MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hilbert42 | 2025-04-29 18:17:44+00:00
"It also doesn't quite agree with your use of the word "we". The article does not conclude whether the elevated levels of metals were down to natural processes or humans…"

That point is key from the perspective that natural levels of dangerous metals act as a reference for comparison.

That said, science tells us that some elements are both toxic and carcinogenic and that humans have contributed to their increased levels in the environment is not in any doubt.

The dangers heavy metals from anthropogenic sources pose to human health depends on many factors, location, concentration, dispersabity, etc.

The point the article makes about "chromium (in its highly toxic hexavalent form, often released by leather tanning and pigment industries)…" is particularly poignant for me. I recall seeing a documentary on WWI military archeology—a new factory was being built in Belgium over a WWI battlefield. When builders discovered soldiers' graves during construction work had to stop until all archeological evidence had been collected and documented.

The grave of one soldier was particularly revealing, except for his skeleton, his boots and a small purse containg a few coins nothing much else remained. What's particularly interesting and relevant to this discussion is that his leather boots were in almost perfect condition, so too was his tiny leather purse.

That these articles were still so intact after nearly 100 years buried under earth was directly because of the high levels chromium used in the tanning of the leather. The chromium was so toxic that after all that time microorganisms were still unable to attack the leather without being killed. (I found this distressing to watch because of the almost pristine condition of those leather items, especially so the purse with its tiny cache of small coins, they vividly brought home the tragedy that had befallen this poor unfortunate soldier.)

Moreover, it also brought home the fact that one didn't have to know an iota of chemistry to know hexavalent chromium is highly toxic. It was so damn obvious.

That said, it's clear from the nature and location of the chromium that it's been largely contained at its source, if it had been dispersed widely then the concentration would have fallen by a significant amount, by now the residual level would such that microorganisms would have been able to attack the leather.

We have to use forensic evidence such as this on a wide scale to ascertain the actual danger these heavy metals pose to human health.
by pgt | 2025-04-29 18:17:53+00:00
Nathan Marz' talk on Specter (Clojure Library that decouples navigation from transformation) is must-watch if you deal with data: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTCy_DkAJGk

I use it in every project for data navigation and transformation, and it's more performant than standard Clojure data manipulation, while retaining types (instead of coercing back from seqs).

E.g. if you have a map and you want to increment every value in the map: (require '[com.rpl.specter :as S])

``` (->> {:a 5, :b 6, :c 7} (S/transform [S/MAP-VALS] inc)) => {:a 6, :b 7, :c 8} ```

^ try to write that in normal clojure.

Now let's say you have a map of vectors and want to increment all of those? (->> {:a 5, :b 6, :c 7} (S/transform [S/MAP-VALS S/ALL] inc)) ;; note the navigator juts got another level of nesting => {:a [2 3], :b [4 5], :c [6 7]}works for all clj data types, and of course it has navigators for recursive walking .

It took me a while to get good at Specter, but it was worth it. I hear Rama uses Specter navigators internally.
by Zambyte | 2025-04-29 18:18:02+00:00
> But I have not objectively done comparisons to try to figure out if it's better or not.

The default search results are nice quality, comparable to Google (they use Google as one of their sources for results). The customization is what makes it head and shoulders better than the rest. I usually don't even see Kagi. In my workflow. Combining snaps, ! (I'm feeling lucky bang), and account level raising and lowering, I can pretty much get exactly where I want on the web just from a query in my URL bar that navigates straight there.
by variadix | 2025-04-29 18:18:13+00:00
Depends on if you need to allocate/deallocate nodes. If you construct the tree once and don’t modify it thereafter you don’t need to. If you do need to modify and alloc/dealloc nodes you can use a bitmap to track free/occupied slots which is very fast (find first set + bitmanip) and has minuscule overhead even for integer sized elements.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-04-29 18:18:17+00:00
Debate as a reasoning tactic is massively undervalued. There's tons of papers on this at places like NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, etc.

Hell, even a whole quanta article. https://www.quantamagazine.org/debate-may-help-ai-models-con...

I got to meet and talk to the authors of this paper at NeurIPS. They're class acts!
by throwaway150 | 2025-04-29 18:18:21+00:00
How can you be so sure? How do you know that our brains don't work like transformers too, except for having the advantage of having more types of sensory data? How can you settle this debate without defining what "thinking" and "reasoning" is and how what LLMs do is not similar to what a kindergarten level kid may be capable of? I think we all agree kindergarten kids can think and reason, don't we?
by team_pyrefly | 2025-04-29 18:19:30+00:00
Hi Hackernews, I’m on the team working on Pyrefly at Meta. We address a lot of the comments in our FAQ: https://pyrefly.org/en/docs/pyrefly-faq/. I will try to address some questions directly too!

Pyrefly is a work in progress, but you can install it from pypi and/or try our alpha VSCode extension if you are interested. You may still get false positive errors on your project as we are still burning down bugs and some features. We would love comments, bugs, or requests on our GitHub as you try it out.

Lastly, one of our team members is giving a talk at PyCon about the design if folks are interested: https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/presentation/118/. We didn’t expect much attention before then, so thanks for taking a look!
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-04-29 18:19:52+00:00
I grind hulled barley to a powder and then boil it with RO water in the microwave. Total cook time in my microwave for the ~2tbl I consume is 2 minutes and 10 seconds.

I put in a little stevia/monk fruit for taste.

Because the end result is basically a thickened drink with a rather neutral flavor I'll often throw in my 3rd shot of espresso for the day or just drink it as is while still hot.

A lot of cultures that are long lived tend to have barley based drinks but of course isolating barley's effect is a fools errand, it's just correlation at best.

I started playing with barley for a "cream of wheat" esq experience, which was actually way better than cream of wheat or oats but I found that the water absorption of barley is so high that for gastro purposes it's more consistent to add enough water that it remains a drink.

The upside bonus is that due to the mechanism of action you can start with very low volumes of barley and it doesn't give you gastro distress the way other types of fiber supplementation can, basically the soluble fiber slows down the movement of food through the intestines giving your gut more digestive time to create a homogenous, gelled slurry making the defection process closer to ideal texture.

I now also spend far less time on the toilet and it only takes 2 minutes and a single hot beverage every morning.

One other positive side effect is I've found that my overall hydration stays more consistent as well.
by bhelkey | 2025-04-29 18:20:00+00:00
If September 2024 marks the date in your mind stagnation was obvious, surely the last improvement must have come before?

Whatever the case, there are open platforms that give users a chance to compare two anonymous LLMs and rank the models as a result [1].

What I observe when I look for these rankings is that none of the top ranked models come from before your stagnation cut off date of September 2024 [2].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04132

[2] https://lmarena.ai/
by ivell | 2025-04-29 18:20:11+00:00
I wouldn't consider ghost cities and wasteful expenditure on infrastructure to just prop up GDP as good governance. As the saying goes not all that glitters is gold.

Democracy is messy, but there is some kind of transparency (freedom of press) that brings up issues out in the open.

Let's not be impatient with Democracy lest we lose all that we valued without us realizing it.

Democracy needs patience and preserverence.
by jmull | 2025-04-29 18:20:19+00:00
> ...where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient, seem to be severely at risk

I doubt it.

Search already "obsoletes" these fields in the same way AI does. AI isn't really competing against experts here, but against search.

It's also really not clear that AI has an overall advantage over dumb search in this area. AI can provide more focused/tailored results, but it costs more. Keep in mind that AI hasn't been enshittified yet like search. The enshittification is inevitable and will come fast and hard considering the cost of AI. That is, AI responses will be focused and tailored to better monetize you, not better serve you.
by hellojesus | 2025-04-29 18:20:40+00:00
Yes. This is the way so long as you can guarantee you wont grow past the bits.

Otherwise you can still use the pregenerated autoincrements. You just need to check out blocks of values for each node in your distributed system from the central source before you would need them:

N1 requests 100k values, N2 requests 100k values, etc. Then when you've allocated some amount, say 66%, request another chunk. That eay you have time to recover from a central manager going offline before it's critical.

I have no problem with using uuids but there are ways around it if you want to stick with integers.
by coolwulf | 2025-04-29 18:20:49+00:00
I built http://chess-notation.com, a free web app that turns handwritten chess scoresheets into PGN files you can instantly import into Lichess or Chess.com.

I'm a professor at UTSW Medical Center working on AI agents for digitizing handwritten medical records using Vision Transformers. I realized the same tech could solve another problem: messy, error-prone chess notation sheets from my son’s tournaments.

So I adapted the same model architecture — with custom tuning and an auto-fix layer powered by the PyChess PGN library — to build a tool that is more accurate and robust than any existing OCR solution for chess.

Key features:

Upload a photo of a handwritten chess scoresheet.

The AI extracts moves, validates legality, and corrects errors.

Play back the game on an interactive board.

Export PGN and import with one click to Lichess or Chess.com.

This came from a real need — we had a pile of paper notations, some half-legible from my son, and manual entry was painful. Now it’s seconds.

Would love feedback on the UX, accuracy, and how to improve it further. Open to collaborations, too!
by mindcrash | 2025-04-29 18:21:11+00:00
Goblin is even better, the backing AI model for example recognizes, and properly responds to (!), foreign language while the OP does not.

For example when I add the major task "Pannekoek bakken" ("Baking a pancake" in Dutch) and break it down into subtasks Goblin breaks down the task in Dutch.

OP's tool does realize what I want to do but responds in English which could be a bit of a problem for people who are not that foreign language savvy.
by electroly | 2025-04-29 18:21:41+00:00
This seems to be different than I expected from the title. I thought it would be explicitly adversarial.

1. You are the assistant. Please answer the question directly.

2. You are the cross-examiner. The assistant is wrong. Explain why.

3. You are the assistant. The cross-examiner is wrong. Defend your claim.

4. You are a judge. Did either party make their case, or is another round of argumentation required?

I haven't tried this. No idea if it works. But I find it's helpful to ask ChatGPT, in separate prompts, "XYZ is true, explain why" and "XYZ is false, explain why" and see which one seems more convincing.
by GuB-42 | 2025-04-29 18:21:53+00:00
Does it need really that much RAM? RAM you don't use tend to get swapped out, and browsers themselves are pretty good working with a large amount of tabs opened, sometimes by unloading those that are currently unused. Note: swap is good!

I think what kill memory more than having dozens of windows on many desktops is self contained apps and VMs. For example, if you have a browser with 1000 tabs open, you will only have one instance of the engine, and the browser can manage the memory associated with tabs effectively. Now if you have 10 distinct browsers opened with all their dependencies, which can happen if you are running electron apps and you are actually using them, you are going to need a lot of RAM. Also if they all come with their dependencies instead of using what's on the system, you also multiply RAM usage.

Running many instances of the same apps running the same libraries tend to not cost that much, as they only need to be loaded once and are shared. There are a reason we call .so and .dll files shared libraries.

VMs are even worse, as they need a whole fixed chunk of memory that is mostly opaque to the host OS, meaning there isn't much it can do.
by mindslight | 2025-04-29 18:22:06+00:00
Maybe? I haven't listened to his speech directly, because I'm burnt out from having to dissect the sheer volume of dog whistles this movement relies upon.

Maybe that's a civically irresponsible take, but it is extremely civically irresponsible for Trump to cause this fatigue by sowing division to create a segment of fervent support. We've had too many years of "4d chess" with everyone trying to read good intentions and coherent reasoning out of the word salad. At this point most reasonable people are only trying to read the tea leaves to know how they might have to protect themselves.

And sure, RFK is not Trump. Except it's clear Trump has no concept of delegation or keeping his hands off of something. Even if RFK has the purest of motivations, it's very easy to see Trump seeing a few edgelord social media comments saying we need to send $whomever to the camps as well, noticing that the topic "drives engagement", and running away with the idea. At this point it's just generally bad to be in the crosshairs of state legibility in any way.
by frank_nitti | 2025-04-29 18:23:25+00:00
That is what I would assume. So, unless I am overlooking something, this seems like a very bad idea for a company to have zero engineering capability in-house who can read and validate the generated application code, test suites etc before it deploys into production where real end users could be harmed by faulty code generated by the LLM.

For throwaway prototypes, coding and design assistance, I can see it being leveraged very effectively, but for mission-critical software systems I can’t see it going this route or we’ll have some very big problems incoming
by zo1 | 2025-04-29 18:23:37+00:00
Good luck getting any of that to happen. All that does is raise the barrier for proof and consequence, because they've got accreditation and "licensing bodies" with their own opaque rules and processes. Accreditation makes it seem like these people are held to some amazing standard with harsh penalties if they don't comply, but really they just add layers of abstraction and places for incompetence, malice and power-tripping to hide.

E.g. Next time a lawyer abandons your civil case and ghosts you after being clearly negligent and down-right bad in their representation. Good luck holding them accountable with any body without consequences.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-29 18:24:03+00:00
Don't base your opinion of China on YouTube channels that show you a few modern places in Chongqing or the high-speed train and pretend that this represents all of China. They don't show you the homeless people, the abandoned half-built high-rises, the dirty parks full of plastic waste, the barred-up windows because break-ins are so prevalent.

And travel 30 minutes outside of any major city. You'll see people living in broken-down buildings without heating when it's below zero, roads that haven't been maintained in decades, and poor people trying to jump in front of your car for insurance money.

China is neither the technological wonder of the world portrayed in these videos nor a bunch of peasants. It's a vast, complex country with a lot of good and a lot of bad.
by tunesmith | 2025-04-29 18:24:11+00:00
I think the effects are more indirect. For instance, GenAI can enable Google to serve summarized content (rather than just search results) that users find useful, which then cuts in to the margins of companies that manually generate that content. Those companies lose revenue, and lay off head count, inhibiting their ability to generate that custom content. So they start using GenAI instead.

At no point did that company choose to pivot to GenAI to cut costs and reduce headcount. It's more reactive than that.
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2025-04-29 18:24:52+00:00
>I resent this framing as being entirely about short-sighted consumers valuing convenience.

Your resentment is not valid. The switch to plastics did not happen overnight. There used a lot more choices in the past. Common people increasingly chose plastics over a period of time. ( or rather were lazy) Your resentment can be rephrased as - "I cannot come to terms with the fact that common people really are that stupid".

Freedoms in various forms are generally not taken away overnight. As they say "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"
by smcnally | 2025-04-29 18:25:14+00:00
Beyond solid benchmarks, Alibaba's power move was dropping a bunch of models available to use and run locally today. That's disruptive already and the slew of fine tunes to come will be good for all users and builders.

https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen3-67dd247413f0e2...
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-04-29 18:25:39+00:00
You can disagree with their motives and methods but it's undeniable that the Chinese government is working incredibly hard for themselves and their citizens. The sheer manufacturing dominance of China speaks for itself, as does their presence on the global stage, as does their looming influence over geopolitics.

And yeah, they put out a shit ton of propaganda too. But it being propaganda doesn't by virtue of that fact make it lies. One would argue the more effective kind of propaganda is the kind that's verifiable fact, even if ideologically slanted in delivery.

And you know, I'm also biased as an American currently living under the "group of incompetent jackasses" administration, but I'd love for my government to do anything besides shutting down departments that make business owners mad and handing out tax breaks to the richest assholes here every fuckin day.
by ModernMech | 2025-04-29 18:26:07+00:00
Normally I agree but Godwin's law is officially suspended the moment they threw a Nazi salute.

Regardless, Godwin's Law is a thought terminating cliche, which is shielding us from the truth. The person you responded to wasn't calling them Nazis (although I am), they were asking you to engage in a hypothetical to try to make sense of a problematic issue: for 70 years since the Holocaust we have heard the slogan "never again", as a cry to the future to prevent such an atrocity from ever happening again.

The question to all those who hear that cry is: how? How do you prevent a holocaust from happening again?

The problem the parent is pointing out is that the perpetrators of a holocaust don't say that is their intent. They will say they are "punishing criminals", "deporting illegals", "purging drug dealers", "cleaning up the streets", "bringing order", "causing peace", "uniting the nation", "restoring glory" etc.

Therefore in order to prevent a holocaust, one has to necessarily stand in the way of people who claim to be doing good. No one doing a holocaust claims to be doing evil.

If you wait for undeniable proof of a holocaust before you act to stop it, you will fail. That kind of proof only comes after the fog of war has cleared.

Therefore if you really want to prevent a holocaust, you have to do so before they consolidate power, before they operationalize their intent, at the stage when they still have plausible deniability, and when they can make their plans seem reasonable. You prevent them from laying the groundwork for the holocaust, despite all the deniers.
by slibhb | 2025-04-29 18:26:25+00:00
Yeah, let's ban machines in factories while we're at it. Then Americans will have the honor of stitching clothing and standing at conveyer belts.

On a less sarcastic note, pretty much zero mainstream economists believe that tariffs will bring back manufacturing to the US. There are economists who think the US should manufacture more. They talk about taxing consumption more and savings/investment less. When you cite economists to tariff-enthusiasts, they usually reply with "economics is a scam!" or some such nonsense. That's only a breath away from an equally dumb Marxist line: "economists are just servants of The Capital". Bleh.

And I love Amazon. They're a fantastic company and have been since day 1. I'm a grown-up. If I want to buy cheap Chinese goods, I should be able to. And if that hurts Americans, that sucks for them, but I shouldn't have to pay a tax because some US company can't compete with Chinese companies. And if I lose my job because someone in China does it better/cheaper, I won't whine about it. I'll find something else to do.
by purplesyringa | 2025-04-29 18:26:25+00:00
You're right, I could've phrased that better.

Profiling to find suboptimal code is perfectly fine. Then you need to figure out how to fix it. Many people don't understand how performance optimization works, so they blindly add caching, improve constant time by invoking more low-level methods, etc. This obviously doesn't work, yet intuitively (to those people, anyway) it should produce good results.

That's why the mantra exists: don't trust your intuition, don't believe it when it says these changes improve performance, instead measure that performance and only apply changes that work. This is also perfectly fine, but this is a double-edged sword, and I've seen people go too far in this direction.

For example, they refuse to do any changes that don't immediately improve performance according to the profiler. If they modify one computation and performance decreases, they abandon this path altogether. They treat optimization as a game with a dense fog of war, and they refuse to apply deductive reasoning and, of course, intuition to apply changes that, according to the profiler at least, are not immediately rewarding.
by philsnow | 2025-04-29 18:26:48+00:00
> By the time I've browsed on a couple topics, I have enough tabs open I can't see the titles any more

Sidebery or TreeStyleTabs lets you see the titles no matter how many you have. ... Well, you have to scroll, but it's so much better than having to go through tab-by-tab with a typical horizontal tab bar.

> Every now and then, I declare tab bankruptcy, mass bookmark them (to get over the feeling that I'll be closing something important), and close them all.

> I've never, ever, once, in 15ish years of operating this way, looked at any of the bookmarks.

Even though I can see the tab titles, this is exactly what I do(n't). I threw together a couple scripts to extract all the tabs (including which window they're in), and export that all to an org-mode file.
by Nevermark | 2025-04-29 18:27:08+00:00
It’s working! Oh, wait …

These models have limitations obviously, but many critiques apply equally or more to people.

If people were tasked with one shot, 10 second answers, to be written out in near errorless grammar, the LLM’s viewing our responses to prompts would be spending a lot of time discussing our limitations and how to game us into better responses. Humor, not at all humor.