MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dahart | 2025-07-20 15:02:46+00:00
That description has no comparisons and no baseline definition of beer quality. Why do those things make them better than other ales, especially when most of that is subjective? For some people, high alcohol content, sweetness, effervescence, and heavy doses of malted barley are bad things when it comes to beers. All beers have flavor notes, though flavor notes are notoriously ephemeral and suggestible.

I’m familiar with Belgian Ales, I used to like Chimay, and have sampled many others (though not Westvleteren yet). These days I prefer something less strong. The story about Trappist monks is intriguing, but what does it actually mean? Obviously Chimay and several other Belgian Trappist ales are enormous commercial productions that ship beer globally. They are just beer factories doing a huge volume of beer business. The narrative about monks is intended to give people the perception of quality, but it doesn’t actually demonstrate anything, it’s just a narrative.
by pornel | 2025-07-20 15:03:03+00:00
Shared mutable state is the root of all evil, and it can be solved either by completely banning sharing (actors) or by banning mutation (functional), but Rust gives fine-grained control that lets you choose on case-by-case basis, without completely giving up either one. In Rust, immutability is not a property of an object in Rust, but a mode of access.

It's also silly to blame Rust for not having flexibility of a high-level GC-heavy VM-based language. Rust deliberately focuses on the extreme opposite of that: low-level high-performance systems programming niche, where Clojure isn't an option.
by barbazoo | 2025-07-20 15:03:33+00:00
I don’t like that the fact that an agent was used to write the code is bleeding into runtime of that code. Personally I see the agent as a tool but at the end of the day I have to make the code mine and that includes writing error handling and messaging that’s easy to understand for a human because the agent is not going to help when you get an alert at 3am at night. And often what’s easy to understand by a human is easy to understand for a LLM.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-07-20 15:03:34+00:00
lol jeans. Just got into selvedge denim, go buy from a company like brave star denim, and don’t buy anything less than 15 oz.

I can find a literal 21 oz unrippable insane heavy weight selvedge denim pants for less than 200, and it’ll be made in America of Japanese materials.

Most Americans are simply stupid when they buy clothes. They don’t do research and they make extremely suboptimal purchases by trusting big brands.

Just checked: https://bravestarselvage.com/collections/heavyweight-selvage...

168 USD for jeans so strong and thick they feel like armor. You will never wear out of these jeans or rip them.
Solving a Childhood Mystery: How BASIC Games Learned to Win
by greentec | 2025-07-20 15:03:56+00:00
Hello HN!

As a teenager, I had this BASIC Computer Games book with a game called HEXAPAWN. Lines 900-970 were just cryptic numbers that made no sense to me. Finally figured it out decades later.

Turns out it's machine learning from the 1970s! The AI learns by literally deleting bad moves from an array. After losing ~10 games, it becomes unbeatable. Just 19 board states, no neural networks, no fancy algorithms.

Martin Gardner (who wrote about it) also mentioned MENACE - a tic-tac-toe learning machine made with matchboxes and beads. Same principle, physical implementation.

Made a JavaScript version if anyone wants to try. The AI really does get better.
by ajross | 2025-07-20 15:03:57+00:00
> There's no getting around fsync if you want to be sure that your data is really on the storage medium.

That's not correct; io_uring supports O_DIRECT write requests just fine. Obviously bypassing the cache isn't the same as just flushing it (which is what fsync does), so there are design impacts.

But database engines are absolutely the target of io_uring's feature set and they're expected to be managing this complexity.
by nathan_douglas | 2025-07-20 15:04:01+00:00
My first computer was a Packard Bell 486-33 with 4MB RAM, purchased in 1993. I can still remember my widowed schoolteacher mother's pursed lips as she paid $1600 - an outrageous sum of money - for it at Walmart. I don't know who was paying $10K for PCs in 1993, but it wasn't anybody I knew.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-20 15:04:12+00:00
> The labor theory of value

This is value in the sense of "price". The labor theory of value was from Adam Smith and Ricardo rather than something Marx contributed.

> Substituting subjective theories takes the air out of the analysis, doesn't it?

You're right that this is an apparent contradiction. Technically, Marx was making a prophecy about an upcoming revolution as being a historical inevitability. And when he was being more rigorous he was careful to clarify that this was a statement about historical inevitability (like manifest destiny) rather than something he thought was "good".

But many people have taken this to be a contradiction. Here's an essay from Michael Rosen defending the claim that his critique of morality isn't inconsistent with his condemnation of people's behaviors [0].

Marx's attitude toward morality is discussed on page 7. The basic gist is that morality claims to be objective, but it's really, to quote Rosen, "particular and relative to the society in question".

Nowadays people sympathetic to his approach paraphrase these ideas by saying that reality and morality are "socially constructed."

> But your antipodal impression of Marx and "Western thought" misses the many strands which make up the latter, as well as the fact that he was no island

This is a reasonable claim and one that has also been well-discussed. My personal take is that Marx critiqued and rejected the Enlightenment, which he saw as serving the interests of the middle class.

I group him with Rousseau and many German philosophers of his time as being overly influenced by the Romantic movement and longing for a return to a primitive way of life.

Western thought has been firmly in the direction of the Enlightenment, engineering, and science. And the romantics have generally been a conservative counter culture wanting to return to a simpler time.

[0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/michaelrosen/files/the_mar...
by onli | 2025-07-20 15:04:16+00:00
> Plausible. But both unproven and unlikely.

Not sure why you claim that, there definitely are studies in that direction. https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291... for example, you can find many more. I'm not saying it's absolutely certain, but it's definitively not unlikely.

"Processing away from the kitchen" on the other hand is a very broad field, and the current thinking seems to be that it is too broad. There are absolutely negative health outcomes observed there, but it is likely about aspects. So at first one has to have certainty about which part of processing is bad, to then known if Beyond Meat is processed in an unhealthy way. That is not at all clear.

There is a big difference between a pizza and a chicken nugget is what I'm saying.

> > That "grass-fed beef" is like a healthy standout is an unsubstantiated myth

> Nope [1].

> [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8728510/

One study, negative and positive aspects in the composition, no tests and thus no conclusion about the overall health aspects of eating that. Your nope is frankly bullshit.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-07-20 15:04:20+00:00
I think it means finer toplevel granularity re: what's runnable/testable at a given moment. I've been exploring this for my own projects and although it's not a silver bullet, I think there's something to it.

----

Several codebases I've known have provided a three-stage pipeline: unit tests, integration tests, and e2e tests. Each of these batches of tests depend on the creation of one of three environments, and the code being tested is what ends up in those environments. If you're interested in a particular failing test, you can use the associated environment and just iterate on the failing test.

For humans with a bit of tribal knowledge about the project, humans who have already solved the get-my-dev-environment-set-up problem in more or less uniform way, this works ok. Humans are better at retaining context over weeks and months, whereas you have to spin up a new session with an LLM every few hours or so. So we've created environments for ourselves that we ignore most of the time, but that are too complex to be bite sized for an agent that comes on the scene as a blank slate every few hours. There are too few steps from blank-slate to production, and each of them is too large.

But if successively more complex environments can be built on each other in arbitrarily many steps, then we could achieve finer granularity. As a nix user, my mental model for this is function composition where the inputs and outputs are environments, but an analogous model would be layers in a docker files where you test each layer before building the one on top of it.

Instead of maybe three steps, there are eight or ten. The goal would be to have both whatever code builds the environment, and whatever code tests it, paired up into bite-sized chunks so that a failure in the pipeline points you a specific stage which is more specific that "the unit tests are failing". Ideally test coverage and implementation complexity get distributed uniformly across those stages.

Keeping the scope of the stages small maximizes the amount of your codebase that the LLM can ignore while it works. I have a flake output and nix devshell corresponding to each stage in the pipeline and I'm using pytest to mark tests based on which stage they should run in. So I run the agent from the devshell that corresponds with whichever stage is relevant at the moment, and I introduce it to onlythe tests and code that are relevant to that stage (the assumption being that all previous stages are known to be in good shape). Most of the time, it doesn't need to know that it's working stage 5 of 9, so it "feels" like a smaller codebase than it actually is.

If evidence emerges that I've engaged the LLM at the wrong stage, I abandon the session and start over at the right level (now 6 of 9 or somesuch).
by specialist | 2025-07-20 15:04:31+00:00
Do you think maybe clothing is size now inferred from an item's weight? Cut close enough and then bin by weight...?

Finding knit caps for my pumpkin sized head is challenging. I'd find a good fit but then couldn't reorder the same item.

I stumbled onto the notion of selecting by weight instead of the declared size. Success!

More recently, there was a HN thread about buying good jeans. I then noticed the better quality mfgs also include the fabric's weight in the item's blurb. Which I then used to inform my foraging.
by 3036e4 | 2025-07-20 15:04:34+00:00
I did at times, but they are more fun now, browsed through the Wayback Machine.

Not only for the nostalgia, but for some topics, like som games or game genres, it can lead into amazing old internet clusters of sites full of fun/useful content (i.e. not just the ad/clickbate stuff everything turned into later, but real people just sharing because they wanted to share).
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-20 15:04:38+00:00
I found it depends very much on the task. For "architect" sessions you need as much context as you can reasonably gather. The more the merrier. At least gemini2.5 pro will gather the needed context from many files and it really does make a difference when you can give it a lot of it.

On coding you need to aggressively prune it, and only give minimum adjacent context, or it'll start going on useless tangents. And if you get stuck just refresh and start from 0, changing what is included. It's often faster than "arguing" with the LLM in multi-step sessions.

(the above is for existing codebases. for vibe-coding one-off scripts, just go with the vibes, sometimes it works surprisingly well from a quick 2-3 lines prompt)
by rpdillon | 2025-07-20 15:04:55+00:00
> Ultra-processed foods are operationally distinguishable from processed foods by the presence of food substances of no culinary use (varieties of sugars such as fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, 'fruit juice concentrates', invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose and lactose; modified starches; modified oils such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils; and protein sources such as hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein and 'mechanically separated meat') or of additives with cosmetic functions (flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents) in their list of ingredients.

They have a different definition of "no culinary use" than I do!
by scythmic_waves | 2025-07-20 15:05:00+00:00
Thanks for breaking that down.

As someone doing weightlifting, this is the primary reason I don't bother with vegetarian meats. They actually taste pretty good IMO, but they don't offer nutritional benefits commensurate with animal meat.

It's a shame, really. I'd gladly incorporate them if I could get a similar protein : calorie ratio.
by alpha_squared | 2025-07-20 15:05:00+00:00
One thing I'll add that isn't touched on here is about context windows. While not "infinite", humans have a very large context window for problems they're specialized in solving. Models can often overcome their context window limitations by having larger and more diverse training sets, but that still isn't really a solution to context windows.

Yes, I get the context window increases over time and that for many purposes it's already sufficient enough, but the current paradigm forces you to compress your personal context into a prompt to produce a meaningful result. In a language as malleable as English, this doesn't feel like engineering so much as it feels like incantations and guessing. We're losing so, so much by skipping determinism.
Show HN: Myriade – Ask your database questions in plain English
by BenderV | 2025-07-20 15:05:16+00:00
Hey HN! Maybe I’m crazy because I’ve been tinkering with this since GPT-3 era... but today, I’m thrilled to share Myriade with you.

As a data guy, I’ve always been frustrated by the effort involved in answering simple questions. Not that SQL is hard, but a simple question can easily require 10+ queries and 1h+ of our time.

Which means it’s not worth doing - more often than not.

Myriade is a natural language interface to analyze your database, which allows you to get answers in seconds/minutes, not hours.

Live Demo: https://hn.myriade.ai (explore HN data!)

Repository: https://github.com/myriade-ai/myriade

What it does:

- Ask "Why was there a drop in sales on July 14?” instead of writing JOIN statements

- The data analyst agent will explore, try, correct, adapt, inspect, analyze & synthetize a response… beyond the classical NL2SQL.

- See the agent's full interaction and “take over” at any moment.

- Works with Postgres, MySQL, Snowflake, BigQuery

- Self-hostable (so you can control where your data goes)

Under the hood

- Developed my own agent library for this (https://github.com/BenderV/autochat)

- Uses Anthropic Claude (also compatible with OpenAI and others)

- Postgres/Flask/SQLAlchemy/Vue/Tailwind/Echarts

I’ve used it a lot, and it shows great potential that goes beyond just “getting information”.

Interesting use cases I've seen:

- “What KPIs should I focus on ?” → Select your KPIs

- “Detect quality issues in billing data" → Review data quality

- “Flatten this table” → Prepare a view

- “Make this query run faster: X” → Optimize a query

This clearly is not the one-size-fits-all solution to solve BI, but I find it really useful for day to day.

Try it for yourself - let me know what you think! I’d love to get any feedback, feature requests and (especially) criticism you may have!
by cratermoon | 2025-07-20 15:05:18+00:00
They should also share their prompts and discuss exactly how much effort went into checking the output and re-prompting to get the desired result. The post hints at how much work it takes for the human, "If you are able to describe problems in a clear way and, if you are able to accept the back and forth needed in order to work with LLMs ... you need to provide extensive information to the LLM: papers, big parts of the target code base ... And a brain dump of all your understanding of what should be done. Such braindump must contain especially the following:" and more.

After all the effort getting to the point where the generated code is acceptable, one has to wonder, why not just write it yourself? The time spent typing is trivial to all the cognitive effort involved in describing the problem, and describing the problem in a rigorous way is the essence of programming.
by jtoberon | 2025-07-20 15:05:20+00:00
Imagine a reader who is not one of your lucky “most” majority. Imagine a reader whose cancer was not caused by the bad lifestyle decisions that you listed. Put yourself in the position of somebody who undergoes extensive surgery/radiation/chemotherapy and then lives with the side effects of these treatments. Consider what it’s like to live with the fear of recurrence even after such treatment. Then maybe you’ll understand why people might be excited about the potential of this sort of screening.
by zerkten | 2025-07-20 15:05:39+00:00
Blogging on personal blogs was somewhat condoned back then. There was a period when MS was really encouraging personal blogs and then they pulled back from this to focus on blogs hosted on their platform.

Channel 9 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_9_(Microsoft)) was taking off and they were doing video all around their campus. It was a real look behind the curtain and probably an element of the foundation for their adoption of open source.
by marcosdumay | 2025-07-20 15:05:40+00:00
Subjective things are real and some times even measurable too.

The problem with objective theories of value is that they are demonstrably wrong. If you rent a small apartment and have two washing machines, one of them has negative value to you, people often give those away; try explaining that with objective value.

And yes, people's values do align to a very large extent.
by crazygringo | 2025-07-20 15:06:00+00:00
Nope, because str(False) produces "False", not "".

Not consistent at all.

There's nothing consistent about bool(str(False)) == True.

It's standard in computing for zero integers to represent False. Heck, bool is a subclass of int. Extending that to the length of strings is where things start to go off the rails in terms of consistency... and why you would ever even want that is beyond me.
by 9rx | 2025-07-20 15:06:56+00:00
> Is the performance overhead significant?

How do you define significant? It is noticeable as compared to C. It is nothing compared to Python.

> Are there any benchmarks on this?

You will see an additional ~20ns per call (assuming the gc compiler; tinygo, for example, can call C functions as fast as C can). In other words, you're not ever going to notice unless you're making millions of calls in a hot loop. The bigger problem in a highly concurrent environment is that blocking C functions can start to mess with the scheduler if they are slow to return. You, again, would never notice in a program of this nature, though. The feature is there to be use. It being a "bad idea" is nonsense.

Some added pain in compilation is, fairly, a tradeoff to consider. But that's just because C compilers, for the most part, aren't very good. It is not like those problems go away if you use C instead.
by fumeux_fume | 2025-07-20 15:06:58+00:00
I currently use LLMs as a glorified Stack Overflow. If I want to start integrating an LLM like Gemini 2.5 PRO into my IDE (I use Visual Studio Code), whats the best way to do this? I don't want to use a platform like Cursor or Claude Code which takes me away from my IDE.
by throw14082020 | 2025-07-20 15:06:58+00:00
I recently travelled the US (California, Arizona, Utah, Ohio), I found it really hard to find vegan options. Some restaurants that used to sell vegan burgers or vegan options have stopped (McDonalds, Applebees) - because not enough people ordered them. Some restaurants that have Beyond Meat burger patties as on option "don't have any in stock" - probably for the same reason.

According to GPT o4-mini, these are the restaurants that have stopped in the past few years: Habit Burger & Grill; McDonald’s; Carl’s Jr.; TGI Fridays; Del Taco; Denny’s; Dunkin’; Wendy’s.

I will say beyond meat tasted pretty good, and I would prefer to eat that than to go hungry at US restaurants. But it's very expensive and very annoying to cook at home (smoky). Not sure how healthy it is either - highly processed?

Also, people who are vegetarian/vegan know the health benefits. They're not going to pay more to get less healthy.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-20 15:07:15+00:00
I think the UPF debate just comes down to "things I want to be healthy are not UPF, and things I want to be unhealthy I call UPF."

It's why the debate rarely exits the semantic stage into the empirical stage of argument where we look at the human health outcome data on supposedly scary chemicals.

Meanwhile, we also have data on not-so-processed foods that are bad for us, and the level of processing did nothing to spare us the negative health impact.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-07-20 15:08:20+00:00
When you learn about clothes and fashion, it’s quite easy to tell the difference.

HN is full of computer nerds who can’t fanthom that computers are as mysterious to normies as sneakers are to the nerds of HN. A lot of people know how to tell apart good and bad footwear - it just isn’t you or your crowd!
by duxup | 2025-07-20 15:08:57+00:00
I recently ran across this weird world of the influencers who have been trotted out (invited) to post social media posts about their rides in the robotaxi. It is amazing how many are “other than the thing(s) that went wrong it was very safe and worked great”.

Some of those things that went wrong were dropping people off in the middle of an intersection, not recognizing railroad track guard rails… and simply not being able to get them to their destination at all.
by coliveira | 2025-07-20 15:09:23+00:00
The sad part is that companies doing this will very soon figure out that the 20% less staff they "achieved" is only at a cost of 100% increase in development and fees to LLM vendor. Moreover, after a few years these fees will skyrocket because their businesses are now dependent on this technology and unlike people, LLMs are monopolized by just a few robber barons.
by wiseowise | 2025-07-20 15:09:39+00:00
> the start menu is written in C# of course

It is funny how quickly this became normalized. During Vista time everyone was absolutely shitting on awful performance, now that PCs became faster it is apparently fine to use one dog ass slow managed language (C#) over another (JS with RN).

Even though RN for Windows is just a thin wrapper over WinRT, but who gives a shit, right? Because JSLOLLOLOL.