MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ratracer2025 | 2025-07-15 08:40:44+00:00
Many of us are adopting AI tools at different paces but that is the giant theme going on with software developers at the moment.

In some level, I feel excited that the game has reset and anyone is having the opportunity to get 10x better or becoming irrelevant. It's about how one would leverage these tools, how to use them rights etc.

It's all about who can adapt better, who can evolve to say on top, which has always been the case in the big picture.

For example, I see myself: - "loose" the way I view "scalable code" in PR reviews - focusing less on programming styles - have new expectation about my productivity. (I tell myself with the tools I should 2x done than before, and challenge myself to get it done. In that process, you find a way to effectively use the tools) - etc.

I actually find joy in this process. Just sharing my story, no pun intended :)
by Sesse__ | 2025-07-15 08:41:21+00:00
As an alternative to the computed gotos, you can use switch/case in Clang or GCC to achieve basically the same thing. :-) It becomes a jump table in most cases. (The article claims that a jump table gives smaller code and fewer branch misses, but it doesn't actually give any numbers, and enough things in there are dubious enough that I'm not convinced they ever measured.)

https://blog.nelhage.com/post/cpython-tail-call/ has made the rounds a lot recently, and explores this for Python's bytecode interpreter.
by pjc50 | 2025-07-15 08:42:04+00:00
Then the more serious one of "do these cookies contain allergen X?"

Any of the answers "yes, no, I don't know" is OK, although the latter is irritating, but if you claim "no" when the allergen actually is present it's a disaster. Whether that's because you bought them and didn't look at the ingredients or made them yourself in a careless shared environment.

For code from the Internet there's the related question "how likely is this to contain security holes or data-loss bugs?" And being LLM-written currently makes that a lot more likely.
by zdc1 | 2025-07-15 08:42:25+00:00
Taking a step back, this is an interesting reality of choosing platforms. Lambda ain't Node.js. Yes, it runs JavaScript, but that doesn't make it Node.js. JavaScript-land is full of frameworks and platforms that let you do less work in exchange for using a particular set of patterns or architecture.

This also shows the best and worst of AWS: things are documented, but not always when/where/how you need them. You will still need to learn a few things the hard way when getting your toes wet (so use those "innovation tokens" sparingly).
by ben_w | 2025-07-15 08:42:41+00:00
>> Before spreadsheets you had to beg for months for the IT department to pick your request, and then you'd have to wait a quarter or two for them to implement a buggy version of your idea. After spreadsheets, you can hack together a buggy version of your idea yourself over a weekend.

> That is still the refrain of corporate IT. I see plenty of comments both here and on wider social media, showing that many in our field still just don't get why people resort to building Excel sheets instead of learning to code / asking your software department to make a tool for you.

In retrospect, this is also a great description of why two of my employers ran low on investors' interest.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-15 08:42:47+00:00
Electricity here is meant as a technology (or a set of technologies) exploiting a particular physical phenomenon - not the phenomenon itself.

(If it were the latter, then you could argue everything uses electricity if it relies in any way on matter being solid, because AFAIK the furthest we got on the question of "why I don't fall through the chair I'm sitting on" is.... "electromagnetism".)
by gilleain | 2025-07-15 08:42:59+00:00
"Stopping the tide coming in" is usually a reference to the English king Cnut (or 'Canute') who legendarily made his courtiers carry him to the sea:

> When he was at the height of his ascendancy, he ordered his chair to be placed on the sea-shore as the tide was coming in. Then he said to the rising tide, "You are subject to me, as the land on which I am sitting is mine, and no one has resisted my overlordship with impunity. I command you, therefore, not to rise on to my land, nor to presume to wet the clothing or limbs of your master." But the sea came up as usual, and disrespectfully drenched the king's feet and shins. So jumping back, the king cried, "Let all the world know that the power of kings is empty and worthless, and there is no king worthy of the name save Him by whose will heaven, earth and the sea obey eternal laws."

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnut#The_story_of_Cnut_and_the...
by defrost | 2025-07-15 08:43:12+00:00
That's a useful baseline for future comparisons.

Currently (mostly) cities don't see Death Valley or Marble Bar range tempretures or beyond .. this will change.

Government statistics show there were more than 10,000 heat-related deaths in the UK alone between 2020 and 2024. Close to 3,000 people died amidst the record-breaking 2022 heatwaves, when UK temperatures exceeded 40C for the first time. Despite this, the UK remains unprepared for extreme heat.

~ https://www.climatechangenews.com/2025/07/14/to-help-people-...

Extreme heat could lead to 30,000 deaths a year in England and Wales by 2070s, say scientists

~ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jul/10/extreme-...
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-15 08:44:07+00:00
How is one post so full of bad advice.

1. No don’t say some lame joke

2. Any company that even asks about your disability during a job is a red flag. The company is unprofessional and doesn’t know how to interview.

3. You only have so much time to impress people during an interview. Don’t waste time talking about it. Besides no company with any interview training will talk about a disability during an interview.

You admitted that you don’t know anything about cerebral palsy. Just sit this one out.
by 0xEF | 2025-07-15 08:44:27+00:00
I'd argue that zero dollars are spent convincing anyone that LLMs are people since:

A. I've seen no evidence of it, and I say that as not exactly a fan of techbros

B. People tend to anthropomorphize everything which is why we have constellations in the night sky or pets that supposedly experience emotion the way we do.

Collectively, we're pretty awful at understanding different intelligences and avoiding the trappings of seeing the world through our own experience of it. That is part of being human, which makes us easy to manipulate, sure, but the major devs in Gen AI are not really doing that. You might get the odd girlfriend app marketed to incels or whatever, but those are small potatoes comparatively.

The problem I see when people try to point out how LLMs get this or that wrong is that the user, the human, is bad at asking the question...which comes as no surprise since we can barely communicate properly with each other across the various barriers such as culture, reasoning informed by different experiences, etc.

We're just bad at prompt engineering and need to get better in order to make full use of this tool that is Gen AI. The genie is out of the bottle. Time to adapt.
by izacus | 2025-07-15 08:44:42+00:00
Android apps have a flag in their manifest which tells the OS "this app was built with Android X (API level X) in mind".

This allows the OS to selectively enable backwards compatibility and change certain behaviors (e.g. selectively enforce new permissions so old apps aren't broken).

Play Store requires apps to target new OSes and port APIs within certain time of an OS launching (usually ~2 years).

This avoids apps targeting older OSes to avoid new security and privacy enhancements (e.g. asking for permisisons to show notifications, asking for permisisons to access microphone, being allowed to show a fullscreen popup ad, etc. Those restrictions were all gated behind the target check.)
Show HN: Youshot – Capture up to 1000 YouTube frames automatically
by timmy3443 | 2025-07-15 08:44:42+00:00
I built a Chrome extension called Youshot to solve a really annoying problem: collecting screenshots from YouTube videos one by one.

Manually pausing, cropping, and saving frames was taking me hours every week, so I decided to automate it.

How it works:

Adds a simple interface right inside Chrome

Lets you choose Bulk Mode (multiple frames) or Framer Mode (up to 1000 frames per video)

Downloads everything as images instantly

Has a free limited version and an unlimited version for heavy use

A few creators and educators are already using it, and so far, it has a 4.75 rating.

I’d love any feedback or ideas for improvement.
by endymion-light | 2025-07-15 08:45:32+00:00
Techno Calvinists vs Luddite Reformists is a very funny image.

Agree - although it's an interesting view, I think it's far more related to a lack of idealogy and writing where this has emerged from. I find it more akin to a distorted renaissance. There's such a large population of really intelligent tech people that have zero real care for philisophical or religious thought, but still want to create and make new things.

This leads them down the first path of grafting for more and more money. Soon, a good proportion of them realise the futility of chasing cash beyond a certain extent. The problem is this belief that they are beyond these issues that have been dealt with since Mesopotamia.

Which leads to these weird distorted idealogies, creating art from regurgitated art, creating apps that are made to become worse over time. There's a kind of rush to wealth, ignoring the joy of making things to further humanity.

I think LLMs and AI is a genie out of a bottle, it's inevitable, but it's more like linear perpsective in drawing or the printing press rather than electricity. Except because of the current culture we live in, it's as if leonardo spent his life attempting to sell different variations of linear perspective tutorial rather than creating, drawing and making.
by tfourb | 2025-07-15 08:45:50+00:00
Maybe read the second part of this analysis? https://ourworldindata.org/part-two-how-many-people-die-from...

Cold deaths will decrease in high-latitude countries (which tend to be sparsely inhabited) but heat deaths will increase in low latitude countries (i.e. places like India). The exact effects of this will depend on political factors (adaption), but it is unlikely that the decrease in cold deaths will compensate the increase in heat deaths. Also, the people dying from heat will still be dead.
by cheevly | 2025-07-15 08:46:05+00:00
Unless you have automated fine-tuning pipelines that self-optimize optimize models for your tasks and domains, you are not even close to utilizing LLMs to their potential. But stating that you don’t need extensive, specialized skills is enough of a signal for most of us to know that offering you feedback would be fruitless. If you don’t have the capacity by now to recognize the barrier to entry, experts are not going to take the time to share their solutions with someone unwilling to understand.
by simondotau | 2025-07-15 08:47:03+00:00
Sometimes, something that seems like an "obviously terrible decision" to subject matter experts turns out to be inconsequential, or perhaps even good. Ask a corporate identity expert in 1998 if you should name your big important company "Google" and they'd vomit in your face. Of course it looks very different in hindsight.

Contrary to your claim, approximately nobody with a professionally designed corporate identity used Verdana in a printed context like IKEA did. It was a "wrong" choice like Google was the "wrong" name for a search engine. It's a perfectly serviceable font, like Times New Roman. And that font was good enough for The Times of London, for goodness sakes.
by FullyFunctional | 2025-07-15 08:50:57+00:00
Completely false. The 4 KiB page size came from a machine with a total of 512 KiB (1962 Atlas, 3072B pages, 96k 48b words). It hasn’t scaled at all for inertia reasons and it has real and measurable costs. 64 KiB would have been the better choice IMO, but 16 is better than 4.
by torginus | 2025-07-15 08:50:58+00:00
This is a bit of an aside, but I wonder if it'd be possible to combine the advantages of dynamic and static linking - meaning no need to do dlsym calls, and virtual dispatch to call into libraries, you could have fixed addresses for functions while sharing dynamic libraries between processes.

How it would work, is the process would tell the OS what libraries it expects to be loaded and at what address, and it would just mmap that piece of shared readonly memory. This mapping step happens for shared libraries anyways, but the symbol resolution is dynamic.

I imagine this would also harden the application somewhat, as there are less dynamic dispatches for hackers to exploit.
by mrandish | 2025-07-15 08:52:06+00:00
I was a huge fan of the Coco since it was my first computer in 1981 and I progressed from 4K in 1981 to 16K to 64K and from the Coco 1 to Coco 2 with full four slot expansion pack, internal video, modem, keyboard, RAM (256K!) and lowercase video mods and two double-sided floppy drives. I ran a large users group and flew around the country to various Coco shows including the first Rainbowfest. However I have mixed feelings about the Coco 3 because by the time it was finally announced I'd already moved on to the Amiga. I wanted to be blown away and love the Coco 3 but by late 1986 the market was evolving rapidly and the Coco 3 was just "okay". Sure the 6809 was still the best 8-bit CPU ever made and OS-9 was still wildly overpowered but the new graphics and sound were only "okay" and not exciting. If the Coco 3 had launched with those specs a year or 18 months earlier, it would have been compelling.

I knew some of the top developers who had close contact with the execs at Tandy in charge of the Coco product line. They'd been working on an expanded new Coco to ship in 1984 or 85 called the Deluxe Color Computer but it was derailed by two things. First, Tandy kept delaying investing in a new Coco because of the consumer computer crash of '83 and Commodore's cutthroat price-warring. Also, Tandy's much higher revenue PC compatibles were selling extremely well. Pouring scarce design resources into a new sub-$500 non-PC computer just wasn't a priority. Tandy's computer sales people also didn't have any interest in selling low-end models when they were moving dozens of >$1,200 PCs at once to businesses.

The other thing that delayed the Coco 3 was Tandy deciding to rely on Motorola's forthcoming RMS graphics chipset (https://archive.org/details/TNM_Motorola_Raster_Memory_Syste...). The specs of the chipset looked very competitive with up to 32 colors from a 4096 color palette at 320 x 200 and 16 colors at 640 x 400 with up to 8 sprites, horizontal and vertical smooth scrolling and hardware display lists. While demos from the bread board prototype looked good, the chipset delivery dates kept slipping due to bugs in the taped out chip. Ultimately, Motorola ended up cancelling the RMS chipset entirely when they realized that the Amiga was going to be better and the Atari ST was going to be cheaper than 68000-based RMS-based systems.

At that point Tandy had to start over for the Coco 3. They ended up hiring a contractor to quickly design a gate array for graphics and that's how the Coco 3 ended up both late and with less than state-of-the-art graphics. It's unfortunate because an RMS-graphics based Coco with an Hitachi 6309 CPU at 3.58 Mhz would have blown away the Commodore 128 in 1985 and even been quite competitive against the Atari ST in both graphics and CPU speed while selling for less thanks to having a less expensive 8-bit CPU.
Show HN: I built an Answer Engine Optimization tool to boost brand AI visibility
by krisozy | 2025-07-15 08:52:51+00:00
Hey HN!

As AI tools evolve and users discover brands in new ways, AI visibility has become increasingly important for businesses. That’s why I built this tool. I believe traditional SEO alone isn’t enough anymore and the future lies in Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).

What MentionDesk offers: - Track mentions, visibility, and rankings across AI platforms - See where and how AI mentions your brand - Understand what AI is saying about your brand - Research the industry and compare visibility metrics and rankings with competitors - Source mapping and comparison to identify gaps and key channels driving AI mentions

It’s still very early in this space, and there is a lot of room for improvement, so I’d love to get your honest feedback and ideas about the project and its features. It will help me prioritize improvements and build a more effective tool. Thanks!
by johnsmith1840 | 2025-07-15 08:53:23+00:00
Take multiple statements like: "the sky is piano"

Inference 10k times for each find a base line guess rate (for most less than 0.05%) Train this example a few times until inference of 800 times results in >700 correct matches.

Then continue training on a dataset I used C4 and CR3 datasets. Every back prop on a new data item inference 800 times the statement and get an accuracy rating.

The effect is so interesting because: 1. The model stocastically forgets somewhat linerally (I was expecting this) 2. Rarely the model will "self reinforce"

Self reinforcement can be characterized as a increase in the number of accurate guesses after forgetting the statement.

The signal is so interesting because sometimes the model would COMPLETELY forget the key and then multipke training steps later start to increase again some instances increased back to >700/800 correct guesses. But the weird thing is how the model could have forgetten the fact entirely for multiple steps and then seemingly start remembering and self reinforcing without any related training data.

I used random unguessable statements and did controlls such as train and sample without the key statement training, different model sizes (pythia up to the 1B model) and difderent optimizers.
by Boristoledano | 2025-07-15 08:54:30+00:00
Disclaimer - I am building an AI web retriever (Linkup.so) so I have a natural bias -

LLMs aren’t just a better Google, they’re a redefinition of search itself.

Traditional search is an app: you type, scroll through ads and 10 blue links, and dig for context. That model worked when the web was smaller, but now it’s overwhelming.

LLMs shift search to an infrastructure, a way to get contextualized, synthesized answers directly, tailored to your specific need. Yes, they can hallucinate, but so can the web. It’s not about replacing Google—it’s about replacing the experience of searching (actually they probably will less and less 'experience' of searching)
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-07-15 08:55:10+00:00
AI is not inevitable, because technological progress in general is not inevitable. It is shapeable by economic incentives just like everything else. It can be ground into powder by resource starvation.

We've long known that certain forms of financial bounties levied upon scientists working at the frontier of sciences we want to freeze in place work effectively with a minimum of policing and international cooperation. If a powerful country is willing to be a jerk (heavens!) and allow these kinds of bounties to be turned in even on extranationals, you don't need the international cooperation. But you do get a way to potentially kickstart a new Nash equilibrium that keeps itself going as soon as other countries adopt the same bounty-based policy.

This mechanism has been floating around for at least a decade now. It's not news. Even the most inevitable seeming scientific developments can be effectively rerouted around using it. The question is whether you genuinely, earnestly believe what lies beyond the frontier is too dangerous to be let out, and in almost all cases the answer to that should be no.

I post this mostly because inevitabilist arguments will always retain their power so long as you can come up with a coherent profit motive for something to be pursued. You don't get far with good-feeling spiels that amount to plaintive cries in a tornado. You need actual object level proposals on how to make the inevitable evitable.
by rgoulter | 2025-07-15 08:57:59+00:00
> The thing is that there's no way to objectively measure this.

Sure. But isn't that a bit like if someone likes VSCode, & someone likes Emacs.. the first method of comparison I'm reaching for isn't "what objective metrics do you have", so much as "how do you use it?".

> > This is insulting to smart and capable engineers with many years of experience working with software.

> Experienced programmers, or any domain expert for that matter, would be able to gauge the output quality much more accurately.

My experience is that smart and capable engineers have varying opinions on things. -- "What their opinion is" is less interesting than "why they have the opinion".

I would be surprised, though, if someone were to boast about their experience/skills, & claim they were unable to find any way to use LLMs effectively.
by eric-burel | 2025-07-15 08:58:34+00:00
Most of them are a bunch of prompts and don't even have actual developers. For the good reason that there is no training system yet and the wording of how you call the people that build these system isn't even there or clearly defined. Local companies haven't even setup a proper internal LLM or at least a contract with a provider. I am in France so probably lagging behind USA a bit especially NY/SF but the word "LLM developer" is just arriving now and mostly under the pressure of isolated developers and companies like me. This feel really really early stage.
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-07-15 08:58:54+00:00
EDTA removes all metals. It's simply a compound that forms water-soluble complexes with metal ions, removing them from the body.

The way idiots kill their children with it is that among other metals, it removes calcium ions, and those are necessary for life, with low enough concentration in blood eventually resulting in cardiac arrest.

So said idiots have an autistic child, read junk online that tells them that "toxins" caused this, find the compound that is legitimately used to remove toxins, and administer enough to end the autism. By stopping their child's heart.

I don't particularly like the FDA, but restricting the availability of EDTA is not something I'd criticize.
by tinco | 2025-07-15 08:59:04+00:00
In English. The decoder translates from the Dhofari to tokens the LLM understands. So you present the LLM with the decoded Dhofari, and a question in English, like "Please express the following in modern English" and the LLM would answer in English. There's also a chance the decoded Dhofari would be intelligible to humans directly, though I don't know how large that chance is.
by ben_w | 2025-07-15 08:59:12+00:00
There's a few levels of this:

• That it is software means that any given model can be easily ordered nationalised or whatever.

• Everyone quickly copying OpenAI, and specifically DeepSeek more recently, showed that once people know what kind of things actually work, it's not too hard to replicate it.

• We've only got a handful of ideas about how to align* AI with any specific goal or value, and a lot of ways it does go wrong. So even if every model was put into public ownership, it's not going to help, not yet.

That said, if the goal is to give everyone access to an AI that demands 375 W/capita 24/7, means the new servers double the global demand for electricity, with all that entails.

* Last I heard (a while back now so may have changed): if you have two models, there isn't even a way to rank them as more-or-less aligned vs. anything. Despite all the active research in this area, we're all just vibing alignment, corporate interests included.