MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tshaddox | 2025-05-30 16:16:13+00:00
> For nearly a century, astronomers have known that the universe is expanding, because the galaxies that we can see around us through telescopes are all rushing away. Riess studied how they moved. He very carefully measured the distance of each one from Earth, and when all the data came together, in 1998, the results surprised him. They were “shocking even,” he told his colleagues in a flustered email that he sent on the eve of his honeymoon. A striking relationship had emerged: The farther away that galaxies were, the faster they were receding. This “immediately suggested a profound conclusion,” he said in his Nobel Prize lecture. Something is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

I'm quite confused by this early paragraph. It seems to be claiming that Hubble's law was discovered in 1998 by Adam Riess, instead of in the 1920s by Edwin Hubble (and others).
by sinisterMage | 2025-05-30 16:16:14+00:00
Thanks! I really appreciate you taking the time to write this up — super insightful.

I definitely get the appeal of internal DSLs, especially with how powerful C#’s fluent APIs have become. W++ takes a bit of a different path: more like “what if .NET had a native scripting layer that felt expressive and lightweight,” even if that means giving up some safety or flexibility of the host language.

And wow — 3 years with IronPython is no joke. Totally agree on how tricky it can get once you step outside the intended boundaries. I’m keeping W++ focused more on smaller, experimental scripting for now, but your point about memory and lifecycle management is a great reminder for anything that gets more ambitious.

Cheers for the link to Fowler’s DSL article too — gold.
by machiaweliczny | 2025-05-30 16:16:39+00:00
AFAIK Gaussian Splatting is somehow connected to NeRFs (neural radiance fields), so job of turning multiple 2D images into 3D scene. Actually tried doing something like this recently for drone navigation (using older point cloud methods) but no luck so far.

Can anyone who read this suggest something to use to scan room geometry using camera only in real-time (with access to beefy NVIDIA computer if needed) for drone navigation purposes?
by Joker_vD | 2025-05-30 16:17:11+00:00
> Now we're cool! Everything works as expected, and it takes much less work

Does it though? It's about the same amount of work as in renaming potentially conflicting variables (and more work than renaming actually conflicting variables). AFAIK, the main argument for them (by B. C. Pierce in his TAPL?) is that if you botch up the implementation of de Bruijn indices/levels, it will blow up in your face almost immediately, while the conventional renaming schemes may have subtle undetected bugs for months.
by jdlyga | 2025-05-30 16:17:39+00:00
It would be nice if this had the same interface for `git add -i` allowing you to type in numbers or letters.

** Commands **

1: status 2: update 3: revert 4: add untracked 5: patch 6: diff 7: quit 8: help

What now>

This allows you to either type in (p) or (5) to go into patch mode.
by sfmz | 2025-05-30 16:18:06+00:00
It has a built-in gating function. People who are out-of-shape or with injuries will opt-out. Bouldering favors slim people. On the other hand, I think gating functions are necessary to build community. Often gating-functions are accomplished with wealth (gated community, country club), but its more interesting when its some other function.

Maybe good idea for a meetup might be to solve some tech challenge, idk. Solve X get invited to some hacker house/space maybe? (i'm saying this as a person who probably wouldn't solve it)
by dingnuts | 2025-05-30 16:18:25+00:00
especially when the world population is billions and at the beginning we were worried about double digit IFR.

Yeah. Imagine if COVID had actually killed 10% of the world population. Killing millions sucks, but mosquitos regularly do that too, and so does tuberculosis, and we don't shut down everything. Could've been close to a billion. Or more. Could've been so much worse.
by McAlpine5892 | 2025-05-30 16:18:42+00:00
This looks awesome. The amount of super lightweight and almost-disposable VM options in recent years is crazy. I remember when VMs were slow, clunky, and generally painful.

I wonder how this compares to Orbstack's [0] tech stack on macOS, specifically the "Linux machines" [1] feature. Seems like Orb might reuse a single VM?

---

[0] https://orbstack.dev

[1] https://docs.orbstack.dev/machines/
Show HN: Yappus – Your Terminal Just Started Talking Back (The Fuck, but Better)
by mostlyk | 2025-05-30 16:19:08+00:00
Tired of clunky terminal assistants wrapped in bloated JS or browser tabs and big corp stealing your data? Yappus is a native Rust terminal companion that actually listens to you, understands your files and directories, and chats back without making you open a damn browser.

It’s got persistent chat history, file context awareness, directory commands, and even lets you pipe shell commands into your conversation. Basically, your terminal just started talking back—and it WILL pissed if you ask it the same thing twice. Be careful Bois! Install with: ``` cargo install yappus-term ``` Or grab system-specific install scripts from github.com/MostlyKIGuess/Yappus-Term.

Local-first, Rust-powered, and still rough around the edges—but loud as hell.

Give me the feedback hehe

No fancy GUI, no VSCode extensions, no bullshit.
by hnthrow90348765 | 2025-05-30 16:19:24+00:00
Lots of reasons you can fail an interview, doesn't mean they're a bullshit artist. If we want to be intellectually honest about this process (letting a candidate prove themselves), the least we could do is offer different formats for people to pick from: leetcode live coding, take-home, pair coding, PR review, etc.

What is key is letting the candidate decide the format they're best at.

Leetcode's signal is pretty bad compared to pair coding/PR reviews IMHO. And if the job genuinely involves writing algorithms, you can put algorithms in the code and have them go over that.

Take home is probably the most vulnerable to cheating, but if you have them code review it afterwards, it's detectable fairly easily.
by reissbaker | 2025-05-30 16:19:26+00:00
At 16GB a Q4 quant of Mistral Small 3.1, or Qwen3-14B at FP8, will probably serve you best. You'd be cutting it a little close on context length due to the VRAM usage... If you want longer context, a Q4 quant of Qwen3-14B will be a bit dumber than FP8 but will leave you more breathing room. Mistral Small can take images as input, and Qwen3 will be a bit better at math/coding; YMMV otherwise.

Going below Q4 isn't worth it IMO. If you want significantly more context, probably drop down to a Q4 quant of Qwen3-8B rather than continuing to lobotomize the 14B.

Some folks have been recommending Qwen3-30B-A3, but I think 16GB of VRAM is probably not quite enough for that: at Q4 you'd be looking at 15GB for the weights alone. Qwen3-14B should be pretty similar in practice though despite being lower in param count, since it's a dense model rather than a sparse one: dense models are generally smarter-per-param than sparse models, but somewhat slower. Your 5060 should be plenty fast enough for the 14B as long as you keep everything on-GPU and stay away from CPU offloading.

Since you're on a Blackwell-generation Nvidia chip, using LLMs quantized to NVFP4 specifically will provide some speed improvements at some quality cost compared to FP8 (and will be faster than Q4 GGUF, although ~equally dumb). Ollama doesn't support NVFP4 yet, so you'd need to use vLLM (which isn't too hard, and will give better token throughput anyway). Finding pre-quantized models at NVFP4 will be more difficult since there's less-broad support, but you can use llmcompressor [1] to statically compress any FP16 LLM to NVFP4 locally — you'll probably need to use accelerate to offload params to CPU during the one-time compression process, which llmcompressor has documentation for.

I wouldn't reach for this particular power tool until you've decided on an LLM already, and just want faster perf, since it's a bit more involved than just using ollama and the initial quantization process will be slow due to CPU offload during compression (albeit it's only a one-time cost). But if you land on a Q4 model, it's not a bad choice once you have a favorite.

1: https://github.com/vllm-project/llm-compressor
by cryptonector | 2025-05-30 16:19:47+00:00
> Presumably if the US (or some other nation) was to drop a bomb in an area with deployed soldiers, they wanted to make sure the soldiers would still be able to perform as expected.

There's other cases to consider:

- the enemy drop bombs near our men

- we drop bombs near enemy men

In each case how the impacted soldiers react would be interesting and somewhat predictive of the other cases.
by sinisterMage | 2025-05-30 16:20:16+00:00
Haha yeah, fair point on the name! I actually chose “W++” from a gaming mindset — in games, W = Win, so W++ was my way of saying "keep stacking wins." It’s not meant to compete with Rust or Zig — it’s more of a light, expressive scripting language that happens to be built on .NET.

But you’re totally right that naming is tricky. I might reconsider down the line if it ever gets serious traction — “Cobra” does sound kinda slick

Appreciate the feedback!
by hatradiowigwam | 2025-05-30 16:20:57+00:00
FWIW, the "principal" part implies a few things no matter which org... they should be able to manage a project from start to finish, mentor juniors, and make confident correct architectural decisions.

If you've ever hired a plumber or electrician, you might have gotten a crew of younger apprentices, maybe a journeyman, and an older "master" plumber or electrician. Most of the master's time is spent with the critical mechanical tasks, solving problems that occur, and directing those other tradesmen. The principal is the 1 person who can do _any_ of the other's job if they are unavailable. They are also the 1 person (and ideally the only 1 person) who makes "the plan" for how the work will proceed, and also decides when a project is complete.

The crucial difference (well, one of many?) between a principal-level engineer, and any type of management...is that the principal-level engineer should be able to do every junior engineer's job in a pinch - expertly, and with confidence and adapability to problems.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-05-30 16:22:10+00:00
Yeah especially with LLMs. It's easy to say "it will get discussed everywhere" but everywhere else has very basic misunderstandings of the technology, so I appreciate being able to discuss it with relatively trusted peers. But unfortunately the Venn diagram of LLM-related news and politics resembles a circle more and more every day.

I also find it laughable that it's always "no politics of any kind" when we have regular posts about the famine in Ireland, cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands, digital identification in Estonia etc etc. -- what is meant by "any kind" is "related to the current regime in the US."
by trealira | 2025-05-30 16:22:53+00:00
> Over the last few years, I've seen a few in use here in Berlin: https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/robot-waiter-for-sale.html

Wow. I genuinely didn't think robotic waiters would ever exist anytime soon.

> For physical retail, or home delivery?

I was thinking for physical retail. Thanks for the video link.
Ask HN: If not Kubernetes, what do you use to run your apps?
by tontony | 2025-05-30 16:24:03+00:00
Kubernetes is everywhere these days, and it might feel like there are very few alternatives to it when you need a simpler sort of self-hosted platform to run your apps/workloads (not talking right now about PaaS options like Heroku, Render, etc.)

- What do people use for single-server app management?

- For multi-node setups, is anyone using Docker Swarm, Nomad, or any other tool that is outside the Kubernetes ecosystem?
by hollerith | 2025-05-30 16:24:09+00:00
I disagree.

I expect AI to make people's lives better (probably much better) but then an AI model will be created that undergoes a profound increase in cognitive capabilities, then we all die or something else terrible happens because no one knows how to retain control over an AI that is much more all-around capable than people are.

Maybe the process by which it undergoes the profound capability increase is to "improve itself by rewriting its own code", as described in the OP.
by daedrdev | 2025-05-30 16:24:12+00:00
They may certainly have a point, but many Nobel Prize winners do have a track record of going off the deep end which is something to keep in mind when an article tries to justify their points using Noble Prizes

edit: I'm just trying to say that "Having a Nobel Prize" doesn't mean they are an authority on subjects they talk about since many wen't on to promote homeopathy, aliens, believed aids wasn't caused by HIV, don't believe in climate change, etc."
by rs186 | 2025-05-30 16:24:14+00:00
In China, cryptocurrency is effectively banned -- mining machines are confiscated, banks are not allowed to do any transaction with crypto exchanges. Effectively you cannot turn money into crypto or the other way via normal means in China. Of course some people still find ways, and pig butchering exists in China, but it is much harder via the crypto route.

I don't know if there will ever be a global crackdown, but I know it's definitely not going to happen in the US, because, well, freedom, and the man in charge is all-in in crypto.

But at least some governments in the world see clearly that crypto does more harm than good and take action accordingly -- surprisingly China in this case.

It may not be the best solution, but it is a solution.
by ffsm8 | 2025-05-30 16:24:15+00:00
Frankly, no. As an obvious example that can be stated nowadays: musk has always been an over-promising liar.

Eg just look at the 2012+ videos of thunderf00t.

Yet people were literally banned here just for pointing out that he hasn't actually delivered on anything in the capacity he promised until he did the salute.

It's pointless to list other examples, as this page is- as dingnuts pointed out - exactly the same and most people aren't actually willing to change their opinion based on arguments. They're set in their opinions and think everyone else is dumb.
by gruez | 2025-05-30 16:24:47+00:00
>rich people spend more in total at the store so their interchange costs are more than made up for by actual spending

Suppose people making $1M+ are taxed at 20%, and everyone else is taxed at 25%. Ignoring the small segment of people making just under $1M, most people would at least characterize this as unfair. You could plausibly this isn't a "subsidy", because the $1M earners are paying more taxes in absolute terms. However it doesn't really refute the argument that the $1M earners are paying "less". Maybe "subsidy" is the wrong word for this, but it's pretty clear this is what detractors of credit card are pointing out.
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-30 16:25:11+00:00
Why?

Irreversible transactions are not desired by anyone in payment networks. Consumers don't want to get scammed out of money. Merchants want customers to feel like transactions are low risk so they are more willing to make them. That's a big reason why merchants put up with the outright hostile to them system of chargebacks. Sure, you will lose some money to chargebacks you might think were not valid, but you have made much more than that back from liberalized spending habits.

Nobody benefits from irreversible transactions except fraudsters and other bad actors. And they benefit soooo much from transactions being irreversible. Why would you build and advocate for a system that explicitly empowers bad actors over anyone else?

An escrow is not a solution. The escrow itself could be a bad actor.
by jimt1234 | 2025-05-30 16:25:14+00:00
Disagree. I used to work with a guy that got scammed by a girl in Vietnam. They met online. He flew there to meet with her multiple times. He met her "family". They were even intimate. After a few months, she convinced him to invest in some sort of restaurant. He even went with her to talk to "lawyers" (in Vietnam; she never came to the US). Then she took all the money and vanished. I think it was close to six-figures.

He's a reasonably intelligent, humble guy. But he was also the perfect mark. He had just gotten divorced from a 10-year marriage, and he was lonely. So I wouldn't call his situation ego. I would call it loneliness. And I think that's how a lot of people get scammed. Everyone wants to feel loved.
by jlarocco | 2025-05-30 16:25:38+00:00
There's some kind of circular reasoning going on here.

Banks are more careful, and that's why they don't deal with certain kinds of transactions. And that's where crypto comes in to "disrupt banks" and "democratize finance".

Long term, crypto will be no different than regular currency and finance because people don't like getting ripped off and defrauded. We'll have a period of time with people pulling old scams but with crypto, and eventually it'll be regulated just like normal finance.
by inoshy | 2025-05-30 16:26:30+00:00
VLC, KMP were born in an era when doing video playback right was a challenge. Users generally came second. Popular user demands remains ignored till to-date.

And I was thinking to myself: It should not be too hard to make a video player that does the foundations right: like Timeline previews. Consistent frame updates with seeking/dragging. Less buttons in the interface.

I noted them down what I miss dearly, and made a video player that does atleast the basic things right. I named it after Rose, my favorite flower.

You can try it from Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9P129QZVMSHF

There is a 15 days trial version, if you like it, you can keep it for 3$ one time payment only. It's forever yours.
by gruez | 2025-05-30 16:26:55+00:00
>but it's not routine

Retailers often have weekly sales. If that's not "routine" what is? Is it only "negotiation" if it's happening on a per customer basis? Moreover apps with targeted offers is literally doing that. The company is assessing a given customer's willingness to pay, possibly on a daily basis, and sending offers/coupons in response.
by Krei-se | 2025-05-30 16:27:26+00:00
Correct and working on it. You can take the approach of mixed experts and train the network in chunks that share known interfaces over which they communicate results. These chunks can be trained on their own, but you cannot have a set training set here.

Then if you go further and alter the architecture by introducing clean category theory morphisms and build from there you can have a dynamic network - but you will still have to retrain this network every time you change the structure.

You can spin this further and know the need for a real-world training set and a loss function that will have to competete against other networks. In the end a human brain is already best at this and embodied in the real world.

What i want to add here is that our neurons not take in weights - they also fire depending on whether one input comes after another or before and differs down to the nanoseconds here - unmatched in IT and ofc heaps more efficient.

I still would say its possible though and currently work on 4D lifeforms built on dynamic compute graphs that can do this in a set virtual environment.

So this is pretty awesome stuff, but its a long fetch from anything we do right now.
by jalk | 2025-05-30 16:27:59+00:00
Can't find the reference now, but remember reading an article on evolving FPGA designs. The found optimum however only worked on the specific FPGA it was evolved on, since the algo had started to use some out-of-spec "features" of the specific chip. Obviously that can be fixed with proper constraints, but seems like a trap that could be stepped into again - i.e. the LLM is now really fast but only on GPUs that come from the same batch of wafers.
by holowoodman | 2025-05-30 16:28:44+00:00
A 23mm round is the size of a banana. An AA missile such as a Stinger is intended to explode near the target, not necessarily making contact, and to produce shrapnel to create a large enough "kill zone" such that precision and contact are unneccesary.

But that shrapnel will be smaller and slower than the 23mm round, so I'm not sure that a non-direct hit would suffice.
by darth_avocado | 2025-05-30 16:28:54+00:00
> I do buy into the narrative that selection bias for lucky risk-takers explains a lot of bad leaders

It’s not even actual lucky high risk gambles that are successful that are rewarded. A lot of times, it’s just perceived success. Plenty of leaders fail upwards. Reward for incompetence and failure is a promotion that is mostly dictated by who you know in the organization. And perceived success is a huge factor in “who you know”.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-05-30 16:28:58+00:00
The analogy I would use is that coding via LLM is like learning to drive in a self-driving car that has manual controls as an option that drives overly cautiously (Leaves excessively large following distances, takes corners slower, etc.) while in self-driving mode.

You can let it self-drive, but you'd probably learn nothing, and it will actually take you longer. Put an expert driver behind the wheel, and they'll drive faster and only use automation features for the boring parts.
by dataflow | 2025-05-30 16:29:06+00:00
I think they're talking acceleration, not velocity? Hubble's law says more distant galaxies are receding faster than slower ones at some calculable rate, but it doesn't say the rate at which they're doing that is accelerating over time. (I do find it kind of shocking that one can prove this without observing the same thing over a prolonged period of time.)
by trealira | 2025-05-30 16:29:31+00:00
> 1. Plumber is a skilled trade, but the "skilled" parts will eventually be replaced with 'smart' tools. You'll still need to hire a minimum wage person to actually go into each unique home and find the plumbing, but the tools will do all the work and will not require an expensive tradesman's skills to work.

I'm not a plumber, but my background knowledge was that pipes can be really diverse and it could take different tools and strategies to fix the same problem for different pipes, right? My thought was that "robotic plumber" would be impossible for the same reasons it's hard to make a robot that can make a sandwich in any type of house. But even with a human worker that uses advanced robotic tools, I would think some amount of baseline knowledge of pipes would always be necessary for the reasons I outlined.

> 2. Waiter serving food, already being replaced with kiosks, and quite a bit of the "back of the house" cooking areas are already automated. It will only take a slow cultural shift towards ordering food through technology-at-the-table, and robots wheeling your food out to you. We've already accepted kiosks in fast food and self-checkout in grocery stores. Waiters are going bye-bye.

That's true. I forgot about fast-food kiosks. And the other person showed me a link to some robotic waiters, which I didn't know about. Seems kind of depressing, but you're right.

> 3. Shelf restocking, very easy to imagine automating this with robotics. Picking a product and packing it into a destination will be solved very soon, and there are probably hundreds of companies working on the problem.

The way I imagine it, to automate it, you'd have to have some sort of 3D design software to choose where all the items would go, and customize it in the case of those special display stands for certain products, and then choose where in the backroom or something for it to move the products to, and all that doesn't seem to save much labor over just doing it yourself, except the physical labor component. Maybe I just lack imagination.