MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by noduerme | 2025-04-04 23:52:42+00:00
From the standpoint of using a human likeness, I don't see the difference between encoding a "conceptual representation" of Ford's face into a model and encoding it into any other digital or analog format from which it can later be decoded into a reasonable facsimile of the original.

I think that calling it a "conceptual representation" over-complicates the issue. At the very least, the model weights encode a process that can produce a copy of their training date. A 300x300 pixel image of Harrison Ford's face is one of what, like 1.5x10^12 possible images. Obviously, only a tiny fraction of all possible images are encoded in the model. Is encoding those particular weights into a diffuser which can select that face by a process of refinement really much different than, say, encoding the image into a set of fractal algorithms, or a set of vectors?

I'd argue that the largest models are akin to a compression method that has simply pre-encoded every word and image they've ingested, such that the "compressed file" is the prompt you give to the AI. Even with billions of weights trained on millions of texts and images, they've only encoded an infinitely tiny fraction of the entire space. Semantically you could call it something other than a "copy", but functionally how is it any different?
by nine_k | 2025-04-04 23:53:19+00:00
Not only that. Fortran is very good for writing number-crunching code. Modern Fortran is a pretty ergonomic language, it gives you a really easy way to auto-parallelize things in many ways, and new Fortran code is being produce unironically. Of course it normally uses the treasure trove of existing numerical Fortran code. (Source: a friend who worked at CERN.)
by sn9 | 2025-04-04 23:53:25+00:00
COVID was basically an act of god that effected everyone and for whom no single actor could be blamed.

This is the thoughtless incineration of trust in a network of relationships, and that has to be earned back.

It's unclear how long that will take even if the GOP loses the next few presidential elections given how much US policy can change from one term to the next.

The world will be waiting to see if Trumpism ends with Trump or if it becomes something they have to account for possibly taking power every four years.

This has ramifications for any long-term investment into the US like factories and manufacturing. The risk has just shot up and will be much slower to come down.
by hollerith | 2025-04-04 23:54:11+00:00
Rayiner says it in a comment upthread. Whereas most lawyers in the US work on cases filed in state court, Rayiner works on cases filed in Federal court, and if you were to sue the US government to try to assert the free-speech rights of the immigrants we are talking about, you'd do it in Federal court.

Sadly, his comment has been flagged.
by MikeKusold | 2025-04-04 23:55:00+00:00
At some point you'll want to upgrade the hugo generator, and then you'll need to wade through their release logs. I neglected my personal site for years and I had to hunt down various errors and deprecations. It's out of reach for non-developers to do. A 1.x compatibility promise would go a long way.

My wife's site runs on Squarespace, and she's been self-sufficient since it was set up.
by willsmith72 | 2025-04-04 23:55:50+00:00
A no-code website builder, 100%. You don't want to maintain that thing. A good builder (I like framer) let's non technical people take ownership over it while still providing flexibility in UI and high speed (for SEO & bounce rate). After seeing landing pages that non tech friends have built, there's no way I'd do it from scratch. Too buggy and time consuming.
by bch | 2025-04-04 23:56:12+00:00
I think he was worried about Sun Microsystems involvement[0] w Tcl when John Ousterhout went there[1], too. But mostly seems like a collection of unsolicited strawmen[2]. Also probably love-of-lisp.

[0] That any proximity to commerce is evil?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ousterhout

[2] https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/
by vessenes | 2025-04-04 23:57:49+00:00
Totally agreed. Among the many complaints I have here, this is a big one. As long as Dems are saying "this sucks we hate it we will change it", we have a lot of uncertainty, and so it is definitely not time to build factories.

I'd contrast this with the Obama energy policy, which was a significant change in US policy toward energy independence, consistently and fairly quietly applied without generating a worldwide recession or trade war.
by WheelsAtLarge | 2025-04-05 00:00:07+00:00
Modern gadget are next to impossible to fully debug since they are based on software. Software gives us infinite possibilities which is a double edge sword. We get infinite ways to design what we want but with that comes infinites ways that bugs can creep in. One way to mitigate the problem is to define strict design rules which minimize problems but that would also mean we minimize creativity.

Current tech may seem worse but that's simply because it tries to so much more which means we see a lot more unintended problems.

Bottom line, software-based-perfect-design is a moving target that it will never be achieved to our complete satisfaction.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-04-05 00:00:27+00:00
Because.

There.

Was.

No.

Vote.

Please, show me the bill they signed for these tariffs. Please, show me the bill for DOGE. The dissolving of the DoE. The mass firing of federal employees.

Democrats cannot do anything because Trump has dissolved the power of the legislative branch and Republicans are capitulating. He is acting unconstitutionally as a king who declared unilateral edicts. The only they can do is sue in the courts afterwards, but they would still need standing, which politicians lack.
by llm_nerd | 2025-04-05 00:00:29+00:00
While I have no doubt that Vietnam went calling, facing devastating tariffs, the "hat in hand" bit is uproarious.

What do you think Vietnam will offer?

It has negligible tariffs on US goods. It exports a lot to the US because it has very cheap labour, because it's a poor country. It is in no position to buy more from the US. There is no universe where it's going to even remotely close that trade deficit.

So what, in your rose-coloured view, do you think they are offering up?

I mean, everyone realizes this is a hilarious cope regardless. Trump declared, with utter absolutism, that the tariffs are not going anywhere and there is no way to negotiate them. That his "ERS" would net trillions and balance the budget. But wait...now it was really a masterful negotiating strategy?

I mean, Trump could have said "here's the tariffs we have estimate based upon a current analysis", and if isn't remediated in a month we'll stagger in "reciprocal" tariffs. That isn't what he did. Instead he did the stupidest thing imaginable, which is what we see today. So yes, when he has to backtrack because it was the most catastrophic self-destruction in history, feel good that a super poor country came "hat in hand".
by kcplate | 2025-04-05 00:00:46+00:00
Tariffs will have negative impact if it’s on an everyday item. That group doesn't buy new luxury euro cars and wines every day. They buy domestic or Japanese and domestic beer and liquor. I’m convinced that east asia (Japan, Korea, Vietnam) will negotiate the tariffs down and that will bring Japanese/Korean vehicles and clothes prices down because China will need to lower prices to stay competitive to Vietnam and Korea and will just eat the tariff.

Coffee will go up, but most food staples will not be all that volatile because Mexico got the out. Coffee is weird one though…because people will gladly pay 30% more for coffee on account of it being more an habit/addiction.
by rottc0dd | 2025-04-05 00:00:49+00:00
From my other comment elsewhere. These resources helped me understand the topics better.

If anyone wants to understand fundamentals of machine learning, one of the superb resources I have found is, Stanford's "Probability for computer scientists"[1].

It goes into theoretical underpinnings of probability theory and ML, IMO better than any other course I have seen. But, this is a primarily a probability course that discusses the fundamentals of machine learning. (Yeah, Andrew Ng is legendary, but his course demands some mathematical familiarity with linear algebra topics)

There is a course reader for CS109 [2]. You can download pdf version of this. Caltech's learning from data was really good too, if someone is looking for theoretical understanding of ML topics [3].

There is also book for excellent caltech course[4].

Also, neural networks zero to hero is for understanding how neural networks are built from ground up [5].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MuDZIAzBMY&list=PLoROMvodv4...

[2] https://chrispiech.github.io/probabilityForComputerScientist...

[3] https://work.caltech.edu/telecourse

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Data-Yaser-S-Abu-Mostafa/dp/...

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMj-3S1tku0&list=PLAqhIrjkxb...
by jackb4040 | 2025-04-05 00:00:54+00:00
>declarative

>create_table

Commands are not declarative. You want a single file with the state of your schema in it? We call that a schema file. It is strictly a negative to declare your schema in SQL, an imperative language. There is no way to guarantee this create_table will run safely, because it's not meant to ever be run.
by falcor84 | 2025-04-05 00:01:00+00:00
Hmm... that's interesting. It sort of gives me a glimpse, but I'm still very confused about what the "process" of programming is for you. You mention in your explanation that these things in your head are somewhat "vague" and "abstract" - so how do you see the action of converting a general idea in your head into working code in the computer?

Just to recap, the way I see this is that the non-verbal neural processes are insufficient to fully define a computer program and it is only at the point where a person converts their abstract thoughts into verbal statements/expressions that the program is fully generated.

So is it that you have some process whereby you feel that you can generate a specific program in your head (e.g. with those shapes you mentioned) that exits in fullness without any equivalent of statements? And if so, can you foresee a future human-computer interface that would allow you to program directly via those shapes without having to type statements?
by vessenes | 2025-04-05 00:01:03+00:00
> What are the chances that XAI just happened to have a thinking model close to as good as revolutionary DeepSeek but happened to launch it 30 days later?

Extremely, extremely good. That was in fact the real point of the deepseek paper - it was extremely cheap to turn a frontier(ish?) model into a reasoning model. There is nothing suspicious about this timeline from an ML Ops point of view.

In fact DeepSeek themselves in a sort of victory lap released six OTHER models from other providers finetuned with reasoning as part of the initial drop.
by blatantly | 2025-04-05 00:01:35+00:00
I lost the thread a bit. Are we talking about Doge? Yes that is a abysmal. No defence for that.

But in general people need to learn some stuff on the job. E.g. hire an 18 year old hacker and by 20 they are leading projects, debugging code, preparing for SOC compliance etc. Is possible.
by cloudbonsai | 2025-04-05 00:04:11+00:00
Maybe. But as an OSS developer, I find it cozy that even domestic food production has a certain global component. I like the image of a global community helping each other, just as we do in software projects.

I mean, if American companies had rejected Linux/Ruby/Lua because "they are foreign goods, born in Finland/Japan/Brazil", were it better?
by llm_nerd | 2025-04-05 00:04:54+00:00
>China is the real target,

To put it impolitely, bullshit. Zero rational analysis comes to this conclusion.

Trump began this idiocy by attacking Canada and Mexico, the very countries he triumphantly signed his trade agreement with just five years ago. He lied -- that's what he does -- about a made up Fentanyl emergency, but it's clear the guy loves tariffs (he's been going on about this for years, and still people try to pretend that isn't what this is about...amazingly everyone just assumes that everything out of his mouth is a lie). Outside of oil and gas the US has (or rather had) a massive trade surplus with Canada, but oh well that's a thing of the past now and will never return.

Then he attacked everyone else.

He did the same thing in term one. He could easily have gotten everyone onboard with strategies to contain or slow China, but instead he pushed everyone else away. He had adults in the room containing his profound sabotage of the US the first time, but this time he's going to speedrun the country to dissolution.

I get that the Trump faithful are desperately trying to do the 4D chess thing now. It will never work. The clown has no idea what he is doing, and has build such a cult no one can tell him how profoundly stupid he is. His treasury secretary is likely to quit in days.
by kazinator | 2025-04-05 00:09:13+00:00
> I'm kind of surprised guitars have stayed monophonic for as long as they have, and I feel like the next advance might be a cultural shift of guitars to a true polyphonic output path.

Guitars are now instruments mainly for backwards looking musicians. New players who want to use distortion want to reproduce the sounds of yesteryear, whether it be 70's hard rock or 90's metal.

It will not sound right without those intermodulation products. Even a simple double-stop blues bend with the G and B strings won't be right with separately distorted strings; you need to hear that beating warble arising from the difference of the frequencies, and how that beat frequency changes with the amount of bend. Intermodulation distortion in chords adds "grit", and that's an inseparable part of the attitude of the music.

Separately from that, guitarists can easily get their polyphonic jolies from playing cleanly.

There is also the whole world of guitars as MIDI controllers for synthesizers. The technology there is mature by now. You can get any sound you want, cleanly polyphonic.

In guitar, there this this bizarre movement of longing for vintage stuff and looking for authenticity in connection with the past. It's getting surreal and almost eerie when 20-somethings are making videos about guitars from 1950-something and pedals from 1979 and whatever. Kids are excited about stuff I thought was old and uncool in 1987. (Telecaster, WTF? Do I look like f'ing Bruce Springsteen?)

Probably the greatest development in guitar in recent years or decades is digital modeling. But what does that do? It is mainly backwards-looking. You have "amp models" which reference specific units or their archetypes. There is a lot of fuss about whether the tube sound is reproduced.
by fedorvin | 2025-04-05 00:09:44+00:00
A declarative OSINT VM builder utilizing Nix Flakes. The goal is to quickly generate a fresh QCOW2 image with all necessary applications installed and configured, mainly Firefox with numerous settings and extensions.

I think this can be really useful as it allows you to maintain separate QCOW2 files for each investigation, since they can be generated in just a few seconds.

Using a Nix Flake also provides an easy way to add or remove tools, offering extensive customization based on your needs.
by ashirviskas | 2025-04-05 00:09:58+00:00
I've only taken duolingo in French for a few months a few years ago, have heard my girlfriend practice her Italian and I've spent some time around german people. Had Russian lessons and I have pretty good English and Lithuanian skills. I'm only fluent in the last two languages. I still understood most of your prompt. So I don't think this is a good test.

Reading that prompt again, I think watching some anime with subs helped too.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-05 00:10:40+00:00
That's true but it's not usefully true.

Even avoiding things like gerrymandering, are voters choosing politicians or are politicians choosing voters?

Do candidates send out emails asking for you to talk to your friends, or do they ask for more money? Do candidates have principled stances founded on an underlying philosophy, or do they focus on issues that are emotional in order to drum up support.

I think "why do candidates ask for money" is a very very important question to ruminate on as is "why are we talking about abortion and race rather than health and housing"?

Before a general election there is a primary and before a primary there is fundraising. In order to succeed in a primary, in general, you have to do OK at fundraising. Fundraising is not dissimilar to an election and it happens before primaries. This means money votes first, which is why it feels like we have a "democracy" approved of by those with money, we literally do.

Money votes first.
by drjasonharrison | 2025-04-05 00:10:58+00:00
The Kora Borehole got to 12,262 metres deep, and was stopped due to a lack of funds.[1]

""" Drilling penetrated about a third of the way through the Baltic Shield of the continental crust, estimated to be around 35 kilometres (22 mi) deep, reaching Archean rocks at the bottom.[13] Numerous unexpected geophysical discoveries were made:

During the drilling process, the expected basaltic layers at 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) down were never found, nor were basaltic layers at any depth.[14] There were instead more granites, deeper than predicted. The prediction of a transition at 7 kilometres was based on seismic waves indicating discontinuity, which could have been caused by a transition between rocks, or a metamorphic transition in the granite itself.[14]

Water pooled 3–6 kilometres (1.9–3.7 mi) below the surface,[14][15] having percolated up through the granite until it reached a layer of impermeable rock.[16][17] This water did not naturally vaporize at any depth in the borehole.[15]

The drilling mud that flowed out of the hole was described as "boiling" with an unexpected level of hydrogen gas.[18]

Microscopic plankton fossils were found 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) below the surface.[1] """

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole
by kace91 | 2025-04-05 00:11:13+00:00
Yup, LLMs are a polyglot’s dream interface, considering multi language is a feature that pretty much all companies screw up each in their own way.

And then there’s apple, which will not let me use their AI features because Siri needs to be in the same language as iOS, Siri is set to English and iOS is set to “English (Spain)” (????).
by leptoniscool | 2025-04-05 00:11:39+00:00
I tried it on gpt-4-turbo and it seems to give the right answer:

>Let's calculate:494,547,645,908,151+7,640,745,309,351,279,642=7,641,239,856,997,187,793 >494,547,645,908,151+7,640,745,309,351,279,642=7,641,239,856,997,187,793 >Answer: 7,641,239,856,997,187,793
by grandempire | 2025-04-05 00:12:55+00:00
> I think it benefits society to fund academic research.

see how you mentally group all these things under one umbrella. No I don’t think sociology research is on the same standing as physics research and I also don’t think all physics research is equal.

Based on the reports coming from Doge I think there are a lot of bad studies funded in the name of science or academic research.
by tagnifi | 2025-04-05 00:13:46+00:00
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by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2025-04-05 00:13:47+00:00
Hmm. Allow me to offer a counter perspective. You are arguing for a complete dismissal of someone's point of view, because you perceive the presented argument to be not an appropriate comparison. However, your response is that the conversation should be shut down and not address the points given. I do not think anyone in this thread is arguing it is not happening. Some of us are actually saying that there is a quite a slippery that we were taken down on. If it helps, it did not start in 2018 ( although some tactics did escalate in that period ).

And, I might add, in US, your work is not just your work. It is your healthcare, your network, your family's wellbeing. If you do not see why some of us consider it an issue, you, if you allow this blatant repetition of your phrase for a specific effect, are blind.
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2025-04-05 00:15:31+00:00
Good grief man, deplatforming, chilling speech and all that is how we got into this mess to begin with. Have you learned nothing from the past 10 years?

edit: Holy mackarel, I am this close to accepting the argument that the people on 'the left' need to be treated that exact way you described just so that they can understand why 'the right' feel aggrevied. I simply cannot accept Soviet Union style 'do not employ this man' brand. I feel dirty just thinking about it as an option.
by em-bee | 2025-04-05 00:16:46+00:00
the problem is in your apparent conclusion that "people without a tribe" are only in that state because they hate company. which doesn't make sense. if they indeed hated company they would not do what you say is bothering you. the reason they come to the party alone and tell you about it is because they do want company but have difficulty finding that company. being a loner most often is not a choice. it is something that we force onto others because we don't accept them the way they are. those who are loners by choice are not the kind of people who go to parties.

what agency is it that i should have that would allow me to make friends with people? i can't use my agency to change the behavior of others. you are right of course that self pity and denial of agency don't help. but the comments you are responding to don't talk about that at all. they are not suggesting that people without a tribe wallow in self pity and denial of agency. you brought that up.

i am the kind of person that has difficulty finding a tribe. (my tribe is here on HN and in the FOSS community to an extent. but those people are all distant and hard to meet. btw, you are one of the few names on HN that i recognize because of interesting discussions we had already). except i don't show up at parties where i am not welcome and don't talk to people that don't want to listen to me. but that's why i used my agency to leave my home country and travel the world to find communities that accept others without judging them and without expecting them to change just for the sake of being accepted.
by bch | 2025-04-05 00:16:56+00:00
Cisco iOS[0], F5 iRules[1], Tealeaf network monitoring/processing[2][3], Fidessa[4][5], …

[0] https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios-xml/ios/ios_tcl/co...

[1] https://community.f5.com/kb/technicalarticles/irules-concept...

[2] https://www.acoustic.com/tealeaf

[3] https://help.goacoustic.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043279654-C...

[4] https://www.cmegroup.com/solutions/market-tech-and-data-serv...

[5] http://www.services.fidessa.com/brochures/_training/VF043.pd...
by notnullorvoid | 2025-04-05 00:17:51+00:00
Not really a surprise. The TOS for the extension marketplace has been clear that it's only to be used for VS Code, that's why VSCodium doesn't use it. Cursor devs undoubtedly knew better, but kept breaking TOS and licenses, MS just chose a strategic moment to enforce the rules already in place.

Cursor not being an extension from the start seemed odd to me, and they wouldn't be in this rough spot if they had done that.
by sebastiennight | 2025-04-05 00:18:38+00:00
People who speak multiple languages can easily understand both the GP's query and every single LLM reply they quoted.

I'm afraid you have failed the jschoe test [0] : you've been outsmarted by an LLM, and incorrectly concluded that it's because the LLM did something dumb.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43468092