MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by taeric | 2025-07-01 14:41:15+00:00
I assert that the idea of "authoritative data" for a lot of hypothetical questions people would explore will itself be a hindrance. That is, for most hypothetical scenarios, you explicitly want modeled data. Ideally, you would know the parameters used in generating the data, but the entire point of many hypotheticals is you are projecting into an area where you don't have data. Or building a counterfactual world and predicting what it would have changed.

Similarly, "invariant preserving operations" is not necessarily what you want, either? You want to know what other parameters you would need to adjust to keep some conditions. But you want to be able to edit anything free form and then interact with it to get back to a "solved" state. That is to say, when interacting with a system, you explicitly want to allow bad or incomplete states. (This is, ultimately, what kills many "code as an AST" ideas.)

FreeCAD has a good example to consider on this. When drafting, you can pretty much freeform draw a part. But if you want to finish the session, you have to fully specify all parameters. This doesn't mean you can't add to the drawing while it is unsolved. It does mean that you can't take it to the next phase without fully solving.

This can be difficult if you don't have training material on how to use an application. And while it can be frustrating that you can save something in a state where you can't click "next," it is also frustrating to have a system where you can't save what you currently have to send to someone else to look at.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-07-01 14:42:02+00:00
I'm skeptical that OpenAI was ever feasible as a nonprofit under it's original mission, which was:

> Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.

As soon as the power of AI became apparent, everyone wanted (and in some ways, needed) to make bank. This would have been true even if the original training costs weren't so high.
by anilshanbhag | 2025-07-01 14:42:32+00:00
Grammarly is one of the tools I pay for, and I am worried about the security risks of using it. Really wish there was an alternative that: 1) Does local processing (local LLM?) instead of sending all my data to their server. 2) Had a lightweight Chrome extension that didn't inject many MBs of scripts on each page.
by diggan | 2025-07-01 14:42:57+00:00
I don't know the ecosystem, but seemingly Stripe themselves lists some projects/products/organizations that themselves have "Stripe" in their name, as part of the "Stripe Partner Ecosystem": https://stripe.partners/?search=stripe&sort=relevance

Still, risky to use someone else's trademark regardless, if they suddenly don't like you anymore they'll start to enforce it at the worst moment.
by adwn | 2025-07-01 14:43:02+00:00
The difference between Hotspot on one hand and Bing's use of NativeJIT on the other is that after code generation (the "formulates a custom expression" part), the code is immediately JIT-compiled to machine code, while Hotspot would first interpret the generated code for a while and collect execution metrics before it JIT-compiles the code. This delay between code generation and compilation to machine code would be unacceptable for Bing's use case, hence why Java+Hotspot aren't suitable for this task. Hope this clears it up.
by dr_kretyn | 2025-07-01 14:43:34+00:00
> Grammarly's acquisition of Superhuman follows its recent $1 billion funding from General Catalyst, which gives it dry powder to create a collection of AI-powered workplace tools.

Dry powder to do what?! Is this americanism? I've been here for over 8 years and every month I find some wording that's just bizarre, like as if there was a competition for ways in how to confuse someone.
by x13 | 2025-07-01 14:44:06+00:00
How are you handling this?

https://stripe.com/legal/marks

Use or incorporate any of our Marks in your own trademark, service mark, trade dress, trade name, website name, domain name, corporate name, or social-media handle (or any other source-identifying use), or use any trademark, service mark, trade dress, trade name, website name, domain name, corporate name, or social-media handle (or any other source-identifying use) that is likely to be confused with any of our Marks.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-01 14:44:10+00:00
To answer the OP, no. Your compiler will never do the optimization you want it to do, no matter how high you try and move up the abstraction.

The fundamental issue isn't just that your compiler doesn't understand SQL. The problem is that your compiler doesn't understand how data is or will be stored. It's blind to the current state of the dataset.

For example, maybe it's the case that the data is stored in a hashtable and it's rarely written. In that case, N+1 might actually be the right way to query the data to avoid excessive read locks across the database.

Perhaps the data has 1, 2 or several indexes created against it. Those indexes can change at anytime and have to be consciously made as building them can take a lot of resources.

RDBMS build up a huge amount of statistics for optimizations purposes. That's all information you'd have to have the compiler JIT into the application to get similar performance or to have a good feeling for how to do the optimization.
by diggan | 2025-07-01 14:45:15+00:00
Feels like that'd be trivial to build, biggest issue is having to ship large files (LLM weights), but maybe CNNs would be enough, I'm guessing Grammarly started with CNNs or similar?

What are you using Grammarly for, is it just spell/grammar checking or something more? Is the UX particularly good? Personally I tried it some years ago but didn't understand/see what is/was special about it.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-07-01 14:46:02+00:00
> Sedna is expected to pass through the perihelion of its orbit in 2075--2076 and then move again away from the Sun. Considering the distances involved, a mission targeting the object would need to be launched "relatively" soon, especially if using conventional propulsion systems, which could require up to 30 years of deep-space travel.

Sedna's perihelion is ~76 AU - more than twice as far as Pluto, which took New Horizons nearly a decade to reach.

Sedna's apehelion is over 500 AU.

> The Direct Fusion Drive rocket engine is under development at Princeton University Plasma Physics Laboratory

Is it ... is it actually working? How close are they? And even if they get it to work next year, will it be something well-engineered & reliable enough to send it into space for 10 years and expect it to work?
by tecleandor | 2025-07-01 14:46:08+00:00
USB-C headphones for phones have their own audio interfaces, yep. Headsets and webcams have usb audio interfaces too.

Also, I guess there are a good bunch of devices that have audio interfaces that, internally, might be connected to the USB bus.

But I'm also thinking about sound "processing" oriented hardware that could run Linux. Sound recorders, mixers, synths, smart speakers... that could be based on an SBC or an ARM or similar processor.
by benreesman | 2025-07-01 14:46:20+00:00
Your reply is enough of a zinger that I'll chuckle and not pile on, but there is a very real and very important point here, which is that it is strictly bad to get mystical about this.

There are interesting emergent behaviors in computationally feasible scale regimes, but it is not magic. The people who work at OpenAI and Anthropic worked at Google and Meta and Jump before, they didn't draw a pentagram and light candles during onboarding.

And LLMs aren't even the "magic. Got it." ones anymore, the zero shot robotics JEPA stuff is like, wtf, but LLM scaling is back to looking like a sigmoid and a zillion special cases. Half of the magic factor in a modern frontier company's web chat thing is an uncorrupted search index these days.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-01 14:46:59+00:00
Having smaller scaling units is a convenience. Yes. The mainframe world has tended to require massive upgrades to scale, yes.

Yet, in many ways, the world we are in today is actually intensely terminal based. When you are on Facebook, on Google, ask yourself where the compute is happening. Ask yourself what you think the split is, what the ratio of client : server compute is. My money is that Facebook and Google spend far more compute than I do when I use their services. And that's with these companies spending probably billions of dollars carefully optimizing their server side architectures to relentlessly reduce cost.

The hyperscalers use lots of powerful dense small servers. It could be argued that these servers more resemble one kind of shared personal computer model, since there are many dozens of them in the rack, not one big system. But still, these systems host many dozens of requests at any given point in time, are being used as a shared system with many terminals connected to them.

Last, I do think we have mis-optimized like hell, and have almost no data points about how incredibly bad a job we are doing, have almost no idea what a thin-client / terminal based world could look like. Much of the reason for personal computers is that individuals had power over these systems, that it didn't take getting departmental them IT approval for each use case: you have your computer and do with it as you will. The organizational complexity pushed us away from the terminal model long long long ago.

But today, there's enormously popular container options. There's incredibly festureful container-based development options abundant, with web or GUI options abound. Toolbox is a great example. https://github.com/containers/toolbox I guess it could be argued that this brings a personal computer model to a shared terminal system, hybridized the option?

But I long to see better richer shared systems, that strive to create interconnected multi user systems, that we terminal into. There is so much power on tap now, so many amazing many core chips that we could be sharing very effectively, offloading work to, while sparing our batteries & reducing our work:idle compute ratios drastically with.
by antonvs | 2025-07-01 14:47:16+00:00
> referring to passed values as distinct from received values.

That’s not the distinction being made by those terms.

“Parameter” refers to a named variable in a function definition.

“Argument” refers to an actual value that’s passed to a function when it’s called.

It’s exactly the same as the distinction between variables and values (which you probably see the use for), just applied to the special cases of function signatures and function calls.

(As an aside, in the lambda calculus this relationship becomes a perfect equivalence: all variables are parameters and all values are arguments.)
by AdmiralAsshat | 2025-07-01 14:47:43+00:00
> U.S. beekeepers had a disastrous winter. Between June 2024 and January 2025, a full 62% of commercial honey bee colonies in the United States died, according to an extensive survey. It was the largest die-off on record, coming on the heels of a 55% die-off the previous winter.

Christ, do we even have any bees left at this point?
by davidjade | 2025-07-01 14:47:56+00:00
Except, what happens when apps get removed from the iOS App Store and moved to another store for distribution? If people want to continue or need to use those apps then they would have to use these other app stores.

What if those apps moved to other stores so they can skirt Apple's review and other consumer-friendly restrictions? How is that better for consumers that use Facebook, Insta, etc... for them to have apps with less review and less scrutinized for their behavior? Some of Apples policies have been good for consumers of apps.

Just witness how Fb, etc... already try and skirt those rules that are in place to protect users from tracking and other abuses. Seems pretty logical to assume they would all jump ship to another store to not be under Apple's review process if they could.

I don't doubt for one minute that Fb, etc.. would not jump to another store with less restrictions, and either pull their existing apps or leave them severely restricted in the Apple App Store as an "incentive" to download from the other store.
by encom | 2025-07-01 14:47:59+00:00
Yea, german is the same way, they translate a lot of tech words as well. Danish is taking on english loan words at an alarming rate. Many products have english labels on them, even though they're manufactured for the danish (or scandinavian) market. Seing a store having "udsalg" is getting rarer, now it's a "sale". Many younger people use english words in regular conversation, and I hate how it affects me, and I start doing it as well. I try very hard not to. Last place I worked had english as the official corporate language, and all meetings were in english. Even if I'm very proficient in english, my brain works in danish and it takes much less effort for me to converse in danish, and switching between languages all day makes the mental load worse.

A language is much more than a protocol for communication - it's culture. I'm not a purist (only a little), but I think this is a concerning development. I can only imagine how much worse it is in Copenhagen, because that's a very silly place.
by parpfish | 2025-07-01 14:48:22+00:00
yeah, but it's a different type of science.

the move from "software engineering" to "AI engineering" is basically a switch from a hard science to a soft science.

rather than being chemists and physicists making very precise theory-driven predictions that are verified by experiment, we're sociologists and psychologists randomly changing variables and then doing a t-test afterward and asking "did that change anything?"
by diggan | 2025-07-01 14:48:59+00:00
> Dry powder to do what?! Is this americanism?

No, is financialism, which is basically the same thing but I digress.

> Dry powder is a slang term referring to marketable securities that are highly liquid and considered cash-like - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/drypowder.asp

Finance seems particularly filled with terms with no real connection attached to the concepts at hand, not sure why. Sounds cool I suppose?
Show HN: Created a script to run commands in an isolated VM for AI tool calling
by bigattichouse | 2025-07-01 14:49:09+00:00
Using AI commandline tools can require allowing some scary permissions (ex: "allow model to rm -rf?"), I wanted to isolate commands using a VM that could be ephemeral (erased each time), or persistent, as needed. So instead of the AI trying to "reason out" math, it can write a little program and run it to get the answer directly. This VASTLY increases good output. This was also an experiment to use claude to create what I needed, and I'm very happy with the result.
by bumby | 2025-07-01 14:49:38+00:00
The hyper car argument is really just a digression and it cuts both ways (which I think was the posters point). If you want to compare hyper car prices, you need to compare hyper gas-only to hyper hybrid. But that’s not really germane to the generalizations being used here.

Where is your 98% claim coming from? The other poster made no such claim.

The irony is there is published info on TCO from companies like Edmunds and Kelly Blue Book. We can take umbrage with some of the factors or weighting, but it’s a better starting point in real data than anything bright up so far. A claim could easily be crafted using such information that addresses everything I’ve raised (maintenance, depreciation, different designs, etc). Yet the discussion seems almost wholly based on vibes and near-ideological bias. It reads to me as conclusions searching for data instead of the other way around.

The best I can tell from that information, TCO is largely a wash. For comparable manufacturers/designs, TCO over the first 5-10 years seems to be about the same. You can pick some designs that favor one side or the other, but in general they are roughly within 10% (usually considerably less) of one another. Given the uncertainty due to the variables in question, it seems reasonable to conclude there aren’t strong conclusions on TCO differences between them.
by ozgung | 2025-07-01 14:49:46+00:00
I found few definitions.

"Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing valid conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth." Wikipedia

This Wikipedia definition refers to The Routledge dictionary of philosophy which has a completely different definition: "Reason: A general faculty common to all or nearly all humans... this faculty has seemed to be of two sorts, a faculty of intuition by which one 'sees' truths or abstract things ('essences' or universals, etc.), and a faculty of reasoning, i.e. passing from premises to a conclusion (discursive reason). The verb 'reason' is confined to this latter sense, which is now anyway the commonest for the noun too" - The Routledge dictionary of philosophy, 2010

Google (from Oxford) provides simpler definitions: "Think, understand, and form judgements logically." "Find an answer to a problem by considering possible options."

Cambridge: Reason (verb): "to try to understand and to make judgments based on practical facts" Reasoning (noun): "the process of thinking about something in order to make a decision"

Wikipedia uses the word "consciously" without giving a reference and The Routledge talks about the reasoning as the human behavior. Other definitions point to an algorithmic or logical process that machines are capable of. The problematic concepts here are "Understanding" and "Judgement". It's still not clear if LLMs can really do these, or will be able to do in the future.
by wonderwonder | 2025-07-01 14:49:56+00:00
from what I have read, it appears that while the weight loss plays a role that the anti-inflammatory effects exist independently of that as well.

I am cheating as I don't want to do a lot of writing to summarize so I just had chatGPT summarize for me:

Mechanisms Beyond Weight Loss Direct Action on Immune Cells:

GLP-1 receptors are found on several immune cells (like macrophages, T cells, and dendritic cells).

Activation of these receptors can suppress pro-inflammatory cytokines (like TNF-α, IL-6) and enhance anti-inflammatory ones (like IL-10).

Reduction in Systemic Inflammation:

Studies show reduced levels of C-reactive protein (CRP) and interleukins in patients taking GLP-1s, even when controlling for weight loss.

In diabetic patients, GLP-1s can reduce oxidative stress and endothelial inflammation, improving cardiovascular outcomes.

Improved Gut Barrier Function:

GLP-1s may reduce gut permeability ("leaky gut"), which helps prevent the translocation of inflammatory endotoxins (like LPS) into circulation.

Neuroinflammation:

In animal models, GLP-1s cross the blood-brain barrier and have shown protective effects against neuroinflammation, relevant in diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-07-01 14:50:47+00:00
> The point is that more, different, better and cheaper options might exist.

They can, on Android, which worldwide is about 75% of the market.

> competition is not greatly distorted in favor of the market's owner

If Apple were primarily engaged in making its own apps that compete with apps in its marketplace, then yes, that is distorting the competition (and one could argue that it does this with certain apps like Mail). But the fact that it takes a cut from anyone who wants access to its user base, doesn't stifle competition per se.

This is primarily about access. If I want to set up a popup store inside a fancy country club to access a captive market, I'm going to pay a lot more in fees to the country club than I would if I put it up in some random strip mall. This is no different.
by mromanuk | 2025-07-01 14:51:03+00:00
I definitely like the LLM in the middle, it’s a nice way to circumvent the SEO machine and how Google has optimized writing in recent years. Removing all the cruft from a recipe is a brilliant case for an LLM. And I suspect more of this is coming: LLMs to filter. I mean, it would be nice to just read the recipe from HTML, but SEO has turned everything into an arms race.
by rpdillon | 2025-07-01 14:51:16+00:00
You didn't address anything I wrote. The issue is not the 30%, it's the lack of choice. Apple locks businesses into having to support Apple Pay to access the user base of Apple users. Google doesn't do this: apps can be distributed via F-Droid or just downloaded from the net. Steam doesn't do this: you can just run apps you bought years ago, or bought from GOG, even on devices built by Valve.

I'll say the same thing, another way: Apple is the only smartphone manufacturer that forces you to install apps through their services only.
by Out_of_Characte | 2025-07-01 14:51:21+00:00
Biological evolution is also impossible to measure on small timescales. that does not mean it does not exist, clearly it exists. It has an exponential effect on the future. I think we fully agree on this definition.

>as people and societies become wealthier and better educated (both correlated with intelligence), their reproduction rates drop precipitously.

There is also the unmistakeable influence of evolutionary psychology on people throughout human history, that seems to have accelerated. When people decide to have fewer kids, especially the more affluent ones, doesnt yet point to any biological influence. Other than the correlation between wealth, IQ and genetics. I dont think there are any risks of a reduction of intelligence through evolution. The world population reduction we're seeing might accelerate it instead.
by myfonj | 2025-07-01 14:51:31+00:00
Interestingly, the original idea of what we call a "browser" nowadays – the "user agent" – was built on the premise that each user has specific needs and preferences. The user agent was designed to act on their behalf, negotiating data transfers and resolving conflicts between content author and user (content consumer) preferences according to "strengths" and various reconciliation mechanisms.

(The fact that browsers nowadays are usually expected to represent something "pixel-perfect" to everyone with similar devices is utterly against the original intention.)

Yet the original idea was (due to the state of technical possibilities) primarily about design and interactivity. The fact that we now have tools to extend this concept to core language and content processing is… huge.

It seems we're approaching the moment when our individual personal agent, when asked about a new page, will tell us:

Well, there's nothing new of interest for you, frankly: All information presented there was present on pages visited recently. -- or -- You've already learned everything mentioned there. (*) Here's a brief summary: … (Do you want to dig deeper, see the content verbatim, or anything else?)

Because its "browsing history" will also contain a notion of what we "know" from chats or what we had previously marked as "known".
by burkaman | 2025-07-01 14:51:34+00:00
I don't know if it's uniquely American but I agree it is a very annoying term. It just means cash. Finance bros like to pretend they are "going into battle" or something when they go negotiate an acquisition, so the analogy is that you have a large store of gunpowder ready to deploy at a moment's notice when you want to go to war (go acquire a company).
by markstos | 2025-07-01 14:51:40+00:00
Because the modern web isn't reliably HTML, it's "web apps" with heavy use of JavaScript and API calls. To first display the HTML that you see in your browser, you need a user agent that runs JavaScript and makes all the backend calls that Chrome would make to put together some HTML.

Some websites may still return some static upfront that could be usefully understood without JavaScript processing, but a lot don't.

That's not to say you need an LLM, there are projects like Puppeteer that are like headless browsers that can return the rendered HTML, which can then be sent through an HTML to Markdown filter. That would be less computationally intensive.