MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lm28469 | 2025-09-15 11:37:28+00:00
It would only be capable of truth on subjects with a large consensus, everything else is biased or hallucinated, it's so obvious that grok is being aligned to musk's world view, you're free to think like musk but it's not some kind of god given truth.

How is a statistical model going to come up with The Truth exactly ? It's all based on existing material, at best you'll get the statistical average of what people wrote about the topic, it's cool if you're asking about the color of tomatoes or the shape of bananas, but now people are using these tools to get The Truth about news or politics

https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/false-claims-about-gaza-pho...

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/7/11/as-millions-adop...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/why-does-the-ai-powere...

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/06/26/elon-musks-ai-...

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250602-hey-chatbot-i...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/05/24/grok-mu...

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/17/groks-white-genocide-respons...
by jefftk | 2025-09-15 11:37:29+00:00
The FASTA format looks like:

> title bases with optional newlines > title bases with optional newlines ...

The author is talking about removing the non-semantic optional newlines (hard wrapping), not all the newlines in the file.

It makes a lot of sense that this would work: bacteria have many subsequences in common, but if you insert non-semantic newlines at effectively random offsets then compression tools will not be able to use the repetition effectively.
by pama | 2025-09-15 11:37:34+00:00
Not sure what you mean. One can easily just make the existing prions if they wanted; they are good enough to destroy humanity if one finds a potent delivery mechanism. Again, the problem is not the protein printing tech or the protein design tech; you need to figure out a contagious, multiplying delivery machanic, ie a virus.

It may surprize people who dont work in these areas, but finding ways to kill humans by injecting something in them is completely trivial. The hard part is finding something that does not kill them and has a therapeutic effect.
by squishy47 | 2025-09-15 11:38:07+00:00
I think of myself as a slow thinker and feel the same as many other comments on this post but I always but this down to being a visual mind and having to draw/picture everything to think it. So in my experience slow thinking is topic dependant; maths, conversations, even code are slow because I have to draw it in my head and it takes time. But give me a spatial/visual problem, like coming up with a plan for garden landscaping, organising room layouts or will this object fit in this space and it takes like 1 micro-second. it's weird.
by omnicognate | 2025-09-15 11:38:23+00:00
The definition of "circle" they are using is the set of points at an equal distance (the radius) from a given point (the centre). This definition works in any setting in which some sort of "distance" (metric) is defined. They are also using an implicit definition of "circumference" that works for the cases being considered here: split the "circle" into sections, measure the sum of their lengths according to the metric and take the limit as you use more and more, smaller and smaller sections. There are details that aren't covered in the article, but it works.

Having defined what a "circle" is and what its "circumference" and "radius" are, "pi" is defined: it's half the ratio of the circumference to the radius.

(I don't think it was very nice of whoever downvoted you, presumably because you're wrong, given you explicitly allowed that you might not be getting it.)
by jokethrowaway | 2025-09-15 11:38:33+00:00
Is your argument that python's package management & ecosystem is bad by design - to increase security?

In my experience it's just bugs and poor decision making on the maintainers (eg. pytorch dropping support for intel mac, leftpad in node) or on the language and package manager developers side (py2->3, commonjs, esm, go not having a package manager, etc).

Cargo has less friction than pypi and npm. npm has less friction than pypi.

And yet, you just need to compromise one lone, unpaid maintainer to wreck the security of the ecosystem.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-09-15 11:38:39+00:00
I assume you do not use TypeScript but JavaScript? With TS your POs are basically discoverable with source-code completion and statically typed.

await page.getStartedLink.click() expect(page.installationHeadline).toBeVisible()

Is much more readable, and on typing "page." you will see what props on your PO are available.

Another note on your specific example: You are probably in the US and only have a single-language project. I am a Frontend Contractor in Europe and for the past 10 years didn't have a single project that was single language, hence the "hasText" selector would always be off-limits. Instead, very often we used the react-intl identificator as text content for code execution - which would make the above example look much more unreadable without POs, while with POs the code looks the same (just your PO looks different).
by ricardobeat | 2025-09-15 11:38:46+00:00
"Leaky gut" might be a myth, but emulsifiers' impact on gut health is not. A steady stream of studies [1] and publications on this [2] has been coming out, since the role of our microbiome became more clear.

[1] ex https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06224-3

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jun/29/the-tru...
by mythz | 2025-09-15 11:38:53+00:00
> The trade-off is fewer features, but also less surface area and almost zero “lock-in” — you can literally view-source and drop it into a page.

You should be able to drop in code dynamically on any existing website with JS Modules, I show an example of this in one of our release notes to showcase the versatility of JS modules [1], which:

- Dynamically adds an Import Map with references to Vue, an external lib + Vue component library - Dynamically creates and mounts a new Vue Component on the fly - Drops in a fully functional and editable Data Grid with API bound forms, API + form validation, etc

Basically you should be able to do most things on a deployed page as can be done in your "no-build" ESM Web App.

I did try building web components with Lit [2], unfortunately WC's encapsulation and shadow dom made it difficult to enable theming and maintain shared global tailwind styles, so ditched it and went back to Vue. Although it's a good option for creating encapsulated components that don't need to share styles.

[1] https://docs.servicestack.net/releases/v6_06#js-modules-quic...

[2] https://lit.dev
by bluGill | 2025-09-15 11:39:15+00:00
Most side effects are not a problem (or should not be).

Years ago we decided that the data directory would be changeable so we call get data directory - that call is an easy constant in production not worth testing, but in test mode it is a complex call to make temp dir, setup the default contents (which might be real default or a test specific situation), then destroy it when the test is done. So a lot of tests are needed to get it right (everyone uses it)- however because we have this we can use a sqlite in our tests thus saving needing to mock the database: side effects from database manipulation no longer matter.

I do a similar thing for dbus, want to use the systembus - in tests I intercept your open call and launch new server on a different port just for this test. Again a lot of tests.

For time I intercept all the timer and get time calls. When in tests I have an advanceTime function that advances all the timers the intended amount and takes action If you advance 100ms a 10ms timer will fire 9-10 times before the 100ms timer you (9-10 because the last time both timers will fire and which is first depends)

The above is real world things I've done and found very useful for long enough that I'm trying to spread it. I believe that it would help everyone to start doing the same.
by cantor_S_drug | 2025-09-15 11:39:17+00:00
> The funny part is that now, I come across as 'quicker'. But that's no accident - I'm just reciting things that I've worked on for a long time, slowly, behind the scenes!

Winston Churchill said something to this effect. His quick witted responses were often pre computed in idle time and he would pattern match the situations to see which one fits where/when.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-09-15 11:40:03+00:00
Wikipedia has a great article[0] which describes the signs of AI writing, and why it prefers not to have those styles in their articles. I agree with almost all of it, and it's far more detailed than I could be in a HN post.

Reading LLM text feels a lot like watching a Dragon Ball Z filler episode.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
by dev_l1x_be | 2025-09-15 11:40:41+00:00
> lowkey ppl who praise cargo seem to have no idea

Way to go on insulting people on HN. Cargo is literally the reason why people coming to Rust from languages like C++ where the lack of standardized tooling is giant glaring bomb crater that poses burden on people every single time they need to do some basic things (like for example version upgrades).

Example:

https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/main/build.sh
by kitd | 2025-09-15 11:40:55+00:00
From the Guidelines [1]:

What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

This one seems reasonable.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by kruador | 2025-09-15 11:41:22+00:00
Strictly, UK teaspoons are 5 ml and tablespoons 15 ml. The metric tablespoons already used in Europe were probably close enough to half an Imperial fluid ounce for it not to matter for most purposes.

My kids' baby bottles were labelled with measurements in metric (30 ml increments) and in both US and Imperial fluid ounces. The cans of formula were supplied with scoops for measuring the powder, which were also somewhere close to 2 tablespoons/one fluid ounce (use one scoop per 30 ml of water). There are dire warnings about not varying the concentration from the recommended amount, but I assume that it's not really that precise within 1-2% - more about not varying by 10-20%. My kids seem to have survived, anyway.
by trinsic2 | 2025-09-15 11:41:56+00:00
Yeah this is a good point. I have been thinking about doing some video creation and I really don't want to be locked into YouTube's platform. I want people to find my video content in some other way because I do not want YouTube to be dominating how my content is shown or becomes visible because then, they are in control of my creative process, not me. So I will stick to posting links on my website and surfacing my content by posting on sites like this. Maybe someday I will find any more automatic way of doing this at some point. I wonder if that is allowed on HN?
by semiinfinitely | 2025-09-15 11:42:21+00:00
other file formats that rival fasta in stupidity include fastq pdb bed sam cram vcf. further reading [1]

> "intentionally or not, bioinformatics found a way to survive: obfuscation. By making the tools unusable, by inventing file format after file format, by seeking out the most brittle techniques"

1. https://madhadron.com/science/farewell_to_bioinformatics.htm...
by noisy_boy | 2025-09-15 11:43:26+00:00
I dont think slow thinking affects the tasks in the example the same way. I have fairly good reflexes e.g. I am able to return pretty fast shots in ping pong, am able to catch things that slip my grip before they hit the ground etc.

But I am not particularly fast in mental maths.

Depending on how relaxed or engaged I am, I can have a witty reply or no comeback at all. Sometimes I have a reply but it is too sharp for the situation so I hold it back.

I think these engage different classes of thinking.
by t43562 | 2025-09-15 11:43:27+00:00
Yes, knowing anything for certain is difficult so it's worth always harbouring a little doubt about both positive and negative conclusions.

Dzerzhinsky liked to say "Trust but verify", and I think that sums it up - if you look at the world entirely from his point of view, head of the Soviet secret police, then you will suspect everyone and if you act on that you'll end up hurting lots of innocents in amongst the people who would really do you harm. If you're in a situation where this is a good survival strategy it seems to me that one should try to leave rather than play the game.
by K0balt | 2025-09-15 11:43:34+00:00
I get presented with one or two of these a month. It’s easy to be calloused until you remember that these people are also victims, often in worse ways than you could ever be as one of their targets.

The best thing is just to ignore completely. If you engage at all, you risk worsening their situation by wasting their time, while if you do engage you might be saving someone else at their expense…. It’s lose/lose to engage in any way.

I’ve settled on just saying, hey, I’m sorry that they are in the situation they are in, and I hope they find the strength to make it out someday. That makes it clear that there is nothing to be gained while offering a tiny bit of hope and empathy, which I’m sure is in short supply.
by Sammi | 2025-09-15 11:43:42+00:00
Sounds like were getting at something in the conversation. For the professional developer generative ai is another tool, making us maybe a bit more capable than before. For the amateur it is a breakthrough enabling amateurs to tackle things that are wildly more ambitious than what they could before. But it's still amateur just-good–enough–for-personal-use software. Productising software is still 90% of the work of professional software development, and this is why we're not seeing a jump in the amount of for-sale software. What numbers should we track for the amount of amateur software? One number I have seen is that the npm downloads of React have jumped a lot in the last year. What this tells us about what additional stuff people are doing with React I don't know.
by eptcyka | 2025-09-15 11:43:54+00:00
There are significantly less palettes being delivered and handled by significantly less people, thus it is far easier to ensure that the plastic used in the delivery process is disposed of properly. Whereas with the abundance of cheap plastic bags that are available on tap to the masses, disposal turns into a mess. I generally agree with you that we should focus on the whole chain and there's lots of easy wins to be had, but decreasing the amount of plastic that gets stuck in trees or otherwise lost in the *environment* is still a good thing.
by bgwalter | 2025-09-15 11:45:02+00:00
You cannot prevent cheating with other policies like the Developer Certificate of Origin either. Yet no one brought up the potential cheating at the time these policies were discussed.

Several projects have rejected "AI" policies using your argument even though those projects themselves have contributor agreements or similar.

This inconsistency makes it likely that the cheating argument, when only used for "AI" contributions, is a pretext and these projects are forced to use or promote "AI" for a number of reasons.
by Pooge | 2025-09-15 11:45:12+00:00
Funny that you say it, but I think Japan doesn't eat any healthier than the average European country. Coming from the USA, I can see how the conclusion might change.

I come from a country that isn't well-known for its cuisine but live quite long lives, but I still gained (and lost when I left) about 7kg when I lived there.

Nothing about their high-sugar, high-sodium, no-fruits diet seemed particularly healthy.

Okinawans eat very differently than people who live in Tokyo, I guess.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-09-15 11:45:53+00:00
The used car market got pretty crazy there for a while due to the covid supply disruptions. 3 year old corrolas with 100k mileage were selling as much as brand new ones! Why? Because you had to wait 9-10 months to get a new one. So a few years ago anybody who needed a car, whether new or used, was paying a lot. A few years later with more inflation in prices and none in wages, its not surprising to see some of these loans start to default.
by rowanG077 | 2025-09-15 11:45:58+00:00
Well I think we talked about memory channels and the maximum speed reachable. And you claimed it was marketing fluff. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that if that speed is reachable using some workload it's not marketing fluff. It was not clear at all to me you limited your claims to CPU speed only. Seems like a classic motte-and-bailey to me.
by Havoc | 2025-09-15 11:45:59+00:00
I’ve noticed the granularity/size of the output matters greatly to whether I learn anything. When generating a cohesive big thing then I can’t be arsed to go through it.

While troubleshooting a specific line or problem is likely to still yield engagement and learning.

In that respect fully agree with author that the vibe coding style (ie IDE) is particularly bad. Substantially more than chatbot style help with coding
by donatj | 2025-09-15 11:46:01+00:00
I recently received a DM on Twitter, this person claimed to have known me growing up and had a surprising amount of personal information some of which I don't recall ever having posted online. I have a very good memory of my childhood and know for a fact that I never knew this person.

The persons profile was strangely convincing, it was hyper-local to my neighborhood growing up. This account had existed for something like 4 or 5 years and had posts going back at least a few. It was almost convincing. The tell was just that their posts were too targeted, all "Hey, local event is going on" "Hey, local politics thing" with no other thoughts expressed. Their replies section was just littered with replies to people about how things were "awesome" or "great news" without any critique or thought.

The whole thing was very unsettling. It was the first scam where I really felt like it would have been easy to fall for with a standard amount of critical thinking. If I had a hazier recollection of my childhood I might have.

I can't imagine this bot was made specifically for me, I'm not that important, but certainly people in my area. I genuinely wonder if this is part of some larger network of hyper-local bots. I don't look forward to the attacks to come as AI progresses.
by yostrovs | 2025-09-15 11:46:06+00:00
Just because some regulations that you would like to exist, but don't, doesn't mean there aren't regulations that exist, but shouldn't. I'm most US states you need a license to cut hair. I'm summer states you need a license to braid hair. These licenses are actually expensive and hard to obtain, keeping a lot of talented people from actually working in the field. I bet in China you can just cut someone's hair.
by crote | 2025-09-15 11:46:12+00:00
Does it, though?

In practice, TLS certificates are given out to domain owners, and domain ownership is usually proven by being able to set a DNS record. This means compromise of the authorative DNS server implies compromise of TLS.

Malicious relaying servers and MitM on the client is already solved by DNSSEC, so it's not adding anything there either.

If we got rid of CAs and stored our TLS public keys in DNS instead, we would lose relatively little security. The main drawback I can think of is the loss of certificate issuance logs.
by wkat4242 | 2025-09-15 11:46:34+00:00
You can but there's just not much point anymore.

I don't remember all the specifics but every time there was a new macos I could cross most of the new features off. Nope this one requires iCloud or an apple ID. Nope this one only works with other macs or iPhones. Stuff like that. The Mac didn't use to be a walled garden. You can still go outside of their ecosystem (unlike on iOS) but then there's not much point. You're putting a square peg in a round hole.

Now, Apple isn't the only one doing this. Microsoft is making it ever harder to use windows without a Microsoft account. That's why I'm gravitating more and more to foss OSes. But there are new problems now, like with Firefox on Linux I constantly get captcha'd. M365 (work) blocks random features or keeps signing me out. My bank complains my system is not 'trusted'. Euh what about trusting your actual customers instead of a mega corp? I don't want my data locked in or monitored by a commercial party.
by IshKebab | 2025-09-15 11:47:39+00:00
A trivial way would be bait cars. I have absolutely no idea why the police doesn't do that more (or at all even). Also for bike theft.

It's reasonably hard to catch bike thieves if they've just stolen a random bike. It's completely trivial if they stole a bait bike that you've loaded with hidden GPS trackers.
by evermike | 2025-09-15 11:48:15+00:00
TL;DR: We run multiple SaaS products on Stripe. Even with clear renewal reminders, invoices and easy cancellations, some users skip refunds and go straight to chargebacks.

A $10 payment ended up costing us $43.95 recently. Banks almost always side with the cardholder, and the only reliable “win” I’ve seen is when the customer withdraws the dispute themselves.

So here’s my question to the community:

What’s really going on here? Why do banks completely ignore the terms customers agreed to when they subscribed, or even in cases where the claims are obviously false? And why aren’t customers required to provide any proof at all?

What actually prevents someone from using a SaaS product, filing chargebacks every time they cancel, and essentially getting refunded for the last several months of usage?

Would love to hear your thoughts.
by xenobeb | 2025-09-15 11:48:58+00:00
I have never found a study that supports this.

The research is pretty clear this is from ghrelin stimulating appetite and at the same time altering levels of leptin so a person feels less full.

It is not from a blood sugar crash.

While some studies link lower BMI, meta analysis shows cannabis is kind of a disaster if you are trying to lose weight.

It is hard to make generalizations though because it is so different if you smoke once a month, once a week or once a day.
by wobfan | 2025-09-15 11:49:05+00:00
> I certainly hope my medical team is using AI tools, as they have been repeatedly demonstrated to be more accurate than doctors.

AI is not a new tool - transformer-based LLMs are. Which is what this post is about.

The latter are very known to be a LOT LESS accurate, and still are very prone to hallucinate. This is just a fact. For your health I hope no one of your medical team is using the current generation for anything else than casual questions.

I'm not an opponent, and I don't think straight up banning LLM-generated code commits is the right thing, but I can understand their stance.