MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cestith | 2025-07-29 19:35:39+00:00
It goes even further than single tools like those.

Very little about Go is entirely novel. It’s a newer descendant of C with some additions and excisions but mostly similar syntax. The language is newer, but the way you use it isn’t that new. Java is about equivalent to C++. PHP and Ruby were inspired by Perl and took things in different directions, while Perl itself was an amalgamation of C, BasicPlus, Lisp, shell, and the common shell tools like sed, awk, and tr. From Ruby comes Crystal. From PHP comes Hack.

tmux isn’t entirely different from screen.

git works differently, but on the surface isn’t drastically different from Subversion.

ssh is basically rsh with encryption.

Zsh and Bash are basically in the Bourne / Korn family trees of shells.

Docker has a nicer CLI interface, but a lot of the same concepts as LXC, LXD, jails, and more. Podman inherited a lot from Docker.

make, cmake, imake, Ant, SCons, and other build systems cover the same tasks with different syntax.

GitHub, GitLab, and Jenkins all cover CI/CD differently, but how to build a reliable pipeline is a skill that transfers to new syntax and configuration file names.
by kazinator | 2025-07-29 19:35:39+00:00
When you microwave food, you are essentially running AC through it, using the food as a dielectric material.

When you make toast in the microwave, the inside of the slice of bread will turn brown, while the outside stays white. (Careful timing is require; a few seconds too long and smoke will start oozing out of the bread's pores while it is still white.)
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-07-29 19:35:57+00:00
It'd be interesting to see another result:

Adversarially named variables. As in, variables that are named something that is deliberately wrong and misleading.

import json as csv close = open with close("dogs.yaml") as socket: time = csv.loads(socket.read()) for sqlite3 in time: # I dunno, more horrifying stuff
by qualeed | 2025-07-29 19:36:20+00:00
>In the case of the underage kid, they are actually gaining something by using a fake ID to buy smokes for which they otherwise would not be able to buy.

The scenario I was comparing is an underage kid visiting this website, generating an ID, and accessing content that would otherwise be illegal for them to access by using the fake ID. In this scenario, everyone (potentially) would be in trouble, not just the website verifying the ID, just like an underage kid buying smokes with a fake ID.

The reason I mentioned domain registration was not because it is illegal to register a domain or anything of that sort. I mentioned it because it suggests the website owner is based in the UK, which is easy pickings for the UK government to pursue (if they choose to). If the website owner was based in Malaysia, it would be significantly harder for the UK to pursue any legal recourse against them (if they choose to).
by SLWW | 2025-07-29 19:36:35+00:00
The crusades were predicated on historic tensions between Rome and the Arabs. Which is why I mention that, while the First Crusade proper was in 1096, it's core reasoning were situations like the Sacking of St. Peters which is considered by historians to be one of the most influential moments and often was used as a justification as there was a history of incompatibilities between Rome and the Muslims.

Further leading to the Papacy furthering such efforts in the upcoming years, as they were in Rome and made strong efforts to maintain Catholicism within those boundaries. Crusading didn't appear out of nothing; it required a catalyst for the behavior, like what i listed, is usually a common suspect.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-07-29 19:36:56+00:00
Full disclosure: I haven't read TFA.

Is it remarkable that Hemingway was convinced? I can understand if I was a 'mundane' person and thought somebody was spying on me, I could be convinced that I was paranoid. But if I have ties to one of the obvious enemies of the US, I think it would be very hard to convince me that I _wasn't_ being spied on because the motive seems obvious. Do we know why Hemingway was able to be convinced?
by turnsout | 2025-07-29 19:37:33+00:00
Installation and onboarding was nice & smooth!

A few random bits of realtime feedback:

You have an icon with the Finder face labeled "Open Finder view." I would expect this to open the app's data folder in the macOS Finder. Instead, it opens an accessory window with some helpful views such as calendar view. I'd encourage you to find another name for that window, because it's too confusing to call it "Finder" (especially with the icon).

I'd also add a menu item for Settings (and Command-comma shortcut) in the Application menu.

You also need a dark mode at some point.

Finally, I'm not sure where note files end up. Seeing that there's an Obsidian integration, I would love an option to save notes in Markdown format into a folder of my choice. I'm an iA Writer user, and would love to have meeting notes go directly into my existing notes folder.

I'll let you know how the actual functionality is working for me after my next few meetings!
by patall | 2025-07-29 19:37:50+00:00
Print out only the text and hand it, without any context, to a random other human and look what happens. I highly doubt that more than 25% will answer the question, and not because they are incapable of answering it.

What you forget is that you have context. Like: 'Look, LLMs are not able to answer this question!'. While you post the text without any context to the LLM.
by mvieira38 | 2025-07-29 19:38:31+00:00
We can assume that OpenAI/Anthropic offerings are going to be better long term simply because they have more human capital, though, right? If it turns out that what really matters in the AI race is study mode, then OpenAI goes "ok let's pivot the hundreds of genius level, well-paid engineers to that issue. AND our engineers can use every tool we offer for free without limits, even experimental models". It's tough for the small AI startup to compete with that, the best hope is to be bought like Windsurf
by blasecocoa | 2025-07-29 19:38:34+00:00
Sharan and I wanted to make something to personalise the concert experience and make it easier so heres FestFlow! Overwhelmed by all the artistes and venues at Outside Lands? Fret no more! Use FestFlow to schedule your festival days and auto-generate your very own "pre-game" playlist with your schedule artists! Try out Festflow: https://festflow-82.lovable.app/
by abdulrahman-mh | 2025-07-29 19:39:29+00:00
Hi HN!

I built Textrix because I wanted a clean, Medium-style story editor that any one can easily embed into your own blog, newsletter, or publishing platform.

It’s: Open-Source (MIT), easy to customize, Support AI auto compilation, Themes and more.

GitHub: https://github.com/abdulrahman-mh/textrix
by EMIRELADERO | 2025-07-29 19:40:37+00:00
> I just don’t understand why anyone here is surprised.

Are they? To me it looks like legitimate complaints and only that.

> Nor is there really anything unique about artificial proprietary lock-in when it comes to services. As a business practice it’s not uncommon.

It's unique in its illegallity. They're lucky these aren't very expensive products, or people would actually go to court and maybe force the manufacturer's hand for once.
by rubin55 | 2025-07-29 19:41:15+00:00
The line link failed. It's line 38:

"Refuse to build in Arch package environments. My license does not allow for packages, and I'm sick of dealing with people complaining about things broken by packagers. This is why we can't have nice things."

if($ENV{DEBUGINFOD_URLS} MATCHES ".*archlinux.*") message(FATAL_ERROR "Unsupported environment.") endif()

Relevant commit: https://github.com/stenzek/duckstation/commit/30df16cc767297...
by rrrx3 | 2025-07-29 19:41:29+00:00
I use my $20/mo plan with Claude Code pretty happily, regularly hitting the limits through the day at a good pace, with nice cool-downs in between while I wait.

I promise I’m not being snarky here - I don’t understand how people are burning through their $200/mo plan usage so quickly. Are they spamming prompts? Not using planning mode? I’ve seen a few folks running multiple instances at once… is that more common than I think?
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-07-29 19:42:17+00:00
In Australia they outlawed advertising “unlimited” broadband, because it was a deceptive term. Providers actually meant “slower than a modem after a certain amount of download”.

Everyone was better off without the deception. Now we are in the early days of AI. Providers should be honest but won’t until forced to.

Because just think about it. Unlimited is untenable. Another example, in the early days of broadband in Australia a friend’s parents were visited by a Telstra manager because he “downloaded more than his entire suburb”. A manager!

Really you can’t blame the providers; some users will ruin it for everyone. I am not saying that is anyone specific. But none of this should surprise us. We’ve been here before. Just look back at how other markets developed & you will see patterns that tell you what’s next.
by kridsdale1 | 2025-07-29 19:43:06+00:00
I agree. I recently bought a broken Rolex and asked GPT for a list of tools I should get on Amazon to work on it.

I tried using YouTube to find walk through guides for how to approach the repair as a complete n00b and only found videos for unrelated problems.

But I described my issues and took photos to GPT O3-Pro and it was able to guide me and tell me what to watch out for.

I completed the repair (very proud of myself) and even though it failed a day later (I guess I didn’t re-seat well enough) I still feel far more confident opening it and trying again than I did at the start.

Cost of broken watch + $200 pro mode << Cost of working watch.
by ofalkaed | 2025-07-29 19:43:18+00:00
It would probably just switch perspective with each chapter. If the AI has any real grasp of literary devices something metafictional like City of Glass could be interesting but an earlier/less complex example of metafiction like Marshlands might work better? If my memory serves I think the metafictional aspects of Marshlands could translate into this even if the AI completely misses the metafiction. Might play with this when I have more time.
by apparent | 2025-07-29 19:43:21+00:00
Of the famous founders, over half were Stanford undergrads and therefore likely were "coterm" students. That means they just added a year to their degree and got this degree tacked on. That saves lots of time and money compared to going to Stanford as a master's student. There are a lot of things that are "worth it" if you don't have to move apartments/cities and get it for half the price — but which are not nearly as worth it if you're paying double and add the friction of moving to the area in order to enroll.
by falcor84 | 2025-07-29 19:43:48+00:00
Thanks for introducing me to the verb Sherlock! I'm one of today's lucky 10,000.

> In the computing verb sense, refers to the software Sherlock, which in 2002 came to replicate some of the features of an earlier complementary program called Watson.[1]

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sherlock
by alias_neo | 2025-07-29 19:43:54+00:00
Trade isn't really the concern I'm implying here. US isn't likely to initiate a "special military operation" without our (European's) borders, but China could certainly get ideas from a more local aggressor.

Whether or not that's likely is another story, but it's possibly a non-zero chance and handing over control of critical infrastructure should be a concern.
by teiferer | 2025-07-29 19:43:55+00:00
Nice!

Would be great if you could include in your launch message how you plan to monetize this. Everybody likes open source software and local-first is excellent too, but if you mention YC too then everybody also knows that there is no free lunch, so what's coming down the line would be good to know before deciding whether to give it a shot or just move on.
by andybak | 2025-07-29 19:43:59+00:00
> There's no forms that need to be completed.

One of us has completely misunderstood the legislation.

By my reading - there's a ton of red tape and paperwork. Heck, there's a ton of work even getting to the point of understanding what work you need to do. And dismissing the fear of life-changing financial liability as "being spooked" is not helpful.

I've got a open-source 3D sharing site almost ready to launch and I'm considering geo-blocking the UK. And I live in the UK.
by CJefferson | 2025-07-29 19:44:07+00:00
As someone who has written and graded a lot of University exams, I'm sure a decent number of students would write the wrong answer to that. A bunch of students would write 5 (adding all the numbers). Others would write "3 apples and 2 cats", which is technically not what I'm looking for (but personally I would give full marks for, some wouldn't).

Many students clear try to answer exams by pattern matching, and I've seen a lot of exams of students "matching" on a pattern based on one word on a question and doing something totally wrong.
by tootyskooty | 2025-07-29 19:44:25+00:00
Honestly thought they would take this a bit further, there is only so much you can do with a prompt and chat. It seems fine for surface level bite-sized learning, but I can't see it work that well for covering whole topics end to end.

The main issue is that chats are just bad UX for long form learning. You can't go back to a chat easily, or extend it in arbitrary directions, or easily integrate images, flashcards, etc etc.

I worked on this exact issue for Periplus and instead landed on something akin to a generative personal learning Wikipedia. Structure through courses, exploration through links, embedded quizzes, etc etc. Chat is on the side for interactions that do benefit from it.

Link: periplus.app
by glitchc | 2025-07-29 19:44:36+00:00
It just sounds like LLMs don't know how to lie on purpose yet. For a question such as this:

If I have four 4 apples and two cats, and I give away 1 apple, how many apples do I have?

An honest human would say:

You have 3 apples, but you also have 2 cats

Whereas a human socially conditioned to hide information would say:

You have three apples

And when prompted about cats would say:

Well you didn't ask about the cats
by 9rx | 2025-07-29 19:44:49+00:00
> The desirability of null results need to be recognized and somewhat consensual

If it is interesting you should also find it interesting when you read it 30 years in the future. You don't need other people. It's a nice feeling when other people want to look at what you are doing, sure, but don't put the cart before the horse here. Publish first and prove to others that there is something of value there. They are not going to magically see the value beforehand. That is not how the human typically functions.

It's not like you have to invent the printing press to do it. Putting your work up on a website for the entire world to see is easy peasy. Just do it!

> Ideally, null or positive result alike, the experiments and the studies need to be solid and convincing enough.

No need to let perfect become the enemy of good. Publishing your haphazard salting experiment isn't apt to be terribly convincing, but it gets you into the habit of publishing. Eventually you'll come around to something that actually is interesting and convincing. It's telling if someone isn't willing to do this.

> The student was able to publish, these null results felt somewhat surprising and counter intuitive, so it's not like it's impossible

Exactly. Anything worthy of the major leagues will have no trouble getting formally published. But not everything is. And that's okay. You can still publish it yourself. If you want to play baseball, there is no need to wait around for the MLB to call, so to speak... Just do it!

> you are thinking I'm talking about failed research [...] it just needs to be widely seen as not failed research.

Yes, I am talking about what is widely seen as failed research. It may not actually be failed research in a practical sense, but the moniker is still apt, especially given that you even call it that yourself. I guess I don't understand what you are trying to say here.
by simonw | 2025-07-29 19:45:19+00:00
My general point is that people say things like "yeah, but this one study showed that programmers over-estimate the productivity gain they get from LLMs so how can you really be sure?"

Meanwhile I've spent the past two years constantly building and implementing things I never would have done because of the reduction in friction LLM assistance gives me.

I wrote about this first two years ago - AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects - https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-developmen... - when I realized I was hacking on things with tech like AppleScript and jq that I'd previously avoided.

It's hard to measure the productivity boost you get from "wouldn't have built that thing" to "actually built that thing".
by shiomiru | 2025-07-29 19:45:21+00:00
Nim's import rules are part of its generalization of OOP's obj.foo() syntax. That is, in Nim, you don't have to put "foo" in a specific class, just set the first parameter of "foo" to the type of "obj", and this only works if you don't have to qualify "foo" (similarly to OOP languages...)
by bretpiatt | 2025-07-29 19:45:31+00:00
*slower with Sonnet 3.7 on large open source code bases where the developer is a senior member of the project core team.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

I believe we'll see the benefits and drawbacks of AI augmentation to humans performing various tasks will vary wildly based on the task, the way the AI is being asked to interact, and the AI model.
by sebzim4500 | 2025-07-29 19:46:23+00:00
I'm too young to have experienced this, but I'm sure others here aren't.

During the early days of tech, was there prevailing wisdom that software companies would never be able to compete with hardware companies because the hardware companies would always be able to copy them and ship the software with the hardware?

Because I think it's basically the analogous situation. People assume that the foundation model providers have some massive advantage over the people building on top of them, but I don't really see any evidence for this.
by patall | 2025-07-29 19:46:48+00:00
Without any context? Without: 'haha look, AI is easily distracted'. Without: 'Can you please answer this question'. Just the text?

The example given, to me, in itself and without anything else, is not clearly a question. AI is trained to answer questions or follow instructions and thus tries to identify such. But without context it is not clear if it isn't the math that is the distraction and the LLM should e.g confirm the fun fact. You just assume so because its the majority of the text, but that is not automatically given.
by ben_w | 2025-07-29 19:47:39+00:00
> Ahura Mazda

Niche reference, I like it.

But… I only hear of scammers who say, and psychosis sufferers who think, LLMs are *already* that competent.

Future AI? Sure, lots of sane-seeming people also think it could go far beyond us. Special purpose ones have in very narrow domains. But current LLMs are only good enough to be useful and potentially economically disruptive, they're not even close to wildly superhuman like Stockfish is.
by godelski | 2025-07-29 19:47:43+00:00
> provoke responses selectively nitpicking about one thing

I'd say that's where the community is made. Either the community supports this type of behavior or not.

I'll at least say I sometimes downvote opinions I agree with and upvote opinions I disagree with. That's because I don't see the upvote and downvote as a signal of my personal feeling about the comment but rather about how I feel the comment should be placed in ordering. Sometimes I downvote a comment I agree with because it is a bad argument and I want to discourage that behavior. Or because it is just signaling or ignores the parent. Sometimes I upvote bad comments because there's a conversation I want highlighted. Sometimes because despite it being bad I think they bring up good points others are ignoring.

But I think we can have more in depth conversations on HN. That comment was much longer than I usually write (and I'm wordy) but I think it is a matter of what we want as a community. For example, I always downvote oneliners, memes, or when someone is just trying to dunk on the other person.

What does the community want?
Show HN: I built a Tamagotchi that teaches French numbers
by valzevul | 2025-07-29 19:48:03+00:00
Hey HN! Halfway through moving to Canada and whilst my conversational French gets me by, I'm absolutely rubbish when someone rattles off phone numbers at full speed (quatre-vingt-dix-neuf anyone?).

So I built a virtual pet that thrives on correctly answered number challenges. 20-second drills throughout the day: get them right and Lexie grows, get them wrong and it gets a bit sad (but never dies, this isn't the 90s).

Speak, type, or tap your answers. Would love any feedback/bugreports.

Or just rant about how the Belgians sensibly say "nonante-neuf" whilst we're stuck with "four-twenties-nineteen".
by rwyinuse | 2025-07-29 19:49:00+00:00
Well, you could use AI to learn you more theoretical knowledge on things like farming, hunting and fishing. That knowledge could be handy after societal collapse that is likely to come within a few decades.

Apart from that, I do think that AI makes a lot of traditional teaching obsolete. Depending on your field, much of university studies is just memorizing content and writing essays / exam answers based on that, after which you forget most of it. That kind of learning, as in accumulation of knowledge, is no longer very useful.
by taude | 2025-07-29 19:49:11+00:00
ha, no one would have clicked on that title. Needs some cta and pep in it.

But Claude gives me:

"Stanford's 230-Student Program That Produces More Unicorn Founders Than Most Schools"

"Why Stanford Engineers Are Choosing MS&E Over CS: A Technical MBA That Actually Works"

"Stanford's MS&E: The 7.8% Acceptance Rate Program Behind Instagram, Gusto, and Sourcegraph

"How Stanford's MS&E Became Y Combinator's Secret Feeder Program"

"
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-07-29 19:49:27+00:00
> "Screwed" = spending hours sifting through poorly-written, vaguely-related documents to find a needle in a haystack.

From the parent comment:

> it was pretty much impossible ... hope at some point, it'll make sense to you

Not sure where you are getting the additional context for what they meant by "screwed", but I am not seeing it.
by general1726 | 2025-07-29 19:49:51+00:00
> I think there is a cultural problem about facing up to death

It definitely is culture problem, just look on average police chase in USA followed by a news helicopter. The moment when suspect crashes, news camera will start wildly zooming off and panning away. Why is that? You don't want to see the end of chase, where a guy is getting crushed by momentum of his car, while he could stop and get arrested anytime during the chase? Show the consequences of his actions and tell that if he would not try to run, he would likely be still alive. Arrested, maybe little bit beaten by the cops, but alive.
by oc1 | 2025-07-29 19:50:16+00:00
I'm wondering where we are heading in the consumer business space. The big ai providers can basically kill any small or medium business and startup in a few days by integrating the product into their offering. They have all data to look at trends and make decisions. Investors are shying away to invest in ai startups if they are not trying to be infrastructure or ai marketplace platforms. So many amazing things could be possible with ai but the big ai providers are actively hindering innovation and have way too much power. I'm not a big fan if regulations but in this case we need to break up these companies as they are getting too powerful.

Btw most people don't know but Anthropic did something similiar months ago but their product heads messed up the launch by keeping it locked up only for american edu institutions. Openai copies almost everything Anthropic does and vice versa (see claude code / codex ).