MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by m0rc | 2025-05-07 20:48:20+00:00
What do a crowded airport in Beijing, parenting, the risk-return frontier, and micromanaging bosses have in common? Everything—if you look at the world through the right lens.

In Through the Geek’s Lens, you’ll embark on a personal, humorous, and yet thought-provoking journey through some fundamental trade-offs and models from mathematics, psychology, economics, and engineering. Through the eyes of a textbook lover, Through the Geek’s Lens opens unexplored mental horizons and connects the dots between accumulated scientific knowledge and our private and professional lives.

The book introduces and explains complex subjects, their factual basis, and their limitations by contextualizing them within a specific time and place—a moment in the author's personal life. Each section offers a small dose of actionable insight. Among the many topics explored are the trade-off between freedom and security, the diminishing returns faced by particle accelerators and large machine-learning models, and the No Free Lunch Theorem, which explains why a self-confident explorer like the author can get lost in an unknown forest. It applies paraconsistent logic to interpret Eastern philosophies and uses unbiased statistical sampling to show how to see your loved ones. It discusses the Law of Small Numbers and why it’s just as important as the Law of Large Numbers, the determination of Service Level Agreements using basic probability inequalities, and the Shannon-Hartley Theorem to decide when to shout (or not) at your kids. And that’s just the beginning—there’s much more to discover when you look your day to day through a geek’s lens.

Feedback is highly apreciated ;)
by distances | 2025-05-07 20:48:34+00:00
Yes, it's important of course that I'm efficient, and I am. But my coding speed isn't the main differentiating factor why clients like me.

I meant that I don't care enough to spearhead and drive this effort within the client orgs. They have their own processes, and internal employees would surely also like to use AI, so maybe they'll get there eventually. And meanwhile I'll just use it in the approved ways.
by devilbunny | 2025-05-07 20:48:39+00:00
> things like sending their kids to school with their own lunches and hiring private tutors

And summer "enrichment". That was popular among the small group of well-off families that insisted on sending their kids to public schools (in, essentially, a school-within-a-school that actually taught the kids instead of warehousing them for six to eight hours a day). Expensive camps, summer programs in Europe, that sort of thing.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-07 20:49:02+00:00
> But it also makes it harder to write software that has to be complex for legitimate reasons.

Might have stolen this quote somewhere, but imho:

Simple things should be easy, complex things should be possible.

Related: software (binary) size should reflect the complexity of the problem domain.

Some time ago, ran down the size of apps on my phone. Smallest one? ~2MB. What does that app do? Calculate some hash on a file. Select a file, it does its thing, shows the hash (and/or copy to clipboard).

What the ..!?!#$ 2,000,000+ bytes for that?

This is on Android, 'batteries included'. Selecting / opening a file should be a couple (or couple dozen) lines of source code, a function call to the OS, and presto. Same with reading file contents, and display output / clipboard copy.

Which leaves... computing the hash. I'm not an expert, but what hash functions are so complex that you'd need a MB+ of code to calculate? (answer: none).

Note that this app was the least worse offender.

Conclusion: Android app model is broken. Or SDKs used to build Android apps are crap. Or other reasons / some combination thereoff. Regardless, ~2MB to compute a file hash is ridiculous. Full-blown Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) have been done in less.

I'd be interested to know what that 2MB consists of, though. And where the hash function is at. And what (minute) % of overall binary size. And what all the rest of that binary does.
by sophacles | 2025-05-07 20:49:59+00:00
A local file can be "newly local" and have recently been saved from the network or via a usb drive, etc.

And assuming a file is going to behave with good intent, or even the same intent as another file of the same format, is bad. It's how we get jpeg/png/etc parsing errors. Its how we end up with PDFs that are also valid executables, and 1000 more issues.
by _bin_ | 2025-05-07 20:49:59+00:00
You’re mis-framing this as “scaring”. It’s not. I am talking about real risks that inform my choice not to take drugs because the info available tells me MDMA is significantly too risky.

If you’re suggesting marijuana is also unsafe, I strongly agree. Smoking anything is a risk and more importantly THC is shit for your brain, pro schizophrenic, turns people into lazy fattys, etc. I never have nor will I ever touch THC, absent perhaps light usage for pain if I get cancer or something.

Where I live my high school bio and chem classes gave more than enough foundational knowledge to understand this. It’s not actually that complex and all the remaining info is freely available online.

The risk of molly has little to do with other risk factors besides eg interactions. You fail to understand that risk and damage are the sum of all your risks and damages, not the single highest value. Things stack up.

If your assertion is “frying a little piece of their brains is fine”, I think that’s an extraordinarily reckless thing to do. Adults may have the right to do so, but I will not stop telling them that they are doing so, because most abusers are either unaware or minimize and deny so they can feel good about their abuse.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-07 20:50:00+00:00
Meta: build a problem bank where people can submit and persist these. Reverse product hunt, maybe with StackOverflow type UX.

Have a problem, leave a problem, need a problem, take a problem. Failed? Bring your post mortem, add it to the library and start a discussion thread. Succeed? Congrats! We love that for you, also start a thread to discuss what worked, what didn’t, and why.

Consider "Problematica" if you have no name yet.
by disambiguation | 2025-05-07 20:50:42+00:00
I want to know if anyone has answered the question: what does a healthy relationship with this thing look like?

All kids grow up and are eventually exposed to sex drugs and rock'n roll. These things are part of our world, you have to coexist with them. The problem with video games, social media, AI, and all things tech is they're so new and evolving so fast that no one really knows what a healthy relationship looks like. Though awareness is growing and we've started asking questions like: how much screen time is ok? At what age do I allow my kid to make a social media account? Should we be using our phones last thing before bed and first thing in the morning? Not to mention more wide spread issues of privacy and exposure to content ranging from amusing to abusive. AI as a "convincing BS artist" you can engage with endlessly is something I struggle to wrap my head around. My personal policy is to keep AI on a short leash; use it sparsely, don't overly rely on it, and always question its assertions. But allowing unrestricted access to a powerful tool that requires self control and good judgment is inviting disaster. Banning it for kids makes sense, but what about everyone else?
by Kozmik1 | 2025-05-07 20:50:52+00:00
I had not heard of/seen the pool noodle idea - looks like a simple and effective way to draw attention to cycling safety.

Here's a video of the NYC Pool Noodle Bike Ride: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97YJOQRQ4Ds&ab_channel=Stree...
by xyst | 2025-05-07 20:52:00+00:00
Posthog is pretty good but very pushy towards using their SaaS (understandably). Self hosting is not really advertised on their main site however is buried in their gh repo as a footnote [1] with indications of vague issues past 100K events/month. Haven’t delved into how to scale it past that though and they do provide some docs that I have yet to review.

Also the primary repo is not FOSS, and that "100% FOSS" repo is buried in yet another footnote [2].

Plausible follows in PH footsteps but is not fully faithful to open source. If you want to self host, you won’t have same set of features as their SaaS and need to rely on long term releases for their "community edition" [3]

On "Ahrefs", is there even an open source version of their product? I couldn’t easily find it (on mobile). [4]

Maybe I’ll take a look at others you mentioned later but if rybbit can remain faithful to their FOSS roots then I think there’s a real chance of it becoming huge.

For thosw that don’t want to self host (mostly corporate shitholes), rybbit can milk them with their managed SaaS product.

[1] https://github.com/PostHog/posthog?tab=readme-ov-file#self-h...

[2] https://github.com/PostHog/posthog?tab=readme-ov-file#open-s...

[3] https://github.com/plausible/analytics?tab=readme-ov-file#ca...

[4] https://ahrefs.com/
by owenpalmer | 2025-05-07 20:52:14+00:00
This move actually makes a lot of sense, and it's shameful that the US government has failed to implement this already. As far as security goes, there's no reason why the system can't be built securely. It's simply a matter of building constraints around who gets to access what data, for what reasons, and what procedures are necessary to grant that access.

It's not like the US government's current systems have any sort of robust security in place. Centralization will hopefully incentivize this effort.
by moralestapia | 2025-05-07 20:52:19+00:00
Indeed, however in practice almost nobody does it.

They event hint at it on their PR:

"Mistral La Plateforme and Amazon Sagemaker, and soon on IBM WatsonX, NVIDIA NIM, Azure AI Foundry, and Google Cloud Vertex"

My point being, why would you pay to use a Mistral model hosted on Azure, instead of using any other company model hosted on Azure?

My answer to that, yesterday, would have been "because the model is free and unrestricted, I only pay for hardware"; that premise is gone today.
by cmogni1 | 2025-05-07 20:52:24+00:00
I think the most interesting thing to me is they have multi-hop search & query refinement built in based on prior context/searches. I'm curious how well this works.

I've built a lot of LLM applications with web browsing in it. Allow/block lists are easy to implement with most web search APIs, but multi-hop gets really hairy (and expensive) to do well because it usually requires context from the URLs themselves.

The thing I'm still not seeing here that makes LLM web browsing particularly difficult is the mismatch between search result relevance vs LLM relevance. Getting a diverse list of links is great when searching Google because there is less context per query, but what I really need from an out-of-the-box LLM web browsing API is reranking based on the richer context provided by a message thread/prompt.

For example, writing an article about the side effects of Accutane should err on the side of pulling in research articles first for higher quality information and not blog posts.

It's possible to do this reranking decently well with LLMs (I do it in my "agents" that I've written), but I haven't seen this highlighted from anyone thus far, including in this announcement.
by minimaxir | 2025-05-07 20:53:15+00:00
The query cost is in addition to tokens used. It is unclear if the tokens ingested from the search query count as addititional input tokens.

> Web search is available on the Anthropic API for $10 per 1,000 searches, plus standard token costs for search-generated content.

> Each web search counts as one use, regardless of the number of results returned. If an error occurs during web search, the web search will not be billed.
by davidmurdoch | 2025-05-07 20:53:16+00:00
Doesn't matter if you disagree, it is still an optimization tool that can be used in some circumstances.

The data is most definitely cached if the server sets the cache expiry for the HTML file, so "anti-caching" makes no sense and is completely orthogonal to the optimization.

If the page's critical CSS is small enough you can deliver an HTML page where the initial render a) happens sooner, and b) is a complete Skelton of your layout + initial content. All at the low low price of ~0 additional client-server roundtrips.

Fun fact: facebook inlines a `style` tag and all HTML necessary to render their initial loading screen. It isn't what I would call "above the fold" CSS, but it is what is referred to as "Critical CSS".

Aside: the most popular and most-used SPAs are scrollers: twitter, instagram, facebook, github, etc, so now I wonder if you might be just trolling?
by kbelder | 2025-05-07 20:53:57+00:00
You're right that it may have, and you're right that it's hard to quantify. But it is thoroughly possible that the increased productivity heightened demand. The ability to create more or better output for the same amount of labor can make some production feasible that wasn't before.

After all, in net, increased production has allowed us to have more. We aren't making do with the same amount of stuff and spending less. We're spending more, and receiving much more. That money is going to other people's pockets.
by H4X0R112 | 2025-05-07 20:54:18+00:00
Extraordinarily based, and this is coming from a peruANO. We aren't generally a Western Civilization so much as we are a broadly Mestizo-Amerindian one, and our political history is closer to Asia or Africa in terms of instability. We need more Bukeles in Mestizo societies and more Mileis in more westernized states like the southern cone.
by betterThanTexas | 2025-05-07 20:56:17+00:00
> So, what's your solution to "lack of self discipline"?

IDK, wanting to be alive and happy?

> What is the physical basis for lack of self discipline?

That's just a category error. I just don't see obesity as worth caring about on an individual-level compared to the social dysfunction that produces it. If we can only address problems on an individual-level I don't really see why I should expect anything positive from society—that's just not rational.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-05-07 20:57:10+00:00
Re: just asking for structured output and parsing it accordingly--you're absolutely right. Do that if you can.

But merely concatenating processes which emit and consume data of known shape is something that the OS can do without an interactive shell. What you really need a shell for is those situations where a bit of duct tape and string is needed to keep the bits flowing... when "--format '{{json .}}'" doesn't work.

Re: ConvertFrom-Csv, touche, but I'm going to guess that it's not prepared to handle cases where the delimiter also appears in the output (spaces in this case).

$ docker ps | detect columns | select CREATED STATUS | get 1 # ConvertFrom-Csv equivalent ╭─────────┬───────╮ │ CREATED │ weeks │ │ STATUS │ 9 │ ╰─────────┴───────╯

Nushell's answer here is --guess, which counts characters to determine how far from the left the column starts.

$ docker ps | detect columns --guess | select CREATED STATUS | get 1 ╭─────────┬─────────────╮ │ CREATED │ 2 weeks ago │ │ STATUS │ Up 9 days │ ╰─────────┴─────────────╯

I'm not trying to bash pwsh, It's just that they're just trying to be different kinds of thing.
by znpy | 2025-05-07 20:57:56+00:00
Disabling io_uring because “guy on the internet said so” or “$faang_company says so” is beyond dumb.

One should evaluate the risk according to their specific use case.

It can be a good idea to disable it of you run untrusted workloads (eg: other people’s containers, sharing the same kernel) but if you have a kernel on a machine (virtual or real) dedicated to your own workload you can pretty much keep using io_uring. There are other technologies to enforce security (eg: selinux emand similar).
by autoexec | 2025-05-07 20:59:00+00:00
> the obvious fact that LLMs are getting better at reasoning than humans

I wanted to say that you were wrong, that LLMs can't reason and so it certainly isn't an obvious truth that they do it better than humans, but when I asked AI if LLMs can reason it told me that they can't which (while still not being reasoned by the LLM) seems to support the spirit of your claim since it gave a correct answer while you (a presumed human that can reason) got it wrong.
by simoncion | 2025-05-07 20:59:32+00:00
> ...for uploading a package that they decree has now been deprecated?

Unity appears to be using the term "deprecated" to mean "removed" or "deleted". This is a fucking stupid trend that I wish we would collectively push through, but we're not quite there yet.

My interpretation of the memo from Unity is that they have deleted the VLC library from the Unity Store and have permanently banned the VLC group's Unity Store account for violation of the terms of the contract with Unity.

Corpo jargon can be difficult to understand. (This might be the primary purpose of corpo jargon.)
by H4X0R112 | 2025-05-07 21:00:01+00:00
Statistically, thieves steal higher valued items compared to food or diapers for their kids. Such things must be rectified by harsh sentences and more vigilant police forces. This is why East Asia has such a low crime rate, compared to the West. This isn't facts you speak of, but your civilizational guilt after your forefathers destroyed so many societies like mine. Hopefully, this multipolar world will rectify Western guilt society dominance.
by tensor | 2025-05-07 21:00:06+00:00
Command A is Canadian. Also mistral models are indeed interesting. They have a pretty unique vision model for OCR. They have interesting edge models. They have interesting rare language models.

And also another reason people might use a non-American model is that dependency on the US is a serious business risk these days. Not relevant if you are in the US but hugely relevant for the rest of us.
by ordersofmag | 2025-05-07 21:01:22+00:00
Except if any of your pages are cached between eyeball and your server and so your server logs don't capture everything that is going on. You can get fancy with web server logs, but depending on what you're trying to understand it may not be the data you need.

<source: did fancy things with logs over the last 25 years, including running multiple tools on the same site in parallel to do comparisons (Analog, AWStats Urchin, GA, Omniture, homegrown, etc...)>
by rhet0rica | 2025-05-07 21:02:20+00:00
It blows my mind how diverse these are, and how diverse their creators were. One single artist, Martha Royer, made over two hundred themes: https://macthemes.garden/authors/martha-royer/ (They're not all amazing in quality, but the sheer industriousness is staggering.)

I was lurking around the equivalent Windows community in roughly the same era (well, a couple of years later) and it was nothing like this. Far fewer people had the patience for WindowBlinds (the Kaleidoscope equivalent) or deep OS modding, and they tended to all be the same few types of person with more-or-less the same tastes—mostly the kind of guy who thought that an RGB fan in a brushed aluminum tower PC was the height of self-expression. (Basic Windows Plus themes were way more primitive than what was possible with the right tools.) It's astonishing to see what looks like the entirety of the pre-dot-com-crash web's wonderful, weird diversity reproduced in perfect miniature over in the Mac space.

Although I keep scrolling, and I haven't found a legit NeXT theme yet. There are a few that get close but nothing with the actual UI assets. Maybe this is an opportunity...

EDIT: For those curious, here's roughly what themes on OS X looked like in the 2000s: https://macgui.com/downloads/?cat_id=10
by nm980 | 2025-05-07 21:02:29+00:00
> "Self hosting is not really advertised on their main site"

How would rybbit.io make money if they are only better at self hosting? Wouldn't the users they are targeting only self host anyways?

> "On "Ahrefs", is there even an open source version of their product? I couldn’t easily find it (on mobile)."

Not all of these companies are open source but they are still competitors because they have generous free tiers so the cost of self hosting an alternative wouldn't be justified.
by simonw | 2025-05-07 21:02:42+00:00
There are plenty of other ways to run Mistral models on a Mac. I'm a big fan of Mistral Small 3.1.

I've run that using both Ollama (easiest) and MLX. Here are the Ollama models: https://ollama.com/library/mistral-small3.1/tags - the 15GB one works fine.

For MLX https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/Mistral-Small-3.1-24B-I... and https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/Mistral-Small-3.1-24B-I... should work, I use the 8bit one like this:

llm install llm-mlx llm mlx download-model mlx-community/Mistral-Small-3.1-Text-24B-Instruct-2503-8bit -a mistral-small-3.1 llm chat -m mistral-small-3.1

The Ollama one supports image inputs too:

llm install llm-ollama ollama pull mistral-small3.1 llm -m mistral-small3.1 'describe this image' \ -a https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/Mpaboundrycdfw-1.png

Output here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/89005e8aa2daef82c53c2c2c62207...
by metroholografix | 2025-05-07 21:02:46+00:00
I see the following in code written by newcomers to CL frequently:

(optimize (speed 3) (safety 0))

but it is a very bad habit to get used to, in general, and may create the impression that it's needed for optimized code. Instead, use this where needed:

(optimize (speed 3) (safety 1))

which will result in roughly same performance for the vast majority of cases, but keep array bounds checks and (weaker) type checks.

For SBCL, there's also the excellent sb-simd [1] plus compiler macros and even hooking into some of the VM internals for custom code generation [2].

[1] https://www.sbcl.org/manual/#sb_002dsimd

[2] https://pvk.ca/Blog/2014/03/15/sbcl-the-ultimate-assembly-co...
by jstummbillig | 2025-05-07 21:03:10+00:00
Nobody is seriously disputing the ownership of AI generated code. A serious dispute would be a considerable, concerted effort to stop AI code generation in any jurisdiction, that provides a contrast to the enormous, ongoing efforts by multiple large players with eye-watering investments to make code generation bigger and better.

Note, that this is not a statement about the fairness or morality of LLM building, but to think that the legality of AI code generation is something to reasonably worry about, is betting against multiple large players and their hundreds of billions of dollars in investment right now, and that likely puts you in a bad spot in reality.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-05-07 21:03:23+00:00
By all means, it's a miracle we didn't have a nuclear disaster during the cold war. It went very very close.

If it weren't for mens like Vasili Arkhipov, who disobeyed direct orders to launch a nuclear torpedo against ships of the United States Navy, and the many other men during different incidents, we would be all dead.

What is frightening is that we, the humanity, keep going that close from our death by atomic warfare over and over, yet make no adjustment whatsoever.

I'm no expert but when I went close to dying a few too many times on my motorbike, broke a few bones, etc.. I was smart enough to realize you can't cheat statistics. At one point I wouldn't be lucky and there wouldn't be a second chance to save me, so I stopped driving recklessly.

On the other hand, the number of nuclear weapons didn't decrease, there are more actors now involved, and the kind of fantasized Pakistani and indians nuthead are really frightening.

I don't think there would be a Vasili Arkhipov over there, they're completely nuts.
by kristopolous | 2025-05-07 21:03:26+00:00
I'm doing something similar https://github.com/kristopolous/llmehelp

The goal is composable semantic routing -- seamlessly traversal between different tools through things like saved outputs and conversational partials.

Routing similar to pipewire, conversation chains similar to git, and URI addressable conversations similar to xpath.

This is being built application down to ensure usability, design sanity and functionality.