MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigyabai | 2025-05-16 05:22:25+00:00
It is relatively modern, I'll give you that. Some people call it "free market economics" when applied to international trade.

> US taxpayers built Silicon Valley.

Then they should have gotten upset a loooooooooooong time ago. Where were the boycotts of foreign-made cars? Why didn't taxpayers ring the alarm when Intel ditched EULV? Why didn't they complain when Steve Jobs bragged about Chinese metalworking capacity? Why aren't we raging against Juicero and the rest of the venture capital scene for squandering our competitive edge? Why didn't we admit that the banks weren't too big to fail?

American taxpayers are directly complicit in the enrichment of Silicon Valley. They have had every opportunity to choose an alternative product, but they don't. It's almost as if the American market at-large overwhelmingly responds to marketing as opposed to the consequences of American leadership when it fails. Sure seems to look that way in the automotive industry, the chipmaking business, the smartphone market and the startup scene.
by TFYS | 2025-05-16 05:23:19+00:00
We've caused a mass extinction, we're warming the planet at a dangerous rate, we've covered it with harmful long lasting chemicals that are now in the bloodstreams of most living things, we've damaged the mental health of youth with social media, etc. All this because we don't test and think about the consequences broadly enough, the most important (if not the only) question we ask being "will this be profitable for the owners?".

If one of the things I mentioned doesn't cause our extinction, it's only a matter of time until one of our inventions does, if we don't consider the effects broadly enough before putting it in production at a large scale.
by tombert | 2025-05-16 05:23:50+00:00
Yeah, similarly, Joe Armstrong (RIP), co-creator of Erlang explained it to me like this:

> In distributed systems there is no real shared state (imagine one machine in the USA another in Sweden) where is the shared state? In the middle of the Atlantic? — shared state breaks laws of physics. State changes are propagated at the speed of light — we always know how things were at a remote site not how they are now. What we know is what they last told us. If you make a software abstraction that ignores this fact you’ll be in trouble.

He wrote this to me in 2014, and it has really informed how I think about these things.
by quitit | 2025-05-16 05:25:42+00:00
and to take it a step further:

1. reporting such advertising doesn't do anything,

2. nor the reporting of accounts that are directly soliciting such in messages,

3. nor policing of instagram accounts whose entire profile is just photos of drugs with instructions on how to buy them

It's farcical. It's also standard for these accounts to have tens of duplicate accounts which only differ by an incremental number after their handle.
by doug_durham | 2025-05-16 05:25:42+00:00
I never have LLMs work on 1000 LOC. I don't think that's the value-add. Instead I use it a the function and class level to accelerate my work. The thought of having any agent human or computer run amok in my code makes me uncomfortable. At the end of the day I'm still accountable for the work, and I have to read and comprehend everything. If do it piecewise I it makes tracking the work easier.
by motorest | 2025-05-16 05:26:47+00:00
> I'm aware of the _why_ but this is why the tools aren't useful for my case. If they cannot consume the codebase in a reasonable amount of time and provide value from that then they generally aren't useful in areas where I would want to use them (navigating large codebases).

I challenge you to explore different perspectives.

You are faced with a service that handles any codebase that's thrown at it with incredible ease, without requiring any tweaking or special prompting.

For some reason, the same system fails to handle your personal codebase.

What's the root cause? Does it lie in the system that works everywhere with anything you throw at it? Or is it in your codebase?
by usr1106 | 2025-05-16 05:27:24+00:00
Before 1582 the rule is just simpler. If it is divisible by 4 it's a leap year. So the difference is relevant for years 300, 500, 600, 700, 900 etc. For ranges spanning those years the Gregorian algorithm would result in results not matching reality.

When the Julian calendar was really adopted I don't know. Certainly not 0001-01-01. And of course it varies by country like Gregorian.
by chii | 2025-05-16 05:28:10+00:00
Any form of reward leads to competitiveness. In research, it's the funding, and the credit/accolades. In business, it's the money.

Any sort of scheme to try allocate the funding leads to competition for said funding!

In other words, in order to remove all competition in the system, you need unlimited funding. Even randomly allocating funding is insufficient, as it simply means you're competing on luck (for example, by trying to acquire more slots in the lottery).

> harder to avoid competitive behavior, but I don't think it's impossible.

Which i think is not true - it is in fact, impossible, unless you add in the condition that there's unlimited 'resources' (after all, there's competition for resources while it is limited).
by Leherenn | 2025-05-16 05:28:18+00:00
That's the thing though, in many places Europe people usually aren't paying much for university, and higher education is funded by the state. So the state has a keen financial interest on people not failing/doing over because they can't be bothered to go to lectures, a lot more than the students themselves.

The reality in my experience is that, whilst students are on paper adults (mostly) and responsible for their own successes and failures, a significant number benefits from being forced to attend. That's unfortunate for the ones that could "safely" skip the lectures and have to go, but on average it leads to better overall outcomes. So in that regard the attendance policies are sensible.
by goobie | 2025-05-16 05:28:58+00:00
Antisocial people flood the site with low quality answers to low quality questions and not indexing everything to the web is just too hard.. Imagine if every town and school was filled with the same pricks? Your kids are stupid and don't understand PhD level research so they should shut up.

It's all very logical for an older time when global communication was the kind of thing you needed to reserve for the top researchers as your total capacity was less than humanity needed. But now you are just repeating the mantras of older generations in an antisocial way.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-05-16 05:29:30+00:00
Do new liver cells always come from stem cells, not from dividing liver cells? Are those heppatocyte stem cells reside in the liver, or do they travel their via migration,.or blood, etc?

A quick search suggests that liver regen involves dividing mature liver cells to replace turnover. If so, I'd suspect that they'd continue to carry the.crispr edit forward.
by mek6800d2 | 2025-05-16 05:30:48+00:00
Part of this excellent movie revolved around the months-long shutdown of the 70-meter antenna at the Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia. Coincidentally, the new JPL press release about Voyager 1's thrusters also details a new months-long shutdown (May 2025-Feb 2026) of that same antenna for more upgrades. It's the only antenna that can transmit to Voyager 2, which flew south of the ecliptic after its Neptune flyby. The DSN stations in Spain and California can still transmit to Voyager 1, which flew north of the ecliptic after its Saturn flyby. (Todd Barber, quoted in the The Register article and in JPL's press release, appears in the movie.)
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-16 05:31:04+00:00
You grossly underestimate how hard it is to sink a warship. During SINKEX live fire exercises that use a retired US Navy ship as a target, they will usually absorb many hits with state-of-the-art weapons without sinking, even though the active defenses are turned off. This is several thousand kilograms of explosive with terminal guidance smart enough to find the most vulnerable part of the ship.

Typically, they have to send a specialized demolition team to actually sink the ship after the exercise is over.

To a first approximation, US Navy ships are demonstrably unsinkable. That has always been a hallmark of US Naval architecture, and they are rightly proud of it. The idea that it is possible to destroy these ships with tens of kilos of explosives delivered by cheap drones isn’t serious.
by refulgentis | 2025-05-16 05:31:25+00:00
It's a turducken of crap from everyone but ngxson and Hugging Face and llama.cpp in this situation.

llama.cpp did have multimodal, I've been maintaining an integration for many moons now. (Feb 2024? Original LLaVa through Gemma 3)

However, this was not for mere mortals. It was not documented and had gotten unwieldy, to say the least.

ngxson (HF employee) did a ton of work to get gemma3 support in, and had to do it in a separate binary. They dove in and landed a refactored backbone that is presumably more maintainable and on track to be in what I think of as the real Ollama, llama.cpp's server binary.

As you well note, Ollama is Ollamaing - I joked, once, that the median llama.cpp contribution from Ollama is a driveby GitHub comment asking when a feature will land in llama-server, so it can be copy-pasted into Ollama.

It's really sort of depressing to me because I'm just one dude, it really wasn't that hard to support it (it's one of a gajillion things I have to do, I'd estimate 2 SWE-weeks at 10 YOE, 1.5 SWE-days for every model release), and it's hard to get attention for detailed work in this space with how much everyone exaggerates and rushes to PR.

EDIT: Coming back after reading the blog post, and I'm 10x as frustrated. "Support thinking / reasoning; Tool calling with streaming responses" --- this is table stakes stuff that was possible eons ago.

I don't see any sign of them doing anything specific in any of the code they link, the whole thing reads like someone carefully worked with an LLM to present a maximalist technical-sounding version of the llama.cpp stuff and frame it as if they worked with these companies and built their own thing. (note the very careful wording on this, e.g. in the footer the companies are thanked for releasing the models)

I think it's great that they have a nice UX that helps people run llama.cpp locally without compiling, but it's hard for me to think of a project I've been more by turned off by in my 37 years on this rock.
by palisade | 2025-05-16 05:32:24+00:00
Does this mean when they grow up, their own offspring will also have this defect and require a correction? And, if so, does this mean it is now introducing this defective gene into our gene pool?

I know this is an issue with caesarean section. It is becoming more prevalent because those who require it are surviving, making it more likely to happen in their offspring.
by dang | 2025-05-16 05:33:13+00:00
Related. Others?

The Awful German Language (1880) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27173967 - May 2021 (253 comments)

The Awful German Language (1880) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18147467 - Oct 2018 (311 comments)
by kjkjadksj | 2025-05-16 05:33:53+00:00
Honestly the biggest barriers to a lot of advancement right now in biology from medicine to our food supply depend squarely on getting uneducated people over their aversions to modern science. It is crazy. We are really at the “I don’t trust that locomotive/airplane/car” stage where what the public understands about the field is so far away from the state of the art and the risk considerations that have been put in place by the actual domain experts who have thought of all your concerns already. It isn’t just lay people either but government officials in charge or permitting and approvals that need the most convincing. They might be out of the field themselves for a decade or more.
by zerosizedweasle | 2025-05-16 05:33:59+00:00
Yeah but this was before war with China and Russia loomed large in the near future (even Trump's foreign policy can't change this.) The security paradigm has shifted, this is not the 1990s and it is a matter of life and death. The penalties for being seen as facilitating the large numbers of American deaths in a war will be vicious. Silicon Valley should act accordingly or get run over. War is coming, and soon.
by jiggawatts | 2025-05-16 05:35:23+00:00
What am I paying for?

I worked out that the markup on CPU, network bandwidth, and storage for the default logging products from the major clouds is on the order of 25x to 500x.

Okay, sure, there's some people that need to be paid, the back-end software may have some licensed components, etc, etc...

But still, comparing this to any other cloud service, the gross profit margin is just ridiculous!

It's the typical IT marketing trick of selling the commodity (VMs) at competitive prices, and then clawing back the profits via the "enterprise add-ons".
by lwo32k | 2025-05-16 05:35:42+00:00
The issue is not that people's brain degenerate. Cause the rest of the body is physically degenerating too. And most people would naturally die by the time they hit retirement age before symptoms of mental decay show up, as was the case before we got modern pharma and surgical procedures.

But since we have more fixes for physical degeneration than mental degeneration, we see most sedentary people kept alive through medication and constant surgeries well into their 80s and 90s while there is nothing much to reverse whats happening to the brain.

Having worked for a while at a hospital, I feel people who really haven't lead active lives or are just naturally less active or don't like too much activity fall into this trap, where the medical system will keep them physically alive for few decades longer than in the past. They need to be told this could be a trap. Instead we keep them alive, let their brains degenerate and study them like lab rats.
by revicon | 2025-05-16 05:35:58+00:00
I usually tell it to go read the relevant doc when I do the initial prompt to it when I start working on something. And sometimes I'll remind it during a conversation if I want to make sure it isn't re-inventing the wheel instead of using a feature that is already there in the lib. I run into that with TanStack Router from time to time as an example.
by usr1106 | 2025-05-16 05:37:35+00:00
Interesting, how standards just ignore reality.

At work we had discussions what date format to use in our product. It's for trained users only (but not IT people), English UI only, but used on several continents. Our regulatory expert propsed ISO8601. I did not agree, because that is not used anywhere in daily life except by 8 millions Swedes. I voted 15-Apr-2025 is much less prone to human error. (None of us "won". Different formats in different places still...)
by kjkjadksj | 2025-05-16 05:37:52+00:00
Easiest way to do this stuff is before fertilization when you have one egg and one sperm to work with. Delivering change through a multicellular organism is very challenging. All this stuff like transgenic mice are set up in mutant crosses before this stage, before mating really.

Eventually this will be the outcome of our species to edit the gametes themselves. The issue to overcome for this again won’t be technological as that is pretty much solved but getting people over their own “ick” factor.
by const_cast | 2025-05-16 05:39:08+00:00
> If you want to convince people, you need to understand their actual motivations.

Yes, but if we did that we would have to deconstruct the history behind the American fixation on private automobiles and, of course, the racism and "think of the children" rhetoric that comes with it.

It's a losing battle. I can't convince people driving is more dangerous than the subway even if all the stats in the world make it plainly true. This is a culture problem, and much like every single one of America's cultural problems, it stems from hundreds of years of systemic racism. It has to be brought down slowly and deliberately.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-05-16 05:39:39+00:00
Anyone who has a vague idea of technical work or project management understands: this current effort doesn't appear interested in efficiency, it's seems focused on new software contract opportunism. Perhaps (deca/centi)gigabucks over many years. And, it doesn't necessarily have to create anything functional or better so long as large amounts of cash are extracted, because that's the primary objective.

Government program oversight:

1. Don't delegate decision-making to the consultants.

2. Don't hire consultants, hire staff in-house because it will be cheaper.

3. Involve customers early and continually through requirements definition, prototyping, testing, and UAT / Shewhart cycle.

4. Separate customer requirement needs from wants.

5. Have well-defined, specific, minimal mission goals.

6. Never rip and replace high-risk, working systems cavalierly.
by fernirello | 2025-05-16 05:39:44+00:00
I've got valuable advice from SO over the years. There's overlap with LLMs, sure, but it's frequent to have questions that have no answers published anywhere on the web; SO brings people who know out of the woodwork, who create an explanation that didn't exist before. A couple days ago, someone in retrocomputing got to bank-switch a 1983 Radio Shack box... that kind of stuff wasn't published anywhere, until a guy who used to write games for that box answered that question on SO.
by lhl | 2025-05-16 05:40:24+00:00
Here's some discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1jzocoo/finally...

Ollama appears to not properly credit llama.cpp: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/3185 - this is a long-standing issue that hasn't been addressed.

This seems to have leaked into other projects where even when llama.cpp is being used directly, it's being credited to Ollama: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/12896

Ollama doesn't contributed to upstream (that's fine, they're not obligated to), but it's a bit weird that one of the devs claimed to have and uh, not really: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1k4m3az/here_is... - that being said they seem to maintain their own fork so anyone could cherry pick stuff it they wanted to: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/commits/main/llama/llama.cp...
by kjkjadksj | 2025-05-16 05:42:30+00:00
Low hanging fruit is very low hanging in this case. There are many point mutations for example that confer risk to disease and cancer. Lynch syndrome which confers significant risk for colorectal cancer for example is something that could he cured with transgenic humans today even with todays technology. Just a matter of screening gametes for the mutation (usually one base in the case of Lynch in heterozygous state with wild type healthy allele and that wild type healthy allele gets a second hit mutation as the cancer develops and things just go off the rails from there) and editing that base back to wildtype. No downside only upside with that.

What gets harder are polygenic traits that even today we don’t have great data on what are the causal alleles. But that is also not a technological limitation either but a statistical one from insufficient sampling of these polygenic phenotypes.
by danpalmer | 2025-05-16 05:42:52+00:00
Watching "BCNY" (why they aren't called Arc I shall never understand) looking for product-market fit has been a fascinating study in startups.

Arc got immediate traction, but the traction was for features that could never be a business model.

They pivoted, seeing AI as the future, and started adding a bunch of AI features, but they were throwing things at the wall to see what stuck, and my personal feeling was that none of it did (the features were fine, but nothing transformational). It felt like increasingly they were just trying whatever and not really focusing on one thing and trying to do it well.

Arc for Mobile was interesting, because again it started out with a "wow" feature and traction – instantly dropping you into a search on every launch/foregrounding. I loved this. But again, there was no business model there.

They started throwing everything at the mobile app to see what stuck, but between holding your phone to your ear to talk to search (Boomer Search?), and growth hacks like overlaying their own search on top of Google search results, the product started to feel weird.

Now on to Dia. From reading this it feels like they're experimenting in a much more bare-bones environment, and I wouldn't be surprised if the Arc -> Dia transition came with layoffs and was a more fundamental business pivot. Perhaps it'll crack it, but so far it looks again like a feature not a product, maybe a feature that will get initial traction, but probably not one that will turn into a business.

I'm not a particularly anti-VC person, but it seems like a BCNY that carried on as they were in 2022 and sold Arc as a browser for professionals for $50 a year would probably be making reasonable money for a small business right now. The reason they're not doing that would probably be VC funding and the need to be a big business.
by beloch | 2025-05-16 05:45:04+00:00
People frequently misunderstand what motivates physicists. They aren't tiptoeing around orthodox theory like it's a precious house of cards that they're desperately afraid will fall apart. At every opportunity, they take sledgehammers to it. It's every physicist's dream to invalidate accepted theory. The more fundamental and important it is, the more work it creates for other physicists, the better.

Because it's so hard and rare, physicists are often quite skeptical of claims that cards have been sent tumbling. This skepticism has delayed progress at times.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-16 05:45:42+00:00
> but they emphasise not to be evil, just naughty

Based on the trajectory many silicon valley companies seem to take, the slope from "naughty" to "evil" must be very slippery

It's a shame that companies don't seem to be able to be competitive if they behave morally

Kind of an awful society we're living in as a result
by albert_e | 2025-05-16 05:45:44+00:00
I have wanted a small LED light / edge strip on top of a laptop screen that lights up when --

you are in a meeting

your microphone is on

your camera is on

customizable to work how you want (including setting it to "show" busy at will)

different color LED to mean different things if possible

This will serve to indictae to people around you whether they can interrupt you or pass in front of your screen etc.

It will also warn you the user when mic/camera is accidentally (or sneakily) on
New Video editor SDK out
by ncounter | 2025-05-16 05:46:41+00:00
We are seeing a wave of AI video startups — tools that generate product videos, reels, explainers, and more using generative models. But many of them hit a wall. Why? Because after the AI generates content, users want to fine-tune it — but the tools lack the video editing capabilities. We’ve been working on a React-based video editing SDK - Twick that solves this. It lets you: - Auto-generate styled captions - Add effects (fade, zoom, typewriter, etc.) - Build timelines and live-edit canvases - Export videos to the cloud via Lambda. All of this can be easily embedded into your app. If you're interested in trying it out or want to collaborate, feel free to reach out. I'm also planning to open-source it soon for the wider dev community.