MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hintymad | 2025-08-17 19:12:44+00:00
All good points. I really can't explain why it is perfectly okay for natives to listen to Chinese/Japanese yet it is so hard to parse Pinyin or Kana when reading, even when spaces are provided.

Maybe it is because we still think in individual characters when reading. As a previous post mentioned, there are many homophones for a given word, let alone for a single character: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%93%E3%81%86%E3%81%97%E.... It's not a problem in a conversation because we track context. Yet when we reading, we, at least psychologically, look for specific meaning per character or per word. Say, when I see こえん, I'll have to figure out if it means a park, a small yard, sound, or something else. Of course, I could figure it out from context, but I'd give up that precision and the warm and fuzzy feeling of seeing the corresponding characters, like 故園, or 子園, or 呼延。We'd solve this problem by giving up learning the individual characters and focus on words or phrases, but then it would be a drastic change.

While typing the above, I also realize that maybe the reason we don't mind homophones during a conversation is because we've already learned the associated characters. Using the example above, when I hear the word "こん” and it means "呼延”, I would know that it's an ancient family name that was associated with many famous generals because of the meaning of the characters. Or if the meaning is "故園”, I would get all the poetic feelings as it is precisely these two characters, not the sound, that deliver the meaning of ancestral land, or childhood home, or place left behind, and etc. And when we study the Chinese and Japanese poems, we focus on the masterful use of characters, and every character matters. Is it 推 or 敲 in 僧敲月下门? Why are the characters in 大漠孤烟直 so compelling and masterful even though each character is so commonly used? It's hard for me to imagine how homophones can differentiate such meanings.

Of course, I'm not saying that removing characters can't be done. I'm just trying to figure out the current state and why many people and I are in favor of learning characters.
by jchw | 2025-08-17 19:13:29+00:00
> Also take a good hard look at the token output speeds before investing. If you’re expecting quality, context windows, and output speeds similar to the hosted providers you’re probably going to be disappointed. There are a lot of tradeoffs with a local machine.

I don't really expect to see performance on-par with the SOTA hosted models, but I think I'm mainly curious what you could possibly do with local models that would otherwise not be doable with hosted models (or at least, stuff you wouldn't want to for other reasons, like privacy.)

One thing I've realized lately is that Gemini, and even Gemma, are really, really good at transcribing images, much better and more versatile than OCR models as they can also describe the images too. With the realization that Gemma, a model you can self-host, is good enough to be useful, I have been tempted to play around with doing this sort of task locally.

But again, $2,000 tempted? Not really. I'd need to find other good uses for the machine than just dicking around.

In theory, Gemma 3 27B BF16 would fit very easily in system RAM on my primary desktop workstation, but I haven't given it a go to see how slow it is. I think you mainly get memory bandwidth constrained on these CPUs, but I wouldn't be surprised if the full BF16 or a relatively light quantization gives tolerable t/s.

Then again, right now, AI Studio gives you better t/s than you could hope to get locally with a generous amount of free usage. So ... maybe it would make sense to wait until the free lunch ends, but I don't want to build anything interesting that relies on the cloud, because I dislike the privacy implications of it, even though everything I'm interested in doing is fully safe with the ToS.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-17 19:13:50+00:00
Computer security -- that requires taking Genode and building a set of powerboxes, and creating a distribution that's user friendly. It's outside of my skillset, and physical endurance to do that, even with an LLM assist.

Memex -- Maybe, just barely maybe... First I'd have to develop an actual working hypertext markup language (to allow marking up an existing file, separately, aka annotation) and then a parser to take HTML and translate it to said new language. Then a browser/editor for said new language to import content, save it all locally with timestamps, with tags to mark where it gets used in other documents, so I can purge everything I don't want to keep after 6 months, or whatever works out as reasonable. I'd also have to be able to compile and export a document and the all things it marks up as a package. (Likely a zip file)

Computing/LLMS - I'm going to do a TinyTapeout for a few cells of a BitGrid, but a proper full scale ASIC is outside my budget/expertise. Then there's the matter of compilers to spit out code to run on it.

None of these require actually infinite resources, but they're all outside what I can pull off solo.
by dwoldrich | 2025-08-17 19:13:51+00:00
According to https://www.npmjs.com/package/chokidar-cli, current version is 3.0.0, last released 4 years ago, so should be good to pin that version and look for alternatives at your leisure.

https://github.com/open-npm-tools/chokidar-cli is the new listed homepage, which tipped me off there was a looming problem. It was created a week ago and has not yet released any new versions, but obviously the account has control over the package in NPM.
Ask HN: What's the best free AI coding assistant available?
by supermanonipad | 2025-08-17 19:15:02+00:00
I’m not a programmer, but I understand how code works conceptually. I rely on AI coding assistants to help me build projects, but I’ve run into a common problem: most good ones are paid or have very limited free tiers.

For example, I used Augment Code (1,000 free daily requests) and Kiro IDE (200 free daily requests), but both eventually moved behind paywalls.

I’m hoping to find recommendations for new or still-free AI coding assistants that I can use without hitting strict limits.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
by ivape | 2025-08-17 19:16:44+00:00
I think both the student and school should be on the hook for the loan. If the student is successful and does not pay, the school has legal rights. If the student is unsuccessful, then the student has legal rights. Both can sue each other for the full cost of the loan.

I still don’t know why there aren’t mass scale class action lawsuits against higher education for certain degrees.
by EA-3167 | 2025-08-17 19:16:51+00:00
That my experience too, the speedometer, speed my phone thinks I'm going, and static radar signs all more or less agree. Plus the only times I've been nailed for speeding, I was speeding, not "just kissing" the limit. Point being I don't think +/-1mph really matters in practice 99%+ of the time, it's usually getting tagged when being overconfident in the passing lane or something like that.
by cricketsandmops | 2025-08-17 19:18:09+00:00
I look at it more as an investment in our citizens . If you don't keep your grades up or fail out you should have to pay it back, but if you graduate and start your life, pay taxes etc the loans should be forgiven. The country would eventually get their investment back via taxes. They could implement this and some type of oversight to reign in the university costs. Easier to control indebted people though so it wont happen.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-17 19:18:32+00:00
> Can’t squeeze a rock.

Sums it up well. What else could anybody possibly expect to happen? Wages have remained flat and/or negated by inflation, upward mobility has declined, and getting hired has become progressively more difficult. Good employment prospects remain in major metropolitan areas with high cost of living that eat paychecks whole. Where are the payments supposed to come from, exactly?
Show HN: Runbooks That Run
by clement1107 | 2025-08-17 19:18:36+00:00
Ops maintenance was a major source of burnout in Palantir and Chainlink

On paper, the happy path is:

* PM writes a runbook spec

* Eng turns it into tools or automation

* Ops executes and feeds back learnings

In reality, tribal knowledge drifts, edge cases pile up, and small rule changes stall until they *maybe* make it into a sprint. Over time, papercuts snowball into "CODE RED" incidents that grind feature work to a halt—sometimes for weeks, even months.

So I built the solution I wish I had: Runbook—a runbook that actually runs. From a single view, I can:

* Turn my process specs into plain-english automation

* Execute and see the process run in the browser in real-time

* Feed ops learnings back into the spec and automation instantly

Check the MVP out at: https://runbook.run and give a shout at clemsut@gmail.com if you're excited about reshaping the future of Ops
by blitztime | 2025-08-17 19:18:36+00:00
For better or worse I’ve been finding it difficult to stay motivated at times for sharpening my craft. I’m currently reading Learning Go 2nd and it’s cool learning the idiomatic ways to write code in a language. However part of me feels like even if I strive to write “clean code”, now the bottleneck seems to be shifting to reviewers time and expertise.

So I fear I’m fighting a losing battle. I can’t and don’t want to review everything my coworkers put out, and code has always been a means to an end for leadership anyways so it seems difficult to justify carving out time for the team as a whole to learn, especially in the age of genAi.
by rafterydj | 2025-08-17 19:18:39+00:00
Interesting. Would you mind elaborating a bit on your workflow? In my work I go back and forth between the "stock" GUIs, and copy-pasting into a separated terminal for model prompts. I hate the vibe code-y agent menu in things like Cursor, I'm always afraid integrated models will make changes that I miss because it really only works with checking "allow all changes" fairly quickly.
by wongarsu | 2025-08-17 19:19:07+00:00
LLMs can be a great help: a therapist/friend who you can talk to without fear of judgement and without risking the relationship, who is always available and is easily affordable is awesome. Not just for likely people.

And not just in crisis or therapy situations. In social media there is a trend of people in relationships complaining about doing all the "emotional labor". Most of which are things LLMs are "good" at.

But at the same time the dangers are real. Awareness and moderation help, but I don't think they really protect you. You can fix the most obvious flaws like tweaking the system prompt to make the model less of a sycophant, and at personal goals to ensure this does not replace actual humans in your life. But there are so many nuanced traps. Even if these models could think and feel they would still be trapped in a world fundamentally different from our own, simply because the corpus of written text contains a very biased and filtered view of reality, especially when talking about emotions and experiences
by MrJohz | 2025-08-17 19:19:14+00:00
ESLint these days doesn't have any styling related lints (unless you opt into them) which means that it works out-of-the-box with Prettier (or Biome's formatter, presumably).

My fear with Biome is missing out on type-aware lints, but I know Oxlint has had some success integrating the new Go typescript compiler, so maybe that will work out for Biome as well.
by andrewstuart | 2025-08-17 19:19:24+00:00
Gpt-2 used to be laugh out loud funny.

I spent hours creating stories with it that were literally hilarious.

At the same time the stories very often suddenly veered off to extreme violence, often murdering everyone.

I guess the humor got lost when they prevented the violence.

A pity because today’s LLMs are not funny at all.
by killjoywashere | 2025-08-17 19:19:24+00:00
In case anyone thinks assistants serving others can't have some incredibly dystopian consequences, The Star Chamber podcast has an incredible 2-part series, * With Friends Like These ...* describing a case that boggles the mind.

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVb7__ZlHI0 (key timestamps: 31:45 and 34:3)

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZvQGI5dstM (key timestamp: 22:05)

If you're like "Woah, this seems kinda disconnected, I'm missing context..." Uh, yeah, there's so much context.

Here's the link that most critical bit in Part 2: https://youtu.be/vZvQGI5dstM?feature=shared&t=1325

And if you listen to the whole thing, here's the almost innocuous WSJ article:

Here's the WSJ article that put it into the press: https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/workplace-har...
by ChadNauseam | 2025-08-17 19:19:34+00:00
The difference is that people on food stamps and people who are in homeless shelters are in need of help. They are our most needy (perhaps in addition to those on mediaid). I am not needy, yet for some reason I would have been a beneficiary of Biden's original student loan forgiveness plan. Giving money to people for having loans for a college degree doesn't seem like a great way to redistribute to "those in need". I haven't looked it up, but I'd be willing to bet that people with student loans earn more than others their age, even after accounting for their loan payments.

And it does create a massive moral hazard. I still have my student loans, because why would I pay them off? I'd rather wait for someone to get elected and decide to pay them off for me. (And you can bet that everyone considering taking loans is thinking the same thing, and factoring the chance of forgiveness into the expected cost of the loans.)
by creatonez | 2025-08-17 19:20:18+00:00
What ArchiveTeam mainly does is provide hand-made scripts to aggressively archive specific websites that are about to die, with a prioritization for things the community deems most endangered and most important. They provide a bot you can run to grab these scripts automatically and run them on your own hardware, to join the volunteer effort.

This is in contrast to the Wayback Machine's builtin crawler, which is just a broad spectrum internet crawler without any specific rules, prioritizations, or supplementary link lists.

For example, one ArchiveTeam project had the goal to save as many obscure Wikis as possible, using the MediaWiki export feature rather than just grabbing page contents directly. This came in handy for thousands of wikis that were affected by Miraheze's disk failure and happened to have backups created by this project. Thanks to the domain-specific technique, the backups were high-fidelity enough that many users could immediately restart their wiki on another provider as if nothing happened.

They also try to "graze the rate limit" when a website announces a shutdown date and there isn't enough time to capture everything. They actively monitor for error responses and adjust the archiving rate accordingly, to get as much as possible as fast as possible, hopefully without crashing the backend or inadvertently archiving a bunch of useless error messages.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-17 19:20:32+00:00
If people leave your country because it sucks, that’s a governance problem, not a citizen problem. People are mobile, if they have options and can do better, they should take them. Life is short and you only live once. Debt is just accounting, it is a shared delusion like a currency.

We set these citizens up to fail, and they’re the bad guys? Hardly. If you can escape the torment nexus, go, don’t look back. The torment nexus does not care about you. “The purpose of the system is what it does.”
No-fluff learnings on the Z Fellows interview
by alliewithane | 2025-08-17 19:20:41+00:00
A bunch of friends and I (aprox. 20 people) gotten to the interview and the stage after it. We didn't get in just yet but we're currently in a Slack channel hanging around, working in huddles and getting to know each other. (email me if you wanna join)

Nonetheless, these are some key tips we believe might be helpful:

1. Bring all your founders on the call. They want to see the chemistry. Analogy: you are currently dating them, are you ready to get married (joining z-fellows)?

2. Focus on yourself during the interview. Take a minute to repeat some stuff mentioned in the application for authenticity but also talk about new stuff you've worked on that are non-startup related.

3. What is the broad picture? What happens if the product flops? Talk about times when something you have worked on flopped and how you mitigated that.

If there's anything you found helpful feel free to comment it down below.
by al_borland | 2025-08-17 19:21:10+00:00
As complexity in a program increases, getting to the level of detail of defining the if...else becomes important. Using plain English to define the business logic, and allowing AI to fill in the gaps, will likely lead to a lot of logic errors that go uncaught until there is a big problem.

For the AI to avoid this, I'd imagine it would need to be directed not to assume anything, and instead ask for clarification on each and every thing, until there is no more ambiguity about what is required. This would be a very long and tedious back and forth, where someone will want to delegate the task to someone else, and at that point, the person might as well write their own logic in certain areas. I've found myself effectively giving sudocode to the LLM to try to properly explain the logic that is needed.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-17 19:21:26+00:00
Oh boy, I always had this knack for seeing/testing multiple langauges and when I had first discovered nim, I used to watch some nim youtube related content and I remember someone in nim community pointed out about this same video from the creator of elm that you also mention.

So, I think that I had watched the video and honestly, I will watch it now once again since I don't remember it clearly but If I remember, I really liked it.

A quick search points me to the video, though I am not sure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8
by fakedang | 2025-08-17 19:21:42+00:00
China doesn't produce plastic as is. They produce plastic products, after buying the plastic from oil producers. The largest plastic raw materials producer is SABIC, a Saudi company.

There are currently no viable alternatives for humanity to replace plastics in daily use while still maintaining the low cost of those products. Unless humanity opts for more expensive material to subvert plastic consumption, plastic is going to be used regardless.

And China is simply feeding that demand in Western countries with those goods, because those countries want those goods for cheap.
by cvoss | 2025-08-17 19:21:42+00:00
I really don't think you have the ability to use self-reflection to discern an algorithm that occurs in your unconscious visual cortex in a split second. You wouldn't feel like you were doing a naive grid search even if a naive grid search is exactly what you were doing.

You have suggested that the process in your mind to find a global minimum is immediate, apparently to contrast this with a standard computational algorithm. But such comparison fails. I don't know whether you mean "with few computational steps" or "in very little time"; the former is not knowable to you; the latter is not relevant since the hardware is not the same.
by ViktorRay | 2025-08-17 19:21:52+00:00
This is the new rhythm of covid waves. Many people are getting sick - some feeling lousy - especially after returning from vacation and conferences. Most probably won’t even know it’s covid because the symptoms can be indistinguishable from a cold or other respiratory bug. Yet hospitals are no longer flooded with patients because immune systems are much better trained to fight the virus five years after it arrived.

Several coronaviruses regularly infect people. They cause up to 30 percent of cases of common cold every year. Most people don’t care because we have been exposed to these coronaviruses since early childhood and our immune system can take care of them.

The virus that causes COVID was devastating because it was new and our species had no immunity. This new virus will not go anywhere but it’s going to be not a big deal in the future just like the other cornaviruses going around.

Humanity has never eradicated a virus that can move between species. The two viruses we have eliminated were each only contained to one species.
by dataflow | 2025-08-17 19:23:33+00:00
Beginner(?) question: why is the model

map<term_id, list<pair<document_id, positions_idx>> > inverted_index;

and not

map<term_id, map<document_id, list<positions_idx>> > inverted_index;

(or using set<> in lieu of list<> as appropriate)?
by Someone | 2025-08-17 19:23:59+00:00
The ARM1 ran at 6MHz, three times as fast as the 6502 in the BBC B.

It also had more (16 user registers vs, counting optimistically, 3) and larger (32 bit vs 8bit) registers, compared to the 8 bit registers of the 6502, and a 3-stage pipeline.

I expect that means the BASIC interpreter kept the current program position in a register, where the 6502 one used memory (likely in self modifying code), and could fetch the next token in a single cycle vs at least 5 or so for the 6502 version.

Having a faster CPU and more memory also may have meant they could be smarter in the way programs get stored.

I guess all that combined means there are programs were that goal can be met, for example programs computing a Mandelbrot image.

ARM2 added a hardware multiplier.
by UncleMeat | 2025-08-17 19:24:01+00:00
I give a huge amount of money to charity. Most of it is local, but I also give a lot to international causes. Should the government interfere in my ability to do that?

It will be difficult to finance care in Gaza given that a lot of the medical infrastructure has been destroyed by bombs.

Yes, charitable organizations could coordinate with hospitals in surrounding countries. But is "your charity is inefficient" justification for this sort of government interference? Should some charity who is trying to help people via the infrastructure they know and understand be required to coordinate with third parties?
by christiangenco | 2025-08-17 19:24:06+00:00
I'm with you on desktop but I've been craving some sort of way to interact with Claude Code from my phone while I'm out and about.

What I want at the core is to be able to open up access to my laptop's currently running Claude Code instance (without all these hacky backdoors that fork the chat with every message by using `--print`; I want a first class API that lets me append messages to the current chat), then I want to be able to send messages (with voice transcription) and approve/deny permissions and see the code diffs and all of that.

Maybe something like a Telegram bot? I had hopes for Claude Code UI[1] but the web interface is too clunky on mobile.

1. https://github.com/siteboon/claudecodeui
by NicuCalcea | 2025-08-17 19:24:26+00:00
Just because I can't have my cooking utensils sterile 100% of the time doesn't mean I can't put minimal effort into reducing the risk. I don't want to cook on frying pans covered in rancid oil and dust. The recommendation is to use soap even for cast iron pans.

Maybe some people do, but I also don't put any wet dishes and cutlery away, I have a dish drainer. If I found my soap was growing mould, I'd throw it in the bin, not write it off as a thing that happens and there's no need to worry about it.

> this study is absolutely not validation of your point, stating "Despite the many investigations on the topic, the antibacterial activity of wood is far from fully understood"

This is standard boilerplate present in nearly any paper, scientists never claim that a topic is fully understood and doesn't require any further research.