MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _jsmh | 2025-11-04 10:06:08+00:00
Thank you for sharing this opinion.

AI != LLMs. A future version of better AI might become capable of saying "I don't know."

The mess of figuring out what the facts are, in a way, already has deployed solutions. Journalists are a form of fact checkers. Big news companies with multi-million budgets pay journalists to check things. In effect there already is a market for fact-checking. Managing perceptions by twisting facts is something many have been accused of. When news companies are found to have spread lies they possibly face penalties.

So if the big clunky enterprise version of a form of fact-checking is already in place and kind of working, why would something closer to the lean startup-y tail-end of the distribution of fact-checking not work? If a version of a facts marketplace is already working, why doubt it would ever work?

X paying users for engagement is a new variation of this. Prediction markets like Polymarket is another. Polymarket teaming up with TruthSocial could be an interesting result.

It's okay to have many contested subjects our society cannot agree on and which don't lend themselves to scientific inquiry. It's okay to say I don't know.
by roxolotl | 2025-11-04 10:06:11+00:00
The point is because natural language systems seem so easy to use people assume the existing hard parts will become easy. But integrating systems is hard not because formal languages are challenging to use but because connecting systems is inherently challenging. The switch from formal to natural language doesn’t reduce challenge it just alters it.

We’re saying the same thing. Integration is the hard (still technical) part.
by wongarsu | 2025-11-04 10:06:23+00:00
In coding agents that would be "the test keeps failing and I can't fix it - let's delete the test" or "I can't fix this bug, let's delete the feature"

If you measure success by unit test failures or by the presence of the bug those behaviors can obscure that the LLM wasn't able to do the intended fix. Of course a closer inspection will still reveal what happened, but using proxy measurements to track success is dangerous, especially if the LLM knows about them or if the task description implies improving that metric "a unit test is failing, fix that"
by chmod775 | 2025-11-04 10:07:40+00:00
About once a year some server provider kicks me out, burns down, or extorts/hikes prices on me specifically. All data is already mirrored to servers at other providers, so I just need to spin up the main infra somewhere else. I can do this in seconds on anything that accepts ssh connections. The slowest step is waiting a few minutes for DNS to propagate.

If you're at the mercy of a single company that probably couldn't care less about the minuscule amount of revenue you represent, your operation has a problem and I have no respect for what you do.
by IanCal | 2025-11-04 10:08:03+00:00
Some business problems need that. That’s not the same as asserting most do and it’s certainly not the same all business problems.

Some things need to be deterministic. Many don’t.

Even your business will have many such problems that don’t need 100% all those properties - every task performed by a human for example. You as a developer are not all of these things 100%!

And your help query may need to be deterministic but does it need to be explainable? Many ml solutions aren’t really explainable, certainly not to 100% whatever that may mean, but can easily be deterministic.
by lapinovski | 2025-11-04 10:08:55+00:00
that's a beautiful and very educational video. Basically how to listen user and how to implement feedback around user feedback.

I mean tantacrul's videos are generally super educational to begin with but I really liked this one tbh. Wish he could do this full time and had more frequent videos.

the only thing that I didn't liked the logo. I mean bleh. i hope they'll do something more nice to look at. that's my only complaint lol.
by water9 | 2025-11-04 10:09:22+00:00
Yes, because if you get a leak in your air conditioner, instead of just patching the hole and refilling it with coolant, you have to replace your entire system in places like California because they require a more green, less gas, in the name of science, and still completely ignoring the simple fact that it doesn’t make a damn difference because we all live in the same globe.

The amount of waste that is generated is 1000 times that of just refilling the coolant. When will people realize that you can use an existential threat that you can’t prove to justify anything? What could be more important than our existence?

If the same scientist came out with a study that said if you don’t pay me $1 million by tomorrow, we are gonna get hit by an asteroid. Would you believe them and pay me? Or has this become a political issue we’re no longer thinking rationally
by squarefoot | 2025-11-04 10:10:25+00:00
I didn't know it was still maintained. Just gave it a try on this laptop with Manjaro Linux + XFCE and noticed it both messes with the desktop panel toolbar making it rearrange and flash repeatedly for some seconds while loading and also when changing preferences, then doesn't correctly fit fonts into the dropdown lists in all toolbars. It appears to me it doesn't take into account that the list elements add a bigger empty space around fonts compared for example to buttons, so it considers them shorter and they're partially cut out. I don't have a GH account to properly report this.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-04 10:10:29+00:00
> Correct, oAI is short rates vol

Why vol? They're just short rates, which is a silly way to say leveraged. If rates become volatile but halve, OpenAI does fine. If rates stabilise at 10%, OpenAI fails. There is no "duration hedging," which for OpenAI would involve buying duration, i.e. bets that profit when rates go up, going on.
by JSR_FDED | 2025-11-04 10:11:01+00:00
One of the things I had to wrap my head around was the whole async server style of programming. I learned that doing a sleep on the server consumes essentially zero resources. The thread goes to sleep and wakes up when the timer expires. In the meantime the server can handle other requests unhindered. You can have hundreds or thousands of these threads at the same time - serving requests, waiting for IO, etc.

It’s not like synchronous servers e.g. Flask with Gunicorn (in the Python world) where you have a few pre-forked server processes. In that case it would be a waste to prevent one of those processes from serving other requests while sleeping, I agree.

Ultimately it’s cool though to be able to control the client from the backend asynchronously, updating signals (think of them as a kind of special front-end variable with superpowers) when something on the backend happens, or updating the client’s DOM, or running scripts.
by qayxc | 2025-11-04 10:11:44+00:00
This isn't about Ivory tower politics or gate keeping. It's just a fact. Software development changed and Whitney started his career 45 years ago.

If you need help understanding what I mean, look at the credits of computer games released in the 80s and early 90s. You'll usually find a single programmer, with maybe one or two others, who contributed specialised parts like sound/music processing or special effects. No one cared about your particular programming style, because there were no big teams, no code reviews, no PRs. If you had questions, your fellow programmer would simply sit down with you and go over the details until you got familiar with their style and -code.

> failure to adapt to the shop standards usually means your position ends

Well, he runs his own company and has been his own boss for the past 32 years so again - this simply doesn't apply to him.
by 9rx | 2025-11-04 10:11:47+00:00
> For me, bugs are all mistakes which manifest themselves in software misbehaving.

And that's fine. It is not like there is some magical deity in the sky that creates and enforces the law of language. Words are just made up by humans on a whim. If I want to exert my own whim and call that "zigglefritz" instead, that works too.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-04 10:12:26+00:00
> It was the era when a major company could brush off the bad PR that comes with copying a major online artist. Is it believable that no one involved in the Nike ads had seen Xiao Xiao? Not really — it was popular with young people worldwide. Yet Zhu was new media at a time when old media ruled. What could he do?

This doesn't make any sense. From earlier in the same article:

> Zhu didn’t invent violent stickman animations. In the ‘90s, the Western site Stick Figure Death Theatre hosted exactly what its name implied. But Xiao Xiao, and its mix of Jackie Chan with Jet Li with The Matrix, perfected the idea.

> Either way, it was Xiao Xiao that made “stick fights” massive online. Clones were rampant — even Stick Figure Death Theatre had them. As one paper reported in 2002:

>> The Web’s legions of part-time Flash animators have begun producing their own copies of Xiao Xiao — so many, in fact, that there’s a whole portal dedicated to them. Stick Figure Death Theatre ... has so many stick man knockoffs, you have to wonder why Zhu doesn’t just give up.

If we assume that people at Nike were familiar with Xiao Xiao... and that they were also familiar with the mountains of similar material, what are we saying they did wrong?
by liampulles | 2025-11-04 10:13:05+00:00
The performance of a web service is largely dependant on how many calls and how quickly it can make calls to external services. If a given system is making 2 DB calls when it could instead make one, then that should be the initial focus for optimisation.

Indeed, if a language and framework has slow code execution, but facilitates efficient querying, then it can still perform relatively well.
by tomhow | 2025-11-04 10:13:08+00:00
Please don't comment like this on HN, not because we don't care about the possibility that this kind of thing could happen (HN has many mechanisms in place to detect and prevent manipulation), but simply because these comments are repetitive and boring. The guidelines have been clear about this for a long time:

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by bombcar | 2025-11-04 10:13:48+00:00
95% of portals could be done with 2000s tech (since they're basically CRUD apps) - the question is what it is worth to make them that way.

And the answer is almost always "nothing" because "good enough" is fine.

People like to shit on development tools like Electron, but the reality is that if the app is shitty on Electron, it'd probably be just as shitty on native code, because it is possible to write good Electron apps.
by TheCoelacanth | 2025-11-04 10:14:09+00:00
It's not unheard of[1]. Ancient Athens used random selection for many offices and some Italian city-states like Venice and Florence incorporated elements of randomness. A lot of historians think that it did help a lot in reigning in corruption and making it harder for foreign powers to influence their politics.

I think randomly selecting a president is probably a bad idea but randomly selecting a parliament and then having them elect a prime minister from within that group would work well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
by rossant | 2025-11-04 10:14:35+00:00
> There are still highly demanded optimized programs or parts of such programs which won't disappear any time soon. Here is a small fraction of such software: > ... > Such software will always exist, it just moved to some niche or became a lower level "backbone" of other higher level software.

Yes. I’ve been working for years on building a GPU-based scientific visualization library entirely in C, [1] carefully minimizing heap allocations, optimizing tight loops and data structures, shaving off bytes of memory and microseconds of runtime wherever possible. Meanwhile, everyone else seems content with Electron-style bloat weighing hundreds of megabytes, with multi-second lags and 5-FPS interfaces. Sometimes I wonder if I’m just a relic from another era. But comments like this remind me that I’m simply working in a niche where these optimizations still matter.

[1] https://datoviz.org/
by throwup238 | 2025-11-04 10:14:42+00:00
> If you were on a real flight and asked a human for help, they wouldn't give a deterministic answer.

If you were on a real flight, asking a qualified human - like a trained pilot - would result in a very deterministic checklist.

Deterministic responses to emergencies is at least half of the training from the time we get a PPL.
by thrance | 2025-11-04 10:15:23+00:00
Pardon the internet lingo, but this is cope. Americans pay way more for their healthcare than citizens of countries with universal healthcare, like France, and their life expectancy is still lower. So clearly, it is better elsewhere. Don't fall into helplessness, the situation can be improved, it will "just" require actual political will to do so, that you unfortunately can't find anywhere among the Right or "moderate" democrats.
by cookiengineer | 2025-11-04 10:16:06+00:00
Well, technically the reason for the fork was the implanted backdoor that was executing a binary coming from Muse groups server, hidden as telemetry and an update check. It's not a well built backdoor and the code is easy to spot, as there's not a lot of other http related code in audacity itself.

edit: Check the au3/src/update/UpdateManager.cpp, they're still not hiding this better after all that happened, lol.

[1] https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/8d6e45a9756e700b7f...
by torginus | 2025-11-04 10:16:32+00:00
I dislike the view of individuals as passive sufferers of the preferences of big corporations.

You can and people do self-host stuff that big tech wants pushed into the cloud.

You can have a NAS, a private media player, Home Assistant has been making waves in the home automation sphere. Turns out people don't like buying overpriced devices only to have to pay a $20 subscription, and find out their devices don't talk to each other, upload footage inside of their homes to the cloud, and then get bricked once the company selling them goes under and turns of the servers.
by bombcar | 2025-11-04 10:17:08+00:00
I can tell the difference between 1080p (or upscaled 1080p) and 4k on a 50" screen at "living room" distances, but it's nowhere near as obvious as SD to DVD was.

At "laptop" screen distances the difference between my Retina display and non-retina external monitors is quite noticeable; so much so that I run 4k in 1080p mode more and more.

8k is going to require those curved monitors because you'll have to be that close to it to get the advantage.
by lucas_membrane | 2025-11-04 10:17:10+00:00
Not for me. I spent a few weeks a few weeks ago trying to use it. Much I liked. Much I didn't.

I like FP, so that was not a problem. But I found that lots of stuff was pretty hard for me as just an old guy trying to write some fancy little GUI apps to assist some of my other spare time activities. The project system, dune, was puzzling to me, and when I looked for clarification on-line it was pretty clear that I had lots of company. Not wanting to pass time writing code and seeing many potentialy useful packages available, I downloaded quite a few (actually, I downloaded not too many, but the dependencies required for those multiplied rapidly). Then I found myself managing multiple environments, because the different versions of this and that do not always work together so nice.

Some library code has to get imported some ways, some other ways. Etc, etc. Many tutorials teach the toplevel interpreter, but that's not recommended for projects of any size, and the other environments will choke on the code that works in the toplevel.

What I liked is that the OCaml ecosystem doen't look like it wants to control or ought to fear the next big thing. It's what you get when you have a lot of smart creative people who get inspired and do their best according to their own motivations and their own conception of quality. I admire that. I'm glad that I tried it.
by 9rx | 2025-11-04 10:17:18+00:00
> So the language/library/framework does not create an exception when operating on the null pointer

It creates an exception in concept. It might not create an exception data structure, depending on the particulars of the language/library/framework. Which are you referring to when you say "exception" here?

It is a bit unfortunate that we've come to use "exception" to mean different things in different contexts. They are not dependent, though. Just as you can have an error in concept without an error data structure, you can have an exception in concept without an exception data structure.
by gabriel666smith | 2025-11-04 10:17:24+00:00
I've spent a few weeks building and using a terminal LLM client based on that RLM paper that was floating around a little while ago. It's single-conversation, with a tiny, sliding context window, and then a tool that basically fuzzy searches across our full interaction history. It's memory is 'better' than mine - but anything that is essentially RAG inherently will be.

My learning so far, to your point on memory being a limiting factor, is that the system is able to build on ideas over time. I'm not sure you'd classify that as 'self-learning', and I haven't really pushed it in the direction of 'introspection' at all.

Memory itself (in this form) does not seem to be a silver bullet, though, by any means. However, as I add more 'tools', or 'agents', its ability to make 'leaps of discovery' does improve.

For example, I've been (very cautiously) allowing cron jobs to review a day's conversation, then spawn headless Claude Code instances to explore ideas or produce research on topics that I've been thinking about in the chat history.

That's not much different from the 'regular tasks' that Perplexity (and I think OpenAI) offer, but it definitely feels more like a singular entity. It's absolutely limited by how smart the conversation history is, at this time, though.

The Memento analogy you used does feel quite apt - there is a distinct sense of personhood available to something with memory that is inherently unavailable to a fresh context window.
by 8474_s | 2025-11-04 10:17:29+00:00
The macros are fine as concept, i've used something similar before for reducing code size,e.g. defining hundreds of similar functions and stuff. What is incomprehensible and puts the entire thing into "Obfuscated C" territory is one-letter variables. You'll need to memorize all of them and can't reuse them in normal code. If at least the variables were self-descriptive i'd support such coding style, but it clearly need comments.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-11-04 10:18:05+00:00
I stopped fighting this battle a long time ago. I think Ocaml just doesn't spoon feed people enough. They would have to actually read the documentation to understand and that's simply too hard nowadays so you end up which this kind of articles about "pain points" which are basically "I don't know what I'm doing and making a lot of mistakes, let me blame my tool".

Basically, when someone complaining starts by "I don't like the Algol-like syntax", obviously without saying it's Algol-like because that would require they actually know what Algol is, the rest is probably going to be extremely poor at best.

And here, it doesn't disappoint. Point 2, "I don't like type inference, it's too clever". Or you could just put type annotations at every declarations like every pieces of documentation ever produced on the language invite you to.

The type paragraph and the mentions of shadowing actually shows the author doesn't know how to use the Ocaml module system. For the neophytes here, it's the main standout feature of Ocaml. It's a bit like talking about C without knowing how to use pointers. I have seen people do that actually so I probably shouldn't be too surprised.

Menhir and ocamllex syntaxes are just slight twists on the actual syntaxes of yacc and lex. Nothing surprising for someone who knows both tools but I guess it's becoming a rarity nowadays. To be honest, the Ocaml compiler works exactly how you would expect a C compiler and linker to work. That makes it really simple and predictable for people who used to be C programmers but apparently completely inscrutable for young developers.

For printing, they quote "#[derive(Debug)]" in Rust but apparently they never reached ppx_deriving in Ocaml. It's a shame because it does exactly the same thing.

The whole conclusion with the weird segway about academics for a language which was purposefully designed to write provers and not as a research language doesn't even deserve to be commented upon.

Anyway, just go use Rust, bask in the hype, fight the borrow checker for things which don't require manual memory management, and leave us be. I think a significant part of why Ocaml is nice is that it is not appealing to many developers.
by HDThoreaun | 2025-11-04 10:18:52+00:00
Yes, agents are really as useful as the hype makes them out to be. Certainly they’re more useful on bigger code bases but even small ones the agent provides more value than you may expect. I have a small side project probably around 10k loc and the ai agents still plow through tokens. End of the day letting the ai read your entire code base really does let it make more intelligent design decisions. Many other benefits as well. Iteration is much faster without copy paste
by liampulles | 2025-11-04 10:18:55+00:00
As far as internal services go, I agree, being able to easily add stuff is the main priority.

For customer facing stuff, I think it's worth looking into frameworks that do backend templating and then doing light DOM manipulation to add dynamism on the client side. Frameworks like Phoenix make this very ergonomic.

It's a useful tool to have in the belt.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-11-04 10:19:09+00:00
There is no problem with that, as Bitcoin itself will never reach the transaction volume of regular cash - it couldn't even handle that given the number of transactions (nor does it make sense to store your coffee payment on any given day for a lifetime in the blockchain). Thats where layer 2 solution such as Lightning come into play - for everyday, more privacy-friendly smaller transactions that are not put on the blockchain. And on Layer 2, you can go even smaller in denominations.
by rendylong | 2025-11-04 10:19:57+00:00
Hi HN!

There's a quiet revolution happening in AI: agents are gaining the ability to actually USE computers, not just talk about using them.

We gave our AI agent filesystem access. It changed everything.

- Before: Advice "You should use pandas to merge those Excel files, then create a pivot table..."

- After: Action Agent opens files, writes Python, generates Excel, saves to disk "Here's your summary report: /cache/analysis_2025.xlsx"

Here's what we've done： - File system access (read/write from user's document library)

- Office document parsing (Excel → structured data for AI)

- Code execution (agent writes & runs Python)

- Output generation (creates Excel, charts, reports)

- Sandboxed environment (Docker isolation for security)

This isn't just about "productivity tools." It's about the *fundamental shift from AI-as-advisor to AI-as-coworker*.

The moment AI can: - Access your files - Execute code - Generate outputs

...is the moment it can start replacing repetitive white-collar work.
by bombcar | 2025-11-04 10:20:06+00:00
More and more - especially on Apple products - Accessibility is the "customization" menu, not the "disabled support" it used to be.

Size increases, animation decreases (when your iPhone is getting old, turn off animation and behold it operating super fast!), etc can all be found there.

I zoom websites until they "feel right" which is usually something close to "they are as wide as the window I have them in" - HN is a few taps up from "actual size".