MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dceddia | 2025-07-20 17:10:15+00:00
A friend of mine set up a cron job coupled with the Claude API to process his email inbox every 30 minutes and unsubscribe/archive/delete as necessary. It could also be expanded to draft replies (I forget if his does this) and even send them, if you’re feeling lucky. I’m pretty sure the AI (I’m guessing Claude Code in this case) wrote most or all of the code for the script that does the interaction with the email API.

An example of my own, not agentic or running in a loop, but might be an interesting example of a use case for this stuff: I had a CSV file of old coupon codes I needed to process. Everything would start in limbo, uncategorized. Then I wanted to be able to search for some common substrings and delete them, search for other common substrings and keep them. I described what I wanted to do with Claude 3.7 and it built out a ruby script that gave me an interactive menu of commands like search to select/show all/delete selected/keep selected. It was an awesome little throwaway script that would’ve taken me embarrassingly long to write, or I could’ve done it all by hand in Excel or at the command line with grep and stuff, but I think it would’ve taken longer.

Honestly one of the hard things about using AI for me is remembering to try to use it, or coming up with interesting things to try. Building up that new pattern recognition.
by jmyeet | 2025-07-20 17:10:29+00:00
There are design decisions you can reasonably question in Rust but the big one that justifies its existence is memory safety. It's simply too important. Not everything needs it but key infrastructure, most notably Web browsers, do.

I predict we will be having buffer overrun CVEs in C/C++ code for as long as we have C/C++ code.

The realities of writing safe, multithreaded C/C++ on processors with out-of-order processing, context switching and branch prediction is simply too complex to get right 100% of the time. Rust makes writing certain code difficult because it is difficult to do/ C/C++ fools you into believing something is safe because you've never encountered the circumstances where it isn't.

We have tools like valgrind to try and identify such issues. They're certainly useful. But you'll be constantly chasing rabbits.

I've seen thread and memory bugs in production code written by smart, highly-paid engineers at big tech companies that have lain dormant for the better part of a decade.

That's why Rust exists.
by mrweasel | 2025-07-20 17:10:45+00:00
Oh, sorry if that wasn't clear. Foster children here aren't up for adoption, only in very rare cases. The two systems are for different purposes. The foster children typically have needs that require foster parents with special training. Often the foster children still have some contact with their biological parents, so again, specifically not up for adoption. Adopting is difficult, you'd have more success as a foster parent, but it's harder to be approved as a foster family, e.g. you need special training.

I get that systems are different around the world, but solutions like this is still required or at least wanted in countries where adoption is pretty much not an option. It is a pretty fortunate situation to have a society where adoption is so rarely needed, but it's also massively hurtful to would be parents to suggest that they should simply adopt, when they want to, but does have that option.
by lmeyerov | 2025-07-20 17:10:46+00:00
I used to believe the error rate fallacy, but:

1. Multi-turn agents can correct themselves with more steps, so the reductive error cascade thinking here is more wrong than right in my experience

2. The 99.9% production requirement is so contextual and misleading, when the real comparison is often something like "outage", "dead air", "active incident", "nobody on it", "prework before/around human work", "proactive task no one had time for before", etc.

Similar to infra as code, CI, and many other automation processes, there's mountains of work that isn't being done and LLMs can do entirely or large swathes of
by zk4x | 2025-07-20 17:11:23+00:00
Indices are the way to go for a whole range of programs - compilers (IR instructions), GUI (widgets), web browser (UI elements), databases, games (ECS), simulations, etc. It is however without borrowcheck guarantees.

Rc and Arc are definitely a bad way to avoid borrowchecker. GC is used because it is much faster than reference counting. OCaml and Go are experimenting with smarter local variable handling without GC. At that point they may outperform Arc and Rc heavy Rust code.
by zozbot234 | 2025-07-20 17:11:27+00:00
Feel free to listen to the context at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/lang-next-2014/from-... around 20:40 to 21:10. It's pretty clear that it's a serious quote and not "sarcastic" at all. Least of all about research languages since Pike mentions CSP at length and how to make concurrency be not "scary" to prospective users - overall, it seems that he's talking about a real constraint he's facing. In the same talk he's even apologetic for not preventing data races in the language, since it would have involved too much complexity.
by deng | 2025-07-20 17:11:54+00:00
Because traditionally, Blender modeling works best on a clean quad-based mesh. Just look at any modeling tutorial for Blender and one of the first things you learn is to always keep a clean, quad-based topology, and avoid triangles and n-gons as much as possible, as it will make further work on the model more painful, if not impossible. That starts with simple stuff like doing a loop cut to things like uv-unwrapping and using the sculpting tools. It's also better for subdivision surface modeling. You can of course use tri-based models, but if you want to refine them manually, it's often a pain. Usually, for me it's pretty much a "take as-is or leave it" situation for tri-based meshes, and since I see these AI-created models more as a starting point rather than the finished product, having a clean quad-based topology would be very important for me.
by jebarker | 2025-07-20 17:12:18+00:00
I totally agree with your strong feelings on the meat industry. The reason I said the main market is ex meat eaters is because if you’re still eating meat then any craving for the taste/texture/smell of meat is at least getting partially satisfied by the meat you’re still eating. There’s definitely some market for people just trying to cut down on meat though, and that’s great too.
Cosmosapien CLI / Dumb LLM Orchestrator
by Musagayev | 2025-07-20 17:12:24+00:00
Wrote this because I couldn’t sleep.

Cosmosapien CLI is a stupidly simple tool that lets you chain together a bunch of AI models like GPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and open-source through one command line. It figures out (at least it did for me) which model to use based on how hard the task is, burns through free tiers first, and sends the heavy stuff to whoever can handle it.

The code is ugly. It barely qualifies as a project. But it works. Maybe it crashes and dies. Either way, it’s out there.

If you feel yourself useless, please do a PR. You might accidentally make this garbage AI CLI smarter than it should be.

https://github.com/musa92/cosmosapien-cli
by tialaramex | 2025-07-20 17:12:27+00:00
The soundtrack of Quake is famously by Nine Inch Nails, a "band" which basically consists of Trent Reznor who these days is probably as famous for movie soundtracks like "The Social Network" or "Soul" or for TV soundtracks like the "Watchmen" series but at the time would have been called the "front man" of NiN.
by remus | 2025-07-20 17:12:59+00:00
> Tesla has developed FSD basically for free, because people pay for software that isn't there yet, and Tesla doesn't waste money on expensive hardware.

In financial terms you could call that a liability, and you might reasonably expect to have to pay off that liability at some point i.e. delivering functionality people have already paid for! In that framing I would be more careful in framing FSD as a financial success.
by JeremyNT | 2025-07-20 17:13:09+00:00
As a vegetarian I actually prefer stuff like Beyond when eating out.

The reason is simple: it has higher protein content than most other place based fast foods.

I'd love to live in a world with minimally processed high protein vegetarian restaurant food (like lots of legumes), but the only reliable place to get this that I know of is CAVA.

Products like Beyond are at least a step up from carb heavy pastas and grains or oily fried vegetables and starches which are the staples of most restaurant fare for vegetarians.
by esafak | 2025-07-20 17:13:12+00:00
The models can't tell when they shouldn't extrapolate and simply need more information. Which rules can be generalized and which ones can't. Why shouldn't a method `doWhizBang()` exist if there methods for all sorts of other things?

When I was young, I once beamed that my mother was a good cooker. It made perfect sense based on other verbs, but I did not know that that word was already claimed by machines, and humans were assigned the word cooks. Decades later, I had the pleasure of hearing my child call me a good cooker...
by gtowey | 2025-07-20 17:13:22+00:00
It's not just being stupid, it's that the information space is overflowing with marketing and BS. It's a mammoth task to parse through it all and not be suckered in by a slick advertisement that says the product you're looking at has everything you want. Amazon is absolutely the worst for false advertising, garbage masquerading as top of the line. And the usual alternative, using Google to search for companies directly, has turned into a largely futile experience as their search results are absolutely terrible, showing almost only the "top" retailers which are the same purveyors of cheap crap.

I have spent a considerable amount of time researching better, more durable pants and this is the first time I've heard about this company. So thank you for that!
by Tokumei-no-hito | 2025-07-20 17:13:22+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426726

relevant quotes:

Xfinity won't give folks in certain locales (maybe everywhere in the US?) unlimited bandwidth unless they use their modem/router. This seems like a good reason that practice should be illegal.

AzzyHN 19 days ago | parent | next [–]

If you want to remove the 1.2TB data cap, you can either pay $25/mo and get Xfinity's gateway router "included" OR pay $30/mo to use your own modem/router.
by comprev | 2025-07-20 17:13:23+00:00
My Dad always extends this quip to "After buying it and selling it there's always a third day - when I get to spend time with the family on the water - and that makes all the other days in between worth it"

He's now in his mid 80s and still gets excited about taking friends & family on the boat - if it's their first or hundredth time.
by rsynnott | 2025-07-20 17:13:37+00:00
Possibly you omitted an (in America) from your original post? The first practical lithium ion battery car was either the Nissan Leaf or a weird Renault, depending on how you define practical (the Renault Zoe was built on the same platform as the weird Renault whose name I can’t remember , but came out about a year later). Both came out before the model S (though I think not in the US).

Really, the electric car revolution, such as it is, was largely driven by battery tech; lithium ion batteries crossed a threshold from not good enough (there were electric cars based on such batteries, notably some weird VW Golfs, but they did not sell well) to good enough.

The rocket thing was more business case than tech; both the US and Soviet Union studied reusable rockets from at least the 70s, but the economics wasn’t compelling.
by stouset | 2025-07-20 17:13:40+00:00
Git as a backend (with some amendments) is lovely and brilliant. Git as a front end is legendarily difficult to use.

Jujutsu has all the advantages with none of the downsides and—unlike the alternatives—adoption doesn’t need to happen all at once. Every single person who I’ve convinced to give it a meaningful shot has fully converted. That speaks volumes.
by paulpauper | 2025-07-20 17:13:41+00:00
These "scam investigators" , along with Zach XBT, never investigate youtube crypto giveaway scams , like those impersonating Elon Musk and others. These collectively since 2020 have stolen much more than rug pulls, yet entirely under the radar and get no attention or help for victims. Probably tens thousands of people have collectively lose $100+ million and not a peep. These guys have the platform to try to force youtube to take further action.
Show HN: Kriegspiel Tic Tac Toe
by fishtoaster | 2025-07-20 17:13:51+00:00
Based on a passing comment on mastodon a year or two back, what if Tic Tac Toe was a hidden information game? I thought that'd be kinda fun to whip up, so here it is as a two-player, online, async game. Code at https://github.com/kkuchta/kttt
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-20 17:13:52+00:00
> I can't easily recognize (post-)modern social construction in his worldview, especially construction of reality at large

The most relevant piece is probably Theses on Feuerbach. Feuerbach advocated a materialist (e.g. essentially naturalistic) point of view to which Marx objected.

His basic argument is that it doesn't make sense to talk about an objective materialist universe. That point of view leads to middle class society. His own point of view isn't really coherent, but it's essentially that humans create the objective world and truth through interacting with it.

To me it feels like what he's trying to do is try to take German idealism and apply it to groups of people rather than single people. Conceptually you get a sort of Cartesian solipsism at the social scale. But you can read it and you may get a different take away from it.
by mind-blight | 2025-07-20 17:14:00+00:00
Using the amount of processing - particularly processing that hasn't been studied - as a heuristic for health vs. unhealthy is pretty reasonable. We have lots of examples over the last 70 years of companies claiming a new processed food is better or safe, only for it to be harmful. And a lot of the changes seemed innocuous:

- Partially hydrogenated oils (most margarines in the US for a while) were pushed as a healthier alternative to butter, but turns out those are terrible for you due to trans fat. And the main difference between a trans vs cis fat is that cis fat have a kink in molecular chain and trans fats don't. Small change, but huge health difference

- The sugar industry paid food scientists in the 60s to downplay sugar's impact on heart disease and play up fat and cholesterol (Check out the "Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents" published at UCFS). This lead to food companies replacing health fats with sugars in much of their food over the last 60 years, resulting in much worse health outcomes based on bias, paid for research

- Apples and other fruit generally have a higher fructose to glucose ratio than high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). But, all of the sugar is surrounded by other nutrients and fiber, which make apples a healthy food choice and HFCS pretty bad for you.

One of the common patterns is that new processes introduced harms that were unknown at the time. Food companies have very little incentive to proactively look for harms that occur over a longer time horizon. And one thing has consistently been true: that closer a food is to how we've eaten it historically (chopped/crushed, cooked, boiled, fermented, and filtered), the less likely it is to have an unknown harm
by ameixaseca | 2025-07-20 17:14:39+00:00
There's a false dichotomy in this whole discussion: for instance, a third option is having the interface as a separate declaration.

A simple example using traits (Rust):

// logger.rs trait Logger { fn log_something(&self); } // mycustomlogger.rs struct MyCustomLogger; // logger.rs or mycustomlogger.rs impl Logger for MyCustomLogger { fn log_something(&self) { println!("Hello"); } }

The actual `log_something` implementation for `MyCustomLogger` (ie, the block with the `println!` call) can be outside of the impl, as a function or inherent method, and just be called by the impl block - thus implementing similar "glue" as described in the article.

The difference is that there is no strong requirement on where exactly it needs to be [1].

This would likely require Zig to support "interfaces" at the language level, though.

--

[1] PS: there is the "orphan rule" for trait implementations, but I'm simplifying it here for the sake of the example

EDIT: formatting
by harrisi | 2025-07-20 17:14:47+00:00
Earlier in the definition it uses the more conservative phrase "no or rare culinary use," which I think is more accurate. The point is just to attempt to categorize foods by processing levels in a way the public can understand.

I am curious what items in the list differ for you. When's the last time you grabbed your isolated fructose and maltodextrin to season your steak?

The way I think of it is if I were to cook a chicken breast or bake a loaf of bread and then write down the ingredients, they'd be chicken, oil, salt, pepper; or flour, water, yeast, salt. Now go look at the ingredients of a chicken breast (raw, marinated, or cooked) and a loaf of bread in the grocery store and note the differences between the ingredient list. If the ingredient list for an item from the store includes things a household wouldn't have at home, like fructose or maltodextrin, that item would be considered ultra processed.

I'll note that I don't eat as healthy as I should, people should do what they want, and it's possible to still be unhealthy while avoiding ultra processed foods.
by FireBeyond | 2025-07-20 17:14:59+00:00
And now he's peddling more horseshit and expecting the public and investors to swallow it:

> One analyst asked about the reliability of Tesla’s cameras when confronting sun glare, fog, or dust. Musk claimed that the company’s vision system bypasses image processing and instead uses direct photon counting to account for “noise” like glare or dust.

I call bullshit. Photon counting requires specialized cameras that are simply not present on Teslas. Not to mention lab conditions (so you can direct photons at your sensor, versus you know, scattering into the atmosphere...) And that don't do anywhere near as well at regular image processing, for that reason.

But Musk thinks you're not smart enough to know this.
by thiht | 2025-07-20 17:15:16+00:00
Except that’s just your opinion, not everyone agrees that it’s "in decline" or does "nonsense". Homebrew is exactly what I want from my desktop package manager: I want everything I install from Homebrew to always be in an evergreen state, I’m ok with everything being in latest and Homebrew forcing package maintainers to work with the latest of their dependencies. This ends up being remarkably stable, and I actually get a looot less of version incompatibilities than when I used Linux (easy because I don’t get any with Homebrew).

If I want a specific version of something I don’t mind using a specific version manager (eg. asdf or mise)
by fragmede | 2025-07-20 17:15:22+00:00
> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools.

Not without a lot of hard thankless work by people like RMS to write said tools. Programming for a long while was the purview of Microsoft Visual Studio family, which cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. There existed other options, some of which was free, but, as is the case today with LLMs you can run at home, they were often worse.

This is why making software developer tools is such a tough market and why debugging remains basically in the dark ages (though there are the occasional bright lights like rr). Good quality tools are expensive, for doctors and mechanics, why do we as software developers expect ours to be free, libre and gratis?
by ayaros | 2025-07-20 17:15:25+00:00
Is 1.5 hours really too long for people to watch that they feel it's not even worth it if they can read an AI-generated summary?

I get that people have limited time, but a documentary is about more than just consuming raw textual information; it's a chance to hear and see people speaking about their experiences. It's a multi-sensory experience.

All a link like this really accomplishes is to take views away from the actual video, and I feel it's a disservice to the people who put in the hard work of filming, editing, and creating graphics and animations for a fully-finished production.
by b33j0r | 2025-07-20 17:15:29+00:00
I get the sense that people might mean that the transformer paradigm might not scale. But I do not understand the argument that AI in general is hype, and that investing in it is cult-like.

It’s just a technology; one that will improve, sometimes stagnate, sometimes accelerate. Like anything else, right? I don’t see a time when we’ll just stop using AI because it “feels so trite.”
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-20 17:15:39+00:00
This is what the founders realized 250 years ago. They did a pretty good job with a constitution to limit government power. Not perfect though. I wish they had been able to foresee the risks of power-accumulating career politicians and had term-limited them. They thought the voters would reject abuses of power but turns out that voters will vote for promises of free stuff.
by altairprime | 2025-07-20 17:15:50+00:00
Eventually; but having something less complex than a general-purpose programming language to build prototypes and v1.0 products to test business-purpose fit is really important, too. Lets users have ideas and build them and try them out without having to engage a programmer. Hella valuable for workflow-process design, too. Best to have that one programmer on tap who can fix problems and recognize when it’s too unwieldy, of course.
by krupan | 2025-07-20 17:16:20+00:00
What is the overall feedback loop with LLMs writing code? Do they learn as they go like we do? Do they just learn from reading code on GitHub? If the latter, what happens as less and less code gets written by human experts? Do the LLMs then stagnate in their progress and start to degrade? Kind of like making analog copies of analog copies of analog copies?
by maxlin | 2025-07-20 17:16:32+00:00
Adding some stat of x things tracked adding top of your stat of "millimeters" really shows the level you're arguing here. Real world doesn't care about exact stats on some simply enumerable attributes, but adaptability. You might see 10 bisons but will instantly react to a scorpion in middle of them in your vision.

In any case. Trying to argue against vision even if LIDAR hypothetically was better (it isn't) would just lead to more deaths, maybe at best shielding the rich driving in cities. FSD's stats don't lie :|
by zavec | 2025-07-20 17:16:33+00:00
I think this will vary largely based on individual opinion. Many vegetarians will feel the same way as you of course.

I'm currently trying to minimize my meat consumption where feasible based on some other factors, for several years in the past have been a stricter vegetarian as well. My motives for that are and were entirely based on cruelty and environmental concerns, so for me (and again, I suspect many other people who are vegetarian for their own combination of reasons) being close to the real thing isn't a downside at all.