MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-22 00:46:29+00:00
Windows absolutely issues like you’re describing, but that’s not what I’m talking about (though not needing to tweak and troubleshoot desktop Linux is very much a YMMV thing in my experience, and I’ve played with Fedora, Ubuntu + derivatives (Mint, pop, etc), and arch derivatives among others a lot over the years).

For Cinnamon specifically I’m talking more UX/UI/visual polish sorts of things. There’s little papercuts all over that don’t make much difference individually but give an impression that it’s not quite finished. It isn’t unique in this regard though, you see this in all the DEs to some degree. It really just boils down to a lack of attention to detail and/or unevenly distributed attention (some things have been heavily iterated on, others implemented just well enough to check a box).

Some of the newer Wayland tiling WMs are better about this and are a lot more detail-oriented, but well, tiling WMs aren’t my thing at all. I’m much more in the traditional desktop camp.
by mshroyer | 2025-07-22 00:46:42+00:00
I don't know if this is somehow particular to my setup, but on both macOS and Linux I find that simply running full `compinit` fails to update mtime on `~/.zcompdump` when nothing's changed. That causes this optimization to fail, for me, if my completions haven't changed within the last day.

This is fixed by adding an explicit `touch ~/.zcompdump` in the branch that runs a full `compinit`.
by waldopat | 2025-07-22 00:47:20+00:00
Yup, but my earlier comment was a bit flippant, so here’s a more in-depth response.

It was an answer to the OP’s question about why Gmail search feels broken, and a nod to the previous comment pointing out Google’s core business is selling ads. In that context, Gmail isn’t optimized for superior search. It’s part of a data funnel that enables keyword targeting, ad placement, and behavioral profiling.

For me, there’s a deeper product lesson here, but also a signal about how someone thinks. Whether a candidate answers “ads” or “search” or “email” isn’t what really matters. It’s the why behind the answer that matters most.

At the end of the day, business models directly shape product decisions. That tension is something every product manager has to navigate because they sit between the business and technical sides of a company. Being able to see and articulate that tradeoff, especially when user needs diverge from monetization incentives, is key to both building effectively and being a successful product manager.

More often the business model, like subscriptions, is more tightly connected to the product. User has X problem that product Y solves and the company receives Z dollars in exchange for access. However, there are many examples where the pricing or monetization strategy is not so clearly connected to the feature set, of which google search is a great example.

For the record, I don't ask this question to junior PMs.
by kalenx | 2025-07-22 00:47:29+00:00
Nitpicking, but I don't see your four-letter word example as convincing. Thinking is the very process from which we form words or sentences, so it is by definition impossible to _not_ think about a word we must avoid. However, in your all caps instruction, replace "think" by "write" or "say". Then check if people obey they all caps directive. Of course they will. Even if the offensive word came to their mind, they _will_ look for another.

That's what many people miss about LLMs. Sure, humans can lie, make stuff up, make mistakes or deceive. But LLM will do this even if they have no reason to (i.e., they know the right answer and have no reason/motivation to deceive). _That's_ why it's so hard to trust them.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-22 00:48:14+00:00
that sounds like a you're holding it wrong type of a situation to me. a major point of Let's Encrypt (besides the obvious free) is that it deliberately keeps the cert times short to avoid the "someone that no longer works here set this up two years ago" type of situation with certbot checking twice a day and updating when necessary. so to break what Let's Encrypt is doing with not using certbot definitely feels like you're holding it wrong
by johnfn | 2025-07-22 00:48:30+00:00
Gemini did not one-shot these answers; it did its thinking elsewhere (probably not released by Google) and then it consolidated it down into what you see in the PDF. From the article:

> We achieved this year’s result using an advanced version of Gemini Deep Think – an enhanced reasoning mode for complex problems that incorporates some of our latest research techniques, including parallel thinking. This setup enables the model to simultaneously explore and combine multiple possible solutions before giving a final answer, rather than pursuing a single, linear chain of thought.

I don't see any parallel thinking, e.g., so that was probably elided in the final results.
by autoexec | 2025-07-22 00:48:36+00:00
Why innovate on the hardware side when you can just use AI to add fake frames to make the numbers you advertise look impressive even while the quality of the graphics your cards output nosedives? Especially if you're nvidia and making plenty of money selling AI chips to non-gamers. It doesn't help that the video card industry isn't even close to competitive and there's no pressure to really innovate in the first place.

It's fine for video games to employ tricks that limit what they have to make look good on screen. Games like Silent Hill did a pretty good job by filling the world with heavy fog or giving you a flashlight leaving everything outside of a small well-lit circle too dark to see. That actually added to the atmosphere and allowed them to make what little you could see look great (for the time).

Guessing at what players might be looking at and making everything else look like garbage is doomed to fail though. It punishes anyone who dares to look half an inch away from what the designers think you should be paying attention to, is distracting even if you are trying to focus where they want you to, and anyone who wants to take a cool a screenshot of the action gets screwed as well.
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-07-22 00:49:29+00:00
There's really pernicious stuff I've noticed cropping up too, over the months of use.

Not just subtle bugs, but unused variables (with names that seem to indicate some important use), comments that don't accurately describe the line of code that it precedes and other things that feel very 'uncanny.'

The problem is, the code often looks really good at first glance. Generally LLMs produce well structured code with good naming conventions etc.
by gjm11 | 2025-07-22 00:50:06+00:00
Your Nakamura example is from 2008. That's 17 years ago. The machines have improved a lot since then, hardware and software both. I've seen Nakamura beat strong-but-still-limited bots playing "anti-computer chess" but I am fairly sure he would be eaten alive if he tried it against present-day Stockfish or Leela on good hardware.

Maybe you're right about correspondence chess. That interview is from 2018 and the machines have got distinctly stronger in that time, but 7 years isn't so long and it could be that human input still has some value for CC.
by phil21 | 2025-07-22 00:50:28+00:00
Presumably this is an "honest" mistake via incompetence by the vendor, with horrible follow-up to remedy said mistake. The same of course happens with every vendor located anywhere in the world. It's getting much worse lately in the US as far as I can tell.

The difference though is your vendor using a lower grade metal than specified, knowingly and with intent to defraud since they decided that you might not notice and/or care enough for it to matter. That sort of thing doesn't seem to happen as much in the West.

I do agree that the reliable Chinese vendors will make things right at their expense if you can prove that they did not meet what they agreed upon. This is basically how I choose to deal with a vendor or not in China (or anywhere, for that matter) - I know stuff will happen, but how hard did I have to fight for them to make it right?
by tinuviel | 2025-07-22 00:50:34+00:00
I gave two examples. Direct Benefit Transfers & getting everyone bank accounts. They did reduce last mile corruption.

The people I allude to are a substantial portion of the population

>> Under Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY), a national mission to ensure access to financial services, about 341 million accounts were opened between August 2014 and January 2019, with aggregate deposits of around US$12.5 billion as of January 2019. Of these accounts, 181 million were opened by women.

>> As of January 2019, 440 schemes covering farm and non-farm subsidies, social protection payments such as pensions and public workfare programmes, scholarships, academic fellowships, conditional cash transfers, and other government payments implement DBTs across 56 ministries, with Rupees (INR) 2,16,844 crores (US$ 2.1 trillion) transferred in total in 2018–19 (Direct Benefit Transfer Mission, Government of India Citation2019)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2019.1...

Please provide sources and data before, again, painting with racist broad strokes. I know the internet has a hate boner for India and anything the country it has done positively but please dont let the rhetoric blind you.

If you lived in India you’d know there are substantially more people joining the formal economy instead of lining up for govt exams.
by schoen | 2025-07-22 00:51:27+00:00
The other benefit of expiration dates in a PKI is in case the subject information is no longer accurate.

In old-school X.509 PKI this might be "in case this person is no longer affiliated with the issuer" (for organizational PKI) or "in case this contact information for this person is otherwise no longer accurate".

In web PKI this might be "in case this person no longer controls this domain name" or "in case this person no longer controls this IP address".

The key-compromise issue you mention was more urgent for the web PKI before TLS routinely used ciphersuites providing forward secrecy. In that case, a private key compromise would allow the attacker to passively decrypt all TLS sessions during the lifetime of that private key. With more modern ciphersuites, a private key compromise allows the attacker to actively impersonate an endpoint for future sessions during the lifetime of that private key. This is comparatively much less catastrophic.
by Herring | 2025-07-22 00:52:00+00:00
Idk, I'm more optimistic than the author.

I'm currently using a LLM to rewrite a fitness book. It takes ~20 pages of rambling text by a professional coach // amateur writer and turns it into a crisp clear 4 pages of latex with informative diagrams, flow charts, color-coding, tables, etc. I sent it out to friends and they all love the new style. Even the ones who hate the gym.

My experience is LLMs can write very very well; we just have to care.

Hubert Humphrey (VP US) was asked how long it would take him to prepare a 15 minute talk: "one week". Asked how long to prepare a two hour talk? "I am ready right now".
by nomel | 2025-07-22 00:52:11+00:00
> This US supplier is charging us for every single bit of their incompetence.

I don't think that's entirely fair, since there's definitely some naivety here. "What happens if there's a mistake" needs to be the first thing you ask, when working with anyone. If you don't, you've both agreed to an uncomfortable argument, when things go wrong. Get it out of the way at the beginning, but expect to pay a little more for not relying on hopes and dreams of perfection.

And, there's a good chance that if you read the fine print, you explicitly agreed to this.
by waldopat | 2025-07-22 00:53:34+00:00
Agreed. And I added an update to give a more thoughtful response. I've been on the receiving side of trick questions, so I do understand. How you ask the question, which I didn't phrase here, is important. Google Search or Gmail are great case study style questions. Here's an oldie but a goodie about it from 2006:

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=33707
by happytoexplain | 2025-07-22 00:53:56+00:00
Yes, you're describing a real trend that occurs in all political identities (over-perception of more extreme opinions). However, in terms of degrees:

>The vast majority of conservatives do not intrinsically hate the LGBTQ/immigrant/welfare

I consider myself anti-immigration (in some contexts). I have wonderful conservative friends. And yet, that said: It's plainly incorrect to use the term "vast majority" here. It's a believable opinion if you leave it at just immigrants, perhaps.
by sarora27 | 2025-07-22 00:53:57+00:00
Once worked at a place in 2017 with a dipshit CIO. Guy spent his entire time trying to evangelize Teams as the reason to switch to Microsoft. He ended up leaving 11 months into the gig and we were more than happy to stay on Slack.

It feels like Microsoft has a (bad) deal with every 3rd rate IT leader where the IT leader eschews Microsoft's BS in exchange for being "unfireable" because "who else knows how all the Microsoft stuff works?"
by jart | 2025-07-22 00:54:52+00:00
Putting aside the people who need LLMs as a prosthetic, the only writers who are asking AI to write lengthy prose for them are the ones who on that occasion didn't have anything important to say in the first place. Maybe they work a fake job where they're required to do ritualistic writing, similar to the medieval scribes who laboriously copied books by hand over and over again. Now, thanks to AI, they're liberated from having to toil through that lengthy process. So, yes, writing is thinking. It's also willpower. But if the purpose for it didn't matter in the first place, then nothing is actually lost if you stop doing it. You just won't get punished.
by banana_giraffe | 2025-07-22 00:55:26+00:00
Not quite. The Game Genie presented a UI before the game started where you could enter codes. These codes were basically patches to the game's ROM. When the game ran, the Game Genie would intercept the requests for the bytes of ROM based off your code and replace them with a different value.

There was a prototype of a more advanced model that would be closer to what you're describing, but it never made it to market.
by alkh | 2025-07-22 00:55:39+00:00
If I may interject, does anyone have any idea why the `-S` flag is required? Testing this out on my machine with a BSD env, `/usr/bin/env -S uv run --python 3.11 python` and `/usr/bin/env uv run --python 3.11 python` do the same thing (launch a Python interactive shell). Man page for env doesn't clarify a lot to me, as the end result still seems to be the same("Split apart the given string into multiple strings, and process each of the resulting strings as separate arguments to the env utility...")
by wmlive | 2025-07-22 00:56:46+00:00
You'd need something like Wayback[1] in Wayland to be able to use it. Being exclusivley an X11 window manager, there is no direct support for Wayland.

There is a Wayland compositor namend wlmaker[2] that tries to mimick Window Maker. But judging by its description it still appears to be a far cry from that Window Maker offers.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback

[2] https://github.com/phkaeser/wlmaker
by jcranmer | 2025-07-22 00:57:16+00:00
What king 500 years could do that? (Well okay, maybe Suleiman the Magnificent, but that about exhausts the list.)

500 years ago puts us in 1525, which is still in the transitional period of Medieval kingdoms becoming actual states. The kind of absolutism you're thinking about is still about 100-150 years away from coming to fruition. Medieval kings were almost entirely reliant on their vassals to be able to marshal any power whatsoever: if an important vassal decides he doesn't want to fight in the king's war, well, the king can't exactly force him (see e.g. the Burgundians in the Hundred Years' War--and this involves the most cohesive European monarchy!). You're starting to see efforts by 1525 to reduce the power of nobles to act independent of their liege, but they're certainly not there yet.

But keep in mind the other luxuries people today enjoy that the kings of 500 years ago can't. The ability to see all of your children survive until, well, your own death. The ability to eat, say, fresh strawberries in the height of winter. The ability to know your wife isn't going to die giving birth to another kid. Hell, pretty good odds your bed is larger than a king's bed from 500 years ago, and more comfortable too.
by phillipseamore | 2025-07-22 00:57:31+00:00
My biggest problem is how centralized issuance is.

Half the year I live on an island that is reliant on submarine cables and has historically had weeks and months long outages and with a changing world I suspect that might become reality once again. Locally this wasn't much of an issue, the ccTLD continues to function, most services (but now about 35%) are locally hosted. Then HTTPS comes along. Zero certificates could be (re-)issued during an outage. A locally run CA isn't really an option (standalone simply isn't feasible and getting into root stores takes time and money), so you are left with teaching users to ignore certificate errors a few weeks into an extended outage.

I could see someone like LE working with TLD registrars to enable local issuance (with delegated/sub-CA certificates restricted to the TLD), that could also mitigate problems like today (decentralize issuance) and the registrars are already the primary source of truth for DV validation.
by hdjrudni | 2025-07-22 00:59:22+00:00
I was trying to copy a schedule into Gemini to ask it some questions about it. I struggled with copying and pasting it for several minutes, just wouldn't come out right even though it was already in HTML. Finally gave up, screenshotted it, and then put black boxes over the parts I wanted Gemini to ignore (irrelevant info) and pasted that image in. It worked very well.
by shagie | 2025-07-22 00:59:22+00:00
Who else used (uses?) SPIM for this?

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~larus/spim.html ... and apparently its being kept up to date https://spimsimulator.sourceforge.net with new builds about every other year.

(I took the class from Professor Miller in... '92... Operating systems in... '94? 95? was from Professor Larus)
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-07-22 00:59:26+00:00
Note that this only works for single-file scripts.

If you have a project with modules, and you'd like a module to declare its dependencies, this won't work. uv will only get those dependencies declared in the invoked file.

For a multi-file project, you must have a `pyproject.toml`, see https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/projects/#managing-dependen...

In both cases, the script/project writer can use `uv add <dependency>`, just in the single-file case they must add `--script`.
by shanktt | 2025-07-22 00:59:39+00:00
Hey, member of the benchmark team. We iterated on the prompts based on observed model behaviors. A few key examples:

Schema introspection: Models were spending significant tokens exploring the database structure through trial-and-error SQL queries, so we included the complete data model in the system prompt upfront.

Reward hacking: We added explicit instructions against gaming the reconciliation checks. This reduced the frequency initially, but models would eventually ignore these constraints.

Domain context: Including company background (YC-backed startup) substantially improved transaction categorization, particularly for startup-specific items like SAFE notes that require domain knowledge to classify correctly.
by tom_m | 2025-07-22 01:01:10+00:00
Is the text flattened? You don't need to run PDFs through OCR if not. The text can be extracted. Even with JavaScript in the web browser. You only need OCR for hand written text or flatted text. Google's document parse can help as well. You could also run significantly cheaper tools on the PDF first. Just sending everything to the LLM is more costly. What about massive PDFs? They won't fit in the context window sometimes or will cost a lot.

LLMs are great, but use the right tool for the job.
by aussieguy1234 | 2025-07-22 01:01:31+00:00
I tried to get an AI agent to do my taxes, I used a gmail MCP agent (1) and Roo Code, complete with a custom system prompt for an accountant role.

Its job was to go over my bank transactions and link them to invoices in gmail by searching for them (and also downloading the attachments)

The transactions were exported from my online banking in CSV format.

It worked after about 4 hours of effort. Then I realised I could have done it myself in about an hour, so might have put a bit too much time into it...

I tried using Claude Sonnet and Kimi K2, given these benchmark results I probably should have given Gemini 2.5 pro a go.

I had to stop/restart the agent a few times because of context rot.

Do any frameworks exist that I could use to write code to implement an agent, lets say in TypeScript or Python, so I could make it use a fresh context each time?

(1) https://github.com/GongRzhe/Gmail-MCP-Server
by bfrog | 2025-07-22 01:01:36+00:00
This is why it’s worth paying for email not at Google. It’s not expensive.

You could self host but that’s a nuisance I’m happy to pay someone for.

Search sucks even when using English. It fails to find emails I know have certain words in the subject.

The entire Google ecosystem is a hot dumpster fire of garbage that doesn’t help me at all at this point. It used to be amazing when they focused on organizing information rather than selling eyeballs. But all things turn to shit chasing profits.
by dnemmers | 2025-07-22 01:01:44+00:00
The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.

The letter concludes: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
by waldopat | 2025-07-22 01:02:07+00:00
Totally valid response :-) And I think that's another great angle as well that you can bring to a conundrum like Gmail or Google Search, like Time to Value or Engagement, etc.

As an extension, what we're seeing with OpenAi et al. is that they are capturing that attention and taking search with them. And so (as I referred to a couple comments down) OpenAI and the others are in the Google pre-2006 moment where the products are highly successfully engaging and grabbing our attention, but they haven't quite found the business model that prints money in the way Google Ads do.

So we'll see. What do you think?
by Dr4kn | 2025-07-22 01:02:23+00:00
PV Panel production acts more like typical mass production and has therefore much higher cost benefits compared to every other way of producing power.

For every other way of producing energy you need separate land for PV you don't. You can put them on rooftops, over parking lots or even vertical in a field. The last one increases the crop yield. Crops get less harsh sun, lose less water and the evaporation cools down the panels, which increases their production.

Today we value costs of energy production and tomorrow we will to. Especially if it results in energy independence. You don't need to buy fuel for PV and wind. As with nuclear fuel only a few countries are probably going to manufacturing the fuel needed for fusion reactors. Producing enough of it and in a sufficient purity needs specialized facilities and they will only be profitable if they produce a lot of it.
by acdha | 2025-07-22 01:02:39+00:00
What if it’s not so cheap, though? I think the problem is that the ad-tech industry offers publishers more than the median reader will pay, and does so reliably, while all of the alternatives mean they have to convince a whole ton of people who’ve been trained their entire lives that the internet is free to start paying non-trivial sums for previously free content.

I would like to live in a world where we do pay for what we use but I’m not sure how we get there by now.