MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fluoridation | 2025-09-03 17:42:58+00:00
I don't agree that forgetfreeman and I are talking past each other.

>Legally, you're right

Cool, but my response doesn't hinge on there being a legal definition of "adult". In fact, the definition I gave was biological, which besides the legal is the definition most people use in casual conversation. When would you say a dog is an adult?

>Most notably, we can describe someone as acting like an adult. We can recognize that behaving like an adult, with the responsibilities that go along with that, can be independent from age.

Sure. But notice that you had to say that acting like an adult is independent from age, and not being an adult is. You wouldn't say that someone who, say, gambled his home is not adult, except figuratively, would you? You wouldn't think he should be entrusted to a guardian and that he should be signed up for school with other children. Regardless of how irresponsible his behavior, he still is an adult in your eyes.

>Refusing to acknowledge it, even after it's pointed out, is bad form

What's been pointed out, exactly? forgetfreeman said something -- something stupid, in my opinion -- I countered it, and they doubled down on it. What, I should just capitulate to anyone who is being insistently stupid?

>it's against site guidelines asking us each to use reasonable interpretations of each others thoughts and comments.

So what's the "reasonable interpretation" for the comment? "An individual who routinely fails to understand the consequences of their actions is by definition not an adult." By all means, tell me what I missed.
by globular-toast | 2025-09-03 17:43:11+00:00
Yeah, same experience here too. I "vibe coded" a project, about 3k loc including tests. But whenever I need to look at it for bugs etc it just feels like I'm looking at someone else's code. I don't have that intuition of where things are, which bits are a bit fragile, which bits might be the likely cause of an issue etc.

I mean, ultimately, I didn't write it myself. It's more of a "remix" of other people's code. Or like if I translated this comment into French. It wouldn't improve my French so why would vibe coding be expected to improve one's programming ability?
by throwaway58576 | 2025-09-03 17:43:20+00:00
> When pressed for reasons what exactly is so bad about Electron, they can rarely offer anything than vaguely mumbled "memory usage" or "b-but it's an entire browser" (both of which have not been true for years, for example Electron's memory usage has improved dramatically, but the meme stuck)

I downloaded Nuclear (the AppImage, if that matters) and booted it up. Instant 300MB RAM usage.

I think I'll pass.
by MarkusQ | 2025-09-03 17:43:40+00:00
> On the other hand, a so-called mountain peak would be a 5 surrounded by 4’s or lower. The odds for having this happen in 10D are 0.2*(1-0.8^10) = 0.18. Then the total density of mountain peaks, in a 10D hyperlattice with 5 potential values, is only 18%.

I believe the odds are actually

0.2 (odds of it being a 5) ×

0.8^10 (odds of each of the neighbors being ∈ {1,2,3,4})

which is ~0.021 or around 2%. This makes much more sense, since 18% of the nodes being peaks doesn't sound like they are rare.
by danialasif | 2025-09-03 17:44:16+00:00
That was one of our assumptions too, since you often hear about long cycles and low willingness to pay. Once we started gathering feedback and learning about the pain points, we found a strong appetite for technology that makes jobs easier and more effective.

Staff and administrators are also just people working in critical functions. When the tools help with their day-to-day job functions, the willingness to adopt is there. We’ve stayed focused on education because the problems are tied directly to retention and student success, and those are outcomes schools care deeply about.
by tetris11 | 2025-09-03 17:44:21+00:00
MullvadVPN seem to be pretty decent at the moment, but it looks like they're laying down a worldwide VPN infrastructure of sorts that other VPN companies can rent (similar to phone networks)

This makes me feel a little uneasy of their unstated longterm goals (corner the entire market), but I do think they are the most trustworthy out there right now
by hn_acc1 | 2025-09-03 17:44:22+00:00
There are pragmas you can give to a compiler to tell it to "expect that this code path is (almost) never followed". I.e. if you have an assert on nullptr, for example. You want it to assume the assert rarely gets triggered, and highly optimize instruction scheduling / memory access for the "not nullptr" case, but still assert (even if it's really, REALLY slow, relatively speaking) to handle the nullptr case.
by j_w | 2025-09-03 17:44:46+00:00
The living wage calculation on that website does not constitute your last paragraph. I'd argue that not including a savings/retirement investment portion makes it a much worse number.

As for a computer, your desktop will work fine with Linux. A laptop doesn't need to cost 1000, again we are over consuming. If your hobby requires a computer, that would be from recreational expenses, not required technology spending.

Living has lots of wiggle room, but it starts with understanding what you actually NEED vs what you think you need, then wiggling from there. If you start with inflated base monthly expenses your true requirements become obscured.

I'm privileged. I don't actually know what a healthy retirement savings rate is because I'm certainly well above that in my own savings. But part of why I'm well above that is because I truly cut down on a lot of unneeded spending that I see many of my peers doing.
by zargon | 2025-09-03 17:45:12+00:00
> the shibboleth identity of the phone in their pocket

Someone here has religion, and it’s not me. I don’t use Google search because it’s a terrible product and we finally have other options. As for AI, there are dozens of options, and it does not take many examples to see how bad Ai Overview is. Gemini 2.5 Pro, however, is in my tool belt.
by rramadass | 2025-09-03 17:45:25+00:00
People have forgotten that it was the invention of the printing press which made books widely available to the masses, which then became the main catalyst for the Scientific Revolution (by diffusing the knowledge/discoveries/inventions of an individual/small group across the entire population) leading to the advanced Technology based society we live in today.

We have become so complacent that anti-intellectualism has become the norm in popular culture and people see no benefit in learning "knowledge for knowledge's sake". The irony is that in today's world there are myriad avenues for knowledge acquisition and far more easily and cheaply than ever before. Because there is so much to learn the minimum that people should focus on is to get exposed to different types of knowledge i.e. breadth over depth. And both Non-Fiction and Fiction are needed here, the former to deal with Reality and the latter for modulating The Human Condition all with the aim of a well-rounded life.
by davepeck | 2025-09-03 17:45:32+00:00
Long ago, in the era of Firesheep and exploding prevalence of coffee-shop Wi-Fi, consumer VPN services were definitely valuable.

But that was long ago. Now, HTTPS is the norm. The only use cases for consumer VPNs today seem to be (1) "pretend I'm in a different geography so I can stream that show I wanted to see" and (2) "torrent with slightly greater impunity".

I live in Seattle and Mullvad VPN seems to have bought approximately all of the ad space on public transit over the past couple months. Their messaging is all about "freeing the internet" and fighting the power. It's deeply silly and, I worry, probably quite good at attracting new customers who have no need for (or understanding of) VPNs whatsoever.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-03 17:45:53+00:00
Thanks for the link about Lanai although that site's cert has expired (very recently too) so it's slightly annoying (or of course bad guys are attacking me)

As to the first point, I suspect this is a foundational problem. Like, suppose you realise the concrete used to make a new skyscraper was the wrong mixture. In a sense this is a small change, there's nothing wrong with the elevators, the windows, cabling, furnishing, air conditioning, and so on. But, to "fix" this problem you need to tear down the skyscraper and replace it. Ouch.

I may be wrong, I have never tried to solve this problem. But I fear...
by Barrin92 | 2025-09-03 17:46:59+00:00
>unless you mean that in thw sense of wake up, eat, work and sleep kind of way.

this is what 99% of people spend 99% of their time on. If you give most people the choice between a place that has jobs, clean trains and where women can walk safely at night and one that looks like the Purge but you can insult the prime minister we can make a bet how people will vote with their feet.

This is why China makes the claim that it is actually more democratic[1]. This is not merely propaganda. They are making the case that delivering material goods to people rather than exhausting yourself in some idiocracy-like circus of abstract rights is what should be the point of government.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole-process_people%27s_democ...
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-09-03 17:47:04+00:00
If I did that, I would expect that I would get some dirty looks. I might get yelled at. I might even get beaten up (by private individuals, not by the authorities). The cops might come by and cite me for disturbing the peace.

I would not be disappeared. I would not be charged with a felony. I would not be imprisoned for years or decades.

And, where the rubber meets the road for my personal mental health: I can say what I think to my friends and family. They may disagree. They may even argue. They're not going to report me to the secret police, nor are there secret police waiting for someone to report something.

That distinction really matters.
by hn_acc1 | 2025-09-03 17:47:25+00:00
AIUI, if you made an LLM deterministic, every mostly-similar prompt would return the same result (i.e. access the same training data set) and if that's wrong, the LLM is just plain broken for that example. Hacked-in "temperature" (randomness) is the only way to hopefully get a correct result - eventually.
by sdenton4 | 2025-09-03 17:47:33+00:00
Sorry you feel insulted.

Lemme try to put it another way, because I am suggesting a different way to think about the idea of work, which /also/ was not the dominant way of thinking about things when I was a student. The notion that you go get credentials in order to get a job standing in a spot and doing a thing and get paid is... perhaps fine, for the trades. But, as I mentioned above, the beaten path is saturated, and you will find yourself in what is essentially a lottery system. (Perhaps most of what has changed since 2006 is that the odds of the lottery have gotten worse...)

Alternatively, you can think of yourself as a problem-solver for hire. You might be more or less specialized as a problem solver, but ultimately, you're asking someone to pay you money in exchange for regularly engaging in creative problem solving to make their business/NGO/whatever run better. Plenty of people come out of school or whatever and have no problem solving ability. And some people create more problems than they solve.

How do you prove that you're worth hiring then? With a portfolio of problems that you have successfully solved. How do you get that portfolio? By plugging into some area you're interested in and solving people's concrete problems.
by Modified3019 | 2025-09-03 17:47:55+00:00
I’m on mobile so trying to dig up the link is a pain, but the company is against commercial propagation/breeding, not personal propagation/breeding. Basically, be reasonable.

Note for others that it’s actually very difficult to accurately take a photo of the glow. They are overall quite “dim”, requiring near total darkness and eyes adapted to darkness for a bit to see. Unfortunately, if you expect what you see in the marketing materials, you’ll be disappointed. Cameras tend to either be unable to see the glow, or blow it way out of proportion. They are quite a bit above your typical glowing fungus though.

They can also be kinda finicky to grow until you learn what they need. Basically:

-Full sun. Internode length directly correlates with light received. I can make them “leggy” or ultra dense with my adjustable lights.

-Prefer cooler temperatures. They don’t seem to like high 80’s to 90’s. Seem to prefer 60-70 degrees F

-They happily survive the winter while inside, and can survive multiple years. Temps below 40F will cause them to start shutting down, with freezing/frost having a good chance to kill them.

-Need well drained soil. Straight potting soil will hold too much moisture for too long, causing root rot.

-Prefer bigger and deeper pots, like 10+”. I’d consider 6” the minimum

-Like being spoon fed fertilizer with waterings. Jack’s petunia feed is perfect.

-May be slightly sensitive to chlorine/chloramine in tap water. I suspect it contributes to some curious yellowing on the leaves. A bit of API stress coat takes care of that. This is good for other house plants as well.

-Sometimes the leaves will have curious yellowing (yellow veins, leaf tips) no matter what you do. It may just be how it is.

-Can be prone to fasciation (mutant flowers or stalks)

-When outside, can get bud worms that chew the flowers, leaves, or developing seed pods

-Fungus gnats can be an issue, especially when propagating cuttings.

-Susceptible to downy mildew (seen mostly in late summer/fall)

-They respond well to being chopped back every so often. I’ll occasionally remove 1/3rd to 2/3rds of their top mass. This also has the benefit of removing weight from the initially thin and weak stems (which thicken over time).

-Can be crossed with other petunias, and sometimes even tobacco. Note that pigments in the flowers from other petunia varieties block the glow, so they’ll be dimmer.

-Wild petunias (or whatever the ancestor plants are) rely on moths for pollination. You can get lots of seeds by manually pollinating the flowers.

-They tend to emit more fragrance at night (for attracting moths)

-The newest growth is the brightest, in particular the recently developed flowers that haven’t opened yet which truly look “glowing”. Normally the glow of most of the plant, is comparable to taking it outside into moonlight. The brightness will shift from day to day as well. Sometimes it’ll be much dimmer or brighter than normal.

reddit.com/r/FireflyPetunia/

If you want “cool glowing thing” but something less intensive, and momentarily much brighter, you may look into getting a glowing algae kit, like pyrofarms.com/
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-09-03 17:47:58+00:00
Yep, it's amazing how modular solar is. It's probably one of the biggest factors driving it down the cost curve and making it the primary source of energy for the human race going forward.

You can buy single panels from the supermarket and plug them in on your balcony! That's amazing.

And that modularity directly drives the competition which reduces the prices of the modules themselves and the many competing solar farms at many different scales racing to connect to the grid and delivering on or under budget on cost and time.

What a time to be alive.
by btbuildem | 2025-09-03 17:48:01+00:00
I agree with you that it would be "made up" content, but I don't know how else to fill in the missing data. The area not scanned by LiDAR is just upstream from and directly beneath a set of whitewater rapids.

I can guesstimate the shape of the bottom by the behaviour of the flow, and hand-model the missing parts of the mesh. I thought outsourcing that to a generative model would be a nice shortcut -- and who knows, likely it'll synthesize it more true-to-nature than I would.
by tim333 | 2025-09-03 17:48:13+00:00
Trump and Rubio don't seem particularly inclined to only go for the low level lackeys. "The president is very clear that he’s going to use the full power of America, the whole might of the United States, to take on and eradicate these drug cartels" and "TDA is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, operating under the control of Nicolas Maduro, responsible for mass murder..." etc.
by cj | 2025-09-03 17:48:47+00:00
The point you were making elsewhere in the thread was that "this is a bad use case for LLMs" ... "Don't use LLMs for dosing guidelines." ... "Using dosing guidelines is a bad example for demonstrating how reliable or unreliable LLMs are", etc etc etc.

You're blaming the user for having a bad experience as a result of not using the service "correctly".

I think the tool is absolutely broken, considering all of the people saying dosing guidelines is an "incorrect" use of LLM models. (While I agree it's not a good use, I strongly dislike how you're blaming the user for using it incorrectly - completely out of touch with reality).

We can't just cover up the shortfalls of LLMs by saying things like "Oh sorry, that's not a good use case, you're stupid if you use the tool for that purpose".

I really hope the HN crowd stops making excuses for why it's okay that LLMs don't perform well on tasks it's commonly asked to do.

> But don't handicap the tool in the name of accuracy!

If you're taking the position that it's the user's fault for asking LLMs a question it won't be good at answering, then you can't simultaneously advocate for not censoring the model. If it's the user's responsibility to know how to use ChatGPT "correctly", the tool (at a minimum) should help guide you away from using it in ways it's not intended for.

If LLMs were only used by smarter-than-average HN-crowd techies, I'd agree. But we're talking about a technology used by middle school kids. I don't think it's reasonable to expect middleschoolers to know what they should and shouldn't ask LLMs for help with.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-09-03 17:49:06+00:00
They're not taxonomically fish (even if you want a monophyletic category & thus count mammals as fish), they're not colloquially fish, they're legally fish under California Fish & Game Code § 45, but they're not necessarily legally fish in other jurisdictions or other subsections of the California Fish & Game Code. Because laws also define words to create jargon, and thereby new meanings dissociated from their common use. The extra fun bit is that other parts of the law can choose to define "fish" differently, for other purposes. Jargon has scope, and allows overloading.
Show HN: Rust-tree is a Nushell script that works like tree for the Rust AST
by awfulsecurity | 2025-09-03 17:49:23+00:00
I spend most of my time in the Nushell terminal and wanted an easy way to query my way around large Rust programs. I also wanted to use LLMs to keep documentation up to date and find places my docs are starting to lie. So I made rust-ast. It scripts ast-grep under the hood to turn Rust repos into nice structured data.
by freehorse | 2025-09-03 17:49:26+00:00
While I do not doubt that there are people who experience this on some monitor/OS combinations, I have used zed on basic 1080p and 1440p 24" monitors with no issue. Sometimes I have general issues with some monitors in macos, which is usually due to some super-resolution/sharpness setting on the monitor itself that I need to adjust, but nothing specific to zed. All I say is that these issues are far from universal with non-hidpi monitors.
by borski | 2025-09-03 17:49:47+00:00
You’re talking about features. It didn’t have that many, sure.

But the features it did have were extremely well polished.

Part of the reason it took them forever to add copy/paste is because Android phones had 12 different ways to do it and it was unintuitive as a result. I’m not suggesting Apple’s solution is better; but it’s definitely intentional and thought-through.

At the time, Apple was one of the very few companies with really intentional design. Now many companies have adopted that philosophy.
by kiba | 2025-09-03 17:50:20+00:00
It's pretty damn clear as to how bad alcohol is. People went to jail, and lives ended because of alcohol. The downside is huge, arguably overwhelmingly not a net positive for humanity.

Make of that what you will.

Note that I didn't say we shouldn't have the right to put alcohol in our bodies. There are also negative consequences to prohibition, as we have seen with the drug war. It's a disaster.
by blakeburch | 2025-09-03 17:50:24+00:00
I really enjoyed sanity.io a year ago. It had the best data structure flexibility by a mile, with the ability to have multiple user draft states and merge conflict resolution.

Other Headless CMS felt restrictive, with shared drafts or the requirement for all published items to have changes go live instantly.

Once you're set up with your schema, the UI is easy enough for non-developers (and you can customize it for them if needed).
by owisd | 2025-09-03 17:50:35+00:00
I was reading The Shallows recently about how the Internet affects your brain, it's from 2009 so a bit out of date re: smartphones & a lot re: LLMs but makes the case that the Internet and hypertext generally as a tool is 'bad' for you cognitively because it puts additional load on your working memory, but offloads tasks from the parts of your brain that are useful for higher-level tasks and abstract thinking, so those more valuable skills atrophy. It contrasts this with a calculator that makes you "smarter" because it does the opposite - frees up your working memory so you have more time to focus on high-level thought. Found it quite striking because it seemed most likely LLMs and Smartphones would fit in the hypertext category and not the calculator category yet calculators is exactly what Sam Altman likes to use as an analogy to LLMs.
by AftHurrahWinch | 2025-09-03 17:50:41+00:00
> "We aim to inform debate with clear, sourced numbers while avoiding sensationalism."

This is a great aspiration, but it seems to be contradicted by the rest of the page, which provides unclear numbers from unsourced categories.

> CO₂: $AI_{CO_2e} \approx (AI_{electricity} \times grid_{emission\_factor})$

How are you accounting for Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) and Renewable Energy Credits (RECs)?

> Water: $AI_{water} \approx (DC_{water\_per\_kWh} \times AI_{electricity}) + (PowerGen_{water\_intensity} \times AI_{electricity})$

Where do the values for $DC_{water\_per\_kWh}$ (the Water Usage Effectiveness, or WUE) and $PowerGen_{water\_intensity}$ come from? These vary wildly by cooling system (evaporative vs. closed-loop) and energy source (hydro vs. nuclear vs. gas).

> Electricity: $AI_{electricity} \approx (IT_{load} \times utilization \times hours) \times PUE$

How do you estimate $IT_{load}$? Is this based on TDP of GPUs? A specific list of GPUs? Market share estimates?

What is the assumed $utilization$ for inference vs. training?

Which $PUE$ is used? A global average? A regional one? A company-specific one?