skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why is everyone rushing to power this bubble? FOMO needs to serve humanities long term interests, yet Scam Altman and his ilk insist their paper-mache puppet will come to life one day...

Dystopia is rather boring, it turns out, with all the plebs believing their devices to be mystical portals or magical...
What surprised me the most is the picture of the Buddhist Monks. I've always associated them with those orange robes, but the patchwork of bright colours almost makes me think of a kids show host. Is this something that has evolved over time, or is it like a rank thing? Apologies for my ignorance
Another that I don't see enough is just resampling and showing the human more 'final answers' if they are easy and quick to check for correctness.
I was going to mention the Pitt-Rivers. It truly feels like a museum from a more imperial age, a mish-mash of curiosities in teak and glass cabinets.

I think it’s still mostly curated as it was (although I believe the shrunken tribal heads are no longer on display).
I for one look forward to LLMs automating the work of MBAs.
> And where that another LLM will get the capability to judge consistency? Had fun recently prompting different models with "a story about everyday life of <some stereotypical character>".
> Absolutely no awareness about anything spatial - what is in which place, who is where, body positions.

These are some things I'd like to at least attempt to quantify - LLMs are better at translation than thinking[0], so the idea was to translate the slop into something that can be then analyzed by a non-LLM tool. E.g. translate the story into a prolog fact database and generate a couple queries for each paragraph/chapter/combination of these. Rough idea, just something I haven't seen done.

[0] don't @ me
> There’s even an argument that such a thing was done deliberately so that voters would be stuck with Harris. Nevertheless, once Biden dropped out, she was the only practical option

Ultimately, if Harris wasn't a good candidate for the Presidency, then she shouldn't have been VP in 2020. That was where the issue lay.
Ask HN: Control Information, Control the World?
- printing press

- radio

- television

- internet

- AI?
Procedural Generation of Mammals and Locomotion
A family member ran into some insane insomnia when they took valcyclovir prophylactically. Like falling asleep at bedtime, and waking up 20 minutes later like they had a good a nap.

YMMV.
We're finally getting an answer to "how could such a thing happen". The answer is pretty simple: We think of history distinctly different than current events, ourselves as more enlightened and of our peers as more capable of calling it. And besides, it'd be really inconvenient if we actually had fascism, so why not ignore it until it's on the news or something.
If I go to Japan, I am more than happy that earthquake and typhoon warnings are provided in English too.

Putting peoples in harm's way just because they don't speak the language is petty, especially for a country as rich as the US, even more especially when they make such a big thing of their superior technology and Silicon Valley and AI...

Artificial intelligence can't beat human stupidity, apparently.
Can we now admit that AI coding hype was overplayed, just like every other LLM application being foisted upon us.
An AI IDE or coding assistant? Yuk. No thanks. I have enough frustrations with normal IDEs and their overgrown spellcheck mentality.
Slightly related, though I'm yet to try anything to this level:

Turn Cursor Into a Novel-Writing Beast - https://www.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1jl0rqu/turn_cursor...

I have tried to have ChatGPT brainstorm story elements for something else, and its suggestions so far have been very lame. Even its responses to direction/criticism are off-putting and fawning.
"If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing."

— John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider"
You're in the richest country in the history of earth. You can have anything you want. If you really want it.
Is it similar to rethinkdb, I remember using RethinkDB for similar use case for live queries running directly on database layer back in 2016.
Most individual share prices is buoyed by continuous pumping from 401ks and the like buying into funds, not on the fundamentals of the companies in question.
Switches are not compulsory, they're just conventional. MK, for example, will happily sell you unswitched sockets (and without the "not to standard in the UK" warning for some of their other products).

Also not sure what you mean by "exactly the same". You can get single/double/triple in a variety of designs and colours. It's a socket - how much variation do you need?
What are the challenges that prevent humanity from further automating clothes production? We don’t weave fabrics by hand anymore, but we still sew pieces of it together by hand. Why is that?
I've only seen this happen when the plug was fitted badly (pinched or damaged wires inside the plug) or someone use a nail in place of the fuse. People do stupid things like that all the time but it's not the fault of the standard, a fuse should blow if it's run over-current for too long.
Indeed. The primary reason to go to China is not that it is lowest cost (but of course lower cost than US) but rather that they have the skills and infrastructure for it.
I was thinking of the same but perhaps it's for both. I saw an explanation that the EQ compensates for the biases caused by the laptop chassis.
Also, I would argue that ICE needs less perverse incentives, not more. It's pretty obvious that they have deportation quotas that they have to meet or exceed, hence hapless tourists get treated like dangerous criminals and locked up for weeks (because the detention centers are also commercial, so the longer people stay, the better for them) before eventually being deported: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/canadian-det...
I'm originally not from a rich country.

Before I became a Swedish citizen I never had a bad experience traveling back into Schengen, border agents were always cordial even on the instances where they were stern and serious. Even had nice interactions sometimes, at Schiphol with Dutch agents once they were quite funny, and light-hearted.

Every single time I traveled into the USA I experienced CBP agents being rude and suspicious, treating people like cattle on immigration lines, being talked down when being questioned, etc. The experience applying for my B1/B2 was also really annoying, not a great one being interviewed and grilled by a consul.

It's definitely different to go through USA's borders than most other places I traveled to.
Show HN: Package designed to make LLMs and Agents first-class citizens in .NET
It's not just Trump, a lot of people voted for him despite all that was known about him and his plans. A lot of politicians still support him and help him drive his insane agenda. So yes, I think blaming the US as a whole is not unfair. And it's not like people outside can target Trump specifically anyway.

The damage is large inside the US, but all this crazy stuff hurts everyone around the globe economically. And even that pales compared to the threats that e.g. Canada received with the 51st state bullshit.
I don't agree. The derivation of new clauses by Resolution is well understood as deductive and the choice of what clauses to keep doesn't change that.

Resolution can be used inductively, and also for abduction, but that's going into the weeds a bit- it's the subject of my PhD thesis. Let me know if you're in the mood for a proper diatribe :)
That's also how it's done in almost all French engineering schools. You get open book tests with a small amount of relatively difficult questions and you have 3-4 hours to complete.

In some of the CS tests, coding by hand sucks a bit but to be honest, they're ok with pseudo code as long as you show you understand the concepts.
Legally you are of course right, but there are certainly charity shops out there which are exploitative and even designed to enrich their owners. One well-known example is Humana People to People which is run by something probably best characterised as a person-worshipping political cult (Tvind).
A number of free LLMs would do that. But if it costs, I agree, people can spend some of their dollars to translate it.
is this proof of the singularity? ai slop aggrandizing ai slop?
What I found hard with Nix is the sheer amount of things I had to get familiar with before it started to really click:

- nix, the command-line tool

- nix, the language

- nixpkgs with the general API/idioms (overriding, overlays)

- individual nixpkgs packages that sometimes deviate from common practices

- flakes (which I haven't properly looked into yet)

The Nix pills series [1] and nixpkgs documentation [2] do help a lot, but that is quite a lot to process.

[1] https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills

[2] https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/
Whilst I respect your experience, is there a chance you may not have been able to find a different opportunity in that time you had been working for free?
The solution to ads may lie in stricter advertising rules. For instance, banning ads designed to manipulate rather than inform and setting standards for this criteria. Or even banning some advertising practices outright that are common methods for coercive or subtle influence. Imagine if a mouthwash commercial couldn't show an isolated women clearly stressed out about her breath to subtly ingrain an insecurity in their target audience.
Do you mean you create SAT solvers with Claude on a daily basis? What is the use case for that?
My high school English teacher's book reports were like this. One by one, you come up, hand over your book, and the teacher randomly picks a couple of passages and reads them aloud and asks what had just happened prior and what happens after. Then a couple opinion questions and boom, pass or fail. Fantastic to not write a paper on it; paper writing was a more dedicated topic.
The old version of the creative writing eval had several "in the style of" prompts actually! But I got tired of reading bad Hemingway impersonations so I cut them out of the new version.

The creative writing v3 prompts (https://eqbench.com/results/creative-writing-v3) focus more on other things that are typical failure modes for LLM writing:

- Romance
- Humour
- Physical-spatial understanding
- Unusual perspectives in first person
- Niche genres

I do have an Asimov and a Le Guin author style prompts in there though. In particular I like the Asimov story as a vibe check.
> some point on the spectrum between "commit your dotfiles to git" and Nix

That would be configuration management tools such as Salt/Puppet/Ansible/Chef.

They were popular ten years ago, and gained a lot of exposure as the devops movement gained ground, but they never stopped being useful.

Having your non-running state defined declarative is powerful, and if you can define a single source of truth for entire distributed systems, that suddenly makes you able to reason about state on whole systems.
The Black Death: Marmots and Mongols?
When I was a student, I spent my first 2 years in a so-called prépa intégré of a French engineering school. 20% of students failed and were shown the door during those two years (some failed, some figured that it just wasn't for them). That's fine, that means you keep the ones who actually do the work.
At a certain point, you have to start treating students like adult, either they succeed or they don't but it's their personal responsibility.
> Why should I hire you if an agent can do it ?

You as the employer are liable, a human has real reasoning abilities and real fears about messing up, the likely hood of them doing something absurd like telling a customer that a product is 70% off and them not losing their job is effectively nil. What are you going to do with the LLM, fire it?

Data scientist and people deeply familiar with LLMs to the point that they could fine tune a model to your use case cost significantly more than a low skilled employee and depending on liability just running the LLM may be cheaper.

As an accounting firm ( one example from above ) far as I know in most jurisdictions the accountant doing the work is personally liable, who would be liable in the case of the LLM?

There is absolutely a market for LLM augmented workforces, I don't see any viable future even with SOTA models right now for flat out replacing a workforce with them.
The primary reason for SpaceX having such a high launch rate is Starlink/Starshield. These launches are largely identical to one another, and are targeting LEO altitudes. The above comments are factually correct.
Historically ULA has been the launch provider of choice for deep space missions.
The Alps is not the answer when you look at all the tunnels that are already there (both in Austria and Switzerland).
Rather, for Austria the answer would be 'because it's a small country with one big city', so purely from the local perspective it doesn't make sense to build up high speed rail. And for that to change we would need an earnest EU-wide effort, possibly even a crossborder rail company, that would build the missing links and possibly even operate the crossborder trains. Because currently the infrastructure owners and big train operators are state owned and have little incentive to build and operate fast crossborder trains.
Absolutely. The proud nerd dad function :D

Congratulations to your daughter for her PhD. I'm guessing she has got it by now.

Sonic hedgehog signalling pathway! And what a date to submit a thesis.

Why is that a negative result, btw?
DeepSeek is pretty darn good. Much less flowery and more on point. At least in Sci-Fi.
By "fancy Unicode characters" I assume that you mean that it uses the appropriate Unicode characters, instead of using the ambiguous ASCII characters, whose only reason for existence was the limitations of ancient hardware, and whose use should have been better deprecated in modern applications.
As git repos greatly outnumber hg repos (sadly:) it's enough to support all git functions to be useful. For example to work with github.
Is this related at all the the private invite only anywhere caches? (or maybe they're GA now?)

https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/anywhere-cache
Unfortunately Debian RFPs generally don't work, unless an existing Debian contributor sees it and also has a need for the project.
"To save the public from propaganda, we must implement national controls on all political media dissemination"
> if you have the base knowledge and skills readily available in your mind.

I have the base knowledge and skill readily available to perform basic arithmetic, but I still can't do it in my mind in any practical way because I, for lack of a better description, run out of memory.

I expect most everyone eventually "runs out of memory" if the values are sufficiently large, but I hit the wall when the values are exceptionally small. And not for lack of trying – the "you won't always have a calculator" message was heard.

It wasn't skill and knowledge that was the concern, though. It was very much about execution. We were tested on execution.

> If you're learning about linear algebra but you have to type in every simple multiplication of numbers into a calculator...

I can't imagine anyone is still using a four function calculator. Certainly not in an application like learning linear algebra. Modern calculators are decidedly designed for linear algebra. They need to be given the rise of things like machine learning that are heavily dependent on such.
Hey, I made this! Cool to see it show up on hackernews.
It will never happen because of economies of scale.

What type of intervention of the free market do you approve of as an alternative that would incentivize local production over economies of scale? It essentially comes down to tarrifs and protectionism.

Free market means voluntarism. You say that consumers ought to have the freedom to source goods anywhere, but the only way to preserve this "freedom" is to either force producers to operate in unprofitable conditions (which is not stable-state) or force consumers to pay a premium for those goods.
Dropping Values ( 2 in The `itertools` Series • `dropwhile()` and `takewhile()`)
Which amid everything, maybe it is time to focus again on our own programming languages and OSes like in the cold war and export regulation days, it will suck for a while, but apparently it is how everything is going.
nobody ever said that. that's ai apologist history revisionism.
Yeas, hand-coding rules doesn't work in the long run. But burning through the world's resources to approximate a huge dataset isn't a viable long-term solution for anything either.
I'm exactly the same. Aqua is so incredible and I really tried to like it, but I just can't get my brain to think of what I want to say first, I have to pause to think constantly.
The European mind cannot comprehend take-home exams.
Tbh, people who blindly accept what they've been taught without considering the situation at hand don't make good engineers anyway (software or otherwise). It's not like programmers not wearing suits is some well-kept secret only accessible to the inner circle. Quite the opposite I'd say.
"One Tech Tip: Protecting your device privacy when crossing borders": https://apnews.com/article/internet-privacy-smartphones-trav... (apnews.com/article/internet-privacy-smartphones-travel-e0a3146ae7966ea0e4157dbfae1f6a81)
UK has had a stable system for many hundreds of years. I don't think it's something that can't be done at the country level, you don't need the EU to do this too!
Probably. These characters do not render properly in my setup (Emacs, SLIME REPL). Gemini and Claude use ASCII.
Early experiences shape brain 'communication superhighways' to affect cognition
I disliked that they don't explain the logic in the ```arrivals()``` function, but it is because in a uniform distribution from 0 to 1 (which is what ```random()``` is), the probability that a value falls below 1/6 is exactly 1/6, i.e.:

P(random() < 1/6) ~= 1/6 .

Which is how they simulate a dice landing a "6". This explanation could be included in the text.
There is zero chance that dude can sit on his hands for 90 days.

He'll have some insane idea to replace it by end of week
The title really needs to mention Linux, as this is a solved problem in the OSs used by the majority of people. (Including developers [0] before anyone comments that this is HN).

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1482210/os-distribution-...
I am genuinely curious about what would happen if China allowed their currency (RMB/CNY) to float. The most obvious thing I can see that would put tremendous downward pressure on the currency would be capital flight from China to more politically predictable/safe places. Currently, normies are limited to 50K USD per year. (Of course, there is a large grey market to move more money.)
>I never got the HPV vaccine and am now too old

It can still help even with previous exposure. This is outdated information. Also it helps against 9 strains. Most people are not exposed to all 9 instantly.

Further you can be exposed without having intercourse. Skin contact is enough. Even walking barefoot in the gym.

You will have to pay yourself probably, but since you paid $129 for a test I'm assuming you could afford at least one vaccine dose.

Also the NHS did a study and found a single dose is sufficient.
To bake a cake from scratch, first, you must create the universe
Show HN: Weather forecast API? More accurate with multiple models and ML
Hi HN, I started running an amateur weather forecast website 20 years ago as a hobby, and later turned it into a professional service during my studies. More recently, we built an advanced weather API after noticing that most existing APIs simply repackage NOAA data and miss key variables.

To improve accuracy, our forecasts pull from multiple sources and use proprietary numerical weather models, learning from historical data to reduce bias. This includes hyper-local forecasts, where each point is calculated based on surrounding data.
Indeed meteofrance appears to be monolingual. I would say they're a bit unusual in that though. Most other national meteorological services I know of have forecasts available in at least two languages.

E.g.:

Finnish/Swedish/English:
https://www.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/, https://sv.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/, https://en.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/

Italian/English: https://www.agenziaitaliameteo.it/, https://www.agenziaitaliameteo.it/en/

A dozen or so languages (full forecasts available in about half): https://www.jma.go.jp/jma/kokusai/multi.html
These photos are, ah, not representative (most historical artefacts of this type aren’t; part of why people tend to have an impression of Victorian London as basically hell on earth is that, unusually, photos _were_ taken of the nasty bits, but really it was no worse than anywhere else at the time).

You’d certainly prefer to live in Japan in 2025 than in 1860.
you're making the common mistake of assuming js devs know anything about core concepts.

they are vibe coding since the beginning.
API docs: https://www.meteosource.com/documentation

I would love to hear your thoughts – what do you look for in a weather API?
Kids are a lot of work but I'll say that of my multiple middle aged siblings, the only one with regrets is the one who chose to have no kids.
I don’t get the patriotism people from the UK exhibit over their plug. I’ve lived and worked in total 1 year in the UK, two years in Dubai. I’m originally from Sweden were we use Schuko. Now I live in Switzerland.

The UK plug is easily the worst. It’s three times the size of the Swiss plug. You can literally connect three Swiss appliances in the same place you can connect one UK.
Oh they are very smart an capable. They just don't work in your favour.
I have the same problem come out in my mind.

What if I wrap the agent as a tool in MCP?

Since the agents I got from the 'A2A' protocol is passed as tools to another Agent...

https://github.com/google/A2A/blob/72a70c2f98ffdb9bd543a57c8...
To be fair, that's standard treatment that has been unilaterally pushed by the US to other nations; their geopolitics can be a bit like Mean Girls:

- "That country is NOT allowing our companies to exploit their citizens? Nobody give them any food until they kill-off their leader."
It's also the topic that has the least literacy and understanding or even coherent debate.

Most developed nations are going to have to choose the lesser of several "evils" very soon and there's almost no serious discussion of what the options actually are.
He is genius level at hype and marketing. No one can touch him.
My first client in video games was the same. They rarely paid their contractors on time (the payment was months late), or it wasn't the entire agreed sum. We kept sending in late payment notices to their finance guy, and they fired us all for being troublemakers. I believe I had a notice period of two weeks, but they fired me with one day's notice.

Suing them was out of the question. For me, as for others, it would have been international. The company was in Italy, and the contractors were all over Europe. We'd probably each spend over 10k euros on the proceedings and representation in Italian courts. And the company wasn't overdue by much more than that. Besides, even if we won and the court ruled our legal expenses were to be paid, we weren't sure the company was solvent enough. So no one sued.

I believe it was their modus operandi. The company continued firing their contractors when it got into arrears before a lawsuit made sense. Sometimes, it's just their business plan.

I agree with the article's author—no pay, no work. Before starting contract work, one should think about the line they won't cross regarding late payments. For me, it's when an invoice becomes overdue, and it's plainly a breach of contract. I will never again cross that line and keep working.