MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-09 16:46:16+00:00
This is interesting philosophy, and others have better critiques here in that regard. I'm a mathematician, so I can only work in what I can define symbolically. Humans most certainly ARE statistical models by that definition: without invoking the precise terminology, we take input, yield output, and plausibly involve uncertain elements. One can argue as to whether this is the correct language or not, but I prefer to think this way, as the arrogance of human thinking has otherwise failed us in making good predictions about AI.

If you can come up with a symbolic description of a deficiency in how LLMs approach problems, that's fantastic, because we can use that to alter how these models are trained, and how we approach problems too!

> What that means in practical terms for programming problems of this kind is that, we can say "I don't know", which the LLM can't, because there's no "I", in the LLM, no unified subject that can distinguish what it knows and what it doesn't, what's within its domain of knowledge or outside.

We seriously don't know whether there is an "I" that is comprehended or not. I've seen arguments either way. But otherwise, this seems to refer to poor internal calibration of uncertainty, correct? This is an important problem! (It's also a problem with humans too, but I digress). LLMs aren't nearly as bad as this as you might think, and there are a lot of things you can do (that the big tech companies do not do) that can better tune it's own self-confidence (as reflected in logits). I'm not aware of anything that uses this information as part of the context, so that might be a great idea. But on the other hand, maybe this actually isn't as important as we think it is.
by CommenterPerson | 2025-08-09 16:47:01+00:00
First, the results seem really good. Definitely better than Bing. Remember the old days when g**gle came out and it seemed amazing? A little like that.

Second, I read their blog. Critical thinking and reading helps one recognize BS.

Now the question is typically HN with no answer "proof". One can dive down a HN sub bullet tree with this. It's something like proving you exist. Nothing definitive there!
by stargrazer | 2025-08-09 16:47:04+00:00
Use C++ with one of the following:

Boost.Spirit https://www.boost.org/library/latest/spirit/ Boost.Parser https://www.boost.org/library/latest/parser/ (which I think succeeds Boost.Spirit Boost.Metaparse: https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/latest/doc/html/metaparse.htm...

All of these allow you to build a parser using C++ syntax and then add semantic or composed actions.
by Nvorzula | 2025-08-09 16:48:09+00:00
Hello, astrophotographer here.

The unique thing about astrophotography is that the subject that we are imaging is (relatively speaking) static. Any slight deviation, even the smallest detail, that is not structurally accurate is PAINFULLY obvious.

As an aside, we do use traditional neural networks for certain processing steps. Deconvolution and noise reduction are very common. However, these are only helping in correcting errors caused by viewing conditions. They are not the "imaginative" AI that you are dreading.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-09 16:48:25+00:00
There is a way around this, but it is board driven: a group buy is arranged and the entire building is done at once. The board or a GC they hire subs out the work and coordinates order of operations, and uses known good contractors from references. It’s for sure a coordination challenge, but it can be done if the will is there and residents are friendly to collaboration. Otherwise, it’s just pain (having coordinated electrification refits for ~50 unit buildings).
by genocidicbunny | 2025-08-09 16:48:32+00:00
If your bedrooms are upstairs, at night you might be running heat a lot less since some of the heat from the first floor rises up to the second. If you have carpet, that can create a warmer area at the floor, closer to where your beds are. So you might not need to heat things as much, or to as high a temperature to feel comfortable.

I lived in an apartment where the floor was poorly insulated. When a new neighbor moved in downstairs that heated their bedroom more aggressively at night, my heating bill went down because the heat rising from below made it less necessary to run my own heating as hard.

It might also be the difference in electricity cost. Especially with tiered rates, you can easily find yourself moving into a higher tier where every kW is significantly more expensive than in the previous tiers. PG&E in the SF Bay Area charges between 43 and 60c/kWh. A 2kW heater is going to cost about $1/hr to run , so if you're working from home, have little kids it gets expensive quick. And in the middle of a NY winter, with a poorly isolated apartment, you might well be running the heat in some capacity pretty much 24/7.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-08-09 16:49:11+00:00
the HVAC industry in the US is absolute highway robbery, I was quoted $10k to install a $1k mini split that took a total novice (me) a weekend to install - the most difficult part of the process was figuring out the best place to route the copper lines (because you have to be careful not to pinch them around a corner)

a friend paid a similar company the same and the work looks like total garbage, they're didn't even properly set the pad to place the outdoor unit on - and the techs are absolutely clueless about how the systems work
by SeanAnderson | 2025-08-09 16:49:29+00:00
Oh nice, this is actually something I very specifically wanted for https://ant.care/! I was trying to have the background sky for the ant farm be reflective of the user's current environment, but I didn't do anything more than a naïve approach. Maybe I'll work on adopting your approach at some point :) Still a bit torn on if the whole thing should be Rust/WASM or just the core simulation in Rust and defer as much as possible to JS/HTML.
by toast0 | 2025-08-09 16:49:30+00:00
Why should they when openfreemap is behind a CDN and their home page says things like:

> Using our public instance is completely free: there are no limits on the number of map views or requests. There’s no registration, no user database, no API keys, and no cookies. We aim to cover the running costs of our public instance through donations.

> Is commercial usage allowed?

> Yes.

IMHO, reading this and then just using it, makes a lot of sense. Yeah, you could put a cache infront of their CDN, but why, when they said it's all good, no limits, for free?

I might wonder a bit, if I knew the bandwidth it was using, but I might be busy with other stuff if my site went unexpectedly viral.
by RugnirViking | 2025-08-09 16:50:04+00:00
I dont think this is actually true? You can, namely, write a will. You can choose what is done with your possesions, presumably including destroying them. Iirc there's a rule called the law against perpetuities, where you have control over your estate via the will, maximally until some time after the death of a specific named person who was alive at the time of your death. (which I find a strange stipulation)
by rvrb | 2025-08-09 16:50:22+00:00
it can narrow the payload: https://zigbin.io/7cb79d

I think the post would be more helpful if it had a concrete use case. let's say a contrived bytecode VM:

dispatch: switch (instruction) { inline .load, .load0, .load1, .load2, .load3 => |_, tag| { const slot = switch (tag) { .load => self.read(u8), else => @intFromEnum(tag) - @intFromEnum(.load0), }; self.push(self.locals[slot]); continue :dispatch self.read(Instruction); }, // ... }

"because comptime", this is effectively the same runtime performance as the common:

dispatch: switch (instruction) { .load => { self.push(self.locals[self.read(u8)]); continue :dispatch self.read(Instruction); }, .load0 => { self.push(self.locals[0]); continue :dispatch self.read(Instruction); }, .load1 => { self.push(self.locals[1]); continue :dispatch self.read(Instruction); }, .load2 => { self.push(self.locals[2]); continue :dispatch self.read(Instruction); }, .load3 => { self.push(self.locals[3]); continue :dispatch self.read(Instruction); }, // ... }

and this is in a situation where this level of performance optimization is actually valuable to spend time on. it's nice that Zig lets you achieve it while reusing the logic.
by bloppe | 2025-08-09 16:50:25+00:00
Lying to investors is illegal, and investors have incentive and means to sue if they think they were defrauded. The problem is proving it. I'm sure a lot of founders genuinely believe AGI is about to appear out of thin air, so they're technically not lying. Even the cynical ones who say whatever they think investors want to hear are hard to catch in a lie. It's not really about being rich and powerful. That's just the unfortunate reality of rhetoric.
by freediver | 2025-08-09 16:50:44+00:00
On the human web. Usually during my gadget research I would use Small Web lens in Kagi search You can also access searching a portion of this directly through https://kagi.com/smallweb UI without Kagi account. Note that human web is well "small" and the coverage would usually be around latest gadgets but at least it will be unbiased. Even Academic lens is sometimes useful, as some tech get coverage in whitepapers like for example electric toothbrushes.

My secondary source are three star reviews on Amazon. While 1 star and 5 star are being gamed by abusers, three star reviews tend to still have wealth of useful information.
by tomxor | 2025-08-09 16:50:53+00:00
Meat especially grass fed beef, is not just protein, it's an incredibly dense source of nutritients. You have to eat far higher quantities and ranges of plant based alternatives to acquire the same nutritional value, and they are usually less bioavailable. So from the perspective of the person consuming it, it's very efficient source of nutrients, and also the most satiating food you can eat, so you won't feel the urge to overeat.

Abstractly, using land for crops is around an order of magnitude more efficient when considering only calories per unit area, but when considering the total system i.e the humans consuming it, there's an argument to be had that more livestock could be more efficient when considering all the side effects of a huge population of malnourished humans overeating refined hyper-paletable carbs.

For either side of this argument, the real issue is industrial agriculture producing both crops and livestock in unsustainable and nutritionally devoid ways, that are incredibly bad for the environment and humans consuming it.
by jpc0 | 2025-08-09 16:51:21+00:00
> Or the simpler version of the above: LLM writes code. You try and compile it. You get an error message and you paste that back into the LLM and let it have another go. That's been the main way I've worked with LLMs for almost three years now.

I’m going to comment here about this but it’s a follow on to the other comment, this is exactly the workflow I was following. I had given it the compiler error and it blamed an environment issue, I confirmed the environment is as it claims it should be, it linked to documentation that doesn’t state what it claims is stated.

In a coding agent this would have been an endless feedback loop that eats millions of tokens.

This is the reason why I do not use coding agents, I can catch hallucinations and stop the feedback loop from ever happening in the first place without needing to watch an AI agent try to convince itself that it is correct and the compiler must be wrong.
by maccard | 2025-08-09 16:51:46+00:00
It’s way easier to avoid eating the calories than it is to exercise them off in practice. For most people exercise will cause them to feel hungry, and to eat. I’d you don’t know how much to eat you’ll end up having the wrong effect and gaining weight.

It’s also way easier to just not eat the calories in the first place. A bag of potato chips or a tbsp of nut butter on a rice cake is roughly the equivalent of 15 minutes of running.

Everyone should exercise and move but if it’s for weight loss diet is the way
Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025?
by lincoln20xx | 2025-08-09 16:52:02+00:00
I recently came across a comment [0] here that highlighted the challenges of building native desktop apps with LLMs. The commenter pointed out how scarce training resources have become—few blog posts, tutorials, or open-source projects exist compared to web or mobile development. They also noted that while desktop app development was a solid career path in the 90s, it's now seen as a dead end for most, outside of big players like Microsoft or Adobe.

This got me thinking: My own experience with desktop development dates back to the late 90s using Turbo Pascal 6 in Delphi, and I'm out of the loop on modern practices. With the evolving landscape, I'm curious about what tools and workflows developers are actually using today.

Some questions to spark discussion:

- What programming languages and frameworks are popular for desktop apps? - Are there any go-to IDEs, build tools, or libraries that make development easier? - Do the above answers change if you care about code performance or efficiency (whatever that means to you)? - Is native desktop app development still viable as a career, or are most greenfield projects shifting to web-based alternatives?

I'd love to hear from folks with recent experience—success stories, pitfalls, and recommendations would be great. Thanks in advance for sharing!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44841291
by nativeit | 2025-08-09 16:53:15+00:00
I’ve been using Caprover for the last 4-5 years, and it’s great for my purposes.

It sounds like the OP may be looking for something that can be provisioned for multiple users, which Caprover doesn’t really have facility for. That said, the one-click-app templates are very easy to read/edit/update/create, if you can create a Docker Compose spec, you can create a template for Caprover.

I like that it’s really just a frontend for Docker, all of its functions are built around standard API calls to Docker. It means that I can install Portainer as a one-click-app, and use it to manage all of my other apps, without sacrificing any features. I can also spin up Docker containers outside of Caprover, and as long as I don’t run into port conflicts, it functions exactly as it should.

Caprover is just a one-man-show, so development may not be as responsive or rapid as some may wish, but the maintainer is very active, and he responds to pull requests promptly. One Click App templates are largely community maintained, but since they’re so easy to deal with, it’s trivial to work around most common issues, like updating versions or exposing new environment variables, and once again, the maintainer is very good about merging pull requests for app templates.
by mbreese | 2025-08-09 16:53:21+00:00
I had something similar happen, but for a gas boiler (hot water radiators). Our was older, but not super old. It would intermittently turn off and we couldn’t figure it out. HVAC Contractor (who we had a maintenance contract with) thought the system was toast and needed a replacement. I noticed a bad capacitor (was blown). HVAC contractor claimed they couldn’t find one through their suppliers. I had two delivered five days later.

When they came back to check the system for a full quote, the tech felt so bad that they just installed the new capacitor for free and we got another few years out of that boiler.
by musicale | 2025-08-09 16:54:11+00:00
> When you prefer legacy students, you perpetuate the kind of discrimination in effect when their parents and grandparents were admitted.

Universities will likely claim that legacy and (especially) donor admits bring more money into the university, which in theory allows them to increase overall economic diversity (and likely social and demographic diversity as well) of the student body by admitting a larger number of qualified students under a need-blind admission policy.
by sheepdestroyer | 2025-08-09 16:54:50+00:00
Sure, I am quite against all of them already:

The first one has been argued against quite nicely by Piketty, it's how you get plutocracy

The three other ones should not be treated as Rights since the concerned individual is no more, and they don't matter much anyway if coming against the rights of people (that means "living"). For instance collecting organs for the good of those who need, when evaluated, should trump any opposition on frivolous grounds.

I'm indead asking if the whole concept is not wrong and deeply harmful to societies
by kentonv | 2025-08-09 16:56:34+00:00
sandstorm.org is an offshoot of sandstorm.io, my old (failed) startup. Some folks who really wanted to keep the project running took over ownership of the open source code. I'm not involved these days. Full story at: https://sandstorm.io/news/2024-01-14-move-to-sandstorm-org

The people still trying to run it are good people, so I hate to say this, but... it doesn't seem like they are going to make progress. There hasn't been a new release in years, and the codebase is rotting. I wouldn't recommend running it in its current state.

Meanwhile, though, I feel like the advent of vibe coding has made Sandstorm's approach seem newly relevant. Sandstorm's architecture made "novice" code safe to run even for users with sensitive security needs. Well well well, suddenly we have a whole lot more novice code than we used to.

Is it... time for me to take another pass at this?
by nostrademons | 2025-08-09 16:57:13+00:00
No, any decent anti-abuse system is going to know where the VPN exit nodes are too.

The difference is that the ratio of abusive to legitimate traffic tends to be much lures with VPNs. Because a VPN isn’t 100% anonymous and just shifts the trust boundary to the VPN provider, most hard-core criminals won’t use them. So your traffic tends to be mixed in with folks who just want to pirate movies, watch Netflix shows that are only available in other countries, avoid geo-pricing surcharges, or who just care about privacy in the abstract. And then they use their VPN for all their web browsing, since they already paid for it. Tor is used by all sorts of folks who are trading kiddie porn, hacking into systems, scraping large quantities of data, buying & selling drugs, and doing other outright criminal things. Most abuse-detection systems care a lot about the legit:malicious ratio. An IP that is 95% legit but 5% malicious traffic will usually go through, as long as the malicious traffic doesn’t crash the system. An IP that is 80% malicious usually won’t.

When I browse through Tor, big websites like Reddit, Google, or anything protected by climate Cloudflare will 429 me, even if I’m just innocuously viewing a page or making a search in a regular browser. In a VPN, it almost always goes through, except for rare transient moments when somebody else is running a scraper through that endpoint.

Counterintuitively, it can often be better to use a system that is less secure, because lots of other people use the system with less security and so your actions get lost in theirs. Systems that are more secure are used by more hardcore criminals, and so they have more eyes on them. In these days of stochastic guilt, it’s often better to be doing naughty things in a law-abiding population than to be a legit user in a criminal population.
by raron | 2025-08-09 16:57:26+00:00
> There are direct elections for the parliament.

Not really, you vote for parties local to your country. You can not vote for EP parties directly.

Anyways, ProtectEU, the new "break all encryption if chatcontrol fails" was proposed by a secret group, whose identities still not known. That's even farer away from a good and democratic institution than unelected bureaucrats.

I don't think calling these anti-EU-propaganda is a good thing, they are valid criticism (even if the EU is mainly a good thing), and they should be addressed at some point in time.
by conradev | 2025-08-09 16:57:32+00:00
You can look at market positioning, or you can look at the experiments…

A million mile Tundra with 117 dealership visits over 10 years:

In maintaining his truck to the extraordinary million-mile mark, Sheppard has logged 117 dealership service visits over nine years, ranging from timing belt replacements, oil changes, and the manufacturer’s regularly scheduled check-ups.

Tesla Model S with 1.2 million:

However, this Model S is currently on its fourth battery pack. Four batteries at 1.2 million miles mean that the average pack lasted some 300,000 and counting, which is actually a strong showing in our opinion.

It’d be interesting to try to get bounds on the costs. It seems like the Tesla special of mishandled repairs (i.e. not understanding motor failure) is an real and persistent factor.

https://pressroom.toyota.com/million-mile-tundra-2016/

https://insideevs.com/news/699413/highest-mileage-tesla-mode...
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-09 16:58:19+00:00
One thing that might work for you is to actually make the empty tile file, and hard link it everywhere it needs to be. Then you don't need to special case it at runtime, but instead at generation time.

NVMe disks are incredibly fast and 1k rps is not a lot (IIRC my n100 seems to be capable of ~40k if not for the 1 Gbit NIC bottlenecking). I'd try benchmarking without the tuning options you've got. Like do you actually get 40k concurrent connections from cloudflare? If you have connections to your upstream kept alive (so no constant slow starts), ideally you have numCores workers and they each do one thing at a time, and that's enough to max out your NIC. You only add concurrency if latency prevents you from maxing bandwidth.
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-09 16:59:50+00:00
Up until the point that parts are no longer available, or so rare that their cost is prohibitive, it's almost certainly cheaper for him to keep the car than buy a new one. This also includes the fact that he does almost all the repairs himself, so it's also a hobby for him. He's also cannibalizing spare parts from several other salvage cars he has acquired.

A new car has so much depreciation in the first couple of years that it's a terrible idea for most people. Buying used cars and either maintaining them or just driving them into the ground and then buying another used car is almost always cheaper.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-09 17:00:20+00:00
The "sufficiently interesting" part is the most important qualifier here. My response was talking about theories and representations that we already know, either instinctively from near-birth, or from learned experience. We have not seen anything unique from LLMs because they do not appear to have an internal understanding (in the same sense that I was talking about) that is as broad as an adult human. But that doesn't mean it lacks any understanding.

> The key point in all of this is symbolism as abstractions to represent things in some world.

The difficulty is understanding how to extract this information from the model, since the output of the LLM is actually a very poor representation of its internal state.
by diggernet | 2025-08-09 17:00:26+00:00
Having HS grades count 100% is a really bad idea. Not because of anything about the schools, but because HS age isn't representative of people's abilities. I had terrible HS grades due to a complete lack of interest. After growing up a little and getting my act together, I got A's in college. Thank goodness they didn't base my admission on HS grades.