MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2025-07-15 19:21:48+00:00
The problem is the quality, not the topic. Understanding serious papers about AI development requires fairly specialist knowledge; there are plenty of people around (like myself) who have been programming for decades and can write really nice code in a bunch of different programming languages, but have very little if any mental model of "transformers" or whatever.

So in practice, "AI" content ends up revolving around people bandying about opinions about whether or not we're all doomed, or whether or not we're all on the edge of a utopia, or how much productivity programmers (and which ones) have lost or gained, or what kinds of tasks the LLMs are or are not currently or still good at, or whether anyone still cares about the fact that the term "AI" is supposed to mean something broader than LLMs + tool use.

The emergence of the "vibe coding" concept has made things worse because people will just share their blog posts about personal experiences with trying to write code that way, or flood the Show HN section with things that are basically just "I personally found this specific thing to be 'the boring stuff' that's actually relevant to me, so now I'm automating it" with a few dozen lines of AI-generated code that perhaps invokes some API to ask another AI to do something useful.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-07-15 19:22:01+00:00
You're screwed financially during child-bearing years if you have kids. You're screwed financially in retirement if you don't, because care is going to be super expensive if/when the population pyramid gets inverted.

The only way to not get screwed is to switch back to the standard non-Western care model: grandparents take on much of the burden of caring for children, and children take care of parents.
by tfourb | 2025-07-15 19:22:29+00:00
Why? Because I used the term "percentage points" incorrectly? Or do you have an issue with the facts?

Those are: In 1976, global average temperature was 0.15 degrees C above the 1861-1890 mean. 50 years later, in 2024 it was 1.54 degrees above. On average, that's a 2.79 percent increase in the temperature anomaly per year over the past 50 years. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/climate-change?Metric=T...

If you look at the graph and the scientific forecasts, it would be dumb not to assume that the rate of temperature increase will increase if we do not drastically cut down emissions quickly. If such a scenario doesn't scare the pants off you, you either have very little investment in the state of the world past 2050 or you are unreasonably confident that it won't impact you or your loved ones.
by zenlot | 2025-07-15 19:22:31+00:00
Love Helix. Congrats. Good looking default theme. Sensible defaults. Literally install and use, no configuration needed. Well I haven't replaced my IDE with it , but set alias of vi to it and made it as $EDITOR for all quick cli edits. So now whenever I need to do quick debugging edits in k9s, it calls for Helix.
by Loughla | 2025-07-15 19:23:09+00:00
We call the local public library and ask if they know anyone who would be interested in x-x media we are getting rid of.

They always panic slightly thinking we're trying to give it to them (most libraries are inundated with out of date materials people donate), and are happy to give us names and numbers of churches and elderly centers who might take them.

It's not a ton of work and worth it overall.
by lenerdenator | 2025-07-15 19:23:47+00:00
"We knowingly bought into a scheme where one man - the one we're suing - has 51% of the voting power on all corporate affairs. We think he screwed up and owes us money. Can you help us?" - the shareholders to the Delaware CoC, in effect.

Remember: the people who work for these shareholders - most of which are institutional investors, not individuals - went to exclusive schools and make more in bonuses than you will in a lifetime of work, at least if you're the average American.
by RRL | 2025-07-15 19:24:21+00:00
We largely stopped growing avocados in the US when water rates went up. With the increased rates, and NAFTA, US avocado ranchers could not compete. There is speculation that Mexican cartels own/operate much of the Mexican avocado industry that we rely on.

I say this as someone who whole heartedly believes in desalination as a way forward, but if we refuse to embrace desalination we need to recognize the tradeoffs like you point out.
by KaiserPro | 2025-07-15 19:24:23+00:00
my friend, opiods out of acute settings are super bad.

Being prescribed opiods to take home, is a sure fire way to get someone addicted https://www.gov.uk/drug-safety-update/opioids-risk-of-depend...

What is even more bad is companies running competitions to encourage family doctors prescribe opiods for long term use.

sure heroin on the streets is bad, don't get me wrong, but giving it to unsuspecting patients, getting them addicted and then effectively forcing them onto the streets is even worse.

Advertising of drugs is fucking stupid, bribing doctors is even more stupid. But as thats where a lot of money comes for politics, its not going to change.
by josefritzishere | 2025-07-15 19:25:02+00:00
I dislike the premise here. It assumes we want another baby boom. There are 8.2 Billion humans on Earth. We do not need another "boom." A 7% increase in birthdate would be disasterous. Define Boomers and the boom: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boomers)
by lxgr | 2025-07-15 19:25:02+00:00
The main problem is that the temperature difference isn't high enough to do a lot of useful things with the waste heat from data centers.

Boiling things directly doesn't work, as the temperature is way below the boiling point of water, and for anything indirect you'll need some type of heat pump – at which point the data center heat also doesn't look that attractive anymore compared to e.g. just using heat from the air or ground.

Maybe you could heat a few buildings in very cold climate, but again, the time or area required for heat exchange is a function of the temperature gradient, so this is something that's typically done using the "waste heat" [1] of power plants, which is much hotter.

[1] Removing steam from CHP cogeneration isn't free in that every joule of heat removed reduces the electricity output a bit, but within a few kilometers of the power plant, it's much more efficient than electric heating using the electricity generated.
by nhecker | 2025-07-15 19:25:38+00:00
I don't think this changes the way the second is defined. Rather, that definition describes some theoretical ideal where the cesium transitions are all perfectly equally spaced over the course of the second.

I think this new clock is simply able to generate more precisely spaced ticks than those of a traditional Cs clock. Less jitter and variation in the timing of those ticks. Similar to how a one-hour water clock or sand timer's runtime will vary between "transitions", but a one-hour quartz stopwatch timer is much more regular. I could keep going, but I'm already out on a limb so I'll stop before my own uncertainty rises too much.

(Edit: I read the article. I don't think my words above are correct.)
by aaroninsf | 2025-07-15 19:26:06+00:00
I'm cynical enough to think that this, too, will result in a payout of some kind. Whatever it might be called.

Companies like this are too big to be held accountable. Every problem is soluble given their capitalization, the only consequence is irritation and fighting—usually among those already complicit and merely concerned that they didn't maximize their view—of interest to few.

Meanwhile, Rome is burning. Oh well.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-07-15 19:26:12+00:00
Blender has solved several key challenges, but the learning curve is steep given many tutorials are version specific.

I usually recommend these courses to users when the under $20 sale is active.

They cover a lot of Blenders non-intuitive workflows :3

"Complete Blender Creator: Learn 3D Modelling for Beginners"

https://www.udemy.com/course/blendertutorial/

* Basics of low-poly design in blender

"Blender Animation & Rigging: Bring Your Creations To Life"

https://www.udemy.com/course/blender-animation-rigging/

* Some more practice rigging

"The Ultimate Blender 3D Sculpting Course"

https://www.udemy.com/course/blender-3d-sculpting-course/

* Sculpting, Retopology, and VDM brushes

* basic anatomy

"The Ultimate Blender 3D Simulations, Physics & Particles"

https://www.udemy.com/course/blender-simulations-physics-par...

* Shader/Texture basics

* Geometry node basics

* Boid sprites

* Hair and physics simulation

* Camera FX, and post-render filters

* Instructions on how to export your assets to Unity 3D and Unreal game engines
Ask HN: How to attract top engineers as an early-stage startup?
by hubraumhugo | 2025-07-15 19:26:20+00:00
Finding great engineers is a known challenge for every early-stage startup as you need to find missionaries willing to trade cash for risk and upside.

What we try: - We try to leverage personal networks, which seems like the best source (10x better than other methods)

- We're willing to poach talent (when timing aligns)

- We're generous with equity (can’t match FAANG cash)

Public job boards didn't work at all. About 98 % of applicants are spray-and-pray. We even added a product-specific question at the end of the ad and only few noticed it (but good filter!).

I also know that experience ≠ talent and that some people are terrible at selling themselves, I try to spot these.

What helped you find top engineers?
by allenu | 2025-07-15 19:26:34+00:00
I love the idea, but I wish the sentences were capitalized and the dashes were fixed. I think the spaces between dashed elements need to be removed. Right now, I see things like "cyber- neon" or "bomb- ware".

In a similar vein, there's DeLorean Ipsum, which I often use for fake text when mocking up UI: https://satoristudio.net/delorean-ipsum/
by dmbche | 2025-07-15 19:26:44+00:00
I don't think the poster has the power to split HN in twain.

I don't think the poster believes some kind of democracy could bring about this.

I do believe that by entertaining the idea, the subsequent discussion will be useful for moderators to get a feel of what their userbase thinks of the current state of things.

From my understanding, the soul of HN and what makes it what it is is the moderation - having discussions on issues is an efficient way to signal to them.
by atmavatar | 2025-07-15 19:27:29+00:00
> The claim has to be something significantly more valuable than a few 100 people dying from poisons each year for the thousands to millions of deaths caused by inefficiencies in the biomedical industry.

It's extremely misleading to argue with confidence that even a significant fraction of those thousands to millions of deaths would be prevented if only we had the good sense to eliminate medical regulations entirely and that doing so would only result in a few hundred deaths.

It's not just about poisoning deaths from toxic medicine -- it's also about additional deaths from people taking snake oil treatments over proven effective treatments. If the US response to COVID shows us anything, it's that this latter group can be quite significant.

A big problem that's led us to where we are is that many in the right wing fringes that brought us the current administration make their fortunes off selling snake oils in the form of supplements. And while I'm sure some will immediately point out that left wing fringes have their own bullshit cures (e.g., essential oils, healing crystals, etc.), the difference is that this group is still treated as the kooks they are.
by bluetomcat | 2025-07-15 19:27:32+00:00
It’s a good direction to follow, but it can only get you so far. Some pieces of code do naturally evolve into a functional formalism, while others are inherently imperative. Usually, the top levels of your program (event loop) are imperative and deal with stateful “devices” like IO, the screen and storage subsystems. The “leaf” functions from the call graph can be functional, but you still can’t reason about the whole program when it is imperative at the top.
by PleasureBot | 2025-07-15 19:27:34+00:00
For the same reasons as you said I don't understand its use in our side projects. Maybe I'm alone in this, but I feel like the entire point of a side project is to learn some new tech, framework, etc. If you just let an LLM do the work for you, you don't actually learn anything about the underlying tech, so what was the point of the whole thing? I think LLMs abuse our dopamine system that usually activates when we get our side projects working and allows us to feel that with very little effort. Of course at the cost of not learning anything other than how to prompt an LLM.
by pdabbadabba | 2025-07-15 19:28:04+00:00
Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread? I realize that they haven't publicly announced a product yet but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building, and they have some pretty significant OpenAI talent on board, including Murati herself. Some amount of skepticism is warranted, of course, but a lot of these comments read as closer to hostility.
by jxjnskkzxxhx | 2025-07-15 19:28:14+00:00
Interesting take.

To me it feels like golden age of hackers in the 60s-80s (which was before my time but I heard stories about) where everybody is doing their own home grown research to the best of their abilities and sharing insights of varying quality.

But somehow these days if it's not all polished, HN "hackers" aren't interested.
by techpineapple | 2025-07-15 19:28:29+00:00
“Have we ever been successful at slowing down technological efficiency?”

Yes, we slow down technological efficiency all the time. Nuclear Power for one. I think you could argue we did the same for blockchain, once the hype died down. I might argue most technologies we slow down by divesting from them as their core use cases subside.

Facebook has been pivoting away from the metaverse which means we’re slowing down research in that area.
by librasteve | 2025-07-15 19:28:56+00:00
sorry I didn't know that Philip Hazel wrote PCRE ... and I certainly credit the initiative to release Perl Compatible Regular Expressions from the grip of perl

my main point is that PCRE was based on perl regexes and that these were designed by Larry Wall and so he had some experience when it came to the strengths and weaknesses of of perl RE when it came to designing the Raku RE syntax (ie. the language formerly known as Perl 6)
by ttoinou | 2025-07-15 19:28:57+00:00
My favorite alternative to Mandelbrot is the Monkelbrot, I made this 13 years ago (probably I discovered this formula on the old fractalforums.com)

https://www.deviantart.com/titoinou/art/The-42-MonkelBrot-29...

f(z) = ( (z*c-1)^2 - 1 )^2 - 1

It features Classic Quadratic Mandelbrots z^2 and also Quartic Brots z^4 in one set, that is apparently connected (I didn't prove this yet...). Also, it doesn't go crazy like others alternative, it stays nicely behaved like the original Mandelbrot set. You can copy paste "( (z*c-1)^2 - 1 )^2 - 1" without the quotes on this site to explore the fractal

It's really fascinating when navigating the fractal to try to understand where would a z^2 minibrot appear vs. where would a z^4 minibrot appear
by vel0city | 2025-07-15 19:29:16+00:00
> The Mach E is about the size of the 1990s Ford Expedition or Chevy Suburban

This is untrue. The Mach E is 186" long, 64" high, and 74" wide. The 1997 Ford Expedition is 205" long, 75" high, and 79" wide. More than half a foot is a huge difference but nearly a foot is about the same size, and the Expedition is a foot and a half longer. 2" is way too much to add to the width but 5" is about the same size.

A Geo Prizm is 173" long and 53" high, and was considered a very small car for the time in the US market. So the difference in length of a Prizm to a Mach E is 13". The difference in length of the '97 Expedition to the Mach E is 19". The height differences are both 11" So yes, the Mach E is closer in size to the Prizm than it is to the first-generation Expedition. And its laughable to compare it to a modern Expedition, its far closer to the Prizm.

Even if you were to say "well, what about the early SUVs like the Bronco", and yeah sure they actually aren't as long as a Mach E was, but they were only 7" longer in length than that Prizm and yet were once again about 10" taller than the Mach E while your standard of 6" is a huge difference in height. And obviously the Bronco was going to have a short wheelbase, it only had a single row of seating.

That you seem to think the Mach E is about the same size as the 90's SUVs once again really points me to the failure of both kinds of cars having the same category. They're very different sizes. And I'm not trying to argue the Mach E is any kind of compact car or anything, but its downright tiny compared to "real" SUVs like Suburbans and what not.

As someone who daily drove a large SUV and a Ford Focus Hatch, the Mach E I drive today is considerably closer in size to the Focus than it is the older SUV. Definitely a bit bigger than the Focus, but it's not even close.
by lxgr | 2025-07-15 19:29:16+00:00
It's also used for humidification to avoid static discharges, apparently: https://datacenters.microsoft.com/sustainability/efficiency/

Looking at the figures quoted there, this can explain why e.g. the Ariozona data center uses so much more water than the Singapore one, although evaporative (i.e. open loop) cooling probably also plays a role in many of these cases.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-07-15 19:29:28+00:00
> I would love an Arch or Debian based distro powering my TV streaming apparatus.

I'd prefer one of the immutable variants for that kind of appliance device. My personal bias is toward OpenSUSE MicroOS, but Debian or Arch based would also be good. (That doesn't mean you can't ssh in, just that there are more guardrails and the system can better self-maintain by default.)
by SteveGerencser | 2025-07-15 19:29:39+00:00
You would be surprised how little water drop is required to cause wells to "go dry". When wells are punched into an aquifer, they stop when they hit water, they don't keep going to be deeper. A water level drop of just 2 inches caused all sorts of issues for locals when Intel built its new Fabs in New Mexico.

Intel said that it wouldn't be an issue, yet when it happened, they did nothing to help and forced a huge number of people to have to put in new wells. The same will happen in Ohio.
Ask HN: Discussion forums like HN for Sales and Marketing?
by yumlogic | 2025-07-15 19:30:37+00:00
There is a good degree of technology discussion but much of it gravitate towards policies, politics, and things that probably does not matter to me. Recently, there is almost no discussion on building startup and challenges faced by startups.

However, I do see value in having forums like HN.

What are forums like HN but built for - Sales - Marketing - GTM - Startup challenges and discussions

Are there any other sites that resemble structure like HN and you find them valuable?
by dlenski | 2025-07-15 19:30:43+00:00
In my opinion, this article does a terrible job of explaining the technical mechanisms by which these blocks have been implemented, and the relationships between the entities involved.

Trying to piece together the details, here's my undewrstanding:

- Until recently, major British residential ISPs were blocking access to torrent/pirate/porn sites for their customers ("BT, Virgin Media, Sky, TalkTalk, EE, and Plusnet account for the majority of the UK’s residential internet market")

- Cloudflare has recently been ordered by courts in the UK to block access to these torrent/pirate/porn sites

- The reason that Cloudflare is involved is because many of these sites use Cloudflare as a content delivery network. A CDN is <waves hands> basically an application-layer distributed cache that sits between end users' web browsers and the origin HTTP servers that they're trying to access.

- Cloudflare geolocates clients connecting to its CDN. It undoubtedly has many reasons to do this, besides just court-ordered geoblocking: these would include routing queries efficiently within its globally distributed datacenters, DDoS prevention, bot blocking, etc.

- Cloudflare's geolocation techniques are, unsurprisingly, more sophisticated than just determining a country based on a client's IP address.

If I've got all that right (do I???)… then the tl;dr is:

It used to be possible for UK users to circumvent the blocks of these sites simply by using any VPN to acquire a non-UK IP address. Now the order to block these sites has been imposed on Cloudflare, which plays a critical role as an intermediary in distributing their content in a scalable way. For a variety of reasons, some of which end-users probably approve of and others not, Cloudflare uses more sophisticated techniques to geolocate clients. So "just use a VPN" is not enough to circumvent the blocks anymore.
by exabrial | 2025-07-15 19:30:57+00:00
Alright, I have a dumb question...

How come with a LAG group on ethernet, I can get "more total bandwidth", but any single TCP flow is limited to the max speed of one of the LAG Components (gigabit lets say), but then these guys are somehow combining multiple fibers into an overall faster stream? What gives? Even round robin mode on LAG groups doesn't do that.

What are they doing differently and why can't we do that?
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-15 19:31:04+00:00
Oh boy. People were expecting nuclear toothbrushes, nuclear school backpacks, nuclear stoves and nuclear fridges, nuclear grills, nuclear plates, nuclear medicine, nuclear sunglasses and nuclear airplanes.

Saying well, we got 500 nuclear power plants is like saying “well, we got excellent `npx create-app` style templates from AI. That’s pretty huge impact. I don’t know a single project post 2030 that didn’t start as an AI scaffolded project. That’s pretty huge dude”
by ReaperCub | 2025-07-15 19:31:27+00:00
> If it hits 100k then it needs to be debated in parliament.

I don't think so. It says on the site "At 100,000 signatures, this petition will be considered for debate in Parliament".

I've seen people get excited about petitions before that got to 100,000 signatures and it all fizzled out, or it wasn't debated seriously in parliament. Often you will get a cookie cutter response with these petitions that is a paragraph long.

The reality is that most of the public are indifferent or supportive of the current legislation and most MPs know that.

> There would be more of an impact if, perhaps, everyone in the UK who has had to shut a web site because of this law wrote to their MP.

Each MP would get maybe a max of 10s of emails/letters each. Many of those MPs wouldn't even bother answering you. Those that do will often will probably give you the brush off.

I've written to my MP before (about encryption legislation), spent a lot of time presenting a clear and cogent argument and I got a "well I might have a chat with the home secretary" and they were still singing the same tune years later. What I was telling them was largely the same as other industry experts. They don't care and that is the unfortunate reality.

The fact is that the direction the UK government (doesn't matter whether it was Red Team or Blue Team) has been going in has been clear for well over a decade at this point. It would take a major political shake up for this to change IMHO.
by yumlogic | 2025-07-15 19:32:19+00:00
You need good incentives. Good engineers know they are good.

Compensation is part of the game. Other factors are autonomy, decision making and influencing power, roadmap, real challenges (not we are curing the world).

Curiuos, what are you building? I am thinking of building a software for Personalized Recruiting. Happy to chat and understand current challenges.