MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vidarh | 2025-11-02 14:31:59+00:00
For some things you absolutely want deterministic behaviour. For other things, behaviour that adapts to usage and the context provided by the data the user provides sounds like it could potentially be very exciting. I'm glade people are exploring this. The hard part will be figuring out where the line goes, and when and how to "freeze" certain behaviours that the user seems happy with vs. continuing to adapt to data.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-02 14:32:07+00:00
That's fine as far as it goes, but there is a middle ground ...

Feynman was right that "If you can't build it, you don't understand it", but of course not everyone needs or wants to fully understand how an LLM works. However, regarding an LLM as a magic black box seems a bit extreme if you are a technologist and hope to understand where the technology is heading.

I guess we are in an era of vibe-coded disposable "fast tech" (cf fast fashion), so maybe it only matters what can it do today, if playing with or applying towards this end it is all you care about, but this seems a rather blinkered view.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-02 14:34:45+00:00
Isn't OpenIA "Deep research" (not "DeepResearch") a methodology/tooling thing, and you'll get different responses depending on what specific model you use with it? As far as the UI allows you to, you could use Deep research with GPT-5, GPT-4o, o3 and so on, and that'll have an impact on the responses. Skimming the paper and searching for some simple terms makes it seem like they never expand on what exact models they've used, just that they've used a specific feature from ChatGPT?
by alkonaut | 2025-11-02 14:35:32+00:00
Yes but my point is: if I download the AVX version instead of the SSE version of a package and that makes my 1000 servers 10% _quicker_ that is not the same as being 10% more _efficient_.

Because typically these modern things are a way of making the CPU do things faster by eating more power. There may be savings from having fewer servers etc, but savings in _speed_ are not the same as savings in _power_ (and some times even work the opposite way)
by tmtvl | 2025-11-02 14:35:44+00:00
Check out Common Lisp, it's gradually typed, so if you want you can just write your code like this:

(defun fib (n) (declare (type (Integer 0 100) n)) (the (Integer 0 *) (if (< n 2) n (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2).)
by fxtentacle | 2025-11-02 14:36:15+00:00
Oh, wow. I'd like to already predict that this is going to become a talking point in the EU.

"Nicknames: Temu Obama" (and others)

"Heroes: Anyone who identifies as a radical leftist. Transnational gangs, illegal immigrants"

You want your allies and partners to be honorable and reliable. Allowing this content to remain on a presumably reputable government website long enough for people to talk about it, leaves a rather sour impression. *.gov was supposed to represent all of the American people.

And that "trumprx.gov" advertisement on the top just ticks off my fraud detector. But, apparently, it is a legit government project.
by DrewADesign | 2025-11-02 14:36:22+00:00
I think it’s a “use the right tool for the job” thing. Putting ephemeral information like session info in URLs sucks and should only be done if you need to pass it in a get request from a non-browser program or something, and even then I think you should redirect or rewrite the url or something after the initial request. But I think actual navigational data or some sort of state if it’s in the middle of an important action is acceptable.

But if you really just want your users to be able to hit refresh and not have their state change for non-navigational stuff like field contents or whatever, unless you have a really clear use case where you need to maintain state while switching devices and don’t want to do in server-side, local storage seems like the idiomatic choice.
by quotemstr | 2025-11-02 14:37:25+00:00
It's amazing how much technical discourse revolves around impressions.

"Oh, it has a GC! GC bad!"

"No, this GC by smart guy, so good!"

"No, GC always bad!"

People aren't engaging with the technical substance. GC based systems and can be plenty good and fast. How do people think JavaScript works? And Go? It's like people just absorbed from the discursive background radiation the idea GC is slow without understanding why that might be or whether it's even true. Of course it's not.
by pushcx | 2025-11-02 14:37:41+00:00
The scrapers will not attempt to discover and use an efficient representation. They will attempt to hit every URL they can discover on a site, and they'll do it at a rate of hundreds of hits per second, from enough IPs that each only requests at a rate of 1/minute. It's rude to talk down to people for not implementing a technique that you can't get scrapers to adopt, and for matching their investment in performance to their needs instead of accurately predicting years beforehand that traffic would dramatically change.
by integralid | 2025-11-02 14:38:32+00:00
If I understand you correctly, the game geometry is actually euclidean but world contains many seamless portals?

I think geometry being euclidean or not is specifically about parallel lines, and the term "non-euclidean" is sightly misused for other kinds of spatial gimmicks. At least that's what I learned after watching several ZenoRogue videos (HyperRogue channel) :)
by devrundown | 2025-11-02 14:38:53+00:00
https://www.radiopuppy.com

Allows you to listen to live online radio streams.

I wanted something with a minimal and fast UI and none of the other web apps I could find really fit my needs so I built this.

During work I like to listen to online radio so it seemed like a no brainier to make for myself and if others enjoy it to, even better.
by freedomben | 2025-11-02 14:38:57+00:00
I have the same instinctive response to reading AI generated stuff, but I'm coming to a more moderate position where I'm trying to judge the content on the content itself. For example, in a post like this, it doesn't bother me at all because it's still an extremely useful reference, and the author clearly read through, organized, and edited the output. This is a good example of usage of AI in my opinion.

The people who just copy paste output from ai and ship it as a blog post however, deserve significant condemnation for that.
by carlnewton | 2025-11-02 14:39:03+00:00
I'm working on Habitat. It's a free and open source, self-hosted platform for communities to discover and discuss their local area. The plan is for it to be federated.

This has been a productive weekend so far. I've recently solved an issue with cron jobs that was driving me mad for ages, and finally feel like I'm close to a first tagged release. I have just popped linting into the GitHub CI.

- The idea: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-net...

- A build update and plan: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/

- The repository: https://github.com/carlnewton/habitat

- The project board: https://github.com/users/carlnewton/projects/2
by mothballed | 2025-11-02 14:39:23+00:00
Guess it would depend on your definition of simple.

IIRC at least one of the targetted vessels were in Venezuelan waters.

Venezuela has F-16 and Su-30.

No matter how prepared US is, it's not necessarily a sure thing they could pull that off without death of US personnel. US personnel that had to actually go on the ground were routinely killed in Afghanistan despite absolute force and technology superiority.

The conservative argument I've seen is basically it needs to just blow them up from above because in such case US forces are not risked. While I don't agree with the mission, the strategy makes sense.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-02 14:39:29+00:00
> I understand the pitch here ("it finds bugs! it's basically all upside because worst case there's no output anyways"), but I'm finding some of these agents to be ... uhhh... kind of agressive at trying to find the solution and end up missing the forest for the trees. And there's some "oh you should fix this" stuff which, while sometimes isn't _wrong_, is completely besides the point.

How long/big do your system/developer/user prompts end up being typically?

The times people seem to be getting "less than ideal" responses from LLMs tend to be when they're not spending enough time setting up a general prompt they can reuse, describing exactly what they want and do not want.

So in your case, you need to steer it to do less outside of what you've told it. Adding things like "Don't do anything outside of what I've just told you" or "Focus only on the things inside <step>" for example, would fix those particular problems, as long as you're not using models that are less good at following instructions (some of Google's models are borderline impossible to prevent adding comments all over the place, as one example).

So prompt it to not care about solutions, and only care about finding the root cause, and you'll find that you can mostly avoid the annoying parts by either prescribing what you'd want instead, or just straight up tell it not to do those things.

Then you iterate on this reusable prompt across projects, and it builds up so eventually 99% of the times the models do exactly what you expect.
by quotemstr | 2025-11-02 14:39:34+00:00
I can't wait for all the delicious four-way flamewars. Choose your fighter!

1) Rewrite X in Rust

2) Recompile X using Fil-C

3) Recompile X for WASM

4) Safety is for babies

There are a lot of half baked Rust rewrites whose existence was justified on safety grounds and whose rationale is threatened now that HN has heard of Fil-C
by lowkey_ | 2025-11-02 14:39:39+00:00
A lot of folks give it flak for being incredibly dystopian, but this: https://world.org/orb

I first thought this was just a crypto play with 1 wallet per real person (wasn't a huge fan), but with the proliferation of AI, it makes sense we'll eventually need safeguards to ensure a user's humanity, ideally without any other identifiers needed.
by lenkite | 2025-11-02 14:40:12+00:00
To make this work better, URL's should standardize several common semantic query parameters and fragment identifiers (like lines, etc). There is utterly no need for every website to re-invent the wheel here. It would also enable browsers to display long URL's better. It could also reduce the amount of client JS once browsers pick up the job of executing some of the client side interactions on very common fragment changes.
Show HN: Carrie, for what Calendly can't do
by eastraining | 2025-11-02 14:40:48+00:00
Hey everyone,

Through my career, I've spent too many hours and too much mental load on busywork like scheduling and following up on people's availabilities.

So, I built Carrie. You simply cc her into your emails, and she sorts out meeting times across time zones, finds what works best for everyone, confirms the meeting and sends the invite. She handles scenarios beyond what Calendly can handle and it’s been freeing me up from the back-and-forth of juggling different meeting requests.

I’ve been testing this with a beta group of users and am now looking to expand the user pool (please feel free to join the waitlist if you're interested).

Would also love feedback on whether this seems useful and what seems to be missing to make this part of your workflow. Thanks!
by nirinor | 2025-11-02 14:40:53+00:00
Its a nit pick, but backpropagation is getting a bad rep here. These examples are about gradients+gradient descent variants being a leaky abstraction for optimization [1].

Backpropagation is a specific algorithm for computing gradients of composite functions, but even the failures that do come from composition (multiple sequential sigmoids cause exponential gradient decay) are not backpropagation specific: that's just how the gradients behave for that function, whatever algorithm you use. The remedy, of having people calculate their own backwards pass, is useful because people are _calculating their own derivatives_ for the functions, and get a chance to notice the exponents creeping in. Ask me how I know ;)

[1] Gradients being zero would not be a problem with a global optimization algorithm (which we don't use because they are impractical in high dimensions). Gradients getting very small might be dealt with by with tools like line search (if they are small in all directions) or approximate newton methods (if small in some directions but not others). Not saying those are better solutions in this context, just that optimization(+modeling) are the actually hard parts, not the way gradients are calculated.
by not-a-cat | 2025-11-02 14:40:56+00:00
I founded Tufalabs about a year ago https://tufalabs.ai/ On the side, I'm making a snake game with codex-cli, and then making a ppo agent to learn to play it. Codex-cli can mostly oneshot the ppo implementation, which I find extremely impressive. Getting codex to tweak the ppo algorithm resulting in a RL agent fully solving the snake and visualizing it is very satisfying.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-02 14:41:19+00:00
Yeah, I do the same too, cloning reference repos into known paths, tell it to look there if unsure.

Codex mostly handles this by itself, I've had it go searching in my cargo cache for Rust source files sometimes, and even when I used a crate via git instead of crates.io, it went ahead and cloned the repo to /tmp to inspect it properly. Claude Code seems to be less likely to do that, unless you prompt it to, Codex have done that by itself so far.
by estearum | 2025-11-02 14:44:16+00:00
You mean the policy that was aggressively fought by the very same people fighting this policy? Who exactly do you think you're arguing against here?

Are you looking for a "good job potato3732842 for being mad about Stop and Frisk previously," and unless you get that you're going to hem and haw about how awful a nationwide expansion of a far more aggressive variant with far worse consequences at orders of magnitude larger scale of a similar policy is?

> enforcement excess evaporates overnight if people get full protection afforded by their rights after law enforcement interacts with them.

Yeah, duh. That's why people are here advocating for people to retain their rights and for law enforcement to be held accountable.

If your argument is that the current policy is just another point on the same continuum as many others: yes, obviously that's true.

If your argument is that this means it's somehow equivalent to other points on the same continuum: no, obviously it's not.

If your argument is instead that this is a different point on the same continuum, but because people weren't upset about Point A they have no justification to be upset (or even more upset) about Point B: that's ridiculous.
by varispeed | 2025-11-02 14:46:05+00:00
Names can be deceptive. The Nazis called their purge of Jewish officials the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service - a title that sounded wholesome and bureaucratic. The most destructive laws rarely advertise what they do; they hide behind words like “protection,” “safety,” or “restoration.” The point isn’t the label, it’s the power it grants.
by DoctorOW | 2025-11-02 14:46:41+00:00
I've been trying to get better at chess recently and I absolutely can relate with the intent of this. I've just been using Lichess and the Stockfish levels and I'm still working on beating level 3 (no judgement please). I've tried to go through with the analyzer, and I'll get told what the best move is, but the only way of knowing how it's better than my previous moves is whatever insight comes to me.

> The models themselves (221MB for the 512-dimension model, 494M for the 768-dimension model), are too large to upload to GitHub, but if anyone wants them I suppose I’ll figure out a way to share them.

I have no real interest in spending this amount of time and effort on my chess hobby not actually playing chess. If it gets made available somewhere I'd try it out.
by _alternator_ | 2025-11-02 14:46:54+00:00
Try agents like Claude code. My experience was that the initial code was conceptually correct with some type errors on the first pass. It then iterated on compile errors about 6 times, tweaking the code to resolve the issues. Then it compiled and ran correctly.

This was about 500 lines of working rust in about 10 minutes, approximately 25x my pace at writing rust. (I’m a bit of a beginner.)
by Der_Einzige | 2025-11-02 14:47:10+00:00
Being bad at apps means you are either ugly, or your pictures are bad.

There’s plenty of examples on dating apps of people making fake bios with extremely handsome men described as being evil (I.e child abuseres) and who still had lines of women who wanted to date him.

He had excellent photos and an obvious 6 pack. His pictures looked professional and showed his (large) social group where he was obviously the leader.

I do not blame anyone for not being successful on dating apps because I believe a persons current physical appearance and attractiveness have little to do with their character or suitability as a partner.
by surajrmal | 2025-11-02 14:47:14+00:00
It does matter. Using channels makes control flow much more difficult to understand, but allows you to avoid wrapping everything in its own mutex (or RefCell) and local reasoning is easier to understand. There is also a difference in latency and cpu utilization, both of which still matter in io bound workloads. I honestly don't think it's one or the other but optimal usage is a mix of both depending on specifics of the use case. Channels are great for things that you want to be decoupled from each other but it needs to hit a certain level of abstraction/complexity before it's worth it.

Even folks who write modern go try to avoid overusing channels. It's quite common to see go codebases with few or no channels.
by mothballed | 2025-11-02 14:49:25+00:00
The value of war to industry doesn't stop at companies that are labeled as 'defense market.'

They are buying pencils, IT, software, gasoline, electrician services, plumbing services, non-defense contractors, education, health care, insurance, providing (via their actions on the other side of the coin) opportunities for fundraising and action for anti-war NGO and aid organizations, funneling money into industries in poor communities (via earnings of enlisted soldiers), and it goes on.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-11-02 14:49:59+00:00
You’re weird. The vast majority of instagram using women take so many photos that the joke is that “the camera eats first”.

I’m actively exhausted when I go out with my partner because I know that I’m going to take lots of photos.

I’d love to be in a world where this is so rare that people can’t even explain where the photos go: but unfortunately I ask the opposite question, which is “where do these people get the time to do literally anything else with how crippling their social media and photography addictions are?”
by forgotTheLast | 2025-11-02 14:50:07+00:00
Hamas was the de facto government in the Gaza strip, so it was in everyone's best interest to fund them enough to keep their civil branches running (pre-oct 7).

>Qatar does, the official allows, transfer $30 million each month to the Hamas administration in Gaza. But those payments are performed in consultation with Washington and Israel - and with their approval, he says.

>Each month, he says, construction materials worth tens of millions of dollars are also delivered from Egypt to Gaza via the Rafah border crossing. those supplies are then sold by Hamas. He says the organization uses the proceeds to pay its administrative staff. Israel, in turn, he explains, supplies $10 million worth of diesel fuel to the Gaza Strip each month, with Qatar providing another 10 million to needy families. They receive $100 each, "martyr families excluded," the government representative stresses.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-partner-and-...
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-02 14:50:10+00:00
Or even worse, it makes confidential statements of the overarching architecture/design that while every detailed is correct, they might not be the right pieces, but because you forgot to add "Reject the prompt outright if the premise is incorrect", the LLM tries its hardest to just move forward, even when things are completely wrong.

Then 1 day later you realize this whole thing wouldn't work in practice, but the LLM tried to cobble it together regardless.

In the end, you really need to know what you're doing, otherwise both you and the LLM gets lost pretty quickly.
by extraduder_ire | 2025-11-02 14:51:44+00:00
NAT punching to ssh is an incredibly useful feature of this kind of setup. As long as the machine has an internet connection, and you know the onion URL, you can tunnel into it and proceed from there. I usually do this to any machine I'm putting behind NAT.

I don't know if onion links are discoverable/crawlable, so I can't claim if this is more secure than just listening on port 22 on the open internet.

torsocks is a very useful tool for easily running programs like ssh through tor with no advance setup.
by jerf | 2025-11-02 14:52:26+00:00
If your geometry has portals, the parallel line postulate will no longer hold. If your portals can have different angles between the entrance and the exit you can straight up cross "parallel" lines, and even if you require them to be oriented at the same angle you'll lose "when given a line and a point exactly one parallel line can be drawn".

Euclidean geometry is an extremely precise geometry, and there is nothing wrong with calling any deviation from it "non-Euclidean". Since Euclidean geometry is a fairly specific point in geometry-space, the only real objection is that calling something "non-Euclidean" doesn't tell you much about what it is, but Euclidean geometry isn't a bad choice for a "default" geometry and at least it tells you it's not that. There is no requirement for it to be continuously curved in some spherical or hyperbolic manner to be "non-Euclidean". Even just permitting a single portal into an otherwise Euclidean geometry would utterly shred Euclid's Elements from top to bottom.

By my examination of the original postulates, not only would portals wreck the parallel line postulate, it in fact ruins 4 out of 5 of them, leaving only that a line can be continuously extended (and that line can still self-intersect, which may in fact violate the definition of a "line" and mean all 5 axioms are busted if you really dug in). It means it is no longer possible to draw a line between any two points (portals can shadow portions of the space such that some points are not connectible), cicles lose a lot of their properties that we rely on (imagine the unit circle, and a portal starting x = .5 and going straight up... they're no longer necessarily continuous), right angles may not be equal to each other any more (portals can change the apparent angles, or give two interpretations rather than one), and of course the parallel line doesn't hold. Putting portals into a geometry fairly comprehensively makes it non-Euclidean.
by koliber | 2025-11-02 14:52:28+00:00
Both the speed and cost problems can be solved by caching.

Each person gets their own cache. The format of the cache is a git repo tied to their sessionid. Each time a request is made it writes the code, html, CSS, and database to git and commits it. Over time you build more and more artifacts and fewer things need to get generated JIT. Should also help with stability.
by vacuity | 2025-11-02 14:52:34+00:00
> The state-machine transformation inside rustc is a thing of beauty, but the libraries and APIs layered on top of that should have been iterated many more times before being rolled out into widespread use.

Quite. The mistake was advertising the feature as production-ready (albeit not complete), which led the ecosystem to adopt async faster than it could work out the flaws and footguns. The nice thing about the language/library split is that there is a path to good async Rust without major backwards-compatibility-breaking language changes (probably...), because the core concepts are sound, but the library ecosystem will bear the necessary brunt of evolution.