MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WillAdams | 2025-05-27 16:26:42+00:00
As a person who has finally arrived at a programming setup which allows him to finally do what he has dreamed about since first trying to sketch things up on a Koala Pad attached to a Commodore 64, I would like to gainsay that the personal computer revolution has come to an end.

When OpenSCAD was first released, I finally had a 3D modeling environment which made sense to me.

When the Shapeoko was first announced on Kickstarter (which made use of the opensource projects Arduino, Grbl, and Makerslide, and was iself initially opensource) I finally had a robotic shop assistant which allowed me to make pretty much anything I wanted w/o the need to make myriad fixtures and jigs or to limit myself to traditional joinery techniques.

When Python was added to OpenSCAD as: https://pythonscad.org/ I finally had a programming environment which allowed not just 3D modeling but also mutable variables _and_ the ability to write out files so as to make DXFs or G-code.

So, I am working on:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

and have been using it for my personal projects for a while now --- hopefully I will have a suitably intricate project ready to function as a showcase for its capabilities in a month or so.
by mNovak | 2025-05-27 16:26:56+00:00
Lots of people talking about how this looks like 2000's clipart, (and I'm not here to disagree) but seems like no one is talking about how these appear to be full 3D models that can be manipulated. AirBnb is actually being fairly subtle (small spinning animation on load) considering how over the top that could get, quickly. People have been doing small versions of this with 3D css transforms, but this is a step further.

Inevitably these things are fashion, and big companies want to have just slightly unique experiences. Usually that means doing something hard that the average site will struggle to replicate for a while, be that squishy UX animations, elegant minimalism, now 3D.
by Retric | 2025-05-27 16:27:09+00:00
We don’t call a 401(k) or an IRA a pension. “A 401(k) is classified as a defined contribution plan while a pension is a defined benefit plan.“ https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/100314/whats-differ...

But there’s little point in arguing over definitions when it’s clear what’s actually going on.
by devoutsalsa | 2025-05-27 16:27:18+00:00
I once wrote a personal’s ad in SQL on Craigslist, back when they had that section. A DBA replied and asked if I wanted hawking. She had a Cooper’s hawk. I met her at a commercial park in a Saturday morning. She was driving a Honda CRV, the hawk was in the front passenger seat, and I hopped into the back seat.

She started driving and spotted some crows. The hawk saw them as well. Wearing a “don’t kill me either your claws” glove, she moved her hand to the hawk, who gleefully jumped on. She rolled down her window, stuck the hawk outside, and it was basically a drive by shooting with a bird bullet. This happened three times.

My most vivid memory of this was her ripping the crows apart into pieces and putting the then into a bucket, like it was sushi you’d order from KFC.
by kens | 2025-05-27 16:28:14+00:00
I remember the big 1977-1979 scam with DataSync, World Power Systems, and "Colonel David Winthrop" advertising S-100 boards and other computer stuff but not shipping it to purchasers while also ripping off his suppliers. The article mentions Colonel Whitney (not Winthrop) for some reason

Interesting article on it: https://medium.com/@madmedic11671/forgotten-fraud-world-powe...
by skrebbel | 2025-05-27 16:28:17+00:00
I'd wager the the majority of small and medium business in my hometown act ethically. You pick out the worst behaving faceless bigcorps and generalize that to every company out there. But the vast majority of the world's economy is small local companies. By and large, these companies aren't evil. Also some larger companies try their best (eg eco-banks, brands like Patagonia, etc). I'm not saying they always succeed but to blanket call all of these "evil" as you keep on doing is ridiculous.
by Kon-Peki | 2025-05-27 16:28:18+00:00
> Looking at the data, Duke’s per-undergraduate donation rate (about 4.9 pounds) is comparable to that at other wealthy private universities like Princeton (7.6 pounds) and Georgetown (6.1 pounds). Duke actually outperforms some schools with similar student demographics like the University of Chicago (0.8 pounds) and Northwestern (0.9 pounds). Most large public universities hover around one pound per student.

This seems to assume that all students are “discarding” the same quantity of items each year. It also assumes that the only student donations that occur are ones that are tracked by their university. It’s hard to believe that it is true.

A place like UChicago is not known for being a party school; I doubt Balenziaga or Valentino items are in high demand. I would assume that people aren’t all that into fashion that goes out of style quickly, thus they probably aren’t throwing as much away. But maybe that’s just an “unfair” stereotype I have about UChicago students ;)

One thing I do know, however, is that up in the area of Northwestern, there is a strong tradition of donating things to churches and synagogues, who then hold rummage sales. There is even a “rummage sale season” and a circuit - every weekend there is a different set holding sales. It seems that any such donations here would not show up in any data that this author has collected.
by olejorgenb | 2025-05-27 16:28:31+00:00
I've been wondering when someone would finally use the actual code structure to do RAG. It seems like such an obvious, if somewhat harder (at least if you need to support many languages), approach.

The vector/keyword based RAG results I've seen so far for large code bases (my experience is Cody) has been quite bad. For a smaller projects (using Cursor) it seems to work quite well though.
by robertlagrant | 2025-05-27 16:28:36+00:00
Thank you; I appreciate your clarity and passion.

I'm trying to read the AGPL in the most tricky possible light to see where the exact boundary is.

From what I think you're saying, I could make a service that uses PgDog behind the scenes, which would mean I could modify PgDog without releasing the source code.

However, given most people making PgDog As A Service wouldn't put PgDog directly on the internet, but would put it behind something like HAProxy, or perhaps even a REST API that takes in a SQL query as text and runs it on PgDog. Would either of those options then mean they could modify PgDog without releasing the modification's source code?
by Spooky23 | 2025-05-27 16:28:52+00:00
I think GE is a tragic story in that they painfully and successfully navigated the transition from legacy giant manufacturer to the global economy, but overdid it.

Growing up in an area with a big presence (one of their division HQ), I did alot of early career business with them. They were shady everything was purchased with weird leasing agreements with themselves, etc.

The business strategy was good, but the demands to return growth powered by financial engineering ultimately killed the company.
by jprd | 2025-05-27 16:28:58+00:00
Old Chromeboxen from eBay. Mr. Chromebox UEFI[1].

I did this before the pandemic for a "real" K8s environment (history is 20/20, but this rocked for what I needed then).

Basically a super inexpensive and tiny i7-4600U laptops w/o display that I upgraded to 16GB of RAM and 256 SSDs. I still run a smaller fleet for different services and testing - both standalone and as part of a Proxmox cluster.

I donated to Mr. Chromebox for years, super awesome work.

[1]: https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/
by adrian_b | 2025-05-27 16:29:11+00:00
RISC-V has obviously been initially designed with the only purpose of being extremely simple to implement, simple enough to be implementable by students.

Nothing else can justify the weird choices made in designing RISC-V.

The idea to use RISC-V in actually useful devices must have come only after the initial design and for this purpose the only advantage of RISC-V versus designing some proprietary CPU core is that for RISC-V there already exists a significant amount of tools for software development, i.e. linkers, assemblers, compilers, debuggers, a few optimized libraries etc.

This advantage of RISC-V is extremely important, because developing compilers and all the other required software tools for any new ISA requires much more work and resources than the hardware design of a CPU core implementing it.

However, it is sad that the first ISA with a permissive license allowing it to be used by everyone everywhere has been one so bad as RISC-V.

It is absurd to claim that the target of RISC-V is to 'be an ISA for everything', when it does not even have adequate means for detecting integer overflow, a feature that existed even in much smaller ancient 8-bit microprocessors, like Motorola MC6800 (1974) and Zilog Z80 (1976).

Startups choose RISC-V because it is a fashionable buzzword good for pleasing possible investors and because their team does not include anyone with experience in low-level assembly programming or compiler back-end implementation, the only people who can assess the quality of an ISA.
by hakfoo | 2025-05-27 16:31:03+00:00
A well-run conglomerate from an investor's perspective is more like a broad mutual fund than a single hot stock.

It's not likely to pop 800% tomorrow, but it's more likely to produce reliable long-term value because it's pre-diversified.

For some reason, the Asian kerietsu/chaebol conglomerates seem to be able to handle it well. Nobody would deny Hyundai or Sony being hugely successful as conglomerates.
by jeffreyrogers | 2025-05-27 16:31:16+00:00
Algorithmic betting is widespread in horse racing now. I can't remember the exact figures but I think it's estimated to be about 40% of the total handle. There is a company that will allow individuals to connect directly to the betting pools and wager automatically. It's rumored that the biggest two bettors are betting over $1bn a year (of course a lot of that is recycled from prior payouts).
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-05-27 16:31:22+00:00
Sigh I knew that. I just posted this in the wider context of running Windows-applications under Linux, no matter which way and how, because at the end of the day that's all that counts. Yah, well. Maybe not, because that WiNE approach could be seen as less ressource intensive, while full-VM feels rather bloated, though more stable.

And because it bubbled up instantly, having read about it before, right here on HN, just ...uhhhmmm...hours ago.
by bigyabai | 2025-05-27 16:31:56+00:00
Gotta love TF2's gimmick levels. I won't spoil all of them, because I think Respawn deserves all the respect they can get for the Cause and Effect chapter. But I will happily share footage of the mesmerizing house factory level in the mission Into the Abyss for anyone unfamiliar: https://youtu.be/oOaHzR7jnJ0?t=420

We may never get a shooter campaign level that tops fighting robots on a prefab assembly line...
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-05-27 16:32:13+00:00
> HN is full of excuses why those things aren't needed, and that is something that AI can match

It's not just on HN; there's a lot of faith in the belief that eventually AI will enable enlightened individuals infinite leverage that doesn't hinge on pesky Other People. All they need to do is trust the AI, and embrace the exponentials.

Calls for the democratization of art also fall under this. Part of what develops one's artistic taste is the long march of building skills, constantly refining, and continually trying to outdo yourself. In other words: The Work. If you believe that only the output matters, then you're missing out on the journey that confers your artistic voice.

If people had felt they had sufficient leverage over their own lives, they wouldn't need to be praying to the machine gods for it.

That's a much harder problem for sure. But I don't see AI solving that.
by potatolicious | 2025-05-27 16:32:34+00:00
It seems like the main pitch here is auto-inclusion and auto-exclusion of various tools via an orchestration agent (which may or may not be the main model itself? Unclear from their post)

Mostly this seems like an end-run around tool calling scalability limits. Model performance degrades heavily if the field of possible tools gets too large, so you insert a component into the system that figures out what tools should be in-scope, and make only those available, to get reliability higher.

In terms of "why outsource this" it seems like the idea is that their orchestration agent would be better than a cruder task state machine that you would implement yourself. Time will tell if this assertion is true!
by ecb_penguin | 2025-05-27 16:32:41+00:00
> Better to maintain separate services interacting over some contract to insulate multiple codebases from the internals of each other.

All you've done is shifted the dependency and made extra work when schemas change. Now we have schema updates, _and_ service updates.

As I said, you give up transactions, performance, and flexibility. You also increase the workload, and increase failures. There is almost no good reason for what you're proposing.
Show HN: I made a VRAM Calculator in Hugging Face
by PieterBecking | 2025-05-27 16:33:31+00:00
It's a chrome extension that automatically loads the specs from the Hugging Face model card into the calculation.

> To test it, install the extension (no registration/key needed) and navigate to a HF model page. Then click the "VRAM" icon on the top right to open the sidepanel.

You can specify quantization, batch size, sequence length, etc.

Works for inference & fine-tuning.

If it does not fit on the specified GPUs, it gives you an advise on how to still run it (e.g. lowering precision).

It is inspired at my work, where we were constantly exporting metrics from HF to estimate required hardware. Now, it saves us in the dev team quite some time and clients can use it, too.

Let me know what you think.
by MissTake | 2025-05-27 16:34:05+00:00
https://archive.is/koHVt

More like Meta’s demands are unworkable.

> However, Clegg said that their demands to make technology companies ask permission before using copyrighted work were unworkable and “implausible” because AI systems are already training on vast amounts of data. He said: “It’s out there already.”

In other words, “we’ve been stealing everything and built our business on that theft, it would hurt Meta if they were held to accountable for all that theft”.
by electroly | 2025-05-27 16:35:56+00:00
I'd guess the breakdown is about:

- 80%: Information about databases. Schemas, sample rows, sample SQL usages (including buried inside string literals and obscured by ORMs), comments, hand-written docs. I collect everything I can find about each table/view/procedure and stick it in a file named after it.

- 10%: Swagger JSONs for internal APIs I have access to, plus sample responses.

- 10%: Public API documentation that it should know but doesn't.

The last 10% isn't nothing; I shouldn't have to do that and it's as you say. I've particularly had problems with Apple's documentation; higher than expected hallucunation rate in Swift when I don't provide the docs explicitly. Their docs require JavaScript (and don't work with Cursor's documentation indexing feature) which gives me a hunch about what might have happened. It was a pain in the neck for me to scrape it. I expect this part to go away as tooling gets better.

The first 90% I expect to be replaced by better MCP tools over time, which integrate vector indexing along with traditional indexing/exploration techniques. I've got one written to allow AI to interactively poke around the database, but I've found it's not as effective as the vector index.
by itishappy | 2025-05-27 16:36:16+00:00
Here's an interesting article on the history of the plant. Sounds like employment peaked in 1966 with 17 thousand employees before dropping to 7500 in 1972 and staying roughly stable until the 90s. Apparently they've been building radar there since 1987, and I can confirm that's still the purpose of the Lockheed-Martin plant.

https://www.syracuse.com/living/2019/09/an-historical-timeli...
by mfbx9da4 | 2025-05-27 16:36:27+00:00
> If you move authentication to the web hook implementer you lose control of what authentication mechanisms are in use

I don't understand where you are coming from. The article is comparing shared secret vs signing. In both those auth methods the "control" remains in the same place. The webhook consumer has to do the auth verification. The webhook sender mandates what authentication method is used.

Under none of these scenarios is the webhook consumer providing their own "authentication system".
by eqvinox | 2025-05-27 16:36:45+00:00
In case you want to calibrate your sense of armchair-ness: you have completely missed the point that discarding an individual attribute can quite badly change the meaning of a route, and since we're talking about the DFZ here, such breakage can spread around the planet to literally every DFZ participant. The only safe thing you can do is to drop the entire route. Maybe there was a point to this being discussed at quite some length by very knowledgeable people, before 7606 became RFC ;)

(I haven't downvoted your comment, but I can see why others would — you're making very simple and definite statements about very complicated problems, and you don't seem to be aware of the complications involved. Hence: your calibration is a bit off.)
by lithos | 2025-05-27 16:37:00+00:00
The gaming engineering side isn't getting the R&D funds, so they're forced to jury rig the AI stuff to something marketable and time wasting for competitors to match.

Everyone knows fake AI Frames, AI upscaling, and AI antialiasing is outright bad looking. But it sells well to AAA for needing to spend less on optimization. (Edit: It looks like a camera smudged with oil or fingerprints)
by sarchertech | 2025-05-27 16:37:00+00:00
>Most of the unrelated degree for CS work is useless.

You're ignoring what I said about time being required for understanding. Your CS and directly relevant math prereqs are going to be spread out of 4 years anyway. Might as well get a well rounded education while your there.

If you want to save money you can CLEP out of at least a year of classes (assuming you have the discipline to teach yourself), or if you were motivated in high school take AP classes.

You're also completely ignoring the part where I said number of credit hours isn't really indicative of total time spent. I'd say I spent 75% of my total active studying time on CS classes.

>You already admitted that the three calculus classes required for a BS weren't useful.

Nope I said they were just less useful than discrete math and stats. But there's overlap, it's hard to understand a big chunk of either of those without calculus.

> I pointed out the into python class isn't useful.

My intro programming class was pretty useful because it didn't focus on syntax, but on concepts. There were definitely a few gaps I had that were filled in there even though I had several years of experience before I took it.

>We really aren't using physics developing most software by CS graduates.

I have used physics directly a few times, but most software doesn't. However that's not why physics is useful, it reinforces your understanding of calculus. An intuitive understanding of growth is incredibly useful in CS.

>Kids coming out of school don't have this. Most people working don't understand the entire system. I worked at decent companies. There are plenty of people who will just stop at "JVM does something with my code".

If you went to a decent school and you paid attention at all you would. If you took the classes I did you'd honestly have to have worked at it to not have a pretty good understanding of the whole stack.

>The gen eds were all intro level classes, the only thing to take away is there are more to know.

I think the problem is that you either never learned all that much from your classes or you've just forgotten it all and you're applying your experience to everyone else.

>making decisions about the world based on an intro to law class

1 semester of business law was pretty useful when I was running a startup. Doesn't make me a lawyer, but I bet I know more than 90% of people in a similar position.

>knowledge of economics is still at the level of supply and demand

I took 2 semesters of micro and 2 of semesters because I found it interesting. I'd wager 2 years of Econ puts you somewhere near the 95th percentile or so among the general population. I've continue to learn certainly, but most people have nowhere near that level of understanding.

>Getting some pop sci level books and reading for a bit would have been better all around then sitting in intro lectures with 100 other students.

Again if that's the level of education you got, I can understand why you think it was a waste of time.
by willlma | 2025-05-27 16:37:53+00:00
This isn't entirely on-topic but I've been trying to understand why AI video editing isn't more common, and thought you might know. I've had an idea for a while to make tennis match highlight videos that show every single point of the match. Tennis has a lot of downtime between points (and even more between games and sets). I just want to tell an LLM: here's a two-hour long video of a tennis match. Strip out all the gaps between points. I'm guessing this would a very expensive frame by frame analysis of the video right now and that's why it's not done. Is that right or are there other reasons?
by samth | 2025-05-27 16:38:54+00:00
The big difference between SBCL and Racket today is support for parallelism, and that's about decisions made by both projects a very long time ago. Racket has incrementally added significantly more parallelism over the years, but supporting lightweight parallel tasks that do IO (as in a web server) is still not something Racket's great at.

(Source: I'm one of Racket's core developers.)
by spmurrayzzz | 2025-05-27 16:39:15+00:00
The aspirational goal is that the model knows what tools to call and when, without human intervention. In practice, you'll see varying efficacy with that depending on the tools you need. Some of the tool usage is in-distribution / well represented in training set, but if you have some custom exotic MCP server you created yourself (or pulled off of some random github) you may see mixed results. Sometimes that can be fixed by simply augmenting your prompt with contrastive examples of how to use or not use the tool.

As an aside, my experience with devstral (both via API and locally w/ open weights) has been very underwhelming to this effect. So I'm curious how this new agent infra performs given that observation.
by layer8 | 2025-05-27 16:39:16+00:00
There is a high risk that the systems that AIs build, and their reasoning, will become inscrutable with time, as if built by aliens. There is a huge social aspect to software development and the tech stack and practices we have, that ensures that (despite all disagreements) we as developers are roughly on the same page as to how to go about contemporary software development (which now for example is different than, say, 20 or 40 years ago).

When AIs are largely on their own, their practices will evolve as well, but without there being a population of software developers who participate and follow those changes in concepts and practices. There will still have to be a smaller number of specialists who follow and steer how AI is doing software development, so that the inevitable failure cases can be analyzed and fixed, and to keep the AI way of doing things on a track that is still intelligible to humans.

Assuming that AI will become that capable, this will be a long and complex transition.