MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by duiker101 | 2025-04-22 14:26:35+00:00
I am pretty AI-skeptic. But I just tried to create a little tool with Junie, and I'm quite in shock. It was SO good I barely had to do anything.

Personally, I still think that they shouldn't be relied upon too heavily, but if you already know what you are doing, some of these tools can definitely give you a big boost.
by btilly | 2025-04-22 14:27:10+00:00
We are able to recognize that they are nonstandard because they contain numbers that we recognize are infinite. But there is absolutely no statement that can be made from within the model from which it could be discovered that those numbers are infinite.

Furthermore, it is possible to construct nonstandard models such that every statement that is true in our model, remains true in that one, and ditto for every statement that is false. They really look identical to our model, except that we know from construction that they aren't. This fact is what makes the transfer principle work in nonstandard analysis, and the ultrapower construction shows how to do it.

(My snark about NSA is that we shouldn't need the axiom of choice to find the derivative of x^2. But I do find it an interesting approach to know about.)
by bee_rider | 2025-04-22 14:27:52+00:00
Are those the systems you learned as a teenager/young adult?

I felt the same way about XP, despite it being generally regarded as a UI abomination. I think it was just familiar.

Anyway, I eventually shook lose of that nostalgia, and for me the best usability has been more recent. The wmii/i3/sway family of window managers are have been just great: simple, to the point, and automatic.

I dunno. There are pretty clearly some bad trends in computing generally and mainstream UX specifically, but improvements are still bouncing around in the margins.
by sbnb | 2025-04-22 14:28:20+00:00
Continuing my journey documenting self-hosted AI tools - today I’m dropping a new tutorial on how to run the amazing LightRAG project on your own bare metal server with a GPU… in just minutes

Thanks to full automation (Ansible + Docker Compose + Sbnb Linux), you can go from an empty machine with no OS to a fully running RAG pipeline.

TL;DR: Start with a blank PC with a GPU. End with an advanced RAG system, ready to answer your questions.

Tutorial link: https://github.com/sbnb-io/sbnb/blob/main/README-LightRAG.md

Happy experimenting! Let me know if you try it or run into anything.
by Tade0 | 2025-04-22 14:28:40+00:00
It helps to like your job though.

I do some of the, ahem, "romanticised" things you mentioned because even in CRUD stuff there are hard problems to solve - particularly problems introduced by other people.

We work to get paid, but you can't get around the fact that we spend so much of our lives at work that it is a part of life.
by tialaramex | 2025-04-22 14:28:45+00:00
I've done this a couple of times. One thing that's slightly awkward and could be refined is that it can't do "Girl menus".

At some fancy restaurants, they have two versions of their menus, the idea is that the person paying (who historically would be a man) gets a menu with prices, but people who aren't paying (historically wives, girlfriends and maybe children or clients) get the same list of dishes but no pricing.

In 2025 it's definitely not OK to assume that people who appear male are paying and people who appear not to be male are not - but it is very much possible that somebody is paying and some people are not, and so it would be nice if the person who is paying can delegate the choices but still pay and the systems I've seen do not facilitate this.

The kind of fancy place which historically had two menus (or maybe even still does although it probably pays to ask who gets which menus these days) this isn't a problem. Somewhere with a decent cellar and the sommelier to guide inexperienced users to a sensible choice is also going to have somebody just memorize what everybody is eating and if only a single person is paying for it all that's discretely handled, no problem.

But the place with a choice of red or white is going to expect phone ordering and it'd be nice if I could let other people choose what they're eating without also just handing them my phone or else expecting them to pay and then I refund it (which is embarrassing for them)
by LinuxBender | 2025-04-22 14:28:48+00:00
Is this how people ended up burning witches?

Only if their scientific minds and governing bodies lied to and gaslit the population repeatedly until all that was left was to come up with their own albeit wrong answers. In this case I put the blame squarely on the NIH and WHO, both of which need some serious reformation.

Oh, and the witches hammer. [1] That book killed millions of women and girls. numbers are often debated

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum
by lifthrasiir | 2025-04-22 14:28:58+00:00
At least at the time of abandonment, Dropbox did say (emphasis mine):

> While we did ensure that the reported vulnerabilities don’t affect our internal use of Lepton, we unfortunately don’t have the capacity to properly fix these and future issues in this public repo.

As far as I know this is indeed the last known public mention of its use, but given that Lepton was already in use and dropping it would substantially increase its traffic, it is reasonable to assume that its use somehow continues to this day.
by kerv | 2025-04-22 14:29:24+00:00
Thanks for sharing! This brings back so many memories. When I was 8 years old, my mother enrolled me in a programming summer camp at our local university. This was my first exposure to BASIC and that is what got me hooked. After that, writing BASIC programs on APPLE 2/2E throughout junior high and highschool was the thing to do. Switched to Visual Basic shortly after that... It started it all for me!
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-22 14:29:51+00:00
Those big backscatter X-ray machines [1] have a powerful X-Ray tube. Not that I'd be worried if I flew once a month, but if I was a member of the aircrew and going through more than once a day I'd be concerned. Think about when you get a medical or dental X-Ray and the operator puts on a lead apron and goes around a corner -- they don't get anywhere near the dose that you get, but they are around the machine all the time time. TSA staff did none of that.

Those machines were killed off because it was easy to demonstrate walking right through them and not getting detected if you wear a gun in a holster the way you would normally wear a gun if you weren't trying to hide it. The trouble is it depends on the gun being between you and the scanner because the gun appears black against the white radiation bouncing back from all the hydrogen atoms in you. With no background the gun is black-on-black and invisible. When people realized you could put a cop in front of the scanner and demo that the scanner couldn't see his gun it got around quickly that the scanner was worthless. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_X-ray

[2] Ok, instead of getting scanned twice on your front and back they could scan you four times but this is getting ridiculous.
by AlchemistCamp | 2025-04-22 14:29:56+00:00
I've been using Elxir for a long time and had that same hope after having experienced how clear, concise and maintainable apps can be when the core is all a bunch of pipelines (and the boundary does error handling using cases and withs). But having seen the pipe operator in Ruby, I now think it was a bad idea.

The problem is that method-chaining is common in several OO languages, including Ruby. This means the functions on an object return an object, which can then call other functions on itself. In contrast, the pipe operator calls a function, passing in what's on the left side of it as the first argument. In order to work properly, this means you'll need functions that take the data as the first argument and return the same shape to return, whether that's a list, a map, a string or a struct, etc.

When you add a pipe operator to an OO language where method-chaining is common, you'll start getting two different types of APIs and it ends up messier than if you'd just stuck with chaining method calls. I much prefer passing immutable data into a pipeline of functions as Elixir does it, but I'd pick method chaining over a mix of method chaining and pipelines.
by thesuitonym | 2025-04-22 14:30:11+00:00
This is the reason I switched from Android to iOS. You may be (rightfully so) disappointed that you only got 10 years of use out of it, most of those years got security and even some feature updates. Compared to an Android phone where, if you don't buy it on launch day, you're lucky to get even a full two years of security only updates, and if you're very lucky (read: Purchased a Pixel or Samsung), one or two new versions of Android.
by mardifoufs | 2025-04-22 14:30:37+00:00
I agree that it is charming when I want to tinker with stuff. But if it's for "real world " usage, I don't think that being charming matters a lot. I mean, it really depends, not everything has to be about "serious" usage but if it's the intended goal then I think that good font rendering is something that still matters a lot.

I still use chrome sometimes for example just because it seems to have a better font rendering (on Linux but also on Windows) than Firefox. It's completely irrational in a way but it does matter sometimes
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-04-22 14:30:43+00:00
Agreed! Whenever I use someone's phone I instantly notice how sluggish it feels with animations turned on. If I offer to turn them off they often get surprised at how much faster the phone feels after.

My pet peeve: Animations are a crutch used by designers who think they need them when in fact they should just have improved the UI so users don't get confused about the origin of a popup or window. The only justified use of animations in UIs that make sense is in scrolling, everything else is just adding latency to hide your incompetence.
by packetlost | 2025-04-22 14:30:48+00:00
I worked on a quantum computer for several years and can speak to this a bit: sorta. They're functionally equivalent in the sense that you can do the same computations, usually, but there are a ton of details that make how each particular modality behave. Things like gate fidelities (how good the gates are), how fast the gates can "execute", how long it takes to initialize the quantum state so you can execute gates, how long decoherence times (how long before the quantum state is lost) are, and many (many) other differences. Some modalities even have restrictions on what qubits can interact with other qubits which will, among other things, impact algorithm design.
by baq | 2025-04-22 14:31:01+00:00
yesterday I've had a numpy+matplotlib prototype spat out by gemini pro, had sonnet 3.7 convert it to a react component and did some final tweaks in chatgpt. took a couple hours of back and forth iteration from idea to a working tool.

of course not everything is how i'd truly like it, but it's 80% there.

before LLMs I wouldn't have bothered with starting. I knew exactly what I want to do, but it'd take me a couple days to proof the idea in Python and then translating it to web ui in TS? forget it
by greatgib | 2025-04-22 14:31:10+00:00
Here is what I do for credit card, I guess you can do the same for tap to pay with the same efficiency.

When the call the waiter to ask for the bill, or when you ask directly when he comes to take out your dishes or ask for dessert, just say directly how you will pay:

The bill please, I will pay by card (/phone)...
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-04-22 14:31:34+00:00
You'd think so, but often the blocking reviewer is an entire team, including people who just aren't careful at all or who don't understand the downstream consequences of their actions, and not just the one person who has strong vision and cares about the process, because the one person is also a bottleneck.

Requiring reviewers isn't sufficient. It needs to require a cohesive review strategy that adheres to a long term product vision for the software component in question. And my experience, though not at the two companies you mentioned, is that it doesn't happen and you instead get a lot of thoughtless "yup, looks like code" approvals.
by FireBeyond | 2025-04-22 14:31:39+00:00
> There's a significant chunk of the US voting population that is willing to forgive effectively anything Trump might do, no matter how distasteful, illegal or unconstitutional it gets.

One of my friends posts almost daily impassioned screeds against Trump. One, yesterday, was about him "handing our country to DOGE on a silver platter, to privatize for the benefit of his friends".

Someone replied:

> Once the systems are torn to shreds, we will need to build new systems that serve ALL of us. We may not like or agree with what is happening, but it’s more effective to come together and work toward building what you want, than it is to fight against what you don’t want.

They completely misunderstand or are in denial or have been deceived (or some combination of the above) into thinking this is the tear down, and Trump will build back something for everyone.

They are completely ignorant to the fact that there is no WE in Trump's plans, just "ME".
by carlmr | 2025-04-22 14:32:17+00:00
Not only that, AI is used for translation a lot nowadays, and the trust in its output seems to be quite high. If you're not a native English speaker and aren't surrounded by many, you might have a much harder time finding such a mistake while proofreading.

I've seen students hand in auto-translated garbage 10 years ago. Nowadays auto-translation works well enough that you are at least able to read it.
by basilgohar | 2025-04-22 14:32:36+00:00
Seeing is no longer believing. Hearing isn't either. The funny thing is, it's getting to the point where LLM-generated text is more easily spotted than AI audio, video, and images.

It's going to be an interesting decade of the new equivalent of "No, Tiffany, Bill Gates will NOT be sending you $100 for forwarding that email." Except it's going to be AI celebrities making appeals for donations to help them become billionaires or something.
by zoobab | 2025-04-22 14:34:15+00:00
Software/AI patents denied:

"The opinion ended with a note that "[m]achine learning is a burgeoning and increasingly important field and may lead to patent-eligible improvements in technology." The court explained that its instant opinion held "only that patents that do no more than claim the application of generic machine learning to new data environments, without disclosing improvements to the machine learning models to be applied, are patent ineligible under § 101."
by tauntz | 2025-04-22 14:34:16+00:00
That really depends on where you live I guess.

Random anecdote from Estonia. I noticed around a year ago that I'm getting old - I was the only person in a restaurant that used his card to pay - everybody else used either their watch or phone. Since then, I've also upgraded/downgraded and started to use my phone for payments.. just because I don't wanna be _that_ dinosaur.

It's not always like that though - you still have lots of people using credit cards (or rarely cash) in grocery stores etc, but it does seem much more common for _the elderly_, like me, 40+ :P
by bitbasher | 2025-04-22 14:34:20+00:00
I think there's a fundamental difference.

Autocomplete and intellisense are tools first and foremost. AI is centralized into a handful of companies you are forced to pay every month for.

Autocomplete and intellisense don't care about your data. There's an inherent issue with data, privacy and ownership when it comes to AI.

If we can run useful models locally and make it generally available on consumer hardware... things would be different.
by ModernMech | 2025-04-22 14:34:48+00:00
I'm glad this is still being discussed. It seems like there are 4 main threads that we have to deal with right now as a society, and the severity of each means we have no time to deal with just one.

1. Breakdown of rule of law and political systems. Executive usurped Congress and is currently usurping SCOTUS. Both parties are dead. MAGA replaced the Republican party and Democrats are in the wilderness.

2. Destruction of the federal government through DOGE, which is this thread.

3. Destruction of the economy through tariffs and usurping the Federal Reserve by firing the Fed Chair, turning America into essentially a controlled economy.

4. Destruction of non-government institutions like law firms and academima which are power centers that could resist points 1-3.
by mikepurvis | 2025-04-22 14:35:05+00:00
Are you thinking here of pre-multitasking desktop usage, stuff like DeluxePaint, Scream Tracker, that kind of thing?

Certainly the late 90s was the heyday of desktop consistency on Windows, in the 95/98/ME era, I think driven largely by the conventions Microsoft established in Office. And I believe Mac OS gave pretty good platform-level guidance then too, so things were generally okay with a few exceptions— stuff like media players that have always been more on the fanciful side.
by Incipient | 2025-04-22 14:35:11+00:00
Other than the recent clown the US has elected, does the EU really feel like a "vassal"? Do people toil against their will, yield their culture to another power? In Australia we're even more so a "vassal" of England, but we're as Aussie as Aussie can be. Life wouldn't change a zack if we separated from the UK...we'd just be a Republic I suppose?

I can't imagine the EU should feel particularly different? (other than Ukraine and the recent shemozzle)
by ryandrake | 2025-04-22 14:36:17+00:00
In the US you constantly have to beg the waitstaff to stick around. They show up and ask if you want water. If you don’t deliberately say “we are also ready to order drinks” they will then disappear. When they take the drink order, you have to deliberately say “we’ll order food now.” If you order appetizers, they will disappear unless you immediately continue with your main course order. Then of course there’s the whole multiple trip song and dance when you pay. Are waiters paid by the step rather than by the hour?
by tomhow | 2025-04-22 14:36:51+00:00
You guys!

Paul Graham (the only "thought leader" behind this website) loudly campaigns against the current U.S. administration almost every day on Twitter.

One YC-backed founder out of more than 10,000 is volunteering with DOGE.

A more thorough response to this trope can be found here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43734897
by psb217 | 2025-04-22 14:36:51+00:00
That depends a bit on the length of the RL training and the distribution of problems you're training on. You're correct that RL won't get any "traction" (via positive rewards) on problems where good behavior isn't already in the model's behavior distribution.

However, if you're training on many problems, it's possible in principle that if you have traction on _any_ of the problems, then the learning signal you get from success on those problems will have a positive effect on the model's behavior on other problems. Ie, the learning that you do on problems where the model is already producing positive reward behavior will nudge the model towards producing positive reward behavior on problems where it wasn't previously doing so.
by Hizonner | 2025-04-22 14:37:34+00:00
> charges me £0

You haven't figured out that there are hidden charges? They're not giving you an account because they love you. They're giving you an account because they're making money on your deposits and/or transactions and not passing it on to you. And the money they're making is pretty proportionate to their risks; the more money you have to lose, the more they're going to make.

Whatever revenue iCloud manages to eke out of a random iPhone is going to be far less, and far less correlated with risk. Apple has to structure the system around the user who buys zero premium services.

> has a £10k limit on transactions

So a low limit by the standards of what we're talking about here, and a nice, quantifiable, insurable amount to boot. Which, as I said before, is the most important part of the whole thing. Oh, and I suspect you'll find out that the limit magically gets lower if the money is being sent to wesellgiftcards.com or whatever.

The person featured in the sob story here claims to have lost an entire career. That's going to be worth quite a bit more than that transaction limit, but how much more is hard to say because it's unquantifiable. It is of course stupid to make that dependent on your iPhone, but Apple still has to worry about it if Apple starts trying to take on responsibility for that kind of stupidity.

> despite having never seen any of my real documents in person

You should get a more responsible bank. Although nowadays they may be able to pull, for instance, your ID pictures from government databases to compare with whatever you send them over the Internet... since they have the numbers (and maybe the authorization) to do the lookups. Unlike Apple.

> Meanwhile Apple is unable to manage to identify its own customers in its home jurisdiction.

"Home jurisdiction" is irrelevant. It's not about where your headquarters are. It's about where you operate. Whatever Apple sets up in its "home jurisdiction", it also effectively has to support throughout the world. There aren't enough phone buyers in Cupertino to support Apple's valuation.
by mrtksn | 2025-04-22 14:37:36+00:00
Okay, how does it look like to be slightly high?

With alcohol stages are something like this:

1) First it makes you relaxed. With the help of the music and the company you start feeling integrated. Thats usually within the first hour of social drinking.

2) Later you usually feel liberated, at this stage your personality and emotional state becomes exposed. You can become more friendly, more talkative or if you are not well you can start opening up about it and even cry a bit. You feel a bit tipsy but this is not the dominant feeling. It depends, but the gist is that you lower your guard. This is the stage where most benefits of drinking is. Usually can be maintained for a few hours by keep drinking slowly.

3) Next the effect of alcohol start becoming a bit more pronounced, you feel funny and you might start having motor skill issues. This is the stage you better stop. There's nothing good beyond this. Ideally this is at the end of the night and you are headed home.

4) Then you actually become drunk, you start slurring when talking. Your motor skills are severely impacted and emotional issues may arise and you can do things you will regret later. This usually happens very late at the hight of drinking.

5) The last stage is when you are blackout level drunk and don't remember much tomorrow. At this stage you need to have someone to look after you. You can be a danger to yourself and people around you. It happens when you push it.

How does the weed smoking look like? Where the social smoking fits in this?
by packetlost | 2025-04-22 14:37:41+00:00
It's still not ambiguous. Your second example would be a syntax error (probably, if I was designing it at least) because you're missing the invocation parenthesis after the wrapped value:

a |> (await f())()

which removes any sort of ambiguity. Your first example calls f() with a as its first argument while the second (after my fix) calls and awaits f() and then invokes that result with a as its first argument.

For the last example, it would look like:

a |> (await f())() | g()

assuming f() is still async and returns a function. g() must be a function, so the parenthesis have to be added.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-04-22 14:37:57+00:00
> I did try Debian YEARS ago and Firefox was out of date in quite a scary way. It's unclear to me if I did something wrong there, but badly out of date web browsers can also be quite scary. At the time, I never looked into and just went back to Ubuntu.

Was it missing updates, or was it just the ESR (LTS) version that only gets security (and maybe bug) fixes but is still maintained?