MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jedd | 2025-04-22 02:44:50+00:00
TFA seems to miss a lot of things.

Mac's unified memory makes them (price-) compelling over x86 with GPU(s) for large models, say something over 24-32 GB. But a 32GB Mac doesn't take advantage of that architecture.

(IIRC by default you can use 66% of RAM in < 32GB Metal boxes, and something higher in > 32GB -- though you can override that value via sysctl.)

Macs can also run mlx in addition to gguf, which on these smaller models would be faster. No mention of mlx, or indeed gguf.

The only model tested seems to be a distil of Deepseek R1 with Qwen - which I'd have classified as 'good, but not great'.

Author bemoans all quants of that are > 5GB, which isn't true. Though with 20GB of effective VRAM to play with here, you wouldn't want to be using the Q4 (at 4.6GB).

Author seems to conflate the one-off download cost (time) from hf with on-going performance cost of using the tool.

No actual client-side tooling in play, either, by the looks of it, which seems odd given the claim that local inference is 'not ready as a developer platform'.

The usual starting point for most devs using local LLMs is vscode + continue.dev , where the 'developer experience' is a bit more interesting than just copy-pasting to a terminal.

Criterion (singular) for LLM model expertise appears to be 'text to SQL', which is fair enough if you were writing about applicability of "Local LLM Inference For Text to SQL". I'd have expected the more coding-specific (qwen2.5 coder 14B, codestral, gemma?) models would be more interesting than just one 6GB distil of R1 & Qwen.

Huggingface has some functional search, though https://llm.extractum.io/list/ is a bit better in my experience, as you can tune & sort by size, vintage, licence, max context length, popularity, etc.

I concur that freely available can-run-in-16GB-of-RAM models are not as good as Claude, but disagree that the user experience is as bad as painted here.
by daemonologist | 2025-04-22 02:45:01+00:00
The examples on your site are impressive, but I'm having trouble getting good results on HF - it's generating a lot of near-silence (often nothing but) and when it does produce speech it bears no resemblance to the audio prompt and only produces parts of the text prompt. Would you suggest any adjustments to the default parameters to improve adherence, or might I expect better results running locally? Thanks!
by contingencies | 2025-04-22 02:46:58+00:00
Exactly that sort of false reductionism is missing the point.

While reduced sunlight can have a role in early stage height differences, this occurs both in cultivation and in nature and therefore is not a sole causative factor.

The sort of factors being indicated that were previously ignored by western horticulture are interaction based. Cultivated trees often face simplified fungal communities, limiting nutrient diversity compared to natural forests’ complex networks. Furthermore, natural forests exhibit interconnected fungal systems that facilitate nutrient redistribution between trees and improved community pathogen resistance.

The average person is unaware or thinks this is fantasy. They are ignorant. Don't be ignorant.
by NaOH | 2025-04-22 02:47:35+00:00
From your own 2023 comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36945046

Play Basic Computer Games in the Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34377776 - Jan 2023 (1 comment)

Basic Computer Games (1978) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28572761 - Sept 2021 (12 comments)

Basic Computer Games (ported to C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, VB.NET) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26188324 - Feb 2021 (3 comments)

BASIC Computer Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604142 - April 2019 (120 comments)

BASIC Computer Games (1978) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9026063 - Feb 2015 (31 comments)

Atari Archives: BASIC Computer Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3200133 - Nov 2011 (23 comments)

BASIC Computer Games Book, published in 1978 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1866103 - Nov 2010 (36 comments)

There's also

More Basic Computer Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41984335 - Oct 2024 (1 comment)

Basic Star Trek Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42709559 - Jan 2025 (1 comment)

BASIC Star Trek Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43070752 - Feb 2025 (2 comments)

Vintage Basic - Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25502018 - Dec 2020 (1 comment)
by thot_experiment | 2025-04-22 02:48:14+00:00
You do absolutely pay for all those things with your attention, if genAI content doesn't hold people's attention then your ad space will be cheap.

> Disney is using genAI in their new live action Moana film

If this is your bar then sure, but I think the interesting question is when/if we cross into a regime where mostly self-managed genAI is in true competition with the media you consume day to day. Not something that's hundreds of thousands of person hours being enhanced by genAI. I don't think there's any chance we see a total collapse of demand for this stuff but I think the jury is still out on how valuable it truly is imo.

I'm sure it's non zero and I expect demand will continue to rise, but it may plateau or slow sooner than people think, I just don't think we can clearly say yet.
by o11c | 2025-04-22 02:48:43+00:00
That's not exactly true. The main thing that is popularized by Dante is "demons are performing the punishment" (rather than being punished as in scripture ... but the general idea goes back to Gnosticism) ... and I guess "hell has circles" if we count those as significant.

"Hell is a place of fire and torment" is explicitly Biblical (Luke 16), even if there are also mentions of Hell without that (and some mentions of fire and torment without calling it "Hell").

Annihilationism vs Eternal Conscious Torment is the main point that isn't given a perfectly clear answer in scripture; there are verses that hint toward each.

Limbo and Purgatory are not in the Bible, but predate Dante. "Deal with the Devil" predates Dante and is only weakly founded in scripture. "Devils" (plural, as opposed to "the Devil") being distinct from "Demons" is a translation artifact, popularized by Dungeons & Dragons. There being various types of demons long precedes Dante. Variants of Universalism (including "Nobody goes to Hell" and "it's possible to escape Hell") are explicitly rejected in scripture.

Those are all the aspects of "modern concept of hell" that I can think of (let me know if you can think of more), and the connection to Dante seems pretty weak.
by AstralStorm | 2025-04-22 02:49:51+00:00
You need to compare on both different variables and additionally produce actual error estimates on the comparison.

Say, suppose you're measuring successful treatments. You would have to both use the count, perhaps signed even (subtracting abject failures such as deaths), cost (financial or number of visits), then verify these numbers with a follow up.

See, the definition of success is critical here. OR and NNT are not evaluating side effects negatively, for example.

So it may turn out that you're comparing completely different ideas of better instead of matching models.
by ivape | 2025-04-22 02:50:58+00:00
One thing you have to consider is that these other non-hardware dedicated companies have to continuously create new generations of AI chips. You can't sit on the M3, or the Google TPUs, you have to keep making new and better ones. How many companies think they can do this stuff in-house and then eventually realize that they are better off relying on a dedicated vendor? One or two leadership changes and they will cut these initiatives entirely (ask the Zuck about the Metaverse), but Nvidia's whole purpose is to make GPU hardware so they can never truly cut their heart out.

The cyclical stuff was the argument made for semis during the 2010s when no one gave a shit about semis really. I think the game changed, but again, I do operate on faith, or in investor terms, conviction. The main evidence for why the game has changed to me (well, other than AI being the most incredible piece of tech we ever built) is mostly that there are companies that have no business making chip hardware now interested in making chip hardware. That's not usually part of the cycle.
by pcwalton | 2025-04-22 02:51:20+00:00
I tried ChatGPT 4o to help me reverse engineer some game code with the symbols missing and the results were quite disappointing. To say it had a tendency to hallucinate is an understatement. It didn't have any clue what was going on.

For me, those AI tools are much better at saving me time looking up documentation when doing simple things where it has examples of the exact code pattern I'm looking for in its training set. ChatGPT is great at writing one-off Blender scripts for me to give to artists, for instance.
by perardi | 2025-04-22 02:52:11+00:00
Hey kids, grizzled UI designer and developer at a startup here. You’ve got 2 keys correct right at the start.

1. Permissions/auth for prototypes. Stakeholders go for that. MBA folks don’t want to be sent crazy random obfuscated URLs, they want a nice login page that makes them feel secure. (Because MBA types will get weird about corporate secrets, even just high-level wireframes.)

2. Figma/Miro-esque infinite canvas with comments. Product managers and stakeholders love that flow.
by defrost | 2025-04-22 02:53:04+00:00
Given your work on vehicle telematics have you any follow on behaviour and / or tips?

eg: Do you disable such things in your car, follow any hackers who give sound advice on how to do so, interesting blogs or forums in that space to share, etc.

It's moot to me .. I'm still driving and maintaining classic old cars (rural Australia), trucks, tractors, etc and doubt I'd purchase a car wih a link.

I'm curious to see if cars are released anytime that respect driver privacy and allow wireless connections to be effectively severed, restricting connections to service diagnostics at a shop.
by ehnto | 2025-04-22 02:53:10+00:00
I'm not sure that's right, method chaining is just immediately acting on the return of the previous function, directly. It doesn't pass the return into the next function like a pipeline. The method must exist on the returned object. That is different to pipelines or thrush operators. Evaluation happens in the order it is written.

Unless I misunderstood the author, because method chaining is super common where I feel thrush operators are pretty rare, I would be surprised if they meant the latter.
by privong | 2025-04-22 02:54:54+00:00
> they can probably measure continental drift (only joking)

They can! Continental drift measurements have been done using radio interfometry since at least the 1980s: https://www.nytimes.com/1983/07/05/science/science-using-new... (Though that 1983 article does suggest they were still working on the accuracy). Certainly radio interferometers can measure displacement of dishes after earthquakes.
by kevmo314 | 2025-04-22 02:54:57+00:00
I have a sneaking suspicion it's because they lifted the model architecture almost directly from Parakeet: https://jordandarefsky.com/blog/2024/parakeet/

Parakeet references WhisperD which is at https://huggingface.co/jordand/whisper-d-v1a and doesn't include a full list of non-speech events that it's been trained with, except "(coughs)" and "(laughs)".

Not saying the authors didn't do anything interesting here. They put in the work to reproduce the blog post and open source it, a praiseworthy achievement in itself, and they even credit Parakeet. But they might not have the list of commands for more straightforward reasons.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-22 02:55:10+00:00
Yeah, my father was mostly jesting, because it is undoubtedly a regular schedule or management's say-so when the store gets rearranged indeed, and not by the "polling at the register".

But in terms of the stores where we shop, the clerks at the register are empowered to help us look up an existing item, or to order an item that's not on the shelves, or even to place a new item on the wishlist. So it's more than small talk for them to ask that; it's an opening and an opportunity to find out what items are in-demand that they're not carrying, or may not be obvious to find if we're just wandering around the store.

Of late, I've found that clerks in stores such as Target and Wal-Mart are equipped with tools no better than the ones we have ourselves: that is, the mobile app or the website has exact information on store layout, item availability, and what aisle we can find this stuff in. Some Targets have spiffy kiosks which I can query without needing to call up stuff on my smartphone, but if I ask a clerk, their nose will immediately go into their own mobile device, just like I would've done.

On the other hand, smaller grocery stores that sell organics are likely to feature a cadre of very personable clerks who are intimately familiar with all stock and everything on the shelves, and they can immediately escort me over to where something is on a shelf, and make recommendations based on what they carry, and tell me how their logistics work. Without even glancing at a computer or screen!
by schwartzworld | 2025-04-22 02:57:05+00:00
I couldn’t build a house, but I did learn a lot of smaller skills I would have otherwise called a pro in over. Turns out changing a toilet is pretty much putting it in place and screwing on the pipe, and you can program keys to my Xterra by toggling certain controls in a certain order.

I wouldn’t expect a vibe coder to build a full featured app on vibes alone and produce a quality codebase, but for smaller tasks and apps it is just fine.
by codebje | 2025-04-22 02:57:50+00:00
It's probably https://www.good-display.com/product/440.html which is also 1mil refresh cycles and a fast refresh time of 1.5sec - around 185 hours of screen updates, so ~3 months of 5hrs a day typing or a few years of e-reader style usage.

I can't really see a device like this getting used super heavily every day, so expecting it to still be usable from time to time for a few years seems reasonable to me.
Show HN: I built a tool that helps you understand new codebases faster
by arifliftos | 2025-04-22 02:57:52+00:00
After years of struggling with onboarding to new projects, I got tired of spending weeks just trying to grasp the basics of a codebase. The README rarely tells the whole story, and "just read the code" isn't practical for large repos.

I built RepoIQ to create personalized learning paths through any GitHub repository. It analyzes the codebase structure, identifies key components, and creates a step-by-step guide tailored to your learning needs.
by NoTeslaThrow | 2025-04-22 02:59:18+00:00
I've been on the internet for twenty-some-odd years and at some point this attitude has come to feel like willful ignorance (generally; i do agree that it is unsurprising that crows recognize patterns. Or much less obviously intelligent animals for that matter, consensus-driven evidence hopefully inbound.)

Most people in active testable science have worldviews where they suspect many relationships about the world that have not been strongly validated. Einstein was not the first person to discuss how space and time seem inextricably related in a special way; pythagoras was not the first to figure out how to derive the third side of a right triangle; galileo was not the first to suggest a heliocentric worldview; etc etc. Demonstrating things that seem obvious or intuitive or that are already assumed and used practice is still immensely valuable. Communication is hard, and demonstrating things about the world without getting tangled up in the inherent unsuitability of language to precisely describe the world is incredibly, incredibly difficult. We are still validating knowledge that the ancients practiced on a daily basis. Galen certainly never bothered to persuade; only to inform.

It nearly makes me want to ban articles if the paper is available. The discussion inevitably sags.
by ForOldHack | 2025-04-22 02:59:19+00:00
The Original IBM AT used a 6Mhz 286, and then an 8Mhz 286, and then modified the ROMSs so you could not make a 6Mhz into an 8Mhz by swapping the crystal. Other vendors cranked up the speed to 10, 12, 16, 20 and finally 25Mhz.

IBM PS2s went for 10Mhz 1 Wait state, and 10Mhz zero wait states.

A 25Mhz 286 rivaled a 386 DX in speed in benchmarks, but was left in the just for any 32-bit apps. I had a 20Mhz 286 with 4mb of ram, but only for DOS programs such as CA-General Ledger.
by steveBK123 | 2025-04-22 03:01:07+00:00
I’m old enough when the VC model was “I dunno, ads?”, followed by “SaaS/cloud”, then “Uber for X” all of which proceeded “crypto” and “AI”.

A lot of it stacks now with “AI for X” running in the cloud funded by SaaS and/or ads. Just increasingly adversarial revenue models to turn customers into product (data) and/or hooked on forever recurring increasingly monthly spend.

Long gone the days of funding a piece of software customers purchase and use as long and as much as they wish.
by btilly | 2025-04-22 03:01:49+00:00
First, the idea of describing it that way comes from Veritasium. Take complaints to him. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRr1kaXKBsU for the video where he does it.

Yes I know it is handwavy and misleading. But I consider it less misleading than most attempts at visualizing it.

> Ok, how does this sketch work for a low-ellipticity eccentric orbit?

At what point in the orbit does it not work as a description of what's going on locally where the orbiting body is?

> Sure, it's a set of events in a region of the whole spacetime. If we take "Big Bang" colloquially enough to include the inflationary epoch, always assuming GR is correct, then at every point in that "Big Bang" region of the whole spacetime there is a small patch -- a subregion -- of exactly flat spacetime. However, these small patches must be small because most choices of initially-close pairs of test objects can only couple to timelike curves that wildly spread in one direction (and focus in the other).

No, there is no requirement of any region of locally flat spacetime existing. It is required (outside of singularities) that, when measuring things to first order, things are flat. However in curved space-time, the curvature can be theoretically revealed in any region, no matter how small, by measurements that are sufficiently precise to show the second order deviations from flatness that we call curvature.

> I don't know how to understand your two final sentences: how do you connect the period just before the end of inflation and the expansion history during the radiation and matter epochs?

I'm just referring to the fact that the Hubble parameter is believed to have been higher in the early universe than it is today. I'm not referring to periods such as the hypothesized inflation where the behavior is not described by GR.
Beginner's Guide to MCP (Model Context Protocol)
by Arindam1729 | 2025-04-22 03:02:04+00:00
I’ve been diving into agent frameworks lately and kept seeing “MCP” pop up everywhere. At first I thought it was just another buzzword… but turns out, Model Context Protocol is actually super useful.

While figuring it out, I realized there wasn’t a lot of beginner-focused content on it, so I put together a short video that covers:

What exactly is MCP (in plain English)

How it Works

How to get started using it with a sample setup

Nothing fancy, just trying to break it down in a way I wish someone did for me earlier

Here’s the video if anyone’s curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH_vdF2iGdo

Let me know what you think!
by AstralStorm | 2025-04-22 03:02:31+00:00
Ah yes, the self fulfilling prophecies or hallucinations based on models trained on models. Overfitting. Ending up in an evolutionary dead end...

Type 4 error of not asking a question one should also exists.

So thing is, suppose you're handling the common cases right - you have software that's say 95% correct. The important bit is how critical the remaining 5% failures are. If one of them happens to be "I give up my computer and data to the exploit" or "everything is destroyed" or "a lot of people die", then the extra 1% better average is no good to any inside observer.

It so happens that a lot of people believe themselves to be outside observers, especially rich.

(What's the success bonus for someone getting treated nicely?)
by ksec | 2025-04-22 03:03:26+00:00
The link is either down or blocked outside of US.

For those not from US this has nothing to do with EPIC Games and I assume no part of Unreal is using MUMPS for those who are reading comments before they click on the link.

This Epic has something to do with healthcare software. And kind of surprised how many people who used to work there appeared on HN.
by its-summertime | 2025-04-22 03:03:52+00:00
Uv provides no support period of bugfixing for the previous minor release after a breaking change. So if a breaking change does occur, you must immediately update your entire world, test, etc, to continue to receive fixes. (unfortunately the norm for python projects).

This is from their own documentation and release history. I never brought up version numbers before now, only their self-admitted unstable status. Version numbers were brought up by someone of the opinion that uv is stable enough.
by agarren | 2025-04-22 03:06:23+00:00
He got Jeff’d. Or maybe Bill’d (or Satya’d). Regardless, any kind of non-gnu open-source collaboration with the Powers That Be in the tech world is just begging for punishment. Amazon will just blatantly rebrand something, but Microsoft seems especially comfortable wasting a dev’s time mining for details before stealing or copying their work entirely.

Boo Microsoft. Winget still sucks.

I read recently that Microsoft is adopting rust more and more. I think that’s a step in the right direction for an OS with such a huge marketshare. That said, I’m just waiting for Rust.Net or Managed Rust to get excreted in a thinly veiled attempt to split the community, steal mindshare, and take over the project.
by lwo32k | 2025-04-22 03:06:44+00:00
Artists aren't taught about the Explore-Exploit Tradeoff (which gives us an upper limit on how many Creative/Curious folk any population can support) or the Laws of Supply and Demand.

You can round up the best and the most influential people in the visual arts world and ask them what happens when Supply (Content) massively overshoots Demand (total Eyeballs and Time available) on the planet? And they don't have a single idea or theory. And they are in charge of Art Schools.

It's left to Economists to think about it (see the UN report on the Attention Economy for implications).

Art schools don't teach kids the implications of their existence within an Attention Economy, where Attention acts as like different types of currencies. While visual artists act like the currency printing press. They are used like front line troops (ie cannon fodder) in a War govts/corporations/politicians wage over a Finite Non-growing Global Pool of Attention. In the same way wars are waged over other finite resources like Land, Oil, Gold, Water etc. Where more and more content is produced to wage the war over finite Attention.

In economic history it took people a long time to understand Inflation is connected to the increase of the Money Supply - rate of printing money greater than the rate of goods entering the market.

Same story is repeating with the visual arts world where there is more content than there are eyeballs (and that is even before AI showed up). Most of the visual art world is hardly aware. They are reacting to it all, just like merchants/bankers of yore, who had to deal with all kinds of chaos/bubbles/system wide meltdowns as Kings/Govts printed currency too fast. They didnt see the connection and blamed each other, the gods and the jews.