MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gettingoverit | 2025-07-21 02:33:02+00:00
Actually AI has a lot to do with material design. I can't do a proper explanation, so please bear with this information dump:

- We don't have a strong physical theory for solid state physics. Quantum stuff doesn't scale well from 1 atom to a mole of atoms, because 10^23 goes into the exponent of number of energy levels in the system, and then we also have to model interaction of those levels.

- Physical properties of materials depend on their crystal structure, unevenness of that structure, spectrum of size of crystals, temperature, pressure, fields they're exposed to and current position of stars in the sky. Even the "wrong" solid state physics equations we have are highly non-linear.

- State-of-the-art effects are usually achieved with combinations of such materials.

- Exact parameters of the process used to put those materials together radically change the behavior of the system. Put that nanolayer with a different sort of vapor deposition or at different pressure, and the thing will stop working. Ever wondered why we don't produce all the neodymium magnets at N55 grade? Because even precise description of the process is not enough.

- AI doesn't care about the exact physics, but is sometimes very good at navigating in the large parameter space.

- Google have recently made AI that predicted thousands of novel material structures. They found more materials than were found by all human research over the whole humankind history.

I wouldn't expect AI to explain what's going on in solid-state physics anytime soon, but exploring crystal structures, doping, and process parameters automatically might actually get us new materials a couple hundred years faster.
by firesteelrain | 2025-07-21 02:33:26+00:00
That seems like a prompt problem.

“Extract the value of the message key from the following JSON object”

This gets you the correct output.

It’s parser recursion. If we directly address the key value pair in Python, it would have been context aware, but it isn’t.

The model can be context-aware, but for ambiguous cases like nested JSON strings, it may pick the interpretation that seems most helpful rather than most literal.

Another way to get what you want is

“Extract only the top-level ‘message’ key value without parsing its contents.”

I don’t see this as a sanitizing problem
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-21 02:35:19+00:00
Europe will deploy more air-conditioning units and renewables before the US ever fixes its gun death problem (highest firearm ownership per capita globally, little to no mental health services at scale [suicide is half of all gun violence deaths in the US], etc). Europe can’t control climate change in the near term, but the US could absolutely provide mental health services and more aggressively regulate firearm ownership. It is an active choice not to.

https://www.ehpa.org/market-data/

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-electricit...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/05/24/suicides-...
by slowmovintarget | 2025-07-21 02:35:40+00:00
I've had that experience in three categories, all for different reasons.

I have clothing that I bought shortly after high school, and it's now more than 25 years old and still good. It's tougher and thicker cotton than anything I seem to be able to buy now. Aside from clothing getting worse (made overseas, made cheaply, or from poor materials), the textiles themselves have gotten worse. Cotton crops have yielded fibers of very low quality in recent years, especially post-pandemic. Once-dependable brands no longer make clothing that lasts. Brooks Brothers used to be the last hold out for high quality clothing in the U.S., and they sold their brand and turned to crap even before the pandemic.

Appliances are another thing. Washing machines routinely lasted more than twenty years. Same for refrigerators. The microwave my parents got as a wedding gift didn't have a lot of features, but it kept on heating for 30 years. Now, it's difficult to find machines that don't need replacing in 5 years, and microwaves are almost exclusively made in China. The good stuff that you used to be able to get just isn't made by manufacturers that attempt to make durable items. They're made to shave margins and turn to junk in a few years.

The third thing extends to all manner of consumer goods, and it is actually a materials and chemicals issue. So many of the things that worked really well, were made from materials that turned out to be actively harmful. Harmful plastics, harmful coatings on non-stick pans, and while I can still go out and purchase those things if I wanted, we've had to eliminate or replace them with worse alternatives.

Tea, when brewed from loose leaf in a pot and strained through a metal strainer instead of plasticized tea bags (they're not actually paper) means you need actual high-quality tea instead of the junk that's on grocery store shelves. It turns out that's actually difficult to come by. Porcelain and glass not made in China (China's porcelain and glass all--all--have unsafe lead levels) is also difficult to find. There very few safe sources: France and Turkey for porcelain, and Italy for glass.

There are a whole series of reasons, but consumer goods, are, in fact, worse than they used to be. It's not just fuzzy nostalgia.
by hahahal | 2025-07-21 02:35:41+00:00
> Gemini 2.5 PRO | Claude Opus 4

What I thought you were going to say is “Gemini- wha?”.

I’ve used Gemini 2.5 PRO and would definitely not use it for most of my coding tasks. Yes, it’s better at hard things, but it’s not great at normal things.

I’ve not used Claude 4 Opus yet- I know it’s great at large context- but Claude 4 Sonnet Thinking is mostly good unless the task is too complex, and Claude 4 Sonnet is good for basic operations in 1-2 files- beyond that it’s challenged and makes awful mistakes.
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-21 02:35:41+00:00
Not really fair to put it on the parents. The internet has totally changed the availability. When I was a kid, to get porn you had to go to someplace that sold Penthouse or Hustler or similar magazines, those had nudes but didn't depict full-on sex. A lot of convenience stores and gas stations sold them but they wouldn't sell them to a kid. To get hardcore stuff you had to go to an "adult bookstore" or maybe the back room at a video rental place. Again they would not let a kid in those places.

Maybe you got to peek at something that a friend's older brother had, or a friend knew where his dad's stash was.

But bottom line it wasn't easily available and took some effort and risk to get it, and that's even if your parents weren't doing anything to prevent it.

On the internet it's just there. Maybe you click "Yes I'm 18" but that's hardly a roadblock.

What these laws do is try to get back to the 1990s and earlier when access was much more limited. Parents want this, they vote for this. In that sense, they are doing something about it.
by Ericson2314 | 2025-07-21 02:35:55+00:00
We're not in a great depression.

I'm not against make-work per se, but we are currently in an era where we need to improve public sector administrative capacity. It's really hard to do that while saddling agencies with make-work, because the latter is so bad for esprite de corps.

It would better to e.g. expand peace corps / Americorps. And if they want to staff do-nothings on subways, they can, but it needs not involve the MTA.
by chrsw | 2025-07-21 02:35:57+00:00
I believe if RISC-V takes off then most of the popular commercial RISC-V implementations will come from existing chip companies. Qualcomm, NVIDIA, NXP, TI, Samsung, MediaTek and a bunch in China. Of course, the performance of those companies probably won't depend on if they're on RISC-V or Arm.

Newer, smaller RISC-V first chip companies will only be able to fill niche markets and customer specific applications because they simply won't have the scale or customer base to compete with the giant chip companies.

Will we see a large market for laptops and workstations on RISC-V? Probably not.

But one of the interesting things about RISC-V is you can build extensions on the standard ISA so custom implementations can get application specific hardware additions while still leveraging pretty much the entire open source software stack for development toolchains and general purpose compute. With Arm, you were pretty much limited to what they provided unless you are huge customer like Apple were you had the leverage to negotiate you're own technology and IP agreements.

I don't think RISC-V is a big threat to Arm though. They can also provide their own RISC-V solutions if they felt like they needed to retain customers.

So maybe there's an opportunity for Arm-like, fabless, deisgn services companies that sell custom RISC-V based solutions for their customers. The only companies I know of like that are Synopsys, Cadence and Siemens.
by apsurd | 2025-07-21 02:36:01+00:00
angular was dead on arrival - to me - because it seems nuts to bolt on full programming language constructs into html attributes. In the same way React easily won because it chose the exact opposite: put the UI constructs inside the full programming language.

Both have their worts, but I'm perpetually puzzled by how angular ever made sense as ergonomic. I suppose people like Vue so there's still some insistence on augmenting templates with programming constructs. Seems inevitable that templates will want more and more powerful constructs... and boom.
by tcoff91 | 2025-07-21 02:36:13+00:00
magit can only be as good as git.

jj’s first class conflicts and the way it handles rebase offers a UX that’s not possible with git.

Like with jj rebasing a stack of branches is just a single command. In git you would have to rebase the branch at the top and then hard reset each branch pointer one by one. jj’s rebase is just more powerful than git’s. Like it doesn’t just rebase a linear series of commits it rebases merge commits, other sibling branches, etc… it’s absolutely mind blowing.

https://ofcr.se/jujutsu-merge-workflow/
by mwigdahl | 2025-07-21 02:36:14+00:00
Sure, compilers are deterministic and LLMs are not. If you're asserting that a probabilistic process can't get you to a deterministic outcome, Monte Carlo integration would like to have a word.

My point was that comparing the rise of AI tooling to the rise of HLL compilers is a much better comparison than comparing it to crypto.

HLL compilers were originally seen as crutches and inferior tools and that "real" programmers used assembly. Compiler-generated code was derided as inefficient and ugly.

And it was! In the early days, a good programmer who knew the machine could outdo the compiler. But that didn't stop a huge expansion of new programmers who could write COBOL and FORTRAN but never learned assembly. And the compilers got better over time. These days it's a rare wizard who can outdo a compiler's optimizations, and it takes multiple orders of magnitude longer for those rare humans to achieve it.

LLM tooling isn't going away. Even in these very early days, it enables non-programmers to construct basic applications that work, using English requests! And the tools have gotten better on almost a monthly basis.

You can like them or not like them, just like the early programmers could like or not like compilers. But dismissing them as analogous to empty crypto hype is a bad comparison.
by taneq | 2025-07-21 02:36:39+00:00
This is very true. Just because there's sunk costs doesn't mean you're falling for the sunk costs fallacy. Sure, sometimes you need to just cut your losses and start over, but often it's better to push through (maybe with a bit of a rethink) and get some degree of useful result than it is to just scrap everything and start over.
by superkuh | 2025-07-21 02:37:10+00:00
It's not AI. It's corporations, a much more dangerous form of non-human person. The actual AI bots aren't doing this abusive HTTP request spamming that causes services to be infeasible to run due to resource usage. It's coming from normal HTTP request software with no AI. And it's happening due to the perverse incentives of corporations and their intrinsic lack of liability. They truly are the worst legal persons.
by vl | 2025-07-21 02:37:14+00:00
It's ultrathink one word, not ultra-think. (See below).

I use Claude Code with Opus, and had same experience - was pushing it hard to implement complex test, and it gave me an empty test function with test plan inside in a comment (lol).

I do want to try Gemini 2.5 Pro, but I don't know a tool which would make experience compatible to Claude Code. Would it make sense to use with Cursor? Do they try to limit context?

~/.nvm/versions/node/v22.16.0/lib/node_modules/@anthropic-ai/claude-code $ npx prettier cli.js | ack ultrathink -C 20 var jw1 = { HIGHEST: 31999, MIDDLE: 1e4, BASIC: 4000, NONE: 0 }, Yk6 = { english: { HIGHEST: [ { pattern: "think harder", needsWordBoundary: !0 }, { pattern: "think intensely", needsWordBoundary: !0 }, { pattern: "think longer", needsWordBoundary: !0 }, { pattern: "think really hard", needsWordBoundary: !0 }, { pattern: "think super hard", needsWordBoundary: !0 }, { pattern: "think very hard", needsWordBoundary: !0 }, { pattern: "ultrathink", needsWordBoundary: !0 }, ], MIDDLE: [ { pattern: "think about it", needsWordBoundary: !0 }, { pattern: "think a lot", needsWordBoundary: !0 }, { pattern: "think deeply", needsWordBoundary: !0 }, { pattern: "think hard", needsWordBoundary: !0 }, { pattern: "think more", needsWordBoundary: !0 }, { pattern: "megathink", needsWordBoundary: !0 }, ], BASIC: [{ pattern: "think", needsWordBoundary: !0 }], NONE: [], },
by nlpnerd | 2025-07-21 02:37:18+00:00
Definitely makes a lot less economic sense today. Takes easily months of full time work to raise from investors. That level of effort in the early days of a startup could put mean practically putting your pre-MVP/MVP on hold for months.

This is why I always believed that VCs and accelerators that mislead startups about how early they are willing to invest are doing a lot of damage to gullible founders.
by Veserv | 2025-07-21 02:37:21+00:00
Everything is events. The problem is that, as you notice, you frequently encounter situations where there are too many events to handle. Metrics, logging, and tracing are just three different ways to handle that problem.

Metrics handles too many events by aggregating them. You handle too many events by squashing them into a smaller number of events that aggregate the information.

Logging handles too many events by sampling them. If you have N times as many events as you can handle, take 1 in N of them or whatever other sampling model you want.

Tracing is logging, but where you have chains of correlated events. If you have a request started and a request ended event, it is pretty useless to get one without the other. So, you sample at the "chain of correlated events" level. You want 1 in N "chains of correlated events".

But, if you have enough throughput for all your events, just get yourself a big pile of events and throw it into a visualizer. Or better yet, just enable time travel debugging tracing so you do not need to even need to figure out how the events map to your program state.
by rockwotj | 2025-07-21 02:39:20+00:00
I did this in about 400 or 500 lines of typescript with direct API calls into vertex AI (using a library for auth still). Supports zod for structured outputs (gemini 2.5 supports json schema proper, not just the openapi schemas the previous models did), and optionally providing tools or not. Includes a nice agent loop that integrates well with it and your tools get auto deserialized and strongly typed args (type inference in ts these days is so good). Probably could had been less if I had used googles genai lib and anthropic’s sdk - I didn’t use them because it really wasn’t much code and I wanted to inject auditing at the lowest level and know the library wasn’t changing anything.

If you really want a library, python has litellm, and typescript has vercel’s AI library. I am sure there are many others, and in other languages too.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-21 02:39:25+00:00
It should be in all standard encyclopedias, but it's certainly in Britannica and Wikipedia. Usually I like to cite Wikipedia, but I'll add Britannica in case people have conspiracy theories about Wikipedia. And you can read more about their romance in the other sources. The Slate article discusses her use of antisemitic sources in her books.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hannah-Arendt

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Martin-Heidegger-German...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger

https://www.openculture.com/2017/05/the-love-letters-of-hann...

https://slate.com/human-interest/2009/10/troubling-new-revel...
by idiotsecant | 2025-07-21 02:39:40+00:00
I think the even bigger problem is that what AI is doing to the Internet now, it will do to personal knowledge on a generational scale.

It will get good, startling good, to the point that going through the heavy effort of really learning things becomes old fashioned, and positively antiquated.

I am afraid of what happens to the march of progress when that happens.
by queenkjuul | 2025-07-21 02:41:56+00:00
No, sorry, the US has had 50 years of "trying not to do it at all if we can get away with it"

Absolutely not been trying to do it well.

Despite this, Washington Metro is pretty solid, i take CTA or my bike everywhere in Chicago, and i was able to navigate Philly and NYC reliably without a car without issue.

US transit agencies have been deliberately and systematically underfunded and poorly maintained. Public transit works great all over the world when governments actually care about doing it well.
by guelo | 2025-07-21 02:42:12+00:00
I'm afraid programming is going to be frozen at 2020s tech for the foreseeable future. New frameworks, libraries and languages will suffer from a chicken and egg problem where no one uses them because LLMs don't know how to answer questions about them and LLMs can't learn the new stuff because programmers aren't generating new samples for the LLMs to ingest.
by Analemma_ | 2025-07-21 02:43:21+00:00
Balkanization was always the inevitable end state of the Internet, because the alternative is ceding sovereignty over what is now critical infrastructure, and states simply do not do that.

It was fine when the Internet was a side hobby for a slice of the population, but now that it’s fundamental to all aspects of life, having it under the control of a foreign government (and the tech companies which act as de facto organs of that government) is no longer acceptable.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-21 02:43:47+00:00
The iTerm version of the feature is buggy, in my experience. The old haxie[0] Visor/TotalTerminal[1] which patched it into the Apple terminal produced a better result, somehow despite being literal hack.

I wouldn’t be opposed to paying for a dropdown terminal that worked as well as or better than TotalTerminal did.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsanity [1]: https://totalterminal.binaryage.com/
by eska | 2025-07-21 02:44:16+00:00
Study 1: “In the first study, college students…”

Study 2: generate 40 words, after 10, ask whether they want to switch to a different letter and restart from 0. The researchers expect people to 1) know that there are more words in their language with the second letter so it’s easier 2) expect them to think it’s so much faster it’s worth undoing 25% progress.

I’m sorry but this sounds like bad science, as is common in this field.
by asadotzler | 2025-07-21 02:46:22+00:00
I paid ~$600 for my first Windows compiler, over a grand in today's money. But I didn't have to keep paying every month forever to be able to code at all. Take Claude or whatever away from a vibe coder and they're completely dead in the water.

Apple's fee is like that Visual Studio purchase I made, a fee that lets me compile for their platforms. It's not a subscription without which I can't code anything at all.

Creating a new dependency on monthly subscriptions to unsustainable companies or products is a huge step away from accessible programming of the last 50 years and one that should not so casually be dismissed.
by perpetualpatzer | 2025-07-21 02:47:31+00:00
It would be interesting to see this argument stratified by some measure of college preparedness like test scores, or admission to a 4yr school.

If -- as the article seems to imply -- most of the effect is explained by what schools and programs poorer students are pathed into, it seems plausible that the failing is at the point of pathing (primary/secondary education).
by woodpanel | 2025-07-21 02:48:02+00:00
May 2019 is when they launched in Germany and by looking at the shelves during the coming months it was obvious that BYND's then-market-cap of over 10B USD was unsustainable. Shelves were being emptied out quickly by customers at the start. By the end of the summer though, these new types of patties (whether BYND or its competitors) had more discount/sale stickers on it than the average carpet store window.

To be fair: Price actually returned to that valuation a year later during Covid but by then I wasn't exposed and didn't bother to double down. Probably bad financial behaviour, since I was betting against "the market can be incorrect longer than you can remain solvent", but the visibility of it's products vis-a-vis the hype, and the unlikelyness to me that a patty of hyperprocessed legumes could ever achieve a moat large enough to sustain such a market cap, gave me confidence that with BYND sanity would return to markets rather sooner along side the first quaterly results.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-21 02:48:44+00:00
When I ask the same question it says primarily glucose and also mentions ketone bodies. It mentions that the brain is flexible and while it normally metabolizes glucose it may sometimes need to metabolize other things. This is both at gemini.google.com and using google.com in "AI mode" in private browsing.

gemini.google.com mentions lactate and fat. But it also knows I care about science. I'm not sure how much history is used currently.

But this is kind of silly because if you're a member of the public and ask a scientist what the brain uses as fuel they'll also say glucose. If you've ever been in a conversation with someone who felt the need to tell you *every detail* of everything they know, then you'll understand that that's not how human communication typically works. So if you want something more specific you have to start the conversation in a way that elicits it.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-21 02:49:06+00:00
> Uhh, you are aware that planned obsolescence is only incentivized in fiat markets based in money-printing which aren't real markets.

I have no idea why you're claiming that. What should I read?

But you're not going to get rid of business cycles by not having 2% inflation or whatever, and those cycles don't seem strong enough to impact product lifetimes all that much. "chaotic whipsaw" is a big exaggeration.
by Ericson2314 | 2025-07-21 02:51:03+00:00
The New York State welfare system is better than the US average by a lot, actually. The problem is overcomplexity (e.g means testing) makes it scary to rely on, and general shit American efficiency means outcomes per dollar are not as good as Europe.

The "machine" politicians who these less-than-enligtened unions tend to support are actually more to the right (of the Democratic party) and less interested in expanding the welfare state. In fact, there have been times the unions are explicitly against more benefits to the general public because they feel they weaken union contracts in comparison (stuff that only they got before now everyone gets).

I wish I was kidding with these things...

European style sectoral bargaining is much better, and makes for much more enlightened unions. Hopefully we get it in the US, there are some positive signs it might be possible.