MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mwcz | 2025-09-23 20:40:18+00:00
This is great. I use Markov chains to describe to normies how LLMs work.

It's very interesting reading what Claude Shannon wrote after producing Markov chains from English sentences.

> In an unpublished spoof written a year later, Shannon imagined the damage his methods would do if they fell into the wrong hands. It seems that an evil Nazi scientist, dr. Hagen Krankheit, had escaped Germany with a prototype of his Müllabfuhrwortmaschine, a fearsome weapon of war "anticipated in the work ... of Dr. Claude Shannon." Krankheit's machine used the principles of randomized text to totally automate the propaganda industry. By randomly stitching together agitprop phrases in a way that approximated human language, the Müllabfuhrwortmaschine could produce an endless flood of demoralizing statements.

From A Mind at Play. I don't remember the exact year he did that work. I think it was some time before 1950, yet strangely timely in 2025.
by kgeist | 2025-09-23 20:40:38+00:00
What is the conceptual difference between a "past state" and a "present state"? In a typical conversation with an LLM, you have past messages that remain in the KV cache when generating the next token (so as not to recalculate everything). Yet here, everything that came before is reinterpreted as part of the present state. In other words, it seems as if you can take any past state and fold it into one large concatenated present state - and, by that logic, call basically anything a Markov chain? I can't wrap my head around it. Can you give an example of a non-Markov system?
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-09-23 20:41:22+00:00
His mother openly says he was left-wing; the governor said he was left-wing; he has a sexual relationship with a male transitioning to female who is also a furry; he cites Bella Ciao on the ammunition; has a "Notices bulge" meme reference also on the ammunition; and you're telling me there's no evidence?

Duh, he’s a leftist; and the fourth violent one the right wing can name from the last year alongside Ryan Routh, Thomas Crooks, and Robin Westman. Denial doesn’t solve problems.
by troupo | 2025-09-23 20:41:39+00:00
Blazor suffers from needing to lift the entire .net runtime into wasm. So first you download a gazillion resources that reimplement .net core/runtime/memory/garbage collector/whatever into the page. An eternity later your hello world can finally run.

Though they did manage to really shave the runtime off somehow. It used to load megabytes and megabytes of data.

> numerous web frameworks should they invest in tech similar to Blazor. Phoenix's LiveView also comes to mind.

Phoenix live view sends minimal diffs that get applied to the DOM. It doesn't have "components that run in the client and on the server". Everything is done on the server, with very specific extension points into JS
by kccqzy | 2025-09-23 20:41:40+00:00
When I was a student I had in fact lived in a room with 5 other people while doing a summer internship. This was in Palo Alto. Basically all people living there were interns. There was even a choice of male-only, female-only or mixed rooms. It wasn't bad. People knowingly chose this kind of arrangement, sacrificing their privacy in exchange for more social mingling, just like youth hostels. In my 20s I would be upset if coming back from work I stayed alone in a private room in a new city; living with people my age was better.
by bitwize | 2025-09-23 20:41:47+00:00
Those illustrations are really cool. The detail is there but the sense of perspective isn't. I think this was a deliberate design choice on the part of the illustrator, reflecting the way an eight-year-old sees the world, unless they have a Stephen Wiltshire-like brain.

One of the explanations of Picasso's Cubist portraiture with its flat, simultaneous front and side perspective was that he was satirizing how "realistic" painters approached a three-quarter-view portrait, by sort of blending a full front view with a full side view. There's something about the human psyche that causes us to elide a full three-dimensional view of an object from our consciousness unless we deliberately practice looking for it.
by anthk | 2025-09-23 20:42:04+00:00
Also for perl user:

curl -L https://cpanmin.us/ -o cpanm ./cpanm -n local::lib ./cpanm -n Hailo ~/perl5/bin/hailo -t file.txt -b file.brn ~/perl5/bin/hailo -b file.brn

file.txt must be a text file with one sentence per line.
by iagooar | 2025-09-23 20:42:18+00:00
There is definitely way too much plumbing and going back and forth.

But one thing that MUST get better soon is having the AI agent verify its own code. There are a few solutions in place, e.g. using an MCP server to give access to the browser, but these tend to be brittle and slow. And for some reason, the AI agents do not like calling these tools too much, so you kinda have to force them every time.

PRD review can be done, but AI cannot fill the missing gaps the same way a human can. Usually, when I create a new PRD, it is because I have a certain vision in my head. For that reason, the process of reviewing the PRD can be optimized by maybe 20%. OR maybe I struggle to see how tools could make me faster at reading and commenting / editing the PRD.
by WorldPeas | 2025-09-23 20:42:20+00:00
the complaint I recall is that people don't like the way they nest, but I've had to write regex for xml and lisp, and I must say the lisp is much more pleasant. Perhaps the only difference on the post-parsing end is that in xml, there is a special place to nest children, that's really the only benefit I can think of even though you have to go through more trouble.
by Sesse__ | 2025-09-23 20:43:06+00:00
Indeed. The output of the beamforming algorithm is something like four (complex) numbers that you use to tell which of your radios to shout the loudest (and with what delay), which magically makes the signal become the strongest possible at wherever the device was last heard. And at an infinite amount of other places.

If you have MIMO, i.e., multiple signal streams, it will be more like an 4x4 matrix instead (how loud should radio X shout signal Y), and you'll not only optimize for “signal 1 should be the loudest possible at receiver 1” but _also_ “signal 1 should be at the _most quiet_ possible at receiver 2”.

The fact that cheap consumer devices are able to do this fairly reliably (one could even say it's pedestrian) at near-gigabit speeds says something about how insane our level of technology is.
by CalChris | 2025-09-23 20:43:31+00:00
Along a similar vein, I was working at a company. I was pretty much the gang leader for lunch.

One day a guy shows up at a desk. I dropped by and invited him to lunch, but thinking he’d say no. There was a considerable difference in our ages. But I thought I’d be polite and social.

He thought for a few seconds and said … sure.

He had the best stories. I have good stories. He had better. He’d been a dresser for Nureyev and traveled the world. He’d taught celestial navigation at RIT. He’d raced the Bermuda race and had a lifetime winning record against Buckley.

And he was dead three months later from the cancer he had that day. I can’t remember any of the lunch gang but I can remember him.
by prosa10 | 2025-09-23 20:43:55+00:00
One day I want to celebrate that, but today I just need the first 10. Who’s in?

I’m about to launch a platform that redefines how we work with data:

Turn your data into instant decisions.

Upload a file (.csv or .xlsx)

Ask questions in plain English

Get insights, summaries, and charts without writing a single line of code

Right now, I’m not looking for thousands of users. Just the first 10 pioneers willing to test it, share feedback, and be part of something big from day one.

You could be among the very first users of the tool that will someday announce:

“We’ve reached 10,000 users.”

Want early access? Jon to the wait list
by danaris | 2025-09-23 20:43:57+00:00
And this is because individual property rights must not be sacrosanct in a civilized society.

We already have a number of rules of what you can and can't do with your private property that I think most people agree on. You can't build a slaughterhouse right in the middle of a residential area. You can't dump your garbage into the water flowing through your property. Etc.

Those are rules we all agree on because they have immediate and very visible primary effects.

The things we're talking about now are less visible secondary effects, but they're still very real.

The ability of our entire society to be able to securely and affordably house all its members is a much stronger imperative than the ability of people in any particular area to have nice views, or neighbors who all share the same socioeconomic class/skin color/native language as them.
by tomaskafka | 2025-09-23 20:43:58+00:00
> This is one of those weird laws that's on the books but is almost never enforced.

Let me introduce to the concept of rubber laws, a beloved tool of every totalitarian states. I now pass over to GPT:

“Rubber laws are vague catch-all offenses—like old vagrancy or ‘disorderly conduct’ laws on steroids. Because they’re so unclear, authorities can always say you broke one, and they use that flexibility to target inconvenient people. In the U.S., the Supreme Court generally strikes down such vague laws under the void-for-vagueness doctrine—but authoritarian systems keep them precisely because vagueness makes selective enforcement easy.”
by triceratops | 2025-09-23 20:43:59+00:00
> Nimbys typically don't care about things that are not part of their locality

Yimbys go even smaller. They don't care about things that are not in their backyard.

You want an apartment building on your land? Cool, none on my land thanks.

If you care about freedom, go with yimbys. The nimbys are the ones putting encumbrances on your property.
by janalsncm | 2025-09-23 20:44:04+00:00
I recognize that an accountant’s job is more than just running a bunch of calculations and getting a result. But part of the job is doing that, and it would be a real PITA if their calculator was stochastic. I would definitely not call it a productivity enhancer.

If my calculator sometimes returned incorrect results I would throw it out. And I say this as an MLE who builds neural nets.
by fuzztester | 2025-09-23 20:45:06+00:00
>I actively dislike Zig's memory safety story

Why? Interested to know.

Just for background, I have not tried out either Zig or Rust yet, although I have been interestedly reading about both of them for a while now, on HN and other places, and also in videos, and have read some of the overview and docs of both. But I have a long background in C dev earlier. And I have been checking out C-like languages for a while such as Odin, Hare, C3, etc.
Ask HN: Going to Taiwan electronics markets; what would you build?
by ihaveajob | 2025-09-23 20:45:20+00:00
Going to Taipei for New Year's and planning to load up at Guanghua Digital Plaza since I've heard Arduino clones are like $5 and sensors are dirt cheap. I've got a few project ideas (bird feeder cam, automated squirrel deterrent for my garden, some LED toys for the kids) but I'm curious what you all would stock up on if you had access to these prices.

Anyone been electronics shopping in Taiwan? What components are stupid cheap there that I should grab? Any weird/interesting stuff that's hard to find in the US?

I'm VERY beginner with Arduino/ESP32 but have been wanting to get into it. I like sensor-heavy projects. My kids (5-10) also love anything with lights that reacts to movement. What would you build if components were basically free?
by bahmboo | 2025-09-23 20:45:20+00:00
I can't speak for SF I'm in Seattle. I don't think it is incumbent on delivery drivers to do activism for their employers. That's my opinion. And I still don't understand why people don't see that the delivery driver on foot is a vulnerable user of the roads and sidewalks. We aren't perfect but we are there for the public not because we like it.

Someone else mentioned "externalizing" the cost of parking via citations. Those are expensive and a trove for the city. That sounds more like subsidising than externalizing.

As far as feeling sorry for "them" - that is a disconcerting view of a servant class.
by dylan604 | 2025-09-23 20:46:08+00:00
I grew up in a construction family. I didn't have this problem. I was given a real hammer and real nails and scrap wood to nail together. It was a shite hammer but real. It was probably only a light 8oz hammer, but I was at the real worksite with my pretend project. I'm sure some OSHA rules were broken, but it was weekends only and most of the crew was off, but it was real enough to kid me then.

But yeah, if someone gave me a red and blue smiley face toy tool, I'd be like WTF is this? Then again, my dad would have said the same thing without the cutesy internet acronyms.
by contingencies | 2025-09-23 20:46:26+00:00
Hi Erik. Frankly, I wonder if this is an elaborate joke since there are some serious concerns in terms of CVP ("wait two seconds and retry"), in terms of gatekeeping potential nobody will sleepwalk in to ("we solve two the second wait with our CoinbaseCoin, get an enterprise subscription!"), or in terms of the inherent lack of openness in HTTP these days (client/server, HTTPS identity chains, DNS, gatekeepers like CloudFlare). For thoughts on a more open protocol without these drawbacks see https://raw.githubusercontent.com/globalcitizen/ifex-protoco... Sincerely, architect of a predecessor exchange (founder asked me not to continue work on open protocols).
by nosequel | 2025-09-23 20:46:35+00:00
Also, in real life, he's a genuine nice guy. I had lunch with him and Armon at a conference when they worked at Kiip, before they founded Hashicorp. Mitchell (to me) was the proper hacker. He just loved everything about computing. This particular conference was about distributed systems and he was just geeking out on everything.

I walked away thinking that no matter what they did, they'd probably be successful. I was extremely happy to find Ghostty and have been using it ever since.
by toast0 | 2025-09-23 20:46:55+00:00
They could probably be quickly found if someone is looking for them, but carriers don't necessarily care that much about these. Add a couple layers of indirection with MVNOs and there's a lot of meh to spread around.

If the reporting around this is accurate, sounds like someone(s) was swatting through these, which brought the attention needed to find this group.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-23 20:46:58+00:00
Okay so I appreciate your comment once again. I hope that this discussion can happen in good faith and lets really continue it as I think that I can learn something new.

I can be wrong, I usually am.

That being said, My question to you is:

Do you believe that it is an excuse if I don't invest in mag7 while they are most profitable and well run because I believe that their stock price is highly overflated and past performances aren't indicative of future performances unless we are talking over an aggregate time which the general markets do have.

Now the question is, Do you think its an excuse if I don't want to invest in mag7 because I am worried that its an AI bubble and that worry is backed up by the fact of this AI craze.

If AI doesn't deliver on its prices, can you wager that MAG7 would actually do good? Of course it wouldn't.

What do you mean to think that AI would deliver to its prices as it seems to be either only hyper applicable in tech and all other AI tech is seemingly run at a loss and I can see no way how they might force normal users when there is so much foss ai to actually pay for ai...

What is the monetization plan? Is it to churn the money that you get from stocks into AI to get a higher evaluation of stocks and do some passing around the circle from one company to other and repeat?

Well run is another questionable term given how Magnificient7 includes tesla but maybe we can talk about it later.

I believe that time in the markets beats timing in the markets, so your experiences shouldn't be with a market that feels bubbly y'know? Otherwise, you might just stop it alltogether and I feel like that things might fall down quicker than we think as AI is kinda scrambling through, A lot of people felt disappointed in gpt-5. Reality is settling in, but is reality settling in those magnificient 7 stocks?

I consider myself to be an average investor in the sense that being a superior investor is insanely insanely difficult and its much easier to think you are a superior investor because you might get lucky and then lose more money than you could've made over a long term of time and you try to recoup previous money and previous money.... I definitely don't want to experience it in first place to keep my experiences somewhat moderate y'know?

This is HN so I presume you don't get bored with this response as I love this talk & trying to understand your point in good faith!
by bko | 2025-09-23 20:47:00+00:00
San Francisco has a system for reporting parking violations. Residents can report illegal parking such as blocked driveways, sidewalk obstructions, double parking, and abandoned vehicles through the city’s SF311 platform.

You can make a report on the 311 website, mobile app, or by calling 311. You receive a tracking number to monitor the response.

https://www.sf.gov/departments--311-customer-service-center
by echelon | 2025-09-23 20:47:07+00:00
Square was originally a single RoR monolith. We spent a decade burning it to the ground with a Java and Go microservice architecture.

Some product surface area remains Ruby, but Ruby was chased away by most teams.

Square brought in a lot of Xooglers over the years to lead the transition, so you see a lot of Google tech: protobufs, gRPCs, at one point a pre-Kubernetes Borg clone, etc.
by HankStallone | 2025-09-23 20:48:00+00:00
True, only the first part is odd.

But is anyone going to believe the Biden administration had to strong-arm them into censoring dissenting opinions about Covid? They did it because they were goodthinkers, and all goodthinkers at the time agreed that those opinions were dangerous and should be blocked from the public ear. No one had to make them do it.

I get the feeling a lot of people/companies are going to use Biden as a scapegoat for things they all agreed needed doing.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-09-23 20:48:02+00:00
I know secure code isn't easy to write, but every line of code I've seen come from AI companies (including the big ones) has looked like an unpaid intern wrote it. "Do you trust AI" is not the right question; it's "Do you trust the engineers building AI products?" So far I don't. It doesn't help that it all feels like a repeat of "move fast, break stuff".
by iagooar | 2025-09-23 20:48:04+00:00
I would not call it vibe coding. But I do not check all changed lines of code either.

In my opinion, and this is really my opinion, in the age of coding with AI, code review is changing as well. If you speed up how much code can be produced, you need to speed up code review accordingly.

I use automated tools most of the time AND I do very thorough manual testing. I am thinking about a more sophisticated testing setup, including integration tests via using a headless browser. It definitely is a field where tooling needs to catch up.
by troupo | 2025-09-23 20:48:06+00:00
Neither the protocol, nor the technologies it uses, nor the capabilities it exposes are new or even novel.

What is novel is the "yolo vibe code protocol with complete disregard to any engineering practices, and not even reading at least something about that was there before". That is, it's world's first widely used vibe-coded protocol.

That's why you have one-way protocols awkwardly wrapped to support two-way communication (are they on their third already?). That's why auth is an afterthought. That's why there's no timeout coordination.
by efsavage | 2025-09-23 20:48:08+00:00
I overheard two very outgoing co-workers once, where one asked the other if he was having his holiday party.

"It was last weekend", he said.

"Oh, I didn't get an invite"

"That's because you never come"

She looked shocked, I think she genuinely didn't know what to say. After an awkward silence she said, "but I liked to be invited"

"I'll happily invite you next year if you promise to come"

She smiled politely and walked away.

It was memorable to me because it was such a foreign interaction on both sides from my perspective.
by gdubs | 2025-09-23 20:48:19+00:00
I find that test-driven advocates border on a religious way of thinking about software development, and I also find it sucks joy out of coding.

Does that mean I don't think tests are valuable – no, that's not what I'm saying. There are critical pieces of code where testing will bring you more joy because you'll catch very bad bugs that would have really ruined your day.

But as a way of constructing an application, it just has always felt really dull and uninspiring.

I know people will vehemently disagree with this. But, sometimes you gotta write the novel once to know what story you're telling. Then you can go back, edit, put tests in the critical places.
by janalsncm | 2025-09-23 20:48:32+00:00
This only works for classes of problems where checking the answer is easier than doing the calculation. Things like making a visualization, writing simple functions, etc. For those, it’s definitely easier to use an LLM.

But a lot of software isn’t like that. You can introduce subtle bugs along the way, so verifying is at least as hard as writing it in the first place. Likely harder, since writing code is easier than reading for most people.
by webstrand | 2025-09-23 20:48:45+00:00
My experience using this, I picked "Frame" from their list of clients.

1. Getting USDC from the faucet was pretty easy 2. Connecting Frame to my browser worked well, x402 was immediately detected 3. The first transaction got lost, I submitted it and the page spun forever. I had to make a second transaction to make it work. If this was real money, it'd be super easy to make people pay twice, because my first transaction is probably languishing in a mempool somewhere. 4. Frame is a terrible tool to suggest. It has no transaction log, so once you commit you can't use any of the tricks like "send another transaction with the same nonce, but with more gas" in case it got lost. It also appears to be largely unmaintained. 5. Second transaction worked fine, processing was nearly instant, the feedback was good.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-09-23 20:49:39+00:00
There would be need to a state specifically for “the cow jumped over the” (and any other relevant context) and states for all the other times ‘the’ is proceeded by something.

This is the limitation i was getting at btw. In the example i wad getting at, if you have an image with solid vertical columns, followed by columns of random static, followed again by solid vertical colors a markov chain could eventually learn all patterns that go

solid->32 random bits->different solid color

And eventually it would start predicting the different color correctly based on the solid color before the randomness. It ‘just’ needs a state for every possible random color between. This is ridiculous in practice however since you’d need to learn 2^32 states just for relation ship between those two solid colors alone.
by CrimsonCape | 2025-09-23 20:49:53+00:00
In my theory of "human-readability", odd double tokens like :: can exist successfully so long as there is sufficient utility and logic in the single token :

Tokens are inseparable from human instincts of single = less, double = more and the corresponding emotions: single=less=easier=quicker, double=more=complicated=longer=difficult

If you are not emphasizing the single token as them most common, it's going to cause confusion.
by toast0 | 2025-09-23 20:50:15+00:00
The packaging in one of the photos is a MVNO. It's easier to get sims for a MVNO than a carrier, but either way, there's tons of sim card resellers, they have to be getting inventory from carriers/MVNOs. Ask a hundred resellers for 1000 sims each, and you'll get to 100k. 1000 sims may be a lot for some resellers, but is probably small for many of them.