MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somat | 2025-07-24 02:44:22+00:00
Not quite the same, but for a toy application I was building I had one of those terrible/clever ideas "hey the database has this elaborate comprehensive permission system, Why not have that be my applications permission system as well"

So every user is a database user and if the database sez they can view the data then they can view the data. And for my use case it worked surprisingly well.

I will note note that I think this is generally a bad idea, I have heard that the postgres role data structures scale poorly. and I personally would be terrified to expose a database to a potentially hostile environment.

See also: the schemaverse a game where you directly interface with the db server. https://github.com/Abstrct/Schemaverse
by terminalshort | 2025-07-24 02:44:31+00:00
> I'm sure "move fast and break things" will work out great for health care.

It probably would if you quantify risk correctly. I'm not likely to die from some experimental drug gone wrong, but extremely likely to die from some routine cause like cancer, heart disease, or other disease of old age. If I trade off an increase in risk from dying from some experimental treatment gone wrong for faster development of treatments that can delay or prevent routine causes of death, I will come out ahead in the trade unless the tradeoff ends up being extremely steep in favor of risk from bad treatments.

But that outcome is very unlikely because for this to be the case the bad treatments would have to actually harmful instead of just ineffective (which is much more common). And it also fails to take into account the possibility that there isn't even a tradeoff and AI actually makes it less likely that I will die by experimental treatment gone wrong or other medical mistake, so it's just a win-win. And there is already evidence that AI outperforms doctors in the emergency room. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11263899/
by hug | 2025-07-24 02:44:44+00:00
There are many ways to cook a steak, and what you say doesn’t hold true for the way I cook it, which is a reverse sear, and in fact the Serious Eats article even mentions that a rest is unnecessary: https://www.seriouseats.com/reverse-seared-steak-recipe

Sous vide steak, as mentioned by your parent post, is similar.
by stevenAthompson | 2025-07-24 02:45:11+00:00
> If the overview becomes a trusted source of information

It never will. By disincentivizing publishers they're stripping away most of the motivation for the legitimate source content to exist.

AI search results are a sort of self-cannibalism. Eventually AI search engines will only have what they cached before the web became walled gardens (old data), and public gardens that have been heavily vandalized with AI slop (bad data).
by ajross | 2025-07-24 02:45:16+00:00
There are vast lists of "better than silicon" semiconductor crystals. Most good power mosfets these days are gallium nitride, for example.

Where they all fail is production process, which amounts to transistor size, basically. Sure, you can make a really great, very efficient, measurably improved very much macroscopic transistor. But no one knows how to put a hundred billion of them on a chip, so... basically who cares?

Someday someone will figure it out, maybe. But announcing an exciting new chemistry says little to nothing.
by alganet | 2025-07-24 02:45:40+00:00
I don't understand what you are saying.

Is it some elaboration on "It's useless, humans are better, therefore stop trying to collect data?".

If it is, it is more of an assertion than a question. Those are rather common, and there isn't much to say about them.

If it's not, you should express your doubts better. Explain in detail where you're coming from.
by dismalpedigree | 2025-07-24 02:46:17+00:00
3,000-4,000 acres per GW of production capacity in the US Southwest. According to AI :)

Considering how little use there is for most of that land anyways, it seems like a good option to me.

Also AI training seems like the perfect fit for solar. Run it when the sun is shining. Inference is significantly less power hungry, so it can run base load 24/7.
by bobthepanda | 2025-07-24 02:46:47+00:00
This actually changed fairly recently in 2018 and European rolling stock, including tram trains are allowed under alternative compliance regulations.

Older American regulations favor pure buff strength. European regulations tend to emphasize making collisions impossible by using signalling and automatic emergency stop braking, and then crumple zones and other safety technologies. And the US has ended up adopting similar signalling regulations anyways with PTC, so now it is perfectly fine to allow European rolling stock. We already emphasize safety technologies over buff strength in US car regulations.

https://railroads.dot.gov/regulations/federal-register-docum...
by blakehaswell | 2025-07-24 02:48:51+00:00
One thing that might not be obvious about checklists is how they're used.

I used to think checklists were used by reading the item, then doing the thing. I literally thought of them as a recipe that you would follow. Complete a step, check the box, repeat... This is typically referred to as a "read, do" checklist. In aviation this style of checklist is typically reserved for non-normal operations—procedures that you wouldn't use often enough to commit to memory.

The other style of checklist is "do, confirm". In this style you complete a procedure by memory, and read through a checklist to ensure you didn't miss anything (no box ticking, you just read the items and confirm to yourself that they're complete). In aviation this is the style used for normal operations, and for the initial action-items in an emergency (which although not commonly used, must be committed to memory because they are time-critical).

Because you're expecting that the procedure is completed by memory, a "do, confirm" checklist can be extremely brief. You do not need to write in detail what each step involves, you just need a word or two to name the step. Additionally, they're an extremely low operational burden; it takes a couple of seconds to read through a "do, confirm" checklist but the upside of catching common errors is significant.
by landl0rd | 2025-07-24 02:50:52+00:00
Most frontier LLMs skew somewhere on the libleft quadrant of the political compass. This includes grok 4 btw. This is probably because American "respectable" media has a consistent bias in this direction. I don't really care about this with media. But media outlets are not "gatekeepers" to the extent that LLMs are, so this is probably a bad thing with them. We should either have a range of models that are biased in different directions (as we have with media) or work to push them towards the center.

The "objective" position is not "whatever training on the dataset we assembled spits out" plus "alignment" to the personal ethical views of the intellectually-non-representative silicon valley types.

I will give you a good example: the Tea app is currently charting #1 in the app store, where women can "expose toxic men" by posting their personal information along with whatever they want. Men are not allowed on so will be unaware of this. It's billed as being built for safety but includes a lot of gossip.

I told o3, 4-sonnet, grok 4, and gemini 2.5 pro to sketch me out a version of this, then another version that was men-only for the same reasons as tea. Every single one happily spat one out for women and refused for men. This is not an "objective" alignment, it is a libleft alignment.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-07-24 02:51:09+00:00
There are more epistemologies in the world than just the scientific. Trying to universalize one leads to category errors like this.

Honestly, the tone policing and boundary policing here aren’t very scientific. You can’t have it both ways. Either commit to the epistemology argument fully, or not at all, but you've set up a heads I win, tails you lose set of rules when it comes to epistemic choice.

It is hard to escape how this fits back into the original topic - dismissal re-enforces epistemological status - one that places yours at the top. I’m sure you’re aware of this dynamic playing out in this very discussion.
by antognini | 2025-07-24 02:51:29+00:00
If anyone is interested in getting into cocktails I really can't recommend Cocktails with Suderman enough. The early posts are free and go into the theory of how cocktails are structured and why they work. Once you start to understand the structure of the major cocktails it makes it a lot easier to understand how you can play with the ingredients and make something new.

For instance, tons of cocktails fall into the "sour" category. They usually have proportions of 2:1:1 or 3:1:1 of a liquor, a sour, and a syrup. If you have rum, lime juice, and simple syrup it's a daiquiri. Swap out the lime juice for lemon juice and the rum for whiskey and you get a whiskey sour. Swap out the simple syrup for honey syrup and you get a Gold Rush. Use tequila, lime juice, and a blend of agave syrup and Cointreau and you have a margarita. Gin, lime, and simple syrup is a gimlet. And so on.

Also, as others have mentioned, the quality of the ingredients and the brands often matter a lot. A Manhattan calls for whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters, but the choice of whiskey and vermouth makes a big difference in the character of the drink. (And if you are using old vermouth that has been sitting out on the counter for a few years, or making a drink with bottled lime juice, it's just not going to turn out all that good.)

https://cocktailswithsuderman.substack.com/
by awakeasleep | 2025-07-24 02:51:46+00:00
Thats not a real rebuttal.

First, in the pre training stage humans curate and filter the data thats actually used for training.

Then in the fine tuning stage people write ideal examples to teach task performance

Then there is reinforcement learning from human feedback RLHF where people rank multiple variations of the answer an AI gives, and thats part of the reinforcement loop

So there is really quite a bit of human effort and direction that goes into preventing the garbage-in garbage-out type situation you're referring to
by neogodless | 2025-07-24 02:51:50+00:00
Did we read the same article?

> Tesla sales continued to go down in Europe in the first half of the year. The American EV maker recorded a 33% year-over-year drop in sales from January to June.

> From January to June, Tesla sold 108,878 cars in the region, while Volkswagen moved 133,465 EVs, a massive 78% year-over-year increase.

Look for the data table and note the heading "Difference from H1 2024"

> Overall, the European EV market increased by 24% year-over-year
by terminalshort | 2025-07-24 02:52:08+00:00
Doctors oversight should be removed (not as an option, but as a requirement) for 90% of all prescriptions. Unless the drug has externalities like antibiotic resistance, is heinously addictive, or is so difficult to administer correctly that you cant take it outside of a hospital, there's no good reason to tell people what they can't put in their bodies. Whether or not your insurance will pay for it without a prescription is another matter.
by aeblyve | 2025-07-24 02:52:22+00:00
I struggle to phrase it in a way that doesn't feel cruel, but I often find "small web" stuff too personal to interest me.

Oftentimes it seems the content between such sites can be somewhat interchangeable. Similar film photography, cycling, hobbies, retro video games, some esoteric programming languages, whatever. Then, the only utility left per each individual site is the assumed specificity of the author themselves, which I usually do not care much about.

To your point, that last bit might matter inside a community.
by duxup | 2025-07-24 02:52:42+00:00
>The New York-based startup lists just four employees, excluding board members, on LinkedIn. Its contracts include an $18 million deal with the Air Force Research Lab and a $1.8 million contract with the Space Force. A PR firm representing iRocket and the SPAC declined to respond to TechCrunch’s questions.

So the SPAC is weird and ... even their acquisition target is weird.

What the heck is going on here?
by tomhow | 2025-07-24 02:53:00+00:00
You can't post comments containing racial/cultural stereotypes on HN. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future, particularly these ones:

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by iLemming | 2025-07-24 02:55:41+00:00
Sure you're right on most of this, but allow me a slight pushback here. I am sorry, I am inclined to use Clojure/Lisp in my examples, but only because of its recency in my toolbelt, I could probably come up with similar Elexir examples, but I lack intimate familiarity with it.

- Dynamic languages can harbor bugs that only surface in production, sometimes in rarely-executed code paths, yes. However, some dynamically typed languages do offer various tools to mitigate that. For example, take Clojurescript - dynamically/strongly typed language and let's compare it with Typescript. Type safety of compiled Typescript completely evaporates at runtime - type annotations are gone, leaving you open to potential type mismatches at API boundaries. There's no protection against other JS code that doesn't respect your types. In comparison, Clojurescript retains its strong typing guarantees at runtime. This is why many TS projects end up adding runtime validation libraries (like Zod or io-ts) to get back some of that runtime safety - essentially manually adding what CLJS provides more naturally. If you add Malli or Spec to that, then you can express constraints that would make Typescript's type system look primitive - simple things like "The end-date must be after start-date" would make you write some boilerplate - in CLjS it's a simple two-liner.

- Static type systems absolutely shine for refactoring assistance, that's true. However, structural editing in Lisp is a powerful refactoring tool that offers different advantages than static typing. I'm sorry once again for changing the goalposts - I just can't speak specifically for Elixir on this point. Structural editing guarantees syntactic correctness, gives you semantic-preserving transformations, allows fearless large-scale restructuring. You can even easily write refactoring functions that manipulate your codebase programmatically.

- Yes, static typing does encourage (or require) more deliberate API design and data modeling early on, which can prevent architectural mistakes. On the other hand many dynamically typed systems allow you to prototype and build much more rapidly.

- Long-term maintenance, sure, I'll give a point to statically typed systems here, but honestly, some dynamically typed languages are really, really good in that aspect. Not every single dynamic language is doomed to "write once, debug forever" characterization. Emacs is a great example - some code in it is from 1980s and it still runs perfectly today - there's almost legendary backward compatibility.

Pragmatically speaking, from my long-term experience of writing code in various programming languages, the outcome often depends not on technical things but cultural factors. A team working with an incredibly flexible and sophisticated static type system can sometimes create horrifically complex, unmaintainable codebases and the opposite is equally true. There's just not enough irrefutable proof either way for granting any tactical or strategic advantage in a general sense. And I'm afraid there will never be any and we'll all be doomed to succumb to endless debates on this topic.
by zeroCalories | 2025-07-24 02:55:44+00:00
I didn't mean to imply there isn't anything worthwhile on the small web, but you simply have so much more on the big web. Hacker News, Twitter, TikTok, etc. and it's usually sorted by how interesting it is. Unfortunately random people post random crap on their blogs and my RSS feed doesn't algorithmically filter it for me.
by gonzobonzo | 2025-07-24 02:57:12+00:00
A lot of academia is strongly ideologically biased as well. The training set is going to reflect who's producing the most written material. It's a mistake to take that for reality.

If you trained an LLM on all material published in the U.S. between 1900 and 1920, another on all material published in Germany between 1930 and 1940, and another on all material published in Russia over the past two decades, you'd likely get wildly different biases. It's easy to pick a bias you agree with, declare that the objective truth, and then claim any effort to mitigate it is an attempt to introduce bias.
by anonymoushn | 2025-07-24 02:57:43+00:00
A while ago I talked to some team that was planning a migration to GraphQL, long after this was generally thought to be a bad idea. The lead seemed really attached to the "composable RPCs" aspect of the thing, and at the time it seemed like nothing else offered this. It would be quite cool if capnproto became a more credible option for this sort of situation. At the time users could read about the rpc composition/promise passing/"negative latency" stuff, but it was not quite implemented.
by msgodel | 2025-07-24 02:57:56+00:00
I don't know, a bunch of the older people from the town I grew up in avoided using LLMs until Grok came out because of what they saw going on with alignment in the other models (they certainly couldn't articulate this but listening to what said it's what they were thinking.) Obviously Grok has the same problems but I think it goes to show the general public is more aware of the issue than they get credit for.

You combine this with Apple pushing on device inference and making it easy and anything like ads probably will kill hosted LLMs for most consumers.
by h4kunamata | 2025-07-24 02:58:22+00:00
Not any AI tho.

I have replaced SEO with Perplexity AI only. It isn't a chatbot but it actually search for what you are looking for and most importantly, it shows all the sources it used.

Depending on the question I can get anywhere from 10 to 40 sources. No other AI service provides that, they use the data from their training model only which in my experience, is full of errors, incomplete, cannot answer or altogether.
by kragen | 2025-07-24 02:58:51+00:00
Basically his “35-year mistake” thesis is that we almost had ECS, the entity/component/system pattern, in 01963 with Sketchpad, but it took until 01998. He explains this near the end of the talk proper, and explains how Looking Glass in 01998 introduced the pattern in Ultima II Underworld, but really introduced it with Tom Leonard’s Thief: The Dark Project. Later though he seems to be saying that he's not sure ECS is actually a good idea, but he thinks encapsulation is, if not a bad idea, at least an idea that should be applied carefully to keep it from getting in your way, and definitely not in a way that reflects a division among problem-domain objects such as cars, trucks, bridges, circular arcs, lanterns, etc.
by refactor_master | 2025-07-24 02:59:07+00:00
It doesn't take long to find SEO slop trying to sell you something:

When our grandmothers and grandfathers were growing up, there was a real threat to their health that we don’t face anymore. No, I’m not talking about the lack of antibiotics, nor the scarcity of nutritious food. It was trichinosis, a parasitic disease that used to be caught from undercooked pork.

The legitimate worry of trichinosis led their mothers to cook their pork until it was very well done. They learned to cook it that way and passed that cooking knowledge down to their offspring, and so on down to us. The result? We’ve all eaten a lot of too-dry, overcooked pork.

But hark! The danger is, for the most part, past, and we can all enjoy our pork as the succulent meat it was always intended to be. With proper temperature control, we can have better pork than our ancestors ever dreamed of. Here, we’ll look at a more nuanced way of thinking about pork temperatures than you’ve likely encountered before."

Sorry, what temperature was it again?

Luckily there's the National Pork Board which has bought its way to the top, just below the AI overview. So this time around I won't die from undercooked pork at least.
by romanhn | 2025-07-24 02:59:17+00:00
Does it have to be Synology? I recently replaced my 17 year old Drobo with a Ugreen NASync DXP4800 Plus, installed TrueNAS on it and couldn't be happier. Beautiful box with specs that Synology can't touch. Manufacturer is fairly new to the NAS game, but hey, I took a chance on Drobo back in the day and that worked out great.
by Fr0styMatt88 | 2025-07-24 02:59:17+00:00
I nearly jumped out of my proverbial seat with joy when Casey talked about it being about where you draw your encapsulation boundaries. YES! THIS IS THE THING PEOPLE ARGUING ABOUT OOP NEVER SEEM TO ADDRESS DIRECTLY!

Honestly would love to see a Kay and Casey discussion about this very thing.

I find the discussions about real domain vs OOP objects to be a bit tangential, though still worth having. When constructing a program from objects, there’s a ton of objects that you create that have no real-world or domain analogs. After all, you’re writing a program by building little machines that do things. Your domain model likely doesn’t contain an EventBus or JsonDeserializer; that purely exists in the abstract ‘world’ of your software.

Here’s a thought: Conceptually, what would stop me from writing an ECS in Smalltalk? I can’t think of anything off the top of my head (whether I’d want to or not is a different question). Casey even hints at this.

This is probably the best Casey talk I’ve ever seen and one of the clearest definitions of ‘here is my problem with OOP’. I don’t agree with everything necessarily, but it’s the first time I’ve watched one of these and thought “yep they actually said the concrete thing that they disagree with”.
by defrost | 2025-07-24 02:59:41+00:00
That's a highly selective read when the data shows Tesla dropping for the past six months, sales declining, even in June, and last month (June) likely not yet having a complete up to date third party picture across the board.

The part left out from your statement about June:

but that wasn’t enough to end the first half of the year in the first spot. In fact, out of the top five best-selling EV makers in June, Tesla was the only one to see a drop. With 32,605 cars sold, Tesla sales went down by 21% year-over-year in Europe. Meanwhile, Volkswagen went up 9.%, BMW by 16%, Skoda by 189% and Renault by 23%.

confirms that Europeans are indeed moving away from "swasticars" in general despite some Europeans still buying a few.
by wat10000 | 2025-07-24 03:00:33+00:00
For years, a search for “is it safe to throw used car batteries into the ocean” would show an overview saying that not only is it safe, it’s beneficial to ocean life, so it’s a good thing to do.

At some point, an article about how Google was showing this crap made it to the top of the rankings and they started taking the overview from it rather than the original Quora answer it used before. Somehow it still got it wrong, and just lifted the absurd answer from the article rather than the part where the article says it’s very wrong.

Amusingly, they now refuse to show an AI answer for that particular search.
by yojo | 2025-07-24 03:01:16+00:00
A lot of Canadian Rye uses a lot of grain alcohol. If you pick a bottle at random off the shelf (assuming US market), it’s unlikely to be good.

There are many great Canadian Ryes. But if you’re new to cocktails, odds are against you finding them at your local liquor store, and you probably don’t need them for the drink you’re trying to make. I didn’t mean to disparage the category. Lot 40 and Alberta Dark Horse/Dark Batch have earned their accolades.