MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by labcomputer | 2025-09-28 16:23:09+00:00
> What's wrong with "personalized ads"? They are fundamentally rooted in the past --- and the past is often no longer relevant. Just because I searched for a car last week doesn't mean I haven't bought one already --- so why am I seeing auto ads when I search for pet supplies?. But if I'm currently looking at an auto dealers web site, the odds are pretty good that I'm still interested in buying one.

So... this intuition is wrong.

Across... well, basically every category of product... the product which you are most likely to purchase next is the same (or a substitute for or a complement to) the last product you purchased. Anyone who has ever worked in retail analytics will tell you this.

Advertisers want to minimize their ad spend, so they always try to sell you first on the product which you have the highest propensity to buy. That's why they want personalized ads. The ROI is astronomically higher than for contextual ads.

(That's why the DMA's prohibition on Facebook's pay-or-consent model, and HN's general cheerleading of it, is such a joke... and that's before you even get into the adverse selection problem of people willing to pay to avoid ads)

There are plenty of greedy people in business. Rest assured: If cost of personalized grew to the point that ROI dropped below contextual ads, advertisers would switch to contextual ads in a heartbeat. They're A/B testing all the time, and it wouldn't take long at all for them to figure that out.
Show HN: I built an MCP server using Cloudflare's code mode pattern
by jmcodes | 2025-09-28 16:23:51+00:00
Read this article by Cloudflare this morning https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/ the main argument being that LLMs are much better at writing typescript code than tool calls because they've seen typescript code many more times.

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45386248

Deno provides a great sandbox environment for Typescript code execution because of its permissions system which made it easy to spin up code that only has access to fetch and network calls.

Stick an MCP proxy on top of that and you've got "CodeMode" (code intermixed with MCP tool calls) for more advanced workflow orchestration.

https://github.com/jx-codes/codemode-mcp

There's a lot of things that can be improved here. Like a virtual file system for the agent to actually build up its solution instead of being forced to one shot the solution but the bones are there.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-09-28 16:24:43+00:00
How are you reinventing a laptop? There is zero friction.

You already have the phone. All the pieces are technically there to seamlessly connecting to a screen and a keyboard wirelessly and have it become a proper computer which is what it always was. I think Google has seen it and that’s why they have started working on their desktop mode but they are sadly stuck with underpowered cpu.

You need to think bigger. The sole reason this is not already a reality is because it would be a loss of money for Apple.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-28 16:27:00+00:00
That wasn't your point, and you are well aware of it. Why not simply apologize, say you got it wrong and move on? After all, you chose to believe the random blogger before. Besides that, believing execs of large US companies is a thing that I would not do without applying my critical thinking skills and a 7% figure is so ridiculously low that even if an exec said it it should still give you pause as to its correctness because even at face value that seems quite unbelievable.
by thisisit | 2025-09-28 16:27:06+00:00
FPTP is bad but other methods are similarly flawed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf7ws2DF-zk

Keeping a democracy requires people to understand it as well. At least in US it seems they'd rather elect a dictator wannabe who clearly said he wanted to be dictator for a day than elect a woman.
by _fat_santa | 2025-09-28 16:27:06+00:00
Unfortunately this occurred in 2016, long before they added "repair mode" in iOS 17.

But I should mention, I was in the middle of writing a comment along the lines of "apple really needs to add a repair mode to iOS" before going to look it up and realizing that it's actually been there since iOS 17.

For me this highlights another issue with iOS which is it has many awesome features that you just won't know about unless you're a techie that keeps up with the news. One great example is the "hidden folder" feature that allows you to hide sensitive apps in an unmarked folder that when set to it's most secure setting, can only be opened with FaceID and no passcode backup. Along with some other features like preventing the app from showing up in your app switcher.

This is a genius feature but I see very few people with it enabled, mostly because they just don't know it's a thing. Something like this should be front and center when you first setup your device but instead it's a feature so buried that I had to lookup a guide on how to enable it.

And repair mode is equally buried, I had to lookup a guide on how to enable it as well. IMHO Apple really needs to tweak iOS to better surface these features.
by babyshake | 2025-09-28 16:27:12+00:00
Especially with junior engineers it is helpful to ask them to provide a Loom video or other proof that they have verified a feature or bug works as intended. I have tried setting up Claude Code with playwright to verify it's work, but so far am not very satisfied with the results. Any tools that are helpful with this end to end testing for web apps using Claude Code and other AI assistants? Feel free to share your product if it is relevant.
by lairv | 2025-09-28 16:27:21+00:00
(I'm the one who posted the url, not author post)

Julian Schrittwieser (author of this post) has been in AI for a long time, he was in the core team who worked on AlphaGo, AlphaZero and MuZero at DeepMind, you can see him in the AlphaGo movie. While it doesn't make his opinion automatically true, I think it makes it worth considering, especially since he's a technical person, not a CEO trying to raise money

"extrapolating an exponential" seems dubious, but I think the point is more that there is no clear sign of slowing down in models capabilities from the benchmarks, so we can still expect improvements
by nerdralph | 2025-09-28 16:27:24+00:00
Calculating temperature correction is in both the NEC and CEC. Here's the CEC version:

64-202 Voltage of solar photovoltaic systems (see Appendix B)

1) The maximum photovoltaic source and output circuit voltage shall be the rated open-circuit voltage of the photovoltaic power source multiplied by 125%.

2) Notwithstanding Subrule 1), the maximum photovoltaic source and output circuit voltage shall be permitted to be calculated using a) the rated open-circuit voltage of the photovoltaic power source; b) the difference between 25 °C and the lowest expected daily minimum temperature; and c) the voltage temperature coefficient as specified by the manufacturer.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-09-28 16:27:34+00:00
This is pretty flakey reasoning. First, the only reason “internalizing” the size of the universe would have any relevance here is if you were going to use that to draw the bad inference of insignificance. That was the context. Otherwise, it is, at best, an interesting fact that can be equally interpreted as awe-inspiring (I do not see why it would be terrifying; I think it is grand and wonderful).

I think Sagan was, in his clumsy way, perhaps trying to recover something lost in the loss of religion, a kind of reverential humility that recognition of God previously inspired. The closest thing he could find was the universe. Naturally, this leed toward a kind of pagan materialist pantheism (which likely explains his interest in Hinduism).
by szopa | 2025-09-28 16:27:37+00:00
Apparently in manga and anime regular characters are often drawn as if they were European-ish (so, some of them are going to have blue eyes or blond hair, not common in Japan). This convention is in part historical (matching American comic books that inspired manga), and in part to make the characters more characteristic and easier to distinguish from each other. But in HnG this applies only to Japanese characters – people from abroad are drawn in a more naturalistic and stereotypical way. Koreans and Chinese will look actually like Asians, and Americans and Europeans will be an even more exaggerated version of themselves. I guess it’s a very different sensitivity than what’s common in the US right now.
by constantcrying | 2025-09-28 16:27:48+00:00
What became incredibly obvious to me, after working in software and then as a mechanical engineer, was that software has absolutely no engineering culture.

Software has a deeply ingrained craftsman culture, which empathized personal flavor, unique approaches, stylistic debates over engineering. Surprisingly this gets worse in large organizations, where adherence to stylistic choices, specific tools and workflows, supersedes engineering at every point. Software is still full of fads, where every couple of year a new or old flavor is found, which is now the "right" thing to do, which will then be defended and attacked until a new fad is found.
by card_zero | 2025-09-28 16:28:23+00:00
> I don’t know how you came to such a bizarre conclusion

By guessing, of course! Gotta start somewhere.

You still haven't supplied details of exactly ... ah, don't worry about it, I suppose I'll just bear your observation in mind when I come to read a Sagan book. Or a Dawkins book. But I don't remember Dawkins sidelining philosophy? It still sounds kind of like "oh he should have said something apologetic about religion because of metaphysics instead of being so damn certain", the kind of thing any wet agnostic would like - not because there's quality philosophy being overlooked, just because wishy-washy people want their spirituality placating.
by redwall_hp | 2025-09-28 16:29:05+00:00
That was the prime directive of the Raspberry Pi foundation all along: they wanted to recreate the BBC Micro experience. Back in its heyday, it was both purchasable and widely installed in schools, and the BBC ran educational television shows about computing. This is also why Raapbian ships with programming tools set up out of the box.

It was kind of an accident that the Raspberry Pi also became the de facto standard single-board computer for hobby electronics projects.
by xnx | 2025-09-28 16:29:08+00:00
The microservices fad/wave was where people seemed to lose their minds. The "Solving Imaginary Scaling Issues (at scale)" meme encapsulated it for me. Most programmers of the time seemed far more interested in being architecture astronauts than making something useful. The overengineered hosting setups were also a major impediment to anyone who just wanted to make something useful.

Fortunately, AI-assisted coding seems to be wrestling back coding from developers and re-empowering domain experts and systems analysts. A full recession will probably shake out a lot more of the waste in software development.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-09-28 16:29:14+00:00
Appliances, sure, because having bought a new blender I might be tempted to look at replacing that old toaster as well. I'm clearly in an appliance-buying mood, and if I'm not, maybe I can be persuaded in that direction.

Cars? People who just bought a car are generally upside-down, and will not be looking to trade or buy another anytime soon.
by childintime | 2025-09-28 16:29:34+00:00
The file descriptor is to support capabilities?

Source: https://nlnet.nl/project/Capability-based-RedoxOS/

"[..] In this project we will replace Redox's internal file descriptor representation with capability descriptors, optimized for both security and performance. This will provide a foundation for capability-based security on Redox, and possibly capability extensions from other UNIX-like systems, while also supporting POSIX-style file descriptors for application compatibility".
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-09-28 16:29:35+00:00
The writer is clearly a good, loving parent, but this stuck out to me:

> It took weeks of careful discussion before she would try a combination of antibiotics. We didn’t yet tell her these antibiotics make some patients feel sicker.

Shouldn’t she be told the possible risks of her medication? If she was 7 i would understand, but I think she’s like 14 at this point? I guess it may be hard to determine when people can own their health decisions. But I’m upset when kids aren’t treated as “real people”, i remember being ignored because I was just a kid. I suspect that by high school almost everyone should be informed about their health decisions.
by PessimalDecimal | 2025-09-28 16:30:01+00:00
> I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless.

The article sort of goes sideways with this idea but pointing out that AI coding robs you a deep understanding of the code it produces is a valid and important criticism of AI coding.

A software engineer's primary job isn't producing code, but producing a functional software system. Most important to that is the extremely hard to convey "mental model" of how the code works and an expertise of the domain it works in. Code is a derived asset of this mental model. And you will never know code as well as a reader and you would have as the author for anything larger than a very small project.

There are other consequences of not building this mental model of a piece of software. Reasoning at the level of syntax is proving to have limits that LLM-based coding agents are having trouble scaling beyond.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-09-28 16:30:05+00:00
The cause of this problem is the standards for Solar Panels, that has the outputs measured at 25C so they are comparable with each other. The specification sheets for panels do list their peak voltage in other conditions but all the advertising is based on the standard. Solar installers know about this and size accordingly but your average consumer doesn't and is very quickly going to get into trouble with this.

I think what Delta needs to do here is accept that the standards mean all Solar will be sold this way and appropriately oversize the inverter so that it can cope with -10C sunny days. Yes its annoying for them but the reality is devices sold to people who don't know how all this works need to compensate for lack of expert knowledge in its user base.
by freetime2 | 2025-09-28 16:30:36+00:00
I would have assumed it worked the same as ls, so I found the article interesting. But now that I know, I think this way is better.

I can’t think of any case where I would need purely alphabetical sort. In most photo browsing apps, photos will be sorted by timestamp rather than filename. If I really needed it to sort properly in file explorer, I would try sorting on created date. And failing that I would probably just normalize the file names.
by altairprime | 2025-09-28 16:30:37+00:00
Date article posted: June 8th, 2021

Date Apple announced self-repair kits program: November 17, 2021

I had been wondering what inspired that program — sure, it’s a good idea, but it’s an odd investment for a corporation. Three months is about their usual turnaround from “okay, this is humiliating” to “okay, we’ve announced our intent to fix”. Thanks, Vice!
by bawolff | 2025-09-28 16:30:40+00:00
That feels like you're moving the goal posts a bit.

Exponential growth over the short term is very uninteresting. Exponential growth is exciting when it can compound.

E.g. if i offered you an investing opportunity 500% / per year compounded daily - that's amazing. If the fine print is that that rate will only last for the very near term (say a week), then it would be worse than a savings account.
by theptip | 2025-09-28 16:31:16+00:00
Agreed, it surely does require a world-model.

I disagree that generic LLMs plus CoT/reasoning/tool calling (ie the current stack) cannot in principle implement a world model.

I believe LLMs are doing some sort of world modeling and likely are mostly lacking a medium-/long-term memory system in which to store it.

(I wouldn’t be surprised if one or two more architectural overhauls end up occurring before AGI, I also wouldn’t be surprised if these occurred seamlessly with our current trajectory of progress)
by gruez | 2025-09-28 16:31:56+00:00
>That wasn't your point, and you are well aware of it.

No you. You're well aware that wasn't my point and are trying to put words in my mouth in a pathetic attempt to save face.

> After all, you chose to believe the random blogger before.

I made no such implication. In fact I specifically quoted the part that I was responding to.
by kevin42 | 2025-09-28 16:32:16+00:00
That's my experience as well. The LLM is great for what I consider scaffolding. I can describe the architecture I want, some guidelines in CLAUDE.md, then let it write a bunch of stubbed out code. It saves me a ton of time typing.

It's also great for things that aren't creative, like 'implement a unit test framework using google test and cmake, but don't actually write the tests yet'. That type of thing saves me hours and hours. It's something I rarely do, so it's not like I just start editing my cmake and test files, I'd be looking up documentation, and a lot of code that is necessary, but takes a lot of time.

With LLMs, I usually get what I want quickly. If it's not what I want, a bit of time reviewing what it did and where it went wrong usually tells me what I need to give it a better prompt.
by dragontamer | 2025-09-28 16:33:00+00:00
Could you look at a few examples from the example tutorials under discussion?

https://online-go.com/learn-to-play-go/bl1-stretch/6

https://online-go.com/learn-to-play-go/bl1-stretch/9

I'm saying that this "correct move" is a middle-game error. Maybe its my 9kyu brain being bad here, but there's nothing about this tutorial (and many others like it in this tutorial series) that strikes me as a strategic error.

And I certainly think that nobi is a bad concept to teach if the tutorial hasn't covered diagonal moves, horse moves, 1-point jump and the like. Its not that "nobi" or "stretch" is a bad thing to teach, but its just one option in a sea of valid middle-game options.

------------

If the tutorial is going into things like this, it really should be going into at least the basic 3-4 Joseki and why various moves are considered good.
by _1tem | 2025-09-28 16:33:25+00:00
I don’t think it’s a bluff. This is more than just a revenue calculation, this is about giving up control of how your hardware and software can be built. If the EU can dictate what features should be included in a software release, that has massive engineering implications for an ecosystem as vast as Apple’s. Simple features like Live Translation or iPhone Mirroring become 10x more complex to build when you need to test and support other vendor devices. In fact some features become downright impossible if you require interoperability. I’m with Apple on this one. If a country could dictate to me that I need to make my engineering 10x more complex to support their whims and can’t build certain features, then I would seriously consider quitting that country regardless of revenue. This is about slowing down the pace of development and adding engineering complexity to everything worldwide, not just revenue.
by wswope | 2025-09-28 16:33:33+00:00
This is multiple layers of uneducated and misguided. Apart from it being a bad idea on the surface, due to antibiotic resistance and wiping out healthy parts of the microbiome, many common antibiotics have anti-inflammatory effects separate from their antimicrobial effects: https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-7643-8550-7_7

Seeing someone improve after taking antibiotics is not indicative of them having an infection that’s being treated by the antibiotics.
by Loughla | 2025-09-28 16:33:47+00:00
Informed, yes. Allowed to make critical choices as children? No.

I'm with you, people act like children don't exist when they're talking about serious matters. But you do have to remember that they lack critical reasoning (partly) and make bad choices based on hormones. Walking the line between autonomy and protection is very very very difficult as a parent. Most people struggle or fail at this, I believe.
by stavros | 2025-09-28 16:34:00+00:00
Because I have the option of using an alternate app store on my Android phone or computer, and I do. Meta, PlayStation, Nintendo, all companies that force me to pay them a cut to install something on my device need to go the way of Apple.

I'm not sure why you thought your point was such a checkmate, as if I have a problem with the company itself, rather than the practice.
by KoolKat23 | 2025-09-28 16:34:59+00:00
Not really, its more a case of "potentially can" rather than "will". This dynamic has always been there with the whole junior, senior dev. split, its not a new problem. You 100% can use it without losing this, in an ideal world you can even go so far as to not worry about the understanding for parts that are inconsequential.
by kelipso | 2025-09-28 16:35:23+00:00
I have only used it for academic papers, which I still do every so often, so I would the answer is mostly yes. I tried using beamer for presentations but it was too much effort for not enough gain. I use tikz for diagrams and graphs in academic papers, really useful for updating graphs by just ruining a single script. But outside of that, again, it was too much effort for not enough gain, when I can just print out jupyter lab output..

Pretty much, I only care about typography when it comes to academic papers, so that’s the issue. If I care about it in other contexts, I probably would use latex.
by abtinf | 2025-09-28 16:35:35+00:00
> iOS which is it has many awesome features that you just won't know about unless you're a techie that keeps up with the news

Probably the single most useful hidden feature, valuable to parents everywhere, is “Guided Access” mode available through accessibility settings.

It lets you lock the screen to a single app or disable touch entirely (or even by custom region), so that you can hand your device to a kid without worrying they will delete your photos.

They never even really promoted this features in their news updates.
by _fat_santa | 2025-09-28 16:36:13+00:00
> I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless.

Here's mine, I use Cline occasionally to help me code but more and more I find myself just coding by hand. The reason is pretty simple which is with these AI tools you for the most part replace writing code with writing a prompt.

I look at it like this, if writing the prompt, and the inference time is less than what it would take me to write the code by hand I usually go the AI route. But this is usually for refactoring tasks where I consider the main bottleneck to be the speed at which my fingers can type.

For virtually all other problems it goes something like this: I can do X task in 10 minutes if i code it manually or I can prompt AI to do it and by the time I finish crafting the prompt and execute, it takes me about 8 minutes. Yes that's a savings of 2 minutes on that task and that's all fine and good assuming that the AI didn't make a mistake, if I have to go back and re-prompt or manually fix something, then all of a sudden the time it took me to complete that task is now 10-12 minutes with AI. Here the best case scenario is I just spent some AI credits for zero time savings and worse case is I spent AI credits AND the task was slower in the end.

With all sorts of tasks I now find myself making this calculation and for the most part, I find that doing it by hand is just the "safer" option, both in terms of code output but also in terms of time spent on the task.