MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sethammons | 2025-09-21 13:02:56+00:00
I learned long time ago, if you are freezing it, freeze it in a shape that can be used frozen.

For instance, I flatten ground meat into 1lb "patties" and don't freeze it as a roll. I can literally snap the patty in half if I want half a pound, and the increase in surface area means rapid thawing if I place it, still in its storage bad (ziplock usually, but vacuum seal sometimes), into room temp water.
by atombender | 2025-09-21 13:03:09+00:00
This maps poorly to the mathematical concept of a closed interval [a, b], which can be written a ≤ x ≤ b for a set of x. An interval where a > b is usually a programming error.

To ensure only valid intervals are supported at the type system level, the function could perhaps be redefined as:

function clamp(n: number, i: Interval<number>): number

Of course, you need to deal with the distinction between closed and open intervals. Clamping really only makes sense for closed ones.
by jstrieb | 2025-09-21 13:03:12+00:00
The point from the end of the post that AI produces output that sounds correct is exactly what I try to emphasize to friends and family when explaining appropriate uses of LLMs. AI is great at tasks where sounding correct is the essence of the task (for example "change the style of this text"). Not so great when details matter and sounding correct isn't enough, which is what the author here seems to have rediscovered.

The most effective analogy I have found is comparing LLMs to theater and film actors. Everyone understands that, and the analogy offers actual predictive power. I elaborated on the idea if you're curious to read more:

https://jstrieb.github.io/posts/llm-thespians/
by imankoma | 2025-09-21 13:03:42+00:00
Famulor just announced pricing of €0.11 per minute for AI-powered voice calls. It’s fully EU-hosted, GDPR & AI Act compliant, and offers features like call answering, outbound calls, CRM integration, and voice cloning.

Curious what the HN community thinks – can ultra-low-cost AI voice replace traditional call centers and IVR systems?
by ay | 2025-09-21 13:03:50+00:00
"Read diligently" - that’s a very optimistic statement. I can not count how many times Claude (LLM I am most familiar with, I had it write probably about 100KLOC in the past few months) explicitly disobeyed what was written in the instructions.

Also, a good few times, if it were a human doing the task, I would have said they both failed to follow the instructions and lied about it and attempted to pretend they didn’t. Luckily their lying abilities today are primitive, so it’s easy to catch.
by eastbound | 2025-09-21 13:03:52+00:00
When I see my interns drinking Red Bull for work: I get it that you have extremely high career objectives, but maybe you’re stressing about them more than working on them.

Worst case, you can work 8hrs during the day and study 3hrs in the evening with or without Red Bull: in both cases you’ll end up burnt out, you can just force it for a few months more with drugs.
by XorNot | 2025-09-21 13:04:26+00:00
Bingo: the story of WW2 is that the Germans started with an effective army, and the Nazis ran it into the ground.

The saddest thing is subsequent decades of bizarre interpretations of this result because people got too excited about some effective German industry that they took Hitlers various wonder weapon attempts as planned engineering projects rather than engineers trying to put form to a mad man's rantings.

Hitler loved the idea of super heavy tanks, so the Germans kept trying to build them even though they were unreliable, ineffective and vulnerable.

Meanwhile the Sherman got a reputation for breaking down a lot...mostly because it kept surviving and being fixed in the field and continuing to provide effective armor support, whereas German tanks just died.
by poszlem | 2025-09-21 13:04:32+00:00
I think Gemini is one of the best example of an LLM that is in some cases the best and in some cases truly the worst.

I once asked it to read a postcard written by my late grandfather in Polish, as I was struggling to decipher it. It incorrectly identified the text as Romanian and kept insisting on that, even after I corrected it: "I understand you are insistent that the language is Polish. However, I have carefully analyzed the text again, and the linguistic evidence confirms it is Romanian. Because the vocabulary and alphabet are not Polish, I cannot read it as such." Eventually, after I continued to insist that it was indeed Polish, it got offended and told me it would not try again, accusing me of attempting to mislead it.
by NekkoDroid | 2025-09-21 13:04:50+00:00
> Either way, until there is an official, in-writting announcement that can be depended on, no one should be taking the advice of an unnamed White House source.

There is literally nothing out of this White House you can depend on, even if it is in-writing & signed with the presidents blood. If he feels like it he will ignore it and use mob tactics to get his will through.
by tarsinge | 2025-09-21 13:04:59+00:00
Sure it’s a lot of work, but the noob in question has all the internet knowledge and can write multiples times faster than a human for a fraction of the costs. This is not about an individual being more productive, this is about business costs. Long term we should still hire and train juniors obviously, but short term there is lot of pressure to not do it as it makes no sense financially. Study or not the reality is there is not much difference in productivity between a senior with a cursor license and a senior and a junior that needs heavy guidance.
by hollerith | 2025-09-21 13:05:04+00:00
My father worked as a mechanical engineer in West Germany after the war. He told me the French removed all the machines from the factories and took them to France, then the Americans installed much better new machines in their place.

The Marshall Plan was a real thing.

My father also told me that before the Americans decided on the Marshall Plan, they considered other plans (also named for American generals IIRC) one of which involved sterilizing all German men.
by macbr | 2025-09-21 13:05:21+00:00
A Fachhochschule (Wikipedia calls them "university of applied sciences") in Germany is very similar to a university but as they're less research oriented and usually (with some notable exceptions) don't have the ability to grant doctoral degrees. AFAIK none have the permission to grant the ability to become professor (Habilitation). They also usually have a limited selection of subjects.

There are also Technische Universitäten (Technical University) which are "proper" universities with the ability to grant doctorates and the ability to become professor.

So Fachhochschulen are a separate thing from both Berufsschule (vocational school) and universities.
by 999900000999 | 2025-09-21 13:05:33+00:00
Everyone has a different path.

I ran out of money, dropped out of college and self taught myself straight to 6 figures.

Thank you Brendan Eich for JavaScript. Without it I'd probably still be making minimum wage, or working in a Java shop which might be worse.

I finished my useless BA just to hang it on my wall.

College should not be a job training program. It's valuable on its own merits, but the loop of you need a degree to get a job, and you need money to get a degree, so you can get a job to pay off your loans is stupid.

If anything, and this is an American perspective, high school has failed.

You should be able to read and write to a point of employability.

If you want to go to college, it should be optional. Do it after work or part time.

Outside of maybe medicine, law( which is debatable, you can technically just take the bar after a clerkship in a few states), and maybe a few other careers, college isn't needed.

Why in God's name would you get a Masters in Art, the loan payments will make it impossible to survive.

Just make the art!

Draw.

Write poems!

Want to make games, make games!

Knowledge is basically free, we're still adapting to this.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-09-21 13:05:35+00:00
One of the issues with vibe coding vs. outsourcing agencies is the sheer volume of code it can produce in a short amount of time.

I vibe-coded a simple helper script. If I wrote it myself it would have been 1/3rd the lines, not covered most edge cases (some of which were completely irrelevant, some of which actually useful), and it would have taken me way longer than just checking if the vibe-coded code works (this was the "either it works or it doesn't" kind of task, not something where subtle errors could reasonably be introduced).

I skimmed the code and removed the line that deletes temp files to reduce the risk that it accidentally wipes my home dir and ran it. As I was trying to work with the data deeper, I noticed missing temp files, and realized that there were two other temp file deletion lines that I missed.

It's simply too much code for a human to reasonably read, but the speed benefits are real.

(My plan for the future is not reading the code more carefully, it's putting it in a sandbox and letting the AI play.)
by uecker | 2025-09-21 13:05:57+00:00
I guess this depends on what you consider good tooling. I am relatively happy with C tooling. But if you want to quickly assemble something from existing libraries, then language-level package managers like npm, cargo, pip are certainly super convenient. But then, I think this convenience comes at a high cost. We now have worms again, I thought those times were long over... IMHO package management belongs into a distribution with quality control and dependencies should be minimized and carefully selected.
by ffsm8 | 2025-09-21 13:06:30+00:00
I mean Amsterdam is kinda renown exactly for reducing parking availability, slow speed limits and generally human-first city planning nowadays.

Wasn't always like that either. In the 90s it was cars-first just like the OP likes nowadays.

It's definitely true that having only bicycle infrastructure doesn't really work for families though. It's a different story if you've got a cargo bike and public transport... But it's understandable that that's not even entering his mind considering the culture of the USA.
by pdabbadabba | 2025-09-21 13:06:53+00:00
The phone looks much nicer without a case. And in my 10+ ceaseless years, I’ve only damaged my phone once (and, in that case, I doubt that a thin silicone case would have saved me). And in that one case, I just needed to replace the front glass. Cost about $40 IIRC.

So why would I use a case?

Your mileage may vary, though, if you have kids, are a woman (fewer/shallower pockets), etc.
by estearum | 2025-09-21 13:07:09+00:00
It really isn't "entirely legal" to deceive people as to how/when/where to cast their vote, and I don't think you'll find much sympathy for the view that it should be even among vigorous defenders of the First Amendment.

His conviction was overturned due to lack of evidence of that he knowingly joined a conspiracy (required by the specific statute they charged him under) not because what he did is protected speech.

https://www.law.georgetown.edu/icap/wp-content/uploads/sites...
by bri3d | 2025-09-21 13:07:11+00:00
Starting in iOS 18 this process is self service (although it does require server-blessing and has to be done online) - there’s a built in Repair Assistant app that will guide you through the process.

Also, the phone has always functioned with an aftermarket battery, just with a warning, so the iFixit statement could still be true in that situation too.
by creshal | 2025-09-21 13:07:11+00:00
> It's usually not that much - typical executable is usually several megabytes in size and many processes can share the same code memory pages (especially with shared libraries)

Have a look at Chrome. Then have a look at all the Electron "desktop" apps, which all ship with a different Chrome version and different versions of shared libraries, which all can't share memory pages, because they're subtly different. You find similar patterns across many, many other workloads.
by Peritract | 2025-09-21 13:08:12+00:00
> Absolute joy turned into anger, and anger into resentment, as I wondered how different my life might have been if I’d been taught subjects I actually cared about by professors who cared too. Then I caught myself, realizing I was being melodramatic about a decade-old grievance.

This is incredibly self-indulgent. You were given opportunities you refused to engage with and are now continuing that pattern by blaming everyone else for your failures.

University has no value beyond credentialism only if you don't put any in.
by delusional | 2025-09-21 13:08:35+00:00
I just ran the same test on Gemini 2.5 pro (I assume it enables search by default, because it added a bunch of "sources") and got the exact same result as the author. It claims ".bdi" is the ccTLD for Burundi, which is false they have .bi[1]. It claims ".time" and ".article" are TLDs.

I think the authors point stands.

EDIT: I tried it with "Deep Research" too. Here it doesn't invent either TLDs or HTML Element, but the resulting list is incomplete.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.bi
by firesteelrain | 2025-09-21 13:08:50+00:00
“New York magazine has previously reported that Wynn-Williams was paid an advance for the book of more than $500,000 (£370,000).”

That’s the part they buried. If you’re handed half a million up front, it’s hard to square “bankruptcy” with some kind of noble crusade. The article frames it like she’s sacrificing everything to expose Meta, but it reads more like poor money management than pure altruism. Meta’s behavior might still be heavy-handed, but leaving that payout until halfway down makes the story feel slanted.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-09-21 13:09:26+00:00
>There's also a lot of misunderstanding about the purpose of swap – many people just see it as a kind of "slow extra memory" for use in emergencies, but don't understand how it can contribute during normal load to the healthy operation of an operating system as a whole.

That's the long-standing defect that needs to be corrected then, there should be no dependence on swap existing whatsoever as long as you have more than enough memory for the entire workload.
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-09-21 13:09:43+00:00
> "Something that describes how an AI is convincing if you don't understand its reasoning, and close to useless if you understand its limitations."

This made me laugh. Because it's the exact opposite sentiment of anti-LLM crowd. So which is it? Is it only useful if you know what you're doing or less useful if you know what you're doing?

> "I can't wait until I can jack into the Metaverse and buy an NFT with cryptocurrency just by using an LLM! Perhaps I can view it on my 3D TV by streaming it over WIMAX? I'd better stock up on quantum computers to make sure it all works."

In the author's attempt to be a smartass, they showed themselves. It makes them sound childish. Instead of just admitting they were wrong, they make some flippant remark about cryptocurrency and NFT'S, despite having vastly different purposes and goals and successes. Just take the L.

to add: "I shouldn't have to know anything about LLMs to use them correctly" is one heck of a take, but ok.

> "I don't. I hate the way this is being sold as a universal and magical tool. The reality doesn't live up to the hype."

And I hate the way in which people will do the opposite: claim it has no uses cases. It's literally the same sentiment, but in reverse. It's just as myopic and naive. But for whatever reason, we can look at a CEO hawking it and think "They're just trying to make more money" but can't see the flipside of devs not wanting to lose their livelihoods to something. We have just as much to lose as they have to gain, but want to pretend like we're objective.
by nerdponx | 2025-09-21 13:10:32+00:00
This line of reason is actually becoming more frequently used to justify things. For years, the right wing propaganda machine has been establishing the concept that conservatism and America as a whole is besieged by authoritarian leftists and their smug out-of-outch enablers the liberals.

THEY are the authoritarians and they are seeking to destroy America. WE are its defenders, and in the face of existential threat, our methods are justified. THEY have been doing this to us for years, now this is our chance to fight back.
by Dilettante_ | 2025-09-21 13:11:22+00:00
>This is a pretty simple question to answer. Take two lists and compare them.

This continues a pattern as old as home computing: The author does not understand the task themselves, consequently "holds the computer wrong", and then blames the machine.

No "lists" were being compared. The LLM does not have a "list of TLDs" in its memory that it just refers to when you ask it. If you haven't grokked this very fundamental thing about how these LLMs work, then the problem is really, distinctly, on your end.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-09-21 13:11:41+00:00
> Even if I enjoy learning, there were absolutely courses that were just a waste of time.

My university experience is somewhat different, and I believe whether this holds true or not depends a lot on the degree course:

- In mathematics, there are barely any "filler courses". Basically all of them were interesting in their own right (even though because of your own interests, you will likely find some more exciting than others).

- On the other hand, computer science more felt like every professor had their own opinion how the syllabus should be, and the hodgepodge that came out of it was adopted as syllabus (design by committee). Thus, there were quite a lot of interesting things to learn, but also "filler courses". Additionally, the syllabus did not feel like a "consistent whole" with a clear vision, but rather like lots of isolated courses that you had to pass.
by tromp | 2025-09-21 13:12:13+00:00
I wanted to check the prime factors of 1966 the other day so I googled it and it led me to https://brightchamps.com/en-us/math/numbers/factors-of-1966 , a site that seems focussed on number facts. It confidently states that prime factors of 1966 are 2, 3, 11, and 17. For fun I tried to multiply these numbers back in my head and concluded there's no way that 6 * 187 could reach 1966.

That's when I realized this site was making heavy use of AI. Sadly, lots of people are going to trust but not verify...
by magicalhippo | 2025-09-21 13:13:19+00:00
> Or, if LLMs are so smart, why doesn't it say "Hmmm, would you like to use a different model for this?"

That is indeed an area where LLMs don't shine.

That is, not only are they trained to always respond with an answer, they have no ability to accurately tell how confident they are in that answer. So you can't just filter out low confidence answers.
by mallowdram | 2025-09-21 13:13:40+00:00
We're seeking narrative to explain how and why these things are happening when narratives are how they are happening. When a species relies on inferior and limited tools, it suffers from their use. When the tool is seamless with the problem, it destroys us without us becoming aware.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/15/jd-vance-lie...

This article is all we need to know about fascism, the candidate admits this is the central tool they use on the path to gain unlimited power, even The Guardian grasps this but can't extricate from their use, the news is addicted to stories financially: "In a stunning admission, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, said he was willing “to create stories” on the campaign trail while defending his spreading false, racist rumors of pets being abducted and eaten in a town in his home state of Ohio."

The central problem is epistemological, the coding of explanations in mythological thought, which is narrative. The myth is the primary causal illusion. That causes that. When we add intent, which is elusive and reduces meaning subjectively, it robs any event of the true meaning load, we create propaganda without knowing it. There's the rub. If we wee the burning bush as just a brushfire, we are sane. See it as the voice of God, we're doomed.
by pessimizer | 2025-09-21 13:13:51+00:00
This is a bad way to go about it. You want to consume more material, and you want each piece of it to have the least impact on your vocabulary.

So maybe looking for high frequency words is good, but only high frequency words that you know. So the most coverage of the most high frequency words would be very bad. To get the most coverage of the most high frequency words, they'd have to be used in a lower frequency than they are normally, with less repetition in natural contexts, which enable the learner to build meaning. Unless the books were longer which makes degenerate the concept of concentrating common vocabulary in very few books (just read two 2000 page books!)

Reading a bunch of stuff with a concentrated dose of tons of words you don't know will leave you with absolutely no retention. If you know every word but one in e.g. a chapter, you'll probably remember that word forever. The concept is called comprehensible input - you set unfamiliar things in a background of familiar things.

If you want a book with the most unfamiliar vocabulary, it's called a dictionary. It contains all of the most commonly used words, and the least commonly used, too.

In fact, maybe this makes sense if you're going to be locked in a cell for 10 years, you want to learn a language starting from zero*, and only get to have a pocket dictionary and two other books (with a size limit.) You might want to have sample natural sentences for as many of the best words to know as you could.

The real algorithmic language learning trick is to write books that are interesting that use the fewest words (which would inevitably be the most important words to use to communicate but not the necessarily the most common words that natives use to communicate), and introduce new, useful words at a steady rate. That seems like how Capretz put together French in Action. It's also graded readers: I still remember the moment I realized that I could not only understand what was happening in the basic graded reader I'd accidentally picked up on a whim, but also I was interested in finding out what was going to happen next. It's been downhill from there.

-----

[*] or maybe from one? You would have to have some familiarity with the script, and it had better be a phonetic one. Otherwise, this would be just learning how to read a language. No English, no French, no Portuguese, no Chinese... although having poetry books might help, because you can be surer of vowel similarities and syllable breaks. Poetry books are not dense, however, and might bump against any size limit. And the vocabulary would be weird and not representative.
by darkamaul | 2025-09-21 13:13:56+00:00
Actually, even for families with kids, the safer option is still bikes and low-car environments. Fewer cars means less air pollution, less noise, and less sedentary behavior for both kids and adults.

The data we have shows that the presence of cars is the main source of risk on the street, not the act of biking itself. Neighborhoods that design around walking and biking tend to have fewer serious accidents, not more.

If we're talking about optimizing for kids, then banning individual car use in residential neighborhoods would be the ideal. I know it’s not politically feasible in most of the US right now, but it’s worth keeping in mind that cars are the danger.
by dogma1138 | 2025-09-21 13:14:06+00:00
This indeed does not look like any sintering MLS or otherwise surface I’ve seen which looks like this https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/0c9b8ea/2147483647...

Edit closed surface finish I’ve seen is indeed of a Laser Assisted DED here is a research published this year https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221486042...