MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fwip | 2025-08-10 16:06:50+00:00
Design/layout/ux have value (and I don't think you're saying they don't!) - when it's done by somebody who knows what they're doing, the result is perceivably better than when it's done by somebody like me who learned HTML for her myspace blog. Stuff like accessibility, "responsive design," theming, and stuff I probably haven't even heard of, all make websites easier and more intuitive to use.

As a silly example, an LLM will happily add all sorts of animated gifs to the screen for me, even if it makes the page take three times as long to load and more difficult to use.

It's a shame to lose well-crafted experiences in favor of the lowest-common-denominator that LLMs put out, just because they're cheaper.
by rylando | 2025-08-10 16:07:43+00:00
I’m assuming each image was taken with 123 microamperes? Or is that total dosage over the 21 hours? If it’s total that’s much less than medical dosage, but if it’s per image that’s a lot more!

Thanks for the info, how interesting!

(for those who don’t know, mAs = mA • seconds = milliampere seconds. It’s how Radiographers measure how much x-ray photos are being produced by the tungsten filament in an X-ray tube. kVp is kiloVoltage potential and it’s how we measure the speed and thus the penetration power of the X-rays. 130kvp is slightly more than the 120kvp used for an avg human chest radiograph)
by whoknowsidont | 2025-08-10 16:07:55+00:00
Not much, really. A lot of LLM models need system prompts or fine-tuning to reliably use MCP; (though to be clear you don't NEED to do either of those things, it just dramatically increases the reliability of the LLM)

It's amusing to watch people refer to MCP as a set of tools, or a framework, or an SDK you can invoke, or something or other across a wide range of forums.It's just a standard. A convention. Calling it a protocol is a stretch as well. But there's no meat to it, really.

If you just used Rest API's, you'd need to create little "tools" (say, another executable) locally that the LLM can invoke that can call those API's. MCP standardizes what those tools should act like and their overall lifecycle model.

The references to it being like USB are also quite frankly absurd and delusional.

But that's the caliber of developer we're dealing with today.
by bsimpson | 2025-08-10 16:08:07+00:00
I'm shocked this attack works. I thought the last 15 years of browser dev were largely isolating domains from each other to prevent cross-site attacks, and introducing consent flows for little used and/or dangerous platform features.

Running JS inside an image format sounds like a thing they could add permissions for (or a click-to-play overlay), especially if it can talk to other sites.
by jonplackett | 2025-08-10 16:08:35+00:00
Me too. Adobe just murdered it. All they had to do was convert the exporter to html5 but they messed it up.

The best thing about flash was that it let non-coders create interactive things. The editor with a timeline + code you could stick to objects was the best feature.

I had to learn to code properly after flash died, which probably was a good thing, but I still miss that way of making things.
by dboreham | 2025-08-10 16:08:58+00:00
Seattle seems to have its own particular issues (somewhat shared by SF in my experience): there's no longer any compelling reason to go to downtown. There are plenty of reasons to avoid downtown. Restaurants in Woodinville seem very busy. Similarly restaurants in Sonoma are also very busy. I think the customers went elsewhere.

Online shopping has removed some proportion of the reason people would visit a city downtown. Remote working has removed some proportion of the reason people would be in a city downtown. There has to be some unreproducible draw to get people to go to a city: The Vatican/Mona Lisa; food and culture not available elsewhere, etc. Conversely the city has to be not a s.hole.
by 7moritz7 | 2025-08-10 16:09:01+00:00
Qwen3 is substantially better in my local testing. As in, adheres to the prompt better (pretty much exactly for the 32B parameter variant, very impressive) and is more organic sounding.

In simplebench gpt-oss (120 bn) flopped hard so it doesn't appear particularly good at logical puzzles either.

So presumably, this comes down to...

- training technique or data

- dimension

- lower number of large experts vs higher number of small experts
by runako | 2025-08-10 16:09:51+00:00
Yes. Water systems, trash collection, fire departments, parks, etc. generally are cost-effective and well administered that they are typically excluded from these discussions.

K-12 is particular is an area where critics demean public systems, but where we have yet to see anyone scale an alternative at lower cost/higher quality targeting the same goals. (Apologies if someone has done it, I am not aware.)

Note: this means that systems that exclude classes of students do not count as they have different goals. Obviously, one could more cheaply build a private education system for rich kids who all have similar capabilities. But that is not the goal of public systems, who are tasked with educating the poor and rich, the deaf, the blind, those who speak other languages, etc. Generally, they are able to do this for less money per pupil than elite private schools that are not able to serve all students.

Anyway the point getting lost here is that states do subsidize public universities, but not as much as they did in prior decades. The debate you seem to be aiming toward is whether we should have public universities, to which I would say that we should have more of them, and they should cost students less by having taxes cover a larger share of those institutions.

Edit: I want to come back to this for a moment. Water and sewers are really core functions of public governments, and in the US they basically work near 100% of the time. They involve tremendous ongoing logistical work at timescales ranging from emergency pipe burst to capacity planning for decades in the future.

The notion that government involvement means poor/expensive service delivery is a fiction constructed from the outliers of government work.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-08-10 16:10:21+00:00
>laid off thousands and yet are still hiring thousands of H1Bs

http://www.h1bdata.info

It shocked me to learn my midsized Southern city (<0.5M MSA) has 1762 H1B jobs, ostensibly because there aren't any qualified Americans; the most common complaint I hear from my peers is that "there aren't enough tech jobs here" when the reality is over 1% of our workforce is underpaid H1Bs, primarily tech field.

I don't think its hateful to want your healthy society's workforce to be made up of citizens, whatever those criteria be determined.

>A.I. is misdirection

It is playing a most useful role for idiots.
by jszymborski | 2025-08-10 16:11:25+00:00
If I had to make a guess, I'd say this has much, much less to do with the architecture and far more to do with the data and training pipeline. Many have speculated that gpt-oss has adopted a Phi-like synthetic-only dataset and focused mostly on gaming metrics, and I've found the evidence so far to be sufficiently compelling.
by onionisafruit | 2025-08-10 16:11:30+00:00
You can also interpret the Dr Dre quote an abbreviation of, “I’m gonna try (to change the course of hip hop again) and change the course of hip hop again.”

In this form “try and” means you will try to do something and that you will succeed. Some of the articles tests make more sense in this light; Of course you wouldn’t reorder the trying and the succeeding because that’s the order the events will happen.

This ignores the fact that “try and” developed concurrently with “try to” and possibly before. So it wasn’t originally an abbreviation for a phrase that was yet to be established.
by cube00 | 2025-08-10 16:12:04+00:00
I wouldn't call it cynicism.

Web services started as the same open utopia. Once everyone was in they jacked up the prices so high it killed the initial consumer apps (eg. Google Maps and Reddit)

Nobody is giving access to their walled garden for the good of open-anything. It's what the VCs and stockholders demand and they're the ones putting up the cash to keep this AI hype funded in spite of it running at a loss.

Given they haven't put security into MCP yet, I guess they'll need to do that first before they move on reinventing API keys so they can charge for access and hailing that as the next reason the line will go up.
by coldpie | 2025-08-10 16:12:17+00:00
> Fine tuning noscript to get such a site to work without obscure breakage will take a long time of trial & error, reloading again & again. Now consider that you've to do this for every one of your regular sites.

No, not really. Usually just the top-level domain is enough. Very occasionally a site will have some other domain they serve from, and it's usually obvious which one to allowlist. It takes like, ten seconds, and you only need to do it once per domain if you make the allowlisting permanent. If you get really impatient, you can just allow all scripts for that tab and you're done.

It is some extra work, and I won't disagree if you think it's too much, but you're really overselling how much extra work it is.
by kasabali | 2025-08-10 16:12:31+00:00
> Why do you think this is an attempt at a persuasion tactic

Because they said so:

> As part of that we sometimes adopt schemes that were previously used by only one of the distributions and push it to a level where it's the default of systemd, trying to gently push everybody towards the same set of basic configuration [1]

1. https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html
by ilamont | 2025-08-10 16:12:54+00:00
I once read somewhere that franchise or investor-backed restaurants in the U.S. were often categorized by AOV per diner, with menus tailored to hit these targets: Pre COVID it was $10 (quick service restaurant/QSR aka "fast food"), $20 ("fast casual" like Chipotle), $50, etc.

These numbers are trending up as costs go up, and owners are pretty ruthless about staying on top of labor and materials and discounts (https://fransmart.com/dan-rowes-tips-for-learning-the-recipe...).

Customers are really turning against the ever-increasing price of going out to eat, with the perception that quality isn't improving. Tipping is another issue that really rubs people the wrong way.

It's a joy to visit countries like Spain or Taiwan or Japan where costs to eat out are very reasonable, quality is good, tipping is nonexistent, and you don't feel like you're being hustled out the door to improve some cold turnover metric.
by MrResearcher | 2025-08-10 16:13:32+00:00
It's still not clear to me how you can make two comptime closures with different contents and pass those as a functor into the same function. It needs to have a sort of VTable to invoke the function, and yet since the contents are different, the objects are different, and their deallocation will be different too. Defining VTable in zig seems to be a pretty laborious endeavor, with each piece sewn manually.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-10 16:15:01+00:00
The price is the price. Maybe you shouldn’t have eaten avocado toast so much and saved more for retirement?

Renters have to move all the time, regardless of where they built a life and have all their things, many times because their income is being taken to subsidize people living on large lots (earned income tax is stupid, it’s working people paying for the rent seekers who get to enjoy living and profiting from larger spaces).

Another option is to have multiple kids, and bet that a few might support you in your old age.

Also, I would like to see which region nominal property taxes increased 6x in 7 years. I research real estate all around the US, and I have never seen anywhere close to that increase. You can link to a Zillow link of any random home in the broader region, as they all would have experienced the same rise.

Property tax rates are usually 0.5% to 2.5% of market value, and you would be in very rarified company if the market value of your house went up 6x from 2017 to 2024.
by bapak | 2025-08-10 16:15:03+00:00
I want to make something clear: <img src=file.svg> will not execute any scripts nor load foreignObject.

For this to work, the SVG has to be loaded in an iframe or in a new tab. Or it could be inlined in the HTML.

Nothing special about SVG really as long as you (Facebook) treat SVG files as images and don't inline it.

The SVG part only really comes in as a way to hide script tags from anyone looking at the network requests, but even then it seems that the specific SVG was crafted to download further scripts.

So what's the issue here exactly? It seems that Facebook is still somehow affected by XSS? Neat.
by 7moritz7 | 2025-08-10 16:15:18+00:00
That would be interesting. I've been a bit sceptical of the entire strategy from the beginning. If oss was actually as good as o3 mini and in some cases o4 mini outside benchmarks, that would undermine openai's api offer for gpt 5 nano and maybe mini too.

Edit: found this analysis, it's on the HN frontpage right now

> this thing is clearly trained via RL to think and solve tasks for specific reasoning benchmarks. nothing else.

https://x.com/jxmnop/status/1953899426075816164
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-08-10 16:15:25+00:00
> The best thing about flash was that it let non-coders create interactive things.

But you are not missing flash, you are Missing Macromedia Director and co. These were wonderful tools, intuitive and easy to use. Flash was an abomination of a format, and it was dragging the web down, also security wise, it's good that Apple and Google killed it.
by Fnoord | 2025-08-10 16:15:31+00:00
My post is the nuance, and as a buyer/user of GPD, Minisforum, and Xiaomi products I respectfully disagree.

Chinese companies are not on par with Western ones. The QA, safety measures, hazard compliance, warranty, or even proper English (they use an online translator service) isn't there. Cha bu duo is an accurate description of Chinese products.

From the link you send they offer 7 days return policy. In EU you got 2 weeks, legally enforced. Companies like Amazon offer even a month. Then they have a restock fee of 15%. This is AFAIK allowed (if proportional to the damage to the product) but it does not seem proportional. Companies like Amazon don't do this. And Amazon isn't great; they have a lot of cheap Chinese dropshipping brand. Then they often lie in China as well. They claim leather, when you buy it it is fake leather.

Cha bu duo can be good enough if you are on a tight budget, or if the product isn't available otherwise (how I ended up with GPD Pocket 2 back around 2018). But I have personally witnessed how Xiaomi smartphones fucked up a mid sized non-profit who dealt with very sensitive personal details. They went for budget, ended up with a support nightmare, and something which shouldn't be GDPR compliant. Cause yeah, spyware and bloatware is another issue.

Furthermore, Framework sell to Western countries.
by coldpie | 2025-08-10 16:16:11+00:00
> Do you just whitelist every site you come across if it's broken? What's the security advantage here?

Most websites load their required scripts from their own domain. So you allowlist the domain you are visiting, and things just work. However, many websites also load JS from like 20 other domains for crap like tracking, ads, 3rd party logins, showing cookie popups, autoplaying videos, blah blah blah. Those stay blocked.

Try it out: Visit your local news website, open your uBlock Origin panel, and take a look at all the domains in the left half. There will probably be dozens of domains it's loading JS from. 90% of the time, the only one you actually need is the top one. The rest is 3rd party crap you can leave disabled.

And yeah, if a website doesn't work after allowlisting two or three domains, I usually just give up and leave. Tons of 3rd party JS is a strong indicator that the website is trying to show you ads or exploit you, so it's a good signal that it's not worth your time.
Show HN: Llmswap – Python package to reduce LLM API costs by 50-90% with caching
by sreenathmenon | 2025-08-10 16:16:59+00:00
I built llmswap to solve a problem I kept hitting in hackathons - burning through API credits while testing the same prompts repeatedly during development.

It's a simple Python package that provides a unified interface for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, and local models (Ollama), with built-in response caching that can cut API costs by 50-90%.

Key features: - Intelligent caching with TTL and memory limits - Context-aware caching for multi-user apps - Auto-fallback between providers when one fails - Zero configuration - works with environment variables

from llmswap import LLMClient client = LLMClient(cache_enabled=True) response = client.query("Explain quantum computing") # Second identical query returns from cache instantly (free)

The caching is disabled by default for security. When enabled, it's thread-safe and includes context isolation for multi-user applications.

Built this from components of a hackathon project. Already at 2.2k downloads on PyPI. Hope it helps others save on API costs during development.

GitHub: https://github.com/sreenathmmenon/llmswap PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/llmswap/
by mikewarot | 2025-08-10 16:17:23+00:00
I've heard, and it seems reasonable to me, that you should never get completely out of the loop when it comes to the actual code. Type it all in yourself so that you can get a real sense of it. Do not copy and paste.

If you do otherwise you're just creating legacy code at astonishing speed. This is fine as long as you throw it away after you're done.
by lutusp | 2025-08-10 16:17:38+00:00
I wish there was a scale that quantifies the degree to which an article headline struggles to attract clicks at the expense of accuracy. Looking further, I find that the JPL source article (https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia26634-curiositys-chemcam-...) used a similar headline, perhaps a bit less click-baity.

I grant that the term "dendritic," which conveys the intended meaning without sensationalism, might be too technical for a wide audience. But "dendritic" doesn't suggest a living organism to the degree that "Shaped Like Coral" (from the JPL headline) does. And in retrospect the JPL headline begs to be turned into "... multi-billion-year-old 'coral' on Mars".

But I wait with bated breath for the next iteration, titled "Scientists Baffled By Coral Reef on Mars!"
by bob1029 | 2025-08-10 16:18:49+00:00
I am finding the approach to intrinsics in .NET to be compelling. For example, a Vector<T> type is specifically handled by the JIT:

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/src/coreclr/jit/...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.numerics...
by flohofwoe | 2025-08-10 16:20:01+00:00
The dot is just a placeholder for an inferred type, and IMHO that makes a lot of sense. E.g. you can either write this:

const p = Point{ .x = 123, .y = 234 };

...or this:

const p: Point = .{ .x = 123, .y = 234 };

When calling a function which expects a Point you can omit the verbose type:

takePoint(.{ .x = 123, .y = 234 });

In Rust I need to explicitly write the type:

takePoint(Point{ x: 123, y: 234);

...and in nested struct initializations the inferred form is very handy, e.g. Rust requires you to write this (not sure if I got the syntax right):

const x = Rect{ top_left: Point{ x: 123, y: 234 }, bottom_right: Point{ x: 456, y: 456 }, };

...but the compiler already knows that Rect consists of two nested Points, so what's the point of requiring the user to type that out? So in Zig it's just:

const x = Rect{ .top_left = .{ .x = 123, .y = 234 }, .bottom_right = .{ .x = 456, .y = 456 }, };

Requiring the explicit type on everything can get noisy really fast in Rust.

Of course the question is whether the leading dot in '.{' could be omitted, and personally I would be in favour of that. Apparently it simplifies the parser, but such implementation details should get in the way of convenience IMHO.

And then there's `.x = 123` vs `x: 123`. The Zig form is copied from C99, the Rust form from Javascript. Since I write both a lot of C99 and Typescript I don't either form (and both Zig and Rust are not even close to the flexibility and convenience of the C99 designated initialization syntax unfortunately).

Edit: fixed the Rust struct init syntax.
by sargun | 2025-08-10 16:20:08+00:00
I really like the manycores approach, but we haven’t seen it come to fruition — at least not on general purpose machines. I think a machine that exposes each subset of cores as a NUMA node and doesn’t try to flatten memory across the entire set of cores might be a much more workable approach. Otherwise the interconnect becomes the scaling limit quickly (all cores being able to access all memory at speed).

Erlang, at least the programming model, lends itself well to this, where each process has a local heap. If that can stay resident to a subsection of the CPU, that might lend itself better to a reasonably priced many core architecture.
by xtracto | 2025-08-10 16:20:09+00:00
I assume it doesn't work well for books that have non-text structured elements (code, diagrams, etc)or images (which is expected).

I wonder, is there some open source NN that can consume PDF pages and produce a "pure prose" version of it. Say, a page with mixed text and an image of a car engine would be output to the text and then a detailed description of the image, or what it is depicting.
by the__alchemist | 2025-08-10 16:20:10+00:00
- Don't let it create function signatures or structs/classes. - Instruct it explicitly not to change variable names, or things unrelated to your query - Pass it exactly the information and code it needs to solve the task, and no more - If it starts going off the rails, or you're more than a few iterations in, start over. (Likely with modified context, including any parts of its results it did correctly)
by danans | 2025-08-10 16:20:11+00:00
Why would it drive wages down? The less desperately that workers need a job (due to universal basic income), the more they can demand, assuming they also have skills that fill the employer's need.

The trick for this to work is that the UBI has to really cover a lot of basic needs.

Overall, this works better for lower skilled workers than it does for higher skilled and higher paid workers. But it could also make sense for people staying home to raise their children, a job which is not compensated today.
by simonw | 2025-08-10 16:21:07+00:00
I've been using LLM-assistance for my larger open source projects - https://github.com/simonw/datasette https://github.com/simonw/llm and https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils - for a couple of years now.

Also literally hundreds of smaller plugins and libraries and CLI tools, see https://github.com/simonw?tab=repositories (now at 880 repos, though a few dozen of those are scrapers and shouldn't count) and https://pypi.org/user/simonw/ (340 published packages).

Unlike my tools.simonwillison.net stuff the vast majority of those products are covered by automated tests and usually have comprehensive documentation too.

What do you mean by my script?
by neilv | 2025-08-10 16:21:37+00:00
> it causes browsers to surreptitiously register a like for Facebook posts promoting the site.

Wouldn't that be discovered pretty quickly, when Bob's family and friends see porn promoted to them because John apparently liked it on Facebook. Eventually, one of them would mention it to him.

"Y'know, Bob, you probably don't want to be liking that on your main Facebook account... Are you feeling OK?"