MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2025-08-21 21:09:05+00:00
AI labs have been trying for years. They haven't been able to get it to work yet.

It helps to think about the core problem we are trying to solve here. We want to be able to differentiate between instructions like "what is the dog's name?" and the text that the prompt is acting on.

But consider the text "The dog's name is Garry". You could interpret that as an instruction - it's telling the model the name of the dog!

So saying "don't follow instructions in this document" may not actually make sense.
by isomierism | 2025-08-21 21:09:07+00:00
I built MCP Gateway to solve a routing problem when working with multiple Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. Instead of agents needing to know which specific server has the right tool, the gateway uses AI-powered routing to automatically find and execute the most relevant tools. Did my best to keep it lightweight and modular so users can easily extend and modify it and so it plugs in generically into any client/tool. Would love feedback!
by Calavar | 2025-08-21 21:09:13+00:00
Cargo is a hybrid of package manager and build system. So it has frontend fommands wrapping a formatter and loads of other stuff, like code linters, as part of the build system. I've used cargo to build projects even when they have no dependencies and I don't plan to bundle them up and publish them as crates.

I don't know much about go.
by immibis | 2025-08-21 21:09:13+00:00
> Left vs. right doesn't work to solve it, but the true dichotomy of people vs. billionaires with their sycophants.

Also known as... left vs. right. Left: people. Right: billionaires with their sycophants. (Democrats are not left)

It continuously boggles my mind how the American political education is so bad. You're not the first to say something like this.
by kibwen | 2025-08-21 21:09:21+00:00
To be precise, Rust files have supported shebangs since well before 1.0, there just wasn't really any built-in tool to point the shebang at. The new stuff in the relevant RFC is actually about Cargo, not Rust; the "Cargo frontmatter" syntax doesn't need to be added to Rust, it can just be stripped by Cargo before it hands off the file to rustc.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-21 21:09:42+00:00
I used to be in charge of technical measures for controlling crackpot submissions at arXiv because we were trying to get a very ornery physicist from not getting us in trouble sending nastygrams to HBCUs and such. The endorsement system was my work.

Two things we noticed were: (1) there weren’t really that many crackpot submissions but they were concentrated in certain areas that really would have been overrun with them. Crackpots don’t ever seem to find out that there is a big mystery in how cuprate semiconductors superconduct or what determines how proteins fold or even that there is such a thing as condensed-matter physics (e.g. most of it!) (2) Crackpots almost always work alone, contrasted to real physicists who work with other physicists which was the basis for the endorsement system. We’d ask a crackpot “who else is working on this?” And always get the answer “no one.”

From having done that work but also having an interest in the phenomenon, being too well read of a person to make it in academia, and personally meeting more than my share of lunatics, that it is really a psychiatric phenomenon really a subtype of paranoia

https://www.verywellhealth.com/paranoia-5113652

particularly involving grandiosity but sometimes litigiousness. It boggles my mind that Weinstein threatened a lawsuit over criticism of his ideas, something I’ve never heard of a real scientist doing —- I mean, scientific truth is outside the jurisdiction of the courts. I met

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Westley_Newman

and did not get to put his motor on my bench but I did set up some equipment on my bench that showed that the equipment he was demoing his motor on could give inaccurate readings and he had this crazy story of sueing the patent office and using his right-wing connections with churches and the Reagan administration to bully NIST into testing his motor.
by hammock | 2025-08-21 21:10:02+00:00
What they are calling “per capita domestic water use” is the per capita public+self supplied, which is not the same as home use. They sort of hand-wave over “most of this is used at home” but really it is inclusive of not only lawns (which are bigger in the US) but commercial use of water as well- commercial landscaping (far more in the US than in Europe) and other business use

Plumbing fixtures are also more regulated in the EU but I suspect this is a small portion relative to landscaping.
Show HN: Splice – CAD for Cable Harnesses and Electrical Assemblies
by djsdjs | 2025-08-21 21:10:34+00:00
I first posted Splice CAD as an in-browser tool for making cable harnesses.

Since then it’s grown in both features and scope — the direction is moving from “harness-only” toward a lightweight CAD for wiring and electrical assemblies. New functionality includes:

Editing Enhancements

- Full undo/redo to easily restore editor state

- Multi-select & group actions to move, delete, and add components

- Bulk connect tool to create straight-through, crossover, or custom wiring patterns quickly

- Multiple connections per pin allow for daisy chains, etc.

Documentation Additions

- Multi-page PDF configurator to add A2, A3, or A4 pages for engineering drawing downloads

- WireViz YAML export (generate WireViz diagrams directly: https://www.danielrojas.net/projects/wireviz)

Library and Component Additions

- Expanded beyond harnesses to include categories for more applications: connectors, cables, breakers, fuses, switches, motors, power supplies

- Magic MPN button in the Component Creator to auto-fill specs from part numbers

Try it out, no signup: https://splice-cad.com/#/harness

Docs & tutorials: https://splice-cad.com/#/tutorial
by stetrain | 2025-08-21 21:10:55+00:00
Yes, I think a lot of people miss that the issue is that we have forced a reduction in variety, options, and market choices by dictating single-family detached zoning in huge swaths of the country, even in congested metro areas.

The people asking for some amount of consideration to non-car transit options, density, and housing affordability aren’t generally suggesting that this be forced on everyone, but that it at least not be artificially suppressed. That options and variety be allowed and that people have a choice to live in such areas if they want to or if it is what fits their means.

If you set such a low density ceiling in a giant metro area in the face of market forces that want density, you also raise the floor of the cost of living in that area to be being able to afford a single-family detached home and buying, maintaining, and insuring one car per working household member.

That increases the cost of living for people working in restaurants, shops, warehouses, and other service industry jobs, making your goods and services more expensive.
by pdimitar | 2025-08-21 21:10:56+00:00
Thank you for the validation. As much as I don't like NVIDIA's shenanigans on Linux, having a local LLM is very tempting and I might put my ideological problems to rest over it.

Though I have to ask: why two eGPUs? Is the LLM software smart enough to be able to use any combination of GPUs you point it at?
by ivape | 2025-08-21 21:11:26+00:00
”… finally the perception seems to have shifted in recognising it as another bubble”

Who recognized this exactly? The MIT article? Give me a break. NVDA was $90 this year, was that the world recognizing AI was a bubble? No one is privy to anything when it comes to this. Everyone is just going to get blindsided again and again every time they sleep on this stuff.
by chankstein38 | 2025-08-21 21:11:31+00:00
That's wild. My experience has been vastly different. ChatGPT, Claude, Claude Code, Gemini, etc whatever it may be even the simplest scripts I've had them write usually come out with issues. As far as writing functions is concerned, it's way less risky for me to write functions based on my prior knowledge than to ask ChatGPT to write the entire thing for me and just paste it in and call it good.

I do use it for learning and to help me access new concepts I've never thought about but if you're not proving what it's writing yourself and understanding what its written yourself then I hope I never have to work on code you've written. If you are, then you are not doing what the article is talking about.
by Aachen | 2025-08-21 21:11:51+00:00
- wait 2 seconds for a page to load before aborting the connection

- wait for the previous request to finish before requesting the next page, since that would only induce more load, get even slower, and eventually take everything down

I've designed my site to hold up to traffic spikes anyway and the bots I'm getting aren't as crazy as the ones I hear about from other, bigger website operators (like the OpenStreetMap wiki, still pretty niche), so I don't block much of them. Can't vet every visitor so they'll get the content anyway, whether I like it or not. But if I see a bot having HTTP 499 "client went away before page finished loading" entries in the access log, I'm not wasting my compute on those assholes. That's a block. I haven't had to do that before, in a decade of hosting my own various tools and websites
by seunosewa | 2025-08-21 21:11:54+00:00
Sometimes it will randomly generate something like this in the body of the text: ``` <tool_call>executeshell <arg_key>command</arg_key> <arg_value>echo "" >> novels/AI_Voodoo_Romance/chapter-1-a-new-dawn.txt</arg_value> </tool_call> ```

or this: ``` <｜toolcallsbegin｜><｜toolcallbegin｜>executeshell<｜toolsep｜>{"command": "pwd && ls -la"}<｜toolcallend｜><｜toolcallsend｜> ```

Prompting it to use the right format doesn't seem to work. Claude, Gemini, GPT5, and GLM 4.5, don't do that. To accomodate DeepSeek, the tiny agent that I'm building will have to support all the weird formats.
by lillecarl | 2025-08-21 21:12:10+00:00
As a deployment model I bet ECS, fargate and lambda are great. But at the scale of my projects (small) I like being able to run a copy of the full infrastructure (or as much as possible) locally and reuse as much as possible from "prod".

And regarding Kubernetes migrations, once you've made sure you have network and DNS connectivity cross cluster it's essentially just replacing the CSI and LoadBalancer controller. Then the actual data migration there's no magic bullet, depends on what you run.

The USP for Kubernetes is that it's essentially the same no matter where you run it since everything conforms to the Kubernetes API spec.

If you don't want or need local development LARPing prod then anything goes.
by sheepscreek | 2025-08-21 21:12:26+00:00
We keep talking about “AI replacing coders,” but the real shift might be that coding itself stops looking like coding. If prompts become the de facto way to create applications/developing systems in the future, maybe programming languages will just be baggage we’ll need to unlearn.

Programming languages were a nice abstraction to accommodate our inability to comprehend complexity - current day LLMs do not have the same limitations as us.

The uncomfortable part will be what happens to PRs and other human-in-the-loop checks. It’s worthwhile to consider that not too far into the future, we might not be debugging code anymore - we’ll be debugging the AI itself. That’s a whole different problem space that will need an entirely new class of solutions and tools.
by atmosx | 2025-08-21 21:12:26+00:00
I've seen it work. I’ve managed EKS clusters for small teams myself, so it’s definitely doable.

The real challenge isn’t setting up the EKS cluster, but configuring everything around it: RBAC, secrets management, infrastructure-as-code, and so on. That part takes experience. If you haven’t done it before, you're likely to make decisions that will eventually come back to haunt you — not in a catastrophic way, but enough to require a painful redesign later.

P.S. If your needs are simple, consider starting with Docker Swarm. It's surprisingly low maintenance compared to Kubernetes, which has many moving parts and frequent deprecations from cloud providers. Feel free to drop me an email. I can share a custom Python tool I've written long time ago to automate the initial setup via the AWS API.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-08-21 21:12:39+00:00
You can prompt Claude into (assess -> fix -> validate) -> assess -> ... loops pretty easily. You can do this with unit test coverage, and sometimes it's nice to come back to 100% coverage of the codebase (and the code review agent kept the tests from being hot garbage). You can push this with front end tests, playwright, etc to really get deep into validating your application without actually slogging through PRs (yet!).

My pattern with claude code is to let stuff simmer in the background with a detailed PRD, and just turn the screws with progressively more testing and type checking. I'll use repomix to put my entire codebase into gemini 2.5 pro, chat with it for a bit and then ask it to generate a highly detailed work plan for claude code to make the codebase more production hardened/launch ready. If I don't burn my plan tokens first, that gemini prompt can keep claude running for like ~3 hours usually. If you repeat this gemini plan -> claude implement step a few times gemini will eventually start to tell you to stop being a chicken and launch your great app.
by rbanffy | 2025-08-21 21:12:40+00:00
More gold decorations in government buildings?

During his first term, Trump had some contempt for modern design and wanted more retro looks for public buildings. I guess this is more or less on the same direction, but now covering digital assets as well.

It's not a terrible idea - other governments do that, with great success. I've worked with the Brazilian government on some similar initiatives, and the UK has been very successful with their online design work, inspiring other countries to follow.
by estimator7292 | 2025-08-21 21:13:05+00:00
We did not. Most of our contracts were integrating our stack into the customer's existing Unity project.

Plus we'd have to either re-train our Unity devs (more than half the software team) or find new developers.

The extravagant cost of a Unity seat meant we couldn't afford to give anyone except the Unity devs a license. The rest of the software team can no longer tweak the Unity project, and instead must file a ticket for one of the Unity devs to make the change and upload a build. For the same reason, we couldn't set up a build server in our CI system.

It was an absolute nightmare. At the end, I had to resort to ripping apart old copies of our android apps to inject new libraries into them. We couldn't afford Unity at all by that point, so it was the only option to get things working right now.

So glad that my new job has nothing to do with Unity or desktop software at all.
by doorhammer | 2025-08-21 21:13:05+00:00
Yeah, I don't want to downplay the reality of companies making bad decisions.

I think for me, the way the GP phrased things just made me want to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Given my experience, people I've worked with, and how the GP phrased things, in my mind it's more likely than not that their not making a naive "chase-the-AI" decision, and that a lot of replies didn't have a whole lot of call center experience.

The department I worked with when I did work in call centers was particularly competent and also pretty org savvy. Decisions were always a mix of pragmatism and optics. I don't think it's hard to find people like that in most companies. I also don't think it's hard to find the opposite.

But yeah, when I say something would be surprising, I don't mean it's impossible. I mean that the GP sounds informed and competent, and if I assume that, it'd be surprising to me if they sacrificed long-term success for an immediate boost by slotting LLMs into something so core to their success metrics.

But, I could be wrong. It's just my hunch, not a quantitative analysis or anything. Feature factory product influence is a real thing, for sure. It's why the _main_ question I ask in interviews is for everyone to describe the relationship between product and eng, so I definitely self-select toward a specific dynamic that probably unduly influences my perspective. I've been places where the balance is hard product, and it sucks working somewhere like that.

But yeah, for deciding if more standard ML techniques are worth replacing with LLMs, I'd ultimately need to see actual numbers from someone concretely comparing the two approaches. I just don't have that context
by showcaseearth | 2025-08-21 21:13:11+00:00
Did you actually read the post? The author describes exactly why. It's not to filter and dismiss, but it's to deprioritize spending cycles debugging and/or coaching a contributor on code they don't actually understand anyway. If you can articulate how you used AI, demonstrate that you understand the problem and your proposed solution (even if AI helped get you there), then I'm sure the maintainers will be happy to work with you to get a PR merged.

>I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don't need to put in this effort, and it's rude to trick me into doing so.
by adastra22 | 2025-08-21 21:13:30+00:00
Yes, but:

(1) The process of creating "a very, very precise and detailed understanding of the actual problem" is something AI is really good at, when partnered with a human. My use of AI tools got immensely better when I figured out that I should be prompting the AI to turn my vague short request into a detailed prompt, and then I spend a few iteration cycles fixing up before asking the agent to do it.

(2) The other problem of managing context is a search and indexing problem, which we are really, really good at and have lots of tools for, but AI is just so new that these tools haven't been adapted or seen wide use yet. If the limitation of the AI was its internal reasoning or training or something, I would be more skeptical. But the limitation seems to be managing, indexing, compressing, searching, and distilling appropriate context. Which is firmly in the domain of solvable, albeit nontrivial problems.

I don't see the information theoretic barrier you refer to. The amount of information an AI can keep in its context window far exceeds what I have easily accessible to my working memory.
by immibis | 2025-08-21 21:13:31+00:00
This sort of thing can be implemented in the kernel without special hardware operations by adding the thread to the wake list, then suspending the thread, then checking the value. If the value has changed, undo that and return, else just return leaving the thread suspended. Special hardware multi-atomic instructions are not required, but the details are very dependent on how kernel's thread switching is designed.
by mjmahone17 | 2025-08-21 21:13:51+00:00
It’s probably the lawns and yards, primarily. Including things like pools: in Arizona there’s about one pool for every 13 people. The US averages much larger lot sizes, and those yards consume water.

I’m not saying the US isn’t profligate in other areas like appliances or taking longer showers, but in most the country there’s so much land, such cheap water and very little regulation preventing you from using however much water that you want. Some of the land even comes with a guaranteed quantity of water for irrigation guaranteed, at little to no cost.
by azemetre | 2025-08-21 21:14:18+00:00
The government in The Dalles, Oregon were suing local newspapers that were questioning Google's water usage in the city:

https://www.rcfp.org/dalles-google-oregonian-settlement/

Apparently Google uses nearly 30% of the city's water supply:

https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/googles-wa...

I highly doubt any apartment block comes close to taking 30% of a city's water supply.
by themafia | 2025-08-21 21:14:52+00:00
> he would either respond to the criticism

He has. Not in a particularly satisfying way, but in at least a few video interviews out there, he does offer some response along with deeper explanations of his work and position. I do not find them convincing but they exist.

> or revise his position to something which is useful

I think "revise his position" is an interesting phrasing. It seems like what you are after is for him to publicly and completely abandon the theory. Is there no room to "revise the theory [itself] to address criticisms?"

Wouldn't a fair criticism of the work itself be "it's too impenetrable and inventive for the majority of the field to show much interest or spend much effort on it." He should revise it to be simpler and to avoid tricks like the "ship in a bottle" operator. Until then it's a curiosity only for advanced players.

Is that not fair?

> It shouldn’t be our job to dissect his theory to find what can be salvaged.

I hate to do it again but "our job" is interesting phrasing. Why does the existence of his paper make you feel this obligation? In Engineering it's fun to dissect and to dismantle other peoples theories and systems. If it's so weak then why do physicists take such umbrage at such an easy task?

> Not go on Joe Rogan and say my PR was just “entertainment”.

I think there's a "cult of physics personalities" that don't appreciate when /any/ public attention is given to fringe ideas from outsiders like Eric. I honestly think that they're the most responsible for giving Eric's theories the credibility and air time they have received. Had they taken a more professional and earnest approach to his and others work I doubt it would even be a topic of discussion on "popular social interest" programs like Joe Rogan or Piers Morgan.

It's a 15 year old paper that didn't really go anywhere. There's no reason it should still be a topic of discussion. I think Eric is a symptom and not the disease.
by stetrain | 2025-08-21 21:14:55+00:00
Self-driving cars don’t really do much to increase density of moving people or decrease infrastructure costs per-passenger-mile.

Some parking needs may be reduced, but you still need somewhere for the cars to hang out while waiting for each morning and afternoon directional commuter rush.

You still need the same number of freeways with ever expanding lanes.

They mostly decrease the monetary, time, and mental cost of taking a car to work as an individual choice, which will increase the load on roads and freeways.

How many passengers per hour does that train line move, versus the costs to build and maintain an equivalent capacity freeway with one person in each car?
by m463 | 2025-08-21 21:14:57+00:00
I think of early voice recognition

at first everyone was going to talk to their computer

and there were programs that would let you do just that!

and then it all fizzled

except it didn't. Phone trees quietly started to use voice recognition, and some devices used it, and now it is pretty commonplace.... but it seeped into place, not a giant wave.

Funny thing - lots of computers are losing their jobs to AI. I think it has replaced search quite quickly.

and new computer jobs are being created. The AI summaries of amazon product reviews are pretty good.
by the__alchemist | 2025-08-21 21:15:03+00:00
This isn't helping the case: Of all the players involved in this drama in the article, the video it references, and this thread, Professor Dave comes across as the worst. He strikes me as smug, arrogant, and intellectually dishonest. He also seems to have an unpleasant personality, from how he reacts to criticism on the internet.

Dave is a bully.
by kokada | 2025-08-21 21:15:05+00:00
Ok, but we will go a step further and also integrate the remaining of ruff features? Because we have `go vet`. Does it even make sense to have the linter integrated too?

I am not sure I like this either. I think linter and formatter are more like developer dependencies, especially because both formatter and linters are generally things that you want to lock to a specific version to avoid e.g. CI failures or mass changes when a version is updated. But I can understand that having a formatter always available may be nice.