MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by camilomatajira | 2025-08-21 20:11:51+00:00
Anki is dead because, after LLMs were introduced, people lost the incentive to learn at all.

Frankly, who wants to learn something the old way when you can ask an LLM to do it for you?

All this reminds me of my home country when the Ponzi schemes were at their highest point (2008). There were small and medium cities, were a sizeable percent of the population actually stopped working at all! Why? Because the ponzi schemes were promising up to 300% returns within 6 months! And the Ponzi schemes were actually delivering (so much that the banks actually pressured the government to intervene). So people put all the money in the ponzis and simply wait a bit to cash in part of their returns. No one opened their small grocery stores, nor small pubs, nor did anyone want to do chores or manual labor. Until everything collapsed.
by esafak | 2025-08-21 20:12:10+00:00
It seems behind Qwen3 235B 2507 Reasoning (which I like) and gpt-oss-120B: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/deepseek-v3-1-reasoning

Pricing: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-chat-v3.1
by neilv | 2025-08-21 20:12:50+00:00
> I don't think anyone who's not monetarily incentivize to pretend there are IP/Copyright issues actually thinks there are.

Why do you think that about people who disagree with you? You're responding directly to someone who's said they think there's issues, and not pretending. Do you think they're lying? Did you not read what they said?

And AFAICT a lot of other people think similarly to me.

The perverse incentives to rationalize are on the side of the people looking to exploit the confusion, not the people who are saying "wait a minute, what you're actually doing is..."

So a gold rush person claiming opponents must be pretending because of incentives... seems like the category of "every accusation is a confession".
by baq | 2025-08-21 20:12:58+00:00
I agree.

Rust wouldn't be a bad language if humans were able to take it in all at once. The problem is, nobody learns like that and Rust is very hard to iterate on if you don't know a lot of the key concepts.

The problem with this is you'll necessarily have to unlearn something or be frustrated when you achieve some level of proficiency in other languages since it still requires all those concepts which don't exist anywhere else.
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-08-21 20:13:24+00:00
Sketchy. It really is only apparent in hindsight after investigation.

When something turns out to be a valid idea, guess that wasn't sketchy.

When something turns out to be wild goose chase, guess that was sketchy, why did we do that?

You don't know the winning paths until you take them. But complaining that some wrong paths were taken, isn't the solution. Because who can pick winners ahead of time?
by runarberg | 2025-08-21 20:13:59+00:00
> Claiming that your political outgroup is engaging in political propaganda is not the same thing as calling for their deaths.

I don‘t think you grasp the seriousness of hate speech. Even if you don’t explicitly call for their deaths, by partaking in hate speech (including by sharing conspiracy theories about the group) you are playing an integral part of the violence against the group. And during an ongoing genocide, this speech is genocidal, and is an integral part of the genocide. There is a reason hate speech is outlawed in almost every country (including the USA; although USA is pretty lax what it considers hate speech).

The Pallywood conspiracy theory is exactly the kind of genocidal hate speech I am talking about. This conspiracy theory has been thoroughly debunked, but it persists among racists like Shaun Maguire, and serves as an integral part to justify or deny the violence done against Palestinians in an ongoing genocide.

If you disagree, I invite you to do a though experiment. Swap out Palestinians with Jews, and swap out the Pallywood conspiracy theory with e.g. Cultural Marxism, and see how Shaun Maguire’s speech holds up.
by smarx007 | 2025-08-21 20:14:06+00:00
How would I share Quadlet files for my repo? Today I have a docker-compose.yml in my repo, the instructions to try it out are usually `docker compose up --build -d`.

I read about the recently released CLI support for quadlets [0] and the ability to install Quadlets from a URL but still cannot wrap my head around it (as in, no matter how I look at it, Quadlets seem to require non-trivially higher knowledge to use and more steps/files).

If we need a concrete example to discuss: https://github.com/oslc-op/refimpl/blob/main/src/docker-comp...

[0]: https://blog.podman.io/2025/08/level-up-your-container-game-...
by Nextgrid | 2025-08-21 20:14:13+00:00
If you need to go beyond what a single bare-metal server can offer, then consider it.

But don’t discount bare-metal first! I see a lot of K8s or other cluster managers being used to manage underpowered cloud VMs, and while I understand the need for an orchestrator if you’re managing dozens of VMs, I wonder - why do you need multiple VMs in the first place if their total performance can be achieved by a handful of bare-metal machines?
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-21 20:14:50+00:00
> Nominally, for the same reason that you pay taxes for upkeep on the roads and power lines. Because everyone capable needs to contribute to the infrastructure or it will degrade and eventually fail.

On the government level, I agree. I’m far from a “taxation is theft” Libertarian.

But I also have an addiction to food and shelter. The only entity capable of that kind of collective action that is good for society is the government. My (and I’m generalizing myself as any rationale actor) goal is to do what is necessary to exchange labor for money by aligning my actions with the corporations incentives to continue to put money in my bank account and (formerly) vested RSUs in my brokerage account.

> To me, that speaks of mismanagement - a poorly run company that is a leech on the economy and workforce. In contrast, as a senior level engineer at a large technology company that has remarkably low turnover, one of my core duties is to help enhance the capabilities of other coworkers and that includes mentorship

The only large tech company I’ve worked for has a leadership principal “Hire and Develop the Best”. But for an IC, it’s mostly bullshit. That doesn’t show up on your promo doc when it’s time to show “impact” or how it relates to the team’s “OKR’s”.

From talking to people at Google, it’s the same. But of course Amazon can afford to have dead weight. When I have one shot at a new hire that is going to help me finish my quarterly goals as a team lead, I’m not going to hire a junior and put more work on myself.

I’m an IC, but in the org chart, I’m at the same level as a front line manager.

> While unrelated to my point, I do have a different experience that you may find interesting in that the most exorbitant salary I have ever been paid was as a contractor for a 12-person startup, not at the organizations with development teams in the hundreds or thousands.

As a billable consultant at AWS (and now outside of AWS) because of scale, I brought a lot more money into AWS than anything I could have done at the startup.

That’s why I said the startup “shouldn’t” have paid me the same close to 1 million over four years that AWS offered me in cash and RSUs. It would have been irresponsible and detrimental to the company. I couldn’t bring that much value to the startup.
by alfalfasprout | 2025-08-21 20:14:52+00:00
The reality is as someone that helps maintain several OSS projects you vastly underestimate the problem that AI-assisted tooling has created.

On the one hand, it's lowered the barrier to entry for certain types of contributions. But on the other hand getting a vibe-coded 1k LOC diff from someone that has absolutely no idea how the project even works is a serious problem because the iteration cycle of getting feedback + correctly implementing it is far worse in this case.

Also, the types of errors introduced tend to be quite different between humans and AI tools.

It's a small ask but a useful one to disclose how AI was used.
by alecco | 2025-08-21 20:14:54+00:00
Very good article but something bothers me:

> Language learners chase something called i+1 material

I really dislike the traditional language teaching method. It didn't work for me. It's too abstract, boring, and you end up memorizing stuff the wrong way. And usually later you need to un-learn/re-learn things properly.

What worked for me (and fellow struggling students I taught) was normal text about topics I find interesting. Like boats? Pick boating magazines, books, and documentaries/movies (turn subtitles on). From WTF to "I know some of those words" to is that a pattern? And only then go for the actual rules of the language. This way you are engaged and learn real-world things.

And for dull learning, it's better to spend time in i-1. Miyagi-stile practice repetition of the basic things to the point you can't fail even if you are tired. Then move to games like finding rhymes or tongue-twisters. [Ironically, AFAIK this is the Japanese way to learn calligraphy, Judo, etc]

Same applies to many other disciplines. YMMV
by foobarian | 2025-08-21 20:15:08+00:00
> Scaling AI will require an exponential increase in compute and processing power,

I think there is something more happening with AI scaling; I think the scaling factor per user is a lot higher and a lot more expensive. Compare to the big initial internet companies. You added one server you could handle thousands more users; incremental cost was very low, not to mention the revenue captured through whatever adtech means. Not so with AI workloads; they are so much more expensive than ad revenue it's hard to break even even with an actual paid subscription.
by KritVutGu | 2025-08-21 20:15:34+00:00
> AI is writing a lot of the unit tests

Are you kidding?

- For ages now, people have used "broad test coverage" and "CI" as excuses for superficial reviews, as excuses for negligent coding and verification.

- And now people foist even writing the test suite off on AI.

Don't you see that this way you have no reasoned examination of the code?

> ... and the code, but it’s entirely by my architectural design.

This is fucking bullshit. The devil is in the details, always. The most care and the closest supervision must be precisely where the rubber meets the road. I wouldn't want to drive a car that you "architecturally designed", and a statistical language model manufactured.
by a-posteriori | 2025-08-21 20:16:08+00:00
This study was led by a PI in the MIT Media Lab who studies cameras and their impact on society.

There's a reason it has a catchy headline, there's a reason you needed to fill in an email form to get access to the study, and there's a reason why the 2nd author has an agentic AI startup.

I thought it was a low quality article with no data or in detail methods. MIT needs to do better. This is the second article of this type in the last few months that caught headlines.
by benjsm | 2025-08-21 20:17:11+00:00
I get it. It definitely isn’t the right fit for every use case at this point in time. That’s why we’ve built support for subscription and usage models as well. Then there's incentive for a sales tool to still charge on usage or subscriptions (slightly less than they normally would), but have the upside of an outcome converting. For buyers, this should be seen as the seller having confidence in their product.
by dothereading | 2025-08-21 20:17:29+00:00
I agree that they could be complementary, but I think there's a not-yet-made tool that goes even beyond this, where you are interacting with an LLM that has an Anki-like backend of some kind, keeping track not only the number of mistakes but of what kind of mistakes you made and when, so that it can later bringing up the card in a more natural way.
by geraneum | 2025-08-21 20:17:38+00:00
> Nobody cares if contributors use an LLM or a magnetic needle to generate code.

That’s exactly opposite of what the author is saying. He mentions that [if the code is not good, or you are a beginner] he will help you get to finish line, but if it’s LLM code, he shouldn’t be putting effort because there’s no human on the other side.

It makes sense to me.
by jackconsidine | 2025-08-21 20:18:03+00:00
> The closest thing the federal government has to a department of water infrastructure, the Bureau of Reclamation, has an annual budget of just $1.1 billion.

One of my favorite books is Cadillac Desert. It's about the damming of the US rivers, the water crisis, and the history of the Bureau.

It may be dwarfed by the other departments, but its had a massive impact on US population development especially in LA.

> From 1902 to 1905, Eaton, Mulholland, and others engaged in underhanded methods to ensure that Los Angeles would gain the water rights in the Owens Valley, blocking the Bureau of Reclamation from building water infrastructure for the residents in Owens Valley.[12]: 48–69 [16]: 62–69 While Eaton engaged in most of the political maneuverings and chicanery,[16]: 62 Mulholland misled Los Angeles public opinion by dramatically understating the amount of water then available for Los Angeles' growth.[16]: 73 Mulholland also misled residents of the Owens Valley; he indicated that Los Angeles would only use unused flows in the Owens Valley, while planning on using the full water rights to fill the aquifer of the San Fernando Valley. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Mulholland

This is the Mulholland of Mulholland Drive who was a major character in CD
by f1shy | 2025-08-21 20:18:31+00:00
Just last week I asked copilot to make a FastCGI client in C. It gave me 5 times code that did not compile. Afer some massaging I got it to compile, didn’t work. After some changes, works. No I say “i do not want to use libfcgi, just want a simple implementation”. After already one hour wrestling, I realize the whole thing blocks, I want no blocking calls… still half an hour later fighting, I’m slowly getting there. I see the code: a total mess.

I deleted all, wrote from scratch a 350 lines file which wotks.
by mdemare | 2025-08-21 20:18:44+00:00
Exactly. Books are still being translated by human translators.

I have a text on my computer, the first couple of paragraphs from the Dutch novel "De aanslag", and every few years I feed it to the leading machine translation sites, and invariably, the results are atrocious. Don't get me wrong, the translation is quite understandable, but the text is wooden, and the translation contains 3 or 4 translation blunders.

GPT-5 output for example:

Far, far away in the Second World War, a certain Anton Steenwijk lived with his parents and his brother on the edge of Haarlem. Along a quay, which ran for a hundred meters beside the water and then, with a gentle curve, turned back into an ordinary street, stood four houses not far apart. Each surrounded by a garden, with their small balconies, bay windows, and steep roofs, they had the appearance of villas, although they were more small than large; in the upstairs rooms, all the walls slanted. They stood there with peeling paint and somewhat dilapidated, for even in the thirties little had been done to them. Each bore a respectable, bourgeois name from more carefree days: Welgelegen Buitenrust Nooitgedacht Rustenburg Anton lived in the second house from the left: the one with the thatched roof. It already had that name when his parents rented it shortly before the war; his father had first called it Eleutheria or something like that, but then written in Greek letters. Even before the catastrophe occurred, Anton had not understood the name Buitenrust as the calm of being outside, but rather as something that was outside rest—just as extraordinary does not refer to the ordinary nature of the outside (and still less to living outside in general), but to something that is precisely not ordinary.
by loeg | 2025-08-21 20:18:44+00:00
People are paid at different rates, but the thing to understand is that there are lot more people not getting paid professional athlete salaries. They matter in aggregate. Hypothetical hits to 20-50% of labor are significant and cannot be compensated for by any amount of white collar productivity.

2020 was hugely disruptive and the stock market did tank for a while. But the actual impact on labor was relatively modest? Cashiers and retail workers largely continued to do the same jobs, which are necessary for a functioning economy. Hospitality and travel are what got hit (and covered by PPP).
by Terr_ | 2025-08-21 20:18:49+00:00
> > YOUR OWN LINK SAYS 49.81% OF VOTES.

> majority of the population who showed up to vote, Einstein.

[sigh] That "49.81% OF VOTES" is already exactly what you're asking for, idiot. That minority (plurality!) of the people who showed up to vote voted for Trump.

Your weird desperation to deny even the smallest and most-understandable mistake has only built a large pile of very embarrassing crazy excuses.
by andersonklando | 2025-08-21 20:19:31+00:00
If I recall, Lucidchart allows up to 15 "shapes.

> Also, Lucidchart is just draw.io fyi - you don't need a license unless you need the file sharing aspect, and I feel like it belongs closer to the code.

No, it is not. I took the whole day to check what is available in the market, and concluded that Lucidchart UX is quite balanced.
by stouset | 2025-08-21 20:19:47+00:00
To your above point about paths, it’s things like this that keep me coming back to Rust. This was just one example, but other languages are absolutely littered with pitfalls and gotchas that—individually—aren’t all that likely to happen.

But all of them? Over a given program’s lifetime? In aggregate these end up being responsible for an absolutely wild number of random bugs that crop up in your exception logs that need to get tracked down. And it never ends. There are an infinite number of edge cases you’ve never thought about that aren’t fully handled and that some of which are constantly being tripped.

This just… doesn’t happen in Rust. The type system catches (and/or completely rules out) a ridiculous number of these situations. I have repeatedly written finished software in Rust, where once it was released there was only an occasional need to add features but the typical bug-squashing treadmill just doesn’t exist.

That’s not to say there are never bugs. You can express faulty logic in any language. But the number of stupid impedance matches that are categorically ruled out makes the experience of operating and maintaining Rust program once written a widely different experience than I’ve had with any other language.
by impossiblefork | 2025-08-21 20:19:57+00:00
I don't understand this idea that Microsoft would follow US law in this case, since doing so would be espionage, and would lead to such long prison sentences for those who did it.

Obviously we've ended the death penalty for all crimes, but I think the police will shoot fleeing people who have participated in things like this.

Being part of an organization that says they will do this is also obviously grounds for being deported.

Don't think about participating in anything like this unless you have diplomatic immunity, because European states have no reason to go easy on someone who does this.
by alfalfasprout | 2025-08-21 20:20:08+00:00
> If you are using any kind of AI assistance while contributing to Ghostty, *this must be disclosed in the pull request*, along with the extent to which AI assistance was used (e.g. docs only vs. code generation). If PR responses are being generated by an AI, disclose that as well.

The extent here is very important. There's a massive difference between vibe-coding a PR, using LLMs selectively to generate code in files in-editor, and edit prediction like copilot.

It says actually later that tab-completion needn't be disclosed.
Show HN: IntelliAgent – customizable deep‑research agent
by yzhong94 | 2025-08-21 20:20:42+00:00
Hello everyone! This is Yi - we just built a deep research agent called IntelliAgent.

We built IntelliAgent because deep research agents from ChatGPT / Gemini / Perplexity are hard to customize beyond some prompt improvement, which means: 1/ Often returning results I was not looking for, including wrong sources, missing sources, and wrong directions. 2/ Cannot be modified during the search process, so I end up waiting for 15min+ only to modify the prompt again

What it does: 1/ Prompt improvement via clarifying questions 2/ Editable pre‑flight search plan you can modify before starting 3/Step‑by‑step execution that automatically pivots or extend directions as results come in

Try it out! https://myintelliagent.com/intelliagent
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-08-21 20:21:06+00:00
i'll try to assume this isn't a snarky response! but it kinda sounds like it.

unfortunately, there are no "good" ISPs in my area. xfinity and the other big ones killed most of the competition via undercutting, lobbying and the legal system (ie, tying up municipal fiber/wifi initiatives in bureaucratic hell).

since i no longer work from home, it's mostly just a convenience to have internet service for personal use. i actually use it very little, and pay for the cheapest option available, so it's not much money.
Show HN: Making Postgres Self-Describing for LLMs with a Semantic Catalog
by cevian | 2025-08-21 20:21:32+00:00
We’ve been exploring what it means to build a database that works for LLMs and agents.

These models don’t see application code. They can’t ask teammates. They just generate SQL from whatever context the database gives them.

Most of the time, that context is not enough. Schema names don’t explain business logic or domain-specific meaning.

So we built a semantic catalog for Postgres: a layer of natural language descriptions for tables, columns, functions, and key facts.

We tested it by comparing SQL generation with and without the catalog. Same model. Same prompts. The only difference was the context.

Accuracy improved by 27 percent.

The results were strong, so we open sourced it. Try it, break it, or tell us what’s wrong.
by jynelson | 2025-08-21 20:21:33+00:00
I think I disagree that you can have a Rust program that doesn't use all these concepts, at least outside of very basic tutorial material. You will very very quickly run into compiler errors that mention them the second you write your own program.

> The author conveniently left out all of the things needed to understand that JavaScript version, including async/await, promises, modules, string interpolation, [...] not to mention the runtime that is running this, etc.

These are also left out of the Rust version.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-21 20:21:57+00:00
You are confusing several things.

First, train cars are not a precious limited resource. Someone having a car creates no impediments to anyone else.

Second, nothing is being taken from a public sphere - these are one off historically interesting cars being maintained by private individuals at no cost to the public, instead of being scrapped by private companies.

So in fact, something that would be wasted is continuing to get use.

Third, many of these cars are being made available for use to anyone, not just their owners, to help cover their costs. More options for everyone is in fact, a real public good.

The world is full of injustice but it’s worth not confusing someone having something others don’t with someone using wealth to suppress or harm others.

There is nothing here to “fix”. No imbalance or obvious benefit here to justify repressing others. Overreactions to injustice are, unfortunately, a common source of injustices themselves.

I share your concerns for others, and also feel deep frustration with the status quo of increasingly unaccountable wealth-driven compounding of economic, political, social, health, educational and legal inequality.