MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by commakozzi | 2025-09-29 19:03:36+00:00
It does feel like it has to be real. I've noticed it since chatGPT with GPT-3.5, once it hit big news publicly and demands were made on "censoring" its output to limit biases, etc. (not inherently a problem to do this with LLMs as a society, but it does affect the output for obvious reasons). Whatever workflow OpenAI and others have applied, seems to be post-release somehow? i'm ignorant and just speculating, but literally every model release i've noticed it. Starts strong, ends up feeling less capable days, weeks, months after. I'm sure some of it could be in the parallelization of processing that has to occur to service the large amount of requests. and more and more traffic are spreading it thin?
by Snuggly73 | 2025-09-29 19:03:50+00:00
Ignoring the tests, the first change was adding a single parent id column and the second "more complex" refactoring added few more hash columns to the table (after you've specified that you wanted them, i.e. not an open-ended question)

Its a very impressive model, but I think we have different views on what is complex.
by DonHopkins | 2025-09-29 19:03:51+00:00
I hope the new API is flexible enough to support my proposed /dev/seven, an infinite source of ^G.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17532285

>DonHopkins on July 14, 2018 | parent | context | favorite | on: The everything-is-a-file principle – Linus Torvald...

>I always wanted /dev/zero, which is used to mmap zeros into memory, to be more general and use the device minor number to define which byte gets mapped, so you could mknod /dev/seven with a minor number of 7, to provide an infinite source of beeps!
by lexarflash8g | 2025-09-29 19:04:31+00:00
Just tested this on a rather simple issue. Basically it falls into rabbits holes just like the other models and tries to brute force fixes through overengineering through trial and error. It also says "your job should now pass" maybe after 10 prompts of roughly doing the same thing stuck in a thought loop.

A GH actions pipeline was failing due to a CI job not having any source code files -- error was "No build system detected". Using Cursor agent with Sonnet 4.5, it would try to put dummy .JSON files and set parameters in the workflow YAML file to false, and even set parameters that don't exist. Simple solution was to just override the logic in the step to "Hello world" to get the job to pass.

I don't understand why the models are so bad with simple thinking outside the box solutions? Its like a 170 iq savant who can't even ride public transporation.
by kccqzy | 2025-09-29 19:04:48+00:00
> It's worth being careful to only add indexes that will be used by real queries.

This reminds me of a technique used by Google App Engine SDK a long time ago before it was called cloud. Basically in development mode, the SDK captures the kind of queries you make, and then automatically add any index that would speed up this query into a configuration file. You then later deploy with this configuration file, which tells the production data store to create such indexes. I thought this was a genius idea. Not sure if something similar exists for SQLite.
by bonoboTP | 2025-09-29 19:04:56+00:00
That's a very economics-minded approach. Also, I'm not quite sure what the futures would be about. That a paper will... get N citations? get a job for the first author? Achieve N stars on GitHub? N likes on social media? Be patented and put in a product? Turn X USD in profit? Bet on retraction? Bet on acceptance? On awards? Or replicability?

The first question is what scientific research is actually for. Is it merely for profitable technological applications? The Greek or the humanistic or the enlightenment ideal wasn't just that. Fundamental research can be its own endeavor, simply to understand more clearly something. We don't only do astronomy for example in order to build some better contraption and understanding evolution wasn't only about producing better medicine. But it's much harder to quantify elegance or aesthetics of an idea and its impact.

And if you say that this should only be a small segment, and most of it should be tech-optimization, I can accept that, but currently science runs also on this kind of aesthetic idealist prestige. In the overall epistemic economy of society, science fills a certain role. It's distinct from "mere" engineering. The Ph in PhD stands for philosophy.
by iagooar | 2025-09-29 19:05:20+00:00
I think that is an interesting observation and I generally agree.

Your point about prompting quality is very valid and for larger features I always use PRDs that are 5-20x the prompt.

The thing is my "experiment" is one that represents a fairly common use case: this feature is actually pretty small and embeds into an pre-existing UI structure - in a larger codebase.

GPT-5-Codex allows me to write a pretty quick & dirty prompt, yet still get VERY good results. It not only works on first try, Codex is reliably better at understanding the context and doing the things that are common and best practice in professional SWE projects.

If I want to get something comparable out of Claude, I would have to spend at least 20mins preparing the prompt. If not more.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-09-29 19:05:27+00:00
Probably no better or worse than the alternative. That aside, the example doesn't understand the standards in question.

The governing standard for geospatial data representation is ISO 19125, which defines (longitude, latitude) order. GeoJSON naturally conforms to ISO 19125 since it is a format for processing data on computers.

ISO 6709 is essentially a print formatting standard and orthogonal to storing geospatial data on computers. That some data file formats happen to be human readable does not make ISO 6709 apply.

If you are processing geospatial data on computers the correct order is always (longitude, latitude).
by int_19h | 2025-09-29 19:06:48+00:00
This is more propaganda than reality, though. Most democratic societies today have evolved out of very non-democratic ones gradually, in a process where the elite had given up some of its privileges to prevent losing all. One of the tricks involved in that process was the notion of a "popular mandate" - not that this isn't a thing, but genuine cases of it are far less common than politicians using the fact that more people voted for them as some kind of argument in support for some specific policy of theirs.

In practice the difference between a democratic and a non-democratic society is more quantitative. In a non-democratic society, people still have a check on the government - they can revolt, and, being far more numerous than any security apparatus that can be maintained over a long time, the rulers therefore cannot simultaneously piss off too many people at the same time. So the bar is pretty high, but not entirely insurmountable. In a democratic society, the people also get an option of protest voting, which provides a safety valve that bleeds off a lot of effort that would have otherwise gone into potential violence, but at the price of making this kind of "voter revolt" less costly to participants and thus more likely. However, representative democracy is still pretty bad at accurately reflecting population preferences - it still takes a lot of abuse before protest voting becomes prevalent enough to alter election results. And then, of course, new mechanisms were developed to "manage" democracy - more efficient propaganda, mostly.

Thus, in practice, governments can indeed be treated mostly similarly to other organizations in this regard.
by cloverich | 2025-09-29 19:06:52+00:00
> You want proof for critical/supportive criticism? Then almost in the same sentence you make an insane claim without backing this up by any evidence.

Nearly every critical reply to my comment bases that criticism on the lack of examples and details I included for my claim which is the very thing I am suggesting we do (i.e. they are, ironically, agreeing with me?). I am sorry I thought that intentional bit of irony would help make the point rather than derail the request.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-29 19:07:12+00:00
> The main takeaway from this for me is that SQLite’s query planner seems to be pretty limited.

This doesn't appear to be true at all.

The order of WHERE conditions does not matter; the order of columns in an index does.

Everything you're describing is pretty much just how indexes fundamentally work in all databases. Which is why you're saying it hasn't been "solved" by anyone.

Indexes aren't magic -- if you understand how they work as a tree, it becomes very clear what can be optimized and what can't.

It is true that occasionally query planners get it wrong, but it's also often the case that your query was written in a non-obvious way that is equivalent in terms of its formal results, but is not idiomatic -- and making it more idiomatic means the query planner can more easily understand which indexes to use where.
by anonymars | 2025-09-29 19:07:39+00:00
This repeatedly confuses correlation and causation. The shape is seasonal - of what relevance is the shape? Why shouldn't we expect there to be a seasonal component of an airborne virus?

Do you see that the all-cause mortality rate is 50-100% higher than prior years? I'm not going to try to suss it out in German but the same pattern holds in the UK: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/....

Similarly, to say "deaths increased when vaccines happened" is the most clear illustration. Why did the vaccines exist? Could that be related to the mortality increase? You can see charts here for Switzerland, US, UK: https://science.feedback.org/review/misleading-instagram-pos...
by landl0rd | 2025-09-29 19:08:36+00:00
Classes are a different story, but at least for the legion of would-be gymfluencers that show up in gyms frequented by us zoomers, there's an easy solution: tell them to please not film you. If they don't comply, mess up their video. Deliberately walk across the camera. Deliberately get in the way. Take the machine against which they're resting a cell phone and start using it. Make funny faces. Whatever.

More people should understand you are no more morally obligated to behave sociably toward those exhibiting antisocial behavior than you are to stay your hand from a man who hits you.

Then there are those who film in the locker rooms which arguably should be reason to ban them from said gyms.

Imo these types should stick to "influencer gyms". They exist. Alphaland in Texas is a great example; a friend of mine frequented it as she started her bodybuilding page. Worked great for her. Just stay the hell out of the "normal people" gyms.
by dcminter | 2025-09-29 19:08:44+00:00
This is just a by the by, but in British English "feeling poorly" mostly means that you are ill. Amusingly it's become slightly euphemistic, so if someone is "a bit poorly" they probably have sniffles or a minor fever. If they are "very poorly" then you probably heard it from a hospital and they're just about dead.

Thus "I feel badly" ... "ok, what did you do?" vs. "I feel poorly" ... "ok, I'll get a bucket."
by g42gregory | 2025-09-29 19:09:18+00:00
Yes, you could write the code yourself, but keep in mind that this activity is going away for most engineers (but not for all) in 1 - 2 years.

I think a better advice would be to learn reading/reviewing an inordinate amount of code, very fast. Also heavy focus on patterns, extremely detailed SDLC processes, TDD, DDD, debugging, QA, security reviews, etc...

Kinda the opposite advice from the blog. :-)

Edit: Somebody pointed out that, in order to read/review code, you have to write it. Very true. It brings a questions of how do you acquire/extend your skills in the age of AI-coding assistance? Not sure I have an answer. Claude Code now has /output-style: Learning, which forces you to write part of the code. That's a good start.
by surgical_fire | 2025-09-29 19:09:19+00:00
Elden Ring is a game that I really wanted to like. I really tried to like. But it failed me, so I dropped it, never to return.

I enjoyed the exploration, the setting, the cryptic writing. Even some of the more obtuse game design decisions appealed to my tastes, such as the lack of a quest log and a map that is just a geographical representation of the world, with minimal markers. It forced me to pay more attention to the world, recognize the terrain, learn the paths to navigate, etc. It was a game where I really was ready to lose myself in.

But it ultimately failed to have minimal respect for my time, and for that I hated it.

First when I accidentally killed a boss that could be spared. I didn't want to kill him, I just happened to be too strong and failed to react mid combo when he surrendered. The game fucking auto saved and I had to start over from scratch.

Second time when I was in the middle of a conversation when I was interrupted by my wife. I couldn't load a game to watch the cutscene again. It fucking autosaved again. I had to read a transcript online to understand what was going on. Total immersion killer.

Lastly, I remember a boss that took me like 40 attempts to kill. I am okay with the challenge. I am not okay with having to go through a mostly boring gauntlet of enemies for each attempt. It offered no challenge, I just felt like I was filling a form before each attempt. A long, 10m long form.

After killing that boss I uninstalled.

Rant over.
Show HN: RecordMark – Annotate audio (pins, highlights, search)
by alipourhadi | 2025-09-29 19:09:24+00:00
Hi HN! We built RecordMark to make voice notes easy to capture and easy to find later.

What’s different • Drop pins while recording: text, tags, photos, highlights (time-stamped) • Live transcription + a concise summary from the transcript on Home • Zoomable waveform with auto-scrolling playhead and precise seek • Search across audio, transcript, and annotations • Folders to organize projects and move recordings • Clean audio: clip guard, input gain, optional auto-split • Flexible formats: WAV, M4A (AAC), MP3, CAF, AIFF

Why we made it Most recorders help you capture, but not recall. RecordMark is built around recall: pin the moment, see words live, get a quick summary, and jump to the exact second.

Privacy On-device by default. iCloud/Files export is optional. We don’t record phone calls.

Pricing Free download. Pro unlock removes the time limit for long sessions.

Looking for feedback — Anything rough or confusing? — Which export formats/workflows do you use most? — What should we optimize for meetings/interviews/lectures?

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/recordmark-annotate-audio/id67... Support / Privacy / EULA links are in the app and on our support page.

Thanks for taking a look!
by herbertl | 2025-09-29 19:09:30+00:00
> You need to deliberately prioritize your growth and choose to go against the current. You need to deliberately introduce friction to the process.

This resonates! Doing things the long, hard, stupid way is the extreme version/application of this opinion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41512207

Also, since convenience/comfort are so widely available now, you practically need to choose discomfort in order to grow: https://herbertlui.net/personal-growth-happens-after-volunta...
by GFischer | 2025-09-29 19:09:56+00:00
Meanwhile I had a terrible experience with DB (Deutsche Bahn) during the European summer two years ago, although it was partly out of their control (weather related delays and cancellations), I had to take awful detours, had paid for 1st class on ICE and ended up on regional trains up and down and lost one day of my holidays. No compensation whatsoever, although maybe I had to fill some online form for that.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-09-29 19:10:14+00:00
I feel like at least part of the issue is that the internet is a different kind of public than everywhere else. it's not transient, and it's not limited to the people who happened to be in the same part of public as you at the same time. instead it's a fully-automatable, permanent record that is 100% available to all present and future humans. that deserves consideration to my mind.
by saalweachter | 2025-09-29 19:10:40+00:00
I feel like if you announced your "picture day", you'd also get a subset of the gym members who wanted to show up that day looking their best. (And a subset of jokers who want to see if they can sneak their way into the marketing material so that there's a picture of someone exercising in a tuxedo or whatever if you look closely enough.)
by Jonovono | 2025-09-29 19:10:54+00:00
I had Claude Code build a fairly complex swiftui app (5+ screens), using Firebase AI Logic and other packages. First prompt it got pretty much foundation for the entire thing set up, then over the next day got it working exactly like I wanted. The thing that took the longest was getting through app review. I was impressed how well it knew SwiftUI and Swift composable architecture.
by Implicated | 2025-09-29 19:11:20+00:00
Well, I don't have the context myself about what's happening in this example, though I don't see anything about auth myself.

And I left that window at 5-20x because, again, no real context. But unless I was already in the middle of a task and I was giving direction that there was already context for - my prompt is generally almost never _this_ short. (referring to the prompt in the top level comment)

> A 20x longer prompt doesn't sound like a satisfying solution to whatever issue is happening here.

It wouldn't be, given the additional context given by the author in a sibling comment to yours. But if you had specific expectations on the resulting code/functionality that 20x longer prompt is likely to save you time and energy in the back and forth adjustments you might have to make otherwise.
by sschueller | 2025-09-29 19:11:51+00:00
I am curious what it would have been like if social media existed back when Hitler was in power.

Do these people really think they will get away unscathed at this point in a few years?

"Hey remember that time you met with that guy that was running a genocide?"

People are trying to distance themselves from Epstein, saying they didn't know what he did. It ain't working and this is way worse.
by OutOfHere | 2025-09-29 19:13:09+00:00
This submission too will get flagged and will disappear like all the other legitimately critical posts.

ICE looks to be operating on very poor intel and with little regard for basic human rights. In assuming that people are guilty, ICE is undoing civil progress going back centuries. If their wrongful behavior continues, I hope they get sued and bankrupted to the point where they have to cease operations. Also, I hope that more states pass laws requiring and actually enforcing them to operate unmasked.
by cloverich | 2025-09-29 19:13:41+00:00
Sure. This is an internal web app that uses react on the front end and rails on the back end. Typical examples I see LLM success with are writing and writing up routes/controllers/models, writing specs for those, abstracting components, writing front-end vitest/storybook entries. A typical request (filenames and such redacted) is like: "We recently added <link to model>. We refactored our approach for <goal> to <link to different model file>. We need to refactor <A> to be like <B> in these ways. Do that, then update the spec to match the pattern in <file Y>. Run rspec and rubocop when done, and address any issues". I then either wait or go do something else, then review the code and either ask for follow up, or fix minor issues. Sometimes it follows the wrong pattern and I ask it to adjust, or simply git checkout -- and say try again you did Y wrong.

Roughly speaking that is how I think through my work, and when I get to the point of actually writing the code having most of the plan (context) in my head, I simply copy that context to the LLM then go to do something else. I only do this if I believe the LLM can do it effectively, so some tasks I do not ask for help at all on (IMHO this is important).

I also have it help with scripts, especially script that munge and summarize data. I know SQL very very well, but find it still a bit faster to prompt the LLM if it has the schema on hand.

Do you find ^ helpful? i.e does that match how you prompt and if not, in what ways does it differ? If it does, in what ways do you get different results and at what step?
by zahlman | 2025-09-29 19:14:08+00:00
Even Wikipedia does not describe that organization (I assume you don't mean the Greater Nashville Apartment Association...) as itself an extremist organization. (It is also described as defunct.) By its very nature, statements by its members (which you have not evidenced) cannot be taken at face value. Auernheimer's views are his own. The only identification I can find of a possibly other leader of the organization (who you have not named) leads to nothing that confirms any detail of your story - not the supposed Nazism of that person (assuming it's the right person), nor employment at Cloudflare, nor any knowledge on their part.

In short, I can find no good reason to believe this.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-29 19:14:30+00:00
I agree with other commenters that there's nothing new or surprising here [1] if you actually understand how indexes work. Which, if you're working in SQL, you should.

But the main takeaway, I disagree with. The author explains:

> When I first set up Scour's database, I put a bunch of indexes on the items table without really thinking about whether they would help. For example, I had separate indexes on the published date, the language, and the quality rating. Useless. It's more important to have one or a small handful of good composite indexes on multiple columns than to have separate indexes on each column.

Yes, the biggest error is throwing indexes at a table without having the slightest idea if they're helpful. But the idea that a smaller number of composite indexes is not the answer either.

The answer is to go through every single query and make sure you have an index that matches the query, adding/changing indexes (including composite indexes) or rewriting queries as required.

Indexes don't exist in a vacuum. They are optimizations for specific queries. Proper database design requires knowing exactly what information you will need to look up using which parameters, and designing the tables and indexes to produce that performantly. When you need to look up data in new ways, you often need to add new indexes or rearchitect tables entirely.

[1] Except that the partial index match condition treats 0.9 and .9 as different. That is unexpected to me, but it is kind of in the docs at "The terms in W and X must match exactly": https://www.sqlite.org/partialindex.html
by IlikeKitties | 2025-09-29 19:14:45+00:00
> csam content is filtered

Filtered how? By some keywords I don't want to know? What about encrypted zips of CSAM? There's no way to filter that in reality.

If you want to learn more about why and you can either speak German or can handle youtubes auto translate i recommend this documentation on the matter[0]. The Pedo Criminals are using scene methods to share their illegal content.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ndk0nfppc_k
by jcranmer | 2025-09-29 19:16:00+00:00
> * uniform function call syntax that is : a.foo(b) vs foo(a, b) being interchangeable.

Herb Sutter has proposed this: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2023/p30... (twice, even, there was an older version of the paper several years ago that didn't pass).

I'm resolutely opposed to such a thing because, having had to actually wade through C++'s name lookup and overload resolution rules in the past, they're a dense, confusing morass of logic that you can only stand to stare at for a half-hour or so before your brain turns to mush and you need to do something else, and anything that adds to that complexity--especially in "this makes things two things nearly equivalent"--is just a bad idea.

(For an example of C++ overload resolution insanity, consider this:)

// Given these overloads... void f(std::float32_t); void f(double); // Which one does this line call? Assume float/double are standard IEEE-754 types. void f((float)1);