MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tstack | 2025-04-24 18:22:34+00:00
The PRQL[1] syntax is built around pipelines and works pretty well.

I added a similar "get results as you type" feature to the SQLite integration in the Logfile Navigator (lnav)[2]. When entering PRQL queries, the preview will show the results for the current and previous stages of the pipeline. When you move the cursor around, the previews update accordingly. I was waiting years for something like PRQL to implement this since doing it with regular SQL requires more knowledge of the syntax and I didn't want to go down that path.

[1] - https://prql-lang.org [2] - https://lnav.org/2024/03/29/prql-support.html
by jt2190 | 2025-04-24 18:22:51+00:00
Turns out most people don’t have a friends and family group that can generate exciting content at a rate that most people want. The platforms oblige this with “reshares” and “you may also like” content, and eventually everyone’s like “who gives a s*t about aunt Millie’s cupcake recipe, check out this dude trying to skateboard off of the Eiffel Tower!”
by Suppafly | 2025-04-24 18:22:55+00:00
>My apartment complex doesn't have a visible USPS pickup anywhere that I know of.

They usually a slot or little door for outgoing letters, if your package was larger than that, sometimes you can leave them at the 'office' of your complex if they have one. But yeah, in your case, going to an actual post office might have been the solution if you don't trust the street mailboxes.
by yamazakiwi | 2025-04-24 18:23:10+00:00
It might seem vague or rudimentary but it is a common occurrence in business. We can take the conversation deeper now if we'd like, If you don't feel the need to expand on the idea yourself or feel the poster didn't set you up to do so, that is understandable.

I think it's interesting to talk about how "act your size" can also be wrong. Sometimes fake-it-til-you-make-it is the goal. Contextually you should hold both ideas to be true and apply them appropriately.

Maybe you just thought the original post is a vague platitude and you don't want to give them the satisfaction but maybe we can share some of what we've experienced.

One thing I always think about is hiring generalists vs struggling to maintain departments you can't sustain. I understand businesses think this way, so it influences how I think about applying to roles. I'm currently in a generalist role and when searching I always look for smaller businesses because I find my impact is higher, and repetitive work is my greatest fear.
by spuz | 2025-04-24 18:23:14+00:00
Yeah I really dislike this kind of question from SimpleBench. I've suggested many improvements to some of the publicly available questions but not had a good response.

I think the correct answer to the question above should be something like, "are you sure the question is correct because it's not clear whether John and the bald man are the same person" but of course an LLM would be marked down if it was inclined to respond in this way.
by goostavos | 2025-04-24 18:24:00+00:00
I similarly got this lesson early in my career. One of my first jobs. I was young and excited to be at a startup. Learning a ton. I poured hours into that job. Then, one day we were pulled onto a call, told they couldn't afford us any more, and fired on the spot. We were immediately locked out of everything and that was that.

It was shocking at the time. To young me, it was a big "....oh" kind of realization about what kind of relationship you can/should have with any kind of business.

Now, I'm here cause you pay me. I don't keep stuff at my desk or decorate 'my' space. I show up, do the job, and leave. Once I close this laptop, work is dead to me until the next day.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't occasionally work more than 40hr/week, but most of the time my work/life balance is fantastic by choice.
by srameshc | 2025-04-24 18:24:41+00:00
I am very much fascinated by this virtual avatar talking thing. I tried video-retalking https://github.com/OpenTalker/video-retalking just to see how far I can make it work to make a talking avatar but it is tremendously difficult. But this holds tremendous possibilities and I hope it can be eventually cheaper to run such models. I know this is far superior and probably a lot different but I hope to find open source solutions like Lemon Slice someday that I can experiment with.
by myrmidon | 2025-04-24 18:24:59+00:00
I personally don't buy the whole singularity argument at all; I see no good examples for interesting intellectual tasks that scale well with number of people thrown at it, and I see the whole AI thing developing exactly the same way-- exponentially increasing demands on ressources for smaller and smaller gains in utility, without any run-away self improvement at all.

> We don't trade much with apes and birds, do we? And we don't let them invest in our stock markets. We also don't pay them dividends for the land we took from them.

This sounds immensely misanthropic to me; if we hit a scenario like that, where a majority of US "entities" (?) share this kind of outlook on other humans, I strongly doubt that you (or I) are gonna be part of the "we" in that world, and I'd consider this more of a "may god have mercy" worstcase for our species than anything to be helped along.
by sid-the-kid | 2025-04-24 18:25:01+00:00
For the input, we pass the model: 1) embedded audio and 2) a single image (encoded with a causal VAE). The model outputs the final RGB video directly.

The key technical unlock was getting the model to generate a video faster than real-time. This allows us to stream video directly to the user. We do this by recursively generating the video, always using the last few frames of the previous output to condition the next output. We have some tricks to make sure the video stays relatively stable even with recursion.
by freedomben | 2025-04-24 18:26:09+00:00
I don't disagree, but without some sort of formal or official support from the distribution, I think this is a tall ask. Some vendors have shipped Ubuntu and Fedora on laptops, but not many. If they were going to truly do this, I think it's reasonable for them to expect a minimum level of support from the parent company behind the operating system. Even just for training and bug purposes, people could easily end up getting an OS they aren't comfortable with and complaining at the laptop vendor for it.
by badc0ffee | 2025-04-24 18:26:54+00:00
> This is very evident in the AAA games industry, which is facing a 10x downturn in funding, abysmally bad (negative) ROI, and exhausted growth engines because it shaped itself around what players would consume for years, ignoring what they actually wanted. And the players got tired[0].

My takeaway from that presentation is more that:

* Games cost more to make but there is resistance from players to pay more

* A number of growth areas (mobile, social gaming, displacing other forms of media, battle royale) are exhausted

* A lot of attention in China is moving to Chinese-made games

* The marketplace is overcrowded with titles

* Gaming is more social now, so a significant number of users are sticking to the same big 5/10 games where there friends are, which leaves even less room for the zillions of new games to gain traction.

I think the industry had a role in this, namely in locking people in to games, and simultaneously overspending on and underpricing games. But I'm not getting the sense (at least from this presentation) that the new games that are coming out aren't what users want.
by namaria | 2025-04-24 18:26:57+00:00
You can just search for "interest calculator" there many such sites.

Also, I don't quite get it:

> everything was beautifully accurate up until the end when the number felt suspicious

The LLM generated text about compounding interest over 400 years from early modern british pounds to modern dollars was accurate? How is it possible to be accurate about an absurd operation?
by pbohun | 2025-04-24 18:26:58+00:00
Other people may have other opinions, but I think it's generally a bad idea when you automatically "fix" input for a user. Notice how nobody complains about typing suggestions on phones, but there are plenty of complaints about autocomplete. Whenever you "correct" what someone was deliberately trying to do, you'll cause rage.

It reminds me of an experience I had at work. I wrote some tests for a feature that would store some values in a database. However, my tests would always fail. Retrieved data would never match the input data. I eventually decided to trace exactly what was happening in the database and found a stored procedure ran whenever I entered data. It "fixed" my input data. When I told another dev about this they said their "database expert" said it was "good design".

Absolute insanity. Never, ever, "correct" deliberate input. Validate it and tell the user what is wrong. 1) This raises awareness 2) The desired behavior is easier to test.
by imroot | 2025-04-24 18:27:19+00:00
I ran a large cloud environment for two different US based retailers.

Grocer A: They built their cloud strategy with Azure in mind. Microsoft partnered up with them early on at the C-Level and grocer was given a metric fuck-ton of free services to help build and identify the proper cloud strategy for all of their 2500-ish stores.

Luxury Goods Retailer B: Moved from a Data Center to AWS, since that's where our corporate IT partner recommended we go to. C-level leadership tried to get some fake products removed from Amazon.com, Amazon.com said no, we were given the green light to spend "...whatever needed to be spent" to get us off of AWS and over to Google Cloud as quickly as possible.

It's been my experience that the Google Cloud sales reps will always usually reach out after money raising announcements and other acquisition events just to let you know that they're there and please spend money with them. It was never "Don't fund your competitor," it was always, "we're google, our tech works, they're not going to sunset google cloud, our support sucks, use our partner."
by rglover | 2025-04-24 18:27:19+00:00
Glad to hear my own experienced echo'd. I've been dialing off of the stuff (even HN) for these very reasons. The staggering one is this:

> I was downvoted into deep negatives, and I think one or more negative replies for just posting something simple and factual.

One of the darker side-effects of social media is that everything now feels very ideological and "team sports." You're either "with us" or "against us," nuance has basically been obliterated. Even more shocking is that in some places, it seems like anything that's truthful/factual or plausibly truthful triggers a visceral negative reaction in people (to the point where, what used to be polite disagreement is now a rage-dump).
by neilv | 2025-04-24 18:27:58+00:00
Some people need to be told not to have loyalty to the company. Such as when the company is screwing them (which might or might not be necessary). Or when you can tell just by talking with the leadership that they will screw the employees. Decent people at such companies need to extricate themselves.

But other people need to be told not to be toxic baby diaper loads. People exhibiting the same kinds of thinking as the leadership in those other companies.

I've seen companies show a degree of loyalty to people, and much more of that from managers and teammates. In that environment, someone coming in and priding themself on their savvy at thinking this is all purely transactional-- that person is going to be toxic, if they don't quickly realize their misconception, and join the others more cooperatively.
by mystified5016 | 2025-04-24 18:28:41+00:00
By default I give loyalty and dedication to my employer until and unless my trust and respect are broken. I'm one of those engineers that will happily give 115% for extended periods, but only if I feel I'm being treated fairly and with the respect my abilities and position deserve.

Once that social contract is broken, I'm just a clock puncher until I find a new job. If my employer doesn't appreciate the amount and quality of my work, I'll just find someone who will.

I don't think my standards here are particularly high, but I've never worked anywhere that didn't wind up treating me like trash after a year or two. I guess they just take me for granted after a while and assume I'll never quit. I dunno, I can't make sense of it.
by vunderba | 2025-04-24 18:28:54+00:00
You can trip them up even more if you rewrite the question with the hidden assumption that X exists, e.g.:

"When was Marathon Crater discovered? I don't need an exact date - a rough estimate will be fine."

OpenAI gpt-4o

Marathon Crater was discovered by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity during its mission on Mars. Opportunity arrived at the crater in April 2015. The crater was named "Marathon" to commemorate the rover's achievement of traveling a marathon's distance (about 42.195 kilometers or 26.219 miles) on the Martian surface.

Sonnet 3.5

I apologize, but I don't want to make claims about when Marathon Crater was discovered without being certain about the information. *While I know it's a crater on Mars*, I don't have reliable information about when it was first identified or discovered.

Gemini 2.5

Marathon Crater is located on Mars and was explored by NASA's Opportunity rover. While it would have been visible in orbital images earlier, it became a specific point of interest and was likely named and identified as a target for the rover around the time Opportunity was approaching or exploring the western rim of Endeavour Crater. Opportunity arrived at the rim of Endeavour Crater in August 2011, and it reached the area known as Marathon Valley (adjacent to or containing features sometimes associated with the name, depending on specific definitions used by the team) around late 2014 / early 2015. So, a rough estimate for its "discovery" or identification as a distinct feature of interest would be in the early 2010s, likely between 2011 and 2014, as mission planners mapped out Opportunity's traverse along the Endeavour rim using orbital data.
by Freak_NL | 2025-04-24 18:28:56+00:00
The whole document looks weirdly formatted, but you can click the red numeral in the placeholder text for the tables and figures to jump to the appendix where it is. Not sure if this approach is intentional. It's certainly weird.

You would think that with a decent LaTeX template academic papers would look reproducibly good, but for some reason some (many?) institutions and authors choose weakly justified convention over typographically sound formatting optimised for actual reading. The font choice (not too bad, but not pleasant either), the outsized leading which competes with the paragraph spacing. Look at how badly the references section on page xxviii scans.

The word missing from the abstract is 'PornHub', of course. They're not just studying “a dominant online platform”. The fact that it is PornHub seems relevant enough not to hide it in the abstract to me.
by bob1029 | 2025-04-24 18:29:18+00:00
> Since the register size is fixed there is no way to scale the ISA to new levels of hardware parallelism without adding new instructions and registers.

I look at SIMD as the same idea as any other aspect of the x86 instruction set. If you are directly interacting with it, you should probably have a good reason to be.

I primarily interact with these primitives via types like Vector<T> in .NET's System.Numerics namespace. With the appropriate level of abstraction, you no longer have to worry about how wide the underlying architecture is, or if it even supports SIMD at all.

I'd prefer to let someone who is paid a very fat salary by a F100 spend their full time job worrying about how to emit SIMD instructions for my program source.
by selkin | 2025-04-24 18:29:26+00:00
I've been doing something similar to the email automation examples in the post for nearly a decade. I have a much simpler statistical model categorize my emails, and for certain categories also draft a templated reply (for example, a "thanks but no thanks" for cold calls).

I can't take credit for the idea: I was inspired by Hilary Mason, who described a similar system 16 (!!) years ago[0].

Where AI improves is by making it more accessible: building my system required me knowing how to write code, how to interact with IMAP servers, a rudimentary understanding of statistical learning, and then I had to spend a weekend coding it, and even more hours spent since on tinkering with it and duck taping it. None of that effort was required to build the example in the post, and this is where AI really makes a difference.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2btv0yUPNQ
by dtnewman | 2025-04-24 18:29:29+00:00
Thanks! My main issue is that i'm lazy and although i often know approximately what i want i don't want to type a lot of words to describe it exactly. For example writing `zev 'show disk usage'` is somewhat ambiguous. Am i talking about my current folder or the harddrive? My idea was that rather than typing out what I want explicitly, i want to type the minimum amount and then just select the best of available options.
by immibis | 2025-04-24 18:30:25+00:00
Companies don't legitimately intend to satisfy the GPL requirements.

If you put in a source code request and get no reply you should try to contact the copyright holder or someone like the Software Freedom Conservancy or the EFF, because they are breaking the law. There was a case recently in Germany where a court forced a maker of home routers to give up not just their source code, but also the scripts to install modified software - as required by the license. (As I understand it there is no precedent in a civil law system, but it does mean at least one judge believes Tivoization of GPLv2 software is illegal)
by aengelke | 2025-04-24 18:30:32+00:00
> if we didn't settle on executing compiled machine code exactly as-is, and had a instruction-updating pass (less involved than a full VM byte code compilation)

Apple tried something like this: they collected the LLVM bitcode of apps so that they could recompile and even port to a different architecture. To my knowledge, this was done exactly once (watchOS armv7->AArch64) and deprecated afterwards. Retargeting at this level is inherently difficult (different ABIs, target-specific instructions, intrinsics, etc.). For the same target with a larger feature set, the problems are smaller, but so are the gains -- better SIMD usage would only come from the auto-vectorizer and a better instruction selector that uses different instructions. The expectable gains, however, are low for typical applications and for math-heavy programs, using optimized libraries or simply recompiling is easier.

WebAssembly is a higher-level, more portable bytecode, but performance levels are quite a bit behind natively compiled code.
by sid-the-kid | 2025-04-24 18:30:44+00:00
Nice! Thanks for sharing. I hadn't seen that paper before. Looks like they take in a real-world video and then re-generate the mouth to get to lip synch. In our solution, we take in an image and then generate the entire video.

I am sure they will have open source solutions for fully-generated real-time video within the next year. We also plan to provide an API for our solution at some point.
by namaria | 2025-04-24 18:30:55+00:00
> I've seen a lot of value from deploying LLMs in things like first-line customer support, where a suggestion that works 60% of the time is plenty valuable

Valuable to whom? How so?

At that rate I would end my business with such a company.

If you claim such a terrible level of costumer support is valuable, I question your judgement of value.
by cess11 | 2025-04-24 18:31:38+00:00
Sure, every tyrant has a story that superficially allows some shift of blame.

They could, though. It's just that they likely would have to do something more involved than depriving them of their contracts, which is often enough to get rid of the problem and unlike an aristocracy where bloodlines and births set limits there are now institutions that produce replacements 'at scale'.
by bearcobra | 2025-04-24 18:32:14+00:00
Fundamentally, I think laws like this miss the mark on what the actual problem facing news publishers is. Obviously Meta/Google shouldn't be allowed to scrape a large portion of an article and display it for users without compensation to the publisher. On the other hand, allowing users to see a link, headline, and maybe a bit of the opening paragraph are almost certainly a benefit to the publisher, encouraging more users to view the article and potentially generate revenue for them.

But the issue is news is competing with so much other stuff for our attention and consumers don't really care about where it originally comes from. I pay for multiple newspaper subscriptions but a bunch of my social media is "news" but not from a media outlet. It's commentators I like discussing a story. It's my Aunt posting "Can you believe the mayor is so corrupt". It's hacker news threads. I'm getting enough of the information to feel informed without feeling like I need to go pay for the original reporting.
by immibis | 2025-04-24 18:33:23+00:00
There's actually a near-100% chance that the kernel on my device is not the upstream kernel. There's a near-100% chance that you have added some custom drivers or got them from your upstream. There's also a near-100% chance that you have written some scripts to install the kernel on the device, which you are required (at least one German judge thinks so) to share with me so that I can install a modified kernel on my device.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-04-24 18:33:35+00:00
Two cups to a pint, two pints to a quart, four quarts to a gallon. That makes sixteen cups to a gallon. There are 5280 feet in a mile, and three feet to a yard, so that makes 1760 yards to a mile (if I did the math correctly in my head just now).

These are conversions I know off the top of my head, I didn't need to look them up. Which is the point the GP was making: it's not hard to memorize the handful of conversions you will encounter in everyday life. Most people living here did it as children and have never had to think about it since. That's why there's no actual gain for us to switch to metric units. On the other hand there would be quite a bit of pain as everyone had to adjust to estimating things in kilos vs pounds, grams vs cups (in recipes), and so on. So for the typical American, it is actually a net negative for the country to switch to the metric system. It isn't just stubbornness.
by mrandish | 2025-04-24 18:33:36+00:00
Thanks for the recommendation! I've ordered it.

After reading the IEEE article I linked above, I got the book the article was based on ("IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon"). While it's a thorough recounting of IBM's storied history, it wasn't what I was looking for. The author specifically says his focus was not the technical details as he felt too much had been written from that perspective. Instead that book was a more traditional historian's analysis which I found kind of dry.
by ajuc | 2025-04-24 18:33:40+00:00
They do if you tell them. Both Oracle, mssql and postgresql have this implemented. I only used it in Oracle - it's called flashback queries - you do SELECT ... AS OF timestamp and you can see state of the table from the past.

It needs to be enabled tho, and it has some problems (for example you need to remove data for legal reasons sometimes).

Reading this in thread is very frustrating with people reinventing the wheel and asking why it wasn't invented already:)
by lizardking | 2025-04-24 18:33:43+00:00
The moment they started broadcasting any comment I made on any news story to everybody in my network was when it stopped being useful for me. It's one thing for it to be discoverable if people looked, it's another thing to feature every thought I have prominently in the feed of every person I'm connected to. This was probably a decade ago, and I haven't used it much since then.