MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by superkuh | 2025-08-09 17:00:43+00:00
An agent has nothing to process if there's no text on the page.

There are few things less accessible than web applications depending on bleeding edge javascript that might not get successfully executed. There are few things more accessible than text in an HTML web page on an HTML web site. If we really cared about accessibility for the differently abled we wouldn't be making such locked down, proprietary websites. But of course it's not really "we" doing this of our free will. It's corporations and their profit motives telling their human parts to make bad websites. And since that's where the money is in web dev it's become the default for all web devs and even shows up in institutional/government websites.

I don't think corps are going to change and I don't think something other than websites is the answer like the author suggests. We just need actual websites with web pages with text.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-08-09 17:00:51+00:00
That's how almost all highschools and colleges do advanced classes, Honors classes are graded on a 4.5 scale and AP classes on a 5.0 scale (and also count for college credit so you get to skip some intro classes after admission).

This, of course, leads to yet more grade inflation. Hard to compete with a >4.0 student when your school doesn't even offer advanced courses!
by hyc_symas | 2025-08-09 17:01:13+00:00
LMDB is for read-heavy workloads. The opposite of RocksDB.

RocksDB can use thousands of file descriptors at once, on larger DBs. Makes it unsuitable for servers that may also need to manage thousands of client connections at once.

LMDB uses 2 file descriptors at most; just 1 if you don't use its lock management, or if you're serving static data from a readonly filesystem.

RocksDB requires extensive configuration to tune properly. LMDB doesn't require any tuning.
by ModernMech | 2025-08-09 17:01:23+00:00
LLMs are not humans, they are ostensibly tools. Tools are supposed to come with a list of things they can do. LLMs don’t and are therefore bad at being tools, so we anthropomorphize them. But they are also not good at being people, so LLMs are left in this weird in-between state where half the people say they’re useful and half the people say they cause more problems than they solve.
by mc32 | 2025-08-09 17:01:26+00:00
The 170MM figure is referring to all losses of life like the purges, man-made famines (Holodomor), inept ww ii strategies, as well as “unborn” children. This last one has no reference so it’s impossible to know what that means or how many people they attribute to that.

That said, the problem is a cultural one. The communists poured gas on the tendencies of the Tsars and modern Russia suffers from that legacy still. The legacy is a peasant (serf) : master way of thinking.

Culture is hard to cure and the change has to come from within. Japan had a similar problem but most of the sharp edges were dulled when they made a deal (surrender) with the Americans.

You also see this tendency to cling to bad cultural habits by some enclaves of immigrants. It can take decades of new generations to wipe some of those bad tendencies away. Some people see that as erasure of culture as a bad thing but it can also bring good.
by 827a | 2025-08-09 17:01:58+00:00
Sure, but no one can actually do that accurately, for the aforementioned reasons. "I'm gaining weight; I should eat less": How do you structure that in a way that's actually actionable and drive results? Just a general sense that "eh I should eat less"? No one eats consistently enough, or exerts energy consistently enough, to actually make vibe-structuring cal-in/cal-out possible. You might think "I should work out more, that's more calories out" -> but ask literally any runner about how running affects their appetite and you'll realize quickly how wrong that is.

Hence: Why diets exist. That is the structure. There are good ones and bad ones.

Keto, for example, can work for weight loss not because there's anything particularly interesting about the way your body absorbs carbs versus protein and fat (there are differences, but its not the biggest reason why it can work). It can work for some people because typical protein and fat food sources are less calorically dense (by volume and weight) than carb sources. You may feel full faster; so you may naturally eat fewer calories.

Similarly: IF can work for some people because most people cannot physically eat enough to consume massive calorie counts if they time-restrict the hours they're allowed to eat. It also seems to come with some well-studied metabolic effects.

You don't have to accurately track inflows and outflows, but vibe-structuring your consumption and exertion habits based on outcomes is a privilege that, sure, some people have, but is not a panacea for every body and mind. Broadly, the people who need to make change who do this will not see the change they wanted.
by Zak | 2025-08-09 17:02:00+00:00
People can buy the second option from someone else, like RePebble.

Of course if they want to use it with an Apple phone, it will have artificial limitations[0]. That, rather than adding a product line that doesn't align with most of their market is what Apple should fix.

[0] https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-...
Discord app tracking users across iOS installs
by brie22 | 2025-08-09 17:02:03+00:00
Had to uninstall/reinstall the iOS Discord app today, due to it being unresponsive. After reinstallation - all my servers/chats were back in place, as if nothing had happened. (IDK if Discord had previously asked about tracking across apps, but I categorically click Ask App Not to Track whenever that dialog appears.)
Show HN: Have kubectl diff use your custom YAML cleaning and comparison logic
by kwentine | 2025-08-09 17:02:19+00:00
Hi HN, Meet `kdiff` a modest Bash wrapper around `kubectl diff` that allows to conveniently specify cleaning and comparison logic.

One example (many more in the README):

# Arguments after -- are passed to kubectl # Limit the diff to the resource spec, and use dyff kdiff --yq='.spec ' --compare 'dyff between -b' -- -f mypod.yaml

Comes with a "preset" configuration system, that allows to save executables in ~/.config/kdiff and then:

kdiff --preset clean:dyff -- -f mypod.yaml

I hope the Bash code is readable, a lot of pen-and-papering and thinking during bike rides went into it... after a sobering first vibe-coding attempt that utterly failed.

Cheers HN, thanks for the endless source of inspiration (and distraction ^^)!
by mdaniel | 2025-08-09 17:02:30+00:00
My understanding is that is what the KV cache does in models serving. I would imagine they'd want to prime any such KV cache with common tokens but retain a per-session cache to avoid leaks. It seems HF agrees with the concept, at least https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/kv_cache#prefill-a-...
by egypturnash | 2025-08-09 17:03:29+00:00
so is it

Bit Chat

or

Bitch At?

And is it somehow connected to bitcoin? This post mentions buying beer in exchange for "sats" so perhaps it is.

The entirely-in-lowercase page of the actual project does not clarify any of these questions. Not that they're more than idle curiosity given that the conclusion of this review is "it didn't work".
by throwaway1004 | 2025-08-09 17:04:18+00:00
No doubt that is true but it doesn't seem to account for the discrepancy, at least not without acquiring more data. Google's LLM is spitting out ~250K immigrant and first-generation Irish fighting in the Civil War, sitting roughly at 10% of the total. That doesn't account for second-generation and older, so I would be interested to see what social mobility was like for those more-established Irish-Americans: were they languishing in the working class, or did they exit from the middle class to go fight in wars disproportionately?

edit: how significant is the class factor, anyway? Does that model really apply, and how many citizens would be considered middle or upper class; enough to make a large statistical impact?
by ikari_pl | 2025-08-09 17:04:27+00:00
I've been submitting my dad's death certificate to Facebook for 4 years now. His account is still active and people still wish him happy birthday every year.

Facebook has a process for that. You have a dedicated proof, like death certificate, upload form, and the account is supposed to change into "in memoriam".

Their part of the process is not to give a shit.
by nradov | 2025-08-09 17:04:52+00:00
Alternatively, whiteboard coding exercises are a hazing mechanism to weed out candidates who have certain forms of anxiety or can't perform well under extreme scrutiny and time pressure. Which could be valid selection criteria for certain jobs. But let's be honest and admit that whiteboard coding exercises aren't actually a proxy for anything else, or at least we have no scientific evidence on that point.
by IshKebab | 2025-08-09 17:05:29+00:00
> You can pay for it with added footprint (Java) or with added effort (Rust)

... or runtime errors (C, Zig presumably).

Ok Zig is clearly better than C in that regard but I think it remains to be seen if it is better enough.

> many Rust programs do use GC (that's what Rc/Arc are)

This is not what most people mean when they say GC.

> Why?

Because when we're talking about the memory safety of a language we're talking about the code you write in that language (and excluding explicit opt-in to memory unsafe behaviour, e.g. `unsafe` or Python's `ctypes`).

Saying "Java isn't memory safe because you can call C" is like saying "bicycles can fly because you can put them on a plane".
by ModernMech | 2025-08-09 17:05:42+00:00
I think necessarily. I don’t think it’s possible to devise a capitalist system that doesn’t devolve into oligarchic control. Markets can’t be regulated like the theory wants, because capitalists just use their wealth to take over the politicians. They are able to do this because they control so much wealth. To prevent this hack, you’d have to take control of capital away from the capitalists, thus defeating the core idea of capitalism.
by Eextra953 | 2025-08-09 17:06:11+00:00
Any other predictions you saw/see coming? I feel like it would be useful to collect all of the predictions from people with domain knowledge and then build a website to track them all. Whether or not they happen, who knows, but being able to track them should be a big help in building a narrative of what is really happening vs media narratives that are hyper localized in time and often do a terrible job of explaining the long history of events.
by ellen364 | 2025-08-09 17:06:22+00:00
Admittedly a minor point of interest, but the last famine in England happened in 1623 and was local to an area called Westmorland [0]. That was 150 years before the Industrial Revolution, so the 10% figure might not be very reliable.

[0] https://bahs.org.uk/AGHR/ARTICLES/59_23_Healey.pdf
by toast0 | 2025-08-09 17:07:19+00:00
The project page kind of suggests he might scale up to infinite cost...

> Financially, the plan is to keep renting servers until they cover the bandwidth. I believe it can be self-sustainable if enough people subscribe to the support plans.

Especially since he said Cloudflare is providing the CDN for free... Yes, running the origins costs money, but in most cases, default fd limits are low, and you can push them a lot higher. At some point you'll run into i/o limits, but I think the I/O at the origin seems pretty managable if my napkin math was right.

If the files are all tiny, and the fd limit is the actual bottleneck, there's ways to make that work better too. IMHO, it doesn't make sense to accept a inbound connection if you can't get a fd to read a file for it, so better to limit the concurrent connections and let connections sit in the listen queue and have a short keepalive time out to make sure you're not wasting your fds on idle connections. With no other knowledge, I'd put the connection limit at half the FD limit, assuming the origin server is dedicated for this and serves static files exclusively. But, to be honest, if I set up something like this, I probably wouldn't have thought about FD limits until they got hit, so no big deal ... hopefully whatever I used to monitor would include available fds by default and I'd have noticed, but it's not a default output everywhere.
by thechao | 2025-08-09 17:07:29+00:00
RAM Air in San Marcos, south of Austin. Ask for Edgar. He's self trained and likes to rebuild boards from scratch. He'll service out to west Austin if the job is big enough. He mostly trains techs. So, if you ask, he'll happily walk you through a repair in the phone. (Most jobs are only 20–40m.) He makes his money on the big jobs with repeat customers. When he retires ... fuck me.
by alexey-salmin | 2025-08-09 17:07:47+00:00
This may be true for real obesity and overeating, but for normal people who just want to lose 5-10 kilos I never saw a diet alone work. They don't eat chips or rice cakes in the first place, their body is in a reasonably healthy equilibrium.

But when you eat less, you just burn less. In the end you're constantly hungry and irritable, you go through all this crap to lose weight and lose none, which doesn't help with the mood either.

At least sport makes you feel good. Dieting without exercise seems to me more like a shortcut into nuthouse.
by alephnerd | 2025-08-09 17:07:53+00:00
She was starting to concentrate on the Ag consolidation [0] but my interpretation is she targeted tech first due to the industry's somewhat weaker political position in both admins.

She also didn't touch Comcast - and they are the kingmakers in PA and DE.

[0] - https://www.law.nyu.edu/news/katzmann-lecture-lina-khan-talk...
by jasoneckert | 2025-08-09 17:07:55+00:00
I still fire up my old SPARCbook 3000ST (Solaris 2.5.1) in case I need a hit of Sun UNIX nostalgia from back in the day.

And whenever I give a presentation at a venue that has a projector with VGA input, I'll do the presentation from the same SPARCbook.
by jmrm | 2025-08-09 17:08:00+00:00
Some European Diesels have reached that amount with the same engine block and head ;-)

My dad's BWM E60 has a M47 2.0L Turbo Diesel, and with around 440,000km keeps going strong.

He probably will change it when it reach the half million due to being an old car, but the sad part here is how we won't probably be able to buy any brand new car that could reach that amount of miles without spending a lot of money on the way on repairs.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-08-09 17:09:21+00:00
This is an entirely useless thing to say. Your body can make choices, based on what and when and how you eat, that you can't control with your psychology.

Your body can raise or lower its temperature. It can put energy towards cell repair or cell reproduction. It can store energy as fat, or signal to burn fat, or build muscle or catabolize muscle.
by bryant | 2025-08-09 17:09:29+00:00
https://www.agri-pulse.com/articles/22636-bird-flu-screwworm...

> Among the GHS projects killed were some dedicated to *monitoring and containing avian flu and New World Screwworm in Central America, monitoring* avian flu outbreaks in Asia and improving the detection of new strains, and efforts to combat swine fever, according to a person familiar with the situation granted anonymity to speak frankly.

you might not have intended to mislead, but the cited source indicates that at least some were defined and thus halted, in partial contradiction to your line "Screwworm detection and prevention was not halted because of the USAID shutdown"
by cnst | 2025-08-09 17:10:01+00:00
I think the last power loss here was 8mo15d ago at my place (around Christmas time in 2024?), but it could easily result in a data loss if you're using an external SSD through a dock, because your MacBook lacks a sufficient port supply, and because internal storage is severely limited by Apple, too, so, you may as well be required to use it with an external SSD at all times.

4k@27in may be too small pitch, but QHD@27in would be too pixelated. Especially on macOS that does NOT allow turning off antialiasing.

I'm currently using the 400nit HP Z24m G3 @ 2560x1440 @ 24in with my 16GB MBA M1, the colours are absolutely amazing compared to the cheaper Lenovo monitors.

Firefox works great, because it lets you turn off antialiasing, but there's no way to turn it off in Brave or Chrome, which results in super washed out and blurry text everywhere.

Honestly, macOS is not production ready at this point. Data loss because you have to use an external SSD through a dock, poor monitor support with regressions after moving to Apple Silicon, no ports for anything, inadequate RAM/storage that cannot be upgraded in any way besides the external SSD through a dock with a UPS.

Basically, the most simple things are super complicated.

Didn't it used to be the opposite with the Macs, where they were actually simpler and more flexible?
by mikewarot | 2025-08-09 17:10:30+00:00
If you want an LLM that can do proper spelling, arithmetic, etc. you'll have to train it on ascii or unicode instead of tokens. This would likely increase training times, and possibly also model size, by an order of magnitude or more.

On the plus side it could then correctly count the number of r's in strawberry.

An aside: you wouldn't believe how easy it is to grow strawberries. Mostly it's a matter of containment.
by xipho | 2025-08-09 17:10:58+00:00
Very hard to escape biology unless you invest in understanding it. Ticks, mosquito-born diseases, agricultural pests, they don't care about AI, politics, or space-races or geo political boundaries. We, on the other hand, require life to go on, it's asynchronous.

This is why natural history collections, and taxonomists are going to be more critical than ever, at some point we'll need to re-invest in knowing what's out there, and, more importantly how and why it's different than what we knew before. Biodiversity is vast, this isn't easy.

Companies that anticipate this (we know we're going to get a billion requests for "what's this fly", how can we monitize this?), and also actully understand that species are literally invaluable lab experiments running millions of years, are bound to benefit. In a not so distance Scifi future will we see big pharma, defense, etc. protecting areas and their environments because they finally grok this?
by mlyle | 2025-08-09 17:11:16+00:00
> When doing automations that are perfectly handled by deterministic systems why would I put the outcomes of those in the hands of a non-deterministic one?

The stuff I'm punting isn't stuff I can automate. It's stuff like, "build me a quick command line tool to model passes from this set of possible orbits" or "convert this bulleted list to a course articulation in the format preferred by the University of California" or "Tell me the 5 worst sentences in this draft and give me proposed fixes."

Human assistants that I would punt this stuff to also consume a lot of wattage and power. ;)

> We didn't have these tools 5 years ago. 5 years ago you dealt with said "drudgery". On the other hand you then say it can't do "most things I do".

I'm not sure why you think this is paradoxical.

I probably eliminate 20-30% of tasks at this point with AI. Honestly, it probably does these tasks better than I would (not better than I could, but you can't give maximum effort on everything). As a result, I get 30-40% more done, and a bigger proportion of it is higher value work.

And, AI sometimes helps me with stuff that I -can't- do, like making a good illustration of something. It doesn't surpass top humans at this stuff, but it surpasses me and probably even where I can get to with reasonable effort.
by mikeckennedy | 2025-08-09 17:11:46+00:00
Hi all. Michael here from Talk Python. We just released a new foundational course for data scientists called "Just Enough Python for Data Scientists". The idea is to help bridge the gap from getting into data science via notebooks and not with a CS degree to cover things like refactoring, reproducibility, single responsibility principle, etc. I hope it's useful to some of you!
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-09 17:12:28+00:00
Nobody who isn't fairly ignorant would've been surprised if it was a 4cyl 5spd Ford Ranger, an old Volvo 240, an 2000s diesel dodge or GM, a crown vic cop car, a Honda Accord, a Ford E-series or Chevy Savannah etc, etc. Somewhere there's probably a rusted out '99ish Grand Caravan that's close to a mil and on it's 6th transmission.

Pretty much every vehicle that isn't equipped with some achilles heel or highly engineered to a price point can go a mil if you take reasonably good care of it and don't mind throwing 0-1 engines and 2-4 transmissions in.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-08-09 17:12:54+00:00
> Metric is really far simpler...

For the common, everyday use case it isn't meaningfully simpler, which is why the US hasn't switched. The conversions are certainly harder to memorize, but by the time you're an adult you have memorized all the common ones (12 inches to a foot, and so on) so that downside only applies to people who have to learn this stuff (largely children, who don't get a vote). The math is also harder than just moving decimal points, but when you carry a computer in your pocket that isn't actually making life harder for anyone.

So, the two big downsides of the imperial system (conversions are harder to learn and the math is harder) aren't actually a problem for the vast majority of adults in the US. But switching to metric would cause a ton of friction as you have to relearn how to estimate measurements for everything all over again. And those two factors combined are why the US doesn't switch. Most people will not gain any upside, while they have to pay significant downsides. It's perfectly rational to not switch when that is the case! You could argue that it's selfish (because future generations of kids have to learn the conversions, so they would benefit from metric and they don't incur the downside either), but it's not stupid. As much as people like to go "haha people in the US are so stupid for not switching to metric", that simply is not the case.
by Merrill | 2025-08-09 17:13:31+00:00
A relative worked at home doing medical transcription. It was not unheard of for physicians to make up non-existent body parts, non-existent drugs, etc. Part of her job was to correct their terminology.

She has since been replaced by cheaper off-shore transcribers and by speech to text applications. It's not clear how terminology is corrected now.