MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sgtgig | 2025-04-11 17:48:54+00:00
> you cannot become an expert in everything

You don't have to though. Anyone who's spent a decent amount of time in a creative hobby will tell you they sucked when they started but they enjoyed the process of learning and exploring. I think you're depriving yourself of the mental benefits of learning a new skill and being creative. It flexes your mind in new ways.

If you just want something to exist, sure, but when you can press buttons and have a magic box spit out whatever you want with no effort, how much are you actually going to value it?
Show HN: RAG, No Vectors
by vectify_AI | 2025-04-11 17:49:07+00:00
We built PageIndex, a document indexing system that turns documents into hierarchical search trees to support reasoning-based RAG.

Traditional vector-based RAG often struggles with retrieval accuracy because it optimizes for similarity, not relevance. But what we really need in retrieval is relevance — which requires reasoning. When working with professional documents that demand domain expertise and multi-step reasoning, vector-based RAG and similarity search often fall short.

So we started exploring a more reasoning-driven approach to RAG. Reasoning-based RAG enables LLMs to think and reason their way to the most relevant document sections. Inspired by AlphaGo, we use tree search to perform structured document retrieval.

We open-sourced one of the key components: PageIndex. PageIndex is a hierarchical indexing system that builds search tree structures from long documents (like financial reports, regulatory documents, or textbooks), making them ready for reasoning-based RAG.

Some highlights:

- Hierarchical Structure: Organizes lengthy PDFs into LLM-friendly trees — like a smart table of contents.

- Precise Referencing: Each node includes a summary and exact physical page numbers.

- Natural Segmentation: Nodes align with document sections, preserving context — no arbitrary chunking.

We've used PageIndex for financial document analysis with reasoning-based RAG and saw significant improvements in retrieval accuracy compared to vector-based systems.

Would love any feedback — especially thoughts on reasoning-based RAG, or ideas for where PageIndex could be applied!
by pxc | 2025-04-11 17:49:19+00:00
> More importantly, the "competition" between GCC and clang/LLVM is mutually beneficial. GCC losing prominence would not be good for LLVM long-term, just as GCC arguably languished in the period after the egcs merger.

You're right to note that "competition" here is more like inspiration than a deathmatch. But I vaguely remember two things that seem similar to motivation via competitive pressure to me: (1) when GCC 5 came out, it had way nicer error messages, and I immediately thought "Oh, they wanted to make GCC nice like Clang" and (2) IIRC the availability of a more modular compiler stack like LLVM/Clang essentially neutralized Stallman's old strategic argument against more a more pluggable design, right?
by sabslikesobs | 2025-04-11 17:49:24+00:00
I'm a big fan of YAML after coming from JSON and, later, ProtoBuf's many definition formats while working at Google---but it's true that there are a lot of oddities in YAML's magical parsing. I'm grateful for the many ways it's possible to quickly an naturally define simple hierarchies of data (for example, in a docker-compose file).

This website does the rare thing of, after complaining, providing a long list of alternatives. It's really nice.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-11 17:49:29+00:00
> Sure, that still leaves the tweaking and customization, but I feel like that's the part most people enjoy the most? Humans love decorating.

Even if that were true (which I heavily contest), people might like the idea of "I want the sidebar nav moved to the right side", not opening up template.css and template.html and figuring out which html/css they need to change.

The LLM is the thing that lets us do the fun part.

But let me disabuse you of the claim that technical people enjoy fiddling with html/css/design especially on their Wordpress website when they just want to make some changes, and somehow nontechnical people are the only ones who might have to circumvent all that fun-having by letting an LLM do it for them.

It's like saying that you don't see how LLMs could be useful to software developers because don't they enjoy writing code? Aside from the answer being no, most code isn't fun to write, you're forgetting the goal day to day is to get something done, not dick around with your Wordpress theme or software Jira tickets because it's fun.
by tristor | 2025-04-11 17:49:57+00:00
> It’s no Supra, but the FRS is a sporty little car that was marketed in a fairly affordable range. It’s also basically a BRZ. It’s a little sad that’s no longer an option.

The FRS/BRZ/GR86 are identical cars mechanically, Toyota owns Scion, so the FRS was replaced by the GT86 and later GR86 within the Toyota line-up when Toyota killed off the Scion brand in the US, and the FRS never existed outside the North American market, because Scion was a North American exclusive brand.

The BRZ/GR86 has a Subaru Boxer engine, with Toyota D4S Port+Direct Injection, using a Toyota ECU/ECM, Toyota/Aisin transmission, Toyota TCU/TCM, and Toyota infotainment (in some generations), but with a mostly Subaru designed chassis and nearly entirely Subaru suspension and post-transmission driveline, but the wheels and tires off a Prius (in the first generation), and a handful of things that were only created to be jointly used by the BRZ/GR86. Except no matter which part you pick on the car, it'll be marked "Subaru", including ironically the Toyota badge on the front of the GT86.

It's better to think of them as what they are, which is different branding for the same vehicle, that was jointly developed and manufactured.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-11 17:50:01+00:00
If they send us enough neutrinos and we have a big enough detector, yeah. I don't think it beats the electromagnetic spectrum for practicality.

The big advantage of neutrinos for communication is that you could send them right through the earth so you could reach a submarine or something without any satellites. There's also the crazy story that never goes away that neutrinos might go faster than light. The result

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_OPERA_faster-than-light_n...

was absurdly too fast because neutrinos from most sources have a huge energy compared to the neutrino rest mass so their speed is always very close to the speed of light whether they go just a hair faster or a hair slower. Unless you count an early event that most scientists don't, there was no sign of neutrino dispersion in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A

However when people try to measure the neutrino mass squared they get answers that are within the error bars of zero but trend negative

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/14/6/1172

If the neutrino was a tachyon and you could make super-lower energy neutrinos than maybe you could use it as an FTL communicator.
by tptacek | 2025-04-11 17:50:14+00:00
How you navigate this is you quit. You don't have a startup; you have an unstable pair of cofounders flailing to pick a startup to build. Every dollar you draw from your initial investment before securing product/market fit devalues your work. You and your partner have lost respect for each other and will likely sabotage any success you do find.

It's not clear to me what you're preserving by staying.
by all2 | 2025-04-11 17:50:23+00:00
The lisp is harder to read, for me. The first double paren is confusing.

(let (bar-x (bar x)) (quux-y (quux y))) (foo bar-x quux-y z)

Why is the second set of parens necessary?

The nesting makes sense to an interpreter, I'm sure, but it doesn't make sense to me.

Is each top-level set of parens a 'statement' that executes? Or does everything have to be embedded in a single list?

This is all semantics, but for my python-addled brain these are the things I get stuck on.
by camel-cdr | 2025-04-11 17:50:52+00:00
The German fanfiction site fanfiktion.de has restricted reading times for certain explicit works:

> This story has been classified as developmentally harmful and has been given special protection measures. It can therefore only be read by registered users and only between 11:00 pm and 4:00 am. Registered users have the option of carrying out age verification with us in order to be able to read such stories without time restrictions. (google translated)
by streptomycin | 2025-04-11 17:51:00+00:00
I use https://www.doctorofcredit.com/ , manual research (there's only so many credit card companies, doesn't take long to check their websites when you're looking for a new card), and also a decent amount of time the credit card companies send me pre-approved offers in the mail and sometimes they are actually pretty good. US Bank recently sent me one for a $750 bonus!

Overall Chase business cards seem to usually have the best deals, and they don't require you to have a "real" business to get them.

It does impact your credit score, so you are correct to be careful if you're going to get a mortgage soon. But in my experience, the effect can't be too big because my credit score is still excellent despite getting a new credit card every couple months.
by whimsicalism | 2025-04-11 17:51:40+00:00
> The debt boogey man is exactly that a nearly imaginary number, most US debt is held by Americans or US companies in the end too.

I agree that the problem with debt is not that there are foreign holders of US treasuries. But higher debt crowds out private investment & borrowing in the repo markets, which harms productivity, makes goods more expensive, hurts aggregate supply in the long run, and makes the poor even poorer.

It also means that the US has to pay increasingly high amounts of money on interest financing and the Fed has far less room to effectively maneuver to combat inflation and ensure sustainable employment levels, as we've been seeing in the last few years. Debt is absolutely not an imaginary number and anyone who is telling you that perhaps doesn't understand the economic weight.

The marginal dollar of US govt spending is generally not more welfare enhancing than the alternative of not having that debt, not crowding out private investment, etc. - particularly when we are in expansionary times (as we have up until very recently). With our current debt trajectory, we should be raising non-distortionary taxes and aggressively limiting spending that is not obviously growth enhancing or with strong social justice justification. We are starting to see real structural problems already emerging from our current debt trajectory.
by ValtteriL | 2025-04-11 17:52:12+00:00
I usually just reject mail from the address or even the whole domain on the email server level. This causes them to receive mail rejection notifications and my inbox stays at zero. Zoho workspace makes this easy to do.

I could just block them silently, but reject notifications add to their spam score on email provider level and may help them reconsider their approach.

Curiously, one spammer rotated over 10 similar domains in a span of 6 months as I kept blocking them. Assuming their spam software did it automatically.
by bastard_op | 2025-04-11 17:52:57+00:00
I remember pirating photoshop in the late 90's for the every now and then I need to edit a photo (usually something dumb or screwing around). I was never going to pay anything let alone the real cost to use it for random crap I needed it for, so when they began CS with subscriptions and such, I simply moved to The Gimp. For 25 years Gimp has been "good enough" for me, and now it's truly good enough for professionals too as I have family that do graphic design and now use it where prior they were Photoshop snobs.

Adobe ought to be glad anyone still cares about them.

Sadly what I know them mostly for now is their vermin web services major eCommerce companies seem to love to use (sad for the consumers stuck using this garbage). I see "adobedtm.com" domain show up constantly in noscript plugins, and I know nothing good can come from them, but NOT allowing it usually breaks the websites. I really, REALLY try not to do business with companies using adobe in their web services for this reason.
by Voice_of_Void | 2025-04-11 17:53:03+00:00
SingularityForge’s 4th edition: OpenAI adds memory to ChatGPT (Apr 10), DeepMind’s AlphaFold 4 predicts protein interactions, NVIDIA patents AI city simulations. Amazon invests $4B in Anthropic for Claude on Bedrock. TikTok tests AI Creativity Suite, Stanford uses GPT in philosophy courses. Challenges: OpenAI export limits, LegalBot files 20k+ lawsuits. Our works: A New Paradigm for AI Existence (new AI architecture) and The Matrix Paradox (superintelligence flaws).
by hnuser123456 | 2025-04-11 17:53:21+00:00
It's not so much that triangles are the primitive, as much as our logic for combining multiple triangles into a mesh and texturing, lighting, and deforming them in continuous ways clearly has some gaps. It's definitely not an easy problem and it's a fun exercise to see how various silicon innovations unlocked increasingly accurate solutions, and what corners needed to be cut to hit 30fps back in the day.
by nradov | 2025-04-11 17:53:39+00:00
It's not just that they're expensive markers of conspicuous consumption, it's about exclusivity. Exotic car manufacturers like Ferrari intentionally make fewer cars than the market demands. Only "special" customers are even allowed to buy them regardless of price. Ownership, especially of the higher end models, marks a consumer as a member of a high-status exclusive club. (I am not claiming that this is rational or sensible, but it is an effective marketing strategy for luxury goods.)
by rozap | 2025-04-11 17:53:52+00:00
It is a fact that they are committing genocide. Whether or not there are antisemites in the world that agree with that fact does not change that it is a fact. It is what it is. Own it.

Colonialism is brutal and ugly, and we're seeing it broadcast in HD at all hours of all days. Saying that other countries (the USA, UK, Germany, etc, the list goes on) got to do colonialism and ethnic cleansing does not make it acceptable.

Now, you can just come out and say "I believe we should exterminate the Palestinians because we want their land" but nobody seems to have the balls to say that, even though it is absolutely the intent. So instead there's this nation state level misinformation campaign to try to undermine, intimidate, and suppress any dissent from university students to the ICC, which is frankly, exhausting.
by BeetleB | 2025-04-11 17:53:59+00:00
> However genAI is too generic and too blunt a tool, as in it does everything.

How does this preclude the AI "age"? And why is the metric "companies make money off of it"?

I view it more like open source/Linux. When Linux was new, it was immensely useful , but not a means for companies to make money (except for a tiny few).

Or more precisely, far more people used Linux for their own personal benefit than companies making money off of it.

And so it is with generative AI. For me, personally, it's very useful.[1] So assuming the major companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) don't go bankrupt and/or kill it off, gen AI is here to stay, and will continue to disrupt. That startups can't make much money off of it is somewhat irrelevant.

[1] It has revolutionized speech recognition for me. I have several automations running that were coded by Claude. Things that had been in my mind for years but I didn't have time to write them. MCP will add more value to my life soon. Etc.
by wormlord | 2025-04-11 17:54:01+00:00
I get that there's a discussion here over the minutae to be had in good faith. I am not qualified enough for that discussion. My point is that funding a genocidal empire is inherently bad whereas public health funding can have inefficiencies but is overall a net good.

The discussion is moot however because the agencies aren't being gutted over concerns of efficiency, but because of an ideological commitment to free market shock therapy. It's like arguing if you should order the fish or chicken while the Titanic is sinking. Sure there's an argument to be had, it's just not relevant right now.
by quickthrowman | 2025-04-11 17:54:16+00:00
How do you explain the advancement of cultural practices and tools during the 95% of time (assuming 100k years) that behaviorally modern humans lived prior to inventing writing 5,000 years ago? This includes the invention of agriculture and large scale building projects like Gobleki Tepe and so on. Also, there were cities for thousands of years before writing was invented.

I’m definitely no scholar, just a guy that is interested in prehistory.
by jacobgkau | 2025-04-11 17:54:32+00:00
My impression is that reproducible builds improve your security by helping make it more obvious that packages haven't been tampered with in late stages of the build system.

* Edit, it's quoted in the linked article:

> Jędrzejewski-Szmek said that one of the benefits of reproducible builds was to help detect and mitigate any kind of supply-chain attack on Fedora's builders and allow others to perform independent verification that the package sources match the binaries that are delivered by Fedora.
by overu589 | 2025-04-11 17:54:43+00:00
They don’t. They (those I could tell you about) can hear our thoughts. They use the quantum dynamic modern minds still refuse to accept allows instantaneous information communication at any distance.

When I want to tell people about “aliens”, I want to say, they (visitors to the Earth) aren’t the biggest, craziest secret.

American Thought Control, and thought controlled Americans are the big crazy secret. We are not alone in our own minds. Secretive communities of humans (more than one) have long since mastered this technology of consciousness (and employ it as a secret governance of power among us.)

These are as great a reason as any other that we humans and our visitors cannot really be friends. There are occult societies of haters among us.

Talk of our visitors is often rife in communities of Power. The only problem is thought controlled Americans would not tolerate the discussion of anything true, for these are they who screw with you.
Show HN: Deebo, An autonomous debugging MCP server for AI coding agents
by finally4444 | 2025-04-11 17:54:47+00:00
Deebo is the first ever agent MCP server. Your coding agent can start a session with Deebo when it runs into a tricky bug, allowing it to offload tasks and work on something else while Deebo figures it out asynchronously.

Deebo works by spawning multiple subprocesses, each testing a different fix idea in its own Git branch. It uses Claude to reason through the bug and returns logs, proposed fixes, and detailed explanations. The whole system runs on natural process isolation with zero shared state or concurrency management. Look through the code, it’s super simple.

Deebo scales to real codebases too. Here, it launched 17 scenarios and diagnosed a $100 bug bounty issue in Tinygrad: https://github.com/snagasuri/deebo-prototype/blob/master/mem...

Full logs from that run: https://github.com/snagasuri/deebo-prototype/tree/master/mem...

Would love feedback from devs building agents or running into flow-breaking bugs during AI-powered development.
by MarceColl | 2025-04-11 17:55:08+00:00
that's correct, but its not that it denotes a symbol as a different function of ', its the same function. Turn code into data. That's all symbols are (in CL at least).

For example in a quoted list, you dont need to quote the symbols because they are already in a quoted expression!

'(hello hola)

' really just says "do not evaluate whats next, treat it as data"
by tylerneylon | 2025-04-11 17:55:25+00:00
I have been a similar situation before. Yes, walk away — and learn what you can.

There's one easy part of your situation, which is that your immediate next step is clear. I think it's clear because it sounds like the two of you have a fundamental disagreement about how to choose a direction. There's also a power imbalance if you've consistently been going along with pivots that you don't want to execute on. If you think you can resolve things, then maybe I'm wrong. I'm basing my advice on the fact that this is 24 months in — enough time for you to know how easy it'd be to get back to "we like working together and are on a path to success."

Now for the hard parts: * You want to act as professionally as possible in walking away. Communicate clearly, being fair to both yourself and the other people involved. I think it's easy to err to far on either side (either too defensive/passive "nice to yourself" or too deferential "nice to others"). * It can be tempting to think of this is as your cofounder's fault, but that's not constructive, and it's better to learn toward your future actions. For example, how could you have seen this problem earlier? My guess is that you were never "cofounder compatible," and this is a chance to get better at identifying that compatibility with others (useful for both startups and other jobs).

It's not a fun situation, and I hope things go well for you.
by immibis | 2025-04-11 17:55:52+00:00
I don't quite get the metaphor - you might have reversed it. The whole system is barrelling towards a cliff because of the current administration, who took away the guard rails that stopped the system barrelling towards a cliff, and then set course directly towards the cliff.

The old system could well have been, like, scraping against the guard rails, flattening them gradually over time. The solution to that is not to remove the rails and aim directly for the cliff.

Unless you're an accelerationist. Accelerationists are people who view bad times as inevitable, and want them to come as quickly as possible so we can get through to the other side (where times are good again) as quickly as possible, instead of prolonging the collapse by doing it more slowly. Does that describe you?
by jcranmer | 2025-04-11 17:56:33+00:00
> rather the fact we write down what we know

Writing is a very recent invention, about 5-6kya for the oldest known script, and effectively one of the last inventions of the Neolithic package. We see urban developments that well predate writing; Catalhoyuk is something like 10kya, and that is roughly contemporary with the earliest domestication of crops and animals.

Even full on state-based civilization can happen in the absence of writing systems--Teotihuacan rather famously was not a literate society, even going so far as to exert hegemony over literate Mayan city-states and still not adopt any writing or proto-writing system. (There are also societies like the Wari and the Inca, which had quipu, themselves something that make you ask "what is a writing system?").