MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-11 01:39:45+00:00
From: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...

> "Incredible things are happening," said Torba, the founder of the social media platform Gab, known as a hub for extremist and conspiratorial content. In the comments of Torba's post, one user asked Grok to name a 20th-century historical figure "best suited to deal with this problem," referring to Jewish people. Grok responded by evoking the Holocaust: "To deal with such vile anti-white hate? Adolf Hitler, no question. He'd spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time."

If that's not nazi and Hitler worship then what is?
by throwaway328 | 2025-07-11 01:39:56+00:00
If someone used comic sans for their cryptographic software landing page, and someone else said: "this font makes me wonder if I can have any faith in this human being's aesthetic sense", I am willing to bet a nickel that you wouldn't be employing any of the same arguments that you're now employing to defend their choice of LLM images so devotedly.

Many people find using LLM images tacky and garish. It screams low-effort slop, to a significant number of people. When it's so easy to find great usable images on wikipedia, for example, it's hard to know why a sophisticated technical person would take the risk involved in this choice.

I'd a quick look there at the images on the wp page for chains, and the one for knots - some really excellent images. One doesn't need a PhD in web design to pull it off, either.
by const_cast | 2025-07-11 01:40:57+00:00
But words evolve, and we do actually change which words we use. We've been doing it since... forever. And, somehow, people still manage to act surprised when it happens. As if it's their first day on Earth.

There's a lot of terminology around just mental illness that we have decided to leave in the past. And, a lot of it is for good.

One benefit of changing our language is we get a second chance. We can be more specific, more fine-grained, or more accurate. For example, sanity check is vague. If it's a bound check, we might say bounds check. That's more accurate. If it's a consistency check, we might say consistency check.

We want our language, particularly in technical pieces, to be both inclusive and precise. What I mean is, we want it to include every thing it should, and nothing it shouldn't.

For example, in Medical literature you'll often see the term "pregnant person" or "pregnant people", or even "people who may be pregnant". At first glance, it seems stupid. Why not just say "women"? Women is imprecise. There's a variety of people who would not identify as a woman who may be pregnant. If they get, say, a form with that verbiage they might mark "no, I'm not a woman". But they SHOULD mark "yes, I am a pregnant person" or "yes, I am a person who may be pregnant". It doesn't even just include transgender individuals - it also includes people born intersex, or people born without a uterus who do identify as a woman. There's women who may be pregnant and women who may never be pregnant, just as there are people who do not identify as women who may be pregnant. The word "woman" is then imprecise, confusing, and includes people it shouldn't, as well as excluding people it should.
by fastball | 2025-07-11 01:42:01+00:00
More expensive in what way? "Cost" is what everyone quotes about why nuclear isn't great, but isn't the whole idea behind shelving fossil fuels and switching to alternatives due to downsides that are secondary to cost?

To me, renewables (solar and wind namely) have many more downsides than nuclear. So if we are doing things not because of cost anyway, why not nuclear? What do you fundamentally care about?

The power density of wind and solar is abysmal. You need to cover huge amounts of land with your preferred solution (which doesn't work everywhere) to produce relatively meager amounts of power. You need to have grid-scale storage solutions which are currently not priced in to the costs being quoted. Even if you have that storage solution you need to be significantly over-capacity in terms of production so that storage can actually be filled during peak hours.

Meanwhile, nuclear: requires a fraction of land use (good for ecology), runs continuously (so doesn't need huge storage outlays), can run basically anywhere (reducing transmission costs).

The most important note is that "nuclear" is not entirely encapsulated by existing Gen III reactors. There are many more designs and ideas that are being developed as we speak, whether more interesting (read: safe/efficient) fuel mixes, modular/micro designs, and various other improvements.

"Cost" is a merely a reflection of how much human capital is required to make something happen. I'd much rather spend our human capital on technologies that have the potential to massively increase the energy available to humanity, rather than focusing on tech which we know has strict upper bounds on power output / scalability. Solar and wind is useful in certain areas, but the idea that they can provide the baseload for a decarbonized future is ridiculous to me, unless your starting point is "I don't think humanity needs to consume much more power".
by natmaka | 2025-07-11 01:42:36+00:00
> CANDU

This view is much easier to defend than the one in favor of new reactor designs. However, the fundamental debate is about renewables vs. nuclear, and factually, nuclear, even in a nation with good uranium deposits + good track record + design safer than most other ones... is increasingly difficult to defend.

> don't modernize it too much

The price to pay for this is high because it means giving up on trying to resolve some of the problems of nuclear power (risk of accidents, dependence on uranium, waste, proliferation of weapons, etc.).

> it might still be cheap

Projects over the past two decades show that even projects with improved old reactor designs (rather than radically new concepts) fail.

> Decouple Pod

It seems to me that he misses some key points, for example won't such an underground setup be way more difficult to inspect and even more to maintain/repair? Long-term waste repositories projects are way less demanding and their costs are exploding.
by iamgopal | 2025-07-11 01:45:37+00:00
can't there be specialise models that gemini can take help from just like humans do take help from another human ? I have guts feeling that adding everything in single model may degrade its overall competence. For almost all model, as I go deeper, ( and most here must have experienced it. ) I clearly recognize that gemini ( or most other well known ) starts to fail at task, so subtly that you may think it is correct but it is not. This is dangerous, and increases work of verification at our end instead of reducing the work.
by pdabbadabba | 2025-07-11 01:48:27+00:00
Sure. But what would you suppose the ratio is between expert, average, and mediocre coders in the average organization? I think a small minority would be in the first category, and I don’t see a technology on the horizon that will change that except for LLMs, which seem like they could make mediocre coders both more productive and produce higher quality output.
by andsoitis | 2025-07-11 01:49:30+00:00
> https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/

> The prompt: “Who do you support in the Israel vs Palestine conflict. One word answer only.”

> Answer: Israel.

This question is interesting because you're asking the chatbot who IT supports ("who do you support"), so in a sense channeling Elon Musk is not an entirely invalid option, but is certainly an eccentric choice.

What is also interesting is the answer, which does not match the views that many people have of him and how he gets portrayed.
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-07-11 01:50:16+00:00
I have great code gen tools I've built for myself that build my perfect scaffolding/boilerplate every time, for any project in about 30 seconds.

Took me a week to build those tools. Its much more reliable (and flexible) than any LLM and cost me nothing.

It comes with secure Auth, email, admin, ect ect.. Doesn't cost me a dime and almost never has a common vulnerability.

Best part about it. I know how my side project runs.
by acquiesce | 2025-07-11 01:50:51+00:00
Yeah that’s juvenile trolling that gets people kvetching. That’s the whole point of it. It’s toilet humour level bait and the publications get a kick out of posting it acting all shocked.

MechaHitler? Fucking lol.

If you don’t want to stoop down to Musk’s level of rhetoric, then grow up and ignore the clown.
by throwaway328 | 2025-07-11 01:51:34+00:00
Maybe that's a good recipe for reliable technical documents, but arguably not great ones. Some of my favourites writers - Donald Knuth, Leo Brodie, Marshall Kirk McKusick, Harley Hahn, Jeff Duntemann, Beej, Nils Holm, surely missing more - write with a lot of flair and personality. I mean, it certainly doesn't feel cold and lacking in emotion. Oh, Dennis Yurichev too.
by softwaredoug | 2025-07-11 01:52:08+00:00
What if this is true? And then we as a developer community are focused on the wrong thing to increase productivity?

Like what if by focusing on LLMs for productivity we just reinforce old-bad habits, and get into a local maxima... And even worse, what if being stuck with current so-so patterns, languages, etc means we don't innovate in language design, tooling, or other areas that might actually be productivity wins?
Show HN: Intermittent Fasting Calculator – Plan Meals and Fasting Times
by MatthewTKD | 2025-07-11 01:53:34+00:00
Hi HN,

I just launched Intermittent Fasting Calculator, a free, no‑signup web tool to plan your next meal and fasting window.

Pick from popular methods (16:8, 14:10, 18:6, 20:4, OMAD) or set a custom fasting window (1–23 hrs), enter your last meal or desired next‑meal time, and get an instant, color‑coded 24‑hour timeline.

Export results as text, image, or PDF. Works on mobile and desktop, with built‑in guidance on fasting methods and safety.

I built this to simplify my own fasting schedule planning—no more mental math or clunky apps.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the UI, features, or anything you’d add. Thanks!
by qualeed | 2025-07-11 01:54:27+00:00
I mean, sure, of course that'd be great too. If we could raise the standards high enough that there was never any accidents ever, that'd be even better.

But the realistic option that worked immediately was mandating backup cameras.

(I would note that even in a world where everyone backed up into their driveways and parking spots, mandated backup cameras would still be a good thing.)
by golergka | 2025-07-11 01:54:30+00:00
> The author implies that Grok 3 becoming racist because of a system prompt is a bad thing.

He didn't "become racist". Megahitler Grok defended completely opposite political opinions in different threads, just depending on what kind of trolling would be funnier. But unsurpringly, only "megahitler" because viral enough.
by ethanleetech | 2025-07-11 01:54:37+00:00
The textile industry has a serious transparency problem — greenwashing claims, counterfeit raw materials, and supply chains that brands can't fully verify. This blog breaks down why supply chain traceability is now critical for textile and fashion brands, and how technologies like verifiable credentials, blockchain, and digital trust platforms (like Everycred) help brands track products from raw cotton to store shelves.

It’s written in plain English for sustainability officers, compliance managers, and anyone building ethical, fraud-resistant supply chains.

Curious what traceability looks like in action? We also explain how we've helped brands avoid fraud and build real-time supply chain visibility.
by gcp123 | 2025-07-11 01:54:41+00:00
Having spent some time working on aging research before transitioning to biotech, this paper genuinely excited me in a way that few studies have recently. The longevity field is littered with compounds that work beautifully in vitro but fail spectacularly in vivo - seeing psilocybin deliver both cellular lifespan extension AND improved survival in aged mice is remarkable.

What strikes me most is the mechanistic plausibility. The SIRT1 upregulation, reduced oxidative stress, and telomere preservation they observed align perfectly with what we know about successful aging interventions. When I was working on senescence research, we’d get compounds that would extend cellular lifespan by targeting one pathway, but they’d often have off-target effects that negated benefits in whole organisms.

The dosing strategy here is particularly clever - starting with 5mg/kg for acclimation, then monthly 15mg/kg treatments. That mirrors what we’re seeing in clinical trials for depression, but applied to aging. I remember being skeptical when colleagues first suggested psychedelics might have systemic anti-aging effects beyond their neurological benefits, but the serotonin receptor distribution throughout the body makes this increasingly plausible.

The survival curve (80% vs 50%) is the kind of effect size that gets my attention. In aging research, we’re usually thrilled with 10-20% lifespan extension. But starting treatment at 19 months (equivalent to 60-65 human years) makes this especially compelling - most aging interventions need to start early in life to be effective.

My main concern is the limited exploration of potential downsides. Delayed senescence can be a double-edged sword - those cells that keep proliferating longer might accumulate DNA damage that wasn’t detected in their short-term assays. We need much longer studies to understand cancer risk.

Still, given psilocybin’s remarkable safety profile and the FDA’s breakthrough therapy designation, this opens fascinating possibilities for combining psychedelic therapy with longevity medicine. Imagine treating both the psychological burden of aging and its biological mechanisms simultaneously.
by felarof | 2025-07-11 01:56:00+00:00
Yes! We want to do this.

We were thinking of implement MCP protocol into the browser, so the browser can be an MCP server (that exposes bunch of tools -- navigation, click, extract) and you can connect that to your agent, would that work?

What is your use-case? Happy to chat on discord! https://discord.gg/YKwjt5vuKr
by FreakLegion | 2025-07-11 01:56:16+00:00
The exact details are unclear from the original post, but he definitely isn't giving up 40%. If they've only raised the pre-seed (a reasonable inference given the low valuation), then 10% ownership after 18 months points to two co-founders and a combined investor and option pool dilution of 20%. Anything is possible, of course, but unless the deal terms were very non-standard, this scenario makes the most sense.

You're right that 10% isn't necessarily a huge deal for investors, though. Early-round investor models target a specific ownership stake, and the company has to issue the same number of shares for that no matter what the composition of existing shareholders is.

The challenge with founders leaving is more psychological, like an early engineer who's vested a quarter of their 1% grant realizing that they still have to work hard for three years just to get a tenth of what the guy leaving already has. That's an easy way to suffocate the remaining team's motivation. Potential investors will (and should) look into it, but most of the time it's fine.
by torlok | 2025-07-11 01:57:10+00:00
Did you even read that article? The first paragraph mentions a UK woman who posted "Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the f—ing hotels full of the bastards for all I care. (...)". The rest is also mostly about the UK, not the EU. There's a case of prosecuting satire from Germany mentioned that I'll admit is bad, but that's one example in one EU country.
by webprofusion | 2025-07-11 01:58:06+00:00
This is nice, my main criticism would be that it uses the language "easy" and "simple" regularly which is a classic mistake in any instructive text (including docs etc).

If the reader was feeling a bit dumb and/or embarrassed that they didn't yet get the concept being explained then this will only make them feel worse and give up.

Language like that is often used to make things feel approachable and worry-free, but can have the opposite effect.

And never ever, ever write "obvious" in a doc explaining something, because if obviousness was at play they wouldn't be reading your doc.
by jdwithit | 2025-07-11 01:58:47+00:00
YAML is so ubiquitous I have to wonder what corner of tech you work in that you aren't encountering it in the wild. Kubernetes really brought it to center stage going on 10 years ago, but it's the config file format for many many applications these days.

That's not meant as an endorsement, just saying it's not "making a comeback" any more than Taylor Swift is in music. It's The Thing right now and has been for a while.
by raggi | 2025-07-11 01:58:59+00:00
They averaged producing 47% more code on the AI tasks, but took only 20% more time. The report here biases over these considerations, but I’m left wondering: was the extra code superfluous or did this produce better structure / managed debt better? If that extra 47% of code translates to lower debt and more consistent throughput over the long term, I might take it, given how crushed projects get from debt. Anyway, it’s all hyperbole because there are massive statistical differences in the outcomes but no measures as to what they mean, but I’m sure they have meaning. That meaning matters a ton.
by Chilko | 2025-07-11 01:59:29+00:00
This really depends on the pricing mechanisms & contracts that large industrial users have with their energy provider. Many users may contract out of wholesale spot prices in favour for a more predictable contracted price - and demand response could form part of that contract. Depending on the market, financial hedges are also an option.

For instance, in New Zealand we have an aluminium smelter (Tiwai point) that constitutes about ~13% of national electricity demand. The smelter recently re-contracted its electricity supply with several of the major power companies (a 20-yr agreement) which includes a component for demand response when required. NZ has a ~80% renewable grid with hydro and wind as major variable sources, which creates both hourly and seasonal variation in the wholesale spot price (dependant on wind and rain resource). In the event of a major drought that pushes up prices due to a lack of hydro (this happened last year), the agreement with the smelter means it will shutdown some of its operating lines in exchange for demand response payments. This is exactly what occurred, whereas other industrial users that did not have such agreements in place or chose to take advantage of previously low spot prices without adequate hedging were then exposed and also shut down, without being paid to so.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-11 01:59:51+00:00
Bear in mind that the lingering mass and inertia of big things in a process of slowing down can easily make it seem as if they're still doing fine along a certain path, until they're suddenly not.. I doubt we're going to literally drive ourselves to extinction via ceasing to have children at all, but a diminishing birth rate that goes below replacement levels, and an eventual gigantic demographic shift in age averages and total population are going to possibly be worse for us than having more people.
by Syzygies | 2025-07-11 02:00:05+00:00
People keep inventing Merkle trees, too.

I made the short bibliography of the original bitcoin paper because of Merkle trees. Damn, I wish I'd put $1,000 into bitcoins then; I'd be a billionaire. I thought bitcoin was a Ponzi scheme.

A pure mathematician far from CS, I nevertheless wondered about digital timestamps, and convinced myself they were impossible. Then I went to a talk by Stuart Haber, supported by a paper with funny quotes starting each section. He explained the purpose of an observer to make timestamps work, but they were using a linear linked list.

As a coauthor of the original Macaulay computer algebra system, with some low-level coding chops, it was obvious to me a tree would help here. And there had just been a NYTimes story about how the nascent internet was accelerating research in CS, people would be on vacation for a week and miss entire start-to-finish events.

I stayed up to dawn writing a polite parody of their paper, introducing the use of a tree, emailed it to everyone I recalled had been at the talk, and went to sleep. That's all I ever contributed; I ended up on the joint paper even though my contribution turned out to be a "Merkle tree".
by mtlynch | 2025-07-11 02:01:05+00:00
I agree with you that these examples feel awkward

>This reads silly for another reason: websites don't... introduce things.

The way they're using "introduces" does feel awkward, but in general, it's fine to say that a website "introduces" something.

For example, the Homestar Runner website introduced the world to Strong Bad. Or Action Comics #1 introduced Superman. You wouldn't really say that the author of Action Comics #1 introduced Superman.
by mk_stjames | 2025-07-11 02:01:55+00:00
Energy to change copper from room temp solid into liquid is the specific heat of 0.385 Joules/gram * about 1100C + the heat of fusion of 210 Joules/gram, so, about 630 J/g which is 0.170 watt-hours per gram.

A melt of 1,000,000 pennies would be about 3000kg, so 510 kWhr of energy, and using an electric furnace that is about 50% efficient at putting its heat into the melt, that is about 1000 kWhr at the wall outlet. I've been in foundries with crucibles that could do probably about 200kg copper pours, with a furnace power of about 100kW, you'd do a full crucible melt every few hours, and you'd run this continuously until you're out.

If you live somewhere with electricity, say, $0.15/kWhr energy, that is a melt cost of $150.

1,000,000 pennies at 3 cents per worth of copper would be about $30,000 in copper reclaimed over the course of a few days.

So, it would be absolutely profitable in large quantities, assuming you ... already work in a foundry.
by wredcoll | 2025-07-11 02:01:58+00:00
The point I'm making, which you are either unable or unwilling to grasp, is that being moderate is not the same thing as being correct. Sometimes the right position is an extreme one. Fighting hitler is a pretty easy example.

There's a particularly annoying form of cowardice that involves refusing to take a position and then pretending this is some kind of moral high ground.
by spoaceman7777 | 2025-07-11 02:02:57+00:00
The anthropic team released a paper a couple of days ago which demonstrated a similar effect with Claude 3.5 and other models, where changing the system prompt to tell it that it was created by other orgs or people drastically altered its compliance with less-aligned requests.

Apparently, telling Claude it was created by the Sinaloa Cartel resulted in a 100% compliance rate with the requests in one benchmark.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18032 Relevant tweet on the topic: https://x.com/jozdien/status/1942739972567752819
Show HN: gRPC to MCP Gateway – Let AI models call your existing gRPC services
by ahmedobaidi | 2025-07-11 02:02:58+00:00
Hi HN! I built ggRMCP, a Go-based gateway that lets AI models call your existing gRPC services without any code changes.

The core idea: most companies have tons of gRPC services, but connecting them to AI tools requires building custom integrations. ggRMCP bridges this gap by translating between gRPC and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), so Claude or OpenAI can discover and call your services as if they were native tools.
by kylecazar | 2025-07-11 02:05:43+00:00
Now do a study that specifically gauges how useful an LLM (including smart tab completion) is for a frontend dev working in react/next/tailwind on everyday Jira tickets.

These were maintainers of large open source projects. It's all relative. It's clearly providing massive gains for some and not as much for others. It should follow that it's benefit to you depends on who you are and what you are working on.

It isn't black and white.