MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FreeFrosty | 2025-12-08 10:01:24+00:00
Hi we’re Alec and Daniel, builders of Sensii (https://sensii.gg), a voice assistant that answers your questions while you play LOL

Webpage: sensii.gg

Download link: https://api.sensii.gg/api/v1/downloads/sensii.exe

Discord: https://discord.gg/un6QXZ7Prg

When my LOL player friends forced me to stop playing Dota2 for a “better” game, I found myself lost in champions, builds and combos. Overlays like professor were good but very static and have no interaction or reasoning to give me understanding of how the game works. I wanted to know what should be my next move and why!

* Our Solution *

We made a windows app that works in the background, you press a button and ask your question, then our agent responds to you based on the game’s live events and the guides we found on the web. Thanks to the LLMs in use, we are supporting 28 native languages too!

* How We Did It *

- Windows client that captures Riot’s official API live events - The agent is Langchain with tool calls fetching champions guides and builds when game starts. - FastAPI python, Auth0, Traefik and docker as infrastructure. - Our main model is gemini-flash-lite-latest, we found it a good choice based on multimodal input capability, latency and price. - Currently responding with about 2s latency on average for each request.

Our plan: we have no plans, just looking for feedback. It’s cheap enough for us to keep it free for now, and we’d like to make it open source the moment it’s a spaghetti-not. On the product side, we will encourage overlays later and also in an interactive way, meaning users can ask a question and see the suggestion in the for of overlay.

We’d be happy to know what you think of it!
by Veen | 2025-12-08 10:01:31+00:00
A lot of it is internal politics. As a consultant, you see the tip of the iceberg. There may be rational reasons for seemingly irrational decisions that you're not privy to. Your contact's boss wants it done some particular way, so your contact insists on doing it that way. Or your contact has recommended doing it some way internally, and they don't want to be made to look a fool by an outside consultant. Etc.
by Telaneo | 2025-12-08 10:01:35+00:00
I doubt the client is wanting to make a massive investment in customer support, but they're probably also not wanting to be actively hostile to anyone who wants that support. It wouldn't surprise me if the client's older support page was little more than a phone number and/or an email address, and the only reason they moved away from that is because of spam. Maybe they're another step removed from that again, but they're not the 16 steps removed that the Fuck Off page is.

If the client's intent is to provide as little support as possible, that would probably have come up during the conversation where they said they wanted that design, but it seems that they like that design for other reasons (it's a decent way to seem bigger than you actually are, seems more professional maybe?).
by bloppe | 2025-12-08 10:02:31+00:00
While I hate defending GHA, the docs do include this:

- Using the commit SHA of a released action version is the safest for stability and security.

- If the action publishes major version tags, you should expect to receive critical fixes and security patches while still retaining compatibility. Note that this behavior is at the discretion of the action's author.

So you can basically implement your own lock file, although it doesn't work for transitive deps unless those are specified by SHA as well, which is out of your control. And there is an inherent trade-off in terms of having to keep abreast if critical security fixes and updating your hashes, which might count as a charitable explanation for why using hashes is less prevalent.
by nickpp | 2025-12-08 10:02:43+00:00
> assuming equivalent efficiency of conversion

Is there any case where this is remotely even true?! The way advertising budget is spent always has an enormous impact on the outcome.

One competitor spends in print, another on TV. One competitor targets young professionals, another families with kids. One competitor goes to best and most famous agency but buys the cheapest package and fights any decision, another gets a genius kid at the beginning of his career to create a most brilliant TikTok ad. Etc...

> I suggest you look at how advertising works

A valuable advice, try following it sometimes.
by eru | 2025-12-08 10:02:59+00:00
You can prevent buffer overflows even when you don't use a VM. Eg it's perfectly legal for your C compiler to insert checks. But there are also languages like Rust or Haskell that demand an absence of buffer overflows.

You can design a VM that still allows for buffer overflows. Eg you can compile C via the low-level-virtual-machine, and still get buffer overflows.

Any combination of VM (Yes/No) and buffer-overflows (Yes/No) is possible.

I agree that using a VM is one possible way to prevent buffer overflows.
by freefaler | 2025-12-08 10:04:36+00:00
A lot of people forget that going hungry is the default state of not doing a thing. The super rich and socially progressive societies redistribute the taxes they levy on the productive people to help the people who can not (elderly, ill) or won't (lazy bastards) work. It might be a better deal for the society as a whole, to offset the cirme that would ensue if there isn't any social net.

A lion in the plains of Africa is not entitled to a dinner, the farmer in not entitled to a crop yield. It is super rare that people can't do anything to better themselves and get more for their own skills or execution. Any buisness owner will gladly share a percentage of profit you generate for them if you can show them you're indeed generating such profit.

If you're in DPRK or Cuba then you'd need to check your free-market priviledge of having a market for your skills.
by eru | 2025-12-08 10:05:30+00:00
> Operations research is technology, but Uber isn't Gurobi, [...]

Intel isn't ASML, either. They merely use their products. So what?

Presumably Gurobi doesn't write their own compilers or fab their own chips. It's turtles all the way down.

> Fraud detection is a Red Queen's race. If the amount of resources that goes into fraud detection and fraud commission grows by 10×, 100×, 1000×, the resulting increase in human capacities and improvement in human welfare will be nil. It may be technically challenging but it isn't technology.

By that logic no military anywhere uses any technology? Nor is there any technology in Formula 1 cars?
by crote | 2025-12-08 10:05:42+00:00
> The challenge with this solution is of course managing who has access and dealing with people leaving your team and no longer being trusted. Even if you still like them personally, just because they are outside your team would require you to change any credentials they might have.

At least it's a clearly exposed problem: everyone who has ever cloned the repo has a copy of your secrets.

With software like 1Password it is way too easy to blindly rely on built-in permission management. People implicitly assume that removing a person's 1Password access means they can no longer rely the underlying resource - but in practice they could've copied the secret onto a sticky note at any time, and it's not safe until you've rotated the secret!

With shared user accounts there's at least usually the possibility of using 2FA - but that's not exactly going to work with things like deployment tokens intended for automated use...

Of course in an ideal world we wouldn't have those kinds of secrets and we'd all be using short-lived tightly-scoped service accounts - but we don't live in an ideal world.
by permo-w | 2025-12-08 10:06:28+00:00
I'm not sure I've ever seen a contact page that wasn't like this. I always felt it was basically reasonable. if you can direct someone to an answer without having to waste money/time/compute on providing custom service, then that seems basically reasonable to me. yes it's annoying, but it's not a pattern I've ever felt was particularly dark. I'm perfectly happy with "speaking to a human" being the last port of call to fix a problem. as long as it is available somewhere
by happymellon | 2025-12-08 10:06:55+00:00
Absolutely. I've communicated with product teams at AWS in my day job, which is pretty sweet as I've worked for some large organisations, but I've also been put in contact with product teams in my personal projects when I encountered bugs with the AWS SSO, for example.

It's annoying that they actually solve my problems because it would be so easy to hate them as the 900 lb gorilla.
by phplovesong | 2025-12-08 10:07:11+00:00
The original promise of crypto was lost a LONG time ago.

Instead of being a true rival to FIAT, it became a thing with a toxic-as-hell commumity, fraud, and basically its nothing more than a high risk stock. The risk is NOT only "will this go up or down" but you have a high risk of being robbed, as have happened to millions of people.

Maybe there will be a better alternative in the future, but right now bitcoin is not it.
by virgilp | 2025-12-08 10:07:18+00:00
Yeah but you can also have a disaster strike in that place (say, a nuclear accident) that will obliterate your real-estate value. Or general society changes that will make a city much less desirable (see the "rust belt"). Of course, nothing is without risk - so in that sense, it's not surprising that real-estate has risks. But that's what I wanted to underline, nothing is "inflation-proof". There's no guaranteed way to preserve wealth (much less increase it). None.
by CamouflagedKiwi | 2025-12-08 10:08:03+00:00
I've used CircleCI quite a bit in the past; it was pretty good. Feels tough for them to compete with GHA though when you're getting GHA credits for free with your code hosting.

I used Travis rather longer ago, it was not great. Circle was a massive step forward. I don't know if they have improved it since but it only felt useful for very simplistic workflows, as soon as you needed anything complex (including any software that didn't come out of the box) you were in a really awkward place.
by yakshaving_jgt | 2025-12-08 10:08:05+00:00
Of course you're "out" when an inconvenient question lands in your lap.

I'll ask you again.

For how long has NATO been on russia's border?

I know you've seen this comment. I know you've downvoted it and ignored it because it's at odds with your sympathy towards terrorists.

And all this from a guy who has never actually even been to russia.

palm_penetrating_forehead.gif
by kragen | 2025-12-08 10:08:30+00:00
This is the opposite. It says, "Refelects [sic] 90% of solar infrared rays," because of its "High IR reflective Pigments [sic]," so its emissivity in the infrared is 0.1, but the IR-selective paints we're talking about here are optimized for high infrared emissivity, which means they absorb a lot of infrared.

Maybe there's some wiggle room here because solar infrared is mostly near IR and MWIR, and the place where we want high emissivity (absorptivity) is longwave IR, but to the extent that the advertisement makes any claims about infrared emissivity, it claims very low infrared emissivity, not high.

A paint with low emissivity across the spectrum will slow down the temperature rise when the sun is up, but also slow down the temperature drop when the sun is down. This can still make rooms livable, but it isn't the same as what you get with regular whitewash, where the temperature of the roof is actually lower than the temperature of the air around it.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-12-08 10:08:53+00:00
Surprised this isn't by lucidrains, they usually have the first repro attempts.

This tidbit from a discussion on that repo sounds really interesting:

> You can load a pretrained transformer backbone, freeze it, and train only the HOPE/TITAN/CMS memory pathways.

In principle, you would:

- Freeze the shared transformer spine (embeddings, attention/MLP blocks, layer norms, lm_head) and keep lm_head.weight tied to embed.weight.

- Train only the HOPE/TITAN memory modules (TITAN level, CMS levels, self-modifier projections, inner-optimizer state).

- Treat this like an adapter-style continual-learning finetune: base model provides stable representations; HOPE/CMS learn to adapt/test-time-learn on top.

----

Pretty cool if this works. I'm hopeful more research will go into reusing already trained models (other than freeze existing parts, train the rest) so all that training effort doesn't get lost. Something that can re-use that w/ architecture enhancements will be truly revolutionary.
by praash | 2025-12-08 10:09:25+00:00
I hate generic name-text-submit-forms as the only method of contact. Somehow the article makes them the definition of not a "f** off contact page" - why?

I think such forms are a direct downgrade from providing an email address.

- Responding to the submissions likely requires email anyway

- Impersonation/spam is even less difficult

- Sender isn't guaranteed to get a record of sending the message

- A faceless form with unknown machinery feels like sending messages in a bottle
by luckys | 2025-12-08 10:09:45+00:00
An alternative, because the use of dice is to effectively decide an outcome: for example, Knight (Player1) fights Troll. Have both players agree on a short set of possible outcomes. For this example:

1-Knight defeats Troll 2-Troll defeats Knight 3-Troll is wounded but escapes 4-Knight is wounded but escapes 5-Another character or party comes into scene

Then Player2 decides which outcomes are assigned to which numbers (1-5), keeping them a secret and Player1 picks a number not knowing the outcome it stands for.

It's quicker and within reach of us, mere mortals.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-08 10:09:49+00:00
> spiky 400MW loads

Ports can have 10+ container ships at once and unloading one can take multiple days. You're not surprising the power company with sudden loads, you're building a big power plant at the docks and then selling power to the grid during the part of the day when the price is high and charging the ships when it's low.
by mike_hearn | 2025-12-08 10:10:28+00:00
There are other issues. In January they claimed that a US health report contained "fabricated" and "AI generated" citations with the headline being a claim from a Cigna Group report. Their claim it's fabricated is based on nothing more than the URL now being a redirect of the type common in corporate website reorgs.

I did some checking and found the report does exist, but the citation is still not quite correct. Then I discovered someone is running some LLM based citation checker already, which already fact checked this claim and did a correct writeup that seems a lot better than what this GPTZero tool does.

https://checkplease.neocities.org/maha/html/17-loneliness-73...

The mistakes in the citation are the sort of mistake that could have been made by both a human or an AI, really. The visualization in the report is confusing and does contain the 73% number (rounded up), but it's unclear how to interpret the numbers because it's some sort of "vitality index" and not what you'd expect based on how it's introduced. At first glance I actually mis-interpreted it the same way the report does, so it's hard to view this is as clear evidence of AI misuse. Yet the GPTZero folks do make very strong claims based on nothing more than a URL scraper script.
by atwrk | 2025-12-08 10:11:16+00:00
$100 put into S&P 500 in 1975 would be about $7500 today, or about $1250 in 1975 dollars.

$100 put into gold in 1975 would be about $2600 today, or about $440 in 1975 dollars.

S&P 500 would have had 3x the returns of gold.
by epolanski | 2025-12-08 10:12:27+00:00
1. Stallman has never, ever argued that fruits of labor should be free. He's always and only focused on knowledge: software, manuals, books for school, etc. In particular he's been against closed software of appliances and hardware you buy. If you buy a printer you should also own it fully and be able to modify it the way you please, which requires access to its software. He's never talked about services or physical goods being free.

2. There are psychological traits that can influence on a statistical level (very high numbers) political views. But this is just tendencies, it's not determinism.

Openness to new experiences correlates often with openness to change and experimentation on social matters. Neuroticism often correlates with sensitivity on safety matters. Agreeableness with tendencies towards egalitarian views. And all of that still matters way less than cultural background and many other things.

But extraversion or social skills, like in Stallman's case have 0 relationship with political views. In fact, by your logic and his traits, he should fall on the other end of the political spectrum.
CLI coding agents browsing ncdu/gdu directly instead of parsing JSON
by shou_arisaka | 2025-12-08 10:13:03+00:00
Idea:

Tools like `ncdu` and `gdu` already present a compressed, human-friendly view of the filesystem tree. A human just looks at the TUI and presses ↑ ↓ → ← to drill down, decide what matters, and ignore the rest.

Most current AI workflows instead export giant JSON dumps, then build an entire parsing + chunking + filtering layer on top of them. This burns context, adds complexity, and doesn’t match the real usage model.

So the question is: Why not let an LLM simply *operate the TUI* the same way a human does?

Just read the visible screen text, choose an action, and repeat. The TUI is already an optimized abstraction layer.

This fits the same class of interaction as modern CLI-AI agents like *Claude Code* or *OpenCode CLI*, but instead of orchestrating commands, the model would literally navigate an interactive interface (ncdu/gdu) step-by-step.

Questions:

* Does this interaction model make sense, or is there some fundamental flaw I'm missing? * Is anyone aware of existing OSS (beyond general agents like Claude Code / OpenCode CLI) that specifically lets an LLM “drive” ncdu/gdu or similar TUIs directly?
by davedx | 2025-12-08 10:13:19+00:00
The difference being not investing in something for ideological reasons won’t jeopardise your assets; whereas YOLOing your 401k on Palantir because “AI surveillance capitalism is dope lol” is potentially risking significant portions of your future.

Can’t people just retweet Karp on X if they want to “support Palantir ideologically”?

This is GME all over again.
by yakshaving_jgt | 2025-12-08 10:13:23+00:00
I do.

When I was sitting in my home in Odesa, Ukraine, on February 23rd, 2022, one side was saying that the russians were going to invade, and the other side claimed that this was Western russophobic hysteria.

Do you remember what happened next? Do you? Tell us. What happened? Was there an invasion? Was there a war? Were there drones and tanks and missiles and rapes and tortures and hundreds of thousands of people dead and cities razed and millions displaced?

Who could possible know these things!?

HuuRR DuuURrR YoU HaVe aCtUaAllyt no WaY oF kNoWiNg ThE TrUtH DuyrrRR
by Zambyte | 2025-12-08 10:15:05+00:00
I'm glad they found a workflow that works for them, but

> but for some reason I cannot proceed on it while eg the CI is running, but I also don’t want to leave the commit and close my code editor etc. It would be simple to just stash everything and later pop the stash, but it still feels disruptive.

I have been using jj as my git client for 2 years now (wow), and I have never considered this to be disruptive. I just immediately switch to a new commit where I want to go, rather than making a new workspace to work in. Maybe it's a difference in the editor that I use (GNU Emacs) that makes this more natural?
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-08 10:15:35+00:00
>then everyone else followed suit

NPAPI's death in non-IE-browsers started around 2015. Jobs announcing mobile Safari without Flash was 2010. Unfortunately, ActiveX still works to this very day.

Chrome built up a whole new PPAPI to support reasonably fast Flash support after the Jobs announcement. Microsoft launched a major release of Silverlight long after Jobs' speech, but Silverlight (rightfully) died with Windows Phone, which it was the main UI platform for around its practical death. Had Microsoft managed to launch a decent mobile operating system, we'd probably still be running Silverlight in some fashion today. Even still, Silverlight lasted well until 2021 before Silverlight actually fell out of support.

Jobs may have had a hand in the death of Flash websites, but when it came to Java Applets/Silverlight, the decision had little impact. That plugin model was slowly dying on its own already.
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-08 10:16:12+00:00
If you want actionable intuition, try "a human with almost zero self-awareness".

"Self-awareness" used in a purely mechanical sense here: having actionable information about itself and its own capabilities.

If you ask an old LLM whether it's able to count the Rs in "strawberry" successfully, it'll say "yes". And then you ask it to do so, and it'll say "2 Rs". It doesn't have the self-awareness to know the practical limits of its knowledge and capabilities. If it did, it would be able to work around the tokenizer and count the Rs successfully.

That's a major pattern in LLM behavior. They have a lot of capabilities and knowledge, but not nearly enough knowledge of how reliable those capabilities are, or meta-knowledge that tells them where the limits of their knowledge lie. So, unreliable reasoning, hallucinations and more.
by bonesss | 2025-12-08 10:16:30+00:00
The amount of tap dancing and philosophizing some developers are willing to do to dodge estimates is hilarious.

It’s a skill… a basic part and critical part of engineering. IME the common thread between objectors is that they haven’t made a consistent effort to improve — developing, iterating, and refining their estimation process over time.

Yeah, every line of code is a unique snowflake piece of undefinable research the universe has never seen, equally unknowable and inscrutably enigmatic. But the workers at EngiCorp building EngiCorp products using EngiCorp project routines and resources first, second, and third quarter of 2025 are literal world experts at EngiCorp outcomes. They very reasonably should be able to estimate EngiCorp work in Q4, and account for EngiCorp realities, providing maps of future costs that can drive EngiCorp process improvement and investment.

If I ask for a decking estimate and get back sophistry and smug incompetence, I’m not talking with a super skilled professional deck builder. Doesn’t matter how they hammer, saw, or draw.
by pzo | 2025-12-08 10:17:06+00:00
I don't think you can just take tesla supercharger and scale it that easily to use in ships. You have to think how thick charging cables you have, how many of those you need to connect to your ship, how heavy they are, how long they are, how much heat the generate. Remember such battery would be many orders of magnitude bigger than in tesla. Tesla charger cable is many times order thicker than your usb charging cable. Now imagine many times order thicker ship charging cable and how heavy it is, how less elastic it is, how much heat generates, how much isolating cover needs (for heat, protection, magnetic field).
by eru | 2025-12-08 10:18:07+00:00
Continuously differentiable is fine with jumps in that derivative.

I agree in principle. And I also suggest that we should probably only have one bureaucracy that does means testing that can then administer both taxes and benefits. No need to duplicate the effort.

However most benefits and taxes aren't just means tested against income, but a myriad of other conditions. So net transfers aren't just a function of income.