MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by still_grokking | 2025-12-09 22:18:14+00:00
Examples and code snippets in the official docs of course default to the new syntax, making them well readable for all people accustomed to Scala's new syntax.

> If I recall correctly, later they added a switch allowing one to choose between syntax versions in the online docs.

Stating this, which is not, and never was true creates the impression you're talking about things you have no clue about.

The point is: Removing braces really makes code much easier to read for people who get distracted by useless line noise!

> So reading unfamiliar syntax is literally harder. > […] > Source: have a degree in neurophysiology.

You need a degree to understand something such obvious? Never mind…

The point is: New syntax is only new in the first few hours of contact with it.

Anybody who uses more than one language knows that switching languages is in fact a bit distracting, but at latest on the second day you completely stop thinking about syntax, and than switching back to whatever was before is as hard as the previous switch to the current thing. Usually this happens already after a few hours for languages you already know.

As we're talking about neurophysiology: As a matter of fact filtering "noise" — irrelevant information — from sensory input is a hard task for the brain. So having less distracting useless noise in the input helps to concentrate on the stuff that actually matters!

Braces in code are 100% redundant, useless noise. The only reason they were added in the first place was to make code simpler to parse for computers, something that does not matter any more since many decades. So there is no rational reason any more to pollute code with useless, distracting noise.
by zmmmmm | 2025-12-09 22:18:34+00:00
I'm bullish on Apple in the long term for AI. Don't get me wrong, they will always suck at it. But it seems obvious to me that we're sailing up to an enshittification cliff in the very near future. Every provider is going to start trying to prove they are making money from consumers and that means one thing: ads, ads ads. Or worse, invisible influence you can't even tell is there. There is going to be a trust crisis and that's going to send people flocking to on-device / local / trustworthy AI that will land right in Apple's lap.
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-12-09 22:18:37+00:00
> What about the multiple people who have reported receiving incredibly useful information after asking an LLM, when doctors were useless?

They got lucky.

This is why I wrote this blog post. I'm sure some people got lucky when an LLM managed to give them the right answer, because they go and brag about it. How many people got the wrong answer? How many of them bragged about their bad decision? This is _selection bias_. I'm writing about my embarrassing lapse of judgment because I doubt anyone else will
by sigmoid10 | 2025-12-09 22:18:41+00:00
The difficulty is turning the metric tensor into a quantum field like object. Apart from being incredibly complicated, because the field interacts with itself and all other fields, there are a bunch of mathematical quirks that prevent this from working out like it does in all our usual quantum field theories. Until someone comes along with a theory where all this works and still returns our normal physics in the low energy limit, noone can say what might really happen at that level. Maybe spacetime isn't quantizable because it fundamentally isn't quantum. Maybe it doesn't even exist at those length scales and what we perceive as space and time are emergent properties of some yet to be understood quantum process.
by ChymeraXYZ | 2025-12-09 22:19:22+00:00
I know it may sound stupid but in my latest project I chose ULIDs because I can easily select them as one word, instead of various implementations of browsers, terminals, DB guis, etc each have their own opinion how to select and copy the whole UUID. So from that point of view ULIDs "look" better for me as they are more ergonomic when I actually have to deal with them manually.
by Animats | 2025-12-09 22:19:30+00:00
> Those questions aren’t monetizable. ... There’s an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make.

There lies the problem. Worse, someone may solve it in the wrong way:

I'll turn on the light in a minute, but first, a word from our sponsor...

Technically, this will eventually be solved by some hierarchical system. The main problem is developing systems with enough "I don't know" capability to decide when to pass a question to a bigger system. LLMs still aren't good at that, and the ones that are require substantial resources.

What the world needs is a good $5 LLM that knows when to ask for help.

Useful Douglas Adams reference: [1]

[1] http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=135
by Izkata | 2025-12-09 22:19:50+00:00
> Nice comment! How is the HD collection?

I bought my Switch because I found out about the HD collection, so this is remembered from 6+ years ago and may be fixed now, but two problems stuck out with Grandia II: One video crossing the Granacliffs didn't play (with the flying ship), and several magics turn out to be multiple videos played on top of each other - and they messed up the aspect ratio in a few (stretch vs center) so the visuals don't line up.

Other than that it was what I remember on Dreamcast. Oddly, even the snowy area lagged in the exact same way as on Dreamcast.
by themadturk | 2025-12-09 22:20:48+00:00
I've been scolded online for buying from Amazon. "Oh, if you look around enough you can get anything locally." I live in the Seattle area, and I certainly cannot get everything I want locally, unless by "locally" you mean taking an hour or two to drive a 40 mile round-trip to a suburb to the north. I know, of course, that Amazon is partly responsible for being unable to find some things locally, but if I want or need something and I can't get it here in town, yeah, I'm using Amazon.
by tunesmith | 2025-12-09 22:21:10+00:00
So, I've been playing with an mcp server of my own... the api the mcp talks to is something that can create/edit/delete argument structures, like argument graphs - premises, lemmas, and conclusions. The server has a good syntactical understanding of arguments, how to structure syllogisms etc.

But it doesn't have a semantic understanding because it's not an llm.

So connecting an llm with my api via MCP means that I can do things like "can you semantically analyze the argument?" and "can you create any counterpoints you think make sense?" and "I don't think premise P12 is essential for lemma L23, can you remove it?" And it will, and I can watch it on my frontend to see how the argument evolves.

So in that sense - combining semantic understanding with tool use to do something that neither can do alone - I find it very valuable. However, if your point is that something other than MCP can do the same thing, I could probably accept that too (especially if you suggested what that could be :) ). I've considered just having my backend use an api key to call models but it's sort of a different pattern that would require me to write a whole lot more code (and pay more money).
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-12-09 22:21:29+00:00
(2017)

Some previous discussions:

4 months ago, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705486

2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24768721

2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867918
by cortesoft | 2025-12-09 22:21:39+00:00
Who gets to choose what products are future rubbish?

Even if you think this product is a waste of resources, why is THIS waste of resources something we should stop, but not other, bigger wastes? Should we outlaw flying somewhere when you could take a train? The fuel spent on a short flight wastes way more resources and damages the environment much more than this smart ring does. If we are willing to ban this piece of tech because it is a waste, couldn't the same arguments be made about a short range flight?
by olsondv | 2025-12-09 22:21:47+00:00
As a kid, I had a bulls-eye rash which is the tell-tale sign of Lyme disease. My dad snapped a Polaroid since we were on a trip and couldn’t get to my pediatrician for a week. The rash cleared up before I went in. My doctor didn’t want to diagnose it as anything or write an antibiotics prescription…until my dad pulled out the photo. She then immediately wrote the antibiotics for it. The danger of under diagnosis for Lyme disease versus antibiotic resistance tilts so far towards writing the prescription that I will never understand her reasoning. Point is we knew to go in and to advocate for my own health. Doctors are fallible humans too.
by wrxd | 2025-12-09 22:22:38+00:00
That's debatable. I heard many people telling me they were confused by the fediverse because they had to pick a server to join. It's never been a problem with me but it's a common complaint.

There was a time when RSS used to be well integrated with browsers, you cannot get a lower barrier to entry than that. Sadly these days are gone.

As it stands now I'd say that the barrier to entry is pretty much similar. One the one hand users have to understand federation and have an account on a fediverse server. On the other hand they need to understand RSS and install an RSS reader or use an online solution
by stocksinsmocks | 2025-12-09 22:22:38+00:00
Having used Bentley software products I can tell you with complete certainty that professional software developers have extremely bad judgment when it comes to the need to test software and verify its functionality. Developers just think they know what they’re doing because there’s typically not a strong feedback mechanism that inflicts serious career damage when they do things that are extremely lazy or stupid or unethical. How many people lost their job or had to change their name and live out the rest of their days in Juarez Mexico over AWS’ incomprehensible configuration causing an internet brown out? Anyone? A teenager serves cold onion rings at a burger joint and he’s on the street. Some lazy dweeb at Amazon blows up the internet and - come on, isn’t it about the friends we made along the way? It’s obscene and the lack of professionalism and accountability is a total disgrace.
by ewoodrich | 2025-12-09 22:22:42+00:00
I wouldn't describe most of Claude's predictions as better, they seem to skew towards wildly over optimistic futurism/science-fantasy:

"SpaceX announces Mars City Alpha is now self-sustaining (spacex.com)" Show HN: I built an IDE for direct neural programming (thoughtexchange.io)

Gemini's SpaceX post is at least in the ballpark of plausibility 10 yrs from now:

First successful telemetry from Starship HLS-9 on the Sea of Tranquility (spacex.com)
by monerozcash | 2025-12-09 22:22:42+00:00
That's an easy cop out!

AI saves lives, it's selection bias.

AI gives bad advice after being asked leading questions by a user who clearly doesn't know how to use AI correctly, AI is terrible and nobody should ask it about medical stuff.

Or perhaps there's a more reasonable middle ground? "It can be very useful to ask AI medical questions, but you should not rely on it exclusively."

I'm certainly not suggesting that your story isn't a useful example of what can go wrong, but I insist that the conclusions you've reached are in fact mistaken.

The difference between your story and the stories of the people whose lives were saved by AI is that they did generally not blindly trust what the AI told them. It's not necessary to trust AI to receive helpful information, it is basically necessary to trust AI in order to hurt yourself using it.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-12-09 22:22:47+00:00
I think AI can be useful to cite in comments as a source of information. I.e., where you might otherwise say "According to Bloomberg, CPI is up 5% in the past 6 months[0]" with [0] linking to a page where you got that info, you could have "According to Claude/GPT/Gemini, CPI is up 5% in the past 6 months" ideally with [0] being the prompt used.
Show HN: DocNode, A TypeScript OT library for local-first apps
by GermanJablo | 2025-12-09 22:23:38+00:00
Hi everyone! After two years of development, I’m excited to announce DocNode: a type-safe, fast, ID-based Operational Transformation (OT) framework for conflict-free collaborative editing. CRDT mode is in progress. Along the way, I learned a ton. I rewrote the library several times. Sometimes because I was obsessed with the API, other times for technical reasons. I moved from CvRDT to CmRDT, and finally to ID-based OT.

Happy to answer questions!
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-09 22:23:53+00:00
This article is not technical and is 4 pages and includes a 1 paragraph executive summary. There's only 2 pages of content.

There's no specific info about any experiment. It just claims a statistics error was recently found in another paper/experiment. It claims fixing the error suggests we should supplement more Vitamin D.

It gestures vaguely at "Diabetes" and "immune health" and "we used to eat fish" to claim that we want/need more blood Vitamin D. It also points to some other actual studies that might have good evidence that we want or need more Vitamin D.

I would doubt anything in this could cause harm. Vitamin D is fat soluble so taking too much can be dangerous, but I don't think the recommended doses here are close to that dosage.

This paper aims for slightly more than 100nmol/l Vitamin D marker in blood, while other NIH papers claim >375nmol/l is getting into Vitamin D toxicity territory.

>https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6158375/

NIH previously claimed a serum level of less than 72nmol/l is a health problem, so this paper is bumping that up slightly.

My understanding is that large scale tests of Vitamin D supplementation don't ever seem to turn out as great as all these papers would imply. Maybe their experiments had too low a dose.

My own supplementation has done jack and shit. Maybe I needed a higher dose.

I still hold skepticism that all of humanity needs a supplement, as that's just a sales pitch from a company at that point, but the "Everyone really does need a shitload of Vitamin D supplement" hypothesis at least has a mechanism that makes sense.
by godelski | 2025-12-09 22:24:04+00:00
I'm curious about 2 things.

1) Why did you not test the standard Collatz sequence? I would think that including that, as well as testing on Z+, Z+\2Z, and 2Z+, would be a bit more informative (in addition to what you've already done). Even though there's the trivial step it could inform how much memorization the network is doing. You do notice the model learns some shortcuts so I think these could help confirm that and diagnose some of the issues.

2) Is there a specific reason for the cross attention?

Regardless, I think it is an interesting paper (these wouldn't be criteria for rejection were I reviewing your paper btw lol. I'm just curious about your thoughts here and trying to understand better)

FWIW I think the side quest is actually pretty informative here, though I agree it isn't the main point.
by rmason | 2025-12-09 22:24:27+00:00
I have run a ColdFusion users group in East Lansing for the past twenty five years. I have helped many first time speakers and this is some outstanding advice.

Although I have never done it myself I can also recommend Toastmasters. Seen some speakers soar after attending this group for a year. You wouldn't even think that it was the same person presenting. Having that experience of public speaking can also greatly accelerate your career.
by UncleOxidant | 2025-12-09 22:24:45+00:00
But I have been vibe coding in C. Created a parser/compiler for a subset of the C programming language that compiles to microcode for a novel computing architecture. Could I have done this on my own? Sure, but if I did I would've probably have done it in OCaml. And it would've taken me a lot longer to get it to the point where it is now. I think the advantage of vibe coding this (at least for me) is that I would have a hard time getting started due to procrastination - and I'd have a hard time keeping interested if there wasn't something working (yeah, maybe I'm a little ADHD, but aren't we all at this point?). Vibe coding it got me to something that was working pretty well in a surprisingly short amount of time which tended to make me more engaged without losing interest and attention. I didn't have to get caught up in remembering the intricacies of creating a makefile to build the code, for example. That's one of many places where I can get bogged down.
by kevin061 | 2025-12-09 22:24:59+00:00
RSS is "simpler" from the perspective of no federation, but in a day and age where people own multiple phones, laptops, and/or computers, RSS sync becomes a real hassle, and Feedly is not exactly cheap.

On the other hand, Mastodon is "just like Twitter", all your activity is synced across your devices and you have a uniform experience, but it is true federation introduces some challenges for novice users.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-09 22:25:12+00:00
A key feature of liberal democracy over the pre-existing aristocratic oligarchies was providing a classless society (which, superficially, as classes were defined under aristocratic systems, it does.)

The entire analysis of capitalism which articulated the class system with which it replaced that of the pre-existing aristocracy and revealed the elimination of class to actually just be a switch in its structure and elevation of a new ruling class was by Communists.
by Mistletoe | 2025-12-09 22:25:20+00:00
I think of my Alexa often when I think about AI and how Amazon, of all people, couldn't monetize it. What hope do LLM providers have? Alexa is in rooms all around my house and has gotten amazing at answering questions, setting timers, telling me the weather, etc., but would I ever pay a subscription for it? Absolutely not. I wouldn't even have bought the hardware except that it was a loss leader and was like $20. I wouldn't have even paid $100 for it. Our whole economy is mortgaged on this?
by bpt3 | 2025-12-09 22:25:32+00:00
You mean you refuse to believe hard data on vacancy rates over sensationalized opinion pieces or outright misinformation that sounds more appealing to you?

Your proposed "action" is comically obtuse and will be ineffective at best. So no one can renovate a home for more than 30 days?

Number go up on property forever is what the masses want and what works for them, because the majority of people live in a home owned by that household. So you're misinformed about that as well.
by QuercusMax | 2025-12-09 22:25:55+00:00
It doesn't help that Google also keeps breaking everything with the home voice assistants, and this has been true for ages and ages.

I only have a single internet-enabled light in my house (that I got for free), and 90% of the time when I ask the Assistant to turn on the light, it says "Which one?". Then I tell it "the only one that exists in my house", and it says "OK" and turns it on.

Getting it to actually play the right song is on the right set of speakers is also nearly impossible, but I can do it no problem with the UI on my phone.

I don't fear a future where computers can do every task better than us: I fear a future where we have brain-damaged robots annoy the hell out of me because someone was too lazy to do anything besides throw an LLM at things.
by whynotminot | 2025-12-09 22:26:15+00:00
You guys must really hate running (and love missing the point). It wasn't even intended to be a "bad straw man" -- I literally would be fine running a 5K. If it was a documented example of a way I could meet their expectations for creating an inclusive environment, I would totally run a 5K themed around one of the company-approved causes. Might even lead up a whole group of us from the company to run in it together.

The point was: Do they have actual documented examples of what they want from me when they put this on my performance review:

> What impact did your actions have in contributing to a more diverse and inclusive Microsoft?

I am glad your companies have given you documented examples of what they have wanted in this arena. I'm sure that helped make it easier for you to meet their expectations and avoid any potentially awkward confusion.
by autoexec | 2025-12-09 22:26:21+00:00
It's always fun when people point out an LLMs insane responses to simple questions that shatter the illusion of them having any intelligence, but besides just giving us a good laugh when AI has a meltdown failing to produce a seahorse emoji, there are other times it might be valuable to discuss how they respond, such as when those responses might be dangerous, censored, or clearly being filled with advertising/bias
by sedatk | 2025-12-09 22:26:45+00:00
Whenever ULID comes up, I need to remind that it has a sequential ID generation mode in its spec which is prone to conflicts on multi-threads, processes or hosts which kills the purpose of a "universal" identifier. If you need a sequential ID, just use an integer, preferably one that's autoincremented by the database.

It's best to stick to UUIDv7 because of such quirks of ULID.
by russfink | 2025-12-09 22:26:53+00:00
One trick I have tried is asking the LLM to output a specification of the thing we are in the middle of building. A commenter above said humans struggle with writing good requirements - LLMs have trouble following good requirements - ALL of them - often forgetting important things while scrambling to address your latest concern.

Getting it to output a spec lets me correct the spec, reload the browser tab to speed things up, or move to a different AI.
by still_grokking | 2025-12-09 22:26:53+00:00
The website is a private undertaking which started literally a few days ago. It's not some official complete tracker.

The point was to show that big corps are dependent on Scala, often at their core.

Scala is likely not for everybody, but where you need to write safe high level code there is more or less no alternative, not even on the horizon. Scala is simply very likely where Rust will end up after the honeymoon, when people realize that feature rich, safety first languages aren't for the mass market, where mostly only the cost of initial development counts.