MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by proteal | 2025-07-22 16:17:05+00:00
If you are a monopoly producer (which seems fair in this context) you would set the price of the rocks where your marginal revenue equals your marginal demand. Loosely, you’d do a market survey to see what price the market would be willing to pay for a mars rock[0], then figure out your cost structure for bringing back one more kilo of rocks. You’d factor in cost to launch a rocket, fuel for the rocket, astronaut salaries, and don’t forget terrestrial costs like marketing and distribution! If you did a good enough job at predicting supply and demand, you wouldn’t actually care what the price of the product is because you would have claimed all the consumer surplus for yourself :)

To specifically answer the optimal quantity question, the above answer implies that you would keep bringing rocks home until the cost to bring them back is higher than the price you set. To be clear, you could still go out and get more rocks and sell them for less and still make a profit, but you wouldn’t maximize your profit with that strategy. Competitive markets nudge behavior towards providing more product for less profit/cost which is why we love competition.

[0] Planet money did a great podcast on how to actually do this. Here’s a link to a transcript (though listening is probably best): https://podscripts.co/podcasts/planet-money/how-much-for-tha...
by praash | 2025-07-22 16:17:07+00:00
> -- eyes darting frantically across screens like a rat in a maze searching for the cheese of instant gratification.

I have lost the ability to search for information online when I'm not solving a specific technical problem. My eyes jump over paragraphs as if performing a binary search to find the sections I'm interested in - obviously a bad approach for less orderly documents.

Search Engine Optimized spam keeps me encouraged to habitually skip large chunks of text.

HN is mostly a safe harbor of high quality content, but I still have a bad habit of completely skipping most HN headlines, or jumping to read the comments before even considering to read the article. That's basically letting the crowd digest and summarize posts for me.

This was a satisfying read and worth the short time to patiently digest it.
by FreezerburnV | 2025-07-22 16:17:18+00:00
I think it really depends on where you are. I visited Japan early last year and encountered a decent amount of foreigners when I went to the Snow Festival or when I was in Tokyo. But when I was visiting friends in Fukuoka I don't really remember seeing foreigners, and someone in an elevator seemed kind of shocked to see my wife and me. If you don't want to see foreigners, you need to stay away from Tokyo and visit the many, many other interesting places in Japan.

As someone who lived on a military base in Japan when I was a kid, the country does feel like it's changing in places. But other places that are more out of the way still feel like "home", almost unchanged from that time a couple decades ago. (sometimes literally: I visited the area around that base last year and found billboards that were exactly the same as a couple decades ago)
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-07-22 16:17:36+00:00
Hilariously enough, the state that will step in is probably China.

Like, if you wanted to make China look good on the international stage you'd be doing a lot of the stuff the current administration is doing.

It's very sad, tbh. Like the US gov have always been less good than they claimed, but they've just gone full dark side now (and in such an ineffective way, at least economically).
by busterarm | 2025-07-22 16:18:18+00:00
Hamas, who run Gaza, want to "Globalize the Intifada" and bring violence to Jews worldwide. You speak about ethnic cleansing like if the roles were reversed we wouldn't be seeing the same thing.

This is basically just criticizing Israel for having the means. Clearly both have the will. The two parties are locked into a death pact with each other.
by CWuestefeld | 2025-07-22 16:18:35+00:00
That's an odd point of view. With Operation Downfall, the Americans were planning literal genocide against the Japanese. If they hadn't surrendered after the atomic bombs, the projections were as high as 5-10 MILLION Japanese casualties (with several hundred thousand on the Allied side), precisely because Japanese policy had been to arm the citizenry with rakes and hoes if it came to that - i.e., the Japanese refusal to surrender despite there being no possible path to victory was going to cost the lives of many millions of their citizens. And America had little choice but to pursue that.

That America was willing to do this, if the bombs didn't work, seems to contradict your claim. (And I think the Americans had little choice to do so.)
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-22 16:18:49+00:00
Yes, I think a lot of people who viscerally don't like Trump, also by association viscerally don't like Elon, and would never consider buying a Tesla.

If any of these folks bought a Tesla before 2024 they might now be somewhat conflicted about what to do about it.

But the fact remains that as far as EVs go, Tesla has the best charger network and the best cars with the longest track record, so other than the Elon/Trump stuff they probably are the best choice.
by jpalomaki | 2025-07-22 16:19:02+00:00
Two fold: AI makes it easier to find "issues" in existing software and automate the CVE process. This means more "critical" vulnerabilities that require attention from developers using these packages.

At the same time rolling your own implementation with GenAI will be quick and easy. Outsiders are checking these, so no CVEs for these. Just sit back and relax.
by landl0rd | 2025-07-22 16:19:20+00:00
No, they obviously aren’t. I don’t think we’ve had an administration or congress that cares one bit in my living memory.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to quit supporting removal of pointless spending any more than it means I’ll support the OBBBA. I’m not going to adopt a sunk-cost fallacy that “well, they just pissed away even more money, so throwing the UN a few billion to further chicom propaganda and political narratives I oppose is fine.” That’s not a facile position.

I agree it’s not going to make a huge difference in the debt but we don’t have the money to burn. The fact that congress and the president ignored that doesn’t make it less true or compel me to do so for this case. There isn’t this bargaining thing happening where trump’s OBBBA pisses away trillions more therefore now it’s acceptable to piss away billions on anti-american global organizations.
by 1980phipsi | 2025-07-22 16:19:37+00:00
I think the key point is that if you put a TODO comment in the code, it should be resolved before merging. If it's important enough to leave in there, it should be an issue. I only use them as something to grep for and so that I don't lose my train of that as in "oh I need to fix that but I'm working on something else at the moment, write the TODO, finish what I'm working on, then go back to the TODO".
by ngruhn | 2025-07-22 16:19:46+00:00
Strongly agree. I think of TODO as a task that might be interesting for the next person who stumbles over this code. "This logic is not great. If you happen to refactor this entire feature consider changing this thing as well". The TODO can even have an associated ticket but because it's right in the code it's more discoverable. Otherwise, the next person to change the code might even complete the ticket without knowing it.
by HaZeust | 2025-07-22 16:19:49+00:00
While correct, the implication of the quote in the article that GP shares is that of, “who ELSE CAN incapacitate the president in event of overreach on the status quo?”

There’s usually 2 implied answers to this - at least in American discourse (the people - with an extralegal right to revolution, and foreign states - as an act of war).

However, the author actually introduces a party that usually isn’t discussed in the conversation - the IC.

I was just bringing up the party of “The People” that is USUALLY assumed the responsibility in hypotheticals like these, and actually challenging the grounds of doing so
by fragmede | 2025-07-22 16:20:14+00:00
Where's the back pressure? The LLM can spit out code faster than I can review it, and it smoke tests fine. The only pressure is for me to actually read and understand and review the code before merging it to main. But that's self imposed. Meaning that under enough pressure to ship, it gets overwhelmed and stops standing in the way of progress in the name of hard to define attributes of code like security and not webscale.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-07-22 16:20:16+00:00
The fact that roughly half the comments here are some sort of weakly veiled climate denialism tells me it won't matter how much data we have anyway.

If members of a reasonably technical community can't accept what's happening, then there's no reasonable hope that people will ever be able to reason about our situation correctly. We are surrounded by evidence of all varieties in every direction that we are heading down a path of catastrophic climate change, and yet people contort their logic to find ways not to see it.
by kyleledbetter | 2025-07-22 16:20:20+00:00
Super cool that you all published these benchmarks. We've seen similar, where some APIs work REALLY well with agents, but convoluted ones just product churn in the agent tool calls. Curious to see how Supabase's APIs would perform with your benchmarks. We've seen their PostgREST via API do really well with our agents (with targeted system prompts), and it's a fairly non-standard REST structure.
by doubled112 | 2025-07-22 16:20:55+00:00
We really like our station wagon. Well, in principle at least. We won't get into the details of keeping a 12 year old German car going.

It's fuel efficient. It's not big. It's a decent people mover. It has more cargo space than many SUVs that are larger. Is low enough the roof racks are easily accessible. Added a hitch, mostly for more cargo space.

I'm starting to wonder if I've done more "truck things" than many of the people with trucks in the neighbourhood at this point. If I ever need to haul more, I'll just rent a truck/van for that moment in time. I'm not going to buy one to drive to the office.
by mrob | 2025-07-22 16:20:57+00:00
I think people underestimate the impact of air pollution because it's so easy to get desensitized to it. Try wearing a respirator with good seal and filter in an urban area for 10 minutes or so. When you take it off you'll probably smell vehicle exhaust you didn't notice before. Human sense of smell tends to tune out constant low level background odors, but they can still be a sign of something harmful.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-22 16:20:59+00:00
My high school got a VAX 11/730 to replace their PDP-8 in the mid 1980's which made it practical to teach programming classes based on PASCAL.

The VAX 11/780 was considered a big machine when it came out in 1977, which had a "32-bit" architecture very similar to the 68k and 386 machines. By the late 1980s, you could buy a 386 desktop computer that whupped the VAX.
by Kon5ole | 2025-07-22 16:21:07+00:00
>I agree that engineering in the UK is a mess, which explains a lot of Hinkley Point C, but just a technical point: people in these conversations often do what you've done and pick a "levelling" stat that elides all of the non-nuclear's disadvantages.

This is a fair point, I only mentioned the total power produced per year, but it wasn't intended to be deceptive. I wanted to emphasize that solar is not a "toy amount of energy" any longer, which it was as lately as say 2020 in many countries.

It used to be that solar doubled from tiny to slightly less tiny, but it's basically doubled semi-annually for many years by now, and the rice on the chessboard is starting to get heavy, so to speak. China went from "same as all nuclear" to "twice all nuclear" in two years. I think that's remarkable and might have gone unnoticed.

That you can't predict very reliably when you get peak production is for sure a problem with solar, and wind, but it's not without solutions. Solutions exist and are also being deployed already.

And even before we have built enough of those, solar still saves the use of hydro reserves, reduces the burning of oil, coal and gas during the day, and so on.

The leveling argument is often employed the other way too btw - all downsides to nuclear tends to be erased, mainly by pretending there is no cost or risk related to the long-term waste management, or for financial risks related to accidents.

Nuclear is generally operated under a government umbrella that covers all such costs, so they are forgotten/ignored, but they shouldn't be.
by p0nce | 2025-07-22 16:21:15+00:00
I'm using:

- TODO: will be needed before release, mandatory or else turn into another category. Blocks release.

- FUTURE: will be turned in to a TODO eventually, optional, often architectural

- MAYDO: nice to have, very optional

- PERF: do this if more performance is needed

+

some semantic tags related to domain

Opinion: TODOs are NOT code smells, they accrue around the most valuable parts of the codebase.
by slongfield | 2025-07-22 16:21:20+00:00
It has some ancient history as a morse code distress signal: https://regulatorylibrary.caa.co.uk/923-2012/Content/Regs/03...

And it shows up in some old BSD code: https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2017-04-17-xxx-fixme/

But... I think repeated letters are just easier to type than any other string, and since X looks like the classic "marks the spot" logo, it's what people jump to.
by cooper_ganglia | 2025-07-22 16:21:24+00:00
That's no longer true, nor should it be:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/04/08/how-ameri...

From the article:

>The public’s views of Israel have turned more negative over the past three years. More than half of U.S. adults (53%) now express an unfavorable opinion of Israel, up from 42% in March 2022

It turns out when you invade a country and commit a genocide, you become less popular. Putin figured that out. Hitler figured that out. Netanyahu’s still mulling it over.
by pasquinelli | 2025-07-22 16:21:29+00:00
haven't noticed compression culture to be honest, but if i may take a second to be stupid and uninteresting myself: i find nothing more stupid and uninteresting than the enormous volume of talking about talking that's done. this is a post about replies to a post about talking about a book, which is probably talking about talking, too. in and of itself that's fine, the problem is that feels like ninety percent of writing.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-22 16:21:51+00:00
The coup wasn't January 6. The coup was the "alternate electors" business, and pressuring Pence to accept them as legitimate.

January 6 was part of it (some of the crowd were shouting "hang Mike Pence" for a reason"), but January 6 was just the last gasp of it.

People don't give Mike Pence nearly enough credit for, first, refusing to go along with the "alternate electors" nonsense, and second, for not leaving the Capitol when the Secret Service tried to get him out of there.
by muzani | 2025-07-22 16:22:07+00:00
It's a skip. Most are fine even if they never get done. What's not fine is when code is not fully functioning and we assume it is.

My favorite TODO was something like class EncryptedSharedPreferences with a "TODO: encrypt this". It was written by someone who left before I joined (I never would have approved it lol). But it made it clear that this code was indeed, unencrypted, instead of having to figure out whether it was encrypted by some other module or worrying that we'd encrypt it twice.
by ribosometronome | 2025-07-22 16:22:12+00:00
>Is it possible that the pulling out of UNESCO is further in-line with Trumps “we want to focus on America” fluff, similar to the threats of pulling out of NATO and the actual pulling out of the Paris Accords.

Why would you give them the benefit of the doubt when they directly state that they're withdrawing over the decision to admit Palestine?
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-22 16:22:26+00:00
True.

But what I mean is that cash handouts are a constant contentious political battleground that feels like a pipe dream where I live while selling plasma was a political decision made before we arrived and probably not something most people feel quite as strongly about.

The danger as I see it is that we can let perfect be the enemy of good, though I suppose you aren't suggesting that it's bad that people have the option to sell their plasma as everything currently stands. I do see it better than the alternative of prohibiting it.
by OutOfHere | 2025-07-22 16:22:33+00:00
There is no proof of torture to get the passwords for tax purposes. Even if guilt is assumed by the court, it will be for failing to comply with the investigation, not for hiding untaxed money. I guarantee you that failing to incriminate oneself for tax purposes will result in a far smaller fine and/or imprisonment if that, than will actually evading taxes.

The article notes:

> if a person is found to be in possession or control of any books of account, or other documents and information maintained digitally, on computer systems, or stored electronically, then they must provide the designated income tax officer “reasonable technical and other assistance (including access code, by whatever name called) as may be necessary” to enable the officer to inspect “any information, electronic records and communication or data contained in or available on such computer systems”.

> “In most of the cases of search operation the taxpayers do not share the password/login credential of online forums/portals/e-mail accounts, etc.

As above, the article already notes that the taxpayers do not share the passwords.

Disclaimer: I strongly and truly believe that everyone should pay a reasonable percentage of tax on their entire income.
Show HN: SwellDB – Query AI-generated tables with SQL
by giannakouris | 2025-07-22 16:22:51+00:00
I'm building a data system called SwellDB that uses LLMs to generate its tables on the fly.

Traditional databases only work over data that's already loaded and cleaned. But in the real world, data lives everywhere — in files, PDFs, web pages, APIs. To query it, we usually need custom ETL pipelines: extract, clean, transform, load. It’s slow, brittle, and different every time.

SwellDB flips that model: you define a table (schema + a description as a natural language prompt) and it generates the table just-in-time — using LLMs and your schema/prompt, on top of the connected data sources (files, databases, LLMs, web). Think: querying a DataFrame that materializes itself from raw input without you writing the ingestion logic.

It supports:

- Structured + unstructured sources: CSV, SQL, web search results (PDF to be added soon)

- Declarative table definitions in Python

- Output compatible with any SQL query engine (DuckDB, Apache DataFusion) or ingestible into any database

Repo: https://github.com/SwellDB/SwellDB

Short paper (4 pages): https://github.com/gsvic/gsvic.github.io/blob/gh-pages/paper...

Would love feedback if you get a chance to try it out, especially from folks dealing with hybrid or messy data sources.
Show HN: Ending the Bot Wars: A New Protocol for AI Consent and Value Exchange
by jithinraj | 2025-07-22 16:23:01+00:00
Hey HN,

I have been on both the AI crawler side and the website owner side, and I keep seeing the same mess.

Bots scrape, publishers block, and the open web suffers.

Now, AI reads more webpages than people do. Can we design an equitable partnership instead of fighting an arms race?

PEAC Protocol is an open, collaborative attempt towards it.

Why should you care?

If PEAC works, we get transparency instead of walls.

- Sites stay economically sustainable.

- AIs get cleaner, higher-quality data.

- The web remains open and beneficial for everyone.

But it only works if both sides join in.

- As a publisher, drop a pricing.txt or .well-known/peac.json on your website with your terms. You can choose between free, attribution, or pay-per-query.

- As an AI company/agent, you signal compliance and unlock higher-quality, trusted access.

- For both, it is a trackable and enforceable layer for consent, compliance, and commerce.

Open questions for HN:

AI/agent builders, if you found a `pricing.txt` or `.well-known/peac.json` on a site, would you feel compelled to honor it as part of your normal workflow?

Publishers, does a clear, simple file for setting access terms (like `pricing.txt`) feel like something you’d adopt, or does “block everything” still seem the path of least resistance?

Developers, what would you do differently to make programmable access and consent both reliable and frictionless?

Best, JR
by asciimov | 2025-07-22 16:23:10+00:00
> on the other, hours long podcasts, Netflix documentaries, and one-person YouTube videos on esoteric subjects are all quite popular. There's no lack of demand for longform content, but it's mostly not writing.

Those are all things that people can put on while doing something else or in the evening when they want to relax. Edutainment used to be the word, but now days it's just flat out entertainment.
by spacemadness | 2025-07-22 16:23:19+00:00
As you can see from the other commenters on here, any perceived limitation is no longer the fault of the LLM. So where we go from here is gaslighting. Never mind that the LLM should be good at refactoring, you need to keep doing that for it until it works you see. Or the classic you’re prompting it wrong, etc.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-07-22 16:23:28+00:00
How is it not the case? It is unusable without VAD or editing. I don't understand what you're questioning

I agree their products could be better "end to end" integrated. Meanwhile there is a continuously-improving field of work for detecting speech (which Whisper is incapable of). They offer official "cookbooks" with guidance on an approach they recommend: https://cookbook.openai.com/examples/whisper_processing_guid...

> At times, files with long silences at the beginning can cause Whisper to transcribe the audio incorrectly. We'll use Pydub to detect and trim the silence.

(Official OpenAI quote)
by jcalx | 2025-07-22 16:24:02+00:00
I have thought of this as knowing _about_ things, as opposed to knowing things, and not having the self-awareness to be able to differentiate between the two.

I've seen this most notably in a former coworker who enjoyed watching YouTube videos (especially when the rest of the team was hard at work, but that was another point of contention entirely). He thought himself very knowledgeable on various topics because he could readily regurgitate talking points, but if you asked him about second-order effects, or implicit simplifying assumptions, or how X from the video would be different if Y and Z were different, it was obvious how surface-level his "understanding" was.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-22 16:24:04+00:00
Casual labor is by and large quiet legal (at least in the US).

The problem is it's not available or easy to find.

I think bringing back something like the CCC [1] would do wonders for the US. It could even be made more available and accessible in the modern era. Imagine, for example, if you had something akin to a small jobs board. Citizens could apply for tasks to be done and the government could fund (or partially fund) the completion of those tasks. Could be things like scrubbing graffiti off a wall. Filling a pothole. Or any other community improvement (like taking care of a park).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps
by Fade_Dance | 2025-07-22 16:24:06+00:00
I've been thinking about physically printing out my articles for the day and reading them in some sort of lounge chair situation.

For me it's something to do with the screen. The more "skim reading" I do on screens, the more the practice becomes habitually embedded and hard to break away from, like my mind is set up to do that when I'm working with a monitor.

Maybe meeting half-way will work, like having a big e-paper e-reader where I (batch-export to PDF) all of the long-form content I want to process that day.