MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skeledrew | 2025-08-10 08:08:22+00:00
LLMs deliver pretty well on their intended functionality: they predict next tokens given a token history and patterns in their training data. If you want to describe that as fully intelligent, that's your call, but I personally wouldn't. And adding functionality that isn't directly related to improving token prediction is just bad practice in an already very complex creation. LLM tools exist for that reason: they're the handles, sheaths, sharpeners, etc for the knife. Teach those adults who're getting themselves cut to hold the knife by the handle and use the other accessories that improve user experience.
by lblume | 2025-08-10 08:09:59+00:00
This is interesting, because I wouldn't be too sure about that. Whether I am able to play chess well exclusively depends on the strengths of my opponents, because there is no absolute baseline. If society somehow decided that what you were writing wasn't "music" anymore, you would be the only person left stating you had that skill.

I believe that most claims about one's own skills do come from outward judgement and interpretation of one's actions, not introspection. The only thing humans have is, to radically appropriate the jargon, a way longer context window (spanning over an entire lifetime!), together with many ways to compress it.
by astrobe_ | 2025-08-10 08:10:02+00:00
The marginal value being too low is just the company being bad at optimizing. Yes, contrary to fairy tales, companies are not so good at this because internal politics and/or poor management.

My country switched from 39 to 35 hours maximum working time per week, some years ago, in order to reduce unemployment (we are talking about around 25M workers). The net result was that companies did not hire more people (or less than expected), they figured out ways to make their working force more productive.

> This is disastrous for someone who'd love to work at $x/hour

This does not exist, period. If x is below the cost of housing and eating in the area, it's not worth working, or it is a last ditch job that delays dying on the streets - that's the reality we are talking about. I am pretty sure that the minimal wage they set is just above that, unless I missed the memo and California became socialist.
by BrenBarn | 2025-08-10 08:10:29+00:00
This is interesting because there can be a fine line between camaraderie and insularism. A feel-good atmosphere among workers is good, but if it doesn't include everyone, it can lead to favoritism towards those in the group relative to those outside, and that's not good. This can be especially important when people who aren't part of the org at all come into the equation (e.g., leading to the classic experience where a customer gets the feeling they're being a bother by expecting employees to help them rather than continue their private banter).

I think it's healthy to have these off-topic spaces, but also important to make sure that everyone in the org has some such space that meets their needs, and that everyone understands where the line is for when you have to put the fun aside and do what needs to be done.
by acters | 2025-08-10 08:11:22+00:00
I asked GPT 5 to spell out the individual letters of strawberry or blueberry. It did it correctly by essentially putting a space char in between the letters.

Then I simply asked it to count all unique letters in the word. GPT 5 still got it completely correct without thinking.

Lastly I asked how many r(or b) is in the word. This one for some reason switched to GPT 5 thinking with few seconds of reasoning. It out put the correct number.

I guess starting the conversation by painstakingly walking it over to the correct answer helps it out. Idk it's a silly test
by dsign | 2025-08-10 08:11:24+00:00
Nice!

As an aside, while this tool can be used to create an audiobook from a book you have in text format, for your private consumption, having an author employ something like this to create files for distribution is extremely risky, even if they acknowledge its use and intend those files to only be available on their website.

Indie authors struggle a lot to promote their works, and the new normal is that potential readers, the polite ones[^1], use the slightest hint of AI usage to discard their title and move on...as they are entitled to, since there are so many books.

I in particular have started to hire voice actors that have good acting skills and good diction but for whom English is their second language, or it's their first language but they speak something else at home; sometimes I even ask them to go a notch up with their accents. It helps with the non-AI recognition, and it also increases the appeal of the book for people who would like to try out something new. Once, I did an audition for a project and was pleasantly surprised with how much life people from around the Mediterranean basin were able to inject into their renderings, compared with people from Britain and North America.

[^1] Impolite readers set the town on fire, and then go about and spread that fire to neighboring towns, for good measure.
by rediscovery | 2025-08-10 08:13:41+00:00
Behavioral psychology goes a long way in explaining the weird distribution of responses to using LLMs to generate code:

"Gambling-like behavior in pigeons: ‘jackpot’ signals promote maladaptive risky choice"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-06641-x

The tech industry is actively promoting gambling addiction and the scary thing is that people are willingly walking into that trap.

Take a look at this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44849147

"Most of what I've learned from talking to people about their workflows is counterintuitive and subtle."

Seriously? Are we at the point of doing rain dances for these models and describing the moves as "counterintuitive and sublte"? This is some magical thinking level self delusion.

Downvote all you like, or ignore this. Agency is being taken away from us, no one gets to say we didn't see it coming down the line because we did and we said something and our peers treated us like ignorant and self interested for pointing out the obvious.
by KronisLV | 2025-08-10 08:14:09+00:00
> Chat control is bad, but it was voted out multiple times already, and is fundamentally incompatible with several member states' constitutions (based on a comment, didn't read more into it, but I believe Romania and Germany, among others).

Why on earth couldn't the member states vote for safeguards AGAINST initiatives like that, so they can't repeatedly keep trying?
by bawolff | 2025-08-10 08:15:21+00:00
That's a terrible comparison. As a society we want cars to be cheap. A race to the bottom for cars is a good thing. The cheaper the better.

We do not want a race to the bottom for wages. If full time employment is not enough for basic necessities, that is the sort of thing that leads to riots. Society in general does not want that. Society prefers stability.
by socalgal2 | 2025-08-10 08:16:47+00:00
> I haven't had this much fun programming

I'm glad you're having fun. I wish I was having fun. I've had mixed results but quite often, for me, the GPT goes off the rails and does something completely stupid. It then doubles down. It's like talking to complete idiot who happens to have moments of lucidiy. If I get lucky and get a lucid response it's great. But so often I get the nonsense response. I mean literally as bad as the "there 3 letter Bs in the word blueberry" answer eariler today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44832908) accept code instead of spelling. I wish I knew what I was doing wrong.
by malavika_manoj | 2025-08-10 08:17:06+00:00
In trading, technical analysis and strategies matter , but the right money habits can make or break your career.

Press enter or click to view image in full size

1. They Treat Trading as a Business Successful traders don’t gamble — they run operations. They have budgets, track expenses, and know exactly how much they can risk per trade.

Action step: Create a monthly “trading P&L” (profit and loss) statement and review it just like a business would.

2. They Separate Trading Capital from Personal Money Mixing personal and trading funds is a recipe for disaster. Professionals keep their trading capital in dedicated accounts and avoid dipping into it for daily expenses.

Action step: Open a separate account solely for trading activities.

3. They Keep a Reserve Fund Markets are unpredictable. The best traders prepare for downturns by having at least 3–6 months of living expenses saved, so they never feel pressured to force trades.

Action step: Build an emergency fund before scaling up your trading size.

4. They Set a Risk Limit for Every Trade Risking too much on a single trade is one of the fastest ways to wipe out an account. Successful traders often limit risk to 1–2% of capital per trade.

Action step: Decide your maximum risk per trade before you place your next order.

5. They Reinvest Profits Strategically Instead of cashing out every win, top traders reinvest part of their profits to grow their account and compound their results.

Action step: Create a reinvestment ratio — e.g., 70% back into trading capital, 30% for withdrawals.

6. They Track Every Trade and Learn from Losses A trade journal isn’t just a record — it’s a teacher. Professionals track entry, exit, reasoning, and emotional state for each trade.

Action step: Start logging trades in a spreadsheet or trading journal app.

7. They Diversify Income Streams Many full-time traders have secondary income sources — from teaching to investing to creating trading tools. This reduces pressure and keeps emotions in check.

Action step: If you focus on forex, explore opportunities with the best prop firms forex to scale your trading capital while keeping personal risk low.

Press enter or click to view image in full size

Final Thoughts Trading success isn’t just about picking the right stocks, currency pairs, or futures contracts. It’s about building habits that protect your capital, manage your risk, and keep you in the game for the long term.

Start small, track your progress, and remember — in trading, survival is victory.
by Pavilion2095 | 2025-08-10 08:17:06+00:00
"Friend" has multiple definitions, including:

> someone who is not an enemy and who you can trust

Here's another:

> a person who you know well and who you like a lot

Don't you think it's beneficial to trust and like your colleagues? I personally find it helpful. Few of us do jobs of our dreams, so having friends at work is nice. You don't have to invite them to your birthday and family events to call them friends.
by justsomejew | 2025-08-10 08:17:11+00:00
Ok, they "essentially had racial laws", with Gelfand and Landau being godlike in the Soviet science, Kantorovich having his prizes, not speaking of the jews with the title of "Hero of Soviet Union". Not speaking of people who founded the Israeli science (together with jews from other European countrues). Where did they go to university? In some parallel world?

This is not to negate the facts, but to put things in perspective.

Yes
by jltsiren | 2025-08-10 08:18:10+00:00
Critical thinking is not something that can be taught. It's a family of skills that can be learned through years of practice. Academic degrees usually place a heavy emphasis on practicing the subset of critical thinking skills relevant to the field. And you can often see the differences in the graduates. People who studied CS, mathematics, law, and history tend to approach problems in different ways.

Of course, not every graduate meets the standards of the degree they got. Many don't have sufficient internal motivation to work hard and learn. And universities often lack strong sources of external motivation. No matter whether it's the government or the student who pays for the education, there is a heavy pressure to have people graduate in time, even when they have not reached the expected standards.
by mongol | 2025-08-10 08:18:13+00:00
The theory behind it is that potatoes are the most filling food of all, so it is hard to over-eat. I tried this diet, and it works for weight loss, but it soon made me feel very unsatisfied. But with a little bit of variation, i.e. making potatoes the base and adding limited extra ingredients, you can sustain on it longer.
by shreezus | 2025-08-10 08:18:14+00:00
Spotify needs to embrace a user-centric payment model (where a portion of your subscription fee goes directly toward artists you listen to the most) rather than the current “pooled” system which massively favors large artists.

YouTube, for instance splits 55% of its YouTube Premium subscription revenue with creators, who get paid based on their share of watch time. Your YouTube Premium fee is distributed to the creators you view the most.
by inglor_cz | 2025-08-10 08:19:02+00:00
I don't believe this, show me your stats. The poorest region is Bulgaria, with life expectancy of 75. Just looking at the American Congress (which isn't even composed of the richest people), few people there die at mere 75 years of age.

Also, here in the EU, life expectancy varies a lot. Interestingly, not-so-rich countries such as Italy and Spain win over richer Austria, Germany and Denmark by a year or so.
by hulitu | 2025-08-10 08:20:39+00:00
> The fact that you cannot even see how ridiculuous this piece of propaganda is, says also about your ability to reason.

TBH, i don't believe he/she does not have the ability to reason, i think that HN has become a main place for state propaganda. Almost a third of articles are either bashing of US adversaries or "exploded but success, terrahertz transistor, could, may be, etc". The next third are AI propaganda.
by socalgal2 | 2025-08-10 08:20:51+00:00
> This took less than an hour while I was watching TV.

I certainly could not review all of those changes in an uninterupted hour. I'd need to test the design changes on multiple browsers, check they respond to zoom and window sizing. I'd have to read through the tests and check that they were not just nonsense and returning true to pass. There's no way I could do all that while watching TV in 1 hour.
by chewz | 2025-08-10 08:21:27+00:00
I agree. I find even Haiku good enough at managing the flow of the conversation and consulting larger models - Gemini 2.5 Pro or GPT-5 - for programming tasks.

Last few days I am experimenting with using Codex (via MCP ${codex mcp}) from Gemini CLI and it works like a charm. Gemini CLI is mostly using Flash underneath but this is good enough for formulating problems and re-evaluating answers.

Same with Claude Code - I am asking (via MCP) for consulting with Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Never had much success of using Claude Code as MCP though.

The original idea comes of course from Aider - using main, weak and editor models all at once.
by Ozzie_osman | 2025-08-10 08:22:39+00:00
> Of course it would be ideal if those born into privilege also could clear the SAT.

They often do. Or at least are very close.

I got into an elite engineering school (off the waitlist at the last minute, no donation/legacy), and the admission folks basically told me "we accept the top X, but if we just ignored the top X and took the next (X+1)-2X (or three), the result would be the same."

Basically, these schools are so competitive that if you wiggle things a tiny bit, on the margin, you're not really sacrificing much. However, if they wiggle too much, that would obviously degrade pretty quickly. But from my experience, that hasn't been the case.

So a school like Stanford is probably thinking, within the margin of noise, if we let in folks because their parents did well here as students/faculty/etc, that's probably net positive.

The donor one is a bit different, but again, on the margin, and with some math around donations vs Cal Grant, they probably see it nets out better for them.
by komali2 | 2025-08-10 08:23:09+00:00
As stated previously, the sockets reduce signal integrity, which doesn't necessarily make them "bad," but is why Framework wasn't able to used socketed ram to maximize the potential of this CPU.

This sort-of-interview of Nirav Patel (ceo of framework) explains in a bit more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lErGZZgUbY

Basically, they need to use LPDDR5X memory, which isn't available in socketed form, because of signal integrity reasons.

Which means you won't see an improvement if you solder your ram directly, I think mostly because your home soldering job will suffer signal integrity issues, but also because your RAM isn't LPCAMM and isn't spread across a 256 bit bus.
by inglor_cz | 2025-08-10 08:24:36+00:00
Israel says that their military conscription indeed lowers some class barriers and helps the "startup nation" work.

Details matter. If a conscription term lasts for 9 months and the richest people do their best to get their offspring exempted (which is how it worked in Czechia prior to professionalization of the army), I am not surprised by the lack of overall effect.

If a conscription term lasts 3 years and the local elite feels compelled to take part (Israel), the effect may be much bigger.

Note that college is closer to the latter in its parameters.
by acjacobson | 2025-08-10 08:25:10+00:00
> 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)

This is a compromise of allowing some of your wishes to be fulfilled after your death while preventing long term 'dead hand' control over property and resources. You can set up a foundation dedicated to "thing" but can't control what that foundation does until the end of time.

We probably don't want to live in a world that is controlled by the wishes of someone gone for 500 years who had a view of the world completely at odds with the present. It centralizes power and ties the hands of those living in the present.
by Anon4Now | 2025-08-10 08:25:14+00:00
It's a phrase coined by Shakespeare in his play Cymbeline. As far as I know, it never had a basis in science but was a common belief.

During the Cold War, with the possibility of fighting in the USSR, the US Army conducted experiments with soldiers doing extended bivouacs outside in cold weather to see whether there was increased likelihood of sickness. They couldn't find any evidence that it did.
by dist-epoch | 2025-08-10 08:25:35+00:00
Thanks for the article. I'm also doing a similar thing, here are my tips:

- https://chutes.ai - 200 requests per day if you deposit (one-time) $5 for top open weights models - GLM, Qwen, ...

- https://github.com/marketplace/models/ - around 10 requests per day to o3, ... if you have the $10 GitHub Copilot subsciption

- https://ferdium.org - I open all the LLM webapps here as separate "apps", my one place to go to talk with LLMs, without mixing it with regular browsing

- https://www.cherry-ai.com - chat API frontend, you can use it instead of the default webpages for services which give you free API access - Google, OpenRouter, Chutes, Github Models, Pollinations, ...

I really recommend trying a chat API frontend, it really simplifies talking with multiple models from various providers in a unified way and managing those conversations, exporting to markdown, ...
by ireadmevs | 2025-08-10 08:25:40+00:00
> Beta technology disclaimer > Rovo Dev in the CLI is a beta product under active development. We can only support a certain number of users without affecting the top-notch quality and user experience we are known for providing. Once we reach this limit, we will create a waiting list and continue to onboard users as we increase capacity. This product is available for free while in beta.

From https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Rovo-for-Software-Tea...
by pcl | 2025-08-10 08:25:46+00:00
> I've started running Claude Code and GitHub Copilot Agent and Codex-CLI in YOLO mode (no approvals needed) a bit recently because wow it's so much more productive, but I'm very aware that doing so opens me up to very real prompt injection risks.

In what way do you think the risk is greater in no-approvals mode vs. when approvals are required? In other words, why do you believe that Claude Code can't bypass the approval logic?

I toggle between approvals and no-approvals based on the task that the agent is doing; sometimes I think it'll do a good job and let it run through for a while, and sometimes I think handholding will help. But I also assume that if an agent can do something malicious on-demand, then it can do the same thing on its own (and not even bother telling me) if it so desired.
by radio879 | 2025-08-10 08:27:06+00:00
I don't like or love many things in life, but something about AI triggered that natural passion I had when I was first learning to code as a kid. Its just super fun. Coding without AI stopped being fun looong time ago. Unlucky brain or genetics maybe. AI sped up the dopamine feedback iteration loop to where my brain can really feel it again. I can get an idea in my head and just an hour later, have it 80% done and functioning. That gives me motivation, I won't get bored of the idea before I write the code.. which is what would happen a lot. Halfway done, get bored, then don't wanna continue.. AI fixed that
by Lammy | 2025-08-10 08:27:57+00:00
> I do not interpret their policies such that they are processing the information you added emphasis to beyond what is necessary to serve the customer. What evidence do you have to the contrary?

Respectfully, you are failing to appreciate the full scope of the problem. It doesn't matter what Tailscale do with the data. The log contents don't matter at all, only the fact that a network connection was made. Every network connection you make creates metadata about you, and the Internet itself — the path between me and Tailscale's logging endpoint — is always listening.

Think what conclusions can be drawn about a person's behavior from a log of their network connections. Encryption doesn't matter, because we're just talking about metadata; each connection's timestamp, source, destination, and port. Think about the way each additional thing-which-makes-network-requests increases the surveillance value of all the others.

Straight away, many people's NTP client tells the network what OS they use: `time.windows.com`? Probably a Windows user. `time.apple.com`? Probably Mac or iOS. `time.google.com`? You get the idea. Yeah, anyone can configure an NTP client to use any of those hosts, but the vast vast majority of people are taking the default and probably don't even know what NTP is.

Add a metadata point: somebody makes a connection to one of the well-known Wi-Fi captive portal detection hosts around 4PM on a weekday? Maybe somebody just got home from school. Captive portal detection at 6PM on a weekday? Maybe somebody just got home from work. Your machines are all doing this any time they reconnect to a saved Wi-Fi network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_portal#Detection

Add a metadata point: somebody makes a network connection to their OS's default weather-widget API right after the captive-portal test, and then another weather-API connection exactly $(DEFAULT_INTERVAL} minutes later? That person who got home is probably still home.

Anyway, you get the point that this stuff adds up! The problem with Tailscale is that its default behavior exposes metadata about entire additional classes of traffic in addition to all the examples I just mentioned that my devices were already leaking. Tailscale would have me start telling the Internet “hey I'm here and doin' stuff!” every time I read or write any file on my NAS, every time I use Steam Link remote play over LAN, every time I SSH or RDP into any of my other machines.

The free “Personal” tier is limited to only 3 users but 100 devices, so it's normal and expected to set it up the client on any and every computer you own: https://tailscale.com/kb/1154/free-plans-discounts#personal-...

My behavior would be exposed to every layer of service provider along the way: my ISP, my ISP's ISPs, the cloud provider Tailscale use to host their surveillance endpoint, Tailscale themselves if they so choose, whatever creepy secret spy implants we're not allowed to know about. No thanks! If you want to be private, you must be silent.