MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by riigess | 2025-07-03 19:21:02+00:00
Calling this a Poor Man’s backend isn’t even the wrong name for it. Admittedly, this is what I’d expect from a Sophomore in University.

To the others arguing you should’ve stored the data as a binary, might as well have created an API wrapper around SQLite at that rate and called it “JASW - Just Another Sqlite Wrapper”.

@ OP - what was the inspiration for the project? Were you learning DBs or intending to use this in a production environment for a chat session with GPT or something? Would love to help you improve this, but we’d have to understand the problem we’re trying to solve better.
by e12e | 2025-07-03 19:21:15+00:00
I wonder if common lisp with repl and debugger could provide a better tool than your example with nasm wrapped via apt in Docker...

Essentially just giving LLMs more state of the art systems made for incremental development?

Ed: looks like that sort of exists: https://github.com/bhauman/clojure-mcp

(Would also be interesting if one could have a few LLMs working together on red/green TDD approach - have an orchestrator that parse requirements, and dispatch a red goblin to write a failing test; a green goblin that writes code until the test pass; and then some kind of hobgoblin to refactor code, keeping test(s) green - working with the orchestrator to "accept" a given feature as done and move on to the next...

With any luck the resulting code might be a bit more transparent (stricter form) than other LLM code)?
by abhv | 2025-07-03 19:21:22+00:00
(1) in this case, an identity issuer provides the source of truth identity information. Examples include state DMV, your passport (you can try "Id pass" in Google wallet), etc.

(2) One of the goals of this project was to layer ZK on top of current identity standards that DMVs already issue, so that gov orgs don't have to change what they currently do to support the strongest user privacy. One example format is called Mdoc.

(3) The user holds the identity information on their device only. No other copies. The user's device makes the zkp proof on-device. This was one of the major technical challenges.

(4) The relying party (eg a website) runs the zk verification algorithm on the proof that is produced by the device to ensure soundness.

(5) Yes, the user can use any compatible implementation to produce the proof. We have open-sourced our implementation and we have a spec for the proof format that others can also reimplement.
by bob1237 | 2025-07-03 19:21:30+00:00
Am the only one bothered by this? I get it is very cheap at 8 dollars a month but this literally only gets you 100 messages to the flagship (Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude 4 Sonnet, o3) models and otherwise are limited to 1000 messages for models I can literally just get for free (Deepseek R1, 4o).

You can't even get 4 Opus or o3 Pro without YOUR OWN API KEY

EDIT: I will add that the UX is very good but the pricing makes it pretty useless, I could max out the flagship 100 message limit in a day easily (upon which I would need to pay another 8 dollars if I wanted more messages). Why could it not be a token limit or something similar so I don't have to think about sending less messages?
by schiffern | 2025-07-03 19:21:55+00:00
>[How real people actually interpret the article] is irrelevant

I don't think that's true, and I don't think The Guardian is so naive and/or innocent.

I love how people are simultaneously replying to my comment with "of course The Guardian didn't mean to say X, you're lying" and "of course X is true." Really proves my point, thanks.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-03 19:22:06+00:00
I'd really love to see more folks trying to make neat chips again. There tends to be a player or two in each section of computing; a couple folks making NVMe controllers, two folks making USB4 chips, a half dozen folks making wifi chips. There's a lot of ARM cores out there but there's really only a handful of cell and tablet chip makers. Then the hyperscalers cranking out server designs, which while compute heavy don't need quite the sea of integrated peripheral connections, somewhat.

The foundry model is so interesting, but there's such an IP qualification barrier to being able to ship your off the shelf say PCIe IP on a new foundry.

Seems alas like Intel maybe perhaps is giving up, or just targeting the hyperscalers with money to throw at chip-making. Samsung seems to have a similar problem here, finding customers competent enough to use well the blank slate of capabilities offered.

Ideally the open chip design world would be buoying these efforts, would be enticing more people into making chips. It feels like if these companies want to have viable foundries, maybe they should be working to accelerate these efforts more, should be trying to get open source ram controllers and open source PCIe and USB designs thriving and usable, helping folks see and understand how to qualify such designs on their foundry.

The IP control of the major design blocks is tight right now. That keeps the foundry work from flooding in, imo. And it seems so fixable!
by andjar | 2025-07-03 19:22:34+00:00
A while ago, I started working on two R packages for creating 'living reviews': metawoRld and DataFindR, see https://andjar.github.io/metawoRld/articles/conceptual_overv... . You do the broad literature search yourself, but the idea is to use LLMs to select relevant studies and perform data extraction in a structured, reproducible manner. The extracted data is stored in a git repository for collaboration and version tracking, with automated validation and website generation for presenting results.
by atupem | 2025-07-03 19:22:52+00:00
Lots of interesting issues:

- The agent has a tool to set it's task to 'completed', 'failed', or 'needs_help', with the last one being a option for human in the loop scenarios. Sometimes the agent gets lazy and says it needs help prematurely.

- Additionally, the agent can create subtasks for itself, either to run immediately, or to schedule in the future. Here it again can call that tool a bit too eagerly, filling duplicate subtasks for a task that involves repetitive work.

- Properly handling super long running tasks, that run for 1+ hours. The context window eventually hits it's limit (this will be addressed this week)

Aside from those top of mind issues, there's a whole bunch of scaffolding issues - filesystem permissions, prompt injection security, i/o support, token cost - lot's to improve!

We're still super early, but already these agents are showing flashes of brilliance, and we're gaining more and more conviction that this is the right form factor
by necovek | 2025-07-03 19:22:53+00:00
On top of the other things mentioned (caching always introduces complexity with lifetime tracking, and thus can't make things simple), the article's got it the wrong way around.

When code has abstract interfaces for data access, introducing caching can be simpler (but not simple) by localizing it in the abstraction implementation which has or doesn't have caching.

But it is not an abstraction (you can perfectly well do caching without any abstractions, and it's frequently done exactly that way).
by moritzwarhier | 2025-07-03 19:22:55+00:00
> AFAIK you can get the same model that they host online, it's just that there's so many distilled/quantized models floating around that the average person using ollama or whatever think they're running the same thing as the one on chat.deepseek.com, but they're not.

No, I was perfectly aware of this difference when writing my comment. I just don't have the hardware, time, and skill/motivation to do a scientific comparison.

OpenAI used to use static weights, but it's pretty clear that they're doing more by now (and no, I don't mean just RAG).

How would you go about verifying the weights used by cloud DS are the same as the ones you get when using full local DS with beefy hardware? Running millions of prompts at temp=0?

> 1. how is it "monopolization", when AI companies are also providing open weights models?

Please refer to the rest of my comment for my response to this. Also, AFAIK, DS was trained on ChatGPT conversations for RILHF?

Regarding the licensing of training data, I feel like we are not communicating on a common basis anymore.

Do you think that training needs no commercial content licensing, or do you think that most AI companies have commercial licenses (not just a paid copy!) for their training data?
by fusionadvocate | 2025-07-03 19:22:58+00:00
What is holding back AI is this business necessity that models must perform everything. Nobody can push for a smaller model that learns a few simple tasks and then build upon that, similar to the best known intelligent machine: the human.

If these corporations had to build a car they would make the largest possible engine, because "MORE ENGINE MORE SPEED", just like they think that bigger models means bigger intelligence, but forget to add steering, or even a chassi.
by ck2 | 2025-07-03 19:23:28+00:00
You never know when a zero-day is going to popup and whack your cameras as IOT, part of a DDOS or whatnot

But if you've hardened it even a little bit with something as easy as not letting it communicate off your intranet, well that can prevent ugly discoveries later

If you need offsite remote camera access you can always carve out a tunnel
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-03 19:23:36+00:00
It might not, depending on what happens with tariffs. Trump would need to find a lot of money in tariffs, though. So either way we pay for it, in tariffs or inflation.

So... how should one play this? I presume that the tariff revenue won't be enough. So we will have inflation, or we will have stagflation. I lived through stagflation, in the 1970s, but I wasn't old enough to understand it as an investment environment.

In light of this bill passing, where's a good place to put money?
by golergka | 2025-07-03 19:23:41+00:00
People claimed that we would spend most of our day on the internet in the mid-90s, and then the dotcom bubble burst. And then people claimed that by 2015 robo-taxis would be around all the major cities of the planet.

You can be right but too early. There was a hype wave for drones and VR (more than one for the latter one), but I wouldn't be so sure that it's peak of their real world usage yet.
by coldpie | 2025-07-03 19:23:58+00:00
Thank you.

> Your phone stores the document, with cooperation from a secure element that binds the document to the phone. The website you visit verifies the proof.

So it does require a "blessed" implementation, and I have to trust Google or Apple to handle my data? I cannot own the document myself and use an open-source client that I trust to provide the proof?
by trcarney | 2025-07-03 19:24:09+00:00
I think ICANN just needs to make a rule that basically says if a country's domain is being used as a general domain (i.e. ai, tv, io, etc), it becomes a general domain if the country no longer exists or needs the domain (like a name change).

This feels like an issue that is only an issue because of a hardline that should just be a general convention.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-07-03 19:26:29+00:00
I'm heavy into roleplay, and that's how I prefer to play D&D.

And I think you're probably right.

D&D is barely the right fit for the kind of game I like to play. But D&D is wildly popular, and it's much easier to find people who'll play D&D with a heavy emphasis on roleplay, than it is to find people who'll play Heart, or Wildsea, or things that are even further way from the "roll-play" aspect.

For what it's worth, we still engage in combat, we use our various abilities outside of combat, etc. Most of the rules are about combat. Even the magic section is framed around using magic in actions. But exploration, etc., is still a part of the game; it's just that those rules are jotted down on like 5 pages out of the 200.
by supertrope | 2025-07-03 19:26:37+00:00
When you talk on a cellphone the codec AMR-WB nominally captures 50 Hz - 7000 Hz. However that's only on the optional highest bitrate 23.85 Kbps. The most common bitrate 12.65 Kbps only goes up to 6400 Hz and synthesizes 6400 - 7000 Hz from lower frequencies and noise as it sounds better than not having the noise!
by jandrewrogers | 2025-07-03 19:26:51+00:00
It isn’t a graph cutting problem, graph cutting is just a simpler, special case of this more general cutting problem (h/t IBM Research). If you can solve the general problem you effectively get efficient graph cutting for free. This is obviously attractive to the extent you can do both complex spatial and graph computation at scale on the same data structure instead of specializing for one or the other.

The challenge with cutting e.g. rectangles into uniform subsets is that logical shard assignment must be identical regardless of insertion order and in the absence of an ordering function, with O(1) space complexity and without loss of selectivity. Arbitrary sets of rectangles overlap, sometimes heavily, which is the source of most difficulty.

Of course, with practical implementations write scalability matters and incremental construction is desirable.
by perching_aix | 2025-07-03 19:28:04+00:00
How does that follow? Or are we talking past each other?

I tried to model this formally (well, to the extent I can model anything formally), cause this is a fun little exercise in a way, and got that at least as far as my toy model goes, it's a wash, both matter equally (since at the extremes, they will approach each other's distributions, i.e. the distribution of expertise or the distribution of tool choice).

Or to be more specific, what matters more is what you can change more, something I only accounted for in the very end. And I don't think significantly pushing the needle in expertise, especially in a way that persists over time, is realistic. People need time to gain expertise, so those with majority expertise will always be a minority. But improving tooling and doing so with long lasting effects is much more realistic. Hence, good tooling that leads your hand matters more. It raises the bar, and automatically ensures past mistakes aren't repeated without a need for costly rediscovery or specific training.
by ShakataGaNai | 2025-07-03 19:28:11+00:00
So our company has reasonably liberal usage of Zoom's AI Assistant. To provide summaries etc. How good the summaries are is a matter of debate..... Sometimes they are fairly good, often they get small details wrong/confused. Overall I view them as a "this will remind us of high level conversation points if needed".

That being said, the notetaker is a supplementary component. It's never "in replace of a person". If someone sends an AI to my meeting instead of showing up themselves, I'm kicking it out.

If there is too much going on or too many meetings, learn to use meetings better. Learn to use emails. I'd much rather exchange a few emails than talk at an AI bot. Hell, I'll use my own AI to help me craft the email if I really feel its needed, but at least then I have the chance to make sure its right before I hit send.
by mathiaspoint | 2025-07-03 19:28:24+00:00
You could buy assets. Be careful though, hyperinflation is pretty weird and a lot of stuff (real estate counterintuitively for example) performs pretty poorly in it. Basically you get the opposing price changes but also the same reaction to price volatility that you during a recession so there's just less liquidity. Some people are doing a bond calendar spread but then you're effectively gambling on FOMC decisions which isn't all that prudent. Someone I know got liquidated earlier this year trying that.

Crypto is actually one of the less crazy things to buy right now IMO if you can mentally handle that.

In general I would avoid holding debt (margin, mortgages, credit card it doesn't matter) because the interim can be pretty funky and hard to predict.
by esbranson | 2025-07-03 19:29:23+00:00
It is decentralized. The holder provides the data, which was ultimately provided to them by the government, they're the client. The verifier is the entity that wants to know how old the holder is, the server.

The form are eg things like the JSON Web Token (JWT), Digital Credentials, and the Federated Credential Management API (FedCM).[1][2][3][4][5] The software can be anything since they're expected to use open protocols, so yes, web browsers.[6] Per the Commission, "For remote presentation flows, … the Wallet Instance implements the OpenID for Verifiable Presentation protocol OpenID4VP in combination with the W3C Digital Credentials API."[7]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_Web_Token

[2] https://github.com/w3c-fedid/digital-credentials

[3] https://w3c-fedid.github.io/digital-credentials/

[4] https://github.com/w3c-fedid/FedCM

[5] https://w3c-fedid.github.io/FedCM/

[6] https://github.com/w3c-fedid/FedCM/blob/main/explorations/HO...

[7] https://eu-digital-identity-wallet.github.io/eudi-doc-archit...
by jama211 | 2025-07-03 19:29:52+00:00
Let’s be honest for a second - we could both pick examples of slow software on old machines, slow software on new machines, fast software on old machines, and fast software on new machines, and talk about cherry picked experiences all day long to “prove our points”.

Which… by default… means I’m you’re going to have a lot of trouble asserting your “everything is slower now” point, if you see my point ;). I may also have to accept I can’t assert necessarily that everything is faster now. Fortunately I don’t really need to, as I am happy to restrict my point to simple activities, such as web browsing and such, but that’s by the by.

And to answer your question I don’t remember why it took quite so long to generate civ 1 maps, but I have a vague memory of trying to do weird things with the maps with my dad, so perhaps they were larger or there was some generation mod but I honestly couldn’t tell you my memory is too fuzzy. I do remember the copy protection that required looking up words in the manual though…
by regularfry | 2025-07-03 19:29:58+00:00
Do you happen to know what the answer of this scheme to "I have a wireguard connection to another country, you can't see my traffic" is? I know that enough of the population would never bother so it wouldn't significantly harm it as a revenue scheme, but if your goal is avoiding identification rather than taxation then the stakes could be high enough to make the effort worthwhile.
by dang | 2025-07-03 19:30:01+00:00
Don't solicit upvotes, comments, or submissions. Users should vote and comment when they run across something they personally find interesting—not for promotion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Q: Can I ask people to upvote my submission?

A: No. Users should vote for a story because they personally find it intellectually interesting, not because someone has content to promote. We penalize or ban submissions, accounts, and sites that break this rule, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
by dmbche | 2025-07-03 19:30:12+00:00
It used to be a bigger deal (when digital cameras started being used) since people felt like digital video didn't look real/as good - movies shot on film were generally better looking (as crews were used shooting with it and digital video wasn't as sophisticated as today) and HAD grain.

It might be that there is a large part of the population that still has that association.

Cinephiles are also more likely to watch older (i.e. with grain) movies that ARE well shot and beautiful (which is why they are classics and watched by cinephiles) and not see bad film movies, only the cream of the crop, while being exposed to the whole gamut of quality when watching todays movies shot digitally. Would reinforce that grain = good while not being necessarily the case - and their opinion might be heard more than gen pop.

At any rate, it can be a neat tool to lower sharpness!
Ask HN: Do you have a BYD car or driven one? What do you think about it?
by diggan | 2025-07-03 19:30:18+00:00
As my government is offering rebates for purchasing electric/hybrid cars until the end of the year, I've been eyeing the idea of moving from a diesel car (Audi A3 2018) to an electric car, and the BYD models are looking enticing for the price they're at.

However, they haven't really been available for a long time here (only since 2023/24, I think, in Spain), and I have no one near me who seems to have driven one or even sat in one.

Hopefully someone here owns one or has at least tried driving one before, and could talk about the experience and how it feels. Looking at some images, it does look too “high-tech” for a software programmer like me, who likes simple and boring controls, but if we're getting an electric car, it doesn't seem like we have lots of options in that direction anyway.

I've mainly looked at the various editions of the Seal, but experiences about any of the models are most welcome!
by jfengel | 2025-07-03 19:30:37+00:00
Stocks, I'd think. All of that extra money in the hands of the wealthy will go towards investments, and eventually into the market.

Probably some stocks and sectors will benefit more than others, but I think that a broad index fund will get you a lot of the benefit with none of the guesswork, and less risk.

There is, of course, the existential risk that the entire system will collapse. You could diversify out of the country, though I would expect any such crisis to ripple out everywhere.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-03 19:31:27+00:00
I think it takes being on a project for several years, more than once. You need to see some good ideas turn out to be bad ones, or at least to have some bad side effects. You need to see some features that were developed that turned into maintenance headaches (and some clever hacks that did, too). You need to bump into the issues that the architecture causes, repeatedly.

I think understanding the longer-term consequences of ideas that sound good in the short term is a big part of "good taste".
by sunshowers | 2025-07-03 19:32:48+00:00
Rust is far more portable in practice than C. Your average C program is written either for Unix or for Windows, while Rust has sufficient abstraction power to be able to write most business logic once.

I maintain cargo-nextest, a widely-used test runner for Rust. It is possible to write nextest's runner loop in C, but it would be extraordinarily difficult — each test's state machine has dozens of states, there are several dynamic event sources as inputs, and the event loop relies heavily on epoll/kqueue/the equivalent Windows thing, as abstracted out by Tokio. So most test runners written in C don't even try to approach the quality, reliability, or portability of nextest.

https://nexte.st/docs/design/architecture/runner-loop/
by ekidd | 2025-07-03 19:33:06+00:00
My approach is that there is a tension between three things:

1. The "combat simulator" built into the rules. I run this according to the spirit of the rules, so that players' investments in classes and feats pays off as expected. Otherwise my players feel cheated.

2. The simulation of the world. This is important because it makes the world feel real and believable (and because as DM, I get many of my plot ideas by "simulating" consequences).

3. The story. The campaign should ideally tell a story. Sometimes this means involving what I think of as "the Rule of Cool (But It's Only Cool the First Time)."

The "peasant railgun", unfortunately, fails all three tests. It isn't really part of the intended combat rules. It doesn't make sense when simulating the world. And it probably doesn't fit into the campaign's narrative because it's too weird.

On the other hand, if a player proposes something really cool that fits into the logic of the world, and that also fits into the story, then I'll look for ways to make it happen.

Let's say the PCs find 200 peasant archers, and set them up on a high hill, and have them all rain down arrows on a single target. That seems like it ought to work, plus it's a great story about bringing the villagers together to save the day. So in this case, I'll happily handwave a bunch of rules, and declare "rain of arrows" to be a stupidly powerful AoE.

But different tables like different things, so this isn't one-size-fits-all advice!