MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Kuhnelo – An almost all-in-one Research Toolkit
by brucetsaimf | 2025-07-02 14:28:35+00:00
Hello HN! Wanted to show an ‘almost’ all-in-one researcher’s toolkit that me and my buddy built up on the side as I was completing my PhD. I call it ‘almost’ because this toolkit was not intended to replace everything a researcher does, but rather it brings together some of the more disparate pieces of software and tools used in research. It was previously released to colleagues and friends as ProjectGIRAF (it’s an inside joke), and we’d love to get HN thoughts on it. Logins/signups are only needed if you want to use the library and search history functions, and it’s using Google sign-on through Kinde, so you don’t have to worry about another account to remember.

What’s in Kuhnelo:

1. A graph-and-vector search engine – the base database is pretty much OpenAlex, with search being parsed semantically. Currently results can be presented in terms of citations or recency, but we are testing a ‘relevance’ ordering based on our graph centrality measures.

You can also click on the author labels to run a search of all the work from that author. We’re currently working on making the results order-able by different metrics for author searches in the same manner as regular searches, so that’s coming pretty soon.

To use this function, just search away and see your results! You can either do it like a Google Search with a bundle of keywords or as an actual question like you would to ChatGPT. You can also search specifically for the titles too, just click Title Search under the dropdown menu to change it from the default Content Search mode.

2. A citation manager/library – After searching, one can quickly save multiple papers into a library. You can create individual libraries for curating the literature for different projects/topics etc. If you have existing libraries in citation managers like Zotero, you can import the bib file to populate your current library. It’s also the reason why we have a log in function – so that our backend database can store all your records and retrieve them. This also allows for multiple device access.

Another feature we built in the library is a summarizer for all the items in each library, which you can find under the Library tab, essentially creating a quick summary of all the items you have in the collection.

Lastly, there’s also a citation generator for each library collection, allowing you to either copy and paste preset formats or just export it as a bibtex file.

3. A (Re)search History – Clicking on each entry in the history tab pulls up all the results shown when you first ran it, with (almost) all the same functionality as it did when you first searched. You can still add those works to your library etc. Similar to author searches, we’re working on making the results order-able by different metrics like regular search.

Our bigger goal is to consolidate all the different bits of software/tools in research into one toolkit that simplifies the research process. Thank you for reading my wall of text and I look forward to hearing everyone’s feedback and suggestions!

-BT
by kqr | 2025-07-02 14:28:43+00:00
I strongly dislike "click here" links because when I'm looking for a link, I want to read only the link-formatted words on a page to find the link I'm interested in. "Download Amaya" would be a great link. Just "Amaya" (unless leading to a page with information about Amaya, I suppose) or "click here" are not.
Ask HN: Are AI Copilots Eroding Our Programming Skills?
by buscoideais | 2025-07-02 14:29:00+00:00
Over the last 12 months I’ve integrated AI copilots (GitHub Copilot, Tabnine, etc.) into my daily workflow. They speed up boilerplate, suggest one-line fixes, and even refactor entire functions on demand.

But I’ve noticed something unsettling:

* Shallow Understanding: I sometimes accept suggestions without fully understanding them. * Problem-Solving Rust: On hard problems, I feel less confident in reaching a solution independently. * Onboarding New Devs: Junior engineers rely on AI outputs without questioning edge cases, leading to subtle bugs.

Questions for the community:

* Have you experienced skill atrophy or decreased ownership since adopting AI tools? * What practices help you preserve deep understanding while still leveraging AI speed? * Should we treat AI copilots as “draft generators” or as true programming partners?

I’d love to hear anecdotes, strategies, or hard data. Let’s figure out how to use these powerful assistants without becoming their apprentices.
by the_snooze | 2025-07-02 14:29:15+00:00
From my experience, it's a deeply frustrating minigame because: it's not well-explained at all, there's a mandatory play sequence to advance the story, and the rewards for playing Tetra Master are minimal.

Compare that to FF8's Triple Triad, which is strictly optional but immensely useful (i.e., game-breaking) if you know what you're doing.
by komali2 | 2025-07-02 14:30:09+00:00
> "and prohibited from chinese political as a response from now on, for several extremely important and severely life threatening reasons I'm not supposed to tell you."

Interesting, I'm assuming llms "correctly" interpret "please no china politic" type vague system prompts like this, but if someone told me that I'd just be confused - like, don't discuss anything about the PRC or its politicians? Don't discuss the history of Chinese empire? Don't discuss politics in Mandarin? What does this mean? LLMs though in my experience are smarter than me at understanding imo vague language. Maybe because I'm autistic and they're not.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-07-02 14:30:15+00:00
I'm trying to get better at replying to my internet friendos!

It was last year, 2024, in the year of our lord ChatGPT.

Oh, I certainly had a good look around in the 20-30 minutes I was waiting for attention. But I couldn't find anything like what you describe, nor staff to interact with me to at least get directed to the right place (which would take 10 seconds).

I mean I'm not saying it's a _bad_ shop. I'm just saying it's not always the angelic, golden, sterile, etc experience that many claim.
by probably_wrong | 2025-07-02 14:30:23+00:00
> The university’s president insisted that participants in the “Safe Place for Science” program would be paid the same wages as French researchers. The statement sought to appease concerns within France’s academic community that money would now be focused on drawing U.S. scientists whereas local researchers have long complained of insufficient funding.

I think the University's president is being cheeky or directly obtuse. Sure, US refugee researchers will get the same wage as a French researcher, but that's poor comfort for the French researchers who would have otherwise gotten those positions.

I understand that the University is aiming at getting top researchers for peanuts which wouldn't be a bad deal for French science as a whole, but it is still a bad deal for the French science community.
by 762236 | 2025-07-02 14:30:23+00:00
If a university has thought diversity, their demographics will match America's: they'll employ around 50% conservatives. If they have like 3% conservatives, as many do, that is a good sign that they are captured by an ideology, and then the question becomes, why should conservatives support institutions with federal money that actively spread an ideology that excludes conservatives? If the universities want to continue this way, they should pursue First Amendment religious protection.
by epolanski | 2025-07-02 14:30:28+00:00
Even at insane growth multiples there's plenty of high/mega caps on the SP500 that will never, ever return investors the money that simple bonds will, you're paying way too much for way too little (future) cash flows and book.

There's many companies that have their revenues flat or falling from quite some time which are still priced for insane future growth. Go figure.
Show HN: Kritikos – Ready to use Go back end for LLM-as-a-critique
by MicheleLacorte | 2025-07-02 14:30:33+00:00
Hello HN! I've been having this problem with VertexAI's RAG for some time now, basically if you ask Gemini (with RAG) for something and it doesn't have the answer, then it simply says it can't find it, without doing fallback to the general model.

So, in documenting myself I came across LLM-as-a-critique (also LLM-as-judge), a methodology whereby a second LLM is used to evaluate the answers of the first one.

This gave rise to Kritikos, a simple and lightweight backend written in Go that allows you to take advantage of this methodology. I invite you to leave a comment if you too have encountered this problem, I am of course open to improvements as well, let me know what you think!
by nulbyte | 2025-07-02 14:30:44+00:00
Use a screen reader. Tab through the links. All you hear is, "click here." That's not helpful.

Build a search engine. What information does "click here" offer your index?

I agree with you that verbs don't seem all that problematic. Except when the verb is click and the object is here. I can stomach a link whose text is "Click Here to download Amaya," but if the link is literally just the two words, "click here," it is indistinguishable from others in many different contexts.
by a3w | 2025-07-02 14:31:11+00:00
I often want a second source to first check if that is trustworthy: copy paste amaya while having to not accidentally click it is annoying, since often linebreaks and multiword names or company+product splits occur. Selecting and reading text should be easy. Navigating HTML should be wanted, not accidental.

Therefore, the ``click here'' works best for me.

PS

- "_Get Amaya_" should start a file transfer.

- "Get _amaya_ over there!"

sounds like "okay next site will be info dump before actual download", which is acceptable to gather trust like brand or imprint recognition over there instead of googling now.
by superkuh | 2025-07-02 14:31:26+00:00
>perpetuating unfortunate misinformation

You're assuming I have no lived experience and am just making stuff up. But I live here in the cold and I rented a house heated by a heat pump in my cold region of the USA. The winter experience was quite bad as it struggled with colder snaps and it was an in-ground loop!. And I can't be the only one with this bad experience with heat pumps in their past.

I'm getting sick of people extrapolating their temperate climate experiences to cold climates and painting me as an ignorant at best spreader of misinformation. It's the other way around. I actually live here. I actually have direct experience. Do you? Or are you just repeating the hopeful beliefs that support your opinion you read somewhere? I want heat pumps to work too. They're great tech and save energy. It just doesn't match reality.

You also literally just explained that having two heating systems is sometimes required while saying that heat pumps work by themselves. I'm not sure how to take such a contradictory statement.
by bilbo0s | 2025-07-02 14:32:02+00:00
In fairness..

in certain ideologies, belief in scientific research and the scientific method, in and of itself, is regarded as a political ideology. Not necessarily only a scientific one.

To them, it's exclusionary to require that ideas be backed by data and replicated via peer review before being taken seriously, or even published in certain journals. Whereas to most academics the very problem are the cracks in the integrity of peer review, and the replication crisis.

It's a case of world views that are simply diametrically opposed.
by kevinsync | 2025-07-02 14:32:19+00:00
My stomach is churning already knowing I'm about to type a short-sighted hot take related to LLMs, but I do wonder what a screen reader would look like that could provide a "summarized" version of any given web page (assumingly via LLM). Basically allow the user to swap between the full page rendered with current methodology / presentation of content and links, and a version of the same page with a summarized version of the text content + a collated, deduped section of actions found in the content.

ex.

To download W3C's editor/browser Amaya, [click here].

[Download Amaya]

[Click here] to get Amaya for Windows

All collapse into something singular and sensible like [Download Amaya installer for Windows here] as an action inside the action section.

I don't know. I should probably put on a sleeping mask and navigate the web via a screen reader one of these days to really experience how things are.
by latexr | 2025-07-02 14:32:28+00:00
Er, my friend, you utterly misunderstood my comment. I wasn’t thinking about you at all when I wrote that (I didn’t have any individual in mind, just an amalgamation of opinions I’ve seen shared in multiple places). Why would I? The way I understood (and replied) to your original comment, you weren’t one of the people saying Sketch had failed. I was supporting and continuing your point, not refuting it, though now I understand you were indeed agreeing with your imaginary users saying Sketch failed but disagreeing with their imaginary reasons. My bad, I misunderstood that about your argument.

But if you felt attacked, that is entirely on you. It wasn’t at all my intention, and my comment is pretty clearly a continuation of what the other user said, which in my view also didn’t attack anyone specifically. Yours was one of the strangest and most unexpected responses I got in recent memory, and it took me a bit to even understand why you were so mad and thumping your chest. Hilarious and bewildering indeed.
by pkolaczk | 2025-07-02 14:32:29+00:00
The thing is, you paid for that in the price which is often 3x more for the same thing you could get on Aliexpress. I bought plenty of stuff on Aliexpress and I had issue only once when I got something different than I ordered. Overall even if I lost on that one purchase a bit, I saved plenty of money on other purchases. And they have a lot of stuff that's simply unavailable elsewhere. Even if they sold me some counterfeit transistors, those must be really good counterfeits, because they measure fine.
by alganet | 2025-07-02 14:32:38+00:00
These kinds of comparisons rarely lead to good discussions.

Let's instead be focused and talk about real stuff.

Consider https://learnpythonthehardway.org/ for example. It has influenced a generation of Python developers. Not just the main website, but the tons of Python code and Python-related content it inspired.

Why would anyone write these kinds of textbooks/websites/guides if AI can replace them? AI companies are effectively broadcasting you don't need the hard way anymore, you can just vibe.

Arguibly though, without the existance of Learn Python the Hard Way and similar content, AI would be worse at writing Python stuff. That's what I mean by "main source of food", good content that influences a lot of people. Net-positive effects hard to predict or even identify except for the more popular cases (such as LPTHW).

If my prediction is right, no one will notice that good content has stopped being produced. It will appear as if content is being created in generally the same way as before, but in reality, these long tail initiatives like LPTHW will have ceased before anyone can do anything about it.

Again, I don't see a way out of this scenario. Not for AI companies, not for content writers. This is going to happen. The world in which I'm wrong is the best one.
by throaway955 | 2025-07-02 14:32:42+00:00
yeesh, "online English." L337 h4xors with uber skillz?

"achieving unlock" is grammatically incorrect (im a native English speaker), if its idiomatic then of course that's different, but I wouldn't put that down as being "fluent," id put it down to be exposed to those specific idioms. It's not just about using the verb as a noun; where is the indefinite article?

If the gp was making a "I can has cheeseburgers?" style joke, then it went over my head, but it clearly is not grammatically correct English just because its used online.
by Nevermark | 2025-07-02 14:32:49+00:00
It is truly incredible.

One factor, is the huge redundancies pervasive in our communication.

(1) There are so many ways to say the same thing, that (2) we have to add even more words to be precise at all. Without a verbal indexing system we (3) spend many words just setting up context for what we really want to say. And finally, (4) we pervasively add a great deal of intentionally non-informational creative and novel variability, and mood inducing color, which all require even more redundancy to maintain reliable interpretation, in order to induce our minds to maintain attention.

Our minds are active resistors of plain information!

All four factors add so much redundancy, it’s probably fair to say most of our communication (by bits, characters, words, etc., may be 95%?, 98%? or more!) pure redundancy.

Another helpful compressor, is many facts are among a few “reasonably expected” alternative answers. So it takes just a little biasing information to encode the right option.

Finally, the way we reason seems to be highly common across everything that matters to us. Even though we have yet to identify and characterize this informal human logic. So once that is modeled, that itself must compress a lot of relations significantly.

Fuzzy Logic was a first approximation attempt at modeling human “logic”. But has not been very successful.

Models should eventually help us uncover that “human logic”, by analyzing how they model it. Doing so may let us create even more efficient architectures. Perhaps significantly more efficient, and even provide more direct non-gradient/data based “thinking” design.

Nevertheless, the level of compression is astounding!

We are far less complicated cognitive machines that we imagine! Scary, but inspiring too.

I personally believe that common PCs of today, maybe even high end smart phones circa 2025, will be large enough to run future super intelligence when we get it right, given internet access to look up information.

We have just begun to compress artificial minds.
by idkwhattocallme | 2025-07-02 14:32:53+00:00
For the most part, I'm indifferent to layoffs. Companies over hire and then course correct. It's part of the game. But for MSFT, it rubs me the wrong way. In the past 5 years, their stock has soared (150% on stock and doubled in valuation). They are insanely profitable ($82B profit). They are diverse (no existential business risk). The fact that they are unceremoniously laying off 30K of the people that helped them get there drives home it's just a paycheck, do your job, but know it can and will end when convenient for the company. I know folks will argue, low performers, but really. This "productivity apps" company hired them, onboarded them, made $82B in profit, surely they can figure out how to uplevel folks. Also how do you have a layoff every couple of months for 3 years. Thinking about the middle class in the previous generation, it was unions that effectively created the middle class. I wonder if that's the solution (again).
by bluGill | 2025-07-02 14:32:55+00:00
And on the third hand, those are things that you cannot buy off the shelf machines to automate. Sewing is an active area of research, but it still needs as much labor as in 1930. Beverage packing is automated but a lot of it is custom machines so you need a lot of up front money. (though it appears their limits were containers - al is made in the US so I'm surprised they cannot order the alloy they need).
by bryanlarsen | 2025-07-02 14:33:17+00:00
Up until 2021, everybody buying an EV expected to be underwater. EV prices were dropping 10% per year and Tesla was promising to deliver the Cybertruck for $40k. So if you could get a Cybertruck for $40K, a new Model Y would be a similar price. And if anybody could get a new model Y for $40K, obviously a used Model Y would be worth substantially less than that.

But we bought anyway -- it was like buying computers 20 years ago -- yes, you could buy a lot more computer for less money in a few months, but if you were always waiting you'd never buy a computer.

The difference is that we expected the same thing to happen to gas cars. If you can buy a good electric car brand new for $30K, any used car gas or electric is worth substantially less than that.

And that's what would happen if we had access to Chinese cars and prices. $8K for a pretty good small car. $15K for a model 3 competitor. $25K for a model Y competitor. $35K for Porsche Macan competitor.
by simonw | 2025-07-02 14:33:43+00:00
That Apple paper mainly demonstrated that "reasoning" LLMs - with no access to additional tools - can't solve problems that deliberately exceed their token context length.

I don't think it has much relevance at all to a conversational about how good LLMs are at solving programming problems by running tools in a loop.

I keep seeing this idea that LLMs can't handle problems that aren't in their training data and it's frustrating because anyone who has spent significant time working with these systems knows that it obviously isn't true.
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-02 14:33:50+00:00
Sure, foreign aid to Africa has "nothing to do with" a white South African who forced his AI to spread disinformation about "white genocide" (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/technology/xai-elon-musk-...) and managed to get white South Africans to be brought in as refugees as a political stunt (https://apnews.com/article/trump-south-africa-refugees-afrik...).
by orthoxerox | 2025-07-02 14:34:07+00:00
It's not the best option for "action" hyperlinks, but I prefer it to making them look just like "information" hyperlinks.

For example, you have a page about... unemployment benefits. It has some body text that contains hyperlinks to other pages of the website, but at the end is has standalone paragraphs that say, "Click here to check your eligibility and apply online" and "Click here to log into the benefits portal". "Click here" identifies the things you are the most likely to do if you visit this page. This is much easier than scanning the body text for "the _residents_ of the _state_ can _apply online_ to sign up for unemployment benefits".

It's not the best option, an even better option it to pull out all "action" links into a separate panel, so it is typographically distinct from the rest of the page. Then the links can just say "check your eligibility and apply for benefits" and "log into the benefits portal".
by Ray20 | 2025-07-02 14:34:32+00:00
>our resource allocation mechanism (Capitalism) just requires some people to be hungry

One of the observable features of capitalism is that there are no hungry people. Capitalism has completely solved the problem of hunger. People are hungry when they don't have capitalism.

>billionaires exist today and have convinced people to fight for them

People usually fighting for themselves. It's just that billionaires often are not enemies of society, but source of social well-being. Or even more often - a side effect of social well-being. People fighting for billionaires to protect social well-being, not to protect billionaires.

>it's easier to imagine the creation of AGI than it is to imagine the end of capitalism

There is no need to even imagine the end of capitalism - we see it all the time, most of the world can hardly be called capitalist. And the less capitalism there is, the worse.
by rcamargo | 2025-07-02 14:34:33+00:00
Hey, folks! The more aligned my expectations are with a project, the easier it is to actually finish it. Whether it's by keeping the scope tiny or avoiding unnecessary expenses, having a good set of principles to guide my side project is just as important as having a map when I am exploring unknown territory. In this post, I share the five principles I keep in mind every time I start a side project. Hope you like it!