MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by latchup | 2025-11-05 20:08:06+00:00
> So what about all these huge codebases you are expected to understand but you have not written?

You do not need to fully understand large codebases to use them; this is what APIs are for. If you are adventurous, you might hunt a bug in some part of a large codebase, which usually leads you from the manifestation to the source of the bug on a fairly narrow path. None of this requires "understanding all these huge codebases". Your statement implies a significant lack of experience on your part, which makes your use of LLMs for code generation a bit alarming, to be honest.

The only people expected to truly understand huge codebases are those who maintain them. And that is exactly why AI PRs are so insulting: you are asking a maintainer to vet code you did not properly vet yourself. Because no, you do not understand the generated code as well as if you wrote it yourself. By PRing code you have a subpar understanding of, you come across as entitled and disrespectful, even with the best of intentions.

> That is just an opinion.

As opposed to yours? If you don't want to engage meaningfully with a comment, then there is no need to reply.

> I have projects I wrote with some help from the LLMs, and I understand ALL parts of it. In fact, it is written the way it is because I wanted it to be that way.

See, I could hit you with "That is just an opinion" here, especially as your statement is entirely anecdotal But I won't, because that would be lame and cowardly.

When you say "because I wanted it to be that way", what exactly does that mean? You told an extremely complex, probabilistic, and uninterpretable automaton what you want to write, and it wrote it not approximately, but exactly as you wanted it? I don't think this is possible from a mathematical point of view.

You further insist that you "understand ALL parts" of the output. This actually is possible, but seems way too time-inefficient to be plausible. It is very hard to exhaustively analyze all possible failure modes of code, whether you wrote it yourself or not. There is a reason why certifying safety-critical embedded code is hell, and why investigating isolated autopilot malfunctions in aircraft takes experts years. That is before we consider that those systems are carefully designed to be highly predictable, unlike an LLM.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-05 20:08:11+00:00
Both the Apple LCII with the Apple //e card, 5-1/4 drive for it and the Apple //e joystick and the PowerMac 6100/60 with the DOS Compatibility card exists somewhere in my parent’s house.

I have no idea where my 5-1/4 disks are. But I know where the 3-1/2 disks are for my Mac. They aren’t in the attic. They are in my childhood bedroom.

My old Apple //e though is lost forever.

I don’t have any real sentimental attachment to the hardware. If anything, i am going to eventually take the time to rin emulators on my Mac.

Since the 6100/60, I’ve only bought them three Macs - a G4 Mac Mini, an Intel Core 2 Duo Mac Mini and my current M2 MacBook Air. The rest have been cheap PCs. I don’t really use my personal computer for much of anything.
by choo-t | 2025-11-05 20:08:17+00:00
The fact that giving free access to books during a pandemic, in a format that doesn't need physical contact, when libraries were shut down or hard to access for a lot of people should have been praised, not pursued by legal action from rent seeking entities.

The copyright system as a whole should by torn up.

At least it give a clear signal to anyone with a ounce of moral which publisher to avoid at all cost.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-11-05 20:08:21+00:00
Tooth regrowth is something I was really hoping for. I abused one of my molars. After years of efforts (repeated fillings, a crown) to stave off losing the tooth it finally had to come out last month. Now I'm waiting for the bone graft to "take" before getting an implant. I was hoping I'd waited long enough for tooth regrowth to become "a thing" but I have not.

(Should have taken better care of it when I was younger and not ignored the massive hole that was growing in it. Chalk it up to a bad dental experience as a child and 25+ years of avoiding dentists as a result...)
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-05 20:09:02+00:00
The first widespread cure for HIV could be in children - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44765981 - August 2025

One-and-done HIV protection in infants - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736988 - July 2025 (First author of the paper even commented here at the time: "labanimalster - First author here. We solved a 30-year problem in gene therapy by leveraging neonatal immune tolerance. A single AAV vector injection encoding HIV antibodies achieved 89% success in newborns vs 33% in 2-year-olds, with protection lasting through adolescence. This could transform HIV prevention in regions where maintaining regular medical care is challenging. Happy to answer questions about the science or implications.")

US FDA approves Gilead's twice-yearly injection [lenacapavir] for HIV prevention - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44312729 - June 2025
by xg15 | 2025-11-05 20:09:39+00:00
You're right, there actually are lots on Google Maps.

Except some of them would be beyond the Yellow Line, in the area where the IDF troops are and which is strictly off-limits for civilians. And none of them have any reviews that are newer than from two years ago.

(Compare with the markers on the Israeli side where the latest reviews are often just weeks or days old)
by bitwize | 2025-11-05 20:09:40+00:00
I definitely see cash register/POS systems like this out in the wild, replete with ugly fonts, Windows 3.x style buttons, and even F-key legends at the bottom. So somebody somewhere is thinking of the poor cashiers.

The entire GUI was sold on it being easy to use for beginners. There's a reason why keybindings are today called "shortcuts": Steve Jobs's diktat was that the primary means of giving commands to the Mac was the mouse. Anything you can do on a Mac (except for entering text) was to be done with, and designed around, the mouse. Keyboard "shortcuts", so called as a quicker way to issue (some, but not all) menu commands, were a sop to power users but really were an addition, not essential to use of the program.

Windows, by contrast, was designed to be keyboard-accessible. Not all PCs in 1985 had mice...
by Waterluvian | 2025-11-05 20:10:00+00:00
I just learned about this 5 mins ago and did some basic research. Here's what I found:

- Sensodyne Repair and Protect contains 'NovaMin' (possibly only in some markets; check the ingredients!)

- NovaMin is the brand name for calcium sodium phosphosilicate

- It reacts with saliva to form a physical layer of hydroxyapatite on your teeth

- This layer blocks the tubules that trigger pain from temperature and such

- It also supports remineralization (how exactly?)
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-11-05 20:10:04+00:00
You equate "housing" and "rent". In a world where consumers had unlimited access to capital, the free market rate for housing would converge on the interest rate + shared costs (think condo fees, property taxes, etc) -/+ appreciation/depreciation of the housing, because consumers would always have the option of taking a loan to buy the property, then re-selling when they want to move, paying off the loan and receiving back whatever they paid on the principal.

Comparing to the real world, the cost of rent is greater than that, because people are paying a premium for their inaccess to capital. Looking at where I live, the hypothetical value is approximately the condo fees (5.5% interest, 1% property tax, 6-and-change% appreciation), which for a 2b2b apartment around around $600 bucks a month. Rent for an equivalent apartment literally next door is $2700 a month. That suggests that more than 75% of the value of rent is paying for inaccess to capital, i.e., textbook rentseeking.
by dboreham | 2025-11-05 20:10:43+00:00
Appreciate the time taken to write this, but imho the problem is a bit worse: you grew up in a context where analysis of facts, risks, knowing your stuff, were valued. That's your training data and reinforcement function.

Here's the thing: the world in general didn't get that training data upload. They don't care about your reasoned analysis. They want a new boat. Like now!

I bet there's an email thread at Amazon years back with someone saying "You're using DNS as a distributed database-- that's a bad idea". But even after crashing the entire internet for a day, the stock is up.

I recommend starting your own company or going freelance. Then at least any organizational nonsense will be your nonsense. And if there's any boat coming it'll be yours.
by petre | 2025-11-05 20:10:48+00:00
If the Chinese wanted to hide anything they'd put SIM chips without markings or eSIMs inside, as opposed to marked SIM cards. What they did is probably obtain a good quote on Romanian SIM subscriptions that work across the EEA. This is clearly FUD, but yes, they should have been more careful as to equip half of their fleet with Chinese buses that call home.
by curiouscats | 2025-11-05 20:10:55+00:00
Enamelon Toothpaste from the 1990s:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/127083185095

"proven to strengthen tooth enamel" I remember researching the stock and deciding not to buy.

Patents from the 1990s https://patents.justia.com/assignee/enamelon-inc

It seems the company is still around https://www.enamelon.com
by Epa095 | 2025-11-05 20:11:01+00:00
The expectation certainly has changed. Do you not remember Thatcher?

Housing as mentioned above. There was also a time the railway was a obvious public responsibility. Similarly for airlines (Scandinavian Airlines, British Airways). Telephone companies(British Telecom, Telenor), mail (Royal Mail), gas (Gas Act 1948), iron and steel (Iron and Steel Act 1967), and electric production ( Electricity Act 1947).

If anything it is rather opposite, the moment something is privatised it's hard to get it under public control again. But even if you don't agree with that it should certainly be clear that removing something from the public sector is both possible and has happened to a large degree.
by intalentive | 2025-11-05 20:11:16+00:00
As a prospective user the first thing I look for is lists, list comprehension, list slices, string methods, zip, zip*, tuple destructuring, generators, dicts and sets. These data structures, their syntax, and associated methods are what make Python a joy to use. They are what make it possible to solve a puzzle in a one-liner.

The examples in the playground are neat but I don’t see any of the Python bread and butter usage. I see C with Python syntax.

I’d like to see Python syntax solving a problem in a pythonic way, albeit with type annotations. And then I’d like to see the compiled version run 30x-100x faster. Is that ultimately the promise of this project?
by rsynnott | 2025-11-05 20:11:40+00:00
It doesn't seem like _that_ bonkers an idea? It'd be a trial, and, well, if they can't compete, they can't compete. And if they _can_ compete, then they will drive down prices.

People probably thought the UK's state-owned bank was a bit bonkers at the time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girobank) but it _worked_; it forced private banks to expand access and to modernise. And then eventually it couldn't compete. But it's hard to consider it as anything other than a success.

(This is all assuming that NYC supermarkets have a competition problem in the first place, though. Never been to NYC, so wouldn't know.)
by noir_lord | 2025-11-05 20:11:52+00:00
Exactly this - there is no technical solution to a people problem and as a manager keeping people on track and knowing when to help get it back on track is a people problem.

When I worked in office, I got into the habit of just eating lunch with my team - always thought it was weird that the seniors (actually leads anywhere else) went to lunch together separately from the devs and the juniors, often we'd go a week without discussing work and I'd never bring it up (lunch time is lunch time and been off the clock is good for a reset) but more than once something that would potentially balloon into a major problem got headed off because someone mentioned it over lunch.

Generally speaking just be someone who is comfortable hearing "bad news" on progress - that is make it "OK, how do we solve this together" problem not a recrimination problem because you want people to be able to tell you when things have gone sideways when they know and not when it's so sideways they can't avoid telling you :).
by rodarima | 2025-11-05 20:12:22+00:00
Yeah, I tried to reach out to Google back when they introduced the JS-wall, but they seem to have an AI chatbot acting as a filter, so I didn't spent much energy.

Later they also blocked other non-JS browsers like links or w3m, so I assume they no longer care. They used to maintain several frontends that worked in really old devices.

I don't think there is any User-Agent that works today, however you can still use the Google index via other search indexes that can fetch Google results without JS (for example Startpage still works). However, it is probably a good idea to have more options available that have their own independent index engine (for example Mojeek). Seirdy has a very good list: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
by kingstnap | 2025-11-05 20:12:25+00:00
This is a silly take. From day zero everyone and their mother was trying every idea under the sun on trying to get inference costs down.

There are a huge number of varients of attention schemes, like seemingly thousands. More posted on arxiv and blogs every single day. There are similarly a huge number of papers and talks on quantization, codebooks, number formats, everything. Like genuinely covering everything from analog compute to training lookup tables in FPGAs.

The AI model architects similarly are not sleeping on things. They genuinely take a bottom up approach to the design of their model and make sure that every mm of die area is being used.

And top down of course has extreme influence with people spinning up entire hardware companies like groq and cerebras to do AI as fast and efficiently as possible. Everyone wants to be the shovel seller.

The idea that anyone is sleeping on increasing inference efficiency when $$$$$$$$$ are being spent is ridiculous.

And genuinely they have actually made massive strides. Some models cost almost nothing like GPT OSS 120B which can be used to create slop at the speed of light.
by rdtsc | 2025-11-05 20:12:29+00:00
Yup. I always thought it was a way just to get business in EU. Do some performative dance of "hey, look! a separate DC building with EU employees only" and then hope nobody would ask too many questions.

Then the next level is regulators in EU also have to care and can't just say "ok, you have a separate DC building with EU employees only. Good. My job is done, I checked" and move on.
by mpweiher | 2025-11-05 20:13:01+00:00
That's how I understand what they wrote.

"Produce a new image:

- Design a new Object Memory and image file format. - Alter the ST-80 System Tracer to write an image in the new format. - Eliminate uses of Mac Toolbox calls to restore Smalltalk- portability. - Write a new file system with a simple, portable interface."

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/263698.263754

Hmm...I wonder if Dan used the PDF writer I wrote for him to produce that version of the paper...
by Noaidi | 2025-11-05 20:13:02+00:00
For who? The Inuit? The Chinese? Europeans? People with my ice age genetics? (Nope)

I despise studies that do not take genetics into account. Fiber made my cholesterol worse! The only thing that lowered my LDL and riased my HDL was a seafood only diet. Fiber flares my IBD, most likely from my NOD2 genetics[1][2].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/35079107

[2] https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/22/4775

"IBD patients show that microbiota dysbiosis and diet, especially dietary fiber, can modulate its composition. These patients are more at risk of energy protein malnutrition than the general population and are deficient in micronutrients"
by rendall | 2025-11-05 20:13:49+00:00
That is a reasonable summary of the ideal framework: government can request, private parties can accept or refuse. The problem is the practical imbalance of power when the requester controls licensing, regulation, or future oversight. The "request" becomes coercive when made by an entity with the ability to punish or reward. Courts have repeatedly recognized this distinction in First Amendment jurisprudence (see Bantam Books v. Sullivan, 1963 [1]).

No one here argued that the government cannot issue PSAs, coordinate emergency messaging, or report CSAM. The issue is when the same channels are used to influence lawful political speech or to "pre-bunk" narratives before elections. That is not analogous to public-safety communication.

As for evidence of coercion: while the Supreme Court dismissed Murthy on standing, the district court found substantial evidence of "coercive pressure." The finding was not overturned by the Supreme Court's decision. Even if platforms denied feeling coerced, the record shows White House officials warning of regulatory consequences and explicitly flagging posts for removal. The absence of a formal order only makes it harder to prove, but it is not therefore benign.

Your murder-suspect analogy works because it's bounded by law enforcement necessity. The social-media cases involve subjective political and scientific claims where the government had a direct reputational stake. That's where the line shifts from coordination to censorship.

So yes, governments can ask. But when the asking is done by regulators, with implied power over those they're asking, the line between request and command gets very thin. That's the danger people are pointing to and it's not partisan.

[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/372/58/
by jakub_g | 2025-11-05 20:13:56+00:00
According to this article from just a few weeks ago there were 56 active MD11 (well, 55 now), split almost evenly by Fedex and UPS, and scheduled to be replaced within next 5-7 years:

https://simpleflying.com/why-mcdonnell-dougls-md-11-wont-be-...
by JCM9 | 2025-11-05 20:14:15+00:00
The other problem with free busses is that in NYC people of all income brackets use public transit. That’s rare amongst cities. New Yorkers know that the subway is way faster than a chauffeured SUV for most trips and so you’ll see millionaires riding alongside those of far less means. Folks of all means also use the busses.

The MTA needs money and so making busses free for everyone is silly when many riders can certainly afford to pay. Various means tested approaches are in place and are the sort of thing that generally gets broader support.

The whole “tax the rich” line makes for good stump speeches but doesn’t work in practice. The rich have good accountants that let people avoid most of these ideas.
by testfoobar | 2025-11-05 20:14:17+00:00
Bringing down asset prices is what is necessary for younger workers to have a chance. As it is - young people will be perpetual wage slaves and never build capital (e.g. home equity, retirement funds) like previous generations. The fear, anger and despondency evident in people who are delaying family formation, delaying medical treatment, hiding their true self while others boast of yachts, and gulfstreams and Aman resorts on instagram, and question whether someone's identity is worthy - all of it is profoundly sad.

But lowering asset prices is a nearly politically impossible lift.

Left-wing populists will promise to deliver. But will ultimately fail. Populism ultimately is a rejection of elites. Elites who are currently failing the public. But you musn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

My objection is that left-wing populism with its rejection of economic elites, rejection of capitalism and the big-tent embrace of "all" is isomorphic to right wing populism with its rejection of science (antivax), embrace of nationalism and focus on homogeneity. Economists have good ideas. Capitalism is what built the water system that nourishes NYC. A movement embracing "all" will find itself eventually fractured by vote-bank politics as tribal affiliations will dominate in the end.

I am personally focused on thinking about how rewire the financial plumbing over succumbing to either left or right wing populist movements.

Anyway - Mamdani is a forceful, and commanding speaker. His victory speech last night was truly an American original. I think he's trying to point the vector towards a better life for more people and that is a good thing.
by yesfitz | 2025-11-05 20:14:49+00:00
I hesitate to use the word "quibbling" now, but it seems like a poor use of time to compare beef when even the most environmentally-friendly beef is multiple times worse than alternatives.

I think this harm-reduction approach might make more sense from a governmental policy perspective, but is otherwise silly for us to take as individuals because we have such comparatively little influence over each other's choices. I wouldn't waste that small influence encouraging someone to make a slightly less bad choice.

The comparison of food to transportation is a bad one. Nutrients are nutrients, and everything else is personal pleasure. In other words, you can easily hit your same macros by replacing animal products with plant products without even having to change grocery stores. You cannot easily transport a mattress on a bicycle instead of a car.
by glenstein | 2025-11-05 20:14:52+00:00
I agree that the "magic" feeling involves abstraction from nuts and bolts, but a kind of notable responsiveness to, say, preferred trains of thought that are optimal for a workflow or project management or for rich functional interaction. I use the word "liminal" in the sense of the aesthetic term "liminal spaces" to indicate a presence of a kind of lightweight logic not necessarily fully articulated.
by Avi-D-coder | 2025-11-05 20:14:55+00:00
Usually when I go and read the github and zulip threads the reason for paused work comes down to the fact that no one has come up with a design that maintains every existing promise the compiler has made. The most common ones I see are the feature conflicts with safety, semver/encapsulation, interacts weirdly with object safety, causes post post-monomorphization errors, breaks perfect type class coherence (see haskells unsound specialization).

Too many promises have been made.

Rust needs more unsafe opt outs. Ironically simd has this so it does not bother me.
by zokier | 2025-11-05 20:14:58+00:00
> Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas

> The lawsuits haven’t dampened Kahle’s resolve to expand IA’s digitization efforts, though. Moving forward, the group will be growing a project called Democracy’s Library

please just stop. let IA be what it is. or rather, nothing wrong in doing new projects but don't tie them to IA, just start them as completely separate things. IA is too important as-is to be a playground for random kooky ideas playing with fire.
by Lerc | 2025-11-05 20:15:19+00:00
In that case I think the best advice I can give here is to focus less on features you dislike in other things and conaider the problems caused by those things. Without being encumbered by legacy reqirements you are free to make any changes you want, but each part is workload. Start at the top of each symptomatic feature and work your way down until you can change the part that causes the symptoms. Some things might require going down to the core. Some could be fixed with top level changes. Focus on finding what makes things bad(and why) instead of identifying bad things.