MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ianbicking | 2025-12-16 21:32:40+00:00
I haven't really kept up with what Midjourney has been doing the past year or two. While I liked the stylistic aspects of Midjourney, being able to use image examples to maintain stylistic consistency and character consistency is SO useful for creating any meaningful output. Have they done anything in that respect?

That is, it's nice to make a pretty stand-alone image, but without tools to maintain consistency and place them in context you can't make a project that is more than just one image, or one video, or a scattered and disconnected sequence of pieces.
by xp84 | 2025-12-16 21:32:59+00:00
That's got to be a good part of it. And to top it off, there wasn't persistent storage available locally, so you couldn't build up a little library of playable content you received from such a service, having to sacrifice the old stuff to get something new, and if they didn't rebroadcast that item, you would never see it again.

I'm sure to some kinds of people that was fine, but I think people kind of don't like having to delete something they like even a little -- even if they won't play it again, they'd rather know they can.
by phildini | 2025-12-16 21:33:36+00:00
Thanks for asking!

- The framework for crawling is open-source. https://github.com/civicband

- There is absolutely not a standardized API for nearly any of this. I build generalized crawlers when I can, and then build custom crawlers when I need.

- Can you let me know which city? The crawlers run for every municipality at least once every day, so that's probably a bug
by phaser | 2025-12-16 21:33:37+00:00
It’s interesting to see the posts from warpbuild, blacksmith, buikdjet and others defending their business model that was based on the inefficiency of GitHub. I love the fact that git is built in such an open way that if you are worried about running in your own infrastructure you can easily deploy it (It’s just like SSH!) yourself. At least for me, cheaper GitHub actions is a win because I can’t justify running my own git. But these companies that are based on offering you a faster or cheaper github actions service are actually the worst of both worlds: they are not your platform and they are not in the position to offer you a better service. I’m not gonna miss them when they’re gone or transformed into an AI pivot.
by ewoodrich | 2025-12-16 21:33:43+00:00
I also get confused when I see it taken for granted that "vibe coding" removes all the drudgery/chores from programming. When my own experience heavily using Claude Code/etc every day routinely involves a lot of unpleasant clean up of accumulated LLM slop and "WTF" decisions.

I still think it saves me time on net and yes, it typically can handle a lot on its own, but whenever it starts to fuck up the same request repeatedly in different ways, all I can really do is sigh/roll my eyes and then it's on me alone to dig in and figure it out/fix it to keep making progress.

And usually that consists of incredibly ungratifying, unpleasant work I'm very much not happy to be doing.

I definitely have been able to do more side projects for ideas that pop into my head thanks to CC and similar, and that part is super cool! But other times I hit a wall where a project suddenly goes from breezy and fun to me spending hours reading through diffs/chat history trying to untangle a pile of garbage code I barely understand 10% of and have to remind myself I was supposed to be doing this for "fun"/learning, and accomplishing neither while not getting paid for it.
by Scoundreller | 2025-12-16 21:34:11+00:00
Yeah it makes sense for buildings where plumbing was retrofitted.

Otherwise people try to retrofit narrow drain pipes in the walls which are prone to clogging or give you poor flushing performance. Or outside big enough pipes outside interior walls where you get to hear every flush/shower unless you build a box around that. Easier to just run it outside if you can configure your bathrooms that way.
by Bender | 2025-12-16 21:34:13+00:00
Yeah I probably have a number of false positives from my semi-fascist nginx configuration [2] I just use this for hobby sites and would never be accepted as a commercially supported CDN. They do fancy detection methods whereas I just use simple hacky methods. I tend to tune things so my friends can get through and some random people may get dropped until I look at what they are sending. For what it's worth each method is entirely optional or tunable to a persons needs or fever dreams. Probably language settings.

[1] - https://mirror.newsdump.org/nginx/inc.d/30_generic_http_stuf...
by tikhonj | 2025-12-16 21:34:51+00:00
You're significantly underestimating fully-loaded cost per person + other expenses. An engineer making a $200k salary is going to cost the company something like $300k, and there are some additional fixed overheads. And $200k is quite a bit less than your competitors are paying.

So you're looking at something more like 150 employees total of which <100 are going to be pure engineers, and that's stretching your budget and operations pretty aggressively while also fighting an uphill battle for recruiting skilled and experienced engineers. (And browser development definitely needs a core of experienced engineers with a relatively niche set of skills!)
by QuercusMax | 2025-12-16 21:35:04+00:00
Sure, but the point is this isn't really making romanized Japanese more English-like. It's making it more similar to how just about every other language already uses the Roman alphabet. This isn't an Anglo-centric thing, it's just good common sense - unless your goal is to make it harder to pronounce your language properly, which seems like an obvious own-goal.
by Balgair | 2025-12-16 21:35:10+00:00
Hey, I know you got a lot of flack for the article. So, I just wanted to thank you for having the courage to publish it anyways and go through all of that for all of us.

I go back to the study frequently when looking at MRI studies, and it always holds up. It always reminds me to be careful with these things and to try to have other be careful with their results too. Though to me it's a bit of a lampooning, surprisingly it has been the best reminder for me to be more careful with my work.

So thank you for putting yourself through all that. To me, it was worth it.
by robrenaud | 2025-12-16 21:35:48+00:00
What is harder, beating Lee Sedol at Go, or physically placing stones on a Go board? Which is closer to AGI?

Because AlphaGo can only do one.

AI could very well be better at formal theorem proving than fields medalists pretty soon. It will not have taste, ability to see the beauty in math, or pick problems and set directions for the field. But given a well specified problem, it can bruteforce search through lean tactics space at an extremely superhuman pace. What is lacks in intuition and brilliance, it will make up in being able to explore in parallel.

There is a quality/quantity tradeoff in search with a verifier. A superhuman artificial theorem prover can be generating much worse ideas on average than a top mathematician, and make up for it by trying many more of them.

It's Kasparov vs DeepBlue and Sedol vs AlphaGo all over.

It's also nowhere near AGI. Embodiment and the real world is super messy. See Moravec's paradox.

Practical programs deal with the outside world, they are underspecified, their utility depends on the changing whims of people. The formal specification of a math problem is self contained.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-12-16 21:35:52+00:00
Suppose the deck for Midjourney hit Paul Graham's desk, and the CEO was just an average Y Combinator CEO - so no previous success story. He would have never invested in Midjourney at seed stage (meaning before launch / before there were users) even if he were given the opportunity.

Better to read that particular story in the context of, "It would be very difficult to make a seed fund that is an index of all avant garde culture making because [whatever]."
by simonw | 2025-12-16 21:35:56+00:00
I'm convinced now that the key to getting useful results out of coding agents (Claude Code, Codex CLI etc) is having good mechanisms in place to help those agents exercise and validate the code they are writing.

At the most basic level this means making sure they can run commands to execute the code - easiest with languages like Python, with HTML+JavaScript you need to remind them that Playwright exists and they should use it.

The next step up from that is a good automated test suite.

Then we get into quality of code/life improvement tools - automatic code formatters, linters, fuzzing tools etc.

Debuggers are good too. These tend to be less coding-agent friendly due to them often having directly interactive interfaces, but agents can increasingly use them - and there are other options that are a better fit as well.

I'd put formal verification tools like the ones mentioned by Martin on this spectrum too. They're potentially a fantastic unlock for agents - they're effectively just niche programming languages, and models are really good at even niche languages these days.

If you're not finding any value in coding agents but you've also not invested in execution and automated testing environment features, that's probably why.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-12-16 21:36:26+00:00
AFAIK He started work on the STL at HP and then SGI based on his and Musser's work on Generic Programming but it didn't get the name STL until he was at the STL.

This of course coming from Sean Parent who was and afaik still is quite close with Stepanov. Sean Parent of course being famous in his own right but also being notable for bringing Stepanov to Adobe and being the one to push for Stepanov to propose the STL to WG21 (the C++ ISO Std committee).
by D-Machine | 2025-12-16 21:36:38+00:00
I do not think there is much neurological understanding about ADHD at all from current fMRI research, there are far too many quality and reliability issues here, not just on the fMRI end or limited amount of data overall, but in the measurement and diagnosis of ADHD itself (i.e. ADHD subtypes, and of course ADHD is a complicated diagnosis with many components manifesting to different degrees in different individuals, which makes it very hard to cleanly link to messy fMRI signals).

Or, as I have commented elsewhere here, the idea that statements like "fMRI shows decreased activity" are ever valid is just fundamentally suspect (lower BOLD response could mean less inhibition or less excitation, and this is a rather crucial difference that fMRI simply can't distinguish). EDIT: Or to be more precise: it may well be that fMRI research suggests less metabolic activity in certain regions, but this could mean the region is actually firing more than normal, less than normal, is more efficient than normal, etc., and interpreting anything about what is functioning differently in ADHD, given this uncertainty, is what is going to be suspect.

Your analogy is largely correct IMO.
by koakuma-chan | 2025-12-16 21:36:51+00:00
Basically, Telegram used to have eggplant sticker that cums, until Apple forced them to remove it. They also had a peach sticker that looked like ass. Thus, I am making this joke about Telegram having best UI.

In this meme, Durov, the Telegram founder, says "Colleagues, greetings. Who can make it, so that eggplant cums? Added a task to Notion." Then "employee" sends a cumming eggplant sticker, and Durov replies "This is what I wanted."
by IshKebab | 2025-12-16 21:37:24+00:00
I found QML to be a terrible language for making GUIs. I really tried with it. But it just felt so hacky and unfinished. A couple of examples (from like 10 years ago so forgive me if I got some of the details a bit wrong):

1. Child components can magically refer to variables in their parents. This is basic encapsulation 101. The only other language I know of that allows that is SystemVerilog and that's from an era where people didn't know better (especially hardware guys).

2. You can create custom widgets... but they can't display text! There's a class called something like QmlSceneGraphTextNode that is the way that all the provided widgets display text but it's private. I guess they might have fixed this eventually but it stayed private for the ~5 years I tried to use it. They wanted me to just use Label widgets in QML land which sucks.

It also felt like there was a pretty huge impedance mismatch between QML and C++ due to its use of Javascript. E.g. stuff like using 64-bit integers. That reminds me:

3. It uses Javascript.

4. I never found a good way to use dialogs. They seem to push you towards having all possible dialogs exist all the time and just showing and hiding them, which is kind of crazy.

I don't think the idea of a GUI DSL is fundamentally bad, but QML is certainly a pretty miserable implementation. Hopefully the Slint guys have learned all of these lessons.
by larossmann | 2025-12-16 21:37:29+00:00
> SF is a hell-hole because of these crime loving activist groups.

the cost per arrest in austin while these cameras were up was over $7000/arrest.

From an anti-crime perspective, spending $7000 on police salaries & having the police patrol high crime areas is a much more effective use of funds. It also doesn't violate the 4th amendment.
by lp0_on_fire | 2025-12-16 21:37:33+00:00
In my experience living here my entire life it’s _far_ more common for a restaurant/ fast food joint to have exclusive deals with one or the other.

That being said there is one popular gas station chain around here that historically sold Coke and Pepsi products in their fountains but in the past decade or so they’ve switched to exclusively Coke products in the fountains (but they still sell bottled Pepsi products)
by phildini | 2025-12-16 21:37:55+00:00
Search context is legitimately hard, especially since this is unstructured text data that (ime building CivicBand) needs to be OCR'd not parsed for best results.

You might be terrified the number of municipalities that are still posting PDFs of scans of printouts of their minutes, which were originally a word document, and round and round we go.

Part of why I haven't guaranteed results building CivicObserver is because of how hard search context is. Maybe making this an MCP helps, but I'm not actually sure it does.
by levocardia | 2025-12-16 21:38:00+00:00
>At a minimum, you would expect the happiest countries in the world to have some of the lowest incidences of adverse mental health outcomes. But it turns out that the residents of the same Scandinavian countries that the press dutifully celebrates for their supposed happiness are especially likely to take antidepressants or even to commit suicide.

"Ecological fallacy! Ecological fallacy!," I screamed, flapping my arms pointlessly at my laptop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy#Individual_...
by adolph | 2025-12-16 21:38:06+00:00
Maybe this is one of those things where "Worse is Better" [0] given HTTP/1.x will always receive more time/attention/resources than something that might be theoretically superior but never got the resources to fulfill its promise. Cloudflare is probably one of the few organizations outside of Google with an internal economic case to support QUIC. For everyone else there is the option of paying IBM for Aspera using FASP.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
by bigbadfeline | 2025-12-16 21:38:12+00:00
> it's harder for young people to get jobs because old people are staying working longer > similar to the "science advances one funeral at a time" effect.

A rather morbid view of reality which has only one logical conclusion "Kill everyone to allow nature to rejuvenate itself".

Life neither creates unemployment, nor impedes silence, so funerals can't fix any of those.

It's a quite ridiculous to see the mass dissemination of blame imputed to minor systemic symptoms while proper systems analysis has been entirely expelled from public discourse, mainly due to the dysfunction of institutional humanities and social sciences.
by larossmann | 2025-12-16 21:38:24+00:00
>7300 per arrest sounds cheap so I am not sure if you are for or against.

think about what a police officer's salary is. think about underpoliced areas.

how many arrests would a trained, qualified police officer make in a high crime area of a major city in the timeframe it takes for them to earn $7300?

this is a bad deal.
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-16 21:38:26+00:00
It's the usual "until we prove animals do _X_ we can safely assert only humans do _X_" trope of biology.

As we learn that animals do things like have homosexual relationships, giggle when tickled, and understand basic rules of economics... biologists are learning to phrase it as "until we prove animals do _X_ we cannot be sure if animals do _X_", which is much safer.

(Also, there are trillions of lines in nature - WTF? Squares are somewhat rarer, except on the ground in wombat territory...)
by joshstrange | 2025-12-16 21:38:27+00:00
> staggered rollout

It's too bad no OpenAI Engineers (or Marketers?) know that term exists. /s

I do not understand why it's so hard for them to just tell the truth. So many announcements "Available today for Plus/Pro/etc" really means "Sometime this week at best, maybe multiple weeks". I'm not asking for them to roll out faster, just communicate better.
by jtbayly | 2025-12-16 21:38:27+00:00
I don't think that particular example focuses on the right thing to make the comparison similar.

The point isn't that education (in general) can't happen during a strike or that you can't get groceries (in general) during the strike you mention. The point is that education union is a small minority controlling what education is available, regardless of what the public wants.

To make your analogy similar, I think you could compare to grocery workers refusing to allow meat to be sold in grocery stores because a large portion of them are vegans, regardless of what the general public wants.
by outofmyshed | 2025-12-16 21:38:29+00:00
This is a great overview of web tech as I more or less recall it. Although pre-PHP CGI wasn’t a big deal, but it was more fiddly and you had to know and understand Apache, broadly. mod_perl & FastCGI made it okay. Only masochists wrote CGI apps in compiled languages. PHP made making screwy web apps low-effort and fun.

I bugged out of front-end dev just before jquery took off.
by Aloisius | 2025-12-16 21:38:33+00:00
> (it's from Latin "centrum": the R goes after the T, and there is no need whatsoever to revise that.)

Why does it matter how it was spelled in Latin? English is not Latin.

In the era of ubiquitous access to dictionaries, I'm not sure the benefits of having spelling reflect etymology rather than pronunciation outweigh the cost.
by glenstein | 2025-12-16 21:38:34+00:00
>So if you have a billion in the bank,

I just want to note that this is what is sometimes called carouseling. Which is, instead of acknowledging the original accusation was not correct, which is what should be happening, this comment just proceeds right on to the next accusation.

What is happening, psychologically speaking, that is causing a mass of people to spew one confidently wrong accusation after another? They don't have an endowment (they do!). Well they're not investing it! (they are). Well they're not working on the browser! (they shipped 12 major releases with thousands of patches per release with everything from new tab grouping and stacking to improved gpu performance to security fixes)

This is like a dancing sickness or something.
Show HN: Ghost – Local-first agent that runs and auto-fixes Python tests
by swarnim1312 | 2025-12-16 21:38:39+00:00
Hey,

This is my first time here, but I really need good reviews and insights from professionals and people.

I built Ghost because I have a bad habit: I write code first, tell myself I’ll write the tests later, and then never do because setting up mocks and imports breaks my flow state. I wanted a tool that acts less like a chatbot and more like a background daemon that handles the grunt work. What it does: Ghost watches your file system. When you save a .py file, it: Scans Context: Instead of dumping raw files, it uses Python’s ast module to map functions and classes to minimize token usage. Generates: Writes a pytest suite using your local LLM (Ollama) or Groq. Executes & Heals: Runs the test in a subprocess. If it fails (e.g., ModuleNotFoundError or syntax errors), it captures the stderr, feeds it back to the model, and patches the file automatically. The "Judge" Problem: A big issue with AI testing tools is that they often modify tests to match buggy code ("testing the implementation"). I added a "Judge" step: if a test fails due to a logic error (AssertionError), a separate prompt analyzes whether the source code is buggy or the test is wrong. If the code is buggy, it halts and alerts you rather than fixing the test to pass. Stack: Python (Watchdog, Rich) LLM Support: Ollama (Local), Groq (Fast), OpenAI. License: MIT It’s definitely still in beta, but the self-healing loop is working well for my side projects. I’d love feedback on the AST context injection strategy or the self-healing logic. Repo: https://github.com/tripathiji1312/ghost Pip: pip install ghosttest
by ericmay | 2025-12-16 21:39:05+00:00
In some ways self-destructive, in other ways not. President Biden restricted early use of long range weapons to strike Russia - that was self-destructive too.

Really, what exactly are folks asking the United States to do here? Give more money or weapons? Sure we could give even more, I support that. I'm quite hawkish on both Russia and China.

But I don't think that giving more money and arms tips the scales enough for Ukraine to force Russia out. So where does that leave us? The EU isn't going to do anything militarily about the situation. As the PM of Poland said, 600+ million Europeans are asking 300+ million Americans to defend them from 180+ million Russians. Something doesn't seem right. That doesn't mean the Trump Administration has handled this well. I'll give them to the extent that it is genuine that pursuing peace, if possible, is what we should do. But it also doesn't mean that all of the political grandstanding and TRUMP MAN BAD is getting us anywhere either. Has he handled our alliances poorly, yea I think so. Are our allies leaving and forming new alliances? No, not in any material sense. Does Europe need to step up and spend to defend itself, absolutely. It also doesn't mean President Trump needs to be an asshat either. Some ways self-destructive, other ways not.
by BalinKing | 2025-12-16 21:39:20+00:00
I'm having trouble finding anything concrete online (other than people simply repeating the folk wisdom) other than control flow operators, which are implemented as normal functions in Haskell (i.e. including custom control flow operators).[0] Although, one Reddit comment[1] did also mention typeclasses as obviating other types of macros, so I've edited my earlier comment accordingly.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/5xge0v/comment/deh...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1929xn/comment/c8k...
by alexpotato | 2025-12-16 21:39:23+00:00
Funny story:

- Friend of mine is Albanian

- Albania wants to join the European Union

- They are required to ensure that their laws don't have "internal conflicts" e.g. one law says something is legal, a different law says it's illegal

- Reviewing by hand would take a lot of work

- Friend uses an LLM to analyze the Albanian laws and find any of these conflicts

Apparently it worked out pretty well
by IshKebab | 2025-12-16 21:39:32+00:00
Yeah I found the same thing. The issue turned out to be that something in my `.bashrc` was appending to `PATH` (or some other env var). Because my `cargo build` commands that were running in one more level of shell than Rust-analyzer, it had different env vars and therefore a different cache key.

Once you fix it so that Rust-analyzer sees the same env vars as your shell then the issue goes away. It's kind of annoyingly hard to debug though.