MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sowbug | 2025-11-02 15:49:54+00:00
Waaay off topic, but does anyone know why LLMs don't have poor grammar if they were trained on the average/poor grammar of the internet? Why don't they mix up then/than or it's/its, or use hypercorrections like "from you and I"?

(Update: of course I had to ask my friendly neighborhood LLM, and the answer is the correct usages still dominate incorrect ones, so statistics favor correctness. They down-weight low quality sources (comments like mine) and up-weight high quality ones (published books, reputable news sites). Then human reinforcement learning adds further polish.)
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-11-02 15:50:02+00:00
The point is accounting doesn't just report numbers, it drives the default strategy of "This is too expensive and costs should be cut."

Management should know there are alternative strategies, and ideally should know which of those is best.

But accounting policies bake strategic implications into their reporting.

Which is why we are where we are - on the verge of a catastrophic crash, because genius Wall St analysts are chasing the gilded AI bubble, while the rest of the economy is starved of consumer spending.

With much more to come.
by derbOac | 2025-11-02 15:51:05+00:00
See also "taxicab theory".

I wish I could upvote you more.

Speaking from experience gained the hard way, I thing compatibility matters a lot. But it's hard to measure and probably includes a lot of physical stuff like chemistry that can't happen online.

But I also think what you're pointing to is critical. People aren't static consumable objects, and what you are willing to do for a relationship with someone matters as much as anything.
by jt2190 | 2025-11-02 15:51:16+00:00
Putting coercive governments aside, the cryptocurrency would need to allow for transaction reversals (a.k.a. “chargebacks”) like credit cards do today, and additionally need to have some kind of “know your customer” (KYC) capability, not just a public ledger that points to crypto wallet addresses but actual names and addresses, so that the “credit system” can identify fraudsters and, at minimum, mark them as such by lowering their credit score.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-02 15:51:17+00:00
> AI is undoubtedly useful, but at its current infrastructure cost it’s not going to be worth selling unless it can actually put people out of work

This doesn't even make sense unless you make the false assumption that the work to do is fixed: things that increase productivity increase employment (they increase the value delivered by each unit of labor, which at a fixed cost of labor increases the range of applications at which it is profitable to apply the same labor or, holding employment level fixed, increases market-clearing pay, the usual result of which is that both employment and pay go up in the field whose priductivity was increased, but less than you would expect in each case if the other was fixed.)
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-02 15:51:39+00:00
> these simple measures

I'm not sure either, it's mostly a guess I guess, more than a prediction. But if companies/governments can get more tracking, usually that's the way they move.

So if the companies that are complaining in the article implements your simple measures, does that mean the fraud problem they're talking about have been solved already? That begs the question, why aren't they just doing that then?
by Zanfa | 2025-11-02 15:52:03+00:00
Another usecase that already works better without any cryptocurrency or blockchain involved.

In Estonia, the government offers public key infrastructure, so any party needing to prove legitimacy of documents from a 3rd party can get it digitally signed by the originator. For example, when you need a bank statement, you can just download a signed PDF (technically it's a zip, but whatever) that proves the legal entity (or person) that ensures it's legitimate.
by hedora | 2025-11-02 15:52:11+00:00
The easiest approach is to charge for greenhouse gas emissions at the source.

Set the price to be 2x the cost of direct air carbon capture, then put the money in a fund that pays for cheapest environmentally responsible capture first.

This would lead to ev’s and heat pumps being drastically cheaper than older technologies.

While they’re at it, federalize the price gouging oil companies. We have signs at gas stations run by international megacorps here in California complaining that we have the highest fuel taxes in the US. The taxes are listed on the pumps, by law.

If you subtract them out, and compare the results to other states, you’ll find that we’re being price gouged dollars per gallon by the industries.

(The excuse for this is that there was months-long supply chain shock 20+ years ago. Of course, the prices never went down after that shock…)

Anyway, screw them. We have EVs now, and as bad as PG&E’s rates are, it’s still saving us hundreds of dollars a month.
by wpm | 2025-11-02 15:52:47+00:00
How likely am I to even detect my neighbors 6GHz network?

I live in a very dense part of Chicago. 2.4 and 5 are a minefield, just a thick soup of interference on everything but the DFS channels (which I get kicked off of too often being close to two airports). While it could be that zero neighbors have 6E or 7 equipment, I find that hard to believe, but nothing comes up on the scan.
by 2earth | 2025-11-02 15:53:20+00:00
Sure!

The battery provides approx 6V - the timing circuit uses a 555 IC to create a pulsed signal. The combination of resistor and capacitor values determines the period of oscillation. Then, the output signal from this circuit is used to switch a transistor on and off. That makes/breaks a connection from the battery to the LED strings.

I also added a switch to select between the red LED and Yellow LED strings.

Will draw the final circuit if I get some time :)
by devchix | 2025-11-02 15:53:41+00:00
Odysseus is shown stringing his bow in The Return (2024). The challenge was to string the bow and shoot an arrow through 12 axes. I had no idea what this meant so I went looking. In fact, it's to shoot the arrow through the eye of the axes. What's the eye of an axe? It's the hole where the handle attaches to the blade.

https://www.sylvaspoon.com/blog/2020/1/16/anatomy-of-an-axe
by YesBox | 2025-11-02 15:53:53+00:00
While working on my game, I tried implementing a custom priority queue.

It ended up being > 2x faster in debug build, but 2x-5x slower in the release build (??!!?) [1]. I haven't learned much about compilers/"lower level" C++, so I moved on at that point.

How it worked:

1.) The P.Q. created a vector and resized it to known bounds.

2.) The P.Q. kept tract of and updated the "active sorting range" each time an element was inserted or popped.

2B.) So each time an element is added, it uses the closest unused vector element and updates the ".end" range to sort

2C.) Each time an element was removed, it updated the ".start" range

3.) In theory this should have saved reallocation overhead.

[1] I believe Visual Studio uses -O0 for debug, and -O2 for release.
by card_zero | 2025-11-02 15:55:46+00:00
I thought so, but then read "Zebra crossings are a type of controlled crossing" on Wikipedia. This may be a mistake (possibly in the source).

Edit: found a definition in a document by the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation. "Uncontrolled crossings do not afford pedestrians any particular priority over motorised traffic", and so it classes zebra crossings as controlled.
Show HN: BillAI – Usage-based billing, revenue splits and dashboards for AI apps
by shmaplex | 2025-11-02 15:56:06+00:00
I’m sharing BillAI, a work-in-progress platform for AI apps that handles usage tracking, billing, revenue splits, and dashboards. It’s built for developers struggling with messy integrations and multi-app setups. Feedback welcome.
by DannyBee | 2025-11-02 15:56:07+00:00
Lawyer here - This is, as far as i know, mostly wrong at this point.

If you are an actual citizen, the law basically says they can briefly detain you to verify. Brief here is meant to be like "15 minutes". However, it is now taking weeks or months in some cases.

These are clear due process violations, and they are happening regularly now.

They also cannot simply ignore authoritative evidence of citizenship because a computer says otherwise, without violating due process (because it affects their ability to have cause).

Certainly they can ignore like a printout or something, but if you have a valid passport or real id drivers license (IE something considered authoritative), it's almost certainly a due process violation to ignore it and detain you for weeks anyway based on a facial recognition match.
by calebkaiser | 2025-11-02 15:56:24+00:00
Based on the comments, I expected this to be slop listing a bunch of random prompt snippets from the author's personal collection.

I'm honestly a bit confused at the negativity here. The article is incredibly benign and reasonable. Maybe a bit surface level and not incredibly in depth, but at a glance, it gives fair and generally accurate summaries of the actual mechanisms behind inference. The examples it gives for "context engineering patterns" are actual systems that you'd need to implement (RAG, structured output, tool calling, etc.), not just a random prompt, and they're all subject to pretty thorough investigation from the research community.

The article even echoes your sentiments about "prompt engineering," down to the use of the word "incantation". From the piece:

> This was the birth of so-called "prompt engineering", though in practice there was often far less "engineering" than trial-and-error guesswork. This could often feel closer to uttering mystical incantations and hoping for magic to happen, rather than the deliberate construction and rigorous application of systems thinking that epitomises true engineering.
by numpad0 | 2025-11-02 15:56:50+00:00
TIL the "full" name of Alibaba Qwen is 通義千問(romanized as "Tongyi Qianwen", something along "knows all thousand questions"), of which the first half without the Chinese accent flags is romanized identically to "同意", meaning "same intents" or "agreed".

The Chinese version of the link says "通义 DeepResearch" in the title, so doesn't look like the "agree" to be the case. Completely agreed that it would be hilarious.

1: https://www.alibabacloud.com/en/solutions/generative-ai/qwen...
by zahlman | 2025-11-02 15:57:09+00:00
> "containers" broadly, including things like pipx, venv, or uv.

This statement makes no sense. First off, those are three separate tools, which do entirely different things.

The sort of "container" you seem to have in mind is a virtual environment. The standard library `venv` module provides the base-line support to create them. But there is really hardly anything to them. The required components are literally a symlink to Python, a brief folder hierarchy, and a five-or-so-line config file. Pipx and uv are (among other things) managers for these environments (which manage them for different use cases; pipx is essentially an end-user tool).

Virtual environments are nowhere near a proper "container" in terms of either complexity or overhead. There are people out there effectively simulating a whole new OS installation (and more) just to run some code (granted this is often important for security reasons, since some of the code running might not be fully trusted). A virtual environment is... just a place to install dependencies (and they do after all have to go somewhere), and a scheme for selecting which of the dependencies on local storage should be visible to the current process (and for allowing the process to find them).
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-02 15:57:55+00:00
> Why would a government use cryptocurrencies though?

Once it happens in the future, probably because the already rich politicians have loaded up on some specific cryptocurrency they then try to pitch as the official currency for their country. Already happened once, and I'm sure we'll see more of it in the future as the overton window moves when the population gets older.

I don't think it's a good idea, I'm not eager to reach that future, but it's hard not to have the most negative view of the future considering what's happening in the moment around the world. I guess I'm too pessimistic not to see that as the eventual outcome.
by phil21 | 2025-11-02 15:59:01+00:00
> On a related note, I asked my AC guy if he knows any trustworthy solar installers. He told me that only crooks are in that business

It's basically this.

There is very little robust competition in the solar installation market, and a lot of the market is a principle agent problem on top of it.

Almost all these solar installation firms targeted at residential are more or less financial engineering companies selling loans wrapped up with solar as an afterthought. They make all their money on the financing end.

I started to look into getting a highly customized solar+backup power setup done at my place, and I just gave up due to how difficult it was to find anyone to throw any amount of money at even when I never hoped to see a payback on the project. I just wanted it to ride out potential power outages.

If you can DIY you can get payback in under 5 years for many locations. But it's just a lot to learn to do perfectly the first time.
by zahlman | 2025-11-02 15:59:09+00:00
What you chose to argue against, by its nature, does not require evidence. The entire point is that you made a universal claim about what other people think. Others saying "I do not think that way" disproves your claim. It is not necessary for others to evidence that they don't think that way; saying so ipso facto establishes it.

Much of the rest of what is said here contra your viewpoint is also readily observable common knowledge.
by dpark | 2025-11-02 15:59:45+00:00
> Email is not a chat client. Use words to communicate to people, and if you don't think a "reaction" merits words, then don't send one.

shakes fist at clouds

Seriously, though, this argument seems kind of silly. Do you not usually use words to chat? It’s fine that you don’t like this in your email but your reasoning is specious. “Chat is for emojis. Email is for words.”
by fluffypony | 2025-11-02 15:59:45+00:00
Agree with this. The punchline here is not "dependent types bad", it is "choose your battles". Isabelle/HOL pushed frighteningly far without proof objects or dependent types, from schemes to BSG, and never hit the mythical wall. What moved the needle was automation, libraries, and legible proofs, not a fancier core calculus. Lean is great, but if the toolchain bogs down and equality games leak into your day, your fancy types are like Tesla FSD: impressive demo energy, unpredictable commute (no offense to anyone who uses it regularly). Knowing when not to use them is the real superpower imho.

If you need finely indexed invariants, sure, reach for DT. For the other 95%, HOL plus type classes and locales, backed by a small kernel and big libraries, will get you to production faster and with fewer regrets. Milner's LCF insight still pays the bills. And yes, croissants are delicious, but optional axioms are a risky breakfast.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-02 15:59:58+00:00
> Another usecase that already works better without any cryptocurrency or blockchain involved.

Agreed! But if I've learned anything in my years on earth so far, is that anything that can be misused, will be misused, and if companies and government can do something that adds more abilities for tracking people, they'll go that way. If it can work cross-border, give people the impression it's "the future" and let companies/governments get more power, then they'll continuously push for that future.
by jitl | 2025-11-02 16:00:30+00:00
It may be worth it to pipe Duper into your WASM/native code, and get back plain JSON out, which you then hand off to the runtime's `JSON.parse` with a post-processing step to support any special features needed. Something like this:

// idea of implementing public duper.parse function to lean on // runtime's JSON.parse // // downlevel to json, eg binary strings become base64 normal json strings const { jsonString, enhancements } = duper.duperToJSON(data) // let the runtime go fast when decoding const rawObject = JSON.parse(jsonString) // `enhance` knows the paths to all the binary base64 strings // and replaces them with Uint8Arrays const decoded = duper.enhance(rawObject, enhancements)

Here enhancements is something very easy / low cost to construct over the FFI bridge, like

type Path = Array<string | number> type TransformFn = (value: unknown) => unknown type Transform = TransformFn | Enhancements type Enhancements = Array<[path: Path, transform: Transform]>

Not sure if this would end up faster, it may allocate more, but it's probably better than unoptimized object/array construction from WASM/native -> runtime. You could also try with a `reviver` argument to JSON.parse but i always find the lack of full path to key somewhat clunky.
by giobox | 2025-11-02 16:02:41+00:00
If you just want to get something running locally as fast as possible to play with (the 2080ti typically had 11gb of VRAM which will be one of the main limiting factors), the ollama app will run most of these models locally with minimum user effort:

https://ollama.com/

If you really do have a 2080ti with 128gb of VRAM, we'd love to hear more about how you did it!
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-11-02 16:03:12+00:00
From a human user perspective, HATEOAS is effectively just the web. You follow links to get where you want, and forms let you send data where you want, all traversed from some root entrypoint.

From a machine client perspective, it's a different story. JSON-LD is more-or-less HATEOAS, and it works fine for ActivityPub. It's good when you want to talk to an endpoint that you know what data you want to get from it, but don't necessarily need to know the exact shape or URLs.

When you control both the server and client, HATEOAS extra pain for little to no benefit, especially when it's implemented poorly (ie. when the client still needs to know the exact shape of every endpoint anyway, and HATEOAS really just makes URLs opaque), and it interacts very badly when you need to parse the URL anyway, to pull parts from it or add query parameters.
by grayhatter | 2025-11-02 16:03:26+00:00
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/resist-fingerprinting

This was part of the resist fingerprinting feature. Which is an advanced user configuration. I can alter the user agent directly myself too.

Sigh

I regret getting tricked into arguing over such a pedantic specific, So I'd like to redirect the actual point, which is that it's not meaningful if a Firefox browser pretends to be a slightly different Firefox browser, but instead the problem is when something that's not a browser, claims to be and behave like one.

Still, +1 for finding the commit, I'd forgotten about this feature. I thought only the tor browser was this foolish.
by CableNinja | 2025-11-02 16:03:48+00:00
Id hardly call this ageism. The person went from being part of engineering on a major space faring project to managing a callcenter. Thats like going back to zero on the career ladder, as far as engineering is concerned. I would have also been questioning whether or not their skills have collected dust, were still relevant, and most specifically why they went from engineering in aerospace to managing a callcenter, and why they want back into engineering again (probably hates callcenter).
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-02 16:03:51+00:00
> often I find his writing and speaking to be more than imprecise

I think that's more because he's trying to write to an audience who isn't hardcore deep into ML already, so he simplifies a lot, sometimes to the detriment of accuracy.

At this point I see him more as a "ML educator" than "ML practitioner" or "ML researcher", and as far as I know, he's moving in that direction on purpose, and I have no qualms with it overall, he seems good at educating.

But I think shifting the mindset of what the purpose of his writings are maybe help understand why sometimes it feels imprecise.
by chrisss395 | 2025-11-02 16:04:17+00:00
You may not have been the target user. I found it intriguing to quickly bring a concept to life for dumb users. I think LLMs significantly lower the cost (barriers) for make something quick and dirty. I'm loving Claude code in an LXC sandbox to take my half-thought out ideas and make me something...most of it is throw-away, but it helps me evolve whatever problem is in my head that I'm trying to solve, and that I find valuable.
by jmyeet | 2025-11-02 16:04:27+00:00
> You don’t need genocide to control mines, farms and oil fields

True but if your goal is the control of resources, you don't really care if your proxy ends up engaging in these and other war crimes. That's just the cost of doing business.

Take as example when Saddam Hussein used nerve gas on the Kurds in Halabja in 1988. Well that's a war crime. Did the US care? Not until 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia. Up until then Saddam was a foil against Iran, who was only really an enemy after religious fundamentalists overthrew the US puppet regime of the Shah in 1979. Then in the 1990s, the US retroactively started caring about Halabja.

So did the US need Saddam to use nerve gas on the Kurds? No, of course not. Did they care? Absolutely not. Again, it was the cost of doing business.

> We don’t have that influence.

Yes we absolutely do. You get that power when you supply the weapons and can choose who to supply them to. We have many weapons that we could wield against allies in particular. What if the US declared that gold sourced from Sudan was illegal to trade in? If you say the US can't make laws in other countries, I'll just laugh. The US still has control of the global financial system and can declare that any bank wanting access to the US financial system has to not trade in Sudanese gold.

Currently, the UAE gets away with this by essentially laundering Sudanese gold. The system allows them to do this. Well the UAE produces no gold so what if any gold exports from Dubai had to come with certificates showing from where it was imported?

If you don't think that can be done, look no further than the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme ("KPCS") for conflict-free diamonds [1].

> ... we’d put serious economic and military interests at stake. Interests American voters care about ...

I'm curious what African (or even Middle Eastern) interests you think voters care about? I say this because American voters pretty famously don't really care about foreign policy at all. Also, foreign policy is notably uniparty. The war in AFghanistan went through 4 administrations, 2 Republican, 2 Democrat. Vietnam went through 5 administrations (2 Democrat, 3 Republican) as well (ie Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford).

[1]: https://www.kimberleyprocess.com/
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-02 16:04:35+00:00
I think there is an opportunity for GenAI chatbot platforms to offer something similar to Quora, Stackoverflow, Reddit, etc and then train on it. answers.tld.com, for example. Human mods curate and perform QA (assisted with LLMs), and the models are built off of the corpus. Reddit is trying to turn into ChatGPT using Reddit Answers, when OpenAI and other platforms already have the traffic, MAUs, and investment.
by macNchz | 2025-11-02 16:04:40+00:00
It’s definitely possible to make a really stellar experience, but that winds up being the exception. The URL and history state are sort of “invisible” elements of the user experience but require thoughtful care and attention to what the user expects/wants at each step, a level of attention which is already a rarity in web development even in the most visible parts of a page…so frequently the history/back button stuff just totally sucks.
by ksec | 2025-11-02 16:07:25+00:00
For those of us who can see it, they are very noticeable. And could be told in blind testing 100% of times. After all 240Hz is still 4.1ms per frame, Again I have to point to this Microsoft Research Video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4