MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AndyNemmity | 2025-08-03 06:59:41+00:00
This is the best question anyone has asked.

Let's consider context. At some level the more context you have is good. At some level, the more irrelevant context you have is bad.

Okay. We have at top level of context, a hook that forces a system prompt on every action.

Next level we have a ./claude/CLAUDE.md then we have the project level CLAUDE.md then we have a possible not required agent setup then we have the instructions you give it

We know that CLAUDE.md gets lost in the context, at any level. The system prompt level hooks don't.

Why does the CLAUDE.md get lost? Why are we losing ability with a longer context.

The problem is irrelevant context to the action. The Documentation agent doesn't require the Golang modernization rules. The Golang agent, doesn't require the planing coordinator rules.

So the question I asked myself last weekend was, what is the experience if you split the contexts to only the required information for the task.

I did head to head battles with agents, reading in the information, versus contextual specific information. The agents with context specific destroyed the competition. Like it was another world.

So then I ran head to head tests on the type of information. Etc etc. My current setup is the best level achieved in those tests.

So my argument is that removing the context that is entirely irrelevant for the agent improves performance dramatically.

But I'm one person doing tests... it's true for me. Maybe it's not true for others. People have to explore the conception and determine that.

I can only tell you what has worked best for me, and for me, it's like a model jump in performance improvements.
by seuros | 2025-08-03 06:59:43+00:00
The idea of a rogue AWS team running a deletion script without oversight should sound ridiculous. At a company that size of AWS, you will expect guardrails, audits, approvals.

But here is the thing: no one from AWS has given me an official explanation. Not during the 20-day support hell, not after termination, not even when I asked directly: “Does my data still exist?” Just a slow drip of templated replies, evasions, and contradictions.

An AWS insider did reach out claiming it was an internal test gone wrong, triggered by a misused --dry flag and targeting At a company that size, you'd expect guardrails, audits, approvals low-activity accounts.

According to them, the team ran it without proper approval. Maybe it is true. Maybe they were trying to warn me. Maybe its a trap to get me to throw baseless accusations and discredit myself.

I'm not presenting that theory as fact. I don’t know what happened behind the wall.

What I do know is:

- My account was terminated without following AWS’s own 90-day retention policy

- I had a valid payment method on file

- Support stonewalled every direct question for 20 days

- No answers were provided, even post-mortem
by somat | 2025-08-03 07:00:18+00:00
My understanding is that a lot of the weirdness is that there may be no such thing as a photon, that is, what we call a photon is the em field interacting with matter(electrons really), in transit there is no such thing as a "single photon" That is, the em field is not quantized( or at least not quantized at the level of a photon) It is very possible to have your em field at "sub photon level" and the electrons at the far end will accumulate energy until a photon level is reached and presto a single photon experiment. What it is actually measuring I am not sure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDtAh9IwG-I (Huygens Optics -How big is a visible photon?)
by yorwba | 2025-08-03 07:00:38+00:00
All three claims of gold medal performance on IMO 2025 that I'm aware of solved the first 5 problems, that were designed to be solvable by application of standard techniques, but got stumped on the sixth problem that was a bit more unusual. So it does seem like state-of-the-art models solve competition problems by recognizing which kind of problem it is and applying a corresponding solution template. Which is not too different from human competitors exploiting common question patterns, but humans seem to be able to degrade more gracefully by falling back to a more explorative mode when none of the standard tricks seem to apply.
by hakfoo | 2025-08-03 07:00:42+00:00
There was a narrow window when TV and monitor products used the same panels.

TVs got bigger very quickly after LCD took over-- there were a few years where they had ~22-25" sets as the small "dorm room" size models, but you walk into Best Buy and there's barely anything smaller than 32" now.

Conversely, mainstream desktop screens didn't get much above 27" before you started going exotic, so the typical monitors you're putting on a million desktops are not using the same panels as TVs.

I suppose you could say that a "master glass" could be cut into 16:9 panels for both TVs and monitors, but wouldn't it require the two panel sizes to use the same pixel density?
by 9rx | 2025-08-03 07:01:24+00:00
> At no point in testing `fn add(a: i32, b: i32) -> i32` am I going to call `add("a", "b")` or `add(2, None)`.

It seems you either don't understand the topic of discussion or don't understand testing (see previous comment). If the user of your function calls it in undocumented ways, that's their problem, not yours. That is for their tests to reason with.

Passing the wrong types is only your problem for the functions you call. Continuing with your example, consider that you accidentally wrote (where the compiler doesn't apply type checking):

fn double(a: i32) -> i32 { add(a, None) // Should have been add(a, a) }

How do you think you are going to miss that in your tests, exactly?
by efitz | 2025-08-03 07:01:44+00:00
> More than half of Helsinki’s streets now have speed limits of 30 km/h. Fifty years ago, the majority were limited to 50 km/h

For us metric-impaired, 30 km/h ~ 19 mph.

In the United States, school zones with children present are generally 15-25mph. fit adult humans run at 8-9 mph.

If it works for Finns and they like it, great. Americans would not accept speed limits so low.
by tossandthrow | 2025-08-03 07:04:02+00:00
It is, it is yet another of the constructions that increases inequality and makes rich people richer.

Yes, an ipo is volatile, it should be! You are literally pricing a company.

Sigh, regardless, Thisnis again one of these ways where free markets are being smashed by monopolistic behavior - you can only be a part of the game if you already have enough.
by hakfoo | 2025-08-03 07:04:43+00:00
Considering how big a thing custom keyboards are on desktops, I could see a very viable market for more keyboard options as an upsell. If they swapped out the entire case top (or at least a large panel including the trackpad and keyboard) as a single FRU, the options could be impressive.

Regular keyboard with stupid trackpad: included Backlit keyboard: +$30 7-row non-trackpad keyboard: +$60 7-row backlit: +$100 All glass programmable touchscreen monstrosity: +$400
by seuros | 2025-08-03 07:04:45+00:00
Yeah, it's fishy. I never claimed the Java theory is confirmed, just that it’s what an insider told me after the fact.

They said a dry-run flag was passed in the --gnu-style form, but the internal tool expected -dry, and since Java has no native CLI parser, it just ignored it and ran for real.

Supposedly the dev team was used to Python-style CLIs, and this got through without proper testing.
by throwaway290 | 2025-08-03 07:05:14+00:00
They are comparable but the outcome of the comparison is not what you think it is. Even in an individual case.

And then remember that wrong cancellations are super, super rare compared to the scale of violence men commit most of which is never reported.

> we no longer see it that way.

Who is we? Many people are still religious (in UK for example more than half of people and growing) but even without that remember this is a physical assault and a major black mark on your ENTIRE life that you have to deal with even if you move abroad and not a single soul around you knows what was done to you, ruinous psychologically and causing destructive behaviors, making you intuitively scared of men. And meanwhile the biggest consequence men suffer, like this guy, is "I lost my way of making money because everyone in Scala community hates me". The number of ways to deal with it, move, change your community, change your name.... he mentions some of them himself. And for a rape victim, none of that works, it's just with you until you die.

This shit requires healing that for some never happens. And for the perp it's just inconvenient logistics (and only IF one victim is brave enough to speak)

This is an insane conversation but I will continue because again the only way to avoid innocent men from a cancel is to try to get more men to understand how this is fucked up beyond belief.
by gethly | 2025-08-03 07:05:32+00:00
I was looking into it as well but I have not found any payment gateway that would accept crypto, convert it into fiat and send it to me as payment as a single step process. I found some that could do it in multiple steps, which makes no financial sense, and they also charge for any movements. So to me, it looks like crypto is a no go for any legal business, for now. Maybe if you would be incorporated in El Salvador where crypto is legal tender and you would not have to involve fiat. But for most, that is not an option.

Maybe one day..
by hollerith | 2025-08-03 07:06:03+00:00
Siri is not AFIAK a competitive offering in the chatbot space, but it is a chatbot; is it not? I guess I just don't understand your argument.

Maybe this will help: AI labs have tried out 100s of different designs for AIs and if they aren't stopped (e.g., by the governments of the developed world) they are going to try out 1000s of additional designs. Most of us who worry about AI takeover or about human extinction caused by AI do not claim to be able to tell which design will be the first design capable of taking over or of extincting humanity -- even if we had complete access to the source code and the training data and we could ask the researchers behind the design questions. (The researchers do not know either IMHO.) But once an design has been widely deployed for many months, we know that that design is not the one that is going to take over. Gemini 2.5 for example has been widely deployed since January. It has been given plentiful access to very gullible people, very desperate people and plentiful compute resources. (When a customer asks an AI to write code, then runs that code without first understanding the code himself, that is giving the AI access to whatever compute resource the code gets run on.) If Gemini 2.5 were able to take over the world, it would have done so already. Ergo, I consider it morally permissible for me to use Gemini 2.5. Now Google is not going to stop with Gemini 2.5: it will continue to try out different designs, which is why I consider it my obligation to avoid helping Google, e.g., by giving it money, which is why so far I've stayed on the free tier of Gemini.

Gemini 2.5 is not very agenty: it does not learn continuously, it is extremely unlikely that its can work effectively towards any long-range plan or devise a plan that can withstand determined human opposition. So in the particular case of Gemini 2.5 and its competitors, we really didn't need many months of wide deployment to go by before we can conclude with high certainty that Gemini 2.5 is incapable of taking over the world. But most AI researchers and most leaders in AI labs consider the fact that the current crop of deployed AIs cannot learn continuously very well and cannot formulate and work towards long-range plans as deficiencies to be overcome.
by explodes | 2025-08-03 07:06:22+00:00
Wow, this really hits the nail on the head for me. I've been pondering about how to make systems that can only be in well-defined states, modified by well-defined state transitions.

This looks like one giant step forward in that direction. I'll be enthusiastically playing around with Austral, all while hoping these concepts can become standardised, and maybe retrofitted to popular tech by way of design patterns or language features, in the future.
by cyberax | 2025-08-03 07:07:40+00:00
In Russian, unstressed vowels are reduced so they are pronounced ambiguously. And when you try to write them down, you need to choose the correct letter for the full-length vowel. There are also double consonants that often are not pronounced differently.

On the other hand, if you just sound out the words syllable by syllable with full-length vowels, they will be completely understandable. You'll just sound a bit over-formal and/or robotic.

There were several attempts at spelling reforms, but only the first one (in 1917) stuck.
by throwaway290 | 2025-08-03 07:08:25+00:00
So

> the broader category of laws that limit speech

How is age verification in that category? I ask repeatedly but you can't explain.

Your argument is "scope creep". I said it applies then to every law, the first time you have laws you have opportunity for scope creep. You deny. So apparently there is a line for you. Why is this age verification crossing the line but something else doesn't? Is it just because "it was this way before so I don't want change"? Anything else?
by jcgl | 2025-08-03 07:08:30+00:00
It seems like European trucks with their cab-over-engine design generally have far better visibility than their American counterparts. Not to mention the fact that they’re often smaller and more maneuverable.

Where I live in Europe, I’m always impressed to see how well these trucks are able to function in mixed-use areas. Never would have seen this where I grew up in the US.
by hakfoo | 2025-08-03 07:08:49+00:00
I assumed much of the PC industry wasn't doing "design" so much as "what's available in stock and quantity."

Only the largest players-- the Dells and HPs and Acers-- really made much design decisions with custom cases and peripherals, but their teams might have some interesting stories to tell. It might be hard to turn it into a mainstream appeal story, rather than a industrial design tech-journal one.
by laurent_du | 2025-08-03 07:09:15+00:00
The Russian alphabet is not phonetic. а can be pronounced а, и, ы; е can be pronounced и, ё, э, and so on, and most consonants can be pronounced in two ways depending on the vowel that follows, or the presence of ь. You need to know where the tonic accent lies in every word to be able to pronounce it, because the position of a vowel w.r.t. the accent modifies its pronunciation. It is more phonetic than English or French, but less than Belorussian or Finnish or Spanish.
by gethly | 2025-08-03 07:09:38+00:00
i would guess that because of how *** * floats are in binary computers, you have something like -0.0000000000000000000000000000000000001 and when you round it you end up with -0.0. Same goes for positive value, you're just not used to write the + sign before every number, so seeing the minus feels strange.
by franga2000 | 2025-08-03 07:09:44+00:00
It's not arbitrary, there are many reasons to block the merger and they were explained in depth when the decision was made.

Also, the EU and UK also made it clear they were against the merger. In fact, if you look at most reporting, the EU and UK seem to be the main reason they gave up, presumably because they know the US FTC has no teeth, even with a competent chair.
by RamblingCTO | 2025-08-03 07:10:13+00:00
> If it works for Finns and they like it, great. Americans would not accept speed limits so low.

European cities are way denser though. So you have less view of the area because of smaller streets and very densely parked cars. I found the limits in the US comparable to what I'd drive in Germany in cities. Maybe Sedona is a one off, but it felt very familiar. For me, wider roads and better view means I can drive 50-55kmh and that's what the limits were. Smaller and denser street means 25-30kmh which is around 15-20mph? We even have the "you can make a right turn at red after coming to a full stop" with a special sign (a green arrow). So I think the speed limits are ok and it doesn't feel too different for me. What is not ok is the rampant ignorance towards laws. Red light and stop runners in bigger cities and such. Lots of bad drivers out there.
by literalAardvark | 2025-08-03 07:11:06+00:00
The seriousness of consequences is very high, but the chance of getting them is reasonable if you're well trained.

Consider that: most motorcyclists are there to have fun, so might have high risk behaviours, most motorcyclists are extraordinarily poorly trained, and it's a very high skill cap vehicle that requires ample training even for braking and evasive actions.

Also consider that it's a very small vehicle and those evasive actions have a high likelihood of squeezing through and avoiding almost any crash, and that the rider is often not even part of the crash they just slide to a stop.
by masklinn | 2025-08-03 07:11:50+00:00
> well-designed human-oriented city like Houston

Said no urban planner in the history of urban planning. Or NJB (https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54)

> FASTER commutes than ANY similar-sized city in Europe.

Houston ranks 7th worst traffic in the US. The internet tells me you’re boasting of 30mn for an “average 6 miles commute”. That’s bicycle distance and speed that you need to drive due to a broken city.
by yeetosaurusrex | 2025-08-03 07:12:07+00:00
The main thing I'm missing at the moment is learning by osmosis from people with more experience. Learning stuff that I didn't know I didn't know. Mentorship.

Something I've been doing for general feedback is keeping my friends updated on what I'm up to and asking for their perspectives. There's a bit of a balance though cause you don't want them to associate you too strongly with your work and bring it up whenever you see them.

If you mean technical feedback then yeah not being surrounded by other engineers you can bounce ideas off kind of sucks...

Not sure how sporty you are but I have a pretty fixed weekly routine where I do sports with my friends some nights after "work" and I've found that great for forgetting about my project and pulling me away from the computer at a reasonable hour. For loneliness during the day I've found working somewhere busy helps, like a library. Maybe a nice way of framing it is that you can't get distracted by coworkers if you don't have any :)
by userbinator | 2025-08-03 07:13:06+00:00
Absolutely zero mention of retention for a storage device is disturbing.

The endurance figures seem to suggest anywhere between 6.6k and 11k cycles, which is both a wide range and unusually high for TLC flash - this is the normally expected range for decent MLC and 5 years of retention, so I suspect they're massaging the retention downwards to get those numbers.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43702193
by gethly | 2025-08-03 07:13:50+00:00
ML(not AI), will be able to automate a lot of simple repetitive tasks with predictable outcome. That will indeed eliminate some stupid-simple jobs that require little to no thinking and are mostly just types of jobs that just have to be done but can be done by anyone. So low level white collar jobs. There will be bleed into different sectors as well but nothing of significance.

I would say no, ML will not have impact on freelancing whatsoever. It will have impact on the bottom line in some companies, but that's like self serving kiosks in mcdonalds. It will have about as much impact as that.
by wg0 | 2025-08-03 07:14:16+00:00
Nah - renters didn't want them. Nobody wants a care for 48 hours on rent out of which at least 12 hours it has to worry about charging it.

Superchargers aren't always available or in working condition even if are nearby.

And EVs don't deprecate faster because technology is advancing by leap and bounds. It has other factors.
by simianparrot | 2025-08-03 07:14:21+00:00
As a human I can learn to play my first instrument (piano) in my late 30’s. I’m also learning Japanese, with an “alphabet” and structure entirely unlike any other language I know. I got my gun license last year and am doing competitive one-hand pistol shooting.

These things in isolation might seem like “RAG+” but in total they’ve reshaped a lot of my thought patterns and physical aspects as well. Piano has improved motor functions, pistol shooting has vastly decreased time to focus and increased breathing control, and Japanese has allowed me to think about the world and how to describe it mentally in entirely new ways.

I think it’s easy to fall into a trap of undervaluing our brain and body until we actually fully use it.
by phatskat | 2025-08-03 07:14:53+00:00
> give teachers more leeway adapt to what their students seem to respond to.

This always feels like one of those “of course, duh” things when the concept of adapting curriculum to students comes up, because it works so well. It’s a bummer that in the US at least, priority for funding that kind of education across public schools is a non-starter. If teachers are buying their own supplies and cramming 20-30 kids in a class, everyone gets the same educational slop and a masters in rote memorization.
by samwillis | 2025-08-03 07:15:04+00:00
There is a lot valid concern on accessibility and abuse this could result in, but it think it's important to see the other side of the argument.

There was a really good thread on Twitter a couple of days ago:

> In light of recent Figma news, lemme reiterate that of all the goods that can happen to the web, 90% of them can't happen due to not having access to font rendering & metrics in JS

https://x.com/_chenglou/status/1951481453046538493

And a few choice replies:

> t’s kind of crazy that a platform specifically designed for presenting text doesn’t provide functionality to manipulate text at a detail level

> Brute forcing text measurement in tldraw breaks my heart

Love it or hate it, the web is a platform for application development, making this easer is only good for everyone.

My argument on web APIs is what we should continue to go lower level, and so font and text metrics APIs for canvas would be awesome and an alternative to this. But I'm also a proponent of "using the platform" and for text layout, web engines are incredible, and very performant. Extending that capability to layout inside a canvas enables many awesome features.

One that I've repeatedly gone back to over the years is paginated rich text editing. It's simply impossible to do with contenteditable in a product level way - one of the reasons Google docs has a custom layout engine. This proposal would enable full use of contenteditable for rich text, but with full page/print layout control.

I hope it lands in the browsers.
by gethly | 2025-08-03 07:16:05+00:00
Yes, this road is very lonely. Always has been. Entrepreneurship is going against the grain, with no help or support. Until one day you make it and then everyone tells you how easy you have it. Is it no different than when European settlers came to America or all of the space program. Exploration is in our blood, few undertake such ventures, and it is always a lonely endeavour.
by WalterBright | 2025-08-03 07:16:08+00:00
> The theory was first proposed in 1967

Good thing I learned to read (phonics) before that nut showed up.

> Picture Power!

This whole word nonsense must have been the motivation for icons promulgated by Steve Jobs, which have infected everything. The latest diseased device I bought was a new scanner, which has a touch screen overflowing with icons. Naturally, the icons are unique and invented by arteests imagining they are Susan Kare. It's all WTF do these things do, which you can only hope to discern by touching them and hoping the scanner does not go into paper-shredding mode.