MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nemo | 2025-07-16 18:06:54+00:00
The big question there is why these metalworkers showed up in only one part of the empire, one of the less wealthy regions, and not one with some unique needs for bronze casting. Note that these are cast bronze, using the term "metalwork" conflates smiths who work with tin, gold, bronze, and iron, but those were different professions. This isn't a blacksmith showing off his ironworking skills, it's a person of a different profession casting fine bronze. Hard to say why you'd have mendicant bronze workers casting things, I don't know of any records of but it's a very limited area for so many finds, while this same work was needed all over the empire, why nothing in Spain, Italy, North Africa, or the eastern provinces where they'd need the same? Why just that one highly restricted range within Rome that coincides with Gallia and Britain?
by compacct27 | 2025-07-16 18:07:18+00:00
Another part of what happened is that the comment section feels more succinct and insightful than the actual article. Articles have to be long form, comments get to the point. It's sort of like your comment is the LLM response I wanted all along. And now we can personalize our reading and have a more meaningful outcome.

Maybe long form content solved a need back in the day when things were printed on paper and figured out well in advance, crossing their fingers on the relevance, and with where we are now we can suss it out without all the reading-as-middleman-to-knowledge
by dangoodmanUT | 2025-07-16 18:07:32+00:00
The BloomSearchEngine takes a TokenizerFunc so you can determine how JSON values are tokenized (that's why each path always returns an array of strings).

The default tokenizer is a a whitespace one: https://github.com/danthegoodman1/bloomsearch/blob/148a79967...

So {"name": "John Smith"} is tokenized to [{Path: "name", Values: ["john", "smith"]}], and the bloom filters will store:

- field: "name"

- token: "john"

- token: "smith"

- fieldtoken: "name:john"

- fieldtoken: "name:smith"

The same tokenizer must be used at query time too.

Fuzzy searches and sub-word searches could be supported with custom tokenizers (eg trigrams, stemming), but it's more generally targeting the "I know some exact subset of the record, I need all that have this exactly" searches
by simonw | 2025-07-16 18:07:36+00:00
> I would like to have a tool that generates the project structure for me, but I haven’t found one that fits me yet.

I recommend cookiecutter for this. I have a few templates I've built with that which I use frequently:

python-lib: https://github.com/simonw/python-lib

click-app: https://github.com/simonw/click-app

datasette-plugin: https://github.com/simonw/datasette-plugin

llm-plugin: https://github.com/simonw/llm-plugin

You can run them like this:

uvx cookiecutter gh:simonw/python-lib
by arp242 | 2025-07-16 18:07:39+00:00
The thing is that this was his "answer" to what was really the quite reasonable question of "do you think this is ethical?" To start talking about this sort of thing is completely disconnected from the actual question.

Of course you can have discussion about these aspects of the open source ecosystem; this is a long-running discussion where many people have discussed and disagreed in good faith. I don't entirely agree with your take personally, but I also don't entirely disagree and can see where you're coming from, and it's of course an interesting thing to discus.

However, in this context, as an "answer" to that question, it's hard to see it as anything other than just self-serving post-hoc rationalisation for being a selfish wanker. This is classic nihilism where the abuse of everything and everyone is justified as long as you can get away with it. Everything that moves the needle and you can get away with is morally justified because it moves the needle and you can get away with it.
by Emdeha2357 | 2025-07-16 18:07:40+00:00
Did I hear "Design Flaw"? On a Dreamliner??

Well I'd Never sputter Good Ma'am or Sir, ARE you implying something like a "MAIN BATTERY EXHAUST"¹ retrofitted to a flagship product because management was impatient and wanted the lighter, better, faster, stronger lithium-ion-battery for their rushed 787-sized baby?

¹) https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/14011413401...
by bonobocop | 2025-07-16 18:07:41+00:00
Not OP, but to me, this reads fairly similar to how ClickHouse can be set up, with Bloom filters, MinMax indexes, etc.

A way to “handle” partial substrings is to break up your input data into tokens (like substrings split in spaces or dashes) and then you can break up your search string up in the same way.
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-16 18:08:11+00:00
> Thinking that some tasks are better suited to a desk / 2 monitors is apparently a millennial thing now .

Sad, but true. Recent batch of new hires where I work, same age range - mid-late 20's, none of them have computers at home except their work issued laptop. They are by far the biggest source of help desk tickets for us, and same story as you, using phone & iPad for everything at home.

Honestly concerns me for talent recruitment in the future, if AI isn't doing everything tech when that time comes - kids only tech experiences now are fully locked down walled gardens, takes away both the ability and incentive to tinker, explore, or even troubleshoot. Whole generation of new workers coming in without even the most basic of troubleshooting/problem solving skills. Have a few at my work where even just reading an error message on the screen seems overwhelming to them.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-16 18:09:18+00:00
Yes it is a direct clone from the earlier NoMachine NX. That was open source, and later they moved to a new closed-source protocol. FreeNX took the earlier one over.

And no it doesn't support Wayland of course. It's an X11 accelerator, the design is heavily connected to the X11 design. It doesn't replace X11's remote display support, it just augments it. Wayland doesn't have that at all so there is no point there.

It basically removes the many round-trips in the protocol that increase latency, by caching values locally. And it can also keep the session alive when disconnected, similar to what termux or screen do for SSH.
Google raising Nest Aware Plus pricing by 25%
by corywatilo | 2025-07-16 18:09:23+00:00
via email:

Thank you for being a Nest Aware subscriber. We wanted to let you know that the price of your Nest Aware Plus subscription ... will soon increase from $150 a year to $200 a year (plus applicable taxes).

This new price will go into effect on your first bill that occurs on or after August 15, 2025...

https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/13856600
by daxfohl | 2025-07-16 18:09:28+00:00
What do people not like about Azure IAM? That's the one I'm most familiar with, and I've always thought it was decent, pretty vanilla.

When I go to AWS it looks similar except role assignments can't be scoped, so needs more duplication and maintenance. In that way Azure seems nicer. In everything else, it seems pretty equivalent.

But I see it catching flak occasionally on HN, so curious what others dislike.
by rsyring | 2025-07-16 18:09:30+00:00
To help answer your question, here's a detailed comparison from the attrs project:

https://www.attrs.org/en/stable/why.html

There's some obvious potential for bias there, but I thought most of the arguments were well reasoned.

Edit: found another that I thought was helpful: https://threeofwands.com/why-i-use-attrs-instead-of-pydantic...
by root_axis | 2025-07-16 18:09:36+00:00
This is just half a dozen examples of the slippery slope fallacy. You could make identically generic arguments for every good law that we all agree on. The specifics of the law in question are a required component of the conversation.

> the state knows best and the state never makes mistakes!

Nobody believes this. Everyone is comfortable with the risks of the state when it comes to rights and laws they believe should be enforced.
by antonvs | 2025-07-16 18:10:54+00:00
> If CoT improves performance, then CoT improves performance, however the naively obvious read of "it improves performance because it is 'thinking' the 'thoughts' it tell us it is thinking, for the reasons it gives" is not completely accurate.

I can't imagine why anyone who knows even a little about how these models work would believe otherwise.

The "chain of thought" is text generated by the model in response to a prompt, just like any other text it generates. It then consumes that as part of a new prompt, and generates more text. Those "thoughts" are obviously going to have an effect on the generated output, simply by virtue of being present in the prompt. And the evidence shows that it can help improve the quality of output. But there's no reason to expect that the generated "thoughts" would correlate directly or precisely with what's going on inside the model when it's producing text.
by hammyhavoc | 2025-07-16 18:10:59+00:00
Is there any extension for Thunderbird that can handle "External Accounts" per-address signatures and sending identities already configured on a Gmail account?

I always go "I'll check out Thunderbird again" then "nope" out when I see it can't handle this kind of set up in the OOBE and most extensions don't receive ongoing support and thus stop being compatible.

I use Gmail on my phone and Pixel Watch, so ditching this setup is a non-starter as reconfiguring something as basic as email every time I get a new device or switch distros isn't my idea of a good time.
by dec0dedab0de | 2025-07-16 18:11:17+00:00
Honestly, I don't really see the appeal of unnamed functions in general. I so rarely use lambdas that I wouldn't really miss them if they were gone. Just occasionally as a sort key, or in a comprehension.

I have seen people do this in JavaScript quite often, but I always assumed there was some kind of underlying performance benefit that I didn't know about.

As I think about it I guess it makes sense if you're passing a function to a function and you just want it to be concise. I could imagine using something like that off the top of my head, but then pulling it apart and giving it a name the moment I had to troubleshoot it. Which is how I currently use nested comprehensions, just blurt them out in the moment but refactor at the first sign of trouble.

I think maybe I just have trouble seeing some of the braces and stuff, and it's easier for me to reason about if it's named. I guess that's why we have 32 flavors.

Thanks for answering me honestly I really do appreciate it, even if my tone came off as dismissive. Sometimes I don't realize how I sound until after I read it back.
by cgannett | 2025-07-16 18:12:08+00:00
even if its not faster than DRAM I wonder at what point would it just not make sense to have two separate modules. Like all the volitile storage in a system could be in the L-cache/s on the CPU and for most things that plus this faster non-volitile storage would do the trick. I wonder what kind of optimizations would have been made in a world where stuff like DRAM just didnt exist and we just had to deal with the bottlenecks of non-volitile storage media
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-16 18:12:20+00:00
As a liberal I've always had to fight the tendency we have to not see legitimacy sinks in the name of politeness. Lately I think people are willing to listen and I'm working on ways to explain this to people who don't bellyfeel them already.

Since I was a kid I thought that the endless fundraising drives destroy the legitimacy of public television. At the bellyfeel level it is visible moneygrubbing, but at a political science level these run side by side with ads promoting the sponsorship of the Archer Daniel Midlands corporation. ADM is notably the prime beneficiary of ethanol subsidies in the U.S. that wreck the environment and make farmers go broke spending money on nitrogen fertilizers that kill off life in the ocean off the mouth of the Mississippi River.

The trouble is that small donations don't give voice, but large donations do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

I can logically justify how I feel about fundraising drives on PBS, but I feel a resonance that causes me to feel the same way for Wikipedia -- I don't know what the Archer Daniel Midlands corporation of Wikipedia is, but it probably exists. Finding out that they don't really the money confirms this feeling.
by chargenorris | 2025-07-16 18:13:16+00:00
KIRA AGI – the real AI brain – is already working and can be demoed today. KIRA OS, the new operating system I’m building to showcase the full AI integration, is currently in early development/testing and not yet ready for public demos.

For now, all breakthrough results come from the KIRA AGI engine, which can run on existing operating systems as a service/API. The full KIRA OS stack is the next milestone – if you want, I can show you how the AGI works, and share the OS progress as it gets more mature.
by Kapura | 2025-07-16 18:13:30+00:00
It's fallacious to assume that defenses stop evolving after new weapons come to the fore. Some drones are deployed in anti-drone capacities; the war economics becomes balancing how advanced to make the attack drones vs. how cheap the countermeasures are. In Ukraine we've already seen small drones that are able to damage the wings of much larger and more "technically advanced" platforms.

War didn't end the first time man invented the longer spear; defenses adapt.
by simonw | 2025-07-16 18:13:32+00:00
This article is about teaching coding agents to use InstantDB, which is "a modern Firebase".

I suggest jumping straight to this document, which is designed to tell the agent how to work with Instant but is pretty great documentation for humans who want to understand what it can do at the same time: https://www.instantdb.com/mcp-tutorial/claude-rules.md
by manofmanysmiles | 2025-07-16 18:13:52+00:00
I make projects following almost identical patterns. It's a little uncanny. Maybe the people in the python developer ecosystem are converging on a pretty uniform way to do most things? I though some of my choices were maybe "my own", it seeing such consistency makes me question my own free will.

It's like when people pick a "unique" name for their baby along with almost everyone else. What you thought was a unique name is the #2 most popular name.
by antonvs | 2025-07-16 18:14:01+00:00
> LLM inference is currently profitable.

It depends a lot on which LLMs you're talking about, and what kind of usage. See e.g. the recent post about how "Anthropic is bleeding out": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44534291

Ignore the hype in the headline, the point is that there's good evidence that inference in many circumstances isn't profitable.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-16 18:14:08+00:00
"This will allow scientists to watch the process that may have birthed our home planet."

Yeah, over the next few millions of years. The way it is written makes it sound like something where we will see a planet in the next few years. Humans may not still exist by the time that planet forms.

Which then makes me wonder if sentient life forms that may come to be on that new planet will attempt to detect other life in the universe and have totally missed out on Earth's inhabitants. Which is one theory on why we haven't detected any either.
by CartwheelLinux | 2025-07-16 18:15:03+00:00
I'm saving all of these articles for the next time we go through the "AI (LLMs) is going to change the world," cycle.

The systems we use can only be as smart and intuitive as the people who prompt them.

On top of it, this (LLMs) is not AI, not even close, if anything they are glorified prediction systems that require human prompting.
by andai | 2025-07-16 18:15:44+00:00
My comment was not referring to the present state of things, but to the ultimate goal.

However, the present state is also worth a look!

The three uniquely human factors which people keep saying a machine can never do:

1. Empathy: they win by default. (My reference group is twenty friends and seven therapists.)

2. Critical Thinking: they win with the correct prompt. (You need to explicitly work against the sycophancy. i.e. the desire to appear empathetic limits the ability to convey true information to a human.)

3. Creativity: I want to say creativity lags behind, in LLMs at least, but Midjourney is blowing my damn mind, so I might have to give them that, too.

That's with the versions of AI we have today. My comment was referring to the ultimate goal, i.e. where this is all heading.

To put it explicitly, we intend to:

(1) make them in our image (trained after our mental output, and shaped after our body),

(2) while also making them vastly superior intellectually and physically (strength, endurance, etc.),

(3) while also expecting them to have no will of their own -- except as it aligns with ours. (We do actually need to give them a will to make them useful.)

I do not expect that to end very well.
by ddejohn | 2025-07-16 18:17:01+00:00
> Wearing something shockingly ugly is a great way to not be mistaken for a deer.

Sure... yes the bright orange is ugly, but it's not the ugliness that prevents you from getting shot, it's the bright unnatural color. Other hunters aren't thinking "oh that's really ugly, it must not be something I can shoot" they're thinking "bright orange means person, I should not fire my rifle in that direction".

> If it wasn't, it wouldn't grab my attention so well.

Are you saying that if you thought the bright orange was pretty it wouldn't occur to you not to fire your gun in its direction?
by ashwindharne | 2025-07-16 18:17:38+00:00
It's all unstructured text (title, company, company size, experience, skills, raw text, etc.) and LLMs are pretty bad at assigning numerical scores in a vacuum. To make it work, we'd have to provide a representative set of examples, break scoring down by specific field, etc.

Kind of a lot of work compared to just dumping the text of 2 profiles into a context window along with a vague description of what I want, and having the LLM make the binary judgment.
by lenerdenator | 2025-07-16 18:17:44+00:00
I've been doing Python professionally for a while (~10-ish years in backend web dev and file processing), and while I don't like how exactly the author described dunder methods as "legacy", it's still not a language facility I reach out to often because, well, it's sort of odd coming from a C# background. The author has blog posts about Java, which isn't that different from C#, so maybe that's the reason.

Maybe as I grow to think of the "big picture" architecture-wise with my code, I will start incorporating dunders, but until then...
by _wire_ | 2025-07-16 18:17:50+00:00
The speed of the UI was established decades ago, there's no reason for it to speed up past the rate at which a person is satisfied when interacting with the system.

But system performance improvement is real. There are ongoing enormous advances of compute and I/O power which allow new and improved media handling, more complex UI and workloads, and overall freer tradeoffs between memory capacity and time required to complete work.

In other words, the system is always getting faster, but you're not, so a more powerful system allows more work to be done within your attention window.

So upon this realization, you might become curious as to what the relationship between system performance and your perceptions of speed. Without explaining in any detail, you might first suspect that the relationship is non-intuitive, much in the way that speed of transportation and perception of distance traveled are not intuitive. A walk to the corner market by every measure is shorter than a flight across country, yet your perception of scale does not lead to the direct apprehension that the flight is 500 times faster than your stride. Same thing with computer power

Another unintuitive aspect of performance is that speed relationships within computing systems are subject to a time vs. distance tradeoff with interactions generally slowing with distance. If your sense of performance comes from interacting with web sites, while the parts of your PC go really fast, the stuff you're accessing is arbitrarily far away, and subject the sum of all the delays over that distance, only some of which are affected by the speed of local processing. There's a famous law, similar to Moore's law, coined by Cray architect Gene Amdahl, that observes that no matter how many things a system can do at once, the time to complete a job are limited by the time required to those things that must occur in a sequence. For your PC the wifi connection is a tube through which all the stuff you want to access is ordered sequentially. Even if your PC and the computers you access were infinitely fast, it still takes time to get the data through that tube. So you might suspect that your experience accessing the web is generally tube limited, not PC limited.
by segmondy | 2025-07-16 18:17:59+00:00
It's not the payment processes that care, it's the underwriting banks!

It's not the underwriting banks that care, it's the investors that own shares in the banks, and the insurance company that cover those banks.

Outside of religious groups, the other owners don't want to be exposed legally or financially due to losses in high risk are strongly regulated areas like gambling, porn, etc. This is why processors say no or might start enforcing on these.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-07-16 18:18:24+00:00
beyond the classic "and then you just" not really showing how half the stuff was done, the conclusion, absurdity, AI-pilled mindset.... designers reducing their own craft (which seems like they leaned on a lot of their experience and insights) to "all it took"..... and the irony? of it being for a design careers site where yes, they've managed to sidestep the backend devs and go from design to production (of granted a basic flashy landing page with a list of links), but are they really going to be able to convince anyone hiring any more than their little 2-person team is necessary with stuff like this? Disheartening, maddening, weird etc.
by flotzam | 2025-07-16 18:18:41+00:00
It's not a benzo, but it is a GABAergic drug. The ironclad law to avoid brutal dependency and addiction is to never take it more than once every 7 days, preferably less frequently than that. No redosing on the same day either. This means it will take a couple weeks to slowly find an effective dose.

https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Phenibut
by omoikane | 2025-07-16 18:18:49+00:00
In a similar spirit, I knew someone who claimed to not pay for parking permits at our university, and just parked wherever he liked. The parking permits were $100+ per month and the parking fines were ~$300 per citation, so if he gets caught less than once per quarter, he would come out ahead.

He tells me later that it didn't quite work out in terms of saving money, but because he sometimes parked in spots that he could not get permits for, it actually saved time.
by PokemonNoGo | 2025-07-16 18:19:13+00:00
Honestly. When I was a kid 20 years ago backpacking around i was worried about this. Now I'm also worried about it but honestly there aren't very many issues. I've had temporary passports issued, cancelled cards, new phones setup on "new sims". One thing I did carry back then was keys. I don't anymore. The rest is just so easy to replace these days. My laptop is insured and so is my work one.
by jihoons | 2025-07-16 18:20:14+00:00
Hey folks — I’ve been building this in my spare hours over the last few months and finally pushed a public beta.

Out of Office (OOO) is an AI-powered travel planner that helps you pack smarter, plan better, and create a personalized trip draft in minutes. Think of it like your travel-savvy friend who always has a plan — now in your pocket.

Auto-generates packing lists

Suggests what to do day-by-day

Considers your personality, weather, and destination

I built this because I got tired of spreadsheets and decision fatigue before every trip. OOO handles that busywork, and you just tweak the plan to fit your vibe.

Would love your honest feedback. Bugs, ideas, questions, critiques — all welcome.

Happy to show how the auto-plan feature works or walk through the flow.