MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shanecp | 2025-04-16 23:35:47+00:00
Here are some notes I made to understand each of these models and when to use them.

# OpenAI Models

## Reasoning Models (o-series) - All `oX` (o-series aka `omni`) models are reasoning models. - Use these for complex, multi-step, reasoning tasks.

## Flagship/Core Models - All `x.x` and `Xo` models are the core models. - Use these for one-shot results - Examples: 4o, 4.1

## Cost Optimized - All `-mini`, `-nano` are cheaper, faster models. - Use these for high-volume, low effort tasks.

## Flagship vs Reasoning (o-series) Models - Latest flagship model = 4.1 - Latest reasoning model = o3 - The flagship models are general purpose, typically with larger context windows. These rely mostly on pattern matching. - The reasoning models are trained with extended chain-of-thought and reinforcement learning models. They work best with tools, code and other multi-step workflows. Because tools are used, the accuracy will be higher.

# List of Models

## 4o (omni) - 128K context window - complex multimodal, applications requiring the top level of reliability and nuance

## 4o-mini - 128K context window - Use: multimodal reasoning for math, coding, and structured outputs - Use: Cheaper than `4o`. Use when you can trade off accuracy vs speed/cost. - Dont Use: When high accuracy is needed

## 4.1 - 1M context window - Use: For large context ingest, such as full codebases - Use: For reliable instruction following, comprehension - Dont Use: For high volume/faster tasks

## 4.1-mini - 1M context window - Use: For large context ingest - Use: When a tradeoff can be made with accuracy vs speed

## 4.1-nano - 1M context window - Use: For high-volume, near-instant responses - Dont Use: When accuracy is required - Examples: classification, autocompletion, short-answers

## o3 - 200K context window - Use: for the most challenging reasoning tasks in coding, STEM, and vision that demand deep chain‑of‑thought and tool use - Use: Agentic workflows leveraging web search, Python execution, and image analysis in one coherent loop - Dont Use: For simple tasks, where lighter model will be faster and cheaper.

## o4-mini - 200K context window - Use: High-volume needs where reasoning and cost should be balanced - Use: For high throughput applications - Dont Use: When accuracy is critical

## o4-mini-high - 200K context window - Use: When o4-mini results are not satisfactory, but before moving to o3. - Use: Compex tool-driven reasoning, where o4-mini results are not satisfactory - Dont Use: When accuracy is critical

## o1-pro-mode - 200K context window - Use: Highly specialized science, coding, or reasoning jobs that benefit from extra compute for consistency - Dont Use: For simple tasks

## Models Sorted for Complex Coding Tasks (my opinion)

1. o3 2. Gemini 2.5 Pro 3. Claude 3.7 2. o1-pro-mode 3. o4-mini-high 4. 4.1 5. o4-mini
by jtagliabuetooso | 2025-04-16 23:36:27+00:00
Correct.

Unlike warehouses or SQL lakehouses, we also any Python code, including from your private AWS repositories for example, through a simple decorator, while giving you transactional pipelines, fully versioned and revertible, like it's a database on your S3.

Wrt deployment, I think things are a bit more nuanced: we are soc2 compliant and provide a enterprise ready control vs data plane separation - data are only processed in single tenant VPC, which is private linked to your account, effectively making the same account networking wise. If you insist on having the data plane in your own account, the architecture supports that as our only data plane dependency is VMs (we install our own custom runtime there!).

To give you a sense, one of our large customers is a 4BN / year large broadcaster with tens of milions of users, and they run with the above AWS security posture.

Happy to answer more offline if you're curious (jacopo.tagliabue@bauplanlabs.com)
by mystraline | 2025-04-16 23:36:40+00:00
I make 160k/yr, and blew 30k on school that amounted to absolutely nothing. I taught myself systems - there aren't even any degrees that discuss systems architecture. Its not even a thing.

I was sold a lemon. At least vehicles have a lemon law. Education has nothing such, and worse yet, has protections against things like even bankruptcy.

Edit: For those of you who -1ed this, I would love any sort of citable proof that university has a demonstrable anything positive. As far as I've seen, I've had to teach myself all the monetizable skills. All I have from what Uni classes I took is a big bill and absolutely no positive things.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-04-16 23:36:56+00:00
Answered in article:

One of the DSS’ main responsibilities was to introduce fast track technology during national security incidents to help the Pentagon to quickly react to developing situations.

While DSS responsibilities will be passed on to another department, it is unclear how long it will take for the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office to assume DSS responsibilities - potentially putting the security of the Pentagon at risk.
by mikhailt | 2025-04-16 23:37:03+00:00
Great news app. Not only does it learn which news you'd like to follow, its AI feature is actaully useful for a change (for me at least); it extracts the data you want to know about and it has a few useful views such as the "opposite views" primpt that I really like using to learn from both sides.

Related articles are great to reduce duplicates and being able to ask questions or seeing questions from other users was great to see.
by jjmarr | 2025-04-16 23:37:09+00:00
The typical student that wants to learn and gain skills self-teaches online.

The reason why I am getting a degree in computer engineering is because I need it to get a job, because a degree is supposed to filter out people who don't understand how to write code at any level. I'm essentially paying for someone to grade my tests and assignments. Honestly, I think most of my courses are too easy and I'm not getting good value on the filtering side.

Most of the lecture materials I pay for are plagiarized from open courses. Sometimes I find the original course. Typically my professor refactors stuff to make it less clear or add false information.

If I was at a top-tier university, I might be getting knowledge I couldn't get elsewhere. But at my school the professors pretend to teach and the students pretend to learn.
by ks2048 | 2025-04-16 23:37:33+00:00
Don't you have consider that many jobs require a college degree?

You can certainly argue that this is a dumb requirement - but regardless of "ROI", if you want job X, you need to get a degree (for many X).

It is very obvious that everyone doesn't choose their career path to maximize income.

Of course, maybe that is changing rapidly. Tech seems to be ahead on this since there are more direct ways to prove your ability.
by gnabgib | 2025-04-16 23:37:34+00:00
https://archive.is/WAjqA

The original title fit, why the edit? "may be" -> "likely" seems like a bit of a claim upgrade.

Related:

2023 Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18B (235 points, 135 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37468342

2019 Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet (606 points, 384 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20944005
by CRConrad | 2025-04-16 23:37:56+00:00
> Delphi uses a binary "form" file into which each GUI form persists its interface.

That's not necessarily binary. I don't recall if perhaps it was in Delphi 1 (the 16-bit version for Windows 3.x and Windows 95), but from Delphi 2 or 3 or so (released around the turn of the century), it could also save form definitions as plain text. oh, and of course since the height of the XML craze (shortly after the turn of the century?), in that format too.
by nyrikki | 2025-04-16 23:38:46+00:00
Funny, gemma will do this all day long.

>>> Please write a hello world app in java ```java public class HelloWorld { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println("Hello, World!"); } } ```

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/getStarted/applicati...

cat /bin/true and /bin/false if you are on a Solaris etc... as an example too.
by Teever | 2025-04-16 23:39:39+00:00
I think it would be cool if the conversation on this post could go more into detail about hycean planets instead of the pretty standard and played out one about the Fermi Paradox and Great Filters.

That stuff is interesting but I'd rather hear experts talk about less talked about stuff like hycean planets and detection methods of them and other bodies that are that size.
by femiagbabiaka | 2025-04-16 23:39:48+00:00
I dropped out of college after stumbling my way through several majors and I still consider it to be a formative experience. But I have another problem with this: American primary and secondary education is terrible. College is the first time so many get exposed to things that are critical: the classics, high level math, statistics, etc.

Making college less necessary starts with improving primary and secondary education.
by out-of-ideas | 2025-04-16 23:39:52+00:00
i'd say its subjective based on my overall interest in the subject matter im asked to focus on.

i will assume it is focus on a work related task..

it helps a lot to find your happy place; rest (sleep and time away from said thing-to-focus-on) does wonders. its all too easy to go over the limit and keep working on a task trying to "bang it out" - take care of yourself first before you can take care of anything else.

background music, or background silence does wonders for me; but everybody will be different. try to take some mental notes on what derails you from a task - if its just "tired" then take a break (context switch to something else) - if its "stuck on problem" - walk away and casually think about it (or try to think of other paths to solving a task)
by bredren | 2025-04-16 23:40:29+00:00
This problem is real.

Claude Projects, chatgpt projects, Sourcegraph Cody context building, MCP file systems, all of these are black boxes of what I can only describe as lossy compression of context.

Each is incentivized to deliver ~”pretty good” results at the highest token compression possible.

The best way around this I’ve found is to just own the web clients by including structured, concatenation related files directly in chat contexts.

Self plug but super relevant: I built FileKitty specifically to aid this, which made HN front page and I’ve continued to improve:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40226976

If you can prepare your file system context yourself using any workflow quickly, and pair it with appropriate additional context such as run output, problem description etc, you can get excellent results and you can pound away at OpenAI or Anthropic subscription refining the prompt or updating the file context.

I have been finding myself spending more time putting together prompt complexity for big difficult problems, they would not make sense to solve in the IDE.
by smitty1e | 2025-04-16 23:41:15+00:00
> While inspecting K2-18b, Dr. Madhusudhan and his colleagues discovered it had many of the molecules they had predicted a Hycean planet would possess. In 2023, they reported they had also detected faint hints of another molecule, and one of huge potential importance: dimethyl sulfide, which is made of sulfur, carbon, and hydrogen. On Earth, the only known source of dimethyl sulfide is life.

---

Intriguing.
by jmcpheron | 2025-04-16 23:41:57+00:00
Plandex was one of the first agentic style coating system to I tried several months ago, and it worked very well. But I've been using the cursor and windsurf style editors more recently because of their popularity. And their effectiveness is honestly pretty great.

Would you classify Plandex as more similar to a terminal interface like Claude Code? Also it looks like Open AI released a similar terminal based tool today. https://github.com/openai/codex

Do you see an obvious distinctions or pros/cons between the terminal tools and the IDE systems?
by philipkglass | 2025-04-16 23:42:45+00:00
This is about dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K2-18b

The NYT article reports a new study in The Astrophysical Journal and links to it, but the DOI is currently not found:

https://dx.doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/adc1c8

I also don't see the article yet under their Latest Articles:

https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/0004-637X

Here are recent articles about K2-18b from Google Scholar:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,48&q=%22K2...
by crabmusket | 2025-04-16 23:42:58+00:00
First, it's great to see new stuff happening in the solar space, and helping use incentives that are there. I wish you success!

> This domain is a good fit for automation and LLMs—not to generate text, but to (1) structure unstructured documents, (2) interact with legacy government websites where there’s no API, and (3) deal with repetitive bureaucratic language.

This isn't a criticism of what you're doing, but a more general gripe/musing about the wider software and AI ecosystem. I've seen this in my own work too. I feel very unhappy that we are using complex, nondeterministic, power-hungry "intelligent" machines to solve the problem of... unstructured data. Instead of... structuring the data.

I know you can't solve that problem. But nevertheless, wouldn't it be better for society as a whole if "we" agreed to make data accessible in machine-readable ways that don't require human-like agents to piece together the mess?

This is a writ-large version of the joke about writing an email in bullet points, inflating it to paragraphs using an LLM, then the receiver summarising the paragraphs back to bullet points using an LLM.
by wisty | 2025-04-16 23:43:02+00:00
> it teaches you how to think

Is there evidence for this?

I'm pretty sure people already know how to think. And IIRC tests of critical thinking (not subject specific) to college seniors and freshmen there's not convincing evidence that college really does that much. https://opportunityamericaonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2017... - also 4 years of anything tends to make an 18-22 year old a bit older and wiser.

A meta argument - colleges are at least halfway competent at assessing critical thinking, and if they were good at improving critical thinking then you'd expect to hear from the unis that can prove they did a good job, and you'd get more than just a slogan. Playing League of Legends also has a bit of face validity to any claim that it improves teamwork, problem solving, decision making under pressure, etc.
by alterom | 2025-04-16 23:43:15+00:00
>The lifetime ROI of college is only 13%?

Yeah, that's BS.

Right off the bat, I'm seeing different numbers[1] for median earnings elsewhere: $60K for college graduates vs. $36K for high-school diploma holders.

I have no idea where they got the $47K wage for high-school graduates from, and it's a substantial difference.

Because the difference between being able to make ends meet, and not being able to make ends meet isn't quantifiable in terms of ROI. Not having to worry about your card bouncing at the grocery store is a step-function-like quality of life increase alone.

What's the ROI of decreased risk of depression and suicide? [2]

Or living 7 years longer, as the article we're discussing acknowledges.

Then, the devil is in the details. Wages of someone with only a high school diploma and 20 years of experience today might be acceptable, but that's because they were able to get into the field with only a high school diploma 20 years back.

The job landscape right now is different, and will be different still 20 years into the future. We all know that a factory worker in the 1950s could get by just fine with only a HS diploma, but lumping their end-of-career earnings with those of a fresh high-school grad entering a dead-end job makes for bad analysis.

Yet this study attempts no such distinction.

Then, there's looking at the toll jobs available to HS diploma folks take on them. With social security and retirement potentially not being an option anymore, that's probably the most important factor to look at today.

I can go on and on; the point is, ROI calculation could make sense, but it is awfully incomplete in studies like this.

And that's ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that colleges are not merely trade schools. College education develops the mind, introduces people to different perspectives and backgrounds - and, on average, creates more informed voters with better critical thinking skills and more ability to resist Russian-style firehose-of-falsehood propaganda.[3]

There is no cure to that, aside from teaching critical thinking (according to the same RAND study) - which Finland has started doing a decade ago, starting from elementary school[4].

That kind of thing is one of a million reasons of why college education (beyond being a trade school with an ROI) is important for the society as a whole.

That, and probably the fact that even if a plumber makes the same as a college-level mathematics instructor, we shouldn't be pushing potential mathematicians to become plumbers for a better ROI.

Just a thought.

[1] https://www.aplu.org/our-work/4-policy-and-advocacy/publicuv...

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6739140/

[3] https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
by jtagliabuetooso | 2025-04-16 23:43:47+00:00
Thanks for the question!

On the data side of things, DVC is more about versioning static datasets / local files, while Bauplan manages your entire lakehouse, potentially hundreds of tables with point in time versioning (time travel) and branching (at any given time, different version of the same table) -> https://docs.bauplanlabs.com/en/latest/tutorial/02_catalog.h....

On the compute side of things, Bauplan runs the functions for you, unlike catalogs which only see a partial truth and provide only a piece of the puzzle: Bauplan knows both your code (because it runs your pipeline) and your data (because it handles all the commits on the lakehouse), which allows a one-liner reply to question such as:

"who change, when, with which code, this table on this branch?"

It also allows a lot of optimizations in multi-player mode, such as efficient caching of data (https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.08203) and packages (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17465).
by credit_guy | 2025-04-16 23:45:48+00:00
The Great Filter hypothesis is based on an analogy with the European conquest of the globe in the 19th century. Little by little all the white spots on the map were first explored, then annexed. The (unspoken) parallel is that an advanced civilization would explore and conquer the entire galaxy. But even if a civilization could achieve interstellar travel capabilities, it is entirely possible that they colonize, let's say, only 80% of the galaxy, not 100%. Or maybe only 50% or 10%. If our solar system is in the complement of their zone, how would we know they are out there. How would we know there are aliens around Alpha Centauri, let's say. They could be busy living their lives, broadcasting in all the regions of the radio spectrum with abandon, maybe even nuking each other from time to time. And we would just hear absolute silence. The distances between stars are just so mind-bogglingly huge.
by xp84 | 2025-04-16 23:46:57+00:00
Impressive that he managed to sneak in there, usually the incumbents do everything they can to block anyone from competing, hence the absurd amount of lobbying they do against municipal ISPs, which Comcast and friends are so scared of that they've successfully enacted many state-level bans of the entire concept.

(Quick but AI-sourced summary: https://chatgpt.com/share/68004134-f9b0-8008-9b77-f43d1750c5... )
by Beijinger | 2025-04-16 23:47:23+00:00
I would prefer to have the aurochs back. With a shoulder height of up to 185 cm ....

colossal biosciences where are you? ;-)

"There are also, in the same forest, aurochs, a little smaller than elephants. They are unlike other animals and resemble bulls. Their strength and speed are extraordinary. They spare neither man nor beast. When captured, even when young, they cannot be tamed. Their horns are highly prized, used in drinking vessels after being collected in hunts." Tacitus
by jtagliabuetooso | 2025-04-16 23:48:01+00:00
The pricing is a bit bespoke at the moment as we work closely with our customers - you can reach out at anytime to any of us for a chat (jacopo.tagliabue@bauplanlabs.com). The general driver is just compute capacity: how much resources you want to have available at any point in time?

My usual suggestion is to get a feeling for the APIs and capabilities on the public sandbox on our home page, which is free and with a lot of examples and datasets to start from!

As for the magic, the reasons behind building a FaaS runtime and the main optimizations have been shared in a few recent papers with the community - e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17465 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.08203 - and deep dive on podcasts (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPJvgkHIEBY).

If you want to geek out more, just reach out!
by karim79 | 2025-04-16 23:48:14+00:00
Weirdly enough, my dad spent roughly the same on my college (in Ireland).

I had no hopes nor expectations as to how my degree would end up being of benefit. It allowed me to see another part of the world, and "learn how to learn" so to speak.

I ended up doing another course in computing at the same time, which I had to pay for myself, using any and all free time I had during the college course, paid for by a shitty call center job I managed to get which paid, at the time, about EUR 3,60 / hour.

Later on, I went from approx. 1000 EUR / month in my first professional gig as a Java dev, to doubling that in the same establishment by getting promoted.

Then I got hired by a fortune 500 and left my country of origin (not Ireland) which paid....so much more. Then founding a startup, and now...

My conclusion is that the learning-to-learn aspect of it is of utmost importance. I think college is great for learning how to learn, even more than the content of what it happens to be that one is pursuing.
by theideaofcoffee | 2025-04-16 23:48:46+00:00
I feel like this is only going to get worse in the near future. These parasites have essentially been given carte blanche to be their most terrible selves. Apparently all of the dollars in the world doesn't shield their fragile little egos against some criticism and jabs from a comedian. Maybe they should talk to a therapist, rather than to their legions of drooling toadies, might be a better return on their money, since that means so much to them.
by dtagames | 2025-04-16 23:48:56+00:00
COBOL isn't a domain specific language by the usual meaning. It was designed for business use cases rather than Fortran that was for math folks but both are fully general purpose languages[0].

A DSL is a language made up by you, the user, for a specific aspect of your business.

[0] Source: I worked on mainframe compiler development at IBM on both the COBOL and Fortran products.
Show HN: A YouTube player to display custom Cantonese subtitles
by devon_c | 2025-04-16 23:49:14+00:00
I have a browser extension that does the same thing but when you're on the actual sites and I wanted a similar experience for mobile : )

(And a cool demo too)

- Transliteration is done via to-jyutping (by Jyutping.org)

- Subtitles were either generated from scratch via a pipeline that I've been working on with some Canto AI friends

- Or generated from an internal YouTube captions API by converting it to an SRT and then translating each line then prefixing (zh), (yue) or (en) respectively