MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-07-09 17:22:22+00:00
I often do something like

SUB_ME = ':sub_me'.freeze def my_method(method_argument) foo = 'foo_:sub_me' foo.sub!(SUB_ME, method_argument) foo end

which, without `# frozen_string_literal: true`, I believe allocates a string when the application loads (it sounds like it might be 2) and another string at runtime and then mutate that.

That seems like it's better than doing

# frozen_string_literal: true FOO = 'foo_:sub_me' SUB_ME = ':sub_me' def my_method(method_argument) FOO.sub(SUB_ME, method_argument) end

because that will allocate the frozen string to `FOO` when the application loads, then make a copy of it to `foo` at runtime, then mutate that copy. That means two strings that never leave memory (FOO, SUB_ME) and one that has to be GCed (return value) instead of just one that never leaves memory (SUB_ME) and one that has to be GCed (foo/return value).

This is true in particular when FOO is only used in `my_method`. If it's also used in `my_other_method` and it logically makes sense for both methods to use the same base string, then it's beneficial to use the wider-scope constant.

(The reason this seems reasonable in an application is that the method defines the string, mutates it, and sends it along, which primarily works because I work on a small team. Ostensibly it should send a frozen string, though I rarely do that in practice because my rule is don't mutate a string outside the context in which it was defined, and that seems sensible enough.)

Am I mistaken and/or is there another, perhaps more common pattern that I'm not thinking about that makes this desirable? Presumably I can just add # frozen_string_literal: false to my files if I want so this isn't a complaint. I'm just curious to know the reasoning since it is not obvious to me.
by root_axis | 2025-07-09 17:22:36+00:00
> What political agenda does he share with Nick Fuentes? They are complete opposites

They don't agree on everything, but it's simply wrong to state they are on opposite sides. They're both far right public figures and extreme Trump supporters that later became critics of the administration. I wouldn't label Elon as a Nazi, but he thinks racism is based just like Fuentes and is generally supportive of Nazi talking points which he is wont to retweet.

> Links to competitor platforms being suppressed lol

That's literally systematic censorship. The fact that you so flippantly dismiss it says a lot about your intellectual honesty on the topic.

> Other social media sites ban you for having viewpoints that do not align with theirs

Totally false.
by pizlonator | 2025-07-09 17:22:47+00:00
Gotta be careful about the tone and mindset here.

Given any arbitrarily optimized thing, it is always possible to optimize it more. And the fact that it's possible to optimize it more is not meant as a criticism of folks who did the previous optimizations.

So, I have no doubt that Mark and others have worked on exactly the thing I'm talking about and that they've gotten wins. And I have no doubt that more can be done. Also, not saying I would do a better job at it than Mark or anyone else
by blargey | 2025-07-09 17:22:53+00:00
I don’t think the third+ flavor of “bad release” this year, of the sort nobody else in this crowded space suffers from, is as innocuous as you think it is.

And Tay was a non-LLM user account released a full 6 years before ChatGPT; you might as well bring up random users’ markov chains.
by skybrian | 2025-07-09 17:22:59+00:00
To figure out who's right, we would need to do research, rather than choosing the judges versus the FTC based on vibes.

I'm hardly going to do that research myself, so I have no opinion. There are legal bloggers whose opinions I'd respect. I assume comments on Hacker News are no more informed than my own, unless they show they have relevant expertise.
by ra7 | 2025-07-09 17:23:17+00:00
There's a lot of push for inference hardware now (e.g. Ironwood TPUs). How does Nvidia maintain an edge there?

Also, I think the market has to expand beyond LLMs to areas like robotics and self driving cars (and they need to have real success) for Nvidia to maintain this valuation. I don't think only LLMs are enough because I don't see code assist/image generation/chatbots as a massive market.
Show HN: Todo2 – AI Project Manager Inside Cursor
by adam-pavlat | 2025-07-09 17:23:40+00:00
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by lucb1e | 2025-07-09 17:24:19+00:00
Huh? Try it, since like ten years it requires validating the account with a phone number, which in many countries requires going through government verification. That alone takes a while to set up if you want a new account that isn't linked to other things already. It's not a quick as generating a new password in your password manager and coming up with a non-taken username anymore

You also can't log into this app specifically, it will tie all apps on your device to this one account. Nobody should be doing this, it's like logging into the Chrome browser and tying all pages that have any sort of google service on it (embedded map, youtube, analytics, ads) to the phone number and thus identity you signed up with
by anonnon | 2025-07-09 17:24:31+00:00
7-zip, through its .7z format, also supports AES encryption. I'd argue it's probably the easiest way to encrypt individual file archives that you need to access on both Windows and Linux. I have a script I periodically run that makes an encrypted .7z archive of all of my projects, which I then upload for off-site backup. (On-site, I don't bother encrypting.)
by tslocum | 2025-07-09 17:24:46+00:00
The linked post got 13 points in 2 hours, and has just been flagged. It was already missing from any front pages before being visibly flagged.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250709152608/https://news.ycom...

https://web.archive.org/web/20250709172615/https://news.ycom...
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-07-09 17:24:53+00:00
> they rightly commented that if this was allowed to stand, the FTC and every government agency would just always estimate low in these cases.

I think you missed this — it isn’t some arbitrary reason to rule in an anti-consumer way. There is good reason to do so. Imo we should keep our checks and balances strong, and this is one small action that does that.
by beagle3 | 2025-07-09 17:25:10+00:00
It’s not very different, but it’s the numpy way is not the math way: when you talk math, you say “the exponent of the absolute value of the cosine of x”, like in APL, not “take x, get its cosine, then take the absolute value, and then get its exponent”

In fact, for many things, you so the math way in numpy as well. But in other things, the dot/object-oriented way is preferred.

APL is just consistent, terse, mathematical notation.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-09 17:25:22+00:00
There was a lot of radio word play. They couldn't say "that sucks" so they said "that vacuums" instead type of nonsense. Now, they just say "that sucks". But back around the Bush Sr and Clinton period, there were changes to broadcast rules that led to talk radio becoming what it has which also led to Fox News and then everyone else following suit
by tsvetkov | 2025-07-09 17:25:41+00:00
The market price is supposed to account for future growth, not just for current revenue. Predicting future is speculative by definition, but it's not completely detached from reality to bet that Nvidia has the potential to grow significantly for some time (at some point either the market cap or the multiple will correct of course).

I also see where the reasoning here contradicts the reality. If we assume Nvidia only sells $1000 gpus and moves a few millions a year, then how did it received $137B in FY2025? In reality they don't just sell GPUs, they sell systems for AI training and inference at insane margins (I've seen 90% estimates) and also some GPUs at decent margins (30-40%). These margins may be enough to stimulate competition at some point, but so far those risks have not materialized.
by RajGuruYadav | 2025-07-09 17:25:50+00:00
Thanks for asking! Out of the 700+ projects I’ve built (mostly for learning, experimenting, and exploring new ideas):

About 4–5 projects are still live, mostly on CodePen, and I also upload my work regularly on GitHub. Around 10–12 projects got real user engagement — through local communities, developer groups, or niche forums. A few tools (like my AI Blob app and some Firebase-based student tools) are still used by friends and classmates. Most of the projects were quick experiments — 1–2 day builds that helped me understand and master new technologies. The goal wasn’t to make each project viral — it was to build, learn, and improve with every iteration.

Right now, I’m shifting focus toward quality and scalability, refining the best ideas into open-source tools that can actually help others.
by unsignedint | 2025-07-09 17:26:51+00:00
Most of the examples this article cites are ones that exclude any coverage from left-leaning sources—and these are often highly biased articles, frequently lacking in merit. Even with tools like Ground News, media literacy is still essential; you can’t just throw it out the window. From my perspective, it offers a much broader view than simply sticking to one or two news outlets—especially ones you'd normally avoid at all costs (which, to me, is the whole point of the Blindspot feature). While it does provide some historical data, media ownership information, and other insights depending on your subscription level, ultimately it's up to the reader to decide whether the coverage is legitimate.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-07-09 17:26:58+00:00
> the system is non-deterministic means that it necessarily is probabilistic.

This is not correct. Both of the examples I gave where specifically chosen because they use non-determinism without any probabilistic framework associated.

Regex matching using non-deterministic finite automata requires absolutely zero usage of probability. You simply need to keep track of multiple paths and store whether or not any are in valid state at the end of processing the string. The list monad as non-determinism is an even more generic model of non-determinism, that again, requires nothing probabilistic in it's reasoning.

Non-deterministic things do often become probabilistic because typically you have to make a choice of paths, and that choice can have a probabilistic nature. But again, NFA regex matching is a perfect example where no "choice" is needed.
by arjunchint | 2025-07-09 17:27:36+00:00
The prevailing wisdom in the agentic AI space is that progress lies in building standardized servers and directories for tool discovery (like MCP). After extensive development, we believe this approach, while well-intentioned, is a cumbersome and inefficient distraction. It fundamentally misunderstands the bottleneck of today's LLMs.

The problem isn't a lack of tools; it's the painful and manual labor to setup, configure and connect to them.

Pre-defined MCP tool lists/directories, are inferior for several first-principle reasons:

- Reinventing the Auth Wheel: The key improvement of MCP's was supposed to be you get to package a bunch of tools together and solve the auth issue at this server level. But the user still has to configure and authenticate to the server using API key or OAuth.

- Massive Context Pollution: Every tool you add eats into the context window and risks context drift.

- Brittleness and Maintenance: If an API on the server-side changes, the MCP server must be updated.

- The Awkward Discovery Dance: It's a clunky user experience to discover the right server and then manually configure, defeating the purpose of seamless automation.

We propose a more elegant solution: Stop feeding agents tool lists. Let them build the tool they need, on the fly.

Our insight was simple: The browser is the authentication layer. Your logins, cookies, and active sessions are already there. An AI Web Agent can just reuse these credentials, find your API key and construct a tool to use. If you have an API key on your screen, you have an integration. It's that simple.

Our AI Web agent can now look at a webpage, find an API key, and be prompted to generate the necessary Javascript tool to call the desired endpoint at the moment it's needed. This approach:

- The user now just has to prompt an agent as opposed to the prior manual steps of finding a MCP Server, setting up, and authenticating to it.

- Keeps the context window clean and focused on the task at hand.

- No maintenance/debugging overhead. An API update? Just point the agent to the new docs and it will configure an updated version.

We wrote a blog post that goes deeper into this architectural take and shows a full demo of our agent creating a HubSpot tool from API key on page and using it in the same multi-step workflow of then loading contacts from LinkedIn with the new tool.

We think this is a more scalable and efficient path forward for agentic AI.

The full write up is here: https://www.rtrvr.ai/blog/on-the-fly-toolgen
by fao_ | 2025-07-09 17:27:37+00:00
That wasn't my answer, pay attention to people's username ;)

You haven't responded to the rest of my post, and your response of "If I can't do it on Kali Linux then it isn't possible because the poster said any Linux distro" honestly leads me to believe you're more interested in nitpicking arguments to "win", rather than debating and understanding. But, I'm going to be generous with my time and energy here and answer nonetheless.

In response to "Which distro?", literally any of the general purpose ones that have an update of this year. Whatever distros come up when you type how to move from windows to linux into google.

A quick search shows that Linux Mint and Zorin are kind of favoured in articles. But hell, Pop_OS!, Fedora, Ubuntu, whatever. You're probably not going to turn Kali or Puppy Linux into a perfect DAW environment without a lot of tweaking, but a simple google shows a bunch of suggested distributions that would work fine, and a specialist search of "linux distributions for audio production" would get you a better selection. None of these distributions you generally have to tweak a whole bunch, at least any more than you would have to tweak windows 11 to get it working right without advertising in the desktop (lmao).

We are a long way away from having to deal with Pulseaudio, Pipewire was feature complete for general purpose use in 2021 before it even hit 1.0, and almost all distributions now ship it, that's how much of an improvement to the Linux audio stack it is. Linux audio is good enough now that big audio companies like e.g. Presonus, are now supporting Linux: https://support.presonus.com/hc/en-us/articles/1921455826958...

And tools like VCV Rack work OOTB on Linux, I even got an Interesting copy of Renoise running in WINE out of the box.

If you want to see a considered opinion on Linux for audio production, here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idcGxMFwvv8

There's a whole bunch more, too. A good bunch of these work on Linux, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8HvTr_q2Yw (Although you'd be better off with Ardour, which is listed)
by heraldgeezer | 2025-07-09 17:27:44+00:00
>The current administration has this weird fixation on "babies"

This is not a Trump or American thing... This is a problem in EU too.. Lack of births is a very real issue and will only get worse.

I live in Sweden where you get 480 days off work already to split between 2 parents already and has for years. Births are in record decline.

Imo we are just too comfortable and don't need kids the same way we used to.
by marcosdumay | 2025-07-09 17:27:59+00:00
IMO, graphical languages should have graphical merge tools. You can't expect the text to be mergeable, but it's not enough reason to refuse file diffing as a concept.

The problem is that graphical tools are usually large, proprietary software made with the explicit purpose of locking people into an entire ecosystem. Diffing is a small specialized operation that enables portability and interoperability between ecosystems, so tool creators actively avoid those.
by sergiotapia | 2025-07-09 17:28:12+00:00
X saved free speech online. Without Musk acquiring it, we would have continued to slip into this franken-Resetera level of discourse. Thank God!

X is the platform where everyone can speak as long as it doesn't break the law. That's fantastic. If you don't like a particular subject, you can just move on. That's what the internet was in the 2000s!
by jimjimwii | 2025-07-09 17:28:13+00:00
Those same users will be tricked into downloading the "secure bowser" which has these tools. This is a nonsensical argument.

To this day, firefox is still the only browser that prevents its users from running custom extensions without Mozilla's blessing, likely motivated by the same garbage argument.

I have very little hope for Mozilla at this point and sincerely hope that they fail soon so that better open source browsers can take its place.
by msteffen | 2025-07-09 17:28:23+00:00
I'm trying to work through the math here, and I don't understand why these two propositions are equivalent:

1) min_{x,y} |x-y|^2

x ∈ A y ∈ B

2) = min_{x,y} d

d ≥ |x-y|^2 x ∈ A y ∈ B

What is 'd'? If d is much greater than |x-y|^2 at the actual (x, y) with minimal distance, and equal to |x-y|^2 at some other (x', y'), couldn't (2) yield a different, wrong solution? Is it implied that 'd' is a measure or something, such that it's somehow constrained or bounded to prevent this?
by empath75 | 2025-07-09 17:28:37+00:00
MCP's are precisely the opposite of "letting agents input whatever they want", even if a lot of MCP servers just do that.

The whole point of an MCP is to expose a subset of API functionality to an agent in a structured way with limited access, as opposed to just giving them access to a bash prompt or to run python code with the user's access.
by fabiensanglard | 2025-07-09 17:28:43+00:00
How does that work? You cannot write to disk before you know the compressed size. Or if you do you can use a data descriptor but you cannot write concurrently.

I guess they buffer the compressed stream to RAM before writing to zip. If they want to keep their zip stable (always the same output given the same input), they also need to keep it a bit longer than necessary in RAM.
by jcranmer | 2025-07-09 17:28:51+00:00
The people I've seen who have talked about their engagement numbers--as measured by something like "how many visitors do we get to a story based on a Bluesky/Facebook/ex-Twitter/etc. link", so independent of the social media's self-reported metrics--have all reported that Twitter is generally among the poorest-performing social media sites. Especially if you're looking at it from a perspective of "how much engagement do we get on social media [likes, quotes, replies, etc.] per conversion to visiting the site," where it strongly looks like Twitter is massively inflating its reported engagement.

I don't know how true that was of Twitter pre-Musk takeover, especially as many of the most direct comparisons didn't exist back then, so I can't say if Musk's takeover specifically made it less effective or not.
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-07-09 17:29:08+00:00
In the case of unhelpful human support, I can leverage my experience in communicating with another human to tell if I'm being understood or not. An LLM is much more trial-and-error: I can't model the theory-of-mind behind it's answers to tell if I'm just communicating poorly or whatever else may be being lost in translation, there is no mind at play.
by simonw | 2025-07-09 17:29:20+00:00
That sounds slightly different from "here is a question, say I don't know if you don't know the answer" - sounds to me like that was Opus running in a loop, presumably via Claude Code?

I did have one problem (involving SQLite triggers) that I bounced off various LLMs for genuinely a full year before finally getting to an understanding that it wasn't solvable! https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-chronicle/issues/7
by antonvs | 2025-07-09 17:29:44+00:00
With a function version of `if`, in general the compiler needs to wrap the alternative in closures ("thunks"), as it does with all function arguments unless optimizations make it unnecessary. That's never needed in the syntactic version. That's one significant optimization.

In GHC, `if` desugars to a case statement, and many optimizations flow from that. It's pretty central to the compiler's operation.

> Maybe it was needed in early versions. Or maybe they just didn't know they wouldn't need it yet.

Neither of these are true. My comment above was attempting to explain why `if` isn't implemented as a function. Haskell is a prime example of where it could have been done that way, the authors are fully aware of that, but they didn't because the arguments against doing it are strong. (Unless you're implementing a scripting-language type system where you don't care about optimization.)
by johnea | 2025-07-09 17:30:03+00:00
I'm sure it's a success for someone 8-/ Mostly IBM.

It's certainly been a successful takeover of all of the userspace runtime by one giant integrated set of executables.

Pwned off as an init replacement, then feature creeping it's way into every nook of userspace.

For me, it's still a disaster for distro and system s/w independence and the "do one thing well" philosophy.

While many welcome our new system overlords, the s/w is still not liked by many many people...

Move into the void! The DJB way and runit await...
by ivan_gammel | 2025-07-09 17:30:13+00:00
I’d suggest that bandwidth optimization should happen when it becomes critical and control presence of hypermedia controls via feature flag or header. This way frontend becomes simpler, so FE dev speed and quality improves, but backend becomes more complex. The main problem here is that most backend frameworks are supporting RMM level 2 and hypermedia controls require different architecture to make server code less verbose. Unfortunately REST wasn’t understood well, so full support of it wasn’t in focus of open source community.
by schmidtleonard | 2025-07-09 17:30:48+00:00
You are missing the forest for one very odd tree. Yes, the tree is wacky, but

* Every private media company has beneficial owners * Those beneficial owners are rich * Rich people who own things for a living have incentives opposed to those of most people, who work for a living

These are not conspiracies, they are just basic facts of capitalism.
by fkyoureadthedoc | 2025-07-09 17:30:54+00:00
There's a subreddit for everything. Reddit as a whole has plenty of users that represent any opinion you can imagine. Fairly conservative subreddits hit r/all regularly, but not as much as less conservative ones.

I think what you're trying to say is that on default subs, or some popular ones, that you can't post/comment some things without it getting removed, and possibly banned from those subs. Which is absolutely true. Same thing is true on HN, you can't even make a post about Grok's latest escapades without getting flagged.

But if you just want to have some space to discuss some topic, make subreddit for it, moderate it however you want. Reddit itself isn't going to ban you unless it's against site level guidelines.

It's pretty hard to get a site level ban. One easy way is to use a VPN though. My account (and any new one I make, so probably my IP/device too) was banned for ban evasion because I accidentally left my VPN on when using the Reddit app.