MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sureglymop | 2025-08-08 15:31:39+00:00
These are great. I am eternally grateful that projects like this are open source, I do however find it hard to integrate them into your own projects.

A while ago I tried to create something that has duckdb + its spatial and SQLite extensions statically linked and compiled in. I realized I was a bit in over my head when my build failed because both of them required SQLite symbols but from different versions.
by FabHK | 2025-08-08 15:32:05+00:00
BTW, it appears that the Flynn effect might have reversed recently.

US: "A reverse Flynn effect was found for composite ability scores with large US adult sample from 2006 to 2018 and 2011 to 2018. Domain scores of matrix reasoning, letter and number series, verbal reasoning showed evidence of declining scores."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2023/03/23/amer...

Denmark: "The results showed that the estimated mean IQ score increased from a baseline set to 100 (SD: 15) among individuals born in 1940 to 108.9 (SD: 12.2) among individuals born in 1980, since when it has decreased."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34882746/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34882746/#&gid=article-figur...
by packetlost | 2025-08-08 15:32:21+00:00
Latency is additive, so all that copper coax that and mux/demux in between a sizeable chunk of Americans and the rest of the internet means you're looking at a minimum roundtrip latency of 30ms if server is in the same city. Most users are also on Wi-Fi which adds and additional mux/demux + rebroadcast step that adds even more. And most people do not have the latest CPU. Not to mention mobile users over LTE.

Sorry, but this is 100% a case of privileged developers thinking their compute infrastruction situation generalizes: it doesn't and it is a mistake to take shortcuts that assume as such.
by mindcrime | 2025-08-08 15:32:32+00:00
What I can't tell you is if data types in computer programs are related to type theory.

I'm far from an expert on this, but my understanding is that there is some relation between the two notions. But I couldn't even begin to quantify the strength of that relation, or explain any of the details. Which is sort of what led me down this path in the first place. Some random thing I read got me thinking that deeper knowledge of type theory could be useful from an AI perspective, and that led me down the rabbit hole of looking for info on type theory. And from what I've read so far, it seems like type theory (more so than, say, set theory, or maybe even category theory) is "closer" in some sense to computer science and does in some sense relate to how types (as used in programming languages) can be constructed and reasoned about.

I have a lot more to learn, needless to say. :-)
by falcor84 | 2025-08-08 15:33:07+00:00
I'm a big believer in spiral learning, and think that it's absolutely ok to teach younger kids algorithms without proof of correctness with hand-wavy motivations, in order to get them used to the idea and feel empowered in using the algorithms, and then to come back to the proof later, once they have more mathematical maturity.

But yes, teaching additional non-arithmetic algorithms would probably be very useful; two related examples I like are binary search in a dictionary and lexicographic ordering to make your own dictionary/index. This can then also lead to an investigation of sorting algorithms, and then back to math.
by quantified | 2025-08-08 15:33:14+00:00
Seconding this. If you're just a team of 10, you are way too small to take on the responsibility of the thing you're trying to provide. I shudder to think of the educational quality a team of ten will provide to hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren in thousands of different schools.

You're too small for the less-regulated US. Add people to deal with things.
by enobrev | 2025-08-08 15:33:24+00:00
I do something very similar for the planning phase, as well as for the code-review after a task is complete. I like to switch between opus in claude code and gemini cli, so I can work from the same files rather than copying and pasting things.

One tip I picked up from a video recently to avoid sycophancy was to take the resulting spec and instead of telling the reviewing LLM "I wrote this spec", tell it "an engineer on my team wrote this spec". When it doesn't think it's insulting you, it tends to be a bit more critical.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-08-08 15:33:30+00:00
If you could simply drop in a library to any of your existing SSR apps that:

- is 50kb (gzipped)

- requires no further changes required from you (either now or in the future)

- enables offline/low bandwidth use of your app with automatic state syncing and zero UX degradation

would you do it?

The problem I see with SSR evangelism is that it assumes that compromising that one use case (offline/low bandwidth use of the app) is necessary to achieve developer happiness and a good UX. And in some cases (like this) it goes on to justify that compromise with promises of future network improvements.

The fact is, low bandwidth requirement will always be a valuable feature, no matter the context. It's especially valuable to people in third-world countries, in remote locations, or being served by Comcast (note I'm being a little sarcastic with that last one).
by j_kao | 2025-08-08 15:33:35+00:00
It's a bit difficult at the moment, given we have a lot of proprietary data at the moment and a lot of the logic follows it. I'm hoping we can get it to a state where it can be indexed and serving OSM data but that is going to take some time.

That being said, we are currently working on getting our Google S2 Rust bindings open-sourced. This is a geo-hashing library that makes it very easy to write a reverse geocoder, even from a point-in-polygon or polygon-intersection perspective.
by random3 | 2025-08-08 15:34:18+00:00
> networks and servers are will only get faster

this isn't an argument for SSR. In fact there's hardly a universal argument for SSR. You're thinking of a specific use-case where there's more compute capacity on the server, where logic can't be easily split, etc. There are plenty of examples that make the client-side rendering faster.

Rendering logic can be disproportionately complex relative to the data size. Moreover, client resources may actually be larger in aggregate than sever. If SSR would be the only reasonable game in we wouldn't have excitement around Web Assembly.

Also take a look at the local-computation post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44833834

The reality is that you can't know which one is better and you should be able to decide at request time.
by denysvitali | 2025-08-08 15:34:25+00:00
He's an hardware engineer, not a software engineer.

After many years of self-hosting an email server I also came to the realization that it's not worth the hassle (in terms of maintenance / problems) and I switched to Proton Mail.

Using a custom domain with Proton Mail is not free (and all the other alternatives I know of are the same) and there's little advantage other than having a nice name. I think for a HW Engineer this is good enough.
by anonym29 | 2025-08-08 15:35:43+00:00
In the past, I would've said no. It absolutely had severe vulnerabilities, no question about it. Anything in userland monitoring keystrokes, mouse input, and display of anything else is userland is genuinely concerning; that said, these were byproducts of architectural decisions made long ago in open source software - not quite the same as deliberately writing code explicitly and specifically to take away privacy and control from your users the way Microsoft and Apple do.

These days however, the negligence of the current custodian, Red Hat, does seem to border on malicious, especially when forks like XLibre are continuing to patch vulnerabilities while Red Hat refuses to merge patches into the "official" X11, as part of a coercive strategy of trying to force all users onto Wayland by allowing X11 to become even worse through active refusal and neglect to merge good PR's with security patches, despite being the official project owner and custodian.

As a final note, I did not say that Windows and Mac OS were spyware, I said they were functionally spyware. There's a meaningful and nuanced difference between those two claims that I'm not sure you are discerning in accordance with my intent.
by JCM9 | 2025-08-08 15:36:24+00:00
The “strategy” consulting offered by the big firms is mostly BS. It’s typically a few senior folks that have minimal real world experience in the thing they claim to be an expert at leading a bunch of junior folks that have minimal to no experience in just about anything. The firms talk a lot of hype about how they’re guiding innovation and such but in practice they’re mostly hired to do fairly routine grunt work and just be an extra set of hands for an exec with budget to burn.

The best “consultants” that actually consult are typically sole proprietorships that is just some semi-retired person truly an expert at something that’s offering up temporary help at a thing they just enjoy doing and making some $ on the side. Ironically the big firms have very few of these true experts floating around.
by monkeydust | 2025-08-08 15:37:03+00:00
Been playing around with Claude Code for a home project over the last week.

I started with an idea but no spec. I got it to a happy place I can deploy yesterday. Spent around $75 on tokens. It was starting to feel expensive towards the end.

I did wonder if I had started with a clearer specification could I have got there quicker and for less money.

The thing is though, looking back at the conversations I had with it, the back and forth (vibe coding I guess) helped me refine what I was actually after so in two minds if a proper tight specification upfront would have been the best thing.
by pxc | 2025-08-08 15:37:20+00:00
Sentience is at once too high a standard and too low a standard for AI.

It's too high in that it requires actual consciousness, which may be a very tough architectural problem at best (if functionalism is true) or an unknowable metaphysical mystery at worse (if some form of substance or property dualism is true).

And it's much too low a standard in that many, many sentient creatures are nowhere near intelligent enough to be useful assistants in the domains where we want to use AI.
by whartung | 2025-08-08 15:37:23+00:00
I don't know, I struggle with a light switch, but that doesn't look like board someone took home with a box of parts and a soldering iron to make at home.

Are there services that you can send the BOM and board files too, and not only do you get the PC board back, but it's populated? Will they do that for a onesy-twosy thing like this?

Then all you have to do is supply the battery and download the firmware (however that is done).
by libraryofbabel | 2025-08-08 15:37:50+00:00
This is a good point, the CLI kind of forces you to engage with the coding process through the eyes of the agent, rather than just treating it as “advanced autocomplete” in the IDE.

However, there are a lot of Claude Code clones out there now that are basically the same (Gemini CLI, Codex, now Cursor CLI etc.). Claude still seems to lead the pack, I think? Perhaps it’s some combination of better coding performance due to the underlying LLM (usually Sonnet 4) being fine-tuned on the agent tool calls, plus Claude is just a little more mature in terms of configuration options etc.?
by jonathaneunice | 2025-08-08 15:38:05+00:00
As a successful consultant for several decades, I played several major roles:

1. Designated Teller of Hard Truths. I operated outside each client's organizational hierarchy and internal factions. By design, I was expendable and not seen as having a particular bias or “dog in the hunt.” That made it easier to say the difficult things that needed saying. E.g. "Your product...is not good and not competitive." "Competitor X is eating your lunch because A, B, and C. You need to get your act together and admit that those are important issues."

2. Bringer of News from the Outside World. Large organizations become exceptionally insular and self-referential. Everyone inside has to speak the house jargon and more-or-less toe the company line. I could break that spell, bringing in new concepts, perspectives, language, and attitudes. Over the years as a tech analyst, I introduced object-oriented programming, CAD/CAM/CAE, distributed computing, Unix, “Big Iron Unix,” the Internet, grid and clustered computing, web services, standardization, buy-not-build strategies, Linux and open source, virtualization, automated provisioning and orchestration, cloud computing, blade servers, scale-out architectures, and DevOps. Many of these were initially unfamiliar or viewed with disbelief and hostility. I also was a conduit for shifting customer expectations and appetites, market attitudes, and cultural vibes—offering a “voice of the customer” or “voice of partners” when internal teams wouldn't otherwise get a clean, unfiltered read on what was happening in the world outside their walls.

3. Family Counselor. Surprisingly often, I told organizations what other people inside the same organization were thinking, saying, or doing (and what customers or partners thought of that). The degree of insularity, siloing, and parochialism in large organizations is hard to overstate. I was almost like a counselor, helping internal teams see, understand, and appreciate their peers, and put what they were doing into a larger perspective that would have otherwise been overlooked.

I did a lot of other things, but these were my largest, most systematic, and most recurring patterns of "adding value."
by CamouflagedKiwi | 2025-08-08 15:38:05+00:00
Not a power user, but most recently I tried it out against Gemini and Claude produced something that compiled and almost worked - it was off in some specifics that I could easily tweak. The next thing I asked it (with slightly more detailed prompting) it more or less just nailed.

Meanwhile Gemini got itself stuck in a loop of compile/fail/try to fix/compile/fail again. Eventually it just gave up and said "I'm not able to figure this out". It does seem to have a kind of self-esteem problem in these scenarios, whereas Claude is more bullish on itself (maybe not always a good thing).

Claude seems to be the best at getting something that actually works. I do think Gemini will end up being tough competition, if nothing else because of the price, but Google really need a bit of a quality push on it. A free AI agent is worthless if it can't solve anything for me.
by CafeRacer | 2025-08-08 15:38:15+00:00
Nope, locally. Roughly I'm doing something like that https://gist.github.com/vladmiller/0be83755e65cf5bd942ffba22...

Example is a bit bad, but roughly shows how we're using. I have built a custom sync API that accepts in the body a list of <object_id>:<short_hash> and returns a kind of json-list in a format

<id>:<hash>:<json_object>\n <id>:<hash>:<json_object>\n

API compares what client knows vs. current state and only returns the objects that were updated/created and separately objects that were removed. Not ideal for large collections (but then again why did I store 50mb of historical data on the client in the first place? :D)
by weego | 2025-08-08 15:38:16+00:00
Agreed. The only caveat to that being a global rule is: 'At scale in a particular niche, even an excellent generalist platform might not be good enough'

But then the follow on question begs: "Am I really suffering the same problems that a niche already-scaled business is suffering"

A question that is relevant to all decision making. I'm looking at you, people who use the entire react ecosystem to deploy a blog page.
by Lukas_Skywalker | 2025-08-08 15:38:28+00:00
Isn't an apology a bad metric for evaluating models?

Without understanding much, it seems to be more an indication of the type of content the model was trained on, rather than an indicator of how good or bad a model is, or how much it knows. It would probably be easy to create bad model that constantly outputs wrong information, but always apologizes when corrected.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-08-08 15:38:34+00:00
> I know someone who was advising a central bank, aged 22.

I know a young consultant who, while consulting for a company during an internship (place by a big consulting company), saved the client millions in shipping costs.

Do you find that, say, the ECB did a particularly stellar job with the Euro? A currency that's in trouble since it was created? (do not forget that Greece already partially defaulted on its public debt).

When I hear someone like Christine Lagarde speak she doesn't strike me as someone particularly smart: just a regular politician doing what politicians do best (i.e. aim for well paying jobs). Typical french political career: we're not exactly talking about rocket scientist here (despite what mainstream media shall write about her).

I'm pretty sure a smart 22 y/o can be helpful.
by enobrev | 2025-08-08 15:38:59+00:00
Nothing quite like "I see what the problem is", and then seeing Claude start reading a bunch of files and strategizing the re-architecture of a feature just resolve its own 3-line blunder.

If you happen catch it and you're quick to "esc" and just tell it to find a simpler solution, it's surprisingly great at reconsidering, resolving the issue simply, and picking up where it left off before the blunder.
by yoyohello13 | 2025-08-08 15:39:10+00:00
A wealth tax is just not feasible because almost none of the rich will accept it. See almost any response to your comment as evidence. What we need is strong labor laws and the will for unions in the working class. A wealth tax doesn’t actually change any power dynamics. The rich are still powerful and the poor reliant on them. If the working class can band together, the power dynamics change and we can see some actual progress.
Ask HN: Reviewing code on your phone, yay or nay?
by changisaac | 2025-08-08 15:39:51+00:00
Not sure if it's just me, but I've often found myself looking at PRs on my phone in my downtime. Think chilling on the couch (when working at home), commuting, running an errand. Sometimes I'm out walking my cat (yes cat, he likes walks), and I get a ping for review and want to look at it right away.

I use the GitHub mobile app but there are obvious limitations to the experience:

1. Basically any change beyond around ~50 lines of code is hard to navigate. Results in a lot of scrolling back and forth (and left and right).

2. Writing any comments beyond a simple 1-2 liner is hard. I'm also definitely not gonna be doing things like referencing files or including code suggestions / samples since I can't copy paste stuff easily.

3. On my computer, I would sometimes do stuff like ctrl+f my codebase or other repos while reviewing, and doing ChatGPT searches to verify lib usage. I'm not gonna be doing these things on mobile either.

So this limits my "phone" code reviews to basically only small sub-50 lines PRs that I can hopefully just LGTM and approve right away.

But I wish I could do more, tbh as a SWE I also just want to walk around more lol (productively), my back hurts ahaha.

So what do you guys think, is this a dum thing to want? Or do you feel the same?
by hollerith | 2025-08-08 15:39:58+00:00
Top four coal consumers as of 2023 (last year for which this data set is available):

China 91.9 exajoules

India 22 exajoules

United States 8.2 exajoules

Japan 4.54 exajoules

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/coal-cons...
by ncallaway | 2025-08-08 15:40:04+00:00
Is the filtering and processing very specific to the data set?

I'd kind of assume that they would dump data into the data warehouse on September 2024, then in parallel continue data collection and do the months of work to determine how to best filter, process it, and select training parameters, etc. Then once that was locked in to do a final update to the say, December 2024 data warehouse for the final training.

Do the filtering, processing, and training parameters need to be fairly fine-tuned to the specific data set?
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-08 15:40:05+00:00
And even with Postgres, I doubt their definition is “multi AZ with a shared storage layer between data centers that is also fault tolerant and replicated across multiple data centers”. Meaning that if your database server goes down, your backup servers are immediately up to date because of the shared storage engine in the same region but the underlying storage was also replicated across multiple AZs.
by marcusverus | 2025-08-08 15:40:09+00:00
> persistent irritation > went to Urgent care

You waited until it became a problem, then went to an expensive option instead of contacting your GP and getting a recommendation for an in-network care? And were surprised that it was expensive? This is healthcare 101 in the US. You could have gotten the same care for a reasonable price had you done 1 hour of due diligence.

We do not need to remake the system--which will result in far greater inconveniences than the 1 hour of dd you found to be unreasonable, not only for you, but for people who are perfectly capable of navigating the current system--to save you from yourself.
by ffsm8 | 2025-08-08 15:40:40+00:00
Not really, but I feel like you might've misunderstood me.

The debouncing of rxjs just takes an observation and debounces, which is essentially throttle with inverted output (it outputs last instead of first).

That's almost never what the product owner actually wants, at least IME.

If they give you any kind of soec, you'll quickly realize that limit.

I.e. debouncing after the request happened is impossible, just like cleanly abortion requests on exit or similar.

There are also often a ton of signals you need to add to the observale for all the events the PO wants to respond to, such as opening dialogues, interacting with elements outside of the context of the debounces event chain etc pp

It just keeps getting more complicated with every additional thing they come up with. But if they're fine with just living with the technical limitations, all is fine.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-08 15:40:44+00:00
The ultimate reference for this is the Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy, which is available as a PDF[1], the print versions aren't cheap.

One example of precision is the Whitworth 3 plate method (invented in the 1830s), with this method, you can make surfaces that approach precision in the micron range, if necessary.

Leonardo Da Vinici's screw cutting lathe sketches show a machine that uses 2 lead screws to generate another, which averages the values of the other two screws, using careful rotations of threads, etc, it should be possible to use this method to work your way up to a uniform precise screw where each new generation is better than the ones before it.

[1] https://pearl-hifi.com/06_Lit_Archive/15_Mfrs_Publications/M...
by BenJacob1 | 2025-08-08 15:40:53+00:00
You're presenting a false dichotomy between building good products and being capable of fulfiling extremely burdensome (not to mention, expensive) compliance requirements from the EU.

We're perfectly qualified to build the core tech. We're just not paperwork experts. Are you suggesting if we can't do paperwork, we shouldn't build innovative products that improve educational outcomes?
by pempem | 2025-08-08 15:41:21+00:00
This feels like you don't actually have experience with consulting.

The amount of hierarchy and peer review is extensive and apprenticeship was core to my experience in multiple consultancies. One might say post-covid, in a pro-hybrid world, this has been hard. Still, as a new hire couldn't introduce myself to a group of clients without sharing my intro with the associate partner first and getting notes on my literal 3 sentence bio and then feedback afterwards. Every deck I've ever presented has been through multiple hands above and below me in the hierarchy. That 22 year old usually if not always has had a discussion, notes, notes reviewed, questions listed that need answers etc.