MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by qwertox | 2025-07-07 14:28:03+00:00
> Meanwhile, I feel like if I tried to offload my work to an LLM, I would both lose context and be violating the do-one-thing-and-do-it-well principle I half-heartedly try to live by.

He should use it as a Stack Overflow on steroids. I assume he uses Stack Overflow without remorse.

I used to have 1y streaks on being on SO, now I'm there around once or twice per week.
by k8sToGo | 2025-07-07 14:28:57+00:00
I have been using LLM as a "therapist" for quite some time now. To be fair, I do not use it any different than I have used the internet before LLMs. I read up on concepts and how they apply to me etc. It just helps me to be much faster. Additionally, it helps working like a smart diary or something like that.

It is important to note that the word therapy covers quite a large range. There is quite a difference between someone who is having anxiety about a talk tomorrow vs. someone who has severe depression with suicidal thoughts.

I prefer the LLM approach for myself, because it is always available. I also had therapy before and the results are very similar. Except for the therapist I have to wait weeks, costs a lot, and the sessions are rather short. By the time the appointment comes a long my questions have become obsolete.
by teiferer | 2025-07-07 14:29:05+00:00
Technically viable.

Socially not viable since all actors that could make it happen are incentivised to actively work against this to ever happen: Governments and big tech. Where are the ad opportunities if stuff does not go to a central platform which profiles you and serves "content" with ads?

It would technologically be even pretty easy to do. There have been many attempts already, including things like roof net / freifunk. It just never works because you have very big actors against you.
by CmdrKrool | 2025-07-07 14:29:10+00:00
In the case of multiple base classes wouldn't it be more sensible for the derived class to forego the lexical convenience of super() and simply call each base explicitly? i.e.

BaseEstimator.__init__(self, **kwargs) ServingMixin.__init__(self, **kwargs)

If one wants to inherit from multiple classes then they should be responsible for specifying the details of how that happens. Why should a base class be expected to add boilerplate just in case some external consumer comes along and wants to use it in some unforeseeable context?

That super() has a "method resolution order" seems like a fudge. Now 'super' doesn't necessarily mean 'superclass' anymore at the point of use. Am I missing some other hypothetical situation in which super()'s MRO brings more value for the price of having to know about this extra, implicit behaviour?

And what's funny is that in the example given, the first base class not calling super() leads to the bad consequence that the other base class doesn't get to set some internal state (self.mode). Yet in the next section, "When to use a Mixin", it advises: "A mixin is a class that [...] does not contain state"
by 93po | 2025-07-07 14:29:25+00:00
i would encourage everyone to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. you interact with these people in passing, they deal with themselves all the time. you might find them grating or difficult to work with, and that's fair, but i would hope people wouldn't extend "i dont like this person" to "I dont believe this person has a disability and they're making it up and i assume this because i dont like them"

neurodivergence can and frequently is a real debilitating disability. it is really fucking hard to cope with in a society that actively punishes it, and is full of perspectives like yours that invalidate these very real conditions.

i understand it's a difficult thing to wrap your head around. it isn't super visible like someone missing their legs. it's a really complicated, nuance spectrum of problems that are also really difficult to understand by people who don't have it, and frequently the people who do have it also don't know they have or understand how it impacts them
by FidoTheDog | 2025-07-07 14:29:28+00:00
Passkeys solve this-Oh wait.

Malware can just steal cookies and ne'er-do-wells can read access tokens from localStorage with XSS.

Edit: Experts, please show how passkeys prevent local cookie theft by infostealer malware and cross-site scripting attacks targeting long-lived auth tokens in localStorage (which isn't subject to HttpOnly/Secure restrictions).
by taylodl | 2025-07-07 14:29:36+00:00
Of course, they're going to use Linux or BSD. But I recently saw a demo of Commodore OS Vision 3.0, which I understand is a Linux distro, and I was overwhelmed by the kitsch. That's what we don't need - how would Linux look if it had been released in the 80s?

I guess what I'm getting at is if Commodore just wants to re-hash their glory days in a modern context, then that's an extremely limited market. I'd like to see the 2020's equivalent of a Commodore 64 or Commodore Amiga: what kind of machine would you end up with by appealing to everyday people and not worrying so much about standards? THAT is what made those machines special. We don't need a re-creation of those machines; we need new machines embodying those ideals.

If Commodore decides to take this route, then they can give me a call!
by dtech | 2025-07-07 14:29:51+00:00
I'd argue that is mostly because 1) people follow audiobook or TV series pronunciations and 2) most discussions happen online and not in verbal form.

This is definitely a problem when it surfaces. For example the Stormlight Archive [1] series has two voice actors narrating the audiobook, and they don't even agree between them how to pronounce half the made up names.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stormlight_Archive
by jazzyjackson | 2025-07-07 14:30:04+00:00
FWIW the number of parameters in a LLM is in the same ballpark as the number of nuerons in a human (roughly 80B) but neurons are not weights, they are kind of a nueral net unto themselves, stateful, adaptive, self modifying, a good variety of neurotransmitters (and their chemical analogs) aside from just voltage.

It's fun to think about just how fantastic a brain is, and how much wattage and data-center-scale we're throwing around trying to approximate its behavior. Mega-effecient and mega-dense. I'm bearish on AGI simply from an internetworking standpoint, the speed of light is hard to beat and until you can fit 80 billion interconnected cores in half a cubic foot you're just not going to get close to the responsiveness of reacting to the world in real time as biology manages to do. but that's a whole nother matter. I just wanted to pick apart that magnitude of parameters is not an altogether meaningful comparison :)
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-07 14:30:15+00:00
I was also at Google for years. Places like that are not even close to representative. They can afford to just-throw-more-resources, they get bulk discounts on hardware and they pay top dollar for engineers.

In more common scenarios that represent 95% of the software industry CI budgets are fixed, clusters are sized to be busy most of the time, and you cannot simply launch 10,000 copies of the same test on 10,000 machines. And even despite that these CI clusters can easily burn through the equivalent of several SWE salaries.

> These are orthogonal. You want maximum deterministic CI steps so that you make builds fully hermetic and cache every single thing.

Again, that's how companies like Google do it. In normal companies, build caching isn't always perfectly reliable, and if CI runs suffer flakes due to caching then eventually some engineer is gonna get mad and convince someone else to turn the caching off. Blaze goes to extreme lengths to ensure this doesn't happen, and Google spends extreme sums of money on helping it do that (e.g. porting third party libraries to use Blaze instead of their own build system).

In companies without money printing machines, they sacrifice caching to get determinism and everything ends up slow.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-07 14:30:39+00:00
French is not a good example. Pronunciation often deviates from spelling in French (e.g. many silent letters and inconsistent mappings).

Hungarian, however, is pronounced the way it is written, as its orthographic type is phonemic, whereas French and English are of type deep orthography.

Serbian is of the perfectly phonemic type. "Write as you speak, read as it is written" is a common saying.
by stared | 2025-07-07 14:31:04+00:00
Well, in my experience (I admit, I am a difficult client), it is much harder to prompt that way a therapist. I mean, they need (ethically, legally, etc) adhere strongly to "better safe that sorry", which also gives constraints on what can be said. I understand that. With one therapist it took me quite some time to get to the point he reduced sugar-coating and when's needed, stick a pin in.

I got some of the most piercing remarks from close friends (I am blessed by company of such insightful people!) - which both know me from my life (not only what I tell about my life) and are free to say whatever they wish.
by g-b-r | 2025-07-07 14:31:13+00:00
While the point that 2FA can also be a risk is fair, that article has some fairly horrible advice.

His long, unbreakable password that he only knows by heart can be leaked by any of the services he uses it for, if he uses it for more than one.

Weak password + name of the service is one of the first combinations tried by attackers.

Random complex password but relying on e-mail recovery for unimportant and rarely used services, instead, seems ok (but it takes very little to save a password in a password manager).

It's not a great look that his site doesn't support tls, by the way
by jcranmer | 2025-07-07 14:31:19+00:00
> The difficulty in coming up with a test for AGI is coming up with something that people will accept a passing grade as AGI.

The difficulty with intelligence is we don't even know what it is in the first place (in a psychology sense, we don't even have a reliable model of anything that corresponds to what humans point at and call intelligence; IQ and g are really poor substitutes).

Add into that Goodhart's Law (essentially, propose a test as a metric for something, and people will optimize for the test rather than what the test is trying to measure), and it's really no surprise that there's no test for AGI.
by cess11 | 2025-07-07 14:31:45+00:00
Right, so I wrote some more too, "something that isn't ancient in some scientific sense but still is a place of historical or archaeological interest".

An athletic facility that's been going since the late 1800s and has a dedicated museum and is of distinct local cultural importance kind of fits the "historical interest" part pretty neatly.

As your lovdata-link shows, there are six different signs for severdigheter, not just one, and in the local parlance severdighet typically refers to things like historiske steder, monument and so on. Unless something has a bit of history it's unlikely to get one of those signs put up.
by psychoslave | 2025-07-07 14:31:53+00:00
That's a tool, and it depends what you need to do. If it fits someone need and make them more productive, or even simply enjoy more the activity, good.

Just because two people are fixing something on the whole doesn't mean the same tool will hold fine. Gum, pushpin, nail, screw,bolts?

The parent thread did mention they use LLM successfully in small side project.
by mathiaspoint | 2025-07-07 14:32:07+00:00
Good God I hate CI. Just let me run the build automation myself dammit! If you're worried about reproducibility make it reproducible and hash the artifacts, make people include the hash in the PR comment if you want to enforce it.

The amount of time people waste futzing around in eg Groovy is INSANE and I'm honestly inclined to reject job offers from companies that have any serious CI code at this point.
by 8organicbits | 2025-07-07 14:32:11+00:00
Let's break it down:

Authentic user sentiment - this is an impossible problem. At scale, the best you could do is to ask an LLM to rate sentiment and authenticity. If you can tolerate inaccuracies, that may be viable.

Rate limits: web crawling frameworks do this out of the box via robots.txt, various headers, etc. Non-trivial to set up, but not novel.

ToS: You'll need a lawyer to advise here. Possibly by reading each ToS document individually, including every ToS update.

Legal/ethical: we'd need to know more about what you're doing to comment.

Generally: Retail websites want users to use their website to purchase products. If your scraping doesn't drive traffic to their sites, then they won't want your scraping. If users previously went directly to the retail website to view the reviews, but now used your site instead, then they'd fear loss of revenue. One way or another, they'll try to prevent this from happening.
by tel | 2025-07-07 14:32:18+00:00
If you're familiar with Zorn's Lemma, the construction is just to order bases by inclusion and to consider chains created by noting that there must be an independent dimension and adding it inductively. You can upper bound each of these chains by unioning the members of the chain (which preserves linear independence). By Zorn's Lemma that means there is a maximal linearly independent system and if an element existed outside of that system's span it would contradict that maximality.
by Twirrim | 2025-07-07 14:33:13+00:00
How do you accurately evaluate candidates with them?

It's an artificial test that doesn't reflect your working environment at all, and so you're not actually getting to see what they'd be capable of doing faced with real world coding work.

It's a discriminatory practice that is proven bad for a lot of neurodivergent candidates, like folks with autism, or ADHD.

You end up eliminating a whole lot of good candidates just by the structure, and then end up picking up a candidate who happens to do well out of that small subset and it still won't stop you from hiring developers that are terrible.

One of the worst developers I've ever worked with will absolutely sail through leetcode exercises. He's brilliant at it. Something about his brain excels in that environment. If only work was like a leetcode interview, filled with leetcode style questions, and someone watching and evaluating his work as he did it, he'd be a fine hire anywhere.

He can't write actual production software to save his arse, needs deadline pressure breathing down his neck, and then what he'll produce at the last minute (always technically makes the deadline), will probably work but is the most unmaintainable nightmare that needs to be rejected and redone by another developer.
by huimang | 2025-07-07 14:33:26+00:00
All languages have inconsistencies, but it seems in vogue these days to single out english and use it as a punching bag. Furthermore, no natural human languages (i.e. not artificially constructed ones like esperanto) are logical. They all have irregularities and illogical aspects.

It is not "beyond fucked" that things have different pronunciations sometimes. Other languages have problems for people who solely learn by speaking. It's not unique to english.
by eesmith | 2025-07-07 14:34:16+00:00
Yes, and how do those entirely true observations connect to the non-use of diacritics in English?

I pointed out the ship example from the text, which was used to demonstrate how "this early French influence over English, which arose from the Norman Conquest, is the beginning of the reason why English is written without accent marks. ... This was the French habit that the Normans brought to England: the use of extra letters to spell sounds that the alphabet didn’t have special letters for. This is why English has combinations like sh, th, ee, oo, ou that each make only a single sound."

That's an extra letter being used to indicate a different sound than the base sound, similar to how diacritics are used to indicate a different sound than the base sound ("the cedilla has the function of ensuring that a c can be pronounced like an s, despite coming before an a, o, or, u").
by Mossly | 2025-07-07 14:35:09+00:00
Anybody wanting more should check out “The Flute and Flute Playing” (1871) by Theobald Boehm - an autodidact polymath who employed his talents in metalworking and physics to iteratively perfect the metal cylinder bored flute.

It contains detailed explanations of his development process, including a complete schema for determining optimal tonehole positions - developed after he first created a flute in which he could move them!

It helped me to more deeply appreciate the engineering marvel that is the modern western concert ‘Boehm’ flute. It’s an exceptionally pure instrument.
by vel0city | 2025-07-07 14:35:16+00:00
> At some point you have to blame the driver model on Windows.

Serious question, specifically what is wrong with the driver model in terms of this situation? What change would you propose to solve this? Why isn't it a matter of the device manufacturers churning out crappy and poorly tested devices and solely Microsoft's fault?

I do agree, Microsoft should probably make it easier to point out "hey this device is causing your system to wake, here's some potential fixes", as reading the powercfg /sleepstudy takes a little bit of deeper computer knowledge. But in the end a crappy driver and bad hardware is going to be a crappy driver and bad hardware. Should Windows just refuse to work at all with said crappy hardware?

Especially considering I've had so many other devices which don't have these problems. If it was truly the OS that was at fault, why isn't the issue with every device running the OS instead of only some devices with some hardware and firmware versions?

> Microsoft's advice last I checked is to not store sleeping laptops running windows in laptop bags

Got an official source for that claim?
by orochimaaru | 2025-07-07 14:35:22+00:00
My thesis is actually simpler. For the longest time until the Industrial Revolution humans have done uninteresting work for the large part. There was a routine and little else. Intellectuals worked through a very terse knowledge base and it was handed down master to apprentice. Post renaissance and industrial age the amount of known knowledge has exploded, the specializations have exploded. Most of what white collar work is today is managing and searching through this explosion of knowledge and rules. AI (well the LLM part) is mostly targeted towards that - making that automated. That’s all it is. Here is the problem though, it’s for the clueless. Those who are truly clueless fall victim to the hallucinations. Those who have expertise in their field will be able to be more efficient.

AI isn’t replacing innovation or original thought. It is just working off an existing body of knowledge.
by trelane | 2025-07-07 14:35:28+00:00
It's also Merriam-Webster, a descriptivist dictionary. Others are of a prescriptionist bent. For example, Cambridge: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/retic...

More on prescriptive vs descriptive: https://twominenglish.com/prescriptivist-vs-descriptivist/

I personally am more descriptivist when it comes to English. It is also a lot of fun to bring some M-W citations in order to "Well, actually" someone who is "Well, actually"-ing.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-07-07 14:35:33+00:00
I meant financially benefit. See

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44490667

Insurance seller has to earn at least enough for payroll, so at least some of the premiums go towards that instead of any money received from claims.

Investment earnings cancel out because both the insurance buyer and insurance seller have access to same returns via broad market index funds. I.e. you can self insure and get the same returns on your savings that the insurance seller is going to get if you gave them a premium.
by simonw | 2025-07-07 14:35:37+00:00
Building the stuff on https://tools.simonwillison.net only represents about 10% of the coding work I do with LLMs.

I wrote about my process for non-vibe-coded projects here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/

> The skill being diminished is not the ability to write a single-page utility or single-purpose script. It is the ability to build and maintain a mental model of a complex machine.

That's the thing that LLMs help me with 90% of the time. It's also why I don't think non-programmers armed with LLMs are a threat to my career.
by LurkandComment | 2025-07-07 14:35:42+00:00
You're trying to create set of rules for something that's evolved from strong oral to written to emphasis on oral again. It's organic and used in coordination with many other countries and their languages. If you understood that many of our rules are defined within specific instances, by specific needs (publishers example), and are somewhat arbitrary, you'd be amazed we have any consensus at all. My theory is that publishers, broadcasters (Like the BBC) and educational institutions are really where standardization has been enforced. Outside of that English and language is as flexible as a sender and receiver of a communication will allow.
by gonzobonzo | 2025-07-07 14:35:53+00:00
I agree with you but I'll go a step further - these benchmarks are a good example of how far we are from AGI.

A good base test would be to give a manager a mixed team of remote workers, half being human and half being AI, and seeing if the manager or any of the coworkers would be able to tell the difference. We wouldn't be able to say that AI that passed that test would necessarily be AGI, since we would have to test it in other situations. But we could say that AI that couldn't pass that test wouldn't qualify, since it wouldn't be able to successfully accomplish some tasks that humans are able to.

But of course, current AI is nowhere near that level yet. We're left with benchmarks, because we all know how far away we are from actual AGI.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-07 14:36:00+00:00
From "Stochastic Parrots All the Ways Down"[1]

> Our analysis reveals that emergent abilities in language models are merely “pseudo-emergent,” unlike human abilities which are “authentically emergent” due to our possession of what we term “ontological privilege.”

[1]https://ai.vixra.org/pdf/2506.0065v1.pdf
by jvanderbot | 2025-07-07 14:36:43+00:00
You might be entertained to learn that this happens _all the time_. The spearpoint of application is often a _long way_ from the theory. So much so that they can miss obvious things.

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscover...

(Dont' skip the comments)

Sometimes to hilarious results:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7677819/
by r00f | 2025-07-07 14:36:44+00:00
I strongly disagree that "it's a shame" that English does not use diacritics. English is my second language (third maybe, considering that the country of my birth is bilingual), and is my favorite language to read and to write. I tried to learn French for two years and stopped, and all those excessive writing marks were among the reasons.

God bless all those monks who decided to keep English writing clean.
Show HN: Smackdown: Markdown Viewer for macOS, Fast, Fluid, and Free
by k_badcommand | 2025-07-07 14:37:28+00:00
Hey all, I'm the Founder & Developer at Bad Command AI, and I'm really excited to share this project with you all!

Smackdown on macOS App Store is now available.

Experience markdown like never before. Beautiful themes, native tabs, and blazing fast performance make reading documentation a joy on your Mac.

Supports light and dark themes, and a very special cyberpunk theme (because why not?).

We just pushed out an update today that adds fluid zooming, dynamic fonts with scaling, and a new wide mode function to expand the view for ultrawide and high resolution monitors.

Lots more to come, we want this to be the very best Markdown viewer available on the Mac platform!

Full disclosure, I am the developer of this project.

I really appreciate the Hacker News community and thank you all for any interest you may have in our humble app!