MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-04-29 17:38:40+00:00
Currently, the script looks like this

#!/bin/sh 0x $1|yy084|yy030|yy073

"0x" is another Almquist shell script that can search about 63 different servers that return search results, e.g., Google, DDG, and so on.^1

yy___ are UNIX filters written in C.

0x uses some yy proggrams as well, e.g., yy025, along with sed and a TCP client, e.g., tcpclient, netcat, socat, bssl, openssl, etc.

yy084 outputs SERPs as SQL.

This makes it easy to create simplified "mixed" SERPs with results from different servers.

Where possible 0x allows for "continuation search". Going past page 1 of SERPs is discouraged or even prevented in recent times, all focus is on "the top result",^2 and some www search engines actively try to block exhaustive research and discovery. By continuing searches over time, e.g., page 1 of results on day 1, page 2 on day 2, page 3 on day 5, etc., one can sometimes avoid being blocked when doing exhaustive searches.

1. This is an ongoing experiment. Sometimes a site will "break" if the site operator changes something but this does not happen too often. Majority have remained stable over time.

2. This coincidentally benefits an advertising services racket.
by xvector | 2025-04-29 17:38:46+00:00
> I'm assuming you believe in some soul that could be transfered from your body to a computer? If so, that's clearly into deeply religious territory.

Actually, I would say the opposite is deeply religious territory. Nothing fundamentally restricts this unless you think the analog nature of a neuron is a pre-requisite to consciousness, and no synthetic/digital consciousness could ever exist. But you have no reason to believe this. Such a belief is almost religious.

> where there is no way for you to discern whether your experience actually comes from your sensors or some other source

This is life today as well. How do you know you aren't part of some Matrix-style biological mind prison? You don't. It's pointless even trying to wonder.

> Regarding "longevity", currently billions are suffering under the rule of a few generations that refuse to let go of power even though

Social problems can be fixed. Death is final. Tyrants existing is not a reason to promote the death of billions of innocents. If Putin lived for another 1000 years, I certainly wouldn't kill myself. You will experience more net social progress being immortal, though it may be slower, than dying after a short 80 years.
by cdrini | 2025-04-29 17:39:16+00:00
I'm not sure if it needs to be at the syntax level, but I think having built in standard library support for graphs (general trees) would help make graphs more common in programming. And seeing how powerful they are, I think that would be a good thing!

I explored this idea with gstd, a standard library for graphs inspired by the JS Array interface: https://github.com/cdrini/gstd/
by ryandv | 2025-04-29 17:39:23+00:00
No, I don't agree with this formalization. It's more that (some) humans have a "theory" of the program (in the same sense used by Ryle and Naur); let's take for granted that if one has a theory, then they have understanding; thus (some) humans have an understanding of the program. It's not equivocating between B and B', but rather observing that B implies B'.

Thus, if an LLM lacks understanding (Searle), then they don't have a theory either.

> LLM's build an internal representation that let's them efficiently and mostly successfully manipulate source code. Whether that internal representation is satisfies your criteria for a theory doesn't change that fact.

The entire point of Naur's paper is that the activity of programming, of software engineering, is not just "manipulating source code." It is, rather, building a theory of the software system (which implies an understanding of it), in a way that an LLM or an AI cannot, as posited by Searle.
by hinkley | 2025-04-29 17:39:30+00:00
I think the confusion sneaks in because “measuring” is something you do several times and each iteration has different connotation.

Once you “find” a candidate change you measure it to see if what you did made things worse and you put it back if it did, or maybe you try it in combination with other changes to see if its value is complementary.

But people fuck up all the time reading the initial telemetry, which is often where I come in. I get tired of hearing people say, “we’ve done all we can, look how flat this chart is,” and hand someone my beer. You won’t find all of the good candidates in the percentage of run time list. That’s not all the data that’s there, and not every change that works needs to even be supported by the initial data. It only needs to be supported by the delta afterward.
by ForOldHack | 2025-04-29 17:39:33+00:00
Just $8000?

A giant ship’s engine failed. The ship’s owners tried one ‘professional’ after another but none of them could figure out how to fix the broken engine.

Then they brought in a man who had been fixing ships since he was young. He carried a large bag of tools with him and when he arrived immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom.

Two of the ship’s owners were there watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away and the engine was fixed!!!

A week later, the owners received an invoice from the old man for $10,000.

What?! the owners exclaimed. “He hardly did anything..!!!”.

So they wrote to the man; “Please send us an itemised invoice.”

The man sent an invoice that read:

Tapping with a hammer………………….. $2.00

Knowing where to tap…………………….. $9,998.00
by empath75 | 2025-04-29 17:39:39+00:00
> - Text editors (people that edit/proofread prose, not computer programs) will be replaced by LLMs.

It has been a very, very long time since editors have been proof-reading prose for typos and grammar mistakes, and you don't need LLMs for that. Good editors do a lot more creative work than that, and LLMs are terrible at it.
by somethingsome | 2025-04-29 17:40:00+00:00
In a more philosophical matter, why there need to be a why? Does the full universe need to be causal? Are we biased to think that there always must be a why?

In Feynman lectures there is a very nice way of describing what is energy, if you like this kind of things it's also a big question ;)

Note:I think the why is important to explore, but I'm unsure there is always something more complex than 'otherwise the universe would collapse or be completely different' it may be that some more fundamental axiom, that I'm unaware of, leads to inertia in such a way that the universe is coherent
by jaredklewis | 2025-04-29 17:40:22+00:00
The paper analyzes facts re: wages and jobs, which I think are (comparatively) easy to measure as compared with productivity, and are also an area where people have concerns about the impact of AI.

Mostly people aren't worried about productivity itself, which would be weird. "Oh no, AI is making us way more productive, and now we're getting too much stuff done and the economy is growing too much." The major concern is that the productivity is going to impact jobs and wages, and at least so far (according to this particular paper) that seems to not be happening.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-04-29 17:40:40+00:00
> tax advice that would have cost hundreds of dollars to get from a licensed tax agent

But are those really the same? You're not paying the tax agent to give you the advice per se: even before Gemini, you could do your own research for free. You're really paying the tax agent to provide you advice that you can trust without having to go to the extra steps of doing deep research.

One of the most important bits of information I get from my tax agent is, "is this likely to get me audited if we do it?" It's going to be quite some time before I trust AI to answer that correctly.
by seltzered_ | 2025-04-29 17:40:43+00:00
Yes, but in practice I've experienced Firefox (at least under linux) getting killed by the OS when RAM runs low. I recently lost some low-priority reading projects after I couldn't recover the tab sets (they were opened months ago, so hard to dig back through history)

I've found myself using Sidebery and the manual 'unload' tab option quite a bit.
by julianhuang | 2025-04-29 17:40:56+00:00
I completely agree that this is an incredible advancement as someone who has watched the rise of LLMs' GeoGuessr abilities. I just wanted to qualify the claim made in the blog post "In Which I Try to Maintain Human Supremacy for a Bit Longer". I also think that models would need to become far more proficient at tool use (querying OpenStreetMap features, coverage-checking Google Maps, calculating sun direction, etc.) that current human geolocators have access to, and precise spatial reasoning. Additionally, there is a whole corpus of GeoGuessr-specific knowledge that probably wouldn't have a reason to be in model training data (Google Street View coverage quirks, the specific geographic ranges of vegetation and architecture, tiny visual idiosyncrasies in country infrastructure like the width of red on a sign, etc.). However, I think this could probably be solved with more data, and I don't think there is any fundamental barrier.
by jrmg | 2025-04-29 17:41:06+00:00
It’s plausible that I didn’t see the email because it got spam filtered away, so I totally believe that one was sent.

On contacting support: to your (Kagi’s) credit, Kagi did cancel the subscription and refund the fee after I contacted support. But if I hadn’t been scrutinising my credit card statements for other reasons, I suspect it may have been a few months before I noticed.

[edit: Thinking more: if their ‘no fee if you don’t use it’ policy actually works, I guess I wouldn’t be charged more than the one month. Although that makes it even less likely I’d’ve noticed.]
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-29 17:41:30+00:00
And on the other side of the coin I worked at a nursing home where some guy who was in pretty bad shape and had maybe a month or so left had a DNR, keeled over, got R'd because poor process (to the great annoyance of the family), did a lap around the hospital, came back to the nursing home and months later walked out, on his own, with a cane. IDK how long he lived after that but the point stands.
by juancn | 2025-04-29 17:41:37+00:00
I see the same mistake made everywhere, thinking that in software engineering that the hard part is making new code.

A large chunk of the work is dealing with people, understanding what do they really want/need and helping them understand it.

On the technical side, most of the work is around fixing issues with existing software (protecting an investment).

Then, maybe 1 to 10% of the workload is making something new.

AI kinda works for the "making something new" part but sucks at the rest. And when it works, it's at most "average" (in the sense of how good it's training set was, it prefers things it sees more commonly regardless of quality).

My gut instinct is that there's going to be an AI crash, much like in the late 90s/early 2000s. Too much hype, and then, after the crash, maybe we'll start to see something a bit more sane and realistic.
by SirHumphrey | 2025-04-29 17:41:38+00:00
My objection is not “that is not real reasoning” my objection is that’s not that hard.

I happen to do some geolocating from static images from time to time and at least most of the images provided as examples contain a lot of clues- enough that i think a semi experienced person could figure out the location although - in fairness- in a few hours not few minutes.

Second, the similar approaches were tried using CNNs and it worked (somewhat)[1].

[1]: https://huggingface.co/geolocal/StreetCLIP

EDIT: I am not talking about geoguesser - i am talking about geolocating an image with everything available (e.g. google…)
by pmontra | 2025-04-29 17:42:23+00:00
I have 53 tabs open on Firefox Android. They are a dump of what I'm reading or wish to read or what I want to come back to. Sometimes I send a tab to my desktop using the KDE Connect app. I have Gnome with GS Connect on my Linux laptop.

I've got 113 tabs on that machine (about:telemetry#scalars-tab_search=tab). I'm using 5 virtual desktop, 2 for me and one for each of my customers. One Firefox window per desktop (maybe my workaround for tab groups), one editor window per desktop, one terminal per desktop. The Slack app on the desktop I'm currently using. My password manager on all desktops. I switch using an hotkey, Windows + the first letter of the customer. No animations, no Activities, nothing. I was OK with Gnome 2.

It's nice to have 32 GB of RAM. 113
by karmakaze | 2025-04-29 17:42:31+00:00
I agree with many of the comments here including some of the ones that are in disagreement. The difference is context where for most situations the starting point is far from optimal and the any of N better choices is a good improvement.

That doesn't seem to be what this post it talking about. It seems to talking about well worn areas trying to improve the state of the art. An example that illustrates it for me is DeepMind's AlphaTensor finding a better way to multiply matrices[0] in 2022. It wasn't a brute-force solution, but the scale of it makes it appear so.

> On 4x4 matrices, AlphaTensor unexpectedly discovered a solution with 47 multiplication steps, an improvement over the 49 required with Strassen’s algorithm of 1969, albeit restricted to mod 2 arithmetic. Similarly, AlphaTensor solved 5x5 matrices with 96 rather than Strassen's 98 steps. Based on the surprising discovery that such improvements exist, other researchers were quickly able to find a similar independent 4x4 algorithm, and separately tweaked Deepmind's 96-step 5x5 algorithm down to 95 steps in mod 2 arithmetic and to 97[24] in normal arithmetic.[25] Some algorithms were completely new: for example, (4, 5, 5) was improved to 76 steps from a baseline of 80 in both normal and mod 2 arithmetic.

This to me shows that direct profiling and observation wouldn't have led to the optimization. Improvements needed a sort-of but not actually brute-force effort of many people trying, but also being clever with their attempts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_multiplication_algorith...
by Lerc | 2025-04-29 17:42:35+00:00
Apart from the issue of relativity mentioned in the sibling comment.

I can easily imagine a bunch of perpendicular lines to describe a volume and I can use coordinates to indicate a point within that volume. Those are just abstract concepts though. How does something that exists have a position.

If you go further and think of the interactions of particles as expressions of perterberances of a field I guess it comes down to what is the amplitude comprised of and ultimately why is it meaningful that there is a relationship between one field and another in a way that you can say that you are talking about the same place.

Maybe that's what both questions devolve down to. Why do fields interact? Or perhaps, why would a fundamental property have a relationship to anything at all if it is fundamental?
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-04-29 17:42:46+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Velaro#Velaro_Novo

They have distributed traction, meaning powered bogies in every second wagon for the current variants. There is no 'engine/locomotive' in the classical sense. All of these also have electronic anti-slip/traction control.

Edit: Even if a quarter of the powered bogies are defect for whichever reason, the remaining ones still suffice to accelerate from full stop at 4% grade. By design. For current variants. It's a variable platform. They could use more powered bogies. Stronger motors. Whatever.
by hnuser123456 | 2025-04-29 17:43:41+00:00
I'm having a lot of fun experimenting with stuff like this. I'm trying to put together an unrealengine blueprints style graph editor to allow people to design workflows like this where you start with the user prompt input, which goes to one agent, which makes an initial attempt, and then that conversation history gets passed to another "agent" with a different system prompt telling it to be a harsh critic, but to also give a pass/fail signal, and loop back until the critic judges pass, then send that back to the user as output. Ideally as a little website that can call your own LLM endpoints and save/load/share workflow graphs.

Mistral small 3.1 and gemma 3 feel like the first semi-competent models that can be run locally, but that competence is just a seed, and they still need to be guided with a framework that keeps them on track.

Try giving it python execution in a loop and tell it to explore the world. It'll start trying to download and read news and stuff.
by IAmGraydon | 2025-04-29 17:43:54+00:00
>It's a bit scary to personally experience how quickly people can start panicking.

People have been panicking, internally, for quite some time. What happened is that the threshold to externalize that panic was dropped with this event. So this is a very real example of how people are always looking for confirmation of what they already believe, and for a relatively brief time after they receive that confirmation, can live in a reality that is not at all aligned with base reality. I find this kind of thing fascinating, and it's been happening more and more in recent years due to changing dynamics in the way we communicate.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-04-29 17:44:09+00:00
When you say it that way, it's actually baffling that there's still separate code paths for solid background colors.

Just offer a background picker, and have it generate a 1x1 PNG, for the color selected. Just like that, you can use the image background code path for everything; and the code for generating the image almost certainly exists in the OS already. Maybe add some metadata to the generated image to filter it from the images picker, and you're done.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-04-29 17:44:25+00:00
Maybe the end-user isn't Google Maps, but TomTom have a pretty comprehensive street-view-ish product for private buyers like car companies, Bing and Apple Maps called MoMa.

I'd be surprised if this building[0] wasn't included in their dataset from every road-side angle possible, alongside every piece of locational metadata imaginable, and I'd be surprised if that dataset hasn't made it into OpenAI's training data - especially when TomTom's relationship to Microsoft, and Microsoft's relationship to OpenAI, is taken into account.

[0] https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/sampatt/media@main/posts/2025-04...
by skydhash | 2025-04-29 17:44:32+00:00
Bookmarks are OK. I's just that their purposes largely varies. There's the "pin this" bookmark for sites that are often visited, there's the "save for later" bookmark for things you want to go back to later", and there's the "interesting" bookmark for things you don't need now, but would be too much trouble to find. Maybe some days, I will code an extension for all those uses cases. For now, I put the first in the bookmark toolbar and the others in "Other bookmarks" while occasionally create folders for the last type.
by jmacd | 2025-04-29 17:44:40+00:00
I am currently dealing with a relatively complex legal agreement. It's about 30 pages. I have a lawyer working on it who I consider the best in the country for this domain.

I was able to pre-process the agreement, clearly understand most of the major issues, and come up with a proposed set of redlines all relatively easily. I then waited for his redlines and then responded asking questions about a handful of things he had missed.

I value a lawyer being willing to take responsibility for their edits, and he also has a lot of domain specific transactional knowledge that no LLM will have, but I easily saved 10 hours of time so far on this document.
by WorldPeas | 2025-04-29 17:45:04+00:00
very true, I was thinking from experience where there was a stony gravel lot I drive past that they covered with them, I couldn't imagine it's a good idea to do such a thing over land that would otherwise.. be absorbing the sun and directly capturing carbon with it.. I'm heartened to see more flat-top buildings taking advantage of their space with solar. To continue the prior point, I don't think scarcity moves like this with the rails are necessary anymore, I think the point's been made we want this and the demand (anecdotally) is higher than supply for free installs/space rental
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-29 17:45:46+00:00
More recent renewable inverters (solar PV and wind) and battery storage both have grid forming power control support. Term of art is "synthetic inertia" and makes spinning baseload obsolete. This has been shown under real world conditions most notably in South Australia with the Tesla Megapack based Hornsdale Power Reserve, which stepped in to maintain grid inertia when a coal plant exploded in 2021. For a more robust grid, you can deploy additional battery storage that can be called upon not only for energy, but also grid support.

(also replaces the need for synchronous condensers where they would typically be sited for grid ancillary services)

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-26/queensland-blackout-c...

https://www.pscconsulting.com/australia-leans-in-on-syntheti...

https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/engineering-fr...

https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2024/01/12/Tesla%20BESS%20G...
by eviks | 2025-04-29 17:46:01+00:00
Glad thousands of users who managed to find their feature voting site pushed Mozilla to do a few baby steps

Though the current interface isn't good - mandatory group names (which also waste space in the precious tab bar by default) and inability to ungroup with a single key (due to naming conflict) - adds too much friction. Also drag&drop to group is too precise, but also can't be disable, so now you can't reliably move tabs around with a mouse without risking triggering the grouping

And, of course, one other top-10 request - to have custom keybinds to group/ungroup - is still too far from the minimum 4500 required to implement it after a few years...
by coldtea | 2025-04-29 17:46:22+00:00
>You made the very wrong assumption that land possession is mostly an individual thing, and second, that the State would be happy to award “common” ownership to communities big and small, and as such that it would allow said communities (in many cases much older than the State itself) to decide who gets to use what land inside of said communities.

I made neither assumption, and both arguments are irrelevant to my point.

Take the current rights of anyone to one or more plots of land they own. As those are today, and also as they change while some are sold and bought etc.

To protect those rights of those onwers (of citizens and businesses and municipalities and so on) a registry or plots and their boundaries is very useful.

>to decide who gets to use what land inside of said communities

That's a totally irrelevant point, one that I didn't bring up.

I never said the state will happily "award “common” ownership to communities big and small, and as such that it would allow said communities (in many cases much older than the State itself) to decide who gets to use what land inside of said communities". In fact, for the purposes of my argument, whether the state will do that doesn't concern me at all.

Just that the state keeping a registry of plots and their boundaries helps keep track of ownership. Not transfer it to communities, to give it to someone else to administer: to keep track.
by senderista | 2025-04-29 17:46:23+00:00
Yeah that reminds me of a startup I worked at that did real-time analytics for digital marketing campaigns. We went to all kinds of trouble to update dashboards with 5-minute latency, and real-time updates made for impressive sales demos, but I don't think we had a single customer that actually needed to make business decisions within 24 hours of looking at the data.