MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crystal_revenge | 2025-12-20 21:31:23+00:00
I wish people would be more vocal in calling out that LLMs have unquestionably failed to deliver on the 2022-2023 promises of exponential improvement at the foundation model level. Yes they have improved, and there is more tooling around them, but clearly the difference between LLMs in 2025 and 2023 is not as large as 2023 and 2021. If there was truly exponential progress, there would be no possibility of debating this. Which makes comments like this:

> The fundamental challenge in AI for the next 20 years is avoiding extinction.

Seem to be almost absurd without further, concrete justification.

LLMs are still quite useful, I'm glad they exist and honestly am still surprised more people don't use them in software. Last year I was very optimistic that LLMs would entirely change how we write software by making use of them as a fundamental part of our programming tool kit (in a similar way that ML fundamentally changed the options available to programmers for solving problems). Instead we've just come up with more expensive ways to extend the chat metaphor (the current generation of "agents" is disappointingly far from the original intent of agents in AI/CS).

The thing I am increasingly confused about is why so many people continue to need LLMs to be more than they obviously are. I get why crypto boosters exist, if I have 100 BTC, I have a very clear interest getting others to believe that they are valuable. But with "AI", I don't quite get, for the non-VS/founder, why it matters that people start foaming out the mouth over AI rather than just using it for the things it's good at.

Though I have some growing sense that this need is related to another trend I've personally started with witness: AI psychosis is very real. I personally know an increasing number of people who are spiraling into an LLM induced hallucinated world. The most shocking was someone talking about how losing human relationships is inevitable because most people can't keep up with those enhanced by AI acceleration. On the softer end I know more and more people who quietly confess how much they let AI work as a perpetual therapist, guiding their every decision (which is more than most people would let a human therapist guide there directions).
by jacquesm | 2025-12-20 21:32:43+00:00
It is amazing. I spend more time in OpenSCAD than in any other program I use and I'm amazingly productive with it. 3 to 4 cycles / day, the longest time is waiting for the printer to cough up the next iteration, then it is building debugging and improving again.

The power of parametric cad is such that I wouldn't be a 10th as productive using an interactive cad system. And because it is effectively software you are writing (even if it compiles into physical objects) you can use all of the goodies that you can use to manage software. Diff files, git, kompare, branching, merging. It is nothing short of amazing, it is like I have a design team and a prototype injection molding facility in one. And the turnaround time is something you'd have killed for in the 90's.
by shmeeed | 2025-12-20 21:32:54+00:00
I was just about to say the same: OpenSCAD is CAD for programmers. It's very different from what's generally considered "CAD".

That's not necessarily a bad thing; there's a clientele for it, especially here on HN. But as a mechanical engineer who's used quite a few industry standard CAD systems, I'm sorry to say I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

Funnily, just a few days ago I tried FreeCAD, and found it to be better than I had expected.
by duskwuff | 2025-12-20 21:33:33+00:00
> It will be interesting to see how they make this arrangement approachable for Arduino’s audience which generally expects ease of use to be a high priority.

If history is any indication: they won't. See the previous Arduino Linux + MCU systems like Arduino Yún and Tian, for example, or the FPGA-based Arduino MKR Vidor - Arduino's approach has generally been to throw hardware over the wall with a bit of example code and hope the community can come up with a use for it.
by benmxrt | 2025-12-20 21:34:03+00:00
OP here.

I built this because I was frustrated with existing file tools requiring uploads for simple tasks like merging PDFs or converting a video.

FileZen is a 100% client-side tool built with React and WebAssembly.

Tech Stack: - ffmpeg.wasm for video/audio processing (running in Web Workers to avoid blocking UI). - pdf-lib for document manipulation. - Vite + React for the frontend.

The main challenge was handling memory limits in the browser (especially specifically on iOS Safari) when processing larger video files.

It's currently an MVP and completely free. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the WASM performance and if you encounter any crashes on mobile devices.
by nness | 2025-12-20 21:34:13+00:00
Largely, no.

AI would need to 1. perform better than a person in a particular role, and 2. do so cheaper than their total cost, and 3. do so with fewer mistakes and reduced liability.

Humans are objectively quite cheap. In fact for the output of a single human, we're the cheapest we've ever been in history (particularly in relation to the cost of the investment in AI and the kind of roles AI would be 'replacing.')

If there is any economic shifts, it will be increases in per person efficiency, requiring a smaller workforce. I don't see that changing significantly in the next 5-10 years.
by abathur | 2025-12-20 21:35:21+00:00
I think both of those experiments do a good job of demonstrating utility on a certain kind of task.

But this is cherry-picking.

In the grand scheme of the work we all collectively do, very few programming projects entail something even vaguely like generating an Nth HTML parser in a language that already has several wildly popular HTML parsers--or porting that parser into another language that has several wildly popular HTML parsers.

Even fewer tasks come with a library of 9k+ tests to sharpen our solutions against. (Which itself wouldn't exist without experts trodding this ground thoroughly enough to accrue them.)

The experiments are incredibly interesting and illuminating, but I feel like it's verging on gaslighting to frame them as proof of how useful the technology is when it's hard to imagine a more favorable situation.
by vasco | 2025-12-20 21:36:00+00:00
> The Contrarian Logic Gate

> A high-frequency debunker who treats every comment thread as a zero-trust environment where empathy is a bug and citing Sartre is a security vulnerability. You are the only person on the planet capable of linking the efficiency of electrical line curvature to the ethics of Anthony Bourdain in a single browsing session.

No I don't! (nice project)
by Copenjin | 2025-12-20 21:36:11+00:00
> If something needs to be fixed, why is it just a log?

What he meant is that is an unexpected condition, that should have never happened, but that did, so it needs to be fixed.

> How is someone supposed to even notice a random error log?

Logs should be monitored.

> At the places that I've worked, trying to make alerting be triggered on only logs was always quite brittle, it's just not best practice.

Because the logs sucked. It not common practice, it should be best practice.

> Throw an exception / exit the program if it's something that actually needs fixing!

I understand the sentiment, but some programs cannot/should not exit. Or you have an error in a subsystem that should not bring down everything.

I completely agree with the approach of the author, but also understand that good logging discipline is rare. I worked in many places where logs sucked, they just dumped stuff, and had to restructure them.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-12-20 21:36:12+00:00
It could be 21.0/8

ref:https://old.reddit.com/r/tmobileisp/comments/1gg7361/why_is_...

I booted an LTE router using a T-Mobile SIM.

Within an hour I had changed WAN IP. Both were from AS749 US-DOD NIC

in 33.79.135.0/24 & 21.140.100.0/24.

They were cgnat'd behind TMble's advertised asn.
by arjie | 2025-12-20 21:37:49+00:00
Oh I had no idea that OpenSCAD was a programmatic toolkit. I recently bought a 3D printer and I don't model so much as describe to Claude Code how to write a Python script that will generate the required STL that I then rescale or whatever in Bambu Studio. LLMs are great at code-oriented stuff so I've stayed away from traditional modeling tools because I assumed you'd have to point and click and so on and I don't really want to learn the ins and outs of their interface. I just need the right mesh made.

The chatbots kept recommending I try using OpenSCAD but I resisted without even giving it a look. The results I had with just the Python script are quite adequate for the tasks I had. You can just ask the LLM to add a fillet to a vertical pin on a plane or to chamfer some edge and it is pretty good at doing it.

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-12-01/Grounding_Yo... if you want to roughly see the workflow.

I'm going to try using OpenSCAD for things in the future. Does anyone else use exclusively an LLM with OpenSCAD (I used Claude Code and Codex) and if you do what did you do to make it more effective? The Python script wouldn't always generate printable meshes so I had to give it a check script to operate on.
by chickensong | 2025-12-20 21:39:18+00:00
> Accountability is a big asterisk that everyone seems to ignore

Humans have a long history of being prone to believe and parrot anything they hear or read, from other humans, who may also just be doing the same, or from snake-oil salesmen preying on the weak, or woo-woo believers who aren't grounded in facts or reality. Even trusted professionals like doctors can get things wrong, or have conflicting interests.

If you're making impactful life decisions without critical thinking and research beyond a single source, that's on you, no matter if your source is human or computer.

Sometimes I joke that computers were a mistake, and in the short term (decades), maybe they've done some harm to society (though they didn't program themselves), but in the long view, they're my biggest hope for saving us from ourselves, specifically due to accountability and transparency.
by asimovaQs | 2025-12-20 21:39:50+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_co...

Postwar kids, now in corporate and political leadership, were raised in a more militant, religious society.

Society is still shedding the paranoia and codependency they observed and have locked away in their neural networks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredric_Wertham

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26328105

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center

It's not the media itself causing mental health crisis but the militant policing and guilt trips at non-conformism

Financial engineering is being used the same way; keeping the next generation poor because they don't want to kowtow to a rich elder.
by mightyham | 2025-12-20 21:39:56+00:00
> Peer-to-peer communications such as gaming usually have to deal with NAT traversal, but with IPv6 this is no longer an issue, especially for multiple gamers using the same connection

You know the list of "benefits" is thin when the second item is entirely theoretical. Even though IPv6 doesn't have to do NAT traversal, it still has to punch through your router's firewall which is effectively the same problem. Most ISP provided home routers simply block all incoming IPv6 traffic unless there is outbound traffic first, and provide little to no support for custom IPv6 rules.

Even if that were not an issue, my bet is that there are close to zero popular games that actually use true peer to peer networking.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-20 21:41:17+00:00
'Normal' cad software is parametric in an entirely different sense. You don't normally build up from entities just like you would in software, which you can then manipulate symbolically.

There are cad packages that can do this but unlike OpenSCAD the main interaction there is the 3D window, not the text editor.

Though AutoCAD of course had this with AutoLISP since 1986.

Interestingly, I'm not sure which has the steeper learning curve, OpenSCAD or AutoLISP. OpenSCAD is really great once it clicks but most people give up long before then.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-12-20 21:42:15+00:00
Strongly agree with this comment. Decoder-only LLMs (the ones we use) are literally Markov Chains, the only (and major) difference is a radically more sophisticated state representation. Maybe "stochastic parrot" is overly dismissive sounding, but it's not a fundamentally wrong understanding of LLMs.

The RL claims are also odd because, for starters, RLHF is not "reinforcement learning" based on any classical definition of RL (which almost always involve an online component). And further, you can chat with anyone who has kept up with the RL field, and quickly realize that this is also a technology that still hasn't quite delivered on the promises it's been making (despite being an incredibly interesting area of research). There's no reason to speculate that RL techniques will work with "agents" where they have failed to achieve wide spread success in similar domains.

I continue to be confused why smart, very technical people can't just talk about LLMs honestly. I personally think we'd have much more progress if we could have conversations like "Wow! The performance of a Markov Chain with proper state representation is incredible, let's understand this better..." rather than "AI is reasoning intelligently!"

I get why non-technical people get caught up in AI hype discussions, but for technical people that understand LLMs it seems counter productive. Even more surprising to me is that this hype has completely destroyed any serious discussions of the technology and how to use it. There's so much oppurtunity lost around practical uses of incorporating LLMs into software while people wait for agents to create mountains of slop.
by db48x | 2025-12-20 21:42:45+00:00
I think you’re conflating multiple things there. There’s nothing magical about IPv4 that gives your LAN addresses stability when your ISP changes your IP prefix. That’s provided by your router doing network address translation. You send a packet from your address which is 192.168.0.42 (a local address), and your router changes the bytes in the packet so that it comes from X.Y.Z.W (your router’s public address). If you really wanted it to your router could do the same thing for IPv6.

IPv6 also has local addresses, but a lot more of them. Anything starting with fd00::/8 is a local address with 40 bits available as the network number. So you can set up your local network with the prefix fdXX:XXXX:XXXX::/48 (where the Xs are chosen randomly) as the prefix and still have 16 bits left over for different subnets if you want. These addresses do not change when your ISP changes your public prefix.

And if you want to add reverse dns for SLAAC addresses then just have your router listen for ICMPv6 Neighbor Announcement addresses and use them to update your DNS server as appropriate. Or configure your servers to use stable addresses based on their MAC address rather than random addresses (which are better for privacy), and then just configure the DNS as you add and remove servers.
by conradfr | 2025-12-20 21:43:24+00:00
I've been self hosting Postgresql for 12+ years at this point. Directly on bare metal then and now in a container with CapRover.

I have a cron sh script to backup to S3 (used to be ftp).

It's not "business grade" but it has also actually NEVER failed. Well once, but I think it was more the container or a swarm thing. I just destroyed and recreated it and it picked up the same volume fine.

The biggest pain point is upgrading as Postgresql can't upgrade the data without the previous version installed or something. It's VERY annoying.
by tptacek | 2025-12-20 21:43:59+00:00
You mean flagged.

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by jasongill | 2025-12-20 21:44:12+00:00
It appears that regularly-updated builds are available here: https://openscad.org/downloads.html#snapshots

or with Homebrew you can do `brew install --cask openscad@snapshot` to install the latest snapshot version.

Or, browse all the snapshot builds here: https://files.openscad.org/snapshots/

(as of this comment, the last snapshot build is from yesterday)
by cm2012 | 2025-12-20 21:44:22+00:00
Ageee with you, this release is obviously a scummy thing to do.

Same as if someone released every book on Kindle for free. There are rules. Project Gutenberg is great. They don't just steal every book they can.

Not to mention the organization is openly trying to profit from this data by selling it to big tech orgs for AI training! None of the artists consented to that, I am sure, to say nothing if Spotify's interests.

On top of that they beg for donations.
by steppi | 2025-12-20 21:45:43+00:00
I don't think they usually make the distinction in a formal sense, but I think most are aware. The space of explorable mathematics is vastly larger than what the community of mathematicians is capable of collectively thinking about, so a lot of aesthetic judgment goes into deciding what is and what isn't interesting to work on. Mathematicians differ in their tastes too. A sense of sturdiness vs flimsiness is something that might inform this aesthetic judgment, but isn't really something most mathematicians would make part of the mathematics. Often, ones interest isn't the result itself, but some proof technique that brings some sense of insight and understanding, and exploring that often doesn't make much contact with foundational matters.
by computerfan494 | 2025-12-20 21:45:58+00:00
Postgres violated serializability on a single node for a considerable amount of time [1] and used fsync incorrectly for 20 years [2]. I personally witnessed lost data on Postgres because of the fsync issue.

Database engineering is very hard. MongoDB has had both poor defaults as well as bugs in the past. It will certainly have durability bugs in the future, just like Postgres and all other serious databases. I'm not sure that Postgres' durability stacks up especially well with modern MongoDB.

[1] https://jepsen.io/analyses/postgresql-12.3

[2] https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/postgresql_fs...
Show HN: Skill capsules" for LLMs, a "poor man's continual learning"
by killerstorm | 2025-12-20 21:46:44+00:00
"Continual learning" is considered one of the "blockers" for LLMs: they can't learn on the job, don't improve over time, etc. In particular, Dwarkesh Patel describes it as a number of problem which has to be solved to get to AGI.

Many academic article propose some kind of a memory system for LLM which might be considered a form of "continual learning". But most evals focus on memorizing facts which is just not very useful (it's better to fetch facts via tool use than to store it in neural memory) and these proposals might not fit well into common LLM API use patterns.

In this article I'm proposing a "new" method called "skill capsules" which is highly pragmatic, easy to understand and evaluate and might integrate well into existing tooling.

Skill capsule is a concrete object - it's a bunch of vectors, basically. You can insert it somewhere into a middle of LLM context and it improves performance on a particular skill, e.g. get tool calls more reliable, use particular writing style, coding style, etc. In theory, it can be used to patch any LLM inadequacy. A capsule can include knowledge (e.g. how to call a particular API or write code involving particular library).

Skill capsule can be produced using a single forward pass from a _single example_, not gradients or "fine-tuning" is required. So it might allow LLM to "learn on the job" - i.e. a single demonstration of how to perform something correctly can be used to create a capsule.

You might ask - why is a "Show HN" and not an academic article? Because researchers already know the method - it's known as "soft prompts", "hypernetworks", "steering vectors", prefix tuning, etc. All these terms are horrible and do not convey possibilities of this method. I just want more people to know that LLMs can be improved on the fly. And a better term -- "skill capsules" -- might help people to think how to apply these techniques (I hope).

Another reasons it's "Show HN" is that:

* it shows one can do a kinda cool ML experiment in a few days using Claude Code and few dollars to pay for GPUs * a somewhat-interesting story of how I got there
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-12-20 21:47:55+00:00
I love these comments on HN.

Now if the (otherwise very kind) guy in charge of the Bureau international des poids et mesures at Sèvres who did not let me have a look at the refrerence for the kilogram and meter could change his mind, I would appreciate. For a physicist this is kinda like a cathedral.
by dekhn | 2025-12-20 21:48:21+00:00
Blender also has a high learning curve but you typically don't need a PhD to understand the errors (instead you just watch youtube videos and copy what they do).

Removing faces from an STL and adding other objects is quite straightforward. Previously, Autodesk had Meshmixer and 123D, I guess Meshmixer is still available: https://meshmixer.org/ and I found it to be great for quick editing of the type you're describing.
by meltyness | 2025-12-20 21:48:35+00:00
I mean this is just one case, I didn't cherry pick this, I peeked at a few previous episodes to find an episode where there was indeed a professor for the feature interview.

It's uninteresting because it's basically become a platform for regulatory capture. It's a wellspring of obviously non-universal ideas like, "there is no right way to integrate AI and primary education", "the federal government should subsidize ai access", or "only safe ai platforms should be permitted". I mean it's obviously their right to blather incessantly about it, I just think it's boring, and that's all I've said.

Maybe it's because I'm not a politician or a philanthropist, and I'm not required to tailor my actions to appease a large number of people subject to my will, but there's obviously better ways to approach that, like delegating and talking to people, who are local to the concern.

It's a nuanced and long term discussion and I think lots of the stuff that winds up in these interviews is really a local issue that's going into the wrong channel by well-meaning folks who don't understand government, or worse folks who are seeking to exploit government for profit.

And concretely, the interview doesn't focus on the book or the study, it's literally just an authoritative "intersectional" quiz about how AI/Education crosses with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,... a dumb question.
by porkloin | 2025-12-20 21:48:40+00:00
I think I'm realizing that openscad was probably just the first time that parametric design options were given to me in a context where it made sense to me (in code). Maybe some of the software I've used has supported parametric positioning, but it wasn't made obvious to me. In OpenSCAD it's parametric by necessity. I said this in another comment, but the other programs I've worked with in GUI are most certainly not high end pieces of software: tinkercad, freecad, sketchup.

I'm not doing complex character model designs, I'm usually building functional prints like enclosures or cases. It certainly sounds like there are features of better CAD software that makes parametric the default?