MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bityard | 2025-04-18 17:59:59+00:00
The "memory effect" of NiCad batteries is an urban myth that got supercharged with a dose of confirmation bias. Nobody has replicated the memory effect in consumer batteries. When people think they are observing the memory effect, most of the time they are seeing the very high self-discharge rate of 10% (or very often more) per month of storage combined with regular human forgetfulness. They charge up the battery, let it sit for a few months, go to use it, notice it went dead faster than they expected, charge it up again, use it right away, and see that it's back up to normal capacity.

In my case, Craftsman just used REALLY bad cells, Plus there was no BMS, AND they wired them all in series so that if one or a few develop high internal resistance, basically the whole pack was shot. Very bad design + very cheap cells = designed obsolescence.
by aeblyve | 2025-04-18 18:01:15+00:00
Worth noting that a decrease in end-tidal CO2 pressure (i.e., decreased amount of Co2 in an exhalation) is not in itself a statement about the amount of Co2 in tissues. A rudimentary analysis might even say that lower Co2 as measured in exhalation implies that more Co2 is retained in the tissues.

Bohr effect and others corroborate the idea that Co2 is not just a "waste gas" produced by respiration but has an important biological role in its own right.

Ingestion of baking soda, which supplies Co2 to tissues, is so effective at countering the effects of lactic acid from muscle overexertion that its administration is banned in horse racing.

It stands to reason that higher Co2 can protect against lactate throughout tissues, perhaps even including the brain, especially in a condition where the brain favors fermentation over respiration (as in cancer, per Warburg effect, and depending on who you ask, in mental illness/depression)
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-18 18:01:44+00:00
No one is forced to buy a car at the median price.

You can buy these cars new under $25K.

Toyota Corolla LE ($23,460), Hyundai Elantra SE ($23,025), Kia K4 LX ($21,990), Nissan Sentra S ($21,590), Mazda3 2.5 S ($24,150), Subaru Impreza Base ($23,495).

I make decent money and I would never spend more than $25K on a car. Of course you can also get used cars with low mileage.

As far as people in rural areas. They deserve every negative thing that they keep voting for.
by aerhardt | 2025-04-18 18:03:19+00:00
I am only on OpenAI because they have a native Mac app. Call me old-school but my preferred workflow is still for the most part just asking narrow questions and copying-pasting back and forth. I've been playing with Junie (Jetbrain's AI agent) for a couple of days, but I still don't trust agents to run loose in my codebase for any sizeable amount of work.

Does anyone know if Google is planning native apps? Or any wrapping interfaces that work well on a Mac?
by bob1029 | 2025-04-18 18:03:47+00:00
> An executive has 48 hours to convince his CEO why AI can't replace human talent

> The "Replace or Justify" Ultimatum

It is hard to take this kind of stuff seriously. Actual businesses that produce value do not operate in this way.

I feel like one of the more important lessons I picked up along my journey is that ultimatums are a really bad idea. Instead of creating dialogue and exploring the entire gradient of in-between goldilocks solutions, you've narrowed an ~infinite spectra into 2 discrete, highly adversarial/tribal bins. This is not a good premise for a conversation around AI and how it applies to business. I don't know of a single business venture that couldn't extract some value from AI. Perverting this notion into an all or nothing narrative is so ridiculous to me.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-04-18 18:04:04+00:00
I'm surprised you haven't encountered paper maps that are wrong. I had one with a trail that (unbeknownst to me) hadn't been maintained in decades. I followed it to an unmarked cliff and injured myself going around rather instead of backtracking several miles like I should have. Digital maps tend to be much better about information freshness unless you're printing the latest maps from different sources before every trip.
by deepsun | 2025-04-18 18:04:08+00:00
It always, always is relative. People compare themselves with neighbors/TV, not with themselves 50 years ago.

Totally agree with you, don't know why so many downvotes. But important point is wealth is never absolute, but comparative. And that's where inequality comes into play. Almost all revolutions happen because of inequality.

I've met Silicon Valley multi-millionaires why cried they are poor and how those damn billionaires gentrifying them from their lovely neighborhoods.

I'm against forced equalization of incomes, but on the long run that's what keeps the system stable. Unless you are Norway, of course, where people strongly believe equalization is good, and post everyone's compensation on public (well, taxes, but it's easy to get comp from taxes).

UPDATE: so the metric we should look at is Gini index, not GDP or PPP.
by hyperman1 | 2025-04-18 18:04:12+00:00
I love working with postgres, but this is one array where it needs a lot more love. If I deploy MongoDB it takes the whole machine and does its thing. With postgres, you have extremely minimalistic defaults, and then you have to turn a zillion knobs before it does what it should.

For beginners, it is a huge footgun, that makes people assume bad performance while evaluating. For the experienced PG admin, it is an annoiance and a time waster. Oh, the VM just gained 64GB RAM? PG will sit there and stare at it.

Apart from that, basically everyone starts with the PG guidelines or a generated template(25% for this, 25% divided by number of sessions for that). Then you keep wondering how much performance you left on the table.
by francasso | 2025-04-18 18:05:40+00:00
I remember having multiple issues doing this in rust, but can't recall the details. Are you sure I would just be able to have whatever refs I want and use them without the borrow checker complaining about things that are actually perfectly safe? I don't remember that being the case.

Edit: reading wavemode comment above "Namely, in Rust it is undefined behavior for multiple mutable references to the same data to exist, ever. And it is also not enough for your program to not create multiple mut - the compiler also has to be able to prove that it can't." that I think was at least one of the problems I had.
Show HN: (bits) of a Libc, Optimized for Wasm
by ncruces | 2025-04-18 18:06:25+00:00
I make a no-CGO Go SQLite driver, by compiling the amalgamation to Wasm, then loading the result with wazero (a CGO-free Wasm runtime).

To compile SQLite, I use wasi-sdk, which uses wasi-libc, which is based on musl. It's been said that musl is slow(er than glibc), which is true, to a point.

musl uses SWAR on a size_t to implement various functions in string.h. This is fine, except size_t is just 32-bit on Wasm.

I found that implementing a few of those functions with Wasm SIMD128 can make them go around 4x faster.

Other functions don't even use SWAR; redoing those can make them 16x faster.

Smooth sort also has trouble pulling its own weight; a Shell sort seems both simpler and faster, while similarly avoiding recursion, allocations and the addressable stack.

I found that using SIMD intrinsics (rather than SWAR) makes it easier to avoid UB, but the code would definitely benefit from more eyeballs.

See this for some benchmarks on both x86-64 and Aarch64: https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3/actions/runs/145169318...
by justin66 | 2025-04-18 18:06:27+00:00
> I couldn't imagine anyone waxing nostalgic for the UX of an old word processor app.

This is a very strange sentiment in general, since word processors are pretty much the only retro software that's worth keeping and using today - professional writers often hang onto them. It's especially strange to hear in a place where people routinely use fifty year old text editors.
by kimiabazaar | 2025-04-18 18:06:40+00:00
WebChatter is an AI-powered assistant that lets you chat with any web content — including articles, PDFs, and YouTube videos — to instantly extract insights, summarize information, or ask questions in real time. Designed for researchers, professionals, and knowledge workers, WebChatter saves hours of reading and context-switching by turning passive content into interactive conversations.

Whether you're trying to understand a dense scientific article, scan a lengthy report, or pull key ideas from a video, WebChatter helps you do it faster and smarter. We’re actively collecting feedback and offering early users 1:1 onboarding and exclusive beta access to shape the future of the product.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-18 18:06:46+00:00
The deep connections of the current goings-on to the tech sector elite, and to ycombinator folks specifically, plus the extreme relevance of all of it to the business landscape have got to be really making moderation here hellish.

It's super-relevant to topics that are often solidly in HN's wheel-house, but it's all "political" and comes with all kinds of above-average flame-war potential built in.
by mdp2021 | 2025-04-18 18:06:55+00:00
And now, the worst of both worlds ("A bear wielding a knife"):

John has a special issue. He calls for support. Support is made of low paid personnel with no real knowledge of the product; during the call, they encouraged John by telling him that his issue is solved by - non-existent - features in the product, that the LLM aiding the "human interfaces to clients" matmulshitted.

John is rightfully upset for a number of reasons. (Happened a few weeks ago.)
by ben7799 | 2025-04-18 18:07:10+00:00
Obviously I've had access to those for a long time. I would still say they are nowhere near as good as published material. And sometimes I've seen the community text ones actually be more correct.

Really a question of how much you pay for it. Sounds like some plans are $25/month, that's enough to just buy tons of published material instead. I paid $5 for a lifetime membership.. very worth it.
by mrangle | 2025-04-18 18:07:39+00:00
The author wants us to believe that their insurance provider reduces their customer service success to the single factor of whether or not someone has an Android phone?

Unmitigated bs.

Use your web browser and find an in-network hospital via the website. Like a person.

This article stretches the limits of credibility.

Garbage premise and clickbait title.

I could continue on to talk about the "walled garden" issue, but I don't think that step is even warranted given the facts.
by jmward01 | 2025-04-18 18:07:52+00:00
I love taking ideas to extremes, but in this case I don't advocate for that. What I mean is, diversity should be sought out and thought of as a positive, but that doesn't mean you throw out what factors you believe are relevant. I am advocating for incorporating diversity, searching for surprise, into hiring, not making it the only factor. Seeking out surprise is the fastest way to learn what you don't know so that you can use that knowledge for the future.
by gwbas1c | 2025-04-18 18:08:00+00:00
As I read the article, I actually wasn't convinced that people were needed over AI in this case.

Why?

When some people hire, they have their subordinates sit in meetings all day, doing occasional tasks, and merely feeding their enlarged egos. If all you want are subordinates to feed your ego, AI is exceptionally good at that. Plenty of people love talking to chatbots.

The problem is the author never really explained what the roles were. Were they customer facing sales calls? Did the CEO really believe that customers will be happy to talk to a sales robot?

Thus, because I believe these roles aren't customer facing, I suspect that these roles are either feeding someones' ego by sitting in meetings all day, or otherwise non-customer-facing roles that handle aggregating information. This makes me wonder if a smaller group of people, who know how to use AI well, will outperform a larger group of people without AI.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-18 18:08:05+00:00
“Easter" or something similar, is only the name in English and German, which weren't spoken at the time the celebration of the holiday began. There is some evidence that that germanic name came from a pagan goddess with a fertility celebration around the time that the resurrection celebration occurred in the Christian calendar, but the celebration itself didn't originate with that pagan celebration. (And the elements other than the name you refer to have no evidence of connection to the pagan goddess, and appear to have attached to Easter later, not been brought in with the name.)
by patagonia | 2025-04-18 18:08:20+00:00
My sailing buddies and I are always asking each other, “why is sailing dying”? Sailing is a very self selecting sport. People generally love it or leave it very quickly. We are in the “love it” camp, and we are always super excited to take people that are curious about sailing out sailing. I would strongly suggest not taking classes. Just get on a boat. It is hilarious how easy it is to find a sailor that will take you out. And if you enjoy that experience, people are always looking for crew to help them sail their boat. So I’d suggest your next step would then be that. You’ll learn so much faster going out for Wednesday night races at your local club. You’ll learn both how to sail and whether you even enjoy it. A lot of places even have a “crew seat” where you literally show up, not knowing anyone, and people see you sitting there and ask your qualifications and if they have room on their boat and are comfortable with the match, take you, a complete newbie and stranger, out sailing.

Classes make it easy feel like you’ve learned “levels” of sailing or to feel like you could rent a boat in the Caribbean. But, they hide a lot of what sailing is really about. Maintenance, rigging, de-rigging, showing up for no wind, learning the rules of sailing, etc, etc. They also miss out on one of the most amazing aspects of sailing: community. Learning from other sailors is key. You’ll borrow parts from (and lend to) other sailors. You’ll help organize races for them and they for you.

Sailing is a beautiful, beautiful lifelong endeavor that I wish everyone could be exposed to and pursue if they’d like to. Look up your local yacht club or Hobie / beach cat fleet or other sailing club and just ask if you can get a ride. Show up early, listen and do what you’re asked, be polite, stay until the boat is totally put away, and repeat. Try different boats with different clubs and people eventually.

Eventually, maybe take a class (RYA not ASA) to formalize your knowledge or fill in the gaps. You’ll clearly know what they are at that point. Eventually maybe buy your own boat, or do as many people do, just keep crewing. Truly good crew are really rare and boat owners will love and appreciate you.

I think you’ll love it.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-04-18 18:08:20+00:00
Poor choice of example since "don't be evil" was just nerd marketing. Google opened negotiations to purchase DoubleClick, infamous for slimy online advertising techniques, as far back as 2007 and absorbed DoubleClick in 2008. Enshittification and advertising dominance was always their endgame; we're seeing them lose anti-trust trials just now because of it.

It probably caused some unease among Google employees but not enough for any of them to walk away from their annual double digit stock price growth.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-18 18:08:33+00:00
This is presented as an argument against objective metrics, but a) the alternative is subjective metrics, which is even worse, b) "disparate impact" is just another metric subject to Goodhart's law, and c) resources aren't the only thing that determines test scores.

If you're poor but determined, you can't afford a high cost test prep course, but you can go to the library. The rich kid has their private tutor come to their house and then saves time that allowed them to be chauffeured to tennis lessons. The poor kid has to take the bus to the library and spend twice as long with the study books and then doesn't get any tennis lessons, but it's possible for someone to do that if they actually care about it. Whereas, how is a low-income white kid supposed to overcome a race quota where every slot for their race was already filled by nepotism?
by goku12 | 2025-04-18 18:08:54+00:00
I would argue that this is more of an ambiguity caused by the English language, rather than a deliberate twisting of the headline. The word 'support' has at least two meanings - 'to advocate for' and 'to provide services for'. It's easy to mix them up when both are equally probable. But the real meaning you mentioned is evident in the article itself.

But even with that meaning, it still sounds like a conflict of interest. Musk retained the staff that he needed to sign-off on his space operations, while no such considerations were given to their colleagues. Further, those retained staff will feel the pressure to not offend Musk in any way, because he has demonstrated that they're disposable.
by gmwhitebox_dev | 2025-04-18 18:08:56+00:00
Thank you!

To approach it from first principles, I didn’t really follow any one specific tutorial or course. I really just started from the bottom up. Starting with my Tensor module, I familiarized myself with the math operations, backprop, computation graphs, autodiff… etc. That was the hardest part honestly, but it set the foundation for everything else in the system.

Once I had that working, the rest (activations, loss functions, optimizers, layers, transformers) started to make a lot more sense. Writing it all myself gave me full control, removed the abstraction, and helped me to really internalize how each part of the system fits together, and why it works - not just how.

Here’s some resources I found helpful, I also have some links to additional resources in the project readme:

- Deep Learning Foundations and concepts: Book by Christopher Bishop. Mainly covers theory and statistical ML.

- Natural Language Processing with Transformers: Book by Lewis Tunstall, Leandro von Werra, and Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face). Good for understanding real world NLP/ LLMs.

- UvA Deep Learning Tutorials: Website for building and understanding DL modules, has a lot of project-based notebooks (tutorial 7 on GNNs was very helpful).

- Deep Learning: Book by Goodfellow, Bengio & Courville. Covers a lot of foundational theory and math.

- Stanford’s CS231 Course: This is fully available online, with lecture videos and coding walk-throughs. Super helpful for learning about backprop, CNNs, and deep nets, etc.

- The Annotated Transformer: Website by Harvard NLP. This goes over the ‘Attention is All You Need’ paper in an understandable way with example code

- codingvidya.com: A good aggregator for finding ML books and learning resources.

- Andrej Karpathy’s YouTube channel, and his micrograd and tinygrad Repos are super helpful resources, especially when learning by building from scratch.

I’m still learning as I go, but I’m happy to share what’s worked for me so far! Hope this helps!
by pengaru | 2025-04-18 18:09:00+00:00
My buddy has a 36' Pearson in the Berkeley marina, sometimes we bring folks out with us.

You can also join the Berkeley Yacht Club (BYC) without a boat, it's not too expensive. There's a bar and social events, good way to meet sailors with boats in the marina and go sailing on a variety of them. They hold races in the bay pretty often, and are sometimes desperate for able bodied ballast.
by freedomben | 2025-04-18 18:09:37+00:00
Yes I agree almost completely with what you wrote. However, I disagree with your premise that GP was "critiquing the actions and policies of a political movement":

> Critiquing the actions and policies of a political movement

Here is their entire comment:

> No, the anti-DEI stuff is predicated on the idea that civil rights are bad and that white (straight dude) rule is good. There's not really any point in sugar-coating it or pretending the idea has any kind of intellectual or legal legitimacy. It is entirely driven by animus and resentment. The folks driving it aren't even hiding it.

Reading that yet again, it seems to me to be clearly making an argument that we shouldn't listen to any of the points/arguments/information they present because they don't have pure motives.

From the wikipedia page on Ad Hominem:

> this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than the substance of the argument itself.

If you believe that GP was critiquing actions and policies, can you kindly point out which actions and policies?
by timewizard | 2025-04-18 18:09:42+00:00
The discussion of rust and ASN.1 libraries and interoperability with other languages might be. The relative differences between the two libraries might be. The efforts of the author to get their library into Python might be.

Simply advertising a different project, with all the standard "rust tropes," is not what most people would consider relevant. It's hamfisted and weird.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-18 18:10:00+00:00
Teams' core problem is that the actual Teams-section is more like a bulletin board than a chat system, almost like it was targeting that weird impulse companies had for a few years to build "company facebooks" or whatever.

The real chat part is cordoned off in ad-hoc channels that individual users can sticky, but that aren't "structural" and can't really have order imposed on them, if that makes sense.

It's like if Slack only had the DM and group-message feature, and no channels.
by from-nibly | 2025-04-18 18:11:11+00:00
> Gollygee I hope this gets better

It's not. I'm not a history buff so I won't speak for the past. But right now there is a huge accountability problem.

Government literally can't exist without ignoring accountability.

Corporations are incentivised to ignore accountability.

Individuals want to ignore accountability.

You only have control over yourself. If you want your life to go better then you have to take the accountability.

Don't put all your eggs in one basket, have backups, understand how the things you participate in work. Ask questions like "why would this be free".

It's a long road for everyone but if you want to be safe and happy you gotta take the solutions into your own hands.
by timewizard | 2025-04-18 18:11:51+00:00
> If the deal is made or influenced

You start your statement with a conditional. So, in your estimation, how often is it true?

> But it's not optimal.

And your assumption is that it would be cheap to optimize literally every decision we make regardless of it's total impact on the actual outcomes? It's almost never worth the actual costs for the given gains.

> this story sounds like an argument in favor of AI to me.

It's sounds like an argument for you to achieve more real world experience to me.
Thinking to add in open-source lib a support of any model and MCP
by kateyan | 2025-04-18 18:13:02+00:00
Hey,

I have a platform to test and improve prompts, with observability. It has its own SDK.

I'm thinking to add in the context of the model rules, like:

You have next skills: ``` - web_call({'query': '...query'}) - make_plan({"step1": {"expected_results": "", actions: "", "where_we_are": }}) - update_plan("step_name": {"expected_results": "", actions: "", "where_we_are": }) ```

If you wish to make a call you need to make a call: ``` <tool_call> { "tool_name": "", "parameters": { // parameters of the tool }, } </tool_call> ```

---- It's a prompting technique which i use for models like deepseek. But, i wonder if ppl here are iinterested to have a python lib which will support MCP in the same similar way with all other models, and it will help to choose easily whoich model performs best.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-18 18:13:09+00:00
In my comment, I am using it as signal wrt infra cost affordability. I agree it is not a bad solution as population declines continue where it occurs, versus having no road. Look at infrastructure cost projections to understand if it is within the light cone of economic affordability. If it can't be paid for with a combination of taxes and debt, it isn't possible.