MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by casparvitch | 2025-12-16 23:14:38+00:00
> There's an entire parallel scientific corpus most western researches never see.

Most of the scientific corpus (I would wager >99%) is not read by anyone. At least in physics, all the stuff you want to read is in english, in the journals that your global community cares about. I'm not sure (in physics) that you're ever going to find anything useful here. From my brief look around I see a lot of junk (similar to the arXiv).

My usual method for keeping up to date on the arXiv is to use their API (rss feed with search query in url) for terms I care about, but usually on click on papers by groups I value. Unless I see papers for those groups on chinarxiv.org (and I didn't find any from the good Chinese groups), I don't think it's worth it.

Anyway, keen to hear if anyone else finds something useful here.
Show HN: AI Trolley Problem Arena
by justintorre75 | 2025-12-16 23:14:51+00:00
I built a tool that presents custom trolley problems to GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, Grok, and DeepSeek simultaneously and streams their ethical reasoning in real-time.

Some interesting findings: - The models are surprisingly split on classic dilemmas. - Models will protect their creator (Sam Altman vs Dario Amodei) - Criminals are not valued equally even when compared to itself

Try it: https://aitrolleyproblem.com
by QuercusMax | 2025-12-16 23:14:56+00:00
This is one of the things I've seen it be very useful for: putting together one-off tools or visualizations. I'm not going to maintain these, although I might check them into version control for historical reference.

I recently ran across a package in my team's codebase that has a bunch of interrelated DB tables, and we didn't already have a nice doc explaining how everything fits together - so I asked the AI to make me a detailed README.md for the package. I'm currently reviewing that, removing a bunch of nonsense I didn't ask for, and I'm going to run it by my team. It's actually pretty good to start with because the code and DB models are well documented, just piecemeal all over the place, and half of what the AI is doing is just collating all that info and putting it in one doc.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-16 23:15:14+00:00
Not sure why you think forgejo is competition and not Gitlab.

> Or shortly summarized: lock in through pricing.

how would increasing price make you locked in more ?

> If you don't really care about the metadata all it pretty much takes is moving git repositories with their history.

moving PR/CI/CD/Ticket flow is very significant effort, as in most companies that stuff is referenced everywhere. Having your commits refer ticket ID from system that no longer exists is royal PITA
by aeve890 | 2025-12-16 23:16:24+00:00
It seems like a solid plan to me:

- charge the same you would pay for the GitHub runners

- you have to factor YOUR server cost also, so self hosted will cost more than the platform option

- you jump to the platform runners and save on servers, sysadmin, DevOps, etc.

And then they grab you by the balls and raise the prices.
by exceptione | 2025-12-16 23:16:25+00:00
All over the world the bed is being made for the autocrats. The new generation of wealthy autocrats have tools at their disposal the previous generations lacked. Like Musk and Vance told the audience, this was the last time it had to vote.

The defense industry is something of a foregone era. Most capital has been allocated to surveillance capitalism since last decades, providing very powerful tools to influence and measure the personal lives of the population. But things are shaping up for more active forms of control; as the finance sector is putting all their eggs in the next iteration, LLMs, which is being accepted by the public as a means for thought generation. I am totally not surprised to learn that the government now needs to a) sponsor this business model and b) needs to pull this horse inside government and executive branches.

Sure, there are positive use cases to be thought of for LLMs. But lets not be that naive this time, shall we? I mean, Grokopedia anyone?
by skybrian | 2025-12-16 23:16:47+00:00
There are a variety of possible memory mechanisms including simple things recording a transcript (as a chatbot does) or having the LLM update markdown docs in a repo. So having memory isn't interesting. Instead, my question is: what does Letta's memory look like? Memory is a data structure. How is it structured and why is that good?

I'd be interested in hearing about how this approach compares with Beads [1].

[1] https://github.com/steveyegge/beads
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-16 23:17:15+00:00
so they are selling cent of their CPU time for a minute's worth

> My guess is that once you think about this some more you will decide it is worth it, and probably spend some time trying to drive down your minutes/month a bit. But at $140 a month, how much time is that worth investing?

It's $140 right now. And if they want to squeeze you for cents worth of CPU time (because for artifact storage you're already paying separately), they *will* squeeze harder.

And more importantly *RIGHT NOW* it costs more per minute than running decent sized runner!
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-12-16 23:17:30+00:00
> But looks like your goal is not really to be effective at using LLMs, but to bitch about it on the internet

Listen, you can engage with the comment or ignore everything but the first sentence and throw out personal insults. If you don't want to sound like a shill, don't write like one.

When you're telling people the problem is the LLM did not have tests, you're saying "Yeah I know you caught it spitting out random unrelated crap, but if you just let it verify if it was crap or not, maybe it would get it right after a dozen tries." Does that not seem like a horribly ineffectual way to output code? Maybe that's how some people write code, but I evaluate myself with tests to see if I accidentally broke something elsewhere. Not because I have no idea what I'm even writing to begin with.

You wrote

> Without that they cannot know if what they did works, and they are a bit like humans

They are exactly not like humans this way. LLMs break code by not writing valid code to begin with. Humans break code by forgetting an obscure business rule they heard about 6 months ago. People work on very successful projects without tests all the time. It's not my preference, but tests are non-exhaustive and no replacement for a human that knows what they're doing. And the tests are meaningless without that human writing them.

So your response to that comment, pushing them further down the path of agentic code doing everything for them, smacks of maximalism, yes.
by thatoneengineer | 2025-12-16 23:17:34+00:00
I disagree. Right now, feedback on correctness is a major practical limitation on the usefulness of AI coding agents. They can fix compile errors on their own, they can _sometimes_ fix test errors on their own, but fixing functionality / architecture errors takes human intervention. Formal verification basically turns (a subset of) functionality errors into compile errors, making the feedback loop much stronger. "Come up with what software we need better than us in the first place" is much higher on the ladder than that.

TL;DR: We don't need to be radically agnostic about the capabilities of AI-- we have enough experience already with the software value chain (with and without AI) for formal verification to be an appealing next step, for the reasons this author lays out.
by throwaway17_17 | 2025-12-16 23:17:38+00:00
As I think I conveyed in my original post, I am not against anyone using whatever language they want to make their software. If a "genius" Rust program 'solved' cancer I would be exceptionally impressed by the PROGRAMMER's work, the language they used would not make a difference. Although I would be more excited to get the source code for the program if it was in a language I already knew and used routinely. My objection is to Rust being imported into software that I already use and is not currently written in Rust, and that is a very different thing.
by bitexploder | 2025-12-16 23:17:45+00:00
It is very janky. The speed camera I have an old Core i5 that is running YOLOv8 on the integrated GPU and it can just /barely/ handle 30FPS of inference. The code is all Python and vibe coded (for science). The speed camera needs a perpendicular view to work best for how I set it up (measuring two reference points with a known distance). So the ALPR camera is separate and I basically just buffer video and built this ultra janky scheme where I call an HTTP endpoint and it saves the last few seconds and then I batch process to associate the plate later in the web app. It is all CSV and plain files; this is a perfect append only DB scenario. Eventually it will need the wonders of the big data format SQLite probably, but I am sure Claude will know what to do ;) The long term solution would be to have a proper radar circuit and two cameras facing both road directions to capture the rear plate as people often don't use front plates here even though they are required to by law.

(the point, though, is you don't need a lot of GPU power to do say YOLOv8 inference on the pre-trained models) and OpenCV makes this all pretty darn easy.
by ahmeneeroe-v2 | 2025-12-16 23:17:51+00:00
Short answer: idk.

Longer answer: this is a fundamental problem across many domains. I don't think anyone has solved it.

I think of a story of Bezos being told by his Amazon execs that customer support wait times were meeting X service levels. In the meeting room with his execs, Bezos dials up customer service, gets some wait time of >>>X and makes the point that service levels are not up to his expectations.

I don't think that story is a great analogy for running society but is interesting nonetheless.
by jkaptur | 2025-12-16 23:18:32+00:00
I think that there are three relevant artifacts: the code, the specification, and the proof.

I agree with the author that if you have the code (and, with an LLM, you do) and a specification, AI agents could be helpful to generate the proof. This is a huge win!

But it certainly doesn't confront the important problem of writing a spec that captures the properties you actually care about. If the LLM writes that for you, I don't see a reason to trust that any more than you trust anything else it writes.

I'm not an expert here, so I invite correction.
by arjie | 2025-12-16 23:18:40+00:00
Yes, that is true. And for those problems, those who use LLMs will not get very far.

As for those who use LLMs to impersonate humans, which is the kind of verification (verify that this solution that is purported to be built by a human actually works), I have no doubt we will rapidly evolve norms that make us more resistant to them. The cost of fraud and anti-fraud is not zero, but I suspect it will be much less than we fear.
by pron | 2025-12-16 23:18:54+00:00
Maybe in the short term, but that doesn't solve some fundamental problems. Consider, NP problems, problems whose solutions can be easily verified. But that they can all be easily verified does not (as far as we know) mean they can all be easily solved. If we look at the P subset of NP, the problems that can be easily solved, then the easy verification is no longer their key feature. Rather, it is something else that distinguishes them from the harder problems in NP.

So let's say that, similarly, there are programming tasks that are easier and harder for agents to do well. If we know that a task is in the easy category, of course having tests is good, but since we already know that an agent does it well, the test isn't the crucial aspect. On the other hand, for a hard task, all the testing in the world may not be enough for the agent to succeed.

Longer term, I think it's more important to understand what's hard and what's easy for agents.
Show HN: F. Incantatem – CLI, Decorator & notebook ext. for traceback analysis
by Paralus | 2025-12-16 23:19:14+00:00
When your Python code breaks, you get a traceback. You can see where it failed. You almost never know why it failed — what was actually in memory at that moment.

I built F. Incantatem to fix this. Add one decorator, and when your code crashes, an LLM captures the full context — stack trace, source code, actual variable values — and explains what went wrong and how to fix it.

It integrates as a decorator, CLI tool, or IPython extension. Works with OpenAI, OpenRouter, or locally via Ollama. Cautious mode automatically redacts secrets and PII before transmission. Zero core dependencies.

I'm sharing it because I keep thinking other people must be debugging these same impossible bugs. Happy to answer questions or take feedback.

Also worth noting that there's some more work to be done (see roadmap).

Repo: https://github.com/aguilar-ai/fincantatem

PyPi: https://pypi.org/project/fincantatem/
by CerryuDu | 2025-12-16 23:19:23+00:00
I find the repeated "yolo" qualifications very tiresome, yawn-inducing.

At least in this article:

https://fil-c.org/runtime

the term "classic C" is still used.

I don't expect for a moment that Fil-C might supplant normal C under normal circumstances. Calling normal C "yolo-C" is dishearteningly pompous. Just because you've invented a C environment with a different tradeoff, people not interested in it are not automatically irresponsible (which is what you are suggesting with "yolo", of course).
by bpt3 | 2025-12-16 23:20:43+00:00
The facts are that we have been paying for Medicare since the 1960s and are legally obligated to continue paying for it indefinitely, as pointed out in one of your citations. That's literally all I said in my last post. In the previous post, I also said that children are inexpensive to insure, which is also empirically true.

The citations you provided are well researched, concerning, raise valid points, and include many facts, but your conclusions based on them are only very strongly held opinions.

This is now the third time you've jumped down my throat for no reason, so feel free to go harass someone else going forward. And the next time you wonder why you don't have much support for your preferred policies, look in the mirror, because I suspect I agree with you on most if not all of these matters but want nothing to do with a discussion with you about them.
by jameshilliard | 2025-12-16 23:20:43+00:00
> They are on a international body that is investigating allegations of war crimes and genocide that the United States and Israel have committed in Gaza

She was apparently sanctioned for the Afghanistan investigation, while others at the ICC were sanctioned for going after Israel.[0]

[0] https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
by tsunamifury | 2025-12-16 23:21:49+00:00
The price of peace historically explains how most war is faught over resources or local status games. Both of those behaviors were mostly captured by world trade and consumerism which replaced each respectively.

But then what emerged is that the largest consumer engines of production and consumptions could control the global trade and resources in a way that would suppress warfare globally by creating an economic MAD game alongside the nuclear one.

People don’t understand how much violence this likely saved us. However it is of course not without consequences. I'm just saying so far the side effects have FAR FAR outweighed the sickness (world war)
by mmooss | 2025-12-16 23:22:00+00:00
Eusocial and antisocial aren't the only options on the continuum - that's a pretty extreme binary. Also, international cooperation and internationalism are well-trodden paths, even if they aren't popular in the moment - the UN, World Bank / IMF, NATO, EU, OAS, OECD, ISO, etc etc etc. Ironically, the current extreme nationalist wave reflects it too.

It might not be popular now but we have generations of evidence of it working, and tools to make it happen. And most of those were done before the Internet.

> That is not my opinion that is a fact of life

If you say so - but because we only have your say so, it's just opinion.
by bccdee | 2025-12-16 23:22:07+00:00
True to an extent. But why would you want to create (e.g.) a movie if you don't think watching movies is worthwhile in and of itself? You're putting effort into creating something that you don't think is truly valuable. To a person with this mindset, the desire to create is cynical—they're only making movies in pursuit of extrinsic rewards such as money, fame, or success. If watching movies is thin to them, then making movies is also thin.

Conversely, an authentic filmmaker is someone who values movies in and of themselves; therefore, the authentic desire to create a movie must be downstream of a passion for watching movies. I don't think you'll find many artistically inclined filmmakers who would denigrate the act of watching movies as "thin." It's the thickness they feel in the experience of watching movies which inspired them to devote themselves to making movies in the first place.
by tryauuum | 2025-12-16 23:22:08+00:00
I don't know. To me, any programmer looks a little insane, no matter of their motivation. Because how can you write code 5 days a week and stay alive?

I do program but I treat is a nessesary evil which has to be done to solve some issue I have. I won't be able to write a codebase which may or may not be deployed in a year
by drdaeman | 2025-12-16 23:22:15+00:00
That would work nicely in an abstract spherical Japan in pure vacuum.

The hardest bit about redoing something from scratch is not how to design the new system, but it's in getting it adopted. Many societies have tried things like that, social inertia, especially paired with learning barriers (the steeper, the worse), and cultural and political notions (and Japan values and tries to preserve their history and culture quite a lot) is not something that can be just dismissed.

That's not to say that there weren't countries that had writing system overhauls, just that it's difficult and of questionable value and not entirely without negative effects.
by retrac | 2025-12-16 23:22:35+00:00
The old official system arguably makes more sense from a Japanese perspective.

If you look at the kana, the Japanese syllabic writing system, they have this ordering: ka ki ku ke ko, sa shi su se so, ta chi tsu te to, etc. If you follow the regularity where there should be a "ti" sound there is no "ti" sound and it happens to be pronounced "chi".

One common analysis holds that the underlying phonemes really are: ta ti tu te to. Traditional Japanese grammarians usually analyzed it this way. And they were historically pronounced that way: it has arisen out of relatively recent sound change. Somewhat like how some British speakers pronounce "Tuesday" such that it sounds much like "Chews-day" to speakers of other dialects. Affrication in a fixed context. The t phoneme triggers that kind of affrication obligatorily in Japanese, before the i vowel or y glide.

Some disagree with this as overly theoretic and based excessively on historical linguistics, and they insist that sh and f and ch are distinct phonemes in Japanese. But the Japanese writing system itself treats it as if they were not.

If you are learning Japanese it makes sense to pick a system that reflects the internal logic of kana spelling. If you want to just approximately pronounce Japanese words in English then you want something that reflects the logic of English spelling.

These two goals are always in tension. Mandarin pinyin, for example, was designed to reflect the logic of Mandarin phonology in a consistent way. It's not meant to be easily pronounceable by English speakers. It's to enable Mandarin speakers to look up words in a dictionary or for students of the language to study Mandarin. Though it has ended up used as a pronunciation guide for English speakers. And that often doesn't go well; a lot of English speakers don't know what to do with the q's and x's.
by piva00 | 2025-12-16 23:22:35+00:00
You need to compare Southern Italy to a similar impoverished area of the USA which might have the exact same doctor shortage. Of course different parts of a country will have different availability, seeing a doctor in Torino will be much faster than in a village like Saliano...

A 1-year waitlist for a necessary heart surgery where? Every country in Europe has their own healthcare system, each one of those have their strengths and weaknesses, exactly as it would be in the USA.

Notwithstanding there are private facilities you can pay insurance or out of pocket, the difference is no matter what you have decent coverage somehow, the richer the country the better it is, the richer the region of the country the better quality it is, exactly as in the USA...
by underlipton | 2025-12-16 23:22:38+00:00
Free AI evangelists need to get better about teaching people how "AI compute" away from the big tech platforms. They need to show that local models are equal or better than ChatGPT et al., and show how people can set those systems up, without being ornery or obtuse.

The same actually goes for artists who want people to create and value human-made art. Everyone seems so resentful of the people who they should want to be on their side. You have to practice what you preach, man.
by pron | 2025-12-16 23:22:42+00:00
I completely agree it's appealing, I just don't see a reason to assume that an agent will be able to succeed at it and at the same time fail at other things that could make the whole exercise redundant. In other words, I also want agents to be able to consistently prove software correct, but if they're actually able to accomplish that, then they could just as likely be able to do everything else in the production of that software (including gathering requirements and writing the spec) without me in the loop.
by oriettaxx | 2025-12-16 23:25:04+00:00
it's about time

and it's the first step back, which I love (and miss),

BUT

there has been 0, zero, niente, nada, rien proper discussion in the EU on WHY UK left!

All UK reasons have been blamed as stupid (which is understandable due to mouth like N. Fartage), while many are not, so need to be discussed, faced, dig! and please don't talk again about immigration: this is already discussed even too much: stop talking about this could be the very first step to do what I mean. EU in Brussel: you do not want to do it? and you'll be kicked in the butt: face reality, face real problems we have withing EU which UK listed clearly: maybe they will really be marked as irrelevant but we need to talk about it.

My very personal opinion is bureaucracy, fat bureaucracy, damned bureaucracy, expensive bureaucracy: believing you can have a better world by regulations IS stupid, and so on... the whole idea of an elite who is elite 'cause is using it's brain, while out there other need to be forced 'cause they are no (so should just obey and not use their brain) is stupid.

E.g. In the UK there is no ID card, you can live your whole life with no ID of any sort: yes, you need an ID (the passport) to go outside indeed: your address is stated by your electricity bill, or bank account address, and that is more that enough ... and it works! This while in other EU countries (much less civilized I would add), police can force you to a police station if you do not have the national ID in your pocket... and, beside this, this ID even expire (!)

Ask AI for: "countries in EU where you can be arrested if you do not have the national ID with you"

Did the 'sacrifice' of many UK citizen who left meant something? did EU learn something from it different than: 'you'll see what you've lost, you'r gonna cry!'

grrrr