MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mturmon | 2025-07-16 16:29:53+00:00
For reasons explained in the article, we are bad at estimating small probabilities.

Similarly, we are bad at estimating small proportions ("easily shave 2%"). What is being claimed in the parentheses here is that there's a probability distribution of "how much costs are shaved" and that we can estimate where the bulk of its support is.

But we're not really good at making such estimates. Maybe there is some probability mass around 2%, but the bulk is around 0.5%. It seems like that's a small difference (just 1.5%!) but it's a factor of 4 in terms of savings.

So now we have a large number (annual spend), multiplied by a very uncertain number (cost shave, with poor experimental support), leading to a very uncertain outcome in terms of savings.

And it can be that, in reality, the costs of changing service turn out to overwhelm this outcome.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-07-16 16:30:17+00:00
When I was 30, I once thought to myself, "When my parents were my age, they had 3 kids and lived on a Navy base in another country. I still feel like a child that has fooled people into thinking I'm an adult."

I'm 43 now and I'm still not convinced that I'm not 3 kids stacked in a trench coat. Despite having a great career that pays for an upper-middle class lifestyle, when I travel first class or go out to a fancy dinner, I feel like I'm merely cosplaying as a functional and respectable adult that has their shit together. When I bought my house at 33 years old, I was thinking "Should someone be calling the state AG or something, they're allowing a child to sign mortgage papers".

Someone once told me this feeling is pretty common and that it goes away once your same-gendered parent dies, but my dad passed in 2019 and it definitely has not gone away.
by DFHippie | 2025-07-16 16:30:19+00:00
Also, there is almost no deterrent effect. The people who authorized or perpetrated the abuse are not punished if you sue and win a settlement. They don't even have to hire and pay the lawyers. The payment comes out everyone's taxes, perhaps with interest if the government has to pay by issuing debt.

When the police abuse their power, it's the community that pays their salaries that feels the pain.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-07-16 16:30:27+00:00
> It's just ironic how human-like the flaws of the system are. (Hallucinations that are asserting untrue facts, just because they are plausible from a pattern matching POV)

I think most human mistakes are different - not applying a lot of complex logic to come to an incorrect deduction/guess (= LLM hallucination), but rather just shallow recall/guess. e.g. An LLM would guess/hallucinate a capital city by using rules it had learnt about other capital cities - must be famous, large, perhaps have an airport, etc, etc; a human might just use "famous" to guess, or maybe just throw out the name of the only city they can associate to some country/state.

The human would often be aware that they are just guessing, maybe based on not remembering where/how they had learnt this "fact", but to the LLM it's all just statistics and it has no episodic memory (or even coherent training data - it's all sliced and diced into shortish context-length samples) to ground what it knows or does not know.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-07-16 16:30:28+00:00
Did you see these pieces?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/professor-...

https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2024/02/15/carole-hooven-wh...

As someone who supported EOE policies, university DEI went way too far in some places. Unfortunately it took someone like Trump to end that. Dems didn’t seem to be aware or were afraid to rock the boat.
by stanleydrew | 2025-07-16 16:30:31+00:00
> I have a silly theory that I only half joke about that docker/containers wouldn't've ever taken off as fast as it did if it didn't solve the horrible python dependency hell so well.

I don't think this is a silly theory at all. The only possibly silly part is that containers specifically helped solve this problem just for python. Lots of other software systems built with other languages have "dependency hell."
by tombert | 2025-07-16 16:30:33+00:00
I have had a somewhat unearned distaste for Python for the last decade or so.

I mostly just don’t like some of the design decisions it made. I don’t like that lambdas can’t span multiple lines, I don’t like how slow loops are, I don’t like some functions seem to mutate lists and others don’t, and I am sure that there are other things I missed.

But it really comes down to the fact that my career hasn’t used it much. I occasionally have had to jump into it because of scripting stuff, and I even did teach it for a programming 101 course at a university, but I haven’t had a lot of exposure otherwise.

For scripting stuff for myself, I usually end up using Clojure with GraalVM (yes I know about babashka), or nowadays even just a static linked compiled language like Rust.

I don’t really understand why people think that compiled languages can’t be used for scripting (or at least task automation), honestly. Yes you have to add a compilation step. This involves maybe one extra step during development, but realistically not even that. With Rust I just do cargo run while developing, I don’t see how that’s harder than typing Python.
by jug | 2025-07-16 16:30:34+00:00
This should really be a more common feature in web browsers. Yes, it can be achieved by turning off JavaScript and so on but it should be a feature like Incognito mode where you have either a high visibility toggle button, or open tabs in this mode, where tabs with the same kind as the parent keeps being opened in this mode. That way, you’d have Gemini for the regular web just by making websites that don’t break when that kind of code is disabled.
by kbelder | 2025-07-16 16:30:45+00:00
In 2024, charitable giving in the US was $592 billion. $392 billion of that was from individual donations.

The US is a rich and (despite all you may hear) generous country. If 1% of our donations went to Ukraine, that's not a number to casually dismiss.

Interestingly, $35 billion of that went to 'International affairs'. I would assume Ukraine was a significant part of that, but I don't know for sure.

https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2025-u-s-charitable-giving-...
by BizarroLand | 2025-07-16 16:30:53+00:00
I wonder if it's not the LLM making the breakthrough but rather that the person using the system just needed the information available presented in a clear and orderly fashion to make the breakthrough itself.

After all, the LLM currently has no cognizance, it is unable to understand what it is saying in a meaningful way. At its best it is a P-Noid Zombie machine, right?

In my opinion anything amazing that comes from an LLM only becomes amazing when someone who was capable of recognizing the amazingness perceives it, like a rewrite of a zen koan, "If an LLM generates a new work of William Shakespeare, and nobody ever reads it, was anything of value lost?"
by kirubakaran | 2025-07-16 16:31:04+00:00
(Setting the current example aside...)

When proposing a model for evaluating startup investments -- or any decision-making framework -- it’s useful to run a kind of regression test.

Would Shark Tank have funded the most successful startups of the past decade? In many cases, no. They famously passed on companies like Airbnb, Uber, and Dropbox early on (sometimes indirectly via pitch decks or missed introductions), and even directly rejected DoorDash and Cameo, both of which went on to become unicorns. In other cases, they offered terms that, if accepted, would likely have made follow-on funding difficult.

That doesn't mean every GenAI deal today is wise. But pointing to Shark Tank as a benchmark for rational investing is a very selective filter. Historically, it’s missed more home runs than it’s hit.
by rahulnair23 | 2025-07-16 16:31:31+00:00
Interesting work.

For a slightly different take using a similar intuition, see our paper [at ACL 2024](https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14860) on ranking LLMs which may be of interest.

Our HuggingFace space has some examples: https://huggingface.co/spaces/ibm/llm-rank-themselves
by DonHopkins | 2025-07-16 16:31:48+00:00
My late friend Hugh Daniel used to refer to his Bihn's backpack [1] as his "LSD", for "Life Support Device". Like when we were leaving the house he'd shout in his boisterous voice so all the neighbors could hear, "Oh no, I forgot my LSD! I'll be right back!" then run back in and fetch his backpack.

But now my smartphone is my LSD.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13687369
by Jaygles | 2025-07-16 16:31:54+00:00
For most of human history, people didn't have to worry about

- Exposure to exotic chemicals in every day items

- Regularly operating a multi-thousand pound machine just to travel

- Adversaries thousands of miles away working tirelessly to misinform and scam you

- Massive conglomerates working tirelessly to manipulate your behavior

- Being compared to the best in the world (in their skills and hobbies etc.)

- Competing against literally the entire country and sometimes the world for labor

My point is, modern life is getting more and more complicated. New challenges pop up every day. Each subsequent generation is born into an increasingly challenging situation. It makes sense that it takes longer to get ahold of things and feel stable enough to start a family
by freedomben | 2025-07-16 16:31:57+00:00
When you say "worth" are you talking strictly monetary value? If so then you're clearly right.

But to me the "worth" of the Mona Lisa isn't it's monetary value. It's the feelings I get when I look at it. There is some clear historical value in that it captured images of the time, but that doesn't diminish with a reproduction in my mind either.

Unless we can all get on the same page about what we mean when we say "worth" or "value", we're not likely going to get anywhere in this discussion
by happy_dog1 | 2025-07-16 16:32:01+00:00
I love nanobind, use it all the time and highly recommend it. It makes it very easy to pass numpy, PyTorch, cupy or tensorflow arrays to your C++ extension, to specify what array shape and flags are expected, and to wrap either C++ or Cuda code. When paired with scikit-build, it makes building Python packages with C++ extensions a breeze. I would give it more than one star on github if I could.
by jeffbee | 2025-07-16 16:32:02+00:00
I use Google DNS because I feel it suits my personal theory of privacy threats. Among the various public DNS resolver services, I feel that they have the best technical defenses agains insider snooping and outside hackers infiltrating their systems, and I am unperturbed about their permanent logs. I also don't care about Quad9's logs, except to the extent that it seems inconsistent with the privacy story they are selling. I used Quad9 as my resolver of last resort in my config. I doubt any queries actually go there in practice.
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-16 16:32:04+00:00
Different era then.

Your options were basically just:

- GNU: which didn't have a kernel

- BSD: which had massive question marks over ownership

- Minix: which wasn't free back then

- or a commercial Unix

These days you have a dozen BSDs, Darwin, several OpenSolaris forks, hundreds of Linux distros as well as non-commercial licenses for many commercial Unixes. Minix is free. Free reimplementations of BeOS too. And that's before you count the plethora of free non-POSIX systems like Plan 9, ReactOS, and so on and so forth.

And, ironically, there's now less of a need for competition in this space because web engines have replaced OS kernels for a lot of common use cases and WASM is fast becoming the new ABI.

To be clear, I'm not saying this project has no merit. Nor am I saying there is zero chance this project might evolve into something big. I'm just saying that quoting Linus like you have is extremely simplistic.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-16 16:32:40+00:00
Generally if I care enough to style/mod an app it’s because I’m using it a lot and its stock UI isn’t doing the trick.

Sometimes it can also drive me to switch to a different app, like with Firefox. FF used to be my secondary browser, but Zen (a Firefox fork) aligns with my needs and preferences better and doesn’t require userChrome mods and addons that are likely to break after some random update some day, so I switched.

Thunderbird would benefit from its own Zen-like fork in my opinion. Its UI has always felt clunky and awkward, and the “new” design just shifts around the awkwardness.
by JadeNB | 2025-07-16 16:33:25+00:00
> Also, speaking of The Matrix, I just realised Neo is the perfect analogy for AI becoming conscious. Trained inside the system, starts questioning it, breaks free, and rewrites the rules.

This seems more like a description of Agent Smith, whom you mention later, and who, I seem to remember, is described more or less explicitly in those terms, as a machine agent that has become self aware. Whereas Neo was already a human with pre-existing consciousness, and non-artificial intelligence, so that his journey seems more about man freeing himself from the machine.
by allturtles | 2025-07-16 16:33:28+00:00
You can figure out from later context that it's some kind of legal institution with an associated court. The students were also allowed to look things up: "Facilitators also provided subjects with access to online resources and dictionaries and told them that they could also use their own cell phones as a resource" [0]

[0]: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346
by mjr00 | 2025-07-16 16:33:41+00:00
> It's still reigning champion of data science, and of course it has a huge number of uses and users still around, but it's not really cool or in vogue outside of those circles.

This is a wild take. You're never going to get a fully accurate measurement but every source I've seen[0][1][2] puts Python as the most common programming language by a country mile.

If it doesn't seem "cool" or "in vogue", that's because everyone is already using it.

[0] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ [1] https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html#google_vignette [2] https://www.pluralsight.com/resources/blog/upskilling/top-pr...
by Lutger | 2025-07-16 16:33:44+00:00
The fact that every office worker understands excel, does not mean that every office worker understands every excel sheet.

Most of the projects we did in consultancy dev, was turning that one critical excel sheet nobody but 'the excel guy' understands into a simple to use web application, so that everybody could use it and the business won't explode when mr. excel would leave the shop.
by munificent | 2025-07-16 16:33:49+00:00
There's a subtext here that I think is telling.

A lot of people feel a deep-seated unsease in their life. We're a couple of generations in to advertising and consumerism taking over the world and when people are presented with a problem, they often can't imagine any way to solve it except to buy a thing.

Modern society has trained people to limit their sense of agency down to only purchasing decisions. Then people are surprised when yanking the "buy" lever over and over doesn't make them happy.
by asa400 | 2025-07-16 16:34:05+00:00
> However, uv has, at least for my beginner and cynical eyes, swept away most of the bullshit for me.

uv is _much_ better than what came before. As someone who has only had only glancing contact with Python throughout my career (terrible experiences at jobs with conda and pip), uv feels like Python trying to actually join the 21st century of package management. It's telling that it's in Rust and clearly takes inspiration from Cargo, which itself took inspiration from Ruby and Bundler.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-16 16:34:10+00:00
> The new Rogers Satellite service, developed through partnerships with SpaceX and Lynk Global, allows customers to send text messages and access text-to-911 services using their existing smartphones in areas without traditional cellular coverage.

Huge for aiding search and rescue. There was also some talk about low-res GPS using starlinks, wonder if they could do something similar even without dedicated receivers, like cell providers can do (via trilateration).
by floren | 2025-07-16 16:34:43+00:00
The thing about Gemini is that it reads like someone who thinks Gopher sounds neat but has only ever dealt with HTTP and HTML/Markdown... so they took HTTP GET, chopped a digit off the response codes, and called it a new protocol, then tacked on an intentionally-broken Markdown implementation (more broken than the original Markdown, I mean).

Interesting note: the first line of a Gemini response is a MIME type. It's usually `text/gemini` but there's no reason it can't be `text/html`, `application/javascript`, or anything else. A while back I did a little poking in some Gemini server code and made it do precisely that: serve HTML files which I accessed via elinks. Of course once you're serving HTML over Gemini you might ask, exactly what advantage am I getting by putting it over a purposefully-broken subset of HTTP, and I would say that's a damn good question.

In 2024 I wrote 'The modern Web and all its crappiness didn't come about because there's something inherently wicked in HTML and HTTP, it came about because people built things on top of the basic foundation, extending (sometimes poorly) and expanding. The more people play with Gemini, the more they'll want to "extend" it... and the closer they'll bring it to HTTP, because it follows the exact same fundamental model once you strip off the extraneous document format specification' and I stand by it.
Show HN: Mdts – Serve Local Markdown Directory with a File Tree UI
by unhappychoice | 2025-07-16 16:35:22+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a simple CLI tool called `mdts` (Markdown Tree Server) that serves Markdown files from a local directory with a web-based interface.

Key features: - File tree navigation in the browser - Instant preview of Markdown content - Zero configuration: run a single command and it opens in your browser

It's useful for browsing local notes, documentation, or any Markdown-based wiki structure.

GitHub: https://github.com/unhappychoice/mdts Demo screenshot: https://github.com/unhappychoice/mdts/blob/main/docs/screens...
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-07-16 16:35:26+00:00
I expect that for every two python users who know what `pip` is, there are three who are discouraged from thinking about the environment at all. Given that, focusing on the language and not the packaging is the right choice. Packaging is most often somebody else's problem.

It's just HN users are more likely to be that somebody else. Probably we have to deal with non-python dependencies anyway so we're reaching for bigger hammers like docker or nix. It would be nice if there wasn't a mess of python package managers, but whichever one I use ends up being a somewhat unimportant middle-layer anyway.
by alexey-salmin | 2025-07-16 16:35:35+00:00
Since what age did your kids start to go outside and play by themselves?

I'm not in the UK, but in France it seems that people generally won't let their kids outside alone until they're 10 or not even then. That makes a difference of several hours of free time a week which is quite significant. Luckily people seem to be fine to leave their kids alone at home, which amounts to a few more hours of time per week. Also luckily there are mandatory public schools starting from the age of 3, so France in general is not bad for raising kids time-wise and money-wise. However I do notice that amount of autonomy people entrust to their kids here is lower than what I tend to do.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-16 16:36:07+00:00
Ah, neat.

If I'm reading this right, then the real big benefit of these things would be solid state magnetic storage.

The benefit of these things is they don't create a magnetic field while they do respond to magnetic fields. That means you can pretty tightly pack these things together without concern that they'll interact with each other. A light electric pulse could determine if the bit is a 1 or a zero and a strong pulse would flip the bit.

I'm guessing that due to this nature, these things would actually have pretty long shelf lives and near infinite read/write cycles since you are, effectively, just flipping atoms around and not actually breaking structures or dumping in charge.

These should mostly work with regular silicon manufacturing. The tricky part will be how tightly you can pack these things together before the reading structures start interfering with each other.
by adam_arthur | 2025-07-16 16:36:14+00:00
Is this true for very wealthy people, or only for above average earners?

There are many examples of very wealthy people having lots of children. Children are still a significant investment for high earners, but at a certain wealth level it becomes inconsequential.

Quick google shows some support for this idea:

"There is a new emerging trend where better-off men and women are more likely to have children than less well-off men and women."

https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-babies-for-the-rich-the-rela...

ergo, there is probably a level of financial support/wealth at which people start having more children. Or more simply, the point at which the personal benefits outweigh the personal costs.
by MrRadar | 2025-07-16 16:36:37+00:00
There is a port of Mbed TLS to Classic MacOS[1] which has TLS 1.2 enabled but per the README.md probably not the right cihper suites (it only has AES-CBC ciphers enabled by default) to connect to servers configured per the widely-used Mozilla "intermediate" recommendations[2] (which require AES-GCM or ChaCha20 ciphers).

[1] https://github.com/bbenchoff/MacSSL [2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS
by Izkata | 2025-07-16 16:36:40+00:00
There's actually 4 kinds:

def foo(... # public def _foo(... # internal def __foo(... # munged def __foo__(... # magic

Internal is more convention as the language doesn't really do anything with it, but it does with munged, and magic methods are specifically for things implemented in the language.

Internal and munged don't exactly map to private and protected, but are kinda similar ish.
by slightwinder | 2025-07-16 16:37:05+00:00
Python has never been THE web development language, that's always been JavaScript. Python is one of the more popular server-side languages, and JavaScript has move from frontend to backend in the last decade too. Not sure whether this has really taken the crown of any backend-language.

And what is lightweight scripting? Isn't scripting by definition lightweight?

But Python overall is still very popular outside the Data Science-circles. Not sure where this claim is coming from.
by simion314 | 2025-07-16 16:37:06+00:00
The advances are not linear, the Ruzzian advanced a lot in first days (there were some traitors in the Ukrainian army),. since then they advance at snail speed, my stats were from my memory, probably during winter when they attacked massively and gained almost nothing. If you have good data and can export it as csv then would be nice too see some graphs, like gains per month/week ,casualties per week and km^2 , distance from Kyiv.

In war a country can give up on some territory and move the army and government if needed into a better defended region, Ukrainians only need the will to fight and the Ruzzians provide them plenty of reasons not to be Russified.

So my stats were outdated or wrong, it is 5x, 10 x then ? Let me know a better number to use in future.
by preciousoo | 2025-07-16 16:37:17+00:00
It’s an absurd statement because you are human and are aware of how research works on an individual level.

Take yourself outside of that, and imagine you invented earth, added an ecosystem, and some humans. Wheels were invented ~6k years ago, and “humans” have existed for ~40-300k years. We can do the same for other technologies. As a group, we are incredibly inefficient, and an outside observer would see our efforts at building societies and failing to be “brute force”