MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jiggawatts | 2025-08-15 23:03:59+00:00
What I would love to see in an SCM that properly supports large binary blobs is storing the contents using Prolly trees instead of a simple SHA hash.

Prolly trees are very similar to Merkle trees or the rsync algorithm, but they support mutation and version history retention with some nice properties. For example: you always obtain exactly the same tree (with the same root hash) irrespective of the order of incremental edit operations used to get to the same state.

In other words, two users could edit a subset of a 1 TB file, both could merge their edits, and both will then agree on the root hash without having to re-hash or even download the entire file!

Another major advantage on modern many-core CPUs is that Prolly trees can be constructed in parallel instead of having to be streamed sequentially on one thread.

Then the really big brained move is to store the entire SCM repo as a single Prolly tree for efficient incremental downloads, merges, or whatever. I.e.: a repo fork could share storage with the original not just up to the point-in-time of the fork, but all future changes too.
by mfoc | 2025-08-15 23:04:39+00:00
When choosing rows = 4000 and columns = 546, an interesting pattern emerges.

For all integers n ≥ 0, the ranges [243 + (n * 546)] to [249 + (n * 546)] inclusive appear to contain no prime numbers. Same with the ranges [297 + (n * 546)] to [303 + (n * 546)].

For both sets of ranges, the minimum gap between the closest neighbouring primes appears to be at least 10 (in decimal). Does anyone know of a number-theoretic explanation for this kind of pattern?
by bamboozled | 2025-08-15 23:05:18+00:00
It’s not about that, it’s about doing the right thing and trusting alliances. Ukraine seems to trust it alliance with Europe , probably because they need Ukraine to defend them now. But Ukraine could also build a nuke but they know it would’ve just give the current administration an excuse to never help them again. They’re hostages.

If they had nuclear weapons they’d be respected, like North Korea now. No one going to mess with them.
by hinkley | 2025-08-15 23:06:01+00:00
When you do a shallow clone, no files would be present. However when doing a full clone you’ll get a full copy of each version of each blob, and what is being suggested is treat each revision as an rsync operation upon the last. And the more times you muck with a file, which can happen a lot both with assets and if you check in your deps to get exact snapshotting of code, that’s a lot of big file churn.
by threecheese | 2025-08-15 23:06:06+00:00
Author IMO correctly recognizes that access to context needs to scale (“latent intent” which I love), but I’m not sure I’m convinced that current models will be effective even if given access to all priors needed for a complex task. The ability to discriminate valuable from extraneous context will need to scale with size of available context, it will be pulling needles from haystacks that aren’t straightforward similarity. I think we will need to steer these things.
by ender341341 | 2025-08-15 23:06:18+00:00
> Its on such an expedition that the ring "slips" from him, further suggesting the ring is actually not only his size, but a little large.

It's heavily implied in LOTR that the ring is able to change it's size to cause itself to slip from a person's finger, though that's somewhat out of scope and the illustrator may not have read that.
by Cu3PO42 | 2025-08-15 23:06:29+00:00
Clearly an LLM is not conscious, after all it's just glorified matrix multiplication, right?

Now let me play devil's advocate for just a second. Let's say humanity figures out how to do whole brain simulation. If we could run copies of people's consciousness on a cluster, I would have a hard time arguing that those 'programs' wouldn't process emotion the same way we do.

Now I'm not saying LLMs are there, but I am saying there may be a line and it seems impossible to see.
by lostlogin | 2025-08-15 23:06:49+00:00
I’m running Ubuntu on the Mac, in UTM.

It works well. Quite why networking from VM is more reliable than networking from the host is a question I’d like to ask Apple. SMB does not reliably start at boot.

Imagine if you could turn on a Mac mini, have docker containers start and then have them access network shares reliably.

The Ubuntu VM on the same host can. That’s ridiculous.
by johntash | 2025-08-15 23:07:29+00:00
One of my semi-personal websites gets crawled by AI crawlers a ton now. I use Bunny.net for a cdn. $20 used to last me for months of traffic, now it only lasts a week or two at most. It's enough that I'm going to go back to not using a cdn and just let the site suffer some slowness every once in a while.
by 1659447091 | 2025-08-15 23:08:35+00:00
> I just moved back to the US and had to find a new local doctor who gives me 30 day scripts

You may have difficultly getting a 90 day, both the doc and pharmacist have to agree to do it - 3x30 day with 'fill on dates' is more likely.

When I had a long out of town trip I was able to get a 60 day script. When I came back the doc sent 60 day script again but the pharmacist wouldn't fill it and only allowed it because what ever code/note the doc added about long term travel. That was self pay so I wasn't even a risk for selling it. Some states won't allow more than 3x30 day.

I am surprised you got name brand vyvanse for $300/month, generic is ~$250/month without coupons/discount cards
by hinkley | 2025-08-15 23:09:09+00:00
So what was the second time the stopped watch was right?

I agree with GP. The git community is very fond of doing checkbox fixes for team problems that aren’t or can’t be set as defaults and so require constant user intervention to work. See also some of the sparse checkout systems and adding notes to commits after the fact. They only work if you turn every pull and push into a flurry of activity. Which means they will never work from your IDE. Those are non fixes that pollute the space for actual fixes.
by MysticOracle | 2025-08-15 23:09:21+00:00
New in v3

- Automatic punctuation and capitalization

- Accurate word-level and segment-level timestamps

- Long audio transcription, supporting audio up to 24 minutes long with full attention (on A100 80GB) or up to 3 hours with local attention.

- Released under a permissive CC BY 4.0 license

- Now supports 25 Languages:

Bulgarian (bg), Croatian (hr), Czech (cs), Danish (da), Dutch (nl), English (en), Estonian (et), Finnish (fi), French (fr), German (de), Greek (el), Hungarian (hu), Italian (it), Latvian (lv), Lithuanian (lt), Maltese (mt), Polish (pl), Portuguese (pt), Romanian (ro), Slovak (sk), Slovenian (sl), Spanish (es), Swedish (sv), Russian (ru), Ukrainian (uk)
by socalgal2 | 2025-08-15 23:09:59+00:00
A bullet train holds 2x to 4x the passengers and loads in 2-5 minutes. I get they are very different. Those 2x to 4x passgeners load into 16 cars (so 16 doors). The baggage does not have to be stowed before take off nor do any cargo holds need to be loaded. The aisles are wider. Etc.

Still, as an example of the best possible case, it does make me wonder how much more efficient loading a plane could be. I can imagine some magic way to use all of the doors, even if in the short term it means walking on the tarmac to one of 4-6 stair cases.

Maybe it doesn't matter. I wonder if anyone has calculated if such a system would save (or lose) money.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-15 23:10:00+00:00
> Edit: also, for the historians, it's absolutely stunning how little power the legal system has.

For historians (and political scientists, for similar reasons), it is not stunning at all. It might be stunning for other people, but people who study history are likely to be very aware that the legal system isn’t magic and is ultimately only a notional agreement about what society will tolerate which has only the weight that people refusing to tolerate violations gives it.
by molf | 2025-08-15 23:10:40+00:00
I feel this is an insanely distorted take.

How about extreme and utter irrelevance (such as after building a thing nobody wants)?

Or how about this, arguably the most common: slightly successful; nobody hates it but nobody loves it either. Something people feel mildly positive about, but there is zero “hype” and also no “moat” and nobody cares enough to hate it.
by hnbad | 2025-08-15 23:11:57+00:00
Have you read either of those books? The only reason anyone ever read Mein Kampf is that the party literally gave it away and people were expected to own a copy to demonstrate their loyalty. Few people read it at the time, even fewer were inspired by it. The Nazi regime was literally enabled by Christian conservatives hoping that imbuing Hitler with dictatorial powers would lead to the end of democracy and that he would cede his powers to the Kaiser once he's done eliminating the lefties. I'd go out on a limb and say that even of those in more recent years claiming to have read the book or be inspired by it, most are just name dropping it for dramatic effect and haven't read it cover to cover.

I'd imagine more people have actually read Das Kapital because unlike Hitler, Marx was actually providing useful insights. But if you're inspired by Das Kapital to do mass killings, you'd also be inspired by reading a stack of spreadsheets or IKEA manuals. It doesn't even clearly define capitalism as a problem that needs fixing, it's a useful analysis.
by Animats | 2025-08-15 23:11:58+00:00
The Gripen is a good choice for geographically small countries. It's able to operate from airstrips that are no more than roads, with modest mobile ground equipment for support. Saab commercial for the Gripen: [1]

The USAF's force model involves basing at big, well-equipped, well-protected air bases. Those are now hard to protect from drone attacks, as Russia recently found out. From now on, air forces have to be able to operate from improvised bases, or build very strong bunkers at major bases.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyD0liioY8E
by Buttons840 | 2025-08-15 23:11:59+00:00
This gerrymandering debacle does seem to increase political tensions around and between states, especially if it spreads to multiple states and everyone starts gerrymandering, making all states politically binary in their representation. The sides for a succession / civil war become clear.

Just yesterday federal agents were in California against the will of the California state government, and gathered outside a building where the governor was speaking, so threats of violence / force are on the table already.
by petcat | 2025-08-15 23:12:07+00:00
> I'm American and kinda stunned how little salience the issue has. Please punish us as much as possible.

The EU has already agreed to one of the most lopsided trade deals in history as a result of all of this. It's a business arrangement just like any other, and at this point it's pretty clear where the leverage is. It's not with the EU.
Ask HN: Is Supabase's Supavisor slow for anyone else?
by devstein | 2025-08-15 23:12:10+00:00
Since June of this year, we've noticed a spike in latency for DB queries routed through Supabase's Supavisor.

Direct DB queries will take a tens of milliseconds while queries through Supavisor will take a minimum of 200ms and up to 5s.

This is phenomena independent of the underlying query even `SELECT 1` through Supavisor can take up to 5s.

Has anyone else experience this before? Is this a known failure mode of Supabase's Supavisor?
by mrandish | 2025-08-15 23:12:35+00:00
Having just gone through it today, I'm imagining getting this from my shiny new neural interface:

"Due to unusual account activity, you must change your password. Please enter 12 characters with at least three upper case and four lowercase letters, punctuation, two UTF-16 and one unprintable ANSI character.

Error: You may not use any password you've ever used (or imagined) previously. Please try again."
by dkersten | 2025-08-15 23:12:45+00:00
Humans can break things down and work through them step by step. The LLMs one-shot pattern match. Even the reasoning models have been shown to do just that. Anthropic even showed that the reasoning models tended to work backwards: one shotting an answer and then matching a chain of thought to it after the fact.

If a human is capable of multiplying double digit numbers, they can also multiple those large ones. The steps are the same, just repeated many more times. So by learning the steps of long multiplication, you can multiply any numbers with enough patience. The LLM doesn’t scale like this, because it’s not doing the steps. That’s my point.

A human doesn’t need to have seen the 15 digits before to be able to calculate them, because a human can follow the procedure to calculate. GPT’s answer was orders of magnitude off. It resembles the right answer superficially but it’s a very different result.

The same applies to the riddles. A human can apply logical steps. The LLM either knows or it doesn’t.

Maybe my examples weren’t the best. I’m sorry for not being better at articulating it, but I see this daily as I interact with AI, it has a superficial “understanding” where if what I ask happens to be close to something it’s trained on, it gets good results, but it has no critical thinking, no step by step reasoning (even the “reasoning models”), and it repeats the same mistakes even when explicitly told up front not to make them.
by keeda | 2025-08-15 23:13:49+00:00
I think the GP's point was that we humans consider ourselves intelligent, but we evolved and clearly weren't designed to be intelligent. One could even say that our intelligence was... "emergent".

Furthermore, our history is full of instances where we invented something that a) we didn't understand and b) had uses way beyond what we intended. As a recent example, GLP-1 was intended for glucouse regulation but is now basically a wonder drug that can treat a bunch of issues ranging from obesity to addiction, inflammation, dementia, fertility and more.

Given we don't know how to define intelligence, I think it's fine to apply some "duck typing" here.
by socalgal2 | 2025-08-15 23:13:54+00:00
I'm the opposite. I hate having to drag my lugguage around while I'm in the airport. I'm happy to wait for my baggage to be delivered. My life isn't so frantic that 10-15 minutes more is the end of the world.

I also don't see it as "downtime". I can check mail, message friends, call friends, read news, listen to podcasts or audio books, or music, all from my phone while I wait.
by hinkley | 2025-08-15 23:17:46+00:00
I always hated the “write your code like the next maintainer is a psychopath” mantra because it makes the goal unclear. I prefer the following:

Write your code/tools as if they will be used at 2:00 am while the server room is on fire. Because sooner or later they will be.

A lot of our processes are used like emergency procedures. Emergency procedures are meant to be brainless as much as possible. So you can reserve the rest of your capacity for the actual problem. My version essentially calls out Kernighan’s Law.
by digikata | 2025-08-15 23:18:31+00:00
I don't know, it's all probability in the dataset that makes one optimization strategy better over another. Git annex iirc does file level dedupe. That would take care of most of the problem if you're storing binaries that are compressed or encrypted. It's a lot of work to go beyond that, and probably one reason no one has bothered with git yet. But borg and restic both do chunked dedupe I think.
by virgildotcodes | 2025-08-15 23:18:36+00:00
Yeah, but my interpretation of what the user you’re replying to is saying is that these LLMs are more and more going to be teaching people how it is acceptable to communicate with others.

Even if the idea that LLMs are sentient may be ridiculous atm, the concept of not normalizing abusive forms of communication with others, be they artificial or not, could be valuable for society.

It’s funny because this is making me think of a freelance client I had recently who at a point of frustration between us began talking to me like I was an AI assistant. Just like you see frustrated people talk to their LLMs. I’d never experienced anything like it, and I quickly ended the relationship, but I know that he was deep into using LLMs to vibe code every day and I genuinely believe that some of that began to transfer over to the way he felt he could communicate with people.

Now an obvious retort here is to question whether killing NPCs in video games tends to make people feel like it’s okay to kill people IRL.

My response to that is that I think LLMs are far more insidious, and are tapping into people’s psyches in a way no other tech has been able to dream of doing. See AI psychosis, people falling in love with their AI, the massive outcry over the loss of personality from gpt4o to gpt5… I think people really are struggling to keep in mind that LLMs are not a genuine type of “person”.
by gonational | 2025-08-15 23:19:39+00:00
It's hard for nupeople to understand that people from our generations learned how to do things and to use our brains. The younger tech folks only do things that the computer automatically knows how to do and/or AI can help with. Even UI design and basic stuff is purely done on web-based tools with prebuilt components and AI help these days. I'm completely shocked from day-to-day when I interface with front end/design. I would venture to guess there aren't many front end peeps that even know how to code HTML & CSS these days.

In my opinion, the only thing that AI is helpful for is doing all the menial boilerplate nonsense that is only necessary because the unexperienced people in charge of so many projects. For example, setting up 30 totally unnecessary GitHub actions, etc. Anything that is worth doing, I'd rather do myself and not lose my skills.
by mwcz | 2025-08-15 23:20:15+00:00
Sorta, but what I have in mind is a graphical browser, not exactly like the OP. It would have CSS support under the user's control, not the website's control. Navigation would also be more constrained and predictable than the totally open-ended nature it has today. That would enable things like perfect universal dark mode, and excellent accessibility. Fuzzy navigation is on my wishlist too, based on a predictable nav structure.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-08-15 23:20:57+00:00
More character attacks to try and counter the cold hard statics truthfully presented.

Unaccountable? Old boy balanced the budget, you know, the topic being discussed (not the Epstein file, who is it not releasing those again?). He came, he took account, he won. How much has Trump, the budget fixer, added to the budget again? And what does that number look like compared to past Presidents?
by quink | 2025-08-15 23:21:12+00:00
> I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.

Shatner on space. Same thing with Carl Sagan and that mote of dust. And Earthrise. And Blue Marble.

I dislike these Trump people and the consistency with which they’ve all had complete spiritual bankruptcies ever so much.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-15 23:21:53+00:00
You are clearly overlooking his threats to withdraw from NATO, and his rhetoric about possibly not coming to the aid if another member was attacked. Of course, Trump being Trump later stated he would abide by Article 5.

The fact his response was not an immediate yes response to supporting Article 5 is destabilizing. As a result, the other NATO members are hedging their bets.

There are many more trees in the world than the Ukraine shaped tree that you can't seem to look around.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-15 23:21:53+00:00
Yeah we're at the CVS stage where everyone uses it because everyone uses it.

But most people don't need most of its features and many people need features it doesn't have.

If you look up git worktrees, you'll find a lot of blog articles referring to worktrees as a "secret weapon" or similar. So git's secret weapon is a mode that lets you work around the ugliness of branches. This suggests that many people would be better suited by an SCM that isn't branch-based.

It's nice having the full history offline. But the scaling problems force people to adopt a workflow where they have a large number of small git repos instead of keeping the history of related things together. I think there are better designs out there for the typical open source project.
by ptmcc | 2025-08-15 23:21:55+00:00
Honestly I'd love to check bags more often, but it's too frequently an inordinately slow and risky proposition.

I get free checked bags through my preferred airline's credit card, but still almost never do it because it adds so much time and frustration. The number of times I've had to wait an additional hour+ at baggage claim is ridiculous. And I've had bags lost/misrouted a stupid percentage of the time considering how infrequently I check bags. Fortunately never lost for good, but getting your bags days after you arrive is not great.

Even airlines like Alaska that have their "20 minute guarantee" often exceed it but get away with it because to make a claim you have to wait in line at the understaffed baggage office, wasting even more time after late bags. Get real.

If airlines/airports want to incentivize checking bags they need to do more than just make it free, but make it fast and reliable, too.
by snickerdoodle12 | 2025-08-15 23:21:57+00:00
> although I would find it extremely distasteful and frankly alarming

This objection is actually anthropomorphizing the LLM. There is nothing wrong with writing books where a character experiences distress, most great stories have some of that. Why is e.g. using an LLM to help write the part of the character experiencing distress "extremely distasteful and frankly alarming"?
by deadbabe | 2025-08-15 23:22:08+00:00
If you live that way, it may feel good in the short term but in the long term you just screw yourself over. Everything to you becomes transactional, and you miss out on benefits of being loyal to people who would reward loyalty. And you will never feel you are “owed” anything by anyone because you never did anything to warrant payback. Far less people will be good to you if you aren’t good to them.

I wish young people knew this, but they will find out too late in life.
by colbyn | 2025-08-15 23:23:01+00:00
Oh hey good to see some more literature on TextKit2. I remember diving into it when I wrote my proof of concept markdown renderer:

https://github.com/SuperSwiftMarkup/SuperSwiftMarkdownProtot...

It’s a good example of what else you can do with TextKit2, beyond plain text rendering. Here, I can draw text layout fragments in a core graphics context and use typographic information to also render markdown specific graphics in the background or foreground such as markdown tables. One day I’d love to experiment with a markdown centric spread sheet app.

At the time there was so little online info that I had to figure out everything on my own (and no chatbots didn’t have a clue about TextKit2), but STTextView was a great reference. Overall his open source work was very much appreciated. (I should probably say as much in the read me.)

That experiment was also a ton of work that ultimately didn’t go anywhere. Most people would rather just use a relatively subpar embedded browser (i.e. web view).
by jasonfarnon | 2025-08-15 23:23:36+00:00
"but most somehow seem like they are caught up in some sort of power fantasy and almost attempting to actualize their own delusions about what they were doing"

Maybe I'm being cynical, but I think there is a significant component of marketing behind this type of announcement. It's a sort of humble brag. You won't be credible yelling out loud that your LLM is a real thinking thing, but you can pretend to be oh so seriously worried about something that presupposes it's a real thinking thing.