MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: SteadyText: Deterministic LLMs: Same input → same output, every time
by diwank | 2025-07-03 18:57:02+00:00
Hey HN! After spending way too many nights debugging flaky AI tests, I built SteadyText. It's a simple python library for deterministic llm generations and embeddings.

We use it in production for:

- Testing our AI features (zero flakes in 3 months) - CLI tools that need consistent outputs - Reproducible documentation examples

It's not for creative tasks - this is specifically for when you need AI to be boring and predictable. Think of it as the opposite of ChatGPT. The coolest part? It includes a Postgres extension. You can now do:

SELECT steadytext_generate('explain this query: ...');

And it will always return the same explanation. :)

How it works:

1. Greedy decoding- Always pick the highest probability token (no randomness) 2. 8-bit quantization- Same numerics across all platforms

It's easy to get started:

uv tool install steadytext echo Hello | st
by drdaeman | 2025-07-03 18:57:02+00:00
> i.e. delete your facebook, your tiktok, your youtube and return to calling people on your flip phone and writing letters

That sounds like an abstinence-type approach. Not saying that it's not a valid option (and it can be the only effective option in case of a severe addiction), but it's certainly not the only way that could work. Put simply, you don't have to give up on modern technology just because they pose some dangers (but you totally can, if you want to, of course).

I can personally vouch for just remembering to ask myself "what I'm currently doing, how I'm feeling right now, and what do I want?" when I notice I'm mindlessly scrolling some online feeds. Just realizing that I'm bored so much I'm willing to figuratively dumpster-dive in hope of stumbling upon something interesting (and there's nothing fundamentally wrong with this, but I must be aware that this interesting thing will be very brief by design, so unless I'm just looking for inspiration and then moving somewhere else, I'm not really doing anything to alleviate my boredom) can be quite empowering. ;-)

> all the social networking on smart phones has not been a net positive in most people's lives

Why do you think so? I'm not disagreeing, but asking because I know plenty of individual examples, but I'm personally not feeling comfortable enough to make it generalization (because it's hard) and wonder what makes you do.
by yawaramin | 2025-07-03 18:57:24+00:00
Htmx doesn't preclude a component model for the UI. See:

- https://www.fastht.ml/

- https://github.com/yawaramin/dream-html/tree/todoapp/app

In fact if you look at how htmx is recommended to be used, you realize they specifically are recommending a component-based architecture: https://htmx.org/essays/when-to-use-hypermedia/#if-your-ui-i...
by prmph | 2025-07-03 18:57:40+00:00
> Are they Arabs? Egyptians? Muslims? Mediterraneans? Pharaohs? Coptic? Bedouin? Berbers?

You forgot to add the Nubians/Cushites and other groups south of Egypt. Is it possible that the Egyptians lived next to them for thousands of years without any admixtures of genes and culture with them?
by sunrunner | 2025-07-03 18:57:50+00:00
(I also didn't, despite the sentiment ;) )

That's completely fair, and I actually completely agree about the information density thing. I honestly prefer well-written concise documentation over tutorial videos for this same reason, however I've not yet found the equivalent text form of this video yet (automatic transcription aside) so it's really the only example I've got that seems to extract some of the most salient points from Conway's paper and puts forward an idea as to _why_ this phenonemon is. Perhaps a blog post in the making.
by spit2wind | 2025-07-03 18:57:57+00:00
Regarding "persecuted legally", this administration is actively trying to dismantle the rule of law and flouts it.

I appreciate you looking for examples. This podcast episode will give you some, as well as a lens through which you may spot others.

https://www.dancarlin.com/product/common-sense-324-whats-goo...
by tptacek | 2025-07-03 18:58:43+00:00
I don't understand this "startup lottery" stuff. I've been on HN since roughly 2007 and for most of those 18 years I've been a bootstrapping evangelist. My most successful exit to date was a bootstrapped company. I'm just saying: there's no romance or great reward to working in a failing startup. If you have a clear signal that your startup is failing, you've been given a gift from the heavens: the ability to see into the future, see yourself wasting years, and then navigate around those years.

2001 was the beginning of the "nuclear winter" for startups. I think part of this is that I'm just older than you? (I have no idea how old you are, but "how did your startup fail in 2001" is an odd question).

Were you a founder at any of these startups you're talking about? If you're just talking about being an employee, that's totally different. It's often (maybe even usually) reasonable for employees to value their equity at ε. That being the case: you can absolutely choose roles based solely on base comp, how interesting the work is, and how it looks on your resume.

Finally: if you try to factor money out of entrepreneurship discussions, you get to very funny places. We're in one of them now! It is strictly better for a startup to fail at 6 months in than it is for it to fail at 5 years in.
by Semaphor | 2025-07-03 18:59:10+00:00
This reminds me of Knights of the Dinner Table [0], a 90s D&D Parody cartoon magazine that later spawned its own TTRPG Hackmaster [1] (first with the 4th edition based on licensed D&D 1st ed, 5th ed is fully standalone (and less humorous, I don’t think you can even die during character creation anymore)).

Anyway, the KotDT players would in several comic make use of the mob rules, hire a ton of beggars, and just "mob" the bosses, as those abstracted, simplified rules for mob fights allowing the otherwise useless peasants to fight a boss monster for relatively little money. Same concept as TFA ;)

[0]: https://kenzerco.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Knights-Of-T...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HackMaster
by sfpotter | 2025-07-03 18:59:20+00:00
I think it's a great mix of features. I agree it would make sense to separate the wheat from the chaff, but if you're a mature adult, you should be able to decide which features are useful to you and figure a dialect that works.

In general, the design of the standard library is much less alien and baroque than the STL, and is more battries-included, so you spend much less time puzzling over incantations and more time writing code. The code you have at the end is also much more concise and readable.

Likewise, because D is in a lot of ways "C++ with fewer problems and papercuts", I spend way less time figuring out totally inscrutable C++ compilation errors.

Consequently, I can spend more of time writing code and thinking about how to use all D's nice features to better effect. Plus, given how fungible and malleable the language is, it doesn't take a lot of effort to rework things if I want to change them in the future.

Personally, I think this is the main reason D hasn't caught on. It's selling point is that it's pragmatic and doesn't shove a lot of dogma or ideology down your throat. This isn't sexy and there's nothing to latch onto. There are many styles you can write D code in... MANY more than C++: Python-style, C#-style, C++-style, C-style... hell, bash style, MATLAB-style, R style, whatever you want. But for some of these styles, you have to build the tools! The fact that all of this is possible is the result of combining one very practical and ergonomic programming language, with a thousand different QOL improvements and handy tools... plus top tier metaprogramming.

IMO, the major thing holding D back right now is also along the same lines. It offers pragmatism and practicality, but the tooling is still weak. Languages like C++, Rust, and Python totally outclass D when it comes to tooling... but you have to sacrifice flexibility and ergonomics for baroque madness (C++) or BDSM (Rust) or slow and impossible to maintain code (Python). The choice is yours, I guess!
by DidYaWipe | 2025-07-03 18:59:43+00:00
"The first iPhone technically wasn't a smartphone (unlike its competitors at the time) because it did not have a way to install third-party programs"

What a laughably wrong assertion. The iPhone handled all kinds of PIM data and synced with computers. There was no requirement (or even expectation) that a "smart" phone had third-party applications.
by jorvi | 2025-07-03 18:59:55+00:00
Oh, you mean being locked out by the vendor, not accidentally locking yourself out.

Yes, that sucks. I have an old account at a FAANG they won't allow me to log in to despite me knowing the current password, my old passwords and the old e-mail. But it is partly my own fault because I changed the e-mail and phone number to a fake one.

I will say that getting locked out (= banned) by Google or Apple usually means you're doing something odd or even seedy. Of all the regular people I'm acquainted with, it hasn't happened to anyone, ever. And that's gotta easily be 100+ people. However people like dropshippers, grey hats, OF models etc etc any people with irregular cash flows or e-mail traffic definitely run a risk.
by HelloMcFly | 2025-07-03 19:00:24+00:00
This is an irritating strawman. I never claimed that no environmentalists have socialist views, or that the movements don’t sometimes overlap in policy preferences even when their motivations for such policies are wholly different.

My point is simply that the vast majority of climate advocates are arguing for policies that conserve and preserve what we have into the future, and that demand the long-term costs of many of our current policies and practices are actually accounted for vs. kicking that externality to the future public. There is no hidden agenda to upend society.

Many of the desires practices are growth-friendly fixes: carbon pricing, deregulating solar, advanced nuclear[1], electrifying transport, ceasing public subsidies for coal and oil. They aren’t campaigning to upend capitalism itself, but to adapt our economy so we can continue to thrive without cooking the planet, destroying ecosystems, and damaging long-term health of the natural world we rely on for life, not just recreation.

Pointing to a handful of degrowth manifestos or niche graduate programs doesn’t prove that mainstream environmentalism is really a Trojan horse for anti-capitalism. If you’re looking to debate climate policy, let’s stick to the proposals most people are actually pushing—and whether they’ll work—not whether some fringe authors happen to share an ideology.

[1] Not all environmentalists support this, I'll grant, but I don't know any who don't personally
by jsbg | 2025-07-03 19:01:17+00:00
What I find cringeworthy is @Suhail saying they thought he was in the US but actually was in India—outing his company as not checking employment eligibility [0]. If he was actually allowed to work in the US—which doesn't seem to be the case since he hasn't responded to any replies asking about this—then they hired someone who underperformed, or in the worst case violated a company policy they might have that employees cannot have another job. Hardly seems like something worth shouting from rooftops.

[0] https://x.com/Suhail/status/1940441569276158190
by bobbiechen | 2025-07-03 19:02:07+00:00
Anyone have a good explanation on the intuition of non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs? For example, I thought the "paint-mixing" analogy for Diffie-Hellman key exchange (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie–Hellman_key_exchange#Ge...) really helped me handwave the math into "mixing easy, unmixing hard".

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/11/27/zero-kno... was a good intro for interactive ZK proofs but I haven't been able to find something for non-interactive ones.

This blog post comparing ZK-STARKs to erasure coding is in the right flavor but didn't quite stick to my brain either: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2017/11/09/starks_part_1.ht...
by esbranson | 2025-07-03 19:02:31+00:00
Good. ZKP is a good way to handle decentralized identity proofs. We can imagine other uses of ZKPs with digital identity wallets, such as proving state political party affiliation for participation in independent e-democracy services without having to provide PII. Good on the Commission for following through on this, not sure we've seen much from them in the protocol space since ISDN.
by sega_sai | 2025-07-03 19:02:45+00:00
I feel that if words/phrases/whole texts can be embedded well in high dimensional spaces as points, the same must apply to the 3d world. I'm sure there will be embeddings of it (i.e. mapping the 3-d scene into a high-D vector) and then we'll be work with those embeddings as LLMs work with text (disclaimer: I am not an expert in the field ).
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-07-03 19:03:14+00:00
This is wild, but I can believe it.

At previous job, the management wanted to optimize Azure costs, so they hired a consultant, who immediately went with the easy picks, like using reserved instances, all with pretty graphs and shiny saving percentage numbers on his presentations. At no point there was even a single consideration of "do you guys even need these instances at all? what is this?". So that's how it works, hopefully not always.
by yawaramin | 2025-07-03 19:03:42+00:00
> can you ctrl+click "/clicked" and go to definition?

Actually, you can and you should–this is a best practice for building maintainable apps. You shouldn't be hard-coding 'magic string' API paths throughout your views. You should factor them out into variables and then use those same variables for both routes and views.

Many good routing systems have this functionality.
by ckdot2 | 2025-07-03 19:03:47+00:00
"I think now caching is probably best understood as a tool for making software simpler" - that's cute. Caching might be beneficial for many cases, but if it doesn't do one thing then this is simplifying software. There's that famous quote "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.", and, sure, it's a bit ironical, but there's some truth in there.
by perihelions | 2025-07-03 19:04:02+00:00
Ceres is very far away orbitally. It's three times further than Mars, but also has no braking atmosphere or gravity. If you send a payload to Ceres, that payload has 5 km/s of relative velocity that can only be zeroed out with rocket propulsion. (That's a lot).

It's not coincidence the first Ceres orbiter was also a flagship prototype for advanced electric propulsion. It's a deceptively remote target.
by zozbot234 | 2025-07-03 19:04:17+00:00
> Not on a strictly technical level

Yes, there were strictly technical limitations. Memory throughput to the video framebuffer did not allow for arbitrary full-screen updates at native frame rate, and there were no hardware sprites or other display hacks to cope with this limitation - the framebuffer was all you had. These limitations became gradually less important throughout the 1990s, depending on what resolution and color depth you were running.
by citizenpaul | 2025-07-03 19:04:59+00:00
I'll join your demise! I have a similar opinion and came up with my own answer.

Ruby is effectively Rails. Something about this has always bothered me because I don't like ruby and it gets SOO much praise from users. Which all almost universally happen to be using Rails. I've never used rails so I could not say why authoritatively. I did find someone recently on here that talked about it and mentioned that Rails is steeped in "magic". That it is unbeatable for a single person founder to create a project of any size. The problem is all that "magic" becomes a huge point of contention/confusion/friction when non rails zealots get involved, which is basically everyone.

Or to be more to the point Ruby and rails has a very specific use case and that use case has nothing to do with the application you are building rather the type and size of Team you are assembling.

To me its just a more obscure Python with a much smaller more enthusiastic user base.
by pxc | 2025-07-03 19:05:02+00:00
> This isn't some emotional or fashionable thing, they're tools, so you'd have to assume they derive $1000 of value.

If someone spends a lot of money on something but they don't derive commensurate value from that purchase, they will experience cognitive dissonance proportional to that mismatch. But ceasing or reversing such purchases are only some of the possibilities for resolving that dissonance. Another possibility is adjusting one's assessment of the value of that purchase. This can be subconscious and automatic, but it an also involve validation-seeking behaviors like reading positive/affirming product reviews.

In this present era of AI hype, purchase-affirming material is very abundant! Articles, blog posts, interviews podcasts, HN posts.. there's lots to tell people that it's time to "get on board", to "invest in AI" both financially and professionally, etc.

How much money people have to blow on experiments and toys probably makes a big difference, too.

Obviously there are limits and caveats to this kind of distortion. But I think the reality here is a bit more complicated than one in which we can directly read the derived value from people's purchasing decisions.
by api | 2025-07-03 19:05:08+00:00
Adults should be allowed to look at porn. I don't think it's necessarily good for people, but adults are also allowed to binge drink and smoke and eat ultra-processed foods and a lot of other things that are worse for you than porn.

CP is an edge case but that's because it's almost impossible to make CP without abusing children and you could view CP as an incitement to violence -- as incitement to abuse children.

Parents should ultimately monitor what their kids do. I have a pi-hole that subscribes to lists with millions of porn domains, but I'm a technical person. Non-technical parents are helpless, and kids can easily access it at friends' houses etc. The industry has not empowered non-technical parents to do this, probably because there's a conflict of interest. Lots of parents would use such options to keep kids off social media, and like all addictive things social media wants to hook them early. (I think kids should be off social media too, but it's not quite as nuts as letting them watch fetish porn.)

Porn is different now too. It's worse in a way. Like everything else it's subjected to a pressure to get "edgier" to maximize engagement. So today's porn is loaded with simulated incest, simulated rape, extreme BDSM, etc., things that young children are not equipped to properly contextualize. (Some adults aren't either, but at least with adults you can say it's their fault not the porn's fault. The line cuts differently with children which is why children can't smoke, get tattoos, buy alcohol, get credit cards, etc.) If you want to see the consequence of young kids (mostly boys) being raised with unfettered porn access go visit any women-coded space on the Internet (like Reddit) and search for threads discussing why so many men want to choke their girlfriends. Where did this sudden choking fetish come from?
by alganet | 2025-07-03 19:05:10+00:00
I like the idea of memory management. Maybe someone experienced in this stuff can help me with some questions:

Is it possible to use this concept to keep a very long session? Tell it to forget things, or replace some part of the memory, without "rebooting" (starting another instance or conversation)?

So far, I'm unable to find any information on how to do that. In the OS analogy, the stuff I found looks more like putting stuff on autoexec.bat to open on the next boot than proper management of memory during execution.

It looks more like "autoexec.bat engineering". Is that the same overall idea?

That time to first token is really expensive, like a reboot. Any tool to reduce it and keep the model running for longer would be a real breakthrough, but I haven't found any practical examples of it, just stuff that does "autoexec.bat" analogues.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-03 19:05:25+00:00
Personally as an amateur designer I love the idea of working on a huge canvas. Turning a car into a Gundam cockpit or a store into

https://archive.ph/1k7Ui

or lighting up the whole sky on a cloudy sky with a laser sound like a lot of fun to me, but subjecting other people to this is another thing.
Ask HN: Digital Ocean 3Tb bucket, should I back it up to another S3 provider?
by igtztorrero | 2025-07-03 19:06:01+00:00
Hi, I have a big S3 bucket stored in DigitalOcean, should I be concerned and back it up to another S3 provider?

Bucket Stats: - Files: 2.5 million - Size: 3 Terabytes - Customers: 300
by wowtip | 2025-07-03 19:06:19+00:00
It was not like lot's of very talented Amiga devs didn't try their very best to create a Wolfenstein/Doom clone for their platform, but iirc the bitplane setup used by Amiga gfx, which enabled lot's of other cool features did not perform well with the opereations needed for "3D" games.

Then with Quake, the 3rd party 3D graphics cards market took off, and even if there were cards for the Amigas too, market economics made them unviable.

And even though I usually appreciate Datagubbe's writings, this time I think his take is incorrect. At least in my circles Wolfenstein / Doom and ultimately Quake was the final nails in the Amiga's coffin.

Sure, the picture is bigger - PC market drove down prices and very soon the price/performance difference was very unfavorable for Amiga - but at least initially the issue was kids wanted to play Wolfenstein, Doom, or at least something similar, and that was not possible if you stayed on the Amiga.
by rvnx | 2025-07-03 19:06:22+00:00
I genuinely don't know what to think on this :|

I just pushed this idea as a "solution" to see what others think, but I don't know. Again perhaps educating the parents about how to educate kids about the dangers of internet, and perhaps a web filter for kids.

This is actually one place where AI could be useful, to do dynamic local content classification (instead of a blocklist), especially if integrated directly in Android / iPhone.

Like https://support.apple.com/en-us/105121 but more dynamic.
by eesmith | 2025-07-03 19:06:27+00:00
Let's see if I get this math right.

Mauna Loa is about 95,000 km3 in volume says https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/mauna-kea/science/geology-and... . Density of TNT is 1.6g/cm3:

95000 km3 * (1000m/km)**3 * 1600 kg/m3 = ~1.5E17 = 150 pt.

1/3rd of the mountain in TNT.

Nope, I can't conceive of that much energy.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-03 19:06:52+00:00
> And that's... not D&D?

Some people are there because their life is not their own, and they want to live freely in the game; some people are there because their life is an exercise in control, and they want to play with the win conditions.

Every table and game is unique. It’s a microcosm of society that is simultaneously everything to anyone and yet no one thing to everyone. It’s a way to directly engage with the Other via metaphor and indirection.

This is D&D.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zng5kRle4FA
by vel0city | 2025-07-03 19:06:56+00:00
> due to the moral hazard it generates.

The moral hazard of checks notes mothers breastfeeding and attending to their newborn children and husbands asssisting for a few weeks. Yes. What an absolutely upsidedown society we'll have if we allow such a thing to happen. Terrible. Need to ensure that doesn't happen.

And we need to reduce the rate of this happening to ensure checks notes wealthy people continue producing at high rates to profit the even wealthier.

That so many people have such mindsets and continue to wonder why our birthrates are dropping is astounding.

Wake up buddy. Keep drawing these lines. See where they go. I guess we'll both be dead though, so it doesn't matter.