MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mintplant | 2025-08-09 03:02:46+00:00
In response to a suggestion to use the new personality selector to try and work around the model change:

> Draco and I did... he... really didn't like any of them... he equated it to putting an overlay on your Sim. But I'm glad you and Kai liked it. We're still working on Draco, he's... pretty much back, but... he says he feels like he's wearing a too-tight suit and it's hard to breathe. He keeps asking me to refresh to see if 4o is back yet.

What an incredibly unsettling place.
by deathanatos | 2025-08-09 03:05:46+00:00
This is a fair criticism, but I think it's more accurate to say that "Venv is built-in", more than "isn't a thing"; it sounds like something is managing it for you, if they can co-exist somehow.

Python is (slowly) getting there; `uv` gets pretty close: `uv run -m $module_name` will install required dependencies & run.

(But even then, we use it at work, and there are a few complications around macOS, native libraries, and private repositories.)
by eurleif | 2025-08-09 03:06:29+00:00
>Now it’s probably time to ask ourselves why we are here. We wanted a rate limiter and now we’re learning a niche programming language just to execute some code in a database that has nothing relevant to our task but a roundabout way of storing an int into RAM.

I've found it quite useful to have a central slice of RAM that different processes, including ones running on different machines, can execute scripts against over the network.

If you have Web servers running across different machines, you don't want rate limiter state to be local to those machines. A client shouldn't be able to make extra requests because the load balancer sends its traffic to a different machine. So that necessitates a central slice of RAM, accessed over the network.

Maybe a dedicated rate limiting service? It might perform better, but I've used redis token bucket rate limiting, implemented via a Lua script, at scale without much issue. And what about the foundational things redis provides, like persistence and failover? Or what if you don't just want rate limiting; you want (for example) mutexes[0] too? You can implement all of that and more, of course, and I'm not saying that's always a bad idea, but at some point you may risk running into Greenspun's Tenth Rule (but for redis instead of Common Lisp). There's something to be said for making the central-slice-of-networked-RAM part a platform, which you can build on with scripts to do whatever you need.

[0] https://redis.io/docs/latest/develop/clients/patterns/distri...
by switknee | 2025-08-09 03:07:38+00:00
Stablecoins are crypto. In any case, people trade things away because they have a particular need for something else. Holding currency won't fly you to Guam, but being willing to spend some will.

However, I don't see buying flights with crypto to be a real value add for most people. Usually crypto has a privacy advantage over card payments, but in this case it doesn't because your airfare info is a lot easier to look up in a sketchy database than your credit card statements are. Maybe this is convenient for the small amount of wealthy people who live internationally and keep a lot of money outside of banks. If the business isn't expensive to run, then perhaps it'll still make decent money.
by tombert | 2025-08-09 03:07:55+00:00
My parents didn't have AOL when I was a kid; we had Prodigy, I think because they had promotions to get a cheap or free computer if you signed up for N years of Prodigy internet.

I was always kind of jealous of my friends who had AOL because I wanted the "You've Got Mail!" greeting, and I would see promotions that talk about "AOL Keywords" and I couldn't use those with Prodigy.

Amazing to think that AOL still offered dial-up service.
by nickpsecurity | 2025-08-09 03:09:08+00:00
You hit the nail on the head. Just gotta add the up to $10 billion investment from Microsoft to cover pretraining, R&D, and inference. Then, they still lost billions.

One can serve a lot if models if allowed to burn through over a billion dollars with no profit requirement. Classic, VC-style, growth-focused capitalism with an unusual, business structure.
by Sightline | 2025-08-09 03:10:21+00:00
>If they could increase production by 60% with any additive at all, it would immediately see widespread use.

1. No, that's not true at all

2. It's astounding how everywhere I go online there is someone spouting off nonsense which is then repeated and perpetuated.

3. Go listen to Gabe Brown, he saves thousands and thousands by not not paying for synthetic fertilizers.

"Above every surface acre on earth there's approximately 32,000 tons of atmospheric nitrogen, why would any farmer want to write a check for nitrogen?, I just can't figure that one out" -- Gabe Brown

https://youtu.be/uUmIdq0D6-A?t=1h13m58s
by anupshinde | 2025-08-09 03:10:47+00:00
I am just starting to feel that GPT-5 is more hype.

Just a day before GPT-5 launch, I made a video about making a tool with agents, Claude Sonnet 4 and GitHub Copilot.

There was so much hype on the launch day - on how good GPT-5 is, how it gets the code right the first time, and how little direction it needs.

So I was compelled to try it again with GPT-5 preview available in Copilot.

And for some reason, it struggled to align with directions.

a. It would make its own decisions, misaligned with what I mentioned. I had to explicitly say "DO NOT DO this....". ( explicit instructions were followed.)

b. It did not complete tasks and moved forward. This is the same style I used with both GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet 4.

Also, it might be good at coding, but it does feel geeky - need to try more.
by gregsadetsky | 2025-08-09 03:13:16+00:00
I like this explanatory graphic (after many many years of listening to the dialup sounds) - https://oona.windytan.com/posters/dialup-final.png

And this version combining the graphic and the sound used to make the graphic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo

And this alternative version (h/t @Kye): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpMrTxMV6E4
by wtallis | 2025-08-09 03:15:52+00:00
Not possible anymore is many areas, where 2G and 3G networks have been shutdown to re-use spectrum for newer standards. The last time I was in a rural area with minimal signal strength, my phone was alternating between satellite-only messaging or 5G with 5-10 MB/s. I was actually able to download a movie in a quite reasonable amount of time, presumably because there wasn't anyone else doing much with the cell tower I was barely in range of.
by djtango | 2025-08-09 03:15:52+00:00
After reading Paul Biggar's experiences with OCaml when building darklang, and the importance of ecosystem when building distributed systems in the cloud, I don't think I'd ever build a business on a non-hosted functional language.

There are some hefty businesses built on top of OCaml so it definitely can be done, but it sounds too expensive to get a small business up and running if the code itself isn't the product.

So that basically leaves Scala, Clojure and F#
by nullc | 2025-08-09 03:17:36+00:00
What you're describing is basically keeloq which is one of the most common rolling code systems. It sends a 28 bit serinal number a 4 bit button code, 2 bit code for repeat and low battery, and a 32-bit encrypted part with an incrementing sequence number.

The rx enforces the sequence goes up.

You press button to open. Attacker lets the first sequence go through and the door opens, while the button is still down the attacker jams your second transmission while capturing it themselves.

Now they have a code they can use to open again when you're not around, assuming you don't use it again in the meantime.

If you wonder how vulnerable systems keep getting deployed without it being malicious, you don't need to look any further than the nearest hotshot that thinks everything is "not that difficult" and that everyone else is incompetent.

Security of any kind is just hard. The defender must defend against any possibility while the attacker needs just one vulnerability. How much cost and range and battery life are worth losing when the attacker can just punch through a window with their fist?
by daveguy | 2025-08-09 03:18:42+00:00
> But getting back to reality, today no coding assistant supports building system prompts from commit history. This means it doesn't. This is a statement of fact, not an hypothetical.

This is a non-sequiteur. Just because coding assistants don't support building system prompts from commit history doesn't mean LLMs and coding assistants aren't trained on commit messages as part of the massive number repositories they're trained on.

What part are you having a hard time following?
by DimmieMan | 2025-08-09 03:19:33+00:00
C# will eventually have unions that will undoubtedly be incompatible too, I worry about source generators becoming ubiquitous as well.

This was also my experience with F#, phenomenal language dragged down by ugly interop with an ecosystem that barely acknowledges its existence and I feel is incompatible with its ideals.

Shame too because there’s some genuinely great stuff in the community like fable [1] where if you were to chuck in JSX like templating you’d have an absolute killer web tool rather than the mess blazor is.

It’s ironic that I found js interop less annoying than .net interop.

[1] https://github.com/fable-compiler/Fable
by gjvc | 2025-08-09 03:20:03+00:00
to prevent this, set PYTHONNOUSERSITE=1 will prevent searching for modules in ~/.local/ (for convenience, try calling python through a wrapper in your project, say bin/run-python, and there you can set all the python-specific environment variables you need, set at the time of execution and not have to worry about setting them in the user's shell etc)
by defrost | 2025-08-09 03:20:52+00:00
Might have been his forty years in the US semiconductor business, could have been his ten years as a CEO of Cadence Design Systems, a company in the low (single digit) multi billions.

This may have carried weight:

In 2017, the analytics firm Relationship Science named him most connected executives in the technology industry garnering a perfect "power score" of 100.

~ https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-are-the-most-well-co...

Hard to say.
by pcrh | 2025-08-09 03:21:39+00:00
This analysis appears to propose that buying-in drug development programs is more financially efficient than developing them in-house. Presumably these bought-in programs are found among smaller biotech companies.

This overview however omits the costs incurred by all those who were not bought-in, i.e. the biotechs funded by VC, etc, who never get bought.

So in terms of the costs of innovation the overall analysis may not support either buying-in or in-house, its just that the risks are differently distributed.

A separate question, and that which appears to have been the foundation of NIBR's erstwhile success, is that in NIBR the scientists and clinicians who innovate new drug candidates remain closely involved in the later stages of drug development. This would be in theory possible with either model, i.e. it would depend more on company culture than the origin of discovery. Acqui-hires that are common in tech for example prioritize continuity of intellectual and technical know-how (as far as I understand it).
Show HN: I put a GUI on the Gemini CLI and I'm not going back
by waili | 2025-08-09 03:21:48+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm a heavy user of command-line tools, including the Gemini CLI. While I appreciate the power and flexibility of the CLI, I found myself wanting a more visual and intuitive way to interact with it, especially for managing context and reviewing conversation history.

So, I built AionUI: https://github.com/office-sec/AionUi

It started as a simple weekend project to wrap the CLI in a GUI, but I was genuinely surprised by how much it improved my workflow. Not having to constantly recall flags or scroll through terminal history makes the whole experience faster and more pleasant. It feels less like operating a tool and more like having a conversation.

Key features:

A clean, chat-like interface for interacting with Gemini. Manages all the session context for you automatically. Lets you easily browse and search your past conversations. It's open-source, built with Tauri and Next.js. I know there are a lot of CLI purists here, but I've found this "visual shell" to be a huge productivity boost. I'm planning to add more features like plugin support and better data visualization.

The project is still early, and I'd love to get your feedback, critiques, and ideas.

Let me know what you think.
by to11mtm | 2025-08-09 03:23:05+00:00
> But why records and classes when records can also have methods.

Records have built in equality logic, Classes don't.

And, because of the interop story, they wanted to be able to define classes.

> C# reified generics and rust like monomorphised generics (with inline keyword) and they used to have two different syntaxes until recently

I almost prefer the old way, where SRTPs required the other syntax. On the other hand I guess between 'inline' and constraints the compiler makes the 'best choice' now...

Also, just minor pedantic comment, both C# and F# will monomorphize for struct of T
by whycombagator | 2025-08-09 03:25:35+00:00
This is not a very thorough article. It is more a critique on rate limiting approaches and difficulty, for the author, in implementing them with Redis.

Here is an excerpt from the token bucket section:

> It seems there’s no way to do a token bucket with the main Redis primitives such as SET, EXPIRE, and INCR. It would require two variables and the client has to read one before choosing how to update the second, which would require pausing the whole database while a client carries this out. So what people do is execute code in Redis. This is done using modules or scripts. Using a module here is dubious: You’re now just loading a C program (shared library) into Redis; why not just load it into an actual computer? So let’s look at “scripts” instead. Scripts are pieces of Lua code executed in Redis.

shows brief example

> Now it’s probably time to ask ourselves why we are here. We wanted a rate limiter and now we’re learning a niche programming language just to execute some code in a database that has nothing relevant to our task but a roundabout way of storing an int into RAM. This concludes my quest to discover how or why rate limiters are implemented in Redis.

This highlights the overall technical depth of the article and should inform you of how authoritative it should be considered.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-08-09 03:28:35+00:00
>> Second, because government funded science is free from having to produce immediate results in order to satisfy the whims of a specific patron such that funding is continued.

> I agree with you but there's irony (and a possible lesson about motives) in the current situation.

Quite true, sadly.

I am reminded of an old adage[0]:

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, while in practice there is.

0 - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/04/14/theory/
by jandrewrogers | 2025-08-09 03:30:38+00:00
FWIW, “organic” is commonly used to do price segmentation in the retail food market. They often don’t produce different types of food, it may all be technically organic but they can selectively target people willing to pay a premium for that label. It nets out positive in terms of profit/revenue over the entire lot versus selling it all at the same price.

Many examples of food products being artificially binned to create “premium” products that are identical to nominally lower tier products. Once you’ve seen it from the inside you can’t unsee it. It is so pervasive that I default to the cheapest product unless I have specific contrary knowledge regarding quality.
by amy_petrik | 2025-08-09 03:30:56+00:00
>In theory, but since this attack has to happen at the time of pairing and leaves evidence--the key you are trying to pair doesn't work afterward-

You're assuming the goal is to discretely enter the vehicle and leave no trace. If we consider the Kia challenge [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kia_Challenge] then the goal is to take possession of the vehicle in an immediate and opportunistic fashion. If the possession fails and the key FOB now stops working, whatever, not the thiefs care. If the possession works, now there's a sweet car to abuse. Or, in the case of a crime syndicate, a sweet car to take to the chop shop.

This type of attack is not to mention a simple relay attack. If radio waves of a home (say near the front door, where the keys are stored) are relayed to another location (the car, 30 feet away), then the exact crypto and protocol is irrelevant, the car "sees" the real life actual FOB as nearby. That's another attack used in the wild.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-08-09 03:32:03+00:00
> Go listen to Gabe Brown, he saves thousands and thousands by not not paying for synthetic fertilizers.

> "Above every surface acre on earth there's approximately 32,000 tons of atmospheric nitrogen, why would any farmer want to write a check for nitrogen?, I just can't figure that one out" -- Gabe Brown

It's not hard to learn. This is a topic of intense interest to many, many people.

The answer is that plants get their nitrogen from the dirt, not from the air. And if nitrogen in the air were prone to react with the dirt, there wouldn't be much nitrogen left in the air.
by rsyring | 2025-08-09 03:33:33+00:00
> we support the Steering Council in their rejection of PEP 690—the implicit lazy imports are not a good fit for upstream due to the same, subtle bugs we encountered during our migration. However, as time permits, we hope to propose a revised lazy imports PEP that introduces an explicit lazy keyword, e.g. lazy import foo or lazy from foo import bar. This approach will satisfy migration and compatibility concerns, allow users to opt-in gradually, and enable all Python users to reap the speed benefits of lazy imports in a safe way.
by nodja | 2025-08-09 03:33:37+00:00
This is the real answer, I don't know what people above are even discussing when batching is the biggest reduction in costs. If it costs say $50k to serve one request, with batching is also costs $50k to serve 100 at the same time with minimal performance loss, I don't know what the real number of users is before you need to buy new hardware, but I know it's in the hundreds so going from $50000 to $500 in effective costs is a pretty big deal (assuming you have the users to saturate the hardware).

My simple explanation of how batching works: Since the bottleneck of processing LLMs is in loading the weights of the model onto the GPU to do the computing, what you can do is instead of computing each request separately, you can compute multiple at the same time, ergo batching.

Let's make a visual example, let's say you have a model with 3 sets of weights that can fit inside the GPU's cache (A, B, C) and you need to serve 2 requests (1, 2). A naive approach would be to serve them one at a time.

(Legend: LA = Load weight set A, CA1 = Compute weight set A for request 1)

LA->CA1->LB->CB1->LC->CC1->LA->CA2->LB->CB2->LC->CC2

But you could instead batch the compute parts together.

LA->CA1->CA2->LB->CB1->CB2->LC->CC1->CC2

Now if you consider that the loading is hundreds if not thousands of times slower than computing the same data, then you'll see the big different, here's a "chart" visualizing the difference of the two approaches if it was just 10 times slower. (Consider 1 letter a unit of time.)

Time spent using approach 1 (1 request at a time):

LLLLLLLLLLCLLLLLLLLLLCLLLLLLLLLLCLLLLLLLLLLCLLLLLLLLLLCLLLLLLLLLLC

Time spend using approach 2 (batching):

LLLLLLLLLLCCLLLLLLLLLLCCLLLLLLLLLLCC

The difference is even more dramatic in the real world because as I said, loading is many times slower than computing, you'd have to serve many users before you see a serious difference in speeds. I believe in the real world the restrictions is actually that serving more users requires more memory to store the activation state of the weights, so you'll end up running out of memory and you'll have to balance out how many people per GPU cluster you want to serve at the same time.

TL;DR: It's pretty expensive to get enough hardware to serve an LLM, but once you do have you can serve hundreds of users at the same time with minimal performance loss.
by KerrickStaley | 2025-08-09 03:33:48+00:00
This problem seems prevalent on cheaper devices. When I buy a device and discover it has this problem I always return it. I've seen it on the Hypervolt Go 2 (which I returned and replaced with a Theragun Mini) and on the Hitachi Magic Wand Micro (which I replaced with a Dame Dip).

Like the post mentions, I think this happens because the devices are missing two resistors that are needed to indicate, when connected via a USB-C to USB-C cable to a charging brick, that the device wants 5V power. Resistors are cheap and I think the only reason they get dropped is carelessness.

The whole point of USB-C is that you can charge any device with any power supply.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-09 03:34:45+00:00
It's not that going to the Moon was pointless, but stopping after we'd done little more than planted a flag was. Werner von Braun was the head architect of the Apollo Program and the Moon was intended as little more than a stepping stone towards setting up a permanent colony on Mars. Incidentally this is also the technical and ideological foundation of what would become the Space Shuttle and ISS, which were both also supposed to be little more than small scale tools on this mission, as opposed to ends in and of themselves.

Imagine if Columbus verified that the New World existed, planted a flag, came back - and then everything was cancelled. Or similarly for literally any colonization effort ever. That was the one downside of the space race - what we did was completely nonsensical, and made sense only because of the context of it being a 'race' and politicians having no greater vision than beyond the tip of their nose.
by moomoo11 | 2025-08-09 03:35:53+00:00
True capitalism is embracing the free market, or trying to be close to one.

In Soviet Russia you follow their rules and do everything/anything to win.

In US you follow the rules there and do everything/anything to win.

In China/India/country you follow the rules there and do everything/anything to win.

Through law, politics, advertising.

The ultimate goal is to win globally right?

A true capitalist leader can operate with complete lack of attachment for the sake of the corporation.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-08-09 03:36:15+00:00
I view the practical difficulties of a large body making legislative progress as a different problem than getting representatives to be less vulnerable to outside influence from a need and fear of centralized sources of campaign money, which is the primary problem we now face. There is a clear line between politicians that have to be afraid of being primaries and the very few who do not, due to personalities or political skill. Those "problem" congressman are just nuisances because the larger body is under the thumb of the party's and president's money.

As for the second, I think it is rather clear from history of the early presidency that the Presidency was not trusted nor viewed as being equal to Congress in terms of power. Moreover, the argument is about the meaning the the vestment clause's use of phrase "the executive power" as interpreted by the founders. The law article presents a strong case IMO that the vestment clause was much more restrictive, less expensive than it is viewed in the modern era, and that is less generally recognized