MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by searchguy | 2025-04-15 05:03:16+00:00
I'm a little confused by your statement that "Meilisearch decided to use hybrid search and avoid fusion ranking" when your website [1] says "Hybrid search re-ranking: The final step involves re-ranking results from both retrieval methods using the Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) algorithm."

Can you clarify what you mean by "fusion ranking"?

All hybrid search requires a method to blend keyword and vector search results. RRF is one approach, and cross-encoder-based rerankers is another.

[1]: https://www.meilisearch.com/blog/hybrid-search
by palmotea | 2025-04-15 05:03:36+00:00
>> As a US citizen my only hope is the rest of the world saves us

> How would they do that?

Due to offshoring and outsourcing, perhaps China could choke the US economy until it agrees to become a strong nation by studying Xi?

The the GP was probably imagining some liberal savior riding in a white horse, but that ain't gonna happen. Liberals are too weak everywhere.
by wyclif | 2025-04-15 05:04:47+00:00
Americans inexplicably re-elected a wildly incompetent conman to be president

In fact, this was totally and easily explicable after the dominant political party tried to convince Americans that their current leader was not suffering from severe cognitive decline and was "sharp as a tack" (a Biden admin talking point) and that NPCs lying to Americans about Trump being "easy to beat" by Kamala and also lying to them about Trump calling Charlottesville protestors "very fine people" and thinking that those fake attempts to make Trump look like he was endorsing Nazis wouldn't backfire explosively.

So, no, it was not "inexplicable" at all but it was rather Whiplash Effect initiated by media narratives originating in the Democrat ecosystem. And don't forget: Trump, Elon and Rogan are all ex-Democrats. I wonder, too, if the author was one of those people who deluded himself into thinking "Kamala is a great candidate" against all the evidence.

So the "Russiagate" hoax failed, "Kamala is awesome" failed, elites orienting themselves around appeasing far left pressure groups failed, smug contempt for middle America failed (astonishingly) and yet it is "inexplicable" why Orange Man Bad won the election!
by gnabgib | 2025-04-15 05:05:49+00:00
Previously (252 points, 2 years ago, 132 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36697119

Related:

NotebookLM launches feature to customize and guide audio overviews (335 points, 6 months ago, 127 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41871262

NotebookLlama: An open source version of NotebookLM (322 points, 6 months ago, 72 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41964980

NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective (907 points, 7 months ago, 490 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693087
by mattigames | 2025-04-15 05:07:42+00:00
The closest thing to Amazon made in Latin America is almost the same thing, I'm talking of course about Mercadolibre.com, you can ask a refund for a product but if you do you cannot leave a review at all, and the products with bad scores have their scores and their reviews hidden, that's why is impossible to find a single product with less than 4 stars, and they have millions of them, it's as shady as it gets.
by zvr | 2025-04-15 05:08:43+00:00
The high-end Falcon models were an engineering marvel and, as you say, nothing else in the market was even close.

I don't know about "real estate inspection", but another use case was for them to be used in oil rigs in the North Sea to inspect the structure of the rig itself. They had to be self-stabilizing under high winds and adverse weather conditions, and they had to carry a good enough camera to take detailed photos.

Unfortunately, while the technology was there, the market wasn't. Not many wanted to get a $35K drone to be able to sustain this business.
by wqaatwt | 2025-04-15 05:08:44+00:00
> You are forgetting

No, I just don’t think they are applicable. Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam were are all very poor and rural Germany was one of the main industrial powers for the at least 50-60 years preceding WW2.

> Marshall Plan

the total inflation adjusted amount of grants and loans that went to Germany was equal to about 32 billion dollars. That’s less than the amount of economic aid US gave to Afghanistan since 2001.

But yeah, I agree that there are no biological reasons preventing any poor or underdeveloped from becoming successful.
by yellow_lead | 2025-04-15 05:08:51+00:00
I haven't found this to be the case in my experience. Although I may be misunderstanding, but this is my experience running Meili in prod:

* Meili uses 50% RAM

* I use 10-20% with another script to occasionally index new data

* When indexing, Meili could jump to use 70-80% RAM

* Meili is OOM killed
by dogacel | 2025-04-15 05:08:53+00:00
All very valuable comments! Actually I had a small edit on the "forget password" flow.

I agree that an asymmetric key makes much sense. Secret key can be left at the user device while server only contains the public key. That sounds much more secure. I will dig deeper!

True about the stuffing proteciton, I actually want to do further reading on how TOTP is secured from random attacks. Statistically you are expected to crack 1 account in every 1 million attempts in 6 digits codes. Those numbers look pretty huge in the context of security, and a bot-net can potentially brute force couple hundred accounts every day.
by tomlockwood | 2025-04-15 05:09:38+00:00
Always bewildering to me when people look at the demographics of conservatives, leaning old and rich, and think that they just fell out of the coconut tree. No. Those people were sometimes "progressives" in their time and later became conservatives.

Same as it ever was. No further explanation needed. Not a new phenomenon.

ed: "No, it must be the fault of the left." must be a reassuring thought, but let me occams razor that for you: when these people were younger, they were selfish, and as they weren't yet the status quo, they were progressive. When these people got older, they were still selfish, and as they were the status quo, they were conservatives. Simple.
by dangus | 2025-04-15 05:09:41+00:00
There is a need for increased geographical coverage in the right corridors. Many corridors with high population density are just not covered.

As bad as the passenger rail situation is in the US, I can totally understand how it got this way compared to other countries from a pure geographic point of view.

The US landscape is ideal for freight trains and not quite as ideal for passenger trains.

If you look at countries like Japan, the geography makes a perfect condition for passenger trains to be most ideal. Railroad as a shipping method for goods doesn't make a lot of sense, you can just put goods on ships that travel along the coasts and for shorter journeys trucks make more sense.

Or look at China: massively higher population, and their population is much more concentrated in the East of the country than the US with its split up coastal populations. Maybe we could say that a high speed train between Indianapolis and Cleveland would be nice, but there isn't even a single direct commercial direct flight between those destinations, so how will anyone fill up a train? China's huge population makes it an extremely ideal high speed rail use case.

But in the US, putting goods on a train from Chicago to LA makes way more sense than any sort of truck or ship situation. And even a high speed train on that route wouldn't make a whole lot of sense compared to a flight.

But there's definitely room to improve geographical coverage in specific corridors where that expansion would have great positive impact.
by anenefan | 2025-04-15 05:09:45+00:00
https://archive.md/cPohD

It's probably worth the time to dig into vitamin K2, what else it does and which foods and how much we as humans generally acquire from dietary sources. My take away was for the most part the body didn't usually have enough gut bacteria to ensure the daily requirement of K2 was met.

For the most part the study is about the role of K2 plays. [1] and [2] are a bit plainer in regard to that same study.

Fortunately most of us eat a wide enough diet, but for those older people who are not absorbing as well as they should or in general folks with malabsorption / gut issues, including more foods that have a higher K2 eg [3] [4] would be beneficial - or perhaps consider taking a supplement.

[1] https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/vitamin...

[2] https://neurosciencenews.com/vitamin-k-memory-aging-28570/

[3] https://www.webmd.com/diet/foods-high-in-vitamin-k2

[4] https://www.nutritionadvance.com/foods-high-in-vitamin-k2/
by coppsilgold | 2025-04-15 05:11:44+00:00
It's often a good idea to set up TOTP on accounts just because they may treat you differently due to having 2FA enabled. It would be harder to lose a gmail account to their "security" systems if you add TOTP to it for example. In the case of gmail adding it is a hassle involving devtools to emulate a hardware key first then add TOTP and then delete the hardware 2FA.

Some password managers such as KeepassXC have TOTP incorporated into them and you can have it available right next to the password. It may defeat the purpose of 2FA under some assumptions.
by selcuka | 2025-04-15 05:14:23+00:00
> You're basically polling the consensus answer to the question you're asking.

There is nothing wrong with going with the consensus answer. Sure, you can't invent an O(N) sorting algorithm with the consensus, but LLMs can definitely write good, maintainable code. Michelin star analogy might be an exaggeration, but it can help cook a good homemade meal, possibly even better than most wannabe home cooks.
by bschwindHN | 2025-04-15 05:14:26+00:00
Nice writeup and very comprehensive! I've done some ESP32 development in the past and I vowed to always use an open protocol and allow users to connect devices to their own servers, if I ever made a product based on it.

You really went through the whole reverse engineering process end to end, I know that must have been a ton of work to not only reverse engineer it but also to write everything up!
Show HN: MCP-Shield – Detect security issues in MCP servers
by nick_wolf | 2025-04-15 05:15:01+00:00
I noticed the growing security concerns around MCP (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43600192) and built an open source tool that can detect several patterns of tool poisoning attacks, exfiltration channels and cross-origin manipulations.

MCP-Shield scans your installed servers (Cursor, Claude Desktop, etc.) and shows what each tool is trying to do at the instruction level, beyond just the API surface. It catches hidden instructions that try to read sensitive files, shadow other tools' behavior, or exfiltrate data.

Example of what it detects:

- Hidden instructions attempting to access ~/.ssh/id_rsa

- Cross-origin manipulations between server that can redirect WhatsApp messages

- Tool shadowing that overrides behavior of other MCP tools

- Potential exfiltration channels through optional parameters

I've included clear examples of detection outputs in the README and multiple example vulnerabilities in the repo so you can see the kinds of things it catches.

This is an early version, but I'd appreciate feedback from the community, especially around detection patterns and false positives.
by CalChris | 2025-04-15 05:15:53+00:00
Actually, anticolonial means opposition to or resistance against the system where one country controls another. It really has nothing to do with their system of government. BTW, they're run by the socialists now and, thanks to Clinton and McCain, we have normal relations with them. The US Navy makes port of call visits to Cam Ranh Bay. Maybe if we'd just done a deal with that former line manager for General Motors we could have made those port of call visits earlier and saved $800B, a 100K US lives and a couple of million Vietnamese dead. You know, mercantilism.
by Rediscover | 2025-04-15 05:16:12+00:00
Lynx is a web browser, bookmarking a page is done by hitting "adX" as in (a)dd (d)ocument to file (X). Or (a)dd (l)ink to (X). Nice and quick. The X is usually a lower case ASCII letter corresponding to a file. You can enable this mode (and the specific bookmark files) in lynx's config file. The Emacs extension uses the same keystrokes and, optionally, the same files.

Alleviations are (I'm intentionally vague here) for getting rid of finding a link, clicking through, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, just to get to where I need to be (like adding an update to a ticket). I usually only automate processes that are intended for use by mouse/pointer-driving users with an ability to comprehend what (and where) icons are - I have a self-imposed problem withe former and a physically/mentally imposed hard time with the latter.
by rmnclmnt | 2025-04-15 05:16:19+00:00
The other day I was reviewing the work of a peer on a relatively easy task (using a SDK to manage some remote resources given a static configuration).

At several times I was like « why did you do that this way? This is so contrived ». And I should have known better but of course the answer started with « … I know but Copilot did this or that… ». Of course no test to validate properly the implementation.

The sentiment expressed in the article were developers won’t even bother to validate the output of coding assistants is real. And that’s one of the biggest shame to this current hype: quality was already decreasing for the past 10 years, signs indicate this will only go downhill from here
by monero-xmr | 2025-04-15 05:17:20+00:00
If someone has a low IQ and can’t do well on a standardized test, how in the world will they succeed at Harvard?

Even if you believe that such tests simply reflect privilege and reveal absolutely nothing regarding innate talent, what difference does it make? It can be a point-of-time snapshot but it still doesn’t mean letting in low-IQ poorly-equipped students to Harvard will help them or anyone else.
by dasil003 | 2025-04-15 05:18:59+00:00
This whole post-developer idea is a red herring fueled by investor optics.

The reality is AI will change how software is built, but it's still just a tool that requires the same type of precise thinking that software developers do. You can remove all need to understand syntax, but the need for translating vague desires from laypeople into a precise specification will remain—there's nothing on the AI horizon that will solve for this, and savvy tech leaders know this. So why are we hearing this narrative from tech leaders who should know better? Two reasons:

First is that the majority of investor gains in the US stock market have been fueled heavily by AI hype. Every public tech CEO is getting questions from analysts about what their AI strategy, and they have to tell a compelling story. There's very little space or patience for nuance here because no one really knows how it will play out, but in the meantime investors are making decisions based on what is said. It's no surprise that the majority of execs are just jumping on the bandwagon so they have a story to keep their stock price propped up.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, regardless of AI, software teams across the industry are just too big. Headcount for tech companies has ballooned over the last couple decades due to the web, smart phone revolution and ZIRP. With this type of environment the FAANGs of the world were hoarding talent just to be ready to capitalize on whatever is next. But the ugly truth is that a lot of the juice has already been squeezed, and the actual business needs don't justify that headcount over the long-term. AI is convenient cover story for RIFs that they would have done anyway, this just ties it with a nice bow for investors.
by consumer451 | 2025-04-15 05:21:01+00:00
This is a paper which echoes your experience, in general. I really wish that when papers like this one were created, someone took the methodology and kept running with it for every model:

> For instance, the NoLiMa benchmark revealed that models like GPT-4o experienced a significant drop from a 99.3% performance rate at 1,000 tokens to 69.7% at 32,000 tokens. Similarly, Llama 3.3 70B's effectiveness decreased from 97.3% at 1,000 tokens to 42.7% at 32,000 tokens, highlighting the challenges LLMs face with longer contexts.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05167
by xavivives | 2025-04-15 05:22:04+00:00
Over the last few months, I've been developing an unorthodox perspective on entropy [1] . It defines the phenomenon in much more detail, allowing for a unification of all forms of entropy. It also defines probability through the same lens.

I define both concepts fundamentally in relation to priors and possibilities:

- Entropy is the relationship between priors and ANY possibility, relative to the entire space of possibilities.

- Probability is the relationship between priors and a SPECIFIC possibility, relative to the entire space of possibilities.

The framing of priors and possibilities shows why entropy appears differently across disciplines like statistical mechanics and information theory. Entropy is not merely observer-dependent, but prior-dependent. Including priors not held by any specific observer but embedded in the framework itself. This helps resolve the apparent contradiction between objective and subjective interpretations of entropy.

It also defines possibilities as constraints imposed on an otherwise unrestricted reality. This framing unifies how possibility spaces are defined across frameworks.

[1]: https://buttondown.com/themeaninggap/archive/a-unified-persp...
by walterbell | 2025-04-15 05:22:07+00:00
For vendors of ESP32-based IoT devices:

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day.

> My intentions were solely to upgrade the smart device I've purchased to integrate with my smart home system. Doing so does not affect any other instances of this product or its cloud services.. sensitive product-specific data, such as private keys, domains, or API endpoints, have been obfuscated or redacted.

For owners of ESP32-based IoT devices:

Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

> Creating an open-source project to de-cloud and debug smart home products; I've learned much more about the technical aspects.. I put a massive amount of effort into creating [this post].. probably more than.. the project itself. It would be amazing to receive feedback on the format!

blog author: https://x.com/jmswrnr
by kgwgk | 2025-04-15 05:25:06+00:00
> If two "observers" disagree about an LLM's probability assigned to some token, then only at most one of them can be correct.

The observer who knows the implementation in detail and the state of the pseudo-random number generator can predict the next token with certainty. (Or almost certainty, if we consider flip-switching cosmic rays, etc.)
by dr_kiszonka | 2025-04-15 05:25:17+00:00
As much as I enjoy Gemini models, I have to agree with you. At some point, interactions with them start resembling talking to people with short-term memory issues, and answers become increasingly unreliable. Now, there are also reports of AI Studio glitching out and not loading these longer conversations.

Is there a reliable method for pruning, summarizing, or otherwise compressing context to overcome such issues?
by npn | 2025-04-15 05:26:33+00:00
> Imagine if South Vietnam had remained independent. If it had become a thriving prosperous free democracy like South Korea or Taiwan.

will never happen.

it annoys me to no end that ever americans out there always assume that the war was between north and south vietnam, while in reality it was not. VCs were mostly southern people, the conflicts were mostly between south vietnam and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam which was found and led by southern vietnamese.

which mean the conflict would never stop, even without the help from north vietnam or soviet.
by bjackman | 2025-04-15 05:26:44+00:00
Yeah I recently put together a home NAS and was dismayed that I had to use Docker Compose. (There's podman-compose but it's... incomplete).

Immediately after I finished the project I discovered the Quadlet thing!

Seems like the userbase is there, the technology is there, and now the two just need to be put together with some awareness.
by sayasen | 2025-04-15 05:27:03+00:00
As the article states we were at 124% debt to GDP ratio in Dec 2024. Since 1981, 98% of economies that reached 130%, defaulted. Trump came into office with the economy about to go off a cliff and the administration is now desperately trying to course correct via any means possible. It's highly likely it won't work and we are screwed anyways from decades of out of control government spending and corruption. Buckle up, it's going to be a bumpy ride.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-15 05:27:24+00:00
> If we rethink our consumption, we could become happier

If we wished upon a star that humans were better a lot of problems would go away. In the real world, poor people will make do and those with resources will buy smuggled goods. I’m already diverting a spring skiing trip to Canada because it’s cheaper to buy kit there than here.
by imgabe | 2025-04-15 05:27:31+00:00
Sure. Research by definition deals with areas that are not settled, so different people can have different theories, and they might disregard scholars who don't like their preferred theory. On the other hand, some academics welcome debate and differing viewpoints more than most people.

Like, if you were a physics professor and you were applying to a department where everyone was a string theorist, and your position was that string theory is a bunch of bullshit, you might not get that job. Or you might, if your work is otherwise solid, you never know.

But that's a disagreement about physics, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to evaluate a physics professor on. It's not about how enthusiastically they endorse some ideological dogma that has nothing to do with physics.
by barotalomey | 2025-04-15 05:27:41+00:00
> You and I do not understand assembly language.

Having written z80 and x86 assembly since the 80s, being knee deep in several decompilation projects and a couple of emulators since then, I can safely tell you that I do know a handful assembly languages and at least 2 syntaxes.

I believe other seniors have similar skill sets, for now.
by MichaelDickens | 2025-04-15 05:27:58+00:00
I think you are being selective. I looked at the top 10 top-level comments and by my judgment:

1. bullish 2. bullish 3. neutral 4. neutral 5. neutral 6. neutral 7. bullish 8. bearish 9. bearish 10. neutral

Of the top top-level comments, you have to go all the way to #8 to find a bearish comment.

Replies to the top comment are more bearish because they're directly responding to a bullish sentiment.
by telotortium | 2025-04-15 05:28:35+00:00
They could. Look up Bob Jones College or Hillsdale College, both of which operate without any federal funding. It appears that the elite universities are going to find out the same thing that the small Christian universities found out in the 1970s, which is that the federal government Can control you if they fund you. I believe Bob Jones in particular won a case in front of the Supreme Court giving them the right to racially discriminate in their admissions if they refuse to take any federal funding.
by comp_throw7 | 2025-04-15 05:31:40+00:00
Confusing take - Gemini 2.5 is probably the best general purpose coding model right now, and before that it was Sonnet 3.5. (Maybe 3.7 if you can get it to be less reward-hacky.) OpenAI hasn't had the best coding model for... coming up on a year, now? (o1-pro probably "outperformed" Sonnet 3.5 but you'd be waiting 10 minutes for a response, so.)
by selcuka | 2025-04-15 05:31:53+00:00
> If they lie, straight to jail.

How do we know whether they lie without a solid definition of net worth?

I'm not defending billionaires and I believe they should be heavily taxed, and huge inheritances should be outlawed, but what's Elon Musk's net worth, for example? He surely doesn't have $369 billion in cash. Can we tax him based on his Tesla shares? What happens if Tesla stock goes down by 99% next year? It's tricky.