MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MrJohz | 2025-07-19 18:57:37+00:00
The homepage for my blog is apparently 9.95kB, which includes all styles, some JS, and the content. There is an additional 22kB font file that breaks the rule, but when I first designed the site I used built-in browser fonts only, and it looked fine. There are no images on the homepage apart from a couple of inlined SVG icons in the footer.

Looking at the posts themselves, they vary in size but the content/styles/JS probably average around 14kB. You've also got the font file, but again a more minimal site could strip that. Finally, each post has a cover image that makes up the bulk of the content size. I don't think you're ever going to get that under 14kB, but they're also very easy to load asynchronously, and with a CSS-rendered blur hash placeholder, you could have an initial page load that looks fairly good where everything not in the initial 14kB can be loaded later without causing FOUCs/page layout shifts/etc.

For a magazine site or a marketing site, the 14kB thing is almost certainly impossible, but for blogs or simple marketing pages where the content is more text-based or where there are minimal above-the-fold images, 14kB is pretty viable.

For reference, my blog is https://jonathan-frere.com/, and you can see a version of it from before I added the custom fonts here: https://34db2c38.blog-8a1.pages.dev/ I think both of these versions are not "spartan minimal academic pages".
Show HN: AlphaDec, a readable, lexically sortable time format for humans and AI
by firasd | 2025-07-19 18:57:57+00:00
I designed AlphaDec, a timezone-agnostic time format that encodes UTC timestamps into chronologically sortable strings like `2025_O2H5_389232`.

The key insight: by dividing the year into 26 periods (A-Z), then subdividing with numbers and letters, you get timestamps that sort naturally as strings while remaining human-readable.

Some practical benefits I've found:

- Perfect as prefixes for database keys

- Time-range queries by truncation (`2024_M` finds everything in that ~14-day period)

- LLM-friendly for log analysis and time-based reasoning

- Glanceable - you can quickly see where in the year a timestamp falls

Interesting emergent property: Periods F, M, S, and Z always bracket equinoxes/solstices, even in leap years.

Live clock: https://firasd.github.io/alphadec/ GitHub: https://github.com/firasd/alphadec

The readme has implementations in JavaScript and PHP. Would love feedback on the concept and where else this might be useful!
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-19 18:59:02+00:00
A problem as old as the field. Quote from the 80s:

> There is a related “Theorem” about progress in AI: once some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an essential ingredient of “real thinking”. The ineluctable core of intelligence is always in that next thing which hasn’t yet been programmed. This “Theorem” was first proposed to me by Larry Tesler, so I call it Tesler’s Theorem: “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”
by arp242 | 2025-07-19 18:59:16+00:00
Here's what I wrote in 2019 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592195):

"The reason for Slack's success is probably because it's a "turn key solution": you register your company, invite your employees, enter your CC, and you're good to go."

"With a lot of these open solutions things are more complex. I think we should really focus on providing a good UX here if we want more adoption."

This seems unchanged, or even worse. Arathorn recommended modular.im in a reply, which now redirects to https://element.io/pricing, and "set up a server" just redirects to GitHub, and the only other option is "Talk to an expert" – yeah, no.

Self-hosting is great but realistically, lots of people are just not interested, and that's fine too. And even if they are: having a simple option to quickly evaluate $the_thing is probably a good idea.

This is of course in addition to all the technical problems outlined in this post, which I also reported in 2019: "opening https://riot.im/app/ makes Firefox use 100% CPU and my laptops fan spin; I closed it after 10 seconds of just a loading animation"
by atleastoptimal | 2025-07-19 18:59:24+00:00
There is a diversity of opinions on this site. I do hope that soon more of the intelligent commenters who have spent a while denying AI progress will realize what’s actually happening and contribute their brainpower to a meaningful cause in the lead up to AI-human parity. If we want a good future in a world where AI is smarter than humans, we need to do alignment work soon.
by sailingparrot | 2025-07-19 19:00:16+00:00
> Would you also get triggered if you saw people make a bet at, say, $24 : $87 odds? Would you shout: "No! That's too precise, you should bet $20 : $90!"? For that matter, should all prices in the stock market be multiples of $1, (since, after all, fluctuations of greater than $1 are very common)?

No.

I responded to the same point here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44618142

> correct thing to do is to just also report the variance

And do we also pull this one out of thin air?

Using precise number to convey extremely unprecise and ungrounded opinions is imho wrong and to me unsettling. I'm pulling this purely out of my ass, and maybe I am making too much out of it, but I feel this is in part what is causing the many cases of very weird, and borderline associal/dangerous behaviours of some associated with the rationalists movement. When you try to precisely quantify what cannot be, and start trusting those numbers too much, you can easily be led to trust your conclusions way too much. I am 56% confident this is a real effect.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-07-19 19:01:03+00:00
This is a fun, and I enjoyed the "CRT Dude" video because I resonate with that need to understand :-). One of the things I learned during that era was that there were a lot of computer makers but relatively few factories in China that were making things to assemble them. Because it was simpler to take the sheet metal work that was already designed and being made for brand 'x' and then differentiate on the case molding and electronics, a lot of the mechanical components were "re-used" (the factory can make 1000 or 10,000 with the tooling and the more they make the easier to amortize the tooling costs so the cheaper they can offer them).

I suspect when a company spec'd out a new design and then got all the tooling done, unless they explicit language in their contract about selling stuff made with the same tooling to others, the factories could pitch "we will do the basic case with no NRE[1]" and that was a bargain. As a result a lot of things ended up being "magically" similar in those days.

[1] NRE = Non-Recoverable Engineering which is the cost label for the engineering work to build the jigs and tooling that the factory will use to make the parts you want. Example an injected molded switch cover might cost $10,000 in NRE to make the molds that can produce 10 switch covers each and be used up to a 10,000 times. Then if you make 10,000 switch covers, you have used the mold one 1000 times and used up 10% of its lifetime. Cost of the plastic plus $1,000 (the 1/10th of the cost of the mold) are the real cost of those switch covers.
by 999900000999 | 2025-07-19 19:01:54+00:00
Honestly it's probably a better idea to ban this before it becomes a problem.

You're talking about experimenting on non consenting subjects. Why stop at 3 parents. Why not 300. Splice in all the DNA you want.

Then 20 years later when the test subject has horrific side effects due to processes we don't understand, ohh well that's the cost of progress.
by perching_aix | 2025-07-19 19:02:06+00:00
> You're destroying one human in this process.

How so? They're removing the pro-nuclei before they fuse (which is when a new human, specifically their first sovereign cell and their DNA, would be formed). So even if you consider life to start at conception, this is precisely just before that still, meaning there's no human being destroyed here - unless I misunderstand the biology going on (or the article is not correct).
by snickerdoodle12 | 2025-07-19 19:02:36+00:00
Buddy, I'm dutch. I am following local politics, and clearly, you're not.

> I describe the law of and linked to a government website of the Netherlands.

No shit? How is the current law relevant to plans to change it?

> What you did not say is that one party leader made an insane comment in a campaign cycle met with so much backlash it took less than a day to radically change to "with 0% under €500.000" and has still been unilaterally mocked by opinion makers, politicians, and media.

Yeah, so he's planning it. For now they seem to have changed their campaign surrounding the subject but there's no saying what they'll do if elected.
by asdff | 2025-07-19 19:03:03+00:00
Kind of reminds me of the beats headphones phenomenon. People had these earbuds that lacked any bass response, so they went with headphones that overdid it just to feel it. Sound bars indeed have features like better separation than tinier TV speakers but still crumble apart in comparison to even very modest bookshelf speakers you can run actual speaker wire into. Let alone a sub or a proper surround setup. Likewise with Beats and other headphones, they crumble put against the humble studio monitors like mdrv6/mdr7506 that have great separation and more faithful response to the intents of the record producer (who might very well have been using those exact headphones themselves).
by techjamie | 2025-07-19 19:04:54+00:00
I've been quite happy with using Typst to write things at home. It's less arcane than LaTeX and easier to reason about.

At work I use our ChatGPT page to generate an HTML+CSS skeleton of what I want and tweak that. It's quicker for me than doing the equivalent in word, and easier to manipulate later. Most of the time I don't need anyone else editing my docs, so it works out.
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-07-19 19:05:02+00:00
If you come to the LLM with your message, and then use the LLM to iterate drafts and tighten your prose, then no, the exercise was exactly the opposite of a disrespect to the reader.

Sending half-baked, run-on, unvetted writing, when you easily could have chosen otherwise, is in fact the disrespectful choice.
by JustExAWS | 2025-07-19 19:05:23+00:00
Technical skill has never been valuable after a certain point except for rare exceptions.

If you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company. Technical skill alone only gets you to a mid level job. After that it’s about scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

https://dropbox.tech/culture/sharing-our-engineering-career-...

A competitive advantage is knowing how to communicate business value from using technology.
by nick238 | 2025-07-19 19:05:58+00:00
I guess my major question would be: does the training data include anything from 2025 which may have included information about the IMO 2025?

Given that AI companies are constantly trying to slurp up any and all data online, if the model was derived from existing work, it's maybe less impressive than at first glance. If present-day model does well at IMO 2026, that would be nice.
by throwup238 | 2025-07-19 19:06:56+00:00
Here’s where it helps to have at least some background in biology: what you propose is not a radical hypothesis. In fact I’d be hard pressed to find a single neuroscientist who disagrees with that hypothesis except in its most nuanced details.

We have no idea how that information is transmitted from generation to generation but we have enough animal behavior research to know that many animals instinctually identify visual cues like predators pretty much from the moment they are born. We also have decent evidence that the inheritance may not be entirely genetic in origin, because nearly identical populations in different locales may have wildly different behaviors (like the animals in the Galapagos islands, who aren’t afraid of humans because they’ve had no predators).

The three main candidates for how this information is transmitted are: genetics, epigenetics, and embryonic development. The latter two fields are still in their infancy but that leaves more room for just so stories.

Always beware of anyone using evolutionary biology to make an argument about the development of species.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-07-19 19:07:16+00:00
Guess I will chime in for the dissent: there is already so much Python language. The more special gotchas that are added just for these minor wins is not worth it. In fact, if I ever saw a function that was foo(bar=) I would correct that to be explicit immediately. ‘import this’ and all that.

Said as a curmudgeon that has never used a walrus.
by vishvananda | 2025-07-19 19:07:51+00:00
I'm really baffled why the coding interfaces have not implemented a locking feature for some code. It seems like an obvious feature to be able to select a section of your code and tell the agent not to modify it. This could remove a whole class of problems where the agent tries to change tests to match the code or removes key functionality.

One could even imagine going a step further and having a confidence level associated with different parts of the code, that would help the LLM concentrate changes on the areas that you're less sure about.
by cluckindan | 2025-07-19 19:08:23+00:00
Well, I’m certainly not qualified to argue against Hawking. Still, the theory is very difficult to test empirically, so I would argue the bets are still open!

I would assume my model is wrong in many ways. The reason I’m sharing my thoughts is not to claim they are the way things are, but to hopefully inspire someone to try building a theory that could explain the empirical, top-down-oriented Standard Model using a novel, minimalistic bottom-up approach.

I could also be getting some terms wrong, English is not my first language and certainly was not the language of natural sciences instruction in my university.
by KronisLV | 2025-07-19 19:08:38+00:00
> For the longest time, writing was more expensive than reading. If you encountered a body of written text, you could be sure that at the very least, a human spent some time writing it down. The text used to have an innate proof-of-thought, a basic token of humanity.

I think it all goes to crap when there is some economic incentive: e.g. blogspam that is profitable thanks to ads and anyone that stumbles upon it, alongside being able to generate large amounts of coherent sounding crap quickly.

I have seen quite a few sites like that in the first pages of both Google and DuckDuckGo which feels almost offensive. At the same time, posts that promise something and then don't go through with it are similarly bad, regardless of AI generated or not.

For example, recently I needed to look up how vLLM compares with Ollama (yes, for running the very same abominable intelligence models, albeit for more subjectively useful reasons) because Qwen3-30B-A3B and Devstral-24B both run pretty badly on Nvidia L4 cards with Ollama, which feels disappointing given their price tags and relatively small sizes of those models.

Yet pretty much all of the comparisons I found just regurgitated high level overviews of the technologies, like 5-10 sites that felt almost identical and could have been copy pasted from one another. Not a single one of those had a table of various models and their tokens/s on a given bit of hardware, for both Ollama and vLLM.

Back in the day when nerds got passionate about Apache2 vs Nginx, you'd see comparisons with stats and graphs and even though I wouldn't take all of those at face value (since with Apache2 you should turn off .htaccess and also tweak the MPM settings for more reasonable performance), at least there would sometimes be a Git repo.
by ivraatiems | 2025-07-19 19:08:45+00:00
> I think maybe you just happened to learn to set up Windows first and then you insist on doing the exact same thing on Linux. If you learnt Linux first, you'd find Windows infuriating.

I'm just sort of confused by this comment. Honestly, I'm confused by a lot of this comment chain. It doesn't feel like you understand or appreciate the circumstances under which I operate.

I'm running a business. I'm setting up machines for customers. This has absolutely nothing to do with my personal preferences. I'm a Linux user of nearly two decades. That does not matter. My job is to deliver a useful experience for my customers. Windows offers that more reliably than Linux does. My personal opinions don't enter into it; the implication that I don't know how to set up a Linux machine is just false. Likewise, that we can produce one Linux machine under the control of an expert such as yourself that works well is not proof that this will work for consumers.

I see that you and a lot of other folks in this thread feel a strong loyalty to Linux and a desire to drive people towards it. There's nothing wrong with that. But insisting up is down isn't going to do it, and that's what this communication feels like.
by mlyle | 2025-07-19 19:10:09+00:00
You do need to spend the 10 statutory accounts associated with the EPA as directed by Congress, though. So, there's an account funded by Congress with this statutory description:

> For science and technology, including research and development activities, which shall include research and development activities under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980; necessary expenses for personnel and related costs; procurement of laboratory equipment and supplies; hire, maintenance, and operation of aircraft; and other operating expenses in support of research and development, $500,780,000, to remain available until September 30, 2027.

Neutering the department that would normally do this and kneecapping the ability to spend that appropriation effectively sidesteps how the executive and legislative have divided responsibilities back to the founding of the Republic.

This is a pretty big systemic issue. There's a normal amount of tug of war between the executive's implementation of congressional appropriation, but deliberately breaking multiple departments so that funds can't be effectively spent is something new that upends our normal checks and balances.

In the past, when Congress tried to delegate the power to selectively suppress spending through mechanisms like the line-item veto, the Supreme Court struck it down as an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers. Now, however, the executive branch is effectively wielding even greater power by deliberately impairing departments, circumventing Congressional appropriations without the constraints or oversight previously deemed essential.

Now I understand that we may spin up a deliberately ineffective agency, and that courts have given the executive a lot of leeway on administrative structuring. But allowing the executive to deliberately frustrate congressionally appropriated expenditures undermines separation of powers.
by conradludgate | 2025-07-19 19:10:31+00:00
The problem I've been having is when I spend time researching a problem, I link documentation and propose a clean solution. Someone I'm talking with will then send a screenshot of deepseek or chatgpt essentially agreeing with me.

I don't care what chatgpt or deepseek thinks about the proposal. I care what _you_ think about it - that's why I'm sending it to you.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-07-19 19:11:04+00:00
I chatted with a motel owner in the middle of nowhere, Arizona who made his yearly nut off seasonal melon pickers, usually Mexican nationals on agricultural work visas. They need a place to stay, too. Otherwise, he had the kind of quiet, far out of the way old motel you see in horror movies (which I particularly love) and the odd foreign film set in America.

I ran into traveling road crews (as in CalTrans contractors building highways) visiting a facility for my current employer. Interesting crowd. The pay is good, and the only real requirements seem to be the willingness to wake up early, work hard, and not be insufferable to work with.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-07-19 19:11:33+00:00
Certainly the models have orders of magnitude more data available to them than the smartest human being who ever lived does/did. So we can assume that if the goal is "merely" superhuman intelligence, data is not a problem.

It might be a constraint on the evolution of godlike intelligence, or AGI. But at that point we're so far out in bong-hit territory that it will be impossible to say who's right or wrong about what's coming.

Has learning though "self-play" (like with AlphaZero etc) been demonstrated working for improving LLMs?

My understanding (which might be incorrect) is that this amounts to RLHF without the HF part, and is basically how DeepSeek-R1 was trained. I recall reading about OpenAI being butthurt^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H concerned that their API might have been abused by the Chinese to train their own model.
by hcfman | 2025-07-19 19:11:44+00:00
Is there a reason why the secure boot thing could not have had several secure boot slots and each one independent of others? So that microsoft world could run securely and other people could boot their system securely out of another slot?

Just wondering what the technical reason would be that Microsoft had to control the whole of the PC??

Surely, the control of the boot environment and any the the boot shims could have been restricted to system that could boot out of said shim. Then the two worlds could have securely co-existed could they not ?
by xdennis | 2025-07-19 19:12:46+00:00
My experience with LLMs (OpenAI) is that it translates Romanian very well (including local slang), but that Google Translate (which I assume is not LLM-based) is very bad. Take for example this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azwUg6cP9BQ .

Original title: "Swedish warm foundation for the house. Full construction process"

Actual title on YouTube in Romanian: "Fond de ten suedez cald pentru casa. Proces complet de construcție"

OpenAI translation: "Fundație suedeză caldă pentru casă. Procesul complet de construcție."

The OpenAI translation is perfect. The Google one is trash. It doesn't just omit diacritics, but translates "foundation" as "fond de ten" (literally "background of tan") a term used in makeup instead of "fundație".

LLMs have enough context here ("house", "construction") to know that "foundation" refers to the term used in construction not the one in makeup.
by distantprovince | 2025-07-19 19:13:09+00:00
This feature predates LLMs though, right? Funnily enough, I actually find it hilarious! In my mind, once they introduced it, it immediately became "a list of things NOT to reply if you want to be polite" and I was used it like that. With one exception. If I came across an update from someone who's a really good friend, I would unleash full power of AI comments on them! We had amazing AI generated comment threads with friends that looked goofy as hell.
by ferguess_k | 2025-07-19 19:13:18+00:00
Back then I was crazy about the story of Starcraft and I thought that was the best of the RTS games. I used to dip into the level editor too but it was kinda limited, missing some of the scripts Blizzard used in the expansion.

By pure coincidence, both Starcraft 2's writers and /me believed that Kerrigan should be brought back to her human form in Starcraft 2 :)