MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rubyn00bie | 2025-08-10 21:05:57+00:00
RAM isn’t cheap but it’s not awful, or as bad as it once was, especially in their laptops. One of the primary things that has kept me from buying a new Apple desktop or laptop is honestly SSD pricing.

It’s absolutely ridiculous given how cheap 1TB or 2TB drives are. And generally, in my experience, the ones Apple uses have had subpar performance compared to what’s available for the PC market for less than half the price. Not to mention their base configuration machines usually have subtly crappier SSDs than a tier up.

I haven’t bought a new Mac since Apple released the M-series. I’ve wanted to multiple times, but the value just isn’t there for me personally.
by dijit | 2025-08-10 21:06:44+00:00
Feels weird to call them ethnically French, especially when the context being presented is religion.

The assumption being made is that they’ll ditch the religion after four generations? I don’t see data for that assumption, maybe it is not 100%, but its certainly not as low as 20% apostacy.

Thus I would take serious issue with that statement, it is evidence of an ethnic or religious replacement.
by formerly_proven | 2025-08-10 21:07:03+00:00
"0.5-1 ppm" covers what's considered the optimum level of fluoride in drinking water, so I doubt you'd get dental fluorosis from that. Coincidentally, if you calculate the equivalent dose that you'd give babies (via dissolved vitamin D + fluoride tablets), you also end up at about 0.3-0.5ppm.
by dns_snek | 2025-08-10 21:07:04+00:00
That's not what "let it crash" is about. Letting something crash in Erlang means that a process (actor) is allowed to crash, but then it gets restarted to try again, which would resolve the situation in case of transient errors.

The equivalent of "let it crash" outside of Erlang is a mountain of try-catch statements and hand-rolled retry wrappers with time delays, with none of the observability and tooling that you get in Erlang.
by mdp2021 | 2025-08-10 21:07:04+00:00
> given we have examples of models that handles

The suggestions come from the failures, not from the success stories.

> what you mean with "architecturally all checks are implemented and mandated"

That NN-models have an explicit module which works as a conscious mind and does lucid ostensive reasoning ("pointing at things") reliably respected in their conclusion. That module must be stress-tested and proven as reliable. Success stories only result based are not enough.

> you may think these models work very differently to how they actually work

I am interested in how they should work.
by keeda | 2025-08-10 21:08:26+00:00
In my experience, it's not just prompting that needs to be figured out, it's a whole new workstyle that works for you, your technologies and even your current project. As an example, I write almost all my code functional-programming style, which I rarely did before. This lets me keep my prompts and context very focused and it essentially elminates hallucinations.

Also I started in the pre-agents era and so I ended up with a pair-programming paradigm. Now everytime I conceptualize a new task in my head -- whether it is a few lines of data wrangling within a function, or generating an entire feature complete with integration tests -- I instinctively do a quick prompt-vs-manual coding evaluation and seamlessly jump to AI code generation if the prompt "feels" more promising in terms of total time and probability of correctness.

I think one of the skills is learning this kind of continuous evaluation and the judgement that goes with it.
by Arnavion | 2025-08-10 21:08:38+00:00
I stand corrected. I didn't know rustc supported such a coercion automatically. Now I see it is documented in CoerceUnsized + Unsize.

That said, other than the problem of this being a breaking API change for Read::read_to_end, another problem is that Vec's layout is { RawVec, len } and the allocator is inside RawVec, so the allocator is not the last field of Vec, which is required for structs to contain unsized fields. It would require reordering Vec's fields to { len, RawVec } which may not be something libstd wants to do (since it'll make data ptr access have an offset from Vec ptr), or to inline RawVec into Vec as { ptr, cap, len, allocator }.
by JJMcJ | 2025-08-10 21:08:44+00:00
They manufactured bicycles, then the apex of precision mass produced products, and they also had a quite scientific approach to the design of their aircraft, with wind tunnels, for example.

They were also the first to understand that steering the airplane was best done by warping the airfoils. Now we do it with rudders and elevators and flaps, then they did the whole surface.
by K0balt | 2025-08-10 21:08:53+00:00
Probably not so useful, since they would not be forced to acknowledge that those people were at least in some ways superior to them? If they know they are surrounded by intellectually superior people, it is probably the first time they are confronted with that kind of contrast. (But that’s just a guess. I suspect that the answer would be highly variable by the individual case)
by jadamson | 2025-08-10 21:08:54+00:00
> There is a massive part of the West who believes that to acknowledge that women are physically different than men is the real sexism.

Followed by:

> The reason only males are required to do military service in Korea is because men decided that's how it should be.

Is a truly staggering juxtaposition.

> If men decided otherwise, it would be changed.

SK is a democracy with a slight majority women, but of course, feminists and statistics are like oil and water. Always remember that.
by dathery | 2025-08-10 21:09:36+00:00
This is a neat visualization. It makes me want to build something like this with actual screenshots (scraping from places like old forums, image hosting sites, etc.) rather than web page renderings.

One of my most prized possessions is my collection of personal screenshots -- I've managed to save basically every screenshot I've taken over the past ~20 years. It's very nostalgic to put them on shuffle and see how my desktop has changed over time, remember what random thing I was working on, etc.

Could be cool to extend the concept beyond one user.
by _Algernon_ | 2025-08-10 21:10:05+00:00
Moving to most of those countries would instantly at least 5x (Colombia would be 30x!) my chance of getting murdered (and I assume increase my risk of being the victim of other violent crimes similarly). Not to mention that suggesting El Salvador — a country that has imprisoned 1.7 % of its population, many without being convicted in a court of law — is a truly laughable suggestion.
by GOD_Over_Djinn | 2025-08-10 21:10:09+00:00
I thought this bit was fascinating:

> Blom begins with Stravinsky, whose famous orchestral work The Rite of Spring was inspired by ancient Russian dance rituals. A melange of old folk music and arresting dissonance, the piece’s first performance in Paris 1913 triggered one of the most infamously violent reactions of any concert-hall audience in history. As Blom puts it bluntly, “all hell broke loose”:

> “During the first two minutes the public remained quiet,' Monteux [a musician] later recalled, “then there were boos and hissing from the upper circle, soon after from the stalls. People sitting next to one another began to hit one another on the head with fists and walking sticks, or whatever else they had to hand. Soon, their anger was turned against the dancers and especially against the orchestra... Everything to hand was thrown at them, but we continued playing. The chaos was complete when members of the audience turned on one another, on anyone supporting the other side. A heavily bejewelled lady was seen slapping her neighbour before storming off, while another one spat in her detractor's face. Fights broke out everywhere and challenges to duels were issued.”

There’s something about the image of a concert hall full of rich, fancy people erupting in a melee that is just delightful
Ask HN: Would you get a CS degree today?
by reilly3000 | 2025-08-10 21:10:19+00:00
I’m looking for feedback from the community. My son made a plan to get a 4 year degree from a decent state university in computer science but is having second thoughts. He is looking at ~$130K in costs and 4 years of not working vs trying to find work and build a resume organically. He’s a fine young developer who loves C++ and learned Java, web dev, and EDA in his teen years for fun. His written several languages and toy compilers, ordered PCBs for his own gaming device, and built a social network in the 6th grade. He’s looking forward to higher level coursework but dreading the intro classes. His motivation for getting a degree was to be marketable to employers, but also to gain a better understanding of fundamentals. With AI making entry level programming jobs scarce, does it really make sense to invest the time and money? If not, what sort of pathway into a programming career would be a good alternative? Any and all advice appreciated.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-10 21:10:30+00:00
Remains to be seen, good longitudinal study over the next 100 years imho. Old age care/consumption isn’t infinite; it’s bounded by what will be provided via social systems or personal resources. If there’s nothing to give (or no personal resources on hand), it’s homelessness or poverty until death. Can’t spend what isn’t there.
by K0balt | 2025-08-10 21:11:45+00:00
Equality of outcomes, or equality of opportunity? Because shooting for equality of outcomes has got a really, really bad track record. Essentially, it is only possible in an unfree society, and even then it has never been proven to work. Ever. Not even one time.

Nobody wants equality. People merely don’t want to be thwarted in their pursuit of a worthwhile life.

We should do what we can to ensure that special barriers aren’t erected for anyone and that everyone can succeed on their merits, but also we must balance that ideal with the fact that some people wield disproportionate power, either as a result of their merits or otherwise.

There is no easy solution, only less bad compromises
by inglor_cz | 2025-08-10 21:12:19+00:00
I find the article's dismissal of population collapses rather dishonest.

There is no doubt that urban centres basically disappeared after collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and that population density went significantly down. Once the city-based specialists were gone, so was any ability of rural folk to buy anything that could not be produced by primitive methods in their own community. And without an efficient trade network, there was no way to import food if local crops failed. Hence, famines, which the previous empire was mostly able to hold in check by moving food over the sea at big distances.

A major problem of the Early Middle Ages was diminished security - all those Viking, Avar, Hun and Pecheneg raids were absolutely real, and their targets weren't "the 1%". Of course loot from the rich would be taken, but so would poor young women for sex and their children into slavery, and their meagre food reserves for the raiders to eat. That is what happens to settled people without an efficient defense of their borders.

We have had two big imperial collapses right in Europe within living memory - the Nazi Reich (by war) and the Soviet Union (economic). Ask the survivors if they "noticed". They absolutely did. I would even say that the working class "noticed" the most, as they usually had fewest reserves to survive the subsequent chaos.

It wasn't that different in the past.
by themafia | 2025-08-10 21:13:09+00:00
> publish all your internal apps through a load balancer / API gateway with a static IP address, put it behind a VPN and call it a day.

Or just use Cognito. It can wrap up all the ugly Microsoft authentication into it's basic OAuth and API Gateway can use and verify Cognito tokens for you transparently. It's as close to the Zero Trust model in a Small Developer Shop we could get.
by nuancebydefault | 2025-08-10 21:13:10+00:00
Coding bootcamps might teach you how to design algorithms and how to code them but developing software is so much more than that. Often you get very vague requirements from the customer and there are many phases of refinement after that, often in a loop. The customer often does not know what they need, though they have a problem to solve.

Those skills you don't fully develop at school or university, let alone a half year of bootcamp. I believe you have to have a developer's or engineering mindset in some way, early on in life, to be good at it.

My point being, if you choose a career swap, or suddenly realise you were studying something you are not passionate about, you still have a very big leap to make.
by jonplackett | 2025-08-10 21:13:31+00:00
I just tried a few things that are simple and a world model would probably get right. Eg

Question to GPT5: I am looking straight on to some objects. Looking parallel to the ground.

In front of me I have a milk bottle, to the right of that is a Coca-Cola bottle. To the right of that is a glass of water. And to the right of that there’s a cherry. Behind the cherry there’s a cactus and to the left of that there’s a peanut. Everything is spaced evenly. Can I see the peanut?

Answer (after choosing thinking mode)

No. The cactus is directly behind the cherry (front row order: milk, Coke, water, cherry). “To the left of that” puts the peanut behind the glass of water. Since you’re looking straight on, the glass sits in front and occludes the peanut.

It doesn’t consider transparency until you mention it, then apologises and says it didn’t think of transparency
by eschulz | 2025-08-10 21:13:59+00:00
I'm reminded of how time pieces such as sundials changed societies, and how some ancients almost lost their minds due to this new development.

“The Gods confound the man who first found out How to distinguish the hours---confound him, too Who in this place set up a sundial To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small pieces ! . . . I can't (even sit down to eat) unless the sun gives leave. The town's so full of these confounded dials . . .” ― Plautus
by dustingetz | 2025-08-10 21:14:45+00:00
upvoted for visibility, quick reaction - not for $130k no way, is he self motivated enough to spend a year at home self of self study? i am a 39yo tech founder who also learned C++ at high school age, the world was different 20 years ago but 130k is a huge amount of debt, and my career was generated almost entirely from side projects. My actual degree is in computer hardware engineering despite the software career. It made no difference
by rubyn00bie | 2025-08-10 21:14:51+00:00
I think it depends on the use case, slow isn’t that bad if you’re asking questions infrequently. I downloaded a model a few weeks ago that was roughly 80GBs in size and ran it on my 3090 just to see how it was… and it was okay. Fast? Nope. But it did it. If the answers were materially better I’d be happy to wait a minute for the output, but they weren’t. I’d like to try one of the really large ones, just to see how slow it is, but need to clear some space to even download it.
by oezi | 2025-08-10 21:15:11+00:00
> A culture evaporating

Well if you being your sentence like this, then you already made it clear that you aren't serious about discussing, because that is not what is happening.

Any discussion that lazyly tries to skirt what Germans have done 80 years ago and tries to move into similar directions is just plain ignorant.

We must get back to the real issues: 10m Ukrainian refugees because we let Putin murder in Ukraine. 10m Syrians being displaced due to the world's inaction to stop a civil war. The list could go on.
by yosefk | 2025-08-10 21:15:22+00:00
A "world model" depends on the context which defines which world the problem is in. For chess, which moves are legal and needing to know where the pieces are to make legal moves are parts of the world model. For alpha blending, it being a mathematical operation and the visibility of a background given the transparency of the foreground are parts of the world model.

The examples are from all the major commercial American LLMs as listed in a sister comment.

You seem to conflate context windows with tracking chess pieces. The context windows are more than large enough to remember 10 moves. The model should either track the pieces, or mention that it would be playing blindfold chess absent a board to look at and it isn't good at this, so could you please list the position after every move to make it fair, or it doesn't know what it's doing; it's demonstrably the latter.
by isaacremuant | 2025-08-10 21:15:33+00:00
Sure. Fight it. And also Remember this moment next time you're calling people conspiracy theorists because your party politician or mainstream news says so.

Next time think twice before calling people "freedumb" lovers and otherwise label them as Nazis, deniers, -ism, terrorism apologist, foreign government agents and more which is the typical attack when people fight for civil rights and freedoms.

It's always placing them on a false spectrum and assuming the worst.

Now you get to enjoy your authoritarian utopia. All for the greater good.
Show HN: Word Pulse, Connect pulsing letters (Svelte 5, Moby list)
by emson | 2025-08-10 21:15:43+00:00
I built Word Pulse as a fun, educational word game for my family. It’s a browser game where you connect letters on a pulsing grid to form words and try to keep things in equilibrium.

Play it: https://scrambleletters.com/apps/word-pulse

How it’s built: Svelte 5 for the UI, with a custom word check pipeline based on the Moby word list (preprocessed into a fast lookup structure). All gameplay runs in the browser.

Why I made it: I wanted something snappy, kid-friendly, and slightly "thinky" that encourages pattern spotting under light pressure, not just another Wordle clone.

What I’d love feedback on: - Difficulty curve and pacing of the “pulse” mechanic - Dictionary choices (UK/US spellings, obscure words, minimum word length) - UX rough edges (accessibility, touch interactions, onboarding/help)

Hope that's ok. Thanks! Ben
by PopePompus | 2025-08-10 21:16:02+00:00
By default ChatGPT et al. will not produce the same output if identical input is fed to it multiple times. There is "stochastic sampling" which means that the most probable next token is not always selected. It will select from tokens of similar probability. The degree of similarity required is controlled by the temperature parameter. If the temperature is set to 0, then the model will reproducibility produce the same output (assuming it's always running on the same hardware and the model weights don't get tweeked by an update). But the chatbox front ends do not have the temperature set to 0.
by russellbeattie | 2025-08-10 21:16:53+00:00
I can't imagine what it would have been like to grow up with horse and carriages only to see us landing on the moon before you die. That's some serious societal whiplash.

I do like to imagine future generations looking back on the era of the internal combustion engines with absolute horror.

"You won't believe this, but for like 200 years, any time a person wanted a machine to move stuff, those apes would carry around tens of gallons of some crazy toxic combustible fluid which they'd spray into a heavy block of metal then bung 20,000 volts of electricity through it to make it explode. Just to spin a wheel! Then they'd pump the poisonous fumes out from the rear of the machine like a cloud of evil flatulence. Into the same air they breathed! There were literally billions of these machines all over the planet. Everyone owned one! There was so much of it, the planet started getting hotter! It was crazy!!"
by lycopodiopsida | 2025-08-10 21:17:27+00:00
> I just told you that those who really helped to build the nazi war machine, were you (the american and other capitalists), and not the Soviet Union.

Oh, this is not a point of blaming and finger pointing, looking for excuses why the communists are not to blame(are they ever?). It is to illustrate the very simple fact that the soviet union was an imperialist, expansive and warmongering state and one of the direct initiators of WWII - contrary to the usual soviet-russian victim narrative. Not that we would not know it in the retrospective looking at the soviet occupation of half of europe.
by qcnguy | 2025-08-10 21:18:05+00:00
But you're not addressing my point, so you cannot be denying it.

You can obviously compute a trend line on this data set, as with any. That doesn't mean the trend matters or can be described in normal English as "storms getting worse", which is why even people like the British government who are fully on board with Net Zero don't try the argument you're trying here. They explicitly say the trend line isn't compelling, even.

So what point are you trying to make, exactly? That they're wrong and it is compelling? Or that on HN there's a rule against describing data in normal ways?

Let's boil this down to the only thing that matters: do you think people should be alarmed by this data? If so, why, when others who have studied it don't?
by isaacremuant | 2025-08-10 21:18:13+00:00
> Is there any regime out there who's not trying to mass-surveil their citizens for one reason or another?

Covid authoritarian policies were hugely successful and supported by mainstream people by and large. Not enough protests. Not enough dissent.

Now politicians know they can turn the power knob as high as they want and nothing will happen. Less and less dissent will be allowed, just like during covid.

If you fail to learn that and denounce those and reclaim the freedoms for all, you're going to just whine into a smaller and smaller room.
by sporkland | 2025-08-10 21:20:45+00:00
While I'm sure some of these predictions will come true and we'll have to layer some additional prompting and context engineering in here...

MCP seems to be the ultimate inheritor of ReSTful architectural practices as described by Roy fielding but instead of needing a human on the other end to interact with links (hateos) you can have an LLM bridging the gap between user intent and concrete subsequent calls.

So many issues around versioning and the fragility here will likely start to disappear. Like embeddings I'd put a bet on this being one of the major unexpected architectural improvements that lets us build our scaffolding a bit higher before it collapses to use a Steve Jobs analogy, LLM's at key glue points to create looser coupling.
by themafia | 2025-08-10 21:20:46+00:00
That's some exceptionally shallow thinking on their part. I think may people would agree that part of the vulnerability is the authentication configuration options do not map well onto real world use cases, the documentation surrounding this is absent or confusing, and even internal teams that should know better are creating insecure services an alarming percentage of the time.

This is what I like about actual safety culture, like you would find in aviation, _all causes_ are to be investigated, all the way back to the shape, size and position of the switches on the flight deck.

It's difficult to take Microsoft's stance seriously. It makes the prices for their "service" seem completely unjustifiable.
by cnst | 2025-08-10 21:21:02+00:00
Aline describes her experience in 2023 of getting permabanned from LinkedIn for several days, until finding a human contract through one of the investors in her startup.

Possible reason for the ban is her content makes mention of LinkedIn in a way that wasn't expressly approved by LinkedIn, and it all happened only after she took their offer to pay $500 to promote the post.

TIL FB isn't the only network to be asking for government-issued IDs all of a sudden.
by ajross | 2025-08-10 21:21:50+00:00
> if you're looking at 1Y TCO, the Apple could easily be cost competitive performance per dollar.

Only if you're buying artesinal single source electricity sustainably sourced from trained dolphins.

Average US electrical power is $.18/kWh per google. Figure the desktop draws 300W continuous (which it almost certainly can't), and that's 0.3 kW * 24 hr/day * 365.2425 days/yr == $473/year. So even if the mac was completely free you'd be looking at crossover in 5 years, or longer than the expected life of the device.