MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spapas82 | 2025-07-13 10:33:38+00:00
I'm a really happy Django user for 15 years and hopefully I'll still use it for at least another 15!

Django has a lot of beloved features but I think one of the most important is it's stability through the years: I actually have production apps that started on Django 1.4 and python 2.6 and now are updated and with with Django 5 and python 3.13.

All this without too much effort on my side or paying companies to support my projects.

So thank you Django people for the hard work!
by kenoath69 | 2025-07-13 10:34:35+00:00
I want to recommend Vernor Vinge's books to anyone looking for some new sci-fi... I've read A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire upon the Deep. They were exemplary to the kind of logical structure of SciFi and made some relevant predictions which I won't spoil. The guy was a professor of computer science (RIP)
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-13 10:36:01+00:00
You’ve made the faux pas of presenting the spiel that a word’s etymology or genus means it cannot be English.

While an entrepreneurial view, this mammoth disinformation is equivalent to plaza cafe sofa schmooze.

(I know this isn’t the most coherent post I’ve ever made, but I wanted to make a point by cramming in as many borrowed words as I could)
by Neywiny | 2025-07-13 10:36:22+00:00
I think for me, and it sounds like for this author, the context lost by that abstraction makes it harder to review. In my experience it's easier for me to understand a small block of code, but it's harder to understand how it impacts the system when it's out of context.

For example:

x++;

A very easy piece of code to understand. But who wants x, and what values could they expect? Why do we ++ and under what conditions?

Those effects, again just for me your mileage may vary, tend to get much harder to understand.
Show HN: I built an LLM chat app because we shouldn't need 10 AI subscriptions
by maniknt28 | 2025-07-13 10:36:28+00:00
I'm lost between ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini... which subscriptions to take? With Cursor and all these specific AI tools, I just wanted one simple chat app where I can use any model and pay only when I use it.

Couldn't find one, so I built one.

Pay only for what you use. Your prompts and docs, knowledge bases work with every model - no more copy-pasting between apps.

Started as a personal project, but thought someone else might benefit from this too.

https://prismharmony.com/chat

What do you think?
by dminik | 2025-07-13 10:37:34+00:00
Sure. Let's do an imaginary scenario. Let's say that you are the author of a http request library.

Async hasn't been added yet, so you're using `std::net::TcpStream`.

All is well until async comes along. Now, you have a problem. If you use async, your previous sync users won't be able to (easily) call your functions. You're looking at an API redesign.

So, you swallow your pride and add an async variant of your functionality. Since Tokio is most popular, you use `tokio::net::TcpStream`.

All is well, until a user comes in and says "Hey, I would like to use your library with smol (a different async runtime)". Now what do you do? Add a third variant of your code using `smol::net::TcpStream`? It's getting a bit ridiculous, and smol isn't the only alternative runtime.

One solution is to do what Zig does, but there isn't really an agreed upon solution. The stdlib does not even provide AsyncRead/AsyncWrite so you could invert your code and just work with streams provided from above and keep your libary executor agnostic.
by mijoharas | 2025-07-13 10:37:49+00:00
Feature request:

It'd be nice to be able go back to a previous puzzle (back button? For me I think I've only wanted one level of "history"), I've occasionally misclicked the next puzzle button when I want to think a little more about why other variations weren't correct.

Another feature that would be nice would be the ability to see my win/loss stats per category so I could know what I should work on. I suspect there are some categories I'm just bad at, but without just trying them all I can't easily figure out which those are on adaptive (and I think concerted practice on the section I'm bad at would help me a lot). Both overall and last n Puzzles would be helpful (can have a hard coded n if you don't want to store all win/loss history - 100?)

Oh and maybe one more request on that last theme. Maybe being able to have checkboxes to include/exclude things in the "adaptive" set, so if I'm doing well at some things I can manually exclude them (now maybe adaptive already does this, but it'd be nice to be able to tweak it myself)

Ok, one more. Being able to see the tags associated with a puzzle after you've finished would help me too. (I.e. puzzle I just did was opening, Caro-Kann, Fork)
by bsindicatr | 2025-07-13 10:38:37+00:00
> How is your brain doing it then?

Quantum entanglement?:

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a65368553/quantum-e...

And we’re not mathematically impossible, unless that’s some new philosophical theory: “If human intelligence is mathematically impossible, and yet it exists, then mathematics is fallible, and by inductive reasoning logic is fallible, and I can prove things with inductive reasoning, because piss off.”
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-07-13 10:38:42+00:00
You seem to avoid discussing the actual nuclear cost and try to handwave it away? Why are you so hellbent on wasting our limited resources on a dead-end technology that have delivered negative learning by doing for the past 70 years?

Lets calculate running Vogtle at a 10-15% capacity factor like a traditional fossil gas peaker.

The electricity now costs $1-1.5/kWh. That is Texas grid meltdown prices. That is what you are yearning for.

The problem is anytime you try to force the nuclear costs on the consumers they will instead buy solar and storage and decouple themselves from the grid. There is no way you can try to "average" things out when distributed power production is involved.

The market is fundamentally a marginal cost one, no matter how you try to handwave with averages and what not.
by lenkite | 2025-07-13 10:38:56+00:00
Love the no function coloring solution! I am so looking forward to Zig 1.0. Finally, a system programming language that I can actually read and understand without putting in heavy labor. Hell, I could fully follow this blog post, without actually knowing anything much about Zig. Broke my head on async Rust several times before throwing in the towel.
by goku12 | 2025-07-13 10:39:03+00:00
Incus is sort of like GCP's own resource management software, though GCP does a lot more than what Incus does. So you'd often be using Incus like a self-hosted alternative to GCP.

Meanwhile, running Incus inside GCP VM(s) should be possible, though I haven't tried it and can't confirm it. Incus can manage system containers - containers that behave like VMs running full distros, except for the kernel.

But keep in mind that Incus is more like docker than docker-compose. You will need a different tool to provision and configure all those containers over Incus's API (docker-compose does this for application containers over the docker API). As mentioned before, that could be Terraform/OpenTofu, cloud-init and Ansible. Or you could even write a script to do it over the API. I have done this using Python.
by buybackoff | 2025-07-13 10:39:30+00:00
I would not recommend using Aeron on long fat pipes with a chance of packet loss for hight throughput. It was several years since I stress tested this, maybe there have been improvements. I saw some work on that in release notes after. But that was the worst case as recovery was slow.

I would think of UDP with redundant encoding / FEC, to avoid retransmits.
by mlugg | 2025-07-13 10:39:42+00:00
Right, the proposal doesn't discuss the implementation details -- I do apologise if that made it seem a little hand-wavey. I opted not to discuss them there, because they're similar-ish to the way we lowered stackless async in its stage1 implementation, and hence not massively interesting to discuss.

The idea is that, yes, the compiler will infer whether or not a function is async (in the stackless async sense) based on whether it has any "suspension point", where a suspension point is either: * Usage of `@asyncSuspend` * A call to another async function

Calls through function pointers (where we typically wouldn't know what we're calling, and hence don't know whether or not it's async!) are handled by a new language feature which has already been accepted; see a comment I left a moment ago [1] for details on that.

If the compiler infers a function to be async, it will lower it differently; with each suspension point becoming a boundary where any stack-local state is saved to the async frame, as well as an integer indicating where we are in the function, and we jump to different code to be resumed once it finishes. The details of this depend on specifics of the proposal (which I'm planning to change soon) and sometimes melt my brain a little, so I'll leave them unexplained for now, but can probably elaborate on them in the issue thread at some point.

Of course, this analysis of whether a function is async is a little bit awkward, because it is a whole-program analysis; a change in a leaf function in a little file in a random helper module could introduce asynchronocity which propagates all the way up to your `pub fn main`. As such, we'll probably have different strategies for this inference in the compiler depending on the release mode:

* In Debug mode, it may be a reasonable strategy to just assume that (almost) all functions are asynchronous (it's safe to lower a synchronous function as asynchronous, just not vice versa). The overhead introduced by the async lowering will probably be fairly minimal in the context of a Debug build, and this will speed up build times by allowing functions to be sent straight to the code generator (like they are today) without having to wait for other functions to be analyzed (and without potentially having to codegen again later if we "guessed wrong").

* In Release[Fast,Small,Safe] mode, we might hold back code generation until we know for sure, based on the parts of the call graph we have analyzed, whether or not a function is async. Vtables might be a bit of a problem here, since we don't know for sure that a vtable call is not async until we've finished literally all semantic analysis. Perhaps we'll make a guess about whether such functions are async and re-do codegen later if that guess was wrong. Or, in the worst case... perhaps we'll literally just defer all codegen until semantic analysis completes! After all, it's a release build, so you're going to be waiting a while for optimizations anyway; you won't mind an extra couple of seconds on delayed codegen.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549131
by mrjay42 | 2025-07-13 10:39:44+00:00
You might want to check out the works of that buzzkill that Gödel is ^^

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...

" The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure (i.e. an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system.

The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that the system cannot demonstrate its own consistency. "

:3
by sethammons | 2025-07-13 10:40:24+00:00
Calvin and Hobbs, the comic strip, has been banned in Tennessee schools on the grounds that it had pornography in the form of Calvin's naked butt being in some cells.

What is adult content? A cartoon butt? A book on breastfeeding? "I can't define porn, but I know it when I see it" has led to Calvin and Hobbs being banned.
by weego | 2025-07-13 10:40:33+00:00
The sheer volume of sidequest projects they've put resources into that were clearly self-indulgence projects from internal staff, that had no obvious market need or target user-base put me off years ago.

They're kept in existence as a cost of doing business for the likes of Google, purely to ward off browser monopoly claims, and absolutely do not deserve to be taken seriously, or be given private funding.
by Neywiny | 2025-07-13 10:41:07+00:00
Agreed. Until I upgraded phones and just couldn't be bothered anymore, I kept around an old build of Firefox from before they messed up extensions. I have to run nightly now to get my extensions and just pause updates at relatively bug-free builds. It's absurd how they took the one selling point and lost it. I've even switched to edge canary because it gives me extensions and didn't have a few regressions (that eventually got fixed) that prevented smooth video watching
by robsws | 2025-07-13 10:41:42+00:00
Maybe I should read the book again making notes like the author did. I finished it understanding how novel this would have been when it was released and impressed with how much worldbuilding was fit into a relatively short book, but ultimately pretty disappointed by the plot itself. Without giving away too much, I feel that there were a few segments that fell pretty flat for me (to be specific, with minor spoilers: the new recruit around the middle of the book and the hacking subplot towards the end).
by keyringlight | 2025-07-13 10:42:59+00:00
I'd wonder if there's enough willing to pay within individual consumers or professionals that would support a browser development team, and my impression is that file compression and browsers are pretty much a software commodity where they can be easily swapped with other options. I doubt there would be a lot of uptake on licensing within companies, and any bundling a licensed copy with an OEM build PC would probably involve mozilla paying them instead of the other way around.

It seems like the browser only exists with a very important secondary motivation, for microsoft and IE it was tying the web and windows together with activex, and for chrome it was to give their ads/services a good presentation. The other alternative I wonder about is the Document Foundation with LibreOffice, where their offering is distinct from MS Office, and there's still space for other players to exist healthily.
by RyukuLogos | 2025-07-13 10:43:03+00:00
Thank you for sharing the link to Deanna Martin's paper. It's a very insightful and ambitious work.

You are right to point out the "same goal." I believe the fundamental commonality between our theories is that we are both addressing how a system can maintain its structure and order against the natural tendency towards entropy.

However, our proposed solutions to this problem diverge significantly.

Her theory seems to focus on maintaining internal consistency—a continuous, dynamic balancing of many internal variables to ensure the system's ongoing operational health.

My RAIN theory, on the other hand, is less concerned with that internal consistency and focuses on a more fundamental, discrete event: whether or not a rhythm "closes." It posits that structure and meaning are not just managed, but are born from the discovery of these closed, periodic patterns in sensory input.

It's a fascinating contrast in approach. Thank you again for prompting this comparison.
by kapep | 2025-07-13 10:43:35+00:00
> when timezones change, countries make changes to when their summer time starts, etc. Which happens all the time.

The frequency in which time zones are changed surprised me the first time I looked it up. For a single country it's probably quite a big deal that doesn't happen too often. But internationally there are several changes each year. I think it was like 4-6 changes per year in the past decades.
by dannymi | 2025-07-13 10:44:19+00:00
>Is this level of fear typical or reasonable?

Of course. Also with regular customer projects. Even without AI--but of course having an idiot be able to execute commands on your PC makes the risk higher.

> If so, why doesn’t Anthropic / AI code gen providers offer this type of service?

Why? Separate the concerns. Isolation is a concern depending on my own risk appetite. I do not want stuff to decide on my behalf what's inside the container and what's outside. That said, they do have devcontainer support (like the article says).

>Hard to believe Anthropic is not secure in some sense — like what if Claude Code is already inside some container-like thing?

It's a node program. It does ask you about every command it's gonna execute before it does it, though.

>Is it actually true that Claude cannot bust out of the container?

There are (sporadic) container escape exploits--but it's much harder than not having a container.

You can also use a qemu vm. Good luck escaping that.

Or an extra user account--I'm thinking of doing that next.
by calf | 2025-07-13 10:44:29+00:00
I'll bite; There was a Kurt Jaimungal interview yesterday explaining that the Navier-Stokes fluid equations are not only unpredictable (chaotic), but also uncomputable (in the Turing sense). (if I recalled it correctly)

But I take that to mean there's no general, universal algorithm to tell us anything we want to know. But that's not what intelligence is, we're not defining some kind of absolute intelligence like an oracle for the halting problem. That definition would be a category error.
by fiji-flo | 2025-07-13 10:45:09+00:00
If you want to help fund Firefox, you can for now just pay for a product https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/ and not use it (if you live in a country Mozilla accepts money from). Be vocal about it that you do this to support Firefox (e.g. reply in the discourse thread). I personally recommend leveraging MDN for this as it's right now the closest to Firefox, as in it's part of the Firefox organization within Mozilla. I would hope down the road we could just directly for Firefox, but we need to put money where our mouth is.
by pama | 2025-07-13 10:45:24+00:00
I didnt read your draft paper, but your premise in HN sounds a bit off to me. AGI does not assume the ability for finding or learning an optimal solution to every problem (with that assumption it would be trivial to prove it impossible in many different ways). Independent of the exact definition, a system of intelligence that is better or equal to the best human in any domain would be at least termed AGI. (If there exist a couple incompressible problems along the way you can memorize the human solution.) If you proved AGI impossible under such a (weaker?) definition you would prove that humans can no longer improve in any domain (as the set of all humans is a general intelligence). Or you would need to assume that there is something special inside humans, which no technology can ever build. I disagree with both premises.
by marvin-hansen | 2025-07-13 10:45:40+00:00
Okay, read the abstract and Intro. Recently, in the paper

"What Has a Foundation Model Found? Using Inductive Bias to Probe for World Models"

your thesis of Ai's lack of capacity to abstract or at least extract understanding from noisy data was largely experimentally confirmed. I am uncertain though about the exact mechanics b/c as they used LLM's, its not transparent what happened internally that lead to constant failure to abstract the concept despite ample predictive power. One interesting experiment was the introduction of the Oracle that literally enabled the LLM to solve the task that was previously impossible without the oracle, which means, at least its possible that LLM's can reconstruct known rules. They just can't find new ones.

On a more fundamental level, I am not so sure why these experiments and mathematical proofs still are made since Judea Pearl already established about seven years ago in "Theoretical Impediments to Machine Learning " that all correlation based methods are doomed as they fail to understand anything. his point about causality is well placed, but will not solve the problem either.

The question I have though, if we ignore all existing methods for one moment, then what makes you so sure that AGI is really Mathematically impossible? Suppose some advancement in quantum computing would allow to reconstruct incomplete information, does your assertion still holds true?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06952 https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.04016
by dminik | 2025-07-13 10:46:45+00:00
Yes, the main character of that article really is mostly JavaScript. The main issue there is that some things must be async, and that doesn't mesh well with things that can't be.

If you're writing a game, and you need to render a new enemy, you might want to reduce performance by blocking rather than being shot by an invisible enemy because you can only load the model async.

But even the article acknowledges that various languages tackle this problem better. Zig does a good job, but claiming it's been defeated completely doesn't really fly for me.
by mindcrime | 2025-07-13 10:47:01+00:00
AGI Is Mathematically Impossible

Unless you believe in magic, the human brain proves that human level general intelligence is possible in our physical universe, running on a system based on the laws of said physical universe. Given that, there's no particular reason to think that "what the brain does" OR a reasonably close approximation, can't be done on another "system based on the laws of our physical universe."

Also, Marcus Hutter already proved that AIXI[1] is a universal intelligence, where it's only short-coming is that it requires infinite compute. But the quest of the AGI project is not "universal intelligence" but simply intelligence that approximates that of us humans. So I'd count AIXI as another bit of suggestive evidence that AGI is possible.

Using Kolmogorov complexity, we show that many real-world problems—particularly those involving social meaning, context divergence, and semantic volatility—are formally incompressible and thus unlearnable by any finite algorithm.

So you're saying the human brain can do something infinite then?

Still, happy to give the paper a read... eventually. Unfortunately the "papers to read" pile just keeps getting taller and taller. :-(

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI
by rotten | 2025-07-13 10:47:02+00:00
The human brain does not have perfect memory. It is not always logical. And more often than not it is motivated and influenced by "external" forces - health, hunger, sex drive, environmental conditions, luck, spiritual inspiration, or whatever. The perfect worker is purely logical and has perfect memory and no external influences - never gets hungry or sick or wants to be the boss themselves. The AI race is funded by folks interested in creating the perfect worker, not a human. I have to agree with the conclusions of this paper that they won't be able to make humans. (But they don't really want to.) The Vatican has also published interesting works on this idea. The question is - if you take out everything that makes it human, can you call it intelligent?
by Barrin92 | 2025-07-13 10:47:02+00:00
>"Some might worry that people would flock to alternatives if Firefox became a user-funded product. I disagree. In fact, I think the exact opposite is true. Right now, people are leaving because they dislike Mozilla’s business model"

Sorry but that's just... delusional. Yes the moment Firefox would charge money and become a paid product 90% of people would switch over to Brave et al. The average internet user or even Firefox user does not now what Mozilla's business model even is because they're not terminally online.

A browser like Firefox if it wants to compete with Chrome and wants to have an impact on the internet needs to be free because the average internet user is willing to spend exactly zero dollars on software. If anyone could make more money charging for their software than not they'd already be doing it, unless you think they hate money.

Same goes for all the tirades about Mozilla's management. Again the average person has no clue about it, they don't read news about software company management. Firefox has been losing ground because Google owns half of all major sites on the internet and Android and ships as a default on tons of devices, it's that simple.