MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rybosome | 2025-07-06 01:20:32+00:00
Thanks for the informative and inspiring post! This is definitely cool, and I can imagine very useful.

However I do want to mention that the “recommended” flow these days isn’t to separate out a tool request in the way you have. Eg instead of asking an LLM to route a tool, extracting that, running the tool, passing output back to the LLM, etc. - you simply pass the tool definitions, prompt, structural output expectations, and let the LLM (and your caller library) manage the tool use loop.

That’s how these modern LLMs are trained in post-training, and so I suspect it’s likely you’ll get different (and potentially worse?) results in trying to subvert this with a small, local model.

It comes with all the downsides you mentioned to let the LLM do this, but is also more likely to be in-distribution, and it’s easier to compose multiple tool calls.

Anyway, thanks for sharing! I’d love to see evals on a task where it compares the result when an LLM is involved in tool selection versus when it is handed tool output only - if I’m wrong about quality degradation then there’s a lot to like about your local tool routing.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-06 01:20:48+00:00
I have found that there are people who just want to watch the world burn. There are many reasons, but, at its most basic, hurt people hurt people.

That's something I like to keep in mind, when I'm reacting to someone being ... less than friendly ... By reacting badly, I then make it all right for them to justify doing it again, to someone else. I've found that I can defend myself, without becoming a foaming-at-the-mouth maniac. We can enforce our boundaries with water pistols, most of the time. We don't need nukes.

Everything is connected. This chap may be naive, but he's actually trying to set good connections in motion. I applaud that.
by rectang | 2025-07-06 01:21:10+00:00
The point stands — it’s not that the heart attack leaves you infirm, but that surviving it lets you live long enough to die of Alzheimer’s or cancer or depression.

Causes of abrupt death are being winnowed down, which the author regards with horror. I hope that they never experience the prolonged agony to which modern medicine has consigned so many, and that they are never forced by suffering to change their mind.
by makeitdouble | 2025-07-06 01:22:00+00:00
Not a clean comparison, but resource driven state could be tackling the same kind of issues: a small minority is ripping the benefit of a huge resource (e.g. petrol) that they didn't create by themselves, and is extracted through mostly automated processes.

From what we're seeing the whole society has to be rebalanced accordingly, it can entail a kind of UBI, second and third classes of citizen depending on where you stand in the chain, etc.

Or as Norway does, fully go the other direction and limit the impact by artificially limiting the fallout.
by al_borland | 2025-07-06 01:22:24+00:00
Cancelling Prime seems to have a big natural impact. I heard stories about how much order volume goes up after someone joins Prime, and it seems the opposite is true as well. I cancelled my membership when they started charging extra for ad-free video. It just felt so cheap and petty, since I was already paying for Prime. This was just the straw the broke the camel's back. I was already pretty fed up with Amazon due to being sent counterfeit products, used or open box items being sold as new, the push to leave retail packaging on my porch, all the fake reviews, the inability to find quality items via their search, the site being overrun with low quality garbage being resold from AliExpress for 10x the price, the concern for the future of my local stores, wishlists no longer supporting external links or simply ideas, etc, etc, etc.

I still do make the occasional order out of laziness or a lack of other options. However, I looked up all my orders from the lifetime of my account and charted them a couple weeks ago. After 6 years of year-over-year order increase, and a 17+ year overall uptrend in orders... they fell off a cliff once I cancelled. My orders fell by 60% the year after I cancelled Prime, and it's on pace to drop even further this year. I even did all my Christmas shopping last year without any Amazon orders, while previous years were 100% Amazon.

Going down to 0 can be hard, but even big drops in orders will have an impact. And if that money goes to other retailers, and demand grows, they can invest in more inventory and a wider array of goods that people need. Any percentage shift away from Amazon is progress, especially in done my the masses.

I'd encourage everyone to dump their Prime membership. If you order more than $35 you can still get free shipping (you just have to be explicit in selecting it and be vigilant during checkout to avoid the multiple traps to try and get you to sign back up... lots of dark patterns). Shipping times are a little more unpredictable. Sometimes it still only takes 1-2 days, while other times it seems to take a week or two. Most things aren't urgent. If they are, I try to find them locally.

I've also tried to stop obsessing about finding the "best" whatever it is I'm looking for. When online, there are a lot of traps, but one of the things I expect retail stores to do is make sure they are carrying quality products they'd stand behind. They don't want returns or to get a reputation for selling junk. I was getting a toaster a while back and instead of spending hours researching online, I just went to a store I frequent, looked at the 5 options they had, and picked the one I liked the best. Hours of time saved, and the toaster works fine. I expect I'll have it for many years to come.
by const_cast | 2025-07-06 01:23:40+00:00
> It's actually impressive that Trump managed to appoint the absolute worst possible person to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.

It's a legitimate and popular republican strategy, I forgot the exact name. They did the same thing with the EPA during the last Trump administration - appointing an actual oil tycoon to head it. I imagine it's pretty difficult to just find an oil tycoon. The idea is to derail the agency from the inside out.
by efitz | 2025-07-06 01:25:46+00:00
Look at the other comments. The trend in the other comments is that the article was accepted as a true and accurate representation of events and that therefore the current FBI administration is corrupt and has politicized the bureau.

That might or might not be true, but the article is almost certainly biased to support that narrative, true or not. I was cautioning that the article not be taken on faith.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-06 01:26:02+00:00
Climate and real estate costs have slowed inbound migration drastically, with quite a bit of folks who can no longer afford Florida moving to Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas.

https://www.newsweek.com/number-people-moving-texas-florida-...

https://www.newsweek.com/number-americans-moving-florida-col...

https://www.axios.com/2024/10/03/american-states-moving-popu...
by dagmx | 2025-07-06 01:26:29+00:00
One thing to note that isn’t captured by the graphics on the site, is that the new 2025 icons are layered and have material effects. So they look flatter on the site than they do in use.

I recommend folks watch the introduction to icon composer video they put up https://youtu.be/4usD1hP1nYY?si=XRKba9Png6Gju12_
by yupitsme123 | 2025-07-06 01:26:32+00:00
1. Wouldn't there be even more money to be made by saving the human race? Putting aside profit, wouldn't people with money want to continue existing and therefore be aligned with the movement?

2. Your example isn't something life or death. Humanity has aligned on numerous things and changed significantly amd uniformly during the past 30 years without even trying. Why is it so hard to come up with a list of demands and reforms for everyone to agree on and march behind to save the world?
by em-bee | 2025-07-06 01:27:39+00:00
for the record for anyone finding this in the future. this example works in firefox, but not in chromium. there it loads the page and the xsl stylesheet, but it displays an empty page.

a more elaborate example has the same results. chromium is empty. firefox works except that it looks like attributes to tags in the main content are ignored, which prevents css classes or links from working and images from loading. both work in the menu that is included from the template.

found it: the problem was that <xsl:copy><xsl:apply-templates/></xsl:copy> doesn't copy attributes. it needs to be:

<xsl:template match="@*|node()"> <xsl:copy> <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/> </xsl:copy> </xsl:template>

oh, and the inspector doesn't work with my example, making this thing hard to debug. xsl support in the browser appears to be limited. and unfortunately, if i can't get it to work in chrome, i won't be able to use it.
by DavidPiper | 2025-07-06 01:27:40+00:00
AI is the new politics.

It's surprising to me the number of people I consider smart and deep original thinkers who are now parroting lines and ideas (almost word-for-word) from folks like Andrej Karpathy and Sam Altman, etc.

But, of course, "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome" never stops being relevant.
by daxfohl | 2025-07-06 01:28:35+00:00
I expect it'll get shut down before it destroys everything. At some point it will turn on its master, be it Altman, Musk, or whoever. Something like that blackmail scenario Claude had a while back. Then the people who stand the most to gain from it will realize they also have the most to lose, are not invulnerable, and the next generation of leaders will be smarter about keeping things from blowing up.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-07-06 01:28:35+00:00
> Left unchecked, this shift risks exacerbating inequality, eroding democratic agency, and entrenching techno-feudalism

1) Inequality will be exacerbated regardless of AGI. inequality is a policy decision, AGI is just a tool subject to policy. 2) Democratic agency is only held by elected representatives and civil servants, and their agency is not eroded by the tool of AGI. 3) techno-feudalism isn't a real thing, it's just a scary word for "capitalism with computers".

> The classical Social Contract-rooted in human labor as the foundation of economic participation-must be renegotiated to prevent mass disenfranchisement.

Maybe go back and bring that up around the invention of the cotton gin, the stocking frame, the engine, or any other technological invention which "disenfranchised" people who had their labor supplanted.

> This paper calls for a redefined economic framework that ensures AGI-driven prosperity is equitably distributed through mechanisms such as universal AI dividends, progressive taxation, and decentralized governance. The time for intervention is now-before intelligence itself becomes the most exclusive form of capital.

1) nobody's going to equitably distribute jack shit if it makes money. They will hoard it the way the powerful have always hoarded money. No government, commune, sewing circle, etc has ever changed that and it won't in the future. 2) The idea that you're going to set tax policy based on something like achieving a social good means you're completely divorced from American politics. 3) We already have decentralized governance, it's called a State. I don't recommend trying to change it.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-06 01:29:40+00:00
Power abhors a vacuum. Choosing to not change is viewed as failure to innovate, even if the design suffers. Planned obsolescence is as old as the concept of yearly production models themselves, and likely older, going back to replacement parts manufacturing and standardized production overtaking piecework.

It’s a race to the bottom to be the least enshittified versus your market competitors. Usability takes a backseat to porcine beauty productization.
by const_cast | 2025-07-06 01:30:12+00:00
I worry about the future of Steam if Gabe Newell retires. He seems to be one of the few people that understands how and why piracy exists, and how to build a platform that consumers trust. Everywhere else you look in the gaming industry, companies abuse the trust they're granted and run over their consumers.

I'm sure Gabe and Valve as a whole have been pressured countless times to provide stronger DRM and guarantees to game publishers, and it's legitimately incredible they haven't bent. But I fear Valve is one leadership change away from devolving into what we see all over the industry - another shitty company treating their own customers like adversaries.
by heavyset_go | 2025-07-06 01:31:02+00:00
And yet, it's the case for plenty of manufacturers.

Yes, bad driver implementations that shit all over the kernel tree just to get hardware "working" should not be upstreamed. 99% of the time in these cases, Chinese equipment manufacturers can't be bothered to write acceptable code and it's a good thing it isn't mainlined and made someone else's problem.
by gruez | 2025-07-06 01:33:17+00:00
>while with 7-zip it seems to immediately delete the temporary file so the external app ends up trying to open a non-existent file.

No, 7-zip only deletes the file after you close its window, so as long as you don't close 7-zip any apps should be able to open those files. Winrar doesn't delete on close, but that has its own problems, namely that you accumulate a bunch of extracted files in your %TEMP% directory, and have to run disk cleanup to delete them.
by al_borland | 2025-07-06 01:33:27+00:00
Some stores do have their stock available online. I know Home Depot does. The website tells you what aisle the item is in, which rack in that aisle, and how many they have.

I've also seen where stores won't have it at the store I have selected, but it will also check the stock of nearby stores to tell me of one of those other stores have it.

It's not ubiquitous yet, but I'm seeing it more and more. I've also found with things like Apple Pay that checkout on random online stores is just as fast and easy as Amazon, which is quite nice.
by simonw | 2025-07-06 01:34:05+00:00
What makes it insecure? It's a pretty simple protocol - anything in there that makes is insecure beyond naive mistakes that could be avoided with a well designed library?

EDIT: Looks like the way CGI works made it vulnerable to Shellshock in 2014: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellshock_(software_bug)

I agree that there's probably not much of an argument to switch to it from the well established alternative mechanisms we are using already.

The one thing in its favor is that it makes it easier to have a polyglot web app, with different languages used for different paths. You can get the same thing using a proxy server though.
by twotwotwo | 2025-07-06 01:35:56+00:00
I give credit to Andy Weir for knowing what The Martian did well--setting up a bunch of technical problems as load-bearing elements of a plot--and going and executing that same general plan, but with new particulars and bigger and with fun new ideas. The made-up sciencey stuff feels infused with principled ideas about how new things we haven't discovered might work, rather than designed for their role in the story alone. And he's willing to write an ending!

There are things he does not stand out at, but those don't take you out of the story. As people work through things on Earth a lot of the nontechnical parts are, I guess, simplified, but I can't care that much; I didn't pick this up wanting a bureaucratic or psychological thriller. And he (or he + early readers and editors) usually make sure to quickly and efficiently get you through all of that to the next fun part.
by IggleSniggle | 2025-07-06 01:36:34+00:00
Right! If you want it to denote an action, you need to include the verb: "TURN ON" would be entirely clear. It's even clear if you sometimes DO want to show state / not a button "IS ON" is also perfectly clear. There's only a few that might he confused when the verb is shown, like "INCREASE," although I would have to work a little to imagine the UI where it's not clear whether the button is showing the verb or noun.
by const_cast | 2025-07-06 01:36:58+00:00
Because most companies are ruthless penny-pinchers and over-optimizers. They're willing to burn dollars to save pennies. The reason is that they're trading things they can measure for things they can't.

Basically, if you remove the knobs you can save, say, 10 dollars on every vehicle. In return, you have made your car less attractive and will lose a small number of sales. You will never, ever be able to quantify that loss in sales. So, on paper, you've saved money for "free".

Typically, opportunity cost is impossible or close to impossible to measure. What these companies think they are doing is minimizing cost. Often, they are just maximizing opportunity cost of various decisions. Everyone is trying to subtly cut quality over time.

Going from A quality to B quality is pretty safe, it's likely close to zero consumers will notice. But then you say "well we went from A to B and nobody noticed, so nobody will notice B to C!". So you do it again. Then over and over. And, eventually, you go from a brand known for quality to cheap bargain-bin garbage. And it happened so slowly that leadership is left scratching their heads. Sometimes the company then implodes spontaneously, other times it slowly rots and loses to competitors. It's so common it feels almost inevitable.

Really, most companies don't have to do much to stay successful. For a lot of markets, they just have to keep doing what they're doing. Ah, but the taste of cost-cutting is much too seductive. They do not understand what they are risking.
by danparsonson | 2025-07-06 01:38:06+00:00
Malleable software is hard not just for technology reasons; probably the most difficult part of designing software is thinking through and cleanly handling the implications of every decision. It's easy to imagine that one could 'just make it work like this instead of that' without understanding the implications of the change or the reasons why the system is like that in the first place. Making software has never been easier than it is today, but it's still hard because designing coherent systems that work correctly in all scenarios of usage is hard.

Yes, configurability is good and scripting is a great way to safely add functionality to a system but there will always be a distinction between people who use software and just want it to work perhaps with minor tweaking, and those who build systems. It makes no more sense to throw everyone in the same bucket than saying that being able to change the oil in a car makes everyone a mechnical engineer.

Also:

> Many, many technologists have taken one look at an existing workflow of spreadsheets, reacted with performative disgust, and proposed the trifecta of microservices, Kubernetes and something called a "service mesh".

Yes, over-engineering is a thing, but piles of interlinked spreadsheets are usually thrown out precisely because the people who created them didn't have the skills necessary to build a system, and these ad-hoc systems eventually outgrow their usefulness and become unwieldy horror shows. Maybe Beryl in accounts knows the eighteen cells across three files that need to be updated when the interest rate changes, but if she leaves then we're all screwed.
by kldg | 2025-07-06 01:38:09+00:00
the big reason I upgrade GPUs these days is for more VRAM for LLMs and diffusion models. I don't care (or need to care, really) as much about gaming -- along with great Proton support, running things from a midrange Linux-based gaming PC I have shoved in my home server rack works great via Steam's Remote Play (NoMachine also pretty good), but I play strategy/spreadsheet games, not twitchy FPS games.

my most recent upgrade was for a 4090, but that gives me only 24GB VRAM, and it's too expensive to justify buying two of them. I also have an antique kepler datacenter GPU, but Nvidia cut driver support a long while ago, making software quite a pain to get sorted. there's a nonzero chance I will wind up importing a Moore Threads GPU for next purchase; Nvidia's just way too expensive, and I don't need blazing fast speeds given most of my workloads run well inside the time I'm sleeping, but I can't be running at the speed of CPU; I need everything to fit into VRAM. I'd alternately be stoked for Intel to cater to me. $1500, 48GB+ VRAM, good pytorch support; make it happen, somebody.
by zmmmmm | 2025-07-06 01:38:17+00:00
I agree with you it's very fashion driven and hence you see it in all kinds of places outside the core drivers of it. But my argument is, those fashions themselves are driven by the major players deciding to do this for less than honorable reasons.

I do think it's likely more passive than active. People at Google aren't deviously plotting to hide buttons from the user. But what is happening is that when these designs get reviewed, nobody is pushing back - when someone says "but how will the user know to do that?", it doesn't get listend to. Instead the people responsible are signing off on it saying, "it's OK, they will just learn that, once they get to know it, then it will be OK". It's all passive but it's based on an implicit assumption that uses are staying around and optimising for the ones that do, making it harder for the ones that want to come and go or stop in temporarily.

Once three or four big companies start doing it, everybody else cargo cults it and before you know it, it looks like fashion and GNOME is doing it too.
by MrPapz | 2025-07-06 01:38:50+00:00
We’re at a terrible crossroads. If climate scientists are right, we’re headed for unavoidable disruption. Some now say it’s already too late — all we can do is mitigate and adapt. Start local. Know your neighbors. Build resilience.

But if they’re wrong, that’s also bad news. It means our scientific institutions failed us, and the political trust placed in “studies” will collapse. The next time someone says “science says…”, society may not listen.

Either way, it’s a precarious place to be. Until then, enjoy the summer — it might be the coolest one we have left.
by kinduff | 2025-07-06 01:38:50+00:00
I found some papers [n] about this. And I think the answer is yes, the format matters asnd hence the representation.

I wonder if the author would be willing to try with another representation.

[1]: Does Prompt Formatting Have Any Impact on LLM Performance? https://arxiv.org/html/2411.10541v1

[2]: Large Language Models(LLMs) on Tabular Data: Prediction, Generation, and Understanding - A Survey https://arxiv.org/html/2402.17944v2
by subsection1h | 2025-07-06 01:40:42+00:00
1. babymetal didn't attack any person; they criticized a book's production.

2. babymetal claims to be a bookseller and, if true, they offered a specialist's insight into the quality of the information disseminated by a person being discussed at HN. (Though, their observation was off topic -- like most comments in most HN discussions.)

3. You want HN users, who are mostly code monkeys, to criticize a proposal to address viral diseases?
by kelseyfrog | 2025-07-06 01:40:50+00:00
Let's clarify that for a serf, support meant military supply, not swinging a sword - that was reserved for the knightly class. For the great majority of medieval villagers the tie to their lord revolved around getting crops out of the ground.

A serf's week was scheduled around the days they worked the land whose proceeds went to the lord and the commons that subsisted themselves. Transfers of grain and livestock from serf to lord along with small dues in eggs, wool, or coin primarily constituted one side of the economic relation between serf and lord. These transfers kept the lord's demesne barns full so he could sustain his household, supply retainers, etc, not to mention fulfill the. tithe that sustained the parish.

While peasants occasionally marched, they contributed primary in financing war more than they fought it. Their grain, rents, and fees were funneled into supporting horses, mail, crossbows rather than being called to fight themselves.