MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MisterMower | 2025-08-24 05:23:16+00:00
Automobiles saved an order of magnitude more lives when they replaced horses because horses leave manure on streets, which breed flies and other insects that can spread deadly diseases like typhoid fever. Cities were littered with horse droppings. The reduction in deadly disease spread caused by widespread automobile adoption more than outweighed the deaths caused by automobile crashes.

I know that’s not really what you were getting at with you comment, but it’s worth noting when people try to demonize cars, as cyclists are wont to do: they’re the least bad and most versatile mode of mass transportation available.

The context in which the automobile met horses matters: contrary to your portrayal of roads, very few of them were actually paved in any meaningful sense. They were mostly compacted dirt, sometimes gravel. Lanes existed in a less explicit way, and speeds were much slower because pedestrians were always mixed in as well.

Cars were a vast improvement over this situation along every meaningful axis. They’re faster, don’t leave manure on streets, and are safer when you consider operation. Horses get spooked and buck their riders, they can kick, they weigh hundreds of pounds and can crush you. And most importantly, they were cheaper than owning a horse. People didn’t switch overnight for no reason.

To the heart of your comment, the reason why we have the infrastructure we do is because cars were so much more capable than horses. Traffic signals, lane demarcations, signage: all of these things came about because cars were so much faster than horses. Congestion doesn’t matter if you can get there in half the time.

When you need to get to the hospital, do you ride a bike? When you want to buy a couch at the store, how do you get it home? When you need to visit your grandparents the next state over, how do you get there?

Overwhelmingly, the answer is a motor vehicle. Unfortunately, the value of that vehicle is proportional to the infrastructure available to use it.

Here’s the rub: cycling is a luxury. Access to a motor vehicle when you need it is a neccesity. When you need to get to the ER, the last thing you want to do is be fighting a bunch cyclists to get there. When it’s snowing and -20F outside, you’re only taking the bike if you absolutely have too.

Your freedom of movement depends on infrastructure built for motor vehicles. Your ability to really do anything beyond get to work and back in a city depends on reliable and efficient access to a motor vehicle.

We should stop wasting money on bike lanes and build real public transit in our cities. The reason people feel compelled to use a bike is the alternatives are too awful to be competitive.

If you think that’s hypocritical, I don’t know what to tell you. Cyclists degrade infrastructure built for motorists. Infrastructure you need. Infrastructure they contribute to the upkeep of via gas taxes.

Not sure about the answer to your question without looking it up, but probably “car crash” given the context of our conversation.
by inferiorhuman | 2025-08-24 05:23:19+00:00
Where would you even get them from?

In my case it was in parsing text where a numeric value had a two character prefix but a string value did not. So I was matching on 0..2 (actually 0..2.min(string.len()) which doubly highlights the indexing issue) which blew up occasionally depending on the string values. There are perhaps smarter ways to do this (e.g. splitn on a space, regex, giant if-else statement, etc, etc) but this seemed at first glance to be the most efficient way because it all fit neatly into a match statement.

The inverse was also a problem: laying out text with a monospace font knowing that every character took up the same number of pixels along the x-axis (e.g. no odd emoji or whatever else). Gotta make sure to call #len on #chars instead of the string itself as some of the text (Windows-1250 encoded) got converted into multi-byte Unicode codepoints.
by gls2ro | 2025-08-24 05:23:29+00:00
AGI is not possible because we dont yet have a clear and commonly agreed definition of intelligence and more importantly we dont have a definition for consciousness nor we can define clearly (if there is) the link between those two.

until we got that AGI is just a magic word.

When we will have those two clear definitions that means we understood them and then we can work toward AGI.
by motorest | 2025-08-24 05:26:48+00:00
> Such a big readme and no introduction to why I should be interested in this tool.

This.

Why in the hell would anyone want to kill random processes that open a port in the tange 2000-6000? And why is this need so pressing as to require a full blown monitor integrated in a task bar?

Without context, this sounds like a complete random silly project that makes no sense and serves no purpose at all.
by faangguyindia | 2025-08-24 05:27:38+00:00
i use gemini flash and pro for pretty much everything. Why? they offer it free to test.

I tried signup for openai wayy too much friction, they start asking for payment without even you using any free credits, guess what that's one sure way to lose business.

same for claude, i couldn't even get claude through vertex as its available only in limited regions, and i am in asia pasific right now.
by cm2187 | 2025-08-24 05:27:40+00:00
My understanding is that jetfighters with nuclear weapons are meant to deliver an ultimate warning by nuking the invading army. ICBM are what comes next (unless the enemy went ICBM first).

That being said this all assumed that Russia had a strong air-defence. The various strikes that Ukraine has been able to make on Russian territory seems to have challenged that idea. I don't know how confident Putin feels he could block such attack, so that adds to the dissuasion too. The thing with nukes is that it only takes one missile to go through.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-24 05:28:10+00:00
> Isn’t this strictly for convicted criminals, though?

No.

Denaturalization is a civil process that does not require a criminal conviction, and the people that have been denaturalized are not always convicted criminals.

(Denaturalization usually involves an allegation that could also be pursued as a crime, such as fraud against the government, but that's very much not the same as it applying only to convicted criminals.)
by sanswork | 2025-08-24 05:29:43+00:00
The benefit I'm getting is it stop almost all bots from submitting forms on my websites. It works basically flawlessly for that. I'm guessing you either don't run any websites with traffic or have never tried it if you think its worthless. I'm sure there are ways to bypass them but no one I care about has bothered so it doesn't matter. The lock on my front door doesn't have to stop a professional lock picker to be useful. The captcha on my website doesn't have to stop someone trying to get around it for it to be useful at stopping almost all the bots that don't even bother trying.
by faangguyindia | 2025-08-24 05:33:23+00:00
that info can be just included in preffix which is cache by LLM, reducing cost by 70-80% average. System time varies, so it's not good idea to specify it in prompt, better to make a function out of it to avoid cache invalidation.

I am still looking for a good "memory" solution, so far running without it. Haven't looked too deep into it.

Not sure how next tool call be predicted.

I am still using serial tool calls as i do not have any subagents, i just use fast inference models for directly tools calls. It works so fast, i doubt i'll benefit from parallel anything.
by tfwnopmt | 2025-08-24 05:34:12+00:00
For the security model to work, the information has to be irretrievable if the security chip breaks. Otherwise a motivated party can simply solder-on a new security chip to get into a locked phone, or compel google to give up the keys.

I suggest you look into reflowing the security chip. Chances are that it's a solder failure, rather than something more difficult like electromigration or something inside the chip.
by shkkmo | 2025-08-24 05:34:16+00:00
> it's trivial to prove there's no heaven or hell.

You're conflating physics and metaphysics.

> Flat earth is very similar to religion

You seem to have a beef to pick with religion. There are religious groups that do function similar to flat earthers, but that isn't true of all religious groups and many of the smartest and open minded people in history have been religious.

If anything, by making this comparison you are legitimizing idiocy.

There's a big difference between taking a position on unknowable metaphysical topics and refusing to recognize or even look at evidence when presented to you.
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-24 05:34:54+00:00
A nuclear first strike is the worst deterrent possible, though. It basically enables and ensures a nuclear retaliatory strike, which is how you rapidly reach midnight on the atomic clock, queueing up WW3.

I don’t think France would ever strike first with nukes, even against Russia invading France itself. Conventional munitions and bombs are justifiable, but I can’t see France nuking any EU country that is being invaded by Russia or anyone else, even as a last resort. There’s nothing to gain militarily by doing so, and it would only give their enemies justification to escalate.

I honestly don’t know much about French nuclear doctrine and policy, so I would be happy to be corrected or pointed in the right direction.
by tfourb | 2025-08-24 05:35:02+00:00
„There is no set of political body in the world with the capability to freeze consumption and lock billions of people into poverty.“

I don’t think this is actually necessary to manage climate change (see my point advice above about the decoupling of economic growth and energy use). But just for the sake of the argument: „freeze consumption and lock people into poverty“ is literally what happens when nation states go to war and we have managed to do that plenty of times, including for really stupid reasons, without much of a problem.

Governments are also quite happy to freeze consumption and lock people into poverty if they can somehow be labeled as undeserving and/or threatening. Plenty of that going around recently.
by jamilton | 2025-08-24 05:35:36+00:00
The dream, as I see it, is that AGI could 1, automate research/engineering, such that it would be self-improving and advance technology faster and better than would happen without AGI, improving quality of life, and 2, do a significant amount of the labor, especially physical labor via robotics, that people currently do. 2 would be significant enough in scale that it reduces the amount of labor people need to do on average without lowering quality of life. The political/economic details of that are typically handwaved.

The morality of it depends on the details.
by cryptoz | 2025-08-24 05:40:49+00:00
I really think the current trend of CLI coding agents isn't going to be the future. They're cool but they are _too simple_. Gemini CLI often makes incorrect edits and gets confused, at least on my codebase. Just like ChatGPT would do in a longer chat where the context gets lost: random, unnecessary and often harmful edits are made confidently. Extraneous parts of the codebase are modified when you didn't ask for it. They get stuck in loops for an hour trying to solve a problem, "solving it", and then you have to tell the LLM the problem isn't solved, the error message is the same, etc.

I think the future will be dashboards/HUDs (there was an article on HN about this a bit ago and I agree). You'll get preview windows, dynamic action buttons, a kanban board, status updates, and still the ability to edit code yourself, of course.

The single-file lineup of agentic actions with user input, in a terminal chat UI, just isn't gonna cut it for more complicated problems. You need faster error reporting from multiple sources, you need to be able to correct the LLM and break it out of error loops. You won't want to be at the terminal even though it feels comfortable because it's just the wrong HCI tool for more complicated tasks. Can you tell I really dislike using these overly-simple agents?

You'll get a much better result with a dashboard/HUD. The future of agents is that multiple of them will be working at once on the codebase and they'll be good enough that you'll want more of a status-update-confirm loop than an agentic code editing tool update.

Also required is better code editing. You want to avoid the LLM making changes in your code unrelated to the requested problem. Gemini CLI often does a 'grep' for keywords in your prompt to find the right file, but your prompt was casual and doesn't contain the right keywords so you end up with the agent making changes that aren't intended.

Obviously I am working in this space so that's where my opinions come from. I have a prototype HUD-style webapp builder agent that is online right now if you'd like to check it out:

https://codeplusequalsai.com/

It's not got everything I said above - it's a work-in-progress. Would love any feedback you have on my take on a more complicated, involved, and narrow-focus agentic workflow. It only builds flask webapps right now, strict limits on what it can do (no cron etc yet) but it does have a database you can use in your projects. I put a lot of work into the error flow as well, as that seems like the biggest issue with a lot of agentic code tools.

One last technical note: I blogged about using AST transformations when getting LLMs to modify code. I think that using diffs or rewriting the whole file isn't the right solution either. I think that having the LLM write code that modifies your code and then running that code to affect the modifications is the way forward. We'll see I guess. Blog post: https://codeplusequalsai.com/static/blog/prompting_llms_to_m...
by userbinator | 2025-08-24 05:41:17+00:00
The README already has a rather repugnant LLM-ish feel to it; lots of lists and verboseness, while saying very little.

Also, this is a perplexing choice (which also serves to illustrate the above point regarding verboseness):

White background with red center: 1-9 processes (some development servers) White background with orange center: 10+ processes (many development servers)
by margalabargala | 2025-08-24 05:42:24+00:00
> The reduction in deadly disease spread caused by widespread automobile adoption more than outweighed the deaths caused by automobile crashes.

[Citation needed]

That's really a...unique...take. The reduction in disease was due to things like antibiotics and water treatment facilities, and preventing contamination from human sewage. Horse manure does not cause widespread disease.

Are you just making things up? Like, that's LLM-level hallucination right there.

The rest of your comment is just you stating your opinion as though it's fact because I guess you live somewhere 100% car dependent. Just because your freedom of movement and ability to do things other than commute relies on a motor vehicle, does not make that true of others outside your bubble of wealth.

That said, as established above I'm either arguing with a robot or with a person who has no problem inventing swaths of history out of whole cloth, so I guess the joke is on me.
by EagnaIonat | 2025-08-24 05:43:30+00:00
> To access their best models via the API, OpenAI now requires you to complete a Know-You-Customer process similar to opening a bank account.

While this is true, you can download the OpenAI open source model and run it in Ollama.

The thinking is a little slow, but the results have been exceptional vs other local models.

https://ollama.com/library/gpt-oss
by phendrenad2 | 2025-08-24 05:46:17+00:00
Linux is a fish, stop trying to make it a bird. The fact that a significant portion of the Linux-user population thinks/believes/hopes/expects that it will someday be a bird won't make it so, or do anything to unblock the technical, legal, and organizational roadblocks.

If you want a FOSS desktop OS that can win the "right battles", here's what you do:

1. Come up with a name and a logo. Trademark them. Make a basic set of rules that people have to adhere to if they want to use your logo. Obviously, get a lawyer to look it over to ensure it's ironclad.

2. Fork FreeBSD (or any other open-source-but-not-copyleft-licensed kernel)

3. Pick a GUI layer. GTK, Qt, WxWidgets, doesn't really matter as long as you keep the API stable so programs written in 2028 will run in 2038 (good luck doing that on Linux).

4. Create a driver API interface so someone can write a Realtek Wifi driver once and it'll never need recompiled or updated for a newer kernel. The driver file will work in 2028 and 2038 (of course, excepting the case where there's a new CPU architecture, or a security vulnerability).

5. Stabilize the application-level API as well. That means, probably pick a version of glibc and stick with it forever. Patch vulnerabilities, but maintain backward compatibility as much as possible. Application binaries should work forever.

If your instinctive reaction to these bullet points is to think "who's gonna do all that" then yeah, I agree with you. It's not going to happen.
by bjornsing | 2025-08-24 05:50:52+00:00
I’m not arguing that there’s something fundamentally wrong with mathematics or the scientific method. I’m arguing that the social norms around how we do science in practice have some serious flaws. Gwern points out one of them. One that IMHO is quite interesting.

EDIT: I also get the feeling that you think it’s okay to do an incorrect hypothesis test (c > 0), as long as you also look at the effect size. I don’t think it is. You need to test the c > 0.3 hypothesis to get a mathematically sound hypothesis test. How many papers do that?
by meander_water | 2025-08-24 05:51:00+00:00
> 1. Analyze the codebase by finding and reading relevant files 2. Create a script to reproduce the issue 3. Edit the source code to resolve the issue 4. Verify your fix works by running your script again 5. Test edge cases to ensure your fix is robust

This prompt snippet from your instance template is quite useful. I use something like this for getting out of debug loops:

> Analyse the codebase and brainstorm a list of potential root causes for the issue, and rank them from most likely to least likely.

Then create scripts or add debug logging to confirm whether your hypothesis is correct. Rule out root causes from most likely to least by executing your scripts and observing the output in order of likelihood.
by fooblaster | 2025-08-24 05:52:07+00:00
The us provides has provided upkeep for pakistans f16s under strict supervision and according to some AI summary maintenance has been a huge issue for them that limited their effectiveness. So not sure the story you are painting is quite as rosy as the reality. Fighter jets are not easy to maintain, without a large domestic fighter jet industry.

Consider for example when one of the radar elements in the f35 burns out, among the thousands that are there. Where in Pakistan does on obtain custom GaN radar ASICs that integrate with the f35?
by setopt | 2025-08-24 05:52:12+00:00
> And the training data has to exist, you can't find millions of pages depicting every thought a person went through before writing something. And such data can't exist because most thoughts aren't even language.

It would be interesting if in the very distant future, it becomes viable to use advanced brain scans as training data for AI systems. That might be a more realistic intermediate between the speculations into AGI and Uploaded Intelligence.

</scifi>
by sprobertson | 2025-08-24 05:52:31+00:00
It's been asked a few times, here are some links to get you started:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36370684

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30752540

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9896369 (Python specific)
by Defletter | 2025-08-24 05:55:27+00:00
> Are all your plates and bowls at home plastic as well?

Funnily enough, there are contingents of people who exclusively use paper plates and plastic cutlery. I think there's an interesting parallel there. Those kinds of people simply do not want the effort and cost of maintenance. I'm not particularly sympathetic to this mindset in either case, but still.
by frm88 | 2025-08-24 05:56:40+00:00
I was wondering about this myself since I saw Milo Rossi's intense takedown of Shayne Truth Vibes, another anti-vaxxer and overall conspiracy theorist https://youtu.be/-gxg7l_Hxa0?feature=shared. He's explained it as predatory behaviour that feeds fears to promote whatever it is they are peddling as the one and only solution to these fears.
by riffraff | 2025-08-24 05:57:20+00:00
I am not qualified enough to answer, but some ~15 years ago I enjoyed going through the book Code Reading[0], which is about this exact topic.

I think there was another one with a similar name but I can't think of it's name.

0: https://www.spinellis.gr/codereading/, check the TOC https://www.spinellis.gr/codereading/toc.html
by EagnaIonat | 2025-08-24 06:01:29+00:00
> Citation needed on that one.

I can't speak for every country but Copyright laws in the US, EU and UK require a human creator to be valid for copyright.

A casual search brought up this:

- https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2025/03/appell...

- https://www.openpolicy.co/resources/u-s-copyright-office-cla...

- https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2025/02/copyrightabilit...

To add to that you can't patent anything created by an AI either.

> What do you know that they don't?

Oh they are well aware of this.

At enterprise level coding, everything normally needs a programmers certificate of origin as it were. So AI generated code is tagged within the source.

A good example of this (pre-gpt) was SCO vs IBM. Where SCO claimed IBM stole their code. IBM could prove the full history of code they created because of these procedures.

So.. if a person vibe codes a whole application and it gets stolen/copied, legally they have no way to protect that.

[edit] Reading further for UK when it comes to computer generated the law is a bit vague when it comes to vibe coding. There are laws to protect digital works. [edit]
by Fricken | 2025-08-24 06:01:54+00:00
Having aptitude in mathematics was once considered the highest form of human intelligence, yet a simple pocket calculator can beat the pants off most humans at arithmetic tasks.

Conversely, something we regard as simple, such as selecting a key from a keychain and using to unlock a door not previously encountered is beyond the current abilities of any machine.

I suspect you might be underestimating the real complexity of what bees and ants do. Self-driving cars as well seemed like a simpler problem before concerted efforts were made to build one.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-08-24 06:04:29+00:00
One thing I've learned is that in all of the brief history of humans we're aware of, people a lot smarter than I am existed in fairly large numbers. It puts things into perspective. They would have learned to use hacker news and program computers as easily as I do. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

I love the perspective they had on things due to living in such different (yet remarkably similar) conditions.
by schrodinger | 2025-08-24 06:06:26+00:00
Thank you so much! "Epsilon greedy" sounds like a great approach for the general idea I had in mind — I only glanced it but will read it more deeply.

I'll definitely try out your product, but I have to say — an enter your email box is surprisingly high-friction and if you weren't a considerate person I'd met on Hacker News I'd probably close the tab when I saw that. I'll try it out and see if there's a particular reason why you need to capture an email address so early on, but I'd bet if you simplified it you'd get more traffic!
by belZaah | 2025-08-24 06:07:32+00:00
My experience (30 years in software, 25 in practicing architecture, MIT system architecture masters) tells me there is no such thing as abstractly “good” design. There are designs with negative consequences for sure, but “good” depends on the context: what are you building, safety/security requirements etc. Probably most importantly on the implementation team and it’s structure. A team of juniors will butcher your intricate design and Conway’s Law makes your software reflect the team.