MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by inetknght | 2025-08-29 15:01:44+00:00
> One day, I will teach them real engineering: It is Rails backend with React frontend. Zero kills. Life above all.

Buddy, if you think that is "real engineering", you've got a lot of things to learn.

Even in software engineering, rails and react aren't really engineering. Real engineering includes calculations -- data structures, algorithms, data structures, and user interfaces designed to work with people who are deaf or blind. You wanna tell me that rails is performant? Have you done calculations? You wanna tell me react's algorithms are well-defined in memory and time? Have you ensured that your "software" is usable by people with disabilities?
by ljosifov | 2025-08-29 15:02:08+00:00
If they leaked bank accounts numbers, or private keys - I would be worried. That has not happened in the past.

About myself personally - my Name Surname is googleable, I'm on the open electoral register, so my address is not a secret, my company information is also open in the companies register, I have a a personal website I have put up willingly and share information about myself there. Training models on my data doesn't seem riskier than that.

Yeah, I know I'd be safer if I was completely dark, opaque to the world. I like the openness though. I also think my life has been enriched in infinitely many ways by people sharing parts of their lives via their data with me. So it would be mildly sociopathic of me, if I didn't do similar back to the world, to some extent.
by drweevil | 2025-08-29 15:02:11+00:00
> “No one my age wants AI. No one is excited about it,” she told me of her high-school-age peers.

> OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was telling he US Federal Reserve’s board of governors...

> Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios he believes...

> Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said ...

> Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke told staff ...

> Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, recently said ...

Does this feel at all like a democratic process? We can claim to be a democracy, but functionally it's clear that we are not living in one when all the most important decisions are being made by CEOs.

And finally: "It would be naïve to think we are going back to a world without AI."

Why is that? Shouldn't we, as a democratic society, be able to decide whether we want to adopt any technology, especially one as destructive as AI? (h/t to Neal Stephenson and his Seveneves, where he explores this topic under the moniker 'Amistics').
by _pdp_ | 2025-08-29 15:02:11+00:00
Assuming that the demand for software remains at the same level as before the infliction point. However, this is not likely to be the case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox).

What I am speculating that we will see is an increasing demand for developers. While AI will be churning more code the work that cannot be done by AI will require more developers overall then ever before.
by threecheese | 2025-08-29 15:02:34+00:00
Fast feedback is one benefit, given the 90% is releasable - even if only to a segment of users. This might be anathema to good engineering, but a benefit to user experience research and to organizations that want to test their market for demand.

Fast feedback is also great for improving release processes; when you have a feedback loop with Product, UX, Engineering, Security etc, being able to front load some % of a deliverable can help you make better decisions that may end up being a time saver net/net.
by bgwalter | 2025-08-29 15:02:46+00:00
I realize this might be satire. If not, you are using the same aggressive strategy of turning the tables as Palantir:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/08/palantir-...

Most people do want to deny their data, as we have recently seen in various DOGE backlashes.
Ask HN: Joining a khronos working group as an outsider
by gh0stcat | 2025-08-29 15:02:51+00:00
Hi HN,

I only became interested in computer graphics development after college, and would like to learn more and get more involved in the field if possible. The working groups for khronos however are all meant for company or university affiliations it seems. What would your recommendation be to get involved in real world computer graphics development? I am not a beginner but looking to get to the next level-skill wise after going through books and tutorials. Thank you for any and all insight!
by gillesjacobs | 2025-08-29 15:02:53+00:00
A suspicious lack of any performance metrics on the many standard RAG/QA benchmarks out there, except for their highly fine-tuned and dataset-specific MAFIN2.5 system. I would love the see this approach vs. a similarly well-tuned structured hybrid retriever (vector similarity + text matching) which is the common way of building domain-specific RAG. The FinanceBench GPT4o+Search system never mentions what the retrieval approach is [1,2], so I will have to assume it is the dumbest retriever possible to oversell the improvement.

PageIndex does not state to what degree the semantic structuring is rule-based (document structure) or also inferred by an ML model, in any case structuring chunks using semantic document structure is nothing new and pretty common, as is adding generated titles and summaries to the chunk nodes. But I find it dubious that prompt-based retrieval on structured chunk metadata works robustly, and if it does perform well it is because of the extra work in prompt-engineering done on chunk metadata generation and retrieval. This introduces two LLM-based components that can lead to highly variable output versus a traditional vector chunker and retriever. There are many more knobs to tune in a text prompt and an LLM-based chunker than in a sentence/paragraph chunker and a vector+text similarity hybrid retriever.

You will have to test retrieval and generation performance for your application regardless, but with so many LLM-based components this will lead to increased iteration time and cost vs. embeddings. Advantage of PageIndex is you can make it really domain-specific probably. Claims of improved retrieval time are dubious, vector databases (even with hybrid search) are highly efficient, definitely more efficient that prompting an LLM to select relevant nodes.

1. https://pageindex.ai/blog/Mafin2.5 2. https://github.com/VectifyAI/Mafin2.5-FinanceBench
by terminalshort | 2025-08-29 15:03:18+00:00
But this speaks to the fundamental point the other commenter is making. A Waymo requires human intervention periodically too. It's just less than a Tesla with FSD, which is in turn less than a Tesla with Autopilot, which is dramatically less than my 20 year old truck. It's just that at some point we assume the probability of a crash is low enough that the human driver can zone out and hope for the best and nobody has the balls to come out and actually define an acceptable probability of serious injury or death to set an actually useful performance standard based on this.
by wl | 2025-08-29 15:03:25+00:00
If we're talking about Swiss SIGs, that'd be the P210 handgun and to a lesser extent, the SG 510 assault rifle. The P226s were always German SIGs (at least until SIG US got started), the "Montage Suisse" models being assembled in Switzerland from German parts rather than being the product of the Neuhausen factory.
by rkomorn | 2025-08-29 15:03:27+00:00
My 6 month data is definitely wrong but it is hilariously more wrong for the time periods I was traveling 6-8 time zones away from home where it's telling me I averaged from 6:05pm to 6:00pm (a cool 24 hours) while showing a graph that has an 8 hour window where I'm not sleeping.

Other than that it's somehow giving me an average of waking up around an hour later than I'd actually wake up.
by busterarm | 2025-08-29 15:04:02+00:00
> where someone at the front (is supposed to have) vetted the person already.

I think that's a mistake, personally. Each interviewer needs to make an independent decision and relying on the judgement of a screener early in the process is giving that person disproportionate weight towards hiring for your team. Usually that resume screener is someone in HR. Would you trust them to decide who your team hires?

Your posts do indicate that maybe there is a larger segment of folks who don't read resumes than I realize...My amount of rigor may only come after being involved in some catastrophically bad hiring decisions. Like someone I made the deciding vote to hire was stalking multiple employees, was a heavy drug user, did zero work of value and ultimately crashed and burned by getting arrested for coming at someone with a knife. For years HR wouldn't let us fire that person because of their protected class and multiple false claims they made against a large number of employees.
by naasking | 2025-08-29 15:04:07+00:00
> You change the prompt slightly, where a human who understands the topic would still give the right response trivially, the LLM outputs an answer that is both wrong/irrelevant and unpredicably and non-humanly wrong in a way that no human who exhibited understanding with the first answer could be predicted to answer the second question in the same bizarrw manner as the LLM.

I think this should make you question whether the prompt change was really as trivial as you imply. Providing an example of this would elucidate.
by jibe | 2025-08-29 15:04:15+00:00
Thanks for the correction, Sig did call it a voluntary upgrade, not a recall. The do have other actual recalls, like on the Sig Cross rifle, so they are willing to do it when there is an issue that calls for it.

https://www.sigsauer.com/blog/safety-recall-notice-sig-sauer...

They would have been in a better spot today to defend the P320 if they had made it a mandatory recall, so they probably should have done it.
by toss1 | 2025-08-29 15:04:23+00:00
Yup, using AI for any serious tax calculation or even advice is a REALLY BAD idea.

A close relative is a top expert in US Trust & Estate Tax law working at a well-known BigLaw firm. Of course they have substantial AI initiatives, integration with their system, mandatory training, etc.

She finds tha AI marginally useful for some things, but overall not very much and there are serious errors, particularly the types of errors only a top expert would catch.

One of the big examples is that in the world of T&E law, there are a lot of mediocre (to be kind) attorneys who claim expertise but are very bad at it (causing a lot of work for the more serious firms and a lot of costs & losses for the intended heirs). The mediocre-minus attorneys of course also write blogs and papers to market themselves, often in greater volume than the top experts. Many of these blogs/papers are seriously WRONG, as in giving the exact opposite of the right advice.

Everyone here sees where this is going. The AI has zero ability to reason or figure out which parts of its training input are from actual top experts and which are dreck. The AI can not reason, and can not even validly check their 'thinking' against existing tax code (which is massive), or the regulations and rulings (which are orders of magnitude more massive). So, the AI gives advice that is confident, cheerful, and WRONG.

Worse yet, the LLM's advice is wrong in ways only a top expert would know, and in ways that will massively screw the heirs. But the errors will likely only be discovered decades later, when it is too late to fix.

Seriously, do NOT use LLMs for tax advice, unless you are also consulting a TOP professional. And skipping the LLM part is best.

My relative is quite frustrated and annoyed by the whole thing, which should be more helpful with these massive code/regs/rulings, but finds it often more work than just using the standard WestLaw/Lexis legal database searches.
by _pdp_ | 2025-08-29 15:04:41+00:00
I agree and I think short term companies will most likely reduce their developer count because AI seems to be cheaper. However, as more code is written by AI the demand for more software will increase therefore the demand for developers will increase.

Of course I am not entertaining the idea of AGI because at that point it will no longer matter as much but if we assume that AI will improve but still require human resourcing the demand for these resources will increase. Don't you think?

This is what makes sense to me at least.
by gitaarik | 2025-08-29 15:05:22+00:00
It's just a summarizing search engine. Instead of you manually looking up multiple pages and reading them and coming to some conclusion that allows you to move to the next step in the process, you can let the AI do that manual work for you.

But you shouldn't expect it do take over your actual thinking, because it doesn't actually think. So it's just another tool in the toolbox that can be useful for some applications, but not for all. If you use it for the appropriate tasks, it can be very helpful. If you try to do everything with it, you'll be disappointed.
by jolmg | 2025-08-29 15:05:30+00:00
> But I think most folks interested enough in the concept are also rich enough to afford a phone and a laptop, and if you want a keyboard for your phone you might as well just use a laptop.

Laptops are bulky; phone and keyboard can fit in one's pocket. I also dislike the idea of carrying around a device that's not under my control. It's not about wanting my phone to behave like a laptop because I can't afford a laptop. It's about getting to have control over my phone the same way I have control over the laptop.

For example, when I try to screenshot and the OS says I'm not allowed to by the app, on my own device, I die a little inside. The very idea that an OS would obey an app over the user is really messed up. It's really wrong. It's like a guest saying their guest sets the rules in your own house.

Also the weird, arbitrary limitations. On Android you can split screen and show 2 apps vertically at limited, specific heights. On the Pinephone with i3/sway, you can divide the screen with as many windows as you want, in whatever orientations you want, with as many workspaces as you want. You can set the scaling to whatever you want, have interfaces be as big or small as you want. Limits aren't arbitrary.

> I still think conceptually it's the right direction for tech that our devices should be so flexible, but it's hard enough in practice that it's not generally done.

The difficulty isn't in getting desktop stuff to work on the phone. The difficulty is getting phone stuff to work on the phone.
by tasty_freeze | 2025-08-29 15:05:37+00:00
To the people downvoting this comment -- it isn't just that Musk made a couple of very sharp nazi salutes. You may say, oh, that was just an unfortunate similarity, he wasn't doing a nazi salute at all. But he has a history of boosting nazi posts on twitter. Oh, Musk posts so often he can't vet the source of all of his retweets. But if those are mistakes, the fact is he never makes a mistake in the other direction, which strongly suggests it wasn't an accident.

Eg, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/musk-retweets-hitler-di...
by uecker | 2025-08-29 15:05:55+00:00
I would not say we agree with respect to your last point. I think also very complex C programs can be made memory safe, when this is a design goal from the beginning. That complexity can make this harder is true also for Rust, where people then often use unsafe, or, alternatively, re-engineer large parts of their project to get the structure right. C gives you the same choice at this point, but it may be more common to pick the unsafe path because memory safety is not valued high enough to justify the refactoring cost, so people often accept safety issues instead of fixing the design issues in the program.
by ForHackernews | 2025-08-29 15:05:57+00:00
CR & LF are in there for backwards-compatibility with ASCII. Similarly, the first emoji were include in Unicode for compatibility with some encoding systems used for SMS on Japanese mobile carriers. I wish the Unicode folks had drawn a hard line that they weren't going to add any more. If people wanted dingbats, they could go use a dingbats font.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-08-29 15:06:22+00:00
Simple does not mean short. I can give you a one line take-home assignment that will take a lifetime to build.

In any case, if it exceeds one or two HOURS, it's too long. And I have never seen a take-home assignment that did not.

(some companies pay for your time for take-home assignments, obviously that changes everything)
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-29 15:06:59+00:00
Okay,so uhh, I think it was my comment where you said that it looks passive agressive and so I just read it again and yeah it does.

So yeah thanks, in the sense that I am not going to say this phrase now realizing it, Not sure how I even found it professional, man I am cringing.

But maybe the context OP used that was really maybe a good roast and I liked the use of this word in that context but yeah good point.

For what its worth, I also don't see the irony. And I also didn't see that it was passive agressive untill you told it and then I saw it..., So uh yeah.
by M4v3R | 2025-08-29 15:07:13+00:00
Speed absolutely matters. Of course if the quality is trash then it doesn't matter, but a model that's on par with Claude Sonnet 4 AND very speedy would be an absolute game changer in agentic coding. Right now you craft a prompt, hit send and then wait, and wait, and then wait some more, and after some time (anywhere from 30 seconds to minutes later) the agent finishes its job.

It's not long enough for you to context switch to something else, but long enough to be annoying and these wait times add up during the whole day.

It also discourages experimentation if you know that every prompt will potentially take multiple minutes to finish. If it instead finished in seconds then you could iterate faster. This would be especially valuable in the frontend world where you often tweak your UI code many times until you're satisfied with it.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-08-29 15:07:14+00:00
So, this has already been done plenty, Serena MCP and Codanna MCP both do this with AST source graphs, Codanna even gives hints in the MCP response to guide the agent to walk up/down the graph. There might be some small efficiency gain in having a separate agent walk the graph in terms of context savings, but you also lose solution fidelity, so I'm not sure it's a win. Also, it's not a replacement for RAG, it's just another piece in the pipeline that you merge over (rerank+cut or llm distillate).
by WillPostForFood | 2025-08-29 15:07:45+00:00
They didn't just clear the gun for use, they arrested the airmen who shot the guy and lied about it. It totally changes the framing of what happened.

In a Friday statement, a Department of the Air Force spokesperson said that the unidentified arrested person is accused of making a false official statement, obstruction of justice and involuntary manslaughter.

In this case, the whole "it want off by itself" claim was a lie.

https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2025/08/08...
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-29 15:08:12+00:00
You're not talking about copying values. You want it to be easy to have smart references and copy them around like you do in Python and Java, but it's more complicated in Rust because it doesn't have a GC like Python and Java.

In Rust, "Copy" means that the compiler is safe to bitwise copy the value. That's not safe for something like String / Vec / Rc / Arc etc where copying the bits doesn't copy the underlying value (e.g. if you did that to String you'd get a memory safety violation with two distinct owned Strings pointing to the same underlying buffer).

It could be interesting if there were an "AutoClone" trait that acted similarly to Copy where the compiler knew to inject .clone when it needed to do so to make ownership work. That's probably unlikely because then you could have something implement AutoClone that then contains a huge Vector or huge String and take forever to clone; this would make it difficult to use Rust in a systems programming context (e.g. OS kernel) which is the primary focus for Rust.

BTW, in general Rust doesn't have memory leaks. If you want to not worry about lifetimes or the borrow checker, you would just wrap everything in Arc<Mutex<T>> (when you need the reference accessed by multiple threads) / Rc<RefCell<T>> (single thread). You could have your own type that does so and offers convenient Deref / DerefMut access so you don't have to borrow/lock every time at the expense of being slower than well-written Rust) and still have Python-like thread-safety issues (the object will be internally consistent but if you did something like r.x = 5; r.y = 6 you could observe x=5/y=old value or x=5/y=6). But you will have to clone explicitly the reference every time you need a unique ownership.
by trod1234 | 2025-08-29 15:08:27+00:00
Luckily I don't need to convince you.

Unfortunately, not everything can be conveniently handed to someone for review when there has been a coordinated effort to either suppress or make unavailable.

The papers exist, you can look them up, and read them. Some are in German. You didn't bother.

In such cases, its rational and standard practice that statements aren't to be discounted until you actually read the material and verify one way or the other. Judgment is withheld until then. Something you fail to do here.

I pointed to the people who did the most work which is sufficient, especially given the fact that claims were made that there are no resources out there on this. There are, they just aren't generally public.

If you have access to Alumni resources; or are able to read another language, great you can read those papers and get the details. Hollwich is particularly famous for his work on both people and later in animals. The pathways mentioned exists, and were confirmed with proper controls in people.

Your claim that this is a nothing burger is unfounded without rational basis, it amounts to "You didn't hand me everything on a plate so you must be wrong". This is not only a total fallacy, but the same kind of behavior observed in toddlers and people who are disadvantaged from their excessive level of entitlement.

These characteristics naturally exclude people from being researchers and makes any viable discussion dubious at best, based on a lack of credibility from those people.

Given your proclivity to contrails and other conspiracy, I think you may have forgotten to mention other biased beliefs other fantastical things that may be clouding your reasoning; or alternatively if you had meant that sarcastically you should have added /s at the end which is standard netiquette.

Overall your response is based in ad hominem, and thus should be discarded by any discerning reader.

Your statements are easily refuted. They certainly didn't have biochemical testing in 2000 BCE to prove this. The researchers mentioned did use testing to prove this pathway exists, rigorously.

In my estimation of your response, you are the type of person that would believe the earth is flat. Good luck convincing those people of anything.
by epiccoleman | 2025-08-29 15:08:36+00:00
I think my question is more a question of how whether than whether, if that makes sense. There is something about "thought" affecting "matter" that feels spooky if there is a bidirectional relationship.

If thought / consciousness / mind is purely downstream of physics, no spookiness. If somehow experienced states of mind can reach back and cause physical effects... that feels harder to explain. It feels like a sort of violation, somehow, of determinism.

Again though, as above, I'm basically a day into reading and thinking about this, so it might just be the case that I haven't understood the consensus yet and maybe it's not spooky at all. (I don't think this is the case though - just a quick skim through the Wikipedia page on "the hard problem of consciousness" seems to suggest a lot of closely related debate)
by disposition2 | 2025-08-29 15:09:24+00:00
This will probably be a unpopular, wet blanket opinion...

But anytime I hear of Grok or xAI, the only thing I can think about is how it's hoovering up water from the Memphis municipal water supply and running natural gas turbines to power all for a chat bot.

Looks like they are bringing even more natural gas turbines online...great!

https://netswire.usatoday.com/story/money/business/developme...