MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-07-29 15:23:12+00:00
"In 1675, the native tribes of New England refused to accept a partition of the land, and decided to wage war against Christians (who accepted the plan) to remove them from the map. They were 100% certain to be able to do so, and nobody bet a penny on the Christians winning at 1 vs. 10. They never stopped trying to do so since that date. Now you can try to blame it on the Christians on X, but HN is an educated forum. Those kinds of arguments won't fly here."

I'm sure you can find ten reasons why my above little story is wrong. They're the exact same reasons your little story is wrong. To name a few:

1. The Zionists / Europeans were trying to colonize Arab / Native American land. They were the aggressors in a very fundamental sense. Asking for the native population to "partition" the land amounts to demanding that they cede part of their homeland to you.

2. The conflict has nothing to do with Judaism or antisemitism. By framing it in that way, you're trying to draw a connection to the Holocaust and the history of persecution of Jews in Europe. But in this situation, the Zionists just happened to be Jewish, but that was totally irrelevant for the Arab population of Palestine. What the native population cared about was that an outside group - it didn't matter who - was trying to come in and take over the land.

3. And contrary to your framing, the Zionists were the group that held the upper hand, for a whole number of reasons that apply across the colonial world. In Palestine, they weren't some little oppressed minority. They had more resources, better education, were better organized, and had the backing of the imperial rulers of Palestine, the British.

4. The Arabs were the underdogs in the 1948 war. This runs completely counter to Israeli national mythology, but the fact is that the Israelis had a larger, better trained and better equipped army. They had military training from the British. They had funding from a significant foreign base of donors. They were able to purchase large amounts of weaponry from Czechoslovakia. The Palestinians themselves never stood a chance against the Zionists / Israelis. The Arab states only intervened after the Zionists had begun carrying out mass expulsions and other atrocities against the Palestinian civilian population. From the point of view of the Arab world, they were attempting to save their brothers from vicious foreign colonizers. You present it as if "the Jews," by which you actually mean the Zionists in Palestine, were in a fight for survival. But that's like saying that a guy who walks into a bar and starts punching people wildly is in a fight for his own survival. It might be true, but he got himself into that situation.
by genewitch | 2025-07-29 15:23:21+00:00
I'll bite. How do i train/make and/or use LoRA, or, separately, how do i fine-tune? I've been asking this for months, and no one has a decent answer. websearch on my end is seo/geo-spam, with no real instructions.

I know how to make an SD LoRA, and use it. I've known how to do that for 2 years. So what's the big secret about LLM LoRA?
by akirahittoxyz | 2025-07-29 15:23:25+00:00
The pay-what-you-want (PWYW) - $0 if you want it for free. Newbee is free! (for a short time)

TLDR: I wrote a modern Novel about Dog Mothers and Incels. Holiday reading for fun and easy times. It reveals an entertaining plot between psychological groups and subconsciously forces the reader to leave their social bubble and live their real life.
by bgwalter | 2025-07-29 15:23:41+00:00
I have not had any LLM correct me even once. In any three-prompt LLM session I find at least one logical mistake, one invalid correction on the part of the LLM and one piece of outright misinformation. All of which is delivered in an authoritative manner.

The only useful feature is that LLMs like Grok can find obscure tweets, but I just want the link like in a search engine, not a summary.
by 9rx | 2025-07-29 15:23:43+00:00
> From the root level comment in this thread

Oh, so you mean not that they are becoming less capable in general, but that they are becoming less capable at testing? I suppose that is a reasonable take in light of earlier comments – but, again, wealthy people don't see value in test results, so what difference does it make?

This is like noticing that people have become less likely to share "hand-me-downs". You'd no doubt see that as a travesty if you are struggling to buy clothes, but if you look at it from a place of wealth where you are buying clothes as if they are nothing, what does that mean to you? Not much.

> if it were easy, the trend wouldn't have happened in the first place

There is a logical leap in there that you haven't explained. In the same vein, it is easy to grow food in your garden, but it is abundantly clear that people no longer see the need, even where they once did. Just because something is easy does not mean that there is reason to do it. You are going to have to elaborate.
by vik0 | 2025-07-29 15:24:05+00:00
Life without work is meaningless. Over the millennia we have done nothing but work. We were made to work.

I don't know if you've experienced not working without having to worry about money, but I have and it has a unique feeling of emptiness to it.

This is not me praising 9-5 office jobs, or work from home jobs, or any other specific job. They can all be hell in and of themselves, but the idea of abolishing work is just so laughable to me.

The moment that happens, a collective neurosis will overtake humanity the likes of which has never been seen before. We can only hope work will continue to be around as long as we are around, for our own sake.
by exasperaited | 2025-07-29 15:24:20+00:00
Well, they didn't take that approach.

Read the actual guidance. They in no way require "send pictures of your official identity documents to every site".

There are a bunch of ways (some advisable, some not) where an existing entity that knows you are an adult can extend just that -- we know they are an adult.

Credit card providers know all their customers are adults, for example -- because you have to be an adult to enter into a credit agreement. And credit cards are insured.

Mobile phone companies in the UK block adult content by default and have done for some time; you have to unblock it by telling them you are an adult. But once you've done that, adult content can be verified quite trivially with an SMS.

And there are other methods still. For example a site with longstanding members is allowed to estimate the age of members based on how long they have used the same email address!

It's not a porn filter. It's a set of rules for companies to follow to identify adult users.

Is it the best law? No. But it's not the Texas law, that's for sure, and that law has survived a US Supreme Court challenge.
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-29 15:24:20+00:00
> If I do poor work with an electric drill then it's not the drill's fault.

> ChatGPT's sycophancy crisis was late April.

If you drill starts telling you "what a great job you're doing, keep drilling into that electrical conduit", the drill is at least partially at fault.

A tool that randomly and unpredictably fails is a bad tool. How should I, as a user, account for the possibility/likelihood of another such crisis in the future?
by mandmandam | 2025-07-29 15:24:20+00:00
I have no problem with any of that, though it sure would be cool if we dealt with the worst of our climate, war, inequality and poverty issues before burning money to privatize space.

But clearly laying out the very real risks and discomforts, as the author here as done, doesn't justify accusations of "not being a happy bunny". That's all.
by joshstrange | 2025-07-29 15:24:26+00:00
I completely agree.

We've had almost every candidate (even some we _didn't_ hire) thank us for the interview process and how we went out of our way to make it stress-free and representative of the job. I'm not interested in tricking people or trying to show off "look how smart we are and how hard our test was"... puke. I want to work with solid performers who don't play games, why would I start that relationship off by playing a bunch of stupid games (silly interview tests/process)?

And here's the thing, even with our somewhat easier/less-stress testing process, we still got high quality hires and have had very few cases where we have later had to let someone go due to not being able to do the job. This isn't a "hire fast, fire fast" situation.
by simonw | 2025-07-29 15:24:40+00:00
"I would like to see it direct me to the original sources it would use to build those tokens"

Sadly that's not feasible with transformer-based LLMs: those original sources are long gone by the time you actually get to use the model, scrambled a billion times into a trained set of weights.

One thing that helped me understand this is understanding that every single token output by an LLM is the result of a calculation that considers all X billion parameters that are baked into that model (or a subset of that in the case of MoE models, but it's still billions of floating point calculations for every token.)

You can get an imitation of that if you tell the model "use your search tool and find example code for this problem and build new code based on that", but that's a pretty unconventional way to use a model. A key component of the value of these things is that they can spit out completely new code based on the statistical patterns they learned through training.
by bwfan123 | 2025-07-29 15:25:09+00:00
There is no right or wrong on the output of AI. You lapped it up wholesale because you were looking for meaning, and found it in the AI.

I have to invoke the BS generator here:

https://sebpearce.com/bullshit/

I can bet lots of people find profound meaning in the output of the above machine because they want to.
by LeonardoTolstoy | 2025-07-29 15:25:26+00:00
My local library and the nearby highschool both have solar panels over the parking lot. They certainly exist. I suppose the ROI they've had would be interesting (although this is in Massachusetts so not exactly the solar capital of the world as far as potential is concerned).

I do like them though. Gives both shade and (some) rain cover.
Ask HN: What's your secret weapon for keeping code/docs/tests from rotting?
by bochoh | 2025-07-29 15:25:59+00:00
I've been using cursor lately to handle some (most) of the grunt work and it's been surprisingly useful for two things: keeping documentation from going stale and spotting gaps in test coverage. For example, I'll ask it things like "what's the most likely way this function could break?" and it will suggest edge cases I hadn't thought of.

That said, it's not (maybe?) magic and sometimes hallucinates test cases that are rubbish so some critical thinking is still required.

I'm curious what y'all are using to keep docs/tests maintainable? Are you leaning on AI or doing it the old fashioned way?
by armchairhacker | 2025-07-29 15:26:06+00:00
Some comparisons:

Job satisfaction (happy/complacent/unhappy):

- 2025: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/work#5-job-satisfaction (24.5/47.1/28.4)

- 2024: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/professional-developers... (20.2/47.7/32.1)

- ...

- 2015: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2015#work-satisfaction (36/51.4/11.6, complacent includes "somewhat" and "so-so")

Work environment (remote/hybrid/in-person):

- 2025: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/work#1-work-environment (45/37.1/17.9, but I counted "your choice" as remote)

- 2024: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/work#1-work-environment (38/42/20)

- 2023: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-employment-wor... (41.41/42.18/16.41)

- 2022: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-employment-wor... (42.98/42.44/14.58)

- ...

- 2017: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2017#remote-work (11.1/52.8/31.8, hybrid includes all answers of "sometimes", the 4.2 who said "it's complicated" not included)

Salary (engineering manager/full-stack/academic, not adjusted for inflation):

- 2025: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/work#salary (130k/73k/57k)

- 2024: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/work#salary (124k/63k/49k)

- 2023: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-salary-salary-... (124k/71k/54k)

- 2022: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-salary-salary-... (112k/66k/55k)

- 2021: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2021#section-salary-salary-b... (96k/56k/49k)

- 2020: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2020#work-salary-by-develope... (92k/54k/41k)

- 2019: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2019#work-_-salary-by-develo... (95k/57k/38k)

Employment status (employed/contractor/unemployed, not counting students/retired/unknown):

- 2025: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/work#1-employment-statu... (69.8/13.9/4.6, all are less for some reason)

- 2024: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/work#1-employment-statu... (75.3/16.4/7.8)

- 2023: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-employment-emp... (75/15.91/6.32)

- 2022: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-employment-emp... (74.4/14.95/6.44)

- 2021: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2021#section-employment-empl... (67.26/9.65/5.02, like 2025)

- 2020: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2020#work-employment-status (74.4/8.9/4.2)

- 2019: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2019#work-_-employment-statu... (79/9.8/10.8)
by Der_Einzige | 2025-07-29 15:26:45+00:00
Americans don't understand that the liberal democrats are the "anti-authoritarian" party of the UK and would be who most American mainstream democrats would vote for in practice.

Labor during the Corbyn years made Bernie Sanders look like a fascist and the current labor is back to being milquetoast and embracing its social authoritarian roots.

Similarly, Americans cannot understand that the Canadians have an "NDP" and "Liberal" and they don't understand their differences - though these days I don't think the NDP knows their differences either!!!
by kazinator | 2025-07-29 15:27:24+00:00
Or don't have people in your project that add random files or directories, and can't even explain what they are.

I don't use .gitignore files in projects that I control. A few times I've been tripped up by these things ignoring something that should not have been.

I feel that these files should stay local. I don't want your .gitignore any more than I want your .vimrc or whatever. If you maintain a very messy local repo with lots of extraneous files, and find that this file helps you when you're using git, by all means create one for yourself.
by nailer | 2025-07-29 15:27:34+00:00
> UNRWA

The one that has a unique definiton of 'refugee' that doesn't correspond with UNs the normal definition of the term? Where many of the staff work for Hamas? Where their schools teach children to be martyrs? The one many countries have halted funding for because of this?

If you want the UN, fine, UNHCR, the normal UN refugee agency.
by biggestfan | 2025-07-29 15:27:43+00:00
"49,000+" makes this the least responses the survey has gotten since 2016 ("over fifty thousand"), every year in between has been in the 65-100k range. Seems as though enthusiasm around SO has diminished significantly over the past year.

My guess is that pro-AI devs have abandoned the site, and anti-AI devs are upset with their collaboration with AI companies.
by alpaccount | 2025-07-29 15:28:42+00:00
I think you'd have a good time doing GSOC, though I think this year's already gone...

Something else that could be done, though I'm not sure how UK unis work, is that you could look for research openings around labs, C is pretty often around legacy research code.

I think the last thing, crypto companies. As someone said, the general market isn't too great right now, crypto bros are the most open minded people regarding employment. Specially if you can contribute to their OSS projects.
by brokegrammer | 2025-07-29 15:28:56+00:00
Once a dependency turns into a security vulnerability, you can either replace it, or write your own library like I suggested. It's more cost effective and time efficient than writing your own libraries from scratch for every project.

For example, I'd rather install React Router for routing in a React app instead of writing my own routing library. I guess some people will reply "grrr React, just use static HTML bro". Okay cool.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-07-29 15:29:16+00:00
My original post wasn't clear and that's my fault, but I am taking that into account. When I said "that's it for the week" I meant "the remainder of the week." It's just a mouthful to write "the remainder of the week" each time.

And... well, I am worried that I could do something stupid or accidental on Monday and Tuesday and then loose access with more than half of the week left, especially since, as everyone else has noted, Claude doesn't show you how close to the limit you are until you've almost hit it. (That said, I also appreciate that it doesn't warn me too early, or I would be constantly watching the usage tick up well before I actually need to worry about it.)

A couple of weeks ago, Claude got into some kind of weird loop where it just kept saying something like "now I need to add the code continuation" over and over and over again. I had auto-accept turned on, and it was chugging for several hours before I realized something was wrong and stopped it. Who knows how much usage that burned! Luckily, it happened late in the evening, so I knew my usage would reset the next day anyway. But IIRC it was also a Monday evening...
by debugnik | 2025-07-29 15:29:27+00:00
That makes it so much harder to show art to people and market yourself though.

I considered experimenting with web DRM for art sites/portfolios, on the assumption that scrappers won't bother with the analog loophole (and dedicated art-style cloners would hopefully be disappointed by the quality), but gave up because of limited compatible devices for the strongest DRM levels, and HDCP being broken on those levels anyway. If the DRM technique caught on it would take attackers, at most, a few bucks and hours once to bypass it, and I don't think users would truly understand that upfront.
by MichaelNolan | 2025-07-29 15:29:27+00:00
I'm curious what they will come up with. For smaller companies, leetcode style tests probably aren't the best, but for large companies that hire 10s of thousands of devs, leetcode style tests have a lot of good qualities. People who criticize leetcode usually prefer take home projects, pair programming with a current employee, "just a conversation" or something else, but these all have serious drawbacks at scale. Despite leetcode's flaws it has a lot of benefits:

* Objective and clear grading criteria.

* Unlimited supply of questions.

* Easily time bound to 30 min or 1 hr.

* Legal - i.e., no worries about disparate impact.

* Programming language/framework agnostic.
by doph | 2025-07-29 15:29:31+00:00
The article you link is a very specific type of failure that apparently did not happen in this instance, where Claude was able to access the author's writing. And the author apparently found the insights useful, though the lack of analysis from the author on that value makes this article basically meaningless for an outsider.

I am apparently a different type of person than the author because my obsidian vaults look nothing like theirs, but I can't imagine asking an LLM for a meta-analysis of my writing. The whole point of organizing it with Obsidian is that I do that analysis myself - it is part and parcel of the organization itself.
by overrun11 | 2025-07-29 15:29:40+00:00
This article follows a familiar pattern of essay in the overwritten MFA style that contrasts particularities without ever arguing why one is better than the other. You can do it with anything and create an equally reasonable sounding essay. Here's ChatGPT on why we should eschew air travel for horse and buggy:

"We don’t need another miracle of steel and jet fuel to fling us across the sky at five hundred miles an hour. We need wheels that creak, hooves that strike the ground with an honesty no turbine can mimic. We need the long road—the smell of manure and lilacs, the way your thighs ache after a day of swaying on a wooden bench.

Because in the air, you don’t hear the frogs tuning their throats in a roadside ditch. You don’t feel the wind peel an apple’s scent from an orchard as you pass. And maybe—just maybe—you don’t really arrive anywhere at all. Not the way you do when a horse brings you there, slow enough to see every dragonfly and every dying sunflower bowing in the field."
by wonderwonder | 2025-07-29 15:29:53+00:00
This is absolutely going to lead to the black mail of people in both the private and public sector. Ruling parties are going to have access to this information and will use it to force votes. Intelligence agencies will do the same. On top of that its only a matter of time before you get a Tea app style leak where this data was simply not secured. Forcing people to identify themselves before engaging in their sexual peculiarities is a recipe for disaster and the rationale behind it is weak at best. Its about control, nothing else.

Note: Forgot to add, this is going to give some low level data or software engineer access to all of your darkest secrets and what is to stop them from using that to blackmail you? Some guy is going to ring up their local millionaire and say "I see you are into X, give me a 100k or everyone else will know as well" There is no end to how bad of an idea this is.
by dismalaf | 2025-07-29 15:29:58+00:00
A high performance Actor-based language is fairly unique. Pony is also very fast for a garbage collected language.

Also the syntax is great, probably my favourite language ever syntactically. Dunno why there's a pointless argument about it in these comments...

The reference capabilities are fairly novel as well. Apart from the lack of tooling, writing in Pony is great.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-29 15:30:12+00:00
Many of these drugs were developed and used as medical products before being adopted by athletes.

EPO is used in medical conditions.

Several anabolic steroids are prescription drugs and can be used in cases of muscle wasting or cancer.

Most people don’t understand the consequences that come with using these drugs. They’re often not a free lunch where you take the drug and become a better human being across the board. There are negative consequences for altering the body’s systems directly in most cases.

In medical conditions doctors can weigh the tradeoffs and use drugs sparingly to achieve an outcome while monitoring the negative effects. When a 20 year old gym bro starts juicing with excessive doses to get swole, they’re not thinking about how it’s going to damage their testes for the rest of their life or disrupt their HPTA axis.
by palata | 2025-07-29 15:30:28+00:00
Are they "managing risk" or are they just "doing stuff"? How often does it happen that an alternative Android OS causes issues to banking apps? I have personally never heard of that, and it would be very bad publicity for the OS.

In my experience, because a company does that kind of "risk management" does not mean, at all, that it is a useful thing to do.