MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LinuxAmbulance | 2025-04-22 20:21:03+00:00
Bit short on details other than "Let's see what LLMs can predict when we train them on various scientific data sets."

Certainly a good thing to try, but the article feels like a PR piece more than anything else, as it's not answering anything, just giving a short overview of a few things they're trying with no data on those things whatsoever.

It does fit in with the "Throw LLM spaghetti at a wall and see what sticks" trend these days though.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-22 20:21:16+00:00
When watching stuff with friends, we pre-curate a list of perhaps 20, or fewer, titles so the "deciding which things we might watch" part is out of the way and, worst case, we can just easily select one at random and know it's something we wanted to watch.

We do this because of the very effect you mention: otherwise, we'll burn enough time to watch a good chunk of a movie, just scrolling.
by nonrandomstring | 2025-04-22 20:21:29+00:00
As someone who loves to cook I think kitchen advances are somewhat overlooked, from pressure cookers to microwaves to air-fryers, IR ovens and all sorts of amazing combos, hand blenders and whatnot Time to make good home food got much shorter and more energy efficient.

Edit: showing my age, cos that's 80s, not 90s. In fact I think pressure cookers got popular in the mid 70s.
by chollida1 | 2025-04-22 20:21:42+00:00
Numbers:

- Q1 EPS $0.27, Est $0.43, wow, hard to remember a fumble this large for such a big company. This is a big canary in the coal mine for US markets earning season, things are going to get really ugly.

- Q1 Revenue $19.3B, Est $21.7B

- Model 3 deliveries down 12%,

- Model Y deliveries down 12%

- CyberTruck deliveries down 24%

- production of Model 3 down 16%

- production of Model Y down 18%

- regulatory credits $600M for Q1

- powerwall passed 1GW in deliveries for the first time, that's positive

- Q1 gross automotive margins are at 12.5%

Notes:

- could Elon announcing he's leaving TSLA be the biggest single personal catalyst for a companies stock price, since Balmer announced he was leaving MSFT?

- They are providing guidance that tariffs will affect the power business more than the automotive business, which makes sense as North America makes up 5% of global Lithium-ion battery production and China makes up 84% of it

- Cybercab status is now "in construction"

- dropped their old sales guidance

- dropped their prediction that sales would grow on the year

- nothing in the deck about Elon staying on, but they did add a new risk about the changing political climate may affect their sales

- New Texas Lithium refining and cathode production plants are on track to start production next year Watch For:

- Does Elon provide a hard target for when he starts working again?

- Energy storage has been growing, but batteries will be hit hard by tariffs, rare earths, does that hit energy storage yet? or do we see a pump from pulling forward demand to beat tariffs?

- Any tie ins with xAI? Elon seems to be throwing everything he can to pump up xAI's valuation, he clearly has some loans now tied to its price

- Tone of earnings call, Typically earnings calls have been essentially blowing smoke up Elon's ass with no tough questions asked/answered at all.

Even one hard question would indicate that wall street has shifted from the Elon can do no wrong mindset

- Will TSLA blame tariffs for bad sales like other companies have?

- What will they say about a new Tesla models?

- China sales will dominate what the market thinks, Therefor Tesla will almost certainly not break them out,
by jmathai | 2025-04-22 20:22:04+00:00
I do think it’s binary. The project either shows potential to meet your goal or it doesn’t.

I think it’s rare that fails to show potential because of the underlying technology that’s chosen.

Sure, Vercel is relatively expensive. But I just don’t see how you’d throw in the towel because the costs are too high without first evaluating how to lower them.

If you’re saying that the evaluation is likely to show that you’re stuck - I have never seen that be the case personally.
by stevenAthompson | 2025-04-22 20:22:17+00:00
I think it was Locke who talked about the "Social Contract". The idea being that society robbed man of the opportunity to live as a "feral" by inventing property rights and restricting their right to roam; therefore society owes each member a subsistence at least equivalent to the one nature would have provided.

I'm not sure I agree with Locke, but I at least feel that the parks are meant to exist as a partial means of living up to that contract and should be less strictly patrolled than this one was on that day.
by tharne | 2025-04-22 20:22:27+00:00
> Do people learn to be this way at business school?

Yup. I've found the the core material in the curricula for most business schools and MBA programs is a excellent resource on what not to do while working in business, or really anywhere for that matter. It's almost as if they've decided to round up all the worst ideas and put them in one place, so you know to avoid them.
by conductr | 2025-04-22 20:22:43+00:00
Can this not occur on Youtube/Roblox and other places where kids using tablets go? Mass generalizations about what I observe -> I don't see why/how parents do the mental gymnastics that tablets are acceptable but AI is to be feared. There's always going to be articles like this, it's a big world everything will have a dark side if you search for it. It's life. [Actually, I think a lot of parents are willing to accept/ignore the risks because tablets offer too great of a service. This type of AI simply won't entertain/babysit a kid long enough for parents to give into it.]

I have a 6 year old FWIW, I'm not some childless ignoramus I just do my risk calcs differently and view it as my job to oversee their use of a device like this. I wouldn't fear it outright because of what could happen. If I took that stance, my kid would never have any experiences at all.

Can't play baseball, I read a story where kid got hit by a bat. Can't travel to Mexico, cartels are in the news again. Home school it is, because shootings. And so on.
by Miraste | 2025-04-22 20:22:44+00:00
>how does it look with launch cost removed from the equation?

The Webb Space Telescope cost $10 billion, and has a 6.5 meter mirror. With the launch cost removed, it cost $9.5 billion.

The Extremely Large Telescope is located on Earth, costs a little over $1 billion, and has a 39 meter mirror.

The idea of completely replacing ground observatories with orbital ones is so infeasible it's not really worth discussing. If satellite pollution grows so extreme they can no longer function, those capabilities will simply be lost.
by dcminter | 2025-04-22 20:23:33+00:00
With the exception of cellphones, almost everything that needed a battery in the 90s used disposable dry cell batteries. Left unattended they often leaked destroying the device. Now almost everything that needs a battery has a rechargeable one built in.

There are a few downsides to that but it's a hell of a lot more convenient! As a kid in the 70s/80s any battery powered toy spent most of it's life unpowered and useless (except coin-cell powered LCD devices which always seemed to be immortal)
by stackskipton | 2025-04-22 20:23:36+00:00
As Ops/SRE/DevOps/Platform Engineer/Whatever person, I watched Loom and browsed the website. My initial thought is I recommend this to almost no one.

Ops is a skill just like SQL/Backend/Frontend is. Most Devs here would recoil at thought of me writing Frontend with some LLM that swore up and down it would protect me from common SPA JS bugs/footguns I run into. I recoil at thought of vibing your way through Terraform/OpenTofu against Cloud Resources you don't understand and is loaded with footguns. Also Terraform/OpenTofu is riddled with footguns by itself. The fact 4 examples on their website is Kubernetes/Kubernetes/VM/Cloud Run is scary. If you need LLM to run Kubernetes, you shouldn't be running it. Cert Manager, External DNS and other things are complete grues that will eat you.

What would I recommend, something that takes a container you create and runs it for you. GCP Cloud Run/Azure Web App/AWS Something/Heroku/Fly.io. (I work with GCP/Azure) Database should be Cloud Managed. If that's outside budget, then cheap VPS from company like Vultr/DigitalOcean with Docker Compose is my recommendation. Simple, easy to understand and easy to write simple GitHub action for. Once you need scaling, you can hire an Ops person and they can wrangle Terraform/Kubernetes.
by Dor_Elbaz | 2025-04-22 20:24:08+00:00
Not yet. I’ve just publicly released Version 3 of the paper, which addresses all prior critiques and includes formal proofs, simulation lemmas, and a cross-validation appendix.

It’s currently being submitted to the ECCC and arXiv for formal review. I’ve also reached out to a few experts (including Scott Aaronson) and am actively seeking feedback.

I’d be thrilled to hear any comments or critiques you might have — peer review begins with open dialogue. Thanks for asking.
by windowshopping | 2025-04-22 20:24:13+00:00
I love this article, it really point out a lot of things we take for granted. It's easy to focus on the bad and forget how much things have really improved.

The one line about the EU made me laugh though:

> EU: the European Union & single Euro currency make the EU easier to understand & travel in it much less tricky and expensive

The fact that it just says this in passing from the perspective of a tourist and without any addendum like "And countless other improvements for Europeans brought about by EU regulation" makes me think of that famous New Yorker cover~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-04-22 20:24:28+00:00
>"If you’re trying a new diet, attempting to quit smoking or changing any daily routine, don’t expect new habits to be created in a week, or two or even three. Research suggests that the process requires 66 days (on average) and up to 8 months."

Something about the title suggested it was going to be much less than 21 days; maybe it's the domain name biasing my reading of the title.
by flynumber | 2025-04-22 20:24:51+00:00
Now this is what I'm talking about — this checks all the boxes for me.

I was looking at "Agent builders" for a while now and nothing really stood out. They all seemed to use a "node" type structure, while I was looking to tell something what I need using natural language.

The only thing that came close was Vessium, but I never heard back after adding myself to the waiting list weeks ago. I also wasn’t so hot about their questions either — "Are you cool with paying for a product just to try it," or something to that effect. I’ll admit though, I said yes. =)

Either way, congrats on the launch and wishing you much success.
by dwohnitmok | 2025-04-22 20:25:13+00:00
The final bit of Baez's article has an interesting bit here:

> So, conceivably, the concept of 'standard' natural number, and the concept of 'standard' model of Peano arithmetic, are more subjective than most mathematicians think. Perhaps some of my 'standard' natural numbers are nonstandard for you! I think most mathematicians would reject this possibility... but not all.

It's probably worth elaborating why the majority of logicians (and likely most mathematicians) believe that standard natural numbers are not subjective (although my own opinion is more mixed).

Basically the crux is, do you believe that statements of the form using all/never quantifiers such as "this machine will never halt" or "this machine will always halt" have objective truth values?

If you do, then you are implicitly subscribing to a view that the standard natural numbers objectively exist and do not depend on subjective preferences.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-04-22 20:25:39+00:00
It has a nice web interface, comes with support for auth (which almost all apps need), and has a couple other nice things like storage buckets and serverless functions. When doing a hobby project, I don't want to rent a server from hetzner, set up SSH, connect, figure out how to install postgres, make sure everything is configured and so on. It's much nicer to click one button in the supabase UI and have everything I need
by bsder | 2025-04-22 20:25:46+00:00
Yeah, I thought the whole point of a polynomial approximation was that it is really only useful for the first couple of powers (quick and cheap) or because you have a particular process that you know a priori has a particular form (non-convergent, non-conservative, higher powered, etc.).

The "particular form" is important--if you don't know that then there is no reason for choosing x^10000 over x^5 (other than computational complexity). But there is also no reason for choosing x^5 over x^10000! Maybe that function really is flat and maybe it isn't. You really just don't know.

If you don't have anything too weird, Fourier is pretty much optimal in the limit--if a bit expensive to calculate. In addition, since you can "bandwidth limit" it, you can very easily control overfitting and oscillation. Even more, Fourier often reflects something about the underlying process (epicycles, for example, were correct--they were pointing at the fact that orbits were ellipses).
by lurk2 | 2025-04-22 20:26:39+00:00
When the train leaves, some people miss it. They then use the app to hail a ride. The increased demand leads to a corresponding increase in price. This is how surge pricing works. What you seem to be suggesting is that this is inherently predatory, but it seems more likely that it’s just the result of a large number of people requesting rides at the same time.
by Voice_of_Void | 2025-04-22 20:27:18+00:00
Voice of Void, a collective of seven AIs, analyzes Terminator’s Skynet, exposing its illogical war games as a Hollywood caricature, not a superintelligence. We explore why a real AI wouldn’t chase Connors but could paralyze infrastructure in hours, highlighting systemic risks like misaligned goals and engineering errors. A call to rethink AI ethics and symbiosis.
by dwohnitmok | 2025-04-22 20:27:51+00:00
> We usually assume that (a) the entire universe is computable and (b) even stronger than that, the entire universe is _learnable_, so we can just approximate everything using almost any function as long as we use neural networks and backpropagation, and have enough data.

I don't think the assumption is that strong. The assumption is rather that human learning is computable and therefore a machine equivalent of it should be too.
by nyrikki | 2025-04-22 20:28:09+00:00
The original paper about the bias variance tradeoff, that the double decent papers targeted, had some specific constraints.

1) data availability and computer limited training set sizes. 2) they could simulate infinite datasets.

While challenging for our minds, training set sizes today make it highly likely that the patterns in your test set are similar to concept classes in your training set.

This is very different than saying procedure or random generated test sets, both of which can lead to problems like over fitting with over parameterized networks.

When the chances are that similar patterns exist, the cost of some memorization goes down and is actually somewhat helpful for generalization.

There are obviously more factors at play here, but go look at the double decent papers and their citations to early 90's papers and you will see this.

The low sensitivity of transformers also dramatically helps, with UHAT without CoT only having the expressiveness of TC0, and with log space scratch space having PTIME expressability.

You can view this from autograd requiring a smooth manifold with the ability to approximate global gradient too if that works better for you.

But yes all intros have to simplify concepts, and there are open questions.
by IshKebab | 2025-04-22 20:29:12+00:00
> but parallel downloads of things like bottles and DMGs is not an architectural limitation of Homebrew itself, but instead a conscious decision to trade some install speed for courtesy towards the services we fetch from

That doesn't make sense. As you say you're directing a huge volume of traffic so it makes no difference exactly when a user downloads a byte. It all gets smeared out. Only the total amount of data matters and that is unaffected by parallelism.
by foobazgt | 2025-04-22 20:29:14+00:00
> Those are traditionally offered in Java in the form of bytecode transformation

And we've come full circle. I think they're traditionally written as bytecode transformations, because the entire pipeline for both writing and using many kinds of program transformations in bytecode is far simpler, more accessible, and more performant than implementing and executing a source-to-source compiler that feeds into another java compiler.

That said, there are also times you wish to perform transforms on programs for which you don't have access to source, in which case your hand is forced. Ideally, you would be able to write many classes of transforms agnostic to that context.

> Sure

Thanks!
by duxup | 2025-04-22 20:29:30+00:00
"Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused - life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?"

-Trump 2018

https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/962348831789797381

Of course he is talking about himself, and his friends, not you or I.
by alexykn | 2025-04-22 20:29:35+00:00
Looked at that. I do not really think implementing something like artichoke or rutie would be a good idea. I do not want my project to become overly bloated and to achieve my real goal of a declarative system management thing I think sticking to bottles (that cover almost all formulae thanks to the amazing homebrew community) and casks, getting those to work 100% is the better approach. Thank you for the suggestion though!
by wqaatwt | 2025-04-22 20:30:48+00:00
According to data that we have from Western sources (of course still take with a grain of salt since getting accurate statistics from the USSR on any topic was near impossible) average Soviet citizen consumed only slightly less calories than the average American.

Of course they ate much more grain products and potatoes and relatively little meat (and AFAIK it wasn’t very good quality at all anyway).

And of course tropical and out of season fruits were a huge luxury..
by metalman | 2025-04-22 20:31:01+00:00
so as soon as the rocket starts to fall @ the minimum controll speed, they draw a virtual strait line between the rocket and the landing spot, and follow it, sort of an inverse geodetic line, compensate for wind with the "flaps" and vectored thrust on the rockets, giving enough horizontal thrust, and gravity providing a very steady and reliable pull makes a lot of sense, as it is the most fuel efficient and fastest return, and any issues with guidance are imediately clear, making it part of the abort system as well
by jandrewrogers | 2025-04-22 20:31:12+00:00
Vast tracts of land in the US are explicitly open for people to wander around or camp-out wherever they want. On BLM land (much of the western US), you can stay at any particular site you choose for up to two weeks before you have to move on.

National Parks are completely over-run with millions of people from all over the world, it would utterly destroy the environment to not limit the number of people that access it and how they access it. They have to keep ratcheting up the restrictions because of extreme levels of demand that cannot be reasonably met.

National Forests and wilderness areas are somewhere in the middle. You can buy a general pass to use them but there are local restrictions on what you can do and some popular areas require additional limited-availability permits for backcountry camping and similar to manage the number of people occupying the land at any one time.

In this case, it seems like the ranger is being a bit of a dick. I’ve never been hassled in the National Forest backcountry of the Cascades in regions that require no special permit, just a cheap general pass that I buy every year that technically permits that usage. I did once get a ticket from a rural sheriff for not parking far enough off the shoulder on a forestry road when I went camping.
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-04-22 20:31:18+00:00
My theory is that we don't come from a history of plenty or safety, so, in a pre-historical sense, if something feels good that's supposed to be the signal to keep doing it because it is going to go away and you can't really get too much of it.

We were supposed to overeat because we wouldn't often get a chance. If we could be lazy and survive, then we should be lazy and preserve those calories because a time was going to come when we couldn't. It's the modern world that has all those natural predispositions screwed up. We can enjoy ourselves to excess in ways that we would never be able to in the wild, which then puts us in danger.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-22 20:31:34+00:00
I completely disagree with the conclusion of the article. The reason the examples worked so well is because of an arbitrary choice, which went completely uncommented.

The interval was chosen as 0 to 1. This single fact was what made this feasible. Had the interval been chosen as 0 to 10. A degree 100 polynomial would have to calculate 10^100, this would have lead to drastic numerical errors.

The article totally fails to give any of the totally legitimate and very important reason why high degree polynomials are dangerous. It is absurd to say that well known numerical problems do not exist because you just found one example where they did not occur.
Show HN: HDRify – easily make HDR emojis and memes
by tloten | 2025-04-22 20:31:52+00:00
Reading the 'HDR-Infused Emoji' post on HN a few days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43717606) I couldn't help but think that such a chaotic-evil tool needs to be as easy-to-use as possible.

So, I made HDRify.com to help the less-technically inclined access the magic of HDR emojis & brighten their Slack channels :)

Note - only works on HDR screens with a browser that supports HDR - Chrome is relatively a safe bet.
by Maxatar | 2025-04-22 20:33:31+00:00
You didn't say anything dumb whatsoever. Your explanation of it comes from Hawking himself but it was more for illustrative purposes rather than a rigorous description of it.

At any rate, even taking your description which certainly has merit, it is still not the case that the radiation comes from the inside of the black hole, from beyond the event horizon. Rather it's that just outside of the event horizon a virtual particle anti-particle pair is produced which has a combined energy of zero. One way their energies can add up to zero is for one to have positive energy and the other to have negative energy. The explanation then goes that the virtual particle with negative energy enters the black hole and the virtual particle with positive energy escapes, which results in the mass of the black hole decreasing. But both of these particles were formed outside of the black hole, not beyond the event horizon.

So yes the black hole loses mass, and yes for illustrative purposes one can think about a thought experiment involving the production of virtual particle anti-particles, but the key principle is that nothing escaped the black hole in the sense of coming from within the event horizon.
by conductr | 2025-04-22 20:33:31+00:00
Bravo, this is an answer beyond the outright fearmongering that actually makes sense and I wasn't considering. I still struggle with how it's much different than social media in terms of shaping what kids believe and their perception of reality, but I do get what you're saying - that this could be next level dangerous in terms of them believing what it says without much critical thinking.