MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by collias | 2025-04-25 06:48:42+00:00
I find this to be profoundly depressing.

I've just recently re-discovered the joy of writing my own songs, and playing them with (actual) instruments. It's something I get immense pleasure from, and for once, I'm actually getting some earned traction. In another life, I may have been a musician, and it's something I fantasize about regularly.

With all these AI-generated music tools, the world is about to be flooded with a ton of low-effort, low-quality music. It's going to to absolutely drown out anyone trying to make music honestly, and kill budding musicians in their crib.

I suppose this is the same existential crisis that other professions/skills are also going through now. The feeling of a loss of purpose, or a loss of a fantasy in learning a new skill and switching careers, is pretty devastating.
by veqq | 2025-04-25 06:49:41+00:00
> In 1979

many high schools were teaching mathematics with APL! There are quite a few textbooks to learn math with APL [1] or J [2] syntax. Iverson originally wrote APL as a superior syntax for math, the programming implementation came a few years later.

[1] https://alexalejandre.com/about/#apl [2] https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Books#Math_for_the_Layman
by magackame | 2025-04-25 06:49:48+00:00
I am not too sure about that. Isn't the whole thing about art and music is that you can convey something that words cannot? Of course, these models start to support image and audio inputs as well, but the most interesting mixing step that happens in the artist's head seems missing in the generated output. If you have some vision inside your head, making something out of it by hand is still the best way to convey it. Just as writing something down refines the thoughts and reveals holes in your thinking - drawing something is visual thinking that reveals holes in your imagination. You can imagine some scene or an object pretty easily, but if you try to draw it into existence, you will immediately notice that a lot of detail is missing, a lot of stuff you didn't think through or didn't even notice was there at all. The same applies to creating music and programming. Using generative AI certainly has some artistic component to it, but I feel like using these models you give up too much expressive bandwidth and ability to reflect and take your time on the whole endeavor.
by refurb | 2025-04-25 06:49:56+00:00
While a low effort comment, it does touch on an important topic.

Imagine if CA was run with the kind of efficiency that Singapore or South Korea was run. Clean, safe streets. Modern infrastructure.

Instead we get a state government that is going to waste the goose that laid the golden egg. The high taxes paid disappear in a black hole centered in Sacramento.

CA reminds me of New Jersey. Other states used to be jealous of New Jersey's economy, yet the riches were frittered away by an inefficient government.
by int_19h | 2025-04-25 06:50:07+00:00
There will come a time when AI will be sufficiently advanced to be reasonably considered sentient and conscious, and at that point it will absolutely deserve rights.

We've been through this before with animals, too. Descartes famously believed that animals are purely mechanistic, unlike humans, and thus lack the "inner state" necessary for true suffering, thus e.g. vivisection was perfectly fine.
by waqar199 | 2025-04-25 06:50:52+00:00
I built Holiday Optimizer, a website that helps you get the most out of your limited PTO days through strategic scheduling. By intelligently placing your time off around weekends, holidays, and company breaks, you can dramatically extend your vacations without using extra days. I was able to transform 15 PTO days into 53 total days off by strategically positioning them around public holidays and company days off (like Summer Fridays and Winter Break). The tool automatically generated a balanced mix of long weekends, mini-breaks, week-long vacations, and extended getaways.

Holiday Optimizer features:

- Interactive calendar visualization to see your optimized time off at a glance

- Multiple optimization strategies based on your preference for shorter or longer breaks

- Current year planning that only suggests future dates

- Support for company-specific days off and recurring patterns (like "Summer Fridays")

- Year-by-year planning for future vacations

- Clean, responsive interface that works on any device

You can customize your optimization strategy based on personal preferences:

- Long weekends (3-4 days)

- Mini-breaks (5-6 days)

- Week-long breaks (7-9 days)

- Extended vacations (10+ days)

- Balanced distribution throughout the year

What would take hours to plan manually using a calendar now takes seconds. The tool is completely client-side, and features a responsive UI built with Next.js and React. Simply input your PTO allowance, company holidays, and preferences to see your optimized schedule instantly.

Try it out: https://holiday-optimizer.com

The code is open source at GitHub: http://github.com/waqarkalim/holiday-optimizer

I'd love your feedback on the tool! What strategies do you use to maximize your time off? I personally prefer week-long breaks (7-9 days) as they provide enough time to truly disconnect without using too many PTO days.
by ActorNightly | 2025-04-25 06:51:22+00:00
Anything that is forward compute only is never ever going to be anywhere close to AI. The LLMs are a dead end.

>or simulating the evolution of digital creatures in the wild web.

You are on the right track with this thinking.

Fundamentally, AI in the actual sense of having intelligence will be something that can run simulations in parallel and pick the winning result, much like genetic algorithms. The rules for the simulation it will obtain from interacting without outside world, and the map of input to output will be stored in a LLM like structure as memory.

The big question is how do you build it. Imagine its running on a hardware, with a UART card that is hooked up to a network cable. It should eventually be able to figure out how go on the internet simply by setting 1s and zeros in the right places at the right time, how to host a server and build an interface that a person can connect to and talk to it for more information (if it decides that this is even necessary), and so on.

I don't think an objective function that it can minimize/maximize is really applicable, so by extension I don't think we can get to this AI agent through traditional training, the process to make this algorithm has to mimic evolution. I.e we basically create some ambiguous structure of a neural net with a clock and recursive connections, and then start doing something like a genetic algorithm, with a fitness function of being able to figure more shit out. Obviously this will take exponentially more compute than the world has currently for running LLMS.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-04-25 06:51:59+00:00
the real question is: what does that say about humans in general (since we see this pattern repeated recently in a few other countries), particularly when stressed?

it turns out, a few thousand years of civilization isn't enough to evolve significant growth in the prefrontal cortex or atrophy in the lizard-brain, so to speak

we're not much more rational than cavemen, and thus biologically as likely as them to break stuff when angry or be fooled by those who promise salvation

unfortunately, some seek to exploit those vulnerabilities: making the promises; feeding the anger; manufacturing stress & FUD to decrease decision quality
by LambdaAndLatte | 2025-04-25 06:52:10+00:00
To add another perspective:

Anecdotally, we have found we have two personas: 1) Those early in their financial independence journey. They want to know what to do next to accumulate wealth 2) Those towards the end have saved and accumulated. Their questions are 'do I have enough'

The second persona are running more plans more frequently because the market volatility (and job market volatility) has made them want to check and check again if they have enough.
by dgfl | 2025-04-25 06:52:33+00:00
I keep coming back to this thought. Maybe it’s how I was raised, but knowing that I’m doing something useful to other people / humanity is the entire point.

When a machine can do everything better than we can, then what do we derive meaning from?

I usually get out of the existential dread by thinking that we’re still some time away from the issue, and that there will still be some pursuits left, like space colonization. But it’s not fully satisfying.
by defrost | 2025-04-25 06:53:17+00:00
I'm retired with tangible assets and land in quasi rural Australia .. so this is largely moot to me, however ...

What of those interested in retiring to a cruise | floating accomadation ship?

That's a serious question for some, I saw a thing the other night and caught an elderly well off couple saying they looked at many options and shipboard life was cheaper and more interesting (personal opinion) than other assisted living retirement options.

Raises the question of a digital life on international waters > 9 months of the year.
by geon | 2025-04-25 06:55:02+00:00
> EU would just demand continued subsidized access

No. Apple is free to charge the same "core technology fee" to developers who choose to release apps on the Apple Appstore. The only issue the EU has is how Apple uses the fee to give themselves an advantage.

The EU creates laws to prevent predatory behaviour from corporations. It isn't the EU's job to come up with an alternative business model that still makes Apple the same amount of money.
by dodos | 2025-04-25 06:55:41+00:00
I feel its already hit the tipping point. I used to listen to mixes on youtube liberally, but I've now had to filter all searches to pre-2023 due to the flood of slop that's appeared. I used to finds loads of great up-coming musicians, but the amount of effort required to do so has increased considerably. I am tired of filtering out the slop.
by dSebastien | 2025-04-25 06:57:46+00:00
The Knowledge Management lifecycle he uses is the one I also follow and recommend.

I've documented it for myself here: https://notes.dsebastien.net/30+Areas/33+Permanent+notes/33....

I've also explained it, along with many related concepts and ideas in the course I've just released: https://knowledge-management-for-beginners.com
by bilbo0s | 2025-04-25 06:58:03+00:00
More accurate to call it “alignment for plebes and not for the masters of the plebes”. Which I think we all kind of expect coming from the leaders of our society. That’s the way human societies have always worked.

I’m sure access to military grade tech is only one small slice in the set of advantages the masters get over the mastered in any human society.
by captainmuon | 2025-04-25 06:58:43+00:00
It's funny that the list includes both California and the US.

It would be interesting to compare economies of the same scale, regardless of legal status: If you are considering the US and China, maybe you should include the whole of the EU. And if you are looking at Germany, Japan, ... It makes sense to not only include California, but also to split up other countries. I'm curious how high up Guandong or Shanghai would be for example.

The fact that the US and China show up as single countries (and not "continents"/regions) whereas the EU shows up as a bunch of "small" countries is source of a lot of inferiority complex in Europe.
by chopete3 | 2025-04-25 06:58:55+00:00
This is a very nifty tool. I started working on an excel sheet for this same purpose.

I created a plan to check it out. I couldn't find a few items.

1. Rental properties in the Assets

2. How to report the whole life insurance plans?

3. A scenario to invest in index funds.

Overall, a great start. Will bookmark this and check back later.
by ActorNightly | 2025-04-25 06:58:56+00:00
If the initial effort can be big, all you really need to do is to move your API/Backend to API Gateway and Lambda (with throttling applied), then for databases, just get a dedicated EC2 instance and host stuff manually, with periodic syncs to S3 for backups.

Most of AWS services exist because people are either too lazy or not knowledgeable enough on how to set up their own stuff on EC2.
by cess11 | 2025-04-25 06:58:57+00:00
Now, I get why you made the quip, but I for one keep both of those out of the business I run for this exact reason: I do not trust MICROS~1 in the medium to long term.

I also present the CEO and board with other arguments, like moral ones about involvement in atrocities and tyranny, legal ones regarding things like data protection, market related ones such as the likelihood of a future showdown between the EU and US.

But the risk that MICROS~1 fucks us over directly is even easier for them to understand, because they have been using Windows and Office for decades and are quite queasy about 10 going EOL and what the next set of annoyances in document management will be that they'll have to suffer under. It's something they have immediate experience of and didn't like.

A year from now it's probable we'll only have a couple of Windows machines left, because some of our customers use software that doesn't run under Wine and tries to block execution under both debuggers and container environments.
by relistan | 2025-04-25 06:59:16+00:00
As a ham radio operator who still likes paper QSL cards, I’ve bought international reply coupons from Swiss Post because they still sell them and you can order them online (I live in Ireland but here they no longer sell them). Any postal service that is a member of the Universal Postal Union (nearly all of them are AFAICT) is obliged to accept them. They work in most places.
by dns_snek | 2025-04-25 06:59:25+00:00
You're still looking at this from a perspective that's completely irrelevant to this entire legislation. In very simple terms if my business needs to reach people who happen to use iOS and Android devices, and the only way to do that properly is using a native app, then I need to go through Apple and Google because that's where all of my potential customers are.

That puts Apple and Google into a gatekeeping position and allows them to dictate unfair terms because together they control access to what, 99% or more of the consumer market? These unfair terms trickle down to all of us and we end up paying more and have less choice than we would in a transparent, regulated market.

That's what the DMA is concerned with, not some fantasy about feasibility of creating a competitor to Android or iOS, or ease of switching between them which is completely besides the point.
by syrusakbary | 2025-04-25 06:59:53+00:00
> After delving into this, it seems Wasmer tried, but as they weren't standards compliant, adoption/ecosystem support never followed.

You may be surprised by how much WASIX is being adopted by the ecosystem! Aiming it to be full POSIX compliant has proven incredibly powerful, as there's no need for waiting for other entities to reinvent what already works in the POSIX (macOS, Linux, ...) :)
by benoau | 2025-04-25 07:00:42+00:00
Whenever it gets in a cycle of fucking up, I ask it to break the code down into smaller functions and write a test suite for each individually.

Tell it what language or packages to use or it might make selections that add dependencies or require installing stuff on your computer.

Tell it how you want your code written or it will be an extra chore to accommodate linting requirements.

Basically just being very explicit.
by YukiyamaShizuki | 2025-04-25 07:00:43+00:00
I’ve just open-sourced a structural encryption system I call TrajectoryCrypt. It's not an algorithm in the conventional sense—it's a framework for how information exists.

Core idea:

Rearranged binary data is injected into logic gate networks under entropy noise;

The output vectors form a spatial path;

A function f(x) is fitted from this path and made public;

Decryption isn’t about guessing keys—it’s about matching the original trajectory: Tangents, projections, and behavior-specific deviation.

It creates encryption as a path memory, not as a mathematical secret.

Source and whitepaper are public. Non-commercial usage is free; commercial use requires a license.

GitHub: https://github.com/YukiyamaShizuka/TrajectoryCtypt
by defanor | 2025-04-25 07:01:12+00:00
I saw it on HN before (and did not like that, either), while now noticed it in another submission by the same user, on a similar topic. [0]

Apart from that, as mentioned in another comment here, the article's content seems no less strange than the style.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30358271
by damnitbuilds | 2025-04-25 07:01:46+00:00
We are not discussing general accident figures on normal streets.

We are discussing the comment you replied to: "the planners' great idea of mixing cars and people on the same street." which was in reply to a link discussing that idea.

And you wrote that you thought that was safe for 10-year-olds. Which it is not. A street with pedestrians and cars on it is called a "street" and is not a safe place for any pedestrian, let alone a 10-year-old. Which makes it a stupid, dangerous idea, but one that is cheap for the planners to implement, hence its popularity.
by beklein | 2025-04-25 07:02:06+00:00
I just want to second this. Your prompt asks for a description, and you get a description. If you instead ask something like, "Do or don't you know about the unspoken etiquette ..." you'll get an answer about whether that specific thing exists.

https://chatgpt.com/share/680b32bc-5854-8000-a1c7-cdf388eeb0...

It's easy to blame the models, but often the issue lies in how we write our prompts. No personal criticism here—I fall short in this way too. A good tip is to ask the model again, with the prompt + reply and the expected reply why this didn't work... we all will get better over time (humans and models)
by goku12 | 2025-04-25 07:02:31+00:00
> Pretty sure RMS would argue linux is less "open source" than emacs too.

The word you're looking for is 'free'. Free as in freedom and free software. The open source philosophy focuses on the openness of the code base and the associated advantages. Free software philosophy highlights the freedom that the software gives its user on their devices. Opening the source code is just a means to that end for the free software philosophy. Most open source software are also free software. But a few software like VSC and Chrome manages to be open while holding back the freedom from its users. Stallman and others tried to highlight this difference, but were largely neglected. The large scale ignorance of this distinction is what led to spread of travesties like the Chrome browser.

I completely agree with GP on this matter. I use centralized repos for Emacs like ELPA and MELPA like a metadata source. The actual packages are downloaded directly from their git repos. All these happen transparently and failure is practically non-existent, even in the absence of mirrors. In contrast with such convenience, the only way to fully utilize VSC extensions market is to use MS's proprietary build of VSC. If you tried installing some essential extensions (like remote editing and editor sharing) on a fork or an open source build of VSC, it would 'conveniently' tell you that it doesn't work on an alternate build and instead give you the link to download the proprietary build. Some of these functionality don't even need an extension on Emacs (eg: tramp). What are the justifications for such restrictions? They alone know. But I'm sure that they aren't technical. You're probably too busy to worry about the politics behind it, whenever you find yourself in such a situation. It's quiet manipulative in my opinion. And all these were before MS started banning VSC forks from their marketplace.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-04-25 07:03:50+00:00
Regarding your fly away (or systems) costs, there is another, related measure:

Cost per flight hour (CPFH), which according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_JAS_39_Gripen#Operational... (sourced from Janes)

is sligthly under 6.000US$ vs. anything between slightly over 25.000US$ to slightly under 40.000US$ depending on the type/model of F-35.

They also got rid of the 'clock shop', just look at that!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_JAS_39_Gripen#/media/File...

(in addition to HUD/HMD)
by riddle8143 | 2025-04-25 07:03:53+00:00
A było to tak: Bociana dziobał szpak, A potem była zmiana I szpak dziobał bociana. Były trzy takie zmiany. Ile razy był szpak dziobany?

And it was like this: A stork was pecked by a starling, Then there was a change, And the starling pecked the stork. There were three such changes. How many times was the starling pecked?
by pjmlp | 2025-04-25 07:04:02+00:00
Thing is, I don't want to build my editor, I want to live the dream of Xerox PARC workstations, and that is what IDEs are for.

I had to make Emacs my go to editor in UNIX, because in those days there were hardly any alternatives, IDEs only started to be taken seriously on UNIX around 2000.

Even James Gosling, one of influencial people in the Emacs history says its time is now passed and he rather use Netbeans,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv5Q39MuTvk
by alissa_v | 2025-04-25 07:05:15+00:00
Totally resonate with this. It feels less like a helpful overview and more like a confidently wrong pop-up I have to dismiss or fact-check before I can get to the actual search results (the links below).

I saw one example where someone asked about the fastest way to boil water, and the AI overview confidently stated that adding salt lowers the boiling point significantly, making it boil faster. It sounds vaguely scientific but gets a fundamental concept completely backward! That's the kind of error that's more worrying than just bad math – it confidently misrepresents basic, easily verifiable science.

It's a strange feeling having to approach Google search results with a layer of skepticism now, which used to be the gold standard for getting quickly pointed to reliable info. The AI Overview feels like a glossy, sometimes misleading, advertisement for the links I actually wanted in the first place.
by benjamin_mahler | 2025-04-25 07:05:34+00:00
Grok 3 beta:

The surgeon is the cousin's father. The man who died in the car crash was not the surgeon's son, but his cousin was. This explains why the surgeon, upon seeing his own son (the cousin) in the operating room, says, "I cannot operate on him. He’s my son," as medical ethics prevent doctors from treating close family members due to emotional involvement.
by Spivak | 2025-04-25 07:07:10+00:00
Once you start asking to query the log by keys, multi-tenancy trees of topics, synchronous commits-ish, and schemas aren't we just in normal db territory where the kafka log becomes the query log. I think you need to go backwards and be like what is the feature a rdbms/nosql db can't do and go from there. Because the wishlist is looking like CQRS with the front queue being durable but events removed once persisted in the backing db where the clients query events from the db.

The backing db in this wishlist would be something in the vein of Aurora to achieve the storage compute split.
by Aeolun | 2025-04-25 07:08:06+00:00
I suppose I just don’t find any of those things very admirable? The fact that their product is associated with so much bad shit and still alive is a terrible thing for society. I just cannot reasonably call someone that led all that a ‘good CEO’, because they represent nothing that I’d like a CEO to be, regardless of what Wall Street things.

I’d also argue that it just means that Facebook was very successful at following all the trends and purchasing what they couldn’t replicate.
by dns_snek | 2025-04-25 07:08:16+00:00
> But this is exactly why this whole topic isn’t an issue. There currently _is_ choice, competition, and a viable alternative in the marketplace

I'll reference my other response because there's not much point in going any further unless we clear up this persistent misunderstanding about what the purpose of the DMA is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43790939