MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-04-08 23:43:58+00:00
Implementations like these are incredibly useful for understanding how something like HNSW works, and being able to make derivative work.

I put together a tiny little implementation a while ago, the key thing being, it writes the index as a few parquet files, so you can host the index on a CDN and read from it via http range requests (e.g. via duckdb wasm).

Definitely isn't beating any benchmarks, but free (or wildly cheap) to host, as you serve it directly from a CDN and processing is done locally.

https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/portable-hnsw
by cratermoon | 2025-04-08 23:44:14+00:00
libgen is far from an archive of "most" books and publications, not even close.

The most recent numbers from libgen itself are 2.4 million non-fiction books and 80 million science journal articles. The Atlantic's database published in 2025 has 7.5 million books.[0] The publishing industry estimates that many books are published each year. As of 2010, Google counted over 129 million books[1]. At best an LLM like Llama will have have 20% of all books in its training set.

0. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libge...

1. https://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand...
by Rochus | 2025-04-08 23:44:17+00:00
> made increasingly irrelevant as open alternatives to it are developed instead

Certainly interesting what these projects are going for, but it's unlikely an "open alternative", given that the degree of formalization and rigor achieved by Cyc's higher-order logic specification is likely not achievable by statistical learning, and a symbolic approach is barely achievable in a shorter time than Cyc.
by Terr_ | 2025-04-08 23:44:18+00:00
Recycling a comment from the past few "explanations":

Hahaha--no. Such a devious long-term plan wouldn't be taxing specific US military bases or populations of penguins, for starters.

I see such a huge outpouring of energy being spent right now trying to develop mutually-incompatible 4D chess explanations for Trump taking a dump onto the chessboard, borne from different flavors of denial.

For some, it's because the first rule of Cult Club is that the cult-leader can't be fallible. For others, it's because they don't want to believe that stupidity sometimes wins.
by FredPret | 2025-04-08 23:44:36+00:00
1. The race animation adds no information, but better communicates the idea that we're looking at a series of moments in time, each with its own history and emotional impact. Watching the lines race shows us what it would've felt like looking at this graph during each year.

2. The Chartjunk wiki cites Adolf Loos's idea "ornamentation is a crime". But I think we're done with modern minimalism and in the process of rediscovering the joy in ornamentation. This is an aesthetic choice and you may disagree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime
by ctrlp | 2025-04-08 23:44:58+00:00
I would hope that people with strong opinions about the uses and abuses of AI would start their own firms and hire people who are unwilling to use AI for whatever reasons. The competition should go a long way to proving the naysayer's points or disproving them. Personally, I think there is no evading the AI juggernaut and that artistic metrics or excellence metrics are going to take a back seat to pure shipping garbage faster metrics. The garbage will be come the new baseline of excellence and the former measures of excellence will be cottage industry artisanship with small and dedicated audiences.

As a small data point, I don't think AI can make movies worse than they currently are. And they are as bad as they are for commercial but non-AI reasons. But if the means to make movies using AI or scene-making tools build with a combo of AI and maybe game engine platforms puts the ability to make movies into the hands of more artistic people, the result may be more technologically uninteresting but nonetheless more artistically interesting because of narrative/character/storytelling vectors. Better quality for niche audiences. It's a low bar, but it's one possible silver lining.
by briHass | 2025-04-08 23:45:02+00:00
I'm a fan of TS and have been a paying customer for work infra for almost a year now. It really is well put together and easy to use, but I do run up against some issues/complaints when diving deep that I hope they can work out:

* The pricing tiers and included features by tier penalizes you in frustrating ways. The base plan is a reasonable $6/user/m, but if you want to use ACLs to control anything in a workable way, it jumps 3x to $18/u/m. Better solutions are available for that kind of money, and I shudder to imagine what the next tier ('call us') costs.

* Subnet routing broke on Ubuntu (maybe other distros) recently, and there were no alerts, communication from TS, or TS tools to pinpoint/figure out what was going on. I stumbled on a solution (install subnet router on a Windows box), and from there I searched and found others with that issue. Lost half a day in emergency mode over that!

* Better tooling to determine why it's falling back to DERP instead of direct for remote clients. DERP relays should be an absolute last resort to provide connectivity for Business-plan-level customers (very slow), and the way TS works just assumes any connectivity is fine.

Overall, the simplicity and abstraction of complex VPN networking is wonderful, but if you have issues or advanced needs, you are immediately thrust into the low-level UDP/NAT/STUN world you were trying to avoid. At that point, you're better off using a traditional VPN (WG, OpenVPN, or heaven forbid, IPSec), because it ends up being more straightforward (not easier) without the abstractions and easy-button stuff.
by getnormality | 2025-04-08 23:48:48+00:00
It's an idiom in math meaning "a problem, together with its solution, that illustrates a general principle or technique".

A worked example of the quadratic formula would be solving a particular equation by plugging in values of a, b, c into the formula.

A worked example of analytic combinatorics is solving a combinatorics problem with techniques from real/complex analysis.
by nitwit005 | 2025-04-08 23:49:42+00:00
I searched Shutterstock for squirrels doing math. Here's a squirrel doing math: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/pensive-squirrel-d...

Yes, it's obvious that if your use case is obscure enough, or you need a ton of unique images, they won't work, which is why I said "largely a solved problem".
by wedn3sday | 2025-04-08 23:50:05+00:00
Had a funny conversation with a friend of mine recently who told me about how he's in the middle of his yearly review cycle, and management is strongly encouraging him and his team to make greater use of AI tools. He works in biomedical lab research and has absolutely no use for LLMs, but everyone on his team had a great time using the corporate language model to help write amusing resignation letters as various personalities, pirate resignation, dinosaur resignation etc. I dont think anyone actually quit, but what a great way to absolutely nuke team moral!
Show HN: Teaish – An Alternative to Tcl's TEA
by sgbeal | 2025-04-08 23:50:11+00:00
As the "final step" in porting the SQLite project's build infrastructure from the GNU Autotools to Steve Bennett's Autosetup, we're left with porting over the TEA (Tcl Extension Architecture, a.k.a. tclconfig) build, i.e. its Tcl extension DLL.

Rather than write a bespoke solution which only works for SQLite, we've instead created teaish (as in "kinda like TEA"), which offers an easy-to-use alternative to the Autotools-driven TEA.

Its main features include:

- Easy to use: just create 1-3 files which describe the extension, run teaish's "configure" script on it, and you're ready to build.

- Can create new stub Tcl extensions and their teaish-specific files with a trivial invocation.

- Supports out-of-tree builds.

- Supports tests. If no tests are provided by the client then it generates one which ensures that the compiled extension can at least be loaded by Tcl.

- Generates install/uninstall makefile rules, and the former automatically tests that the resulting installation can be loaded using Tcl's "package require".

- Generates "make dist" rules for packaging your extension up for distribution.

- Builds MUCH more quickly than extensions build using TEA. For example, the SQLite extension with -O2 optimization builds in 20 seconds on my laptop with teaish vs 40 seconds with TEA. An -O0 build is even faster: 3.5 seconds vs 23 seconds.

- Works with Tcl 8.5+.

- Tested with several Linux flavors, OpenBSD, Cygwin, Msys2, and even Haiku(!).

We have not yet officially replaced the SQLite TEA build with teaish because we first need to determine the downstream impact of doing so and how we can adapt teaish to minimize that impact (we're in communication with the Tcl folks about that). The SQLite Tcl extension is, however, heavily used in teaish's development.
by lucasoshiro | 2025-04-08 23:50:14+00:00
> Is it safe?

Given the dimension of Pix, I never heard of someone losing money directly because of using it (for example, here in the past was common to see where credit cards were cloned)

> can someone be coerced into emptying their bank account at knifepoint?

There are limits of use. Banks have different settings for limiting the amount of money that will be transferred in different situations, like when using their apps outside a trusted network, at night, etc

> Are there scams?

Just like any other payment method. I dare say that it is even safer, as some banks (e.g. Nubank) alerts if you are trying to transfer money to a suspect account.

> Can stolen money be retrieved?

Perhaps if you contact the bank, but as far as I know it is not a feature :-(
by brundolf | 2025-04-08 23:51:14+00:00
> and agree Lenat was a grifter

I worked at Cycorp for 3.5 years, so I can say:

While I haven't been surprised to see Cyc become more and more clearly a failure, Doug Lenat was no grifter. To the very end, he (alongside a handful of others at the company) was the truest true-believer I've ever known. Cyc was his life's mission, and he never doubted that.
by mistrial9 | 2025-04-08 23:51:19+00:00
a similar inflection point happened in the history of film? because cheap prurient material was faster to produce and did generate commerce quickly.. much faster than say, an epic drama with 3000 extras, costumes and theme musics.. The Film Code in American did happen, was widely mocked, and probably was very responsible for the flourishing of an entire industry to the public for decades..

People left alone for a race to the bottom, does not end well, it seems..
by thordenmark | 2025-04-08 23:52:07+00:00
I find these image generators and LLM's in general fairly toy like. Not useful for serious work, but you can create mood boards and idea generators. Kind of like random word generators when you've got writer's block. As soon as you analyze any output from these you can see they are producing nonsense. And as we now know from the Claude paper recently released, these things are far from reasoning.
by hintymad | 2025-04-08 23:52:42+00:00
Netflix used to have a single level for engineers: Senior. That was the best decision they made, at least when they were small. It simply eliminated any incentive to work for promotion, and the result was magnificent: engineers would generally work on what's right, if they were ambitious. Or they could choose to finish what they were supposed to do. Netflix's culture deck explicitly said it was okay for employees to just do what their roles required, so no pressure to move up at all.

> How did this work out in practice and across teams? My experience at Meta within my team was that it would be almost impossible to determine what the company actually wanted from our team in a year.

That's why it is critical to have good leaders. A problem, at least per my own experience in Meta, is that many managers are people managers. I'm not sure what they want. It's hard to know what product they want to build, what gaps they want to fill, or what efficiency goals they want to drive. If they were in Netflix, they would fail the "setting the right context" test, as they didn't know what the right context should be.
by throw10920 | 2025-04-08 23:53:02+00:00
> I'd be far more concerned with the safety and public-health issues of cheap, unregulated access to high-proof alcohol.

This isn't grounded in reality.

Alcohol itself is already dangerous, yet we've managed to figure out how to build cultural elements that mitigate the risks a lot.

You can already buy huge amounts of high-proof alcohol for cheap after you're 21, and most underage kids know someone who could get it for them anyway.

And it's already legal to brew your own alcohol - it's fairly easy to get up to 20% ABV with wine.

And I don't know where you got "unregulated" from. I certainly didn't mention anything about that. Alcohol is already regulated quite heavily - you can't give to a minor or sell without a license, homebrew or not - and legalizing distillation wouldn't change that.

You need to do some research, because you're clearly not familiar with the legal and social environments of the US, at least.
by anon84873628 | 2025-04-08 23:53:38+00:00
My (totally amateur) opinion is that, yes, the ravens are just playing.

As birds spread to fill many different niches, their vocalizations had to diversify so they could still find each other.

Complex mating displays (singing, dancing, nest building) are fitness demonstrations. They correlate to endurance, resourcefulness, memory, etc.

And of course, some behaviors may simply be vestigial.
by jim-jim-jim | 2025-04-08 23:56:49+00:00
> I would think that, if AI-generated content is inferior, these games will fail in the marketplace.

You'd hope so, but I'm not so sure. Media developments are not merely additive, at least with bean counters in charge. Certain formats absolutely eclipse others. It's increasingly hard to watch mainstream films with practical effects or animal actors. Even though most audiences would vastly prefer the real deal, they just put up with it.

It's easy to envision a similar future where the budget for art simply isn't there in most offerings, and we're left praising mediocre holdout auteurs for their simple adherence to traditional form (not naming names here).
by jmward01 | 2025-04-08 23:57:04+00:00
These cherry-picking arguments are a huge problem and we need to acknowledge that they are. So, we focus on one problem and ignore all the benefits that helped us in that time? The world-wide effort to understand the disease and rapidly develop a vaccine? The world-wide talent pool that feeds our hospitals and clinics? The supply chain that did kick in to fill the holes eventually? An economy that always 'makes its own masks' is not going to be able to do everything because everything is simply too much, even for the mighty US of A. It is easy to point at one thing that didn't go well and ignore the reality that the world that would have gotten that one thing right would have gotten so many other things terribly wrong.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-08 23:57:09+00:00
> the equivalent of ~20M people's output if we naively scale

Or about 12% of the US labor force. Meanwhile the 12th percentile US income is ~$22,000, i.e. less than the $32k median in China, and half of the jobs there are above that median.

Obviously these numbers are all useless napkin math and none of it really works like that, but the premise isn't inherently absurd. If China is subsidizing manufacturing in order to capture manufacturing jobs and those jobs pay more than what many in the lowest quartile of the US are currently making, there are people who could be made better off by having those jobs back, and they'd still only be paid about what we're currently paying to China.

And this before considering the general arguments about advantages to proximity of manufacturing, e.g. being able to talk to the people in the factory in your timezone in your language assists in product development so the location of the factory has an easier time developing new products. Which allows not just the manufacturing jobs but the whole rest of the company to be there, instead of those jobs starting to get eroded going forward.
by KerrAvon | 2025-04-08 23:58:33+00:00
Dictated, past tense. As a result of these tariffs. And that part's not coming back even if everything got magically reversed tomorrow. That level of trust is gone, forever.

If capital doesn't get very mad and do something fix the fallout immediately, it will get very bad. You can't wait for things to work themselves out; they will not. It's as stupid as it appears on the surface. These people are sociopathic, vengeful idiots, they're mad at anyone smarter than they are, and they're going to destroy everything that's good and replace it with much, much worse.

There is no logic behind it, no matter how badly everybody wants there to be. Trump's brain is stuck in the early 1980's when he first had a subliterate fixation on tariffs, and he's never let go of the idea. I'm sorry that's it not more complex than that -- it would be reassuring if there was an actual plan that anyone not MAGA-infected would thought would work! But there isn't. This is them destroying America and taking down as much of the global economy as America can reach.
by woodruffw | 2025-04-08 23:58:42+00:00
I don't have strong opinions about Cyc in either direction, but this obit feels pretty mean-spirited to me: it imputes moral failure on Lenat and others for working on symbolic AI for 40 years, without acknowledging that Lenat's basic belief ("priming the pump") is shared by ML too -- the main difference is that ML needed the pump to be primed with an overwhelming amount of compute, which grew faster than Cyc's ability to ingest facts and relations.

(This isn't to imply that I think symbolic AI "works"; only that more perspective on underlying beliefs is due.)
by j-bos | 2025-04-08 23:58:42+00:00
I find LLMs good for general knowledge, and clever rubber ducking, but if I have a very specific niche issue in some sort of language or framework, generally search is a better bet to find a stack overflow post of people going through the exact same thing I went through. And even if they don't have solutions, they'll usually link you to more valuable and specific references that you can use.

Though lately for more in-depth research I've been enjoying working with the LLM to have it do the searching for me and provide me links back to the sources.
by defrost | 2025-04-08 23:58:52+00:00
Every voting system has flaws, no voting system is perfect.

FPTP has more flaws than other systems and almost inevitably leads to less representation in democracies by promoting two party blocs that barely differ over successive election iterations. It's a political form of Hotelling's Law coupled with discrete dynamics.

As has happened to the USofA despite a strong opposition to party politics by the founders and crafters of the current system who failed a few centuries back to understand the dynamics of a scheme that didn't scale well.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-08 23:59:21+00:00
You can improve all those things, even fast, without doing… this.

Tariffing close allies at the same time as likely or actual foes especially doesn’t make sense. And rather than this weird roundabout approach, the government can just… pay for things to happen. Like, they used to run weapons factories. If that’s the actual reason for this, it would have been a ton cheaper to just fire up a few government factories, continue and expand the chips act, and maybe ramp up some targeted tariffs and other controls, which would have been way more effective with allies on board. Or, they can start placing drone orders and handing out r&d contracts with specifications that they be entirely made in the USA.

You may be presenting a real perspective, and it could be entirely correct, and this still would be extremely stupid.
by jemmyw | 2025-04-09 00:00:17+00:00
I use search engines all the time (kagi specifically). AIs don't have up to date information. How would you find reviews for products via an AI? It'll just come up with one or two, and when you read you can pick out nuance and also tell if its a genuine review or made up garbage. Or find a place to buy something. Or a place to go, and to read other peoples comments on it. Summaries aren't very useful over comments imo.

I use an LLM a lot for coding. However, I was never as much into doing web searches for programming problems anyway, I used docs more and rarely needed sites like SO. I haven't therefore moved away from search engines for that side of things.
by Spivak | 2025-04-09 00:00:20+00:00
> that's the only way to do it without incurring huge transaction fees and / or long processing time.

You're joking right? I just did a $25,000 wire internationally with a currency exchange in the middle and it cost $75. It went through in one business day. You'll get more hassle trying to withdraw from your exchange than that.

When I bought my house and did the wire it cost $15. Where are you getting huge transaction fees?
by manwe150 | 2025-04-09 00:00:58+00:00
Both yes and no. It was a brief lack of available local stock from suddenly unexpected demand, followed by a lack of factories willing to stop doing well paid work to switch to making cheap masks, while we waited for even cheaper masks to get made and imported from countries with cheap labor, followed by a surplus of masks (source: a brief chat with a factory manager in my social network who was considering whether he could at least break even on costs and labor if temporarily switching to making masks)
by throw10920 | 2025-04-09 00:02:23+00:00
> That's an assertion I don't agree with.

The part about users being more latency-limited than compute-limited, or wanting to push as much to the browser as possible?

The former is somewhat hard to quantify, but most engineers building interactive applications (or distributed systems, of which interactive client-server webapps are a special case) have far more trouble with latency than compute.

The latter is definitely true.

> Data still needs to come from or go to the server, whether you do it in a snippet of HTML or with an API call. ... In either case, latency is there.

This is definitely incorrect.

Consider the very common case of fetching some data from the server and then filtering it. In many, many cases, the filtering can be done client-side. If you do that with an interactive frontend, then it's nearly instant, and there's no additional fetch to the server. If you shell out to the server, then you pay the latency penalty, and incur a fetch.

"In either case, latency is there." is just factually wrong.
by tristor | 2025-04-09 00:02:25+00:00
> A direct USB connection would remove a cable and an adapter.

Most modern mirrorless cameras can be connected to a computer via USB and used as a video source. Some are nerfed to only run for 30 minutes or some other arbitrary number consistently, but most are not.

f/9.5 in Full Frame is abysmal and generally past the point where scene sharpness suffers from stopping down. Even when doing street photography or landscapes, I rarely stop down past f/8. Running something like my Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 S Z-mount lens at f/4 is sharper edge-to-edge than most other lenses at f/8, and gathers enough light to operate a pleasingly fast shutter speed for handheld work even in low-light. A phone does not compare. My wife has the latest Samsung Galaxy S, I have an iPhone 16 Pro, we both also have cameras (her a Fuji APS-C body, me the Nikon Z8 FF body), and we walk around and take photos composed correctly within each camera. We can see it, even without cropping. A camera body is much better than a phone if you care about the quality of your work, and especially if you ever intend to print.