MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jimt1234 | 2025-07-22 20:07:57+00:00
One of my favorite Ozzy moments had nothing to do with his music, but was equally awesome. He was on the Howard Stern radio show shortly after 9/11:

Howard: Ozzy, what are your thoughts around 9/11?

Ozzy: It was terrible; one of those things you'll always remember where you were and what you were doing when you first heard the news.

Howard: Where were you when you first heard about 9/11?

Ozzy: I can't bloody remember.

I'm sure it was staged, but it really hit the spot for me after all the tragedy of 9/11. RIP Ozzy.
by jsrozner | 2025-07-22 20:07:59+00:00
This is actually not that surprising. Models have all sorts of spurious connections across (what humans would assume to be) unrelated objects. This is a nice result that shows how it can manifest.

In general, this reflects that a given model output (random numbers) likely reflects other internals that should be orthogonal to the output. Even theoretically "factual" outputs (i.e. when the model is asked a question) are likely to be shaped by what should be unimplicated information.

Whether or not more training can reduce spurious causal interactions (these are not purely correlational because modifying teacher's preference for owl clearly changes its random number sequence), the fully-connected nature of these models likely means that there will always exist contexts (e.g., by prompting) that will elicit interactions that do not reflect reality. See also https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06518.

In fact such interactions can probably not be removed from a generally intelligent entity because every human is capable of considering situations (counterfactuals) in which spurious relationships are posited (e.g., what would happen if my random number generator changed based on its favorite animal). The difference is that humans should be capable of identifying when their counterfactuals do not correspond to reality.

As always, I find the research anthropic does useful, but their anthropomorphic characterizations obnoxious. This is not "subliminal". Models are not conscious and do not have self-awareness. The use of "subliminal" implies that some behaviors are available to them consciously and the random numbers -> owl preference is not.

Do humans exhibit these behaviors? Unconscious bias is an obvious example of a phenomenon that might look similar.

And it is surprising to me that the effect does not show up across models. I hypothesize that there may be some way to elicit it. Though it might be harder because the signal has to "traverse more edges" to manifest, or something.
by pessimizer | 2025-07-22 20:08:20+00:00
> businesses should use their success to fund their dependencies in a way that makes sense for them.

They already do, and always have. It doesn't make any sense to most of them to fund their OSS dependencies at all, because they're available for free. They should do more than what makes sense for them, and they should have to pay professional consequences if they don't.

Programmers should have enough unity to bring pressure against companies that make a lot of money from software they don't pay for. Or rather, should have had, because LLMs have changed anything.
by ActorNightly | 2025-07-22 20:08:47+00:00
For whatever reason, the Palestine/Israel conflict causes people to just stop being rational. Like, the facts are there, both parties attack each other as part of the conflict throughout history, but for whatever reason, people really want to pick sides on this one, and Im not sure why.

Its not the genocide aspect - there are other genocides that are happening (Myanmar for example) that don't cause this reaction. Don't think its anti antisemitism either, as you don't see a lot of narratives that come with traditional rhetoric of that type.

Whoever is pushing media out on this is must have figured something out in the format to make people this polarized.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-07-22 20:08:51+00:00
A CEO is just a person like you and me. Having the title "CEO" doesn't make them right or wrong. It means they may have a more informed opinion than a layperson and that if they're the CEO of a large company that they have enough money that they can hold onto a badly performing position for longer than the average person can. You can become a CEO too if you found a company and take that role.

In the meantime if you're a software practitioner you probably have more insight into these tools than a disconnected large company CEO. Just read their opinions and move on. Don't read them at all if you find them distracting.
by baby_souffle | 2025-07-22 20:09:35+00:00
> They can only do 200-300 Mb/s up though.

This is changing with newer DOCSIS standards! It's still up to the network provider to choose how many channels they allocate for up vs down. Even in perfect lab conditions, DOCSIS 4 is still about 3:1 ratio down/up (about 5/1.5 gigabit). Fiber is the only medium that makes a 1:1 down/up possible at any meaningful speeds.
by danudey | 2025-07-22 20:09:49+00:00
> I wouldn't call that "basic".

"Basic" is relative. Nothing about LLMs is basic; it's all insanely complex, but in the context of a list of requirements "Don't tell people with signs of mental illness that they're definitely not mentally ill" is kind of basic.

> I'm trying to imagine what kind of safety measures would have stopped this, and nothing short of human supervisors monitoring all chats comes to mind.

Maybe this is a problem they should have considered before releasing this to the world and announcing it as the biggest technological revolution in history. Or rather I'm sure they did consider it, but they should have actually cared rather than shrugging it off in pursuit of billions of dollars and a lifetime of fame and fortune.
by nudgeOrnurture | 2025-07-22 20:09:54+00:00
one of the projects listed is probably somewhere in my bookmarks.

and AFAIK it still is a real plan but, officially, we are not where we wanted to be material science-wise ... heat, distances and batteries are still somewhat an issue, meaning, not efficient and cheap enough to be a no-brainer (despite already being a no-brainer but, you know, wolfs of the wall street bangers are super cool and smart and who wouldn't be partisan with leBuffets et al???)
by Nition | 2025-07-22 20:10:18+00:00
Good point about the ~1mm difference. Interestingly on my MIDI keyboard the difference between white key widths is even larger (maybe ~3mm max), showing some variation in style.

By the way your two comments in this discussion had been voted down and hidden (marked [dead]) for some reason. I voted for them to return and I'm happy to see they've now been reinstated.
Show HN: Zero-back-end process mining tool running Python in WASM
by Norcim133 | 2025-07-22 20:10:28+00:00
I was working with a data startup that had solid problem-solution fit but couldn't close enterprise deals.

We figured out that small companies would try it but they didn't need the solution. Large companies needed it desperately but wouldn't share data with an untested startup.

Later, when I was building my own process mining tool, I hit the same Catch-22.

This demo was my attempt to side-step the data concerns and avoid enterprise IT onboarding altogether.

I built it in Python and used Pyodide to run it entirely in the browser. Pyodide provides the CPython interpreter compiled to WebAssembly, so the Python code executes client-side.

Getting pandas, numpy, and visualization libraries working in WASM was tricky. Initial load takes ~15 seconds, but after that performance is good. The constraint visualization updates in real-time as you add process steps.
by apical_dendrite | 2025-07-22 20:10:29+00:00
I think you are just fundamentally confused. There are two separate entities with similar names. There's the Mauna Loa Observatory, which is what's being discussed here, and there are the Mauna Kea Observatories. The latter one has the telescopes. The Mauna Loa Observatory monitors the atmosphere. It has other types of sensors that are useful for atmospheric science. It isn't an astronomical observatory that just happens to have a CO2 sensor. It was specifically set up in the 1950s to study the atmosphere because of the advantages of being at that specific location. It just happens to have a name that's similar to an institution that does have telescopes.

Perhaps you should have some basic familiarity with what they do before deciding that they shouldn't be doing it. https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/mlo/programs/programs.html
by woodpanel | 2025-07-22 20:10:44+00:00
This was my thinking, too.

Why distract users with giving an auxiliary feature so much prominence? Why wasn’t a GIF enough? Or just an SVG that consists of 3 frames?

Spending this much time on fixing this bug was worthwhile (at least it created a HN front page article) but the solution was not. 6% CPU usage is horrible.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-22 20:10:46+00:00
Not a great idea. On paper it seems like a smart deterrent, but in practice it's a fallible defense that invites even more dangerous weaponry.

The argument is that it's safer and easier to intercept a ballistic missile in it's ballistic phase than it is to defeat it in a boost or terminal phase. This is true, but it will result with adversaries skipping those steps altogether. Additionally, it likely wouldn't protect against long-range cruise missiles or similarly maneuverable glide vehicles. Best case scenario, nuclear weapons get sent up in satellites and "deorbited" in a scheduled attack that won't be recognizable until it's too late. Worst case scenario, a space-capable adversary (eg. Iran, China, Russia) kicks off a Kessler syndrome and flips the table back in their favor. It's no-win, even as peacetime deterrence.

This is why nonproliferation and elimination was America's only feasible solution to the nuclear issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reykjav%C3%ADk_Summit
by rectang | 2025-07-22 20:11:19+00:00
I read this article because just last week I set up CSS height transitions to show/hide divs in a form which displays conditional content (based on radio button selection). "Why shouldn't I do this?", I thought.

It looks like the point of this article is that you should avoid continuous animation for CPU performance reasons. These performance reasons are probably inconsequential for occasional transitions.

For many of us in the target demographic of "people who animate height", the scary title of this article is misleading.
by ldenoue | 2025-07-22 20:12:13+00:00
Unless you fetch directly from your browser. It works by getting the YouTube json including the captions track. And then you get the baseUrl to download the xml.

I wrote this webapp that uses this method: it calls Gemini in the background to polish the raw transcript and produce a much better version with punctuation and paragraphs.

https://www.appblit.com/scribe

Open source with code to see how to fetch from YouTube servers from the browser https://ldenoue.github.io/readabletranscripts/
by Quarrelsome | 2025-07-22 20:12:38+00:00
> Instead, we can create the illusion of a changing height by using two rectangles, applying translate to each.

Its a very clever solution and props to the engineer, but this being the fix makes me truly despair at where we are as an industry around web UI. That html and css won despite these sorts of counter-intuitive horrors.

UI layers that make me feel good reflect intent. I can take an image and write some code to darken that image (any image) and show that to the end user. It makes sense. However, in html+css I have to introduce a third element, another rectangle, slap it infront, paint it entirely black and set its opacity to something low. Sure, it works the same but it just feels so conceptually ugly.
by linotype | 2025-07-22 20:12:40+00:00
That’s the point. It’s not crazy. Tariffs are regressive taxes. Rich people buy more stuff, sure, but as a percentage of their income they net out as beneficiaries of shifting taxes from income to spending. It’s totally rational if you want to increase taxes on the bottom 80% to subsidize the top 20% (and especially top 5%).
by mnky9800n | 2025-07-22 20:12:58+00:00
I think what vibe coding does in some ways is interfere with the make feature/test/change then commit loop. I started doing one thing, then committing it (in vscode or the terminal not Claude code) then going to the next thing. If Claude decides to go crazy then I just reset to HEAD and whatever Claude did is undone. Of course there are more complex environments than this that would not be resilient. But then I guess using new technology comes with some assumptions it will have some bugs in it.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-22 20:13:26+00:00
Darn, it's all rather obvious. Personally, I could never sustain a regimented five-day workweek. That just left Saturday to decompress, and Sunday to be on the edge for going back. There's no time for actual life, especially in North America where people typically get shitty amounts of vacation time. Is that life?

Personally, I'd rather be poor, at least defined by modern economic standards. And I did choose to be. And after having quit my high-paying job, I'm so much happier.
by zahlman | 2025-07-22 20:13:35+00:00
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

TFA is about the meta level of what persuasive arguments look like.

I see several examples in the comments here of people appearing to share their favourite object examples of how such and such nefarious force is causing people to believe bad things with propaganda — according to them and the sources they trust. If you do this, you are missing the point completely.

Instead, consider privately examining the opposed memeplex to understand why someone else might find it convincing — how their values might be understood, charitably. Re-evaluate how you know what you know; recognize the basis of your own position, and assess the soundness of that "structure" (as the author terms it). Recognize who you need to implicitly trust, and how much, in order to accept that reasoning. Consider why other people might not trust the same authorities you do. (Consider the possibility that other people might be able to trace direct harm done to themselves, to those authorities.) Recognize that reasoning from entirely absurd premises is still reasoning; consider that others do reason. This is why your own (sane, to you) premise does not resonate: it does not fit in that framework.

> So when you encounter someone whose worldview seems impenetrable, remember: you’re not just arguing with a person, you’re engaging with a living, self-stabilizing information pattern—one that is enacted and protected by the very architecture of human cognition.

> Truth matters—but it survives and spreads only when it is woven into a structure that people can inhabit.

Time spent on the Internet complaining about others' structures, is not time spent weaving truth into them. On the contrary, should those others see you, you will only activate their defense mechanisms.
by lluc23 | 2025-07-22 20:14:11+00:00
I put together a guide on creating a custom testing framework in Python using Locust and Docker. It’s a practical way to run performance and fuzz tests with controlled resources (CPU, memory) and simulate production traffic. Locust handles requests and stats with a nice dashboard, while Docker ensures a reproducible environment for your service. You can even hook it into CI/CD pipelines.
by michaelt | 2025-07-22 20:14:50+00:00
> Coding agents are very new.

Surely these coding agents, MCP servers and suchlike are being coded with their own tooling?

The tooling that, if you listen to the hype, is as smart as a dozen PhDs and is winning gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad?

Shouldn't coding agents be secure on day 1, if they're truly written by such towering, superhuman intellects? If the tool vendors themselves can't coax respectable code out of their product, what hope do us mere mortals have?
by dinfinity | 2025-07-22 20:14:50+00:00
Yes, also, the base rate of smoking in different groups is important to take into consideration to prevent the base rate fallacy.

Very few Chinese American women smoke (~2%), so if smokers and non-smokers have the same chance of getting lung cancer not caused by smoking, then the number of non-smokers with lung cancer will be a larger proportion.

If 100% of some group would be non-smokers, then obviously 100% of lung cancer cases in that group will be in non-smokers.

It's similar to misinterpreting the fact that most people that were hospitalized from Covid-19 were vaccinated.
by papanoah | 2025-07-22 20:15:01+00:00
Not a big company, however:

- uv (went from pipenv to poetry to uv), which was the right decision imo.

- ruff (replaced black)

- PyCharm, but some people use vscode or neovim.

- mypy for type checking, which I am not 100% happy with. One experienced developer swears by mypy, thats the reason we haven't explored alternatives.

- 'just' as task runner
by delecti | 2025-07-22 20:15:07+00:00
I don't agree that that's the right definition to use though. LLMs do not output computed or measured values.

If I expect Windows to add $5 to my bank account every time I click the Start button, that's not an error with Windows, it's a problem with my expectations. It's not a thing that's actually made to do that. The start button does what it's supposed to (perhaps a bad example, because the windows 11 start menu is rubbish), not my imagined desired behavior.
by russellbeattie | 2025-07-22 20:15:19+00:00
I'm not sure how it's implemented on the JS side, but I can imagine the CSS getting a lot of updates per second as the voice level changes, constantly interrupting the current animation.

Might be worth it to buffer the input until animationEnd() event fires. That might reduce the amount of calculations and redrawing that needs to be done.

Or the CSS engine is robust enough to handle continual updates and this won't solve a thing. I'd have to test it.
by avidiax | 2025-07-22 20:15:47+00:00
That seems easier to do by using OpenStreetMaps and a GPS trace. You would need the businesses to cooperate by putting a QR code out, so they might as well cooperate and keep a maps listing up to date.

I could imagine maybe OCRing the results from a line-scan camera. That would read all the business signs and street names as you drive by them.
by somehnguy | 2025-07-22 20:16:14+00:00
Many of my LLM experiences are similar in that they completely lie or make up functions in code or arguments to applications and only backtrack to apologize when called out on it. Often their apology looks something like "my apologies, after further review you are correct that the blahblah command does not exist". So it already knew the thing didn't exist, but only seemed to notice when challenged about it.

Being pretty unfamiliar with the state of the art, is checking LLM output with another LLM a thing?

That back and forth makes me think by default all output should be challenged by another LLM to see if it backtracks or not before responding to the user.
by forgotmypw17 | 2025-07-22 20:16:35+00:00
What has helped me with this is committing to doing one small thing, a very small task, an outrageously small task per day. This might be one minute of meditation; one commit to my project, no matter how small; one pushup. I can then stop, or I can keep going, depending on how I feel. But there's basically no excuse for me not to do that one thing, which keeps me primed and there mentally.

The other thing that has helped me is changing how I talk about myself and my struggles. Diligently and attentively remove negative talk (e.g. "I suck at x") and replace it with positive talk (e.g. I'm learning to get better at x").
by teamonkey | 2025-07-22 20:17:05+00:00
I think you’re thinking of the complex on Mauna Kea (which has several individual sites and has funding from several countries).

Mauna Loa has a telescope that studies the Sun in order to help understand better how that contributes to changing weather patterns on Earth. It is a relatively small site but very important.

The reason that telescopes are often in high up, hard to reach places is because that is the most efficient, cost-effective place for them to be.
by coxley | 2025-07-22 20:17:42+00:00
> because interface{} is always counted as escaped from the stack

Not quite - if the function accepting interface{} can be inlined (and other heuristics are groovy), then it won't escape.

Trivial example but it applies to real-world programs:

> cat main.go package main import "github.com/google/uuid" func main() { _ = foo(uuid.NewString()) } func foo(s any) string { switch s := s.(type) { case string: _ = "foo:" + s } return "" } # Build with escape analysis > go build -gcflags="-m=2" main.go # command-line-arguments ./main.go:9:6: can inline foo with cost 13 as: func(any) string { switch statement; return "" } ./main.go:5:6: can inline main with cost 77 as: func() { _ = foo(uuid.NewString()) } ./main.go:6:9: inlining call to foo ./main.go:6:24: uuid.NewString() does not escape ./main.go:6:9: "foo:" + s does not escape ./main.go:9:10: s does not escape ./main.go:12:14: "foo:" + s does not escape
by danudey | 2025-07-22 20:17:44+00:00
The program is producing correct output, for technical values of correct.

The LLM is a statistical model that predicts what words should come next based on current context and its training data. It succeeds at that very well. It is not a piece of software designed to report the objective truth, or indeed any truth whatsoever.

If the LLM was producing nonsense sentences, like "I can't do cats potato Graham underscore" then yes, that's "incorrect output". Instead, it's correctly putting sentences together based on its predictions and models, but it doesn't know what those sentences mean, what they're for, why it's saying them, if they're true, what "truth" is in the first place, and so on.

So to say that these LLMs are producing "incorrect output" misses the key thing that the general public also misses, which is that they are built to respond to prompts and not to respond to prompts correctly or in a useful or reasonable manner. These are not knowledge models, and they are not intended to give you correct sentences.
by rafaelmn | 2025-07-22 20:18:15+00:00
What I am saying is these people are the decision makers. They chose where the money goes, what gets invested in, etc. The outcomes of their decisions might be measurable/determined as wrong years down the line - but I will be impacted immediately as someone in the industry.

It's the same shit as all the other VC funded money losing "disruptions" - they might go out of business eventually - but they destroyed a lot of value and impacted the whole industry negatively in the long run. Those companies that got destroyed don't just spring back and thing magically return to equilibrium.

Likewise developers will get screwed because of AI hype. People will leave the industry, salaries will drop because of allocations, students will avoid it. It only works out if AI actually delivers in the expected time frame.
by oliwarner | 2025-07-22 20:18:28+00:00
Gmail search is objectively awful. I can feed it verbatim phrases from an email I've checked exists and it won't find it. I've used parametrised queries and it fails.

I'm happy it works for you, but it consistently doesn't for me.

The reason feels obvious: they're handling exabytes of email and building a full search index just for me is expensive. They cut serious corners.