MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by srean | 2025-09-03 14:28:09+00:00
It can be beautiful with less.

All that needs to be demonstrated is that for real numbers + associates and commutes. That * associates and commutes. And most satisfyingly, these two operations interact through the distribution property.

Of course, it's more revealing and interesting if one has some exposure to groups and fields.

Do people encounter linear algebra in their course work before that ?

For us it came after coordinate/analytical geometry where we had encountered parallelogram law. So while doing LA we had some vague awareness that there's a connection. This connection solidified later.

We also had an alternative curriculum where matrices were taught in 9th grade as a set of rules without any motivation whatsoever. "This is the rule for adding, this one's for multiplication, see you at the test"
by Lukem121 | 2025-09-03 14:28:21+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm a solo entrepreneur and like many of you, I spend way too long talking to LLMs, writing specs, and outlining ideas. The biggest bottleneck for me was always getting thoughts from my head. Typing was just too slow & I suck at spelling. So, I built VoiceGecko. It’s a super lightweight voice-to-text app:

You start & stop recording (Ctrl+Shift+Z), say what you have got to say, and a few milliseconds later your words appear wherever your cursor is.

It works system-wide in VS Code, Cursor, Obsidian, your browser, Notepad, anywhere you can type.

My main use case is brain dumping an entire spec or bug report. Without ever breaking my flow state. It's honestly changed how I interact with my computer.

A quick technical note: The app is built with Tauri (cross-platform applications framework), It's only available Windows. Mac and Linux versions are definitely on the roadmap once I can test properly.

I'm here all day to answer questions. As a solo founder, I'd be incredibly grateful for any feedback, bug reports, or feature ideas. I'm especially interested to hear what other workflows you can imagine this for.

This isn’t a promo; it’s a commercial product, but I just want your feedback.

You can check it out here: https://www.voicegecko.io

Thanks for reading.
by elAhmo | 2025-09-03 14:28:38+00:00
It is an abstraction.

Just because you end up looking at what the prompt looks like “under the hood” in whichever language it produced the output, doesn’t mean every user does.

Similar as with assembly, you might have not taken a look at it, but there are people that do and could argue the same thing as you.

The lines will be very blurry in the near future.
by simonw | 2025-09-03 14:28:45+00:00
https://chatgpt.com/share/68b85035-62ec-8006-ab20-af5931808b... - "There are only seven recognized continents on Earth: Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America."

Here's a recent example of it saying "I don't know" - I asked it to figure out why there was an octopus in a mural about mushrooms: https://chatgpt.com/share/68b8507f-cc90-8006-b9d1-c06a227850... - "I wasn’t able to locate a publicly documented explanation of why Jo Brown (Bernoid) chose to include an octopus amid a mushroom-themed mural."
by rhet0rica | 2025-09-03 14:29:06+00:00
The two concepts were often one in the same—a "magician" was simply any art that "we" considered to be not in keeping with "our" religious practices. The label was slung about freely for some thousand years.

There are some philosophers who attempted to divide miracles from magic. They tended to classify the latter as esoteric science confined entirely to the natural world with no supernatural elements, and the former as invoking the aid of some confirmed divine being. When one considers souls and demiurges to be part of the natural world, however, even this most imaginative delineation is an inherently blurry one.
by hedora | 2025-09-03 14:29:27+00:00
Go to Home Depot, and check out the plumbing section.

The stuff marked “hot water line” “lead safe” is all leaded.

Now, try to find equivalent lines (same threads, diameters, etc) that are not marked for hot water heater use. They don’t stock them, but they stock fixtures that require them.

One thing that puzzles me: ICE has been targeting Home Depot parking lots out here in California, but Home Depot is a big supporter of Trump.

I’d expect them to go after bluer Lowes lots. Maybe Home Depot has agreed not to sue for trespassing or something?

If so, that sounds like a breach of fiduciary duties to me.
by Mistletoe | 2025-09-03 14:29:41+00:00
If I had to guess, they don't want to leverage the web because calling the phone number to get the 10 year warranty is a dark pattern they hope most people give up on. And they know the current version of the Electrolux washer is hot garbage that won't make it 10 years, compared to the previous one that made it 20 years. Now this is not great long term for the brand, but Yannick Fierling, the new CEO, just started in January 2025 after stepping down from being CEO of Haier Europe in March 2024, a job he kept for 9 years. The previous CEO, Jonas Samuelson, started on February 1, 2016, so why would Yannick care? Yannick will probably be out with a nice golden parachute and have a shorter life than the washer. Yannick is 54 years old and I guarantee the only thing he thinks about every day is retiring soon with as much money as possible.

This enshittification cycle runs every day in the world and I don't know how we can stop it.
by bjourne | 2025-09-03 14:29:55+00:00
> In a less alarmist take: this could also be read to show that AI use effectively simplifies the essay writing process by reducing cognitive load, therefore making essays easier and more accessible to a broader audience but that would require a different study to see how well the participants scored on their work.

In much the same way chess engines make competitive chess accessible to a broader audience. :)
by MBCook | 2025-09-03 14:30:23+00:00
I was just looking up laser disk and I never realized just how analog they were.

I always thought that they recorded the video signal the same way CDs did, in a series of bits.

I had no idea the length of the pits on the disk actually corresponded to the wave form. They’re not digital in any way shape or form.

Amazing. Thanks!
by matthewdgreen | 2025-09-03 14:30:26+00:00
It is possible to use LLMs this way. If you're careful. But at every place where you can use LLMs to outsource mechanical tasks, there will also be a temptation to outsource the full stack of conceptual tasks that allow you to be part of what's going on. This will create gaps where you're not sitting at any level of the abstraction hierarchy, you're just skipping parts of the system. That temptation will be greater for less experienced people, and for folks still learning the field. That's what I'm scared about.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-09-03 14:30:45+00:00
> Calculators reduced our capabilities in mental and pencil-paper arithmetic.

And now people make bad decisions in their daily life about money etc. Most people can't do the math in their head but they also aren't using their calculator at the grocery store to avoid being taken advantage of. The math doesn't get done.

The lesson isn't that we survived calculators, it's that they did dull us, and our general thinking and creativity are about to get likewise dulled.
by lelanthran | 2025-09-03 14:31:31+00:00
> Your success will of course vary depending on the topic and difficulty of your questions, but if you "can't remember" the last time you had a BS answer then I feel extremely confident in saying that your BS detector isn't sensitive enough.

Do you have a few examples? I'm curious because I have a very sensitive BS detector. In fact, just about anyone asking for examples, like the GP, has a sensitive BS detector.

I want to compare the complexity of my questions to the complexity of yours. Here's my most recent one, the answer to which I am fully capable of determining the level of BS:

I want to parse markdown into a structure. Leaving aside the actual structure for now, give me a exhaustive list of markdown syntax that I would need to parse.

It gave me a very large list, pointing out CommonMark-specific stuff, etc.

I responded with:

I am seeing some problems here with the parsing: 1. Newlines are significant in some places but not others. 2. There are some ambiguities (for example, nested lists which may result in more than four spaces at the deepest level can be interpreted as either nested lists or a code block) 3. Autolinks are also ambiguous - how can we know that the tag is an autolink and not HTML which must be passed through? There are more issues. Please expand on how they must be resolved. How do current parsers resolve the issues?

Right. I've shown you mine. Now you show yours.
by zahlman | 2025-09-03 14:31:41+00:00
This logic makes no sense to me. Names aren't an inherent property of languages; the names you didn't like come from either someone else's "framework" or your own design decisions. Lots of Java code has short names (including single-letter iteration variables), and lots of Python code has long names — for example, the standard library `email.errors` has a class called `InvalidMultipartContentTransferEncodingDefect`. The number of things to name, meanwhile, is purely a consequence of the problem domain, how you model it, and how you factor the code.

"Give me a name for this thing" is the last micro-managing coding task I would assign to an LLM, because the entire point of the name is to express my own intent behind the code.

Besides which, you haven't identified something you actively dislike about Python, just that a problem you supposedly used to experience in Java is supposedly ameliorated now.
by LAsteNERD | 2025-09-03 14:31:50+00:00
LANL researchers are cataloguing the molecules in healthy human breath to create a baseline profile that could enable new non-invasive diagnostics.

Some details:

Method: Using tandem mass spectrometry, the team has identified 227 distinct compounds across 31 volunteers, narrowing to 48 common features that may define “healthy breath.”

Patterns: Certain metabolites correlated with sex and time of day; others trace back to environmental contaminants or microbiome interactions.

Partnerships: Collaborating with the University of New Mexico to expand sampling (including both breath and blood data).

Goal: Easy-to-use diagnostic tests where a patient might one day “just breathe” to screen for illness, fatigue, or impairment.

The approach echoes the original breathalyzer’s leap in the 1950s but applies it to a far wider range of health conditions.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-09-03 14:31:51+00:00
It's probably an effect of the transition period where today people are using ais to meet work expectations and metrics of yesterday.

At some point ai will probably be like calculators where once everyone is using them for everything, that will be a new and different normal from today, and the expectations and the way of judging quality etc will be different than today.

Once everyone is doing the same one weird trick as you, it's no longer useful. You can no longer pretend to be a developer or an artist etc.

There will still be a sea of bottom-feeders doing the same thing, but they will just be universally recognized as cheap junk. Annd that's actually fine, kinda. There is a place and a use for cheap junk that just barely does something, the same as a cheap junky screwdriver or whatever.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-03 14:32:02+00:00
Mind you, I was just a kid when it happened so I'm basing it off of 2nd hand stories, but my understanding was anyone with a pulse (ie. A hs grad or a college dropout) could get hired into the industry at the time (eg. The KOTH joke that if Peggy was laid off from being a substitute teacher she'd learn to design software).

At least ime in the 2010s and 2020s, while you had some aspect of that with bootcamp grads, it wasn't to the same degree. Or was it? Like I said, I was a kid when the busts happened so I have no frame of reference.
by e3bc54b2 | 2025-09-03 14:32:07+00:00
As the other comment said, LLMs are not an abstraction.

An abstraction is a deterministic, pure function, than when given A always returns B. This allows the consumer to rely on the abstraction. This reliance frees up the consumer from having to implement the A->B, thus allowing it to move up the ladder.

LLMs, by their very nature are probabilistic. Probabilistic is NOT deterministic. Which means the consumer is never really sure if given A the returned value is B. Which means the consumer now has to check if the returned value is actually B, and depending on how complex A->B transformation is, the checking function is equivalent in complexity as implementing the said abstraction in the first place.
by Lariscus | 2025-09-03 14:32:20+00:00
Windows does this nonsense all the time. Recently I used my mothers windows notebook to show her some photos. Five Minutes in with Firefox in full-screen it pops up a Teams window for no reason. She didn't install Teams nor does she need it, but Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided not only to install it but also that taking focus while another application is in full-screen mode is the perfect moment to prompt the user to login into an application they never used.
by Bender | 2025-09-03 14:32:22+00:00
thanks for sharing.

You are quite welcome. I hope this gets some people curious enough to research.

Even if they were the active form there are typically only two or three of them. A healthy diet is the optimal method to get all the B vitamins or at least the 13 critical B vitamins but if ones lifestyle is preventing this one can get them from a B-50 complex. A healthy diet should be preferred when possible.
by jajko | 2025-09-03 14:32:24+00:00
> I'm not saying everywhere is identical, there's a spectrum

Why such drama with many words, when all can be summed up with that. Yet somehow, people consider life much better on one side of the spectrum, while other side is considered utter shit. So much that many people are risking their lives, and some are dying just to 'move across spectrum'. It may be a hard concept to grok for typical western kids who often struggle with finding noble worthy hard-to-achieve goals in their lives, who got good life served at literal plate without moving a finger, but trust me its damn real.

I've grown up during communism, in country heavily oppressed by soviet russia and littered with many of their military bases, ready for that WWIII battles that never came. Not 'spent some time someplace so I am an expert', my whole identity was only that and nothing else.

Yes we all need to go shopping, its just that my parents couldn't buy any fresh vegetables nor fruits for their son, who suffered mild malnutrition due to that. And sometimes the shelves were empty or full of one type of canned sardines (I mean whole supermarket, nothing else, beauty of constantly failing central planning, unless you were part of regime/communist party).

Yes we all went to some form of school, but I was being brainwashed to be obedient future soldier for absolutely rubbish ideologies. If I would say something bad about regime even with utmost innocence of a small kid, my parents could easily end up in jail, lives ruined, even distant family torn apart for good.

Yes we all could travel, its just that I could not travel even within different communist countries, not without regime's special approval stamp in passport. Neutral, or god forbid proper western countries were off limits, unreachable, you would be shot on sight on the border, or torn apart by dogs.

And so on and on. Yeah, its just a spectrum, what a joke.
by pillars | 2025-09-03 14:32:26+00:00
Cyrus(creator of Cylo's Garage) written a paper on the diamond lathe design:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/178KoqYAQUScSW27opubo9K794Pe...

Another awesome video on precision engineering resources in the same channel:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FM9X_gjnleY
by krapp | 2025-09-03 14:32:26+00:00
>As an European, I find the definition of European that excludes Spaniards super weird.

Because you are, as I suspect many people will, intentionally misreading the context of my comment.

I am implying that the use of "European" herein does not literally refer to the geographic region known as "Europe," but rather that in the context of a statement about the likely physical appearance of Jesus it should be understood as a statement about race and ethnicity whereby "European" is a politically correct descriptor for the common set of physical traits often described as "white," as is represented in Western depictions of Jesus, particularly where traits like skin color, eye color and hair color are concerned.
by culturestate | 2025-09-03 14:32:41+00:00
Incredibly, I actually did learn this today because it was in the NYT crossword and I went down a very similar rabbit hole. I never made it to Freud, though, after I discovered and got sucked into the European Union Eel Regulation Framework[1].

If you, like me, are masochistically fascinated by this kind of “I can’t believe this is a real thing that the government actually does” documentation I recommend giving it a once-over.

1. https://oceans-and-fisheries.ec.europa.eu/ocean/marine-biodi...
by nevon | 2025-09-03 14:32:55+00:00
Ah, I think the part that I didn't consider was that an "idle" VM is not zero CPU cost, unlike a container, so indeed from a hypervisor owner perspective you'd like other active VMs to be able to use that CPU time. But again, doesn't that presuppose oversubscription? If a node is fully reserved, it doesn't matter if all of the running VMs are idle, you're still not going to be able to schedule another job on that node, so your costs remain the same unless you oversubscribe the host and count on the fact that there will be unused capacity available most of the time (similar to AWS Flex instances).
by jandrewrogers | 2025-09-03 14:32:57+00:00
At scale, the savings of slightly cheaper hardware is often dwarfed by supply chain management costs, both direct and indirect. How much is it worth to your business to get the hardware deployed six weeks sooner and/or with a high probability of timely delivery? I imagine xAI wanted to move with maximum speed.

This is a big part of the decision process. North American supply chains are slightly more expensive but also fast and responsive. The advantage of someone like Dell is also that they can do almost everything in-house, which avoids the overhead (to the business) of coordinating integration of components manufactured in Taiwan, the US, etc into the final build. I’ve done it both ways. There are real tradeoffs so context matters.
by pessimizer | 2025-09-03 14:33:29+00:00
> We're not because you have to still check every outputted code.

To me, that's what makes it an abstraction layer, rather than just a servant or an employee. You have to break your entire architecture into units small enough that you know you can coax the machine to output good code for. The AI can't be trusted as far as you can throw it, but the distance from you to how far you can throw is the abstraction layer.

An employee you can just tell to make it work, they'll kill themselves trying to do it, or be replaced if they don't; eventually something will work, and you'll take all the credit for it. AI is not experimenting, learning and growing, it stays stupid. The longer it thinks, the wronger it thinks. You deserve the credit (and the ridicule) for everything it does that you put your name on.

-----

edit: and this thread seems to think that you don't have to check what your high level abstraction is doing. That's probably why most programs run like crap. You can't expect something you do in e.g. python to do the most algorithmically sensible thing, even if you wrote the algorithm just like the textbook said. It may make weird choices (maybe optimal for the general case, but horrifically bad for yours) that mean that it's not really running your cute algorithm at all, or maybe your cute algorithm is being starved by another thread that you have no idea why it would be dependent on. It may have made correct choices when you started writing, then decided to make wrong choices after a minor patch version change.

To pretend perfection is a necessary condition for abstraction is not even somebody would say directly. Never. All we talk about is leaky abstractions.

Remember when GTA loading times, which (a counterfactual because we'll never know) probably decimated sales, playtime, and at least the marketing of the game, turned out to be because they were scanning some large, unnecessary json array (iirc) hundreds of times a second? That's probably a billion dollar mistake. Just because some function that was being blindly called was not ever reexamined, and because nobody profiled properly (i.e. checked the output.)
by chipsrafferty | 2025-09-03 14:34:09+00:00
> with a complete copy

Ok, so make a build script that creates a complete copy for each separate config from the default config and the overrides. Then use the complete copies.

> I easily see the one line diff among hundreds of thousands using… diff.

Yes, and in 5 years when it's not just 1 line?

Your approach does NOT scale. You just haven't scaled yet and haven't realized this.
by rvz | 2025-09-03 14:34:10+00:00
In all cases, having zero auth at all [0] even when others want to use it as a service to broadcast across the internet is ridiculous. Leading to problems like this: [1] and now all exposed without any protection.

Even allowing others to change the $OLLAMA_HOST env is a security footgun.

[0] https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/849

[1] https://www.wiz.io/blog/probllama-ollama-vulnerability-cve-2...
by alexisread | 2025-09-03 14:34:23+00:00
It's a combination of things.

Adding polyfills for older browser targets.

Tree shaking, that is removing code that is not used.

Bundling several files into one to save on requests.

Transpiling, that is, if you want to write code in a different language to javascript eg. Typescript then vite will compile that to javascript.

Linting ie. Reformatting your code to standardise it across developers.

Vulnerability checking, are your dependencies out of date?

Execution of build tasks eg. Preparing static assets like images.

Packaging your app for deployment eg. Zipping

Including logging and hot reload triggers during development.

Bundling environment specific changes eg. Different backend urls if deploying to test envs.

Running unit tests on rebuild to avoid regressions.

Having said all that, the bundling for me is a disadvantage as my own code changes more than 3rd party libs and they are cached. I'm less fussed with types and a lot of the tests and env stuff can be done with a single-file express server for development.

The main advantage for me is that a buildless app will still work correctly in 6 months- permacomputing considerations.
by actionfromafar | 2025-09-03 14:34:33+00:00
To further mess with your mind, there was a digital tape format which is more like you imagined - it is a CVBS video signal, but in PCM format. Very similar to CD audio in concept. It was used in TV studios and also found use for mastering LaserDiscs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-2_(video)
by IFC_LLC | 2025-09-03 14:34:33+00:00
Gee, I'm sorry, but this is just over my head.

It takes over 282 crates to build this 1000 lines of code. It takes 1.3 gigs of space to display a window with a game on one's screen. And the AI does not work at all since it just crashes in itself. I'm not sure how this can be a good example of a program written in Rust. Rust is all about low-level optimized over-speedy small-sized binaries. Right now I see just a blob of something that barely works.

And yes, Light Cycle is in fact just a version of a Snake with a different ruleset.