MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by incomingpain | 2025-08-15 13:08:03+00:00
>Why dynamic over static?

I started my coding career in C++. I know static well enough for my lifetime. It makes sense that if you're in the 1980s and choose static as the designer of the language.

But now the choice is available, why would you want to declare the variable. In my code I want to write "bob =" and the language figures that all out. If I feed a string into it or a number, why does it matter?

It saves me oodles of time not having to be concerned at all about that.

It's also very interesting in functions. Yes, I have been using the typing in python. def process_bob(self, bob: int) -> bool:

Technically i can shove whatever i want into that arg of bob. Imagine the function was a network protocol. v 1.1 did X, v1.2 did X and Y. That int becomes perhaps a list and that's totally fine. Very reusable, because iterating, process_bob can just become if bob == int: elif bob == list.

Why would I want my programming language to make things harder on myself for literally no gain?
by TheRealDunkirk | 2025-08-15 13:08:47+00:00
I was converting all the views in my Rails app from HAML to ERB. It was doing each one perfectly, so I told it to do the rest. It went through a few, then asked me if it could write a program, and run that. I thought, hey, cool, sure. I get it; it was trying to save tokens. Clever! However -- you know where this is going -- despite knowing all the rules, and demonstrating it could apply them, the program it wrote made a total dog's breakfast out of the rest of the files. Thankfully, I've learned to commit my working copy before big "AI" changes, and I just revert when it barfs. I forced Claude to do the rest "manually" at great token expense, but it did it correctly. I've asked it to write other scripts, which it has also mangled. So I haven't been impressed at Claude's "tool writing" capability yet, and I'm jealous of people who seem to have good luck.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-15 13:09:22+00:00
Being entirely dependent on Chinese manufacturing to make anything. This also has the downstream effect of no one young learning how to make stuff, which then leaves you as a society that is forced to buy everything from China, and puts China in an excellent position to rug pull American society if they want.

I can tell your first hand, that the engineers in the hardware/physical product space probably have an average age of 58 years old. That's very bad.
by milesjag | 2025-08-15 13:09:49+00:00
The legal basis is there to protect wildlife from man-made disruption and provides a kind of ecological basis to limit the kind of boundless growth that politicians appeal to.

Unfortunately, for those laws to be effective, they have to be strong enough to beat the various legal shenanigans / loopholes which can be used by developers to effortlessly leapfrog them.

Finally, if the laws are strong enough, they might be effortlessly wielded to prevent even reasonable developments from occurring.

The law lands somewhere in the middle and I think there are always people at either extreme trying to take advantage.
by nachox999 | 2025-08-15 13:10:35+00:00
It appears to me unnecessary to say much about the terrors of death. The subject has been sufficiently enlarged upon by various writers; besides, every one knows and feels for himself that life is sweet and death is bitter. However old a man may be, however broken in health, however miserable his circumstances, the thought of death is an unwelcome one. There are three principal reasons why all sensible people fear death so much:

First, because the love of life, the dread of death is inherent in human nature. Secondly, because every rational being is well aware that death is bitter, and the separation of soul and body cannot take place without inexpressible suffering. Thirdly, because no one knows whither he will go after death
by josefprusa | 2025-08-15 13:10:39+00:00
Hi! Josef here! I was just recently sharing a little update on socials, here is a copy:

Since I posted my “OHW is dead” article, you’ve been asking me about “that patent”. I didn’t want you to miss the forest (thousands of filings since 2020) just because of one tree. But let’s take a look now. In this case: the MMU multiplexer (we open sourced it 9 years ago). Anycubic (another IDG Capital-backed company) used the tactic of filing in China for an easy initial grant: CN 222407171 U > DE 20 2024 100 001 U1 > US 2025/0144881 A1. The playbook: file a Chinese utility model (10-year patent, same protections, lower examination, already granted) claim that priority in Germany (again as a utility model, already granted) file in the US. Cheap to file, but expensive and time-consuming to fight. I already wrote why prior art isn’t a magic wand that solves it immediately in my article ⤵ And there are many more, we just found a new juicy one!

Edit: Emojis stripped from the original, tried to fix it a bit ;-)
by jdlshore | 2025-08-15 13:10:42+00:00
According to Wikipedia, the ranking agency is lauded for its objectivity and independence. The ranking is based on these factors:

10% for number of alumni who are Nobel laureates or Fields medalists

20% for number of staff who are Nobel laureates or Fields medalists

20% for number of researchers with highly cited papers

20% for number of papers published in Nature or Science

20% for the number of papers indexed in Science Citation Index-expanded and Social Science Citation Index

10% for “per-capita academic performance” (not sure what this means… student grades, maybe?)

I can’t help but see a relationship between “published papers” as a metric and the relatively recent surge in academic fraud. Goodhart’s Law, anyone?
by anenefan | 2025-08-15 13:11:00+00:00
I see some of the results A.I. assist throws - getting a no brainer right should not be seen as a major win.

I wouldn't use any of the A.I. search for numerous short comings but I'll list a couple of thoughts where it could be better.

A.I. search needs to ignore advertising spiel - ie work out what and where it is (perhaps better stated as becoming more resistant to poisoning)

A.I. search needs to identify and discard common BS that is trotted out by unwitting human parrots.

A.I. search should offer an option for the user to input a great number of sites or sets of sites they don't feel offer anything whatsoever, though not to the point it only echoes what the user wants to hear - but it is easy to say most woo woo kook areas are not greatly reputable as far as facts and real science in the context of the real world. Personally for me, (given what I'm generally searching for) I would like to avoid results being based on facts found in social media areas.
by conorbergin | 2025-08-15 13:11:24+00:00
If you are a hobbyist or small business in desktop manufacturing you are basically forced to buy Chinese products.

I have never owned a Prusa, but I have owned several Creality and Bambu Labs printers, because I could get the same utility at half the cost. The same goes for soldering irons, linear actuators, oscillscopes, etc. I still buy European hand tools (Knipex, Wera, etc) because I know they won't break in a year, so they are good value in the long run.

Often the choice is whether to buy a used, last generation tool of eBay, or a brand new next-gen tool from China. The choice depends on how flawed the Chinese implementation is and the gap in utility between the generations.

The main problem with Chinese products is the lack of accountability. The same product will be sold under multiple brands, or by dropshippers, and you have no idea who actually made it, there are some strong Chinese brands that buck this trend, i.e. Bambu Labs. When you buy western tools you are buying peace of mind, something I can't currently afford.
by vhab | 2025-08-15 13:11:38+00:00
Open hardware for 3D printers is actually thriving. There's a whole fleet of community designed hardware, with most innovations to consumer 3D printing still originating in the DIY community.

Multiple manufacturers have direct contact with community members to produce custom hardware at a small but affordable scale, and keeping up with rapid iterations and multiple hardware improvements throughout the year.

Some of the most cutting edge as well as niche 3D printing hardware available to consumers are being sold on small webshops operating out of someone's garage.

If anything, we're in a golden age right now. 3D printing in 2025 is a very exciting place to be.
by mahmoud-almadi | 2025-08-15 13:11:54+00:00
You make valid points. At the end of the day we're focused on delivering real value while taking every security precaution we can reasonably take and build new technology at the same time. Eventually as we grow we'll be able to do full self hosting for our customers and perhaps even spin up our own LLMs in our own servers. But until then, we can only do so much.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-08-15 13:12:27+00:00
> There is a place that is perfect, and it requires perfect understanding.

I counter that a perfect place would not require anything of it's inhabitants, except perhaps that they be capable of joy. Requiring more would make the place imperfect.

The concept that one must meet certain qualifications, take certain actions, and be certain things to EARN a right to exist is nothing but the strange artifact of an elderly belief system born of scarcity models of the universe. Again, people define things based on the other things they know. When this model of the universe was created everything was scarce, and daily life was mostly misery. Sky-daddy had to decide who got to eat, and who didn't - So, obviously, it was the good boys and girls that agreed with sky-daddy.

> You can’t walk in dirty to a pristine palace, not because you are dirty and bad, but because such a place is to be clean, for eternity.

God does not require you to be perfect, or God would have made you that way from the start. Or to use your code analogy- If God wrote my code in such a way that it won't run within the operating system provided then he is a bad programmer. He is not, therefore we know my code will run there.

Note: I should caveat that I don't believe any of this - I'm just arguing from a sort of devils advocate position because it's entertaing to me. Please don't let it offend you if you are a true believer.
by reactordev | 2025-08-15 13:12:36+00:00
While I don't entirely disagree with you. You have to understand why the courts exist at all. To govern working class citizens. Laws are written by the powerful and wealthy - always has been - to control the working class (everyone else).

You're freedom is an illusion. A social contract agreed upon by you following certain rules. Those rules, written by the wealthy, don't apply to the wealthy. In a just society they would be, but we have ceased to be a just society for the last 50 years. Technology isn't going to solve this without becoming that AI overlord everyone is scared of. Court systems are designed to prevent working class from becoming wealthy and to protect the wealthy and their assets from the working class. (violent crimes aside)
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-08-15 13:12:38+00:00
> AI startups burn a huge amount of money on providing free service to drive growth.

Of the pure-play companies, only OpenAI do this. Like, Anthropic are losing a bunch of money and the vast majority of their revenue comes from API usage.

So, either the training costs completely dominate the inference costs (seems unlikely but maybe) or they're just not great businesses.

I do think that OpenAI/Anthropic are probably hiring a lot of pre and post sales tech people to help customers use the products, and that's possibly something that they could cut in the future.
by vidarh | 2025-08-15 13:12:47+00:00
You'll note the person threatened with arrest in the first one did not express support for PA, but the police claimed that saying "Free Gaza" and "Israel is committing genocide" was expressing support for a proscribed organisation.

This has been a common theme after the proscription: The police has repeatedly abused the proscription to go after people expressing opposition to Israels actions in Gaza, without mentioning PA.

The excuse for that is that the Terrorism Act is not limited to making direct, overt support illegal. Section 13 makes it illegal to wear an item or clothing or wear, carry or display an article in such a way or in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that he is a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation.

This has multiple times been interpreted by the police as justification for threatening arrest over expressing support for Palestine, and the government has done nothing to stop the police from drastically overreaching in this way.
by DecoySalamander | 2025-08-15 13:13:01+00:00
This isn't necessarily contradictory. A government can choose not to prosecute certain crimes, such as property crimes targeting lower classes or crimes committed by certain social groups, while cracking down on what it perceives as a threat to its power.

I'm not saying that this is happening in the UK now, but every piece of news I hear about it is less than great, to say the least.
by kqr | 2025-08-15 13:13:12+00:00
There's also a more conservative rule similar to the CLT that works off of the definition of variance, and thus rests on no assumptions other than the existence of variance. Chebyshev's inequality tells us that the probability that any sample is more than k standard deviations away is bounded by 1/k².

In other words, it is possible (given sufficiently weird distributions) that not a single sample lands inside one standard deviation, but 75% of them must be inside two standard deviations, 88% inside three standard deviations, and so on.

There's also a one-sided version of it (Cantelli's inequality) which bounds the probability of any sample by 1/(1+k)², meaning at least 75 % of samples must be less than one standard deviation, 88% less than two standard deviations, etc.

Think of this during the next financial crisis when bank people no doubt will say they encountered "six sigma daily movements which should happen only once every hundred million years!!" or whatever. According to the CLT, sure, but for sufficiently odd distributions the Cantelli bound might be a more useful guide, and it says six sigma daily movements could happen as often as every fifty days.
by esskay | 2025-08-15 13:13:30+00:00
And theres the "obscure cases where the details are being conveniently glossed over" part. How long has he been sentence to jail for again?

I'm not defending his arrest, and quite obviously something went very wrong there, but again, we're talking about jail here. Posting an obscure cockup as if its the norm is pretty disingenuous.
by ashtonthu | 2025-08-15 13:13:39+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm Ashton, a solo developer, and I’ve built Dolphy AI—an offline, privacy-first AI assistant for Windows. As AI becomes more powerful and pervasive, I believe it’s time to rethink how we protect our data. Dolphy AI runs entirely on-device, with no cloud calls or tracking. It’s designed for users who want the benefits of AI without sacrificing privacy.

Under the hood, Dolphy uses ONNX Runtime for fast, lightweight inference, and supports GPU/iGPU acceleration to keep things snappy. The models are tuned for GPT-4–like output while staying small enough to run on consumer hardware.

I’d love your feedback—especially on performance, UX, and how we can make it better. You can check it out here: [https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9n7094pzch4q?hl=en-GB&gl=A...]

Thanks for reading!
by eqvinox | 2025-08-15 13:13:57+00:00
I can't help but notice nothing you're arguing is in relation to which part of the system should be doing the mapping from abstract keys to actual letters. As such I don't see anything to engage with…

(It's also a bit strange that you argue your freedom of choice to use Colemak and then immediately proceed to call two other layouts "abominations and shouldn't exist". And this is where I'm cutting my participation in this course, because even though I absolutely agree they exist, I'm not interested in discussing objective advantages of keyboard layouts over each other. If you're arguing ergonomics, you need to accept that for a lot of people the thing they're used to is the most ergonomic because the cost of adjustment far outstrips the benefits.)
by Ukv | 2025-08-15 13:13:57+00:00
> Funny. GPT-5 will confidently tell you that Willian H. Brusen is a former US president

Checking the link, it seems this mistake occurred when generating an image of the names of all the presidents, I believe using gpt-image-1 (the model which GPT-5 will call, but which predates GPT-5). Not to say inaccuracies in generated image text shouldn't also be addressed, but I feel it's relevant context when judging progress.

> The verdict of some users is in. They hate GPT-5. [...] OpenAI to bring back the older, but more reliable, GPT4o model

GPT-5 is top of https://livebench.ai/#/ and top of https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard (blind user-preference ratings). Those leaderboards aren't the be-all-and-end-all, but I feel narratives formed within particular groups can be prone to confirmation bias (with different groups having different narratives and seeing the others as delusional).

> and an Arizona State University study indicate that our current ways of improving LLMs have gone as far as they can go

Unclear to me that a study of a 4-layer GPT-2 on a synthetic task implies specifically now is the stopping point. I don't believe in a singularity/intelligence explosion or that we're close to replacing all human labor, but it does seem that incremental progress has continued through over a decade of people saying deep learning is hitting a wall.

> Kilo Code blog observed, people have been assuming that since "the raw inference costs were coming down fast, the applications' inference costs would come down fast as well but this assumption was wrong."

> [...] Of course, Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, can predict "The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months," but I believe that just as much as I would an Old West snake oil huckster who'd guaranteed me his miracle elixir would grow my hair back.

Wouldn't necessarily trust Altman's predictions in general, but the fact that the cost of a fixed level of capability decreases dramatically over time seems fairly uncontroversial and easy to verify across providers.

That's not inconsistent with the fact that the per-token price of the current best model has stayed approximately the same, which is what the quoted blog post is referring to. I believe that's mostly just determined by how much people are willing to pay (if people are willing to pay more to be a couple months ahead of the current progress curve, scale up the model or increase context/CoT to squeeze out extra performance).
by placardloop | 2025-08-15 13:14:08+00:00
One of Rick Perry’s signature accomplishments as governor of Texas was that he implemented a few policies mandating the expansion of renewable energy, and also a massive initiative called the Competitive Renewable Energy Zone that funded building high voltage transmission lines that connected population centers in North and Central Texas to the open land in West Texas, which is what enabled massive boosts in wind farms being built in west Texas.
by Saline9515 | 2025-08-15 13:14:13+00:00
Defeating the army of one the poorest country on earth is not an incredible feat. Understanding the fact that it's borderline impossible to import american-style democracy in Afghanistan didn't require more than a few anthropologists and historians specializing in this part of Asia. Or they could have asked anyone who had lived there for some time. US soldiers would have been much safer this way.

Israel didn't suppress anything in Gaza so far, and for sure the next generation of insurgents (not necessarily Hamas) who have nothing to lose since Israel destroyed their homes and killed their families is being cultivated right now. This is why now the government talks openly about their own "final solution"[0][1], as they know that it will be difficult if not impossible to stabilize the situation.

[0]https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-07-15/ty-article/.p...

[1]https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/05/06/smotrich-sees-gaza-de...
by bluGill | 2025-08-15 13:14:16+00:00
You have limited time. That year needed to build and debug a 3d printer (if you are single a year would be way to long, but for those with kids that is way too short) is a year that you can't spend on whatever your real hobby is. If you real hobby is 3d printers then that is great, but if not you shouldn't. I work on FOSS projects, but most of what I have installed on my system is a per-packaged distro from someone else who made it work (I have FreeBSD, Ubuntu, and Arch - each slightly different) because I don't have time to do linux/BSD from scratch even though I could. I have built gcc, but most of the time I just use the pre-packaged gcc so I can get on building the project I'm interested in.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-08-15 13:14:25+00:00
> The fixed cause due to R&D is what makes it unprofitable but not each request. Your line of thinking is bit ridiculous because OpenAI is never going to lose money per request.

We don't know this for sure. I agree that it would be insane from a business perspective, but I've seen so many SV startups make insane business decisions that I tend to lean towards this being quite possible.
by jordanb | 2025-08-15 13:14:26+00:00
I think there's a strong case for having maximum wealth above which you'll just get a 100% tax.

All the billionaires are equal parts clearly miserable people, and also terrifying and psychopathic. I assume they didn't start out that way, but there's also probably a personality that just has a need to run up the score.

I think if capitalism had a kill screen, that you get to and then you have to go do something else for a while, both the billionaires and the rest of us would all be happier and healthier.
by andsoitis | 2025-08-15 13:14:37+00:00
> To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats, and we need to weigh the social and economic benefits of allowing some level of environmental disruption. Progress comes at a cost. We should be clear about what that cost is.

Do you have a sense of how to approach the question of “cost” for this particular bat case?

When destroying an entire habitat (let’s assume we can define the boundaries of that habitat and it is mostly unique), do you have a sense of how to compute the cost given the multitude of species, geographical feedback loops, etc.?