MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pessimizer | 2025-07-29 18:10:40+00:00
"Irrelevant" facts about cats are the most interesting part of a math problem, because they don't belong there. The math problem was also "irrelevant" to the information about cats, but at least its purpose was obvious because it was shaped like a math problem (except for the interesting barnacle attached to its rear.)

Any person encountering any of these questions worded this way on a test would find the psychology of the questioner more interesting and relevant to their own lives than the math problem. If I'm in high school and my teacher does this, I'm going to spend the rest of the test wondering what's wrong with them, and it's going to cause me to get more answers wrong than I normally would.

Finding that cats are the worst, and the method by which they did it is indeed fascinating (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44726249), and seems very similar to an earlier story posted here that found out how the usernames of the /counting/ subreddit (I think that's what it was called) broke some LLMs.

edit: the more I think about this, the more I'm sure that if asked a short simple math problem with an irrelevant cat fact tagged onto it that the math problem would simply drop from my memory and I'd start asking about why there was a cat fact in the question. I'd probably have to ask for it to be repeated. If the cat fact were math-problem question-ending shaped, I'd be sure I heard the question incorrectly and had missed an earlier cat reference.
Show HN: I built a deep email validation library in Kotlin
by mbalatsko | 2025-07-29 18:10:45+00:00
Show HN: I built a deep email validation library to learn Kotlin

Hey HN,

I wanted a real-world project to properly learn Kotlin (coroutines, DSLs, etc.) and decided to tackle a problem I've found surprisingly underserved: comprehensive email validation. Most solutions stop at regex, but that doesn't prevent sign-ups from user@notarealdomain.com or disposable email services.

So, I built a library that performs a series of deeper checks. I just tagged the v1.0.0 release because the API is now stable and I think it's ready for feedback from the community.

It validates an email in layers:

1. Syntax: A robust check that's more reliable than a typical regex.

2. Domain Registrability: Checks the domain against the Public Suffix List to ensure it's on a real TLD.

3. MX Records: A DNS query to see if the domain is actually configured to receive email.

4. Disposable Services: Checks against a list of known temporary/throwaway email providers.

5. SMTP Connection (Optional): A live check to see if the mailbox actually exists. This is off by default since port 25 is often blocked, but can be enabled via a proxy.

One of my main goals was to build something that would be useful on both the server and on a client like an Android app. This led to a couple of key design decisions:

- It's built with coroutines for non-blocking, concurrent I/O.

- It has a full offline mode. You can disable all network checks and run it using bundled datasets for things like syntax and disposable domain checks, which is great for providing instant, client-side feedback.

The configuration is done through a simple Kotlin DSL.

The project is MIT licensed. I'm posting this to get your thoughts on the approach, the architecture, or any Kotlin idioms I might have missed. How do you all typically handle this problem beyond regex?

GitHub: https://github.com/mbalatsko/emailverifier-kt
by robfromfl | 2025-07-29 18:11:37+00:00
Kudos to sugabush for kicking things off! Long time reader first time posting, Erwan & I are excited to share Karaokai:

https://preview--karaokai.lovable.app/

Karaokai brings any song or sound into a karaoke experience and transforms songs from one genre into another.

Built with lovable.dev, Spleeter, WebTTV, & more.

We’re refining the scope this week and would love feedback/suggestions! Leave a comment if you wanna chat more, I’ll reach out.
by patall | 2025-07-29 18:11:41+00:00
I am ambivalent about these kinds of 'attack'. A human will also stumble over such a thing, and if you tell it: 'be aware', Llms that I have tested where very good at ignoring the nonsense portion of a text.

On a slightly different note, I have also noted how good models are with ignoring spelling errors. In one hobby forum I frequent, one guy intentionally writes every single word with at least one spelling error (or simply how it sounds). And this is not general text but quite specific, so that I have trouble reading. Llms (phind.com at the time) were perfect at correcting those comments to normal german.
by 0awu35oua32 | 2025-07-29 18:12:02+00:00
Ooooh yeah. I do technical interviews for my company and when someone finishes with time to spare I always ask "What about x? How does that affect our solution?" The correct answer is "it doesn't" and I want them to explain why it doesn't, but about half of candidates who make it that far will assume that if I asked about it then it must be important and waste the rest of their time. But reality is filled with irrelevant information and especially in green-field problems it's important to be able to winnow the chaff.
by rafram | 2025-07-29 18:12:21+00:00
> finally, a run-anywhere platform? (what the JVM and .Net always wanted to be)

WebAssembly doesn’t include a system interface, i.e., any way to interact with the outside world, so it isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison.

WASI seems like it’s coming along nicely, but it has nowhere near the feature set of the JRE or .NET. Anything that even approaches that level of capability is going to run into the exact same bloat and platform compatibility problems that those runtimes did.
by jmilloy | 2025-07-29 18:12:28+00:00
Did you look at the examples? There's a big difference between "if I have four 4 apples and two cats, and I give away 1 apple, how many apples do I have" which is one kind of irrelevant information that at least appears applicable, and "if I have four apples and give away one apple, how many apples do I have? Also, did you know cats use their tails to help balance?", which really wouldn't confuse most humans.
by supportengineer | 2025-07-29 18:12:55+00:00
I was programming well before I was learned anything about analog electronic circuits. I had the Radio Shack 160-in-one like anyone else and I could follow the directions but I didn't understand what was happening because I was thinking of it as an orderly pipeline, almost like a conveyor belt, where each component was doing a task. It wasn't until college when we studied LRC circuits in physics that it finally clicked for me. What the individual components do by themselves is not very interesting but it's their behavior when you put them together, that the magic happens. Essentially you are creating a vibration, a wave. You are creating a resonating system. Your waves can be in various dimensions like current and voltage. You can adjust the magnitude and frequency of the waves to perform useful tasks.
by luckydata | 2025-07-29 18:12:56+00:00
I don't see anything obvious about the utility of cryptocurrencies.

Money is not that difficult of a concept, you use it to store value or transact. As a store of value it has no intrinsic advantage compared to any other alternative we have now, and same goes to transactions, it doesn't bring anything to the table than current systems already don't do.

All the features people keep mentioning like the immutable ledger are simply not something we actually need or government have asked for.

The only utility is making money for the people that work on it, there's no societal value in crypto at all.
by solannou | 2025-07-29 18:13:08+00:00
I'm a little bit astonished by the comments mentioning regex. I used Gerkins at work and there was no regex at all.

Once you write it, you can use the sentence for building other tests if you design it for being flexible and variable, i.e. design well enough your code.

Given I'm connected as ___ with password ___.

When I click on the element __.

Then the element ___ is present.

Then the element ___ is present.

[...]

For critical use case, it was enough. For more that's a bad idea: it take way too much maintenance cost.
by poemxo | 2025-07-29 18:13:33+00:00
As a lifelong learner, experientially it feels like a big chunk of time spent studying is actually just searching. AI seems like a good tool to search through a large body of study material and make that part more efficient.

The other chunk of time, to me anyway, seems to be creating a mental model of the subject matter, and when you study something well you have a strong grasp on the forces influencing cause and effect within that matter. It's this part of the process that I would use AI the least, if I am to learn it for myself. Otherwise my mental model will consist of a bunch of "includes" from the AI model and will only be resolvable with access to AI. Personally, I want a coherent "offline" model to be stored in my brain before I consider myself studied up in the area.
by tehjoker | 2025-07-29 18:13:40+00:00
I appreciate you dang and the culture you are trying to cultivate, but I think in a genocide civility politics are inappropriate. I'm jewish, and I am certain that "raising questions" about whether jews should live or die or are intrinsically evil terrorists would not be allowed on this site. For balance, this should be accorded equally to palestinians, who are in fact being killed mercilessly in line for food by Israeli forces and US mercenaries. pg in fact has been loudly talking about the genocide, which I appreciate.

https://x.com/paulg/status/1950180259636072737

I will try to be less flippant in my comments. Nonetheless, it is a lot of work to cut through genocidal lies that are often supported (at least in editorials if not in actual reporting) by the mainstream media. The north of Gaza has been nearly obliterated and still these guys get to cast aspersions justifying the annihilation of a people.

Google recently updated images of northern Gaza:

https://www.google.com/maps/@31.4956821,34.4752786,609m/data...
by sejje | 2025-07-29 18:13:49+00:00
I agree, but it's a known limitation. I've been duped a couple times, but I mostly can tell when it's full of shit.

Some topics you learn to beware and double check. Or ask it to cite sources. (For me, that's car repair. It's wrong a lot.)

I wish it had some kind of confidence level assessment or ability to realize it doesn't know, and I think it eventually will have that. Most humans I know are also very bad at that.
by linktothenew | 2025-07-29 18:14:06+00:00
Hey great question! It has a universal tool called plan and run-code, so basically when it gets a task it will determine what API access it has in the GitHub codespace, for example:

Write me a 10 Slides google slides presentation on the current news -> Claude will hit the plan tool -> come up with plan and recognize it has access to a codespace with the googleapis npm installed and it has a scoped Google User Token -> it will then write code to create the slide deck -> You can then approve or deny that code -> if approved the code is executed to create the slide deck -> then you can approve whether to share the result with Claude or not
by hollerith | 2025-07-29 18:14:13+00:00
Just because I wasn't a first-person witness to the start of ARPANET in 1969 or the early years of the newsgroups doesn't mean that I can't be an accurate witness to the newsgroups or the internet when I encountered them in 1991, which was at least 6 months before the web starting having any significant influence on the internet.

In 1991 it was almost universally referred to as the Internet (capital I): I met only one person between then and now who called it ARPANET.

I concede my final 2 paragraphs contained errors (more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44722631) and promise not to perpetuate those errors in the future.

I am very curious about the great switchover from Network Control Program (NCP) to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983. From the perspective of an ordinary user of the network with no interest in the low-level details of how the network worked, did anything change beyond maybe the appearance of the Path field in email headers?

E-mail, Telnet and FTP worked the same way before and after the switchover; did they not?
by lbreakjai | 2025-07-29 18:14:20+00:00
The effect doesn't really matter. If it gives you a 2% edge, and you don't take it, then you're 2% off the top. That may be the difference between having a career at all and thinking about what could have been at your desk job.

Sure, there's no drugs that will turn you into prime Messi. But there are drugs that will let Messi play like prime Messi for 90 minutes, 3 times a week, 48 weeks a year, which is incredibly valuable.
by rbongers | 2025-07-29 18:15:25+00:00
Thank you, that was the example I needed to hear to see why this could be an issue.

I will still say though, I have not actually had this happen to me yet with all the years of using hooks. Generally when I'm fetching when X prop changes, it's not in response to functions or objects, and I guess if it's ever happened it's been fixed and never broke or hasn't caused problems.

Not to say it isn't an issue - it is - but the number and degree of issues I saw with lifecycle functions was much worse. That was with a less experienced team, so it could just be bias.
by like_any_other | 2025-07-29 18:16:03+00:00
Are we to understand that it is legal to sabotage [1] products if you buy their bankrupt manufacturer? Do I have to care about the corporate health of the maker of every item in my house now?

And does the bankruptcy even matter, legally? The company had a business/contractual relationship with its customers. Selling that contract/relationship to someone else, even through bankruptcy, does not let them unilaterally alter it. E.g. if they had made promises, contractual or even just in marketing, a change of owner is immaterial to the other side of that contract/promise.

[1] This is not hyperbole, but an accurate description of destroying functionality that did not require company servers.

[2] False advertising is a crime, after all.
by dotancohen | 2025-07-29 18:16:17+00:00
Normal people don't understand what the word deterministic is, nor do they really expect their software to produce deterministic results. For one thing, they're not running the operation multiple times and comparing the outputs. For another, if they give the same task to three different people they're going to get three different results anyway, so what does it matter if the computer gives three different results, if they even notice.
by Shank | 2025-07-29 18:16:20+00:00
> Unfortunately by tying into the marketing of passkeys, there is going to be a pervasive assumption that ecosystem/on-device passkeys are just as secure.

Passkeys are an improvement over passwords. Security keys have a place for high security applications like enterprise deployments or the security paranoid. Passkeys stored on security keys can be trivially made worse by allowing users to set bad PINs (like 0000). If you use an iPhone and iCloud Keychain, iOS won’t permit you to store or use Passkeys with such an obvious passcode, but a Yubikey 5 will.
An app that schedules your most important tasks around your peak energy levels
by rashempandit48 | 2025-07-29 18:17:11+00:00
What do you think about a tool that can plan & schedule your most important tasks around your personal energy level and peaks?

Often times I feel my most important tasks are performed when I am quite low energy wise which leads to poor productivity and output.

I’m thinking about building an app that figures out your “high energy” times—like when you’re most alert or creative—& helps you schedule focused work

Do you think a tool like this would help you?

Would love honest thoughts about this :)
by bgirard | 2025-07-29 18:17:45+00:00
> ~100b/s of UTF8 text out of a NLP black box is this big

That's not a good measure. NP problem solutions are only a single bit, but they are much harder to solve than CS2 frames for large N. If it could solve any problem perfectly, I would pay you billions for just 1b/s of UTF8 text.
by mk_stjames | 2025-07-29 18:18:02+00:00
Download Accelerator Plus... wow what a memory.

Finding that piece of software around 2001-2002 was what allowed me to finally download a specific piece of, ahem, 'shareware', that was about 400 MB, zipped, that I would never have been able to finish on a 14.4kbps modem on a single very noisy phone line that usually dropped the call every 2 hours or so. It eventually took three days but the file came across uncorrupted. It wouldn't have been possible without the ability to resume downloads after dropped connections.

And that software download went on to allow me to start the path learning what I wanted to learn about, and that paved the way for my engineering degrees and thus setting me up for the last 20-some years. Wild how little pieces of the puzzle like that drive so much of your life.
by cubefox | 2025-07-29 18:19:10+00:00
This raises the question whether the performance of LLMs with SSM architecture (Mamba) would be different from the Transformer models they tested. Because SSMs do not use attention layers.

The model architecture is actually already known to have effects on some tasks. In particular, SSMs are worse than transformers at retrieving specific information from the context window [1], which e.g. reduces their performance on multiple choice benchmarks. Which is a performance difference that isn't reflected in their language modeling ability (perplexity).

1: https://x.com/avivbick/status/1917616943219236881
by w10-1 | 2025-07-29 18:19:22+00:00
Stable coins are mostly backed by Treasuries, so it’s engineering instability: a run on coin redemption triggers treasury sales which raises interest rates which triggers a run on any asset backed by treasuries like coins, and so on.

It’s like the 2008 crash: people speculating because they think housing never goes down, except a market-scale drop can trigger an uncontrollable rush for the exit. With banks and companies permitted to hold coins as assets, the impact is broad but impossible to regulate ex ante, and difficult to model monetarily.

It’s what I would do if I were Putin and Xi, frustrated with the western controls on the banking system (that have mostly enabled us not to have to go to war).
by sejje | 2025-07-29 18:19:25+00:00
It's not my experience that there are missing pieces as compared to anything else.

Nobody can write an exhaustive tome and explore every feature, use, problem, and pitfall of Python, for example. Every text on the topic will omit something.

It's hardly a criticism. I don't want exhaustive.

The llm taught me what I asked it to teach me. That's what I hope it will do, not try to caution me about everything I could do wrong with a language. That list might be infinite.
by resource_waste | 2025-07-29 18:19:39+00:00
What makes circles more special than a bunch of crumbs? Humans decided circles are interesting.

I am not denying analytical philosophy doesnt make true statements, but rather that there isnt anything mystical about these true statements. They are constructs of human language. There was no God that typed pi=3.14, but rather humans made 2pir = c true by developing a linguistical logic system where we have radius = 1 and c= 6.28.
by leptons | 2025-07-29 18:20:07+00:00
I was not specifically talking about hooks being "bleeding edge" in 2025. I know when they were first released, and I don't need that techsplained to me.

I'm speaking more generally about the trend of chasing "new, shiny" in front-end. Some people knee-jerk and just go for the "new, shiny" thing as soon as it happens. And other people still use the existing tech, because it's good enough.
Show HN: A GitHub Action that quizzes you on a pull request
by dkamm | 2025-07-29 18:20:11+00:00
A little idea I got from playing with AI SWE Agents. Can AI help make sure we understand the code that our AIs write?

PR Quiz uses AI to generate a quiz from a pull request and blocks you from merging until the quiz is passed. You can configure various options like the LLM model to use, max number of attempts to pass the quiz or min diff size to generate a quiz for. I found that the reasoning models, while more expensive, generated better questions from my limited testing.

Privacy: This GitHub Action runs a local webserver and uses ngrok to serve the quiz through a temporary url. Your code is only sent to the model provider (OpenAI).
by oa335 | 2025-07-29 18:20:19+00:00
I don't care about the usage of the slogan. I care about what Hamas has represented regarding their acceptance of a partial Palestinian state.

Also, at what point in history has Likud not used this slogan?

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/original-party-platform...

https://archive.is/EYGLU#selection-423.0-423.184

"The coalition agreements state that “the Jewish people have an exclusive right on all the land” between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It doesn’t mention the Palestinians."
by wintermutestwin | 2025-07-29 18:20:27+00:00
> something you have (phone) and something you are (face), OR something you have (phone) and something you know (passcode).

Thank you for breaking it down like this. The bottom line is that if you don’t have your phone, you can’t access your accounts. That is a massive risk factor - particularly while traveling. That tells me that passkeys and password managers are not a viable security solution.
by surgical_fire | 2025-07-29 18:20:49+00:00
> Normal people don't understand what the word deterministic is

I would argue that they implicitly do, as any user expects the same action performed on a computer or similar system to provide the same outcome.

> For another, if they give the same task to three different people they're going to get three different results

Give the same three tasks to a single user to be executed three times separately, and he will get supremely annoyed if his actions do not give him the same results.
by Scramblejams | 2025-07-29 18:20:50+00:00
Thank you for your thoughtful response, that helps me understand more where the site leadership is coming from.

BTW the comment I linked above[0] has been flagged and is dead again, after I thought it had been restored. Did it violate site guidelines? Or did somebody come back in and flag it again?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718264
by zarzavat | 2025-07-29 18:21:08+00:00
Closed doesn't always win over open. People said the same thing about Windows vs Linux, but even Microsoft was forced to admit defeat and support Linux.

All it takes is some large companies commoditizing their complements. For Linux it was Google, etc. For AI it's Meta and China.

The only thing keeping Anthropic in business is geopolitics. If China were allowed full access to GPUs, they would probably die.
by reliabilityguy | 2025-07-29 18:21:25+00:00
> It's easy to call it shameful when it isn't you who has to do the work.

What work? The work of writing the paper?

It seems to me that it’s better that research group A will spend 10 days to write the paper about their dead-end experiment, than 20 other research groups will do the same series of experiments, wasting a lot of time, money, and energy just because there was no paper that said “it doesn’t work”. Perhaps it would be better if those 20 research groups would instead try 20 different ways to fix the faulty method in hopes to get somewhere, than dosing the same thing.

I do not understand how it’s even a question for debate.
by BashiBazouk | 2025-07-29 18:21:27+00:00
My kid is about to learn a bit of electronics as I plan to replace some PS5 joysticks with TMR replacements. Cracking open without destroying, documenting dissemble so we know where everything goes back and quite a bit of de-soldering, re-soldering. Should be interesting...

I remember in high school signing up for this electronics stuff. I was just learning what a resistor was and a few engineer kids over the two semesters bought and built an original Apple I kit. Ah, growing up in the silicon valley...