MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sporkland | 2025-07-10 15:21:02+00:00
As someone that criticized a number of their employers API's for not being sufficiently ReSTful especially with regards to HatEoS, I eventually realized the challenge is the clients. App developers and client developers mostly just want to deal with structured objects that they've built fixed function UX around (including the top level) and desire constructing URLs on the client. It takes a special kind of developer to desire building special mini-browsers everywhere that would require hateos and from the server side.

I think LLM's are going to be the biggest shift in terms of actually driving more truly ReSTful APIs, though LLM's are probably equally happy to take ReST-ish responses, they are able to effectively deal with arbitrary self describing payloads.

MCP at it's core seems to design around the fact that you've got an initial request to get the schema and then the payload, which works great for a lot of our not-quite-ReST API's but you could see over time just doing away with the extra ceremony and doing it all in one request and effectively moving back in the direction of true ReST.
by sly010 | 2025-07-10 15:21:03+00:00
Genuine question: How does this work? How does an LLM do object detection? Or more generally, how does an LLM do anything that is not text? I always thought tasks like this are usually just handed to an other (i.e. vision) model, but the post talks about it as if it's the _same_ model doing both text generation and vision. It doesn't make sense to me why would Gemini 2 and 2.5 would have different vision capabilities, shouldn't they both have access to the same, purpose trained state of the art vision model?
by ben_w | 2025-07-10 15:22:18+00:00
> If it could write like George Will or Thomas Sowell or Fred Hayek or even William Loeb

Having only barely heard of these authors even in the collective, I bet most models could do a better job of mimicking their style than I could. Perhaps not well enough to be of interest to you, and I will absolutely agree that LLMs are "low intelligence" in the sense that they need far more examples than any organic life does, but many of them will have had those examples and I definitely have not.

> We are also getting this kind of discussion

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44502981

Even just a few years ago, people were acting as if a "smart" AI automatically meant a "moral AI".

Unfortunately, these things can be both capable* and unpleasant.

* which doesn't require them to be "properly intelligent"
by mvieira38 | 2025-07-10 15:22:19+00:00
No one from what I can tell, that's why I still pay and give a damn. But they are missing a lot of desired features:

Financial: can't pay with Monero or cash, can't just buy Privacy Pass tokens instead of generating them from my account. Usability: can't access other features than Search with Privacy Pass, looking for a location doesn't pop a Maps widget, missing useful/cool search widgets from google and ddg (coinflip, rng, minigames, weather), bad Tor Browser integration (requires installing an add-on), bad/missing Mastodon search

But resources are being funneled towards replacing Google the company/stack instead of Google the search engine/app, so it begs the question if search is still really the top priority or not
by theozero | 2025-07-10 15:22:20+00:00
Hey all! Co-creator of varlock here. Varlock is the next evolution of what we learned building https://dmno.dev. We wanted to make things simpler (no more proprietary TypeScript schemas) and meet folks where they already are: .env files.

We think the decorator comments (it’s an open spec we call @env-spec - RFC is here https://github.com/dmno-dev/varlock/discussions/17) are an intuitive addition to .env files that are ubiquitous.

The hope is to remove the papercuts of dealing with env vars (and configuration more generally) by introducing an easy to understand system for validation, and type-safety, with the flexibility to use any third party provider to persist your secrets. We found ourselves reimplementing this stuff on every project, wiring together many tools and custom code, only to end up with a mediocre outcome.

The very common pattern of using `.env.example` leads to constant syncing problems, with many folks resorting to sharing .env files and individual secrets over slack, even when they know they shouldn’t. By turning that example into a schema and involving it in the loading process, it can never get out of sync. With validations built in, if something is wrong, you’ll know right away with a helpful error instead of an obscure runtime crash.

Because the system is aware whether things are sensitive or not it means we can do things like log redaction and leak prevention on the application side of things. Many tools try to do scanning but use regexes, while varlock knows the actual values to look for. We felt these were problems especially worth solving in a world where more frameworks are running the same code on both the server and client.

We intended to share this ourselves on here next week but you beat us to the punch. We’re in the midst of shipping the drop-in next.js integration (hopefully just merged today).

I also see a few comments about the “AI friendly” part. Right now tons of folks have sensitive keys in their .env files that are being leaked to AI assistants left and right. By removing plaintext secrets from env files, it entirely removes this problem. We also want to highlight the fact that with this DSL on top of .env we’re making it much easier for LLMs to write safer code. Part of creating devtools is trying to understand how they will be used in the wild so we’ve been trying to work with common tools (Cursor, Windsurf, Claude, Gemini, etc) to make sure they can coherently write @env-spec for varlock.

We’re literally just getting started so all of your feedback is super valuable.

We’ll continue to expand support for non-js languages (which already work via `varlock run`) as well as add more integrations, and eventually some CI/CD features for teams to help track and manage config.
by Tyyps | 2025-07-10 15:22:22+00:00
He is technically not wrong, most signatures can be seen has a public coin interactive proof system where you prove knowledge of a private key. They are then compiled into an non-interactive proof system via the Fiat-Shamir transform that uses a random oracle concretely instantiated using a hash function (easy to see in Schnorr signature). So at the end you are using a Hash function to generate your random coin.
by kadushka | 2025-07-10 15:22:35+00:00
I got 3 tokens: st, raw, and berry. My point still stands: processing "berry" as a single token does not allow the model to learn its spelling directly, the way human readers do. It still has to rely on an explicit mapping of the word "berry" to b e r r y explained in some text in the training dataset. If that explanation is not present in the training data, it cannot learn the spelling - in principle.
by sershe | 2025-07-10 15:22:39+00:00
That reminds me of an article I can't find anymore on the plight of the American poor couple trying to raise a child in a gasp 900sqft. Uh, check real estate sqft averages around the world?

I never was much of a partier as a teen but I've been to a few, and they were all in flats ranging from much smaller than an American house to literally one room sometimes with 15 people in it. Had no problem falling asleep drunk on somebody's kitchen floor or on a couch in a room with a bunch of other people.

Even in the US a dorm room (a tiny, rented place) is a stereotyped party location.

Oh and ofc numbers are wrong. The houses in the US are bigger than ever and homeownership rate is smth like 60%.
by tumsfestival | 2025-07-10 15:22:46+00:00
It's what happens when you don't play ball with the biggest bully there is this side of the pond. Not surprising at all though, the US has been continuously pushing their agenda around these parts for many decades now, even aiding the former military dictatorship, now aiding our former putschist president and his criminal family. Then they wonder why every day we're inching closer to China and their allies instead of them.
by sporkland | 2025-07-10 15:23:27+00:00
And they managed to get it flagged. The longer HN mods pretend this is just natural flagging because folks are sick of the same old topics and not a coordinated effort to control the narrative, the more I'm going to start seeking alternative sources for interesting news.

At the very least someone showing data that in aggregate there are just more follow-on duped stories about things and they're letting one through un-flagged (ideally the top up voted one) to show that there is or isn't bias creeping in via the flagging system would be helpful in re-establishing trust.

I probably have a unique view as I view HN through an RSS feed of posts with over 100 up votes. Every single time I see a post critical of X or Musk and click through the story has been flagged. I'll try to do data analysis via that lense and see what it turns up.
by mistercheph | 2025-07-10 15:23:31+00:00
Very cool, I did not know that the SSPL was like that!

And I'm surprised both by the fake grassroots campaign to attack sspl: https://ssplisbad.com

And by the OSI's interpretation of it as not open source: https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l....
by cogman10 | 2025-07-10 15:23:32+00:00
I think this is the most frustrating part. You wouldn't even need to massively change out neighborhoods to get a huge benefit. If a developer built with district and heating planned, you could have an entire neighborhood heated and cooled without needed AC and heaters in every building. You could still have single family homes that are massively more efficient per unit.

The problem is that has to be planned almost from the beginning. Which shouldn't be a huge deal. My neighborhood had a water tower built at the same time the neighborhood was built. There's no reason district heating couldn't have occupied the lot right next to it.
by exoverito | 2025-07-10 15:23:47+00:00
It's overwhelmingly due to monetary policy which has inflated assets and depreciated real wages for decades.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Restrictive zoning laws preventing construction in coastal cities is also a major factor. The cities which see the greatest declines in rents have the greatest increases in supply.

https://www.nmhc.org/contentassets/f9a5ef47d06143e6b8355cfad...
by red-iron-pine | 2025-07-10 15:23:47+00:00
in 2025 anything vaguely desirable in a coastal-ish city is starting at more like 600-700k. actual decent houses will be 1MM or more.

the folks in those areas, if you owned a house for the last 20 years, are now richer than ever due to that property appreciating. but the younger generation is absolutely screwed
by bonoboTP | 2025-07-10 15:23:54+00:00
Academics, yes. Like from the upper years of the PhD process onwards, to postdocs and professorship, yes. But during the bachelor's and master's, we had essentially zero idea what professors did outside lecturing. Didn't even realize a thing called "PhD student" exists. Just that TAs exist. Didn't know what a scientific publication or journal is. I did end up learning about it when I got a student assistant job at a chair, and interacted with the PhD students.

Even then, I didn't quite understand what peer review was, other than a vague idea of being some kind of expert stamp of approval that it is real science and not woowoo. Didn't know what a citation was or why it mattered. The whole "knowledge production" system is fully opaque. And this was the view inside the university as a student. Now imagine people who don't attend university. To them science is not much more than some mad scientist Einstein trope and that's it. And that it has something to do with NASA and stuff.
by pkilgore | 2025-07-10 15:24:59+00:00
I think we are reading separate implications from the same statement.

I (and others, and Google has not disabused anyone of this when asked), understand that to mean "Gemini always has access to a sliding 72 hour window of all your data, even if this feature is off".

You think it means: "Once you turn it off, Gemini has access for another 72 hours then it has no access".

The later is less alarming for sure, but the former appears what is actually happening.

Previously "off" meant "off". Now "off" means "only send/retain data for 72 hours".
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-07-10 15:25:01+00:00
If you're putting your name on something that an LLM wrote for you and you're not aware of what's in there or its factual correctness, that's on you.

Yes, that often means that using LLM text is actually more effort than just writing it yourself. Personally I find editing LLM text incredibly laborious, but I also find so many problems (hallucinations, weird structure choices, repetition, points that don't go anywhere, wordiness, etc) that I refuse to not give it extreme focus.

I'm not putting my name on crap work, and LLMs do not change that.
by namdnay | 2025-07-10 15:25:11+00:00
The type of people posting these questions on reddit today wouldn't have been at those parties yesterday, so I don't think we can extrapolate some overarching theme here

My anecdotal experience with two children who are young adults is that there are still house-parties (nearly) every weekend at high-school, but that there's a lot less drinking, and they're a lot more open and mature (i'm not sure i would have enjoyed being a trans kid in a 90s high school)
by Brendinooo | 2025-07-10 15:25:14+00:00
What kind of editorial policies will you have about how you frame stories and what kind of words you will use?

I'm a happy subscriber to Tangle News, and its founder has spent a lot of time about about how he wants to bridge ideological divides in a way that echoes "We strive for diversity and transparency of resources and welcome your contributions to widen perspectives." He talks about looking for language to avoid those divides: where one side might speak of illegal aliens and other side might speak of undocumented immigrants, Tangle picked the term unauthorized migrants.

He did a little TED talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=543mYKKh1EE

Anyways, just curious how you'll approach this issue. I'm interested in your project and wish you all the best!
by frozenseven | 2025-07-10 15:25:40+00:00
It's not identical. ARC-AGI-2 is more difficult - both for AI and humans. In ARC-AGI-1 you kept track of one (or maybe two) kinds of transformations or patterns. In ARC-AGI-2 you are dealing with at least three, and the transformation interact with one another in more complex ways.

Reasoning isn't an on-off switch. It's a hill that needs climbing. The models are getting better at complex and novel tasks.
by os2warpman | 2025-07-10 15:27:07+00:00
The median age of buyers has increased from 31 in 2004 to 38 in 2024.

The median age of the population of the United States has increased from 35.3 in 2000 to 38.8 in 2020. (hmmmmm)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...

As the population pyramid of the US, which is already a "population Empire State Building", further morphs into a "Population Baseball Diamond", I expect the median age of all buyers to increase and the percentage of owners by age group in the younger cohorts to decrease.

Additionally, as the median age increases, because older people tend to have more money, I expect home prices to continue to increase.

Honestly, I expect home prices to spike by 2035-2040 as the current crop of 50–60-year-olds reach retirement realizing that their only real prospect of not starving to death in retirement is the main (and often only) asset: their home.

That will further stress younger folks, but people don't seem to care and anyone who expresses concern is denigrated as a communist so what is to be done?

Regardless, with the homeownership rate for "under 35" fluctuating between ~41% in 1982 and ~37% in 2024 "nobody owns shit no mo" is still false.

https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf
by TheAmazingRace | 2025-07-10 15:27:38+00:00
This is a detail conveniently left out by home owners justifying their purchase, especially if they overpaid and have a higher interest rate on their mortgage on top of it. With a mortgage, the amount you pay is the expected floor you'll encounter, whereas with rent, the amount you pay is the maximum you'll deal with, at least for the duration of the lease agreement.

Renting honestly can be a better deal, especially if you have the discipline to stick excess money in the market consistently. In fact, your returns are likely better than just using a house as a forced savings account. In my neck of the woods, we have seen rental inversion too.
by wavemode | 2025-07-10 15:27:46+00:00
Are you arguing in bad faith, or do you just not have any practical experience dealing with complex systems?

Even if the bug can't be reproduced, on the basis of multiple user reports the first step absolutely should be to add some assertions and logging around email deletion.

The point is not to give it a "100% safe" label, the point is to start narrowing down possible root causes. If the problem recurs again, you'll have assertions ruling out certain possible culprit code paths as well as logs displaying the values of relevant variables.
by ns-148 | 2025-07-10 15:27:56+00:00
I think that pricing it will be challenging, given the outcome can be achieved in other ways for less money but perhaps with a touch more effort.

However, if they solve a genuine problem, do that one thing very well, package it very well and provide sufficient value-add around it, then why couldn't they be a success? There are many successful products like that today.

The other challenge is that because it's relatively easy to do, there's a lot of noise. Standing out from the crowd will be hard.
by alberth | 2025-07-10 15:28:12+00:00
> It is pity, that Google Mail is «good enough» and it killed development of good desktop e-mail clients.

You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was considerably better than most desktop mail clients at the time.

It had auto-complete for who you wanted to email (prior you had to manually type their email address).

It came with an eye watering amount of storage (1 GB).

Worked from any computer (when POP was common and downloaded the emails locally to that desktop computer).

And more.

So it wasn’t so much that Gmail is “good enough”. It was more like desktop clients saw how much better Gmail was and didn’t think they could compete - also given that Google provided the hosting as well which allowed for tighter integration - something a desktop app alone could ever do.

Note: I'm not saying I think Gmail is a great experience. For web, I personally really enjoy Fastmail and for desktop - I surprisingly have grown to like Outlook. What I am saying is that when Gmail was launched, it took a lot of wind out of the sails of desktop mail app creators.
by Yizahi | 2025-07-10 15:28:15+00:00
It's like a car whose engine randomly shuts down with a very low reproduction rate. Except with cars when this happened GM has recalled 30 million cars and paid billions of fines.

Emails to email client is an engine to the car. It is pointless without one and it is THE purpose of it. All the rest of functionality like fancy UI, filter, notifications, editor is meaningless if your emails were deleted without recovery. Even car without engine is more useful than email client with empty DB.
by lenkite | 2025-07-10 15:28:57+00:00
> the type checking can only happen at the call-site, because you need to know the actual type arguments used, regardless of what the constraints might say.

No longer true after C++ 20. When you leverage C++20 concepts in templates, type-checking happens in the template body more precisely and earlier than with unconstrained templates.

In the below, a C++ 20+ compliant compiler tries to verify that T satisfies HasBar<T> during template argument substitution, before trying to instantiate the body

template<typename T> requires HasBar<T> void foo(T t) { t.bar(); }

The error messages when you use concepts are also more precise and helpfully informative - like Rust generics
by sashank_1509 | 2025-07-10 15:29:03+00:00
You tokenize the image and then pass it through a vision encoder that is generally trained separately from large scale pretraining (using say contrastive captioning) and then added to the model during RLHF. I’m not surprised if the vision encoder is used in pre training now too, this will be a different objective than next token prediction of course (unless they use something like next token prediction for images which I don’t think is the case).

Different models have different encoders, they are not shared as the datasets across models and even model sizes vary. So performance between models will vary.

What you seem to be thinking is that text models were simply calling an API to a vision model, similar to tool-use. That is not what’s happening, it is much more inbuilt, the forward pass is going through the vision architecture to the language architecture. Robotics research has been doing this for a while.
by yndoendo | 2025-07-10 15:29:19+00:00
Batteries are just one means to store renewable energy and mechanical storage is another. Re-designing the power grid to transfer peak to areas via HVDC is another, to spread into areas where the weather limits or constricts the renewables for that time of day or day itself.

"Taming the Sun" [0] goes into more details and talks about it better than I can.

People like to over simplifying complexity by reducing arguments to a single reasoning. It helps make everything seem more simple than it really is. It is a way to persuade people that lack understanding "all systems are complex". Even instructions on how to construct a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. How many years does it take of development before a child can actually preform that "simple" task?

[0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537070/taming-the-sun/
by jabroni_salad | 2025-07-10 15:29:34+00:00
My strategy has been to use light mode all around but I have f.lux set to about 20% strength all day long. I also have my monitors dimmed a fair amount unless I want to display HDR. It also helps to have a bias light behind your screens if you can.

My goal was to get rid of the 2pm eye twitch and I've mostly got it.
by nbstme | 2025-07-10 15:29:34+00:00
I built Bustameme this weekend to generate memes using AI. You upload any image, and it uses a combination of vision models and LLMs to generate a caption.

Memes are one of the hardest forms of communication for AI—humor, context, subtlety. So this was partly an experiment: how funny can AI get?

Curious what people think. What would you improve?
by cogman10 | 2025-07-10 15:29:42+00:00
Maybe better disposal practices. Regulations standardizing batteries would also do a lot of good.

But really, we simply need a lot of virgin batteries regardless because we don't have enough. Recycling and disposal will only really take off once the market is mostly saturated (which we don't appear to be anywhere near).

I'd also point out that modern LiPo batteries are 90% recyclable with no special techniques needed. That's because by weight, the batteries are mostly iron and nickel. Recycling them is really as simple as just melting them down. It only gets tricky if you want to collect the lithium, silicon, and other trace materials (and there are already recycling plants that are handling that).
by mindslight | 2025-07-10 15:29:52+00:00
This is such weird reasoning. When you're young and throwing parties where you're implicitly inviting a whole lot of people who you don't know, they will be bringing random chaos and you want to appear judgement proof and have it be someone else's property getting accelerated wear and tear. By the time you own a house with a yard, you're only inviting people you already know, with maybe one layer of transitive trust. Perhaps this focus on owning a house as the first step to doing anything points to the real problem though?