MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-07-01 01:12:00+00:00
So many people yearn for LLM's to be like the Star Trek ship computer, which when asked a question unconditionally provides a response relevant and correct, needing no verification.

A better analogy is LLM's are closer to the "universal translator" with an occasional interaction similar to[0]:

Black Knight: None shall pass. King Arthur: What? Black Knight: None shall pass! King Arthur: I have no quarrel with you good Sir Knight, But I must cross this bridge. Black Knight: Then you shall die. King Arthur: I command you, as King of the Britons, to stand aside! Black Knight: I move for no man. King Arthur: So be it! [they fight until Arthur cuts off the Black Knight's left arm] King Arthur: Now, stand aside, worthy adversary. Black Knight: 'Tis but a scratch. King Arthur: A scratch? Your arm's off! Black Knight: No, it isn't. King Arthur: Well, what's that then? Black Knight: I've had worse.

0 - https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Monty_Python_and_the_Holy_Grai...
by numpad0 | 2025-07-01 01:12:02+00:00
Rice patriotism in Japan is just result of politically motivated and generally unpopular gen-tan policy spectacularly backfiring. The price is not artificially inflated, at least not by JA, it's just result of forcing rice to be uneconomical in the market where people just buys rice no matter what. As supply is decreased artificially and price increases in response, unit price rose and so did quality. As result of quality increased artificially although indirectly, imports unaffected by local market further lost competitiveness.

I bet Japan's going to be internally forced to expand rice exports, not imports. Farmers must pay bills or else they go away, and people aren't going to eat imports. So farmers has to stay by either completely subsidized a la defense production, or by scaling out at paces permanently exceeding inflation. Maybe both. Extra production has to go somewhere but population is on decline, so it has to go somewhere beyond the seas.

Unless iPhone moment happens and the country's hit by vastly superior rice, which iOS was - iPhone had worse hardware with worse integration than any of local phones back then, but UI/UX was literally 5-10 years ahead of everything else, and it completely replaced the entire Japanese phone market helped by blatantly illegal marketing tactics. That's not happening so far with rice.
by zzo38computer | 2025-07-01 01:12:34+00:00
That is what should be illegal, for electronic devices (even if rented) to be unable to disable wireless communications, or for a contract to affect the operation of stuff other than wireless communications when the wireless is disabled. It should also be illegal to be unable to disable all power to electric devices (for devices with battery power, that would include that it must be possible to remove the battery, and the method to be documented).
by zem | 2025-07-01 01:13:07+00:00
I've recently gotten into T Kingfisher (who writes fantasy, usually with strong romance elements). She is really good at getting me super invested in the characters very early on, and I think it's for similar reasons that Austen does - not so much the pacing of the plot, but how quickly she establishes that (i) this character is very relatable and (ii) there is significant tension between their personality and their living situation, so something has to give, and fast. Then it's just a matter of waiting with bated breath to see what gives and how soon - in some sense the books are very predictable in that you know you're getting your happily-ever-after, but the journey is truly the point.
by bearjaws | 2025-07-01 01:13:28+00:00
Claude Code has basically grown to dominate my initial coding workflow.

I was using the API and passed $50 easily, so I upgraded to the $100 a month plan and have already reached $100 in usage.

I've been working on a large project, with 3 different repos (frontend, backend, legacy backend) and I just have all 3 of them in one directory now with claude code.

Wrote some quick instructions about how it was setup, its worked very well. If I am feeling brave I can have multiple claude codes running in different terminals, each working on one piece, but Opus tends to do better working across all 3 repos with all of the required context.

Still have to audit every change, commit often, but it works great 90% of the time.

Opus-4 feels like what OAI was trying to hype up for the better part of 6 months before releasing 4.5
by bko | 2025-07-01 01:13:29+00:00
> That means it is more expensive for Americans to travel abroad and less attractive for foreigners to invest in the United States, sapping demand when the government is trying to borrow more money. On the flip side, the weaker dollar should help U.S. exporters and make imports more expensive, though these typical trade effects are in flux because of the tariff threats.

I'm confused how a weak dollar makes it less attractive for foreigners to invest in the US. If your currency is stronger relative to the USD, doesn't it make productive US assets cheaper?

This seems like a pretty elementary mistake, doesn't even require economics, just common sense. Makes me question the rest of the editorials in the piece.
by sandworm101 | 2025-07-01 01:14:11+00:00
Every time I've tried to sell and/or give away my previous laptop, I discovered that nobody wants anything more than a few years old. A 6yo Acer laptop, that isn't running the latest windows, is basically worthless even in the eyes of charities. And a used laptop running linux, regardless of age, seems to be unwanted by everyone.
by teruakohatu | 2025-07-01 01:15:33+00:00
> As mentioned, I've done taste tests across various options and I can definitely tell the difference, which is why I pay more.

Can you tell the difference between Japanese brands or only between Japanese and non Japanese origin rice?

Is rice a significant percentage of food cost in Japan? Coming from a culture that uses less rice, the cost of price verses the cost of protein makes it just about a rounding error when cooking.

Now butter on the other hand has just about become a luxury good in New Zealand when it was once cheap, plentiful and extremely high quality.
by rtp4me | 2025-07-01 01:15:35+00:00
Just started using Claude (very late to the game), and I am truly blown away. Instead of struggling for hours trying to get the right syntax for a Powershell script or to convert Python to Go, I simply ask Claude to make it happen. This helps me focus on content creation instead of the mind-bending experience of syntax across various languages. While some might call it laziness, I call it freedom as it helps me get my stuff done quicker.

I have been using it for other stuff (real estate, grilling recipes, troubleshooting electrical issues with my truck), and it seems to have a very large knowledge base. At this point, my goal is to get good at asking the right kinds of questions to get the best/most accurate answers.
by KetoManx64 | 2025-07-01 01:16:19+00:00
It totally can. Governments around the world are trying their damnest to squeeze and crush as many of their citizens liberties as they possibly can. The European Central Bank is poised to push out the digital Euro that will track every single transaction you make and can be set to burn itself in your bank account if you post an anti immigration meme on Facebook. That is the direction the world is going. The only way we are going to protect outselves is ensure that our monetary system is a decentralized, peer to peer, self-governed and un-debankable, so that Corrupt governments do not make us financial slaves for the next 1000 years like in George Orwell's 1984.
by coldtea | 2025-07-01 01:16:41+00:00
>Drew makes some significant etymological mistakes. For example loadout doesn't come from gaming but military terminology

Does he pretend to give the etymology and ultimately origin of the term, or just where he or other AI-discussions found it? Because if it's the latter, he is entitled to call it a "gaming" term, because that's what it is to him and those in the discussion. He didn't find it in some military manual or learned it at boot camp!

But I would mostly challenge this mistake, if we admit it as such, is "significant" in any way.

The origin of loadout is totally irrelevant to the point he makes and the subject he discusses. It's just a useful term he adopted, it's history is not really relevant.
by efitz | 2025-07-01 01:16:44+00:00
> Easy if you know where to look. If you end up in the wrong sub menu you might simply search the web for instructions.

Actually, at the very top of the home page of the settings app is a search bar. If you type in anything reasonable (default, email, mail) then one of the first 2-3 results will be “default apps” or “default email”.
by godelski | 2025-07-01 01:17:06+00:00
> “It technically functions and therefore doesn’t need attention” has become an industry norm.

Most commonly seen with the aphorism "don't fix what isn't broken." But I really hate that aphorism. There's some truth to it, but it is commonly used as a thought terminating cliche. If you see a rusty pipe you should sure as hell fix it. Sure, it isn't "broken" in the sense that it has burst and is leaking water everywhere, but it sure is a ticking time bomb. And boy, is it a hell of a lot cheaper to fix a rusty pipe that isn't leaking than to fix a burst pipe and also pay for all the water damage.

The aphorism misses that "maintenance" is much cheaper than "repair". The aphorism misses that you can get major cost savings by doing thing differently. Sure, it costs more in the moment, but are we trying to run a business paycheck to paycheck or are we trying to create something sustainable. I sure hope your business is thinking more than just 3 months out. "More expensive now" is far too common of an excuse, enough that I see it used to justify not implementing things that would have a ROI within 6 months! Which not doing anything with under a year ROI is absolutely batshit insane (unless you're a startup living on the edge or something, but I see this in big tech companies and I hope we understand that's the context here).
by sandworm101 | 2025-07-01 01:18:39+00:00
Carfax for Cars is also a bit of a joke. It is designed for people who don't know anything about cars and/or are too intimidated by the process to get a proper inspection done. So the analogy holds for laptops. This is for low-knowledge people who want some nebulous/vague reassurance that a particular laptop is still "good" even though used.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-01 01:19:17+00:00
> White rice is basically pure carbs with barely any nutrients.

You should fact check your intuitions about nutrition on cronometer.com.

2 cups of cooked white rice have 17% of the days nutrients for 20% (400) of the calories (2000cal/day). 47% of the day's iron, 33% of the day's folate. 20-30% of almost every B-vitamin. 25% copper, 65% manganese, 43% selenium, 14% of the day's zinc.

Also look at 500g of boiled potato. Someone in this thread called it pure carbs. Ok, pure carbs that give you 27% of the day's nutrients for just 18% of the day's calories? That's a great deal.
by mdaniel | 2025-07-01 01:20:00+00:00
> But jesus fucking christ, I really hate these private communities.

Also, I don't know if Discourse was dropped in its head as a baby but only through some determined use of the mouse wheel could one possibly discover that there are ... I don't even know ... unlimited additional pages of discussion hiding in that thread. Infinite scroll wasn't designed to be taken literally, holy shit

At least with "Page 1 of 8675309" one can know in advance that they should pull up a chair. I guess the UX pattern is "hover over the '1h ago' URL to see the page number, n00b"

But, back on topic:

> We chose not to exclude all disappearing messages because

uh-huh, so kind of defeats the purpose of disappearing if they're preserved, eh?
by WarcrimeActual | 2025-07-01 01:20:21+00:00
Currently building a SaaS for product management to make up for some of my own defects. Looking for beta testers if anyone is interested in trying it and providing feedback. There will definitely be bugs but I plan to start using it for myself to help me keep up on some projects I'm working on. The big thing I'm excited about is AI Risk Analysis, which will review the dependencies and hopefully catch bottlenecks and issues before they cause misses. Current URL is below. Name is pending. Just had Google tell me something that sounded cool.

https://axonmesh.pages.dev/
by userbinator | 2025-07-01 01:20:33+00:00
MediaTek still has the old-style approach in many of their devices, requiring some incantations which expose serial over USB, but not in the way you think -- it's serial over USB pins!

Wasn't that only in their old feature-phone (MT62xx) SoCs? All the smartphone ones AFAIK (at least since the MT657x days) use USB CDC in their BootROM and preloader.
by andrewjk | 2025-07-01 01:20:34+00:00
A JS framework called Torpor: https://torpor.dev (https://github.com/andrewjk/torpor)

Been working on this for a while, with the aim of making something simple and immediately usable. Components are JS functions, containing UI that is (mostly) HTML, with reactivity only done through proxied objects.

To test it out I built a distributed social media/microblog site called Redraft: https://redraft.social (https://github.com/andrewjk/redraft)

Self-hostable or hosted for a fee, all your posts stored in an SQLite file, comment/like/react on other people's Redraft posts via a Web extension (pending approval, but you can use the unpacked version from source).

Both are in a pretty rough state, but usable for the intrepid.
by godelski | 2025-07-01 01:21:21+00:00
This just kinda made me think, are there less war stories being shared on HN? It sure feels like it. But what got me thinking is how sharing these types of war stories is an effective way to teach and share with one another. Maybe it's just my bubble, but I feel like I hear them infrequent. Anyways, this was a good one. Thanks for sharing.
by pezezin | 2025-07-01 01:22:04+00:00
I played the original DKC trilogy for the first time three years ago, and I have to say that I really disliked parts 1 and 2. The controls felt very "floaty" and the difficulty was not well adjusted. The bird stage in DKC 2 was specially rage-inducing, you know which one.

I really enjoyed DKC 3 though, which apparently is not that popular among hardcore DKC fans, so there is that.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-01 01:23:40+00:00
There's a ton of different factors at play, and American debt is one of the big ones. The dollar isn't like a stock, you typically want high confidence that the dollar will be strong when your investment matures. In the 1950s, buying a 30-year yield bond made a ton of sense and people did it like crazy, which gave the US treasury a lot of short-term liquidity. Comparatively, buying a 30-year bond in today's climate is like betting black on roulette and closing your eyes.
by woleium | 2025-07-01 01:24:20+00:00
SSL officially became TLS in 1999 when the Internet Engineering Task Force published TLS 1.0 as RFC 2246. TLS 1.0 was designed as an upgrade to SSL 3.0, addressing security vulnerabilities and making several improvements, but the changes were significant enough to prevent interoperability between SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0

It seems a bit silly to call a new tool an SSL manager?
by ChadNauseam | 2025-07-01 01:24:39+00:00
Haha, this is funny. I've been obsessed with rolling-hash based chunking since I read about it in the dat paper. I didn't realize there was a tree version, but it is a natural extension.

I have a related cryptosystem that I came up with, but is so obvious I'm sure someone else has invented it first. The idea is to back up a file like so: first, do a rolling-hash based chunking, then encrypt each chunk where the key is the hash of that chunk. Then, upload the chunks to the server, along with a file (encrypted by your personal key) that contains the information needed to decrypt each chunk and reassemble them. If multiple users used this strategy, any files they have in common would result in the same chunks being uploaded. This would let the server provider deduplicate those files (saving space), without giving the server provider the ability to read the files. (Unless they already know exactly which file they're looking for, and just want to test whether you're storing it.)

Tangent: why is it that downloading a large file is such a bad experience on the internet? If you lose internet halfway through, the connection is closed and you're just screwed. I don't think it should be a requirement, but it would be nice if there was some protocol understood by browsers and web servers that would be able to break-up and re-assemble a download request into a prolly tree, so I could pick up downloading where I left off, or only download what changed since the last time I downloaded something.
by SamaraMichi | 2025-07-01 01:25:03+00:00
This brings us to the problem AI companies are facing, the lack of data, they have already hoovered as much as they can from the internet and desperately need more data.

Which make sit blatantly obvious why we're beginning to see products being marketed under the guise of assistants/tools to aid you whose actual purpose is to gather real world picture and audio data, think meta glasses and what Ives and Altman are cooking up with their partnership.
by magicalhippo | 2025-07-01 01:25:50+00:00
In the Physics of Language Models[1] they argue that you must augment your training data by changing sentences and such, in order for the model to be able to learn the knowledge. As I understand their argument, language models don't have a built-in way to detect what is important information and what is not, unlike us. Thus the training data must aid it by presenting important information in many different ways.

Doesn't seem unreasonable that the same holds in a gaming setting, that one should train on many variations of each level. Change the lengths of halls connecting rooms, change the appearance of each room, change power-up locations etc, and maybe even remove passages connecting rooms.

[1]: https://physics.allen-zhu.com/part-3-knowledge/part-3-1
by godelski | 2025-07-01 01:28:08+00:00
A pet peeve of mine is how common it is for people to ignore qualifying words. Like you can say "most people do 'x'" and you can guarantee if you post that online people will come out of the woodwork saying "I don't do 'x'". Sure, the most claims can often be inaccurate, but those types of responses aren't helpful and aren't meaningfully responsive even if true. "Most" is just a very different word from "all". It implies a distribution but idky we often think things are discrete or binary.

I also see ignoring qualifiers as a frequent cause for online arguments. They're critical words when communicating and dropping them can dramatically change what's being communicated. And of course people are fighting because they end up talking about very different things and don't even realize it.

While I agree with you, that it's common for people to use these words sloppily, I think it is best to default to not ignore them. IME, in the worst case, it aids in communication as you get clarification.
by zzo38computer | 2025-07-01 01:28:28+00:00
I agree, but that is only one reason. The other reason is to save power (and also RAM, disk space, network bandwidth, time, etc) by omitting unwanted functions. (Some things to actively make it difficult (e.g. encryption, passwords) would use up more power, but since they are not constantly active and are not as many functions, they might still use up less power in total.)
by wakawaka28 | 2025-07-01 01:28:56+00:00
I think the cost of processing stuff that way would far exceed the cost of downloading the entire file again. You can already resume downloads from a byte offset if the server supports it, and that probably covers 99% of the cases where you would actually want to resume a download of a single file. Partial updates are rarely possible for large files anyway, as they are often compressed. If the host wants to make partial updates make sense then they could serve over rsync.
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-01 01:30:20+00:00
> I disagree with his indictment of the video game landscape as being narratively poor.

I think he would say they are narratively poor by his defintion that the narrative must be generated by the game/player combo and not just pre-programmed. People love "The Last of Us" for it's narrative but that narritive is something that can arguably be conveyed via book or movie. Crawford wanted something where the narrative itself was generated.

And no, he wouldn't count the choices players make in the average game. Whether to get go west or east. Whether to get the a sword first or the arrow. He wanted the story and character dialog to change. Few if any games do that. Of course today with LLMs it's likely some games will soon / have already done it to some degree and will do better in the future.

Going back to his older work, you'd need to feed a context to the LLM about each characters motivations and then update that context based on player actions so that as the game progresses the way each NPC interacts with the player, and other NPCs, changes in a way that's consistent with each character's intrisict motivations and their interactions with others.
by al_borland | 2025-07-01 01:32:58+00:00
I had AT&T DSL many years ago. They forced me to use their modem/router combo from 2Wire. It was truly awful. I eventually got so fed up with trying to connect things to the WiFi that I bought a separate router to plug into it, and connected to that network, which it did let me do. That solved most of my problems, other than the overall poor service.
by Intralexical | 2025-07-01 01:33:28+00:00
> I think veo3 proves that ai can generalize 2d and even 3d games, generating a video under prompt constraints is basically playing a game.

In the same way that keeping a dream journal is basically doing investigative journalism, or talking to yourself is equivalent to making new friends, maybe.

The difference is that while they may both produce similar, "plausible" output, one does so as a result of processes that exist in relation to an external reality.