MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LexiMax | 2025-05-21 19:58:29+00:00
This seems like a worldview borne from an era where the PC was _the_ definitive, ubiquitous computing device of choice for the layperson. These days, that crown is taken by the smartphone.

If you need a PC in 2025, you're probably a fair bit more knowledgeable than someone buying one in 2005. You're also almost certainly buying one online, possibly even directly from the manufacturer or builder, which means the seller can simply give you options and doesn't have to worry about competing for store shelf space.
by redwood | 2025-05-21 19:58:57+00:00
I for one have been tracking Appwrite since it launched and am not affiliated with the company. This is a tough segment to build a business in. It's crowded, and these kinds of opinionated abstractions are limiting once you want flexibility or scale. Still this is clearly a time in which people are looking for good open source options at this layer... Someone has to keep Supabase honest...
by kstrauser | 2025-05-21 19:59:04+00:00
I prefer this approach. It's kind of like using `.expect()` or `.unwrap()` in Rust when there's no plausible way the call should fail. Like if my program writes out a JSON file and then reads it back in, and the file isn't value JSON, panicking is a reasonable way to deal with the situation. Someone the world got itself into a strange state I can't reasonably recover from.

Well, same here. If you're using strtol on data that must be well-formed, and it's not, and you're at an earlier stage of startup like parsing the config file, go ahead and blow up. That's almost certainly better than plowing ahead with invalid data.
by jxmorris12 | 2025-05-21 19:59:22+00:00
Very fair!

> Does this extend to being able to analytically determine which concepts are encodable in one embedding but not another? An embedding from a deft tiny stories LLM presumably cannot encode concepts about RNA replication.

Yeah, this is a great point. We're mostly building off of this prior work on the Platonic Representation Hypothesis (https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07987). I think our findings go-so-far as to apply to large-enough models that are well-enough trained on The Internet. So, text and images. Maybe audio, too, if the audio is scraped from the Internet.

So I don't think your tinystories example qualifies for the PRH, since it's not enough data and it's not representative of the whole Internet. And RNA data is (I would guess) something very different altogether.

> Assuming that is true. If you can detect when you are trying to put a square peg into a round hole, does this mean you have the ability to remove square holes from a system?

Not sure I follow this part.
by aaronbrethorst | 2025-05-21 19:59:22+00:00
LUV CBDS YOUR ARE WRONG!!! REJECTED | Reason: CBD=CANNABIDIOL, A COMPOUND OF MARIJUANA LIKE THC.

Well, that's silly seeing how CBD is available OTC basically everywhere (thanks to Mitch McConnell and the law of unintended consequences https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-mitch-mcconnell-acc...)
by delusional | 2025-05-21 19:59:52+00:00
> > We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work.

> We have redefined competence, but we haven't redefined it to be measured in nebulous ways. Far from it. Nadella does one thing and he does it well: he makes number go up. And that's all that matters.

I think Ziton would argue that this statement was supposed to be one level below "number going up". His argument seems to be not that number shouldn't go up, but that the number that goes up used to be based on "being good at stuff" but now isn't.

His argument isn't that executives shouldn't focus on the money, but rather that the money has last track of what they were supposed to track. It's not the executive themselves, it's the economy. The executives would then be the outcome of skewed incentives by an economy that has disconnected from "useful stuff".

This also happens to be my favorite take. So I may just be confirmation biased.
by srean | 2025-05-21 20:00:58+00:00
I can understand that two relatively rotated embeddings from the same or similar dataset can be realigned as long as they don't have internal geometric symmetries. The same way we can re-align two globes -- look for matching shapes, continents.

EDIT: Perfect symmetries, for example, feature-less spheres, or the analogues of platonic solids would break this. If the embedded space has no geometric symmetries you would be in business.

Re-aligning, essentially would be akin to solving a graph-isomorphism problem.

Lie algebraic formulation would make it less generic than an arbitrary graph-isomorphism problem. Essentially reduce it to a high dimensional procrustes problem. Generic graph isomorphism can be quite a challenge.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes_analysis

EDIT: Sinkhorn balancing over a set of points (say a d-dimensional tetrahedron, essentially a simplex) furthest from each other might be a good first cut to try. You might have already done so, I haven't read your paper yet.
by bruce511 | 2025-05-21 20:01:02+00:00
You also need some sort of battery management, and inverters typically have this built in as well.

So yeah, you can get by without an inverter, but then you need a battery charger manager so as not to overcharge, and (depending on the battery chemistry) something to cut off the battery as it runs down. (Lead acid for example shouldn't go below 50%).
by anonzzzies | 2025-05-21 20:01:10+00:00
So does openai know how to widen the context window without it taking more money? Otherwise Google wins, again. And this is all boring. Gemini 2.5 pro preview where you can just insert all files you have and actually it doesn't compress and has it in memory is just what you want. All the compression tricks etc really are shit compared. 32k input tokens is a joke now once you tried this.

As in bearish on openai if they don't offer cheaper 10m context soonish. Google will.
by lolinder | 2025-05-21 20:01:19+00:00
You're not getting it: this is already happening everywhere. There is no private data on public Discord servers. Never has been.

All these researchers have done is admit to doing what many less well-meaning people and organizations are already doing on a regular basis. If that admission leads to more people realizing that public Discord servers are public, then the researchers have done everyone a service.

Blaming the researchers in this case is like blaming LockPickingLawyer for locks being pickable. The bad guys were already picking the locks before he started his channel, all he did was shine a light on just how bad most locks are.
by xg15 | 2025-05-21 20:01:25+00:00
I don't think the list is that tiny.

Countries cannot vote for themselves, so whatever a broadcaster does in its own country isn't relevant to the votes. (And obviously every country hypes their own candidate as much as possible to their own audience. So does Israel. That's not a problem)

I'd also see it as mostly OK if some country wanted to run a standard promo/advertising campaign for their candidate in other voting countries. A bit desperate, yes, but at least the campaign would be obvious to the public and would essentially just raise interest for the candidate's performance at the contest.

Where I think it gets potentially deceptive is if you call up people to vote who are not even planning to watch the contest, do so with a clear political motivation - and then later pretend all the votes were organic.

(Just checked the group's mails again. Interestingly, their call last year sounded a lot more urgent and openly political. "set an example", "every vote counts", with remarks that you can vote up to 20 times per device. This time the wording was much softer: "we wish her good luck and invite you to vote for her", with no mention of the 20 votes ability. Make of that what you want. Maybe someone complained.)
by markostamcar | 2025-05-21 20:02:11+00:00
Videos made using the devices showcased at our Computer History Museum Slovenia.

The devices list, their Doom port names, Doom port authors and source links:

- Kodak DC260 (1998): Doom for Digita, author: James Surine, https://web.archive.org/web/20070720203938/http://digita.mam...

- Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch (2011): prboom4android, authors: Florian Schulze, L!TH!UM, Marko Štamcar & others, https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/doom-for-nook-simple-touc...

- Polycom VVX 600 (2012): doomgeneric, authors: ozkl, maximevince, Neil Bostian & others, https://neilbostian.github.io/#/doomphone

- Apple iPod Mini 2nd gen (2005) & SanDisk Sansa Clip+ (2009): Rockdoom, authors: Florian Schulze, The Rockbox Crew & others, https://www.rockbox.org/

- Texas Instruments TI-Nspire CX CAS (2011): nDoom 3, authors: Xavier Andréani, Mrakoplaz, critor & others, https://tiplanet.org/forum/archives_voir.php?id=6631
by tasuki | 2025-05-21 20:02:26+00:00
Yes sure. There isn't much a userland app can actually do if your OS wants to spy on you. I wonder why they spend their time on this?

Meanwhile, Signal still requires a phone number to register and use. It's terrible: phone numbers are easy to lose, and not everyone has a phone number.

I like the ideas behind the Session[0] messenger: create an account with no authentication (no phone number, no email, no nothing), get a list-of-words-to-note-down, which allows you to access your account from any device. You get a UUID or something as your user id. Share that with a QR code or send a link over an existing channel to connect to someone.

To me this seems way ahead of Signal. I'm not affiliated with Session and haven't actually persuaded anyone to start using it just yet, so I don't really know how it is in practice. But the UX of creating an account made me weep tears of joy and hope <3

[0]: https://getsession.org/
by vel0city | 2025-05-21 20:02:33+00:00
> you shouldn't be using anything you don't control from the bottom up

You absolutely do not control any Apple device from the bottom up. It is Apple software running on Apple hardware, tons of closed off secret stuff in there.

And even then, you probably don't really control whatever Linux you installed from the bottom up. It's filled with code you didn't audit and validate, you're probably getting updates delivered on a regular basis by people you don't know, etc.

And even then, where are you going to run that? On a modern x86 processor running all kinds of UEFI software and microcode with security coprocessors you can't directly interface in but can see all your memory and devices?
Ask HN: Any MacBook Alternative?
by max_ | 2025-05-21 20:02:37+00:00
Apple computers are now spyware.

I would like to switch to Linux.

The problem with Linux is that there is really no good computer.

Is there a great linux laptop with stuff like good driver support, liquid cooling, good battery at least comparable to that of the Macbook Air?

I was thinking of the Razerblade but it has very poor linux support. But the hardware is well built. (The battery is not as good as MacOS)

I heard good things about Framework.

What laptop do you recommend for Linux users? (good hardware and reliable driver support)
by jasonthorsness | 2025-05-21 20:02:43+00:00
It's always a sign of good design when something as complex as the scheduler described "just works" with the simple abstraction of the goroutine. What a great article.

"1/61 of the time, check the global run queue." Stuff like this is a little odd; I would have thought this would be a variable dependent on the number of physical cores.
Show HN: I made Blueprint for brain health to hit daily peak productivity
by Lilian_ | 2025-05-21 20:02:49+00:00
I made Bryan Johnson's blueprint for brain health to help you reach daily peak productivity.

Here is how it works:

1) We get a snapshot of your life - connect your your phone data, calendar, and biomarkers from your wearable data and answer some standardized questions.

2) Psychologists review your data.

3) You get a full brain health snapshot — plus a personalized action plan.

I am building this mainly because as a former Judo national team athlete, I’ve seen firsthand that peak performance demands being in the top 1% physically and mentally - working on my brain health, sleep routines, stress reactions etc. helped me perform a lot better.

We're currently in early access, based in SF, and working primarily with athletes and founding teams
by wyager | 2025-05-21 20:03:10+00:00
This article reads like it was written entirely by GPT (it even has the tell-tale em-dashes), but besides that, the core contention of the article seems obviously false. There is, in fact, a position between "I support aggressively nerfing diesel engines via ECU restrictions" and "I like rolling coal"! Many of my friends who studied mechanical engineering seem to fall into the middle ground; none of them are coal rollers, and many of them feel strongly that diesel is held back by questionably justifiable legal restrictions.
by tonyarkles | 2025-05-21 20:03:18+00:00
I'm in the Canadian prairies and we pay a similar electric rate. It's funny though...

> avoiding the need to service additional equipment and deal with backup generators is an easy decision.

We've got a house in a very small town (pop. 100) and there are solar panels on a ton of the houses there. I've asked a few people about it and it's 100% for grid redundancy. Sure, they save a bit of money on their power bill, but they're basically using the panels and batteries as an alternative to a backup generator. Winters are quite cold here and having enough power to run the natural-gas-fired furnace and a few light bulbs is a huge win when the power inevitably goes out. Lots of people have small generators kicking around too (like the Honda EU2200 that RV folks love) but the solar install has seriously cut down on the need for those.
by trod1234 | 2025-05-21 20:04:09+00:00
This is not really accurate.

National currency as the defacto reserve currency does not necessarily guarantee a trade deficit. It just happens that way in history quite often, but it is unsustainable throughout the currency lifecycle.

> The solution is a non-national global reserve ... Keynes argument.

Keynes was wrong about a great many things which weren't really recognized until after the 1970s. His depiction of Say's law (and the disproving caricature of it which meant nothing), as well as the related actual failures of monetary policy in low interest rate environments, where his theories indicate contradictory outcomes.

I'd like to know why you think this would be a solution. It is not an obvious stance, and in fact the suggestion has been discounted in the past as impossible/intractable for a large number of reasons. First and foremost any system would be fundamentally unstable, and the risk of economic contagion unmitigated, there are cultural, sovereign, and other influences at the intersection of fiscal and monetary policy.

Most of the issues under that proposal are caused by the lack of economic calculation being possible, and growing chaos, and its a problem where the indicators lag behind the wave, so it comes without warning, or possibility to react.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-05-21 20:04:32+00:00
Anyone who has it, please post the SHA384 or BLAKE3 (BLAKE3 will be way faster on 100+ GB) so I can verify it if I get a torrent later. Zenodo requires a sign-in, and I won't auth with GitHub as they want some WILD permissions on my GitHub.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-05-21 20:04:45+00:00
Having worked on expert systems the difficulty in creating them is often the technical limitations of the end users. The sophistication of tooling needed to bridge that gap is immense and often insurmountable. I see the AI as the bridge to that gap.

That said it seems like both domain expertise and the ability to create expert systems will be commoditized at roughly the same time. While domain experts may be happy that they don’t need devs they’ll find themselves competing against other domain experts who don’t need devs either.
by grandslammer | 2025-05-21 20:06:01+00:00
The friction isn’t “can I call an LLM,” it’s every time I want to do anything with this file I have to:

open it in a tool that understands the format,

export / paste the part I care about,

phrase an LLM prompt,

paste the result back,

do this all again if i want the data formatted differently for different use cases.

adding the ability to format your data and view/download that natively, fast is like giving python scripting capabilities to normal users. You're thinking like a dev not like a business owner who may want to take a picture of a timesheet and have that immediately become a CSV then have it reformatted for a management system they use, all on the fly through natural language... there's so many ways that normal people navigate files and formats and I want to give these people some superpowers that they won't seek out themselves.

the gpt-wrapper argument is so played out. just like you’d say “my app is a GPT-wrapper” (it wraps the OpenAI API in a file-centric UX), you could say “Google Drive is a distributed-storage-wrapper” or “a cloud-storage-and-sync wrapper.” It’s the polished frontend and glue that makes the raw backend useful to end users.
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-05-21 20:06:11+00:00
I think the bubble is already a bit past peak.

My sophisticated sentiment analysis (talking to co-workers other professional programmers and IT workers, HN and Reddit comments) seems to indicate a shift--there's a lot less storybook "Ay Eye is gonna take over the world" talk and a lot more distrust and even disdain than you'd see even 6 months ago.

Moves like this will not go over well.
by silisili | 2025-05-21 20:06:35+00:00
You can kinda work around this though. runtime package has a LockOSThread that pins a goroutine to its current thread and prevents others from using it.

If you model it in a way where you have one goroutine per os thread that receives and does work, it gets you close. But in many cases that means rearching the entire code base, as it's not a style I typically reach for.
by ch4s3 | 2025-05-21 20:06:47+00:00
I'm saying he clipped the quote to give that impression.

> He says that Friedman was a fundamentalist and that people should be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, and the quote illustrates that well and the context doesn't change anything to that point.

No, Firedman says that government force isn't the best way to address discrimination. Again the quote is clipped to mislead.
by noir_lord | 2025-05-21 20:07:45+00:00
A device with 96% market share in the developed and developing world, that is also a fashion item, that most adults spend a good chunk of their waking life staring at… is over.

I do love HN at times, I really do.

In my case smart phones never started, I did and do find the form factor aggravating for everything but phone calls and reading but they aren’t remotely over.
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-21 20:07:47+00:00
Good fuzzing workflows and tools use the flow of code and which branches get taken to help find correlations between inputs and outcomes, and uses that extra context to more efficiently fuzz inputs.

In bigger programs this is an outright necessity because pure random fuzzing would basically be a lottery.

I've always felt that unit testing frameworks and libraries and even parameterized testing were missing this kind of functionality.

Intellij is able to run my tests and figure out the code coverage, but why isn't it closing the loop and auto-fuzzing/auto-discovering how to mutate tests to cover more?

And don't point me at AI, none of this requires AI and nothing should have to "think" to do this.

It's crazy to me that the vast majority of code running all the time is not exhaustively tested through almost all of it's possible state space with most of it's possible input space. It's not like we are lacking the CPU bandwidth to do it.

Why can't I write a new function and have something tell me within ten minutes "this input param causes an exception" without any effort from me? Instead all those extra cores in my CPU just run javascript trash and crowdstrike scanners
by godelski | 2025-05-21 20:07:53+00:00
Awesome! Great to hear!

There definitely can be some hurdles depending on what your goals are. If you're mainly browser user, don't stress. If gamer, go PopOS (if want to be a bit more, EndeavourOS is a good recommend).

If you do want to learn linux, then I actually suggest doing things "the hard way". That is installing Arch (fastest newbie I've seen is install on the 4th attempt) and try living in the terminal. The failures lead to a lot of learning. But it is a good way to learn because it forces you to get your hands dirty and makes you quick to not be afraid because well... you will have already experienced fucking up and it is less scary once you have haha. It's one of those things where you don't feel like you're making progress but boy do you learn fast this way.

But this of course is not what everyone should do! I just wanted to offer the advice in case you or anyone does. I am being serious about it being the hard way. But it pays off.
by koakuma-chan | 2025-05-21 20:08:27+00:00
Why did they hide the model thought details? Thoughts look like this now:

Analyzing TypeScript Errors

I'm currently focused on the actions/user.ts file, where I've identified a few issues. Specifically, I need to address a "Cannot find name" error related to UpdateUserDetailsFormState, and confirm that the intended target is UpdateUserDetailsFormInput. There might be some other discrepancies in the file that I need to resolve.

Debugging the Import

I've been trying to pinpoint the Cannot find name 'UpdateUserDetailsFormState' error. The type is definitely defined and imported, but it's not being recognized in the updateUserDetails function's arguments. I'm suspecting a scoping issue with the import statement within actions/user.ts. I also need to verify that UpdateUserDetailsFormState is correctly defined with the fieldValues property as optional as per the schema.
by mandevil | 2025-05-21 20:08:59+00:00
Dwarf planet versus comet/asteroid hinges on mass, basically its "enough mass to be roughly round" (technically it's called "hydrostatic equilibrium").

Back from the 1810's to the 1870's or so, most people considered Ceres, Vesta, and things like that to be planets- they were bodies that wandered around the solar system, that meant they were planets. When the numbers started to get into the 20's, everyone decided to create a new category, "asteroid" (Greek for 'star-like') and put all of the smaller things in that. So when Pluto was discovered in 1930 it was slotted right into the planet category. Pluto was discovered mostly by accident, because Clyde Tombaugh was amazing at working the blink comparator, and finding the one dot that moved in between the two pictures of the night sky a few days apart.

However, by the 1990's and 2000's you had computers and digital cameras, which are even better than Clyde at finding things that move, and quickly the number of planets started to go up- and it was clear that once we had thoroughly mapped the ~~Oort Cloud~~ (meant Kuiper Belt, see below) etc. we would have dozens of planets. And so once again astronomers decided to create a new category, just like they had with asteroids a century earlier. This time they drew the line in such a way that Ceres got moved from asteroid to dwarf planet- it has enough mass to be roughly round, so after over a century of being an asteroid it became a dwarf planet.

This is how things always work in science: we discover something, then we discover more of them, and re-categorize everything based on the new discoveries. It's just more noticeable with Pluto because reciting the planets is done by every schoolkid in a way that they don't for subatomic particles or for species of voles or whatever.