MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bko | 2025-04-23 17:38:49+00:00
We should devise a system that gathers all human resources and applies them to a set of goals, like you mentioned. The smartest people in the world should get together, determine the most pressing issues and command all of humanities resources into those problems. We can remove a lot of waste like frivolous consumerism, endless choice and competition. Why has no one ever tried this before?
by aeturnum | 2025-04-23 17:38:52+00:00
I really think you are under estimating things here. The trip to mars is ~145x longer (at minimum!) than the trip to the moon. Let's say it only takes us twice the time to develop a rocket & ship that can do that (and come back ofc) - so that's 20 years (for 145x the distance). Then you gotta develop structures and building techniques, some of which you can look at with robots, but some of which will need human feedback. The trip itself takes 7~10 months, adding extra time.

If all of humanity devoted ourselves to setting up a mars base it would take less than 100 years! My timeline was based on NASA with 2-4x the budget, which I think is very reasonable. I think you are being foolish.
by os2warpman | 2025-04-23 17:39:13+00:00
Timber, rope, time, and effort.

That's it. That's all there is to it.

Nothing more.

It isn't complicated, it's leverage, ramps, muscles, and patience.

It is likely that the entire construction program was planned around the 10-20 years it took to move the 80-ton weight-relieving stones much like how today I plan engineering and manufacturing efforts around the components with the longest lead times.

There were very few 80t blocks and those only had to go halfway up. Most were 2.5t.

Sacsayhuamán in Peru has 100t+ stones that were quarried 35km from the fortress location and transported up a steep incline. It took 6,000 men to move the stones.
by csours | 2025-04-23 17:39:25+00:00
Once this category of error is raised to your attention, you start to notice it more and more.

A little piece of technology made sense in the original context, but then it got moved to a different context without realizing that move broke the contract. Specifically in this case a flying boat became an airplane.

---

I recently worked a bug that feels very similar:

A linux cups printer would not print to the selected tray, instead it always requested manual feed.

Ok. Try a bunch of command line options, same issue.

Ok. Make the selection directly in the PPD (postscript printer definition) file. Same issue.

Ok! Decompile the PXL file. Wrong tray is set in pxl file... why?

Check Debug2 log level for cups - Wrong MediaPosition is being sent to ghostscript (which compiles the printer options into the print job) by a cups filter... why?

Cups filter is translating the MediaPosition from the PPD file... because the philosophy of cups is to do what the user intended. The intention inferred from MediaPosition in the PPD file (postscript printer definition) is that the MediaPosition corresponds to the PWG (Printer Working Group) MediaPosition, NOT the vendor MediaPosition (or local equivalent - in this case MediaSource).

AHA!! My PPD file had been copied from a previous generation of server, from a time when that cups filter did NOT translate the MediaPosition, so the VENDOR MediaSource numbers were used. Historically, this makes sense. The vendor tray number is set in the vendor ppd file because cups didn't know how to translate that.

Fast forward to a new execution context, and cups filters have gotten better at translating user intention, now it's translating a number that doesn't need to be translated, and silently selecting the wrong tray.

TLDR; There is no such thing as a printer command, only printer suggestions.
by mNovak | 2025-04-23 17:39:59+00:00
Just want to say the interactive widgets being actually hooked up to an LLM was very fun.

To continue bashing on gmail/gemini, the worst offender in my opinion is the giant "Summarize this email" button, sitting on top of a one-liner email like "Got it, thanks". How much more can you possibly summarize that email?
by hulium | 2025-04-23 17:40:13+00:00
The users may have 1080p monitors, but even Windows does not do subpixel antialiasing in its new apps (UWP/WinUI) anymore. On Linux, GTK4 does not do subpixel antialiasing anymore.

The reason is mostly that it is too hard to make it work under transformations and compositing, while higher resolution screens are a better solution for anyone who cares enough.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-04-23 17:40:25+00:00
IMO Smith misapplied the term "pixel" to mean "sample". A pixel is a physical object, a sample is a logical value that corresponds in some way to the state of the physical object (either as an input from a sensor pixel or an output to a display pixel) but is also used in signal processing. Samples aren't squares, pixels (usually) are.
by rdtsc | 2025-04-23 17:40:35+00:00
> i’m breaking up with vibe coding. here’s why.

I eventually figured out Andrej defined the term seriously, but initially I thought "vibe coding" was a parody. As in, it's was ridiculing people who can't code and won't put the effort and just kind of like letting the LLM drive. A bit of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law in action I guess.
by thanhnguyen2187 | 2025-04-23 17:40:36+00:00
I've gone mouseless, or using the computer without a physical mouse, for around 2 months. The supporting tools I used are:

- Vimium: a browser extension for interaction (mainly navigation/links following) while browsing the web

- `warpd`: a program to control the mouse in other cases

- A drawing tablet: the last resort if `warpd` cannot make it

To be honest, I don't think there is a huge boost in productivity, but it helps with concentration as I don't have to move my hands that often anymore. Going mouseless might aid in preventing common pains and injuries of software engineers (namely RSI and carpel tunnel) as well. In this post, I'll try to get into each tool I used and my thoughts about them.
by sigmarule | 2025-04-23 17:40:47+00:00
> Someone in the original HN thread about funding wrote a post explaining how poorly run CVE org was and it had been like that for years.

Sure, but that doesn’t change anything, does it? Most people that use or have benefited from the CVE program are not even aware of these criticisms, and I’d be willing to bet that the majority of people who _are_ aware only became so in the past week.

> This is purely a reputational concern. Being on government networks doesn't make it instantly more trustworthy or safe.

I did not say the concern was the safety of the CVE program. The concern is influence over the world’s inbox for 0days and the tangible ways that can be used to a nation’s benefit. It is most certainly not just a reputational concern. If China had stepped in last week and took the reins there would be groups within both industry and government having mild freakouts this week.
by robocat | 2025-04-23 17:42:15+00:00
> fighting authoritarianism, inequality, genocide. Are these too boring?

Right, have the tech guys spent their money on politics - that seems to be working out well.

> fighting starvation

We have enough food in the world: we don't choose to share it or distribute it. Politics.

> fighting disease

Politicised within the US (measles, birdflu, NHI, health insurance), and similarly politicised within my own country (US social media is only partly to blame).

Bill Gates put a lot of money towards helping fight Malaria and other health issues: I would guess no other rich dudes wish to get similarly tarred.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-23 17:42:31+00:00
These seem to be terrible reasons to give up on using AI, although they might be valid reason to stop using AI a certain way.

You can use AI in different ways, it is extremely good as documentations. Often to understand how a library works you want a specific example, getting that example and having an AI answer questions about particulars has been very valuable to me and often saved me meaningless wandering through other parts of the documentation or the Internet as a whole.
by zahlman | 2025-04-23 17:42:33+00:00
`more_itertools` is definitely on my shortlist of things I wish were in the Python standard library. (The list of things I'd like to see cut out, is probably considerably longer. But that's mainly on aesthetic principles; it's probably not creating a significant maintenance burden.)

And yet somehow I keep forgetting about it in the exact moments when it would probably make my life easier.
by esalman | 2025-04-23 17:43:24+00:00
> One of the biggest wastes of human talent is corporations hiring people to solve the same problems over and over and over.

It's not the same human who is doing the same thing over and over though.

I have a toddler. He's learning addition and substraction now. I could had him a calculator or LLM and let him skip the entire learning process and do something productive instead. I don't. Because it'll destroy his critical thinking and ability to do anything productive later in life.
by SirBill | 2025-04-23 17:43:29+00:00
I find the extra space useful over just a laptop screen for coding - I can have a simulator to one side, and a coding window open with a good amount of space for metadata sidebars, along with a window or two for code documentation.

Where it really shines though is for photo review and editing. There it is spectacular to have so much space for image review even with a good number of adjustment controls up.

The other thing the screen is great is for use on a plane. No-one can see what you are working on, but it's also a kindness to others since your laptop screen is totally dark. It was really nice working on an international flight with the AVP and a laptop.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-23 17:43:38+00:00
Unironically

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWF74KMRq04

We as an industry are seen as defined by crap/enshitification now. The world gave us good faith, cheered us on, mostly excitedly hyped us. And we picked, by small choice after small choice, this.
by rocqua | 2025-04-23 17:43:43+00:00
I would wager 80% of places that write software have almost trivial ways to get that 5% improvement. Between ci/cd, static checkers, upgrading IDEs, and just aligning practices between everyone, I think you can easily improve at 50% of places.

Those things don't happen because the slowdown required before adoption, and the office politics of convincing everyone to make a change, and then the effort of convincing people that this new thing is what should be changed to.
by simpaticoder | 2025-04-23 17:43:46+00:00
I can say "Gee whiz $335M per F-22 seems a bit much!" without being an expert in jets, military equipment, or going into the details of its production. I know a bit more about software so I can safely say something similar about MITRE. The fact that I don't want to spend my time doing (frankly, rather useless since I'm not a journo or in government or influential at all) investigative journalism into the specifics doesn't invalidate my opinion. Random people will read random things into whatever random content they consume; deep in an HN comment thread this is of little concern.
by Animats | 2025-04-23 17:43:54+00:00
The real question is when AIs figure out that they should be talking to each other in something other than English. Something that includes tables, images, spreadsheets, diagrams. Then we're on our way to the AI corporation.

Go rewatch "The Forbin Project" from 1970.[1] Start at 31 minutes and watch to 35 minutes.

[1] https://archive.org/details/colossus-the-forbin-project-1970
by alexjplant | 2025-04-23 17:44:07+00:00
> 7-11's outsized popularity in Asia versus its more moderate presence in the States.

I just got back from a two-week-long trip in Japan. When I was there I ate 7-11 (or Family Mart) every single day - the Japanese konbini blow their US equivalents out of the water. I live a block away from a 7-11 in California and now have zero desire to ever set foot in it again (the only real casualty being the Jalapeno Cream Cheese taquitos which pale in comparison to onigiri and "juice box" sake). I'd like to think that if US locations were stocked similarly to their Japanese counterparts that they'd have greater success but this is a country where people turn their noses up at vegetables on cheeseburgers... I'm not holding my breath.
by martin_drapeau | 2025-04-23 17:45:30+00:00
Our support team shares a Gmail inbox. Gemini was not able to write proper responses, as the author exemplified.

We therefore connected Serif, which automatically writes drafts. You don't need to ask - open Gmail and drafts are there. Serif learned from previous support email threads to draft a proper response. And the tone matches!

I truly wonder why Gmail didn't think of that. Seems pretty obvious to me.
by gymbeaux | 2025-04-23 17:45:31+00:00
There's so much we can learn from history, but that takes time and we're a very apathetic and comfortable civilization now.

I think it's important and worthwhile, though. It will give you an edge over everyone else if you "know" what is going to happen- history repeats itself, in part because so few bother to learn it and learn from it.

It was only this month that I finally learned that the American Civil War was about BOTH states' rights and slavery. To some reading this (this is a particularly-learned forum after all), you may think "duh - it was about states' rights to own slaves"- but that wasn't how it was taught to me in my public, Florida high school. We weren't taught that the North was just as racist as the South, and that the ONLY reason they didn't have slaves in the North was that their economy was better-off without it. We weren't taught that Lincoln's main problem with the South seceding was simply that it was illegal- literally not allowed by the Constitution. It only became a fight over "slavery" when the Union Army was getting its ass kicked and Lincoln was forced to "free all slaves" so that some would join the Union Army to fight (this was also to gain support on the global stage and make it less likely for other countries to trade with and otherwise support the Confederacy).

The Confederacy decided to secede because they believed that slavery was going to become illegal at the federal level "at some point"- there was not a formal plan to do so at the federal level at the time.

This segue came about because I was seeing memes on Facebook about the Union beating the Confederates "a second time" if the current political trend continues. These people think they're on the right side of history by identifying with the Union but that's not really the case. I mean heck the Civil Rights Movement wasn't for another 100 years following Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

All that to say- history implies there's another revolution on the horizon where, once again, we have to put the 1% in their place.
by usefulcat | 2025-04-23 17:45:32+00:00
Let's be clear that it was a success very much in spite of UB, not because of it. And there was still a cost--likely at least hundreds of person-hours spent fixing other similar bugs due to UB (if not more).

I worked in gamedev around the time this game was made and this would have been very much an ordinary, everyday kind of bug. The only really exceptional thing about it is that it was discovered after such a long time.
by lapetitejort | 2025-04-23 17:45:33+00:00
I ran some calculations looking to see if there were patterns to the next lowest number (call that number x) and could not quickly find any. So even if 7 + k*2^n follows a predicable path to its next lowest number, that number is not currently predictable.

Of course, if you can identify which n satisfies the equation x = s + k*2^n for some value of n and some "base" value s (7 is the base value in the previous example), you can predict the path of that number.

As an example, take 7 + 4*2*7 = 519. Its next lowest number is 329. 329 = 5 + 81*2^2. So for 329, s=5, k=81, n=2. So we know 329 will only take two steps to reach 247.
by frabonacci | 2025-04-23 17:46:32+00:00
Thanks for trying out c/ua! We still recommend pairing the Omni loop configuration with a more capable VLM, such as Qwen2.5-VL 32B, or using a cloud LLM provider like Sonnet 3.7 or OpenAI GPT-4.1. While we believe that in the coming months we'll see better-performing quantized models that require less memory for local inference, truth is we're not quite there yet.

Stay tuned - we're also releasing support for UI-Tars-1.5 7B this week! It offers excellent speed and accuracy, and best of all, it doesn't require bounding box detection (Omni) since it's a pixel-native model.
by 13years | 2025-04-23 17:46:39+00:00
> we usually say that we don't know

I think this is one of the distinguishing attributes of human failures. Human failures have some degree of predictability. We know when we aren't good at something, we then devise processes to close that gap. Which can be consultations, training, process reviews, use of tools etc.

The failures we see in LLMs are distinctly of a different nature. They often appear far more nonsensical and have more of a degree of randomness.

The LLMs as a tool would be far more useful if they could indicate what they are good at, but since they cannot self reflect over their knowledge, it is not possible. So they are equally confident in everything regardless of its correctness.
by dvt | 2025-04-23 17:46:46+00:00
What we need, imo, is:

1. A new UX/UI paradigm. Writing prompts is dumb, re-writing prompts is even dumber. Chat interfaces suck.

2. "Magic" in the same way that Google felt like magic 25 years ago: a widget/app/thing that knows what you want to do before even you know what you want to do.

3. Learned behavior. It's ironic how even something like ChatGPT (it has hundreds of chats with me) barely knows anything about me & I constantly need to remind it of things.

4. Smart tool invocation. It's obvious that LLMs suck at logic/data/number crunching, but we have plenty of tools (like calculators or wikis) that don't. The fact that tool invocation is still in its infancy is a mistake. It should be at the forefront of every AI product.

5. Finally, we need PRODUCTS, not FEATURES; and this is exactly Pete's point. We need things that re-invent what it means to use AI in your product, not weirdly tacked-on features. Who's going to be the first team that builds an AI-powered operating system from scratch?

I'm working on this (and I'm sure many other people are as well). Last year, I worked on an MVP called Descartes[1][2] which was a spotlight-like OS widget. I'm re-working it this year after I had some friends and family test it out (and iterating on the idea of ditching the chat interface).

[1] https://vimeo.com/931907811

[2] https://dvt.name/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/image-11.png
by zadbit | 2025-04-23 17:47:04+00:00
It won't let me reply to your last comment, so I'm writing here. I have read your work already, that's why I'm asking. I was just hoping to get some clarification on the situation I mentioned before, where we have a coherent state in an optical cavity. I see in your report that you're using a dimensional tesseract vector. I was just curious how we use that to assign a unique vibrational frequency to the context of each photon in an optical coherent state. Thanks!
by libertine | 2025-04-23 17:48:11+00:00
Let's start with your statement:

> They were less the start of the smartphone revolution than PalmPilot or the IBM PC.

With this in context, you claim that hardware built for productivity was more of a smartphone revolution than the devices that created a market by offering the same benefits, features, and user behaviors we have nowadays (mainly media and entertainment) - let's continue.

> Lol. Yea, that's 99% of the entire thing!

I don't get how that's 99% of a thing.

> Well that's not true. They did in fact have touch interfaces too. Just that it wasn't capacitive. And the entire interaction model sucked, the APIs sucked, the graphics sucked, the screen sucked, etc.

This is the confusing part, here you agree with me that the "dumb phones" had all the main set of features and software in place, but the experience just wasn't as good as the iPhone. All the user behaviors were there.

> There was no wave before BECAUSE the products before were so inferior.

Here I'm not sure if you're claiming that there was no demand for Nokia, Motorola, SE, etc devices? Because if that's it, that's just silly.

> It's maddening that people don't get this. The difference between utter crap and a great product isn't checkboxes on a feature list. It's a thousand tiny details that seem insignificant, and CARING about those things.

Again, this makes no sense. Apple did things differently, but how does that show that the other brands didn't care about their products and user experiences? Have you seen the number of Nokia devices that were released catering to different users?

Every time someone launches something better or different than Apple, means that Apple doesn't care?

I find it hard to follow your logic. Like, the mobile phone market was created by a few brands, which built habits and connected people, ultimately bringing entertainment to their customers (the wave) - yet you believe the Palm Pilot started the Smartphone revolution, not the guys who built the market over decades.

The odd thing is that you're implying that what Apple did with the iPhone could have been done at any point in time prior to 2007. Why didn't Apple do it with the iPod, while others were already using interactive menus with graphics? They didn't care..?

I understand you're passionate about the subject, but I don't understand your point of view. To be clear I'm not saying "Apple didn't do anything special" - they shifted the experience of mobile phones for the better.

But to say that Nokia, Motorola, SE, and other brands contributed less to smartphones than the Palm Pilot is just silly imo.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-23 17:48:26+00:00
The fact that we do dumb things does not make the specific plan of colonizing Mars a good idea. Hell, we could try to colonize the asteroid belt, at least that doesn’t involve dropping down some enormous gravity well to visit a dead planet.

> You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc.

I’m not sure what “the argument” is here, I didn’t really present much of an argument (I think colonizing Mars is self-evidently dumb). But if the argument that is being levied against these things is that they are all too expensive—I disagree that it applies to some of the things in your list. The New Deal and the Highway system had positive effects for existing people. Maybe the Apollo program was frivolous on some level, but at least it had a plausible goal.

We have a finite budget, I agree that it would be better to spend less of it killing each other, but it will still be finite. We should try to do something more useful than Mars.
by m2f2 | 2025-04-23 17:48:34+00:00
How long will cygwin lifetime be?

A proud cygwin user myself, with cygwin in the PATH since the 2000s, I recently sideloaded Ubuntu under wsl.

Right now, wsl is my primary terminal app, I've mounted C:\ as /c, added a symlink to bypass the ugly Onedrive default name, and... I'm happy.

Slowly, I removed 90% of the mixed BAT scripts, converted to bash the rest, and I now enjoy it.

As the old timer that I am, I limp around powershell, so no luck with that.

Cygwin on the other hand seems to be slowly dying, as more and more packages are now unsupported/unmaintained, with Redhat apparently willing to smother it at the first viable moment.

Any thought?