MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ADHDan | 2025-04-22 13:35:14+00:00
Thanks for your questions.

Right now, it's fiction only — but non-fiction has been one of the most requested additions. It was always on the roadmap, but the demand we’ve seen so far has definitely bumped it up the list.

We’ve also had a few people ask about adding their own books. The tech to support that is already in place, but it's currently disabled. Since there's a cost involved in processing each book, it's not part of our short-term plan — but if enough people request it during testing, we’ll definitely consider moving it up the queue.

Our current thinking is to build around a Netflix-style model with a curated library, and continuously grow it, but we're keeping an open mind based on how people actually want to use it.
by SkyPuncher | 2025-04-22 13:35:17+00:00
When I'm working through a problem with Cursor, I find platitudes go a long way to keeping it grounded. However, when it really refuses to do something then then best way to break the pattern is harsh, stern wording.

For example, if it's written code that's mostly correct but needs some tweaking, a platitude will keep it second guessing everything it just wrote.

* "That looks great so far, can you tweak XYZ" -> Keeps the code I care about while fixing XYZ,

* "Can you tweak XYZ" -> often decides to completely rewrite all of the code
Show HN: I built a tool with AI to lay out furniture on floor plans
by shapmeans | 2025-04-22 13:35:18+00:00
I was facing a possible move and wanted an easier way to visualize how my furniture might fit into different apartments. The tools I found were complicated and didn't do what I needed, so I used AI (Augment) to create a tool for it callled FurniMapper [0] and a demo/tutorial [1].

I'm a product manager, used to be a dev and can still code. I'm not an LLMs-to-AGI guy, and I still find these models unbelievably useful - I would have never spent the time to build this otherwise.

[0]: https://furnimapper.pages.dev

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OewO1WTooBA
by bilekas | 2025-04-22 13:35:30+00:00
Hmm, I’m not going to say musk is working with Russia or not, that’s a whole political thing that’s all opinion based until there are facts of course, but as for your view of the court system, INAL but there is “Federal Tort Act” that says you can sue the government for negligence but to be honest you’re probably right, nothing will happen anyway.
by gingerBill | 2025-04-22 13:36:09+00:00
What is the incentive to maintain something that is free (in both senses of that word)? Even if it is just out of the kindness of their heart, is that even a kind thing for them?

Most open source projects are people who have dumped their unfinished project online, but it's hard to know whether or not it is finished until you use it, or worse, use it for a long time and find the gaping holes.

And without being paid, there is the issue that the maintainer doesn't work on the important things, since there is a lack of (price) signal to state what to work on.
by docmechanic | 2025-04-22 13:36:28+00:00
Fascinating insight into the original purpose of ‘junk’ DNA.

'This tension caused by genes that grew at the same rate as before while proteins could not was resolved continuously but abruptly with the incorporation of non-coding sequences into the genes. With this innovation, the algorithm for searching for new proteins rapidly reduced its computational complexity, becoming non-linear through the spliceosome and the nucleus, which separated transcription and splicing from translation.'
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-22 13:36:34+00:00
Where do you draw the line though? I know some people that ask Google proper questions like "how do I match open tagx except XHTML self-contained tags using RegEx?" whereas I just go "html regex". Some people may even add "please" and "thank you" to that.

I doubt anyone is polite in a terminal, also because it's a syntax error. So the question is also, do you consider it a conversation, or a terminal?
by hbbio | 2025-04-22 13:36:37+00:00
From the article: "the impacts of generating a 100-word email. They found that just one email requires .14 kilowatt-hours worth of electricity, or enough to power 14 LED lights for an hour"

Seems completely off the charts. A 70b model on my M3 Max laptop does it for 0.001 kWh... 140x times less that stated in the article. Let's say the OpenAI Nvidia clusters are less energy efficient than my Macbook... but not even sure about that.
by creshal | 2025-04-22 13:36:47+00:00
> whatever happened to netbooks?

Windows Vista and Windows 7 happened to them, and Android/iOS tablets happened to their target demographics.

And notebooks got much lighter and smaller on average, compared to the netbook era. You used to need a 14" or 15" notebook with an inch worth of screen bezel to get a "full-powered" CPU and enough RAM to have a reasonable desktop experience, plus an unwieldy docking station to have enough ports to wire it up to a work place; netbooks were tempting companions to that.

Today you can get a full desktop experience (and even some fairly high end graphics capabilities) with a 13" laptop that's smaller than 11" subnotebooks and ligher than most netbooks used to be, and can fit a full keyboard.

E.g., a modern Asus PX13 is about the size of an 11" Asus eeePC, and just as heavy… but it comes with a 24-core Ryzen CPU, 32 GiB RAM, and an RTX 4070. If I'm on the move, I can just take that, instead of buying a companion device, and if I'm in the office, I can connect it to multiple daisy-chained monitors with connected peripherals using a single USB-C cable. Other Windows vendors have similar offerings.

And that's just looking at direct equivalents; completely ignoring the Apple-sized ARM elephant in the room. The M series CPUs are nuts in terms of performance, but the battery life is comparable to netbooks.

> Even the smallest Chromebook seems only slightly smaller than a laptop.

For a while companies made ChromeOS tablets to fill the gap between notebooks and Android tablets, but the higher end Android tablets these days have cannibalized that market too. And "higher end" is relative; netbook prices (400-ish dollars) get you fairly capable 10"-ish tablets from multiple vendors, complete with precision stylus and keyboard/touchpad cover. That's big enough to get netbook-tier keyboards (which were never great, let's be honest), but small enough to fit in cargo pants pockets (very handy for air travel), and the battery life is measured in days.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-22 13:37:28+00:00
It didn't affect my health, and not that of anyone else that I knew of back in the day.

Besides, nobody was forced to type anything in. People did it because they wanted to and enjoyed it. For many people, it was a large part of how they learned to program. If anyone had health concerns, they could easily just not type the programs in.

I would have strongly objected to the notion of regulation about this because it would have effectively makes publishing source code in printed form illegal. Aside from ethical considerations, that would have been a tremendous loss to society in general.
by Kirby64 | 2025-04-22 13:37:36+00:00
Like the other poster said, your anecdote says more about the doctor than the average user. TrueNAS documentation isn't the worst by any means, but it has far too many extremely low level controls accessible. It would be overwhelming to most users unless you stay very within a small window of basic functionality. If you're just using it for network storage, maybe it's fine... anything beyond that though is going to trip up many folks.
by lo_fye | 2025-04-22 13:38:07+00:00
>>It won’t design your domain layer with the care and consideration that >>comes from deep experience and hard-won knowledge.

What if every time you had an Aha! moment, you blogged about it in detail. Many people do. AI ingests those blog posts. It uses what they say when writing new code, or assessing existing code. It does use hard-won knowledge; it just wasn't hard-won by AI itself.
by rgbrenner | 2025-04-22 13:38:26+00:00
unlike other loans sent to collections, collection costs are added to the loan. the amount varies by loan type, but it’s typically 25%. so for example, if you owe 50k: you miss a few payments, and put into default, the loan is sold.. and you immediately owe 62.5k. they can then start garnishing wages and any tax refunds based on this amount.
by oriel | 2025-04-22 13:38:37+00:00
My experience informs my opinion, that structure is more important than specific tone.

IMO If LLMs are made from our language, then terminology semantics plays strongly into the output, and degree of control.

Some people rage when the machine doesn't work as expected, but we know that, "computers are schizophrenic little children, and don't beat them when they're bad."[1] ... right? Similar applies to please.

I've had far better results by role playing group dynamics with stronger structure, like say, the military. Just naming the LLM up front as Lieutenant, or referencing in-brief a Full Metal Jacket-style dress-down with clear direction, have gotten me past many increasingly common hurdles with do-it-for-you models. Raging never works. You can't fire the machine. Being polite has been akin to giving a kid a cookie for breaking the cookie jar.

It is funny though, to see the Thinking phase say stuff like "The human is angry (in roleplay)..."

[1] https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-04-22 13:38:43+00:00
Agreed. I caught some shit from some friends of mine when I got mildly annoyed that they were saying offensive things to my smart speakers, and yeah on the one hand it's silly, but at the same time... I dunno man, I don't like how quickly you turned into a real creepy bastard to a feminine voice when you felt you had social permission to. That's real weird.
by hueho | 2025-04-22 13:38:57+00:00
A sidenote is that Wii actually ran a separate operating system (nicknamed IOS by the community) in a dedicated ARM processor (Starlet), that was responsible for performing the majority of device input/output, including disk access, internal and external storage, and notably in this case, networking - the TCP/IP stack was implemented entirely there.

Besides running on a weaker CPU, IOS can access (for exclusive use) some of the main system memory, but it was usually about 12-16MB to not starve the actual games running on the main CPU (https://wiibrew.org/wiki/Memory_map), which can help explain why everything except for the actual games was so slow.

Originally, code running on the main PPC CPU could not access directly most of the IO related hardware at all (only GPU/display output and wired controllers - the bluetooth stack was also on IOS AFAIK, but the Wiimote drivers themselves were userspace), so even the Linux ports had to "proxy" some hardware access through the IOS, but later after reverse-engineering the full boot process, people were able to create a replacement IOS that could enable full access through a special register: https://wiibrew.org/wiki/MINI, enabling full-speed Linux ports, and since that functionality is about a decade old now, I would guess that the NetBSD port also takes advantage of that.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-04-22 13:39:35+00:00
> But jesuits are historically linked to education and the sciences, this is a fact.

Isn't that what I said? I merely said it is not their charism, not their specialty. The point is that in the popular imagination, people elevate them above orders who not only have a better historical record, but whose mission is to educate, study, etc.

That isn't to downplay the good contributions of the Jesuits, but I can point you to Jesuits (who, as an order, are in poor shape these days, tbh) who would say the same thing. The popular imagination is simply ignorant or tendentious on this point in its exaggeration relative to the others.
by ziddoap | 2025-04-22 13:40:00+00:00
I looked around (Smithsonian, space.com, astronomy.com, etc.), but nowhere has any mention of people disputing the findings, do you have a link? Who is "people" in this case?

(I was/am skeptical just because it's a single-author study with pretty spectacular results, and have been keeping an eye out for any followups, but must have missed them)
by int_19h | 2025-04-22 13:40:27+00:00
It depends on the task. E.g. FoxPro 2.6 is basically proto-RAD, complete with visual form and report designers and an online help system, but it's too high-level for systems programming. Borland Pascal 7.0 is probably the sweet spot of power and convenience - no visual designers, but you get Turbo Vision for TUI, a very nice integrated help system, and decently powerful object-oriented language. Better yet, early versions of FreePascal that targeted 32-bit DOS.

I don't think any of these would fit on a floppy, though; you'd have to unwind a little bit for that. Say, Turbo Pascal 5.5?
by Muromec | 2025-04-22 13:40:32+00:00
First they came for enemy combatants, called them terrorists, shipped them to a torture prison abroad, stripped of all rights and still keep some there despite not having them convicted. But I'm not an enemy combatant, so I didn't care.

Then they care for immigrants, called them enemy aliens, shipped them to a torture prison, stripped them of all rights despite not having anybody convicted, but I'm not an immigrant, so I don't care.

<--- you are here right now -->
by jmyeet | 2025-04-22 13:41:28+00:00
Empires usually operate by looting their holdings to enrich the imperial core. There is normally something that sustains their dominance.

The British Empire was the drug dealer empire, first with tobacco and later with opium. There were also some spices in there too. But the British Empire at one point covered a quarter of the globe, leading to the double-meaning of "the sun never sets on the British Empire" (also meaning it never ends).

Rome was a little diferent because of simply looting their provinces (by demanding tributes). Instead they formed alliances of mutual benefit and provinces essentially became Romanized. This sustained Rome for ~1500 years (post-Republic, ignoring the Holy Roman Empire).

Spain looted silver from South America.

The USA is an empire but it breaks the mould by generally not using direct colonization. It's probably better described as economic imperialism. Even "global" institutions largely just project US power (eg the IMF and the World Bank).

Ultimately, the US is an arms dealer empire. What backs the US dollar is the US military and, in addition to the ability to directly project global military power, the US has a ton of influence by who it chooses to sell weapons to.

Additionally, there's soft power through things like foreign aid.

Why do I mention all this? Because despite the mantra of "making America great", the current administration is doing more to destroy US direct and soft power than anyone could possibly have imagined, more than current and former adversaries (eg the USSR, China) could ever have dreamed of doing themselves.

Abandoning Ukraine, which is what the US is really doing at this point, may in fact be the catalyst to restart European weapons production. The president may complain that Europe is taking advantage of the US with NATO and we're somehow "paying for European defense" like that's a bad thing. It's not, at least from the perspective of US foreign policy and interests. NATO is what the US uses to control and influence Europe.

If Europe becomes no longer dependant on US weapons and can be responsible for European security, then NATO doesn't really need to exist, which is bad for the US and good for basically everybody else.

Now if the goal is American isolationism then all this sort of makes sense but I don't think that is the goal. Also, it's worth adding that previous periods of American isolationism happened in the lead up to both WW1 and WW2.
by AngryData | 2025-04-22 13:41:35+00:00
What do you mean there is no other way with weed? You don't have to go full Cheech and Chong with smoking. Your experience doesn't match mine at all, 7/10 of the most brilliant people I know, half of which are mechanical or electrical engineers, smoke weed regularly. To me your comment reads like government propaganda from 60 years ago.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-04-22 13:41:35+00:00
Snow Leopard is pretty good, but personally I’ve found that Mavericks (10.9) edges it out for the little bits of polish it has that SL doesn’t, as well as its brighter more cheery color scheme. The only big downside of Mavericks for me is that it’s missing Snow Leopard’s 2D grid of virtual desktops and instead only has the linear arrangement found in modern versions. I really miss the 2D grid.
by ordu | 2025-04-22 13:41:39+00:00
I'm a little surprised by their approach. I mean, it did work, it is cool, and it is the most important thing. Still I can't stop thinking that I wouldn't sleep before I wrote an assembler and a disassembler. Judging by the presentation they had no assembler and disassembler for several months and just lived with that.

asm/disasm can help to find typos in listings, they can help to find xrefs or even to do some static analysis to check for mistake classes they knew they could make. It wouldn't replace any of the manual work they've done, but still it can add some confidence on top of it. Maybe they wouldn't end with priors 50/50 for the success, but with something like 90/10.

Strange. Do I underestimate the complexity of writing an asm and disasm pair?
by JackFr | 2025-04-22 13:42:09+00:00
I often find myself saying please and thank you, but the inability of the LLM to pick up tone can be amusing.

After one of the trashed my app in Cursor, and I pounded on my keyboard "WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT!!!" and the model, ignoring my rage and frustration, responded with a list of 4 bullet points explaining why in fact it did make those changes.
by dailykoder | 2025-04-22 13:42:40+00:00
The UI in terms of space and usability looks great. Two "modern" things I don't want to miss: Good font rendering and a fast application launcher (mod -> type a few characters -> enter). What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations. Just gimme the damn thing, I don't need those animations. (Yes I know on most plattforms I can disable them, but this often takes quite a few steps)
by teleforce | 2025-04-22 13:43:12+00:00
For a latest reference on AI and machine learning for network engineer please check this book by Javier Antich [1].

Please also check the review here [2]. For what it's worth, the book is listed in the "10 Books Every Network Engineer Should Read" [3].

[1] Machine Learning for Network and Cloud Engineers: Get ready for the next Era of Network Automation:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101180344-machine-learni...

[2] MUST READ: Machine Learning for Network and Cloud Engineers:

https://blog.ipspace.net/2023/02/machine-learning-network-cl...

[3] 10 Books Every Network Engineer Should Read:

https://networkphil.com/2024/05/21/10-books-every-network-en...
by monktastic1 | 2025-04-22 13:43:13+00:00
I think it depends on the self-awareness of the user. It's easy to slip into the mode of conflating an LLM with a conscious being, but with enough metacognition one can keep them separate. Then, in the same way that walking on concrete doesn't make me more willing to walk on a living creature, neither does my way of speaking to an LLM bleed into human interactions.

That said, I often still enjoy practicing kindness with LLMs, especially when I get frustrated with them.
by bovermyer | 2025-04-22 13:43:15+00:00
There is a lot I hate about this statement.

First, the pervasive assumption that there is no skill involved in food preparation is wrong. While the floor may be higher in a kitchen operated by an executive chef, there is a noticeable difference between a badly-made Big Mac and a well-made one. Execution matters.

Next, at this point "IT" is so broad as to be almost meaningless. In this discussion, we're talking about programming.

Finally, you're holding up Michelin starred chefs as being inherently better than all other chefs. The Michelin star program is skewed towards one particular end result; to put it in technology terms, it's like grading your business solely on a narrow set of SLOs rather than a holistic understanding.
by macleginn | 2025-04-22 13:43:24+00:00
‘Crucially, all correct solutions from RL-trained models already exist in the base model's distribution, proving RLVR enhances sampling efficiency, not reasoning capacity, while inadvertently shrinking the solution space.’ — wouldn't any kind of RL fail to converge or even progress at all if the solution weren't to be found in the base model distribution? The way training is set up, the models absolutely need to be able to find right solutions in a reasonable time, otherwis there wouldn't be any training signal.
by looofooo0 | 2025-04-22 13:43:31+00:00
You mean people who make it back to doctors is biased? Maybe against guns or mortars, but not so much against artillery. But this bias is also a secondary effect stemming from drones, as it increases time to evacuate or denies it totally. Which means that guns and mortars became more deadly because of drones. You can also look at the statistics of number of bullets to kill someone in major wars. Which is shockingly high. So with single digit hit percentage of drones and the numbers of drones deployed...
by hiatus | 2025-04-22 13:44:06+00:00
I have plenty of friends that graduated from state schools and incurred no debt, all in the US. Does that invalidate your points about the inability to get an education at a reasonable cost?

> I’m sure you’d have no problem burning millions of dollars of VC funding on a low value business idea, as if that would be of superior economic value.

You know absolutely nothing about me.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-22 13:44:11+00:00
They built a Route 93 bypass around Manchester, NH and a new mall in 1980, not long after that I bought a copy of "101 BASIC Computer Games" from the Digital [1] Store there (really!) This was the minicomputer edition that David Ahl had published when he worked at DEC, not the microcomputer edition that he produced at Creative Computing magazine.

I was typing those programs into a TRS-80 Color Computer which had a very good implementation of Microsoft BASIC enhanced with commands to draw lines, circles and flood fills on a high resolution screen. The text mode only had 32 characters across, but you could get most programs to work on it.

That generation of games was intended to be run on a teleprinter so they did not use any graphics other than drawing scenes with ASCII characters and didn't use any commands to write text at specific places on the screen. Later in the 1980s you saw books with more complex BASIC games that implemented shooters and Pac-Man clones and such but all of those were specific to a particular computer whereas Ahl's games were portable even though you'd often have to modify the programs a little to get them to work.

By 1991 though I was done with BASIC. I had a ROM cartridge with an assembler by 1982 or so but I was still writing a lot of BASIC. Circa 1985 I was doing a lot with the OS-9 operating system which had a C compiler and BASIC09 which was particularly advanced, I remember writing a FORTH in 6809 assembly. Circa 1987 I had a 286 PC which had a wide range of programming languages including various BASICs, but Turbo Pascal was my favorite, though I switched to C in college (where I was in '91) because C was portable to the 32-bit workstations they had.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation
by zmgsabst | 2025-04-22 13:44:27+00:00
This is due to being unable to meet the artillery demands of the Ukraine war.

NATO has been badly out produced by Russia — and drained its collective stockpiles to dangerous levels.

- - - -

Articles pretending that this was invented in a few months due to Trump are silly — and commit a fallacy so common it has a name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc