skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except that we've seen that bigger models don't really scale in accuracy/intelligence well, just look at GPT4.5. Intelligence scales logarithmically with parameter count, the extra parameters are mostly good for baking in more knowledge so you don't need to RAG everything.

Additionally, you can use reasoning model thinking with non-reasoning models to improve output, so I wouldn't be surprised if the common pattern was routing hard queries to reasoning models to solve at a high level, then routing the solution plan to a smaller on device model for faster inference.
There's a great option for small companies that aren't amenable to on-call that is underappreciated. Hire an MSP. There are companies whose entire business model is having a geo distributed team with a stack of automated monitoring and run books for multiple clients. You train them, pay a set fee and never ask anyone on your team to be on call.
So, only us HN members are members of Kagi.
Yes, basically every eng position paying what HN people expect will have the exact sort of described oncall.
You aren't special for using em dashes, and it doesn't make someone an NPC to notice that AIs frequently make use of them.
US auto tariffs help Chinese EVs to race ahead
Thanks for the insight. Most of what I know about LEDs, and specifically the LM301 series, comes from research I did prior to setting up a small indoor grow tent several years ago. It was a "spikey spectrum" precisely that I was trying to avoid. For growing Cannabis you do want spikes at red and blue, but better LEDs also emit a wider spectrum along with the spikes and that results in a better result. Having only spikes at red and blue alone works, but not as well. The lights I ended up buying had LM301H EVO LEDs with a CRI of 80 and were designed for a 2'x2' tent. You can also get LM301H LEDs with a CRI of up to 90, though. The lights I ended up buying only cost 80 BezosBucks at the time. I don't spend BezosBucks anymore, though, due to enshittification of everything Amazon, but I digress.

While they aren't designed for growing, and to use them would be a complete waste of $8k, I bet the Arri SkyPanel S120-C SoftLight with a CRI of 95 would do a fine job for growing. You weren't kidding about them being extremely expensive.
My favourite feature is when spotlight tells me that indexing is paused when I am searching for something.

You went through the effort to show some UI when something I am looking for may not be there because indexing is paused... but you didn't think to just unpause the indexing so that I can find it? I feel like I am being spit on, "Yeah, you not finding what you are looking for? I know, I'm not even trying"
Intl.NumberFormat also prefers it, but then you can't paste negative numbers into most financial software, calculators, spreadsheets. Even back into inputs on the same webpage, if it does custom number parsing. Even though <input type=number> accepts U+2212 as a minus, it turns it into a regular minus when you spin it down to -2.

It looks much better though and more visible: −1 vs -1. I wish hyphen was a separate symbol from the ascii start, or that monospace fonts didn't tend to shorten "-" cause it makes little sense in monospace anyway.
There can be differences which statistical models pick up which we humans don’t.

For example, a couple years ago there was a statistical model made which could fairly accurately predict (iirc >80%) the gender of a person based on a picture of their iris. At the time we didn’t know there was a visible iris difference between genders, but a statistical model found one.

That’s kind of the whole point of statistical classification models. Feed in a ton of data and the model will discover the differentiating features.

Put another way, If we knew all the possible differences between someone with cancer and without, we wouldn’t need statistical models at all, we could just automate the diagnosis.

We don’t know the indicators that we don’t know, so we don’t know if some possible indicators show up or don’t show up in a given group of people.

That is the danger of wholly relying on statistical models.
When I've been reverse-image searching for obscure things, sometimes it's been the only result (despite not being the original source). I'd rather see pinterest than nothing - but I suppose you can fix that with downranking rather than banning them outright.

Compared to the AI slop flooding image search results, pinterest is increasingly looking "better than the alternatives".
> Can humans want things?

Yes. Do I have to prompt you? Or do you exist on your own?

> Our reward structures sure seem aligned in a manner that encourages anthropomorphization.

You do understand what that word /means/?

> are symptoms of imperfect data

Which means humans cannot generate perfect data. So good luck with all that high priced "training" you're doing. Mathematically errors compound.
> Their generality of knowledge, and ability to weave completely disparate subjects together sensibly, is beyond any other artifact in existence

Very well said. That’s perhaps the area where I have found LLMs most useful lately. For several years, I have been trying to find a solution to a complex and unique problem involving the laws of two countries, financial issues, and my particular individual situation. No amount of Googling could find an answer, and I was unable to find a professional consultant whose expertise spans the various domains. I explained the problem in detail to OpenAI’s Deep Research, and six minutes later it produced a 20-page report—with references that all checked out—clearly explaining my possible options, the arguments for and against each, and why one of those options was probably best. It probably saved me thousands of dollars.
Even if the VC-backed companies jacked up their prices, the models that I can run on my own laptop for "free" now are magical compared to the state of the art from 2 years ago. Ubiquity may come from everyone running these on their own hardware.
How the U.S. Used Agriculture as a Tool of Global Power
Since WWII, U.S. agriculture has been more than just food production — it's been a cornerstone of American foreign policy. From "Food for Peace" to Cold War diplomacy, grain embargoes, and biotech diplomacy, this essay explores how the U.S. wielded food as strategic leverage.

It’s a fascinating and underappreciated piece of soft (and sometimes hard) power that continues to shape global relations — even in the age of climate change and agtech.

Would love to hear how others see the intersection of food, policy, and strategy.
I have it help me with reporting (with private info taken out of course). I've easily saved myself hundreds of hours already.
Are they progressing quickly? Or was there a step-function leap about 2 years ago, and incremental improvements since then?

I tried using AI coding assistants. My longest stint was 4 months with Copilot. It sucked. At its best, it does the same job as IntelliSense but slower. Other times it insisted on trying to autofill 25 lines of nonsense I didn't ask for. All the time I saved using Copilot was lost debugging the garbage Copilot wrote.

Perplexity was nice to bounce plot ideas off of for a game I'm working on... until I kept asking for more and found that it'll only generate the same ~20ish ideas over and over, rephrased every time, and half the ideas are stupid.

The only use case that continues to pique my interest is Notion's AI summary tool. That seems like a genuinely useful application, though it remains to be seen if these sorts of "sidecar" services will justify their energy costs anytime soon.

Now, I ask: if these aren't the "right" use cases for LLMs, then what is, and why do these companies keep putting out products that aren't the "right" use case?
Do you mean genetic information?
> not liking the consequences of choosing those options

Correct. "Shove it" is usually preceded by not liking something.

> They could negotiate with their manager to lessen the load.

Most of the time the manager will simply refuse. As a business owner it's my decision.

> They could upgrade the systems.

At big companies this is usually outside the scope of an on-call engineer. The on-call engineer often doesn't even have commit rights to that repository.

The specific example I gave was paying $10/month more. That can be a very hard sell at a large company because their service contracts are much more complicated/expensive.

> They could straight-up refuse on call.

A business owner has much more negotiating power than an employee does.

> They don't because they don't like the consequences of taking these options—and neither does the self-employed person!

In the vast majority of cases making changes to the on-call infrastructure has very little (if any) measurable impact on the business. Like spending a week making the systems better. Or changing deploy/release dates to be more convenient.

As a business owner I can take advantage of this and make my life easier.

As an employee I have layers of bureaucracy to wade through and will probably be refused. Not because it affects the business but for other reasons.

That's the difference.
Why is healthline so high on the block/lower list? (Excluding Pinterest)

IMO I like the fact that they link sources to their claims, which is very rare on the current web. I think of it as a somewhat trustable source of information. Am I wrong?
> LLM opponents aren’t wrong about the limits of LLMs. They vastly overestimate humans.

On the contrary. Humans can earn trust, learn, and can admit to being wrong or not knowing something. Further, humans are capable of independent research to figure out what it is they don't know.

My problem isn't that humans are doing similar things to LLMs, my problem is that humans can understand consequences of bullshitting at the wrong time. LLMs, on the other hand, operate purely on bullshitting. Sometimes they are right, sometimes they are wrong. But what they'll never do or tell you is "how confident am I that this answer is right". They leave the hard work of calling out the bullshit on the human.

There's a level of social trust that exists which LLMs don't follow. I can trust when my doctor says "you have a cold" that I probably have a cold. They've seen it a million times before and they are pretty good at diagnosing that problem. I can also know that doctor is probably bullshitting me if they start giving me advice for my legal problems, because it's unlikely you are going to find a doctor/lawyer.

> Just needs to beat a typical human.

My issue is we can't even measure accurately how good humans are at their jobs. You now want to trust that the metrics and benchmarks used to judge LLMs are actually good measures? So much of the LLM advocates try and pretend like you can objectively measure goodness in subjective fields by just writing some unit tests. It's literally the "Oh look, I have an oracle java certificate" or "Aws solutions architect" method of determining competence.

And so many of these tests aren't being written by experts. Perhaps the coding tests, but the legal tests? Medical tests?

The problem is LLM companies are bullshiting society on how competently they can measure LLM competence.
I agree. I recently asked if a certain GPU would fit in a certain computer... And it understood that fit could mean physically inside by could also mean that the interface is compatible, and answered both.

WhY aRe PeOpLe BuLlIsH
Why would it be bad business for Apple? Their business model is based on selling a holistic ecosystem. They don’t have any need to chase new features and there steady stream of high margin hardware revenue is at stake.
You can call 'dagger -i' to enable interactive debugging. If a step in your pipeline fails, you get an interactive terminal to inspect the current state.
The em dash is now a GPT-ism and is not advisable unless you want people to think your writing is the output of a LLM.
Came to say this as well. I use the compose key to write em dashes and other symbols on a daily basis. Very handy!
Do you have any good alternatives to Photoshop that are open source? And that are not GIMP.

Nothing against GIMP, I just found it too hard to learn coming from photoshop.

I'm looking for a simple editor that can do color adjustments, crop/resize images, and add text.
I only get Pinterest results when I'm searching for something generic enough, and in those cases, why not use an image from Pinterest. I don't really understand the hate.
I wonder if this site isn't impressed because there are a lot of 1% coders here that don't understand what most people do at work. It's mostly administrative. Take this spreadsheet, combine with this one, stuff it into power BI, email it to Debbie so she can spell check it and send to the client. Y'all forget there are companies that actually make things that don't have insane valuations like your bullshit apps do. A company that scopes municipal sewer pipes can't afford a $500k/yr dev, so there's a few $60k/yr office workers that fiddle with reports and spreadsheets all day. It's literally a whole department in some cases. Those are the jobs that are about to be replaced and there are a lot of those jobs out there.
The first stackexchange link I see answers the question of thermal conductivity, not electrical. Google is convinced I didn’t actually mean electrical. Forcing it to include electrical brings up nothing of use.

The Google AI summary suggests MLV which is wrong.

ChatGPT suggests using copper which is also wrong.

I call bullshit on the entire affair.
Interesting that TikTok is the 3rd highest on the block list (considering Pinterest links as one). I wonder why since it’s not often that I get it as a search result on Google . Is TikTok showing up as a result common on kagi or is TikTok just that bad?
I have such a hard time getting a read on Sabine Hossenfelder. I wish I was a physicist so I knew if she was full of shit
Pretty sure dedupe is done manually by u/dang.
If I’m rewarded for no incidents, doesn’t that mean I’m punished for there being incidents?
> Does it fabricate references? Absolutely, maybe about a third of the time

And you don't have concerns about that? What kind of damage is that doing to our society, long term, if we have a system that _everyone_ uses and it's just accepted that a third of the time it is just making shit up?
Product, Design, and AI
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. It doesn't matter what after-the-fact explanation someone generates to try to explain it, or whether we could purposely do the bad thing more efficiently with manual code.

It AustrianPainterLLM has an unavoidable pattern of generating stories where people are systematically misdiagnosed / shortchanged / fired / murdered because a name is Anne Frank or because a yarmulke in involved, it's totally unacceptable to implement software that might "execute" risky stories.
Do you think there is a middle ground for a progressive 'detailization' of the data -- you form a model based on the minimal data set that allows you to draw useful conclusions, and refine that with additional data to where you're capturing the vast majority of the problem space with minimal bias?
As a former Mac user, I'm really happy with my System76 linux laptops. The only tradeoff is the terrible built-in speakers. My Lemur is lighter and has better battery life than my Macbook Air and has been bulletproof despite my ill treatment. Each of my Macs, however, have had various hardware failures or the famous keyboard recall on the horrible touchbar Macbook Pro. I also prefer matte screens to glossy, so that's a win for me, but ymmv.
Walk into any coffee shop or office and I can guarantee that you'll see several people actively typing into ChatGPT or Claude. If it was so useless, four years on, why would people be bothering with it?

I don't think you can even be bullish or bearish about this tech. It's here and it's changing pretty much every sector you can think of. It would be like saying you're not bullish about the Internet.

I honestly can't imagine life without one of these tools. I have a subscription to pretty much all of them because I get so excited to try out new models.
Yes, the more LEDs you mix the closer you can get to your target SPD but more LEDs also add cost and may not fit mechanically depending on how you are mixing them.

One other variable is energy efficiency, there are a lot energy codes around the world that limit how much energy you are allowed to use to light a space. In California for example it can be 0.6w per sqft. Sunlight is more like 100w/sqft so you end up having to optimize the spectrum for what humans can see and feel. I like to compare it with jpeg compression for light. In jpeg we throw away components you can’t see very well, you can do the same for light for an energy efficiency sake and maintain a close perceptual proxy.

We found 4 chips is a minimum bar for good light and use 5 for virtual sun - more info:
https://www.innerscene.com/products/circadian-sky/CircadianS...
> And yes, some people surely become too provoked by the request, but also the person making the request could often do a better job with the tone.

I agree. At a minimum, it needs to clearly come off as a "it's not you or personal, it's this weird condition I have, it's difficult for me to control at this time, and it causes me distress" - which is 100% true.

> Either way though, finding a truly non-provocative angle for this request is basically intractable.

You definitely never know what you're going to get from people! But, I suppose it's good to know if others have room to make space for you.
No, thanks—I’ll keep using them as I always have.
Sounds pretty much the same to me.
You never write code to automate something in your personal environment, or to analyze some one-off data, rather than to actually go into production?
“That document” is the MCP spec. What is says _is_ MCP, regardless of your understanding of it.

It’s not a “mandate” it’s a specification for how the protocol works. If the connection isn’t stateful, then it isn’t adhering to the specification.

I mean also like… how is it stateless? For both example transports (stdio and SSE) a connection must be maintained.

ANY connection must be initialized via an MCP message and both server and client must negotiate capabilities.

Those capabilities must be honored through the entire lifetime of the connection.

That alone is state.

I suggest you read the spec…
I'm just observing that the cost is a lot higher than $99/year.

I do this professionally, I maintain macOS CI workers for my employer. Apple doesn't make it easy.
Not sure. We haven't figured it out for humans yet.
I had to look up when that episode aired since it is so applicable to many elections. It was 2004 so Bush vs Kerry. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douche_and_Turd
An unfortunate problem with using awk: there are three different versions of awk, and it is frighteningly easy to use a feature that exists on one but not other.

(source: I have written unit tests against different versions of awk. That was... unpleasant.)
I'm ok with dupes. But cross-linking should at least be automatic.
It's targeting a different market. The MDN web docs are excellent reference material, but if you're learning or early in your career they're impenetrable. W3Schools has a reputation of over-simplification (to the point of being wrong sometimes), but that's not at odds with being useful to people at a particular stage in their career.

For another example, I gather that most of the high school chemistry I learnt is wrong, but it was mostly pretty useful in understanding the physical world as far as I needed to progress in my education at that age. W3Schools can be useful in that respect.
These days? Short-list them. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/domu-technology-inc/jo...
Founder of Nikola Motor Company, Trevor Milton, Pardoned by President Trump
Rails MCP Server: Enhancing AI-Assisted Development
Also the hardware acceleration in gdi and especially gdi+ is not totally complete. Text rendering in gdi+ is still handled in software and only some operations in gdi are hardware acclerated
What Apple needs, is to fix that weird bug where my mouse cursor stops responding to what it's hovering over. How does something so fundamentally broken make its way into an OS?
Just like System Settings in macOS! Always have to use keyword search in that thing.

FWIW, search as a UI isn't a bad thing, Cmd + Space is the main way I launch apps on macOS (or Win + "type whatever").
You lost me. Lenses? Are you being fanciful or is this a thing?
I love using it to boilerplate code for a new API I want to integrate. Much better than having to manually search. In the near future, not knowing how to effectively use AI to enhance productivity will be a disadvantage to potential employers.
Apple got hooked on money. Behead everyone at the helm, let some fresh air in.
This is an excellent article. I've commented before¹ why "on-call" as described is bad because it conflates roles and responsibilities and robs developers of resources, but this goes quite a bit further and explains why it's a bad practice that eventually leads to burnout.

With the exception of companies like PagerDuty, the sooner this practice is ended the better off we'll be.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43400898
> Why be obtuse?

In the context of the quote precision is called for. You cite fear but that's attempting to have it both ways.

> humanity as a whole doesn't have this "will" you speak of

Why not?

> will is an aspect of the consciousness of the individual.

I can't measure your will. I can measure the impact of your will through your actions in reality. See the problem? See why we can say "the will of humanity?"

> So you seem to be be uncritically anthropomorphizing social processes!

It's called "an aggregate."

> is a question that can only ever be speculated upon, but not definitively perceived.

The original point was that LLMs want the future to be like the past. You've way overshot the mark here.
Oh yes, LLM's are a failure when measured against my very specific metrics in my specific use case. Sigh.

Actually I think they work really well, in any case where you can detect errors, which the OP apparently can.
Thanks so much for sharing your work. Your blog posts are _far_ more interesting and helpful than most of what I'm seeing about agentic coding.

I'm particularly fascinated by those last two links, along with your latest post about READMEs. It makes me wonder about a visual specification editor that provides GitHub-like task chronology around the spec, with the code as a secondary artefact (in contrast to GitHub, where code is primary).
And if I did my own taxes, I wouldn't know if I were in legal trouble until audit day as well!
Honest question, how do you validate it?
Also

> Higher in what way?

Higher as in at a higher level in the network stack (not exactly, I don’t think, but lower on the same level)

Higher as in you can implement MCP on top of grpc.

You can’t implement grpc in mcp, that doesn’t make sense, because grpc is at a lower level, so to speak, in the network stack.
Two different views for logged-in users and public. I realize that it has a different view from a different non-logged-in browser (or incognito).

I stopped wearing T-Shirt swags from companies quite a while back. Recently, I thought of promoting Kagi and wore the T-Shirt they sent at a few meet-ups, office spaces with lots of tech-people and no-one recognize it. A few of them thought, when we talked, if the logo is for a Golfing group/community!

Personally, I was thinking I’m proudly promoting something akin to ‘Wearing Google T-Shirt in 1999’ but this time, “Humanize the Web.”
> Yeah but if your accountant bullshits when doing your taxes, you can sue them.

What is the point of limiting delegation to such an extreme dichotomy? As apposed to getting more things done?

The vast majority of useful things we delegate, or do for others ourselves, are not as well specified, or as legally liable for any imperfections, as an accountant doing accounting.