MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-04-28 21:45:39+00:00
While there is a lot of bullshit hidden behind obtuse language, I would claim that in Germany there is a very different culture around what is a "good, clear academic text".

When I see HN discussions, in the USA, it seems to be that simple, clear explanations are something to be cherished. On the other hand, in Germany, the academic ideal is to use terms that describe things as precisely and exactly as possible.

In other words:

- in the USA "clarity" means "describing things as simple and "understandable" (for less educated people) as possible".

- In Germany (in particular humanities academia) "clarity" means "describing things in the most precise ('clear' in the sense of 'minimal risk of misunderstanding') terms as possible. You may assume that the reader is either sufficiently educated to know these specialist terms or take a serious effort to learn them".

Thus, the expectations what "clarity" means in academic texts are very different between these countries.
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-04-28 21:47:04+00:00
I've always been surprised at the sheer amount of work that's outsourced in software/IT.

Even companies that had staff of developers would often outsource work that should be part of their core competency. Without fail, every time, they ended up with a bill ~an order of magnitude higher than they'd pay if they were just hiring competent staff to deliver the project.

In many of these cases, these same firms would then hire another (lower quality) company to maintain it for them. This typically went as expected.

I could never understand the rationale for a lot of these cases.

"The existing staff is busy"--but they could have two hours of meetings with us daily?

"They don't have competence in those areas"--they're already using $CLOUD and $THAT_STUFF? It often was working with existing systems?

"Costs"--again, see above.

I really could not understand the motivation. I get it for clients that had no experience in what we were sent to do or got sold on something they didn't need, but a majority surely had or could get the resources to do the projects that were done, but opted not to, for whatever reason.

I've seen this kind of thing fail on many occasions.

If it's critical for your business, (ya know, not some LLM demo or something), you need ownership, otherwise you end up with a far larger cost of ownership and piles of logistical and quality problems.

I genuinely can't imagine a start-up doing this. Everything I've seen is private sector companies, most ~competent companies.

I'll say this, the cases where I have seen success in consulting (from the perspective of the 'buyer' is those that were intimately involved with the process from the start, providing feedback and pushing back when needed and taking initiative deliberately to "on board" so they could maintain and use whatever it was they got, and typically working alongside consultants)

You also have to basically avoid most consulting companies. I won't name them, but it's not hard to guess.
by pronik | 2025-04-28 21:47:05+00:00
I remember both those games from when I was about 12 and I also remember being endlessly frustrated with the mechanics. I couldn't get controls in order, seemed to fail at almost every sport (for some reason, I remember high jump vividly). Since those games came with several dozen others on a very cheaply bought CD (if you know what I mean) then I guess I can finally have a redemption arc for my skills after three decades. Great stuff!
by LordDragonfang | 2025-04-28 21:47:23+00:00
The reason it's hard to render straight from Markdown isn't because it's not a markup language like html - because Markdown is just syntactic sugar for a subset of html. Because of that, it's usually easier to just use the abundant html tooling to render it. The problem is that html needs CSS to render nicely - and any tool used to render CSS+HTML is almost by definition a browser engine.
by efnx | 2025-04-28 21:47:23+00:00
I think this is a problem of using the right abstractions.

Rust gamedev is the Wild West, and frontier development incurs the frontier tax. You have to put a lot of work into making an abstraction, even before you know if it’s the right fit.

Other “platforms” have the benefit of decades more work sunk into finding and maintaining the right abstractions. Add to that the fact that Rust is an ML in sheep’s clothing, and that games and UI in FP has never been a solved problem (or had much investment even), it’s no wonder Rust isn’t ready. We haven’t even agreed on the best solutions to many of these problems in FP, let alone Rust specifically!

Anyway, long story short, it takes a very special person to work on that frontier, and shipping isn’t their main concern.
by EMIRELADERO | 2025-04-28 21:47:26+00:00
A mixture of many architectures. LLMs will probably play a part.

As for other possible technologies, I'm most excited about clone-structured causal graphs[1].

What's very special about them is that they are apparently a 1:1 algorithmic match to what happens in the hippocampus during learning[2], to my knowledge this is the first time an actual end-to-end algorithm has been replicated from the brain in fields other than vision.

[1] "Clone-structured graph representations enable flexible learning and vicarious evaluation of cognitive maps" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22559-5

[2] "Learning produces an orthogonalized state machine in the hippocampus" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08548-w
by EA-3167 | 2025-04-28 21:47:28+00:00
It's always by comparison to heavily subsidized sources of power, especially gas/oil/coal where environmental externalities aren't costed in... or by comparison to solar (which is great, but can't hack it alone). As though it's shocking that an industry kept paralyzed by over-regulation and decades of uneducated public hysteria might not be competitive with some of the most subsidized and widespread industries in the world.

It's all part of a piece though, because people are both scared of radiation, and almost always totally ignorant of how it works, where it comes form, and what non-nuclear sources we encounter daily. At some point you just give up, and accept that it's easier to talk to brick walls than nuclear-deniers.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-28 21:47:36+00:00
This country was literally founded on terrorism oops, sorry, "revolutionaries"

Many founding fathers had strong ties to the smuggling industry, the Boston Tea party was the kind of vandalism that would put you in prison for life now, and there was constant and brutal aggression towards loyalist citizens including stealing their land and physically assaulting them.

No amount of Hamas chants will harm the US. Hamas is only effective in Palestine because people are outright propagandized and have almost zero hope for their lives. Or they are literal children.

Funny, the last time we got all antsy about teenagers chanting stuff on college campuses, several children were shot by the national guard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings

Seems to me, the threat isn't actually teenagers.

In fact, if you ask the FBI, the threat has consistently been white dudes with guns trying to do things like bomb federal buildings, do hate crimes, and attempt to abduct a sitting US state governor.

Should we deport all white guys with guns? I'll tell my brother to pack his stuff.
by akprasad | 2025-04-28 21:47:54+00:00
As a side project, I'm creating resources for learning Tamil, my parents' native language:

https://akprasad.github.io/tamil/

It's been a lot of fun getting the basic tools going: transliterators, morphological generators and analyzers, and some other things on top. But the main goal is to improve fluency as quickly and efficiently as possible.
by aadhavans | 2025-04-28 21:48:40+00:00
https://indiantranslate.com

It's a translation map of Indian languages - type in a word, see the translations across 22 languages.

I was inspired by this HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152587), and wanted to make something similar for India (which has similar linguistic diversity). Translations are fetched with Google Translate, but I also display 'romanizations' (transliterated into Latin script), which are generated with a local ML model.

Now that it's done, I've mostly been working on a little Markdown-to-HTML parser in Haskell.
by jleyank | 2025-04-28 21:49:10+00:00
When I’m trying to create new stuff, it has to be no-voice. Multiple genres are ok, but words are distracting. Quiet always works, too. For wtf debugging, anything with a hard edge is good. (Voice or not). I’m either idling awaiting inspiration or chasing an idea. If the latter is deep enough, the music sorta goes away.
by lynndotpy | 2025-04-28 21:49:46+00:00
What I mean is, I want to be able to use i32/i64/u32/u64/f32/f64s interchangeably, including (and especially!) in libraries I don't own.

I'm usually working with positive values, and almost always with values within the range of integers f32 can safely represent (+- 16777216.0).

I want to be able to write `draw(x, y)` instead of `draw(x as u32, y as u32)`. I want to write "3" instead of "3.0". I want to stop writing "as".

It sounds silly, but it's enough to kill that gamedev flow loop. I'd love if the Rust compiler could (optionally) do that work for me.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-28 21:49:55+00:00
wehnelt interrupter / electrolytic interrupter can work as a switching up or down converter, fully analog, no transistors, thyristors, no ic, no capacitors, just coil.

single electric motor can be used stationary as a transformer

or in pairs, in motion like inverter, rectifier, (synchronous rotary converter)

autotransformer
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-04-28 21:49:58+00:00
> I stated my assumptions pretty clearly and why I've made them as well.

The first yes, the second no. If you had a reason for the assumption, I think it would not be an assumption.

> I have a former coworker ...

One might assume you are thinking more about your former co-worker than you are about Clubber. They could make that assumption because you describe in detail an actual instance of what you complain about in the absence of any other such description in Clubber's comment.

Should they assume that? Even if they have reasons? Even if they're right? What does it add to the discussion?

I think you could have made a good point about their assessment missing the mark because I agree that the skills you write about are improved by "finding the lowest level you can execute" more than "coding to make an actual sellable product". Still, they might consider the latter to be no different from the former (the former is certainly a more precise description, regardless). Your story about the co-worker is a good one on that topic. It's unfortunate that the assumptions make your comments easier to dismiss.
by sega_sai | 2025-04-28 21:50:24+00:00
With all the different open-weight models appearing, is there some way of figuring out what model would work with sensible speed (> X tok/s) on a standard desktop GPU ?

I.e. I have Quadro RTX 4000 with 8G vram and seeing all the models https://ollama.com/search here with all the different sizes, I am absolutely at loss which models with which sizes would be fast enough. I.e. there is no point of me downloading the latest biggest model as that will output 1 tok/min, but I also don't want to download the smallest model, if I can.

Any advice ?
by NaOH | 2025-04-28 21:51:20+00:00
(2010)

Previous discussions:

The BeOS file system: an OS geek retrospective - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43813579 - April 2025 (2 comments)

The BeOS file system: an OS geek retrospective - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24535591 - Sept 2020 (19 comments)

The BeOS file system: an OS geek retrospective - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24417890 - Sept 2020 (1 comment)

The BeOS file system: an OS geek retrospective - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17468920 - July 2018 (50 comments)

The BeOS file system: an OS geek retrospective - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2705067 - June 2011 (33 comments)

The BeOS file system: an OS geek retrospective - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1400759 - June 2010 (12 comments)
by bardak | 2025-04-28 21:51:38+00:00
Even if you insist on going through the cities in the valley they chose a construction sequence that takes the longest time to show any process. If they fast tracked LA-Bakersfield they could have extended the Amtrak San Joaquin service to LA by now. Concentrat on the SF-Merced section next and then you can work on the Merced-Bakersfield piece meal.
by simonw | 2025-04-28 21:52:08+00:00
Something that interests me about the Qwen and DeepSeek models is that they have presumably been trained to fit the worldview enforced by the CCP, for things like avoiding talking about Tiananmen Square - but we've had access to a range of Qwen/DeepSeek models for well over a year at this point and to my knowledge this assumed bias hasn't actually resulted in any documented problems from people using the models.

Aside from https://huggingface.co/blog/leonardlin/chinese-llm-censorshi... I haven't seen a great deal of research into this.

Has this turned out to be less of an issue for practical applications than was initially expected? Are the models just not censored in the way that we might expect?
by Tempest1981 | 2025-04-28 21:52:10+00:00
The grid uses AC (not DC), running at 50 Hz (cycles per second). So the voltage is going up and down at that frequency, in a sine-wave pattern.

If you try to connect another generator to the grid, it needs to be at the same point (phase) in the sine-wave cycle, so that its power contribution is added, not subtracted.

If it's not in sync, huge currents can flow, causing damage. Sort of like connecting jumper cables backwards.
by pronik | 2025-04-28 21:52:17+00:00
I remember Pizza Tycoon having copy protection based on pizza recipes (for which I didn't have the recipe booklet, for usual reasons). In the early days of your pizzeria, people would only want the classics and if you couldn't make them, you struggled hard. Somehow, I've managed to power through (probably easy difficulty or something) and as soon as you build up connections to the mafia, people would gladly eat the most abhorrend pizzas the world has ever seen (I vividly remember an all-plum pizza I've created, it was beloved beyond any reason).
by lancekey | 2025-04-28 21:53:00+00:00
https://computeprices.com

A side project I started at the end of last year.

It's pretty clear that compute and energy are going to be two of the most important resources to track and manage in the coming decades. I'm trying to get a sense for prices and usage of compute and this project is my attempt to do that hopefully providing useful info to others as well.
by rorylaitila | 2025-04-28 21:53:22+00:00
I've been looking for an open source image editor that I can embed in my app for managing my vintage ad archives (https://adretro.com). Basically I just need to rotate, crop, adjust color. But the images come from from the archive database rather than upload. And I want to work with them quickly, rather than save/open like a desktop app. Last time I looked I couldn't find something with good documentation that was easy to get started with. Right now I bulk edit in Google Photos.
by gwern | 2025-04-28 21:53:46+00:00
The quality would not follow because Distill.pub publications take literally hundreds of man-hours for the Distill part. Highly skilled man-hours too, to make any of this work on the Web reliably. (Source: I once asked Olah basically the same question: "How many man-hours of work by Google-tier web developers could those visualizations possibly be, Michael? 10?")
by kazinator | 2025-04-28 21:53:53+00:00
While you can put the entrance and exit wherever you want, if you know that the maze was generated by a recursive branching process which had a starting point somewhere, it probably behooves you to put the start at that point corresponding to the root of the tree, so that the maze wanderer faces the most branching choices.

Laying out the abstract maze tree into the rectilinear grid of cells obfuscates the tree somewhat, but not entirely. A process that generates from upper left to lower right, for instance, will tend to generate cells whose parent-headed exits going left and up more often than not, making the reverse direction a bit easier.

(Again, it depends on the maze generation process.)
by EugeneOZ | 2025-04-28 21:54:02+00:00
My son was at the university outside of Barcelona, and I lost contact with him for 6 hours. He was traveling home, and I knew that the roads had no working semaphores, and there were dozens of incidents...

I lost some years today.

My son is fine, thanks to a random person (“the man with a rabbit”) who just decided to give a lift to my son and his friend to the edge of Barcelona.
by ergsef | 2025-04-28 21:54:38+00:00
The fact is that politicians are insanely car-brained and nobody has any enthusiasm for improving rail infrastructure. Via Rail is trapped in this insane spiral of service cuts where it's miserable for staff and riders, and the solution is to cut more to make up for declining ridership.

The new HSR is only happening because with the innovation of P3 deals the government can pay for the project but give all the profits to their private-sector pals. Suddenly investing in public infrastructure is appealing again (as long as the public doesn't actually get to own it!)
by Yizahi | 2025-04-28 21:55:02+00:00
A simple program in the calculator can provide the correct math answer, hence I conclude that my Casio can "reason" and "understand" maths.

You have redefined words reason and understand to include a lot of states which most of the population wouldn't call neither reasoning not understanding. In those arbitrary definitions, yes, you are right. I just disagree myself, that producing correct math answer is in any way called reasoning, especially given how LLMs function.
by pcwalton | 2025-04-28 21:55:04+00:00
> Nobody has really pushed the performance issues.

This is clearly false. The Bevy performance improvements that I and the rest of the team landed in 0.16 speak for themselves [1]: 3x faster rendering on our test scenes and excellent performance compared to other popular engines. It may be true that little work is being done on rend3, but please don't claim that there isn't work being done in other parts of the ecosystem.

[1]: https://bevyengine.org/news/bevy-0-16/
by tandr | 2025-04-28 21:55:19+00:00
The larger model (235b) on chat produced rather an impressive answer on a small coding task I gave it. But Qwen-30B-A3B gave a result for the same task worse than Qwen 2.5 does.

"Write a Golang program that merges huge presorted text files, just like sort -m does". Quite often models need "use heap" as guidance, but this time big model figured it out by itself.
by scythe | 2025-04-28 21:55:36+00:00
It would be one thing if they were just going to Fresno. There are three major cities in the Central Valley: Bakersfield, Fresno and Sacramento. You get Bakersfield for free; Sacramento is north of SF and has existing commuter rail. Fresno is big enough to justify a stop; it has room to grow, too. You could put a stop that's ten miles outside of Fresno, and you don't have to cut through the city too much. That's what they do with airports. Throw in a LRT while you're at it.

But the plan also calls for Tulare and Madera to have stops. Now you're doing three times the work for a 20-40% increase in the population served. Then they want a line to Sacramento that goes through Merced and Visalia At this point it looks silly. Fresno is larger than Tulare, Madera, Merced and Visalia combined. Stockton already has the Altamont Commuter Express line to San Jose.
by pbmango | 2025-04-28 21:56:39+00:00
It is also possible that this "world view tuning" may have just been the manifestation of how these models gained public attention. Whether intentional or not, seeing the Tiananmen Square reposts across all social feeds may have done more to spread awareness of these models technical merits than the technical merits themselves would have. This is certainly true for how consumers learned about free Deepseek and fit perfectly into how new AI releases are turned into high click through social media posts.
by pcwalton | 2025-04-28 21:57:20+00:00
> Just a mode to automatically coerce between numeric types would make Rust so much more ergonomic for gamedev.

C# is stricter about float vs. double for literals than Rust is, and the default in C# (double) is the opposite of the one you want for gamedev. That hasn't stopped Unity from gaining enormous market share. I don't think this is remotely near the top issue.
by minimaxir | 2025-04-28 21:57:26+00:00
DeepSeek R1 was a massive outlier in terms of media attention (a free model that can potentially kill OpenAI!), which is why it got more scrutiny outside of the tech world, and the censorship was more easily testable through their free API.

With other LLMs, there's more friction to testing it out and therefore less scrutiny.
by legitster | 2025-04-28 21:58:33+00:00
> An early version of the ACFT held male and female soldiers to the same physical fitness standards, regardless of age. In 2019, initial testing showed that 84% of women who took the test had failed while men across 11 of 63 battalions had a 70% pass rate. The test trials prompted criticism from the Service Women’s Action Network, which called the Army’s implementation “rash” because “too many otherwise qualified soldiers are failing elements of the test.”

That's actually pretty striking. Only 30% of men fail vs 84% of women. And I am assuming women probably train harder and more intentionally.
by Suppafly | 2025-04-28 21:58:35+00:00
man google's ai uses context clues better than some people I know. I kinda wish it wouldn't though, because it gives somewhat real sounding answers to things like that that actually have a different meaning because of historical and cultural context that it's not aware of. it should let you know when it's making something up using it's limited awareness of word meanings vs something that's an actual phrase that people use.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-28 21:58:35+00:00
Just because we sit them in front of textbooks and lectures for 8 hours a day for 12 years (plenty of kids drop out of highschool or take fairly nonstandard "get to work" programs that de-emphasize education.) doesn't mean they learn anything.

Plenty of kids sat next to me in precalc learning how to calculate mortgage rates and then complain that school doesn't teach useful skills like how to calculate a mortgage. At the end of the day, learning cannot be forced. You can put all the info in front of the person you want, they can just ignore it.

This is especially true after Bush Jr. made it impossible to hold kids back, which was the primary way we worked around a stubborn kid.

We are roughly one generation after No Child Left Behind, and a lot of kids have been educationally left behind. IMO this is not coincidence. Good teachers knew right away the negative effects that program caused.

Obama reformed NCLB a bit, but did not fix the part that incentivizes schools to prefer just pushing kids forward if they are struggling.
by GodelNumbering | 2025-04-28 21:58:54+00:00
There are a lot of variables here such as your hardware's memory bandwidth, speed at which at processes tensors etc.

A basic thing to remember: Any given dense model would require X GB of memory at 8-bit quantization, where X is the number of params (of course I am simplifying a little by not counting context size). Quantization is just 'precision' of the model, 8-bit generally works really well. Generally speaking, it's not worth even bothering with models that have more param size than your hardware's VRAM. Some people try to get around it by using 4-bit quant, trading some precision for half VRAM size. YMMV depending on use-case