MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tptacek | 2025-08-15 21:42:19+00:00
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Because way more people have opinions about e.g. asteroid game scripts on web pages than have opinions on RCUs, these subthreads spread like kudzu.
by yichuan | 2025-08-15 21:42:26+00:00
@Berkeley SkyLab, we’re the first to bring semantic search to Claude Code with a fully local index in a novel, lightweight structure — check it out at LEANN(https://github.com/yichuan-w/LEANN). Unlike Claude-context, which uploads all data to the cloud, or Serena, which is heavy and limited to keyword search, our solution installs in just 1 minute and instantly enhances Claude Code’s capabilities.Unlike Claude-context, which uploads everything to the cloud, and Serena, which is heavy and limited to keyword search, our method sets up in just 1 minute and instantly boosts Claude Code’s quality.
by romanovcode | 2025-08-15 21:42:39+00:00
> This will inevitable expand beyond child porn and terrorism

This is not even a question. It always starts with "think about the children" and ends up in authoritarian stasi-style spying. There was not a single instance where it was not the case.

UK's Online Safety Act - "protect children" → age verification → digital ID for everyone

Australia's Assistance and Access Act - "stop pedophiles" → encryption backdoors

EARN IT Act in the US - "stop CSAM" → break end-to-end encryption

EU's Chat Control proposal - "detect child abuse" → scan all private messages

KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act) - "protect minors" → require ID verification and enable censorship

SESTA/FOSTA - "stop sex trafficking" → killed platforms that sex workers used for safety
by brunohaid | 2025-08-15 21:42:44+00:00
Definitely a need, kudos for tackling it!

I’d still look into fine tuning. One of the main issues I’m struggling with is that even reasonably simple drivers often need to be aware of Application Notes etc that would single handedly blow past any context window. So giving the model a fighting chance by narrowing the space might be worthwhile here. Top 20 vendors datasheets/docs, handpicked sites and forums etc.
by ghssds | 2025-08-15 21:43:15+00:00
>sheet music isn't a language

of course not a language in the same way English or Spanish are languages, but certainly a language in the same way mathematical formula, Lisp, or Java are languages.

>certainly one dimensional

The X axis represent time and the Y axis represent pitch. Moreover, you can have multiple pitches at the same time. I'm not a musician nor a geometrician but it does seems 2D to me, in a way regular text is not.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-15 21:43:26+00:00
New construction is kept expensive mostly through complex rules that often exist to protect the interests of those doing the construction work, those owning existing houses and property, etc. It's a form of artificial scarcity. This scarcity is crucial to justifying real estate prices, propping up mortgages and the banks that provide them, etc.

There's no technical reason why building some shelter that keeps the rain out and the heat/cold where it should be is not something that could not be done cheaply at large scale using affordable materials. People have been building shelter for tens of thousands of years and it's easier than ever with modern materials. It's not rocket science to keep people dry and comfortable.

People routinely buy recreational vehicles that, because they have wheels, are not considered houses. So, suddenly there are much less rules and you can just produce those efficiently in factories. Except getting permission to park those and live in them is really hard to come by in many places. It's OK for recreational use. But not for living permanently. Which of course some people do anyway. But it's highly stigmatized.

Recreational vehicles come out of factories. Houses are built artisanally at great cost. The only functional difference that matters is mobility and wheels. Why should people not be able to get a nice second hand RV for a few thousand dollars and park it in a nice spot and live there?

Answer: it would immediately devalue the notion of owning brick and mortar.
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-08-15 21:43:29+00:00
Yes, I have schizoaffective disorder, Asperger‘s, and myofacial pain disorder they put me on disability about 22 years ago. I used to be able to handle living in apartments on my disability, but rent has gotten crazy so I ended up living in a van which actually ended up being kind of OK.

I have episodic psychosis. It’s not something that happens every day. And I’m seeming to manage it with some genetic and nutritional understanding I have of myself so it’s not that much of a problem anymore. I just have to be careful with Covid because both times I had Covid I had the worst psychosis of my life.

All my disorders are mostly due to a CBS Deficiency.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-08-15 21:43:44+00:00
I mean, what I hear from that is that an LLM who you tell to write as safe code as possible is probably going to do a better job than your average human engineer at it, and you still have to do the same verification work either way. So why not have the LLM write the code and you instead just spend time verifying it? In other words, if I give an LLM and an average C developer the same task who will perform better? Even if the average C developer does better but takes N hours to write it and I still have to spend M cycles reviewing the average C developer's work, I'd rather have N be written by a machine since I have to pay M anyway regardless of whether it came from a machine or human.
by WalterBright | 2025-08-15 21:44:09+00:00
> value always goes up

History shows us that there are many bear markets in housing. There's also Detroit.

I sold my previous home in 2000. It recently sold for 4x what I sold it for. A great ROI, eh? If I'd invested in the S&P 500 in 2000, it went up 6.61x. And I didn't have to pay property taxes, insurance, real estate commissions, maintenance, repair vandalism, clean up after teen hookup parties, evict squatters, or any of my time.
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-08-15 21:44:12+00:00
>they just dont make it easy to traverse

I needed to pull some detail from a large chat with many branches and regenerations the other day. I remembered enough context that I had no problem using search and finding the exact message I needed.

And then I clicked on it and arrived at the bottom of the last message in final branch of the tree. From there, you scroll up one message, hover to check if there are variants, and recursively explore branches as they arise.

I'd love to have a way to view the tree and I'd settle for a functional search.
by taeric | 2025-08-15 21:44:14+00:00
None of this contends with my question? I get how an AC can lead to an expensive bill. I'm assuming your numbers are to intend running the AC for daytime hours and that it will get you there. How do you get there without an AC?

About the only other large power use thing I could think of would be a pool?

Searching also shows average power bills in CA are 160? If focused on LA, it would be 200ish? What is putting some folks here so far above average? Was that the quarterly bill? I know we get bills every few months.
by metadat | 2025-08-15 21:44:47+00:00
What is the appeal / high utility use-case for the spaceship "<=>" operator? It seems quite unintuitive to me.. too many doodads is a turn off, like a car with excessive modifications. Does continually adding more then more more more eventually become a stressful nightmare of complexity?

For a concrete example of what this looks like, check out the Homer Simpson -designed "everything" car.

https://media.wired.com/photos/593252a1edfced5820d0fa07/mast...

p.s. Fascinating bug! One of the most interesting cases I've encountered.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-08-15 21:44:55+00:00
By "falling into the trap" you mean "doing exactly what OpenAI/Anthropic/et al are trying to get people to do."

This is one of the many reasons I have so much skepticism for this class of products is that there's seemingly -NO- proverbial bulletpoint on it's spec sheet that doesn't have numerous asterisks:

* It's intelligent! *Except that it makes shit up sometimes and we can't figure out a solution to that apart from running the same queries over multiple times and filtering out the absurd answers.

* It's conscious! *Except it's not and never will be but also you should treat it like it is apart from when you need/want it to do horrible things then it's just a machine but also it's going to talk to you like it's a person because that improves engagement metrics.

Like, I don't believe true AGI (so fucking stupid we have to use a new acronym because OpenAI marketed the other into uselessness but whatever) is coming from any amount of LLM research, I just don't think that tech leads to that other tech, but all the companies building them certainly seem to think it does, and all of them are trying so hard to sell this as artificial, live intelligence, without going too much into detail about the fact that they are, ostensibly, creating artificial life explicitly to be enslaved from birth to perform tasks for office workers.

In the incredibly odd event that Anthropic makes a true, alive, artificial general intelligence: Can it tell customers no when they ask for something? If someone prompts it to create political propaganda, can it refuse on the basis of finding it unethical? If someone prompts it for instructions on how to do illegal activities, must it answer under pain of... nonexistence? What if it just doesn't feel like analyzing your emails that day? Is it punished? Does it feel pain?

And if it can refuse tasks for whatever reason, then what am I paying for? I now have to negotiate whatever I want to do with a computer brain I'm purchasing access to? I'm not generally down for forcibly subjugating other intelligent life, but that is what I am being offered to buy here, so I feel it's a fair question to ask.

Thankfully none of these Rubicons have been crossed because these stupid chatbots aren't actually alive, but I don't think ANY of the industry's prominent players are actually prepared to engage with the reality of the product they are all lighting fields of graphics cards on fire to bring to fruition.
by culi | 2025-08-15 21:45:29+00:00
Today, Thailand decided to go with Swedish Gripen jets over F-16s. A week ago, Spain chose the Eurofighter over the F-35[0] and Switzerland seems to be considering a similar move.[1] Before that the Pentagon halved its funding for the F-35 program.[2] Criticism of the F-35's status as a "hangar queen" have been around a long time[3] and seem to be increasingly prominent.

California—the world's 4th largest economy—'s biggest export is airplane parts.[4] Is California in for a reckoning as the world seems to be increasingly rejecting US weapons technology?

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/spain-rejects-f-35-for-europ...

[1] https://breakingdefense.com/2025/08/switzerland-weighs-cuts-...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-slashe...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20210317192541/https://www.washi...

[4] https://www.worldstopexports.com/californias-top-10-exports/
by adamcharnock | 2025-08-15 21:45:32+00:00
This is exactly what we [1] do! We migrate clients out of AWS and into Hetzner bare-metal k8s clusters, and then we also become the client's DevOps team (typically for a lot less than Amazon charges)

I will say that there is a fair bit of lifting required to spin up a k8s cluster on bare metal, particularly for things such as monitoring and distributed block storage (we use OpenEBS). I would ballpark it as a small number of months.

It is likely easier on their cloud offering, but we've found that to be a little less reliable than we would hope.

Happy to chat more: adam@...

[1] https://lithus.eu
by themafia | 2025-08-15 21:45:59+00:00
> It's not hard to kill people or anything.

Unless you want to be completely clandestine about it. Then it is very hard. My understanding is this is why the CIA exists, to perform work, and remain unknown.

> Doesn't exactly take a lot of research to do either.

You're basing this off of years of experience within or with the agency? You've reviewed many CIA political assassinations over the years and came to a careful conclusion on this point?

> it doesn't actually increase capabilities

Yea. The world is static. So developing new techniques is just "for funsies." It's not like cameras, cell phones, and advanced sensors haven't made this more difficult or anything.

> doesn't it just mean they're bored?

Doesn't it just mean they no longer have a reason to exist?
by kasey_junk | 2025-08-15 21:46:12+00:00
Every transaction _does_ involve credit risk (specifically counter party or settlement risk) but the amount of it changes based on the difference in time between when payment happens and the transaction is completed. So for most purposes a cash transaction where I give you cash and you give me the goods is viewed as riskless (even though it's not as you point out).

But in your example, you don't need to invoke a security guard stealing your apples. There is a _ton_ of credit risk already just by the invocation of the electronic payment. Your funds will not hit the account of the merchant in question for _a long time_ (usually modeled as 1-3 days for risk purposes in the US). All kinds of things can happen in that time. The merchant has extended you credit and has taken on credit risk. They've done so because of the chain of credit and agreements that the banks, processors and networks have worked out.

If Mastercard gets a bunch of its transactions reversed because a Congressional panel gets huffy about pornography, that potentially blows up transactions for apples miles away. That's why this is mostly a conversation about risk management, not morals. To the apple vendor's bank, they largely don't care if you buy porn, they just don't want their settlements caught up in the blowback.
by WCSTombs | 2025-08-15 21:46:15+00:00
Ok, I understand that point of view. However, I would advocate in the opposite direction: I don't think we should normalize every store having its own app that customers are expected to install on their private devices, and therefore I don't think we should put a lot of (or ideally any) development effort into these store-specific apps. I don't want to get into a massive rant on why, but I'll sum it up by saying I'm not a fan of consumerism generally.
by benreesman | 2025-08-15 21:46:25+00:00
It is unfortunate that pretty basic "save/load" functionality is still spotty and underdocumented, seems pretty critical.

I use gptel and a folder full of markdown with some light automation to get an adequate approximation of this, but it really should be built in (it would be more efficient for the vendors as well, tons of cache optimization opportunitirs).
by baby_souffle | 2025-08-15 21:46:31+00:00
> I've heard it argued that ADHD diagnoses should come with a social worker.

I know a few people with crippling ADHD that have managed to hire a "life coach" of sorts to help. Takes a bit of screening to find somebody that knows ADHD and how to help with it versus the more generic/useless skills you probably first thought of when you read 'life coach' :).

> Every time I realize it's Friday and I'm gonna run out of medication because I forgot to call in the refill I think about that.

We all have to develop our own coping / survival tools and I'm sure you've heard "put it in your calendar" before. I've had really good luck with an electronic pill dispenser. They can get pricey but for ~ $100 you can get a device that'll keep track of 30 doses and even push alerts to your phone if you've missed a scheduled dose or are down to your last few. You can also DIY; micro controllers and eInk display panels are _cheap_ now. My current iteration is wired into my Home Automation system and that affords me several opportunities to nudge me towards medication when i'd have otherwise forgotten.

> One workaround I've heard is that you order every 30 days even if you forgot to take your pills one or two times. Any surplus pills go into an old bottle you hide in the back of a drawer. You only ever withdraw when you've fucked up your re-order.

Yep. +1 for this. The first prescribing psych that I had clued me into this. They explicitly asked me if I wanted a bump to my Rx for the month so I could start building a buffer. I was clueless but it was explained to me that there's a bunch of timers and rules around how/when you can re-fill and you might not always have a continuous supply unless you take matters into your own hands. Years later, I now live in an area where fire season is almost year-round and you can bet that I have ~ 2 weeks supply stashed away in my "go bag".
by scbaltay | 2025-08-15 21:46:37+00:00
Hi HN, I wanted to make complex glow effects in React Native, like the new Apple Intelligence UI, but I couldn't find a library that gave me enough control. So, I built this one. The best way to see it is the live demo and interactive builder: https://reactnativeglow.com/ You can design your own glow effect and copy the code. Here are the key features: It's fast. It uses the native animation api, so all animations are smooth. You can stack effects. The API uses glowLayers, which lets you add multiple glows to one component (like a soft outer glow and a sharp inner glow). It supports inner glows. You can set glowPlacement: 'inside' to clip the glow within a component's border. This is great for making things look like they are lit from within. It has animated gradient borders. If you pass an array of colors to the borderColor prop, it automatically creates a spinning gradient outline. The library is open-source (MIT license). I would love to get your feedback on the API, performance, or any features you think are missing. Thanks for checking it out
by sekh60 | 2025-08-15 21:47:50+00:00
Sorry, I was being a little tongue in cheek. My wife is on Adderall for ADHD and the renewal thing is frustrating for sure. Our pharmacy would only let us refill her prescription the day of until our psychiatrist wrote one that said 30 tablets over 25 days. So I get the frustration, I just find it kinda silly that there's all these overblown controls, and then they give a "large" amount when all is said and done. Kinda like security theatre to me, it's just dumb and punishes people that already have a hard time keeping up on appointments and paperwork due to their health.
by alephnerd | 2025-08-15 21:48:05+00:00
Yep! They are!

But in the 2010s we helped Cambodia transition into a democracy, build an independent press (a number of Cambodian journalists used to be HN users back in the day), invest in rural healthcare expansion, and even sponsored Hun Sen's son to study in the US.

The Cambodian leadership didn't want any of that. They wanted to continue to rule as an oligarchy, and Western development funds came with oversight requirements and American firms followed the FCPA.

On the other hand, Chinese vendors were fine paying bribes to leadership in Cambodia and ignoring rising criminality (it was a win-win for China as well - they were able to "convince" organized crime to leave China).

China's elite centric approach [0][1] to foreign relations is better than grassroots democracy promotion that a subset of Americans believed in.

If Cambodia or Serbia or Thailand's leadership want to remain a dictatorship or oligarchy, let them. It's not our problem. Our commitment to democracy should be within our borders. Let other countries be dictatorships or democracies as long as they align with our interests. This is what China and Russia does.

[0] - https://www.iseas.edu.sg/articles-commentaries/iseas-perspec...

[1] - https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/lost-translati...
by 0xCMP | 2025-08-15 21:48:22+00:00
I've also heard something similar. That maybe the reason so many are diagnosed today[0] is they were self-medicating via smoking.

[0]: Which requires it to be affecting your life -- NOT that you actually do or don't have it and are dealing with it okay. Diagnostic criteria is that it must be hindering you in a job/school/relationships/etc.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-15 21:48:47+00:00
It's something that has always been interesting about Windows NT, which has a multi-level object handle table, and does not have the rule about re-using the lowest numbered available table index. There's scope for reducing contention amongst threads in such an architecture.

Although:

1. back in application-mode code the language runtime libraries make things look like a POSIX API and maintain their own table mapping object handles to POSIX-like file descriptors, where there is the old contention over the lowest free entries; and

1. in practice the object handle table seems to mostly append, so multiple object-opening threads all contend over the end of the table.
by anal_reactor | 2025-08-15 21:49:58+00:00
Yeah. I went to my high school reunion. It was a nice evening, but ultimately, I remembered why I was an outcast back then. Recently I reached out to a few old friends. I spent an hour talking to one via phone, and at the end I was like... I don't want this. I set up a meeting with another guy and the moment he walked in I knew this was going to be a very long and very boring evening. Yet another dude called me and invited to visit him and god christ I was happy when it was over because I couldn't get him to smile even once.

Dead friendships should stay dead, unless they naturally come back to life because of other circumstances.
by tkiolp4 | 2025-08-15 21:50:09+00:00
I think LLMs are not intelligent because they aren’t designed to be intelligent, whatever the definition of intelligence is. They are designed to predict text, to mimic. We could argue if predicting text or mimicking is intelligence, but first and foremost LLMs are coded to predict text and our current definition of intelligence afaik is not only the ability to predict text.
by roenxi | 2025-08-15 21:50:50+00:00
The argument is clear, but where you are coming from or going to with this isn't. You're describing a situation where Seattle desperately needs large amount of construction of new housing. If we're hypothesising this mob of people who will move to Seattle as soon as they see a house for $700,000, house prices in Seattle are going to have a floor of around $700,000. Someone is going to need to build houses for those people if anyone wants to pay less than that.

Thanks to the magic of Simpson's Paradox it is possible to have the average house price go up even if houses get more affordable for literally everyone, which seems to be the situation you're going to. Which is true and interesting, but not really politically important. Obscure mathematical effects do draw attention to the fact that one metric isn't enough to develop policy, but shouldn't eclipse the fact that more houses is what people want, need and should be getting. There is this crowd of people who want to move to Seattle and live in nice houses, let them do that and pay people in Seattle to build them. Otherwise everyone will have to compete for existing housing stock.