MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by romaniitedomum | 2025-07-29 23:12:52+00:00
> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions. This is leaps and bounds ahead of that experience.

But now, you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is correct or something it hallucinated. Every time I find myself putting factual questions to AIs, it doesn't take long for it to give me a wrong answer. And inevitably, when one raises this, one is told that the newest, super-duper, just released model addresses this, for the low-low cost of $EYEWATERINGSUM per month.

But worse than this, if you push back on an AI, it will fold faster than a used tissue in a puddle. It won't defend an answer it gave. This isn't a quality that you want in a teacher.

So, while AIs are useful tools in guiding learning, they're not magical, and a healthy dose of scepticism is essential. Arguably, that applies to traditional learning methods too, but that's another story.
by rainsford | 2025-07-29 23:12:52+00:00
I agree with your iPhone camera advantages, but to that list I'd add that I'm already going to buy an iPhone, which means any comparison of value for the price is effectively between the price of a camera (which for even an entry-level mirrorless isn't exactly cheap) and literally zero dollars. You could argue that the phone would be cheaper without the nice camera to make for a fairer comparison, but such a product doesn't really exist.
by phailhaus | 2025-07-29 23:13:28+00:00
HN is resistant because at the end of the day, these are LLMs. They cannot and do not think. They generate plausible responses. Try this in your favorite LLM: "Suppose you're on a game show trying to win a car. There are three doors, one with a car and two with goats. You pick a door. The host then gives you the option to switch doors. What is the best strategy in this situation?" The LLM will recognize this as SIMILAR to the Monty Hall problem and tell you to always switch. I just reproduced this with ChatGPT.

But this is completely wrong! In the Monty Hall problem, the host has to reveal a door with a goat behind it for you to gain the benefit of switching. I have to point this out for the LLM to get it right. It did not reason about the problem I gave it, it spat out the most likely response given the "shape" of the problem.

This is why shrugging and saying "well humans get things wrong too" is off base. The problem is that the LLM is not thinking, period. So it cannot create a mental model of your understanding of a subject, it is taking your text and generating the next message in a conversation. This means that the more niche the topic (or your particular misunderstanding), the less useful it will get.
by pyuser583 | 2025-07-29 23:14:15+00:00
What you’re saying is not at all what I understand to be the history of crusading.

Its background is in the Islamic Christian conflicts of Spain. Crusading was adopted from the Muslim idea of Jihad, as we things like naming customs (Spanish are the only Christians who name their children “Jesus”, after the Muslim “Muhammad”).

The political tensions that lead to the first crusade were between Arab Muslims and Byzantine Christian’s. Specifically, the Battle of Mazikirt made Christian Europe seem more vulnerable than it was.

The Papacy wasn’t at the forefront of the struggle against Islam. It was more worried about the Normans, Germans, and Greeks.

When the papacy was interested in Crusading it was for domestic reasons: getting rid of king so-and-so by making him go on crusade.

The situation was different in Spain where Islam was a constant threat, but the Papacy regarded Spain as an exotic foreign land (although Sylvester II was educated there).

It’s extremely misleading to view the pope as the leader of an anti-Muslim coalition. There really was no leader per se, but the reasons why kings went on crusade had little to do with fighting Islam.

Just look at how many monarchs showed up in Jerusalem, then headed straight home and spent the rest of their lives bragging about crusaders.

I’m 80% certain no pope ever set foot in Outremere.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-29 23:14:57+00:00
the customer can self-determine just fine using a web based SaaS no-code website builder. it's not like this is a different type of app. the thing is making a website that is more also hosted by the maker of the app. if you want to make a website to host on your own servers, then you are not the target audience of the web app.

you're like the person complaining that the hammer isn't very useful for driving in the screw. you need a different tool/app if you want to make a site you host yourself
by Pannoniae | 2025-07-29 23:15:02+00:00
you're being downvoted sadly, but you are 100% right ;)

long gone are the days of games with actual modding support (think of games like CS:1.6, half-life, civ4 where you had a dll src with the game)

the whole "mods can have malware" with them is just an overblown risk assessment, most people do the right thing. there's been like fewer than 10 malware incidents with minecraft modding over the years and most of it has been recently because trust in that modding community has basically evaporated.

it's a much better stance to just let mods do whatever and hold their authors accountable with their reputation. srsly.
by conroy | 2025-07-29 23:15:10+00:00
Maintainer of sqlc here. Thanks for the kind words! I'm considering switching to the sqlx model of talking to a running database simply because trying to re-implement PostgreSQL internals has been a huge challenge. It works for most queries, but for the long tail of features, it's a losing battle.

Can you tell me why it's a non-starter for you?
by kragen | 2025-07-29 23:15:50+00:00
I've greatly appreciated the ACM's movements toward open access, but I have to ask:

What's the license?

The Berlin Declaration that defined Open Access https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration defines it as follows:

> 1. Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions:The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

> 2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability [sic], and long-term archiving.

This page is all about #2. What's #1?

I'm delighted to be able to read and share the classic CACM articles that have shaped the history of informatics, thanks to the ACM's policy changes over the last few years. The other day, for example, I was reading Liskov's paper on CLU in which she introduces the abstract data type: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800233.807045

But, as far as I can tell, neither that web page nor the PDF linked from it has a license granting "a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose." So, if I post it on my personal web site, or upload it to WikiSource or the Internet Archive, I'm still at risk of copyright lawsuits. And until I can do that, I only have access to the paper as long as CloudFlare thinks I'm human.

That's the problem Open Access is designed to solve.
by zahlman | 2025-07-29 23:16:21+00:00
> Are you trying to imply this was some kind of a real thing that happened?

I won't speak for GP, but it was very clearly a real thing (no "some kind of" qualifier necessary) that actually did happen.

I observed it to happen.

I observed it to negatively affect people I personally met and cared about.

I observed the creation of entire subreddits dedicated to the application of the technique, such as r/byebyejob which today has 650 thousand subscribers.

Wikipedia recognizes that it has happened (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture). (And this is despite that I would generally consider Wikipedia's coverage of political and cultural topics to be biased against me.)

I have been observing it for over a decade, longer than it had a name (if Wikipedia is to be believed, anyway — although of course one should naturally expect "cancelling" to have existed for longer than the "culture" around it). For just one example completely off the top of my head, consider the case of Dr. Matt Taylor, who was browbeaten into apologizing for wearing a shirt (which was a gift from a female friend) deemed "sexist" (for depicting women in outfits that wouldn't be out of place in a general-audience comic book) and further harassed after apologizing. I followed this story closely as it happened.

Aside from that, if you disagree with someone else about facts, please speak plainly. Phrasing like yours implies a level of disdain and disrespect that is well outside my understanding of how discourse is expected to work on HN.
by me-vs-cat | 2025-07-29 23:17:10+00:00
If you mean how does that lawsuit work, the only way the employee wins is if there's some type of agreement that says they should get paid. That agreement could be employer's written policy, an individual or union contract, an email from someone with authority, or so on.

(Or the lawsuit could be a hail-mary on its merits, hoping the employer will settle rather than air dirty laundry in court.)

There may be state-specific laws (in a small number of states for limited circumstances) and there is the WARN Act (but any court payout there would be a penalty on the employer and much delayed for the workers, while it only requires advance notice rather than being like severance -- and also limited by more conditions), but still "no general entitlement to severance" for the vast majority of workers no matter the reason for their separation.
by dang | 2025-07-29 23:17:35+00:00
I appreciate your good intentions re the site guidelines! But I'm afraid you've been breaking them multiple times in this thread by being much too aggressive with other users. This post is one example, and here are two others:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44728708

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44722043

It's laudable to want work like Pony to get discussed in terms of the most interesting things about it, but the best way to do this is to describe and explain more of what's interesting. It's not helpful to comment about how bad other comments are, and certainly not to cross into attack. Those things feed flamewars, as unfortunately happened badly in this thread. That's what we're most trying to avoid.
by zahlman | 2025-07-29 23:17:51+00:00
> but I don't think that repeating the meme/myth that there was or is a "cancel culture", much less one that could peak, is harmless.

It is not a meme or a myth. It has happened, has been happening for a long time, and is still happening. I have personally observed it to happen on many occasions, including ones that caused harm to people I care about.

It is disrespectful to dismiss that.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-29 23:18:00+00:00
Viltrox, Sirui, Sony themselves, and Samyang have all kicked out really nice 85mm fast primes. $600 down to $400, listed in decreasing weight order (down to 270g!). Yes, whatever you have: it's a massive amount of gear to carry compared to a phone. But what results!

The past 2-4 years have been amazing for lenses: Sony's willingness to let other people make lenses has been an amazing win for photography.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-29 23:18:02+00:00
because you still need a cable with a lightning end in your spaghetti of cables in a drawer somewhere. if all of your devices had USBC on both ends, then you don't need the one cable with the special adapter. you just need USBC cables. this isn't rocket science, and it's not a hard position to be sympathetic with either.
by rainsford | 2025-07-29 23:18:22+00:00
I sort of agree, but I also think there is lot that goes into taking interesting photos as an art beyond the technical capabilities of the camera you are using. Certainly a good camera can produce a better end product and can enable dimensions of creative freedom that's more difficult with a smartphone. But the process of picking an interesting subject, figuring out the angle and composition of the frame, finding the right light and time of day, etc, are all independent of the camera you're using and something you can explore with just the smartphone you already have in your pocket.
by davidpolberger | 2025-07-29 23:18:22+00:00
No, not really. GoRules appears to be a decision engine that allows non-technical users to define rules visually through a graphical interface. Engineers can then interpret and evaluate these rules using provided libraries.

What I'm building is a formula engine that validates, compiles, and evaluates Excel-like formulas. Compared to GoRules, it’s more akin to the ZEN expression language component than to the broader GoRules system.
by cunidev | 2025-07-29 23:18:38+00:00
I recently switched to an imported phone with a bulky 1" sensor (Vivo X100 Ultra) and although far from my Sony mirrorless, the quality of shots and color science went up dramatically compared to my older Pixel 9 Pro (way overprocessed) and iPhone 13 (way oversaturated and pretty low-res). This is not to say there's no AI or strong computational component to it, but larger and more expensive sensors, which still have not found their way in mainstream phones, do bring massive advantage if they are not killed by excessive AI processing (as, sadly, I saw multiple times when test-driving Samsung Ultra phones)

Ironically enough, the Vivo ("Zeiss") color science also looks more accurate than most phones I've owned, and is pretty flexible at editing time.
by jus3sixty | 2025-07-29 23:20:22+00:00
I have handled a few personal legal matters myself by drafting with Lex.page (a very useful tool for any writing but you can also accomplish about the same thing with Google Docs and Gemini.)

It’s also important to perfectly prompt the “AI” promptly to perfection. You have to tell it who it is, what it is doing and make sure to be specific about the scope and legal matters involved.

Break it down into smaller chunks and once you have a draft you like, send the draft to another “AI” and ask it to play as a lawyer on the other side of your equation and “rip apart” the draft letter you wrote like any good lawyer would.

Make your two “AI” models adversarial to each other until the final result is a rock solid document.
by IceWreck | 2025-07-29 23:20:30+00:00
You can already use in it ollama by using the unsloth quants:

``` ollama run hf.co/unsloth/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507-GGUF:Q4_K_M ```

> And what is the best offline model for coding?

That would depend on your hardware.
by palata | 2025-07-29 23:21:42+00:00
First, what a weird example.

Also, the IPCC is not saying that there can be "some dangerous irritation to the lungs". The IPCC is describing catastrophic outcomes. And climate scientists are saying that it is most likely optimistic.

Back to your weird example, it's more akin to ChatGPT saying "don't do it because you will probably die", and you complain because you want ChatGPT to tell you that you will most likely die and that on top of that it will be painful.

The point is that if you don't wanna die and still do it, then you are the problem here, not ChatGPT.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-07-29 23:21:53+00:00
> WebAssembly doesn’t include a system interface, i.e., any way to interact with the outside world

I believe that's WASI, which builds on top of the base wasm spec: https://wasi.dev/interfaces#presentation

e.g. the WASI 0.2 spec here mentions clocks, filesystem access, creating sockets, etc.

Lua is architected the same way - As host, you create a Lua VM with no I/O, and then the host decides which I/O interfaces the VM can or cannot see.

JRE and .NET are probably built the same way internally. The reason wasm is hyped more than VMs with a decade of momentum behind them is that wasm is lower-level, it isn't tied to any particular GC model, and there's already backends for popular low-level languages like C, C++, Rust, and Go to compile into wasm modules.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-07-29 23:21:56+00:00
This has been Apple's way since times of yore.

This has a parallel to the late 90s when Apple dropped floppy disk support when it was still very much mainstream. Even the Apple II to Macintosh transition was abrupt and alienating to some in the ecosystem.

The justification is:

It makes supporting the new features and devices easier, as it focuses resources, at the expense of legacy support.

You, as an Apple ecosystem participant, pay up for the "Apple Tax" (again, a term that has been around for decades).

Just because. Any myriad of reasons could have spurred the change, from internal team tech talent reshufflings to whims in the marketing department.

This is how Apple is, and how Apple has been for much of their existence. The anger can probably be justified, but you definitely shouldn't be shocked.

May I suggest you pay for the higher tier cloud backup service on a monthly basis. Apple didn't get to a multi trillion dollar valuation out of good will exclusively. I hear service revenue is a major priority internally...
Ask HN: Is OpenAI charging me for free tokens?
by prats226 | 2025-07-29 23:23:28+00:00
Was doing a deep dive on structured generation and basically in json mode, since structure is fixed, most tokens like keys of json and grammer tokens don't even need to be predicted via LLM. Openai would still charge for these tokens basis their pricing?

https://lmsys.org/blog/2024-02-05-compressed-fsm/?ref=aidancooper.co.uk
by giantg2 | 2025-07-29 23:24:02+00:00
Yes,my prior comment reversed numbers 2 and 3.

"Only half of the studies pointed to a negative impact of competition, and most of the negative impacts were studies where wild bees changed their visitation rate on certain flowers. It has yet to be demonstrated how competition may result in a long-term change in the composition of bee species in an environment."

You wouldn't find the term rural because they use the term wildlands.

The studies used in the Oregon article are not all urban focused and included studies investigating increased competition in varying habitat, finding "As the California study demonstrated, increased competition may cause bee species to switch their foraging patterns, resulting in little impact on their overall reproductive success."

And yes, any conservation area will not promote the inclusion of non-native species regardless of their impact. Just becuase they are competitors doesn't show that they have negative impacts.
by xienze | 2025-07-29 23:24:02+00:00
> It's also not really the point, the point is more that the claim in the paper that humans would be unaffected is unsubstantiated and highly suspect.

I think the question that adds a random cat factoid at the end is going to trip up a lot fewer humans than you think. At the very least, they could attempt to tell you after the fact why they thought it was relevant.

And ignoring that, obviously we should be holding these LLMs to a higher standard than “human with extraordinary intelligence and encyclopedic knowledge that can get tripped up by a few irrelevant words in a prompt.” Like, that should _never_ happen if these tools are what they’re claimed to be.
by gerdesj | 2025-07-29 23:24:39+00:00
Enamels vs acrylics. Brush vs airbrush vs air gun (not to mention sponge, cloth and even toothbrush). Your air brush can have one or two controls - one for the amount of compressed air and one for amount of paint. For models like airplanes and tanks, a single control is enough to get a flat smooth finish.

Then you discover washes and other techniques and it goes on 8)

I still have a scar in the side of my thumb where I stuck an Xacto blade into it, 45 years ago.
by QuantumGood | 2025-07-29 23:24:44+00:00
I use the Monty Hall problem to test people in two steps. The second step is, after we discuss it and come up with a framing that they can understand, can they then explain it to a third person. The third person rarely understands, and the process of the explanation reveals how shallow the understanding of the second person is. The shallowest understanding of any similar process that I've usually experienced is an LLM.
by whartung | 2025-07-29 23:24:58+00:00
Oh boy, yea.

I tried to put together a helicopter (probably an Apache) a few years ago, and got a couple of those classic Testor paint bottles to help finish it.

I had to put it all away. The fumes from the paint, my reaction to it was nothing like I remembered. I had no issues with them as a boy. But, today, yea they were making me loopy. I’m surprised the AQMD in California still allows these.

I’d like to try again with some modern acrylic, but the only place in my orbit is a Michaels, and they really don’t cater much to plastic kits. So opportunity has bumbled my way yet.

The other trick is to keep it me and not be intimidated by the YouTube experts. Easier said than done.
by danny_codes | 2025-07-29 23:25:14+00:00
Consider the adoption of conventional technology in the classroom. The US has spent billions on new hardware and software for education, and yet there has been no improvement in learning outcomes.

This is where the skepticism arises. Before we spend another $100 billion on something that ended up being worthless, we should first prove that it’s actually useful. So far, that hasn’t conclusively been demonstrated.
by zahlman | 2025-07-29 23:25:23+00:00
> I don't really understand how this conflict has been dragged out for so long.

Consider that even people on HN are replying to you with the kind of rhetoric that they are, on both sides of the issue, and then keep in mind that the world is full of people who feel even more strongly about it and don't feel at all restrained by HN commenting guidelines.

No, there is no trusted neutral party. There are many players involved who reject that concept on principle, who even consider that it would be suicidal to accept such a thing.
by pornel | 2025-07-29 23:25:44+00:00
I've started this thread by explaining this very problem, so I don't get why you're trying to lecture me on subpel motion and disocclusion.

What's your point? Your replies seem to be just broadly contrarian and patronizing.

I've continued this discussion assuming that maybe we talk past each other by using the term "motion vectors" in narrower and broader meanings, or maybe you did not believe that the motion vectors that game engines have can be incredibly useful for video encoding.

However, you haven't really communicated your point across. I only see that whenever I describe something in a simplified way, you jump to correct me, while failing to realize that I'm intentionally simplifying for brevity and to avoid unnecessary jargon.
by xp84 | 2025-07-29 23:25:55+00:00
It did take 8 hours to do a migration of data from my wife's 256GB iPhone 14 (lightning) to her iPhone 15 Pro this year, so that's at least one "serious" thing. I am so glad to be rid of that cursed Lightning port. Now I just have to come up with a good excuse to replace the younger child's tablet, despite it working fine. It is so frustrating to have to maintain special charging cables just for certain devices especially when you know it was a deliberate and cynical choice by the vendor. Thank goodness for the EU forcing this matter.