MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rainsford | 2025-04-17 21:12:45+00:00
I've seen the video and tried switching from pods (which I assume is the same thing as a tab, just never heard that name before) to powder with some power in the prewash compartment without prerinsing the dishes.

Other's results may vary, but I found my dishwasher would eventually get clogged with the TC approach, even though I clean the filter regularly and wasn't putting in dishes with absurd amounts of food still on them. Since I switched back to pods and prerinsing, the clogging went away. Maybe my dishwasher or the install has something goofy about it, but it was definitely a failed experiment for me. Although I still think the TC argument is a solid one in theory.
by redeux | 2025-04-17 21:12:46+00:00
The US budget for 2024 was $6.8T [0], and apparently all of DOGE's actives combined have saved us about $150B [1], or about 2% of the annual budget.

For that 2% savings Trump and Elon wrecked the Agency for International Development (USAID), Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Department of Education (ED), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), National Endowment for Democracy (NED), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Social Security Administration (SSA), and US Postal Service (USPS) [2]. That doesn't seem like a good deal to me.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_federal_bud... [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_federal_agencies_targeted_b...
by timewizard | 2025-04-17 21:12:48+00:00
That we don't have a single unified explanation doesn't mean that we don't have very good hints, or that we don't have very good understandings of specific components.

Aside from that the measure really, to me, has to be power efficiency. If you're boiling oceans to make all this work then you've not achieved anything worth having.

From my calculations the human brain runs on about 400 calories a day. That's an absurdly small amount of energy. This hints at the direction these technologies must move in to be truly competitive with humans.
by ValveFan6969 | 2025-04-17 21:12:52+00:00
I do not like those who try to play God. The future of humanity will not be determined by some tech giant in their ivory tower, no matter how high it may be. This is a battle that goes deeper than ones and zeros. It's a battle for the soul of our society. It's a battle we must win, or face the consequences of a future we cannot even imagine... and that, I fear, is truly terrifying.
by sebastiennight | 2025-04-17 21:12:54+00:00
The thing is, AGI is not needed to enable incredible business/societal value, and there is good reason to believe that actual AGI would damage both our society, our economy, and if many experts in the field are to be believed, humanity's survival as well.

So I feel happy that models keep improving, and not worried at all that they're reaching an asymptote.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-04-17 21:13:29+00:00
I suppose the method would be to derive ln(xy) = ln(x) + ln(y) and the corresponding exp(x + y) = exp(x)exp(y), then see how this lets exp(y ln(x)) coincide with repeated multiplication for integer y. Connecting this to the series definition of exp(x) would also take some work, but my textbook wasn't very big on series definitions in general.
by ajross | 2025-04-17 21:13:38+00:00
If the only way to sell a profitable product is to buy its core value-add (Google integration) from someone else, then your product isn't profitable by definition. Split off Android and Pixels become just another Fire Phone, and will compete just about as well (or worse, since the spun-off Android division wouldn't even have free Amazon integration).

Again, there are Google-free Android phones in the market today. They do very poorly.
by gnabgib | 2025-04-17 21:16:23+00:00
Discussion (160 points, 21 hours ago, 123 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43711376

Related:

2023 Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18B (235 points, 135 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37468342

2019 Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet (606 points, 384 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20944005
by sph | 2025-04-17 21:16:43+00:00
Same. In the 2000s the mIRC scripting scene was buzzing, so many interesting scripts pushing the boundaries of the language to the point of binding directly into the Win32 API to do pretty much anything. We had music players, custom GUIs, bots, colour themes, all hand crafted by teenagers. I used to spend all my days chatting and browsing mircscripts.org

It’s weird how that scene has just disappeared and no one seems to have written about it in retrospective. I keep thinking I should be the one to write about an article about that long lost art, but it’s so long ago and memory is a bit hazy.

I was so annoyed when I moved to Linux and I had to chat with KVIRC which was so inflexible and rigid compared to mIRC.
by spiffyk | 2025-04-17 21:16:44+00:00
The time the dishwasher takes to wash the dishes is time you yourself can use for literally anything else. Not to mention the savings on the water bill and the much higher quality of the wash. The only objection I can think of is if you do not have enough dishes, which means the dishwasher "locks in" the dishes for some time, but the real solution to that is to simply get extra dishes so that you have some to use while the dishwasher is running – seriously, it will pay for itself in no time.
by jdgoesmarching | 2025-04-17 21:16:50+00:00
You say deep integration, yet there is still no way to send a Gemini Canvas to Docs without a lot of tedious copy-pasting and formatting because Docs still doesn’t actually support markdown. Gemini in Google Office in general has been a massive disappointment for all but the most simplistic of writing tasks.

They can have the most advanced infrastructure in the world, but it doesn’t mean much if Google continues its infamous floundering approach to product. But hey, 2.5 pro with Cline is pretty nice.
by p_ing | 2025-04-17 21:17:24+00:00
Say something minimally negative about macOS in /r/macos. You'll be -1 in no time.

I'd like to see someone post the link of retail macOS 15 is not UNIX, only a bastardized version of macOS 15 configured in-house at Apple passed UNIX 03 cert.

Thread would probably die on the vine given the number of users in that subreddit who reference "it's UNIX"!

Reddit has entirely turned into a downvote == disagree/opinion I don't like.
by xurias | 2025-04-17 21:17:56+00:00
The ship has sailed on us being able to deal with influences like modern social media on an individual level. Modern social media like TikTok, Twitter and even YouTube Shorts are fundamentally designed to take advantage of what our brains evolved into over millions and millions of years.

The nuclear family can't do shit about it. That's just a dream, an ideological fantasy. We don't need a dream. We need real solutions. "People should take a little more responsibility" isn't a solution. It's just empty wishful thinking and part of the reason why things are so screwed up today.
by jjcm | 2025-04-17 21:18:10+00:00
I was playing around with this a ton yesterday.

One thing I was attempting to do was create an emoji that only had partial portions that had their brightness maxed, while the rest of the emoji displayed "normally". It turns out this was quite hard to do - most filters or scripts such as the one on this page simply max out the channels, which creates a "fried" look to the image.

Gimp luckily has support for this, but getting an existing image to display the "same" with the new color space proved fairly difficult. I found this curve to be the best starting point, after which I edited things from there manually: https://image.non.io/a3c227d4-56d6-40bd-a898-3879fd062cf3.we...

I used this to create a companion emoji to the :mean-jacob: emoji (https://html.non.io/emoji/mean-jacob.png) my team is quite fond of using (I'm Jacob). I made :angel-jacob:, which has a halo that shines with the brightness of a thousand suns. I don't expect my team will use it, but still it was a fun exercise: https://html.non.io/emoji/
by Suppafly | 2025-04-17 21:18:23+00:00
I started feeling bad about having used mIRC for 20ish years without paying for it so I switched to HexChat. It does everything I need and has a simpler interface, but I do sometimes miss the hacked up pirated copies of mIRC that were customized with scripts to do different things.

>Edit: Hm, seems it was some time ago I checked out the news/blog of HexChat, seems like last version was a year ago.

Pretty sure it's had security updates more recent than that, but I don't really pay attention.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-04-17 21:18:27+00:00
I can in fact, go to a different mail provider, use a different file hosting and sharing service, and use different browsers with different sync technologies.

All of that I can do _for free_ with little to no hassle.

This was not the case with IE. You are not doing a fair comparison here, and it's bordering on dishonest.
by woodruffw | 2025-04-17 21:18:45+00:00
The more general version of this is probably sops[1].

(A general problem with these kinds of “wrap GPG” tools is that you end up with “mystery meat” encryption/signatures: your tool’s security margin is at the mercy of GPG’s opaque and historically not very good defaults.)

[1]: https://github.com/getsops/sops
by zoogeny | 2025-04-17 21:19:02+00:00
It is more gut feel than a rational or carefully reasoned argument.

I think Pichai has been an exceptional revenue maximizer but he lacks vision. I think he is probably capable of squeezing tremendous revenue out of AI once it has been achieved.

I like Hassabis in a "good vibe" way when I hear him speak. He reminds me of engineers that I have worked with personally and have gained my respect. He feels less like a product focused leader and more of a research focused leader (AlphaZero/AlphaFold) which I think will be critical to continue the advances necessary to push the envelope. I like his focus on games and his background in RL.

Google's war chest of Ad money gives Hassabis the flexibility to invest in non-revenue generating directions in a way that Altman is unlikely to be able to do. Altman made a decision to pivot the company towards product which led to the exodus of early research talent.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-04-17 21:19:03+00:00
Also the AOSP calculator, of course[1,2,3].

[1] https://chadnauseam.com/coding/random/calculator-app

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2911981

[3] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3385412.3386037
by bradac56 | 2025-04-17 21:19:27+00:00
As a former Sprint/T-Mobile tier 3 System Design Network Eng I'd rather have the Exec's burned at the stake.

I've been on 300 people bridges trying to diagnose software problems (programmers blame the network 100% of the time until you smack them with facts and prove what they did) with CIO's, CTO's, I kid you not CFO's and CMO's on the line demanding 5 minute updates on hours long outages.

During a major outage the only good exec is the one we tranked in the corner not bothering me while I look at packets.
by KaiserPro | 2025-04-17 21:19:40+00:00
Underage drinking is a social problem.

The issue isn't social media is bad, the issue is that social media has no effective moderation. If an adult is hanging out at the park talking to minors, thats easy to spot and correct. there is a strong social pressure to not let that happen.

The problem is when moving to chat, not only is a mobile private to the child, there are no safe mechanisms to allow parents to "spot the nonce". Moreover the kid has no real way of knowing they are adults until it's too late.

Its a difficult problem, doing nothing is going to ruin a generation (or already has), doing it half arsed is going to undermine privacy and not solve the problem.
by simonw | 2025-04-17 21:19:53+00:00
I spotted something interesting in the Python API library code:

https://github.com/googleapis/python-genai/blob/473bf4b6b5a6...

class ThinkingConfig(_common.BaseModel): """The thinking features configuration.""" include_thoughts: Optional[bool] = Field( default=None, description="""Indicates whether to include thoughts in the response. If true, thoughts are returned only if the model supports thought and thoughts are available. """, ) thinking_budget: Optional[int] = Field( default=None, description="""Indicates the thinking budget in tokens. """, )

That thinking_budget thing is documented, but what's the deal with include_thoughts? It sounds like it's an option to have the API return the thought summary... but I can't figure out how to get it to work, and I've not found documentation or example code that uses it.

Anyone managed to get Gemini to spit out thought summaries in its API using this option?
by lnenad | 2025-04-17 21:19:55+00:00
> Honestly, too many. Software engineers can be really, really dumb. I think it has something to do with assuming they're really smart.

Maybe I am one of the stupid ones but I don't get you people.

This is going to happen whether you want it or not. The data is already out there. Our choice is either learn to use the tool so that we could have that in our arsenal for the future; or grumble in the corner that devs are digging their own graves and cry ourselves to sleep. I'd consider the latter to be stupid.

If you had issues with machines replacing your hands in the industrial age, you had a choice of learning how to operate the machines, I consider this to be a parallel.
by paxys | 2025-04-17 21:20:01+00:00
Not at all the same, because these startups are ultimately dependent on OpenAI or OpenAI-like model providers to be able to exist. So OpenAI isn't preemptively quashing competitors like Facebook did, rather moving further up and down the chain (chips -> data centers -> foundation models -> fine-tuned models -> AI-powered products) to expand their business.
by Patryk27 | 2025-04-17 21:20:26+00:00
Curiously enough, I've used to work in hospitality! (https://pwy.io/posts/mimalloc-cigarette/ & https://pwy.io/posts/memory-for-nothing/)

Our dataset wasn't so large as to warrant experimenting with GPUs - `cost(extraCpu) < cost(developerExperimentingWithGpus)` - but the CPU implementation got a lot of love; it was mostly engineering-based work, though ("how to load stuff from the disk effectively", "how to make it multi-threaded" etc.), not math-based work ("if we represented prices using $someFancyStructure, we could ...").

I like when seemingly engineering-oriented problems turn out to be way more approachable once you apply / invent / adjust some math foundations, e.g. like with Feldera (https://sigmodrecord.org/publications/sigmodRecord/2403/pdfs...) - wouldn't figure something like this myself in a hundred years, I'd just probably apply maps on top of caches on top of whatever else I could pile until it works!
How will AI swarms coordinate?
by ondrejgon | 2025-04-17 21:20:27+00:00
AI agent swarms are coming, but how will they coordinate? For now I can have main agent calling other agents as tools (think n8n), but say I want to deploy 10 AI coders? How will they communicate?

Will there be an AI senior dev making sure each piece of code falls into its place?

Or will there be a human in a loop coordinating all of them through some sort of dashboard?

To be clear I am not talking about Lindy deploying 100 instances of the same agents in parallel. I am talking about advanced agents that work on big tasks that require planning and cooperation.
by Symbiote | 2025-04-17 21:20:56+00:00
I've used the type that are common in bars/pubs/nightclubs in the UK and Denmark. They take 20 minutes or so to heat the water, then each cycle is just 2 minutes or so. The glasses are loaded on trays, so it's best to have a place to load up a tray and another for them to cool down.

This kind of thing: https://www.buzzcateringsupplies.com/classeq-c500-gw-glasswa...

I've also used one three times as wide in a small food factory for cleaning equipment, mixing bowls and so on. This was even more powerful, and could clean greasy pots and bowls quickly. It was hot and steamy while unloading it.

Like this: https://www.buzzcateringsupplies.com/mach-utensil-washer-130...

There's probably something in between for restaurants

Presumably this: https://www.buzzcateringsupplies.com/classeq-pass-through-di...

And something like this for somewhere huge, maybe a large school or office: https://www.buzzcateringsupplies.com/warewashing/commercial-...
by benbridle | 2025-04-17 21:21:02+00:00
Oh I think I see what you mean now, you're talking about the encoding of the Torque source code that gets fed into the assembler. To be honest I'd never really considered anything other than UTF-8, the parsing is all implemented in Rust which requires strings to be valid UTF-8 anyway. Are you wanting to write Torque code with a non-Unicode text editor, or are you thinking about how the document encoding affects the handling of string literals inside the assembler?

Some kind of table syntax would be useful for character mappings, but I'm not sure what it'd look like or if it'd be applicable outside of dealing with characters. I'll think more on that.
by tptacek | 2025-04-17 21:21:15+00:00
These threads are so weird. There almost certainly is a thread you can go read on a mailing list about this where people discussed this ad nauseam. But nobody is going to go out of their way to prove this to you. We have the before/after picture of the WebPKI with respect to root programs actively managing, and disregarding the concerns of systems administrators and enterprise customers. It's the world of Certificate Transparency, LetsEncrypt and TLS 1.3. The "won't anybody please think of the middlebox operators" perspective, which I'll grant still has some currency in the IETF, is almost completely discredited.
by overfeed | 2025-04-17 21:21:42+00:00
> But if your distributed file system is geographically redundant

Redundancy and backups are not the same thing! There's some overlap, but treating them as interchangeable will occasionally result in terrible outcomes, like when a config change that results in all 5/5 datacenters fragmenting and failing to create a quorum, then finding out your services have circular dependencies when you are trying to bootstrap foundational services. Local backups would solve this, each DC would load last known good config, but rebuilding consensus necessary for redundancy requires coordination from now-unreachable hosts.
by artimaeis | 2025-04-17 21:21:44+00:00
She spent a lot of words making really solid arguments about how segregation has taken hold in some of the most influential and profitable sectors of the modern world. Let’s not pretend that casting people from it does not have consequences.

The technocracy does not tolerate other communities - that’s also another of her points. The powers that drive this machine are malignant and constantly striving for monopolization and domination. Competition has become a thing to be avoided, rather than relished.
by biomcgary | 2025-04-17 21:22:15+00:00
An excellent description of a recent fundamental discovery. The post might have a bit more jargon than a non-biologist would immediately recognize, but it does convey the complexity and logic of both discovery and validation.

As a computational biologist, I enjoy the parallels between the logic of hypothesis generation and testing in biology and algorithm-development on the CS side. In both areas, asking the right big questions is important. But in other cases, recognizing the importance and application of an otherwise obscure discovery is important, e.g., CRISPR and penicillin or discovery of transformers at Google vs their application at OpenAI.
by delecti | 2025-04-17 21:22:23+00:00
> I think you can basically make a case for including or excluding transwomen in women's sports depending on whether you think inclusion or fairness is most important.

A pretty wide spread of sports have allowed trans women*, and they have not dominated. If trans women did have an outsized performance in women's sports, there'd be examples to point to. I don't think you can make an evidence-based case for fairness and inclusion being at odds, given there aren't any unfair examples of inclusion to point to.

Some of the most notable examples include weightlifting and swimming. In weightlifting, probably the sport I'd expect an unfair advantage to make itself most apparent, Laurel Hubbard got a DNF in the Olympics, and did merely pretty good in several other events. Or in swimming, another sport I'd expect body proportions to have a significant impact in, Lia Thomas, who was the center of a ton of controversy, also did merely fine.

I'm not sure there are sports where trans women would have a bigger advantage than weightlifting, if such an advantage existed. And the tiny number of trans women interested in sports means that erring on the side of inclusion (if it does turn out to be an error) would also have a tiny negative impact,

* - Pedantic side note, combining "transwomen" and "ciswomen" into single words implies that we're different base nouns. It's similar to how "chinamen" is not acceptable, but generally there's nothing wrong with "Chinese men". "Trans" and "cis" are just adjectives modifying "men" or "women".
by seadan83 | 2025-04-17 21:22:45+00:00
I don't think I agree. I'm trying to point out the 'expert-beginner' problem. We don't realize how much is involved in human intelligence. To the extent we think it is easy, that AGI will be here in a couple years. It's the same reason that in software "90% done is 90% left to go." We are way under-estimating what is involved with human intelligence.

An analogy I think is like crypto problems that would require 1 billion years to compute. Even if we find a way to get that 100x more efficient, we're still not coming up with a solution anywhere near in our lifetimes.

> Today's LLMs are capable of outperforming your average human in a variety (not all, obviously!) of fields

My impression is many of those are benchmarks that are chosen by companies to look good for VCs. For example, the video showing off Devin was almost completely faked (time gaps were cut out, tasks were actually simpler and more tailor made than they were implied to be).

Something I was trying to convey to a non-technical stake holder is that some tasks are stupid easy for humans, but insanely hard for computers - and vice versa. A big trick was therefore to delegate some things to humans and some things to computers. For example, computers are excellent at recollection and numerical computations - while humans can taste salt easily and tell you when something is too salty or undersalted trivially. In my opinion, AGI is an attempt to have computers do those things that are trivial for humans, but insanely tough for humans. There is a long, long way to go; getting that first 50% is the easy part, the last 50% (particularly the last 30% and the last 5%) IMO is several hundreds (if not thousands) of __magnitudes__ harder.
by bornfreddy | 2025-04-17 21:23:03+00:00
If you are willing to have a remote team then this is not a problem - lots of great (senior) developers in EU, Asia,... No need to pay FAANG level compensations either. Curiously enough not many US companies do that, or those that do, put rounds and rounds of interviews in front of each candidate. Which is OK I guess - if you pay FAANG salaries. But if not, maybe just limit to 3 interviews, one hour each? If that's not enough to judge a potential hire then I don't know what is. Once the hiring is fixed you should have lots of great candidates available.