MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whydoineedthis | 2025-04-29 18:05:50+00:00
pile - a framework & cli for managing a large number of docker-compose files running on the same machine.

Inspired by a pile-of-poo SOA application where essentially every service was dependent other services such that the entire app stack needed to be run in order for any 1 service to work.

In addition to organizing the array of docker-compose files, which may live in different directories, i also add some helper functions to bring clarity to the usual docker cli output. Ugly "docker ps" output can be gathered by using pile ports, pile commands, & pile state - all of which output what you think they do, but in a way that is actually legible and useful when running 20+ containers locally.
by swatcoder | 2025-04-29 18:05:59+00:00
They seem to see tge writing on the wall and have been panicked for a while, yes.

Gobbling up rising brands kept their finances going for a while, but the grand Metaverse pivot was clearly their (much struggling) attempt to invent their own titanic platform akin to Android or iPhone.

With that not gaining as much traction as they wanted as quickly as they wanted, they're still on the hunt, as here.
by karmakaze | 2025-04-29 18:06:36+00:00
Not a deep article, but good to see the listing of players and calling out Google and Microsoft being at the forefront. Also good to see some Canadian companies in the list: D-Wave, IonQ (US acquired Canadian networking specialist Entangled Networks), and Xanadu.

Interesting to read about but of the significant step changes that could happen in my remaining lifetime this is less likely IMO. Even AGI and superintelligence may be more likely, as are global warming, national or global financial collapse, UBI that works, clean energy, breakouts of destructive conflicts, nuclear accidents, etc. It's a pretty long list but at least there's some positive ones in there too.

I'm basing this on my very limited armchair understanding that the physical qubits we have today are nothing like ideal quantum bits that we think of in Shor's algorithm. To get 1000 ideal quantum bits we might need a million qubits to deal with noise and decoherence errors, and I have no idea how fast operations with such a configuration would be.
by NelsonMinar | 2025-04-29 18:06:39+00:00
This game has gotten interesting, for instance people have figured out a single board with pieces filling the outside edges two squares deep is impervious.

I love how we're seeing emergent gameplay. That's the genius in eieio's projects. He's inventing game systems that on the surface seem simple, but at this mass scale they have interesting possibilities that people discover. And they're entirely new and invented, so we have no idea what to expect until the community figures it out.
by dizhn | 2025-04-29 18:06:49+00:00
What a roller coaster ride of a post. Great job guys. No mention of whether the feature is available now on a stable release. What release version that is. How to enable it. How to actually use it. Where to go for documentation or bugs. And congratulations on concentrating on the one top feature request. What's next? Looking at some of the 20 year old bugs that still exist?
by cornholio | 2025-04-29 18:07:14+00:00
If you give the same subject to two different journalists, or even the same one under different "temperature" settings, say, he had lunch or not, or he's in different moods, the outputs and approaches to the subject will be completely different, totally nondeterministic.

But that doesn't mean the article they wrote in each of those scenarios in not useful and economically valuable enough for them to maintain a job.
by lupusreal | 2025-04-29 18:08:31+00:00
What Blue Origin really has going for them is effectively infinite funding for as long as Bezos wants to keep at it. They've already slogged through most of New Glenn's development with hardly any revenue, and that's after skipping over small lift completely.

As for the market being saturated, I think Blue Origin could plenty of business in the "anybody but SpaceX" market. They're up against Rocket Lab (who is still stuck in small lift.)
by tpm | 2025-04-29 18:08:37+00:00
The whole content of the business transaction is persisted as a blob until it's "done" from the business perspective. After that, entities are saved(,updated,deleted) to their respective tables, and the blob is deleted. This gives the users great flexibility during their workflows.

Yes the overhead of UUIDs was something I mentioned already. For us it absolutely makes sense to use them, we don't anticipate to have hundreds of millions of records in our tables.
by schainks | 2025-04-29 18:09:09+00:00
It's vastly more expensive to put cables underground, and high voltage cables underground is in the realm of Bad Ideas because you're putting a high voltage physically near the electrical ground (the earth's crust), which adds cost, reduces reliability, and poses a serious danger to all living things near the line.

Sure, there may be exceptions that might make it worth while. However, if long distance high voltage underground wires was practical and cheap, you would see deployed much more often.
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-29 18:09:13+00:00
If you have mastered the art of user acquisition where you can get enough people to install an extra hypothetical Waymo app that is only useful in a few cities, not available during peak times with the value proposition that it may be 20% cheaper, you should really be starting your own business.

Well funded startups haven’t been able to beat the incumbents profitably. How many people that can afford to fly from the US to Isreal or anywhere else that requires crossing an ocean are going to be price sensitive enough to research the local ride sharing spp they never heard of to save a few dollars?

Even working for a startup, once you take into account all of the other costs if business travel, is saving 15% on Uber rides really meaningful? Before working for AWS (no longer there), I worked for a 70 person startup and even there they didn’t quibble about spending money for minor quality of life improvements. This wasn’t unicorn by any means. Just a run of the mill enterprise SaaS company in the medical industry.
by mgdev | 2025-04-29 18:09:13+00:00
There is a potential world where Meta uses AI as a vector to tap into the home.

Like, literally building smart homes.

Locally intelligent in ways that enable truly magical smart home experiences while preserving privacy and building trust.

But connected in ways that facilitate pseudo-social interactions, entertainment, and commerce.

Meta's biggest competitors are Apple and Amazon. This is the first clear opportunity they've had to leapfrog both.
by kbenson | 2025-04-29 18:09:34+00:00
If it takes a model and database with a large chunk of the internet to compete and win, then that says something, as that's much more expensive and complex than just the model, because models have problems "remembering" correctly just like people.

It's important to have fair and equivalent testing not because that allows people to win, but because it shows where the strengths and weaknesses of people and current AI actually are in a useful way.
by notahacker | 2025-04-29 18:10:24+00:00
A friend of mine is working on a "RAG for tax advisers" startup. He's selling it to the tax accountants, as a way for them to spot things they wouldn't otherwise have the time to review and generate more specialist tax advisory work. There's a lot more work they could do if only it's affordable to the businesses they advise (none of whom could do their own taxes even if they wanted to!)

Jevons law in action: some pieces of work get lost, but lower cost of doing work generates more demand overall...
by jaredmpeterson | 2025-04-29 18:10:25+00:00
Impressive work on leveraging ART and GRPO to enhance the capabilities of LLM-based email agents for deep-research tasks. I’m curious about the scalability of this approach: how does the system handle a growing volume of diverse email queries, and what measures are in place to maintain response quality over time? Additionally, are there plans to integrate this agent with existing email platforms for broader accessibility?
by pornel | 2025-04-29 18:10:40+00:00
Most likely it does what their other apps do: opens URLs in an in-app "browser" WebView, which is then injected with a ton of trackers that have unlimited access to everything you browse in their app.

iOS apps are allowed to add arbitrary JavaScript to any page on any domain, even HTTPS, as long as it's a WebView and not the standalone Safari app.
by ChaitanyaSai | 2025-04-29 18:11:11+00:00
Great article! SDT has fascinating parallels in consciousness science that no one to my knowledge has actually explored. This is because in consciousness research, the experiencing self is a given, it just happens to be taken for granted that there's an "I" experiencing, and the wonder and magic is focused on the experience itself. What about the self that is experiencing? On the other hand, SDT operates at a level where a biological and even experiencing conscious self is taken for granted, and the focus is on how the cognitive self operates (in many ways). And this is also where the criticism comes from. This is all in the domain of the self and motivation and whatnot articulated in language. To go deeper, we need a bridge between these two that can explain how the self is constructed. And we do have a beautiful theory/framework for that

Consciousness is a consensus mechanism by which the self is constructed. It is a recursive loop where the self emerges, experiences, and folds in the next experience to create an evolving, expanding self. With language we have the ability to freeze many of these ideas and we are able to go much further. "I can think, feel, experience and reflect on this"

And why a consensus mechanism? Because "you" are actually a constellation of cells and experiences that needs to be sufficiently decentralized but also be able to act and plan in the very short and long term. How do you get 87 billion cells (in our case) to decide as one? That is actually a pretty difficult engineering problem where you have to think about both compute (all the different data streams coming from different sources need to be digested and acted on) and commute (one cell group in the prefrontal cortex needs to immediately broadcast a danger message to other corners of the brain, and we dont have direct wiring)

Now the natural question to ask is, what do synthetic beings need to develop both? If you are interested you might want to read our book Journey of the Mind

Here is a short read on the idea of consciousness as a consensus mechanism https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-me...
by omgitspavel | 2025-04-29 18:11:18+00:00
Legally they can. But we all know that Yandex had always had very strong ties with the Russian government. I used to work for Yandex for more than 6 years in early 2010s and even then there were signs of the state trying to influence it through censoring Yandex.News and various other means. And these days you have to be very naive to assume that it is not controlled by the state and people close to it.
by shash | 2025-04-29 18:11:53+00:00
Doubtful. The petitioner in this case is an international architecture firm, hardly a typical group to be used for a sham case. The judgement itself isn’t out so we can’t see the court’s reasoning.

This is a bit more comprehensive: https://www.barandbench.com/amp/story/news/karnataka-high-co... and the Delhi case in which the ban is previously mentioned is only peripherally about email (the mail used by one of the parties is proton). The court makes an observation there that it should already have been banned so how is it still around.
by IAmBroom | 2025-04-29 18:12:21+00:00
Because nowhere in recorded history, at least that I am aware of, has growth consistently followed tremendous gains found at optimistic starts.

If I have a successful small store, and next year I employ 2 helpers, that's 200% growth in size. If the year after that I open a new store, with 4 workers at each, and me just managing the whole thing, that's another year of 200% growth.

If I then predict that in ten years my company will be employing half a million people, I'll be laughed out of the bank.

But that's what you are expecting: linear growth FACTORS.

In the real world, there's actually a limit to how many small stores of my niche type are needed. When you hit the point where there's a Starbucks inside a Starbucks, you may have overreached...
by karlding | 2025-04-29 18:12:34+00:00
If you watch the video, (one of) the reasons why the AI was winning was because it was using “meta” information from the Street View camera images, and not necessarily because it’s successfully identifying locations purely based on the landmarks in the image.

> I realized that the AI was using the smudges on the camera to help make an educated guess here.

[0] https://youtu.be/ts5lPDV--cU?t=1412
by asadotzler | 2025-04-29 18:12:48+00:00
I get wrong answers for basic things like how to fill out a government form or the relationship between two distant historical figures, things I'm actually working on directly and not some "trick" to get the machine to screw up. They get a lot right a lot of the time, but they're inherently untrustworthy because they sometimes get things subtly or catastrophically wrong and without some kind of consistent confidence scoring, there's no way to tell the difference without further research, and almost necessarily on some other tool because LLMs like to hold onto their lies and it's very difficult to convince them to discard a hallucination.
by dublin | 2025-04-29 18:13:02+00:00
We'll see how this holds up. I currently have nearly 3283 tabs in my primary Firefox window. (The other six windows only have 35-125 tabs at the moment. I sort of use the windows as tab groups.)

To its credit, Firefox is the only browser that does not either slow to a crawl or just fall over dead with that many tabs.

I still need a good tool to merge bookmarks from a bunch of older Firefox profiles, though. Does anyone know of a good tool to do that?
by Kon-Peki | 2025-04-29 18:13:11+00:00
And it was well on the way to falling out of the news until a plane crash that killed a sitting Congressman. And in the wreckage, they find the wife of one of the conspirators with $10k in cash in her purse. He eventually has a breakdown worrying about what happens to his kids if he goes to prison for a long time, and asks for a plea deal.
by semi-extrinsic | 2025-04-29 18:13:38+00:00
> the TT is clearly an inadequate test, which some argued for decades before LLMs became a reality

To be specific, in a curious quirk of fate, LLMs seem to be proving right much of what Chomsky was saying about language.

E.g. in 1996 he described the Turing test as "although highly influential, it seems to me not only foreign to the sciences but also close to senseless".

(Curious in that VC backed businesses are experimentally verifying the views of a prominent anti-capitalist socialist.)
by markisus | 2025-04-29 18:13:41+00:00
I have done a recent proof of concept to generate Gaussian splats from depth cameras in real-time. The intended application is for robotics and teleoperation. I made a post on reddit [1] a while back if you're interested.

I believe the quality of realtime Gaussian splatting will improve with time. The OPs project could help ROS2 users take advantage of those new techniques. Someone might need to make a Gaussian splat video codec to bring down the bandwidth cost of streaming Gaussians.

Another application could be for visualizing your robot inside a pre-built map, or for providing visual models for known objects that the robot needs to interact with. Photometric losses could then be used to optimize the poses of these known objects.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/GaussianSplatting/comments/1iyz4si/...
by d1sxeyes | 2025-04-29 18:13:49+00:00
Well it sort of is, actually.

Autism is quite literally what we define it to be: there’s no physiological or neurological test we can use to diagnose it, there’s no biomarker that defines autism.

If we change how we diagnose autism, we change how we define it.

The evidence by the way seems to indicate that there is a significant increase in diagnoses, and not all of that can be attributed to changing definitions.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-29 18:14:08+00:00
The issue with it isn't so much that it isn't safe but that is nowhere near as optimized as the 787 and A350 not to mind narrowbodies like the 737 and A320 that the C919 competes with. Optimized in the sense of "least cost" operations, particularly fuel consumption. Also optimized in the sense that Boeing has been making 737s for 55 years now so they are really good at making them and can pass the savings on to their customers.

The C919 has the first prototype built in 2015, flew for the first time in 2017, was approved in 2022 and entered commercial service in 2023. There is no sense in which development was rushed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919
by ModernMech | 2025-04-29 18:14:22+00:00
> That is a definition, not a tautology... we will argue over the definition of definition.

We shall.

Given your circular definition of profound autism, what I had said is a tautology. And that's my point, the way you've defined this thing doesn't make logical sense.

A shame to bow out on a semantic quibble, I made a number of substantive points I'll that I guess will have to remain unanswered. At the end of the day this definition is circular and is of no use to anyone.
by asadotzler | 2025-04-29 18:14:45+00:00
NFTs weren't a trillion dollar black hole that's yet to come close to providing value anywhere near that investment level. Come back when AI companies are actually profitable. Until then, LLM AI value is negative, and if the companies can't turn that around, they'll be as dead as NFTs and you won't even get the heavily subsidized company killing free of cheap features you think are solid.
by briandear | 2025-04-29 18:14:59+00:00
> no good government like China // good government means competent government

As someone that lived in China for 5 years, competent is the last adjective I’d use.

Sichuan Earthquake —> https://circa.art/ai-weiwei-recapturing-the-tragedy/

The Shanghai Lockdown —> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-59890533.amp

Local Chinese government corruption —> https://thediplomat.com/2025/03/how-local-corruption-evolved...

Tai Lake pollution —> https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/taihu-green-wash-or...

Land seizures —> https://rightsandresources.org/blog/the-guardian-chinese-vil...

Xinjiang —> https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/china-xinjiang-uyghurs-musl...

One could call China’s government competent the same way one could say Stalin was a competent administrator. Nazis were also very “competent” and efficient. In no universe should that be considered “good government.”
by DistractionRect | 2025-04-29 18:15:03+00:00
> A genuine answer, how about looking up some studies on this subject?

I figured that since you had a strong opinion on the subject you probably had strong evidence and could steer us to more directed reading to understand your viewpoint. Certainly we all should investigate things for ourselves, but sometimes it helps to have a place to start. You've certainly given us plenty to read through and consider. I'll read it with an open mind - some prereading thoughts that come to mind, is the citation bias proportional to factual accuracy (some outlets are more factually accurate than others, so one would expect to see them cited more often)? What's the distribution of the population of potentially citable sources (I.e. Is the bias a reflection of the population, or selection bias)? Is editor sanctions selective in enforcement or are conservative editors more likely to engage in behavior that warrants sanctions?

In other words, are we confusing correlations with causation? I don't know, I'll have to dig into the sources you provided and do my own research. I posit the questions now because it's the only thoughts I can contribute to the discussion at present.
by whydoineedthis | 2025-04-29 18:15:31+00:00
I used to work for Lark. They raised $140mm to solve this problem and the best they could do was a non-ai chatbot that whined at users for not eating enough vegetables. The Lark app has 100% user drop off in 60 days and yet is still the silicon darling in the diabetes space.

Your platform has more science & more solution than 100 engineers in 3 years could produce. Keep at it and know with confidence that there is great value in what you are building. I know it's not your primary goal, but this will be lucrative if you keep going. I wish you a lot of luck, this is very cool!
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-29 18:15:35+00:00
No, the best way to learn a language is comprehensible input. Every other language acquisition method is bootstrapping that eventually needs to segue into actually using your target language to read or listen to things, unaided.

What these bootstrapping exercises are doing is not unlike, say, what early expert systems or Cyc did with AI. They aren't so much building an understanding of language as much as they're handing you a bunch of logical rules to parse out into sentence constructions. The problem is, that's not how human language actually works. In fact, it's not even how humans use programming languages, even though those do have formal specifications.

If you want an "open source Rosetta Stone" what you want is Anki and a flashcard deck for it. But even then, that's limited to vocabulary memorization, which is just bootstrapping. Personally, if you wanted to build a good language acquisition app, you almost certainly would want to have some kind of large language model in there powering it.
by abhisek | 2025-04-29 18:16:39+00:00
Technology adoption will always lead to misuse or gaming the system. Computers can never be truly safe and secure. If it is then it will be highly restricted. That’s the trade-off.

Reasonable security can be achieved. Security researchers have often toyed with the idea that security breaches should be localised through compartmentalisation. So if you install a bad software then it ideally should not impact everything else in your computer.

Quine’s OS is an interesting project towards this direction.

https://www.qubes-os.org/
by godelski | 2025-04-29 18:16:46+00:00
> No mention of whether the feature is available now on a stable release

FWIW, I updated and was presented with a new tab announcing this feature. So... update.

> Looking at some of the 20 year old bugs that still exist?

Looks like browsers are hard

https://gbhackers.com/google-to-patch-23-year-old-chrome-bug/
by consumer451 | 2025-04-29 18:16:53+00:00
I am not sure that you can make that absolute statement. Reasoning is subdivided into types, and one of those types is inductive reasoning.

> Inductive reasoning refers to a variety of methods of reasoning in which the conclusion of an argument is supported not with deductive certainty, but with some degree of probability. Unlike deductive reasoning (such as mathematical induction), where the conclusion is certain, given the premises are correct, inductive reasoning produces conclusions that are at best probable, given the evidence provided.

Doesn't predicting the next token qualify as doing just that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning
by compiler-guy | 2025-04-29 18:16:58+00:00
From the article:

"Even Apple’s LLVM fork lacks scheduling annotations for Apple Silicon. How am I supposed to write efficient code when Apple doesn’t bother to tune their own compiler?"

In addition to its public fork of LLVM, Apple also keeps a very private fork where (one assumes) they keep all the really juicy stuff.

I agree that it is frustrating not to have the data, but don't confuse "I don't have the data" with "no one has the data".