MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by infecto | 2025-07-20 11:13:29+00:00
Link does not work for me but as someone who does a lot of work with LLMs I am also betting against agents.

Agents have captivated the minds of groups of people in each large engineering org. I have no idea what their goal is other then they work on “GenAI”. For over a year now they have been working on agents with the promise that the next framework that MSFT or Alphabet publishes will solve their woes. They don’t actually know what they are solving for except everything involves agents.

I have yet to see agents solve anything but for some reason this idea that having an agent that you can send anything and everything will solve all problems for the company. LLMs have a ton of interesting applications but agents have yet to grasp me as interesting, I also don’t understand why so many large companies have focused time around it. They are not going to be cracking the code ahead of a commercial tool or open source project. In the time spent toying around with agents there are a lot of interesting applications that could have built, some of which may be technically an agent but without so much focus and effort on trying to solve for all use cases.

Edit: after rereading my post wanted to clarify that I do think there is a place for tool call chains and the like but so many folks I have talked to first hand are trying to create something that works for everything and anything.
by panick21_ | 2025-07-20 11:13:47+00:00
Except of course we are in fact in control of the evaluation function. Hence, lots of people do not buy into mainstream for each thing. The thing about capitalism is that each person still spends their money according to their evaluation function. Ads might tell me I should discard close as soon as possible, sorry but I don't. Ads also tell me I should buy a new computer, and I might. Now have I been manipulated by ads or not?

If there are ads and manipulation for every possible thing, then what you end up buying still depends on your personal tastes and preferences.

At the end of the day, ever living creatures depends on its extend environment to some extent. The idea that this ever could be different is not realistic. Even if you band all ads, other things would simply take its place as the environment your exposed to.

That said, I'm not against limit some kinds of ads and specially in some places. But we should just outright claim people are not capable of making their own decisions, that's a bad road to go down.

> market moves based on majority so it doesn’t matter

Except it does matter because we do not live in a state controlled system where if 51% people believe pants should be green, 100% of people wear green pants. Even a small number of people can be enough to create a small market for something. Go look into retro computers. The majority clearly doesn't care about old Amiga hardware and software, but yet you can buy it in various forms. There are countless examples.
by arexxbifs | 2025-07-20 11:13:55+00:00
Yes, consumerism makes us throw out and replace perfectly working things. That doesn't mean there's not a decline in quality _as well_.

> One is that attributes like durability -- which used to be a major factor in how people judged a product's quality -- have lost relevance.

> some companies design certain products -- especially household appliances -- stop working after a certain period of time. This isn't a conspiracy theory, but a proven fact.

So, in many cases we no longer factor in durability because we know that consumer products don't offer that quality _by design_.

> healthcare services may not be worse than they were a few years ago. "The big problem is that they haven't adapted to the pace of social change. They haven't evolved enough to serve the entire elderly population, whose demographic size is increasing every year"

But then they are, in fact, of worse quality for a large group of the population.

> five out of 10 consumers openly reject virtual assistants. The conclusion is clear: society isn't adapting to the pace of technological advancement.

No, that's not a clear conclusion. Another conclusion that could be drawn is that the adaptation of AI technology in customer service has lowered the quality to a point customers don't even care to bother with. I.E., the pace of technological advancement, in this case, isn't ready for the demands of society.

> It's difficult to prove that today's products are worse than those of 20 years ago.

No, it's not. Some products and consumption patterns may be harder to compare. In other cases, we have clear examples of engineered decline in quality. One example: soap companies changing not just the size of the soap (shrinkflation) but also altering the ingredients to make the bar of soap last about half as long as before. Ever look under the bed at a hotel? After the pandemic, the quality of cleaning has declined substantially, at least in my country. My previous landlord lowered the indoor temperature and raised the rent, all in the same year. House prices keep going up, but building standards are lowered.

In short: there are very real and measurable declines in quality because economies are tanking and, as the article correctly states, "the promise of capitalism" is no longer being fulfilled.
by bo1024 | 2025-07-20 11:14:27+00:00
Your parents, lower middle class in the 80s, could afford a washing machine that lasts 40 years.

You, lower middle class in the 2020s, can afford with the same resources a washing machine that lasts 5 years and is no more effective than your parents' (but has an app).

In the sense of the parent comment, you are fortunate that the magic of capitalism currently produces such cheap washing machines that even people as poor as you can afford them. But from another angle, the purchasing power of the lower middle class has sunk over time, and quality has degraded to match because durable products have now become "outside the grasp of most Americans".
by npteljes | 2025-07-20 11:15:18+00:00
Besides the reasons of sheer taste, another good reason is culture. Meaning, the preexisting meat-eating culture at a place. One of the reasons why vegan / vegetarian / etc options are often lacking is because there is no longstanding culture of eating those dishes at that certain place, and so, a vegan dish will likely come from a meat dish, minus the meat. But that dish is created around the meat, so without the meat, it will be lacking, like taking the patty out of a burger, or taking the meatballs out of the spaghetti with meatballs.

So, a quick solution is to create a substitute to the missing thing. That way, the culture problem is immediately solved, as the alternative dish will the be the same dish, just with the questionable thing substituted. As a bonus, it will be very similar to the existing, accepted culture, so the participant doesn't become an outsider. Also, for many, it's easier to adopt, than changing the culture entirely.
by dijit | 2025-07-20 11:16:12+00:00
Well, I can tell you how: rigorous testing.

I worked for Nokia (briefly, just before Eloppification) and I remember being told that when the iPhone launched everyone laughed because there was no way that the battery could last more than a day, there was no app store back then, no flash, no high-speed data (2G) and it failed every single one of the internal tests that Nokia had.

Yet, people didn’t care, obviously - and the iPhone is the model for nearly all phones today.

I get bent out of shape about this, the same way I get bent out of shape about the death of small phones and modular laptops; but people vote with their wallets and if the market was large enough for both to exist then there would be better options; yet it seems like there’s not.

People seem to care much more about capacitive touch screens, large displays, hungry CPUs, incredible post-processing of cameras (and great camera sensors) than they do about being drop proof, having stable software or battery life.

Features > Stability ; to most people. (and, how do you put stability on a spec sheet for tech youtubers to care about or savvy consumers trying to buy the best “value” they can; build quality doesn’t fit onto a spec sheet).
by drewcoo | 2025-07-20 11:16:53+00:00
> I wonder when "Radio Free Europe (EU)" becomes a thing in the US

RFE is openly intended as propaganda. NPR does not claim that. They're not the same thing.

There used to be Radio Moscow which in the 1980s was repeated from Havana on AM 1040 for a while. This overpowered 50,000 watt WHO 1040 from Des Moines, Iowa for some folks in the southeastern US. It was an international incident and made the nightly news repeatedly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Moscow
by Paradigm2020 | 2025-07-20 11:17:20+00:00
Utility-wise: I specifically mentioned same amount of coffee so this one is moot.

Social: most coffee is consumed for takeaway and on Auto-Pilot. In the usa most starbuckses make 80%! From takeaway and 20% from sit ins (they tried to close some Starbucks locations because of this but the funny part is that sales drop more than the 20%... Probably because people take the "cost of the store" into their reasoning why they are spending 7-12$ on a cup of Joe.)

-regulating your emotions: if you are in a luxury position that's fine... Being / perceiving / stressing about being poor causes a drop of 8 IQ points. I know/understand what you mean and changing a default always causes stress but the question is always about short term pain vs long term gain... Nobody likes to change... Being told what to do... The app is not pressuring you - it's making you aware of options / costs that you might not have considered. (Did you know) The thing is that if the app is well made and you trust the maker you know you have a "friend" who is looking out for you... Even though you might still ignore him/her (think friends who smoke cigarettes etc...)

The brain's main goal is not too think because it tries to preserve energy... Unfortunately the environment is simultaneously safer (we killed all animals that literally can kill us) and more dangerous (our fellow humans who used to stand next to us having our back against the animals are often against our interests now.)

The question is always what is a low effort high reward substitute... I'd say takeaway coffee is probably one of the best options for a lot of people.

The art is just to visualize the profit you're gonna make in the future in the now --- because your brain focuses on the now... If I said to you that if you drink a coffee less every other day you'd "make" 4140$ in 5 years would you --- pretty sure for most people in dire financial straits they would... On the other hand not meeting with your friend for brunch once a month might save you more even but a friend is harder to substitute than some sugary beverage...

The question is always "why" - the "suffering" now is always certain (change is painful if it is not perceived as improvement) but by making the future gains big, visual and realistic people (can be) more self motivated.
by jorangreef | 2025-07-20 11:18:30+00:00
To be clear, this is different to what we do (and why we do it) in TigerBeetle.

For example, we never externalize commits without full fsync, to preserve durability [0].

Further, the motivation for why TigerBeetle has both a prepare WAL plus a header WAL is different, not performance (we get performance elsewhere, through batching) but correctness, cf. “Protocol-Aware Recovery for Consensus-Based Storage” [1].

Finally, TigerBeetle's recovery is more intricate, we do all this to survive TigerBeetle's storage fault model. You can read the actual code here [2] and Kyle Kingsbury's Jepsen report on TigerBeetle also provides an excellent overview [3].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRgvaqpQPwE

[1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/fast18/fast18...

[2] https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/src/vsr...

[3] https://jepsen.io/analyses/tigerbeetle-0.16.11.pdf
by raincole | 2025-07-20 11:18:35+00:00
> In a Nutshell

> AI tools aren't perfect yet. They sometimes make mistakes, and they can't always understand what you are trying to do. But they're getting better all the time, In the future, they will be more powerful and helpful. They'll be able to understand your code even better, and they'll be able to generate even more creative ideas.

From another post on the same site. [0]

Yup, slop.

[0]: https://utkarshkanwat.com/writing/review-of-coding-tools/
by thatjoeoverthr | 2025-07-20 11:18:42+00:00
I’ve noticed a significant drop even recently, having recently bought the single worst pair of shoes at a brand name store. They basically dissolved like tissue paper within a week. I’ve never seen anything like it.

My working assumption right now is this two phenomena together.

One, a sneakier kind of “shrinkflation”. You can make a can of coke smaller but you can’t do this with shoes. But you can swap out materials or hire more careless manufacturers.

Two, the breakdown of communication caused by AI, earlier fake reviewers and the death of the media at the hands of the web. Taken together, you can get away with a lot more without liquidating your brand simply because word won’t spread.
by blub | 2025-07-20 11:19:23+00:00
As late as 2011 Nokias like the N8 or N9 were competitive with the iPhones of that time i.e. the iPhone 4. That iPhone is the famous “holding it wrong” phone.

Then Nokia admitted defeat and switched to Windows which failed badly. Symbian was too hard and expensive to maintain and their Linux OS strategy was to redo the OS three times instead of incrementally developing it.
by Chloebaker | 2025-07-20 11:19:49+00:00
Honestly its crazy to think how far we’ve come since GPT-2 (2019), today comparing LLMs to determine their performance is notoriously challenging and it feels like every 2 weeks a models beats a new benchmark. I’m really glad DeepSeek was mentioned here, bc the key architectural techniques it introduced in V3 that improved its computational efficiency and distinguish it from many other LLMs was really transformational when it came out.
by Avamander | 2025-07-20 11:19:50+00:00
Yes, they're called low-power (or nano-power) system timers. Some also incorporate watchdog timer functionality. These chips turn on power to the main CPU based on some given interval. TI has a few that consume ~30nA (@2.5V), like the TPL5100.

This is when the MCU itself you're using doesn't have this functionality of if it's still consuming too much power. MCUs like the ATMega368(PU) consume ~100nA in their deepest sleep states, so it can be a rather drastic reduction in some cases.
by pas | 2025-07-20 11:19:51+00:00
my nothing phone (1) full of very ugly scratches (and one especially ugly testament on a corner to me dropping it one too many time) was stolen a few months ago while I was in a house of worship (I was introducing my favorite girlfriend to the forbidden pleasure of dipping fries into mcfreeze ice cream with caramel - and while in this trance state...)

anyway, the new Nothing phone (3a) is amazing batterywise!
by timmy3443 | 2025-07-20 11:20:05+00:00
Hey HN,

Just wanted to share an update on Youshot, the Chrome extension I launched recently for capturing and editing website screenshots.

After weeks of testing and feedback, I’ve finally finished the unlimited version, and it’s now available!

What’s New in the Unlimited Version: Framer: A clean canvas-based editor that lets you add device frames, backgrounds, and polish your screenshots for sharing or presentation.

Bulk Mode: Capture multiple sections or pages in one go—great for workflows like documentation, tutorials, or audits.

If you haven’t tried it yet, you can start with the limited version.

(limited version supports up to x2 capture speed with basic screenshot features)

To unlock Unlimited, just:

Download the extension

Open Settings

Tap “Get Unlimited Version”

Thanks to everyone who's supported it so far. Feedback, reviews, or feature ideas are always welcome. Hope the new tools make your workflow smoother!
by TheAlchemist | 2025-07-20 11:20:54+00:00
"Plans" is an overstatment here.

The whole US tariffs policy is not planned nor thought about at all. It's just a game, of an old guy who's changing his mind 10 times per week. Maybe he is crazy, maybe it's for the publicity, or maybe (most probably) people around him make huge profits by taking the right bets on the market, knowing a bit in advance what he will announce next.

"Liberation day" was only 3 months ago. It seems like it was 3 years already.
by spacechild1 | 2025-07-20 11:21:06+00:00
> they check that a type has some set of properties, but they don't check that the implementation only uses those properties.

I'd say that's a mistake of the person who wrote the template then.

Also, there are Concepts where you absolutely know which types are allowed, e.g. std::same_as, std::integral, std::floating_point, etc.
by danaris | 2025-07-20 11:21:09+00:00
While it may be true that Pirsig's mental breakdown had nothing to do with what went into the book, the facts you have presented here do not particularly support that conclusion.

If his mental breakdowns had been, say, in 1976 and 1978, that would have supported it much better. But someone working on the philosophical underpinnings of a book for over a decade before the book is published is not at all unreasonable.
by countrymile | 2025-07-20 11:21:53+00:00
Lidar has been a game changer. Also, in the UK context, new developments will often require archeologists to survey the land before ground works can start. There are piles of photographs of fields from the RAF, US air force and Luftwaffe. And names of places and roads often reveal ancient origins. If you meet somewhere with chester or caster in it, e.g. Manchester, that suggests a Roman origin. The same for stret and strat.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-07-20 11:22:05+00:00
> use LLMs to help them phrase their thoughts

But is it their thoughts? Another problem with LLMs is that while it sometimes can produce a better english phrasing of what they were thinking, other times it could be something conceptually different that they didn't catch because of thier english isn't proficient enough to see it, or worse case, they are just lazy and write broad vague prompts and accept whatever blob of text comes out.
by Xmd5a | 2025-07-20 11:22:34+00:00
>A database query might return 10,000 rows, but the agent only needs to know "query succeeded, 10k results, here are the first 5." Designing these abstractions is an art.

It seems the author never used prompt/workflow optimization techniques.

LLM-AutoDiff: Auto-Differentiate Any LLM Workflow https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16673
by tialaramex | 2025-07-20 11:22:46+00:00
We're not "iterating through the bucket" in the sense you mean. There's a control word which tells us which slots might have our key, and so we never need to look at keys which do not match the byte from our hash used in the control word.

In most cases there are zero or one matches in the control word, so the interleaving could not help us, but it would still hurt us if N=1 and it's a match, which is the common happy path when keys looked up always or almost always exist by design.
by kalleboo | 2025-07-20 11:23:26+00:00
If you limit your smartphone usage to the capabilities of a 2003 Nokia (turn off data and wifi, only use calls and SMS) the battery will last 2 weeks and never crash or reset. Before I got a phone with dual SIM capability I used to bring an old spare phone to keep my home SIM in with data off only to be able to not miss calls/SMS. They’d typically last the whole trip without charging when they’re not keeping connections alive for email, push etc.

Before I got a smartphone I used a j2me IRC client to keep connected with my friends, and I had to carry 3 batteries to swap throughout the day for it to last, the battery life was horrible if you actually did anything on it.
by bobajeff | 2025-07-20 11:23:45+00:00
>UPF is not inherently bad. Some UPFs (Pasta, wholemeal bread, baked beans, probiotic yoghurts, wheat biscuit cereals), are actually good for you.

The only thing in that list that I agree with is Yogurt. Sure, if you live in Europe where they've banned some of the more harmful ingredients and processes and you are taking about very limited quantities, maybe they are not so bad for you but that just puts in the same league as wine or beer.
by ifwinterco | 2025-07-20 11:23:49+00:00
Switzerland does it and my understand is they basically just ask you to fill in a tax return every year and say how much wealth you have (all the assets you own).

Presumably they do have a department of people checking this to make sure people aren't lying, but also Switzerland is a relatively high trust society, and taxes are reasonable, so people probably don't mind paying too much.

In the UK in 2025 I'm not sure this would work, people would try and evade it and the UK government isn't competent enough to stop them
by larodi | 2025-07-20 11:23:50+00:00
Anecdotally I know so many people thrashing their lives and this of loved ones with alcohol and antidepressants while I can’t immediately think up of even a single one, okay I know one guy who was doing everything altogether, who went so badly down the spiral thanks to acid. And this one guy actually had a horrendous childhood with lotta abuse so perhaps was already scheduled for a cathartic experience.
by AdrianB1 | 2025-07-20 11:23:54+00:00
It is not that hard, if you do the minimum effort to educate yourself. For example 20 years ago I struggled to find motorcycle gear in Eastern Europe, it was very hard and stuff was extremely expensive for the salaries in this region. I bought initially cheap stuff that broke fast, then the next generation I knew what to buy and I have now equipment that is over 10 years old that I am using with great pleasure. It is similar in most cases I have to buy something, but it takes some effort to look for options.
by dijit | 2025-07-20 11:24:16+00:00
Counter-anecdote. I bought some Jeans from ASDA (owned by Walmart now, not sure about then) for 5GBP in 2005..

FIVE, POUNDS.

Crazy cheap by any measure; they were extremely thick, to the point where you could stand them up with no person inside them. They lasted me for over 10 years.

New jeans (at any price point) seem to wear out in the inner thigh inside of a year, and I am not as active as I was back then due to age. I also haven’t gained a significant amount of weight to account for this. I thought it could be caused by cycling, but I stopped cycling and the wear outs still happen. I thought it could be the quality of what I was buying so I bought more and more expensive jeans, alas, the same was true.

The best Jeans I ever owned are simultaneously the cheapest.

(side note; I also noticed that nearly all Jeans these days contain “elastane” which is basically plastic, which probably contributes to the degradation - Elastane didn’t exist for jeans in 2005, they were mostly still 100% cotton until the legging jeans fad and then it started making its way into normal jeans).
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-20 11:25:34+00:00
I hate seeing this repeated because it is plainly untrue despite being technically true.

An attention grabbing headline that feels smart but is really just careful half-truth writing.

McDonald's chargers fees that are a percentage of a stores gross sales and rent that is usually a base fee plus a percentage of sales.

What they are actually doing is folding part of the food sales cut into rent so they can evict you if they don't like you.

So while "McDonald's is actually a real estate company" gets clicks, the truth is they are a hamburger company with a huge cash flow from selling burgers, which they funnel through "Rent" for control. They also do own a ton of commercial real estate, but they aren't cashing out on that.