MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vicentesteve | 2025-05-14 23:01:11+00:00
Quantum computing offers immense power, but remains out of reach for most users. This preprint introduces a universal protocol that enables purely classical clients to securely delegate quantum computations to remote servers, while ensuring both blindness (privacy) and verifiability (correctness).

The protocol integrates:

Post-quantum cryptography (trapdoor claw-free functions, LWE) Zero-knowledge SNARKs A novel thermodynamic verification mechanism using entropy flow as a physical signature of computation

The goal: democratize access to quantum computing without compromising trust or requiring quantum capabilities.

Would love feedback from the community.

Paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391055609_Universal... Author: Vicent Esteve Voltes
by rcxdude | 2025-05-14 23:01:20+00:00
>I think a lot about Motie engineering versus human engineering. Could Motie engineering be practical? Is human engineering a fundamentally good idea, or is it just a reflection of our working memory of 7 +/- 2? Biology is Motie-esque, but it's pretty obvious we are nowhere near a technology level that could ever bring a biological system up from scratch.

It's the kind of thing you commonly get if you let an unconstrained optimization process run for long enough. It will generally be better, according to whatever function you're optimizing for. The main disadvantage, apart from being hard to understand or modify the design, is manufacturing and repair (needing to make many different parts), but if you have sufficiently good manufacturing technology (e.g. atomic level printers), then that may be a non-issue. And in software it's already feasible: you can see very small scale versions of this in extremely resource-constrained environments where it's worthwhile really trying to optimize things (see some demoscene entries), but it's pretty rare (some tricks that optimizing compilers pull off are similar, but they are generally very local).
by eek2121 | 2025-05-14 23:01:44+00:00
In CA they do, what other states?

In response to those laws, Uber has taken even more money from drivers.

The last number I heard was that drivers only get 53% of cash per ride.

Don’t misunderstand me, Uber is a cancer that needs to die and I am about to be at the point where I make a platform that will do just that.

My point is that those laws aren’t helping. More needs to be done.
by wbhart | 2025-05-14 23:02:20+00:00
1. Correct

2. Correct, however you can use Waksman as a basecase and always beat Strassen (though it is not asymptotically better of course).

5. Possible, but even so, there is already an algorithm that will work with 46 real multiplications (and some divisions by 2). The real numbers are commutative and admit division by 2.
by jiggawatts | 2025-05-14 23:03:03+00:00
I’ve had good experiences using it, but with the caveat that only Gemini Pro 2.5 has been at all useful, and only for “spot” tasks.

I typically use it to whip up a CLI tool or script to do something that would have been too fiddly otherwise.

While sitting in a Teams meeting I got it to use the Roslyn compiler SDK in a CLI tool that stripped a very repetitive pattern from a code base. Some OCD person had repeated the same nonsense many thousands of times. The tool cleaned up the mess in seconds.
by munificent | 2025-05-14 23:03:24+00:00
Oh, sorry, you're right. Mentioning the abbreviation is a red herring. The full quote is:

"But what if we don't need that tradeoff? What if I told you that analog photographers captured HDR as far back as 1857? Ansel Adams, one of the most revered photographers of the 20th century, was a master at capturing dramatic, high dynamic range scenes. It's even more incredible that this was done on paper, which has even less dynamic range than computer screens!"

It seems pretty clear to me that in this context the author is referring to the high dynamic range of the scenes that Adams pointed his camera at. That's why he says "captured HDR" and "high dynamic range scenes".
by blackguardx | 2025-05-14 23:04:19+00:00
I live in a low density city and my neighbors are constantly complaining about how fast cars speed by and how it makes it unsafe for their kids.

Dense cities are too congested for speeds to get that high. As an example, I felt safer biking in downtown San Francisco than I do on the country roads near me because people are constantly speeding and on their phones.
by dcre | 2025-05-14 23:04:38+00:00
I’m impressed. This is one of the strangest opinions I’ve ever seen. What is special about “at use”? Presumably because it lets you avoid the question of whether everyone should get a free car. Does a monthly car payment count as “at use”? Why not if a monthly transit pass does?

The other replies point out that different forms of transit compete with each other, so the more cars we have, the fewer bikes and trains.
by pj_mukh | 2025-05-14 23:05:14+00:00
Is squeezing into the 7th seat in the trunk of an Uber-XL SUV worth the faux-instantaneous nature of this product?

Get the Transit app folks [1], great GPS tracking of the right bus for you, advocate for an efficient well-funded bus/train service in your city and a municipal DOT that doesn't have to host 5 community meetings for every small change in routes.

[1]: https://transitapp.com

P.S: I'm an Uber One member, it certainly has its place in a car-less life. But this ain't it Chief.
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-14 23:05:34+00:00
While I am sympathetic to the general gist of the "poors aren't the subject of this tax" argument but the change in denominator "85% in this zone" to "2% of the city's working poor" is obvious and it's kind of concerning that with the huge efforts that went into quantifying this they couldn't come up with something more precise.

It's not like NYC doesn't have cameras everywhere and couldn't probably figure it pretty easily in an afternoon by crossing the ALPR DB with the tax DB (after spending 48mo of political wrangling to allow that to happen).
by gnabgib | 2025-05-14 23:05:59+00:00
Article title: Sharing new breakthroughs and artifacts supporting molecular property prediction, language processing, and neuroscience

About OMol25 (with better detail): [Computational Chemistry Unlocked: A Record-Breaking Dataset to Train AI Models has Launched](https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2025/05/14/computational-chemistr...) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43989140)
by nowittyusername | 2025-05-14 23:06:45+00:00
This is an important moment. We now have verifiable evidence that these systems can do new useful research that has actual value in the real world. That 1% savings is only the start as well. I would expect the compounding number of gains to be significant over some time. Also in a way this process was used to make gemini 2.5 pro better, so its like a baby step towards recursive self improvement. Not fully automated yet, but there are hints of where this is going.
by niwtsol | 2025-05-14 23:08:00+00:00
That was an interesting read, seemed like an overwhelming amount of data for why they should move off cockroach. All of my db work has been read heavy and I’ve never had a need for super fast multi-region writes. Is a multi-region write architecture possible in Postgres? I’m trying to understand if GDPR was the requirement that resulted in cockroach or if the lackluster multi region write was the bigger driver.
by etblg | 2025-05-14 23:08:48+00:00
> When I need to write an email, I often bullet-point what I want to write and ask the LLM to write out a coherent, cordial email. I’ve gotten worse at writing emails.

Think I'd rather just have the bullet points in the first place, to be honest, has to be easier and quicker to read than an LLM soup of filler paragraphs.
by dkhvost | 2025-05-14 23:09:05+00:00
I built URLMint to solve a pain I kept running into: finding a great .com domain that's actually available. It uses AI to generate short, brandable names and checks live availability, returning only domains you can register right now. No more dead ends, awkward spellings, or wasting hours on name ideas that are already taken.

Perfect for startups, side projects, or anyone trying to name something fast. Feedback welcome — would love to hear what you think or how you'd improve it.
by Swizec | 2025-05-14 23:10:10+00:00
> When I need to write an email, I often bullet-point what I want to write and ask the LLM to write out a coherent, cordial email. I’ve gotten worse at writing emails

Just send the bullet points! Nobody wants the prose. It’s a business email not an art. This is a hill I will die on.

Prose has its uses when you want to transmit vibes/feelings/... For actionable info communication between busy people, terse and to the point is better and more polite.

It’s bad enough when I have to read people waffling. Please don’t make me read LLM waffle.
by wirybeige | 2025-05-14 23:10:10+00:00
I always thought the "Your Desktop Trying To Sort Its Shit Out" part was a necessary evil, but other platforms don't suffer from this (at least from what I can tell); the state of HDR on Windows is very disappointing, even just adjusting the TF to gamma 2.2 would make it substantially better. Watching all your non hdr content's blacks become gray is terrible. I assume the washed out appearance comes from it giving up on doing SDR->HDR for the desktop.

My brother got an OLED monitor & was telling me how bad his experience was on Windows, & he recently switched to Linux & does not have the issues he was complaining about before. Ofc, downsides to hdr on Linux (no hdr on chromium, hdr on Firefox is unfinished) atm, but the foundation seems better set for it.
by qingcharles | 2025-05-14 23:10:15+00:00
A lot of this is poor QA. When you start to do clever things like HDR you have to test on a bunch of properly calibrated devices of different vendors etc. And if you're targeting Windows you have to accept that HDR is a mess for consumers and even if their display supports, their GPU supports it, they might still have the drivers and color profiles misconfigured. (and many apps are doing it wrong or weird, even when they say they support it)

Also (mostly) on Windows, or on videos for your TV: a lot of cheap displays that say they are HDR are a range of hot garbage.
by joquarky | 2025-05-14 23:10:20+00:00
If copyright stayed at 7+7, I would agree that AI companies were "skirting" copyright law, but as I see it life + 70 violates the "limited" terminology in the Constitution by denying people the right to create derivative works.

IP holders did this to themselves by extending the term beyond any reasonable interpretation of "limited".

Hell, Jack Valenti wanted to extend it to "forever minus a day"

IMO, copyright law in its current form is unconstitutional and unnatural.
by grugagag | 2025-05-14 23:10:51+00:00
Having a dinky appartment that is still expensive is not worth it unless you’re young and don’t have kids and want to be around everything you care about. Or you’re rich and don’t mind paying a fortune to live in a nicer appartment in Manhattan. If I had the money I would still prefer something outside Manhattan just to be able to avoid the noise pollution, the crowds and all that Manhattan commotion.
by michael1999 | 2025-05-14 23:11:39+00:00
I think your problem is higher up the stack. Try running this SQL

create table tz_test ( comment varchar, ts timestamp, ts_tz timestamptz );

insert into tz_test (comment, ts, ts_tz) values ( 'in "local"', TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE '2003-04-12 04:05:06 America/New_York', TIMESTAMP WITH TIME zone '2003-04-12 04:05:06 America/New_York'), ( 'flattened to UTC', (TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE '2003-04-12 04:05:06 America/New_York') at time zone 'UTC', TIMESTAMP WITH TIME zone '2003-04-12 04:05:06 America/New_York'), ( 'in "local" no types', TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE '2003-04-12 04:05:06 America/New_York', '2003-04-12 04:05:06 America/New_York'), ( 'flattened to UTC no types', (TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE '2003-04-12 04:05:06 America/New_York') at time zone 'UTC', '2003-04-12 04:05:06 America/New_York');

select comment, ts, ts AT TIME ZONE 'UTC' as ts_utc, ts_tz, ts_tz AT TIME ZONE 'UTC' as ts_tz_utc, case when ts < ts_tz then 'less' when ts>ts_tz then 'greater' else 'equal' end from tz_test;
by adolph | 2025-05-14 23:12:18+00:00
Are the 100s of nanometers of light larger than the perturbations of Brownian motion?

This oldish link would indicate inclusions of lead in aluminum at 330°C will move within 2nm in 1/3s but may displace by 100s of nanometers over time:

https://www2.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/MSD-Brownian-m...
by h4ck_th3_pl4n3t | 2025-05-14 23:12:41+00:00
This is not "running macOS VMs in Docker".

This is "running debian noVNC clients in Docker that connect to the same macOS host system".

I mean it's great that you use the Apple Virtualization Framework for that on the host service, but that's a different type of VM than a docker VM which would assume syscalls to be abstracted inside the docker container and not on a host service.

But yeah, just my two cents, I guess.
by exiguus | 2025-05-14 23:13:13+00:00
I understand your point. The Vibe approach is IMO only effective when you adopt a software engineering mindset. Here's how it works (at least for me with Copilote agent mode):

1. Develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or prototype that functions.

2. Write tests, either before or after the initial development.

3. Implement coding guidelines, style guides, linter etc. Do code reviews.

4. Continuously adjust, add features, refactor, review and expand your test suite. Iterate and let AI run tests and linters on each change

While this process may seem lengthy, it ensures reliability and efficiency. Experienced engineers might find it as quick as working solo, but the structured approach guarantees success. It feels like pairing with a inexperienced developer.

Also, this process may run you into rate limits with Copilot and might not work with your current codebase due to a lack of tests and the absence of applied coding style guides.

Additionally, it takes time. For example, for a simple to mid-level tool/feature in Go, it might take about 1 hour to develop the MVP or prototype, but another 6 to 10 hours to refine it to a quality that you might want to show to other engineers.
by jacknews | 2025-05-14 23:13:19+00:00
"Park now finds refuge scrubbing dishes in the back of the kitchen, away from the counter"

They seem to have this entirely backwards.

The robots should be in the truck cab for a start, driving the trucks.

But even if there are human drivers who need these stops, the robots should then be doing the drudgier and more easily automated work; cleaning dishes, mopping the floor, prepping ingredients, and leave the cooking to an actual chef, and the human interaction to an actual human.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-14 23:13:48+00:00
What do you mean, counterargument? A "counterargument" can only exist relative to an argument. So far there hasn't been an argument. To recap:

1. "A big reason bats carry a lot of diseases is that they have large temperature fluctuations."

2. "How does the one lead to the other?"

3. "Diseases can't tolerate temperature fluctuations."

That's gibberish, not an argument. Combining two random (or in this case, contradictory) sentences doesn't make an argument.
by holografix | 2025-05-14 23:13:56+00:00
There’ll be a move to oral ability assessment across the board.

Oral exams, face to face interviews, etc.

If you think of the LLM as a tireless coach and instructor and not a junior employee you’ll have a wonderful opportunity. LLMs have taught me so so much in the last 12 months. They have also removed so many roadblocks and got me to where I wanted to be quicker. Eg: I don’t particularly care about learning Make atm but I do want to compile something to WASM.
by qingcharles | 2025-05-14 23:15:00+00:00
What you said, it's definitely become a style. But, also, a lot of these movies that look like ass on Joe Public's OOGLAMG $130 85" Black Friday TV in his brightly-lit living room actually look awesome if your entire setup is proper, real HDR devices and software, your screen has proper OLED or local dimming, is calibrated to within an inch of its life etc, and you view them in a dark home theater.
by idopmstuff | 2025-05-14 23:15:31+00:00
I think the list of historical analogies is missing the biggest one - the internet.

Memorization used to be a much more important skill than it is today. I am probably worse at rote memorization than I was when I was 13. Am I dumber? I would say no - I've just adapted to the fact that memorization is much less important in a world where I have access to basically the entire recorded history of human knowledge anywhere, anytime.

LLMs are just another very powerful technology that changes what subdomains of intelligence matter. When you have an LLM that can write code better than any human being (and since I know I will get testy HN replies about how LLMs can't do that, I will clarify here that I mean this is a thing that is not true today but will be in the future), the skill that matters shifts from writing code to defining the problem or designing the product.

> Looking at historical examples, successful cases of offloading occurred because the skills are either easily contained (navigation) or we still know how to perform the tasks manually but simply don’t need to anymore (calculator). The difference this time is that intelligence cannot easily be confined.

This is true, but I think it just means we'll see a more extreme kind of the same change we've seen as we've created powerful new tools in the past. I think it's helpful to think of the tool less as intelligence and more as the products of intelligence that are relevant, like generating high quality code or doing financial analysis. You'll have tools that can do those things extremely well, and it'll be up to you to make use of them rather than worrying about the loss of now-irrelevant skills.
by edunteman | 2025-05-14 23:16:06+00:00
Thanks for sharing your experience! I'd love to chat about what you did to make this work, if I may use it to inform the design of this system. I'm at erik [at] pig.dev

To clarify, the use of CLIP embeddings in the CUA example is an implementation decision for the CUA example, not core to the engine itself.

This was very intentional in the design of Check being a pair of Capture() -> T and Compare(current: T, candidate: T) -> bool. T can be any data type that can serialize to a DB, and the comparison is user-defined to operate on that generic type T.

A more complete CUA example would store features like OCR'ed text, Accessibility Tree data, etc.

I'll use now to call out a few outstanding questions that I don't yet have answers for:

- Parameterization. Rather than caching and reusing strict coordinates, what happens when the arguments of a tool call are derived from the top level prompt, or even more challenging, as the result of a previous tool call. In the case of computer use, perhaps a very specific element x-path is needed, but that element is not "compile time known", rather derived mid-trajectory.

- What would it look like to stack compare filters? IE, if a user wanted to first filter by cosine distance, and then later apply more strict checks on OCR contents.

- As you mentioned, how can you store some knowledge of environment features where change *is* expected. Datetime in the bottom right is the perfect example of this.
by jmyeet | 2025-05-14 23:17:23+00:00
Gas taxes (partially) pay for the roads. Get rid of those and you've just decreased your tax base, which means you're going to have to pay for it from another tax. It's just shifting the tax burden. We can argue about what's a better tax policy, if a certain tax is progressive or regressive and so on but wherever the money comes, somebody needs to pay for the roads.

NYC is one of about 2 places in the US that actually has usable public transit, barring certain outer boroughs where car ownership dominates. It's largely a hub and spoke model though so it's good for going into and out of Manhattan but not so good for, say, getting from Red Hook to Flushing so driving will dominate that kind of travel.

But that's why congestion pricing is targeted at Lower Manhattan and can't really spread beyond it. Like see how far you get trying congestion pricing in Houston or Dallas, let alone Bakersfield, Boise or Lexington (KY).

Economic incentives work. They're probably most responsible for the drop in smoking. Congestion pricing consistently changes people's behavior and every metric shows it. Some bus lines in NYC now move nearly 30% faster.

I don't know what island you're talking about and what happened but will generally agree that people are struggling all over. It's well-known that real wages have largely been stagnant for 40-50 years.

But that's not a problem caused by gas taxes. It's caused by capitalism.
by legohead | 2025-05-14 23:17:38+00:00
I love LLMs, and actually feel they are making me smarter.

I'll be thinking of something in the car, like how do torque converters work? And then I start live talk session with GPT and we start talking about it. Unlike a Wikipedia article that just straight tells you how it works, I can dive down into each detail that is confusing to me until I fully understand it. It's incredible, for the curious.
by nowittyusername | 2025-05-14 23:17:38+00:00
What you are talking about is the "proper" way of vibe coding. Most of the issues with vibe coding stem from user misunderstanding the capabilities of the technology they are using. They are overestimating the capabilities of current systems and are essentially asking for magic to happen. They don't give proper guidance, context or anything of value for the coding IDE to work with. They are relying a mindset of the 2030's to work with systems from 2025. We aint there yet folks, give as much guidance and context as you can and you will have a better time.
by ZeWaka | 2025-05-14 23:17:47+00:00
> While CS undergrads are still required to take classes on assembly, most productive SWEs never interact with assembly.

You may think this, but the principles are extremely relevant even in much 'higher tiers' of programming, such as the front-end. Performance optimization is always relevant, and understanding the concepts you learn from learning assembly is crucial.

Such courses also generally encourage a depth of understanding of the whole computing stack. This is more and more relevant in the modern age, where we have technologies such as Web*Assembly*.
by gwbas1c | 2025-05-14 23:17:47+00:00
> At this point, I need 120hz displays. I can easily notice when my wife’s phone is in power saver mode at 60hz.

Yeah, the judder is a lot more noticeable on older TVs now that I have a 120hz TV. IMO, CRTs handled this the best, but I'm not going back.
by zahlman | 2025-05-14 23:18:56+00:00
>She's lived in suburban and rural areas her entire life. The idea that she simply has to get in a car to go anywhere is so ingrained into her psyche that even a solid week of not driving is insufficient to dislodge it.

I'm in a suburban area. When I was a child, I got driven everywhere - until I was old enough to take public transit by myself.

I'm about to walk ~3km (2mi) each way to a grocery store, something I do regularly. I save thousands of dollars annually like this. I could feed myself several times over with that money.

It will never stop being strange to me that people actually get that car-dependent mindset ingrained into them.