MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by terminalshort | 2025-07-15 18:54:40+00:00
It may not be the FDA that is directly responsible here, but if the FDA approved it tomorrow, all my problems will go away. That's because, as you mentioned, our system relies on bureaucratic stamps of approval to adjudicate responsibility rather than anything real. Doctors who prescribed oxycontin and harmed their patients get off scot free because they can just say "but I was told it wasn't addictive" because it has this stamp of approval.

I will certainly take a look at those links as they may help me, but this doesn't change my opinion on the state of things. It infuriates me that I have to jump through all these bureaucratic hoops to get what I need. There is a company with a product they want to sell, and a customer who wants to buy it. The fact that they won't just sell it to me is an indication that our system is fundamentally broken.

I put little weight on the fact that the FDA in particular isn't outright banning me access. They are just one arm of the bureaucratic squid that is strangling me. The FDA says "take this at your own risk" which is on the face of it a fair statement. But they know that the civil liability system, which is just the other arm of the squid, will deny me the ability to actually take my own risk. And they know that the arm of the squid that mandates Takeda can't sell me the medicine without the approval of a doctor means that I won't be able to get through that bureaucratic gatekeeper. So the whole system works together against me while ensuring that no part of it can be blamed because it isn't the decision of any one part that prevents me from getting it, but rather the interaction between these parts. This is why "burn it all down" is such a popular position.
by spookie | 2025-07-15 18:54:42+00:00
> *: Assuming genAI won't deliver and make that world disappear entirely, ofc.

The current state of things leaves a lot to be desired. I have yet to see a model, or technique that actually tackles real 3D content creation problems, aside from animation of course.

Most solutions are trying to solve things completely orthogonal to what you really need in the real world. They produce bad meshes, if meshes at all, have bad topology or inconsistent point sampling, and are extremely prone to parroting their training data.

It's kind of incredible how far we have come but seriously, to understand a problem space you need to try to use the existing tools. Only then, do new, and useful ideas pop up that solve real issues. But man, nobody in the space seems to have a clue.

Believe me, 3D modelling software is REALLY good at what it does, it is really hard to try and dethrone human and machine working together in these really well thought out pieces of software.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-07-15 18:54:48+00:00
I do wish that there was a good place to talk about interesting stuff with people online that was a bit more resistant to both the extreme hype and the extreme pessimism

HN threads very often feel like whichever side posted first winds up dominating the thread, it's bizarre

I see the comments on some articles that are massively pro AI all upvoted to the top, then the comments on another article and it's all the negative AI comments upvoted

It's weirdly echo-chambery on a post by post basis
Ask HN: What should be included in a standard library?
by vodou | 2025-07-15 18:54:59+00:00
I know, I know... There are countless "it depends" baked into this question. But let’s try anyway.

After reading HN for years, I have encountered so many opinions regarding standard libraries in various programming languages, e.g., how they should be designed, what they should (and should not) include, etc.

The C standard library is very minimal, focusing mostly on low-level facilities. Everyone is expected to implement their own dynamic arrays or choose one implementation from a zillion available libraries. And, apparently, null-terminated strings are the work of the devil. C++ has a much more extensive standard library, built around generic programming techniques using containers, iterators, and algorithms applied in a composable way. It is rather elegant and powerful, but not very intuitive for beginners. It also has some notable omissions compared to more modern languages. Python comes with "batteries included" in the form of a very rich standard library. However, the PSF tends to "break user space" from time to time by deprecating older modules, such as “boring” technologies like CGI or modules with known security problems. (I am not comfortable enough to say anything about JS, Go, Rust, etc.)

So, what would a great standard library look like? What would make you happy? What have we learned about this after 50+ years of computing? Do you want everything from linked lists to red-black trees (and beyond)? Graphics and sound? (Even if no single API can please everyone.) XML? YAML? SIMD abstractions? Where do you even stop without causing anger? Where do you begin?

(No, I am not creating a new programming language. Enough is enough.)
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-15 18:55:02+00:00
I’m absolutely telling people not to have kids into a macro that just wants economic slavery to pay back debt of all sorts incurred (sovereign, demographic).

Labor was cheap because of a population boom with a root cause of women not empowered. Now empowered, they are having less children (family planning, not having unwanted or unaffordable children). Suboptimal economic systems can change, and they should.

Can you say with a straight face, “Have more kids and be beholden to 1-2 decades of minimally compensated childrearing labor and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs so the economy might get better and things might be cheap again?” I cannot.
by brokencode | 2025-07-15 18:55:20+00:00
I think the thing people hate about that is the lack of effort and attention to detail. It’s an incredible enabler for laziness if misused.

If somebody writes a design or a report, you expect that they’ve put in the time and effort to make sure it is correct and well thought out.

If you then find the person actually just had ChatGPT generate it and didn’t put any effort into editing it and checking for correctness, then that is very infuriating.

They are essentially farming out the process of creating the document to AI and farming out the process of reviewing it to their colleagues. So what is their job then, exactly?

These are tools, not a replacement for human thought and work. Maybe someday we can just have ChatGPT serve as an engineer or a lawyer, but certainly not today.
by ghaff | 2025-07-15 18:55:23+00:00
Tastes vary. I was on the executive committee of my college film group yers ago and going to weekend films was a lot of fun.

These days? Maybe an Imax film is a once a year experience.

I keep in touch with a lot of people I was on the film committee with and I'd say the opinion is pretty much split between people who still go to the theater a lot and those who basically never do like myself.
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-15 18:55:33+00:00
Its true that they are but the number of cases is still just around 1,000 which is not many in the context of the overall population, and only about 1/10 of the numbers we saw in the late 1980/early 1990s.

Most parents still get their kids vaccinated. You hear about the few oddballs that don't when their kids get sick and it's trumpted all over the news as if it's a new pandemic.
by nozzlegear | 2025-07-15 18:56:04+00:00
> It’s not only the bigger screen and better sound system. The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.

I think I understand that, it's just not for me. I've never felt that other people do anything but subtract from my experience in watching a movie. And I'm not saying that to be cynical or because I dislike social experiences – I'm an outgoing person and enjoy being around other people; I just don't want to watch a movie with them.

Plus I'm lost without subtitles, even if the dialog is crystal clear!
by dredmorbius | 2025-07-15 18:56:25+00:00
One of the rather curious facts about the Sun is that its net energy emissions, on a unit-mass basis, are roughly the same as a mammalian metabolism.

That is, your body is converting mass to energy (the only way the conversion is possible) through chemical processes (ATP-mediated molecular breakdown in the Krebs cycle) at roughly the same rate that the Sun is converting mass to energy through fusion of hydrogen to helium (modulo some pathway hand-waving).

You'll need far more input chemical fuel (carbohydrates and fats, mostly) than the Sun needs of input hydrogen fuel. But the net energy release rate is roughly equivalent.

The biggest difference between you and the Sun is that it (presumably) weighs somewhat more than you do. So that per-unit-mass conversion is multiplied by a much greater mass.
by kibwen | 2025-07-15 18:57:08+00:00
> the linear time guarantee required by the `regex` crate

Making sure this line isn't glossed over: the point of the regex crate is that it provides linear-time guarantees for arbitrary regexes, making it safe (within reason) to expose the regex engine to untrusted input without running the risk of trivial DoS. From what I can tell, supporting lookbehinds in such a context is something that researchers have only recently described.
by mdaniel | 2025-07-15 18:57:43+00:00
> at the cost of much lower quantity.

Which they could solve by having a less dumb invite system. They can very easily confirm I am not a bot nor a spammer based on any number of objective metrics I can provide to them. But instead the answer is "idle in IRC, hope for the best" and thus they end up with the audience who is willing to jump through those hoops
by jeffbee | 2025-07-15 18:57:45+00:00
I guess this statement is technically correct, since a data center that needs a net of 5 million gallons of water per day would indeed be large, but I wonder if there are any such data centers in reality. None of the data center sites, which are agglomerations of data centers, rather than individual data centers, in Google's 2025 environmental report use that much. Google's worldwide footprint is a net 22 million gallons per day, and their largest complex of data centers in or near Council Bluffs, Iowa, uses less than 3 million gallons per day. So this supposed "large data center" would be something like 10x as large as any Google data center?
by s1artibartfast | 2025-07-15 18:57:58+00:00
I probably agree with transparency, there is very little information on the ways in which the FDA was not transparent.

the article states "And the agency kept the exemptions largely hidden from the public and from Congress."

How so, are the examples?

The FDA maintains a public red list of companies with import bans, and a green list companies operating under exemptions.

What transparency are we talking about?
by pron | 2025-07-15 18:58:15+00:00
> However it is like having a team of 20 Junior Engineers working. If you know how to steer a group of engineers, then you can create high quality code by reviewing the code.

You cannot effectively employ a team of twenty junior developers if you have to review all of their code (unless you have like seven senior developers, too).

But this isn't a point that needs to be debated. If it is true that LLMs can be as effective as a team of 20 junior developers, then we should be seeing many people quickly producing software that previously required 20 junior devs.

> but the model is "smarter" then a junior engineer usually

And it is also usually worse than interns in some crucial respects. For example, you cannot trust the models to reliably tell you what you need to know such as difficulties they've encountered or important insights they've learnt and understand they're important to communicate.
by shadowgovt | 2025-07-15 18:59:35+00:00
You're asking me if I, as a full-time web developer, would like to see an HTML standard that is incredibly expensive to modify? A standard that could be relied upon to be bedrock atop which you could build frameworks and polyfill to bridge any arbitrary issue you may encounter between the underlying interface and the developer's interface, for years if not decades? A concrete, unyielding standard the browser implementers could forever optimize towards, confident their optimizations won't run afoul of a change to the standard coming down the pipe, or an entirely new feature in the standard that demands novel support at the cost of breaking abstractions that supported the existing standard?

... is there, like, a change.org petition I can sign in favor of this? ;)
by msteffen | 2025-07-15 19:00:37+00:00
I think your frustration is illustrative, actually: the reason mutable global state is bad is because in order to prove that a piece of code reading it is correct, you have to know what _the entire rest of the program_ is doing.

If, instead, you make the global variable immutable, make the state variable into a function argument, or even wrap the mutable global state in some kind of helper class, then you only need to know what the callers of certain functions are doing. The visibility of those functions can be limited. Caller behavior can be further constrained with assertions inside the function. All of these (can) make it easier to prove that the reader is correct.

I think most programmers already do this, actually; they just don't think of their decisions this way.
Show HN: Ruby on Rails tutorial running in the browser
by palkan | 2025-07-15 19:00:51+00:00
Meet the Ruby on Rails Getting Started tutorial that runs fully in the browser: a web server, a console, a database—everything you need to explore the framework without dealing with local installation.

Source code: https://github.com/evilmartians/rails-tutorial

This is the first step towards an in-browser development environment for Rails that could be used with AI app generators like Bolt among other things.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-07-15 19:00:59+00:00
Ohio is not exactly short on water.

You've got Erie to the North, the Ohio to the South East, and about 40 inches of rainfall per year, or 81M acre-feet of water for the whole state in precipitation, or around ~80 BILLION gallons of rain water per day.

The water is returned to the atmosphere as vapor, not transmuted into bismuth and shipped overseas, never to be seen again.

You're talking about 1/20,000th of the rain water.

Okay, it's not nothing. But it's not going to ruin all the farms or something.
by thiht | 2025-07-15 19:01:03+00:00
> Buzzy films from “Anora” to “The Substance” are undone by a relentless signposting of meaning and intent.

Can’t read the article because of paywall, but citing The Substance here from all possible movies is… weird? I agree with the title, and although there’s some literalism in The Substance, there’s also tons of subtext in it, so that’s a pretty terrible example. I’m guessing the rest of the article is extremely elitist, and no movie is good enough for the author except for obscure Eastern Europe movies from the 60s?
by josefresco | 2025-07-15 19:01:19+00:00
From what I understand it's not the editors, but rather the HN community (and possibly bots) who engage in this (egregious) flagging behavior. I happens almost daily for anything critical of the current US administration, including posts about Elon. Even posts from reputable news sources like Wired get flagged if they are even remotely critical of the tech oligarchs.
by zahlman | 2025-07-15 19:01:23+00:00
Nice concept. It doesn't seem to live up to the promise, though.

In particular, the apparent logic for determining whether the example order "is_late" a) is in the "Order" model (in entities.py), not in the YAML; b) apparently just checks whether the customer claims the order was late, rather than actually comparing the order and delivery dates. It appears that everything is hard-coded around provided Customer and Order models; I get that you aren't trying to be fully general, but people are going to have more data on their customers than this, and business logic that cares about that data.

The CLI doesn't seem production-ready either. "3.2" is a strange default for policy version (presumably chosen to make the test pass), and if you have multiple required arguments on the command line it isn't usual to make them all keyworded.

Oh, and to apply the MIT license properly you should have such a file in the repository and appropriate metadata in pyproject.toml.

You might also consider:

* Publishing an installable wheel, so that people don't have to do a "development"-type installation. Tools like uv and pipx can even set up a new environment from scratch for such a wheel; you already include the same abstract requirements in pyproject.toml after all. BTW, pip can now install from PEP 735 "requirement groups" described in pyproject.toml, and is soon expected to install from PEP 751 lockfiles. Regarding the licensing, you should also definitely check out PEP 639 https://peps.python.org/pep-0639/ .

* Accepting TOML as a third input format (it natively supports dates; support is built in since 3.11, and the original library they incorporated is available for earlier Python versions and is a small amount of native Python code, unlike pyyaml which may bring in a couple megabytes of compiled C).

* Allowing for mixing and matching of input formats (they're all fairly interchangeable anwyay).
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-15 19:01:33+00:00
How about:

1) Unbounded claims of miraculous intelligence don't come from people actually using it;

2) The LLMs really are a "miraculous intelligence that works right out-of-the-box" for simple cases of a very large class of problems that previously was not trivial (or possible) to solve with computers.

3) Once you move past simple cases, they require increasing amount of expertise and hand-holding to get good results from. Most of the "holding it wrong" responses happen around the limits of what current LLMs can reliably do.

4) But still, that they can do any of that at all is not far from a miraculous wonder in itself - and they keep getting better.
by xenadu02 | 2025-07-15 19:01:57+00:00
Success in anything (sports, politics, startups) has a luck element to it. By that I mean there were N other people who were just as capable or qualified as you and it was luck that selected you above them.

Luck of being born in the Bay Area and going to high school with people in the startup community.

Luck of not being hit by a bus and spending your critical early career years in physical therapy recovering.

Luck in meeting the right people while volunteering in your local political party event.

Luck in going to a different restaurant and so not getting a cold from a patron at your normal restaurant so you performed your best when a scout was at game three days later.

It doesn't surprise me that a bit of randomness from a qualified pool would pay off.
by gwbas1c | 2025-07-15 19:02:31+00:00
Hacker news, like everything in tech, is susceptible to hype. Today it's AI, a few years ago it was Bitcoin.

I do think it's worthwhile to occasionally have a discussion about what content we want to see, and if a particular topic is getting too much attention.

It's also totally reasonable for a group of people to not want their agenda hijacked.

So, IMO, let the discussion continue. Let's see what comes out of it.
by sva_ | 2025-07-15 19:03:11+00:00
RL is a lot more general than that, it is basically a way in which an agent learns to make optimal decisions by learning from experience to maximize rewards. So you can do all kinds of stuff other than finetuning LLMs with it, like controlling a robotic arm, playing/mastering videogames, etc. For example, AlphaGo was also RL.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-07-15 19:03:33+00:00
The bug in that paper is actually the very buffer overflow bug I was referring to. Given that Jon himself made that error in the "definitive" implementation, it seems unlikely that he would have spotted it in the 10% of implementations he considered correct. Under Google's stricter criteria it seems likely to me that not a single person got the search implementation truly correct enough.
by superfrank | 2025-07-15 19:03:33+00:00
They stole from the amount they would have legally paid to buy a copy from the copyright holder.

Think about it like sneaking into a movie theater and watch a movie without paying. The theater was going to play the movie anyway and, assuming it wasn't a packed theatre, I didn't deprive anyone else of their ability to watch. It's still theft because I'm getting something that costs money for free and depriving the theater of the money that they're owed.
by II2II | 2025-07-15 19:04:01+00:00
If I had to guess, the issue is that they are taking treated water and releasing it back into the environment. It is consumed in the sense that what comes out is not identical to what goes in in terms of its temperature and composition (e.g. what's dissolved in it). If they aren't treating their own water, it will also have an impact on local water treatment facilities.
by jajuuka | 2025-07-15 19:04:05+00:00
I don't understand the fear of Chromium. What benefit is it to developers to have to run through three different engines to make sure their site conforms to all three? Users will naturally collect around one option and make it the most popular anyway. If Apple can only maintain relevance by preventing users choice and freedom, why is that worth keeping?

Even though all those browsers use the blink engine they are dramatically different experiences, features and support.
by anonymousab | 2025-07-15 19:04:25+00:00
I would wager that the average person against the resource usage of AI datacenters are also against the resource usage for golf courses.

The difference being that those opposing view LLMs as an inherently negative technology, and thus it is a waste of resources for something that is actively detrimental to society. Whereas golf courses are just golf, so the negative aspect is merely the resource usage.
by obirunda | 2025-07-15 19:04:34+00:00
It's an interesting comparison, because Segway really didn't have any real users or explosive growth, so it was certainly hype. It was also hardware with a large cost. LLMs are indeed more akin to Google Search where adoption is relatively frictionless.

I think the core issue is separating the perception of value versus actual value. There have been a couple of studies to this effect, pointing to a misalignment towards overestimating value and productivity boosts.

One reason this happens imo, is because we sequester a good portion of the cognitive load of our thinking to the latter parts of the process so when we are evaluating the solution we are primed to think we have saved time when the solution is sufficiently correct, or if we have to edit or reposition it by re-rolling, we don't account for the time spent because we may feel we didn't do anything.

I feel like this type of discussion is effectively a top topic every day. To me, the hype is not in the utility it does have but in its future utility. The hype is based on the premise that these tools and their next iteration can and will make all knowledge-based work obsolete, but crucially, will yield value in areas of real need; cancer, aging, farming, climate, energy and etc.

If these tools stop short of those outcomes, then the investment all of SV has committed to it at this point will have been over invested and
by wwweston | 2025-07-15 19:05:32+00:00
Golf courses are semi-regular targets of concern for both people concerned about water availability and housing. So while I’m not sure what your purpose for looping them in is, their existence hardly absolves other water-demanding industry much less establishes anything remotely like a sound basis for establishing bad faith.

We could use more media discourse on the current political realities of water use and potential improved economic structure though.