MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lrvick | 2025-08-18 11:16:27+00:00
I run AdNauseam to click as many ads as possible randomly simulating ad-addicted humans, just to waste as much money of adtech companies and ad buyers as possible. This year I caused something like $10k to likely be paid for ads to be delivered to my computer that I sent to /dev/null and never saw.

I see no way adtech will reform unless conversion rates plummet to the point that the business model becomes unsustainable.

Genuine question: If millions of people ran automated ad-clicking bots, how would your industry survive?
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-18 11:16:57+00:00
They sell the same networks in my experience (west and northeast coast).

The MCOs are not carving out different networks for specific employers. You buy a bronze PPO from United Health directly, or your employer does, it’s going to be all the same providers. If you get gold, then the deductibles/copay will be less.

The networks used to be different when HMOs were in vogue, but if your employer is only giving you an HMO option, you need to find a different employer. PPOs are the only sensible option (except maybe Kaiser on the west coast, but even they sell PPOs, just costs more to see a non Kaiser provider).
by Fr3dd1 | 2025-08-18 11:17:21+00:00
I had quiet a ride myself with that topic. For years my opinion was, that I dont want to, as the auther here suggests as well, go with tdd as long as I dont know exactly what I need. Than I switched over and used tdd for everything with a more regid (interface) design upfront. Nowadays I use tdd from the integration side and only add unit tests later or case by case when I think its usefull. A really good ressource is "Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests"
by philipp-gayret | 2025-08-18 11:17:46+00:00
Agree on that it should be composable. Even better if MCP tooling wouldn't yield huge amounts of output that pollutes the context and the output of one can be input to the next, so indeed that may as well be code.

Would be nice if there was a way for agents to work with MCPs as code, preview or debug the data flowing through them. At the moment it all seems not a mature enough solution and Id rather mount a Python sandbox with API keys to what it needs than connect an MCP tool on my own machine.
by Ezhik | 2025-08-18 11:18:06+00:00
I really want to see more HyperCard-style data persistence, where both the code and the data are one one document, so this is cool to see.

I was actually just playing with a similar concept, except as an Obsidian plugin: https://bsky.app/profile/ezhik.jp/post/3lwoazfypx22j
by 0xCE0 | 2025-08-18 11:18:47+00:00
Here is my strategy for bookmarking:

I have my own custom frontpage.html as browser's homepage, where are links for websites I visit daily (e.g. HN). In that frontpage there is a tab, which shows links.txt content in iframe, where I throw links that I feel I should sometime revisit. I also have random.txt for random copypaste storage that shows in its own iframe tab.

If I encounter something I feel contains very important reading, I just take a full page screenshot of the webpage with Firefox's screenshot tool as png, so it won't linkrot/vanish. If the page is too long for png, I print it as PDF.
by rickdeckard | 2025-08-18 11:18:48+00:00
> "The wearable, codenamed Hypernova, has been rumored for some time. It is expected to be a high-end version of Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, with a small display at the bottom of the right lens. The display will only be visible to the wearer, and it can be controlled using a wrist accessory called Ceres"

> "Hypernova will now start at $800, the same as the iPhone 16."

This will be interesting to see play out. Not just Meta, not this specific device, but the entire ecosystem.

For the first time there is now a device-class which can replace the "consumption" aspect of a smartphone, with the potential to start a journey away from the smartphone as the main device...
by zahlman | 2025-08-18 11:20:51+00:00
I have to say, it feels rather strange to read

> It would be a great to ignore all the noise of modern web dev and just build the experience I want

sandwiched in between meme images that intersperse short bursts of text as if the reader needs constant distraction from the act of reading.

The experience I want is a short prose description up front, backstory that flows, and diagrams only where they actually illustrate a concept that needs it.
by neuralkoi | 2025-08-18 11:20:56+00:00
> how long before the total collapse?

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

I've still to see a site where Firefox is not supported. uBlock origin still works well with Firefox.

When I start having issues with those, I'll start looking for a replacement. Hopefully Ladybird Browser will be out by then.
by agentcoops | 2025-08-18 11:20:56+00:00
I've worked extensively with Tesseract, ABBYY, etc in a personal and professional context. Of course they work well for English-language documents without any complexity of layout that are scanned without the slightest defect. At this point, based on extensive testing for work, state of the art LLMs simply have better accuracy -- and an order of magnitude so if you have non-English documents with complex layouts and less than ideal scans. I'll give you speed, but the accuracy is so much greater (and the need for human intervention so much less) that in my experience it's a worthwhile trade-off.

I'm not saying this applies to you, but my sense from this thread is that many are comparing the results of tossing an image into a free ChatGPT session with an "OCR this document" prompt to a competent Tesseract-based tool... LLMs certainly don't solve any and every problem, but this should be based on real experiments. In fact, OCR is probably the main area where I've found them to simply be the best solution for a professional system.
by juanviera23 | 2025-08-18 11:22:35+00:00
I agree MCP has these flaws, idk why we need MCP servers when LLMs can just connect to the existing API endpoint

Started on working on an alternative protocol, which lets agents call native endpoints directly (HTTP/CLI/WebSocket) via “manuals” and “providers,” instead of spinning up a bespoke wrapper server: https://github.com/universal-tool-calling-protocol/python-ut...

even connects to MCP servers

if you take a look, would love your thoughts
by kqr | 2025-08-18 11:23:22+00:00
You mean (n+1)/(n+m+2) and yes, this is Laplace's rule of succession. It won't give you a confidence interval, but it gives you a posterior point estimate.

If you want a rough 95 % confidence interval without complicated maths, the Agresti–Coull interval is useful. It's computed as if the distribution was normal, but pretending there were two more successes and failures instead.
by florbnit | 2025-08-18 11:24:16+00:00
There's also a fascinating tension with physical exercise, which is that your preference would obviously be do it as early as possible, so you spend more time at a younger age as opposed to just prolonging the last years of your life, where you'll be stuck in a nursing home anyway.

But doing exercise while you're young is also much higher risk, and you might see people sacrificing their 20s for the sake of their 70s in a way they end up regretting, even if there aren't any injuries.

That said, even with risk of injuries it feels like a no brainer to be active and to be active from an early age.

Also I don’t think people should wait until their late 50ies to make sure they get enough vitamin c to “avoid sacrificing their 20ies”
by blenderob | 2025-08-18 11:24:16+00:00
> Unless you know ahead of time the exact dimensions you will be displaying your book at you shouldn't use either.

This is incorrect. You can sure write LaTeX that is intricately dependent on the output dimensions. But you can just as easily write LaTeX that is independent of output dimensions.

Case in point is compiling LaTeX doc to HTML which you'd admit is easily resizable.

Case in point is also writing LaTeX docs for journals or publication where you can easily resize the document to match the publisher's style guide and dimensions by changing the documentclass.
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-08-18 11:24:32+00:00
Put more simply: suppose I have a coin that might be biased. I decide to asses this via repeatedly flipping it—if it’s biased, it will disproportionately land on heads or tails. If I flip 10 times and get 4 heads/6 tails, I don’t have the power to make a confident assessment of any bias. On the other hand, if I flip it 100 times and get 40 heads/60 tails, I am a bit more certain. At 1000 flips, with 400 heads/600 tails, I am extremely confident the coin is biased. Even though the fraction of heads is identically 40% across all three sets of flips, the underlying counts yield very different amounts of confidence on how close to 40% the coin’s bias is. The first question is a way of rigorously quantifying this confidence.

I don’t think this is “leetcode for statisticians.” This question (and the other two) are all examples of concrete, real-world problems that people across a variety of quantitative disciplines frequently encounter.

In fact, the first question is directly relevant to voting on this site. When sorting replies by fraction of upvotes, how should the forum software rank a new reply with 1 upvote/0 downvotes, versus an older reply with 4 upvotes/1 downvote? What about an older, more controversial reply with 20 upvotes/7 downvotes? 15 upvotes/2 downvotes?
by kriops | 2025-08-18 11:24:44+00:00
Science is philosophy, though what one might describe as applied philosophy. The point being: science (the scientific method) cannot exist outside the context of some epistemic system.

I saw your 'recommendation' to read about Hume further up the comment chain. Respectfully, I know more than you. Take your own suggestion. But don't just read about Hume; get a broader intro to the subject so you can understand how ontology, epistemology, ethics, and politics tie into one another.
by throw0101c | 2025-08-18 11:24:58+00:00
If you really want to get into it, then could start worrying about your I/O. In the AMD example here:

* https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/Display_Linux_CPU_topol...

you'll see some NUMA nodes with networking I/O attached to them, others with NVMe, and others with no I/O. So if you're really worried about network latency then you'd pin the process to that node, but if you want look at disk numbers (a database?) you'd be potentially looking at that node.

In recent years there's also chiplet-level locality that may need to be considered as well.

Examining this has been a thing in the HPC space for a decade or two now:

* https://www.open-mpi.org/projects/hwloc/lstopo/

* https://slurm.schedmd.com/mc_support.html
by agentcoops | 2025-08-18 11:26:07+00:00
100%. My sense is that many in this thread have never gone through the misery of trying to use classical OCR for non-English documents or where you can't control scan quality. I did a test recently with 18th-century German documents, written in a well-known and standardized but archaic script. The accuracy of classical models specifically trained on this corpus was an order of magnitude lower than GPT5. I haven't experimented personally or professionally with smaller models, but your experience makes me hopeful that we might even get this accurate OCR on phones sooner rather than later...
by GuB-42 | 2025-08-18 11:26:15+00:00
My guess is placebo, done "right" homeopathy is maybe the purest form of placebo, as extreme dilution make sure that there is nothing active in there. In your case, antibiotics may have been placebo too.

For me, the most probable explanation is that your body just healed by itself and taking nothing would have had the same result. It is not uncommon for symptoms to appear, repeat a few times, and disappear completely. It happened to me countless times, like, for example a cough persisting after a cold episode, coming and going for a few weeks after I realize it is completely gone, some minor injury occasionally manifesting itself before finally disappearing completely.

Your symptoms are a bit more serious, enough for you to justify doing something, but it is probably the same idea. That your interventions worked may be a coincidence, in addition to some placebo effect which is known to be somewhat effective for pain.
by blenderob | 2025-08-18 11:27:23+00:00
>>To which I say, are you really going to avoid using a good tool just because it makes you puke? Because looking at it makes your stomach churn? Because it offends every fiber of your being?"

> Yes. A thousand times yes.

Your comment comes off as if it makes an opposing point to the article. My apologies if it wasn't meant that way.

But I want to note that the author agrees with you! The next sentence from the author which you didn't include in your quote says:

> Okay yeah that's actually a pretty good reason not to use it. I can't get into lisps for the same reason. I'm not going to begrudge anybody who avoids a tool because it's ugly.
by incomingpain | 2025-08-18 11:27:42+00:00
>You don't seem very informed about wildfires. Indigenous people have indeed helped the Forest Service understand about forest maintenance,

Between the 1930s and 1960s a ton of people who set fires were arrested. The vast majority of which were indigenous people. There were protests about the government using fake justification to round them up. That suppressing all fires is an idiotic plan that will cause lots of trouble. Which in hindsight, they wrongfully arrested all of those people. The indigenous were 100% correct.

>but those practices aren't always applicable due to the enormous buildup of fuel from decades of fire suppression, and the greatly increased drought, high temperatures, and wind due to the effects of climate change.

Because they mismanaged the forests for decades.

How can something be a climate change indicator when root cause is government mismanagement and the practical cause is 85% of the time man made.
by mechanicum | 2025-08-18 11:27:49+00:00
I’m curious what led to that conclusion. As far as I remember, making concurrency easier to manage was always presented as one of Clojure’s primary objectives. It’s fundamental to the design e.g. a major motivation for all core data structures being immutable.

STM, atoms and agents were there from the beginning. I think futures and promises were added in 1.1. core.async is from 2013. Even popular third-party libraries like promesa and manifold are around 10 years old at this point.

I think flow promises to make it easier to orchestrate core.async, specifically, in complex applications, but the essential primitives are far from new and I don’t consider them any harder to use than JavaScript.
by mapt | 2025-08-18 11:29:12+00:00
Maintaining friends in the Party, often Party Members inside your HR department and inside the board of your Chinese corporate division, means rolling over on their priorities a carefully considered percentage of the time. What that percentage is depends on context, but the whole structure of corporate life allows the Party to lean on the scale of decisionmaking as necessary to pursue national priorities. In most issues, in most areas, they aren't going to try to intervene because it doesn't benefit the Party to micromanage.

This works for Chinese businesses pretty well.

The problem for Western businesses is that "Creating domestic competition to any Western business with a comparative advantage which becomes too important to China" is always, on some level, a national priority.

My favorite Party explainer - https://chovanec.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/primer-on-chinas-l...
by kaboomshebang | 2025-08-18 11:29:18+00:00
On-topic: Seems like a good feature.

Off-topic: I've been reading some of the comments and I notice a bunch of HN-members are unhappy about their product. My experience: things never broke for me, never needed to contact support, ads are blocked, etc (But I also use uBlock, etc)

(P.s. - My only complaint is that -- like so many other SaaS offerings -- administrating payments is not easy enough. - No option to pay by year - So every month you have to go the website, login, go the admin, click download invoice - Instead of: click download PDF from monthly invoice email)
by faangguyindia | 2025-08-18 11:29:34+00:00
Here is why MCP is bad, here i am trying to use MCP to build a simple node cli tool to fetch documentation from Context7: https://pastebin.com/raw/b4itvBu4 And it doesn't work even after 10 attemps.

Fails and i've no idea why, meanwhile python code works without issues but i can't use that one as it conflicts with existing dependencies in aider, see: https://pastebin.com/TNpMRsb9 (working code after 5 failed attempts)

I am never gonna bother with this again, it can be built as a simple rest API, why we even need this ugly protocol?
by agentcoops | 2025-08-18 11:30:07+00:00
You don't need full reasoning to get accurate results, so even with GPT5 it's still pretty cheap for a one-time job and easy to reason about costs. It's certainly cheaper if you have data where reliability is key and classical OCR will undoubtedly require some manual data cleaning...

I can recommend the Mistral OCR API [1] if you have large jobs and don't want to think about it too much.

[1] https://mistral.ai/solutions/document-ai
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-18 11:30:19+00:00
Somewhere, underneath this, you have the beginnings of a valid point. I suggest some time to reflect, get your thoughts in order, and think about the analogy you're drawing, and the extent to which it's valid. Reactionary flaming helps nobody. "Do bad things to bad people! The label of 'bad people' is inconsistently-applied and hard to justify! Do bad things to them anyway!!!!!" is not insightful, and it's not satire. It is, however, wildly off-topic for this thread.

What do you want to accomplish? If it's "draw attention to injustice": the comments you're making are so unspecific that they're only intelligible to people who already know about the problem. If it's "motivate people to act": being irritating isn't effective at that. If it's "change people's minds"… well, I'll quote Friedrich Nietzsche:

> The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

If you care about the plight of Palestinians, work a summer job for an hour and send the money to Spark Space (https://chuffed.org/project/spark-space-gaza), or something.
by sneak | 2025-08-18 11:30:40+00:00
I have recently written security-sensitive code using Opus 4. I of course reviewed every line and made lots of both manual and prompt-based revisions.

Cloudflare apparently did something similar recently.

It is more than possible to write secure code with AI, just as it is more than possible to write secure code with inexperienced junior devs.

As for the RCE vector; Claude Code has realtime no-intervention autoupdate enabled by default. Everyone running it has willfully opted in to giving Anthropic releng (and anyone who can coerce/compel them) full RCE on their machine.

Separately from AI, most people deploy containers based on tagged version names, not cryptographic hashes. This is trivially exploitable by the container registry.

We have learned nothing from Solarwinds.
by dale_glass | 2025-08-18 11:31:01+00:00
That's because systemd knew who the target users of it were: people making distributions, and professional users with little desire to be woken up at 3 AM to troubleshoot a stuck PID file.

Most of the complainers weren't really relevant. They weren't making the decisions on what goes in a distro, and an init system is overall a fairly minor component most users don't use all that often anyway.

> This feeling is particular striking for me, because I once worked on a Linux project with the aim of improving packaging and software distribution. We also got a lot of hate, mainly for not being .deb or.rpm, and it looked to me as if the hate was a large reason for the failure of the project.

I think that's a good deal trickier because packaging is something a Linux user does get involved with quite often, and packaging systems don't mix well. A RPM based distro with some additional packager grafted on top is a recipe for disaster.

Still, I think it's also a case of the same thing: sell it to the right people. Find people making new distros suffering problems with DEB and RPM and tell them your tool can save them a lot of pain. The users can come in later.
by newsclues | 2025-08-18 11:31:11+00:00
When you rob a bank, there isn't a minimum fine where you can walk away and still keep some of the banks stolen money.

If we want to stop bad behaviour, there can be NO PROFIT from illegal actions.

So if a company makes billions of dollars, through illegal actions, all of those billions of dollars need to be the fine, and the board and senior executives should also face personal fines, so they aren't also profiting.
by npc_anon | 2025-08-18 11:31:33+00:00
People block ads and/or not pay for content because they can. Simply because it's possible. People have been conditioned to consider any and all digital content to be worth zero. Yet continue to consume it for hours on end every day.

When not paying at all is an option people will reliably pick that option. They'll even go into extremes to avoid paying. I know somebody that plays a particular mobile game about an hour each day. Every round (taking 90s or so) it's interrupted by 1-3 mins of ads. It's maddening. She suffers through this instead of paying a one-time $4.99. We're talking about somebody firmly upper middle class.
by h4ch1 | 2025-08-18 11:31:52+00:00
Is this "progress" or are we glorifying moving backwards by including this sort of language just to be "in"?

I really don't know how to feel about this, maybe it's my education making me bigoted, looking down upon what's clearly ephemeral; slang words like these come and go with time, and I think the timeframe for words to be included in the dictionary has greatly reduced.

Almost no one apart from a very small, terminally online subset of people will ever use these words and an even smaller subset will use these in IRL conversation; adding these is a bad idea and doesn't bode well for dictionaries wrt credibility.

They should release a DLC for dictionaries that covers slang like this, not make it part of the official English specification.
by senko | 2025-08-18 11:31:52+00:00
tldr: Gary Marcus Went To Black Hat - What He Saw There Will Shock You

(it won't if you've been following LLM coding space, but anyway...)

I hoped Gary would have at least linked to the talks so people could get the actual info without his lenses, but no such luck.

But he did link to The Post A Few Years Ago Where He Predicted It All.

(yes I'm cynical: the post is mostly on point, but by now I wouldn't trust Marcus if he announced People Breathe Oxygen).
by AmazingTurtle | 2025-08-18 11:31:58+00:00
Yet another Prompt Wrapper

TRANSCRIPTION_PROMPT = """Task: Transcribe the page from the provided book image.

- Reproduce the text exactly as it appears, without adding or omitting anything. - Use Markdown syntax to preserve the original formatting (e.g., headings, bold, italics, lists). - Do not include triple backticks (```) or any other code block markers in your response, unless the page contains code. - Do not include any headers or footers (for example, page numbers). - If the page contains an image, or a diagram, describe it in detail. Enclose the description in an <image> tag. For example:

<image> This is an image of a cat. </image>

"""
by johnisgood | 2025-08-18 11:32:11+00:00
And I tried telling people "news-teller" (or "news teller") is a better word than "herald", and I got told off, so I dunno.

By the way, I love that the OP used the Text Fragment (Scroll-to-Text Fragment) feature. I hope it is going to catch on more, quite helpful / useful.