MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pclmulqdq | 2025-09-02 19:17:55+00:00
It's explicit that the code is async, but how the asynchrony happens is completely implicit with async/await, and is managed by a runtime of some kind.

Kernel-style async code, where everything is explicit:

* You write a poller that opens up queues and reads structs representing work

* Your functions are not tagged as "async" but they do not block

* When those functions finish, you explicitly put that struct in another queue based on the result

Async-await code, where the runtime is implicit:

* All async functions are marked and you await them if they might block

* A runtime of some sort handles queueing and runnability

Green threads, where all asynchrony is implicit:

* Functions are functions and can block

* A runtime wraps everything that can block to switch to other local work before yielding back to the kernel
by imiric | 2025-09-02 19:18:12+00:00
There is untapped potential for building modern web sites by leveraging standard web technologies, such as the template element, and sidestepping a whole bunch of bloated abstractions that plague most modern web frameworks. Essentially, we need the simplicity of old school web development married with modern web features.

There are a few modern libraries and frameworks that trend in this direction: Nue, Datastar, Lit. The DX and UX with these is a breath of fresh air.

I've experimented with this approach myself with Miu[1]. It doesn't quite integrate with Web Components nicely yet, but it's almost there. I have some bones to pick with the WC standard, but that's a separate matter.

My wish is that modern web development can eventually not require any 3rd party libraries or frameworks, just like in the early days. Web developers got used to these because of limitations of native web APIs, but the web has grown leaps and bounds since then. Before the modern workflow became standard, it was magical to open a text editor, and have a functioning web page within a few minutes. No dependencies, no build step, no nonsense. Let's bring that back, please.

[1]: https://github.com/hackfixme/miu
by jama211 | 2025-09-02 19:19:11+00:00
The devil is always in the details with these studies. What did they measure, how did they measure it, are they counting learning the new tool as unproductive time, etc etc etc. I’ll have to read them myself. Regardless, I’ll be sad if it makes most people less productive on average if that’s the scientific truth, but it won’t change the fact that for my specific use case there is a clear time save.
by lawlessone | 2025-09-02 19:19:48+00:00
>Realistically, how useful is local LLM usage?

For me, none really, just as a toy. I don't get much use out of online either. There was Kaggle competition to find issues with OpenAI's open weights model, but because my RTX gpu didn't have enough memory i had to run it very slowly from with CPU/ram.

Maybe other people have actual uses, but i don't
by spiralcoaster | 2025-09-02 19:20:05+00:00
Feel free to go back to a world in which human beings stopped developing technology at the sharpened stick. It's pretty easy to buy a large, remote plot of land in many states in the US, so you can live in your technology-free paradise.

Just to clarify, this statement will always be true: "N members of our species aren't ready for technology Y". And N will always be greater than or equal to 1.
by daxfohl | 2025-09-02 19:20:37+00:00
Yeah, I can't even get them to retain a simple state. I've tried having them run a maze, but instead of giving them the whole maze up front, I have them move one step at a time, tell them which directions are open from that square and ask for the next move, etc.

After a few moves they get hopelessly lost and just start wandering back and forth in a loop. Even when I prompt them explicitly to serialize a state representation of the maze after each step, and even if I prune the old context so they don't get tripped up on old state representations, they still get flustered and corrupt the state or lose track of things eventually.

They get the concept: if I explain the challenge and ask to write a program to solve such a maze step-by-step like that, they can do that successfully first-try! But maintaining it internally, they still seem to struggle.
by abraxas | 2025-09-02 19:20:44+00:00
> it's pretty clear at this point that LLMs are never going to lead to general intelligence.

It is far from clear. There may well be emergent hierarchies of more abstract thought at much higher numbers of weights. We just don't know how a transformer will behave if one is built with 100T connections - something that would finally approach the connectome level of a human brain. Perhaps nothing interesting but we just do not know this and the current limitation in building such a beast is likely not software but hardware. At these scales the use of silicon transistors to approximate analog curve switching models just doesn't make sense. True neuromorphic chips may be needed to approach the numbers of weights necessary for general intelligence to emerge. I don't think there is anything in production at the moment that could rival the efficiency of biological neurons. Most likely we do not need that level of efficiency. But it's almost certain that stringing together a bunch of H100s isn't a path to the scale we should be aiming for.
by Mars008 | 2025-09-02 19:20:56+00:00
> Yes, helicopters can't fly at extremely high altitudes because their rotor blades need dense air to generate lift,

On Mars atmosphere is about 1%, or close. Still helicopter did fly. Correctly saying 'helicopters designed for dense atmosphere cannot fly in thin'.

It is possible to build a drone specifically for these cases. Which will be able to lift 200kg off Everest. With long, wide blades. It's not that expensive and not a rocket science onymore.
by idle_zealot | 2025-09-02 19:21:30+00:00
This is something I have a hard time understanding. What is the point of this aggressive crawling? Gathering training data? Don't we already have massive repos of scraped web data being used for search indexing? Is this a coordination issue, each little AI startup having to scrape its own data because nobody is willing to share their stuff as regular dumps? For Wikipedia we have the official offline downloads, for books we have books3, but there's not an equivalent for the rest of the web? Could this be solved by some system where website operators submit text copies of their sites to a big database? Then in robots.txt or similar add a line that points to that database with a deep link to their site's mirrored content?

The obvious issues are: a) who would pay to host that database. b) Sites not participating because they don't want their content accessible by LLMs for training (so scraping will still provide an advantage over using the database). c) The people implementing these scrapers are unscrupulous and just won't bother respecting sites that direct them to an existing dumped version of their content. d) Strong opponents to AI will try poisoning the database with fake submissions...

Or does this proposed database basically already exist between Cloudflare and the Internet Archive, and we already know that the scrapers are some combination of dumb and belligerent and refuse to use anything but the live site?
by Leftium | 2025-09-02 19:21:32+00:00
I discovered this CSS oddity while trying to figure out why my plan to use (negative) margins to create a new "effective" content box wasn't working with percent units (but worked with other units).

The best explanation seems to be in the middle of this article: https://www.aleksandrhovhannisyan.com/blog/css-aspect-ratio/...
by forest_pink | 2025-09-02 19:21:44+00:00
There are plenty available: https://jamstack.org/headless-cms/ Keystone mb?

You may also want to check things like Appwrite for hosted solution (free plan available) or PocketBase for self-hosting on any VPS (fly.io does not charge below 5$). Those are more developer-focused, but also should be much less restrictive.

Have no real experience with any of them.
by dingnuts | 2025-09-02 19:22:29+00:00
they meant that to be interpreted as a statement of how good GPT-2 is but the real problem is how they've marketed everything that came after to people who can't know better

it's EXACTLY the same situation as Musk selling "Full Self Driving" and then playing dumb when people go to sleep behind the wheel of their Tesla

These rich men should be in prison for this kind of false advertising
by guyzero | 2025-09-02 19:22:46+00:00
The PATH is great as Toronto has pretty variable weather and on a snowy or rainy day it sure beats being outside. One thing this article doesn't note is that post-pandemic half of it is empty. So many empty retail storefronts. There's still the assortment of Shoppers and various food courts and a handful of actual store under TD Place. But compared to a decade ago, it's so empty.
by sinuhe69 | 2025-09-02 19:23:04+00:00
I find the simple expression of a causes b as in this database without qualification not very helpful. At least, we need causal graphs/causal digram loops to describe these causal relationships better.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_graph

Harvard has a free course about it: https://www.edx.org/learn/data-analysis/harvard-university-c...
by stego-tech | 2025-09-02 19:23:09+00:00
Basically what I was saying a week ago about the rise of China as an empire: we already have this at home, and it’s worse because we don’t bother regulating it.

Look, social credit is neither a new concept nor is it destined to be some Orwellian/Black Mirror/Authoritarian tool that keeps undesirables enslaved in low-wage work or targeted for “reeducation” - that’s a decision we allow Governments or Corporations to make on our behalf by refusing to bother regulating these systems or holding bad actors accountable.

The sooner we accept that this is possible, that it’s already here in many cases, the sooner we can begin negotiating regulations in good faith with one another. Maybe it’s placing limits on the data corporations can gather and retain, or maybe it’s preventing the government from acquiring private data without transparent judicial warrants tied to crimes. Maybe it’s something else entirely!

All I know is the current status quo enriches Capital while harming people, governments, and Democracy. I think that’s bullshit, and we should do something about it.
by snerbles | 2025-09-02 19:23:27+00:00
> The problem here isn't the crawlers, it's your price-gouging, extortionate hosting plan.

No, it's both.

The crawlers are lazy, apparently have no caching, and there is no immediately obvious way to instruct/force those crawlers to grab pages in a bandwidth-efficient manner. That being said, I would not be surprised if someone here will smugly contradict me with instructions on how to do just that.

In the near term, if I were hosting such a site I'd be looking into slimming down every byte I could manage, using fingerprinting to serve slim pages to the bots and exploring alternative hosting/CDN options.
by fulafel | 2025-09-02 19:23:45+00:00
Also back then multicore wasn't as prevalent, it made sense to multiplex a zillion things onto one CPU process. Whereas now servers have hundreds of cores / SMT vCPUs [1] and running a lot of processes makes much more sense.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amd-announce...
by pants2 | 2025-09-02 19:23:56+00:00
Sure, OpenAI shouldn't have had a 4o sycophancy issue, but who would've guessed that a "be nice to the user" fine-tune would turn in to a murder-suicide?

I think OpenAI is only now beginning to realize how connected some people are to their product and that the way their models behave has a huge impact.
by ManlyBread | 2025-09-02 19:24:09+00:00
>credit score

Non-existent in the country I live in. There's a national registry of debtors and people end up there for a very good reason.

>Linkedin, Amazon

There's no reason to consider these to be essential services, I am not using either and I'm doing perfectly fine in life.

>Instagram

LOL

>Uber, Airbnb

There are several copycats, traditional taxis and hotels are still a thing and public transportation or your own car are valid alternatives

What even is this article? I skimmmed the rest of it and it just seems like the crux of the article is about proving how China's systems are actually fine while ommitng the fact that their systems are mandated by the state. Is Chinese propaganda what makes it to the front page of HN nowadays?
by devilkin | 2025-09-02 19:24:10+00:00
Before I would even consider something like this:

* Where's your privacy policy?

* What/how are you handling the different customer protection laws? What juristictions are you working in? Where's the data hosted?

* Where's the design description?

* What encryption are you actually using? If you rolled your own, then well.. good luck.

* How could you ensure end-to-end encryption over multiple protocols, without either completely reverse engineering said protocols? If your answer here would be that you're using a central server where messages get passed between services (and thus decrypted), it isn't end-to-end.

The site is also very flaky. Sometimes it loads, sometimes it doesn't. There are so many questions, and zero answers.
by robocat | 2025-09-02 19:24:17+00:00
> XSLT

Very rarely used, so two better examples:

* http://

Now mostly unusable.

* Quirks mode

Netscape navigator or Internet Explorer compatibility (no <!doctype html>). Still supported by browsers for rendering old pages. Must be annoying to maintain. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Guides/Qui...
by raigol | 2025-09-02 19:24:41+00:00
——————————————

Remote (EU/US) | Senior Product Designer—Design Systems, Design-to-Code, Accessibility | Long-term or freelance

—

Portfolio: https://raigo.design/case-studies

CV: https://raigo.design/cv_raigo-lilleberg.pdf

Email: hi@raigo.design

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/raigolilleberg

—

Core skills:

- Product design & UX/UI

- Design systems & component libraries

- Design consultation

- Accessibility audits & WCAG/EAA compliance

- Async & remote collaboration

- Prototyping

- Figma, Cursor, Git, GitHub, LLMs

- Front-end (HTML/CSS) understanding

- AI workflow integration

—

About me:

Product designer with 10+ years of remote experience, focused on reducing design-to-dev friction through systems thinking, audits, and clean handoffs. Currently expanding into frontend and accessibility to make design more inclusive—and easier to build.

Reliable, async-friendly, and focused on helping fast-moving teams ship with less friction.

—

Contact: hi@raigo.design

——————————————
by Nevermark | 2025-09-02 19:24:50+00:00
You are just adding random behavior to the system to create variation in response.

Random behavior in inputs, or in operations, results in random behavior in the outputs. But there is no statistical expression or characterization that can predict the distribution of one from the other.

You can't say, I want this much distribution in the outputs, so I will add this much distribution to the inputs, weights or other operational details.

Even if you create an exhaustive profile of "temperature" and output distributions across the training set, it will only be true for exactly that training set, on exactly that model, for exactly those random conditions. And will vary significantly and unpredictably across subsets of that data, or new data, and different random numbers injected (even with the same random distribution!).

Statistics are a very specific way to represent a very narrow kind of variation, or for a system to produce variation. But lots of systems with variation, such as complex chaotic systems, or complex nonlinear systems (as in neural models!) can defy robust or meaningful statistical representations or analysis.

(Another way to put this, is you can measure logical properties about any system. Such as if an output is greater than some threshold, or if two outputs are equal. The logical measurements can be useful, but that doesn't mean it is a logical system.

Any system with any kind of variation can have potentially useful statistical type measurements done on it. Any deterministic system can have randomness injected to create randomly varying output. But neither of those situations and measurements makes the system a statistically based system.)
by coliveira | 2025-09-02 19:25:05+00:00
Thanks for the 94% correction. But there is no need for the percentage of GDP to increase, it's only enough that the richer pay more, so less will be payed by the lower classes. Not only that, but a reduction in loopholes is also needed. The goal is not to prevent people from making more but to prevent concentration of wealth, so we need to make it harder and harder for huge fortunes to accumulate instead of supporting it.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-09-02 19:25:24+00:00
As someone who's been doing Infra stuff for two decades, this is very exciting. There is a lot of mindless BS we have to deal with due to shitty tools and services, and AI could save us a lot of time that we'd rather use to create meaningful value.

There is still benefit for non-Infra people. But non-Infra people don't understand system design, so the benefits are limited. Imagine a "mechanic AI". Yes, you could ask it all sorts of mechanic questions, and maybe it could even do some work on the car. But if you wanted to, say, replace the entire engine with a different one, that is a systemic change and has farther reaching implications than an AI will explain, much less perform competently. You need a mechanic to stop you and say, uh, no, please don't change the engine; explain to me what you're trying to do and I'll help you find a better solution. Then you need a real mechanic to manage changing the tires on the moving bus so it doesn't crash into the school. But having an AI could make the mechanic do all of that smoother.

Another thing I'd love to see more AI use of, is people asking the AI for advice. Most devs seem to avoid asking Infra people for architectural/design advice. This leads to them putting together a system using their limited knowledge, and it turns out to be an inferior design to what an Infra person would have suggested. Hopefully they will ask AI for advice in the future.
by Terr_ | 2025-09-02 19:25:28+00:00
> I basically agree, but not because of how individuals are reacting to it. On a societal level we're failing to stop megacorps from selling this thing as intelligent, a virtual assistant you can chat with.

Analogy: I'm not scared and surprised to hear some consumers are dangerously allergic to peanuts... However I am flabbergasted that there's multi-billion dollar industry somehow selling frickin' Peanut Immortality Panacea Serum and way too many people believe in it.
by goalieca | 2025-09-02 19:25:30+00:00
> On a societal level we're failing to stop megacorps from selling this thing as intelligent, a virtual assistant you can chat with.

You nailed it here.

From the LLM generated search result asking how an LLM works. But this is not what the end users are being told.

>They learn to predict the next word in a sentence based on the context of the preceding words, allowing them to generate coherent and contextually relevant text

My worry is now the users are being entrapped. The LLM is "telling" them something insane and now they're being reported to the police.
by tw04 | 2025-09-02 19:25:31+00:00
> What the hell was reddit doing that they didn't immediately implement an image hosting feature to keep users on the platform?

Image hosting is insanely expensive and they couldn’t afford to do it or were smart enough not to.

Every image host that added paid accounts or ads all over the place had a horrible reputation at the time (see photobucket). They likely wanted to avoid ruining their reputation before going public.

Heck even Imgur caught heat when they needed to start paying the bills.
by nickpapciak | 2025-09-02 19:25:38+00:00
LLMs are pretty awesome at Terraform, probably because there is just so much training data. They are also pretty good at the AWS CDK and Pulumi to a bit of a lesser extent, but I think giving them access to documentation is what helps make them the most accurate. Without good documentation the models start to hallucinate a bit.

And yeah, we are noticing that it’s difficult to convince people to give us access to their infrastructure. I hope that a BYOC model will help with that.
by askafriend | 2025-09-02 19:25:45+00:00
I'm actually quite familiar with the history of app stores and getting people to pay for software on the internet. I grew up in this timeline so I have first-hand experience too.

Before the App Store, the picture was mostly a disaster of security, reliability and quality. There was no trust and so people didn't bother parting with their credit card information to buy software...especially not on their phone.

Apple's App Store model dramatically grew the pie because it was one of the few platforms that people were willing to actually transact confidently on and trusted. This is why millions of developers flocked to the platform. This is also why Apple has traditionally maintained an iron grip on it; it was beneficial for everyone involved.

Over time, they are being proven right as more open platforms realize that openness at the expense of trust doesn't work for the masses.
by Scramblejams | 2025-09-02 19:25:45+00:00
> it is hard to maintain two APIs.

This point doesn't get enough coverage. When I saw async coming into Python and C# (the two ecosystems I was watching most closely at the time) I found it depressing just how much work was going into it that could have been productively expended elsewhere if they'd have gone with blocking calls to green threads instead.

To add insult to injury, when implementing async it seems inevitable that what's created is a bizarro-world API that mostly-mirrors-but-often-not-quite the synchronous API. The differences usually don't matter, until they do.

So not only does the project pay the cost of maintaining two APIs, the users keep paying the cost of dealing with subtle differences between them that'll probably never go away.

> I do not prefer Python for reliable, high-performance HTTP servers

I don't use it much anymore, but Twisted Matrix was (is?) great at this. Felt like a superpower to, in the oughties, easily saturate a network interface with useful work in Python.
by mrandish | 2025-09-02 19:25:54+00:00
There are already many vacation alternatives to Vegas whether for gamblers, for those seeking entertainment/dining or just for family getaways. Vegas has always had an iffy value proposition. It's become a major city that's not near anything nor especially on the way to anywhere which had no reason before gambling to exist in that location.

In the last 20 years, two long-term trends are making Vegas less attractive. The increasing proliferation of gambling alternatives from indigenous casinos, riverboats, poker parlors, online casinos, etc, as well as the broad decline of big "destination" trade shows and conferences people are willing to get on an airplane for. To me, Vegas has always been an odd mix of upsides and downsides. It can easily get congested and over-crowded and quickly become unfun. Now that they're pricing themselves out of the market, people are choosing better alternatives.
by djoldman | 2025-09-02 19:26:18+00:00
> Escalate risk of physical harm to others for human review. When we detect users who are planning to harm others, we route their conversations to specialized pipelines where they are reviewed by a small team trained on our usage policies and who are authorized to take action, including banning accounts. If human reviewers determine that a case involves an imminent threat of serious physical harm to others, we may refer it to law enforcement. We are currently not referring self-harm cases to law enforcement to respect people’s privacy given the uniquely private nature of ChatGPT interactions.

https://openai.com/index/helping-people-when-they-need-it-mo...