MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by taeric | 2025-07-07 13:48:19+00:00
It has become a thing where folks are taught, basically, that English is not a phonetic language. It is truly mind boggling the number of college educated folks I've talked with that start to try and argue that we don't have a phonetic alphabet.

And, like, I get it. We don't have a fully regular one. But this is like the people that think we don't have a single word to describe some things, when they have to basically ignore adjectives and many many synonyms to get to that idea.

Even better when folks complain that we have different ways to refer to people from other nations. Ignoring that a large part of that is that we heavily deferred to how said people wanted to be referred to.
Show HN: A Curated Directory of Developer Tools Built in a Weekend
by venelinkochev | 2025-07-07 13:48:24+00:00
I built devtool.io over a weekend to solve a recurring pain point: discovering and keeping track of high-quality developer tools. I've lost count of how many times I've bookmarked a great CLI, API tester, or AI tool—only to forget where I saw it.

DevTool.io is a minimal, searchable directory where developers can find and compare tools by category (CI/CD, Frontend, AI/ML, Databases, etc.), see what's trending, and browse curated picks. Each tool includes metadata like website, GitHub, category, and tags (open-source, freemium, etc.).

Feedback, ideas, or tool suggestions are all welcome!

Happy to answer any questions.
by tremon | 2025-07-07 13:48:57+00:00
There's plenty of ways to communicate complex ideas without using complex language, as long as you have sufficient time to interact. Skills can be taught using demonstration, imitation, and correction; ideas can be drawn or acted out.

What language enables, in my view, is accurate communication through intermediaries. It makes a lot of difference whether you need to supervise someone through all the ways that cooking on leather can go wrong versus richly explaining those same failure modes and how to avoid them. The former pretty much prescribes that most complex knowledge will stay within a tribe or a close community, whereas a rich vocabulary allows knowledge to spread readily among trade routes.
by lukeschlather | 2025-07-07 13:49:10+00:00
Yes, strictly speaking, the model itself is stateless, but there are 600B parameters of state machine for frontier models that define which token to pick next. And that state machine is both incomprehensibly large and also of a similar magnitude in size to a human brain. (Probably, I'll grant it's possible it's smaller, but it's still quite large.)

I think my issue with the "don't anthropomorphize" is that it's unclear to me that the main difference between a human and an LLM isn't simply the inability for the LLM to rewrite its own model weights on the fly. (And I say "simply" but there's obviously nothing simple about it, and it might be possible already with current hardware, we just don't know how to do it.)

Even if we decide it is clearly different, this is still an incredibly large and dynamic system. "Stateless" or not, there's an incredible amount of state that is not comprehensible to me.
by Towaway69 | 2025-07-07 13:49:12+00:00
Generalising the point the author is making: how do tools and programming languages shape/influence our thinking. I think this something we all should be asking ourselves.

It’s important to remember that certain concepts simply don’t occur to us as programmers because the language(s) we use.

For example how many JavaScript programmers know what an Erlang supervisor pattern is. How can they if JavaScript doesn’t support it. Perhaps the problem I’m facing in JS would be best solved using a supervisor but since it isn’t available, I don’t use it.

Even the language we speak influences our thinking, so do the tools we use and perhaps we should be aware of that.
by germandiago | 2025-07-07 13:49:45+00:00
One of the problems in english (not the only one, but one of them) is that for the vowels there are 5 graphs (is this term correct? Sorry but hope it is understandable) but many more sounds. In Spanish there are 5 vowels in the latin alphabet and exactly five sounds and nothing else.

Valencian has 7 sounds though, two for e and two for o. Similarly, Catalan also (and in some circumstances the o sounds as u, when the stress is not in it and other stuff). But they still have quite strict rules.
by masfoobar | 2025-07-07 13:50:00+00:00
I was rather sad when everyone moved away from MySpace to Facebook. While the interface today would likely be poor, I felt it was much better than what Facebook was offering. Still its hard to believe it was around 19 years ago many started to move over.

While I cannot remember the names of these sites, there were various attempts to create a shared platform website where you could create a profile and communicate with others. I remember joining a few at least back in 2002 before MySpace, Yahoo360. There was also Bebo which, I think, was for the younger kids of the day.

Lets not forget about friendsreunited.

Many Companies become successful being at the right place at the right time. Facebook is one of those companies.

Had facebook been created a year or so beforehand (or a year or two after) we would likely be using some other "social media" today. Be interesting how that would have compared to facebook. Would it be "more evil" ???

Regardless, whether its Facebook/MarkZuckerberg or [insert_social_media]/[owner]... we would still end up with a new celebrity millionnaire/billionnaire.. and would still be considered "a fool" one way or another.
by robin_reala | 2025-07-07 13:50:21+00:00
The heating elements were buried deep in the machine and would have involved many hours of labour to take it apart; it took long enough to strip it down to the point where I realised how complex it was going to be to get any further. Machine was bought in late 2021, but was unfortunately out of guarantee by a couple of months when it broke. I’m happy to tear stuff down (spent yesterday unsticking the fan on a vacuum cleaner) but that was too much for me.
by fastball | 2025-07-07 13:50:45+00:00
ICYMI, DeepMind also has a Gemini model that is diffusion-based[1]. I've tested it a bit and while (like with this model) the speed is indeed impressive, the quality of responses was much worse than other Gemini models in my testing.

[1] https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-diffusion/
by plotlyadmin | 2025-07-07 13:51:38+00:00
Plotly | plotly.com | Senior Software Engineer, Platform | Canada | US| Remote, Full-Time

As a company with roots in the open-source community, Plotly introduced web-based data visualization to Python. Today, the company offers Dash Enterprise, which provides the best software tools and platform to enable every enterprise in the world to build and scale data applications quickly and easily.

We are growing our team and hiring for the following roles:

Senior Software Engineer, Platform (Remote: Canada or US) Senior Full Stack Software Engineer, AI Senior Customer Success Engineer, Infrastructure

If interested, apply here: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/plotly
by BenjiWiebe | 2025-07-07 13:52:12+00:00
Nope, I wouldn't say it's carried solely/primarily by the dielectric, since the material the conductor is made out of also matters when you are considering losses. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong.)

Also, you've got this weird thing called skin effect where the current mainly flows on the surface of your conductor. 8.5mm deep for 60Hz, but 2μm for 1Ghz. So what's in the center of your conductor doesn't really matter.

However, if you want your signal to travel at c, surround your conductor with vacuum instead of insulation. I think to actually reach exactly c your vacuum would have to cover an infinitely(?) large area around it.

If you want something more practical, air has a relative permittivity of 1.0006 (vacuum is 1.0), so if you surround your uninsulated conductor with air, you get a velocity of 0.9997c.
by xnorswap | 2025-07-07 13:53:03+00:00
I've dealt with low-limit APIs, and I've always considered the better approach to the problem is to create a proxy rather than trust the clients to manage, limit and coordinate themselves.

Then we send all traffic to proxy.service instead of canon.service, and implement queuing, rate limiting, caching, etc on the proxy.

This shields the weak part of the system from the clients.
by docmars | 2025-07-07 13:53:06+00:00
I think this is exacerbated by the acute rise in real autism cases (not self-diagnosed) going from 1 in 10,000 clear to 1 in 31 cases in children, in the span of 50 years.

As people learn there's something gravely wrong with how they interact with others, struggle with social situations, etc. — and they validate that by observing enough "normal" people interacting or watch enough Hollywood entertainment depicting perfectly rehearsed conversations — in desperation, they seek a remedy in everything from personality systems ("everything must be labeled and explained") to psychiatric treatment just to cope with the lack of frequent, validating, normal interactions; and in many cases, aren't improving because of how isolated their lives have become.

This is something I've observed in my own life and in friends who share similar challenges.
by sgarland | 2025-07-07 13:53:07+00:00
Bear in mind I have a large bias towards performance, and am a DBRE, so I also have strong opinions about normalization.

Separating compute and storage means that if you ever have to hit the disk - which is every time for writes, and depending on your working set size, often for reads as well - you’re getting a massive latency hit. I’ll use Amazon Aurora as an example, because they’re quite open with their architecture design, they’re the largest player in this space, and I’m personally familiar with it.

Aurora’s storage layer consists of 6 nodes split across 3 AZs. For a write to be counted as durable, it needs to be ack’d by 4/6 nodes, which means 2/3 AZs. That’s typically a minimum of 1 msec, though they do get written in parallel, which helps. 1 msec may not sound like much, but it’s an eternity for traditional SSD access.

MySQL is even worse with Aurora, because of its change buffer. Normally, writes (including deletes) to indexed columns (secondary indices) results in the changes to the indices being buffered, which avoids random I/O. Since Aurora's architecture is so wildly different than vanilla MySQL, it can't do that, and all writes to secondary indices must happen synchronously.

Given most SaaS companies' tendency to eschew RDBMS expertise in favor of full-stack teams, and those teams' tendency to use JSON[B] for everything, poor normalization practices, and sub-optimal queries, all of this adds up to a disastrous performance experience.

I have a homelab with Dell R620s, which originally came out in 2012. Storage is via Ceph on Samsung PM983 NVMe drives, connected with Mellanox ConnectX3-Pro in a mesh. These drives are circa-2013. Despite the age of this system, it has consistently out-performed Aurora MySQL and Postgres in benchmarks I've done. The only instance classes that can match it are, unsurprisingly, those with local NVMe storage.

In fairness, it isn't _all_ awful. Aurora does have one feature that is extremely nice: survivable page cache. If an instance restarts, in most circumstances, you don't lose the buffer pool / shared buffers on the instance. This means you don't have the typical cold start performance hit. That is legitimately cool tech, and quite useful. I'm less sold on the other features, like auto-scaling. If you're planning for a peak event (e.g. a sales event for e-commerce), you know well in advance, and have plenty of time to bring new instances online. If you have a surprise peak event, auto-scaling is going to take 30 minutes to 1 hour for the new instances to come online, which is an extremely long time to be sitting in a degraded state. This isn't really any faster than RDS, though again to Aurora's credit, the fact that all instances share the same underlying cluster volume means that there is no delay when pulling in blocks from S3.

Finally, Aurora’s other main benefit, as I alluded to, is that its shared cluster volume means that replication lag is typically quite low; 10-30 msec IME. However, also IME, devs don’t design apps around this, and anything other than instantaneous is too slow, so it doesn’t really matter.
by cultofmetatron | 2025-07-07 13:53:38+00:00
> For example how many JavaScript programmers know what an Erlang supervisor pattern is. How can they if JavaScript doesn’t support it.

I've been running into the opposite issue. we built a project in liveview and the state management is not quite how I'd like it. pretty much everything is a callback to handle_info on a single object where you set the value to socket.assigns but no canonical way of organizing it. The pieces are all there to do some kind of stream based pipeline with an async reducer but no one has done it yet.

JS devs of course already know redux so this is a solved pattern in the js world
Ask HN: Should the new Commodore create C64 digital art displays for your wall?
by amichail | 2025-07-07 13:54:39+00:00
The idea is to add an interactive retro exhibit to your home.

Left alone, it would continuously display retro imagery—and optionally, sound—either at all times or only when it detects someone in the room.

It could also allow interaction, perhaps through a touchscreen, giving visitors a hands-on taste of retro computing in general, and the C64 in particular.
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-07-07 13:55:09+00:00
LLM making a quick edit, <100 lines... Sure. Asking an LLM to rubber-duck your code, sure. But integrating an LLM into your CI is going to end up costing you 100s of hours productivity on any large project. That or spend half the time you should be spending learning to write your own code, dialing down context sizing and prompt accuracy.

I really really don't understand the hubris around llm tooling, and don't see it catching on outside of personal projects and small web apps. These things don't handle complex systems well at all, you would have to put a gun in my mouth to let one of these things work on an important repo of mine without any supervision... And if I'm supervising the LLM I might as well do it myself, because I'm going to end up redoing 50% of its work anyways..
by vorpalhex | 2025-07-07 13:55:36+00:00
Read the article carefully.

They are allowed to run N turbines.. but have N+B turbines on the property.

They.. aren't breaking their permit. The article never says they are, it just sets things up for you to have that belief.

It looks like they are swapping turbines, thus the extras. They may also be hoping to get more approved.

These may also be properly emission reducing. The article never says they aren't - it only includes quotes from people saying they don't think they are with no evidence.

The news doesn't lie, but it gets as close as it can.
by cainxinth | 2025-07-07 13:55:43+00:00
I do this to determine if a person I'm talking to online is potentially a troll. I copy a big chunk of their comment and post history into an LLM and ask for a profile.

The last few years, I've noticed an uptick in "concern trolls" that pretend to support a group or cause while subtly working to undermine it.

LLMs can't make the ultimate judgement call very well, but they can quickly summarize enough information for me to.
by chmod775 | 2025-07-07 13:55:53+00:00
Care to add any country to the list then? Did I miss anything? Let's see if we can push it past half of the world's population, but I don't think we will.

> I can assure you in most parts using your thumb and index finger for a visual OK is not OK.

You're moving goal posts. Of course it doesn't just mean "OK" in some places.

What you actually claimed was "The OK gesture has always been very inappropriate in most parts of the world."

Which is plain wrong. In India for instance it can refer to "money", while in China it can nowadays also be seen as a distress signal when performed a certain way (thanks to Chinese social media popularizing that use). There's some ways you can mess this up, like making it seem you're attempting to bribe someone, or signalling you're in distress when you aren't, but in neither country the gestures are inherently anywhere near "very inappropriate" and both will even understand it as "OK" if you perform it correctly and in the appropriate context.

That's already almost 3 billion people, but let's say 2.5 billion because there's regional variations in both countries and I'm sure you could find some northern Chinese village that will take offense.

I can easily push the number of people to whom it is not inappropriate past 4 billion by adding smaller populations (Indonesia, Japan, western Europe, USA, Taiwan, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, ...), so your claim that "[it] has always been very inappropriate in most parts of the world" cannot possibly be true.
by arkh | 2025-07-07 13:55:59+00:00
> Not really. There's no way to guess how many english words are pronounced based on the written form, unless you've heard it before. And of course the pronunciation may vary wildly based on region/country as well.

> The most telling evidence of this is the existence of Spelling Bee competitions in english language countries. The fact that hearing a word being spoken is challenging enough to figure out how it is written that it is a competitive sport, says it all.

That's two exact opposite things.

Languages for which you know how to pronounce a word just from its written form => you can have spelling bee competition there.

Languages for which you know how to write a word when you hear it pronounced => no spelling bee competition.

I'll take French as an example : if you see "o", "au", "eau" in a word you know how to pronounce it. There is one and only way. But if you hear "o" in a word then good luck knowing how to write it. So you got dictées (spelling bees) even if you can easily guess how a written word sounds like. The existence of spelling bee competition in the English world is not proof that the language written word pronunciation are a guess.
by nsypteras | 2025-07-07 13:56:05+00:00
A while back I made a little script (for fun/curiosity) that would do this for HN profiles. It’d use their submission and comment history to infer a profile including similar stuff like location, political leaning, career, age, sex, etc. Main motivation was seeing some surprising takes in various comment threads and being curious about where it might have came from. Obviously no idea how accurate the profiles were, but it was similarly an interesting experiment in the ability of LLMs to do this sort of thing.
by nelox | 2025-07-07 13:56:10+00:00
The claim that “English doesn’t use accents” is, quite frankly, a bit naïve. After all, one only needs to step into a café for a crème brûlée, or to read a novel featuring a tête-à-tête, to see that English is perfectly comfortable with accented words. From the résumé of a job seeker to the façade of a building, from the attaché case of a businessman to the naïve assumptions of a newcomer, accents are sprinkled throughout our language like so many éclairs in a patisserie. English may not have been born with diacritics, but it has certainly acquired a taste for them.
by stevepotter | 2025-07-07 13:57:03+00:00
When I interview a candidate, I focus primarily on what they've done. Ideally they'd have a body of work online that I can view beforehand. Then I go through a high level system design and have a collaborative conversation. Last, I give a pretty straightforward coding question, whose purpose is only to make sure they aren't full of shit, which often they are.

The mistake I see interviewers make is that they are looking for the candidate to solve some kind of puzzle, and the focus is kept on whether they had that "ah-ha" moment vs a clean implementation. Maybe this would be a good approach for a job that required defusing a bomb, but this is relaxed desk work haha.

I once had someone bomb the coding, then email me a few hours after with a clean answer. One of the best hires I ever had.
by trknhr | 2025-07-07 13:57:15+00:00
This is a CLI tool I’ve been building to manage AI-generated memory files like CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md, .cursor/rules/, and others, without polluting your main Git branch.

Over time I found myself relying on various “memory” files to track prompts, embeddings, scratch notes, context rules, and other AI agent state. These were important, but messy. I wanted a way to isolate them into a separate Git branch and still keep them versioned, shareable, and editable.

So I wrote ai-docs, a Go-based CLI that creates a dedicated orphan branch (e.g., @ai-docs/your-name) and uses git worktree to mount it locally at .ai-docs/. You can push, pull, and sync AI memory files independently of your main codebase. It supports multiple agents like Claude, Gemini, Cursor, and Cline, and is configurable via YAML/JSON/TOML.

It's not a Git plugin or shell script wrapper—just a standalone binary with minimal dependencies that tries to stay out of your way. The whole point is to give you a clean, reversible way to manage machine-generated AI context as first-class citizens in your project, without turning your repo into a junk drawer.
by mopsi | 2025-07-07 13:57:18+00:00
That might have been the case decades ago. For example, in the USSR, various finger gestures usually implied something related to a penis and were considered extremely offensive. But that hasn't been the case since at least the early 1990s, when VCRs became widely available, people saw Hollywood movies for the first time and got used to westernized meaning of thumbs-up and OK gestures. Nowadays, when backing a truck towards a trailer, a thumbs-up would be taken as "good job" and an OK gesture (often paired with a kiss) as "exceptionally well done".
by ca123 | 2025-07-07 13:57:36+00:00
Composable | Boston, MA | On-Site | https://composable.ai

We're hiring experienced C#/.NET engineers to help us build out the core of our enterprise-grade, distributed DataOps platform.

Open Roles: - Senior Software Engineers (C#/.NET Framework): We're looking for engineers with deep experience in the Microsoft stack, including multi-threading, performance optimization, and scalable system design. Ideal candidates are comfortable working across the stack—from SQL Server and backend APIs to modern UIs.

We're a team based in Boston building a flexible and powerful platform for modern data operations. You'll be working on challenging engineering problems with a sharp, collaborative team. Opportunities are ideal for those that have an interest in designing and building large-scale, distributed, web-based platforms.

More info: https://composable.ai/careers/
by xenocratus | 2025-07-07 13:57:42+00:00
Why the clickbait title? Yes, it's technically correct, but it obviously implies (as written) that o3 used those links "behind your back" and altered the replies.

Another option that's just as correct and doesn't mislead: "Profiling myself from my Pocket links with o3"

Note: title when reviewed is "o3 used my saved Pocket links to profile me"
by morkalork | 2025-07-07 13:57:50+00:00
I've been thinking about the possibities of using an LLM to sort through all my tabs; I'm one of those dreadful hoarders that has been living with the ":D" count on my phone for too long. Usually I purge them periodically but I haven't had the motivation to do do so in a long time. I just need an easy way to dump them to a csv or something like OP has from pocket.
by carefulfungi | 2025-07-07 13:59:17+00:00
More than 10% of the global population is illiterate. Even in first world countries, numeracy rates are 75-80%. I think you overestimate how many people could pass the benchmark.

Edit - rereading, my comment sounds far too combative. I mean it only as an observation that AI is catching up quickly vs what we manage to teach humans generally. Soon, if not already, LLMs will be “better educated” than the average global citizen.