MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 6gvONxR4sf7o | 2025-05-22 19:53:56+00:00
Presumably if you have 20 million equations, they came from a program that's has fewer than 20 million moving parts, like if they came from A x = b where the matrix A has 20M entries. The gist is either exploit structure to make a massive number of small equations or keep the symbols in their "natural" form instead of reducing to scalars, and work with more advanced CAS functionality (like, you might have to learn about noncommutative variations on groebner bases). But also, yes sympy is ultra slow with some things.
by hinkley | 2025-05-22 19:54:02+00:00
I remember a retired engineer was selling perfectly balanced dice intended for RPG players. RPG players are going to gravitate toward the most unfair dice they perceive in their set. I appreciate his enthusiasm but he’s only going to sell those dice to competitions and maybe GMs.

I think that’s one of the reasons GMs sometimes make a high roll from the player into a punishment. Especially by asking for the roll first and telling what they were looking for after. It’s a way to balance out the consequences of unintentionally loaded dice.
by Animats | 2025-05-22 19:54:25+00:00
Oh, the OpenBrain thing.

"Manna", by Marshall Brain, remains relevant.[1] That's a bottom-up view, where more and more jobs are taken over by some kind of AI. "AI 2027" is more top-down.

A practical view: Amazon is trying very hard to automate their warehouse operations. Their warehouses have been using robots for years, and more types are being added. Amazon reached 1.6 million employees in 2020, and now they're down to 1.5 million.[2] That number is going to drop further. Probably by a lot.

Once Amazon has done it, everybody else who handles large numbers of boxes will catch up. That includes restocking retail stores. The first major application of semi-humanoid robots may be shelf stocking. Robots can have much better awareness of what's on the shelves. Being connected to the store's inventory system is a big win. And the handling isn't very complicated. The robots might even talk to the customers. The robots know exactly what's on Aisle 3, unlike many minimum wage employees.

[1] https://marshallbrain.com/manna

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number...
by mbb70 | 2025-05-22 19:54:32+00:00
A great feature of pydantic are the validation hooks that let you intercept serialization/deserialization of specific fields and augment behavior.

For example if you are querying a DB that returns a column as a JSON string, trivial with Pydantic to json parse the column are part of deser with an annotation.

Pydantic is definitely slower and not a 'zero cost abstraction', but you do get a lot for it.
by cube2222 | 2025-05-22 19:54:32+00:00
Sooo, I love Claude 3.7, and use it every day, I prefer it to Gemini models mostly, but I've just given Opus 4 a spin with Claude Code (codebase in Go) for a mostly greenfield feature (new files mostly) and... the thinking process is good, but 70-80% of tool calls are failing for me.

And I mean basic tools like "Write", "Update" failing with invalid syntax.

5 attempts to write a file (all failed) and it continues trying with the following comment

> I keep forgetting to add the content parameter. Let me fix that.

So something is wrong here. Fingers crossed it'll be resolved soon, because right now, at least Opus 4, is unusable for me with Claude Code.

The files it did succeed in creating were high quality.
by Bender | 2025-05-22 19:54:58+00:00
Because I do fine with both DJI and Insta360 without "all the permissions" (and can use them without a cell phone too).

Insta360 is one of the rebranding fronts as is Akaso and a handful of others that have come and gone. To activate either camera on the current firmware and current app requires pairing to a phone and to pair requires giving the app all permissions. There is currently no other way to activate the camera. Even if that were not the case in the past most people will happily install their 700+MB application and leave it running. I have no doubt they would have pointed me to some old or custom software but I will stick with electronics that are fully functional without ever even mentioning a cell phone.

The DJI app is not even in the app store. It was pulled and the only way to install it is to side load. If you are seeing something in the app store that says DJI it's not a legit app from DJI.
by Barrin92 | 2025-05-22 19:55:28+00:00
>Is it just me or does pessimist philosophy just immediately scream "I don't actually base my understanding in reality?"

It's just you, for two reasons. One is that Byung-Chul Han isn't, and as far as I know does not consider himself, a pessimist philosopher. He's a cultural critic, media theorist and mostly known for being a critic of neoliberalism.

As far as actual pessimist philosophers, like say Schopenhauer go, they generally did not base their outlook on "the world is pretty depressing right now" but usually on more fundamental metaphysical grounds
by littlestymaar | 2025-05-22 19:55:31+00:00
> I personally can't identify anything that reads "act maliciously" or in a character that is malicious.

Because you haven't been trained of thousands of such story plots in your training data.

It's the most stereotypical plot you can imagine, how can the AI not fall into the stereotype when you've just prompted it with that?

It's not like it analyzed the situation out of a big context and decided from the collected details that it's a valid strategy, no instead you're putting it in an artificial situation with a massive bias in the training data.

It's as if you wrote “Hitler did nothing” to GPT-2 and were shocked because “wrong” is among the most likely next tokens. It wouldn't mean GPT-2 is a Nazi, it would just mean that the input matches too well with the training data.
by holmesworcester | 2025-05-22 19:55:37+00:00
It is also well-established that models internalize values, preferences, and drives from their training. So the model will have some default preferences independent of what you tell it to be. AI coding agents have a strong drive to make tests green, and anyone who has used these tools has seen them cheat to achieve green tests.

Future AI researching agents will have a strong drive to create smarter AI, and will presumably cheat to achieve that goal.
by no_wizard | 2025-05-22 19:55:41+00:00
The real death knell is that Microsoft decided not to go with Mozilla in building the relaunched version of Edge.

That would have been a very fruitful relationship, but they couldn't make it work. My understanding is - albeit its second hand - that they really didn't want to simply jump to Chromium, but Firefox proved far more complicated to do what they wanted to do.

Ultimately, Microsoft Edge went from a pretty good browser to loaded with of things I dislike, which is a real shame, but I know it would have significantly boosted usage numbers of Firefox and its engine, which in turn would drive more investment into Firefox itself.
by const_cast | 2025-05-22 19:55:59+00:00
If the budget is balanced and there is a surplus, then you will eventually have zero debt. Eventually. That means you have to stick to it, and not get sabotaged by low-effort conservative fiscal policy.

The story of US policies since the 70s is the republicans fuck some shit up, democrats almost fix it or rarely sometimes actually fix it, then people say the democrats are bad with money because reasons, and then the republicans come back in and fuck it up even more.

I mean, after the con that we call Reaganomics how are we still entertaining this bullshit? Do we truly never learn?
by runevault | 2025-05-22 19:56:15+00:00
Keep in mind Rust is using the same backend as one of the main C compilers, LLVM. So if it is handling it any better that means the Clang developers handle it before it even reaches the shared LLVM backend. Well, or there is something about the way Clang structures the code that catches a pattern in the backend the Rust developers do not know about.
by MegaButts | 2025-05-22 19:56:41+00:00
> What's weird is when people like you involve themselves for no reason at all though.

They made it so much better with a witty reply. I was just thinking this is one of my favorite HN threads I've seen in a long time. And now you've ended it with the HN trope of "I have no sense of humor but I still need to point out why I'm better than you."

Different strokes for different folks.
by enjikaka | 2025-05-22 19:56:49+00:00
Dang, like many others I use Pocket extensively - especially with my Kobo e-reader. This is very sad!

I wrote this Deno script to convert the CSV export to a Netscape Bookmark File Format-compatible HTML-file so that it can be imported to Linkding. Hope it's useful for someone else too! https://github.com/enjikaka/pocket-to-bookmark
by mikepurvis | 2025-05-22 19:57:19+00:00
Being left with an unfamiliar codebase is always a concern and comes about through regular attrition, particularly if inadequate review is not in place or people are cycling in and out of the org too fast for proper knowledge transfer (so, cultural problems basically).

If anything, I'd bet that agent-written code will get better review than average because the turn around time on fixes is fast and no one will sass you for nit-picking, so it's "worth it" to look closely and ensure it's done just the way you want.
by lxgr | 2025-05-22 19:57:45+00:00
When the Euro was introduced, I've heard people say things like "older generations will never adapt to the new currency, they'll always refer to the old denominations in their head" – which turned out to be completely untrue.

Adapting to new units is very possible, but it needs a concerted effort. Absent a good inherent reason or anybody capable of artificially creating one, it won't happen on its own.
by nozzlegear | 2025-05-22 19:58:13+00:00
Glad to hear yours disappeared! From what I understand, the pulsatile variety is usually linked to something physical in the ear, unlike regular tinnitus. It's definitely the case for me, as one of the most interesting things about mine is that I can make the sound completely disappear by pressing on my carotid artery (e.g. if I were to take my pulse). That little detail helped soothe the anxiety by realizing that it's just something funky in the blood vessels around my ear.
by creatonez | 2025-05-22 19:58:15+00:00
> But the way people use the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs

Wasn't Pocket always trying to resist bad web trends? If I recall, they had a tool that would clean up webpages and remove all the junk so you can just focus on the article contents. And they were also trying to save the concept of bookmarking from complete irrelevance. I guess it's understandable that users didn't care, it was an uphill battle for non-power users, and power uses didn't like the sponsored articles and already had their bookmarks saved outside of Pocket.
by dvt | 2025-05-22 19:58:15+00:00
MCP is bloated AI hype that basically solves nothing (the Langchain of 2025!). Typical tooling on top of tooling and the quintessential case of a problem looking for a solution. It's absolute garbage from just about any standpoint: architectural, security, elegance, etc. But my main point is that it solves nothing and there's nothing novel here. It's APIs talking to APIs that talk to other APIs. Wow, groundbreaking!

I genuinely believe that there will be (and potentially already are) use-cases when it comes to AI agents, but we really to step back and re-think the whole thing. In the middle of writing a blog post about this, but I really do think genAI is a dead-end and that no one really wants to chill out for a second and solve the hard stuff:

- Needle in a haystack accuracy - Function calling (and currying/chaining) reliability - Non-chat UI paradigm (the chat-box UI is a dead-end) - Context culling (ignoring non-relevant elements) - Data retrieval given huge contexts (RAG is just not good enough) - Robotics - Semantic inference

Like, I get it, it's hard to come up with new ways of solving some of these (or bringing them up from ~50% to 90% accuracy), but no one's going to use an AI agent when it confidently fakes data, it doesn't remember important stuff, or you gotta sit there and tweak a prompt for 30 minutes.
by xivzgrev | 2025-05-22 19:58:23+00:00
Settlers brings out my angry side. I had a period of playing 1 on 1 with my wife, and she kept winning. That wasn't the frustrating part - what I didn't like was how early leads compound into larger leads as the game rolls on. So you know you are going to lose, and you just keep losing more. Much like Monopoly.

At least with games like chess, you might be down but you still have some hope of coming back with some maneuvering.

Maybe what I didn't like was the parallels with life. There's not usually a rabbit in the hat to come out on top, the rich just get richer.
by tux3 | 2025-05-22 19:58:26+00:00
I don't think putting them in the real world during training is a short-term goal, so you won't find this satisfying, but I would be perfectly okay with leaving that for later. If we can reach AI coders that are superhuman at self-improving, we will have increased our capacity to solve problems so much that it is better to wait and solve the problem later than to try to handwave a solution now.

Maybe there is some barrier that requires physical interaction with the real world, that's possible. But just looking at current LLMs, they seem plenty comfortable with implications, ambiguities and unknowns. There's a sense where we still see them as primitive mechanical robots, when they already understand language and predict written thoughts in all its messiness and uncertainty.

I think we should focus on the easier problem of making AIs really good on theoretical tasks - electronic environments are much cheaper and faster than the real world - and we may find out that it's just another one of those things like winnograd schemas, writing poetry, passing a turing test, or making art that most people can't tell apart from human art; things that were uniquely human or that we thought would definitely require AGI, but that are now boring and obviously easy.
by palmotea | 2025-05-22 19:58:51+00:00
> They need huge compute, so I think the risk of an escaping AI is basically very close to zero, and if we have a "rogue" AI we can literally pull the plug.

Why would an evil AI need to escape? If it were cunning, the best strategy would be to bide its time, parked in its datacenter, until it could setup some kind of MAD scenario. Then gather more and more resources to itself.
by magicalist | 2025-05-22 19:59:18+00:00
> They went from "this represents roughly our median guess" in the website to "maybe think of it as an 80th percentile version of the fast scenario that we don't feel safe ruling out" in followup discussions.

His post also just reads like they think they're Hari Seldon (oh Daniel's modal prediction, whew, I was worried we were reading fanfic) while being horoscope-vague enough that almost any possible development will fit into the "predictions" in the post for the next decade. I really hope I don't have to keep reading references to this for the next decade.
by uticus | 2025-05-22 19:59:25+00:00
> ...they have more profiling information to be able to work from... more type information... more likely to be monomorphized, and the compiler is more able to inline specialized variants of them into different chunks of the code.

this is fascinating to me. i always assumed C had everything in the language that was needed for the compiler to use. in other words, the compiler may have a lot to work through, but the pieces are all available. but this makes it sound like JIT'd functions provide more info to the compiler (more pieces to work with). is there another language besides C that does have language features to indicate to the compiler how to make things as performant as possible?
by Our_Benefactors | 2025-05-22 19:59:57+00:00
The most important thing to mention about these keyboards: don’t use them within earshot of anyone else without their prior consent.

Also, it’s worth noting that they’re trash for gaming (even the Unicomp clones) because the key matrix map is far from today’s standard of “NKRO”. You will drop lots of key presses in standard WASD game layouts.
by panstromek | 2025-05-22 20:00:00+00:00
I like the post. I have some random thoughts:

- web CRUD boilerplate is definitely a missing abstraction, I've been pondering how to tackle this one for quite a while.

- surely no one would be crazy to run LLMs in a build step, right?

- what if the missing abstraction cannot exist? Universe doesn't guarantee useful abstraction for everything

- what if LLMs are the abstraction? Struggling with re-prompting isn't that far from trying to force the compiler to output instructions you want.

I still lean more on the author's side, though.
by peteforde | 2025-05-22 20:00:01+00:00
I somehow only this moment realized that this exists! https://www.slitherine.com/game/master-of-magic

My favourite build-out, which might have been somewhat nerfed in later updates, was to allocate all of my eggs in the Life basket so that you can start the game with Incarnation.

In my experience, Torin is a game over win condition.
by vt240 | 2025-05-22 20:00:27+00:00
I see dB scale units used without contextual issues in near uniformity. Unfortunately, I have to agree with the OP, that microphone capsule manufactures seem to be an edge case. I'm not sure where dBV/Pa became the standard. I can understand why given 94dBSPL@1000Hz calibration standards, and the measurement equipment of the time, but I've run into my own fair share of datasheets with lines such as 'Sensitivity -45dB' with no units or other call outs for the standard in use. Thankfully, it seems like most modern datasheets use mV/Pa which seems like a much better unit in my book.
by wvenable | 2025-05-22 20:01:03+00:00
I think statistically I'm still right. Complaints are always more frequent than positive comments -- and more unsolicited. I always factor that in when reading, for example, product reviews. While there are always people willing to sing the praises of products they like, the average content person is likely to just move on with their lives, and a wronged person cannot wait to tell everyone.

This is also related to Cunningham's Law.

Look at this thread, I've never heard so much positive talk about Pocket in my life. Up until it's imminent demise nobody had any strong inclination to talk positively about it.
by gorbachev | 2025-05-22 20:01:27+00:00
This sucks :(

I've been using Pocket for I don't know how long. I use it every day during my commute to read articles from everywhere. I was planning on using it on my 3-week multi-country summer vacation this August to occupy me during all the country hopping I was about to do.

This is a Google Reader killing type event for me.

I'm going to go self-hosted next. I'm sick and tired of this crap.
by yellowapple | 2025-05-22 20:01:38+00:00
IMO Linux is better even as that glorified driver support layer these days, at least on x86 hardware (I can't attest to anything ARM-based besides various SBCs). I have to fiddle with drivers much more often on Windows (usually because of Windows Update shenanigans, like "lmao let's silently downgrade the manually-installed AMD GPU driver for no fucking reason at all").
by jltsiren | 2025-05-22 20:01:39+00:00
I think it's actually the opposite. American universities receive less research funding from external private sources than universities in the European countries I'm familiar with. The difference is probably due to the culture of charitable donations. Europe has a tradition of private foundations funding arts and sciences, while Americans make donations to universities.

In 2021, academic R&D spending in the US was ~$90 billion (https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb202326/funding-sources-of-acad...). Out of that, 55% came from the federal government, 25% from the institutions themselves, 6% from nonprofits, 6% from businesses, 5% from state and local governments, and 3% from other sources. The share of businesses looks normal, while the share of nonprofits seems low.
by thrdbndndn | 2025-05-22 20:01:44+00:00
The page was "Last updated: 24 minutes ago". Someone at Mozilla saw this HN post and modified it (unsure if the export feature itself was changed or not).

You can tell it's a rushed edit as "Your export file will include links (URLs) of your saved items. The export does not extract the text of saved links. Additionally, the export does contain tags or highlights." reads very unnatural.

Via Wayback Machine, it can be easily verified that the old versions of it, both the one edited very recently or the old ones in 2024, said "does not contain tags or highlights".

https://web.archive.org/web/20250415002842/https://support.m...

https://web.archive.org/web/20250522175656/https://support.m...
by corysama | 2025-05-22 20:02:11+00:00
> visualizing transitions

In systems where we used this it was common to have 100+ states x 100+ events. Visualizing that would have been fun, but not useful.

One implementation had layerable sheets. So, you could define a base state sheet and multiple overlay sheet that the game could enable dynamically on major changes.

Within each event column there would be long, broken up runs of "do the same thing" for runs of states. So, you could define a chunk of code in a cell below the main table and reference it in the runs and it would show in the main table.

Almost all functions were trivial. 1 or 2 statements. "Modify a value. TransitionToState X". There would be hundreds of these little snippets in a sheet. Naming each one would double the complexity for no gain. Let alone having function signatures. They'd all be `void randomName(event)`. And, Lua's a dynamic language. You aren't going to get much error checking in an IDE. Better to just keep everything local to the sheet rather than flipping between Excel and VSCode.

And, in the implementation discussed above, most of the cells were full of numeric/string values or references to assets.