MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brendoelfrendo | 2025-07-29 23:26:27+00:00
What were its arguments? Do you have enough of an understanding of astronomy to know whether it actually made good arguments that are grounded in scientific understanding, or did it just write persuasively in a way that looks convincing to a layman?

> I've had success getting it to offer the Carthaginian perspective in the Punic Wars.

This is not surprising to me. Historians have long studied Carthage, and there are books you can get on the Punic Wars that talk about the state of Carthage leading up to and during the wars (shout out to Richard Miles's "Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization"). I would expect an LLM to piggyback off of that existing literature.
by gronglo | 2025-07-29 23:27:18+00:00
> But now, you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is correct or something it hallucinated. Every time I find myself putting factual questions to AIs, it doesn't take long for it to give me a wrong answer.

I know you'll probably think I'm being facetious, but have you tried Claude 4 Opus? It really is a game changer.
by amluto | 2025-07-29 23:27:24+00:00
I’m suspicious that a lot of the apparent inherent benefit of a prime lens is that it can’t zoom, which forces the person holding it to think a little bit more about composition.

It would be an amusing experiment to compare a prime lens to a zoom lens that it somehow fixed to the same focal length. Maybe level the playing field a little bit by applying distortion correction to both lenses.
by dang | 2025-07-29 23:27:52+00:00
Related. Others?

The New Wave of Programming Languages: Pony, Zig, Crystal, Vlang, & Julia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36911186 - July 2023 (9 comments)

Pony Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33970547 - Dec 2022 (82 comments)

We moved from Pony to Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28777306 - Oct 2021 (175 comments)

Pony – High-Performance Safe Actor Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25957307 - Jan 2021 (152 comments)

Pony, Actors, Causality, Types, and Garbage Collection - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24398469 - Sept 2020 (29 comments)

Pony 0.29 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20370448 - July 2019 (19 comments)

Fearless Concurrency: Clojure, Rust, Pony, Erlang and Dart - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19241427 - Feb 2019 (143 comments)

Pony 0.25.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18212633 - Oct 2018 (38 comments)

Introduction to the Pony programming language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17195580 - May 2018 (72 comments)

Pony (programming language) Cheat Sheet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17118368 - May 2018 (1 comment)

The Snake and the Horse: How Wallaroo's Python API Works with Pony - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16768706 - April 2018 (8 comments)

Some high level information about the Pony programming language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16619264 - March 2018 (10 comments)

Why we wrote our Kafka Client in Pony - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16264845 - Jan 2018 (95 comments)

Why we used Pony to write Wallaroo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15558051 - Oct 2017 (84 comments)

Pony Performance Cheatsheet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14999899 - Aug 2017 (35 comments)

Pony: Combining safe memory sharing with Erlang-like actors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14676505 - July 2017 (62 comments)

An Early History of Pony - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14280565 - May 2017 (8 comments)

Pony language 0.11.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13846063 - March 2017 (52 comments)

On the State of Pony - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12331458 - Aug 2016 (40 comments)

Using Pony for Fintech [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11849579 - June 2016 (6 comments)

Pony is an open-source, actor-model, high performance programming language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10902906 - Jan 2016 (57 comments)

Pony – High Performance Actor Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9482483 - May 2015 (124 comments)
by p1necone | 2025-07-29 23:27:56+00:00
> designed for this

This is kind of my point - I'm not saying you can't have applications that are usable across multiple UX paradigms, and I'm also not saying you can't write a UX library that automatically translates at least simple applications with little manual effort.

I'm just saying this requires active buy in from application developers into the ecosystem - you can't just run everything on all devices and have it magically work (with usability comparable to current state of the art in single device applications).
by oofbey | 2025-07-29 23:28:02+00:00
Here's a specific complaint about XMPP, and possible explanation why nobody uses it any more. (I worked on a large-scale XMPP implementation back in the day.)

Presence. That's the colored dots indicating "is somebody online or not". The traffic needed to maintain presence scales by N^2, and in any large-scale implementation, the traffic to maintain presence data completely dominates anything useful.

Not to mention that for the past 15 years or so (ever since everybody has a connected cell-phone all the time) the whole idea of presence (am I online or not?) is either meaningless or just badly modeled.

So the result is a protocol which spends tons of bandwidth and battery maintaining metadata that is functionally useless. That's why the real world has run away from it as fast as possible.
by qingcharles | 2025-07-29 23:28:08+00:00
This is exceptionally well-made. The problem is... people smell a bot and hang up. I tried using it to get a quote from my friend's construction company, but twice he hung up as soon as Piper introduced themselves. I had to call him and tell him to take the call.

It did work its way through their IVR system, though, as it was outside operating hours, and left a good message on their voicemail.
by wonderwonder | 2025-07-29 23:28:12+00:00
I voted for Trump and would make the same choice today without hesitation but agree the Republicans pushing this state by state age identification is pretty bad. State level Rs and house reps leave a bit to be desired. My vote is essentially a vote against the other party. Sometimes we have to choose between the best of two less than perfect choices. Politics is so often a deal with the devil against a worse devil
by blinkbat | 2025-07-29 23:28:28+00:00
if I was working for google I'd resign. supremely irresponsible for them to push AI this hard, it is simply not capable of replacing engineers nor speeding them up considerably if they have to review all of its output. seems like all the devs will just be pushing AI slop into the repos and letting the poor fucker in charge of reviewing it take all the inevitable heat

unless their tooling is somehow lightyears ahead of market and doesn't constantly bullshit or write broken, insecure code...
by cvoss | 2025-07-29 23:28:46+00:00
> But now, you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is correct

> a healthy dose of scepticism is essential. Arguably, that applies to traditional learning methods too, but that's another story.

I don't think that is another story. This is the story of learning, no matter whether your teacher is a person or an AI.

My high school science teacher routinely mispoke inadvertently while lecturing. The students who were tracking could spot the issue and, usually, could correct for it. Sometimes asking a clarifying question was necessary. And we learned quickly that that should only be done if you absolutely could not guess the correction yourself, and you had to phrase the question in a very non-accusatory way, because she had a really defensive temper about being corrected that would rear its head in that situation.

And as a reader of math textbooks, both in college and afterward, I can tell you you should absolutely expect errors. The errata are typically published online later, as the reports come in from readers. And they're not just typos. Sometimes it can be as bad as missing terms in equations, missing premises in theorems, missing cases in proofs.

A student of an AI teacher should be as engaged in spotting errors as a student of a human teacher. Part of the learning process is reaching the point where you can and do find fault with the teacher. If you can't do that, your trust in the teacher may be unfounded, whether they are human or not.
by linkjuice4all | 2025-07-29 23:29:05+00:00
I got back into R/C stuff after about 15 years after working at Hobbytown as a teenager.

The biggest advancements I've seen are around batteries and electronics (LiPo and cheaper/better radios that don't need a crystal), more access to parts (3D printing and cheap overseas CNC'd stuff), and some minor improvement in other accessories/electronics.

POV cameras seem to be much more popular in R/C aircraft - but the drifters and crawlers really seem to be embracing it.

Many of the brands still exist but a lot of them have been bought-up and are now competing with no-name bottom of the market stuff.

Kids still seem interested but I've noticed a big resurgence in adults that can afford to buy the stuff they couldn't get when they were younger. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough - but there's not a ton of open-source support controlling R/C vehicles or "vehicle platforms" that you can hack and build yourself. I think a lot of people want a reliable chassis and parts so they can focus on customizing the body/appearance.
by bastawhiz | 2025-07-29 23:29:52+00:00
> You don't need stable props from the bottom up. Component will always react to props change and will returns a new Tree.

This is strictly false, because of effects. The bottom of your tree consumes props and triggers events. The author has plenty of examples of this, and even calls out useEventEffect as being helpful.

> The only solution is to have everyone have discipline and respect the convention of React.

The article specifically goes out of its way to show that mistakes still happen and linters aren't capable of solving this alone.

> as long as you ensure that the props you're sending down is referentially stable, you're golden

This is literally the point. You can't. As the component, you're powerless to ensure this. And components that use your component can't even be sure, because referential stability doesn't only require your code to be correct, but every third party library as well.
by xp84 | 2025-07-29 23:30:10+00:00
It shouldn't be, my understanding is that the springy bits (the most likely wear part) in Lightning are in the port, whereas in USB-C they're intentionally in the cable so you can replace it. I'm surprised you have a failed USB port, but I've never experienced one fortunately.

I see Lightning as fragile on both sides of the connection, since the port has springy bits that can wear, and the cables also die, either due to the DRM chips Apple involves in the mix for profit reasons, or due to the pins becoming damaged (perhaps this? https://ioshacker.com/iphone/why-the-fourth-pin-on-your-ligh... ).
by runarberg | 2025-07-29 23:30:17+00:00
I feel like I was just flamebated.

I will conclude by saying at some point (and that point may even be reached) genocide denial will not be tolerated on HN, it is not a matter of more HN agreeing that Israel is conducting a genocide (thought that is a probable precursor) but rather that HN users will start treating genocide denial as the form of hate speech that it is.

My conduct up to this point will be deemed insignificant—and almost entirely forgotten about—by then, no matter how heated I become. But many HN users—including me—will remember how difficult it was to get to that point, and how much hate was allowed on HN during an ongoing genocide. I hope some HN users will see their own guilt in participating in a culture which treated genocide denial as a simple disagreement.
by xp84 | 2025-07-29 23:32:08+00:00
> Dynamic DNS doesn't reveal your IP to anyone that doesn't know the domain name

That assumes you don't set up SSL, since cert transparency now forces the publishing of every hostname that a cert is issued for.

(Painfully) work-around-able though, with a paid wildcard cert and manual setup, or with a self-hosted certificate authority that you have to install everywhere.
by s1mplicissimus | 2025-07-29 23:32:13+00:00
The numbers don't add up to 100%. I personally draw strong conclusions about the overall quality of statistics when I find an obvious error just from scanning over it.

Highly trust 3.1%

Somewhat trust 29.6%

Somewhat distrust 26.1%

Highly distrust 19.6%

========================

sum 78.4%

source: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/ai#2-accuracy-of-ai-too...
by yieldcrv | 2025-07-29 23:32:37+00:00
If LLMs of today's quality were what was initially introduced, nobody would even know what your rebuttals are even about.

So "risk of hallucination" as a rebuttal to anybody admitting to relying on AI is just not insightful. like, yeah ok we all heard of that and aren't changing our habits at all. Most of our teachers and books said objectively incorrect things too, and we are all carrying factually questionable knowledge we are completely blind to. Which makes LLMs "good enough" at the same standard as anything else.

Don't let it cite case law? Most things don't need this stringent level of review
by cschmidt | 2025-07-29 23:32:58+00:00
I think in this context Management Science is an older term that was synonymous with operations research. The flagship journal of Informs (the institute for operations research and management science) has the same name. Studying how to optimize thing, lots of statistics and math. Stanford was at the forefront of the field from George Danzig onwards. So not trying to make management a “science” in this case.
by xp84 | 2025-07-29 23:34:06+00:00
> personal email

no, it is isolating because self-hosting personal email you may as well just pipe your messages straight to /dev/null. Google and Microsoft will straight up blackhole messages coming from a random IP, let alone a residential one.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of selfhosting and play around with it myself, but at no point in the next 10 years will it be ready for average people to "plug and play" and for that reason it will be limited to tech enthusiasts like us.
by chpatrick | 2025-07-29 23:37:03+00:00
Humans who have heard of Monty Hall might also say you should always switch without noticing that the situation is different. That's not evidence that they can't think, just that they're fallible.

People on here always assert LLMs don't "really" think or don't "really" know without defining what all that even means, and to me it's getting pretty old. It feels like an escape hatch so we don't feel like our human special sauce is threatened, a bit like how people felt threatened by heliocentrism or evolution.
by MPSFounder | 2025-07-29 23:37:13+00:00
Is it just me or is color saturation a huge deal with iphones? I take a pic of myself, and it literally makes it portrait like and changes my skin (makes it smoother and more transluscent). I take a pic of the outdoors, and if there is text somewhere far away, it mangles it. I get iphones are mostly sold for social media influencers these days and beauty standards matter, but damn it I just want it to scan stuff and take photos of my family. There is a big problem with image fidelity.
by gnabgib | 2025-07-29 23:37:58+00:00
A LibreOffice dev gets locked out of his /hotmail account/ and neowin turns this into a Microsoft developer ban? Specious reporting.

Mike doesn't make this claim in the original source: https://mikekaganski.wordpress.com/2025/07/25/microsoft-anyb...

Hotmail/outlook support isn't great (I've had a similar challenge but it was eventually resolved), google support is worse (a similar challenge, eventually denied).
by kevingadd | 2025-07-29 23:38:09+00:00
Freedom is valuable in games, especially text adventure games. And an LLM is a powerful way to give the player freedom, since it can respond to almost anything.

But for games to shine they also need carefully considered constraints - when the player bounces off constraints they start to understand how the game's world and systems function, which lets them build a mental model and be able to start thinking the same way the designer(s) thought and come up with solutions for puzzles or decide how to react to a given situation.

What makes a maze engaging as a challenge is that your path is closed off in some places and not in others. Ideally any maze also has one or more concrete solutions, so the player is rewarded for mastering the maze by finding an exit, or maybe finding objectives or creatures hidden at key locations in the maze.

You can probably use modern LLMs to construct this sort of world and set those constraints, but I wonder how far we are from being able to also have the LLM maintain that world state and enforce the constraints?
by bdamm | 2025-07-29 23:38:09+00:00
I see iPhone pictures posted on walls all the time, because most people aren't pretentious.

The iPhone photo of the golf players is better than the "photographer" shot in every way that actually matters; the guys are more comfortable and they have natural smiles, whereas the other photo is full of grimaces and frowns. Why that might be is hard to guess, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the photographer forcing them to stand there and hold a pose while they fiddled with their weird little machine.

Don't underestimate the power of the subject's comfort and state of mind. Gramma is happy to get the picture, she doesn't care how it got taken.
by simonw | 2025-07-29 23:38:18+00:00
I think it will happen a bit, but I'm not worried about it.

My ability to write with a pen has suffered enormously now that I do most of my writing on a phone or laptop - but I'm writing way more.

I expect I'll become slower at writing code without an LLM, but the volume of (useful) code I produce will be worth the trade off.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-07-29 23:39:04+00:00
This pattern - saving the query to the URL with the history API - is fantastic UX but never gets implemented because there’s never time. Luckily an LLM can build this quickly as it’s straightforward and mostly boilerplate.

Still the boilerplate makes me wonder if it belongs in a library, eg. a React hook that’s a drop in replacement for `useState`. Backend logic would still need to be implemented. Does something like this exist?
by bariumbitmap | 2025-07-29 23:39:43+00:00
This post made me feel things. In Phillip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", the inspiration for the movie Blade Runner, wild animals have died out due to the after-effects of war and most people can only afford electric animals as pets.

Here the ingenious circuit design and debugging to make an electronic firefly is made all the more poignant by the fact that artificial lighting disrupts firefly reproduction and communication,[0][1] meaning that LED light pollution at night is one of the main reasons firefly populations are declining.

[0] https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.4557 [1] https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.220468
by wasayybuildz | 2025-07-29 23:40:04+00:00
I'm at a crossroads with my SaaS and could really use some outside perspective.

I started building startupidealab.io about 3 months ago while balancing school after pivoting from my previous web design agency. It's an AI-powered platform that analyzes real pain points from Reddit, G2, Capterra, and Upwork to generate validated SaaS ideas with market analysis and roadmaps.

Current stats:

$250 revenue so far

650 signups

$20-50/month operating costs (Vercel + Gemini API costs)

5,000+ pre-analyzed pain points in database

Built the entire scraping infrastructure and AI analysis from scratch

Why I'm considering selling: I'm pivoting my focus to a other SaaS venture preferably in the consumer app space and honestly don't have the bandwidth to market this continuously. School + new projects = time crunch.

Part of me thinks I should sell it now (considering offers around $2-5K) since someone else could scale it better. The scraping algorithms and data infrastructure alone would cost a decent amount to rebuild. But another part wonders if I'm giving up too early on something that could grow.

What would you do? Keep grinding and find time to scale it, or sell to someone who can dedicate proper focus? Really torn here and would love to hear from founders who've been in similar spots. Thanks
by stelonix | 2025-07-29 23:40:06+00:00
Yet the interface is fundamentally different, the output feels much more like bro pages[0] and it's within a click of clipboarding, one CTRL V away from extracting the 13th second screenshot. I've been using Google the past 24 years and my google-fu has always left people amazed; yet I can no longer bother to go through Stack Exchange's results when an LLM not only spits it out so nicely, but also does the equivalent of a explainshell[1].

Not comparable and I fail to see why going through Google's ads/results would be better?

[0] https://github.com/pombadev/bropages

[1] https://github.com/idank/explainshell
by dbeley | 2025-07-29 23:40:14+00:00
> Maru is built on the latest Android Oreo.

Yeah this is abandonware, idk why it's being posted and upvoted now.

Something similar to real mobile/desktop convergence is still technically possible today with Phosh on PostMarketOS (or Mobian, Mobile NixOS or Arch ARM) and a compatible device with USB-C video out (like the PinePhone).
by Modified3019 | 2025-07-29 23:41:24+00:00
From my experience using various (work provided) devices in outdoors agriculture use, I consider the lightning connector/port less prone to failure as well. If something was to break (from torque), it seems like the tab on the cable should snap or the cable just pull out before catastrophic damage to the port can occur.

Though I still had to replace cables because the cable itself developed a break somewhere, even with one that had proper stress relief at the ends.

Meanwhile most of the USB C ports on my Lenovo laptop from 2022 are barely working because somewhere along the line either the soldering broke or the port got too loose. Possibly from too much torque but I’m not sure. So the cable has to be at just the right angle. I’ve also done some android phone battery/screen replacement for friends, and had to do a few USB-C ports when it was possible due to the same sort of thing.

However all that is pretty much moot now, thanks to wireless charging and magnetic attachment docks. As such the only time I connect a cable anymore is monthly for cleaning out photos and other data. Previously I’d be connecting cables several times a day to charge in between fields as the battery went to shit. Honestly the “MagSafe” concept is the only change I’ve seen to smart phones in the past decade that I actually really like.