MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cosmicgadget | 2025-12-21 04:39:19+00:00
> The Centuries isn’t included on sanctions lists from the U.S., U.K., European Union or the United Nations, according to shipping data firm Kpler... The ship was first tracked moving Venezuelan oil to China in April 2020 and was involved in ship-to-ship transfers off Malaysia.

I imagine this is being done for all the wrong reasons but it seems to, in effect, enforce the multilateral sanctions.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-12-21 04:40:19+00:00
Thought this was going to lead to something about a major annoyance or weird commenters but pleasantly surprised at the list of impacts, heartfelt, emotive, human experiences connecting community from the physical to the virtual (to the otherworldly no doubt).

There are a lot of trees with similar sort of sponsorships and commemorations... wonder if a spin off would be something like opentreebutes.org ?
by subdavis | 2025-12-21 04:41:12+00:00
I recently asked Opus to just “Add vector search” to my current hobby project, a topic I know very little about. It set up manticore, pulled an embedding model, wrote a migration tool for my old keyword indices, and built the front end. I’m not exaggerating much either: the prompt was the length of a tweet.

I think it would easily have taken me 4+ hours to do that. It ran in 15 minutes while I played Kirby Air Riders and worked on the first try.

Afterward, I sort of had to reflect on the fact that I learned essentially nothing about building vector search. I wanted the feature more than I wanted to know how to build the feature. It kept me learning the thing I cared about rather than doing a side quest.
by baby_souffle | 2025-12-21 04:41:47+00:00
I've had extensive luck doing just that. Spend some time doing the initial work to see how the page works and then give the llm examples of the HTML that should be clicked for next page or the css classes that indicate the details you're after and then ask for a playwright to yaml tool.

Been doing this for a few months now to keep an eye on the prices for local grocery stores. I had to introduce random jitter so Ali Express wouldn't block me from trying to dump my decade+ of order history.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-21 04:41:56+00:00
> However I can't see it happening, governments would outlaw it claiming it'd be used to transfer money for nefarious purposes, money laundering etc.

I feel like it's too common for people to say "we can't have nice things because the government is run by a clutter of lummoxes" when they should be saying "we should improve society somewhat".
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-21 04:41:59+00:00
When you need to scale up and don't want that $160 to increase 10x to handle the additional load the numbers start making more sense: 3 month's worth of the projected increase upfront is around 4.3k, which is good money for a few days' work for the setup/migration and remains a good deal for you since you break even after 3 months and keep on pocketing the savings indefinitely from that point on.

Of course, my comment wasn't aimed at those who successfully keep their cloud bill in the low 3-figures, but the majority of companies with a 5-figure bill and multiple "infrastructure" people on payroll futzing around with YAML files. Even half the achieved savings should be enough incentive for those guys to learn something new.
by avoutos | 2025-12-21 04:42:57+00:00
Agreed. I see far too many people rationalizing piracy as a principled thing to do. Instead of finding ways to improve the market such that the control of content isn't siloed in monopolistic corporations, many celebrate Annas Archive which is itself a more or less monopolistic profit-interested entity. The major difference being that we don't have to pay directly. The cost continues to fall on the writers and artists and the industry suffers.
by MichaelNolan | 2025-12-21 04:43:42+00:00
Per 1 billion vehicle-km the US has 6.9 deaths and the Netherlands has 4.7 deaths. That’s obviously better much but I wouldn’t call it “problem solved”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

(Wikipedia links to itf-oecd.org/ where those numbers come From)
by ModernMech | 2025-12-21 04:48:03+00:00
The result of you having worked 4 hours to implement the thing is not just that you have the thing, it's that you have the thing and you understand the thing. Having the thing is next to useless if you don't understand it.

At best it plods along as you keep badgering Claude to fix it, until inevitably Claude reaches a point where it can't help. At which time you'll be forced to spend at least the 4 hours you would have originally spent trying to understand it so you can fix it yourself.

At worst the thing will actively break other things you do understand in ways you don't understand, and you'll have to spend at least 4 hours cleaning up the mess.

Either way it's not clear you've saved any time at all.
by simonw | 2025-12-21 04:50:00+00:00
I didn't really understand the "long task" thing until I actually experienced it. The problem is finding a task you can set an agent that justifies working for that long. I finally hit one when I tried porting that Python HTML5 parser to JavaScript by pointing Codex CLI at the 9,200 html5lib-tests test suite: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/porting-justhtml/

It's pretty amazing to watch tools-in-a-loop crunch away for >4 hours to solve a generally difficult problem through sheer brute-force.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-12-21 04:54:48+00:00
I was reading over a comment thread on songfacts.com a few days ago and thought to myself "this is what the internet was supposed to be". People from all over the world connecting to discuss their favorite music, across time and space, without any upvoting, downvoting, likes, followers, or other systems to game for popularity.

Without upvotes/likes/etc. as a "quality filter", you tend to read more comments written in broken English with poor grammar and so forth. I consider that an acceptable price to pay, in exchange for no viral memes, ragebaiting, etc.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-21 04:55:28+00:00
> However, most welfare systems have hard cutoffs.

Most welfare systems have phased benefit reductions (there is a point where the benefit hits zero, which can be viewed as a hard cutoff, but it doesn't go "full benefit up to the line and then zero at the line" in most cases, though there are exceptions.

> If you get $500 in SNAP a month and make $500 a month, you have $1000 to last a month. And if the cutoff is $501, making that one extra dollar is going to cost you $499.

If the SNAP cutoff applicable to your situation was $501, then your actual benefit at $500 would be $24 (the minimum SNAP benefit), not $500. Because SNAP does a $0.30 per dollar of income clawback until the minimum benefit is reached, and then stays at the minimum benefit until the eligibility limit income is reached.

There is a cliff still, but its a lot smaller of a cliff (for SNAP alone) than you are painting.
by tokioyoyo | 2025-12-21 04:56:05+00:00
The point of eventual “all-code-is-written-by-AI” is that it really does not matter if your code is maintainable or not. In the end, most of the products are written to accomplish some sort of a goal or serve a need within a given set of restrictions (cost, speed and etc.). If the goal is achieved within given restrictions, the codebase can be thrown away until the next need is there to just create everything from scratch, if needed.
by komali2 | 2025-12-21 04:56:17+00:00
> Your savings account is just bits on a disk, yet presumably it represents value that you worked for and which belongs to you to do with what you wish.

That's another example of the shared delusion, since yes, we tell eachother it represents labor and resources, and the market engages in allocation somewhat efficiently, and so the money is a pretty accurate representation of the value of labor and the value of resources.

In reality, that's not true, because the most highly compensated jobs are some of the least valuable, such as investment bankers, landlords, or being born rich (which isn't even a job, but is compensated anyway). Rent seeking is one of the most highly compensated things you can do under this system, but also one of the most parasitic and least valuable things.

Your savings account's number is totally detached from accurately representing value. It's mostly a representation of where you were born.
by lukasb | 2025-12-21 04:58:17+00:00
I'm playing around with it, and it's very cool! One issue is that fingerprint expansion doesn't always work, e.g. I have a memory "Going to Albania in January for a month-long stay in Tirana" and asking "Do I need a visa for my trip?" didn't turn up anything, using expansion "visa requirements trip destination travel documents..."

What would you think about adding another column that is used for matching that is a superset of the actual memory, basically reusing the fingerprint expansion prompt?
by Avicebron | 2025-12-21 04:59:06+00:00
> I learned essentially nothing about building vector search. I wanted the feature more than I wanted to know how to build the feature

Opus/Anthropic is hands down the best in my experience. But using it feels like intellectual fast food (they all are), I hate the fact that I can build something like a neatly presentable one off spa tool (ty Simon) when I'm barely paying attention. it feels unsatisfying to use.

EDIT: because I'm rambling, I like "AI" as much as the next guy, probably more because I was there before it turned into LLMs"R"US, but I also like(d) the practice of sitting around listening to music solving problems with Scala. I don't know why we've decided to make work less fun..
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-12-21 04:59:23+00:00
Interesting how internet boosters in the late 90s/early 2000s told us the internet would revitalize democracy by making it so anyone could publish. I'm not aware of a single cynic who successfully predicted how things actually ended up turning out. Nor have I seen much of an attempt to revisit those early predictions.
by simonw | 2025-12-21 04:59:48+00:00
I don't think building it the long way is necessarily a more effective way to learn.

You could spend 4 hours (that you don't have) building that feature. Or... you could have the coding agent build it in the background for you in 15 minutes, then spend 30 minutes reading through what it did, tweaking it yourself and peppering it with questions about how it all works.

My hunch is that the 30 minutes of focused learning spent with a custom-built version that solves your exact problem is as effective (or even more effective) than four hours spent mostly struggling to get something up and running and going down various rabbit holes of unrelated problem-solving.

Especially if realistically you were never going to carve out those four hours anyway.
by pugio | 2025-12-21 05:00:09+00:00
Opus looks like a big jump from the previous leader (GPT 5.1), but when you switch from "50%" to "80%", GPT 5.1 still leads by a good margin. I'm not sure if you can take much from this - perhaps "5.1 is more reliable at slightly shorter stuff, choose Opus if you're trying to push the frontier in task length".
by Gracana | 2025-12-21 05:01:33+00:00
Yeah, I wouldn’t complain if one dropped in my lap, but they’re not at the top of my list for inference hardware.

Although... Is it possible to pair a fast GPU with one? Right now my inference setup for large MoE LLMs has shared experts in system memory, with KV cache and dense parts on a GPU, and a Spark would do a better job of handling the experts than my PC, if only it could talk to a fast GPU.

[edit] Oof, I forgot these have only 128GB of RAM. I take it all back, I still don’t find them compelling.
by simonw | 2025-12-21 05:01:46+00:00
I don't buy it.

I think that could work, but it can work in the same way that plenty of big companies have codebases that are a giant ball of mud and yet they somehow manage to stay in business and occasionally ship a new feature.

Meanwhile their rivals with well constructed codebases who can promptly ship features that work are able to run rings around them.

I expect that we'll learn over time that LLM-managed big ball of mud codebases are less valuable than LLM-managed high quality well architected long-term maintained codebases.
by roenxi | 2025-12-21 05:03:01+00:00
One-off incidents don't really mean anything in the big picture.

However, I do recall back when there were grid problems in Texas a few years ago someone justifying the high prices California paid as due to their high grid reliability and solid regulatory framework (California pay 2x as much IIRC). I'm too far away to really get into the details but it'd be much more interesting to have a comparison on the reliability of the Californian grid compared to other US states and even countries. When it comes to high availability the diminishing returns to spending set in pretty quick and I get the impression there is a slow return to economic reality happening as voters are forcing governments to start paying attention to energy again, environmentalists or otherwise.
by scuff3d | 2025-12-21 05:03:29+00:00
Dude this thing is savage, I love it

> You spent twenty years avoiding a single line of JavaScript only to get depressed and give up on front-end dev as soon as you saw a CSS file.

> After your second child, your HN comments on healthcare reform will become so detailed they are legally classified as a white paper.

Lmao
by vel0city | 2025-12-21 05:04:04+00:00
The city I live in practically didn't exist by most measures until the 1940s. Meanwhile many cities in Europe draw roots back a few thousand years BCE. The lot my house is on was barely even used as farmland in 1960, and got turned into a residential area finally in the 80s.

But sure I'll trust you in telling me this is a much older civilization than Greece. Makes sense.
by aabhay | 2025-12-21 05:06:27+00:00
This feels like the exactly wrong way to think about it IMO. For me “knowledge” is not the explicit recitation of the correct solution, it’s all the implicit working knowledge I gain from trying different things, having initial assumptions fail, seeing what was off, dealing with deployment headaches, etc. As I work, I carefully pay attention to the outputs of all tools and try to mentally document what paths I didn’t take. That makes dealing with bugs and issues later on a lot easier, but it also expands my awareness of the domain, and checks my hubris on thinking I know something, and makes it possible to reason about the system when doing things later on.

Of course, this kind of interactive deep engagement with a topic is fast becoming obsolete. But the essence to me of “knowing” is about doing and experiencing things, updating my bayesian priors dialectically (to put it fancily)
by inferiorhuman | 2025-12-21 05:07:47+00:00
Dunno, I think it's quite reasonable to class electricity as a natural monopoly. What's less reasonable is regulatory capture. Landline telephones were insanely reliable in their heyday because they were required to be so. PG&E is reckless because they're allowed to be reckless.

Edit: For non-Americans, landline telephones were highly regulated up until '82 with AT&T having a government sanctioned monopoly.
by Aperocky | 2025-12-21 05:08:42+00:00
Recreating everything from scratch gets harder and the previous requirements will eventually not be met after sufficient number of them have been accumulated. AI would have no solution to this unless it iterate on the same code base, but since I've not seen evidence of architectural maintainability from AI, a project that are fully given to AI is bound to fail.

AI is still incredibly useful used in tandem, but have it implement full feature from one sentence usually lead to doom.
by inferiorhuman | 2025-12-21 05:11:05+00:00
The same substation went up about a decade ago, I'd be pretty cautious about calling problems with PG&E infrastructure "one off".

California's rates were rationalized, in part, because California is taking steps to increase reliability. It's been decades seen we've seen rolling blackouts at the hands of Enron. Long-term plans to increase intra-state transmission capacity are in place and are currently being executed (you're welcome to dig them up on the ISO's site). The weather related preemptive power cuts have been pared back dramatically since their introduction. We're talking hundreds of thousands of people without power for days versus hundreds or thousands for hours.

Let's not forget that the "grid problems" you're referring to cost some ratepayers tens of thousands of dollars because that's the sort of retail electric plan that was legal in Texas.

But also please don't lump all Californians one group. PG&E rate payers are extorted for some of the highest electric rates in the nation (as are SDG&E and most IOU rate payers). Folks with access to municipal power in California pay far less.
by tokioyoyo | 2025-12-21 05:13:21+00:00
Fair enough. In my imagination, I can see people writing AI-first framework/architectures and a general trend for people to “migrate to such frameworks”, just like the push towards the microservices architectures in 2010s. A part of these frameworks would be “re-constructibility” by changing contracts in parts where it matters, and somehow the framework would make it easy for the LLM to discover such “parts”.

Honestly, i’m making stuff up, as I don’t think it’s feasible right now because of the context sizes. But given how fast things develop, maybe in a couple of years things might change.
by harmmonica | 2025-12-21 05:14:18+00:00
Not asking you to dox yourself, and I’m not questioning your take that renting is better than buying, but are you sure the data you pulled didn’t have a filter where you ended up with apples to oranges on the listing vs sale prices?

Just trying to find a hood in LA, at least the city itself, where there’s a $9M+ home for sale and where during the past 3 months the max sale price has been less than $2M. Unless the $9M place for sale is a total outlier.

Maybe it’s a small part of a single hood but I’m not sure you can conclude much about the broader city if that’s the case. Or maybe the asking prices didn’t have a bed/bath filter but the sale prices did?
by drusenko | 2025-12-21 05:14:22+00:00
That claim would be hilarious and also wildly inaccurate, that OP apparently never heard of a PSPS. California’s grid is not particularly resilient or reliable, and certainly not in the 2016-2020 time frame. Also, the regulatory framework is awful and high prices are driven by a mix of 1- regulatory capture and disincentives to utilities saving money, 2- wildfire mitigation costs, 3- NIMBYism and the lack of ability to build anything quickly, and then a hodge podge of CA specific issues.
by Aperocky | 2025-12-21 05:14:36+00:00
I think the problem here is LLM eventually pollute its context window with so much of the current task that the larger picture or architectural sanity is forgotten in favor of the current task at hand.

And rarely is a software one and done, with a few round like this, the software architecture would have become schizophrenic. Combating this tendency usually require a lot of the work of these "long task" to be thrown away and more closely limiting what the AI is trying to do as they happen. The success of one "long task" is not necessarily a good thing!
by pyuser583 | 2025-12-21 05:14:41+00:00
You’re absolutely right about this.

The Republic of Venice, Holy Roman Empire, and Poland-Lithuania Commonwealth were all still around when America was founded.

Malta was still under the control of the Crusaders. Mongols still occupied Crimea.

The modern European map really comes from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Many European memories of nationhood are quite fake, and often deliberately so.
by asdff | 2025-12-21 05:15:35+00:00
If you have ever driven in Ohio the driving behavior is absurdly different than what you see in places like CA. People rarely speed. They willingly let you cut them off. And there are reasons for that too. Here is a map of where you are most likely to get a speeding ticket (1). The only place in california I've seen any enforcement of speeding or traffic behavior is along the 395 corridor in the Owens valley. Incidentally this region comes up in the map. It simply does not happen in LA county at least. Well, maybe they slap a speed ticket onto a pursuit case on top of everything else. But no sit and wait radar taking that I've seen.

1. https://i.redd.it/f898arvdx6je1.jpeg
by vel0city | 2025-12-21 05:17:50+00:00
Parking lots are private spaces where the store management can ask you to leave at any time. That some don't is almost a happy accident.

Compared to a public park where anyone is free to loiter and play. Plus parks are usually segregated from cars so you don't have to worry about a random car not paying attention killing you, the ground isn't hot pavement everywhere, there might be playground equipment and benches and picnic tables, etc.
by troglo-byte | 2025-12-21 05:18:36+00:00
Hoping this mega-mess pushes the city's effort to buy its own grid past the finish line. PG&E has been fighting it tooth and nail.

Not that it will necessarily make for fewer blackouts, but a ~50% rate discount would be nice. That's what users in Santa Clara pay IIRC, and SF even owns the hydro generator at O'Shaughnessy Dam.
by BrenBarn | 2025-12-21 05:18:49+00:00
All such arguments about the constitution and federal power are just a waste of time. The constitution is so riddled with flaws that there's little point in attempting to save the good parts. We absolutely should throw out a large proportion of the "rules" in the constitution. The idea that some policies are okay for state governments to do but not okay for the federal government to do also makes no real sense. It's just an arbitrary jurisdictional distraction from the substantive content of policies. Talking about "breaking the rules" in this context is like there's a basketball game where fans, coaches, and players are all kicking each other in the nuts and you're worried about calling double dribble.
by karimQuant | 2025-12-21 05:19:10+00:00
The big issue is the 50%, if you switch to 80% it's much less. Now if you are in the wrong side of 50% given the task was 4hours. How much additional time to 4hours you need. repeat trying to get the task done 50%*50%->25% , 50%^4 -> 6.25%. the cost of bad luck is very high.