MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-04-19 15:53:11+00:00
Some tools take more effort to hold properly than others. I'm not saying there's not a lot of room for improvement - or that the ux couldn't hold the users hand more to force things like this in some "assisted mode" but at the end of the day, it's a thin, useful wrapper around an llm, and llms require effort to use effectively.

I definitely get value out of it- more than any other tool like it that I've tried.
by doublerabbit | 2025-04-19 15:53:24+00:00
I found that the wow factor was friends. You went to these places with mates and enjoyed the environment. Grab a slice of pizza and play some games.

It wasn't so common to encounter arcade places in the UK so I used to dos around shopping centres. Not much of a wow factor but the wow was had having fun with mates and now this has now shifted to online and online friends making such places redundant. It's as we are now allergic to go outside.
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-19 15:53:25+00:00
Modern is tough because it isn’t hundreds of years ago.

Around me, The High Bridge between Bronx and Manhattan was built pre Civil War and abandoned for decades and still standing (and now is use again). The Hell Gate Bridge was built by the NY Central Railroad and will probably outlast the US.

Lots of 19th century infrastructure will be around for centuries, if you look at the the path of the Erie and Lackawanna railroad routes, many bridges and other infrastructure will be standing hundreds of years from now. Lots of interstate infrastructure will function for hundreds of years in rural areas with low traffic, well beyond their engineered lifespan.

Stone is the most durable material and structures are overbuilt. Steel is much cheaper but requires maintenance.
Ask HN: What are the hottest areas of *non*-LLM AI work currently?
by dira3 | 2025-04-19 15:53:35+00:00
10+ years ago, "AI" would likely refer to work in RL, evolutionary/genetic algorithms, etc.

Nowadays most of the spotlight seems centered on LLMs, CNNs, and other methods that are either human-labeled or at least reliant on human-created data, and have a static separation between "learning" and "inference".

I know that there are still non-LLM, non-CNN, non-anthropocentric topics of AI development currently, in RL and in other areas. Which would you say are the most prominent or promising today, or likeliest to come to fruition?
by stuartjohnson12 | 2025-04-19 15:54:33+00:00
I wanted to see how this compares.

---

Burj Khalifa - 828m

US Penny - 1.52mm (0.00152m)

Adding a US penny to the Burj Khalifa would therefore make it 0.000183% taller.

--

Original work - 4,000,000,000,000,000,000

OP's work - 70,000,000,000

OP's work added 0.00000175% to the current record.

---

Conclusion: adding a penny to the Burj Khalifa is actually >100x more constructive than this effort.
by Validark | 2025-04-19 15:54:47+00:00
> Proponents of all of the above are looking for a grand unifying cosmology. Dark matter and dark energy are confusing and unknown, so people want to just simplify them away. Flat earthers want to simplify away the existence of other planets. Antivaxers want to simplify away medicine.

Ironically, you are positing a grand unifying theory here by stating that detractors from mainstream opinions just want simpler answers. But isn't it simpler to just go with the mainstream opinion and go with the flow? Alternative models of the earth are typically rooted in Biblical or ancient belief systems. Any specific argument based on physics come long after a person's acceptance of, e.g., the Bible. And I can't even imagine how you might think anti-vax beliefs are simpler so I can't speak to that. Homeopathy sounds pretty dumb to me, sure, but also there are tons of reasons to distrust the medical system in the USA, I'd be surprised if anyone seriously argued against that. I can understand why people suspicious of America's medical culture of prescribing 10 medications to someone instead of lifestyle changes might see a bottle of sugar pills at the store labeled with "natural remedy" and think it could be a better alternative.

> Every new observation has completely overturned the predictions of every MOND or modified gravity theory, and they just come back with a totally different explanation to fit the new data.

That's how science works. Scientists are not prophets, they do not have the luxury of starting with all the answers. It's really disheartening to see you make these theories into an "us vs them" ego contest.

I'm guess I'm just a dyed-in-the-wool agnostic, but when I hear someone suggest an alternative theory I don't immediately feel the need to group them with everything I think is wrong with the world. Instead I think, "That's really cool they came up with a different model of the universe. I wonder how they account for everything we observe and how it will be refined over time and whether it will predict new discoveries." Even if your current theory never gets overturned, I think your attitude is a perfect example of why science is said to advance one funeral at a time. Just because they got it wrong in the past doesn't mean they can never get it right, and it doesn't mean there's a 100% certainty that you got it right.
by gruez | 2025-04-19 15:55:21+00:00
I'm disappointment how unrigorous that lawsuit is. Their argument basically relies on the fact there's a patent filing that vaguely mentions this, and that the odometer sped up even though the plaintiff's driving habits haven't changed. Those are certainly reasons to be suspicious, but aren't exactly smoking guns. Plenty of things are patented but aren't implemented in reality, and we only have the plaintiff's word that there's no other change in driving behavior that could have accounted for the extra mileage. If they're spending all this time drafting a legal complaint, surely they can do a carefully controlled empirical test?
by IngoBlechschmid | 2025-04-19 15:56:11+00:00
> speaking of climate change, global overpopulation kinda has an impact on it!

You are right, of course; but just to put some perspective to it:

If Thanos-style the population and the CO2 emissions would be cut in half, this would not be enough at all -- we need to get back to 350 ppm (or similar).

I'm writing this to counter the meme that "climate change is Africa's fault, because of their population count".
by tim333 | 2025-04-19 15:56:56+00:00
For me Ralph Baric's 2024 test testimony moved the lab leak hypothesis to pretty likely. I think that's probably "since then" depending on when then is exactly.

Also the 2023 "so friggin likely" messages. There has been various stuff dragged out into public by the court actions, leaks and subpoenas that are the hallmark of open science.
by al_borland | 2025-04-19 15:57:06+00:00
The game doesn't hold your hand, but it does guide you to discover things pretty well. I never really felt lost, which is something I've often had problem with when playing open world games. I could explore, but I could also easily get back to whatever I needed to continue progress. There was also no penalty for exploration once you can fast travel, as you can easily get out of a bad situation.

What I think is really good is that there is no one right way to do something. With some games if you can't figure out what they are trying to tell you, you hit a brick wall. With BotW, I could always figure something out, even if it wasn't "right". For example, at one point you can talk to the old man chopping down trees and the intent is for you to chop down a tree to make a bridge across a gap. For whatever reason, I didn't pick up on this. However, there was a wall that I thought I might be able to use to climb over there. It wasn't trivial (I died several times), but it taught me how to find little places on walls to recover stamina while climbing. I was still able to get over there. This lesson on climbing paid dividends throughout my entire play through, while the tree bridge mechanic was almost never needed again.

The first non-red Bokoblin (in the skull with the archer out front) probably killed me 10 times on the first play through. That was a bit frustrating, but I eventually got it. But I just ran in there and tried to fight him directly. To use tactics, you should have just gotten a bow and arrow before activating the first tower, and you can shoot the rope that suspends the hanging light inside the skull (by shooing through the hole where the skull's eye would be). This causes an explosion and gives you a big leg up in the fight. Later there are shines that help teach you how to use the various fighting mechanics, which help level up your skill controlling Link.

Most of the dying I didn't mind so much, because there was little to no penalty for it, and all felt like I was learning something. Can I jump off this high thing... nope dead... how else can I do this? I used the manual save a lot, instead of just relying on the autosave, if I was about to do something risky.
by digianarchist | 2025-04-19 15:58:40+00:00
It’s expensive to hold a long term short position against Tesla. Options expire, leveraged ETFs decay, opportunity cost. I’m sure there are some Michael Burray types that are long on short positions but as a retail investor I can’t do it.

The stock has show amazing resilience in face of continuous bad news. To summarise just the recent bad news:

- Sales are down 15% in California

- Cybertruck production has been reduced in Texas due to poor demand

- Two models have been pulled from sale in China

- RoboTaxi delayed again, this will probably never ship

- Model Y remodel delayed
Show HN: Chessophone – Listen to Chess Games
by csmeyer | 2025-04-19 15:58:44+00:00
Chessophone takes a PGN string representation of a chess game and generates music - Notes from the C major scale are added for each piece in each row of the board for each move in the game.

Games played with the same opening will sound the same until they deviate from book moves. The perceived tempo of the music speeds up as pieces are captured. Enjoy!

The Web Audio API is a bit annoying and this would be better if it used an actual <audio> tag but alas Saturday mornings are only so long.

Created with python-chess and tone.js.

Source code here: https://github.com/charliemeyer/chessophone
by throwaway290 | 2025-04-19 15:58:58+00:00
"Finance a revolution"... as if Russian or Ukrainian people are bots who can't desire freedom and non corrupt governments.

Yes many Russians send kids to study in China now, I know some of those Russians.

No most Russians don't speak Chinese but yes they get news from official media which is China aligned. Remember using VPN to work around censorship or telling people about using VPN is now illegal in Russia.

And Russia does not refuse China like UK does not refuse US... China does not need to threaten to blow anything up. Brics currency for example would be a disaster for Russia and good for China but Putin will dance to Xi's pipe because he has no other friends left.
by doublerabbit | 2025-04-19 15:59:55+00:00
You can feel the sadness from the first picture with the tarp. Such hobbies of restoration will end, the "built-to-last" has lost it's charm and it's sad. We have grown up with such high expectations for an object; "It must have X, Y, Z" turning the future is a blessing and a curse. I guess it was the way for it to be.

You have a pocket device more powerful than Apollo 13 yet to actually preform restoration upon it is near-impossible. That itself will be a skill replaced by AI and as more future devices become completely unserviceable, all of this will just fade in to the darkness. It's broke, throw away and buy anew.

Young folk today are dumbfounded on how to top-up their oil, change their wheel for their car, I do ask is this as intended?
by lIl-IIIl | 2025-04-19 15:59:59+00:00
"Increasing the limit by less than a thousandth of a percent does not make this a "world record"!"

Why doesn't it?

"If we go by that logic, I only have to validate one more example than you and claim a world record."

Yes. You can argue that it's not difficult enough or interesting enough, but you can't argue that N+1 result is not a world record.
Show HN: Web Video editor, 100% local, AI subtitle, auto cut based on volume
by jerryliuoft | 2025-04-19 16:00:52+00:00
I made this mostly to make content creation faster.

When recording a youtube video/ podcast. there's alot of downtime (silence) while looking at scripts or getting the correct item to display. So I made a webapp to automatically cut and stich the video back together then I can further edit in davinci resolve.

But I recently found out that this is crazy good for rewatching lectures or meeting recordings, No need to render, just drop the video in and watch it right away.

30min lecture can be watched in 12min!

I even added auto generation of subtitles to make studying lecture /meeting better.

Best of all everything runs locally, even the AI is running local models.

Hope HN finds this useful like it did for me!
by edelbitter | 2025-04-19 16:00:56+00:00
Android ships a feature called bootchart which you can use to prove that most of the time your phone spends booting.. it is actually far from bottlenecked on storage or compute - bugs to be fixed; not worked around with even more complexity. Heck, some phones do not even stop playing their vendors fancy animated logo when they are finished before the animation is.
by sega_sai | 2025-04-19 16:01:40+00:00
I think many people are worried, but unless there is a good alternative theory, the particle is still the simplest explanation. Over last 20 years a lot focus was on WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), but those searches ruled out a lot of parameter space that was considered sensible. For axions, people have only recently started to design detectors, so if dark matter is an axion there is hope to detect it. If we will not find anything, it remains to be seen what is the best path forward. In the end the dark matter just behaves too much like dark particle with little cross section, so it is hard to replace it by something else ...
by like_any_other | 2025-04-19 16:01:41+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43736805 is one example. Another is the Highway of Death, which inspired a Call of Duty level, but swapped the perpetrators from US to Russians [1]. Yet another might be A Time to Kill [2], based on a novel [3], inspired by a true event. Again, perpetrator and victim were swapped - in the novel and film, there are two white attackers, and the victim is black. In the real event that inspired it, the attacker was black, and the two victims were white. The subway killing of the three scoundrels in the Joker film was likewise inspired by a real event [4], but again, the antagonists were changed from black to white. Or how Dr. Who deliberately alters historical settings [5]. Especially amusing is the case of The Sum of All Fears - in the film, the villains trying to construct a nuclear bomb are neo-nazis. In the book it is based on, the villains were Palestinian terrorists. Finally, in the real event the book was inspired by [6], the uranium was stolen by Israel.

A more straightforward example is the many times that the New York Times 'mistakenly' claimed Iraq had expelled nuclear weapons inspectors, in the run up to the Iraq invasion [7]. This is more obviously false/a lie, while the prior examples use the cover of fiction to mislead.

'Small' changes, but pervasive, like water, mostly cut only one way, and they add up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_of_Death#In_popular_cu...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_to_Kill_(1996_film)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_to_Kill_(Grisham_novel)...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_New_York_City_Subway_shoo...

[5] “And we’ve kind of got to tell a lie: we’ll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won’t dwell on that. We’ll say, ‘To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we’ll summon it forth.’ - https://www.doctorwhotv.co.uk/moffat-on-diversity-in-doctor-...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_affair

[7] https://theintercept.com/2023/03/30/new-york-times-iraq-war-...
by throwaway290 | 2025-04-19 16:01:46+00:00
> don't think "covid doesn't exist" was ever a widespread position

Semantics... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/03/donald-trump...

> you could argue it's not as bad as some flus.

A flu kills at most 50 000 people per year in US. Remind me which flu killed 1+ million in 2 years and cost US 16 trillion bucks?
by greatgib | 2025-04-19 16:02:07+00:00
Doesn't necessarily have to be in an invalid state. You can have your object with a none value for the socket or a state like "not_started" and the different method will look at that to handle everything properly.

Also, it was not supposed to be used in a context manager as there is just a close method but it is the caller that decided to wrap it in a context.

But as what you suggest, indeed it would have been a great idea to add an __enter__ and do the starting there are as it would be the proper way.
by hilbert42 | 2025-04-19 16:02:48+00:00
"How do you do anything during that weekend, …?"

Easy, do what we did before mobile phones—civilization existed for thousands years and worked quite well without them (Rome built an empire sans mobile phones, so did the English). We even ran and coordinated the largest and most organized event in human history—WWII—without them!

Some of us have not yet succumbed to phone addiction (I often go for quite some days without using a phone and still have a normal life).
by lumost | 2025-04-19 16:03:04+00:00
I'd love to see some small scale experiments in geoengineering. Despite multiple climate agreements, over my life time - I have not seen any actual progress on climate change outside of technological advancement. Technology such as wind, solar, BEVs, and similar appear to be coming far too slowly to avoid catastrophe. Perhaps China's recent push on BEV and similar technologies will tip the scale, but I am skeptical.

Human's have been geoengineering for millenia via clear cutting of forests, bio engineering of crops, fertilization of fields, damming of rivers, and other activities. While there will certainly be consequences and side effects, even a partial sequestering of ~20B tonnes of CO2 per year would meet the Kyoto protocol.

Are the consequences of Geo Engineering so disastrous that we should accept the worst case scenarios of global warming.
by ghuntley | 2025-04-19 16:03:30+00:00
That's my point.

- L3 SWE II - $193,712 USD (before overheads)

- L4 SWE III - $297,124 USD (before overheads)

- L5 Senior SWE - $377,797 USD (before overheads)

These tools and foundational models get better every day, and right now, they enable Staff+ engineers and businesses to have less need for juniors. I suspect there will be [short-to-medium-term] compression. See extended thoughts at https://ghuntley.com/screwed
by fasteddie31003 | 2025-04-19 16:03:32+00:00
Am I wrong to assume that science that is harder to prove will have less impact on human wellbeing? Electricity is easy to run experiments on and prove, meaning humans can manipulate it for our benefits easy. However, the Higgs Boson was extremely difficult to prove and I see no way that it could ever benefit humanity's wellbeing. Now how could humans improve our wellbeing by manipulating dark matter?
by Amezarak | 2025-04-19 16:04:15+00:00
That’s because librarians have been making a concerted effort to “deaccession” (throw them into the dumpster or send them for pulping) old books, no matter how valuable. Often this teeters into ideological territory - old books might contain unacceptable thoughts. Libraries are now seen as entertainment centers by many librarians, not as a place to educate yourself.

In some places it’s particularly absurd, for example, here’s one that had the school libraries junk anything written before 2008: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school-board-lib...

A second awful thing is this usually goes along with the idea that “well, it’s available online” - even as those resources are lost. There’s a lot of long tail works on niche historical, scientific, and technical topics that have been lost forever, aside from the loss of serendipity from discovering this books in your library and reading them.

In the past 20 years, my local library system has deaccessioned nearly every work from Ancient Rome and Greece. This is happening not just as small local libraries like mine, though, but even at large, old research libraries.
by SamLL | 2025-04-19 16:04:53+00:00
It seems relevant to this article, and its portrayal of librarians as dangerous, that the national Institute for Museum and Library Services was recently essentially destroyed by Presidential executive order and DOGE, probably illegally, its grants largely or entirely revoked, and its employees laid off.

See, e.g., https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/11/trum...

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l...
by belter | 2025-04-19 16:05:42+00:00
The lawsuit has low chances of succeeding but not on the merits. It exposes a regulatory gray area, both in the US and in the EU. Existing laws focus on tampering, not manufacturer accuracy.

"Tesla odometer mileage vs actual miles discrepancy" - https://www.reddit.com/r/ModelY/comments/106m2dz/tesla_odome...

"...Besides the disappointing result in the range test, the Tesla Model 3 had quite an unusual issue–its onboard trip meter was way off and essentially lied about the distance covered...." - https://insideevs.com/news/747548/ev-winter-range-test-norwa...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43736091
by dventimi | 2025-04-19 16:06:46+00:00
I agree with you. "Dark Matter" (and "Dark Energy") are colorful (colorless?) names that I think helped these theories diffuse into the popular consciousness at a time when popular interest in science was at a high-water mark (remember when "chaos theory" was fashionable?). As I mentioned in another comment recently (it feels like a "Dark Matter" or "Dark Energy" headline trends on HN almost every day), this coded these theories as "exotic" or "weird" as you say, and invited speculation about Dark Matter and even an urge to overturn it among laypeople who equated "exotic" with "tendentious." But, as you suggest, personally I don't regard Dark Matter as all that exotic. We already know about some species of "dark matter": the neutrino is one, and before that there was the neutron. Oh, well. I suppose there will be another episode on HN in a day or so.
by alephnerd | 2025-04-19 16:07:03+00:00
> This is also a golden moment for EU and other countries to say “come here instead” and make that process as smooth as possible

It's walking on egg shells in other countries as well - either requiring upfront cash in the $30-50k range as proof of funds, or limited ability to convert into residency or a work visa.

More fundamentally, at least in STEM the cream of the crop of a lot of countries doesn't really immigrate to settle anymore because domestic options can pay comparable or higher than those in the EU or the Commonwealth. At best they will study abroad for grad school at a top program, work for a couple years, and then return to the old country because of family commitments and upward growth potential.

This trend already began among Koreans in the 2000s, Chinese in the 2010s, and now among Indians as well.

The EU might have had a chance attracting top talent from MENA, but xenophobia and low salaries+high taxes made UAE and KSA more enticing (German level salaries for white collar work, no taxes, and easier to blend in).