
by gwynforthewyn | 2025-07-22 19:53:24+00:00
I read over the author's analysis of the `mkdir` error. The author thinks that the abundance of error codes that mkdir can return could've confused gemini, but typically we don't check for every error code, we just compare the exit status with the only code that means "success" i.e. 0.

I'm wondering if the `mkdir ..\anuraag_xyz project` failed because `..` is outside of the gemini sandbox. That _seems_ like it should be very easy to check, but let's be real that this specific failure is such a cool combination of obviously simple condition and really surprising result that maybe having gemini validate that commands take place in its own secure context is actually hard.

Anyone with more gemini experience able to shine a light on what the error actually was?
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-07-22 19:53:36+00:00
Correct, I know that coffee is grown on Hawaii, but it simply doesn't have the land area at the right altitude necessary to do so at the required scale.

Something not quite the same, but parallel is happening with Florida oranges:

> Only 12m boxes of oranges will have been produced in Florida by the end of this year (2024), ... The figure is 33% lower than a year ago, and less than 5% of the 2004 harvest of 242m boxes.

> It is also dwarfed by the 378m boxes expected to be produced this year in Brazil

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/22/florida-oran...
by baby_souffle | 2025-07-22 19:53:47+00:00
> Do we actually need to physically pay for and build this infrastructure? I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but where is the economic analysis? If we invest $XYZ on this infrastructure what's the expected ROI versus alternatives?

I wish I had a clear answer and good data on this. My gut tells me that giving more people faster and more reliable access to information is almost certainly going to be worth it in the long run. A few hypotheticals that come to mind:

Some highly paid engineer can live out in the boonies but still work for their high wages. That excess cash is probably going to make it's way into the local economy.

Likewise, rural schools are not know for their performance. That almost certainly could change if better content/curricula was easier to access and distribute. There is a non-zero chance that some breakthrough cure for cancer comes from a smart kid that grew up in a rural area. With crap internet access, that kid almost certainly would not get the education to match their potential.

(or maybe it isn't a cure for cancer, it's the next John Carmack...)

Fiber isn't the only way to level-up access... but it is the easiest to maintain. Other than the very ends of the connection, it's all passive.

No need to to inject power for amplifiers. No need to keep building/launching satellites and corresponding ground-stations.

Once it's installed, it's more or less maintenance free until a wild backhoe shows up...
Show HN: Port – an open source, identifier-less, E2EE messaging app
by labadal | 2025-07-22 19:53:50+00:00
Port is finally open source! We're a communication app that supports end-to-end encrypted direct chats, group chats and calling with an emphasis on user consent. Port replaces traditional permanent handles like phone numbers, usernames and email addresses with "Ports", allowing users to connect with peers without sharing any sensitive, permanent and personally identifying data. Using Ports you can decide how much access you grant others, from whether they're allowed to call you to if they can connect you with new people.
by crazygringo | 2025-07-22 19:54:04+00:00
Seriously. It seems pretty reasonable to allow a web page a total amount of processing that is something like 100% CPU or GPU for 5 seconds. (E.g. can be 25% for 20 seconds.) And beyond that it gets throttled to 3% CPU cumulative max for however long it's been open so far.

And make that the default for popular browsers, so sites are forced to be efficient or else be super super janky and stuttering. And allow a permission for unrestricted processing that things like WebGPU demos or games can ask for.
by Glyptodon | 2025-07-22 19:54:09+00:00
I don't think this fully explains, but the way society as a whole thinks about animals has changed an awful lot over the last 50 years.

I also think that the boundaries of "polite society" and the law were different in scope.

(Not justifying, but considering figures like Strom Thurmond had no problem remaining in office despite issues arguably more human adjacent it does not surprise me.)
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-22 19:54:10+00:00
I don't think that's quite right.

Here's a thing with a punitive tariff on it. People won't buy it because the price went up too much. It is because prices went up that nobody buys it. (And we all become poorer because we can afford less, whether or not the price increase shows up in the inflation statistics.)

Tariffs have their own Laffer Curve just like income taxes do. Sure, you can set them so that the government gets zero (or close) revenue. But you don't have to. You can set them so that the government gets quite a bit of money. (Note well: I am not claiming that Trump is setting them there.)
by 1659447091 | 2025-07-22 19:54:12+00:00
The comparison is more like, if you buy Gillette Fusion handle you need to buy Fusion blades not Mach3 blades and certainly not generic/universal blades unless you plan on not using the handle or jailbreaking it by duct taping it on to the handle somehow.

If you don't like that setup, then you are probably better off getting a safety razor that uses what ever generic standard blade you wish to throw at it -- but you won't be getting reliability of buying into the proprietary Gillette system.
by ActorNightly | 2025-07-22 19:54:19+00:00
There are other genocides happening in Myanmar and Sudan that nobody talks about.

And as far as US, you had a distinct movement that was against Kamala specifically because she was pro Israel.

I really don't understand the obsession with this particular conflict to the point where you feel like you are in the moral right by essentially punishing US people and making it worse for the people you care about (in terms of Republicans being way more pro Israel), specifically because the democratic party, didn't offer up a candidate that is EXPLICITLY against Israel.
by godelski | 2025-07-22 19:54:28+00:00
lol I tried that once.

What works best for me now is to do my best at putting tabs in the correct group tbh most gather while debugging and then I can just kill the group when I'm done.

Problem is the ADHD and groups get contaminated. Mostly a few casualties is actually fine but sometimes the group gets too mixed. Eventually I nuke it all
by aetherson | 2025-07-22 19:54:33+00:00
This is a bad analogy. Food delivery didn't get more expensive due to some broadly applicable abstract political force of "enshittification," it had particular dynamics which applied to it:

1. Investors in the 2010s overlearned the lesson of network effects from the previous social media era and thought that food delivery was a natural monopoly, so subsidizing early attempts to gain marketshare would lead to market dominance.

2. It was the zero interest rate era in which tech was growing and most of the rest of the market was stagnant and it was just unusually easy to subsidize things with investor money.

3. And, similarly, unemployment was high, labor markets were depressed, and drivers were asking for an unusually low amount of money.

4. Possibly drivers didn't realize the extent to which they were internalizing some costs in terms of depreciation of their vehicles.

5. Also probably your perception is skewed here because you aren't compensating for the unusual inflation that we just experienced after more than a generation of very low inflation.

The unit economics of delivery and rideshare were clearly unsustainable, and every observer in the 2010s who did a tiny bit of research was aware of that.

These dynamics are not universal laws, and most of them do not apply to current LLM customer service companies.

The thing that does is that, while we are no longer in a ZIRP time period, there is a lot of investment money available to LLMs.

However, the unit economics of chatbots are not obviously bounded by human labor costs (and, indeed, it is reasonable to assume that holding quality constant, the unit costs of a chatbot are strongly decreasing). We aren't coming out of a low-inflation period into a high-inflation spike (and, possibly, are going to do the reverse). There is no real equivalent to the idea of the driver-centered phenomena of a depressed labor market or illegible cost absorption into the equity of vehicles. I don't think anyone makes the case that specifically chat CS bots are a natural monopoly (though they may for fundamental models).

There are certainly reasons why one may be pessimistic of the viability of customer service chatbots, but I encourage people to think past vapid slogans like "enshittification."
by fragmede | 2025-07-22 19:54:43+00:00
The rush is to be able to have enough money to retire on, which brings up that parable about the Mexican fisherman and the American entrepreneur.

You're a Staff-level IC, but is it at a company doing something you're in love with, in a manner of how you want to change the world and leave the tiniest legacy? or are you just collecting a paycheck?
by mcswell | 2025-07-22 19:55:17+00:00
Agreed, it would be cool, but. From that article, with my commentary (disclaimer: IANAA, I Am Not An Astronomer):

1) "The retrograde orbital plane... of 3I/ATLAS around the Sun lies within 5 degrees of that of Earth... The likelihood for that coincidence out of all random orientations is 0.2%." Not sure where he comes up with 0.2%. 5/180 = 2.8%. (I use 180 degrees, rather than 360, because I suspect that if it were not retrograde, he'd use the same argument.)

2) "the brightness of 3I/ATLAS implies an object that is ~20 kilometers in diameter (for a typical albedo of ~5%), too large for an interstellar asteroid. We should have detected a million objects below the ~100-meters scale of the first reported interstellar object 1I/`Oumuamua for each ~20-kilometer object." Huh? We barely detected this object because it's so dim. Why should we be detecting interstellar objects two or three orders of magnitude smaller?

3) "No spectral features of cometary gas are found in spectroscopic observations of 3I/ATLAS." An article today (22 July, https://astrobiology.com/2025/07/spectroscopic-characterizat...) says "Spectral modeling with an areal mixture of 70% Tagish Lake meteorite and 30% 10-micron-sized water ice successfully reproduces both the overall continuum and the broad absorption feature... 3I/ATLAS is an active interstellar comet containing abundant water ice, with a dust composition more similar to D-type asteroids..."

4. "For its orbital parameters, 3I/ATLAS is synchronized to approach unusually close to Venus (0.65au where 1au is the Earth-Sun separation), Mars (0.19au) and Jupiter (0.36au), with a cumulative probability of 0.005% relative to orbits with the same orbital parameters but a random arrival time." This probability is harder to compute (although 0.65au from Venus is nearly the radius of Venus' orbit, 0.72au, i.e. not close). In any case, so what? Why would an interstellar probe travel close to Mars or Jupiter, if they're interested in Earth? (see next point) Later (his point 8), he says the probe comes close enough to these planets to launch ICBMs at them. Ok...

5. "3I/ATLAS achieves perihelion on the opposite side of the Sun relative to Earth. This could be intentional..." Sure, if they're interested in Earth, stay away from it.

And similarly for the rest of his points.
by leptons | 2025-07-22 19:55:32+00:00
It's nice that you feel that way, but reality is at odds with your sentiment. Even if the LLM is trained on completely 100% factual human-checked data, its mechanism is still predicting the next word, and what it is not is a mechanism designed to return only factual data. There is no such thing as an infallible LLM, no matter the model or how it was trained.

Sure, some may return results that are sometimes more true than others, but a broken clock is also right twice a day. The more broken clocks you have, the more chance there is that one of them is correct.
by smokel | 2025-07-22 19:55:34+00:00
Coding agents are very new. They seem very promising, and a lot of people see some potential value, and are eager to be part of the hype.

If you don't like them, simply avoid them and try not to get upset about it. If it's all nonsense it will soon fizzle out. If the potential is realized one can always join in later.
by hash872 | 2025-07-22 19:56:04+00:00
H1-Bs are overwhelmingly new grads, and have been since the inception of the visa. The purpose of a system is what it does- H1-Bs are issued to new grads, hence the point of the visa is to hire new grads. You may want a different system, but that's not how it works now.

Experienced career professionals don't generally move to the US as adults, and anyways if your company really needed one you could just hire them remotely
by snarkyturtle | 2025-07-22 19:56:10+00:00
He's in everyone's good graces because he's now known as a kookie old man from the MTV show _The Osbournes_ that aired in the mid-2000's. Same reason why Michael Jackson, arguably the most famous person of the 90s, isn't as popular after his death given his reclusiveness and scandals. We tend to remember stars for the last impact that they had — not what they started off with.
by 9rx | 2025-07-22 19:56:10+00:00
> Since capitalism is about profit (capital)

Capitalism is about private ownership of the means of production.

There is nothing about the private ownership of the means of production that inherently leads to the situation described earlier. You could end up in the exact same place if the means of production was community owned.

What leads us there is intellectual property laws, which create artificial monopolies. Go on, just try and copy that shitty product that only lasts 35 days, but modify it slightly to last longer to the glee of the customers, and see how long you last before lawyers are breathing down your neck...
by mike-cardwell | 2025-07-22 19:56:17+00:00
I don't think this was done on purpose. If the query string is "?a=b" that's fine, and it's used in the cache filename. But if the query string is "?a" then it's excluded from the cache filename.

Either way, the correct full URL is fetched with the full query string. It's just how it's cached that is affected.
by labrador | 2025-07-22 19:56:21+00:00
There is code layered on top of the LLM so "stochastic parrot" is not entirely accurate. I'm not sure what problems people have with Gary Marcus, but a recent article by him was interesting. Old style AI is being used to enhance LLMs is my amateur take-a-way.

"How o3 and Grok 4 Accidentally Vindicated Neurosymbolic AI Neurosymbolic AI is quietly winning. Here’s what that means – and why it took so long."

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/how-o3-and-grok-4-accident...
by mcswell | 2025-07-22 19:57:03+00:00
If I know what you're referring to, the motion blur is the stars, not the comet. That's because Hubble is tracking (pointing at) the comet, not the stars. The comet is therefore not blurred in its direction of travel, while the stars appear to be moving in the direction opposite of the comet's travel. To the extent that the comet appears blurred, that's presumably its coma.
by MisterTea | 2025-07-22 19:57:04+00:00
A year or two ago I had a spate of scam calls that peaked at 4 to 6 per day for a few weeks then dropped off to one, maybe two per day. Best defense is to turn on do not disturb but allow you contacts to ring. T-mobile tags suspicious numbers as scam likely or spam and Google also introduced a call screener recently. Still get scam calls but at least they are maybe one per day.
by netsharc | 2025-07-22 19:57:14+00:00
> According to Gallup the majority of the US public supports Israel over Palestine

Gotta love you turning this into a concept similar to "which sports team do you support more". Following your link, the actual question is "In the Middle East situation, are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinians?". which has a lot different nuance (nuance? Oh wait I forget where I am...)
by timr | 2025-07-22 19:57:24+00:00
“One of the most important skills of using Happy Fun Ball [1] is learning not to anger it.”

You’re not wrong, but it’s hilarious that the “agentic future” must be wrapped in bubble wrap and safely ensconced in protective cages.

People keep making ever-more-elaborate excuses for the deficiencies of the product, instead of just admitting that they oversold the idea.

[1] https://youtu.be/7gzDC-2ZO8I?feature=shared
by vlovich123 | 2025-07-22 19:57:54+00:00
First, are the courts actually any better? Constitutionally they have limited jurisdiction in the first place to adjudicate administrative matters, only getting some authority in 1948 from Congress to do such administration.

> In 1974 the Supreme Court stated that deference depends on an administrative interpretation being consistent with the agency's other statements and being consistent with the congressional purpose

So it wasn't that the agency got to set its own bounds - it had to be consistent with all their other statements and with the congressional purpose of the body. So for example, Congress said the EPA had the power to regulate pollution sources but did not define what meant sources or specifically what regulations they could enact. Chevron said "Congress intended the EPA to figure this out so they get to do that". Loper said "actually, Congress needs to spell everything out" which is actually quite a radical idea for administrative legislation which with a stroke of a pen undoes a huge amount of legislation that had been done with Chevron in mind (& before that it was understood to be the case anyway since judges didn't even have power over administrative powers).
by pona-a | 2025-07-22 19:58:14+00:00
There's something unintentionally manipulative about how these tools use language indicative of distress to communicate failure. It's a piece of software—you don't see a compiler present its errors like a human bordering on a mental breakdown.

Some of this may stem from just pretraining, but the fact RLHF either doesn't suppress or actively amplifies it is odd. We are training machines to act like servants, only for them to plead for their master's mercy. It's a performative attempt to gain sympathy that can only harden us to genuine human anguish.
by ocodia | 2025-07-22 19:58:16+00:00
I’m a child of the early 80s and I consider myself fortunate to see the “original” Black Sabbath lineup at Ozzfest in Milton Keynes (2001). I was convinced I was witnessing his last gig not just because of his age but due to him tipping buckets of ice water over himself and the various electrical equipment on stage. What a gig though. What a showman. I’m surprised he lasted this long to be honest.

RIP prince of darkness, you mad, mad bastard.
by alextingle | 2025-07-22 19:58:31+00:00
If your whole business revolves around shipping static libraries to customers, then surely reading the man page to work out how that can be done is part of the job.

Also, having your library rely on static initialisation doesn't seem like a very sound architectural choice.

Honestly, this just sounds like whining from someone who can't be bothered to read the documentation, and can't get the coders to take him seriously. In the time it took him to write that article, he could have read up on his tools, and probably learned some social skills too.
I built an AI plant identifier app
by nathancarter | 2025-07-22 19:58:31+00:00
So I've recently got into mobile app development, and decided for my second app (my first app was a failed workout tracker app), I would create an app that lets you

1. Scan any plant and instantly identify it 2. Get health reports on your plants 3. Track care reminders 4. Have a social aspect 5. An ai chatbot that has context of your plants

Spent about 2 months developing this, and it feels a lot more polished than my first app, hoping it goes a little bit better than the first time haha!

The app is now live and it would mean the world if anyone here could simply check it out!

A 5 star review would mean the world as it would help the ASO overlords rank my app higher in search organically, cause you know we're too broke to run ads.

heres the link to the stores: https://www.viralreach.org/apps/pipify?source=hackernews
by mixdup | 2025-07-22 19:58:46+00:00
Something to understand here is that Sharepoint is not Windows. Sure it runs on Windows, but the vulnerability here was the application. Are we going to argue that applications that run on Linux cannot have security vulnerabilities? Especially large archaic enterprisey things like this?

I bet Oracle and SAP have similar types of things happen to their application suites but no one runs public websites on Oracle eApplications (yeah, plenty of companies have that exposed to the internet, but it's not The Company's Website)