MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by miki123211 | 2025-04-29 22:18:46+00:00
China's population is almost twice that of the US and EU combined. If what you're lacking for is patients, there's no better place to go to.

Not only that, but we're also a lot more obsessed with patient privacy. If somebody dies of cancer, there's no headline news about them dying of a cancelled trial, even if that's actually what happened. If patient data leaks, there's both a PR nightmare and legal consequences for the institution. That drives priorities.

I wouldn't be surprised if (some) Chinese researches are allowed to SELECT * from citizens where disease = 'bone_cancer', whereas researchers in the US have to send people to waiting rooms in hopes of catching an eligible patient[1]. Unless this gets changed, things won't get better.

We really need to start optimizing for min(deaths) instead of min(bad_pr) or min(outrage). That's a genuinely hard problem in a democratic society that respects the right to free speech (which, to be clear, is a very good society to live in IMO). In a way, it's a good problem to have.

[1] is a really good and accessible overview of why drug trials are so hard and what could be done to make them easier, it's worth checking out for anybody who wants to dive deeper into the subject.

[1] https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/drug-developm...
by LorenPechtel | 2025-04-29 22:19:05+00:00
Blackstart assumes *no* power is available, period. Nothing but human muscle power. Thus the first stage is always either a human pulling a starter cord or the like, or a human building up energy in some fashion that is then dumped into the system to produce a bigger surge than is possible by direct muscle power.

And, despite the news reports, this is not a true blackstart. Some power survived.
by pkdpic | 2025-04-29 22:19:28+00:00
Literally anything written by Liu Cuxin. Not overtly positive all the time but always infused with a deep historical optimism about humanity and the power of science + engineering.

Also I second Ministry for the Future.

Reading the newer translation of We right now also and the first 1/2 or so is weirdly positive. Not what I remembered at all.
by rvz | 2025-04-29 22:19:29+00:00
> The Windows version of our application was ~2MB and included both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries. WTF are they doing shipping a 250MB screen recorder?

Electron.

> So, IMO, they didn't learn their lesson. The whole article makes them look foolish.

The lesson is to do better testing and write automated tests and don't roll your own updater.
by jmyeet | 2025-04-29 22:19:52+00:00
Used cars respond to market forces too.

If new cars become much more expensive, used cars will become much more expensive. This isn't even a theoretical idea. The exact thing happend in 2020-2021 when you couldn't buy a new car.

This is what many don't understand about tariffs in general: you put tariffs on foreign goods and anything exempt will simply raise their prices to match.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-29 22:19:56+00:00
Not really. It really is that simple. It's just dictionary decompression, and it's just halting it at some limit.

It's just nobody usually implements a limit during decompression because people aren't usually giving you zip bombs. And sometimes you really do want to decompress ginormous files, so limits aren't built in by default.

Your given language might not make it easy to do, but you should pretty much always be able to hack something together using file streams. It's just an extra step is all.
by intermerda | 2025-04-29 22:20:02+00:00
You can extend the "free market ideologues" to include more groups such as those who were very concerned about free speech for exactly four years from 2021-2024. Same people were concerned about politicization of justice department, but only when certain Presidents are in office. Same goes for "respect for constitution". "Family values" was abandoned quite a while ago.

Wilhoit’s Law has never been truer.
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-29 22:20:15+00:00
What did the military do on Jan 6? They stood back and did nothing.

That wasn’t an actual coup because some Capitol Police had the balls to do their job and Vice President Pence is a patriot.

I’m sure the next time around anyone “untrustworthy” in the police force will have been removed, and the national Guard in surrounding states will have routine training in Alaska.
by divan | 2025-04-29 22:21:07+00:00
I'm working in Quest 3 almost every day. I use Immersed, as it implements virtual displays for my MacBook better than others, but I'm impressed with the Meta ecosystem. Granted, social interaction is still awkward without proper face expressions, but it feels closer each year to the depicted vision.

I recently travelled and needed to work (coding and video editing in DaVinci) a lot in hotels and random places. I can't bring large screens everywhere (and I hate to work with small fonts and screens), and Quest 3 was a perfect fit here. Sometimes at home or office (I have a private one), I just don't want to sit on my buttoks all the time, so I put on VR goggles and can keep working in any position (lying on a sofa or even sunbathing outdoors).

As soon as new XR/MR glasses become lighter (there are some good ones already - Visor, Beyond BigScreen 2, etc), more and more people will discover how usable and optimized for work this tech is.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-04-29 22:21:55+00:00
I am kind of surprised that the collection of people at the tops of all the big companies commanding so many billions, don't have some sort of behind the scenes levers they can pull to make him squeal like a pig, elected office or no.

I can only assume they're all actually largely ok with it.

I would not have imagined that they just never thought about things like that in general and now have actually no idea what to do now that this kind of situation has happened. I have no previously considered reactions or plans for most things and life just smacks me in the face like I've been walking with my eyes closed, but I'm a hapless midwit.
by ferguess_k | 2025-04-29 22:22:43+00:00
I look forward to a world where people no longer need to sacrifice their curiosity to earn bread, clothes and basic housing. UBI would be a good start, but with the resources at hand we should be able to do more.

I look forward to a world where potentials are promptly discovered and put to be nurtured, instead of being wasted or randomly thrown to the society. Every one willing to share what they have learned or made are welcomed.

I look forward to a world that prevention of physical and mental illness is more recognized than treating them, or worse, extracting value from them.

I look forward to a world that citizens do not hesitate to speak out when they identify anything worrying. That is, they feel that they own the world, not be owned as some sort of human resources.

I look forward to a world that technological advance frees people, not keeping them enslaved.

I look forward to a world where monetary profit is not the dominating indicator for success and failure of an organization.
by holoduke | 2025-04-29 22:22:50+00:00
Just a walk in a random big city in China reveals how fast they are progressing. The speed of things changing is ridiculous. In almost every field they are getting better. And fast. Thats what you can achieve when your country has 40 years of mass production experience. The thing I hope most for is that China gets its own high performing chips so that companies like Nvidia really get a competitor.
by SamPatt | 2025-04-29 22:22:56+00:00
Nice photo. Here's what it told me:

Where on Earth the photographer had to be

Because M 13 sits at +36 ° declination, it never rises for far-southern latitudes and hugs the horizon below about 30 ° S. The high elevation in the shot (no obvious atmospheric extinction gradient) suggests a mid-northern site—e.g., the U.S. Midwest such as Michigan (your home turf), Canada, northern Europe, etc. The star field alone can’t narrow it further than that.

So, in practical terms: the camera was pointed toward Hercules to capture M 13 and nearby NGC 6207, almost certainly from a mid-northern latitude location on Earth.
by _AzMoo | 2025-04-29 22:23:11+00:00
> I somewhat feel that there was a generation that had it easier

I don't think so. I've been doing this for nearly 35 years now, and there's always been a lot to learn. Each layer of abstraction developed makes it easier to quickly iterate towards a new outcome faster or with more confidence, but hides away complexity that you might eventually need to know. In a lot of ways it's easier these days, because there's so much information available at your fingertips when you need it, presented in a multitude of different formats. I learned my first programming language by reading a QBasic textbook trying to debug a text-based adventure game that crashed at a critical moment. I had no Internet, no BBS, nobody to help, except my Dad who was a solo RPG programmer who had learned on the job after being promoted from sweeping floors in a warehouse.
by II2II | 2025-04-29 22:23:29+00:00
> I don't like the 300 search limit, because it scratches my brain - "do I need to search for this? can I find it some other way? should I just use duckduckgo for this search?"

I have been using the free 300 search trial for several months now, and have not found it limiting. In a way, it highlights the strength of the search engine since I devote more time to reading the sites it directs me to than sifting through search results or refining my query. In other words, I am spending less time searching and more time pursuing the fruits of those searches. I am also okay with the idea of using different search engines for different purposes. I have a general idea of which queries will produce good results on DDG or Google, and use those search engines in those cases. I also have a general idea of which queries will generate terrible results on DDG or Google, and reach for Kagi in those cases.

> I'm largely allergic to subscriptions. Still, if I can spend $360/year on Disney/Hulu/Max, I should be able to upgrade my search experience.

I am allergic to subscriptions, which is likely why I am working within the bounds of Kagi's free trial for as long as I can. Once I have used up those queries, there will be a decision to make. Thankfully they are advertising $5/month for 300 queries. It's something that I can live with, even if I do go hog-wild with queries using the model that I have settled upon. Still, I have to get over that allergy first.
by cogman10 | 2025-04-29 22:23:46+00:00
> Pretty much everyone I know will throw down an O(n^2) algorithm or whatever in their first pass and replace it with something more thought out once they have the time to think deeply about it.

Most of the times I've seen this, the faster algorithm is literally just a dictionary with a well-defined key.

I honestly do not understand why that's not the first solution most devs think of and why n^2 seems to dominate.

As an example, I've seen code like this quiet a bit

result = [] for (item: items) { for (item2: items) { if (item != item2 && item.foo == item2.foo) { result.add(item) } } }

Easily replaced and massively easier to read as

result = [] itemFoo = HashSet() for (item: items) { if (itemFoo.contains(item.foo)) result.add(item) else itemFoo.add(item.foo) }

The mindset of re-looking for values in a collection you are already iterating through is just foreign to me. The first solution for something like this in my mind is always utilizing dictionaries.
by munificent | 2025-04-29 22:23:52+00:00
> When you write simple code, you spend less time writing code.

I have found that many engineers write complex code faster than simple code.

You're given requirements like: "the program should do W when the user does A, X when the user does B, Y when the user does C, and Z when the user does D." And a naive programmer will happily trot off and write a pile of code for each of those cases, often with a lot of redundancy between them.

It takes more time and judgement to analyze those cases, see what they have in common, and distill a simpler underlying model for the behavior that encompasses all of the requirements.
by ivape | 2025-04-29 22:24:06+00:00
That's very easy to do. A prompt I regularly use is a "council" system. For example:

"I believe I have been contacted by the supernatural. Here are the details <details>. Please form a council of seven people: 1) Secular scientist 2) Religious scientist 3) Paranormal historian 4) Secular Psychologist 5) Religious psychologist 6) Carl Jung 7) Richard Dawkins. The council should all be independent and provide their own objective analysis. Please have them create a final report and conclusions at the end".

Your council can be anything, a law firm, a jury, a parent teacher association, whatever you want, and as you can see, you can throw in known people as well. This can all be done with one prompt. It's one my favorite things to do.
by jbm | 2025-04-29 22:24:06+00:00
I have hard similar things but I think that's an exaggeration. When I tell GPT o3 or o4-high to assume a professional air, it stops acting like a meat-based AIs on r/politics; specifically, it stops making inane assumptions about the situation and starts becoming useful again.

For example, I had a question from a colleague that made no sense and I was trying to understand it. After feeding the question to GPT 3o, it aggressively told me that I made a major mistake in a quote and I had to make major changes. (It would be OK if this is what the colleague had said, but this wasn't the case). In reality the colleague had misunderstood something about the scope of the project and GPT had picked up on the other person's opinion as the "voice of reason" and just projected what it thought he was saying in a stronger way.

I changed its instructions to "Be direct; but polite, professional and helpful. Make an effort to understand the assumptions underlying your own points and the assumptions made by the user. Offer outside-of-the-box thinking as well if you are being too generic.". The aggro was immediately lost, and it instead it actually tried to clarify what my colleague was saying and being useful again.

I agree with those who say the vanilla version is sycophantic, but the plain talk version has far too many bad habits from the wrong crowd. It's a bit like Monday; lots of aggro, little introspection of assumption.
by n_ary | 2025-04-29 22:24:21+00:00
In another news, I intend to uninstall duolingo effective immediately and actually in an effort to support human-first businesses and enroll into a real language course class where I get to talk to real human beings with same goal and have actual exams and people trained in teaching particular language.

For me, Duolingo(uber for Anki flash cards of preliminary words for a 3 day tourist in a new country) was always an odd product. It is very popular among people because they can immediately learn how to say hi/hello, thanks, please in new language but after that, it is akin to learning to swim by reading different tips and tricks, without actually ever touching water or doing the act.
by jayofdoom | 2025-04-29 22:24:48+00:00
Doing 'the cloud' right at scale has to involve running your own cloud at some point. We should not pollute the good ideas around API-delivered infrastructure with the more questionable idea of outsourcing your infrastructuree.

OpenStack has been around 15 years powering this idea at scale for huge organizatons, including Wal-Mart, Verizon, Blizzard and more.
by socalgal2 | 2025-04-29 22:25:17+00:00
I don't know if it's the same people but many of the comments here seem the opposite of the comments on EUs rules where people say they're targeting specific companies and comments say "no, the rules are such than all companies over a certain size are covered".

If the rule is 85% domestic than any company can do it.

I'm not saying the tariffs are good. Only that their point is to get things made domesticly
by CMay | 2025-04-29 22:26:27+00:00
Ok, so Qwen3 32B works now with the update.

It seems much better than the Qwen3 30B A3B for quantized local use from what I can tell so far. Not sure yet how it compares to Gemma 3, but it's at least not clearly worse. It definitely does a much better job of formatting output in a friendlier way than Gemma does, but that's not as critical to me.

I suspect many people are getting even worse results out of the A3B than I did, since I saw downloads defaulting to 3-bit quants, but even at a higher quant, for local use it just isn't there yet.

I'm sure there are plenty of use cases for the low active parameter MoE models like sentiment analysis, summaries, etc, but for anything real I'll stick to the dense models. It makes me wonder if Qwen3 has similar problems that Llama 4 had, trying to be a big MoE model with low active parameters producing spotty results.

Qwen3 32B is quite usable, though. The problem I have with it so far is that it seems worse at instruction following, language translation and inferring the meaning of my prompt than Gemma 3. This isn't ideal, because if it can't follow instructions, you can't easily shape its reasoning/response to account for its issues.

One of my prompts simply asks it to do some translation and it occasionally feeds in Chinese characters. That's just not going to be usable for that scenario. Gemma 3's language consistency and quality is closer to production ready.

Gemma 3 does have its own problems with translation though, because if you instruct it to translate and what you want to translate is "what do you know?", it will instead go on talking about its capabilities rather than translating the language. You have to use a few tricks to prevent it from doing that.
by kazinator | 2025-04-29 22:26:47+00:00
I forgot I can remove the outer parentheses, and also use infix with C-like operators, since I have those modes turned on in the REPL. (Infix is an unreleased feature, coming in TXR 300).

3> for-tree n 1 (if (n < 8) (n << 1)) (if (n < 8) (n << 1 | 1)) (format t "~b\n" n) 1000 100 1001 10 [...]
Show HN: OasRails – AutoGenerate Interactive API Docs in Rails with Yard and OAS
by achaconcom | 2025-04-29 22:26:58+00:00
I built OasRails, a Rails engine that automatically generates OpenAPI 3.1 documentation from YARD comments in your Rails controllers. It renders the docs using RapiDoc for a slick, interactive UI—no DSLs, no generators, and no dependency on RSpec or Grape.

I was inspired by FastAPI’s interactive docs and wanted something similar for Rails. After not finding anything that met my needs, I built OasRails during downtime as a freelancing dev.
by gs17 | 2025-04-29 22:27:49+00:00
It's pretty funny reading https://www.quora.com/What-made-Luis-Von-Ahn-start-Duolingo/... now:

> So, the largest part of the market was not being addressed because there was no great way to make money from them. Most people who wanted to learn a language couldn't really afford the best ways of doing it. We wanted to have a way to teach people languages for free. But not just free.

> We wanted to have the best quality of language education, and offer it for free.

Modern Duolingo feels like neither half of that sentence.
by thmoonbus | 2025-04-29 22:27:49+00:00
Ah yeah the weird propaganda that people labor to make creative output, and if you value that output and have the means, you should consider paying for it.

Also, read what I wrote: "if you want to pirate, fine, but don't act like you're performing a noble act". What specifically bugs me is less so the act - I assume few among us haven't engaged in illegal streaming, paywall bypassing, password sharing etc. - it's the weird contortions people go through to frame piracy as a noble endeavor vs. just admitting they're being too cheap to pay for something.
by gotoeleven | 2025-04-29 22:28:17+00:00
I'd honestly love to have a real discussion with people about this topic. HN comment sections, as imperfect as they may be, are afaik about the only place left on the internet where somewhat fact-based discussions of contentious topics happen.

The flagged comment is pretty inscrutable but I think I can explain the overall sentiment a bit better: half the country is under the impression that much of the science spending in this country is wasteful or even pernicious. They hear stories about studies of "racist highways" and "periods in transgender men," or the CDC claiming racism and gun control are diseases it should control, and think "why am I paying for this?". Combine this with the perception that the science establishment really shat the bed in their response to covid--lying about its origins, lying about the efficacy of masks, lying about the efficacy of the vaccine, lying about two more weeks, pushing ineffective and harmful lockdowns, etc--and half the country is ready to burn the whole thing down.

I, personally, know that science in general is a great good and should be funded. But the craziness, corruption, and dishonesty have to be excised or people are not going to support it.

To your comment in particular, the people supportive of these cuts don't think they're dragging us back to the dark ages. They think they're excising a tumor.
by layoric | 2025-04-29 22:28:43+00:00
Been using Kagi for about 18 months, and IMO well worth it. It does what is says on the tin, it's a search. You use it, it provides good results, and you're done. No fighting with ads, no making you automatically skipping the first few results because you know from experience they are promoted. You control what experience you want with specific domains. Privacy pass means you don't even have to be logged in.

One gripe would be trying to use other features while using privacy pass. Eg, maps doesn't seem to work. They are regularly improving the experience though. And that's a key difference. Google is getting worse for their ad revenue, Kagi is getting better for paying customers.
by lillecarl | 2025-04-29 22:29:33+00:00
No, but they also don't wanna sell to the entire planet. There's definitely a market for a 10$ search engine, since it doesn't make money by maximizing eyeballs it doesn't have to cater to the planet.

Not everyone has a cooled mattress, AC, car etc.. "Are all those things only for techbros"?
by timmytokyo | 2025-04-29 22:29:47+00:00
I think this is an important point. It's easy to lose track of just how bad search has gotten over the years because the enshittification has been so gradual. The replacement of search by AI is capturing so many people's imaginations because it feels like the way google felt when it first came around.

If AI replaces search, I do wonder how long before AI becomes just as enshittified as search did. You know google/OpenAI/etc will eventually need to make this stuff profitable. And subscriptions aren't currently doing that.
by boriselec | 2025-04-29 22:29:58+00:00
Good tool, I like it so far.

My biggest progress in English was when I started to read the English internet (HN, Reddit, etc.). I used an browser extension to translate words that I didn't know.

I'm learning Spanish now, but there is no content that interests me. Maybe the Spanish Wikipedia sometimes.

So this extension gives me that language exposure.
by arghwhat | 2025-04-29 22:30:51+00:00
Private tutoring for 1 hour, 3 times a week at the current rates offered by local freelancers where I live would be ballpark 1000 USD per month for a long time. If you start nitpicking about quality and put in some more serious hours I wouldn't be surprised if you hit two grand.

Language should not be reserved for people that can throw that kind of money monthly at their random hobbies, and suggesting that this is "the solution" is grotesque at best.