MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-29 05:56:14+00:00
There's a difference between model training and model fine tuning. Model training is not something e.g. OpenAI does a lot. The cutoff for gpt 5 was actually quite long a go. They sat on that for almost a year while they fine tuned the model. Finetuning is a lot faster and cheaper than training the full model. Training + finetuning is essentially fixed cost.

And you have to see this in proportion to the revenue. If you charge 20$/month and you have a few tens of millions of paying users and some premium tier users, that generates quite a bit of revenue.

OpenAI recently claimed they have 700 million regular users. I'm not sure how real/accurate that number is, but if one tenth of those pay for it it, that would be 1.4 billion per month coming in. That's excluding higher tiers. And I suspect they are shooting for a much larger market and are going to be nudging people to a bit higher tiers. Some have suggested that employers paying hundreds of dollars per month for AI subscriptions per employee might become normal in some sectors. That's an awful lot of money and I don't think they are done growing.

And of course with that kind of revenue, you can burn some cash on training cost. A few hundred million is basically nothing.

OpenAI has raised tens of billions of money. But they should be making 10-20 billions of revenue per year as well with some healthy growth. And they are showing very little signs of running out of money.
by postalcoder | 2025-08-29 05:56:49+00:00
You can no longer answer "what is the state of the art” by pointing to a model.

Generating a state-of-the-art response to your request involves a back-and-forth with the agent about your requirements, having a agent generate and carry out a deep research plan to collect documentation, then having the agent generate and carry out a development plan to carry it out.

So while Claude is not the best model in terms of raw IQ, the reason why it's considered the best coding model is because of its ability to execute all these steps in one go which, in aggregate, generates a much better result (and is less likely to lose its mind).
by firecall | 2025-08-29 05:56:50+00:00
> I’m currently going through an identity crisis (as a gearhead) as a result of this.

I view it as much like having an appreciation of Steam Trains and older aircraft!

Still interesting and the best are machines worthy of our ongoing attention.

FWIW I own an old Porsche 911 and an alarmingly fast EV.

I love them both.

When I get back in to the old 911, I think to myself, how the bloody hell was this even legal! It feels dangerous and exciting all at the same time. It's an event every time I turn the key and it starts making noises and the gauges spring into life and lights and switches start glowing. Then you turn the key from a cold start and listen to the sound, and you get to know exactly the state of tune. You dont even need to drive it very fast or very far and it makes you feel alive in a way my EV never does!

Now when I get in and drive my EV, it works in an astonishingly safe and effective way every time. When you stamp on the accelerator it will immediately rocket forwards in a way that makes the occupants of the car feel sick LOL

The acceleration in an EV tapers off, whereas in an older performance cat the performance builds in a more exciting way I think.

But as I say, it's like being a Steam Train enthusiast. They are what they are, from a time when they did what they did.
by pempem | 2025-08-29 05:58:36+00:00
Well lets think about it.

Software devs jobs getting less cushy is no biggie. We can afford to amp up the efficiency. Teachers jobs got "less cushy" -> not great for users/consumers or the ppl in those jobs. Doctors jobs got "less cushy" -> not great for users/consumers or the ppl in those jobs. Even waiters/ check-out staff, stockists jobs at restaurants, groceries and AMZ got "less cushy" -> not great for users/consumers or the ppl in those jobs. at least not when you need to call someone for help.

These things are not as disconnected as they seem. Businesses are in fact made up of people.
by rolisz | 2025-08-29 05:58:39+00:00
Paul Krugman (Nobel laureate in economy) said in 1998 that the internet is no biggie. Many companies needed convincing to adopt the internet (heck, some still need convincing).

Would you say the same thing ("If it helped as much as its claimed, there wouldn't be any need to try and convince people they should be using it.") about the internet?
by simonw | 2025-08-29 05:59:50+00:00
"What am I doing wrong?"

Your first prompt is testing Claude as an encyclopedia: has it somehow baked into its model weights the exactly correct skeleton for a "Zephyr project skeleton, for Pi Pico with st7789 spi display drivers configured"?

Frequent LLM users will not be surprised to see it fail that.

The way to solve this particular problem is to make a correct example available to it. Don't expect it to just know extremely specific facts like that - instead, treat it as a tool that can act on facts presented to it.

For your second example: treat interactions with LLMs as an ongoing conversation, don't expect them to give you exactly what you want first time. Here the thing to do next is a follow-up prompt where you say "number eight looked like zero, fix that".
by b_e_n_t_o_n | 2025-08-29 06:03:18+00:00
Tailwind is the closest popular thing to that and it's no wonder it's become so liked. Not so much in terms of providing a better layout system, but it just removes so much of what's wrong with CSS, at least for those who don't like it.

I haven't seen anything out there that provides an alternative but it does seem like CSS has almost added enough features you could actually build something that works. Alternatively it could be done through higher level abstractions built on something like React: <Flex>, <Grid> etc.
by viccis | 2025-08-29 06:03:41+00:00
I'm widely read. Enough that I'm not a pseud trying to imply that I read a lot of super duper hard books as evidence that my midwit opinion on emdashes is better than the guy here who made me mad by criticizing them.

Let me know if you're so stoked at reading Infinite Jest that you think that's proof I'm wrong.
by trod1234 | 2025-08-29 06:04:03+00:00
The foundational work was done by Fritz Hollwich, a German Opthalmologist in the 1970s. Supplementary work was done by John Nash Ott in the same time period when he had numerous issues with time-lapse displays with plants dying under artificial light. Together they show environmental light greatly impacts both plant kingdoms and animal kingdom species.

Many studies since then have been done, though some are not translated to English.

The high energy near N-UV (370nm and below) from common white LEDs may cause retinopothy. Individuals who received lasik treatments between 2000 and 2009 (iirc) had their lens replaced with a lens that blocked NIR/IR.

Incidents of macular degeneration are higher in such groups, along with myopia.

Prior to 1998 blue-light LEDs were not manufactured, and NIR light leakage weren't issues. There are demographic studies for countries that have high exposure to digital LED-based signage where light pollution is an issue. The incidence rates in school children in those regions are dramatic (~70% iirc); Japan was one such country that studied this.

The unfortunate thing is a lot of this research isn't available to the general public because it is paywalled. Its also not an area that has received a lot of funding compared to other areas.

The TL;DR is there's a biochemical switch in the eye that travels through to the brain which controls metabolic hormones and gene expression based upon the light you are exposed to, and it is turned on or off based on the levels of natural sunlight you are exposed to and the time of day.

There are also a number of chemicals within the eye itself that act as light traps/charge signaling, as well as melatonin based specks which have biochemical reactions with UV, and reflect UV (to a lesser degree).

That should get you started in finding references.
by al_borland | 2025-08-29 06:04:31+00:00
As someone who generally wants to write some pretty simple stuff to solve everyday problems for myself, I’m a big fan of scripting languages.

I’ve wanted to write some stuff for my Mac or phone for quite some time, but with my day job being in a whole different realm of development, I don’t have the bandwidth after work and on the weekends to sit down and learn Xcode; I’ve started so many times I’ve lost count. I’d love to have a simple solution, without so many hoops to jump through, that I could pickup in a day or over a long weekend. Currently, I tend to opt for basic webpages to fill the void.

Last time I tried Xcode wasn’t all that long ago, and there was a lot of friction to get going. The most annoying was that I couldn’t even start making something that used iCloud to save the app data without paying $99/year. I thought (from years back) that the payment was only needed to publish in the App Store. Now it asks up front if you want to use iCloud, and if you say yes, you’re met with a bunch of cryptic errors, and then ChatGPT tells you to disable iCloud if you didn’t pay.

It makes me think their tactic is to make app development annoying enough where only people getting paid to do it full time will put up with the friction.

It’s not just with Apple. I’m finding more and more dev environments are assuming everyone is looking to launch a company with delusions of being the next Facebook, and is moving further away from something that may appeal to a hobbyist or someone just looking to make something simple to solve the little annoying problems in their life.
by akst | 2025-08-29 06:04:38+00:00
Something I've wanted to make was a data type to represent a value that may or may not be known with a level of certainty over a certain distribution (or probability density function), but you could apply various transforms that may or may not have their own level of uncertainty, and you end up with a refined set of probability distributions each observation (or a new set of classifications based on whatever conditionals).

With the eventual goal of running various simulations over different randomly generated outcomes based on those probability distributions.
by kgwgk | 2025-08-29 06:05:02+00:00
If you want people to solve that math problem then state a problem equivalent to that one!

Otherwise the context of “how/why you're being given that fact” is relevant, because the problem being discussed asks for P(X+Y=2| being told that “X=1 or Y=1”) and that depends on P(being told that “X=1 or Y=1”|X=1,Y=0), P(being told that “X=1 or Y=1”|X=0,Y=1) and P(being told that “X=1 or Y=1”|X=1,Y=1).

You cannot fault people for noticing the relevance of the missing information and pointing out that the problem you posed is not the one that you think and the answer may not be the one that you propose.
by joerick | 2025-08-29 06:05:16+00:00
I've been wondering for a while if a program could "learn" covariance somehow. Through real-world usage.

Otherwise, it feels to me that it'd be consistently wrong to model the variables as independent. And any program of notable size is gonna be far too big to consider correlations between all the variables.

As for how one might do the learning, I don't know yet!
by pjmlp | 2025-08-29 06:07:59+00:00
The irony of this, is that Microsoft was trying to push CoPilot everywhere, however eventually Apple, Google and JetBrains have their own AI integrations, taking CoPilot out of the loop.

Slowly the AI craziness at Microsoft is taking the similar shape, of going all in at the begining and then losing to the competition, that they also had with Web (IE), mobile (Windows CE/Pocket PC/WP 7/WP 8/UWP), the BUILD sessions that used to be all about UWP with the same vigour as they are all AI nowadays, and then puff, competition took over even if they started later, because Microsoft messed up delivery among everyone trying to meet their KPIs and OKRs.

I also love the C++ security improvements on this release.
by flomo | 2025-08-29 06:08:14+00:00
Just fyi, the Mustang was originally marketed as more of a young woman's car, and only certain models are considered to be "musclemen" cars. Rental agencies stock these because they are fun for tourists, so glad you enjoyed it. (SF Bay has a greenbelt, so recommend to all driving the 1 or 35 Skyline to Santa Cruz.)
by eastbound | 2025-08-29 06:08:30+00:00
> I don't think it's because Americans are better at this -- I think it's cultural.

My experience is ANY delegation incurs a big loss in agency. I want to create a startup -> my employees are much less invested than I am. My remote (French) employees are even less invested. My Ukrainian employees are completely passive and I fired them. The more the distance, the less invested, the more passive.

It’s tempting to attribute this to your country’s qualities, but my experience is every country is a mixed bag.
Show HN: HTMS (write JavaScript using HTML)
by DigitalSea | 2025-08-29 06:09:22+00:00
Don't ask me where this idea came from. But a couple of years ago I had this crazy idea of writing a HTML to Javascript compiler. I went off it for a bit, but just started hacking back on it again and have something that actually works (demos and all). It's inspired a little by the early days of my development career writing Coldfusion.

Would you use this to build production apps? You'd probably be as crazy as I am for making this if you did, but still.

A fun little crazy experiment.
by mhitza | 2025-08-29 06:09:54+00:00
What distro are you running? systemd-oomd kills processes a bit quicker than what came before (a couple minutes of a slow, stuttery system). Still too slow for a server you'd want to have back online as quickly as possible.

At least now when I run out of memory it kills processes that consume the most memory. A few years back it used to kill my desktop session instead!
by anon84873628 | 2025-08-29 06:11:26+00:00
>So it seems very spooky on its face that somehow thoughts themselves could have a bidirectional relationship with chemistry.

There's no scientific reason to believe thoughts affect the chemistry at all. (Currently at least, but I'm not betting money we'll find one in the future).

When Scott Alexander talks about feedback loops like bipolar disorder and sleep, he's talking about much higher level concepts.

I don't really understand what the parent comment quote is trying to say. Can people have circular thoughts and deteriorating mental state? Sure. That's not a "feedback loop" between layers -- the chemicals are just doing their thing and the thoughts happen to be the resulting subjective experience of it.

To answer your question about the "thought trap". If "it's possible for simple normal trains of thought to latch your brain into a very undesirable state" then I'd say that means the mind/brain's self-regulation systems have failed, which would be a disorder or illness by definition.

Is it always a structural or chemical problem? Let's say thinking about a past traumatic event gives you a panic attack... We call that PTSD. You could say PTSD is expected primate behavior, or you could say it's a malfunction of the management systems. Or you could say it's not a malfunction but that the 'traumatic event' did in fact physically traumatize the brain that was forced to experience it...
by zer00eyz | 2025-08-29 06:11:38+00:00
> What am I doing wrong?

My coding ranges from "exotic" to "boiler plate" on any given day.

> Create a boilerplate Zephyr project skeleton, for Pi Pico

Yea... Asking Claude to help you with a low documentation build root system is going to go about the same way, I know first hand about how this works.

> I asked it to create 7x10 monochromatic pixelmaps

Wrong tool for the job here. I dont think IDE and Pixelmaps have as large of an intersection as you think they do. Claude thinks in tokens not pixels.

Pick a common language (js, python, rust, golang) pick something easy (web page, command line script, data ingestion) and start there. See what it can do and does well, then start pushing into harder things.
by atomicfiredoll | 2025-08-29 06:11:46+00:00
Okay, but are those radio tabs accessible?

I think that if you want to follow WAI-ARIA practices, the aria-selected, tabindex and aria-controls need to be updated via JS when the active tab changes? I'd love to be wrong about that.

Accessibility is often an afterthought. And, sometimes there's an assumption that by working with HTML/CSS directly, accessibility comes built in. Just Something to keep in mind when choosing an approach.
by tomashubelbauer | 2025-08-29 06:12:57+00:00
For my personal projects it has completely replaced the need for CC with Anthropic models for me. At work, I am waiting for native Windows support. I don't like using AI assistants via WSL. Since both CA and CC are Node apps and CC has since shipped native Windows support, I don't foresee it taking CA long either. Especially since it can be hacked to work that way today as I've experimented with here: github.com/TomasHubelbauer/cursor-agent-windows
by popcorncowboy | 2025-08-29 06:13:09+00:00
> "If it's going to happen it will" - That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable

You're right in general, but I don't think that'll save you/us from OP's statement. This is simple economic incentives at play. If AI-coding is even marginally more economically efficient (i.e. more for less) the "old way" will be swept aside at breathtaking pace (as we're seeing). The "from my cold dead hands" hand-coding crowd may be right, but they're a transitional historical footnote. Coding was always blue-collar white-collar work. No-one outside of coders will weep for what was lost.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-08-29 06:13:39+00:00
Ok. several tips I can give. 1. Setup a sub-agent to do RESEARCH. It is important that it only has read-only and web access tools. 2. Use planning mode and also ask the agent to use the subagent to research best pratices with the tech that you are wanting to do, before it builds a plan. 3. When ever it gets hung up.. tell it to use the sub-agent to research the solution.

That will get you a lot better initial solution. I typically use Sonnet for the sub-agents and Opus for the main agent, but sonnet all around should be fine too for the most part.
by atoav | 2025-08-29 06:13:40+00:00
Well, that just means the function might be named wrong?

copy_from_to_by_key(objectA, objectB, "name")

Or, much better, you use named parameters, if your language supports it:

copy_value( source=objectA, target=objectB, key="name" )

Or you could make it part of object by declaring a method that could be used like this:

objectB.set_value_from(objectA, key="name")
by os2warpman | 2025-08-29 06:13:47+00:00
> Why, given that the foam strike had occurred at a force massively out of test conditions had NASA proceeded with re-entry?

What was the alternative?

Columbia could not have made it to ISS.

Columbia could not have repaired the damage in orbit.

Columbia could not have lasted, after two weeks in space, long enough to launch a rescue mission.

I know the "In Flight Options Assessment" said they could launch at an accelerated pace but the assessment assumes that it's ok to launch another vehicle with the same problem, no fix, and no completed analysis of the cause.

Yeah, they suspected the external tank bipod foam, but WHY did the foam come off? Was it a fluke? Had some unknown factor not present in previous external tank bipod foam applications but now present in all external tank bipod foam applications manifested?

>Two major assumptions, apart from the already stated assumption that the damage had to be visible, have to be recognized – the first is that there were no problems during the preparation and rollout of Atlantis, and the second is the question of whether NASA and the government would have deemed it acceptable to launch Atlantis with exposure to the same events that had damaged Columbia. At this point, at least two of the last three flights (STS-112 and STS-107) had bipod ramp foam problems, and the flight in-between these two, STS-113, was a night launch without adequate imaging of the External Tank during ascent.

https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/caib/news/report/pdf/vol2/pa... (page 397)

That's not a valid assumption.

This is from a pre-flight safety report for STS-113

>“More than 100 External Tanks have flown with only 3 documented instances of significant foam loss on a bipod ramp”

STS-1 through STS-111, April 1981 - June 2002: three "significant" bipod foam losses

STS-112, October 2002: significant foam loss

STS-113, November 2002: night time, but they saw 112 and went "oh shit" and wrote a report

STS-107, January 2003: yet another, fatal, significant foam loss

If two of the last three flights had foam problems and the one that didn't only didn't because you couldn't see if it did, and over 100 of the preceding flights only had three, you don't risk four more lives.

You start designing a memorial at Arlington.
by reissbaker | 2025-08-29 06:14:27+00:00
I'm not deeply familiar with Mastra, but reading their docs, it looks like they use the Vercel AI SDK — which is great, since Vercel's AI SDK can work with any OpenAI-compatible API, including ours. All you need to do is set a custom API base URL; in our case, that's https://api.synthetic.new/v1

Then just plug in your Synthetic API key, and you should be able to use any supported model. For example, to use GLM-4.5, you'd pass the following model string: "hf:zai-org/GLM-4.5"

The AI SDK docs are here for using custom base URLs: https://ai-sdk.dev/docs/ai-sdk-core/provider-management

You can also join our Discord if you need help! https://synthetic.new/discord should redirect you to our Discord server :)
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-08-29 06:15:20+00:00
It’s good at doing stuff like “host this all in Docker. Make a Postgres database with a Users table. Make a FastAPI CRUD endpoint for Users. Make a React site with a homepage, login page, and user dashboard”.

It’ll successfully produce _something_ like that, because there’s millions of examples of those technologies online. If you do anything remotely niche, you need to hold its hand far more.

The more complicated your requirements are, the closer you are to having “spicy autocomplete”. If you’re just making a crud react app, you can talk in high level natural language.
by righthand | 2025-08-29 06:15:28+00:00
You may be interested in tools that parse XML, I'm sure there are libraries for parsing RSS/Atom specifically. I'm not sure what you're asking exactly. You want a tool that will read RSS feeds then reformat the data to a different (JSON?) format or something and have an API endpoint return that converted format? But then for what purpose of transforming the XML(an already suitable format)?
by masklinn | 2025-08-29 06:15:49+00:00
Got to say it’s interesting to read this comment and check the site and prices are 150~600 (the upper end being an anniversary edition aluminium and stainless beast).

Obviously really expensive for what is at the core a spring and an electric contact or two (depending on type) — which can be just one part at the expense of longevity, but as hobby pieces it seems quite reasonable, I’ve seen way worse spends from friends who fell in love with mechanical keyboards.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-29 06:17:13+00:00
That has always remained my sole use of Python, scripting OSes and applications, my use of Tcl for application software trained me avoiding languages that always require going down to C for any performance related task.

Best of all with this approach, is that what is in the standard library suffices, no need to mess up with venvs, PYTHONPATH, or whatever is the current trend.