MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lapcat | 2025-07-10 18:01:15+00:00
> the kids who were socially marginalized in the prenetworks era also did not get to see the parties the socially active kids were having

What do you mean exactly by the distinction between "socially marginalized" and "socially active"?

There was a social hierarchy where some kids were considered "popular" and others "unpopular", though really the distinction was more accurately between the beautiful/attractive kids and the average/unattractive kids, and certainly the unattractive kids did not get invited to the parties of the attractive kids, but the unattractive kids had plenty of parties among themselves, to which the attractive kids were usually not invited either.

Perhaps there were some kids who were truly marginalized, with no friends at all, but unattractiveness by itself did not necessarily marginalize you socially.
by conradkay | 2025-07-10 18:01:16+00:00
There's an online playground with the data here: https://play.clickhouse.com/

Wrote up this query:

SELECT db_name, sum(if(type = 'comment', 1, 0)) AS comment_mentions, sum(if(type = 'story', 1, 0)) AS post_mentions, count(*) AS total_mentions, sum(score) as total_score FROM hackernews ARRAY JOIN extractAll(replaceAll(LOWER(text), ' ', ''), '(sqlite|postgres|mysql|mongodb|redis|clickhouse|mariadb|oracle|sqlserver|duckdb)') AS db_name WHERE toYear(time) >= 2022 GROUP BY db_name ORDER BY post_mentions DESC;
by FinnKuhn | 2025-07-10 18:01:29+00:00
In the US[1] and UK[2] you can find bridges with actual 90-degree angles that look a lot more dangerous than the Indian one.

[1]https://maps.app.goo.gl/3CBqVHbVEtonHjcr9 [2]https://maps.app.goo.gl/8cVB44VDJRPadY6s6
by furyofantares | 2025-07-10 18:02:13+00:00
> My personal theory is that getting a significant productivity boost from LLM assistance and AI tools has a much steeper learning curve than most people expect.

I totally agree with this. Although also, you can end up in a bad spot even after you've gotten pretty good at getting the AI tools to give you good output, because you fail to learn the code you're producing well.

A developer gets better at the code they're working on over time. An LLM gets worse.

You can use an LLM to write a lot of code fast, but if you don't pay enough attention, you aren't getting any better at the code while the LLM is getting worse. This is why you can get like two months of greenfield work done in a weekend but then hit a brick wall - you didn't learn anything about the code that was written, and while the LLM started out producing reasonable code, it got worse until you have a ball of mud that neither the LLM nor you can effectively work on.

So a really difficult skill in my mind is continually avoiding temptation to vibe. Take a whole week to do a month's worth of features, not a weekend to do two month's worth, and put in the effort to guide the LLM to keep producing clean code, and to be sure you know the code. You do want to know the code and you can't do that without putting in work yourself.
by yorwba | 2025-07-10 18:02:18+00:00
Figure 21 shows that initial implementation time (which I take to be time to PR) increased as well, although post-review time increased even more (but doesn't seem to have a significant impact on the total).

But Figure 18 shows that time spent actively coding decreased (which might be where the feeling of a speed-up was coming from) and the gains were eaten up by time spent prompting, waiting for and then reviewing the AI output and generally being idle.

So maybe it's not a good idea to use LLMs for tasks that you could've done yourself in under 5 minutes.
by pfdietz | 2025-07-10 18:02:38+00:00
> a small strip of magnesium explodes when dropped in water

No it doesn't.

Magnesium metal burns because the boiling point of magnesium is just 1091 C, so extremely reactive vapor is readily produced. But it would be very hard to heat it that high in water unless it was ignited first. It will then continue to burn under water.
by mjr00 | 2025-07-10 18:02:44+00:00
> I'm not sure about your example about talking to LLMs. There is good reason to think that speaking to it like a human might produce better results, as that's what most of the training data is composed of.

In practice I have not had any issues getting information out of an LLM when speaking to them like a computer, rather than a human. At least not for factual or code-related information; I'm not sure how it impacts responses for e.g. creative writing, but that's not what I'm using them for anyway.
by spoaceman7777 | 2025-07-10 18:03:03+00:00
It still hasn't been turned back on, and that repo is provided by xAI themselves, so you need to trust that they're being honest with the situation.

The timing in relation to the Grok 4 launch is highly suspect. It seems much more like a publicity stunt. (Any news is good news?)

But, besides that, if that prompt change unleashed the very extreme Hitler-tweeting and arguably worse horrors (it wasn't all "haha, I'm mechahitler"), it's a definite sign of some really bizarre fine tuning on the model itself.
by CorrectHorseBat | 2025-07-10 18:03:27+00:00
If the world's energy usage increases by 2% for a thousand years we use 3.4 * 10^4 times more power than the solar radiation reaching the earth (1.02^1000 * 15/170000). Enough power to boil off the oceans in about a day (if I can believe Reddit and my math isn't off)
by mgdev | 2025-07-10 18:03:29+00:00
You are right, it is a good litmus test.

I suppose it depends on which battle you’re choosing to fight.

When I enter such orgs, I join to fix the org. And I want every tool at my disposal to do it.

I love turnarounds. But they require careful management of energy. So if I have an opportunity to convince someone to change a name now, it saves me a bunch of energy later.

FWIW, I learned this while getting both React and Clojure approved for internal use at a Fortune 100 co. Took me weeks. Both had problematic licensing issues, both of which could have been avoided if the authors had spent 10 extra minutes clarifying a few small things a few years before.
by qchris | 2025-07-10 18:03:29+00:00
I totally get the point you're trying to make (and don't even disagree) but I think the analogy isn't quite right.

I'd actually be surprised if I got robbed at a mobbed-up restaurant; my naive understanding was that they actual put a lot of effort into keeping places like that above-board so they have legit businesses to attach their name/revenue/employees to, while still retaining muscle in case a rival tries something. It's arguably one of the last places I'd expected to get robbed outright.
by Sniffnoy | 2025-07-10 18:03:32+00:00
I think the thing that you're missing here is that the "malicicous program" being discussed here isn't malicious from the usual point of view of what "malicious" means. It's truly functionally identical to the original program -- it returns the same outputs on the same inputs, there isn't some secret input that makes it do something wrong.

Despite that, it's nonetheless "malicious" in that, with the modifications made to it, FS can be made to "prove" false things about it. So you can "prove" that M(x)=y, even though when you actually run M(x), you find that you don't get y.
by lukan | 2025-07-10 18:03:33+00:00
"But I can assure you that "pandas count unique values column 'Foo'" is just as effective an LLM prompt as "Using pandas, how do I get the count of unique values in the column named 'Foo'?""

How can you be so sure? Did you compare in a systematic way or read papers by people who did it?

Now I surely get results giving the llm only snippets and keywords, but anything complex, I do notice differences the way I articulate. Not claiming there is a significant difference, but it seems to me this way.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-07-10 18:03:52+00:00
> rubber ducking

i don't mean to pick on your usage of this specifically, but i think it's noteworthy that the colloquial definition of "rubber ducking" seems to have expanded to include "using a software tool to generate advice/confirm hunches". I always understood the term to mean a personal process of talking through a problem out loud in order to methodically, explicitly understand a theoretical plan/process and expose gaps.

based on a lot of articles/studies i've seen (admittedly haven't dug into them too deeply) it seems like the use of chatbots to perform this type of task actually has negative cognitive impacts on some groups of users - the opposite of the personal value i thought rubber-ducking was supposed to provide.
by heisenbit | 2025-07-10 18:04:29+00:00
AI sometimes points out hygiene issues that may be swept under the carpet but once pointed out can't be ignored anymore. I know I don't need that error handling, I'm certain for the near future but maybe it is needed... Also the code produced by the AI has some impedance match with my natural code. Then one needs to figure out whether that is due to moving best practices, until now ignored best practices or the AI being overwhelmed with code from beginners. This all takes time - some of it is transient, some of it is actually improving things and some of it is waste. The jury is still out there.
by AIPedant | 2025-07-10 18:04:53+00:00
"Simple" is unfair to the humans who discovered that knowledge, but not to the LLM. The point is that such questions are indistinguishable from niche trivia - the questions aren't actually "hard" in a cognitive sense, merely esoteric as a matter of surface feature identification + NLP. I don't know anything about hummingbird anatomy but I am not interested in hummingbirds and haven't read papers about them. Does it make sense to say such questions are "hard?" Are we talking about hardness of a trivia game, or actual cognitive ability? And it's frustrating to see these lumped into computational questions, analysis questions, etc etc. What exactly is HLE benchmarking? It is not a scientifically defensible measurement. It seems like the express purpose of the test is

a) to make observers say "wow those questions sure are hard!" without thinking carefully about what that means for an LLM versus a human

b) to let AI folks sneer that the LLM might be smarter than you because it can recite facts about category theory and you can't

(Are my cats smarter than you because they know my daily habits and you don't? The conflation of academically/economically useful knowledge with "intelligence" is one of AI's dumbest and longest-standing blunders.)
by exiguus | 2025-07-10 18:04:53+00:00
Perhaps I don't understand it correctly, but doesn't journalism mean examining a topic from different perspectives based on evidence?

Additionally, if someone writes an op-ed or commentary, the author is expressing their personal opinion. So why should I buy a newspaper that does not align with my political or personal opinions? I thought that was the point.

From a reader's perspective, it would be beneficial to have a scoring and warning system that identifies poor journalism or indicates when something is a commentary or op-ed rather than objective journalism. Based on that, I can adjust, where I get my news from.

Basically, every newspaper works like this. Isn't it? And when I read two or three different newspaper, that fact-checks every article and mark opinions as commentary, there is no "echo chamber" right?.
by keoneflick | 2025-07-10 18:04:53+00:00
> By constrast, it is less and less easy to live only in French in Montréal, since it is not always possible to find someone that speaks French.

Sorry you went to a restaurant in chinatown that didn't speak french. I hope you can recover safely from that experience. Meanwhile, this is the truth of living in Quebec as an allophone: https://www.montrealgazette.com/news/article505933.html
by lenkite | 2025-07-10 18:04:55+00:00
There are common solutions for the library issue. Authors of libraries for example can force instantiations for a dummy type that checks their concepts.

template void foo(Dummy);

This can be done at the consumer side as well. I don't see a big deal of this. Dummy checks are common in Go too. For example, to check if a type satisfies an interface.

var _ MyInterface = (*MyType)(nil) var _ SomeInterface = GenericType[ConcreteType]{}

After all, Go checks that a type implements an interface only at the point where you assign or use it as that interface type.

Thanks for your blog post. Unfortunately, the intentional limitations make the design space a massive headache and many times lead to very convoluted API. I would actually make the argument that it explodes complexity - for the developer, instead of constraining it.
by verall | 2025-07-10 18:04:57+00:00
It is common and it is coupled with investment in improving schools in underprivileged neighborhoods.

A school in a poor area gets heavy investment and then can pull ("magnet") a certain percentage of their students from a much wider area. Involved parents apply for their children to go to these schools since they have the best art or theater or robotics or whatever programs.

This acknowledges that an important part of a successful school is parental involvement and a general culture of students that are interested in learning.

In practice, at least in my childhood, the schools largely self-segregated by the classes they took, i.e. AP or not, more or less challenging tracks ("honors" classes).

I still think it was a net positive. At least students in the underprivileged areas got access to these advanced programs, even if there were still social barriers. And as a kid from the suburbs, I got to meet kids outside of my suburban cohort - I think this was really valuable to me as a bit of a misfit.
by sgt | 2025-07-10 18:05:37+00:00
I'm invested in the JetBrains ecosystem though. I tried Junie but it crashed so I'm putting that on pause for now. Maybe there is a Claude plugin that looks across files, not sure.

Any experiences from HN'ers using JetBrains IDE's like IntelliJ, PyCharm, WebStorm, CLion etc?
by IshKebab | 2025-07-10 18:05:42+00:00
Ah really? Their example here doesn't do that: https://github.com/jonhoo/inferno/blob/main/tests/data/flame...

But even so, pprof's is better. (You'll have to try it or take my word for it; they don't seem to have a demo anywhere unfortunately.)

When you hover a function it highlights all the other calls to that function (in different stacks), and if you click it it shows all the calls to and from that function in all stacks with two-sided flame graph.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-07-10 18:06:39+00:00
Elaborating on this a bit, I think it's less that things are less forgiving, but that our risk tolerances have dramatically shrunk. Millennial parents are less risk tolerant with their kids' safety, and Gen Z / A kids and young adults are more careful about the rules.

The root cause of this risk intolerance might be dispersed, just a cumulative result of cable news scare tactics, dropping birth rates and more investment per child, but I suspect a big aspect of it is that risk taking is no longer the only way to get a dopamine hit. Prior to the modern internet, if you avoided all the normal risk-taking behaviors associated with teenagers and young adults, you'd just be bored to death. Now the reward side of the risk-reward balance is just the difference between high-quality fun from meatspace shenanigans versus lower-quality enjoyment derived from social media and online gaming.
by cbigc | 2025-07-10 18:07:08+00:00
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by porridgeraisin | 2025-07-10 18:07:23+00:00
Oh don't worry.

In India, land is the most valuable thing in general and all land/housing/infra related industries are infested with politicians.

There are exceptions of course, and unless this company is one, they'll just be back with a new name, and the political party will be advertising to the public how they're so unbiased that they shut down the company of their own political brother.
by blacklion | 2025-07-10 18:08:37+00:00
> How do you do Gmail style threading view in thunderbird ? They changed the game wrt email display and 20 years later I still don’t know how to get thunderbird to do it.

I hate it. It hides texts, and I lost answers in this view more often than I want to admit. If it is not ping-pong conversation (I wrote you, you answer, I answer at your last answer, etc), but discussion between 3+ people where different people answer to different messages, gmail view is total mess when you cannot understand who answer to what. As I said, it doesn't support threads, only messenger-like conversations.

Any e-mail client which doesn't support tree view for threads is wrong.

You can put answers to same folder that message your answer in (any?) sane e-mail client, Thunderbird is not exclusion.

Update:

> smart hiding of quoted text so you only see new content

I've missed text hidden by mistake due to some formatting quirks more than once. It is solution in search of problem: proper quoting doesn't need any magic.
by jerf | 2025-07-10 18:08:44+00:00
Less "23rd century" and more like "23,000,000th century".

I've read a lot of science fiction involving macroscale engineering on such levels, but I think even the most misanthropic science fiction writers have a hard time imagining a species that can start meaningfully affecting the orbital dynamics of their solar system but are clueless about possible negative side effects. By the time you're postulating such things, all the negative side effects that may leap to your mind involve energies many, many orders of magnitude smaller than the disruptions themselves, e.g., "oh no our satellite orbits", well, divert .000000000001% (I just hit some zeros, that's not calculated carefully) of the energy to fixing the satellite orbits. You're going to anyhow.
by 93po | 2025-07-10 18:09:14+00:00
i think you're missing the point. my point is that free software exists, and i recognize that the people who build it arent paying the bills with it. i'm saying there's no logistical reason why the vast majority of software people use cant be open source even with this being the case - it's capitalist pressures that suppress its visibility and therefore adoption.

my point with torrenting is that people offer their bandwidth for free without any real incentive to do so. if there was more systemic open source adoption and awareness of how systems like this work well when people make token donations (like with bandwidth) then i think we could be fine.
by Ketselidis | 2025-07-10 18:09:52+00:00
I'm Kostas, one of the co-founders of Uplodio. For the last year, we've been trying to solve the most painful part of B2C marketing: scaling creator and affiliate programs.

We started with a traditional platform, but our customers kept telling us the real bottleneck wasn't finding creators, it was the insane amount of manual work in communicating with them. One customer told me, "I just spent 2 hours onboarding one creator, 59 more to go." We were trying to sell them a car, but what they really needed was a driver.

So we built Amy, an AI agent that automates the entire process. You give her context about your brand and goals, and she:

Finds relevant creators across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube who fit your brand.

Writes genuinely personalized first-touch messages. We don't use simple "{first_name}" templates. It actually analyzes their recent content to find a relevant hook.

Handles all the back-and-forth: follow-ups, answering questions, and even light negotiation until the creator is activated and ready to make content. It all happens directly from your own Gmail account, so the relationship is always yours.

The goal is to let founders and marketers focus on strategy while Amy runs the entire outreach motion.

Launched our self-serve product today.

Would love to hear your thoughts and get your feedback, especially from anyone who has lived in this world of outreach hell. What's the hardest part you've faced? I'll be here all day answering questions.

We are live on PH and you can get 40% off for one month with the code PH40
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-10 18:09:55+00:00
Bro, I've been running wmii since before i3 forked off from it. Don't come at me with this dripping disdainful attitude, pretending like you are some high and mighty elite system whisperer.

It's so unfortunate that there is such a widespread persistence of hater-dom. It's so toxic and awful, and so rarely does it have even the faintest shred of anything to stand up on. I struggle so much to see these attractors into the negative as so compelling, so ensnaring of the human souls as they have been lately.

Systemd is amazing, provides such a rich world versus piecemeal poorly managed systems of yore. Yes you could understand init scripts with very little effort but what a sad virtue, to dare to go no further than what an afternoon of exploration might get you.
by diggan | 2025-07-10 18:10:34+00:00
> But nothing will make them stick to the one API version I use.

Models trained for tool use can do that. When I use Codex for some Rust stuff for example, it can grep from source files in the directory dependencies are stored, so looking up the current APIs is trivial for them. Same works for JavaScript and a bunch of other languages too, as long as it's accessible somewhere via the tools they have available.
by narush | 2025-07-10 18:10:46+00:00
Qualitatively, we don't see a drop in PR quality in between AI-allowed and AI-disallowed conditions in the study; the devs who participate are generally excellent, know their repositories standards super well, and aren't really into the 'get up a bad PR' vibe -- the median review time on the PRs in the study is about a minute.

Developers totally spend time totally differently, though, this is a great callout! On page 10 of the paper [1], you can see a breakdown of how developers spend time when they have AI vs. not - in general, when these devs have AI, they spend a smaller % of time writing code, and a larger % of time working with AI (which... makes sense).

[1] https://metr.org/Early_2025_AI_Experienced_OS_Devs_Study.pdf
by geodel | 2025-07-10 18:11:30+00:00
Without reading I knew it is about India. This maybe internet example to generate some LOLs but even "well made" highways, bridges, airports will appear crappy once one has experienced infrastructure in US or Europe. Even Many decades back I used to think why things are so crappy while taking up rotten, falling apart stairs to a government office building. And that too in a big city.

There are 2 main kind of people in India

1) Majority - suffering daily quietly while knowing things are not good despite whatever official data/reports say.

2) Internet yahoos - small minority with their money and big support slave underclass labor who find any fact as "insult to India", "racism" , "foreign interference" and so on
by 93po | 2025-07-10 18:11:43+00:00
this assumes you're using it for a service that has your name/address/birthdate/social.

i use it for stuff like scammy dark pattern photoshop trials, and i can use a fake name and address.

i wouldn't use it for stuff like utilities or gym memberships that absolutely send stuff to collections and they deliberately collect your information to be able to do so
by conductr | 2025-07-10 18:13:08+00:00
> There's this weird, persistent meme that large corporations are buying up all the housing and nobody owns homes anymore, which is fundamentally not supported by the data.

They are and the trend is there. The housing market moves slowly and it takes time to chip away enough at the larger stat. Once the boomer's age out, even with wealth and asset transfer, let's revisit this and see how it looks. I'd bet 2/3 ownership looks more like 1/2 or less by then, which is a significant drop and it probably will only continue from there.