MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kelnos | 2025-09-23 20:20:09+00:00
That's a naive take that lacks nuance.

If your government started doing something you don't agree with, would you renounce your citizenship and move to another country? What would be the threshold of bad things that would be required for you to do that? I think I do have such a threshold, but even as bad as things are in the US right now, I'm still here. Maybe that makes me a bad person. Maybe not; I'd like to think not.

Also just consider that we can't all be responsible for everyone else in the whole world. That's just not possible, and not reasonable to ask of anybody. Someone living paycheck-to-paycheck, in a tiny apartment, trying to feed their kids, afraid of getting evicted or being unable to put food on the table... that person does not have the mental or emotional bandwidth to be concerned about people in Iran suffering under US sanctions.

Even someone of higher financial means... what should they care about? Should they care about Iran? Ukraine? Palestine? Those are the ones in the news right now at least. But dig a bit deeper and you'll find a bunch of other places where their government meddles in politics and war. Do we need to care deeply about those, too?

Human psychology is not built for global scale. Honestly, if we could get all humans to care deeply about their local and regional communities, I would think that would be a huge win. Getting everyone to care deeply about people halfway across the world, and constantly consider them in their life decisions? That's a pipe dream.

> In countries where people didn't vote, you can always go back in history to find a moment where people either did agree to let a certain faction run their country (religious revolution), or allowed an authoritarian regime to take all power slowly by neglect and doing nothing.

I think at this point you've really jumped the shark. Using Iran as the salient example here, do you truly believe that some 30 year old living in Iran is responsible for a regime that was installed before they were born?
by simianparrot | 2025-09-23 20:20:46+00:00
And look at Germany now. I have friends and family there. Merkel’s utopian naïveté has certainly not benefited Germany at this point. It went way too far.

I can’t believe people are like this. But it explains why Europe is more and more split on this topic: It’s two irreconcilable worldviews and one of them requires ignoring observed reality.
by philipwhiuk | 2025-09-23 20:21:11+00:00
I’ve always assumed that’s the point of these things. Ask a broad question that will allow you to write a puffy blogpost that backs your conclusion and then write it in a way that pushes your tools.

The amount of free training coming out on AI shows just how keen they are to push adoption to meet their targets.

Eventually these training will no longer be free as they pivot to profit.
by qwelfkh | 2025-09-23 20:21:16+00:00
Okay, so we have a function that converts a buffer of tokens to a distribution of next tokens. We give the function a buffer, get back the next-token-distribution, from which we sample to get our next token. We append that to the buffer (and possibly roll off the first token) to obtain a new buffer. If we consider entire buffers to be states (which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do), then we have a stochastic process that moves us from one state to another. How is that not a Markov chain?
by electric_muse | 2025-09-23 20:21:28+00:00
MCP feels like the 1903 Wright Flyer right now.

MCP is a novel technology that will probably transform our world, provides numerous advantages, comes with some risks, and requires skill to operate effectively.

Sure, none of the underlying technologies (JSON-RPC, etc.) are particularly novel. But the capability negotiation handshake built into the protocol is pretty darn powerful. It's a novel use of existing stuff.

I spent years in & around the domain of middleware and integrations. There's something really special about the promise of universal interoperability MCP offers.

Just like early-aviation, there are going to be tons of risks. But the upside is pretty compelling and worth the risks. You could sit around waiting for the kinks to get worked out or dive in and help figure out those kinks.

In fact, it seems I'm the first person to seriously draw attention to the protocol's lack of timeout coordination, which is a serious problem[0]. I'm just a random person in the ecosystem who got fed up with timeout issues and realized it's up to all of us to fix the problems as we see them. So there's still plenty of opportunity out there to jump in and contribute.

Kudos to this team for responsibly contributing what they found. These risks are inherent in any new technology.

[0]: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol...
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-23 20:22:16+00:00
You literally, and I mean literally read my mind dear random stranger down to the wording. Micro is definitely underrated.

Micro is a truly goated software. I mean, it can genuinely replace vscode for small scale editing in the context of shopify that the parent comment was referring to.

https://micro-editor.github.io/

It also helped me in physics when I had to remember the units like 10^-6 being micro, 10^-9 being nano etc. and the funny thing is that I used to remember it in the start by seeing I am not sure if it was on micro's github or something but it was a comment on how micro has more features than nano and thus it's name.

So like for some time I definitely felt like I was thinking of micro software, then nano and making the feature comparison to find micro to be larger than nano.

Might seem kinda niche but I ABSOLUTELY LOVE MICRO. Its the one software that I install everywhere, even on my android phone by using UserLand[1] with alpine linux.

I tried writing python code on my phone and it was definitely pleasant thanks to micro.

[1]:https://github.com/CypherpunkArmory/UserLAnd
by parpfish | 2025-09-23 20:22:36+00:00
i always hated when my toys were made to look "kid like".

if you give me a toy tool box, there better be a toy hammer that looks like a real hammer that adults use. it better not be multicolored with a big smiley face on them. i'm pretending to be a big strong adult doing a cool job. do you really think i want to show up to the pretend worksite looking like some sort of baby?!

i'm pretty sure all my friends also wanted the "real" thing, so i have to assume that the cute whimsical angle is just to help sell it to adults.
by primitivesuave | 2025-09-23 20:22:38+00:00
I should have clarified - I only found his business through that list because I noticed his vanity license plate HPPYPPS, which corresponded to a business named Happy Pipes Plumbing which I subsequently found on Yelp.

Also, I found out about his van getting towed because I scraped towing records from Autoreturn (the city's main towing provider - lots of corruption around that deal). Autoreturn's website at the time had a query parameter like "?towid=1", so you could increment that to pull all towing records.

I started working on a pretty in-depth data analysis and visualization, similar to what was done here, but I got caught up with my day job and some rock climbing dreams. I handed over all my research to a few local reporters a while back - they were really excited to talk to me in person about it, but I haven't seen anything published since.
by lazyasciiart | 2025-09-23 20:22:45+00:00
> if you spend some time in municipal spaces you find out quickly this isn't decided by politicians, but by city planners and managers

Unfortunately parking mandates and other building regulations are often set directly by politicians. There was some interesting insight into the political input to Seattle’s proposed planning updates last year - https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/04/16/planners-proposed-big...
by JohnBooty | 2025-09-23 20:22:53+00:00
Regardless of whether or not that's the correct term for DHH....

real white supremacists they are a magnitude more scary and dangerous than DHH's dopey opinion

I would like to caution you against the use of the term "real" white supremacists.

Are you imagining a "real" white supremacist as guy who burns crosses, is covered with racist tattoos, and openly spouts slurs? Because the effective and dangerous ones are a hell of a lot more stealthy than that.

Racism in general, including white supremacy, is more accurately viewed as a spectrum and not a binary racist/non-racist divide.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-09-23 20:22:59+00:00
I think people have a lot of rosy glasses and fondness for those early days, combined with general usability benchmarks being mostly saturated now. GPT-3.5 would say Dallas was the capital of USA, but GPT-4 got it every time!

GPT-4 launched with 8k context. It hallucinated regularly. It was slow. One-shotting code was unheard of, you had to iterate and iterate. It fell over even doing basic math problems.

GPT-5 thinking on the other hand is so capable that the average person wouldn't be able to really test it's abilities. It's really only experts operating in their domain who can find it's stumbling blocks.

I think because we have seen these constant incremental updates that it creates a staircase with small steps, but if you really reflect and look back, you'll see the actual capability gap from 3.5 to 4 compared to 4 to 5 is way way smaller. This is echoed in benchmarks too, GPT-5 is solving problems so wildly beyond what GPT-4 was capable of.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-09-23 20:23:17+00:00
Huh interesting idea.

You could probably build something like this on Solana or the EVM directly. The thing is, if you get the address of the recipient wrong, how can you tell? Like if I send SOL to a payee, then I can look at the chain to make sure that SOL was sent from my address to the payee's address. But that doesn't change the fact that I don't know if the payee is who I think it is.

Are you thinking about situations where, say, you meet in person, then send an amount and have the recipient verify they received an amount, then send the rest? Like a multi-party escrow?

Third-party escrow contracts are very common.
by mhuffman | 2025-09-23 20:24:00+00:00
This particular one may not work on M chips, but the model itself does. I just tested a different sized version of the same model in LM Studio on a Macbook Pro, 64GB M2 Max with 12 cores, just to see.

Prompt: Create a solar system simulation in a single self-contained HTML file.

qwen3-next-80b (MLX format, 44.86 GB), 4bit 42.56 tok/sec , 2523 tokens, 12.79s to first token

- note: looked like ass, simulation broken, didn't work at all.

Then as a comparison for a model with a similar size, I tried GLM.

GLM-4-32B-0414-8bit (MLX format, 36.66 GB), 9.31 tok/sec, 2936 tokens, 4.77s to first token

- note: looked fantastic for a first try, everything worked as expected.

Not a fair comparison 4bit vs 8bit but some data. The tok/sec on Mac is pretty good depending on the models you use.
by horsawlarway | 2025-09-23 20:24:03+00:00
To add... The missing scrollbars feel painful to me. I don't even want them for scrolling, really. I want the visual reference for:

"How much content is in this window"

and

"Where am I in that content"

I still use it daily but it means I have to switch tools for certain things, and reading log files or log output is one of the more common reasons I switch.

I should probably look into trying to get the scrollback info into my statusline, No idea how easy or hard that is - so if someone has done it, feel free to shoot me pointers.
by lordnacho | 2025-09-23 20:24:06+00:00
What I don't understand is, why don't the authorities think the actual bad guys will avoid the surveillance?

It seems to me that organized crime will find their own solution, and the rest of us will occasionally have a snooping policeman checking our private messages. It's not unknown, even in Denmark, that people who are given access to private data will abuse it, eg snooping on ex girlfriends, that kind of thing.

Why do people think this chat control thing will be effective?
by yazaddaruvala | 2025-09-23 20:24:26+00:00
I turn a lot of real photos into cartoons. I love the feature!

Most recently I took a photo of my grandma and me, asked Gemini to make it a cartoon, asked Gemini to make the new variant into a birthday card.

My grandma loved it! I was happy to make her something custom. Buying people cards just never felt right to me. Writing was also never my strongest suit - so this new form of expression for me has been enhancing :)

The only remaining thing I need to do better is getting the card printed! I wish that also was only 12seconds of work.
by JeremyNT | 2025-09-23 20:24:38+00:00
There's ruby the tech and there's ruby the community.

The former is mature, robust, fit for purpose.

The latter is... messy.

DHH's prominent role in the ecosystem and full throated endorsement of reactionary politics has alienated a lot of people who might otherwise have been invested in that community, and this latest maneuvering seems downstream of all that.

At this point the tension between corporate interests (and by extension DHH, who is a central player in that group) and open source / community interests has become frustratingly high, and it all seems like it could have been avoided.

It doesn't mean ruby is dead or even dying, but you can't blame anybody for looking at this and just noping right out over to a community without such drama.
by scoopdewoop | 2025-09-23 20:24:40+00:00
> If we could wave a magic wand and make all code safe with no downsides, who among us wouldn't?

Anybody would, but Rust is not that wand, and there is no wand.

Code needs to _exist_ in order to matter. Time is finite, my free-time is even more limited. Most of my code is garbage collected, and runs great, but if I needed it to be really fast, I would use Zig.

I don't need to be told what software is for or how to accomplish my goals, and I'm sure you wouldn't understand my goals. I've been making code creatively for almost 30 years. You might as well tell an origami artist that folding paper is a bad way to accomplish their goals.

The attitude among _some_ Rust devs (or armchair coders) that there is no place for non-rust manual-memory languages is insanely disconnected with reality. Games exist, Rust ones hardly do. Synths exist, Rust ones hardly do. Not everything is a high-availability microservice or an OS kernel! Look around!

Edited to add:

> "Safety" is just a shorthand for "my program means what I say". Unsafety is semantic gibberish.

You know this isn't true, right? "Safety" in Rust specifically means memory safety and thread safety: no use-after-free, no data races, no null/dangling pointer dereferences, no buffer overflows. That's it. It doesn't guarantee your program is correct, and it doesn't even prevent memory leaks.

Things being manually managed doesn't make them gibberish, and something being implicit, rather than explicit, doesn't mean its gibberish.

The attitude of Rust being bug-free is _insaaaane_. A "bug" is just code that breaks expectations, I promise we can and will write those in every language forever.
by odensc | 2025-09-23 20:25:35+00:00
Pretty simple fix: require more data to look up a citation, like the number, issue date and plate/VIN (this is how my city does it). Technically doesn't make the scraping impossible if you wanna try every permutation of a license plate, but makes it mostly infeasible.

Currently it just requires the sequential citation number [1], which is how the data is being scraped so easily.

[1]: https://wmq.etimspayments.com/pbw/include/sanfrancisco/input...
by zer00eyz | 2025-09-23 20:25:55+00:00
> But you don't refute this,

The 66 percent turn out rate is not that high period. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voter-turnou...

If non voting renters showed up, this could easily swing the other way. Renters are (generally) unmotivated to change their destiny at the voting booth.

> And it's common knowledge that homeowners assume/depend on rising values as part of their purchasing decision.

This is far far far more complicated than it looks. Because what is inflation vs increase in value after adjustment. There are plenty of places where housing has gone down in value (see Detroit, see Camden NJ). There are plenty of places where gentrification has changed whole regions (see the SF Bay Area).

There has also been a massive change in what we build (smaller homes, vs McMansions).

When you dig into the WHY of this, the destruction of old stock is a huge part of it (see Detroit). Massive changes to what and how we build (back to home owners and zoning) limiting growth in areas. Over regulation (see slow rebuilding in southern CA after fires, and the whole housing shortage here). NOTE: the ADU law that was an attempt to let home owners fix this themselves has been somewhat of a flop... however it is gaining momentum.

The fixes to housing in the US require voters to pass something where only a bit more than half of it would be "good" for them and in a hard to explain way. It is easy to get them to vote such a policy down when the 40 percent that might impact them makes for a clear cut argument for a NO.
by mothballed | 2025-09-23 20:26:08+00:00
It's because if some Karen sees your kid with a real looking hammer anywhere near actual work, (s)he's gonna rat your ass out to CPS faster than you can snap your fingers.

Similarly for toy guns. The weird look ain't for the kids, it's so some passerby doesn't see the "gun" and call the cops (no matter there is no regulation in most states from making a real gun to look like a toy gun so it's a totally bogus presumption).
by fluxusars | 2025-09-23 20:26:17+00:00
Can't believe no one's mentioned this classic yet: https://www.tumblr.com/kingjamesprogramming

Back in the early days of Slack I wrote a chat bot that logged all the messages people wrote and used that data to make it say random things prompted by certain trigger words. It was hilarious, until the bosses found out that I was basically logging all their conversations. Unsurprisingly they made me turn it off.
by hansvm | 2025-09-23 20:26:31+00:00
> disagree with generalizations that you can judge the quality of code based on whether or not it uses a lot of Arc

That wasn't really my point, but I disagree with your disagreement anyway ;) Yes, you don't want to over-generalize, but Arc has a lot of downsides, doesn't have a lot of upsides, and can usually be relatively easily avoided in lieu of something with a better set of tradeoffs. Heavy use isn't bad in its own right, but it's a strong signal suggestive of code needing some love and attention.

My point though was: If you are going to heavily use Arc, Rust isn't the most ergonomic language for the task, and where for other memory management techniques the value proposition of Rust is more apparent it's a much narrower gap compared to those ergonomic choices if you use Arc a lot. Maybe you have to (or want to) use Rust anyway for some reason, but it's usually a bad choice conditioned on that coding style.
by schainks | 2025-09-23 20:26:38+00:00
Additional context — DHH's latest blog post: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

Using your personal brand to espouse the values of ethnonationalism fundamentally serves the capital class wishing to divide and exploit social order among those who labor. This is so rich, coming from the guy who literally created a tool that increases the value of labor.

So, if I had to guess, the smart, critical thinkers in the _global_ Ruby community might find this whole situation reeks.

If I were an immigrant to the UK and a Rails developer, and DHH is getting re-platformed while saying crazy stuff like this, I would think twice about my career choices going forward — Or, push the Ruby community not to stand with a garbage attitude like this, even if from a BDFL-type personality. I _invested_ my life into promoting the use of your tool, while you disparage me based on skin color and country of origin for the sake of some 'ye olde country' vibefest?

Does DHH even know where his principles lie?
by janalsncm | 2025-09-23 20:27:28+00:00
> I really don't understand the hallucination problem now in 2025

Perhaps this OpenAI paper would be interesting then (published September 4th):

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04664

Hallucination is still absolutely an issue, and it doesn’t go away by reframing it as user error, saying the user didn’t know what they were doing, didn’t know what they needed to get from the LLM, or couldn’t describe it well enough.
by lowsong | 2025-09-23 20:28:20+00:00
They are very much earned, but don't take my word for it when DHH says it himself.

> In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.

What does he mean here with that last sentence? Did he do a survey? Ask people where they were born or to self report their nationality? No. He walked through London, saw people who weren't white, and then went on his blog to complain about "non native Brits". He is explicitly talking about skin colour and implying that unless you are white you are not British. That definitionally racist.

To then go on, and praise Tommy Robinson, a far-right extremist who's spent the past decade stoking hate. The message of this article leaves no room for misunderstanding.

In DHH's own view if you are not a white "native" Brit then you should be removed. That is, by definition, a white supremacist.
by mgh95 | 2025-09-23 20:28:34+00:00
> Cloud providers are currently “un-differentiated”, but there are three huge ones making profits and some small ones too. Hosting is an economy-of-scale business and so is inference.

Anybody who has worked in a compliance heavy segment (PCI-DSS, HIPAA, etc.) will tell you the big 3 clouds have very significant differences from the smaller players. The differentiation is not on compute itself, but on the product. It's partially why products like AWS Bedrock exist and are actively placing model providers both in competition with eachother and AWS itself which is exactly the market dynamic they should seek to avoid.

> The idea that OAI is un-differentiated is just weird. They have a massively popular consumer offering, a huge bankroll, and can continue to innovate on features. Their consumer offering has remained sticky even though Claude and Gemini have both had periods of being the best model to those in the know.

This is exactly where this line of reasoning goes off the rails. The consumer market is problematic (see the recent post about the segment its growing in; basically young women of limited spend in low income countries); a huge bankroll is also a huge liability, model providers are on a clock to get huge or die, and the innovation we are seeing is effectively attempting to "scale-up" models, not provide novel features.

> Their consumer offering has remained sticky even though Claude and Gemini have both had periods of being the best model to those in the know.

This isn't a good thing with current market mix.

> And generally speaking there are huge opportunities to do enterprise integrations and build out the retooling of $10T of economic activities, just with the models we have now; a Salesforce play would be a natural pivot for them.

Do you have any indication these are achieving buy in or profitable? Most significantly, we have seen a recent study by MIT that 95% of generative AI pilots fail. The honeymoon period is rapidly coming to a close. Tangible results are necessary.