MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xoa | 2025-09-18 18:52:14+00:00
>there was a rich woman that drove into a lake on her estate and drowned because she couldn't open the door in time.

Just to expand a bit on vkou's sibling reply, exiting a car that has already gone under water is absolutely non-trivial in any vehicle. Water pressure goes up very fast with depth: at just 10' (3m) deep, just minimum recommended depth for a simple outdoor low dive board pool, you're already at 4.25 psi. At 16.5' (5m) you're up to 7.1 psi.

Just using a tape measure on a more compact car (not my truck) our in the parking lot, a GTI mini, front door is ~1680 in^2 in surface area. So you already cannot open the door if it's air inside and water outside and you're in even 10' of water let alone more. My recollection from driver's ed and then emergency response is that you're supposed to get the window open (by lowering it in time if electric or unshorted or more likely by shattering it with the emergency tool you hopefully have in the car) and let water fill the interior to equalize the pressure, trying to get a last breath from the bubble at the top as long as possible. Then you've got a breath-full-of-air time to get the door open (or get out through the broken window) and get to the surface. And not lose your bearings if it's anything but shallow+bright sunlight, etc., easy to do under water when panicked if you're not well trained to instinctively do tricks like let out a small stream of bubbles to feel which way is up. It's a pretty frightening (and thankfully rare) scenario.

I think I vaguely remember the incident you're talking about, and bad doors certainly didn't help, but it's not the same impact as someone being trapped right on land where 99.9% of vehicles made in history would allow an easy exit.
by sparrish | 2025-09-18 18:52:29+00:00
I'm sure some are able to rehome them but very few.

When you live in a rural area, nobody wants a chicken-killing dog cause most them have chickens - and those that don't - have neighbors that have chickens and you don't want to be that neighbor.

If there are reasonable alternatives, please do avail yourself. When there are none, putting an animal down is best and is common practice.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-09-18 18:52:29+00:00
All the people at the forefront of AI really loved and thrived in highly academic settings from kindergarden to PhDs, their own lived experience doesn't match up with this product at all. Why are they making it?

EdTech has the worst returns of any industry in venture capital. Why?

There are no teachers who say that technology has generally improved experiences in classrooms, even if some specific technology-driven experiences like Khan Academy and Scratch are universally liked. Why?

When you look at Scratch, which I know a lot about, one thing they never do is allege that it improves test scores. They never, ever evaluate it quantitatively like that. And yet it is beloved.

Khan Academy: it is falling into the same trap as e.g. the Snoo. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's about, who pays? Who is the customer? Khan Academy did a study that showed a thing. Kids are not choosing to watch educational YouTube videos because of a study. It is cozy learning.

But why does Khan Academy need studies for a test score thing? Why does Google? This is the problem with Ed Tech: the only model is to sell to districts, and when you sell to districts, you are doing Enterprise Sales. You can sometimes give them a thing that does something, but you are always giving them exactly what they ask for. Do you see the difference?

It doesn't matter if it's technology or if it is X or Y or Z: if the district asks for something that makes sense, great, and if it asks for something that doesn't make sense, or doesn't readily have the expertise to know what does and doesn't make sense, like with technology, tough cookie. Google will make something that doesn't make sense, if it feels that districts will adopt it.

We can go and try the merits of Learn Your Way, thankfully they provide a demo. All I'll say is, people have been saying, "more reading" is the answer, and there is a lot of fucking reading in this experience, but maybe the problem isn't that there isn't enough text to read. The problem is that kids do not want to read, so...
by cjs_ac | 2025-09-18 18:52:30+00:00
I'm a former physics teacher, and while I'm impressed by the technology, I think this is a low efficacy innovation.

The real challenge in teaching Newton's laws of motion to teenagers is that they struggle to deal with the idea that friction isn't always there. When students enter the classroom, they arrive with an understanding of motion that they've intuited from watching things move all their lives, and that understanding is the theory of impetus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_impetus

An AI system that can interrogate individual students' understanding of the ideas presented and pose questions that challenge the theory of impetus would be really useful, because 'unteaching' impetus theory to thirty students at once is extremely difficult. However, what Google has presented here, with slides and multiple guess quizzes, is just a variation on the 'chalk and talk' theme.

The final straw that made me leave teaching was the head of languages telling me that a good teacher can teach any subject. Discussions about 'the best pedagogy' never make any consideration of what is being taught; there's an implicit assumption that every idea and subject should be taught the same way. School systems have improved markedly since they were introduced in the nineteenth century, but I think we've got everything we can out of the subject-agnostic approach to improvement, and we need to start engaging with the detail of what's being taught to further improve.
by spwa4 | 2025-09-18 18:53:02+00:00
I wish instead Google would instead find a good way to have exercise books, with:

1) well-thought out exercises (covering all cases, whether in math or Spanish)

2) CORRECT solutions (just saying because even ChatGPT gets it wrong even for high school math)

3) that you can enter them using pen (if need be on an iPad)

Just a way to make zillions of exercises if I want to. And for my kids, the problem is these days teachers won't (AND mostly can't, they just don't know their subject) help them make a lot of exercises.
by MegaDeKay | 2025-09-18 18:53:02+00:00
> For many years now KDE has focused on polish, bug fixing and "nice-to-have" improvements rather than major redesigns, and it paid off.

Yes, and this process continues. There are still parts of the environment that need attention or cleanup, but by reading Nate's weekly blog posts [0], you can see that they chip away at cleaning this stuff up week after week after week. And it is all headed in the right direction vs. not (looking at you, Liquid Glass).

[0] https://blogs.kde.org/categories/this-week-in-plasma/
by hnuser123456 | 2025-09-18 18:53:09+00:00
The quote cited in TFA claims that the murderer was "one of them". Now, why would someone take out a prominent spokesperson for their own party? They wouldn't, because that's not something that people do to other people they agree with. But somehow, people interpret that remark to make sense? The remark only makes sense if "one of them" refers to the fact the shooter was a white male, and the reader believes all white males are on the same side, and the enemy, and that the incident serves as entertainment. So, yes, I find that remark extremely problematic, and representative of increasingly tribal and divisive "us vs. them" mentality that is gridlocking the country. Not to mention, the comment is itself using the event for political "told-you-so"-ism, while criticizing others for doing exactly that, so it's utterly hypocritical. We can and must set a higher standard for our talking heads. If you want to be a popular figure without burning bridges, maybe don't be so brazenly racist and sexist to the point of publicly celebrating murder because it was "one of them", thinking that proves anything other than that the speaker is a sociopath?
by pizlonator | 2025-09-18 18:53:33+00:00
Gotcha. For some reason I was under the impression that getting perf from gradual typing had been a goal of y'all's.

> primary interest in building the type system is in supporting a better developer experience

Yeah this is the right reason to do it :-)

> there's definitely some interest in how we could leverage types to support more optimized code, but it's been a notoriously difficult problem for gradually-typed languages in general

I know. I still get folks asking why TypeScript types can't be used to make JS fast and it's quite exhausting to explain this.

Hard to imagine gradual types beating what you get from the combo of PICs, speculative JITing, and static analysis.

(I worked on JavaScriptCore's optimizer, hence why I'm curious about where y'all are coming from on this)
by handedness | 2025-09-18 18:53:44+00:00
The GGP's comparison was KDE vs. macOS, so that's the most charitable interpretation I can think of.

The comparison also holds. With every major release macOS has become more like iOS and iPadOS much more so than iOS and iPadOS have become like macOS.

It's a shift I loathe, but Apple has a much harder time selling Macs to iDevice owners than the other way around. It's an understandable and maybe even unavoidable shift for Apple to make, much as it will drive a small number of die-hards elsewhere.
by swinglock | 2025-09-18 18:53:52+00:00
I had the same experience. I only remembered KDE being the the ugly, sluggish, buggy one that reminds me of Windows but cheaper. That must have been two decades ago now. I've never considered looking at it again. But then I got it pre-installed with the Deck, had issues with my computer, plugged it in to the monitor as a backup, and I like it.
by devmor | 2025-09-18 18:53:53+00:00
This feels at first glance like another instance of an AI tool doing something humans already enjoy doing, rather than replacing work we'd like to avoid.

The teachers and professor I've known have always loved adapting their lessons to suit the interests of their students - I think that's a core educational instruction skill.

I'm open to hearing disagreements, but reading through the usages and evaluations does not leave me thinking of a tool that would provide any benefit greater than just giving teachers more resources would.
by hansvm | 2025-09-18 18:54:00+00:00
That's an interesting example. On the one hand, we really don't want actively suicidal pilots. On the other, are the current guidelines too stringent? I can't imagine you're saying that actively suicidal pilots should be allowed to fly hundreds of people, so the argument seems to be more that private corporations have too much information and too much power and are willing to blacklist qualified candidates just to reduce examination costs.

That seems more like an argument against corporate overreach than anything else.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-09-18 18:54:03+00:00
One interesting parallel is Intel and AMD back in x86 1991, which is today the reason AMD is at all allowed to produce x86 without massive patent royalties to intel. [Asianometry](https://youtu.be/5oOk_KXbw6c) had a nice summery of it.

Nvidia is leaning more into data centres, but lack a CPU architecture or expertise. Intel is struggling financially, but have knowledge in iGPUs and a vast amount of patents.

They could have alot to give one another, and it's a massive win if it keeps intel afloat.
Research: AI and Software Verification/Validation
by bolfe11 | 2025-09-18 18:54:40+00:00
I’m Guilherme Bolfe, and I recently started my Master’s in Software Engineering.

I’m conducting a research study to understand how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Language Models (LLMs) are being used to support software Verification and Validation (V&V) activities — both in industry and in academic proof-of-concepts.

* If you work in software development, testing, quality assurance, or related fields, your experience could greatly help us map:

* Tools already in use

* Perceived benefits (productivity, quality, time savings, etc.)

* Challenges and limitations encountered

* How you see the future of AI in V&V

The survey is quick (5–10 min), completely anonymous, and your answers are confidential:

[Take the survey] https://forms.gle/XCxpzt6Par4XHR37A

I really appreciate your time and help Feel free to share this with colleagues in the field — it makes a huge difference!
by Apfel | 2025-09-18 18:54:46+00:00
Honestly, as someone who is not particularly pro Apple but bought (and returned) the Vision Pro, I cannot stress enough how much you need to try it out.

The issue with the product is entirely the lack of an ecosystem - the interface is unbelievably polished. The eye tracking & finger touch to click feels absolutely perfect. It really did feel like living in the future.

I returned it because the security policy at my work didn't allow me to pair it with my macbook, otherwise I would be using it all day every day.
by ismailmaj | 2025-09-18 18:55:16+00:00
Typically for matrix multiplications there is a wide range of algorithms you could use to compute it, on one extreme end you could use numerically stable summation and the other extreme you could have tiled matmul with FP8, the industry trend seems to go further away from numerical stable algorithms without much quality drop it seems. My claim is probably unfair since it ignores the scale you gain from the speed/precision tradeoff, so I assumed numerical stability is not that beneficial compared to something precision heavy like physics simulation in HPC.
by quuxplusone | 2025-09-18 18:55:25+00:00
I, also, found that DOSBox wasn't able to run the .exe file.

Have you considered just making the game directly playable online? Sure, this eliminates the "potentially pay me some money" funnel associated with the download link, but it would be a lot more friendly to casual onlookers such as Hacker News.

To make that happen, you'd embed DOSBox on the page itself, with a preloaded disk image containing the .exe (and/or the .bas source plus an interpreter). I have a tutorial/example here, which (six years later) still seems to run fine: https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2019/08/11/dragonflight/
by implicit | 2025-09-18 18:56:34+00:00
Further, these extra components are easy to omit if you don't want to use them.

The REPL that we offer in the distribution doesn't include any of the analysis logic and it's just 1.7mb once compiled (on my M1 Macbook). I'm not sure how much smaller it gets if you omit CodeGen.

Luau can be pretty small if you need it to be.
by rasz | 2025-09-18 18:56:59+00:00
Microsoft wasnt funding bankrupt Apple, Microsoft was settling lawsuit with Jobs just on the cusp of DOJ monopoly lwasuit. Microsoft was stealing and shipping Apple QuickTime sourcecode.

https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_...

> handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million
Show HN: My lightweight prompt management and analytics tool.
by squishy47 | 2025-09-18 18:57:07+00:00
I’ve been working on a side project that helps compare and analyze AI prompts. You can test prompts side-by-side, collect ratings, and see which one performs best.

This came out of a chatbot project I built at work last year. We discovered how sensitive LLMs are to small prompt changes and with our setup being storing prompts in a `.ts` file checked into the repo, it meant analysing effectiveness of prompts was impossible. Existing tools I tried were either overloaded with data or locked me into their own models.

So over the last few months I’ve spent my very limited free time (new Dad) building something simpler:

- Compare prompts with real user feedback. - Clean analytics without information overload. - Bring your own OpenAI key and choose any of their LLM models.

It’s up and running and free to try (signup required, no credit cards though). This is no where near a finished product in terms of the website design, it’s a bit rough and ready since design is not my thing. Feedback on the idea and direction would be really appreciated.

https://testune.xyz
by cloverich | 2025-09-18 18:57:30+00:00
That's literally every other site. The reason you can't see high quality HN style comments on those sites, is because they don't block stuff like this. And quality goes exactly where you'd expect. You can't get quality commentary on charged political topics on a mostly unmoderated online forum. You need dedicated groups and in depth moderation.

Like it or not life does go on regardless of political complex and so long as we're working, we need more than _just_ politics in our news feeds. That's what HN is.
by sethhochberg | 2025-09-18 18:58:23+00:00
10 years ago, I hated the idea of Google Glass, voice assistants, cloud doorbells, and their ilk. I thought the privacy zealots were reactionary but the general premise still was a bit icky - a little bit for the privacy, but mostly for the "weird nerd stuff" stigma.

5 years ago, I acquiesced started to let voice assistants into my home, thought the first edition of Meta Ray Bans were cool but not for me, and generally started to feel like these things were everywhere and nothing bad had come of it.

In the current year, I've gotten rid of all of my voice assistants, carefully blocked internet traffic for my IoT things, got rid of devices without local controllers, and would generally decline to be around someone who was wearing smart-camera glasses of any kind in the same way I'd decline to be around someone who was holding their phone up taking a video of me. The privacy zealots were right, it took some time - but we've learned that tech often isn't our benign anonymous friend. All it took was "tech" (the brand) completing its transition from benevolent cool hip industry to big business just like any other.
by jjmarr | 2025-09-18 18:58:48+00:00
In my experience, LLMs are strongest when paired with an automated BS filter such as unit tests or linters. I use Cline and after every generation it reads VS Code's warnings & fixes them.

> If an LLM code generator is used, is it better to use it for generating production code and writing tests to verify or write production code and use LLM generated code to produce tests to verify?

I do both.

1. Vibe code the initial design with input on the API/architecture.

2. Use the AI to write tests.

3. Carefully scrutinize the test cases, which are much easier to review than the code.

4. Save both.

5. Go do something else and let the AI modify the code until the tests/linting/etc passes.

6. Review the final product, make edits, and create the PR.

The output of step 1 is guaranteed to be terrible/buggy and difficult to review for correctness, which is why I review the test cases instead because they provide concrete examples.

Step 5 eliminates most of the problems and frees me to review important stuff.

The whole reason I wrote the check is because AI keeps using `int` and I don't want it to.
by burnte | 2025-09-18 18:58:52+00:00
> The server and business compute market is still firmly Intel and there isn't much evidence of that changing

This is not true anymore, as it IS changing, and very rapidly. AMD has shot up to 27.3% of the server market share, which they haven't had since the Opteron days 20 years ago. Five years ago their server market share was very small single digits. They're half of desktops, too. https://www.pcguide.com/news/no-amd-and-intel-arent-50-50-in...
by dhdresser | 2025-09-18 18:59:16+00:00
Hi everyone — Denise Dresser here, CEO of Slack. As Rob shared, this was our mistake. An oversight in our billing process caused the issue, and I’m truly sorry for the concern it created. As soon as our team learned about it, we corrected it and restored Hack Club’s nonprofit pricing.

Christina - we have reached out directly and are committed to working with Hack Club to ensure your workspace remains fully accessible and that you have everything you need to keep inspiring the next generation of coders. We’re reviewing our billing and communications processes so this doesn’t happen again.

Thanks for holding us accountable.
by kawfey | 2025-09-18 18:59:28+00:00
ABC/Disney made the choice to pull Kimmel, bent at the knee in fear of losing their broadcast license. That decision itself is one worth questioning...what if they didn't? Would the FCC actually do it? If they did, how many lawsuits would come their way since that's the greatest infringement of the First Amendment the US has ever witnessed? Wouldn't ABC, the public, and the First Amendment win out massively at the end?

What if that bit of libertarian anarchy played out?

ABC ignores the backlash and threats, and keeps Kimmel on the air, maybe even encouraging speech against those bullies and hatred. Then FCC pulls their license, but ABC keeps broadcasting. Their pirate broadcasts would escalate both sides even further: stoking a great groundswell of support for the freedom of speech from liberals/the left, a storm of legal battles representing We The People v. the Government would form, and a massive (possibly violent) outcry from far-right conservatives and nationalists. What happens then would redefine our nation. Would corporations back ABC and capitalism retake the reins, and grassroots efforts steer the misguided Right back to normalcy? Or would an explosive sabotage and a bloody battle over the fate of our nation take place before any progress, or regression, would happen?

As much of a work of fiction as that sounds, it's almost more believable given the timeline we're already on.
by chuckadams | 2025-09-18 18:59:33+00:00
Right, it's very useful for lots of reasons, one being that any construct that actually tries to use a Void return value or construct a parameter value will be rejected at compile time.

What I am really curious about is whether there's any uses of `absurd :: Void -> a` in the wild. I guess it's a top type for arbitrary functions, though I'm not sure how useful that is in itself...
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-18 19:00:26+00:00
It's not just Meta. All big tech companies (including Amazon, if you are a vendor) have gotten infamous for basically only getting a human to intervene with automated moderation or outsourced lowest-effort moderation if one raises a big-enough stink on social media or manages to secure a court judgement, but even that isn't foolproof these days. Twitter has recently gotten under fire for ignoring German court orders.
by xp84 | 2025-09-18 19:00:28+00:00
Sure it is. But he was elected with everyone fully knowing that's what he does. Including the popular vote, remember that. Including improving his margins with Hispanic voters and Black voters compared to 2016. [1]

I don't like Trump and I think 80% of his policies seem like those of an immature child. But also, this is what the public wanted when presented with the two choices of this, and Harris, who was the weakest major-party candidate in history. The DNC couldn't literally couldn't beat this guy.

Anyone complaining that Trump should be impeached or should never have been elected should, in my opinion, admit to not believing in democracy. (Which IMHO is fine, but I don't think people are admitting that to themselves.)

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patte...