MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wat10000 | 2025-12-14 21:45:09+00:00
I’m very confused. Why would “black-box ranking algorithms” be on the no advertising side?

Medicine has a pretty good system for getting knowledge out to doctors as far as I can tell. I fail to see how advertising contributes to this in any way. Banning advertising is the opposite of controlling attention.

I’d like a total ban on all advertising, but I at least see some merits in the discovery argument for consumer goods even if I don’t agree with it. But saying advertisement is necessary so doctors can find out about new treatments? I hope this is just subtle satire, because, what?
by drdeca | 2025-12-14 21:45:14+00:00
Of course. Did part of what I said suggest I thought otherwise?

I guess the part about the “when you quantize it after fixing the gauge in a way that loses the manifestness of the Lorentz invariance, if you aren’t in the critical dimension, supposedly you don’t keep the Lorentz invariance” part could imply otherwise? If that part is wrong, my mistake, I shouldn’t have trusted the source I was reading for that part.

I was viewing that part as being part of how you could be right about Lorentz invariance being something derived nontrivially from the theory.

Because, the Polyakov action (and the Nambu-Goto action) are, AIUI, typically initially(at the start of the definition of the theory) formulated in a way that is not just Lorentz invariant, but manifestly Lorentz invariant,

and if there is no step in the process of defining the theory that isn’t manifestly Lorentz invariant, I would think that Lorentz invariance wouldn’t be a nontrivial implication, but something baked into the definition throughout,

so, for it to be a nontrivial implication of the theory, at some point after the definition of the classical action, something has to be done that, while it doesn’t break Lorentz invariance, it “could” do so, in the sense that showing that it doesn’t is non-trivial.

And, I was thinking this would start with the choice of gauge making it no longer manifestly Lorentz invariant.

I trust you have much more knowledge of string theory than I do, so I would appreciate any correction you might have.
by agumonkey | 2025-12-14 21:45:32+00:00
I don't have all the variables in (financials of openai debt etc) but a few articles mention that they leverage part of their work to {claude,gemini,chatgpt} code agents internally with good results. it's a first step in a singularity like ramp up.

People think they'll have jobs maintaining AI output but i don't see how maintaining is that harder than creating for a llm able to digest requirements and codebase and iterate until a working source runs.
by malnourish | 2025-12-14 21:46:19+00:00
Yes; well, I might not get "mad" at my wife, but I might emotionally disengage or feel like I lack closure were I to explain a situation to my wife and she responded with solutions before I even had the chance to finish.

It took me a long time to realize this. Actually, I've just now realized it clearly. Our emotional expression and the scenario may be a bit different, but it's fundamentally the same concept.
by musicale | 2025-12-14 21:46:21+00:00
Universities will respond that regulatory compliance is more complex and costly every year, and that student services costs are also increasing continuously (and cannot be cut if a university wishes to remain competitive). They may also say that with faculty not wishing to take on administrative roles (which take time away from research and teaching and do not help with tenure cases) the university needs to hire more full-time administrators.

Some universities will also claim that the average financial contribution for students and families has not increased, in spite of tuition and fees outpacing inflation for half a century or more and student loan debt reaching $1.6T.

But any large bureaucratic organization tends to seek expansion of its staff, budget, and influence, and that is likely a core reason for the dramatic increase in non-teaching university staff.
by loxs | 2025-12-14 21:46:32+00:00
It depends very much on the language/server you are using. In Rust, IMO GraphQL is still the best, easiest and fastest way to have my Rust types propagated to the frontend(s) and making sure that I will have strict and maitainable contracts throughout the whole system. This is achieved via the "async_graphql" crate which allows you to define/generate the GraphQL schema in code, by implementing the field handlers.

If you are using something which requires you to write the GraphQL schema manually and then adapt both the server and the client... it's a completely different experience and not that pleasant at all.
by vpribish | 2025-12-14 21:46:50+00:00
I'm building personal, minimalist, website monitor in Gleam using the Erlang OTP.

In the time-honored hacker tradition of added more problems to the problem i'm trying to solve I'm learning a new language (never done FP before, either), building the product I wanted, using the latest crop of creative tools, and treating it as a little end-to-end business startup too. Launching in January!
by alexpotato | 2025-12-14 21:46:54+00:00
Lots of comments about using your own systems etc so I'll say two things:

1. The biggest win is just doing spaced repetition. Period

You don't even need an algorithm. You can just have options for "remind me in 1 day, 7 days, 14 days". This is how people did with physical cards: they just put the card at the back of the deck, the middle or the front.

2. LLMs now make it trivial to just say "make me an Anki clone in python with these features" and it will come up with something pretty decent.

In closing, learning the things that LLMs can't do quickly and efficiently is basically what we should all be doing.
by blazingbanana | 2025-12-14 21:46:56+00:00
Thank you for the feedback, I really do appreciate you taking the time to check it out and write out the comment! I'll look at adding a note about total app size in the description, it won't hurt.

As for discoverability / the "your purchase is successful" message, I'm not sure what else I can do, I've set it to free, no ads etc in Google Play. Maybe I need to hit a few more keywords for transcription so it surfaces it more.
by sureglymop | 2025-12-14 21:47:02+00:00
That's correct, however I would say there is a small difference in that most of this code still seems just like JavaScript, sometimes it even feels as though it is JavaScript running in the same context when it then gets compiled to run on server/client.

I think the point I'm trying to make is that this can be confusing or even dangerous especially for new developers. It just doesn't hurt to actually look at the Vite plugins transforming it all to understand it instead of making assumptions if we work with it on the daily.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-14 21:47:13+00:00
> For that, you needed CGI scripts, which meant learning Perl or C. I tried learning C to write CGI scripts. It was too hard. Hundreds of lines just to grab a query parameter from a URL. The barrier to dynamic content was brutal.

That's folk wisdom, but is it actually true? "Hundreds of lines just to grab a query parameter from a URL."

/*@null@*/ /*@only@*/ char * get_param (const char * param) { const char * query = getenv ("QUERY_STRING"); if (NULL == query) return NULL; char * begin = strstr (query, param); if ((NULL == begin) || (begin[strlen (param)] != '=')) return NULL; begin += strlen (param) + 1; char * end = strchr (begin, '&'); if (NULL == end) return strdup (begin); return strndup (begin, end-begin); }

In practice you would probably parse all parameters at once and maybe use a library.

I recently wrote a survey website in pure C. I considered python first, but do to having written a HTML generation library earlier, it was quite a cakewalk in C. I also used the CGI library of my OS, which granted was one of the worst code I ever refactored, but after, it was quite nice. Also SQLite is awesome. In the end I statically linked it, so I got a single binary to upload anywhere. I don't even need to setup a database file, this is done by the program itself. It also could be tested without a webserver, because the CGI library supports passing variables over stdin. Then my program outputs the webpage on stdout.

So my conclusion is: CRUD websites in C are easy and actually a breeze. Maybe that also has my previous conclusion as a prerequisite: HTML represents a tree and string interpolation is the wrong tool to generate a tree description.
by foldr | 2025-12-14 21:48:36+00:00
You seem to be suggesting that a language being safe or unsafe is a social contract rather than a technical property of the language.

>And do you say that C offers these guarantees ?

No, that would be silly, and it's an illustration of why it is silly to say that a language guarantees X if it is the programmer who must check that X holds. If we go down that route (which, to repeat, would be silly), then we can make C safe without any technical changes just by adding some language to the standard saying that C programmers are obliged to ensure that their code maintains a certain list of invariants. When you say that "Rust makes the same guarantees regardless of the unsafe keyword", it seems to me that you are doing something equally pointless.
by Eric_WVGG | 2025-12-14 21:48:46+00:00
I’ve been knocking around and getting various false starts on three ideas for a while…

- a videogame. I've got a pretty killer idea in an open niche, but the indie market is so massively oversaturated that it feels impossible to get eyeballs.

- a next-generation post-RSS newsreader. But news is so depressing these days. I think most of the world wants to ostrich and I don't blame them.

- a reboot of Svpply, my own shuttered startup. I'd love to just make (another) thing that's about excellent clothes and shoes and artisanal pocketknives, but the way the economy is going, this feels grotesque. I was lucky to make it the first time when luxury goods were attainable _and_ normal people could pay for necessities; that window has closed.
by linkage | 2025-12-14 21:49:11+00:00
Obligatory mention of Obsidian’s most popular spaced repetition plugin: https://github.com/st3v3nmw/obsidian-spaced-repetition

It has the least friction for creating flashcards I’ve ever seen. You actually don’t even have to create flashcards - you can add any note to the review queue with one keystroke and record the ease of recall with another command.
by munch117 | 2025-12-14 21:49:24+00:00
I struggled a bit with what to point to as signs that it's not an LLM conception. Someone else had commented on the headlines as something that was AI-like, and since I could easily imagine a writing process that would lead to headlines like that, that's what I chose. A little too confidently perhaps, sorry.

But actually, I think I shouldn't have needed to identify any signs. It's the people claiming something's the work of an LLM based on little more than gut feelings, that should be asked to provide more substance. The length of sentences? Number of bullet points? That's really thin.
by _JoRo | 2025-12-14 21:49:28+00:00
As someone who has used spaced repetition extensively I will just provide a few insights that might be helpful:

1. Decide on what's important. Just because you learn something doesn't mean that it should be logged to the system. I used to log a lot of minor details (like niche method signatures or command flags to the system). If you make cards for every detail like this then you will be trapped reviewing 100s of cards daily that you likely never use.

2. For the cards you deem are important, make sure you understand the concept. This often means making 2-5 cards for the concept that test your understanding from different angles (definition, pros, cons, how would I explain this to someone else, etc...). This helps to cement the concept at a foundational level.

3. Try to move from the existing flashcards to 2nd order flashcards or pure application after the first couple reviews. So your foundational cards are now set to review in 6 months or 1 year. At this timescale if you prioritized what was important and made sure that you understood the foundational concepts, then usually simply doing things related to the concepts will be the reviews (and sorry to say but if in 1 year you get a card related to what you are doing, but never used, chances are it probably wasn't that important). In addition to doing, you can also create 2nd order flashcards (which might compare 2 concepts). These types of cards test the foundational knowledge indirectly, and are helpful for higher order thinking.

In conclusion, I think spaced repetition is a very effective tool for efficient learning (especially in the first 60 days or so after learning something). I think the major pitfall is not prioritizing what cards get made and being stuck in review hell.
by arvida | 2025-12-14 21:49:48+00:00
Building https://localhero.ai, automated on-brand i18n translations that run in your CI pipeline. Right now I'm working on better .po/gettext support, based on feedback from an early customer. With gettext you usually keeps source strings in the actual source code. So I'm building a workflow where non-technical people (PMs, designers) can edit translations in the web UI and then easily generate a PR with both code changes and translation file updates. Trying to make translations work smooth for both automated CI pipelines and PMs/designers who don't live in Git, when translations are checked into the repo. Also going through my network, talking to devs and localization folks to understand what could be improved in their orgs for translations.
by sureglymop | 2025-12-14 21:50:01+00:00
Let's not act like it's the same thing. I'm not strictly talking about just Typescript, I'm saying that if you work with these technologies every day it would be wise to go look at their Vite plugins to see how they transform your code and be sure to understand it. It's nice to have magic but it's nicer to use the magic if we have demystified it first.

And I don't know about you, but I occasionally do open compiled ELF files in a hex editor and I certainly did at first when I was learning more. That's a good practice also.
by wowczarek | 2025-12-14 21:50:06+00:00
I was going to mention Planet before I saw your follow-up comment. I bought their Gemini, and it seemed interesting for a while, but being a phone with a keyboard, still effectively a phone, battery life wasn't great and again a phone, my default was never to shut it down, and it would always be out of juice if not used for a while. Eventually it outdated itself sitting in a drawer; just didn't feel right. The external notification screen seemed like a good idea but too clunky for general use, and then the awkward fingerprint sensor position and accidentally touching things when opening / closing. I was actually considering it during my post-BlackBerry withdrawal period, but it just didn't cut it, and while it had the roots behind it and some seemingly nice productivity software, a Psion it just wasn't.
by yunyu | 2025-12-14 21:50:21+00:00
> Medicine has a pretty good system for getting knowledge out to doctors as far as I can tell.

Yes, it does - it’s called advertising. In the US, the average promotional spend per physician exceeds $20k/yr. As a result, a lot more patients are able to quickly benefit from new medications like Dupixent or Ozempic as a result of wider awareness.

Suppose we banned Google ads and you are searching for a plumber. You are now entirely at the whims of whoever designs the ranking algorithm on Google/the Yellow Pages, who has nothing at stake here. Meanwhile, advertisers have to bid for your attention - making them at least somewhat aligned with your buying intent.

The same applies for doctors searching for state of the art diabetes treatments. It’s hard to say that relying on a fuzzy notion of “legitimacy” (or entrenched status-quo cliques) is a more fair system.
by adsharma | 2025-12-14 21:50:23+00:00
Opensource Embedded Columnar Graph Database: https://github.com/LadybugDB/ladybug

Store your graphs in Parquet files on object storage or DuckDB files and query them using strongly typed Cypher. Advanced factorized join algorithms (details in a VLDB 2023 paper when it was called Kuzu).

Looking to serve externalized knowledge with small language models using this infra. Watch Andrej Karpathy's Cognitive Core podcasts more details.
by llbbdd | 2025-12-14 21:50:29+00:00
A lot of software engineering is recognizing the limitations of the domain that you're trying to work in, and adapting your tools to that environment, but thank you for your contribution to the discussion.

EDIT: I hemmed and hawed about responding to your attitude directly, but do you talk to people anywhere but here? Is this the attitude you would bring to normal people in your life?

Dick Van Dyke is 100 years old today. Do you think the embittered and embarrassing way you talk to strangers on the internet is positioning your health to enable you to live that long, or do you think the positive energy he brings to life has an effect? Will you readily die to support your animosity?
by minusf | 2025-12-14 21:50:54+00:00
Thank you for the clarification, that was not entirely clear to me from the post.

You also mention that the current "optimised" version is "good enough" for every-day use (I use `bs4` for working with html), was the first iteration also usable in that way? Did you look at `html5ever` because the LLM hit a wall trying to speed it up?
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-14 21:51:22+00:00
Yep, nuance is definitely needed. The greater issue is orthogonal: pushing out unfinished and incompatible code as production-usable rather code written in another language.

Rust, by itself, isn't a panacea to add formal verification but one leg on the footstool of formal verification methodologies to produce safe(r/ish) software rather than subtly buggy software that's difficult to prove correct and more expensive to maintain.

"If it aint broke don't fix it" =~= "I've never gotten into an accident until now, so airbags and seatbelts are pointless." ==> reactive methodology / failure / hubris
by mmooss | 2025-12-14 21:51:35+00:00
I agree about serious lectures, but ...

> not story telling like history or other humanities

Those are not serious humanities lectures. The serious ones are not storytelling, but serious examination of the evidence or of its analysis. There are far more factors, complexity, and uncertainty in an historical event or process than in a petri dish, and the event can't even be reproduced. It's impossible to use the same kind of scientific method and obtain the same kind of certainty, and requires far more critical thinking, judgment, and analysis.

What caused Andrew Jackson to be elected? There's a relatively simple story told, but the reality is enormously complex and uncertain.
by quirino | 2025-12-14 21:52:07+00:00
I'm a big fan of last.fm.

If you use Spotify, you can download your full listening history here: https://www.spotify.com/us/account/privacy/. You get it in a pretty convenient JSON format and with a little bit of code it's pretty easy to create some visualizations.

There are also websites for visualizing this data. I'm quite fond of this one: https://explorify.link/. It allows you to do some custom queries.
by bfuller | 2025-12-14 21:52:25+00:00
Anthropic has less users, but I think their value per user is higher due to claude mostly producing code. I know my shop is just gonna keep paying for $200 max subscriptions until one of these open source clients with a chinese LLM can beat sonnet 4.5 (which may be now, but not worth it for me to explore until its solid enough for my uses)
by badwriter101 | 2025-12-14 21:53:03+00:00
> They're about engaging the imagination and making you take hypothetical situations seriously.

- that nudges readers in interesting (to society) or new (to the reader) directions. Or at least in not in actively harmful ways. Otherwise, OF, livestreaming, or whatever latest social media BS, etc. are king: purposefully designed to create parasocial relationships that trick you thinking you have chance to be noticed.

My main beef with most fan fiction is that in my experience, it unconsciously locks readers into an extremely rigid way of thinking. Of course, this varies from fandom to fandom but woe upon the budding writer who ships the wrong pair or violates the canon.

It mirrors religious dogma, but somehow even worse when compared to all the disputes in Christianity throughout the centuries. (Plus, there's at least a connection between Christianity to modern democracy.)
by llbbdd | 2025-12-14 21:53:09+00:00
Disappear might be an extremely strong word here, but yeah as you said as the delta closes between what a human user and an AI user are able to interpret from the same text, it becomes good enough for some nines of cases. Even if on paper it became mathematically "good enough" for high-risk cases like medical or government data structured data will still have a lot of value. I just think more and more structured data is going to be cleaned up from unstructured data except for those higher precision cases.
by majormajor | 2025-12-14 21:53:18+00:00
I think "cultural" is a better word there than "political."

But Banksy wasn't originally Banksy.

I would imagine that you'll see some new heavily-AI-using artists pop up and become name brands in the next decade. (One wildcard here could be if the super-wealthy art-speculation bubble ever pops.)

Flickr, etc, didn't stop new photographers from having exhibitions and being part of the regular "art world" so I expect the easy availability of slop-level generated images similarly won't change that some people will do it in a way that makes them in-demand and popular at the high end.

At the low-to-medium end there are already very few "working artists" because of a steady decline after the spread of recorded media.

Advertising is an area where working artists will be hit hard but is also a field where the "serious" art world generally doesn't consider it art in the first place.
by frizlab | 2025-12-14 21:53:24+00:00
> poorly designed String API

I wholeheartedly disagree and counterpoint that all other String APIs are wrong (bold statement, I know). Accessing a random index of a String is a complex (slow) operation, and as such, should be reflected as complex in the code, especially since people usually think it is not complex.

If you want an array of UInt8, just use that.

The part about the regex I agree with. They are slow and that’s a shame. I do not personally use regex much though, and don’t think it should be done much in prod either, unless there are no other options, but that does not excuse a poor implementation.

Regarding the domain, I recognize it seems to have difficulties escaping the “native iOS/macOS apps,” but IMHO it should not. It is a language that is simple to use, with a reasonable memory handling default (ARC), though it can also use the memory ownership model of rust. Generally speaking using Swift is possible everywhere. I use it personally for an app (native and web front, and back), and it is extremely cool.

Its ecosystem is also becoming quite interesting. Most of the libs are from Apple, yes, but they are also very qualitative.

All in all I think it’s shame Swift is not more used overall in the industry.
by speedplane | 2025-12-14 21:53:32+00:00
Legal-tech: Using AI to help attorneys bill flat-rate instead of hourly. It's data intensive, but possible if you go through their old time entries and tell them the flat-rate price of all of their hourly work. 93% of attorneys bill hourly, primarily b/c they don't have any sense of the cost of the upcoming work. DM me if you want to work on these problems.