MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andrewaylett | 2025-07-22 19:06:17+00:00
A tool like pre-commit really helps here: it'll run against the staged files, before committing. Your CI tool really ought to be testing the commit too, at which point having a clean commit locally isn't necessary for correctness, only for avoiding needing to re-do your work.

It's really important to catch bugs early, because it's a lot more expensive to fix them later -- even if only as late as in CI before merging.
by 9rx | 2025-07-22 19:06:19+00:00
Nah. "Capitalism" is simply losing its original meaning amid more lower quality comments.

If you look closely, the earlier comment is really about the apparent failing of intellectual property laws (which are antithetical to capitalism!), not capitalism. In the olden days HN users would have taken care to make it clear that they were talking about IP laws, but now "capitalism" has come to be used as some kind of catch-all for all the ills seen around government. Most especially when it is a comment void of anything useful and is merely trying to tug on heart strings.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-22 19:06:20+00:00
You're asking a question in response to a question. Your Type Ia link suggests this is not what is happening with Betelgeuse though. Its companion star is not a white dwarf. Betelgeuse itself is the start expected to go boom. So what happens to its companion? The anim you linked to shows that the white dwarf's explosion didn't destroy its larger star companion, but Betelgeuse is the opposite with the larger star going boom.
by jpc0 | 2025-07-22 19:06:28+00:00
Using it as a tool isn’t, maybe not everyone would use it correctly but I’m happy to share.

About a month ago I came down with what I thought was a mild fever, usually I would likely not have cared much, went to work and pushed on but I asked the AI anyway. It asked some follow up questions and then recommended I see my family medicine doctor urgently.

A few hours later when I saw my doctor my fever had spiked to above 40c and I needed immediate medical intervention.

Without the AI I might have toughed it out, went to work, went home early because I felt bad and tried to push through to the next day, hoping I could sleep it off.

Instead of a cheap visit to the doctor and some meds and in office treatment, that situation could have gotten way more out of control likely a hospital trip if not worse.

The subscription definitely saved me some money if not more, not because it dispensed medical advice, but because it was available and had enough “knowledge” to recognise an emergent situation.
by jotux | 2025-07-22 19:07:02+00:00
I'm ~20 years into my career, currently working on a relatively complex C++ codebase for a space application. Internally we have copilot (gpt 4 or claude 3.7) and a custom ChatGPT (4o/o3) client we can use. It's great for autocomplete, boilerplate stuff, and generally learning about a new topic but terrible for complicated or niche development (just outright fabricates stuff that doesn't exist or compile).

We got a batch (10+) of summer interns this summer, bright students from good schools, and they are absolutely glued to the AI tools. They're getting lots of code written with lots of tasks complete, but occasionally they write code that makes absolutely no sense and can't explain why they did it. Lots of very overcomplicated solutions to problems, and seemingly low comprehension of the code they're creating. It actually makes me feel pretty good about career viability long term -- people that have a deep understanding of the systems and code will need to be around to clean up the mess that is about to be created over the next 5-10 years.
by honorable_coder | 2025-07-22 19:07:06+00:00
How do I put this behind a proxy? You mean run the module as a containerized service?

But provider switching is built in some of these - and the folks behind envoy built: https://github.com/katanemo/archgw - developers can use an OpenAI client to call any model, offers preference-aligned intelligent routing to LLMs based on usage scenarios that developers can define, and acts as an edge proxy too.
by analognoise | 2025-07-22 19:07:10+00:00
Here goes: people can donate it without the threat of losing their lives and homes (social violence).

You know what sucks? Having what, 150+ “mass casualty” incidents a year, extracting the blood of the poor, then trying to say “hey that reduces crime!” while 5 families have more wealth than 50% of America combined, and the only “advanced” country where medical debt is a leading cause of bankruptcy.

There’s no sane washing any of this shit.
by louthy | 2025-07-22 19:07:24+00:00
Sure, but you’re talking about a 25 year old feature (structs). One that was implemented like that for performance reasons in C# 1.0 – because we were all using single or dual core machines back then.

Records were a relatively recent feature addition, computers are significantly more powerful, and our programs are significantly more complex. And so it’s hella frustrating that MS didn’t opt for program correctness over performance. They even missed the opportunity to close the uninitialised struct issue with record structs (they could have picked different semantics).

I find their choices utterly insane when we’re in a world where bad data could mean a data breach and/or massive fine. The opportunity to make records robust and bulletproof was completely missed.

I was hoping that we’d get to a set of data-types in C# that were robust and correct: product-types and sum-types. With proper pattern matching (exhaustiveness checking).

Then either a Roslyn analyser or a C# ‘modern mode’ which only used the more modern ‘correct’ features so that we could actually go away from the compromises of the past.

Unfortunately many modern features of C# are being built with these ugly artefacts seeping in. It’s the opposite of declarative programming, so it just keeps increasing incidental complexity: it exports the complexity to the users, something a type-safe compiler should be reducing.
by mcswell | 2025-07-22 19:07:27+00:00
The edges are labeled by transitive verbs, where the arrow points from the subject of that verb to the direct object. (I'm counting particle verbs, like "leads to", as verbs.) The nodes are labeled by nouns. If you can change a noun to a verb, I guess you would be changing what is an edge and what is a node.

Example: In the article's first diagram, there is a node labeled "Innovation". This could be replaced by a node labeled "Capitalist" and a node labeled "Improvement", with an arrow from the first to the second labeled "innovates."

So yes, if you can replace a node by an edge (and vice versa, although I don't give an example), this node vs. edge thing is fuzzy.
by jerf | 2025-07-22 19:07:59+00:00
Another fun one is the .zip or .tar.gz file that decompresses to itself: https://research.swtch.com/zip

If you are processing emails for security reasons, and want to find viruses even if they are in archive files, it's easy to write the code to "just keep unarchiving until we're out of things to unarchive", but not only can that lead to quite astonishing expansions, it can actually be a process that never terminates at all.

I remember when I first read about these, and "a small file that decompresses to a gigabyte" was also "a small file that decompresses to several multiples of your entire hard disk space" and even servers couldn't handle it. Now I read articles like this one talking about "oh yeah Evolution filled up 100GB of space" like that's no big deal.

If you have a recursive decompressor you can still make small files that uncompress to large amounts even by 2025 standards, because the symbols the compressor will use to represent "as many zeros as I can have" will themselves be redundant. The rule that you can't compress already-compressed content doesn't necessarily apply to these sorts of files.
by moffkalast | 2025-07-22 19:08:01+00:00
Hmm that might also be contributing to dogshit Firefox performance on a web app of mine, I'm using that to store and fetch map tiles. Though that's all async so it shouldn't really matter in terms of rendering aside from having to wait a bit longer to retrieve.

But it already lags like fuck even without that part running or anything much at all, while being buttersmooth on Chrome almost regardless of how much I load up rendering. It infuriates me to hell because there is no optimization I can make to get equal or even usable performance.
by ericmay | 2025-07-22 19:08:04+00:00
> Not all of us.

I didn't vote for all these highways and suburbs either but we live in a democracy. By and large rural voters* voted to cut programs like this, though, and I think it's very fair to point that out.

> Fiber is objectively the right choice for future proofing. Bouncing a radio wave off of cube 300 miles above will _always_ be sub-par compared to a direct fiber connection because the latency is higher.

Yes and no, it depends on the cost. It might not be ideal but I'm also not sure my tax dollars should go to make sure people who live in rural areas have faster Playstation downloads. Do we actually need to physically pay for and build this infrastructure? I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but where is the economic analysis? If we invest $XYZ on this infrastructure what's the expected ROI versus alternatives?

* Just to be clear I don't have any particular problem with "rural voters" and I don't really like these arbitrary groupings of people into Urban, Suburban, Rural but it is what it is.
by ngriffiths | 2025-07-22 19:08:48+00:00
In practice I think people often don't see the full structure of their own belief graph. Parts of it are clear but for 99% of important issues, it's more fuzzy than portrayed in the figures here. I still think this is an illuminating way of looking at it!

Another major factor is that while the graph may be fuzzy, the people we trust are clear. Only those people are allowed to "fill in" the missing pieces, and I think it takes a lot of work to do that, so it totally makes sense.

If the takeaway is "don't expect conflicting facts to convince your audience" I agree with that, but the reason is they don't trust you, not the conflicting graphs, and the trust is not really a consequence of the graph structure.

(Also, I was writing about similar stuff recently here: https://blog.griffens.net/blog/no-one-reads-page-28/)
by redleader55 | 2025-07-22 19:09:30+00:00
Sure, but you forget something. It's impossible to have a discussion with someone you consider inferior to you and they know it(eg. "Trump supporters are morons"). This makes them vote with the person who is willing to have that discussion. That lost the democrats the previous election and has all the chances to happen again in 3 years. I'm not American, and while I do follow US politics, I see the signs closer to home in Europe, where all the "idiots" are voting with worrying candidates for the same reason - the "nice" parties are ignoring them and calling them idiots, subhumans, TikTok drones, etc.
by weavejester | 2025-07-22 19:10:17+00:00
There's some truth in what you say, but it's filtered through a distorted lens.

Like many countries, the UK government makes the laws and the courts interpret them. The government can't ignore the courts, but can introduce new legislation.

The UK population leans more conservative than many other European countries, but free speech, for the most part, has broad public support. There's a lot of discussion around where the line should be drawn, however, and the government tends toward a more restrictive interpretation, while the opposition tends to oppose censorship.

There is a strong element of class in the UK, but this is often misinterpreted. Class in the UK is not particularly fluid. You can have power and wealth, and still not be considered upper class. In the current government, only a minority of MPs are upper class, and of the current cabinet, only one attended a private school (a typical indicator of being upper-class).

The raiding of the Guardian over the Snowden leaks was justified as recovering stolen national security information, and was widely (and rightly) criticised by the press at the time. It's not a common occurrence.

Now, I don't mean to justify the UK government's behaviour. The government bows to the whims of GHCQ far more than it should do, particularly on any technological issue, where it seems GHCQ is the only one ever consulted. Obviously putting backdoors in messaging software, or raiding newpapers, is both incredible stupid and has ultimately lead to the UK government backing down.

But that, I think, is the important part - that it backed down. The UK has a lot of flaws, and certainly isn't at the top of the press freedom list, but it's also consistently in the upper quartile (and notably above Slovakia, if you want a reference point). Looking from the outside, you see the exceptions and controversies - the parts where the system fails - which makes it easy to get a distorted picture of the situation.
by Mars008 | 2025-07-22 19:10:19+00:00
> For example, Musk's obsession with colonising on Mars is troubling when you hear what scientists have to say about it. Musk tends to talk about it as if Earth is already lost.

He is pushing the idea using all techniques. This one is like propaganda, dismiss unwanted facts, repeat good sounding short wanted statements. Colonizing Mars would make him _the_ _king_. Single person who controls it all.

IMHO, the right way to do colonization is to start with bases build by robots before humans arrive. Technologies can be first tested on Moon, then used on Mars. With AI explosion it's possible. Same way automatic bases can be build on big Jupiter/Saturn moons
by gnabgib | 2025-07-22 19:10:42+00:00
The sharepoint hack: Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say (765 points, 2 days ago, 403 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44629710

Source blog post: Disrupting active exploitation of on-premises SharePoint vulnerabilities https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44647250
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-22 19:10:58+00:00
> melodramatic, overdone theatrics that the US doesn't seem to do to anyone else

Iran and North Korea. China with Taiwan. This is deeply precedented geopolitical drama.

> It ends up coming off as the US bowing on their knees to relatively minor nations

If Israel and Palestine are your issue, of course. (Everything will tend to be. This is just how pet causes and the availability heuristic work.) If not, it doesn’t.
by like_any_other | 2025-07-22 19:11:12+00:00
> This is a story about OpenAI's failure to implement basic safety measures for vulnerable users.

I'm trying to imagine what kind of safety measures would have stopped this, and nothing short of human supervisors monitoring all chats comes to mind. I wouldn't call that "basic". I guess that's why the author didn't describe these simple and affordable "basic" safety measures.
by keithwirch | 2025-07-22 19:11:35+00:00
Hi HN,

I built SteadGoods to help home-based bakers, crafters, gardeners, and other makers run simple online stores—especially when they sell locally.

It’s designed for individuals selling small-batch or handmade goods who don’t want the complexity of a full e-commerce platform such as Shopify. SteadGoods gives them a clean store page, handles orders and payments, and supports both local pickup/delivery and shipping (optional, if needed).

What makes it different:

Built for solo sellers: low overhead, no tech knowledge needed Local-first: customers can choose pickup, delivery, or shipping Stores are listed in a marketplace to help encourage finding local stores Focused on real-world sellers using Instagram, Facebook, or word-of-mouth Simple subscription pricing (no per-order commission, only percentage used to cover transaction costs)

It’s live and onboarding early sellers now. I’m doing this solo and would really appreciate feedback—from people working on tools for creators to anyone who's had to build a simple e-commerce setup from scratch.

Thanks for checking it out.
by godelski | 2025-07-22 19:11:54+00:00
Isn't the fps capping? I'm pretty confident it is because it won't go above that on my system even when I do a trivial number of fish and my monitor maxes out at 60fps...

> on a demo that looks like it's from the late 2000

Okay... now I think I shouldn't take you seriously...

The literal visual aesthetics aren't really important for the test. You could place some nicer shaders and it wouldn't necessarily change the compute load. Hell, it could just be highly unoptimized. Benchmarks are mostly about having something static to test, not making something visually pleasing.
by tux3 | 2025-07-22 19:12:26+00:00
Well, this is what you might call sub-optimal news.

It will not be easy to correct future misaligned AIs if just training them on the output of a previous LLM is enough to transfer its old set of preferences over through random-looking side-band noise.

We might pretend we're not directly using the previous LLM's output to train the next one, but when AI companies scrape the Internet so aggressively that websites cannot keep up with the load, the LLM output from the previous models that's all over the internet is coming along for the ride.
by jerf | 2025-07-22 19:12:28+00:00
The user asked it to write a story about how important the user was. The LLM did it. The user asked it to write a story about how bad an idea it was to tell the user they were that important. The LLM did it.

The tricky part is that the users don't realize they're asking for these stories, because they aren't literally typing "Please tell me a story in which I am the awesomest person in the world." But from the LLM's perspective, the user may as well have typed that.

Same for the stories about the AIs "admitting they're evil" or "trying to escape" or anything else like that. The users asked for those stories, and the LLMs provided them. The trick is that the "asked for those stories" is sometimes very, very subtle... at least from the human perspective. From the LLM perspective they're positively shouting.

(Our deadline for figuring this out is before this Gwern essay becomes one of the most prophetic things ever written: https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy We need AIs that don't react to these subtle story prompts because humans aren't about to stop giving them.)
by fsckboy | 2025-07-22 19:12:38+00:00
what would make a "word of the day" stream compelling to me would be a word that reflected recent news. William Safire did this to some extent in his weekly column in the NY Times and it was usually pretty interesting.

a way to increase the discovery of relevance could be looking up the etymologies of words that pop up, I'm always fascinated by how complex and interesting etymologies are
by benreesman | 2025-07-22 19:12:50+00:00
This was the point of posting the trivial little `pkg.bzl` above: Bazel doesn't need to do all this crazy stuff in `rules_cc` and `rules_foreign_cc`: those are giant piles of internal turf wars within the Blaze team that have spilled onto GitHub.

The reason why we can't have nice things is that nice things are simple and cheap and there's no money or prestige in it. `zig cc` demonstrates the same thine.

That setup:

1. mega-force / sed / patch / violate any build that won't produce compatible / standard archives: https://gist.github.com/b7r6/16f2618e11a6060efcfbb1dbc591e96...

2. build sane pkg-config from CMake vomit: https://gist.github.com/b7r6/267b4401e613de6e1dc479d01e795c7...

3. profit

delivers portable (trivially packages up as `.deb` or anything you want), secure (no heartbleed 0x1e in `libressl`), fast (no GOT games, other performance seppeku) builds. These are zero point zero waste: fully artifact cached at the library level, fully action cached at the source level, fully composable, supporting cross-compilation and any standard compiler.

I do this in real life. It's a few hundred lines of nix and bash. I'm able to do this because I worked on Buck and shit, and I've dealt with Bazel and CMake for years, and so I know that the stuff is broken by design, there is no good reason and no plan beyond selling consulting.

This complexity theatre sells shit. It sure as hell doesn't stop security problems or Docker brainrot or keep cloud bills down.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-22 19:12:56+00:00
Just because it isn't useful to the user doesn't mean some dev hasn't spent the cycles doing it. I know I've personally had to write code that was an absolute waste, but some PM wanted and it was coded. Usually so it can be a bullet point in a demo that impresses low skilled PMs or sales drone, but techy user types just roll their eyes when it's pointed out to them.
by torginus | 2025-07-22 19:13:03+00:00
Imo this has more to do with the 'honeymoon' period promoted by companies where people get better outcomes easier using AI than otherwise.

Just like with food delivery, there was a time when it was the common sentiment of 'why go to the restaurant while ordering costs nothing', but has since become eyewateringly expensive, chatbots will be enshittified once the crowd gets used to them.
by swyx | 2025-07-22 19:13:20+00:00
> LiteLLM: While popular, it reimplements provider interfaces rather than leveraging official SDKs, which can lead to compatibility issues and unexpected behavior modifications

with no vested interest in litellm, i'll challenge you on this one. what compatibility issues have come up? (i expect text to have the least, and probably voice etc have more but for text i've had no issues)

you -want- to reimplement interfaces because you have to normalize api's. in fact without looking at any-llm code deeply i quesiton how you do ANY router without reimplementing interfaces. that's basically the whole job of the router.
by vehemenz | 2025-07-22 19:13:36+00:00
> Tailwind does nothing to reduce the mental load on your developers to understand, read, and write in your codebase. In fact it does the opposite. Your developers are not spared the hassle of learning CSS by instead learning tailwind's abstractions. Developers have to understand not just that background-color is the CSS key to set a background color, but they also must understand that classes prefixed with bg- mean background color. Every feature of CSS, such as media and container queries, will need to be learned twice, CSS style and Tailwind style.

Just wrong. The whole point of 1:1 style:class mappings is that you don't have hidden structures relating the DOM to your stylesheet's class abstractions.

If you're going to talk overhead, talk about all the abstractions and hidden structures you have to learn in a codebase written in the "correct" way to do CSS. It's just incomparable.

Tailwind's class names are trivial to learn for anyone that already understands CSS. It's minimal overhead compared to learning CSS. "Learning it twice" is completely inaccurate.
by rajaman0 | 2025-07-22 19:13:39+00:00
That wasn't the take. The take is generally, "glorified next token predictor" quality LLM skepticism takes have been repeatedly proven wrong. See the original Cursor, Devin, etc announcement threads.

More broadly, its unfortunate that vibe coding is so overloaded a term. - Yes, product managers with 0 coding expertise are contributing code in FAANG. - Yes, experienced engineers are "vibe coding" to great success. - Yes, folks with 0 years of experience were building simple calculators 2 years ago and are now building games, complex website, etc, just by prompting. Where will this go in another two years?

One needs look no further than kiro - Amazons own code editor thats being used extensively internally.

Folks bemoaning vibe coding are simply suffering from lack of imagination.