MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jlcummings | 2025-08-15 09:01:55+00:00
Being effective with llm agents requires not just the ability to code or to appreciate nuance with libraries or business rules but to have the ability and proclivity of pedantry. Dad-splain everything always.

And to have boundless contextual awareness… dig a rabbit hole, but beware that you are in your own hole. At this point you can escape the hole but you have to be purposefully aware of what guardrails and ladders you give the agent to evoke action.

The better, more explicit guardrails you provide the more likely the agent is able to do what is expected and honor the scope and context you establish. If you tell it to use silverware to eat, be assured it doesn’t mean to use it appropriately or idiomatically and it will try eating soup with a fork.

Lastly don’t be afraid of commits and checkpoints, or to reject/rollback proposed changes and restate or reset the context. The agent might be the leading actor, but you are the director. When a scene doesn’t play out, try it again after clarification or changing camera perspective or lighting or lines, or cut/replace the scene entirely.
by Piskvorrr | 2025-08-15 09:02:14+00:00
How I envision this to work:

- vibe code a thing

- it doesn't work, but it was CHEAP

- hire someone "to fix it"

- actually means "rewrite most of it, but cheaper"

- also means "become the scapegoat"

To a developer, it offers most of the work for very little payment. Not an enticing proposition.

(Yes, I've been burned by various "it's 90% done, we just need a few fixes", and that was BEFORE the current slop era)
by ei8htyfi5e | 2025-08-15 09:02:21+00:00
We're building an AI moving company! WHAT? Well, this article hopefully explains why we think moving is the single most powerful commercial moment in a person’s life. When you relocate, your housing, finances, daily routines, and spending habits all reset at once.

Amazon built the Everything Store. We’re building for the Everything Moment, using AI to bring transparency and trust to one of the most broken, chaotic industries out there.

Would love your thoughts!
by kypro | 2025-08-15 09:02:50+00:00
> LLMs get endlessly confused: they assume the code they wrote actually works; when test fail, they are left guessing as to whether to fix the code or the tests; and when it gets frustrating, they just delete the whole lot and start over.

That's actually an interesting point, and something I've noticed a lot myself. I find LLMs are very good at hacking around test failures, but unless the test is failing for a trivial reason often it's pointing at some more fundamental issue with the underlying logic of the application which LLMs don't seem to be able to pick up on, likely because they don't have a comprehensive mental model of how the system should work.

I don't want to point fingers, but I've been seeing this quite a bit in the code of colleagues who heavily use LLMs. On the surface the code looks fine, and they've produced tests which pass, but when you think about it for more than a minute you realise it doesn't really capture nuance of the requirements, and in a way a human who had a mental model of the how the system probably wouldn't have done...

Sometimes humans miss things in the logic when they're writing code, but these look more like mistakes in a line rather than a fundamental failure to comprehend and model the problem. And I know this isn't the case, because when you talk to these developers they get the problem perfectly well.

To know when the code needs fixing or a test you need a very clear idea of what should be happening and LLMs just don't. I don't know why that is. Maybe it's just they're missing context from the hours of reading tickets and technical discussions, or maybe it's their failure to ask questions when they're unsure of what should be happening. I don't know if this a fundamental limitation of LLMs (I'd suspect not personally), but this is a problem when using LLMs to code today and one that more compute alone probably can't fix.
by vvillena | 2025-08-15 09:04:56+00:00
The screen size advertised by Apple measures the "full screen" area, the undisturbed 16:10 rectangle of pixels. I just took measures on both a 14 and a 16 inch Macbook Pro. The screen we get is indeed slighly larger.

If you want to avoid the extra space, it's as easy as using a 16:10 resolution size. The menubar will drop down to the 16:10 space.
by Mashimo | 2025-08-15 09:05:13+00:00
I would say either private torrent trackers or usenet. Later I never tried.

I never had a problem with "garbage" on private trackers, and if they are "nuked" fairly quickly.

Both torrent and usenet can be automated. (Sonarr, radarr etc.) If you want to watch a specific series, new episodes will be automatically downloaded, added to the torrent client, maybe moved and renamed and you get a ping your discord server / telegram / whatever.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-15 09:06:21+00:00
Most medical research doesn't go up in smoke if it didn't lead to a production drug. And i don't argue R&D isn't a larger portion of what pharmaceutical companies do.

Although the statistics is old (2017), its interesting to compare the $2.2 billion total spent by all US healthcare companies listed (2017) compared to the $38 billion tax money spent by the NHS on research grants to medical research 2024. (80% of their budget of $48 billion)

Even assuming very generous increase of the medical research budget since 2017, makes N.H.S. research grants a significant portion of medical research that the expensive drugs supposedly cover?

https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/organization/budget

And again, this is somehow only an issue in the US. Why does European and Asian pharmaceutical companies produce cheaper drugs and cutting edge medical research as a competitive rate, if the high cost of the drugs is to needed to keep them afloat?

The statistics you sent also seem to show non-us pharmaceutical companies regularly spent more % of their revenue on R&D. What gives?

---

And again, i didn't single-out pharmaceutical companies specifically. I blamed all of US medical industry, from the hospital to the insurance. The pharmaceutical companies seem to charge quite reasonable prices to the insurance companies. Odd how much more it costs to buy it without insurance though (the cost is to cover R&D right?.... right?)

---

I'll be even more spicy. If your goal it so save as many people as possible, and R&D truly is single-handedly the reason drugs and drugs and medical care is so expensive (which i think is blatantly incorrect); The US should just stop doing R&D entirely.

You could save vastly more lives with the drugs already in existence, which is prevented because the US healthcare system is so fundamentally broken.

But i don't think it would do squat because there are a lot of other things affecting the price of drugs and healthcare than that. Cutting out R&D not do squat on healthcare costs.
by arnon | 2025-08-15 09:07:17+00:00
it's going to happen.

we take a lot of things today at face value and that's not necessarily how things will work.

WHY do I still need to update fields in a CRM, why doesn't it just know that I've had an e-mail/meeting (that is auto-transcribed and tracked) and update it accordingly?

the ai-native variants of CRMs will look different for sure.
Show HN: Localit.io – Fast, affordable translation management with integrations
by Donder | 2025-08-15 09:07:41+00:00
Hi HN! I'm Ilya, creator of Localit.io - a translation management system for dev teams who are tired of expensive tools like Lokalise and Phrase.

The problem: Traditional TMS solutions charge $100-2000/month for basic localization features. Complex setups take hours, and many charge extra for Git integrations. What we built: - Direct GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket integration (including Enterprise) - AI translations via ChatGPT, DeepL, Google Translate - Professional translators through Gengo - Built-in team chat with message translation - Mobile app for remote translators - Same features as competitors at 10x lower cost

Technical details:

We support all major file formats (.json, .xml, .strings, .po, .srt), handle complex plural forms, and offer webhook automation. Setup takes minutes instead of hours.

Why we built this: After paying $500+/month for basic localization tools at my previous company, I realized there had to be a better way. We've made enterprise features free and focus on developer experience.

Current status: Live with paying customers, growing 50% monthly. Recently launched GitHub Enterprise support.

Would love feedback from the HN community! What's been your biggest pain point with localization tools?

Try it free: https://localit.io
by gjf | 2025-08-15 09:07:46+00:00
Author here; I think I understand where you might be coming from. I find functional nature of R combined with pipes incredibly powerful and elegant to work with.

OTOH in a pipeline, you're mutating/summarising/joining a data frame, and it's really difficult to look at it and keep track of what state the data is in. I try my best to write in a way that you understand the state of the data (hence the tables I spread throughout the post), but I do acknowledge it can be inscrutable.
by croon | 2025-08-15 09:08:01+00:00
They only show ads for other shows on their own service (at least in my region), and they're skippable, but I'm not defending it, it's still bad and serves no purpose for the customer.

What bothers me more with Prime is that when I finish watching the latest episode of something, as there is no next episode, it starts playing something entirely different I have no interest in watching, which then ends up on my "Continue watching" list.
by troupo | 2025-08-15 09:08:55+00:00
> I found the keybinding situation to be a complete mess.

As in: most shortcts work the same across all apps?

> It's also incredibly hard to track down and change certain keybindings, many apps don't have any text configuration to easily modify and require you to go through their GUIs

Any action exposed in menus is handled on OS level in keyboard configuration: https://techtoro.io/blog/how-to-change-keyboard-shortcuts-on...
by dcminter | 2025-08-15 09:09:09+00:00
Speaking for myself I'm static or death, BUT I can see how one might come away scarred from C++ and conflate static with the wild degree of ceremony and clunky tooling.

Nowadays the better static languages do a lot of type infererence so that a lot of that ceremony is pushed aside.

I recently did some semi-serious python work and I see some of the appeal; I definitely missed mandatory type declarations at the function argument level but barely if at all within functions.

There's a great Steve Yegge post about this topic of static/dynamic alliegence (via someone's gist because Google can't run a service long term for love or money): https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150
by perching_aix | 2025-08-15 09:09:15+00:00
> Where's the equality in that?

How would you expect equality in an arrangement where you have a few hundred to a few thousand very specific kind of people producing something for billions?

They are in a special position. Every time you depend on someone to do something for you you cannot perform yourself, either due to a time or any other constraint, that is no longer an equal relationship, and it cannot be. You can make it codependent at best, which is not the same, and doesn't apply here.

All the licensing and open collaboration theatrics are just that, "words on a piece of paper" and things that can go away. I feel people really misjudge the "power" they "gain" from "open" and "transparent" processes like this.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-15 09:10:01+00:00
Slightly different spellings of names (Ant Mars Smith vs Mark Tony Smith-Jones), ways to write addresses (house name vs road name), etc will make automatic joins difficult. Such inconsistencies do not significantly affect the ability for humans to use the records.

Then it's just a matter of making sure that everybody with the skills to do so, either refuses, or does a bad enough job to sabotage other parts of the process. (It is not hard to think of these, so I will not discuss them here.) Making the job legitimately difficult makes it easier for people to refuse to do it, and makes it more likely that the bad guys who try will find that they actually can't.
by haburka | 2025-08-15 09:10:49+00:00
> Very true. But why is that argument never deployed against the bullies?

Unfortunately part of being an adult is realizing there are no bullies. There are adults with power and some people who wield unfairly, but that’s different from a mean schoolchild, although the similarities are there. I don’t think the people who work on browser standards are bullies and it’s weird to frame them in that way.

> Where's the equality in that?

I guess why do you think there should be equality between users and the people that work on browser standards? It’s a committee not a direct democracy. Although they do take user feedback seriously, they surely can’t only do what every vocal minorities wants right?

> Again, why isn't anyone calling for them to be more calm and respectful of the people they're hurting?

They’re not be disrespectful by moderating the thread. They’re simply trying to do their jobs without being insulted constantly. It’s a bit different. They are actively responding respectfully to the feedback, I don’t think they’re hurting people.

> But given that they know these proposals would be contentious, why didn't they approach this in a more respectful and collaborative manner?

How could it be more collaborative? It’s already a request for feedback on an open forum. The comments aren’t even deleted just hidden because they’re duplicates. I’m curious what could be more collaborative?
by account42 | 2025-08-15 09:11:04+00:00
I've used Valgrind (mainly memcheck) as a proactive tool or at least as a tool to fish for easy to fix issues before spending too much time debugging specific reports. Main issue is the huge performance overhead that make interactive use under it less than fun - but IMO running your testsuite under it from time to time at least is a no brainer.
by timr | 2025-08-15 09:11:35+00:00
No you don’t. There’s actually a lot of research showing that native English speakers don’t read letters, they read word shapes. And people who read fastest read in even larger groups of words, to the point of eliding segments of sentences or paragraphs entirely.

Chunking is incredibly important for reading speed, and reading hiragana is much closer to reading letters than words. My reading speed in Japanese is nowhere near native, but the way I’ve gained speed so far is almost exclusively by increasing my minimum comprehension unit: I see word patterns, common grammatical constructions, etc., and I don’t need to read them.
by alternatex | 2025-08-15 09:11:38+00:00
>are trained on far more data

I feel like we're underestimating how much data we as humans are exposed to. There's a reason AI struggles to generate an image of a full glass of wine. It has no concept of what wine is. It probably knows way more theory about it than any human, but it's missing the physical.

In order to train AIs the way we train ourselves, we'll need to give it more senses, and I'm no data scientist but that's presumably an inordinate amount of data. Training AI to feel, smell, see in 3D, etc is probably going to cost exponentially more than what the AI companies make now or ever will. But that is the only way to make AI understand rather than know.

We often like to state how much more capacity for knowledge AI has than the average human, but in reality we are just underestimating ourselves as humans.
by DrScientist | 2025-08-15 09:11:41+00:00
> So go enforce those laws. The rent seekers will thank you.

Seems you have bought into the idea idea that companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft are the poor little guys. Wow.

What we are talking about here is certain companies trying to gain a defacto monopoly on the sum of human knowledge - without paying any of those people who built it in the first place.

This is the real story.

Now it may well be their moat isn't as big as they thought it was and the greedy investors trying to do this heist will fail - but that's what they are attempting - and you are cheer leading for it.
by kookamamie | 2025-08-15 09:11:50+00:00
Ok, so the author thought it's a great idea to embed a little mini-game onto the page - in case two squares shot by the things in each bottom corner ever collide, your mouse cursor vanishes. Brilliant - tab closed.

PS. fix the origin of the projectile shooters - right now they are shooting from the "side" and it looks sloppy.
by arp242 | 2025-08-15 09:12:31+00:00
> Chrome's developers say "We want to do X". People say "No, please don't." Chrome says "I'm not going to respect your wishes."

Absolutely not what's happening in that thread. Complete nonsense. It's a discussion/proposal.

The bullies are the people coming in and commenting with a bunch of rants, personal abuse, etc. Not the ones wanting to have a technical discussion (either pro or against removal). This is classic "reversing victim and offender" abuser/bully stuff.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-08-15 09:12:31+00:00
I can tell you that choosing to lose will make it happen faster.

I would like to see https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2... on the top of every major news outlet:

> The U.K. Online Safety Act was (avowedly, as revealed in a recent High Court case) "not primarily aimed at protecting children" but at regulating "services that have a significant influence over public discourse."
by stpedgwdgfhgdd | 2025-08-15 09:12:51+00:00
I did not understand ‘hg’ and asked Claude:

The “hg” in this passage refers to Mercurial, a distributed version control system. `hg` is the command-line tool for Mercurial (just like `git` is the command for Git).

The Go project itself was historically stored in Mercurial repositories before migrating to Git. Some Go modules may still be hosted in Mercurial repos.
by Svip | 2025-08-15 09:13:36+00:00
Kind of wish Firefox allowed one to modify the common keyboard shortcuts in the browser. But considering the open issue on the matter, I won't keep my hopes up: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57805

The hacks about seems to be basically steal keyboard shortcuts the same way webpages already do; either through an extension[0] or modifying config-pref.js[1]. Neither of which seems very appealing to me. Though, funnily: I did hit Ctrl-W writing this message to delete a word; thank goodness for cache.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/shortkeys/

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/kilmm2/restore_ctr...
by zdc1 | 2025-08-15 09:13:38+00:00
I'm learning traditional Chinese and found that writing helps me recognise the components and strokes when reading the same characters.

If I just try and visually pattern match with flash cards, anything that's hand written or in an stylised font will throw me off. If I can sympathise with / recognise the stokes used, I find it easier to tell what character they're trying to show.
by iamflimflam1 | 2025-08-15 09:14:42+00:00
The job market is pretty tough at the moment and every job will have many qualified candidates applying.

I would not take this failure too much to heart. There will be quite a few other people who applied and also went all the way through the process only to be rejected at the end.

In these circumstances it can be very marginal things that sway the balance in favour or against one candidate.
by bob1029 | 2025-08-15 09:15:23+00:00
> An online or in-person appointment typically lasts 30-60 minutes.

I've already taken the time to submit thorough support tickets regarding insane performance regressions with their react frontend. Perhaps Github's revised leadership can go mine some ideas out of their support ticket pile instead of wasting even more of my time.

Tools that persistently feel like shit to use will eventually be replaced. AI should be 3rd or 4th priority for the GH development team if we are being even remotely serious about the product's health. Network effects are not god mode or an infinite moat. The competition is getting closer every day.
by vidarh | 2025-08-15 09:16:11+00:00
A search is pretty "easy" (doing it distributed is just more expensive in terms of resources than a single index, because you end up doing multiple searches in parallel and merging results) - the main issue with search on the Mastodon side of things have been politics. That is, a lot of people like that discovery isn't as easy as searching. For subsets of the Fediverse where people actually agree search is a good thing or if the software specifically indicates consent or not, it'd be fairly straightforward to provide.

For Lemmy the hub and spoke model is essentially intentional - groups "belong" to a specific instance. But there's nothing in ActivityPub that'd prevent a USENET style model of groups either. There's nothing in ActivityPub that prevetns an application where a collection is effectively open to writing by all, and that would then relay messages to a sufficient set of "downstream" instances.

It'd be interesting to have that as an alternative to the Lemmy approach - I think the two could live quite well side by side.
by edent | 2025-08-15 09:16:19+00:00
> By definition overly emotional is bad – that’s what separates “overly emotional” from just “emotional”.

Human reactions are by definition not bad. They are a genuine expression of how we feel. We use that to signal our emotional state to others.

Try an experiment for me. Tell your partner that you want to split up. Once they finish crying, tell them that they're being "overly" emotional. See how that goes for you.

> Why are you misrepresenting this as “it will make me sad”?

Your mental model of the world has to include that other people have emotions, right? When you announce a change, you know that some people are going to be upset by it. That means you need to craft your message to account for other people's reactions.

Much like the above experiment, email your mother and tell her that you've decided that calling her every week is too much of a hassle and you're not going to do it any more. What do you think her reaction would be?

Perhaps you have a genuine reason for doing so. How would you best communicate that with her? What mitigation strategies would you use? What would you be prepared to compromise on?

Gatekeepers are usually terrible at accounting for the emotions of others. This is a repeated pattern and, by now, shouldn't be surprising to them.
by cess11 | 2025-08-15 09:16:53+00:00
They're the Computing-Tabulating-Recording, International Business Machines, Company of our age, and just as they did in the thirties and forties, Palantir shapes contemporary tyranny and genocide.

While the predecessors arguably chased profit for its own sake, this is not the case with top Palantir leadership, who have very loudly declared their political ambitions and wallow openly in the nastiest of criminality.

Now, that's not a good sales pitch, and neither would 'we will collapse complexity in your decision making while providing abstractions that add to plausible deniability, and hence make you more efficient at doing crimes while at the same time make it feel more boring to the people that actually do the things'.

Hence the 'we fight for the Western civilisation against the barbarism of the world' branding, tuned to make NATO military personnel feel more or less at home. This is also why the Palantir employees don't have a solid idea about what they do, the same muddying about purpose through abstractions and cult like techniques are what keep them around.