MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KempyKolibri | 2025-10-10 08:26:11+00:00
> Who is "we"?

Me and anyone else reading this.

> While empirical evidence is valid only for the situation in which it was obtained, mechanism is universal.

Mechanisms are inferred from empirical evidence, I don't see how you can treat them as two separate categories. For example, in your crash test dummy analogy, verification through crash tests (with dummies) is empirical evidence. Yet under your framework, should we assume that it is valid only for the situation in which it was obtained - only for dummies, not people; in cars pushed towards walls in controlled situations, rather than on public roads?

If you name proxy experiments that support your views (crash tests) as mechanisms and ones that don't (SSB replacement with NNS RCTs) as "empirical evidence is valid only for the situation in which it was obtained" then sure, everything you want to believe is supported by sound science and everything you don't isn't. But the view itself seems to contain a logical contradiction, so you're dead before you've even got off the ground.

I would understand mechanistic evidence in the domain of health science to be in vitro and animal studies. Even if we were to grant that mechanism is universal in this field (which I wouldn't, we frequently see heterogenous results even within the same exposures on the same mouse models, for example), there are thousands of mechanisms that come together to influence the outcomes we actually care about. This is why when we look at translation rates of mechanisms to outcomes in humans we typically see rates below 5% (and is also why pharmaceuticals that work perfectly in animal models barely ever make it to market in humans).

Going back to the evidence you've cited in support of your intervention - the first two (the only ones in humans) are neither looking at NNSs nor an intervention on banning them. So it doesn't meet your own goalpost for "if we introduce a public health policy, then we need to take human behavior and adherence rates into account". In the rationing example, you have an entirely different context - one in which people literally cannot purchase large amounts of sugar. This would not be the case if we were to ban NNS today.

Your third study was in mice which, as discussed, has an incredibly low chance of actually translating into human outcomes. I don’t find “we have evidence in RCTs that NNSs are beneficial but there’s this mouse study that says otherwise so let’s ban them” a convincing argument.

So again, any actual evidence in support of your proposed intervention? How do we know, for example, that banning NNSs won't just lead to higher sugar consumption and adverse outcomes, since we know from RCTs that substituting SSBs for NNSs improves health outcomes? If all those consuming your banned substance now switch to SSBs instead of their NNSs, congratulations, you've just worsened health outcomes.
by DanielHB | 2025-10-10 08:26:37+00:00
> For international travel, small kids having a different name is surprisingly painful and can get you stuck in an office for hours until it's somewhat clear you're not kidnapping them

Passports have your parents name, this might cause the clerk to do a double check to make sure but unless losing you or your children documents you will never run into this. Or if you are travelling without passports (which is okay between some countries) and using documents (like birth certificates) in different languages
by raxxorraxor | 2025-10-10 08:26:37+00:00
Same. I use AI to code, but it often is just scaffolding (I often have projects with limited scope, but a lot of them). It is a real help. Also it shuffles things up, uses solutions I didn't have the time to learn or look up. So it provides some education as well. I still have to check everything, but i basically replaced project scaffoliding tools to a large part.

I also use image generation extensively, but that is for hobby purposes.

I trained some models (RAG) and build some tools, but quickly noticed that is quiet a bit of work even to generate and audit the knowledge base you want to consume. I think it warrants to be a new job position. Problem is that this position needs someone who is very familiar with the processes within a company, so external help here is hard to come by and it would be a longer time investment. If you have success here, I would assume it could boost productivity for workers that aren't that close to AI tech and maybe just used AI for search and questions.

Until now we (only?) have an AI that reads mails and imports the relevant information into our ERP, CRM or general content systems. It queries relevant information about support cases to provide helpful context for case handlers. I think it works quite well, but I cannot imagine it replacing anyone. Exception might be if you specialize on scamming people, that could probably work.
by SimplyUnknown | 2025-10-10 08:27:11+00:00
I'm still not sure I get it. I think it is

1. Put the BWT string in the right-most empty column

2. Sort the rows of the matrix such that the strings read along the columns of the matrix are in lexicographical order starting from the top-row????

3. Repeat step 1 and 2 until matrix is full

4. Extract the row of the matrix that has the end-delimiter in the final column

It's the "sort matrix" step that seems under-explained to me.
by piokoch | 2025-10-10 08:28:19+00:00
Intuitively, this is understood and I was wondering about that. LLM algorithm is just predicting next "token" in the series of tokens. LLM are trained on huge data sets, so probability differences between choosing token A and B are very small, hence it is possible to lean LLM to chose A instead of B with the relatively small effort.

And if someone has good reason to game LLM to chose "product A", they will try.

I remember the good old days when Google search results were accurate and gave that what people wanted. Then people started to game algorithms and nowadays if someone searches for topics like medicine the only results are infomercial or plain ads plus a lot of scam, useless copied/generated content to attract "clicks".

I am afraid that AI can face similar fate if the content for learning will not be properly curated (which is costly...).
by rubenvanwyk | 2025-10-10 08:28:25+00:00
I recently read this: https://drshapeless.com/blog/posts/htmx,-datastar,-greedy-de...

Which states some of the basic (great) functionality of Datastar has been moved to the Datastar Pro product (?!).

I’m eager to support an open source product financially and think the framework author is great, but the precedent this establishes isn’t great.
by ffsm8 | 2025-10-10 08:28:51+00:00
Because it unnecessarily anthropomorphizes it to create the illusion that there is intelligence behind it (in the traditional sense, where the intelligence is synonymous with being aware of its existence and embodied)

But I personally don't have a big problem with the term in this context. Our industry have been using misleading terms since the beginning to describe things that somewhat resemble whatever it's called after.

Like literally from the start, "bootstrapping"
by kcexn | 2025-10-10 08:29:08+00:00
Mathematics is a philosophy that focuses on the study of logic. It's a bit of an exaggeration to conflate mathematics with 'truth' in an absolute, universal sense.

Mathematical 'truths' are themselves only true in the sense that they can be derived from axioms.

The fact that mathematics can be used to understand the world around us is nothing short of a mystery (or a miracle).
by fragmede | 2025-10-10 08:29:15+00:00
> this is the worst it’s ever going to be.

People keep parroting this line, but it's not a given, especially for such an ill-defined metric as "better". If I ask an LLM how its day was, there's no one right answer. (Users anthropomorphizing the LLM is a given these days, no matter how you may feel about that.)
by ChadNauseam | 2025-10-10 08:30:46+00:00
Ironically, especially when you combine it with the em-dash, it really sounds like exactly the type of completely pointless and unilluminating analogy that LLMs love to generate. These analogies are essentially a bridge between two concepts, much like how a physical bridge connects two pieces of land separated by water, except in this case the 'water' is understanding and the bridge doesn't actually help you cross it.
by flave | 2025-10-10 08:30:59+00:00
I assume that this is so that MS can train on the vast corpus of word documents going forward.

Anyone who wants their documents in OneDrive already has them there so this will mean that the huge number of default Office users will now be trained on.

> “As part of our efforts to improve and develop our products, we may use your data to develop and train our AI models.”

From the MS privacy policy.
by taleinat | 2025-10-10 08:31:35+00:00
The biggest thing PyPy adds is JIT compilation. This is precisely what the project to add JIT to CPython is working on these days. It's still early days for the project, but by 3.15 there's a good chance we'll see some really great speedups in some cases.

It's worth noting that PyPy devs are in the loop, and their insights so far have been invaluable.
by sph | 2025-10-10 08:32:09+00:00
I did for a while, then I burned out of that, too.

A one man software business is very unlike being a craftsman; the work becomes a small part compared to having to do marketing, public relations, accounting, management (of external contractors to whom you hopefully delegate some work load). The problem also is that software never ends.

I figured I like being a craftsman, an artisan on well-defined projects that have a start and a natural end; not a salesman that also needs to find time to work on their eternally-growing product.
by lock1 | 2025-10-10 08:32:09+00:00
Why does "good" C have to be zero alloc? Why should "nice" javaesque make little sense in C? Why do you implicitly assume performance is "efficient problem solving"?

Not sure why many people seem fixated on the idea that using a programming language must follow a particular approach. You can do minimal alloc Java, you can simulate OOP-like in C, etc.

Unconventional, but why do we need to restrict certain optimizations (space/time perf, "readability", conciseness, etc) to only a particular language?
by wheresmylogin | 2025-10-10 08:33:59+00:00
Interesting write-up. Thanks.

I've written costumer-facing interfaces in HTMX and currently quite like it.

One comment. HTMX supports out-of-bound replies which makes it possible to update multiple targets in one request. There's also ways for the server to redirect the target to something else.

I use this a lot, as well as HTMX's support for SSE. I'd have to check what Datastar offers here, because SSE is one thing that makes dashboarding in HTMX a breeze.
by johnisgood | 2025-10-10 08:34:33+00:00
Same. I found serious bugs in a couple of games, exploited some, had fun, wrote a patch and sent it to whoever. Problem is, I was so anxious I did it under an alias. I have my different aliases in the changelog of some games. Nice to look at them, like "wow, that's my contribution", and then it hits "but no one will believe it was me, it was not under my name". God damn it. :(

You know, back when I confused "hash function" with "encryption" and whatnot.
by guru_meditation | 2025-10-10 08:38:58+00:00
For the uninitiated, the Paula chip is the mother of all trackers [1][2].

Decades since, way too many talented people obsessed over whether F-3 is 22168 Hz, 20864 Hz or something else. [3][4][5]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20110726144753/http://helllabs.o...

[3] https://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=8628

[4] https://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=12158&page=1

[5] https://resources.openmpt.org/documents/PTGenerator.c
by tialaramex | 2025-10-10 08:40:08+00:00
Right, one of the best out-of-box tooling decisions for Rust is that by default, and out of the box cargo will assume all your documentation examples are tests it should compile and execute.

This means so long as you run the tests before shipping you basically can't ship with examples you forgot to update after an API change because they either don't compile or don't work.

And you might think well, nobody would ship examples that don't even compile right? But on more than one occasions I've used a Microsoft C# library that comes with examples clearly hand made by their engineers (yes I'm that old that it couldn't be LLM output) without checking they work. Somebody has sketched out what ought to work, they haven't tested it, and a reviewer has seen that it looks right and OK'd it, but again, never tested that it works. This is extremely frustrating because the documentation is wrong but now what?
by modo_mario | 2025-10-10 08:40:20+00:00
>I'm not sure, why must it be so? In cell-phones...

And then described a bunch of winners in a winner take all market. Do you see many people trying to revive any of the apple/android alternatives or starting a new one?

Such a market doesn't have to end up in a monopoly that gets broken up. Plenty of rather sticky duopolies or otherwise severely consolidated markets and the like out there.
by Lumoscore | 2025-10-10 08:40:54+00:00
AI and LLMs are rapidly becoming the next-gen tool for crypto markets—whether it’s parsing thousands of white papers, finding hidden sentiment shifts, or optimizing trading strategies. This is the speed layer of the market, and it’s undeniably cool.

But the real irony is that while we're using futuristic AI to trade, the underlying market structure is still stuck in the past. An LLM can only analyze and trade what is available and liquid.

The hard, foundational work that needs to be done has nothing to do with prediction. It's about fixing the technical debt left over from the early years. The Real-World Asset revolution is where the institutional value is moving, but those tokens are often trapped in single-chain ecosystems.

An AI can’t solve the problem of interoperability. It can’t build the bridges or create the necessary security standards to allow different blockchains to trust each other. That requires specialized, industrial-grade tooling and cross-chain infrastructure. Until platforms like LumosCore (https://lumoscore.com/) build those unified, multi-chain standards to seamlessly secure and move high-stakes RWA—making them liquid and tradable everywhere—AI is just optimizing trades on an unnecessarily small pool of assets. We need robust infrastructure first; then, AI can truly unlock global liquidity.
by CraigJPerry | 2025-10-10 08:40:58+00:00
I was late to the hypermedia party, started with datastore but now use HTMX when i want something in this space. The datastar api is a bit nicer but htmx 2.0 supports the same approach, the key thing is what htmx calls OOB updates, with that in place, everything else is a win in the htmx column.
by pjc50 | 2025-10-10 08:41:46+00:00
> Looking at graphs with clear improvements on many metrics .. one of the UK's most hated things the government has ever done

This is a classic of metrics driven management, isn't it. Customer satisfaction isn't in the metrics so people stand around saying "well they should be happy!"

Mainly about the cost, but the overcrowding on certain lines and the unreliability are also major factors. Commuters end up using the train because they're more or less forced to - you're not going to drive into rush hour London, and there's nowhere to park; and that's also a matter of policy to get people on the trains for sustainability reasons.

The "playing at shops" market setup exacerbates the problems. Original comment says "costs have gone down due to competition", but since the UK's operators are little regional monopolies they don't actually compete. The operators own neither track nor rolling stock; most of the money flows to the "train landlords", the ROSCOs.

Privatising the track, through "Railtrack" was the big disaster. They cut maintenance, but when you enshittify railways eventually people get killed, and nationalization was inevitable after Hatfield.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-10 08:43:21+00:00
It is - like everything else - nice because you, me and lots of others are used to it. But I remember starting out with C and thinking 'holy crap, this is ugly'. After 40+ years looking at a particular language it no longer looks ugly simply because of familiarity. But to a newcomer C would still look quite strange and intimidating.

And this goes for almost all programming languages. Each and every one of them has warts and issues with syntax and expressiveness. That holds true even for the most advanced languages in the field, Haskell, Erlang, Lisp and more so for languages that were originally designed for 'readability'. Programming is by its very nature more akin to solving a puzzle than to describing something. The puzzle is to how to get the machine to do something, to do it correctly, to do it safely and to do it efficiently, and all of those while satisfying the constraint of how much time you are prepared (or allowed) to spend on it. Picking the 'right' language will always be a compromise on some of these, there is no programming language that is perfect (or even just 'the best' or 'suitable') for all tasks, and there are no programming languages that are better than any other for any subset of all tasks until 'tasks' is a very low number.
by ricroz | 2025-10-10 08:45:14+00:00
Thank you !!:) Sorry the site was down, it’s up now. I don’t know what that was.

Yes you’re exactly right. A mind palace. The mind thinks mostly in maps. Although also in lists maybe but I would say mostly in maps. And yes there’s this idea that when you can « decorate » your space, then you find things more easily. Because of visual memory. Decorating helps organizing.

Thanks again! I hope you were able to sign up so you’ll get updates :)
by ashtonjamesd | 2025-10-10 08:45:30+00:00
Hi, I have been coding on GitHub for about 2 years. There's no trick other than enjoying it and relentlessly programming for fun. You probably know this, but if you enjoy something, you'll likely be better at it than someone who doesn't! More concrete advice would be to become an expert on the fundamentals and then try to tackle large projects, things that you think you could definitely not do, but do them anyway.
by mejutoco | 2025-10-10 08:45:44+00:00
If the median has half the users over it and half under it, wouldn’t writing for most of your readers be very close to writing for the median? If we are aiming for 51% (most readers). Most readers is somewhere between 50% and under 100%.

I appreciate the idea, but I think there are always assumptions. Like you did not explain what the median is because this is hn. I like the standars of the economist, always saying what an acronym is on first usage, and what a company is (Google, a search company). What they dont do is say: Google, like a box where you enter what you want to find and points you to other boxes. That would be condescending for its readers I believe. It is a matter of taste, and not objective, I guess.
by jpc0 | 2025-10-10 08:46:06+00:00
So what happens when the env value happens to actually have a # in it?

So you then need to implement escaping which can go from a very simple implementation to an actual lookahead parser

EDIT:

Actually I agree, this parser is already very overbuilt and should be able to handle comments. Generally an env parser is a few lines a best… you need to read a line, look for the first instance of the separator, generally no reason to build a full parser for that, env is an absurdly simple format if you don’t want features like comments.

Hell even an ini format parser is simple to implement in the same style.
by noelwelsh | 2025-10-10 08:46:27+00:00
Politics is unavoidable when groups of people get together, as politics is defined as how groups make decisions [1].

Therefore, "open source software should be a-political and open to all" is by definition both impossible (you cannot have a group without politics) and a political statement (as it is suggesting a decision making process.) Furthermore, don't mistake a conservative position (e.g. everything should stay the same) for an apolitical one.

[1]: For example:

> politics: “who gets what, where, when, and how”—the process for resolving disputes and allocating scarce resources"

https://openstax.org/books/introduction-political-science/pa...
Ask HN: How do you maintain a state of flow when "vibe engineering"?
by s-a-p | 2025-10-10 08:46:37+00:00
Pretty much what's in the title. One of the hardest things I've found when using tools like Claude Code is staying as concentrated as when I'm doing all the coding myself. Perhaps a skill issue on my end, so curious as to how other folks manage their attention in a world of coding agents.

(I'm submitting this while waiting for some code...)
by raxxorraxor | 2025-10-10 08:46:37+00:00
As far as I know and that information is probably way out of date, such an integrity chain on MD5 could be compromised as someone would be able to switch out some important bytes (switch the byte with a toggle on "I do NOT want to buy this very expensive washing machine") while keeping the hash value intact. So using MD5 as a signature check on documents like invoices going through unsafe channels is not safe.

But this is a security case that requires a hostile actor. If the problem is just checking for data integrity or in this case data identity without there being a danger for manipulation, MD5 should perform fine. I don't see a problem with your use case. I am no expert here and there are probably more optimal hashes, but MD5 has the advantage of being widely implemented in all kinds of systems.

Because understanding the intrinsic weakness of hashes isn't trivial, many just recommend "MD5 is broken, don't use it". I think this is just to be on the safe side. Many applications would probably be fine, but because to err on the side of caution is safer, people sometimes say that MD5 is the worst hash function ever conceived.
by haute_cuisine | 2025-10-10 08:46:55+00:00
Thanks for the link, very interesting data structure.

I'm wondering is it really worth dumping a general knowledge articles into code comments? To me it feels like the wrong place. Would just the wikipedia link be enough here?

I also notice a lot of comments like this

// IsEnd checks if this is the EOF sentinel // // Example usage: // // if pos.IsEnd() { // // We've reached the end, stop searching // } func (p *Position) IsEnd() bool { return p.Offset == EOF }

Is it really necessary to have a text description for a code like "a == b"? It would be really annoying to update comment section on every code change.

This is one of the typical issues when AI creates "code comments", because it always describes "What" is happening. A good comment should answer the question "Why" instead.

For the linked skip list module, a good comment could say why skip list was chosen over b-tree or other data structure and which trade offs were made. AI will never know that.
by Klaster_1 | 2025-10-10 08:49:14+00:00
Recently, I wanted to TTS a book with abogen. I main Windows and it does everything I want from it, mostly gaming and web dev. It didn't work with my 7900XTX because of Pytorch incompatibility. Even Zluda didn't help because it lacked a specific feature necessary for the app. I just want to use locally AI powered software. AMD/Windows combo sucks for this.
by willvarfar | 2025-10-10 08:49:19+00:00
Many people who live off grid do not have a well or anything, they carry water in. This means they do things to minimise the amount of drinking water (called "potable water") they need. This is just normal off grid life, nothing remarkable.

On the other hand, normal housing where potable water is used to flush toilets etc uses a large amount of precious water!