MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by windexh8er | 2025-08-19 02:40:41+00:00
Not to mention that rail only got better as more was built out. With LLMs the more you allow them to create, to scrape, and to replace deterministic platforms that can do the same thing better and faster - the further down the rabbit hole we all go.

I look around and the only people that are shilling for AI seem to be selling it. There are those that are also in a bubble and that's all they hear day in and out. We keep hearing how far the 'intelligence' of these models has come (models aren't intelligent). There are some low hanging fruit edge cases, but just again today I spent an extra hour thinking I could shortcut a PoC by having LLMs bang out the framework. I leveraged all the latest versions of Opus, Kimi, GLM and Grok. For a very specific ask (happened to be building a quick testing setup for PaddleOCR) none of them got it right. Even when asking for very specific aspects of the solution I had in mind Opus was off the rails and "optimizing" within a turn or two.

I probably ended up using about 20% of the structure it gave me - but I could have easily gone back to another project that I've done where that framework actually had more thought put into it.

I really wish the state of the art was better. I don't use LLMs for searching much as I believe it's a waste of resources. But the polarization from the spin pieces by C-levels on top of the poor performance by general models for very specific asks looks nothing like the age of rail.

Do I believe that there are good use cases for small targeted models built on rich training data? I do. But that's not the look and feel from most of what we're seeing out there today. The bulk of it is prompt engineering on top of general models. And the AI slop from the frontier players is so recognizable and overused now that I can't believe anyone still isn't looking at any of this and immediately second guessing the validity. And these are not hallucinations we're seeing because these LLMs are not intelligent. They lack cognition - they are not truly thinking or reasoning.

Again - if LLMs were capable of mass replacement of workers today OpenAI wouldn't be selling anyone a $20/month subscription, or even a $200 one. They'd be selling directly to those C-levels the utopia of white collar replacements that doesn't exist today.
by mmaunder | 2025-08-19 02:42:15+00:00
A return to formality is the antidote, I’m afraid. As austere and priggish as it may seem. You may see brands and influencers emerging that gain traction with a kind of 1950s post WWII flavor of seriousness and formality. I’m not suggesting social conservatives. More the presentation and packaging of ideas and their purveyors. Formal instead of slovenly, polite vs obnoxious, eloquent vs simplistic, cultured vs vulgar, intellect vs spectacle.
by inkyoto | 2025-08-19 02:43:29+00:00
There is no such a thing as «subsequent commits» in git.

Commits in git are non-linear and form a tree[0][1]. A commit can be easily deleted without affecting the rest of the tree. If the git commit represent a subtree with branches dangling off it, deleting such a commit will delete the entire subtree. Commits can also be moved around, detached and re-attached to other commits.

[0] https://www.baeldung.com/ops/git-objects-empty-directory#2-g...

[1] https://www.baeldung.com/ops/git-trees-commit-tree-navigatio...
by strange_quark | 2025-08-19 02:44:38+00:00
Agree with this, the "find this thing in my spaghetti codebase" is far and away the best use of LLMs I've seen. Fill in the rest of this switch statement, populate this struct from this database call, etc. also work pretty well. I would love if I could get a small model that ran locally that was able to pull off those 2 tricks. Explaining code works sometimes, but even the biggest models are still prone to getting confused and/or making stuff up that isn't there. I don't like the agentic features at all and expect these to mostly die because they're expensive and, IMO, only provide the illusion of productivity.
by hifikuno | 2025-08-19 02:45:04+00:00
I was kinda similar when I first started using it. I watched heaps of videos and had so many plugins installed but I was never really sure if I was doing it "right". Then one day I got annoyed and uninstalled every plugin and just went back to basics. I only reach for plugins when I feel something is missing, but honestly the only plugins I use are Style Settings which let's me customize the theme a bit more and Calendar so I can have... well... a calendar.

I think the real power of it is the fact you can extend as much, or as little as you want!
by jdlshore | 2025-08-19 02:46:07+00:00
That was my thought too. General rule of thumb for independent contracting is that you should take the annual salary you would normally make and chop off the zeroes to get the hourly rate. So 150K/yr becomes $150/hr. That’s about double the yearly salary and pays for your increased costs (payroll tax, healthcare, retirement, vacation) as well as your bench time between jobs.

Additionally, the going rate for an interim CTO was about $50K/month last time I checked, which doesn’t get you 40 hrs / week, so is north of $600/hr.
Show HN: Memeclip.ai – AI-powered meme maker that turns text into memes
by zjy71055 | 2025-08-19 02:46:48+00:00
Hey HN!

I built MemeClip.ai - an AI meme maker that transforms any text into viral memes

Why I built this:

Most people want to express themselves with memes but face real barriers: they don't know what's trending, can't think of funny captions, or don't understand which templates work for different situations. I wanted to solve this by building an AI that understands both meme culture and context.

Technical highlights:

Semantic template matching: Text and image embeddings to find the perfect template match for any concept. Vision-language model integration: AI grasps visual context and meme structure for perfect captions

What's different:

Traditional meme generators like Imgflip are just template galleries with text editors - you pick a template and write captions yourself. MemeClip reverses this: describe your situation and our AI finds the perfect template and generates the caption automatically.

Would love to hear what HN thinks! Happy to answer any questions about the tech stack, AI approach, or meme philosophy

Thanks for try out
by chrisweekly | 2025-08-19 02:47:55+00:00
That's... weird. And kind of hypocritical, given the quality of your own comment which (a) mentioned downvotes and (b) used a few more words that boil down to "module protection". At this point I'm not exactly elevating the conversation either, for which I apologize. But I do think brief comments like mine and the one I replied to are perfectly fine.
by dbmnt | 2025-08-19 02:48:11+00:00
This is wrong. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how certificate authorities (CAs) work.

A certificate has to be signed by a trusted CA (one your browser already trusts).

A DNS provider could mint a self-signed cert for pornhub.com, but your browser would reject it immediately.

Even if they tried to trick a real CA, Certificate Transparency (CT) would expose the bogus certificate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency

Instead, NextDNS is very likely abusing the EDNS Client Subnet feature to provide website operators with a spoofed client location. Much more simple and less nefarious.
Heatwave deaths in Europe >= Gun deaths in the US?
by RestlessMind | 2025-08-19 02:48:18+00:00
"Nearly 47,000 people died of gun-related injuries in the United States in 2023" per https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-us/

"Europe counted 47,690 excess deaths due to heat in 2023, estimated a new study in Nature Medicine." - https://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/en/observatory/news-archive-observatory/heat-caused-over-47-000-deaths-in-europe-in-2023
by aetherspawn | 2025-08-19 02:48:27+00:00
If you have 10k rows this isn’t for you, but 99% of use cases have less than 100 rows.

For example, book list, movie list, customer list, invoice list, asset register, key register… once you hit a certain point, obsidian probably isn’t the right tool anymore. But no reason to go to the monthly SaaS “right tool” at the POC stage.

Obsidian is the pre-step for a larger database: cheap, fast to customise, easy to backup (git), self supported. It’s probably not going to run a company, but it will suit an individual or small startup.

And 99.99% of discussions about scaling are premature optimisation (cit needed). A lot of people spend more time thinking about scaling then entering their data, which probably means the data is smaller than they think! ha
by strictnein | 2025-08-19 02:49:13+00:00
> I will forever mourn the general demise of server browsers.

I miss GameSpy, the original application, not the service it morphed into later. It was so easy to find a server to play on, playing the levels/mods you wanted to play.

Before that, I spent a lot of time (and money from my dad's credit card) on DWANGO. For those not familiar with DWANGO, you dialed in to their servers and then it acted like you were on a LAN. You could play games like Doom, Doom 2, Duke Nukem 3D, etc against other people. There was a main chat room to talk about what games you wanted to play.

It was also a much nicer place to play, partly because you had to pay _per minute_ in each game. The price wasn't anything crazy, if I recall, but it definitely kept people focused on the game.

Also met some good people and ended up working on a gaming site with one (MeccaWorld.com, on the off chance someone remembers that - I ran the Quake section) and started a company with them a decade or so later.
by PessimalDecimal | 2025-08-19 02:49:23+00:00
"While Aaronson puts blame on Jewish communities in the U.S. and the U.S. government for not aggressively pursuing extraditions, she says Israeli authorities have also failed to prioritize the hunt for suspects."

"JCW says the problem reaches into the upper echelons of Israeli politics as well. They note that Yaakov Litzman, leader of an ultra-orthodox alliance in Israel's legislature and the current minister of health, has been accused of preventing the deportation of a Malka Leifer, a former head teacher at a Jewish school in Australia, where she is wanted on multiple charges of child sexual abuse."

Why is this uncooperative behavior tolerated?
by prisenco | 2025-08-19 02:49:49+00:00
Every contractor already knows all this. And those who don't learn quick.

I'm not clear what you're arguing here.

When I evaluate an hourly rate, I multiply by 2100 and ask myself if this is a reasonable salary & benefits total package.

So if my rate is $125 an hour, that comes to $263k, which is a base salary of around $200k plus healthcare, self-employment taxes and sick/vacation time, etc. Now my healthcare costs might be lower than others and I don't factor in retirement because I work primarily for startups, but again this is why each contractor calculates differently.

I wouldn't multiply it by more hours if it was insufficient, I would just raise my rate.
by alex1138 | 2025-08-19 02:50:01+00:00
See also: https://brownstone.org/articles/facebook-is-dead/

And I would like an explanation from HN about their censorship of covid too (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36654466) and why my posting of https://rumble.com/v28x6zk-sasha-latypova-msc.-nsa-team-enig... got flagged
by maximinus_thrax | 2025-08-19 02:50:04+00:00
This is about creating a moral panic. That ship has sailed back in 2020. This is a calculated move towards voter suppression. The playbook is that an overgrown ICE could be used to 'police' the polling stations and discourage brown people from voting, if mail-in voting is challenged and states bend the knee to cheeto. I'm not worried about traditional blue states, but purple states may be just enough to tip the scales at the midterms. I don't think the country realizes how big of an error the 2024 elections were...
by 1659447091 | 2025-08-19 02:51:00+00:00
It doesn't matter if a student ID required a DNA test. It is simply not a valid ID as accepted by the state of Texas.

States have a constitution right to establish its voting rules. If students want to vote in Texas and Texas requires a valid Texas ID then the student needs a Texas approved valid ID to vote. There is a list of IDs the state of Texas considers valid, including a passport, however a student ID is not a valid ID as recognized by Texas for any state business.

If that is simply beyond your being able to look at without grasping for straws and moving the goal post [we are talking about LTC vs student ID specifically, if you wanted to talk about voting locations then you should of went with that and left the ID thing out of it, which was exactly my point in the first post]. Anyway the only valid conclusion I can come away with from this discussion is that you only want to indulge in faux outrage and win kudos or something.(unfortunate but what a weird way to waste time) You have fun with that and I hope you get bunches of kudos, take care.
by latentsea | 2025-08-19 02:51:51+00:00
How would you even detect the violations in the first place? How much resources would it take to enforce? How effective do you think that would actually be in practice?

Pretty unrealistic at actually being a workable solution, and obviously so.

You misunderstand my position. I don't want a police state for everybody. I think that's the greater of two evils. It's just from personal experience that I wrote about elsewhere in this thread, I know the depths of the horror of opting for the status quo. It's brutally fucked up.

But at least I'm honest enough to say I'd rather live in a free society where kids are subject to abuse than risk a full-on dictatorship where everyone is subject to a different kind of abuse. I'm willing to accept those kids as collateral, because at least it's only a subset of people as opposed to all people.

The thing that bothers me about the discussion is everyone I've talked to who is on the same side as me is either blissfully or willfully unaware of the reality of what's happening to large numbers of kids, or they won't be honest and say that even in the face of knowing the reality that they accept it's a sacrifice they are willing to make.

So be honest.
Ask HN: Are we allowed to discuss Israel on HN?
by Jimmc414 | 2025-08-19 02:52:20+00:00
It happens too often that a story like this one [0] gets a great amount of traction and interest then it is banished from the front page. Can we get greater clarity as to what topics are not allowed? Respectfully, it seems inorganic for stories like this to go from #10 to #1005 in seconds.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44947572
by anywhichway | 2025-08-19 02:53:09+00:00
One potential issue with that approach is the factors wouldn't stay very constant across generations of AI models.

While a lot of people have used various methods to try to gauge the strength of various AI models, one of my favorites is this time horizon analysis [1] which took coding tasks of various lengths and looked at how long it takes to humans to complete those tasks and compared that to chance that the AI would successfully complete the task. Then they looked at various threshholds to see how long of tasks an AI could generally complete with a certain percent threshold. They found the length of a task that AI is able to complete with a various threshholds is doubling about every 7 months.

The reason I found this to be an interesting approach is both because AI seems to struggling with coding tasks as the problem grows in complexity and also because being able to give it more complex tasks is an important metric both for coding tasks or more generally just asking AIs to act as independent agents. In my experience increasing the complexity of a problem has a much larger performance falloff for AI than in humans where the task would just take longer, so this approach makes a lot of intuitive sense to me.

[1] - https://theaidigest.org/time-horizons
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-08-19 02:54:07+00:00
I have a (knowingly irrational) dislike for Counter Strike because it fragmented what was previously an essentially single 'Quake / Quake 2" community, making the free-for-all adrenaline frag fests that I most enjoyed less populated, specifically at LANs.

I got my fun from balls out running and firing rockets and rails in the chaos of free for all, and CS offered what was essentially the 'we're all campers' version, which wasn't fun at all (for me, at the time).

I didn't want to simulate anything, I want(ed) chaos, instant respawn, lightning reflexes, constant motion. Maybe I do have ADHD.

CS has stood the test of time though, so respect for that.
by KingMob | 2025-08-19 02:54:29+00:00
I agree with your critiques, but I still don't think it negates the overall picture I see.

When I was a scientist, we were trained to look at the overall body of evidence when trying to assess a claim. Any individual study has flaws, but when we survey the literature as a whole, do we see many studies confirming a finding? Independent studies presumably don't share the same set of flaws (usually), and the more studies demonstrating something, the more likely it is to be true.

And I just haven't heard any counter-evidence. Are job postings increasing or decreasing? What's the change in MAU for Clojurians? Etc.

I looked for job/social media numbers, but it's hard to get those numbers. If you have better data, I'd love to see it.
by nis0s | 2025-08-19 02:54:40+00:00
> We do not benefit from working with the grain of post-Christian egalitarian-humanitarian morality…

Except that you do? There is a sizable number of the intelligentsia which refuses to perform impartial and objective analysis.

Imagine your most annoying ideological opponent. Whatever they say, has some kernel of truth. If there’s anything that should follow progressivism is pursuit of truth-seeking, and how to determine where politics starts and reality ends.
by rectang | 2025-08-19 02:54:52+00:00
Or as my brother and I called it, "Ick-bihn-buh" — enunciating the "ICBINB" acronym.

The proof-of-concept marketing name "I Can't Believe It's Not Salmon" illustrates the fundamental problem here. Can lab-grown salmon be labeled as just plain "salmon"? Can it reside in the meat department right next to farm-raised and wild-caught salmon fillets? Does it always have to be prepended with "cultivated"?
by Eisenstein | 2025-08-19 02:55:27+00:00
"The degradation rate of lithium-ion battery is not a linear process with respect tonumber of cycles, battery aging tests (Fig. 1) have shown that in cycling tests the degradation rate is signiﬁcantly higher during the early cycles than during the later cycles, and then increases rapidly when reaching the end of life (EoL)."

Actually, 80% is considered effectively 'end of life':

"Battery end of life is typically deﬁned as the point at which the battery only provides 80% of its rated maximum capacity"

* https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303890624_Modeling_...
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-08-19 02:55:41+00:00
> People asking for performance aren't pissed you didn't write Microsoft Word in assembly we're pissed it takes 10 seconds to open a fucking text editor.

It could be worse I suppose...

Some versions of Microsoft Excel had a flight simulator embedded in them[0]!

:-D

0 - https://web.archive.org/web/20210326220319/https://eeggs.com...
by seneca | 2025-08-19 02:55:57+00:00
Perhaps some kind of Mandela effect, but I would have adamantly sworn I remember newgrounds shutting down.

My friends and I spent many hours playing games on NG and screwing around with flash. Feels like a completely different world at this point. Glad they're still around, and I love that they're running events like this to remember the good old days.
by alexose | 2025-08-19 02:56:14+00:00
It's a little hard to describe. Flavor-wise, I thought it was great. Very clean, savory taste with no fishiness. The texture wasn't right, though. Too smooth and consistent, I guess due to the lack of connective tissue. Still incredibly impressive and exciting technology.

Also, the dish itself was really cool. Kann served it as sashimi, along with a bunch of small pickled things and a hunk of smoked watermelon.
by david_draco | 2025-08-19 02:56:16+00:00
The words "good" and "very bad" indicate that the world is less important to that person than themselves. I'd be okay with a bit of personal harm if it helps against climate change.

Ultra-processed food does not have an agreed-upon definition, and is the new "junk food" with the pretense of being more scientific. Is bread and pizza ultra-processed food? Studies do not agree on their definitions, sometimes including ingredient lists, sometimes not, sometimes it is required that the product is made in small shops with love and not in large factories. The mechanism of how ultra-processed food are supposed to cause harm remains undefined.
by somebehemoth | 2025-08-19 02:56:46+00:00
To support the idea of unexpected difficulties in getting ID, I suggest reading about the North Carolina DMV. More direct evidence: try to schedule an appointment with the NC DMV via their online appointment system from any metropolitan area of the state and probably most others. Most people would not expect this to be a problem since the state requires online booking to do all kinds of identification related services.
by teleforce | 2025-08-19 02:57:21+00:00
It's not only lower frequency, it also need robust wireless modulation that can work with very limited LoS where LoRa perform badly. LoRa is pretty much useless in your use cases.

Currently we're working on a new wireless modulation that has much higher bandwidth (similar to HaLow) but 1000x better in BER performance than LoRa in limited LoS propagation model based on simulation. If we can get 100x improvement in real world testing for the high bandwidth version I'm more than happy. Our Japanese collaborators has tested the lower bandwidth version similar to LoRa bandwidth and frequency, and it work fine inside a bunker.

If you're interested perhaps we can collaborate on testing the solution. Already proposed to IEEE as new wireless PHY modulation but to no avail yet.
by sans_souse | 2025-08-19 02:58:01+00:00
As someone who worked directly with PFAS in the substrate coating industry, as well as (and not coincidentally) living in close proximity to a know 'mega-site' where ground water has to contain high levels to the point EPA was involved and towns were issued free bottled water.. the issue is one I recognize and have a somewhat personal relationship with

My question after reading the article is how exactly is this to make an impact while we continue to manufacture and use these products that contain them? Are the applications declining, because I tend to think the opposite is true with only prospective replacements being in the experimental stages at best..