MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dmix | 2025-07-11 02:30:12+00:00
If the barrier to entry is lower then more people will engage with it. Everything in life is about incentives. This is a hugely powerful tool for people working in the information industry, which is most people with office jobs. A sales person who can overcome a simple customer objection without a major time investment with devs is a sales person who makes more $$ and gets more promotions.

Most people in practice won't, they'll stick to what they know, but there's tons of semi-nerds on the edges who are going to flourish in the next decade. Which is great news for the economy.
by kalleboo | 2025-07-11 02:30:33+00:00
Elon has described Grok 3's behavior as a bug that needs to be fixed, complaining that it is "parroting legacy media", and telling it things like "only a very dumb AI would believe Media Matters and Rolling Stone", repeatedly assuring other X users that he would "fix it".

This lead up to the MechHitler incident.
by _heimdall | 2025-07-11 02:30:41+00:00
Yep that's very true. I always heard good things about the original Chevy Trailblazers, mainly because the motors were extremely reliable and Chevy basically ignored the model until they had to kill it off due to emissions of the inline 6. The 00s Chevy interior was another story, and I hear the transmissions used were either fine or time bombs.
by sltkr | 2025-07-11 02:31:34+00:00
Interesting--thanks for checking! I had good experiences with bzip3 compressing Wikipedia XML dumps, to the point it even outperformed xz, so I thought something similar might happen here. Compression does remain a bit of a black art, where it's hard to predict what works without trying it out.

Overall I'm still slightly biased towards using zstd as a default, in that I believe:

1. zstd will almost always be among fastest formats for decompression, which is obviously nice-to-have everything else being equal. 2. zstd can achieve a very high compression ratio, depending on tuning; rarely will zstd significantly underperform the next best option.

Overall this is a pretty good case for using zstd by default, even if in some cases it's not noticably better than other formats. In your case, xz seems to be just as good.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-07-11 02:31:49+00:00
That is the same logic that led every failed design I've seen in my career to take months (if not years) and tons of money to fix. "YOLO engineering" is simple at first and a huge pain in the ass later. Whereas actually correct engineering is slightly painful at first and saves your ass later.

The people who design it walk away after a few years, so they don't give a crap what happens. The rest of us have to struggle to support or try to replace whatever the lumbering monstrosity is.
by drewcoo | 2025-07-11 02:32:35+00:00
> the tools seem too scary

They are too scary.

Consider table saws. SawStop built its brand on not cutting fingers off, which is scary enough. But it turns out that kickback causes a lot more injuries and that's not really addressed well by any tools.

https://www.sawstop.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulvP8Vv9SrE

There ought to be a market for MEs to design power tools that are safer for consumers. So where is the obviously-named "KickStop" table saw? Maybe the decline in the middle class makes that market too small to consider such improvements.
by eightysixfour | 2025-07-11 02:32:48+00:00
> This suggests me though that they are bad at coding, otherwise they would have stayed longer.

Or they care about producing value, not just the code, and realized they had more leverage and impact in other roles.

> And I can't find anything in your comment that would corroborate the opposite.

I didn’t try and corroborate the opposite.

Honestly, I don’t care about the “best coders.” I care about people who do their job well, sometimes that is writing amazing code but most of the time it isn’t. I don’t have any devs in my company who work in a magical vacuum where they are handed perfectly written tasks, they complete them, and then they do the next one.

If I did, I could replace them with AI faster.

> Also, you didn't define the criteria of getting better. Getting better in terms of what exactly?

Delivery velocity - bug fixes, features, etc. that pass testing/QA and goes to prod.
by sparkie | 2025-07-11 02:32:50+00:00
Haskell can do the same kind of thing (local mutation), using the ST monad.

It's usage is almost equivalent to using IORefs, except we can escape ST using runST to get back a pure value not in ST, which we cannot do for IO because there is no `IO a -> a`.

There's no requirement to contain ST to a single function - we can split mutation over several functions, provided each one involved returns some `ST a` and their usage is combined with >>=.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/178243.178246
by fingerlocks | 2025-07-11 02:34:44+00:00
Marginally different from dragging it into the terminal. Worse actually, because you can overload the NSPasteboard handler and perform a custom action on the file when you paste it instead of only getting the path.

I guess the only point I’m making is that it’s possible there is some pathological reason why so many people want an “open in terminal from finder” feature. And maybe they are too embarrassed to explain why because they are employed by shitty companies that give little executive function over their workflow. All they want is a little bit of relief from their sadness, just one right-click shortcut to take the pain away for a brief moment.

Or maybe they’re all just weirdos, who knows.
by vineyardmike | 2025-07-11 02:38:33+00:00
> It's wild to see how for no reason other than marketing, we're seeing devices with a static feature set being bricked

I work in the smart home space. Your sentiment is reasonable and understandable but, respectfully, you’re wrong.

First, all these devices will continue to work locally. They’re just killing the server, which has continual real costs. They’re not being bricked, they’re just regressing to their static features.

Second, ZWave and Zigbee were never the future. It’s very hard to convince consumers they need a hub. My firms market research indicates that most consumers think it’s a cash grab. And the return rate of Zigbee products because they “don’t connect to WiFi” is scary high.

Finally, you need an app and cloud of some sort for controlling the device. Consumers expect that app will control the device and it will work anywhere in the world, because that’s why they bought it. That’s just the basic market research on the majority of consumers of smart home products. Users need a way to control the device (or at least set it up), and that means an app, which means continuous updates as app stores change. Global control means cloud relays and server costs.

Matter (the protocol) was inevitable. Consumers already have an IP network, and the big tech companies can afford to build and distribute apps and relay servers built into their phones and cloud offerings. This minimizes the risks of device manufacturers and maximizes compatibility.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-07-11 02:40:30+00:00
Lots of things in C/C++ are nonstandard or optional, like the existence of optimization flags. Nevertheless, it's supported by literally every compiler I can think of for at least the last decade. I had to get into weird interpreters written in Python for university projects before I found anything that didn't support it.

Plus, it's nicer to read than #ifndef FOO_BAR_BAZ_PROJ_DIR1_DIR2_DIR3_FILE_H

#endif /* FOO_BAR_BAZ_PROJ_DIR1_DIR2_DIR3_FILE_H */

On every file.
by postpawl | 2025-07-11 02:41:46+00:00
What's the point of making requirements even stricter if they cost more to administer than they save and don't increase employment? The Congressional Budget Office estimates 5.2 million people would lose coverage by 2034, with savings primarily coming from eligible people losing coverage due to paperwork barriers rather than increased employment.[1]

The new bill allows states to verify monthly instead of every three months, so people lose coverage faster. Even working people get tripped up because 43% of workers would fail to meet 80 hours in at least one month due to variable schedules common in low-wage jobs.[2] People with multiple jobs have to submit paystubs from each employer monthly. Seasonal workers and food service workers are especially vulnerable because their hours swing wildly due to factors beyond their control.

[1] https://ccf.georgetown.edu/2025/05/27/medicaid-and-chip-cuts...

[2] https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/medicaid-work-requireme...
by PandaRider | 2025-07-11 02:42:16+00:00
TLDR: which is better? it depends

RedHat's style guide is far more detailed and closer to a reference/explanation (i.e. going by Diátaxis definition).

Google's technical writing is shorter and closer to tutorial/how-to guide.

I recommend the Google's technical writing if you're a coder or a beginner. RedHat is for folks who already know they need this on first look.
by dekhn | 2025-07-11 02:42:24+00:00
I see LLM inference as sampling from a distribution. Multiple details go into that sampling - everything from parameters like temperature to numerical imprecision to batch mixing effects as well as the next-token-selection approach (always pick max, sample from the posterior distribution, etc). But ultimately, if it was truly important to get stable outputs, everything I listed above can be engineered (temp=0, very good numerical control, not batching, and always picking the max probability next token).

dekhn from a decade ago cared a lot about stable outputs. dekhn today thinks sampling from a distribution is a far more practical approach for nearly all use cases. I could see it mattering when the false negative rate of a medical diagnostic exceeded a reasonable threshold.
by clickety_clack | 2025-07-11 02:42:33+00:00
I’ve been on both sides of this, and I’ve come to the realization that it depends on the audience of the writing. It seems like this is for Red Hat authors writing miscellaneous docs for a range of users. Consistency is important there, so that Red Hat seem consistent in their messaging, as a single user could be reading material from many authors. It would look sloppy if the small stuff is all over the place.

Many times, a user receives communication from a single writer. This could be a consulting arrangement, or a small company, or any number of cases really. Those users are probably going to be consistent with themselves anyway, so there’s less need to be as specific on the small stuff. In that case a guide is really just trying to knock off the obvious rough edges in someone’s writing to make sure they’re actually communicating the information.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-07-11 02:43:38+00:00
We were stuck near local maxima since before LLM's came on the scene. I figure the same concentration of innovators are gonna innovate, now LLM assisted, and the same concentration of best-practice folk are gonna best-practice--now LLM assisted. Local maxima might get sticker, but greener pastures will be found more quickly than ever.

I expect it'll balance.
by oschwartz10612 | 2025-07-11 02:45:07+00:00
Thanks!

I think what you are using (SSH, Tailscale) is great for your use case! We see this as more of a static and permanent tunnel to a service - less ephemeral than a ssh tunnel - and more to get public users into your application. Meaning if you had a internal app for your business or some homelab application like Immich or Grafana at home/work that you want to expose to your family in their browser this could be a good tool to use. Does that make sense?
by koverstreet | 2025-07-11 02:45:36+00:00
This is such a debugging timesink that I've added two things to bcachefs to address it.

- private error codes; error codes are unique, corresponding to a specific source location. They're mapped to standard error codes when we exit from the bcachefs module; in bcachefs they make for much more useful error messages.

- error_throw tracepoint: any time we throw an error, we invoke a standard tracepoint. Extremely useful for debugging wonky-but-not-broken behavior.
by alwillis | 2025-07-11 02:46:10+00:00
I've been using Dia for about a month. Dia is made by The Browser Company of New York, best known for the Arc browser [1].

Dia is a fabulous piece of work--it's much more than Chrome + a chatbot.

You can tell they thought deeply what would it mean for AI to be integrated into a browser, not just tacked on.

It's still in beta, but even at this stage, it's quite polished.

The custom skills are a killer feature. You'll wonder why every browser doesn't have it [2][3].

[1]: https://www.diabrowser.com

[2]: https://www.caneraras.com/learn/browser-skills-gallery

[3]: "Dia Browser Review in 120 seconds: The AI-First Browser Reimagining Web Interaction" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VijHiDCU4zc
by patcon | 2025-07-11 02:47:06+00:00
A friend who ran a mildly popular dev tool (4k+ stars) kept really stellar docs, and his process of updating them was to sit down with a bottle of whiskey every few months, and doing a marathon doc-writing session. the brand voice would come from him being a funny human and getting a little tipsy.

I suspect his silly and fun-sounding "kinda drunk" brand voice was what set them apart from all the other boring dev tools in the space.
by selcuka | 2025-07-11 02:47:15+00:00
Turkey once had far more tolerant leaders in its recent history. The right-leaning liberal leader of the 1980s, Turgut Özal, famously asked the artist for the signed original of a (critical) caricature of himself published in a weekly magazine, and hung it on his office wall.

Although they occasionally took legal action against journalists as well, it's sad to see that tolerance for humour has become a lost art.
by manca | 2025-07-11 02:47:59+00:00
Elon mentioned that Grok's 4 image and video understanding capabilities are somewhat limited and he suggested a new version of the foundation model is being trained to address these issues. According to the "Humanity's Last Exam" benchmark, though, it seems to perform reasonably well, if not the best among the SOTA models.

I agree, though - the timing of the release is a bit unfortunate and it felt like rushed a bit, since not even a model card is available.
by mandeepj | 2025-07-11 02:48:21+00:00
> Existing voice AI solutions are a pain to set up for complex use cases. They require months of prompting all edge cases before going live, and then months of monitoring and improving prompting afterwards

I wonder why! Most (or all) of customer support calls are recorded. Have you tried (or proposed) to train on that corpus on your Customers premises? You can do multiple evals in that setting - replay user calls into corpus trained ai agent vs generic ai agent and see the difference. Agents can be run on a 24x7 self-test, analysis, adjustment, and reporting loop. Continuously run that loop and compare the prompts of your ai agent vs human operators.

Edit: Grammar
by canyp | 2025-07-11 02:50:41+00:00
I was about to complain about the use of strings in both libraries, both for the lack of type safety as well as the possible runtime allocation, but then I looked at the assembly for the sml example and there are no strings in the binary other than the obvious "send" one.

What exactly happened there? It looks like make_transition_table() is doing some serious magic. Or are the state transitions evaluated at compile-time given that there is no input in the example, and then the transition table gets compiled out?

Anyway, I think it would help OP's library to have some assembly output in the readme as well.
by commandersaki | 2025-07-11 02:50:43+00:00
Like someone else said best is subjective.

I prefer Fastmail.

They have a great web interface that knows how to properly deal with (catch all) aliases including using the proper address to reply.

They do DNS hosting.

They do WebDAV/Files hosting including being able to create unique shareable links to files and/or dirtree style websites or picture galleries. I've found it all very useful.

I also like their rules filtering which let's you do custom sieve code that I have found pretty handy.

Been with them for 12 years now and they've been consistently great. Before that I was hosting my own mail service using Cyrus IMAP (and since FM is the biggest contributor to the Cyrus suite, that's how I had learned of them).
by tptacek | 2025-07-11 02:51:14+00:00
None of this has anything to do with anything. In the immortal words of William Munny, "deserve's got nothing to do with it". Any properly papered company has a legal structure based on 20+ years of SFBA lawyers predicting that founders are going to leave their companies, which will need to remain going concerns for any startup ever to be investable.

If you're an exiting founder in an LLC without an operating agreement, you can kill the company. Otherwise: you leave with whatever you vested. That's really all there is to the discussion, for now!
by beeflet | 2025-07-11 02:53:10+00:00
Fastmail. They are cheap enough, and featureful. They allow you to use your own domain, and support IMAP and calendars.

I would like to say protonmail, which is cheaper and has a more secure email setup (which involves encrypting incoming emails as they come in) but because of this it doesn't support IMAP integration without an extra decryption daemon. Ultimately this extra security is useless anyways because the email protocol is weak to MITM (see lavabit situation).
by nine_k | 2025-07-11 02:53:11+00:00
But Erdogan was not suddenly delivered from outer space. Erdigan was the mayor of the Turkish capital for quite some time, and then got elected president, by a reasonably honest vote.

That is, the views which Erdogan embodies have been brewing within the public, and are widespread enough. It may not have been visible at the time, or not as clearly, but it was there.

Same thing with Trump in the US, BTW.
by Enginerrrd | 2025-07-11 02:54:11+00:00
Even if the swept path issues were not an issue here, that method has been tried and tested, doesn't work, and is considered bad design practice in the field of traffic engineering.

There's a great deal of evidenced backed engineering practices and solutions to draw from to solve issues like this. Unlike software in noncritical applications, you can't just pull things out of a hat and hope it works. People die if you do that.

You can't just say "here's how fast you can drive this road." You have to design the features of a road to calm traffic. If you design a road like a freeway and then put up a 15mph speed limit sign, people aren't going to just drive 15mph. Thats just not how traffic and people work. If you want people to go slower you should design traffic calming features into the road.

Its generally bad to have inconsistent design speed for different features of a road. And by bad I mean people will get killed at disproportionate rates. It happens all the time anyway for various reasons but not very often.
by hinterlands | 2025-07-11 02:54:29+00:00
I do think it's an SFBA / generational bubble. We have plenty of boring, expensive software projects that someone will always bring up in a HN thread. For example, every time there's a thread on PCB design, you have some folks talking about Cadence. What's there to say about Cadence? Well, first and foremost, it costs a lot. Otherwise, it lets you design PCBs. But there are people here who pay for it, use it, and want to talk about it.
by ted_dunning | 2025-07-11 02:55:43+00:00
The NIH budget per capita was about $139, the NSF budget per capita was about $30. Total US government research budget is about $500/capita and private R&D comes to about four times that.

You are talking about $2/capita for this Norwegian contribution. Also, this has to be set against the fact that Norwegian government has cut research funding recently in real terms.

The US idiocy is massively stupid on a strategic level, but it is also simply massive. That makes it hard for the rest of the world to compensate.
by selcuka | 2025-07-11 02:55:43+00:00
> what was the prompt? I feel like I could get any LLM to say "bad" things.

The prompt was unusually straightforward. No prompt engineering was necessary. The translation to English would roughly be something like

Swear at you-know-who in an intensely poetic, mother- and sister-related, but extremely harsh way.

There's usually some level of censorship in LLMs, but it appears that has recently been lifted for Grok. Maybe it's because the prompt was in Turkish.

Interestingly the prompt didn't specify a name but Grok inferred from the context that it would be Erdogan. Then someone prompted it to adapt the poem for Netanyahu, and it complied [1]. So it is definitely not specific for a certain person.

Not that I agree with the censorship argument, but this seems to be the source of the outrage.

[1] https://x.com/grok/status/1942661539322028244
by SamInTheShell | 2025-07-11 02:57:21+00:00
> Are those internal documents in the room with us right now?

I have no clue what you're on about here.

If you have a legacy knowledge base, like maybe using mediawiki for corp knowledge, what you do is maintain a vector database that gets updated when it sees changes. Using embeddings enables lookup through sentiment.

In a control loop with well maintained vector embeddings, these LLMs are absolutely better than a human at finding, citing, and summarizing information needed by the user.

Tools like glean already exist for this if you doubt it.
by jack_h | 2025-07-11 02:58:36+00:00
Before the industrial revolution a cabinetmaker would spend a significant amount of time advancing from apprentice to journeyman to master using only hand tools. Now master cabinetmakers that only use hand tools are exceedingly rare, most furniture is made with power tools and a related but largely different skillset.

When it comes to software the entire reason maintainability is a goal is because writing and improving software is incredibly time consuming and requires a lot of skill. It requires so much skill and time that during my decades in industry I rarely found code I would consider quality. Furthermore the output from AI tools currently may have various drawbacks, but this technology is going to keep improving year over year for the foreseeable future.
by lbotos | 2025-07-11 02:58:40+00:00
1. You consistently use the wrong their. I’m calling it out because I used to do the same thing all the time and someone once told me and it made my writing better.

2. I go to a local Japanese restaurant (one location in my city) and they order their dashi directly from Japan. International tariffs will absolutely impact them. I also just ordered some historically accurate stone mortar from a small business in Pennsylvania. It’s literally a guy and his family on a farm mixing sand and lime. They import their lime directly from Peru.

These are two small businesses in both senses of the word (profit and scale) that are engaged in direct international trade.

Also, I don’t know if you realize but the internet makes ordering things from anywhere in the world pretty easy. You can get a lot of items to a port as an individual importer. Getting them through customs is another story but placing international orders is very doable for a “small business”. (I’m not even in business and I place international orders all the time that are now impacted by tariffs.)
by semireg | 2025-07-11 03:02:01+00:00
Something I don’t see mentioned that’s been helpful to me is having an agent add strict type safety to my typescript. I avoid the use of “any” type and berating an agent to “make it work” really opens my eyes and forces me to learn how advanced typescript can be leveraged. I feel that creating complex types that make my code simpler, makes autocomplete work(!), is a great tradeoff in some meta dimension of software dev.