MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tudorgirba | 2025-04-08 17:57:09+00:00
Ok, do you write tests? If you do, you are already employing analyses :).

The interesting bit about a test is that it's inexpensive to create and you can create it within the context of your system after you know the problem. You do not download it from the web. You create it in context and then, when even a single test fails you might stop and fix that one. Why? Because it reveals something you consider valuable.

Now, tests answer functional questions, but the same idea can be applied to any other kinds of analyses. The key is to have them created within the system. If you download an analysis from the web, they will be solving some problem, just not yours, so it will not look interesting.
by devmor | 2025-04-08 17:58:04+00:00
To me, this is one of the most frustrating parts of this type of ML. If we could actually track the steps taken in the LLM, it would be trivial for the judge to evaluate the output of each intermediate and detect when reward hacking is taking place.

I wonder if there's any alternative other than trying to build the perfect judge for every single test case.
by arandomusername | 2025-04-08 17:58:14+00:00
> russian gas is cheaper is russian propagandist lie.

That's not true. It is cheaper. Logically it makes absolute sense, as it is cheaper to transport through a pipeline than tankers and there is no other pipeline in Europe that can cover what russia used to provide. That's why countries that import Russian gas have significantly cheaper household natural gas prices [1].

I'm not going to get into the bribe tangent. As long as russian gas is cheaper, that will be the biggest reason to buy it IMO.

Switching energy source takes years and huge investment. The big problem is that a lot of households rely on natural natural gas for heating, and a lot of them can't afford to switch.

1: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
by BobaFloutist | 2025-04-08 17:58:21+00:00
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe, and if you want to be able to right-click and/or highlight some text in your child's school's communications app you must first start a company, find funding money, hire developers, develop a go-to-market strategy, A/B test, pivot, pivot again, and eventually maybe release a product or maybe just get bought out.
by tialaramex | 2025-04-08 17:59:09+00:00
Standardization is a huge benefit if as here you can actually standardize so that things become interchangeable. e.g. I went out for an impromptu dinner yesterday, two different people had phones which were low, a friend had a power bank, everything speaks USB C so it all just works. I think one of them was an iPhone? I don't remember the brand of power bank, it doesn't matter, everything uses USB C.

It's not useful where "standardization" means either writing a document everybody agrees but nobody actually implements, or, the document just says do any of six things but each vendor chooses differently, or worst of all the document says it's basically dealer's choice so in practice the standard was worthless. In these cases the "standard" is just a thin barrier to entry, no real benefit to consumers since they can't swap supplier.

This often means accepting that maybe the global standard isn't quite ideal for you in some sense, but must be enforced anyway.
by oersted | 2025-04-08 17:59:29+00:00
It seems that they used CRISPR to make 20 modifications to 14 genes of Grey Wolf DNA to match the major characteristics of dire wold DNA samples from 13K and 72K years ago.

De-extinction is rather a stretch, they are slightly modified modern wolfs, but impressive nontheless.

Nowhere close to getting dinos from frogs (or chickens?) though :)

Better source (with damn cute pictures): https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-brought-back-dire-wol...
by bbor | 2025-04-08 17:59:40+00:00
Evolution is a stochastic process operating almost entirely in the shadowy past, so the scientifically-responsible answer to this “why?” question is “we don’t know for sure”, I think we can all agree.

Moving past that to speculate though, I think Chomsky would point to two (surely somewhat syncretic) forces:

1. Evolution is not an exhaustive breadth-first search; even if an adaption would be advantageous, genetic affordances can make it unlikely on a finite timeline. Theres lots of speculation on why humans in particular were well-prepared to evolve language for internal deliberation and/or external communication, but it’s somewhat beside the point here.

2. Evolution works most quickly in reaction to environmental stressors. There’s something of a consensus forming around the importance of changing climates for our genus (i.e. why aren't there other apes in cold regions?), whereas birds were inherently afforded a much simpler answer to that stressor: migration.

All of that said, I think it’s important to highlight an under-appreciated fact: the only things we have ever observed using language are a) humans, b) possibly other Homo species like Homo Naledi, c) LLMs, and—as of the past ~week (!!!)—D) possibly Bonobos.

Lots of animals communicate using words/signs, and a majority (?) of plant & animal species signal to each other and others using scents, colors, shapes, body language, etc. But only the above four can intuitively synthesize those signs on the fly into contextual phrases — or, as Chomsky would say, “generate an infinite range of output from a finite range of inputs”.

It’s worth caveating that this is absolutely a subjective stance based on how you want to use “language”, and that a sizeable camp of linguists would disagree on that basis. But I think the underlying unique quality is important, so Chomsky is correct to single it out as “language” — otherwise, how would you even phrase the above question? Birds clearly have complex verbal and visual communication already, and “better communication” is vague and unsatisfying, IMHO.
by sksxihve | 2025-04-08 17:59:59+00:00
I worked on a project once that was a complete mess, they outsourced the QA of the product and the off-shore team was creating hundreds of dupe reports for each issue they found. Out came the burn-down charts, used as justification for requiring weekend work for the whole team.

I got tired of this and grabbed a couple other devs and split up the jira bug backlog between us, and we started closing out dupes and non-repro tickets, after about two days and thousands of tickets closed my manager angrily came over to my cube and demanded I stop because "it was making the company look bad".

Sometimes the best option is not to play.
by dahart | 2025-04-08 18:01:01+00:00
Hehe explain aesthetics from first principles sounds like demanding the equation that proves Mona Lisa is a good painting.

I mean you can argue aesthetics, but it’s a fact that in the western world, a suit is considered by everyone, more or less, to be more formal than T-shirt and jeans, and more formal is widely considered to be more dignified than casual wear. The first principles that matter aren’t aesthetics, they are more likely customs and class (socioeconomic status).
by btilly | 2025-04-08 18:01:01+00:00
Huh. The article claims at least an order of magnitude more SLT modules than the reference I found. I think it is still quite a bit less than the smartphone, but that makes global compute at least closer.

Still, 55 years of doubling transistors at a given cost every 2 years is about a 190 million fold transistor difference for a given cost. Clock speeds have improved by a factor of 1000 on top of that. Even with performance tradeoffs for battery life in a smartphone, there is no surprise that the phone should have more compute power than the world did in 1970.
by margalabargala | 2025-04-08 18:01:09+00:00
It does in this context.

The goal here was stated as "prevent China from militarily taking control of Taiwan". It wasn't "occupy Taiwan/Beijing/wherever and deal with an insurgency".

The US left Vietnam due to lack of national willpower, not due to military defeat. Again, the problem statement here was formulated with "given a nationally united, determined US".

China, attempting to invade Taiwan and being met by the US military, would fare little better than Saddam Hussein's military did either time they went toe-to-toe with the US. The insurgency afterwards is not relevant to the discussion, as the US need not try to occupy China.
Show HN: Only health tech not monetizing your data. MYME Prelaunches today
by lsantfornow | 2025-04-08 18:01:12+00:00
Hey HN! We're happy to come here to announce MYME's pre-launch-induced-by-industry-news. While our full platform is set to launch in a few months, recent uncertainties around 23andMe ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43457666 ) have inspired us to offer early-access storage for your genetic data.

Our mission is simple: to give everyone a complete, accessible health record that helps healthcare professionals truly understand who you are and what works for you. We see your 23andme data as a vital part of this narrative, adding valuable context to your overall health story.

What is (or will be) this MYME? Simple! It is a health app designed to be your one-stop solution for managing your health. It will be the first solution made for the “patient” in the health tech space! You will own full control of your electronic health records (EHR). Think of MYME as your personal Data Lake for health data.

MYME was born after one of our founders was diagnosed with a chronic disease (and had to start keeping records of loads of health data) and his wife had to change the doctor that had been helping her treat her diabetes for more than 15 years. In both cases they needed detailed health records that were hard to get or downright non-existent or almost impossible to get (e.g.: a summary of more than a decade of consultations that were hand written). Those experiences showed how little control we have over our own health data, as well as how little of it is stored in a safe digital space.

Our platform will conform and exceed all regulations around personal data and health records. It will help you aggregate data from all places (e.g.: insurance, lab work, genetics, hereditary conditions, past and ongoing medication, etc) and then share with whom you trust (the doctor right in front of you during a consultation, for example). Our goal isn’t to sell your data but to harness its potential to improve care—all while ensuring it remains securely stored and entirely under your control.

(For the millennials in the room:) Sorry for the long post, here's a link: https://upload.myme.health/safe .
Show HN: Astrocade - AI-powered game creation tool
by andreyk | 2025-04-08 18:01:38+00:00
Hi HN!

My startup has just launched a web demo of our tool to make 2D games with AI assistance. There are some other players in that space, but we are trying to make a truly codeless and casual platform for non technical people to make cool stuff.

I came to work on it after studying AI in grad school, and it's actually been two years since then... Classic statup journey stuff, lots of mistakes and lessons learned the hard way, so super rewarding to finally get a widely shared demo out there.

Would love feedback / for you to break it in creative ways so we can fix it.
by Akkuma | 2025-04-08 18:02:07+00:00
Location: SC, USA

Remote: Yes (only)

Willing to relocate: If you make selling my house painless perhaps or pay enough to justify it

Technologies: JavaScript, Node, TypeScript, React, Solid, Bun, AWS, CI/CD

Resume/CV: https://akkuma.github.io/resume

Email: JS for my email atob('Z3JlZ29yeXdheG1hbitobkBnbWFpbC5jb20=')

My personal site: https://akkuma.github.io

17+ years in engineering (staff/principal) with 17+ years in JavaScript, Node since Ryan Dahl was working on it, React before it had a major version. Check resume for full list, which includes using lots of TypeScript, .Net, minor Elm, minor Ruby, minor Python, minor Elixir) with interest and willing to learn other languages like Rust.
by lazzlazzlazz | 2025-04-08 18:02:29+00:00
Equity investments like this don't need to be repaid, so there isn't a legal obligation to repay them. Of course, there is an obligation to maximize shareholder value — but that is totally independent of the dollar amount invested.

When founders raise this much money, it's because there's (1) a lot they want to do and hire for, or (2) they don't want to worry about monetizing the product for a significant period and focus on growth or product development.
by elevation | 2025-04-08 18:02:59+00:00
Investors expect that Tailscale will extract many multiples of their contribution from users.

If you'd like to avoid this extraction, you can fork their command line client code (along with the open source headscale server) and run a mesh network across your linux machines with all the magic DNS and userspace-TCP/IP-stack goodness that you're used to. Tailscale has given away a lot of the engineering for free.

However, as soon as your fork becomes incompatible with Tailscale's stack, you lose a massive value-add: proprietary platform support. Today, you can add the sale's guy's iPhone to your tailnet in seconds. If Apple's capricious automated AppStore security pulls the Tailscale app from the AppStore, Tailscale Corp is big enough to get Apple's attention. A small FLOSS group with some forked clients on github won't be able to provide this same operational stability.
by mikepurvis | 2025-04-08 18:03:17+00:00
The Rockefeller Center in general is such a vibe. I was able to see a Seth Meyers taping there a few years ago, and while I obviously enjoyed the show, the building itself is what made the more lasting impression on me— all that black marble and gold trim, you can really feel the weight of a place that knows it's got some history to it.
by netfortius | 2025-04-08 18:04:02+00:00
I am sure you have not read more than the title ;-)

1. Done - so far - 12 new attempts, 12 new emails: 4 on gmail, 4 on protonmail, 2 on infomaniak and 2 on Tuta

2. Done - 12 diff exit points, in 12 diff countries, associated with each diff email (these also vary at times, by the intrinsic way the VPN picks dynamically servers in their exit points data centers). Used two diff VPN solutions: PIA and Mullvad (if that matters at all)

3. FF, Chrome, Brave, Safari (all on macos), Kiwi, Samsung Internet, Hermit and RIF (on Android) => changed the agent on a few, to match uniqueness of new email and new IP

Thank you!
by Kirby64 | 2025-04-08 18:05:13+00:00
> So what if a candidate wants to look good? How you feel about your looks affects your confidence, and you want to be confident in an interview.

Like it or not, if someone needs to wear a suit to feel confident that says something about them. It may just be a personality quirk of them unrelated to their skills, but it often is not. There’s no reason you need to wear a suit to feel confident.

> You get judged on your merits, not on anything else. This way of thinking is how you create an environment hostile to women and minorities.

How often does tech discriminate for “culture fit” reasons? Someone’s personality fit is often a huge point of contention, and wearing a suit is part of someone’s personality and choices.

I’m not advocating for it being an absolute state, but you certainly have to give some consideration to the fact that dressing up far more than is needed implies you don’t culturally understand. It’s as simple as that.
by octopoc | 2025-04-08 18:05:43+00:00
Yeah I'm in the same boat. I have a MacBook Pro 2009 that still works fine. That is 16 years old! I use it for web browsing occasionally, although I do have to update the certs manually.

Only downsides are it has only 2GB of RAM and about 0.1 seconds of battery life.

When I bought a new one, I made sure to get 32GB of RAM. That way I'll still be able to browse the web in twenty years, although I'm sure it'll be very slow because of the CPU.
by fennecbutt | 2025-04-08 18:05:48+00:00
Pretty sure he was simply informed of all of that and he put himself on a pedestal as the CEO as he's done for countless interviews.

He seems to have a mostly surface level of understanding of what goes on at his companies, which is all a CEO needs. But it doesn't justify all the people I see idolising him as some sort of technical God. I heard he's a master of PoE, too ;)
by southernplaces7 | 2025-04-08 18:06:11+00:00
Fair enough, but you'll get a lot less if the laptop has no drive, so you could do as the other comment here notes, which is replace it with a cheap drive. However, I emphasize that if you don't want to do that or are short enough on cash that you can't even buy a replacement drive (it happens), encrypting the whole drive with a free tool like veracrypt or bitlocker is absolutely as secure for protecting residual data. Nobody who buys that shit is going to break through 256 bit AES for your favorite nude photos and love notes!
by thiht | 2025-04-08 18:06:28+00:00
Nope. I’ve despised using Google Search for years, and thought it would eventually be replaced with another better search engine. At one point I even switched to a paid Kagi subscription for a few months and it was sooo much better than Google. I only stopped using Kagi because I’ve completely switched to ChatGPT now. It’s a really great search engine but for my daily use ChatGPT is more convenient and faster to use.
by devmor | 2025-04-08 18:06:50+00:00
How do you reconcile that opinion with the fact that LLMs trained on programming concepts generally give incorrect answers about 50% of the time?

Is it actually more useful than Googling, or is it just so convenient that you let it convince you that it was useful? Or, depressingly, is Google just becoming so useless that something wrong a solid half of the time is still better?
by belthesar | 2025-04-08 18:06:56+00:00
I have this happen largely with Apple OS devices. Apple's DNS service can be notoriously persnickity (I've had issues with it outside of Tailscale as well), and I usually need to bounce interfaces or flush DNS cache (where I can on macOS) to resolve issues. WRT Tailscale, I also have issues with it on my phone. I currently have my phone configured to connect to my Tailnet when I leave networks I don't control so that I can maintain access to my personal cloud on the go, however after a few connections and disconnections, I have to bounce several interfaces in order to correct both DNS and routing.
by burningion | 2025-04-08 18:06:58+00:00
Yes, rerun does replay, that was my main use case when prototyping.

They've since raised more funding recently, and have larger use cases in mind for robotics: https://rerun.io/blog/physical-ai-data

I've spoken with members of the team, and they're all great. Wouldn't hesitate to use the product / work with them anywhere.
by adolph | 2025-04-08 18:07:07+00:00
One would not directly. Given measures of intelligence of evaluable existing life, work backwards to find last common ancestors given evolutionary theory from the available fossil record.

This leaves a lot to be desired, in my mind. Examples: * Soft tissue organisms may not be well enough preserved to be studied. * Can't evaluate intelligence in evolutionary dead-ends that no longer exist. * Limited evolution theory may miss mechanisms of how intelligence comes about, like maybe from something akin to a shared toxoplasmosis infection among different species rather than each getting there through a random walk.
by felideon | 2025-04-08 18:07:25+00:00
Congrats! Some feedback, if you're taking any:

- Without the tutorial, it's confusing that you're not supposed to click and you're supposed to start typing. I wonder if placing the text box at the top would make that more clear.

- Some of the clues are confusing due to inconsistent punctuation. For example:

[to ___fish, to lure someone in using a fake internet persona] = cat [do this or cut bait] = fish [taking a pay one is a bummer] = cut [rocks when added to soda will NOT cause your stomach to explode] = pop

The first line uses a comma, the second line uses "or", the third and fourth lines don't have any punctuation at all, so the sentences make no sense.
by vunderba | 2025-04-08 18:07:40+00:00
As somebody who actually tried to build a multimodal stable diffusion chat agent about a year back using YOLO to build partial masks for adjustments via inpainting, dynamic controlnets, and a whole host of other things, I highly doubt that it's as simple as an agentic process.

Using the prompt to detect and choose the most appropriate model checkpoint and LoRa(s) along with rewriting a prompt to most appropriately suit the chosen model has been pretty bog standard for a long time now.
by ffsm8 | 2025-04-08 18:08:01+00:00
Uh, almost nobody I've worked with to date codes in their free time with any kind of regularity.

If you've never encountered the average 9-5 dev that just does the least amount of effort they can get away with, then I have to apploud the HR departments of the companies you've worked for. Whatever they're doing, they're doing splendid work.

And almost all of my coworkers are university grads that do literally the same you've used as an example for non formally taught people: they write abysmally performing code because they often have an unreasonable fixation on practices like inversion of control (as a random example).

As a particularly hilarious example I've had to explain to such a developer that an includes check on a large list in a dynamic language such as JS performs abysmally
by mikepurvis | 2025-04-08 18:08:02+00:00
With the disclaimer that I know nothing about zig, I will say that Nix's flake files follow an interesting pattern where the output section is evaluated under the regular Nix interpreter and can do anything, whereas the input section is evaluated under a far stricter mini-interpreter that prohibits everything other than basic strings and attrsets (dictionaries).

A flake.nix is certainly not packaging metadata, but I do know those input section restrictions do cause occasional confusion with users who think "ah, Nix code" and only realise afterward that it's really json in Nix syntax."

All that to say, if a thing is not evaluate-able, it's probably best to represent it in a different enough form that no one could mistake it for a thing that can be evaluated.
by annjose | 2025-04-08 18:08:47+00:00
Congrats — well deserved! I love the game and play it every day; it's actually the first thing I do in the morning. A big fan of Hard mode! My best friend has also started playing it and we share the results with each other.

Just one feedback - on desktop browsers, I can see the list of answered clues below the textbox, but on the phone (Brave or Firefox on Android), I don't see that list. I am not sure if this is a feature or a bug, but it’s a feature I miss when playing on my phone. Seeing those answers gives that little “aha!” moment of satisfaction.

I also made a custom GPT - Bracket GPT [0] that helps in solving the clues when I am stuck. It doesn’t directly give the answers, but offers hints to help nudge you to the solution. It’s a fun companion when you're totally blanking.

[0] https://chatgpt.com/g/g-67e0f124cd408191943faadb3d70c6df-bra...
by misnome | 2025-04-08 18:08:50+00:00
Obviously. But then you still have caching, passing data/artifacts between stages, workflow logic (like skipping steps if unnecessary), running on multiple platforms, and exposing test results/coverage to the system you are running in.

Written properly, actually building the software is the least of what the CI is doing.

If your build is simple enough that you don’t need any of that - great. But pretending that the big CI systems never do anything except lock you in is a trifle simplistic.