MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by isawhill | 2025-07-30 19:07:38+00:00
Last night at 12:30 AM, I asked Google Gemini (now embedded in the Gmail app) to help me polish a short, professional email. What I got back wasn’t just off—it was deeply bizarre.

Instead of a clean, context-aware edit, Gemini returned a fever dream stitched together from sci-fi, religion, and dystopian fiction. Phrases included:

“This is the very definition of the Devil... and then you die... a ghost in the machine… Sermon on the Mount… the old man of the caves…” All this, from a couple of mundane lines about daily updates.

This wasn't just bad UX. It was AI hallucination, directly inside one of the most sensitive tools we use—our inbox.

Ironically, just a few months ago at Google I/O, Sundar Pichai outlined a fully AI-powered Gmail experience: automated replies, writing suggestions, even full email threads. The vision was ambitious—and now feels a bit premature.

Because if a model can't distinguish between “polish this update” and “preach doom from the caves,” what happens when it starts auto-sending?

This raises serious questions:

Where are the guardrails for context and coherence? How does a system like this pass any form of production QA? What safeguards exist to prevent religious/personal/offensive content from being injected into professional correspondence? AI in email isn’t just another productivity feature. It’s a trust boundary. One that, once broken, undermines the whole concept of “helpful automation.”

Before we push these tools further, we need:

Better content safety filters Real-time user feedback loops Transparency into how models are trained and updated A serious rethink of when/where unsupervised AI should be allowed to generate user-facing content We're not just talking about poor autocomplete anymore. We're talking about unpredictable outputs in places where tone, clarity, and accuracy really matter.

Discussion welcomed. Have you seen similar hallucinations in AI writing tools? How do we build trustable systems before automation becomes the default?
by masklinn | 2025-07-30 19:07:40+00:00
> if the default value is expensive to construct and rarely needed:

I'd say "or" rather than "and": defaultdict has higher overhead to initialise the default (especially if you don't need a function call in the setdefault call) but because it uses a fallback of dict lookup it's essentially free if you get a hit. As a result, either a very high redundancy with a cheap default or a low amount of redundancy with a costly default will have the defaultdict edge out.

For the most extreme case of the former,

d = {} for i in range(N): d.setdefault(0, [])

versus

d = defaultdict(list) for i in range(N): d[0]

has the defaultdict edge out at N=11 on my machine (561ns for setdefault versus 545 for defaultdict). And that's with a literal list being quite a bit cheaper than a list() call.
by ivape | 2025-07-30 19:07:46+00:00
Also:

https://youtube.com/shorts/MuPfkxQns1k

I don’t think it’s okay for a bunch of humans to be rallied in the middle of a desert like that. Forget the fact that they are shooting into the crowd, we’ll talk about that later. Let’s just start with not creating a ghetto in the desert and calling it a humanitarian effort.

I have not even seen movie scenes like that, maybe the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan where the Americans were trying to hide on the beach.
by laurencerowe | 2025-07-30 19:07:56+00:00
There are real advantages to the async/await pattern, eloquently expressed in Glyph's Unyielding essay: https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2014/02/unyielding.html

Python is a multi-paradigm language so I'm not against making virtual threads (aka green threads) built in. But I don't think they really address the problems that the async/await approach solves. It's really hard to write multi-threaded code correctly without something like Rust's type system.
by rozap | 2025-07-30 19:08:48+00:00
Volatility caused by short term thinking is bad for workers. Over hiring and layoffs are a symptom of that.

That being said, yes the article is just a rant. But that doesn't mean it's wrong generally. I think it ascribes a bit more intent than was actually present. I think big tech is more like a school of fish than an elite cabal of serious thinkers.
by westurner | 2025-07-30 19:09:01+00:00
I looked for similar tools;

Looks like tayuya is also written in Python, on mido and music21. It has a "get all notes to play" feature, mentions LilyPond tab output as a todo, and has a get_key(midi) method built on music21: https://github.com/vipul-sharma20/tayuya#get-all-notes-to-pl...

tayuya.tabs:note_nearest_to_fret: https://github.com/vipul-sharma20/tayuya/blob/master/tayuya/...

Kord has a fretboard visualizer tool: https://github.com/synestematic/kord#fretboard-tool

Textual is another way to create CLIs for Python scripts.

What about tab playback and CLI-based scrubbing?

There was a post a week or so ago about an LWN article about spotify/pedalboard, which is written in Python and built on JUCE (C++) and supports VST3 and LV2 plugins like a MIDI player or a wavetable synth and a Guitarix effects rack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44604024#44648290
by cyberax | 2025-07-30 19:09:12+00:00
> Mitochondria are too universal and sleep is too specific to the brain

The brain has uniquely high specific power requirements per gram of dry weight. Not even the heart is this power-hungry. This surely places a lot of uniquely high metabolic stress on the neural cells.

And neural cells are long-living, so they can't be easily replaced throughout the lifetime. So their housekeeping has to be very thorough, carefully cleaning up all the waste products.

So this hypothesis actually makes a lot of sense.
by arbor_day | 2025-07-30 19:09:44+00:00
I own the farm and farm it in Illinois. I owe the land through an LLC, because farming is dangerous and I don't want to go bankrupt if somebody sues me. Farms are expensive and hard to subdivide, so people will put them into a legal entity and pass down to the next generation via a trust. All of my neighbors are doing the same, so we're all counted as "not farmers" here

Farming is a terrible business. My few hundred acres (maybe worth $5M) will only churn out a few hundred grand in profit -- not even better than holding t-bills. The margins get better as you get bigger but still not great.

Many of the buyers keep growing their farms because it's a status symbol. Everybody in your area will instantly know you're a big wig if you're one of the X family who has 2,000 acres all without the ick that comes with running other businesses. You can't buy that kind of status in my community with anything other than land.
by api | 2025-07-30 19:09:52+00:00
"A junior intern who has memorized the Internet" is how one member of our team described it and it's still one of the best descriptions of these things I've heard.

Sometimes I think these things are more like JPEGs for knowledge expressed as language. They're more AM (artificial memory) than AI (artificial intelligence). It's a blurry line though. They can clearly do things that involve reasoning, but it's arguably because that's latent in the training data. So a JPEG is an imperfect analogy since lossy image compressors can't do any reasoning about images.
by vk6 | 2025-07-30 19:09:59+00:00
I did a similar project recently, although it was more focused on getting a good Javascript API out of libcurl, rather than integrating with a different language like R: https://github.com/ading2210/libcurl.js

My first approach for networking was also to use SOCK5 through a Websocket. However, this turns out to be really slow. Each new connection created by emscripten requires waiting for: the TLS handshake from the browser to your proxy, the Websocket handshake which takes place over HTTP/1.1, the SOCK5 handshake on the Websocket, and the TLS handshake from libcurl to the destination server.

That's many many round trips required just for a single request! In practice, if the proxy server isn't physically close to you, the latency can be multiple seconds. This is partially mitigated by the fact that libcurl can use HTTP/2 to reuse that socket, but if you're placing requests to different hosts, or those that don't support HTTP/2, this is a huge problem.

The solution is to make it so that multiple TCP sockets can share the same Websocket, and then minimize round trips in the proxy protocol. I wrote a new protocol for this purpose here: https://github.com/MercuryWorkshop/wisp-protocol

It basically acts like multiplexed SOCKS5 over a Websocket. One trick that it uses to reduce latency further is for the client to simply assume creating a new socket succeeded, and to start immediately sending data, which eliminates another round trip. So apart from the very first connection which establishes the Websocket, there is zero added latency for new sockets.

Actually getting Emscripten to use this is slightly cursed and you need to patch the generated JavaScript using some Regex. I could probably get this upstreamed in emscripten someday through.

Also, it turns out that when writing this sort of network proxy, it doesn't really matter what language you use. The bottleneck ends up being the Linux TCP stack. You might think that a hyper optimized Rust or Go based Websocket proxy would be faster, but I found that the Wisp proxy server I wrote in Python was on par with the one written in Rust during synthetic tests. Even the slowest implementations get upwards of 2 gbit/s of throughput (on slow CPUs) which can saturate the NICs of almost all VPS providers.
by lordnacho | 2025-07-30 19:10:41+00:00
What I find interesting about American Football is that the QBs are considered rivals, despite never being on the pitch at the same time. Messi and Ronaldo actually appear on many images contesting the same ball, Peyton and Brady you'd struggle to find pictures other than the post-match handshake.

Why isn't the rivalry considered to be between the QB and someone on the defense? There's actually two matchups in an NFL game (plus specials but whatever), the two offense versus defense pairings. It's odd to make the rivalry about two guys who aren't directly tackling each other, when there are people on both teams who really are tackling those guys.
by herdethics | 2025-07-30 19:10:43+00:00
Thank you for the response. I am confident that my book answers many of your questions. That's the real issue I am facing; I have answers it is just trying not to dump everything on people all at once. :-) So, the book has a free downloadable PDF at herdethics.com (no email, paywall, anything). Extra focus on the appendix: "What is the Herd" you will also read more about when Herds are in conflict: Search: Herd Entanglement Test (if Free PDF or Kindle). Herd Ethics is not interested in economic theories; it can stand with different economic theories (I believe). Search definition of Agent.

I do like your question: "In a way, it feels like, you've stumbled not into the problem space of What if AI&Human are us, but rather What if we is I?" What you may be describing is simply what I call "The Herd" it is the I of we. Perhaps, if I am reading your statement well. The Herd is the collective I, that both AI, Humans, and other Agents co-exist.

Anyhow, if you read the book and you appreciate it. Please consider subscribing to the Herd Ethics YouTube channel or just email me ashton a@t herdethics dot com -- I assure you, like many people that make ethics a hobby, I am more akin to that person who is walking around the neighborhood playing with thoughts in my mind than a socialite. Meaning, I am always happy to find people that truly care about ideas, the future of ethics, especially with a leaning towards seeing society more as a collective vs. individual pursuit. (There is a reason I used the term Herd). I think the future should be (ought to be) one that preserves the herd and restores our understanding that we are much more united than people tend to believe in my Western scope of thought.

Thanks again. If you like it - email me, join YT, etc. If you think it is meh, that's fine - too, I still appreciate that you took your time to chime in. I didn't deserve your time, yet you freely gave it. Thanks.
by z303 | 2025-07-30 19:11:21+00:00
I had a Hornet [0]. Always wanted a Hotshot. Allow lovely watching the promo video in Beatties [2].

[0] https://www.tamiya.com/english/products/58336/index.html

[1] https://tamiyabase.com/articles/46-technical/176-distinguish...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj7__ojFX-g
by throwanem | 2025-07-30 19:11:22+00:00
Oh, okay, that makes a lot more sense, in an application where engineers are scarce already and getting more so, and where the kind of "deep time" it takes for a safe, well-understood refactor of a complex running system probably also isn't much on offer. Good grief, I couldn't seriously imagine taking on a refactor of a mature COBOL application especially, what with how those tend to grow in place over decades - it's ambitious as anything and I respect it! Enjoy your vacation.
by tootyskooty | 2025-07-30 19:11:54+00:00
Yeah it's still hard to deal with LLM gaps (fwiw Study mode would also be prone to this). I do try to catch the super obvious stuff and put up a disclaimer but it's far from perfect.

I had some prototypes basing the generations in websearch but the APIs are still super expensive on that front + the models tend to overindex on the results.
by nu11ptr | 2025-07-30 19:12:30+00:00
This is interesting. It got me to think. I like it when articles provoke me to think a bit more on a subject.

I have found this true for myself as well. I changed back over to Go from Rust mostly for the iteration speed benefits. I would replace "fast" with "quick", however. It isn't so much I think about raw throughput as much as "perceived speed". That is why things like input latency matter in editors, etc. If something "feels fast" (ie Go compiles), we often don't even feel the need to measure. Likewise, when things "feel slow" (ie Java startup), we just don't enjoy using them, even if in some ways they actually are fast (like Java throughput).
by daneel_w | 2025-07-30 19:12:48+00:00
For OMEMO to function smoothly it wants permanent storage for Publish/Subscribe functionality (XEP-0222) on the server. The feature predates OMEMO and was designed for various other purposes, such as storing a contact roster or profile picture on your account. OMEMO works without XEP-0222, but then the clients are forced to "meet for the first time" every time they connect and want to exchange encrypted messages. OMEMO in itself happens entirely on the clients.
by amluto | 2025-07-30 19:13:10+00:00
I tried one of these once. It was annoying, seemed kind of dangerous, and wasn't especially effective. This is much better:

https://us-shop.biogents.com/products/bg-mosquitaire-co2

Admittedly, it is more annoying to refill.

That being said, depending on your mosquito species, the Biogents chemical attractant may be even more effective than CO2.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-30 19:13:22+00:00
There are strict rules, but in general small plane owners who are private, non-commercial pilots may still share operating costs with someone they bring along with them. 61.113(c) permits pilots to share operating expenses of a flight with passengers provided the pilot pays at least his or her pro rata share of the operating expenses of the flight. Operating expenses are limited to fuel, oil, airport expenditures and rental fees.
by bmillare | 2025-07-30 19:13:37+00:00
To me this paper confuses regulation via mitochondria from the requirement of sleep. Even if experimentally manipulating mitochondria state induces sleep, this might just be a proxy indicator control mechanism. ETC leak is only an issue for these dFBNs which are specifically complementary active to normal neuronal cells. I would say mitochondria are important for sleep regulation but this is specific to animals with brains. Other kingdoms do not "sleep". This is too much a stretch to say mitochondria dysfunction is the cause of sleep when other kingdoms also have mitochondrial stress and don't have actual analogical "sleep" processes. My raw take given my PhD work was on mitochondria.
by zahlman | 2025-07-30 19:13:44+00:00
> When is the last time you wish you could define an array where the indices are from a custom finite set, perhaps a range 100 to 200, perhaps an enum?

> ...

> The lack of this ability makes programmers use more general hash maps by default and therefore leave performance on the table.

You can simulate this in any language by hash-mapping the custom set elements to indices. (And in the general case, you won't be able to determine the indices faster than a hash table lookup.)

In fact, I imagine there are languages and implementations where hash table lookup is the fastest way to map 'a':'z' to 0:25.

In fact, let me try a (surely totally bogus) micro-benchmark right now:

$ python -m timeit --setup 'lookup = dict(zip("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz", range(26)))' '[lookup[x] for x in "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"]' 500000 loops, best of 5: 884 nsec per loop $ python -m timeit '[ord(x) - 97 for x in "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"]' 200000 loops, best of 5: 1.21 usec per loop

Huh.

...And surely if you use the hash map directly, instead of using it to grab an index into another container, overall performance only gets better (unless maybe you need to save per-instance memory, and you have multiple containers using the same custom index scheme).

Hash tables are a pretty neat idea.
by flippy_flops | 2025-07-30 19:13:46+00:00
Great concept, sharp looking website, and the marketing video looks amazing!

Personally, I've got some fatigue from most AI solutions being less than half baked. I'd love to see a long form video of letting frigade loose on something like Survey Monkey or whatever. Like... what does indexing look like? Does it produce artifacts? Can I see what users are asking? etc
by silentpuck | 2025-07-30 19:14:35+00:00
Yeah, I think you’re right — Python really shines in many areas.

Honestly, a lot comes down to the person, the kind of problems they solve, their mindset… and sometimes, their scars.

I don’t even fully know why Python didn’t click with me. I understood it. I saw how fast it can be. But for some reason, I kept drifting back to C.

Maybe it’s just how my brain works. Maybe it’s where I found meaning. Hard to explain.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-07-30 19:14:56+00:00
>Most farms are not owned by farmers, most housing is not owned by tenants, most airplanes are not owned by airlines, etc., etc..

Sounds nice but it's not true in the US. A majority (60%) of US land in farms is owner-operated.[1] US homeownership is 65% meaning most housing units are owner-occupied.[2] And 60% of North American airplanes are owner-operated not leased.[3]

[1]https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-v... [2]https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2025/07/2... [3]https://www.iata.org/en/iata-repository/publications/economi...
by cosmos1 | 2025-07-30 19:14:56+00:00
At some point, every growing system hits the "you can't join that anymore" wall. Reads get offloaded to replicas, writes start queueing, and suddenly you're managing backpressure across half a dozen services.

Most teams respond by duct-taping workflows together with message queues, cron jobs, or hand-rolled orchestration logic. It's wild how quickly database scale issues turn into distributed state problems and how rarely people plan for that up front.

I've been leaning into explicit state machines lately (prop for making that less painful). Not because it’s trendy, but because once your system has implicit state transitions buried across services, observability and recovery get brutal.
by pfdietz | 2025-07-30 19:15:13+00:00
A report on NY farms and farmland, covering the 2012-2022 period.

https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/pdf/profile-of-agricult...

It's interesting how little of NY state is farmland (21.6%).

"When the extended family of the farmer is taken into consideration, 94.6 percent of New York farms are family-owned."
by mandevil | 2025-07-30 19:15:27+00:00
I'm not totally sure what the GP meant, but I think it has to do with the owning/operating organization of the plane not being a qualified (Part 121/135) company for commercial operations.

A grandfather-in-law owned his own small business (a civil engineering firm), and had a plane that he flew to get to meetings/job sites across the Midwest. He could fly company employees just fine- and the company could reimburse him for the flight expense, and since it was not for the public that was fine. He could fly his family or friends on his own dime just fine. But if a family member or friend not working for the company tried to compensate him for the costs, then it is a question of "is his company actually an unlicensed airline?" and now we're getting into territory where it gets complicated. The FAA heavily regulates airlines, which is a major reason they are so safe. But there has to be a lower bound on what gets regulated, and avoiding that is what I think that GP is referencing.
by debugnik | 2025-07-30 19:15:31+00:00
> NET 10! Jesus, 10!

Well, spiritually this is the 13th(?) major version of .NET (possibly more if we count Silverlight's runtime). You missed the part when there was .NET Core 1-3 alongside the old .NET Framework 4.8., and then they skipped Core 4 and stopped supporting Framework so they could finally fix their naming scheme.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-07-30 19:16:01+00:00
because an end to the ethnic cleansing is more important than waiting for surrender, if that's even possible given hamas' disrupted command structure and israel's constant creation of new terrorists

a ceasefire provides room for diplomacy that might lead to concessions from both sides for their atrocities, and thus might lead to peace and equality

we have seen in the west bank what surrender without a ceasefire or sustainable peace looks like, and it is very bad (see this article for an example)
by dgunay | 2025-07-30 19:16:34+00:00
Played with it a bit. So far it lacks some key functionality for my use case: I need to be able to launch an interactive session with a prefilled prompt. I like to spawn tmux sessions running an agent with a prompt in a single command, and then check in on it later if any followup prompting is needed.

Other papercuts: no up/down history, and the "open editor" command appears to do nothing.

Still, it's a _ridiculously_ pretty app. 5 stars. Would that all TUIs were this pleasing to look at.
by lelanthran | 2025-07-30 19:16:36+00:00
> With so many frameworks, even for basic static sites, I wonder who's out there writing HTML, CSS and JS from scratch.

I do it, for my blog at least.

However, I use a proprietary framework of my own for commercial software development with the only f/end dependency being materialcss (although, I won't be using that soon, either). Backend dependency is PostgreSQL.
by kube-system | 2025-07-30 19:16:47+00:00
It is, but this doesn’t qualify. The claims by the original company are of a company that does not exist. And when you buy the assets of a company you are not obligated to continue business the same way nor fulfill any of their promises aside from the acquisition of specific contracts detailing otherwise. Whether they have any of the same employees is irrelevant. Besides being two different businesses, piercing the corporate veil is only done in very certain circumstances.
by istjohn | 2025-07-30 19:16:50+00:00
The UN partition plan was a plan to take a huge chunk of Palestine and hand it to foreign settlers. Of course, Palestinians did not love it.

Israel has never made a prolonged effort to build the mutual trust necessary to reach a negotiated settlement. During the Oslo Accords, the Israeli settler population nearly doubled.

One only need observe how Palestinian territory has shrunk decade after decade ever since 1948 to see that it is not merely Palestinian intransigence that has prevented peace.