MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dang | 2025-07-10 16:53:29+00:00
Recent and related:

Perplexity Comet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44513769 - July 2025 (52 comments)

Comet Browser by Perplexity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44511527 - July 2025 (14 comments)
by kokanee | 2025-07-10 16:53:35+00:00
> developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.

I feel like there are two challenges causing this. One is that it's difficult to get good data on how long the same person in the same context would have taken to do a task without AI vs with. The other is that it's tempting to time an AI with metrics like how long until the PR was opened or merged. But the AI workflow fundamentally shifts engineering hours so that a greater percentage of time is spent on refactoring, testing, and resolving issues later in the process, including after the code was initially approved and merged. I can see how it's easy for a developer to report that AI completed a task quickly because the PR was opened quickly, discounting the amount of future work that the PR created.
by atmavatar | 2025-07-10 16:54:08+00:00
The women's rights movement came with both positive and negative effects that impact birth rates.

Normalizing women as equals in the workforce is great from a rights perspective, but as incomes have started to equalize (and actually start to tip the other direction in younger generations), the pool of prospective mates has shrunk because a large majority of women won't date men that cannot out-earn them. Additionally, there is the problem that a woman taking maternity leave suffers a long-lasting (if not permanent) dip in her earnings from then on. Equivalent paternity leave could help to balance things out, but in the US at least, there are virtually no employers who offer it.

Another hallmark of the women's rights movement which is largely negative has been the demonization of housewives as lessers and treating raising kids as a form of servitude. That in itself discourages having children. However, as stay at home dads are still largely considered unacceptable, having kids now increasingly relies upon extremely expensive day care, significantly increasing their economic burden. If a dual-income household made significantly more than their single-income household counterparts of prior generations (adjusted for inflation), this may be a non-issue, but if anything, dual-income is often required just to get by nowadays.
by zone411 | 2025-07-10 16:55:20+00:00
The exact questions are almost certainly not in the training data, since extra words are added to each puzzle, and I don't publish these along with the original words (though there's a slight chance they used my previous API requests for training).

To guard against potential training data contamination, I separately calculate the score using only the newest 100 puzzles. Grok 4 still leads.
by marssaxman | 2025-07-10 16:55:22+00:00
There is genuine value in having it all set up out of the box, and not having to figure it out yourself.

I have been using Linux since the '90s and haven't used anything else in at least a decade, but I struggled to understand what all the pieces were and what I was supposed to do with them when I wanted to play a Steam game with my kid several months ago. I'm still not sure I did it right; I think I probably did install Lutris, maybe, but I have no idea what problem it is meant to solve.
by jamiek88 | 2025-07-10 16:55:24+00:00
> contact information on some paper

Is not the same as handing your dad’s business card around to your friends (and is a borderline disingenuous way of summing it up, business cards have business implications i.e., formal implications it’s kinda in the name of them, kids aren’t business people aren’t used to using them socially like you might and don’t see it as a scrap of paper) if you can’t see that then yes I agree with your conclusion on your social skills.

Hey let me give you my mom’s number or add her on Facebook / instagram (how old are these kids by the way?) is not the same as handing out and having handy your moms/dads business cards.

It just isn’t.

It ain’t rational and yes technically they are ‘both pieces of paper’ but the vibe is simply different.

It ain’t cool. It comes across as desperate and forced and it’s embarrassing as a result.

The tone of your reply intimates anger at my responses, that’s unfortunate but I stand by it.
by dadadad100 | 2025-07-10 16:55:29+00:00
And Quebec has it’s own English. I spent a few years working in Montreal and soon learned about “passing the vacuum” and “closing the light”. There are so many bilingual folks that concepts and word orders flow back and forth. I had an interesting discussion with a bilingual anglophone about how in English elsewhere it’s called a “pacifier” and not a “souce”
by fwip | 2025-07-10 16:55:39+00:00
I like the idea, but it can't possibly be neutral. Both philosophically, and more concretely, it's run by Elon Musk, whose idea of neutrality is waaay to the right of the US Overton window. Not only is it trained on X data, which has swung dramatically rightward since his takeover, he makes sure that it generates a steady stream of edgy opinions and hot takes.

See his just-removed-after-public-outcry instruction to disregard "political correctness", which immediately resulted in it calling itself MechaHitler - or his previous instructions to try to cry about reverse racism in South Africa.
by TheAmazingRace | 2025-07-10 16:56:08+00:00
I have no qualms with AI. There are some neat applications with it. And prime numbers... lolwut? Prime95 is a fun stress test, but I don't see how it improves my day to day life.

I feel this is whataboutism.

EDIT: I should note that I should have worded my statement to say that the Web is infinitely useful as a tool in addition to being here to stay. I don't necessarily see Bitcoin going away any time soon, if ever. However, its utility is much lower on the totem pole, if not non-existent, depending on who you are. To each their own though. Some folks like living life on the edge.
by a_sydelov | 2025-07-10 16:56:22+00:00
Most teams have data. Dashboards, reports, even warehouses. But decisions still feel like guesswork — and different teams often work off different "truths".

This article breaks down: – Why tools aren’t the root cause of data chaos – Why “one-size-fits-all” tables fail in practice – What a data platform actually is (not a product, but structure) – What outcomes you get when it’s done right – How to start without a massive rebuild

Written from a practitioner’s perspective, with a focus on organizational friction and system design.

Would love feedback from others who’ve built (or rebuilt) internal platforms.
by qualeed | 2025-07-10 16:56:35+00:00
>The OP admits that their kids don't initiate socializing

Either you are I are reading it wrong, because I don't see anywhere in their comment where they say their own kids aren't initiating.

What they do say is that other parents are rarely initiating play dates.

Can you quote the part where they "admit that their kids don't initiate socializing"?
by talos_ | 2025-07-10 16:56:39+00:00
The reality in Montréal is that most people are bilingual. Outside older folks, unilingual French speakers are much rarer than unilingual English speakers, which are structurally preserved via the institutions you described. For instance, English-only schooling from first grade to university is available to them, but not to French-speaking households or immigrants. IMHO, it's a disservice to this population. I've had colleague born in Québec deciding to leave because they felt insecure about their professional abilities in French

English is associated with money (historically from colonial forces, and now foreign capital). Montréal, the metropolis, is an island that was unified as a city. Rich English-speaking borough lobbied in 2006 to become independent entities to control their regulations, policies and taxes. This includes the West Island (Dorval, Pointe-Claire, Beaconsfield), and even the very central Westmount near McGill. Nowadays, poor neighborhoods and their french names are erased by condo promoters: Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve is HOMA, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce is NDG, Ville-Mont-Royal is TMR, Pointe-Saint-Charles/ Le Sud-Ouest is Griffin Town

ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boroughs_of_Montreal
by TheAmazingRace | 2025-07-10 16:58:16+00:00
The few that I remember advertising "We Accept Bitcoin!" turned out to not accept it at all, and it was some sticker left on the window.

To be fair, I'm sure there are shops that do directly accept it, but it's not this amazing life changing thing, unless you acquired a bunch in its halcyon days and forgot about it, only to then cash out afterwards, assuming you didn't forget your keys. ;-)
by owenversteeg | 2025-07-10 16:58:17+00:00
>That implies a huge boom and near-total depopulation crash in only 500 years.

There is a fierce debate on the history of Rapa Nui - whether the population was stable until European contact or if there was a large boom and bust. The evidence for the boom-bust has always seemed pretty strong to me. There are the classic arguments of the obvious deforestation, collapse of biodiversity, erosion, islanders moving into caves, etc. But there is one aspect that is, I think, underestimated: heat.

It is a small, isolated island with cooler weather than most other Polynesian islands. The heat really does make a difference, it gives you substantially higher energy requirements; most of the year mean daily temps are 60s F versus 80s on many other Polynesian islands, and the winds are strong. You will need both more calories and more heating (trees.) Then, consider that the period of collapse would line up with the Little Ice Age, which we already suspect to have caused severe drought on the island. [0] Cut down a relatively small number of trees to burn and now your crops and homes will be sprayed with salty, cold sea spray, so you move inland, and to move inland you have to cut down more trees!

There are, of course, other causes of the deforestation, but there is strong evidence [1] suggesting that the people killed the trees, not the rats. Why would you cut down trees? 1) you need more agricultural land, 2) building, 3) heat. Spend all day on a small island with strong salty sea winds on a cool day and you too would enjoy a nice big fire to warm up...

[0] https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/6509/

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03054...
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-07-10 16:58:25+00:00
The consumption of music has changed.

I almost never meet people who like the same bands as I do. I can listen to new music that I love at home. If I go to a bar or a party I'm going to mostly hear music I don't like, and if I do like it, I could have already heard it at home.

Maybe that is part of it
by ryandrake | 2025-07-10 16:58:28+00:00
I don't know how this didn't become a serious taboo. People who post pictures and video from a private event without everyone's consent should be shunned, but somehow this became normalized. I've heard of the recent trend to hand out stickers for everyone to put over their cameras during events, and that's a really good development, but we shouldn't even need to do that. It should be socially disgusting to even take the pictures in the first place.
by qualeed | 2025-07-10 16:59:37+00:00
>Is not the same as handing your dad’s business card

It's my general contact information on business card stock.

Maybe it's a regional thing, but when I read the comment, I just assumed they meant "business cards" in the general sense. Like how there are "joke business cards" that say "yes I'm tall, the weather is fine", etc.

Mine are business card size, on business card paper, made on a business card generation website. It simply says my name, my number, and my email.

>The tone of your reply intimates anger at my responses

Yes, I think it is wild to say that it is "cringe" and "risky as fuck". The dude just wants his kids to play with some friends. It seems to be working for everyone involved.

I feel way more stupid litigating this over comments on the internet mid-day during the week than I would handing out business cards with my full business information on it, to be honest. Parents get so much flak on the internet for normal ass things, it's crazy. Say a little off-hand comment about how you're trying to get your kids to have a good social life and people come out of the woodworks to call you cringe.
by erghjunk | 2025-07-10 16:59:42+00:00
~25 years ago I could have taken you to multiple entirely dead streams within a 20 minute drive of where I grew up - and you don't get very far in 20 minutes on Appalachian roads. Over large swaths of my home state, in fact, I could have done that from most people's homes. This is no longer the case, and a huge number of streams are now recovered or recovering. The surface water problems are by no means gone, but some of the recoveries that I've witnessed - the North Branch of the Potomac River is a good example - are breathtaking. That river was as dead as a doornail in the 90s and is now a vibrant, healthy wild trout fishery. It is still a post-industrial river, it still has dams, run-off issues, wastewater inputs, etc, but it is a far cry from what it was.
by chickenzzzzu | 2025-07-10 17:00:34+00:00
the funniest thing about this graph is that it proves there was a raw drop off in all popularities in the last 2 years, which of course directly coincides with the great layoffening that has been happening for almost 3 years now.

this shows that people are definitely rotating out of "web technologies" in general, not because they aren't useful, but because the money isn't there anymore.

perhaps a large chunk have switched to AI hype trains, and it would be interesting to compare raw results of different AI headlines, but i suspect maybe 30% of people have left tech all together.
by AuryGlenz | 2025-07-10 17:00:59+00:00
While well intentioned, car seat laws have gotten a bit insane. Minnesota recently implemented some pretty nonsensical ones that are dependent on if they've outgrown their seat.

How are cops supposed to know if they outgrew their seat? It also means that when they move to forward facing or a booster seat depends on the car seat you bought, not their height, (only their) age, or weight.

For older kids, here's the new rule: "A child at least 9 years old or has outgrown their booster seat AND the child can pass the "5 step test" may be restrained by a regular seatbelt, but they must be in a the back seat if possible under 13."

That's not too bad because they at least have a set age, but you still can't expect a parent to have a set of 4 booster seats ready to go to haul your kids friend's around.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-10 17:01:20+00:00
If I look at the number of 90 degree turns a cruise missile can make and compare it to an airplane I wouldn't rate it very highly.

> However, the distinction is usually applied where aircraft become missile’s when the attack can no longer be aborted.

So for a quadcopter that's a pretty negligible amount of time. And not all that much for tiny planes either.
by exceptione | 2025-07-10 17:01:49+00:00
I am deeply impressed by the depth and breadth of this language. Algebraic data types, logic programming, mutability, all there from the get go.

Another aspect that I love from their comparison table is that a single executable is both the package manager, LSP and the compiler. As I understand, the language server for Haskell has/had to do a lot of dances and re implement things from ghc as a dance between the particular ghc version and your cabal file. And maybe stack too, because I don't know which package manager is the blessed one these days. Not to shit on Haskell -- it is actually a very fine language.

However, the best feature is a bit buried and I wonder why.

How ergonomic is the integration with the rest of the JVM, from the likes of Java? AFAIK, types are erased by JVM compilers... With the concept of `regions` they have at least first class support for imperative interaction. Note: With the JVM you get billions worth of code from a high quality professional standard library, so that is a huge plus. That is why the JVM and .net core are IMHO the most sane choices for 90+% of projects. I think the only comparable language would be F#. I would love to see a document about Flix limitations in the JVM interoperability story.

__EDIT__

- There is a bit of info here. Basically all values from Flix/Java have to be boxed/unboxed. https://doc.flix.dev/interoperability.html

- Records are first-class citizens.
by garciasn | 2025-07-10 17:02:47+00:00
Videos from Perplexity as well as YouTubers show what it's supposed to do: provide you an interface to simplify your research, evaluation, and execution of written instruction.

For example: you're supposed to tell it to do something like, "plan my week for me including make me a menu plan, setup a grocery list and add everything I need to it, shop the list and allow me to pick it up on Sunday afternoon, and, in the meantime, plan for me 2 days of things to do." And supposedly, it will do all of these things for you automatically. I haven't tested it, but it basically this is intended to do all the things we've hoped AI would help us do--automatically. Will it be successful? Probably a bit better than we've come to expect, but it's nothing like we have built up in our minds.

AI has been game changing for me in my work life, but I have yet to find it useful for things like I laid out above. Maybe that's changing and this is the first step toward that future.
by Retric | 2025-07-10 17:02:49+00:00
This is exactly why science education is so important.

But if it makes you feel better, all man made structures combined cover a small fraction of the earths surface people tend to be in areas with other people and thus it looks like we’re doing more than we are. NYC for example has 291x the average population density of the rest of the US and that’s including over a square mile devoted to Central Park.

Agriculture has a bigger impact because it cover so much land, but that’s offset by it being relatively close to nature.
by scubbo | 2025-07-10 17:02:52+00:00
I first got hold of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas early in the summer holidays during my school years, which meant I was able to play nearly-uninterrupted (save for pesky things like sleep and food) for several days straight.

When I finally surfaced, and Mum drove me into town for something or other, I felt visceral panic that she was driving on the "wrong" side of the road.
by david-gpu | 2025-07-10 17:03:11+00:00
Is it possible that the people who set the constraints are different from the people who design the bridge, who again are different from the people who approve the design? Yes, that's how it works in the real world.

As a design engineer, all you can do is explain to the stakeholders how the constraints will affect the outcome and suggest alternatives.

Ultimately, the engineers will have to work with what they are given, and as long as the outcome is safe and its limitations are communicated, they can't be blamed.
by ether_at_cpan | 2025-07-10 17:03:18+00:00
This is very sad news.

As I said on irc:

He brought many people into the community, and encouraged their growth (like me)

I popped into the scene by sending a few Moose patches and then coming onto irc displaying an utter lack of understanding of anything

Matt set me straight, and encouraged me to send more patches and I ended up as the manager for Moose

and then inherited the ownership of literally hundreds (perhaps thousands by now) distributions

that work helped me move from being mediocre at my job to being stellar, and enabled me to move on to much better jobs
by noisy_boy | 2025-07-10 17:04:56+00:00
It is 80/20 again - it gets you 80% of the way in 20% of the time and then you spend 80% of the time to get the rest of the 20% done. And since it always feels like it is almost there, sunk-cost fallacy comes into play as well and you just don't want to give up.

I think an approach that I tried recently is to use it as a friction remover instead of a solution provider. I do the programming but use it to remove pebbles such as that small bit of syntax I forgot, basically to keep up the velocity. However, I don't look at the wholesale code it offers. I think keeping the active thinking cap on results in code I actually understand while avoiding skill atrophy.
by sudo-i | 2025-07-10 17:04:56+00:00
The problem is that code as a 1-off is excellent, but as a maintainable piece of code that needs to be in source control, shared across teams, follow standard SLDC, be immutable, and track changes in some state - it's just not there.

If an intern handed me code like this to deploy an EC2 instance in production, I would need to have a long discussion about their decisions.
by kennywinker | 2025-07-10 17:04:58+00:00
Like if it generalizes to situations where the developer is not familiar with the repo? That doesn’t seem like generalizing, that seems like specifying. Am I wrong in saying that the majority of developer time is spent in repos that they’re familiar with? Every job and project I’ve worked has been on a fixed set of repos the entire time. If AI is only helpful for the first week or two on a project, that’s not very many cases it’s useful for.
by bluGill | 2025-07-10 17:05:53+00:00
Inflation is a factor in a few years but never today. Now inithe 1970s high inflation meant that a house you can barely afford becomes a small part of the budget in a couple years while the small inflation of today means a house you can barely afford today is still a big part of the budget in 5 years - but that is not a consideration of today.
by darth_avocado | 2025-07-10 17:06:19+00:00
It is not a 90 degree bridge but more of a 120 degree bridge as seen here: https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/action-taken-against...

It is most definitely bad engineering as having a more gradual curve would’ve made it completely acceptable. Elements of corruption and “not my job” mindset.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-07-10 17:06:47+00:00
It's interesting how attitudes sometimes differ.

I love to present or teach. From 2 to 2000 people, I never ever had one second when I was not trepid yo get on stage. I love it, feel very well and live to turn unexpected events into fun.

And then there is the coffee break where I need to talk to people. Once it syarts then it is on, but finding how to start is a nightmare for me.

I've been presenting at conferences for 30 years and still did not solve that.
by 7402 | 2025-07-10 17:07:00+00:00
In Northern California it's also just "5" "880" etc. We can pick out Southern Californians by their use of the pronoun.

If you want to show your geographical sophistication within California, you can safely refer to "80" (I-80 passes through only the northern part of the state) and "the 10" (which passes only through the southern part). As for "5" vs. "the 5" just make sure that if you're heading south you've switched by the time you reach the Grapevine (q.v.).

I'm not sure where the N/S dividing line is, though. Any HN readers from Bakersfield or Coalinga?
by duskwuff | 2025-07-10 17:08:11+00:00
No. Any type of metal wire would break under its own weight.

What you're describing is essentially a space elevator. Interestingly, such a system wouldn't actually end at geostationary orbit - its center of mass needs to be in geostationary orbit, so the top end would need to be significantly higher up. It might be possible to construct such a structure using exotic materials such as carbon nanotubes, but even that would have to be tapered to achieve the needed tensile strength. Ordinary materials like steel are out of the question.