MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by protocolture | 2025-07-01 04:44:38+00:00
Did you read tfa?

>roughly one in six — were found to have incorrect active ingredient levels

>But some drugs are also counterfeit, and that increases the risk of discrepancies between what's on the product label and the actual medicine within.

If I was desperate, and given a choice between either 1 of "Might have incorrect active ingredient levels" "Might be counterfeit" "Might have been stored improperly" or "No cancer drugs for you" I know which way I would be leaning.

"Defective" is doing a lot of work in this headline.
by ezekiel68 | 2025-07-01 04:45:01+00:00
I can so relate to this guy.

I'm "only" in my 50s now, but I am in my 50s now. For a couple of decades I've had this grand vision about how to build the perfect algorithmic trading system. The practical expression of this has come in fits and starts.

During the Pandemic, I finally devoted some time to building a bespoke server and hosting it co-located facility near a high-quality market data provider. I chose to do this before the software was ready in order to "light a fire under my a$$" and help motivate me to move things along. By the end of 2021 I had written, tested, and deployed a set of specialized clients written in rust to consume the market data and perform basic parsing of the real-time information. I stored the transformed output of these processes in log files as a temporary data sink that could represent the data "someday" moving downstream in a custom stream processing platform that would perform trades via an online broker.

And then, it stalled. There always seemed to be good reasons why I couldn't commit to one implementation strategy or another. Would I pass the data downstreeam via pipes? With Kafka? Via shared memory? Would the parsed input be represented via protobuf records? A custom binary format? Apache Arrow/Parquet format? Would the algorithms be expressed in custom rust code? Using Pandas(numpy)/Polars? Would I focus on my imagined "insights" into how prices move or make the transition to Machine Learning by trying to produce "special sauce" custom features that could be fed into models of various types? In the meantime, I have only collected a high volume of daily log files.

There has been some progress, of course. Last year, with LLMs as my pair programmer, I added vector processing to the ingest components, which made them run even more efficiently. I certainly enjoy the sporadic work I dedicate to working on the system. But there always seems to be a fog of possibilities ahead of me obscuring my view towards a broker API getting called.

My family and closest friends look upon this as the "hot rod in his garage" which I sometimes work on and which will probably never get finished.
by ModernMech | 2025-07-01 04:47:04+00:00
According to that link you posted, many of the other argument parsers don't even generate help, only one other offers multiple interfaces, and none of the others are noted as having color or suggested fixes.

These aren't exactly esoteric features, and you're not going to get them for free. I'm happy to pay in space and compile time for clap to gain those features.

This isn't a case of the commandline app needing to be facebook, but rather putting the exponential gains we've made in storage space to good use providing features which should be table stakes at this point.
by seszett | 2025-07-01 04:48:08+00:00
I don't know, maybe I didn't look hard enough but the last time it happened to me I couldn't find a way to hear the original.

It was a video in French over accents, so the automatic English translation kind of made it useless. I'm French anyway, why translate it to English? I don't even live in an English-speaking country either (not that translating to Dutch would have been better).
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-07-01 04:48:12+00:00
Surely that is not true? I thought rental fees were common with using the vendor equipment (something like $10/month). It is a frequently listed as a cost cutting measure to buy your own modem rather than rent from The ISP. A modem is $100-200, so you should be net positive after a year on the investment.
by kevmo314 | 2025-07-01 04:48:52+00:00
Yeah, at a very high level it's similar to an actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithm. The rule text is a value function and one could build a critic model that takes as input the rule text and the main model's (the actor's) output to produce a reward.

This is easier said than done though because this value function is so noisy it's often hard to learn from it. And also whether or not a response (the model output) matches the value function (the Cursor rules) is not even that easy to grade. It's been easier to train the chain-of-thought style reasoning since one can directly score it via the length of thinking.

This new paper covers some of the difficulties of language-based critic models: https://openreview.net/pdf?id=0tXmtd0vZG

Generally speaking, the algorithm and approach is not new. Being able to do it in a reasonable amount of compute is the new part.
by tomhow | 2025-07-01 04:49:19+00:00
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by b0a04gl | 2025-07-01 04:50:25+00:00
10kloc for command line parsing. TEN THOUSAND LINES. pico-args does it in 700 lines and probably handles 99% of real world use cases. compile times go to shit binary size bloats and for some edge case you'll never hit.most CLI tools need what three four flags max, maybe a subcommand or two. you don't need the swiss army knife of argument parsing for that. tried replacing clap with pico-args on three different projects last month. 80% reduction in compile time every single time. binary went from 8mb to 2mb on one of them.the "disk space is cheap" argument's acceptable partially but compile time isn't. developer experience isn't. startup time isn't. memory usage isn't
by com2kid | 2025-07-01 04:50:51+00:00
If you rename your wife on your contact list to "my wife" it'll work!

"Test <name> and say I'll be late" works fine. Sometimes the message gets sent, sometimes a request for confirmation is asked first. Irritating it isn't consistent.

> "open app antenna pod and begin playing"

This should work with the old Google assistant even, assuming the app added the proper integrations.
by majormajor | 2025-07-01 04:51:48+00:00
Why are we drawing a difference between "prompt" and "context" exactly? The linked article is a bit of puffery that redefines a commonly-used term - "context" - to mean something different than what it's meant so far when we discuss "context windows." It seems to just be some puffery to generate new hype.

When you play with the APIs the prompt/context all blurs together into just stuff that goes into the text fed to the model to produce text. Like when you build your own basic chatbot UI and realize you're sending the whole transcript along with every step. Using the terms from the article, that's "State/History." Then "RAG" and "Long term memory" are ways of working around the limits of context window size and the tendency of models to lose the plot after a huge number of tokens, to help make more effective prompts. "Available tools" info also falls squarely in the "prompt engineering" category.

The reason prompt engineering is going the way of the dodo is because tools are doing more of the drudgery to make a good prompt themselves. E.g., finding relevant parts of a codebase. They do this with a combination of chaining multiple calls to a model together to progressively build up a "final" prompt plus various other less-LLM-native approaches (like plain old "find").

So yeah, if you want to build a useful LLM-based tool for users you have to write software to generate good prompts. But... it ain't really different than prompt engineering other than reducing the end user's need to do it manually.

It's less that we've made the AI better and more that we've made better user interfaces than just-plain-chat. A chat interface on a tool that can read your code can do more, more quickly, than one that relies on you selecting all the relevant snippets. A visual diff inside of a code editor is easier to read than a markdown-based rendering of the same in a chat transcript. Etc.
by dinfinity | 2025-07-01 04:52:33+00:00
If you wear a glucose monitor and experiment a little, you'll find that the composition and timing of meals matter a lot. Eat high glycemic index stuff on its own: big spike, big crash. Eat it with slowly digesting stuff: hardly a spike. It makes sense if you mentally trace how the food you ate will be moving through your digestive system.

French people eat lots of bread, but it's not like American white 'bread' and it is often eaten together with plenty of cheese, olives, butter, etc. From your linked study: "Dietary carbohydrate content may not fully represent glycemic response, because other aspects of the diet, such as fat content and cooking methods, can also influence glycemic response."

Said otherwise: glycemic index != glycemic response.

> The theory about "nutrient-poor environments" doesn't really fit the case of France which is consuming 3x more bread per capita than US while having 4x less obese people.

I think you're misinterpreting. The nutrient-rich French (or American) environment doesn't cause glycemic spikes, but those spikes are problematic when they occur due to that environment. If there were only a very limited source of food in the US, the spikes wouldn't be as problematic (with regard to obesity, not insulin insensitivity).
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-01 04:52:45+00:00
> If a company invests billions in R&D to create hardware and its integrated software, shouldn’t it have the right to control who or what interacts with it?

You're asking a rhetorical question without providing any argument for why the answer should be yes, which makes it pretty easy to just answer the question with the word no.

> Why should I be forced to open up the carefully designed ecosystem I’ve built?

The premise of this question is that they have the right to interfere with how other people choose to interact with each other.

Meanwhile the premise of the government-granted copyright monopoly they've used to build their lock-in system is that you build something and in exchange you can charge money for it. Leveraging that into control over markets external to the one you developed is a thing that should be expressly prohibited.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-01 04:53:48+00:00
Trying to win with good policy alone is nightmare mode hard.

The Democrats have been utterly unwilling to go towards popularism– to calling out the capitalist classes–as the problem, as exploiters.

Also the Democrats havent gotten a ton of chance to actually do much. The last time they had a trifecta was 2011. We got the ACA, which Dems attempted very very hard to make bipartisan, and ended up passing on their own anyways after making concession after concession in failed attempts to woo in some Republicans. The ultra conservative supreme court and court shopped to high hell 5th district have also kept any possible progress from happening. Running on talk alone is hard, in a system set up to only enable obstruction & de-governance.
by dotancohen | 2025-07-01 04:54:01+00:00
It should be noted that Mein Kampf's first three chapters are pretty much a call for the common citizen to start becoming more interested - if not involved - in his local politics. I am of the opinion that this is the reason that the book was banned. The antisemitism in the book is far more restrained than I was expecting. But the call to hold politicians accountable to the people - that was a surprise.
by userbinator | 2025-07-01 04:54:39+00:00
I stopped using the site long ago because of what it's turned into, and only visit it for the occasional things I can't do with Invidious, yt-dlp, and a few shell scripts.

It's quite telling of how their developers "think" when they put the original language stream as the last one in the track list, instead of the sane first (zeroth?) position that it should occupy.
by dawnofdusk | 2025-07-01 04:55:44+00:00
>This really does sound like Computer Science since it's very beginnings.

Except in actual computer science you can prove that your strategies, discovered by trial and error, are actually good. Even though Dijkstra invented his eponymous algorithm by writing on a napkin, it's phrased in the language of mathematics and one can analyze quantitatively its effectiveness and trade-offs, and one can prove if it's optimal (as was done recently).
by margalabargala | 2025-07-01 04:56:07+00:00
What are you talking about? Modems are incredibly simple to set up. You buy it, log into your account on another network or call the ISP, enter your modem's mac address...and that's it. You have to type in the mac or read it off over the phone. There's nothing on device to set up, it's much easier than a router.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-01 04:56:43+00:00
> Which are those?

Well like I mentioned earlier, there's a regulation that cars have wheels, right? That's not a risk thing.

> I’m beginning to think the discussion is more about dogmatic feelings about regulation than the topic at hand.

No, it's just explaining my logic. Using a more abstract example makes it easier to focus on the logic.

> Again, your argument is based on following regulations for the sake of regulation

No it's not.

> and I don’t agree that’s why regulations exist.

I never said that's why regulations exist.

I never said anything about why regulations exist.

I'm so confused.

I'm just talking about whether a certain kind of rule is circular or not...

It's not a very important point, to be fair. But you seem to think I'm making some wildly different points from what I intend, and I'm not sure why there's such a communication breakdown.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-01 04:59:30+00:00
> the rich and powerful minority is more organized

They show up. I've worked on privacy legislation at the state and local level. Barely anybody calls or writes in support. That means barely anybody would turn up to a contested primary election over it, or donate to a challenger, or organise the foregoing en masse. Contrast that with bread-and-butter or activist issues, where it's immediately clear there is political capital at the very least on the board.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-01 05:00:03+00:00
Unlike phone platforms, phone apps are a fairly competitive market, and competitive markets have low margins.

Which means that if you remove 30% of revenue as a cost, one of two things happens. Either the price comes down because the suppliers who lower their price get more business, or the customers aren't very price sensitive in which case developers who use the additional money to improve their apps get more of the market and then users get better apps.

Either of those is better for the customer than having the money go into a megacorp's money bin and have them use it for competition-reducing M&A or unrelated empire-building projects or just have them add it to their cash mountain and have the customer paying that money in exchange for nothing.
by dcow | 2025-07-01 05:00:23+00:00
Well, I guess you’d argue that if the ecosystem is so big that it has a social-scale impact, then it should be subject to the whims of society. One such whim is adoption of capitalism as economic policy and a following belief in preserving the free markets that enforce the competition that is required.

Why do we oppress any freedom? When doing so protects the society we are trying to build.
by pyuser583 | 2025-07-01 05:02:33+00:00
There are some very complicated legal issues that come up with international video.

Movie companies sometimes don’t want things distributed on certain areas - ever. Like when there are different productions of the same movie for different areas.

The productions would compete against each other.

It’s one of the reasons DVD has multiple incompatible regions.

I don’t know if this is YouTube’s reasoning.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-01 05:02:34+00:00
The horrors about to happen as education, science, weather, disaster, space, aid, and other systems are all roundly sabotaged doesn't look at all promising to me. I think we were getting a ton of value for a very very little amount of money (if you consider total spending) in these areas, that is hugely responsible for driving America's economy in countless ways. Going horror movie slasher against Medicare also seems really obviously crazy bad.

If the problem is that "tax the rich" is taxing the middle class & poor, it wasn't actually popularism. It's also not what happened under Biden nor Obama nor what Kamala's plan was!!
by ezekiel68 | 2025-07-01 05:03:02+00:00
I should. Yet what I'm trying to express in my comment is that the part of the system that would analyze the data and then make trades is not only unfinished, is still unstarted. So I have continually polished the ingest portion but felt "stuck" when contemplating how to get the system as-a-whole into a testable state.

The broker API I plan to use features the ability to "paper trade" in a simulated account. So I'm not so worried about switching the thing on one day and immediately blowing my account.

I do trade manually in a broker account but as fun and instructive as that is, it doesn't represent the kinds of high-speed analysis and execution my system would make once it was completed.
by majormajor | 2025-07-01 05:03:40+00:00
Here, even making that distinction of prompt-as-most-recent-user-input-only, if we use context as how it's generally been defined in "context window" then RAG and such are not then part of the context. They are just things that certain applications might use to enrich the context.

But personally I think a focus on "prompt" that refers to a specific text box in a specific application vs using it to refer to the sum total of the model input increases confusion about what's going on behind the scenes. At least when referring to products built on the OpenAI Chat Completions APIs, which is what I've used the most.

Building a simple dummy chatbot UI is very informative here for de-mystifying things and avoiding misconceptions about the model actually "learning" or having internal "memory" during your conversation. You're just supplying a message history as the model input prompt. It's your job to keep submitting the history - and you're perfectly able to change it if you like (such as rolling up older messages to keep a shorter context window).
by bakugo | 2025-07-01 05:04:23+00:00
> shouldn’t it have the right to control who or what interacts with it?

Does the manufacturer of your refrigerator have the right to control what food you're allowed to put into it? If not, why do you have different standards for computing devices? Why did it ever become okay for Apple to decide what you do with your device after they've sold it to you?
by johncolanduoni | 2025-07-01 05:05:20+00:00
You’re right that there are only trade-offs in engineering. But the key to evaluating trade-offs is evaluating impact, and how long my dependencies take to compile when I first check out a repo or whether it takes 1ms or 2ms to parse my command line (if we’re even talking about something above microseconds) have no discernible impact for approximately all use-cases. If you’re making some odd CLI tool that has to run on an microcontroller with 1MB of RAM or something, fine, agonize about whether your command line parser is parsimonious enough. Otherwise you’ve abjectly failed to evaluate one of the most important trade-offs in engineering: whether something is even worth your time to think about.
by majormajor | 2025-07-01 05:07:32+00:00
Listing a bunch of examples of militias causing problems is not changing my opinions on the dangers of having easily-accessible arms...

(This is also something I was alluding to with "issuing pardons for the rebels on your side" which is already happening, of course.)

And so then it just falls back to "the good guys just need to shoot the fascist armed militia members before they shoot the good guys" which is... difficult to guarantee...
by sandspar | 2025-07-01 05:08:06+00:00
It's a cute idea and well told! I think the general idea is that you have a "watching" self and a "deciding" self. Perhaps like different AI agents that check each other's work.

My favorite version of this is the guy who imagines a village of dwarves in his head. When he feels annoyed or angry or whatever, he imagines the "angry dwarf" making his case in front of the dwarf counsel. "We should strike back!" Then he imagines how the rest of the dwarven counsel would respond. "Ah, but this could be chance for us to practice compassion," says the compassionate dwarf. And so on. According to him he finds this very helpful.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-01 05:09:10+00:00
If we unpack this argument we can precisely pinpoint the issue.

In order for this argument to be true, Apple would need to have market power.

Having market power is the thing that makes tying etc. an antitrust violation.

Because it can be used for more than allowing people to cancel subscriptions. Like charging a 30% margin in a market where it's normally 3%, or excluding apps that compete with Apple software or services, or requiring customers to use a specific combination of hardware, operating system, app store and services, even if the customer only wants one of those things and binding them together then eliminates competition from any company that can't supply all of them. Which are exactly the sort of things that antitrust rules are meant to prevent.
by phire | 2025-07-01 05:09:25+00:00
The clever thing about the Apple II is that there are no refresh cycles. Woz laid out the screen buffer in memory in such a way that simply scanning out the screen will touch every single row of DRAM.

This is more about saving chips than saving cycles, since the Apple II was implemented entirely with 74 series logic. A more traditional approach that used spare cycles during horizontal blanking would have required several more chips.

It does mean that the layout of the Apple II's screen memory is somewhat insane. Those DRAM chips needed to be refreshed every 2ms, and it takes 16ms to scan out a whole screen. Every 8th of the screen needs to be spread out across all 128 rows.
by arugulum | 2025-07-01 05:09:45+00:00
Because the author is artifically shrinking the scope of one thing (prompt engineering) to make its replacement look better (context engineering).

Never mind that prompt engineering goes back to pure LLMs before ChatGPT was released (i.e. before the conversation paradigm was even the dominant one for LLMs), and includes anything from few-shot prompting (including question-answer pairs), providing tool definitions and examples, retrieval augmented generation, and conversation history manipulation. In academic writing, LLMs are often defined as a distribution P(y|x) where X is not infrequently referred to as the prompt. In other words, anything that comes before the output is considered the prompt.

But if you narrow the definition of "prompt" down to "user instruction", then you get to ignore all the work that's come before and talk up the new thing.