MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by d4rkn0d3z | 2025-08-09 20:24:00+00:00
I mean that as valuations rise before a bubble bursts, the curve provides that successive values grow, sometimes at an increasing rate. The greatest values, and change in values comes just before the bubble bursts. The point being that high valuations and increasing valuations are not very capable of distinguishing bubble/non-bubble. In fact, tulips were most valuable, and those values were climbing at the highest rate before the tulip bubble burst.
by FraserGreenlee | 2025-08-09 20:24:14+00:00
I see this is using GPT4o, any plans for something more sustainable? Would be interesting to see an https://openfreemap.org for LLMs.

Perhaps via an RNN like in https://huggingface.co/spaces/BlinkDL/RWKV-Gradio-2

Or even just leverage huggingface gradio spaces? (most are Gradio apps that expose APIs https://www.gradio.app/guides/view-api-page)
by SillyUsername | 2025-08-09 20:24:21+00:00
MCP is flawed but it learnt one thing correctly from years of RPC - complexity is the biggest time sink and holds back adoption in deference to simpler competing standards (cf XML vs JSON)

- SOAP - interop needs support of DOC or RPC based between systems, or a combination, XML and schemas are also horribly verbose.

- CORBA - libraries and framework were complex, modern languages at the time avoided them in deference to simpler standards (e.g. Java's Jini)

- GPRC - designed for speed, not readability, requires mappings.

It's telling that these days REST and JSON (via req/resp, webhooks, or even streaming) are the modern backbone of RPC. The above standards either are shoved aside or for GPRC only used where extreme throughput is needed.

Since REST and JSON are the plat du jour, MCP probably aligns with that design paradigm rather than the dated legacy protocols.
by krylon | 2025-08-09 20:24:25+00:00
As an owner of two i386 systems (both netbooks built around Intel's Atom N270), that run Debian, I am a little sad. I understand the reasoning, and I won't deny it is a very niche platform by now. But I had hoped Debian, with a history of supporting a wide range of platforms, would keep i386 going for a while longer.

Fortunately, bookworm will continue to receive updates for almost 3 years, so I am not in a hurry to look for a new OS for these relics. OpenBSD looks like the natural successor, but I am not sure if the wifi chips are supported. (And who knows how long these netbooks will continue to work, they were built in 2008 and 2009, so they've had a long life already.)

EDIT: Hooray, thanks to everyone who made this possible, is what I meant to say.
Show HN: Offline map of Budapest listing embassies (150 megabyte download)
by logicallee | 2025-08-09 20:25:15+00:00
I wanted a browser-based offline map of Budapest showing embassy locations, with around a 150 megabyte download size that I could check from my phone at any time and that would not change.

I first tested that persistent storage works at this scale in indexedDB, you can try a browser test here (small download file): https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/aug2025/index.html this is an IndexDB persistence test with random data that I used to verify that the offline functionality works as I expected, I verified it on many different occasions over multiple days and across power cycles, etc. After I verified that this was working as expected I used the help and work of a lot of different projects to complete the offline maps application.

The offline map of Budapest listing embassies (150 megabyte browser download):

http://stateofutopia.com/bpoffline/

This project leans on a lot of other projects, there is a long acknowledgments list in the application. It's a 150 megabyte offline map of Budapest (where I live) that is stored persistently in the browser's indexedDB database (you can click the remove button to remove it). I added hard-coded embassy locations and addresses, that are written into the underlying image files. These are all static images current as of August 7, 2025 and the embassy addresses were also verified as of that date.

The process of creating this involved downloading the maps, creating a web app to load the tiles, and loading the tiles, as well as adding the correct mobile support. There is a button to center on the current user's location based on GPS locations, which I verified works correctly in Budapest.

As you might expect, I used Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini as tools to complete this project successfully.

The project is served on a dedicated server I pay around $180 per month for that is not serving anything else (other than a small react front-end demo), it has enough capacity to serve the files at full speed to most users.

If you are experiencing any slowdowns, please contact your Internet Service provider to advocate for better upload and download links.
by hinkley | 2025-08-09 20:25:16+00:00
I applied for a job at AT&T using CORBA around 1998 and I think that’s the last time I encountered it other than making JDK downloads slower.

Didn’t get that job, one of the interviewers asked me to write concurrent code, didn’t like my answer, but his had a race condition in it and I was unsuccessful in convincing him he was wrong. He was relying on preemption not occurring on a certain instruction (or multiprocessing not happening). During my tenure at the job I did take the real flaws in the Java Memory Model would come out and his answer became very wrong and mine only slightly.
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-08-09 20:25:18+00:00
The amount of misconceptions in this comment are quite profound.

Copilot isn't an LLM, for a start. You _combine_ it wil a selection of LLMs. And it absolutely has severe limitations compared to something like Claude Code in how it can interact with the programming environment.

"Hallucinations" are far less of a problem with software that grounds the AI to the truth in your compiler, diagnostics, static analysis, a running copy of your project, runnning your tests, executing dev tools in your shell, etc.
by bayindirh | 2025-08-09 20:25:54+00:00
Another problem is, Canonical promised to release server components and enable alternative stores, and just forgot that they made that pledge.

Also, rugpulling users and migrating things to snaps without asking their users in order to "create a positive pressure on snap team to keep their quality high" didn't sit well with the users.

> But in practice even for flatpak the only realistic place you can publish your flatpak if you want any traction at all would be flathub

But, for any size of fleet from homelab to an enterprise client farm, I can host my local flathub and install my personal special-purpose flatpaks without paying anyone and thinking whether my packages will be there next morning.

Freedom matters, esp. it that's the norm in that ecosystem.

I was neutral-ish about Ubuntu, but I flat out avoid them now, and migrate any remaining Ubuntu server to Debian in shortest way possible.

I'm using Debian for the last 20 years or so, BTW.
by spenrose | 2025-08-09 20:26:00+00:00
So many articles should prepend “My experience with ...” to their title. Here is OP's first sentence: “I spent the past ~4 weeks trying out all the new and fancy AI tools for software development.” Dude, you have had some experiences and they are worth writing up and sharing. But your experiences are not a stand-in for "the current state." This point applies to a significant fraction of HN articles, to the point that I wish the headlines were flagged “blog”.
by EA-3167 | 2025-08-09 20:26:14+00:00
You... do understand that it isn't exported to be incinerated, it's exported in return for money, and then people and livestock in other countries eat that food. The fact that there's a transaction in the middle of the process doesn't change the value proposition, just like the absurd overvaluation of all things AI doesn't change the value proposition there either.
by dang | 2025-08-09 20:26:29+00:00
Ok, since you don't seem to want to use HN as intended, I've banned the account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
by woah | 2025-08-09 20:27:04+00:00
It sounds like the developer spent a lot of time implementing something that nobody wanted. Drawing the sky accurately may be cool, but it wasn't required in this case. It's also not innovation. It's been done before.

This is like if you were renovating your house and the drywall guy spends a huge amount of time building up round corners, but you just wanted regular square corners. Then on some drywall forum they're bitching about how "all clients are stupid" or something.
by troupo | 2025-08-09 20:27:59+00:00
> I have never heard anybody successfully using LLMs say this before. Most of what I've learned from talking to people about their workflows is counterintuitive and subtle.

Because for all our posturing about being skeptical and data driven we all believe in magic.

Those "counterintuitive non-trivial workflows"? They work about as well as just prompting "implement X" with no rules, agents.md, careful lists etc.

Because 1) literally no one actually measures whether magical incarnations work and 2) it's impossible to make such measurements due to non-determinism
by arghwhat | 2025-08-09 20:28:27+00:00
The way pan-and-scroll works in every other CAD program has been that zooming with the cursor off-center is a panning zoom (zoom centering on the cursor position), without the cursor warping anywhere, so that seems like a reasonable behavior. I do see that the described behaviour can be convenient, but definitely not a deal-breaker in the space.

Maybe I changed the config, can't remember and I must admit that it's been a little while since I had to fire it up.
by cnst | 2025-08-09 20:28:36+00:00
I think this article is missing the point that MCP is simply using the mainstream building blocks that have already regressed from what we've had previously, namely, JSON in place of proper RCP.

The ISO8601 v Unix epoch example seems very weak to me. I'd certainly expect any model to be capable of distinguishing between these things, so, it doesn't seem like a big deal that either one would be allowed in a JSON.

Honestly, my view that nothing of value ever gets published on medium, is strongly reinforced here.
by mafuy | 2025-08-09 20:28:45+00:00
Sorry but that's just nonsense. "Programming" has for a long time been a low level job. In Germany, it is taught as an apprentice level program. CS in practical universities will instead, or rather on top, teach program architecture and planning. At theory focussed universities, you'll learn how an LLM actually works, how to design high or low level protocols, how to design a new algorithm suited to your environment, etc. The programming required for these can be done for personal recreation, be outsourced, or replaced with an existing library as desired.
by dang | 2025-08-09 20:28:46+00:00
We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive comments and ignoring our requests to stop.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
by saltcured | 2025-08-09 20:29:21+00:00
Isn't that a bit like saying object-linking and embedding or visual basic macros weren't to blame in the terrible state of security in Microsoft desktop software in prior decades?

They were solving a similar integration problem. But, in exactly the same way, almost all naive and obvious use of them would lead to similar security nightmares. Users are always taking "data" from low trust zones and pushing them into tools not prepared to handle malignant inputs. It is nearly human nature that it will be misused.

I think this whole pattern of undisciplined system building needs some "attractive nuisance" treatment at a legal and fiscal liability level... the bad karma needs to flow further back from the foolish users to the foolish tool makers and distributors!
by docdeek | 2025-08-09 20:29:53+00:00
The Secret Service did it to ensure the security of the second family. Via NYT:

"Anthony Guglielmi, a Secret Service spokesman, said that for security reasons, the agency asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to temporarily increase water flow from Caesar Creek Lake, which is connected to the river.

The boats used by the Secret Service for security or an emergency evacuation are usually motorized and need deeper waters to operate, he said. Smaller boats like the ones the Vances were using, such as kayaks and canoes, can operate in shallower waters.

Mr. Guglielmi also said that the Service and local public safety officials conducted a scouting mission ahead of the excursion. During that time, one of the local public safety boats ran aground, an indication that the water level was too low for that vessel.” [0]

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/us/politics/secret-servic...
Show HN: Dvcdbg – Lightweight no_std logger and I2C scanner for embedded Rust
by Placeless | 2025-08-09 20:30:05+00:00
When creating drivers for unfamiliar boards, have you ever wanted to understand the I2C command sequence? dvcdbg is a lightweight, no_std-friendly Rust crate offering easy logging and I2C bus scanning to help you debug and explore embedded devices. Perfect for embedded Rust enthusiasts working on hardware integration.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-09 20:30:14+00:00
Does district heating actually work for heat from data centers? The exhaust temperature of computer equipment is only slightly above room temperature and the structures in need of heat would only be at slightly below room temperature when calling for heat. Heat distribution systems with tiny differentials like that tend to have poor efficiency, i.e. you're going to have consume a lot of energy on fans/pumps.

Meanwhile in a cold climate you can do cooling by just blowing outside air through a filter, so the alternative in those climates is that rather than running a compressor.
by tremon | 2025-08-09 20:30:50+00:00
The maintainer has a short explanation here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1098866#10

> The webapp is a nodejs app that requires packages that are not currently in debian.

Since vendoring dependencies inside packages is frowned upon in Debian, the maintainer would have needed to add those packages themselves and maintain them. My guess is that they didn't want to take on that effort.
by whartung | 2025-08-09 20:31:29+00:00
Have you, or anyone, ever lived with such a system?

For human beings, they sound like a nightmare.

We're already getting a taste of it right now with modern systems.

Becoming numb to "enter admin password to continue" prompts, getting generic "$program needs $right/privilege on your system -- OK?".

"Uh, what does this mean? What if I say no? What if I say YES!?"

"Sorry, $program will utterly refuse to run without $right. So, you're SOL."

Allow location tracking, all phone tracking, allow cookies.

"YES! YES! YES! MAKE IT STOP!"

My browser routinely asks me to enable location awareness. For arbitrary web sites, and won't seem to take "No, Heck no, not ever" as a response.

Meanwhile, I did that "show your sky" cool little web site, and it seemed to know exactly where I am (likely from my IP).

Why does my IDE need admin to install on my Mac?

Capability based systems are swell on paper. But, not so sure how they will work in practice.
by prmoustache | 2025-08-09 20:31:29+00:00
You can install debian and ubuntu with same DE and you'd be hard pressed to find a difference apart from the theme unless you are a power user who knows what snap is.

In fact, Ubuntu has never been an especially user friendly distro. At the beginning it was just a debian that was installed with debian's experimental installer before they decided to use it in stable. Nothing more, nothing less.

If you wanted to find a distro that was making efforts towards beginners looking for Gui config tools, you had to look at Suse and Mandrake (now Mandriva).

The only specific thing Ubuntu did for beginners is sending CDs for free at a time when not everybody had fast internet connections and would look for paper magazine to come with CD/DVD. And they have stopped doing that a loooooong time ago.
by echelon | 2025-08-09 20:31:51+00:00
Dementia is a disease that mostly effects elderly patients, so make the denominator the number of people in the 65-100 age group.

Roughly 10% of the world population, or 800 million, fall within this age group.

57_000_000 / 800_000_000 ~= 7%

That's quite a large number of people who will be impacted.

> a number that is expected to almost triple to 152.8 million cases by 2050

I don't have the statistics for the elderly population in 2050, but if we assume the proportion is the same (it won't be), then the higher incidence case rate is sobering.

It's nearly 20%.
by kodisha | 2025-08-09 20:31:58+00:00
LLM driven coding can yield awesome results, but you will be typing a lot and, as article states, requires already well structured codebase.

I recently started with fresh project, and until I got to the desired structure I only used AI to ask questions or suggestions. I organized and written most of the code.

Once it started to get into the shape that felt semi-permanent to me, I started a lot of queries like:

```

- Look at existing service X at folder services/x

- see how I deploy the service using k8s/services/x

- see how the docker file for service X looks like at services/x/Dockerfile

- now, I started service Y that does [this and that]

- create all that is needed for service Y to be skaffolded and deployed, follow the same pattern as service X

```

And it would go, read existing stuff for X, then generate all of the deployment/monitoring/readme/docker/k8s/helm/skaffold for Y

With zero to none mistakes. Both claude and gemini are more than capable to do such task. I had both of them generate 10-15 files with no errors, with code being able to be deployed right after (of course service will just answer and not do much more than that)

Then, I will take over again for a bit, do some business logic specific to Y, then again leverage AI to fill in missing bits, review, suggest stuff etc.

It might look slow, but it actually cuts most boring and most error prone steps when developing medium to large k8s backed project.
by 01100011 | 2025-08-09 20:32:11+00:00
Recently started looking at daycares in San Diego. All the good ones near me are within a couple hundred feet of a major freeway. I can't believe people send their kids to something like that.

Intuitively, I don't mind the ones 0.5 mi away from the freeway, especially if the prevailing winds place them up-wind. I have no idea if that's correct, but it seems to me that you'd have a fairly fast drop-off in noxious substances as you move away from the freeway.

We also have this recent trend of building huge apartment complexes right next to the freeways while many of the nicer areas are given to commercial and industrial uses. Makes no sense to me.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-09 20:33:23+00:00
...in one single cohort-based study that only looked at around 10K deaths between the United States and 16 European countries, not the EU or all of Europe.

Life expectancy in the EU varies a lot by country. Someone born in Sweden has a life expectancy over ten years longer than someone born in Latvia.

That one study feels like a paper that was engineered to make headlines and social media sound bites, not to be an accurate look at the entire population.
by danielbln | 2025-08-09 20:33:25+00:00
I've noticed that the quality of the output can be improved dramatically, but it takes a lot of... work isn't the right word, prior knowledge, persistence and systems, maybe.

Implementation plans, intermediate bot/hunan review to control for complexity, convention adherence, actual task completion, then provide guidance, manage the context and a ton of other things to cage and harness the agent.

Then, what it produces, it almost passes the sniff test. Add further bot and human code review, and we've got something that passes muster.

The siren song of "just do it/fix it" is hard to avoid sometimes, especially as deadlines loom, but that way lies pain. Not a problem for a quick prototype or something throwaway (and OP is right, that that works at all is nothing short of marvelous), but to create output to be used in long term maintainable software a lot has to happen, and even that it's sometimes a crap shoot.

But why not do it by hand then? To me it still accelerates and opens up the possibility space tremendously.

Overall I'm bullish on agents improving past the current necessary operator-driven handholding sooner than later. Right now we have the largest collection of developer agent RL data ever, all the labs sucking up that juicy dev data. I think that will improve today's tooling tremendously.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-08-09 20:33:55+00:00
The computer, at least aboard the enterprise, is kind of portrayed as a singular monolithic AI that can access the majority of the ship's subsystems (different networks, other computer/control units, etc) and functions. It can control nearly every aspect of the ship while talking with its human crew / commanding officers.

So very much like an LLM accessing multiple pieces of functionality across different tools and API endpoints (if you want to imagine it that way).

While it is seemingly very knowledgeable, it is rather stupid. It gets duped by nefarious actors or has a class of bugs that are elementary that put the crew into awkward positions.

Most professional software engineers might have previously looked as these scenarios as implausible, given the "failure model" of current software is quite blunt, and especially given how far into the future the series took place.

Now we see that computational tasks are becoming less predictable, less straight-forward, with cascading failures instead of blunt, direct failures. Interacting with an LLM might be compared to talking with a person in psychosis when it starts to hallucinate.

So you get things like this in the Star Trek universe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUJh7id0lK4

Which make a lot more sense, become a lot more plausible and a lot more relatable with our current implementations of AI/LLM's.
by rayiner | 2025-08-09 20:35:05+00:00
> Asian and Jewish kids today can game the system.

This is just a cope. Poor Asians outperform in standardized metrics as well. New York’s selective admissions high schools, for example, are dominated by asians but have almost half of students qualifying for free or reduced price lunch.

To another example, comparing Asian kids and Hispanic kids raised in the bottom quantile of the income distribution, the Asian kids are over three times more likely to end up in the top income quantile as adults: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/27/upshot/make-y...
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-09 20:35:06+00:00
This time.

Can you guarantee it will validate it every time ? Can you guarantee the way MCPs/tool calling are implemented (which is already an incredible joke that only python brained developers would inflict upon the world) will always go through the validation layer, are you even sure of what part of Claude handles this validation ? Sure, it didn't cast an int into a Toyota Yaris. Will it cast "70Y074" into one ? Maybe a 2022 one. What if there are embedded parsing rules into a string, will it respect it every time ? What if you use it outside of Claude Code, but just ask nicely through the API, can you guarantee this validation still works ? Or that they won't break it next week ?

The whole point of it is, whichever LLM you're using is already too dumb to not trip when lacing its own shoes. Why you'd trust it to reliably and properly parse input badly described by a terrible format is beyond me.