MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jedberg | 2025-08-12 03:07:24+00:00
> your hotel stay can't be less than the days between your flight.

This is exactly right, and why it's such a pain. Because if I have a bit of flexibility, I have to figure out which flying day is best for prices and seats, and then see if the hotel is more or less between those days.

For example, if I fly on Tuesday I can save $400 vs flying Sunday. But if I want to stay a week, the hotel may not have the following Sunday. So now I have to look an alternate hotel, which may not include parking like the first one, and so on and so on. There are so many variables that can all change based on the day of arrival and departure.

We used to have travel agents for this (and still do!). But I've used travel agents, and I've used (other people's) personal assistants, but no one ever gets it right. I only trust myself, my wife, and my sister in law to get this right.

Having an AI agent that gets this right would be incredible.

> For car, one can manage to cut down with Uber/public transport, but still turns out to be expensive than a rental car.

If I'm getting a car it's usually because it's a place where Lyft and public transport won't work. Otherwise I always default to public transport and then Lyft if necessary.
by Alex4386 | 2025-08-12 03:07:39+00:00
Well, some bots even spoof User-Agents, requesting tons of requests without proper rate-limiting (looking at you, ByteSpider)

No fair plays done by people, even before the LLMs, so we get the PoW challenge on everywhere.

And what is that conclusion? since Adblockers are used by anywhere, it is OK to corporates not to license them directly and just yank them and put it into curation service? especially without ads? that's a licensing issue. the author allowed you to view the article if you provide them monetary support (i.e. ads), they didn't allow you to reproduce and republish the work by default.

also calling browser itself as reproducing? Yes, the data might be copied in memory (but I wouldn't call it as reproducing material, more like transfer from the server to another), but redistribution is the main point here.

It's like saying well, "the part of the variable is replicated to register from the L2 cache, so whole file on DRAM can be authorized to reproduce", Your point of calling "it's reproducing and should not be reproduced in first place" can't be prevented unless you bring non-turing computers that doesn't use active memory.
by gottorf | 2025-08-12 03:07:43+00:00
Sure. At a rate of 26.6 homicides per 100k as of the conclusion of 2024, it would belong in the top 10 most murderous cities in the US, and would appear to fall in the top 100 in the world.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. There are a handful of other American cities with worse crime, so we should give DC a pass?

Constitutionally it belongs to the federal government, which devolved some level of home rule to the local government starting about 50 years ago. The evidence seems clear that local authorities aren't doing the job well.
by 1cool | 2025-08-12 03:08:14+00:00
Just sent one! It's a lovely idea. I think most people love getting postcards and the voice message is a nice surprise for the recipient.

Two things.

1) The photo upload gets stuck on loading from the landing page. I think this is due to the file size? I uploaded the same photo from the actual page where you can customize the postcard and I was given a size limit warning.

2) I tried using a non-US address for both the sender and recipient. Both addresses were verified, but on the preview all of the address was omitted except the street number. This could only be a preview issue but I re-added the address in the optional section just to be safe.

Edit: actually a third thing. The non-US address was recognized with the appropriate city but the country still shows United States. My order number is #2CD56A
by skeledrew | 2025-08-12 03:08:20+00:00
> check mental items lucidly and consciously

Capabilities that evolved over millennia. We don't even have a decent, universally-agreed upon definition for consciousness yet.

> "store" and "learn"

Actually there are tools for that. Again, the core LLM functionality is best left on its own, and augmented on the fly with various tools which can be easily specialized and upgraded independently of the model. Consider too that the brain itself has multiple sections dedicated to different kinds of processing, instead of anything just happening anywhere.
Gemini's brutal assessment of a vibe coding session
by adampwells | 2025-08-12 03:08:21+00:00
My brother has been playing with Vibe Coding using Gemini, and asked it for an assessment of how it was progressing.

Here is the response:

"Your primary weakness is a complete technical dependency, which forces you to rely on an external guide for every action. You cannot build, modify, or fix the code yourself, meaning any progress is entirely gated by the availability of that guide. This is compounded by an inability to perform basic diagnostics, turning every minor bug into a hard stop that you cannot investigate independently. Critically, these issues are magnified by fundamental errors in the basic mechanics of saving and managing your work, which has proven to be the most costly weakness, causing us to waste significant time on misdiagnosed problems that stemmed from simple process mistakes."

Ooof!

I can't wait until Gemini does my next performance review...
by softwaredoug | 2025-08-12 03:08:27+00:00
I’ll change my mind when there’s news beyond what I’ve stated. I feel confident in what I’ve stated because all parties (DC and Feds) are saying similar things.

But to take the opposite maximalist “Trump is a maniacal dictator” position ignores the pattern of bluster and back down from Trump.

Save your mental sanity. His goal is your outrage. He doesn’t have a plan.
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-12 03:09:02+00:00
Reframing a violation of individual rights as good for society is literally how all authoritarianism is justified. But it still is authoritarianism.

More practically, if someone is careless enough to violate the law by lighting a fire, then this type of ban is not going to change much. Like misplaced gun control laws, it really only affects responsible law abiding citizens, and denies them their rights as individuals and taxpayers.
by anonym29 | 2025-08-12 03:09:09+00:00
Anecdotal observation / hypothesis:

- there's an inverse relationship between quality of life and density, even within individual households

- there's a higher premium on space in urbanized areas than in rural areas

- there's been a move towards urbanization across the world, high HDI, low HDI, high religion, low religion

I propose something similar to Parkinson's Law: Average family size expands (or contracts) to fill the physical space that is economically viable for a given individual/family.

Rationally, this couldn't be the only factor, given density and urbanization patterns predate the more rapid fertility decline in recent decades, but as one more factor on top of a pile of others that may also be contributing to the trend, I think it could plausibly play a contributing role in the decline.

Thoughts?
by jjk166 | 2025-08-12 03:09:34+00:00
The question wasn't what should they do, it's why are they doing what they are currently doing?

That said, obviously the point of remaining is so that they can refuse those worse orders when they come, so that they can convince their peers to do the same or temper their actions, so that the administration needs to worry about pushing too far lest that wave of resignations comes at a critical moment. Alarming though the pattern may be, this is neither a clear cut violation of the constitution nor likely to be a major turning point in the administration's public support. Leaving now would be ineffectual - there is no plan in place to take advantage of a few resignations to put a serious damper on the current plans, nor will it stop what's to come. The people who resign now may feel good about themselves, maybe enough to justify the potential hardship they and their loved ones will suffer as a consequence, but they deny the rest of us a key resource. Resigning is a weapon that can only be fired once; it would be selfish and stupid to waste the shot.
by aw1621107 | 2025-08-12 03:09:37+00:00
> You can't make a teaspoon of neutroniun, either. The neutrons would immediately drift off and quickly decay (half life about ten minutes).

Technically speaking that sure sounds like scooping out a teaspoon of neutronium to me. Nothing said it had to be stable :P

But in any case, I suppose what doesn't work for me is that when the teaspoon illustration is being used it's in the context of picking out some sample/subset of a larger whole - take a whole neutron star and examine the properties of this supposed representative part of it, same way one might scoop out some ice cream out of a container. While that's technically not totally correct for neutron stars since they don't exactly have a uniform density, I feel that it's usefully-close-enough compared to black holes, since as far as we know all the mass of a black hole is concentrated in a point at its center so your "scoop" is either going to get nothing or everything.

> You actually can have a black hole with the volume of a teaspoon, and it's stable.

Sure, but at that point I wouldn't use the wording "a teaspoon of black hole"; something more like "teaspoon-sized black hole" would be more appropriate (though to be fair that's still technically somewhat ambiguous).
by rayiner | 2025-08-12 03:09:39+00:00
>There is no thread of our possible history that is colored 'good' for the next couple of years that starts off with deploying the NG in Washington, D.C.

What if it helps clean up the homeless encampments and crime like Gavin Newsom did in San Francisco when Xi visited recently? That would be good!

D.C. is a dump and has been my entire life. There's been a drop in homicides since the peak in 2023, but last year was still 15% higher than in 2019: https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2025/01/02/homicid.... In 2023, the homicide rate in D.C. was 39 per 100k people. This is only a little better than the civilian death rate in Iraq when it peaked in 2014 during ISIS (that was around 50 per 100k).

This is not a "guns" issue, it's a policing issue. Idaho has among the most guns of any state in the union, and Boise is as safe as a western European city, with 1/30th the homicide rate of D.C. Even several large U.S. cities, like Austin, El Paso, and Virginia Beach, have homicide rates 1/10th or less of D.C.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b....

D.C. is a rich city surrounded by wealthy suburbs. There's no reason for it to be as unsafe as decaying post-industrial cities like Philadelphia or Baltimore.
by scott88lee | 2025-08-12 03:11:35+00:00
Pre AI, we are already in a hyper-capitalistic world. In an AI driven world coupled with robotics and possibly clean renewable energy, capitalism(Value and Value creation) is going to be broken. I envision that there will be violence when one system is overtaken by another. Hopefully, a post economic society. UBI assumes that money$ and its value, would be that unit to be exchanged in the future. No, its not going to be bitcoin either. Of course I wouldn't know what it is, but I'm looking forward to the future +
by WuxiFingerHold | 2025-08-12 03:12:06+00:00
It can. DX is pretty much the same for backend and CLI stuff using VS Code on Mac, Linux and Windows. I'm working daily on C# backend and CLI stuff on a Mac (those are the dev machines at my employer). DX is on par with Go and Rust (at least dotnet CLI, LSP, Debugger, I can't speak for the profiler as I've never used it). I like the Rust tooling most, but dotnet CLI is not far behind.

Language and std lib wise, C# sits in the sweet spot.
by jofer | 2025-08-12 03:12:45+00:00
To be fair, it's the higher level folks who are too far removed from things to have any actual authority. I've never heard a direct single-team engineering manager something like that. But yeah, CEOs say crazy crap. And we're definitely there, though to be fair, his exact quote was "I insist everyone try to have AI generate your code first before you try making any direct changes". It's not _quite_ as bad as what I described. But then the middle management buys in and says similar things. And we now have a company level OKR around having 80% of software engineers relying on AI tooling. It's a silly thing to dictate.
by rayiner | 2025-08-12 03:13:05+00:00
You mean red states with large blue cities in them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_intenti.... The states with the lowest homicide rates include a mix of very blue (Massachusetts) and very red (Iowa, Utah).

The cause is not "poverty and guns," because Idaho, which has a lot of poverty and a ton of guns, has one-third the homicide rate of Maryland, which is one of the richest and most educated states.
by cyral | 2025-08-12 03:13:59+00:00
I haven't tried Claude Code yet, but I extensively use Cursor and find it can do similar work (which makes sense). I think it's good you led with the length prompt/spec, which will maybe help the "AI can't do ____" crowd grasp that it really is a skill issue when they can't get any good results from LLMs. (Unfortunately it cannot help the "well, this isn't actually useful or making an impact" group)

Regarding some of the comments here: I found the article style fine, and I even like the "follow my journey" style writing as it helps the reader understand the process you went though. That kind of engineering and debugging workflow is something I enjoy about this industry.
by jiggawatts | 2025-08-12 03:14:02+00:00
Try adding a rehydrating powder mix, the same stuff they use for treating diarrhoea. It’s just salts, glucose, and citric acid. It is hugely more hydrating than plain water, with a much faster onset of feeling relief from intense thirst.

Sports drinks are basically the same thing, but with excess sugars for “energy” (and weight gain).
by aw1621107 | 2025-08-12 03:14:42+00:00
> Rust has reserved the `become` keyword that will eventually guarantee tail call elimination (So pretty similar to Clojure's recur, but I think Rust's version will allow mutual recursion)

Support got added to nightly quite recently, in fact - on 2025-07-31 [0].

[0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/144232
by eru | 2025-08-12 03:15:16+00:00
I have almost the opposite view: tail calls are great.

But most of the time you will want to express your program in terms of more restricted combinators, because restriction makes the readers job easier. Easier to understand, and easier to convince yourself that no weird things are happening.

Basically, you might already agree that restricting mutation is good. This is the same principle.

So when you see a 'fold' you know even without looking at the callback, that your program will run through the whole list and not exit early. When you see a 'map' you also know that no early exit will happen, but even more you know exactly how the return value will be constructed (whereas for fold that's arbitrary).

However you are right that 'fold' and 'filter' and 'map', just like 'for' and 'while', are not good as universal building blocks.

That's why you should define new combinators when you need them. Typically, that's when you define new data structures, eg when you define a tree you will also want to define a 'map' for it, and also various tree traversals and perhaps searches. Less typically, you also want new combinators for new algorithmic ideas, even on old data structures.

Eg matrix multiplication is an interesting combinator. You provide the meaning of 'addition' and 'multiplication' as call-backs, and depending on your choice you get an algorithm for finding shortest paths or for matching regular expressions etc (in addition to the obvious matrix-multiplication on real numbers, of course). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9751987

It's relatively seldom that you want to use 'naked' recursion. The main example I can think of is when implementing state machine or interpreters. See eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43076088 for the latter, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43076088 for the former.
by muzani | 2025-08-12 03:15:25+00:00
I've often asked what the point of constitutional monarchies were, but this seems like a good one. The king has nearly no power. He's a figurehead. He's just there to press the "STOP" button when things have gotten out of hand. But whenever a king abuses this power, the lawmakers cut it from him. So he just sits there in a palace, living luxuriously from tax money. In good times, we ask why he's allowed to do this (but not out loud, that would be illegal).

Kings have control over the military. The prime minister has control over the police. In absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia, there's no separation between the police and the army; soldiers are out there enforcing the law. In constitutional monarchies, you can't elect someone into Commander-in-Chief; the prime minister has to convince the king that it's something worthy of military action. As the king is well fed, it's difficult to bribe or blackmail kings into acting against the state.

I'm not saying it's a better system by any means - the US of A has seen plenty of wars and maybe it's best to have an elected Commander-in-Chief. But just some thought from a systems design standpoint.
by starchild3001 | 2025-08-12 03:15:27+00:00
Really appreciate the depth of this paper; it's a welcome change from the usual model announcement blog posts. The Zhipu/Tsinghua team laid out not just the 'what' but the 'how,' which is where the most interesting details are for anyone trying to build with or on top of these models.

The post-training methodology (Sec 3) is what really stands out to me. The idea of creating specialized 'expert models' for reasoning, agents, and chat, and then distilling their capabilities into a final unified model is a fascinating approach. It feels like a more structured way to solve the "jack of all trades, master of none" problem that can plague generalist models. Instead of just mixing all the data, they're essentially having a generalist learn from a committee of specialists.

A couple of the findings from their RL experiments are pure gold for anyone working in this space. The counter-intuitive result that a single-stage RL process at the full 64K context length outperforms a progressive, multi-stage approach (Fig 6) is a fantastic lesson. I've seen teams assume the opposite would be true. Also, the pragmatic choice to use an XML-like template for function calls to avoid JSON escaping hell (Fig 4) may be a small but brilliant engineering decision that makes a huge difference in practice. Wrangling escaped code inside JSON turns out to be a mess.

The performance on SWE-bench is impressive, putting it in the same league as much larger or proprietary models. What I’d love to see, and maybe others here have thoughts, is whether this hybrid training recipe holds up outside ARC-style evals. For example, do the agentic improvements transfer to messier, real-world workflows where APIs are undocumented, partial failures are common, and user input is full of ambiguity?
by mark_l_watson | 2025-08-12 03:16:30+00:00
When I get fed up with VSCode, I run Emacs and I feel happy until I start working on something else that can be done a little faster on VSCode because of the available extensions.

I feel like we almost need government intervention to keep GitHub an open commons, but I am a Libertarian and I distrust the government perhaps even more than the tech industry - still an open question for me.

Lock in and control by huge corporations is almost always uniformly bad. I have accepted the message of great books like Privacy is Power, The Tech Coup, and Surveillance Capitalism, and I feel pretty good about just using Google’s Gemini APIs when I need them, and lean as hard as possible on open models running on Ollama and LM Studio. There are also little things you can do like not installing apps and using web apps.

Back to test editors: the Lem Emacs-like editor written in Common Lisp is an interesting project https://github.com/lem-project/lem
by felbane | 2025-08-12 03:16:42+00:00
Your argument highlights its own flaw; changing your editor opens up a world of tooling that's certainly adequate for most use cases you can throw at it, but it also requires either discarding or (worse) un-learning all of the tooling that you've learned for your current editor.

For example, I'm perfectly content to use nvim as my primary editor, and this was born out of having to develop for and administer literally tens of thousands of linux servers professionally. I have all the plug-ins and configuration necessary for productivity on my development machines, and when I'm on a remote system ad hoc editing a configuration it already has a built-in lightweight version of the editor I'm already used to.

If I switched to Emacs locally, I'd still have to maintain a working knowledge of vi and context switch when in a remote shell. Changing to Emacs would require more cognitive bandwidth when the whole purpose of "switching for org mode" is to reduce mental load.
by intended | 2025-08-12 03:16:57+00:00
In society an affair is still an affair even if no PV intercourse occurred. Sex comes under the category of “I’ll know it when I see it” / “just understood” things most humans do not realize has very fuzzy edges. The narrow definition is, from the autism perspective, one of the many useless definitions. You will be better served by (yet another) exhaustive list of edge cases.
by gottorf | 2025-08-12 03:17:38+00:00
> Simply ignore all rights -- something this admin is getting really eager to do -- and then dump enormous, completely irrational amounts of resources into it.

Criminology studies have shown that you in fact do not need a hyper-resourced police state to achieve this. The Pareto rule applies very strongly in criminality; the majority of violent crime is committed by a tiny fraction of the population[0]. About 90% of prisoners have been arrested more than three times[1].

You do not understand the difficulty in obtaining a criminal conviction in this country (a result of the common law tradition coming down from Blackstone) and the degree to which local policy in places like DC outright favors the rights of the criminals over the rights of the innocents that must live near them. There's a lot of room to improve the lives of the law-abiding before there are "snipers on every roof".

> should every town increase the police budget by 50x? Is that actually a solution for anyone?

DC isn't just any town; it has such a high homicide rate that were it a country, it would rank in the top 20 most murderous. In 2024 alone, it had over 5000 cars stolen in a place that only has 350k cars. That's more than one in a hundred.

Perhaps every town whose crime rate is at this level should increase the police budget by 50x, or try some other radical thing? Because this isn't working out.

[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/

[1]: https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/arrest-history-pers...
by beeflet | 2025-08-12 03:18:03+00:00
I choose to believe that trump's whole campaign is motivated out of spite for getting ribbed after the birther movement. Everything he does, he does it to flabbergast the democrats "because he can"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeGpLg0b3DE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC1NGWM8gP8
by dvt | 2025-08-12 03:18:23+00:00
Have you ever been to DC? National Guard is literally constantly all over the city. The headlines are a bit sensationalized and even DC's mayor on MSNBC earlier today was cautiously optimistic about more law enforcement on the streets.

> "We did it in Washington" becomes the precedent.

The fact that Trump mobilized troops in LA to help with ICE raids was way more worrying, but they were withdrawn a week and a half ago by the Pentagon without much hullabaloo.