MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bloppe | 2025-05-21 17:28:17+00:00
You're talking about very subtle effects that have more to do with an individual than with a speech community.

English has so many "standard" words because the speech community became unusually eager to borrow them from other languages after the Norman conquest (The Anglo-Saxons were actually quite reluctant to do so before). Many speakers of other languages are now just as eager to borrow words from English (or other languages). Look at the pervasiveness of Spanglish and Hinglish, even though they are broadly considered non-standard by the speech community. A Spanish speaker will find just as many different words to describe something as an English speaker if they bother to try.

The hoax is that a language systematically shapes the patterns of thought of the entire speech community in profound ways. There is actually consensus among linguists that it can shape thinking of very subtle ways, however. Noun-gendering is one. A bridge is masculine in French: "le pont". It's feminine in German: "die Bruecke". A French-speaker is more likely to think of a bridge as "strong" or "sturdy", and a German is more likely to describe it as "elegant". But this does not rise to the level of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that a language limits its speakers' view of the world.
by danans | 2025-05-21 17:29:54+00:00
> Missing site diagram placard at MSP

I got dinged for this on the first inspection of my own self-installed solar+battery system.

A lot of signage companies don't know how to do the placard, but the company that I found that knows how was PVLabels:

https://www.pvlabels.com/04-645-map-placard/
by ics | 2025-05-21 17:29:57+00:00
This is a somewhat lame suggestion but in the spirit of Pinboard/del.icio.us or Bluesky/Twitter, a well-supported copy of OG Friendster or Facebook could just work to some degree.

I don't use social media outside of old.reddit if that counts but would strongly consider something like this. It would be easy to describe to friends; my friends/family over 30 are nostalgic and those under 30, especially those living on their own now, are curious about alternatives to the current state of things.
by 6510 | 2025-05-21 17:30:27+00:00
Almost all index pages are zero effort machine generated pages. I'm not entirely sure about it being an effect over time but Newspapers use to have tiny articles summarizing page 12 which later(?) became "more on page 12".

For a while (until I got to lazy) I maintained a front page article that talked about everything going on in the blog linking to tag pages that should have (but didn't) enjoy the same love. It was challenging to have a single sentence describe a group of articles and string those sentences into an article that sufficiently hides the truth that the blog randomly rambled all over the place. There was a lack of urgency for new articles to appear (except from the rss feed) in stead the front page article revealed missing posts. You could compare it to a wiki (while html offers the same utility) but the blog had 3 clear levels and blog like articles that rarely got updated.

It had me spend some thoughts on the absurdity of putting a log file on the front page or attempting to massage that automation into something nice? Everyone is doing it so it must be right.
by simonw | 2025-05-21 17:30:32+00:00
The first number I look at these days is the file size via Ollama, which for this model is 14GB https://ollama.com/library/devstral/tags

I find that on my M2 Mac that number is a rough approximation to how much memory the model needs (usually plus about 10%) - which matters because I want to know how much RAM I will have left for running other applications.

Anything below 20GB tends not to interfere with the other stuff I'm running too much. This model looks promising!
by hu3 | 2025-05-21 17:31:21+00:00
Thank you for providing context.

"About 55 hardware engineers, software developers, and manufacturing experts will join OpenAI as part of the acquisition". (for $6.5B)

So I think WhatsApp still holds the record for engineer/$B acquisition:

"WhatsApp had 32 engineers when it was bought for 19 billion dollars."

Even more if you correct for inflation.
by zamadatix | 2025-05-21 17:32:02+00:00
I think you're hitting on ideal vs. constrained wants (or, at least, that's how I've always referred to them). That is: what they want to be able to allow in itself vs. what they want to allow given the trade-offs with other wants.

E.g. "I'm going to go to the beach all day" and "I'm going to keep my job" are both likely the results of ideal type wants whereas "I'm going to go to my job today and then the beach tonight" would likely be the result of a constrained want.
by poormathskills | 2025-05-21 17:32:13+00:00
OpenAI does literally anything

“This is a sign of OpenAI’s weakness”

I think this is the third time I’ve seen this exact comment at the top of a HN post about an OpenAI announcement.There is a weird amount of emotional investment in not wanting OpenAI to win.

Personally, I am just excited to see what the device looks like. The prototype must be good to justify this valuation.
by belval | 2025-05-21 17:32:14+00:00
> Dumb question, why run inverters?

Can't say for OP, but DC appliances are just difficult to find, usually more expensive due to economies of scale and not as uniform in voltage (12/24/48V) as AC appliances. If your battery is in a shed somewhere it's also much easier to run a smaller gauge AC wire than setup distribution for your DC power.

Most large system are also 48V so you need to get it down to 12/24V which adds components anyway, at which point you might as well just have an inverter and not worry about any of that.
by westurner | 2025-05-21 17:32:31+00:00
Would such an integrated nanophotonic light source substitute for quantum dots, for cavity QED QC and sensors?

"Electrons turn piece of wire into laser-like light source" (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33490730 :

"Coherent Surface Plasmon Polariton Amplification via Free Electron Pumping" (2022) https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-1572967/v1
by wahern | 2025-05-21 17:32:43+00:00
Both clang and GCC support multi-core LTO, as does Rust. However, you have to partition the code, so the more cores you use the less benefit to LTO. Rust partitions by crate by default, but it can increase parallelism by partitioning each crate. I think "fat LTO" is the term typically used for whole-program, or at least in the case of Rust, whole-crate LTO, whereas "thin LTO" is what you get when you LTO partitions and then link those together normally. For clang and GCC, you can either have them automatically partition the code for thin LTO , or do it explicitly via your Makefile rules[1].

[1] Interestingly, GCC actually invokes Make internally to implement thin LTO, which lets it play nice with GNU Make's job control and obey the -j switch.
by breakyerself | 2025-05-21 17:33:26+00:00
I'd like to see a social network where everyone is to some extent verified. If you aren't willing to put your identity behind what you're saying then maybe keep it to yourself.

Nested comments in the style of reddit/HN are great for facilitating conversations. Part of why I left Facebook was they seem to be actively trying to hinder discussion.

Favor facts and reality over sensationalism and conspiracy BS.

No bigotry.
by fallinditch | 2025-05-21 17:34:24+00:00
It seems to me that Mephistopheles' offer was a no brainer for Faust.

Who in their right mind would reject an offer of unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures?

Presumably if Faust refuses Mephistopheles’ bargain, he must resign himself to a life haunted by unfulfilled longing, existential frustration, and the bitter realization that some mysteries will forever remain beyond his grasp. Or worse, his life could descend into base forms of evil and criminality, which seems likely given what he did to Gretchen.
by toss1 | 2025-05-21 17:34:29+00:00
I'm not talking expert-professional-level knowledge.

Merely sufficient familiarity with the STEM, History, etc. to be able to pass undergrad distributive requirements. In this age, if you do not have a clue about how the scientific process actually works and basic concepts, and you don't understand the basics of how and why the country and it's constitution are built, you do not have any business writing the laws of the country. Too many current congress people couldn't pass these tests and it shows.

If we cannot, among a country of ~330 million, with 90+million with college education or above [0], find less then 20,000 [1] qualified and willing to fill state and national offices, we are pretty much doomed as a nation.

Even if we do something like include all 500k local offices, and then require prior local or state service to fill a national office, it should be a good selection.

OFC, if there is a problem, you can always increase the incentives (good idea) or lower the standards (bad idea). Since it is a temporary office, making the pay even more attractive than I mentioned above would be good -make it 95th-percentile or 115% of previous income to compensate for any inconvenience (e.g., a business owner who must vacate their position for 2yrs will likely have costs)

[0] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2022/demo/educational-att...

[1] https://poliengine.com/blog/how-many-politicians-are-there-i...
by neuralkoi | 2025-05-21 17:34:45+00:00
The comments on this article are very interesting. The next major device will definitely be AI-first. Apple is currently trying to jerry-rig AI into their existing product, the iPhone. This has so far not only been a complete failure, but is bound to be a complete failure in the end.

The next Apple will be the one that creates an AI-first device entirely from scratch. AI lies at the core of everything it does. It's an AI assistant, a friend, another brain. It's not some BS summarizing engine that can't even do simple tasks like copy the name of a song playing on Spotify into Notes.

That's what I think Jony Ive envisions.
by tristor | 2025-05-21 17:35:25+00:00
> If you had a digital camera that perfectly mimicked output of film camera, you could take a "filmmaker" from 70s, give them the digital camera and they will successfully create a film of equal quality. Yes, one needs to understand that e.g. focal length changes depth of focus, but it's all about controlling the output. One does not really need to understand the inner workings of a system, all they need to understand is which parameters affect output in what way.

This paragraph tells me you don't understand how cameras work, because what you said is not true. The study of photography, and from it cinematography, is FUNDAMENTALLY about understanding the relationship between light, color, and the camera. This dates back to the beginnings of photography, and is the /primary/ topic written about by many of the world's best photographers (and famously a key area of focus for Ansel Adams). Photography, and from it cinematography, is almost entirely about lighting and exposure, and it requires a deep technical understanding of the inner workings of the camera to do it at a professional level. A cinematographer working on feature length films is not an amateur recording video clips, every element of the frame affects the mood and context of the story that is being told, and controlling for light and exposure is essential and goes beyond merely adjusting settings on the camera until it looks good in the viewfinder, it requires adjusting the actual environment you are recording (e.g. artificial lighting, light control, shadowing) in conjunction with technical details of the camera system, the lens choice, and things like adjusting aperture.

To have no understanding of the basic principles of light and its relationship to the camera, which is the core principle of a camera's operation, makes it impossible to produce professional quality work.
by danans | 2025-05-21 17:35:34+00:00
> This disabused me of the notion of doing it myself, lol.

The author did a very custom setup. If you want to DIY with a pre-integrated setup, you can enroll in Enphase's self installer program, and complete their online coursework:

https://enlighten.enphaseenergy.com/manager/registration?_gl...

I think EcoFlow may have a similar option.
by 0xBDB | 2025-05-21 17:35:35+00:00
> In which case that is just "reduce your budget and spend less" with extra steps.

I'm pretty sure the extra steps are the point, in that I simply don't believe the MMT folks expect them to ever take place.

It's not a coincidence it's an American theory, from a country where it's politically almost impossible to raise taxes. Otherwise it would just be a roundabout way to raise taxes and pay for stuff in reverse order. But in fact it isn't "buy now pay later". It's "buy now YOLO LOL". But hey, maybe I'm missing something.
by msukkarieh | 2025-05-21 17:35:52+00:00
Facebook is a great example of doing this and it succeeding very well. Zuck recognized that Facebook was going to zero and bought WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus. My guess is that sama sees the writing on the wall and knows that he must expand OpenAI in a similar way.

What happens to OpenAI competitors that can't make similar moves is another question.
Show HN: I made a running app that turns your runs to a virtual garden
by Utkarshn101 | 2025-05-21 17:36:16+00:00
Hi all,

I am a long distance runner and to motivate myself to run my first marathon I built a simple app that rewards you with plants and trees for your runs and grows a virtual garden for you (like Forest + Duolingo).

Hope you all like it. Do share what you think.

Thanks!
by otteromkram | 2025-05-21 17:36:18+00:00
> Optical devices called diffraction gratings stretch it out in time so that when the pump lasers dump power into the pulse, it doesn’t get so intense that it starts tearing the air apart.

Oh,my.

> "The crystal that we’re going to get in the summer will get us to 3 petawatts, and it took four and a half years to manufacture"

This entire thing is beyond cool. I hope the rest of the process goes smoothly for the teams involved!
by Ray20 | 2025-05-21 17:36:31+00:00
By population decline we mean a depopulation scenario, when the birth rate falls, the number of young people decreases, while the proportion of elderly people increases?

Automation can create a dynamically changing labor market. Today you had a job, tomorrow it is automated, you need to find another job, learn new skills required for it, and all of this.

Not a problem for the young (especially since automation increases the general standard of living, so young people will often find that their new job pays better).

But older people find it more difficult to adapt, learn new skills and find their place in a changed world.

And then there is career growth. Imagine an elderly gentleman who has spent 30 years building a career, accumulating valuable experience, and is USED to receiving a huge salary for his qualifications... And he is told that he has been replaced by a video card, his skills are now worth nothing on the market, and in the job available to him he will now be paid the same as a snotty 20-year-old yesterday's schoolboy. Do you think this won't become a point of social tension in a situation where there aren't many young workers?

There is also a solidarity pension system, which creates a greater burden on workers the smaller the proportion of young people and the greater the proportion of old people.

And in the scenario of a population decline with a simultaneous increase in living standards - this will create enormous social tension, when the shrinking working class will ask itself: why should we give more and more of the money we earned with our sweat and blood to old people who were unable to save for their old age when were younger?

Even if no one voices this as an official slogan, it will still be implied in political decisions and will boil down to at least the fact that old people will be denied an increase in their standard of living ("because we are already giving them more and more, but look at what a terrible world they left us, and now they want to live in luxury at the expense of our sweat and blood?").

But with the aging of the population, the proportion of old people will increase very much, and, if we are talking about democratic regimes, their political influence will be increased.

And the situation, when we have a confrontation between a shrinking productive minority and people who do not produce anything, but have power over them and live at their expense - can end badly. It will definitely end badly. Like, really badly
by sn9 | 2025-05-21 17:36:50+00:00
In general cardio will always use more energy than lifting because you can simply do much more of it.

Cardio is continuous work while lifting is work done a few seconds at a time.

Walking in particular is still moving your body horizontally through space. That horizontal displacement is the biggest determinant of energy cost for any given body, all things being equal.

Running only burns slightly more per unit distance because there's slightly more vertical displacement as you're literally leaving the ground between steps.
by waleedlatif1 | 2025-05-21 17:36:50+00:00
i think it significantly lowers the bar for entry to building agentic workflows, but also has the potential to augment the development process for engineers since its such a tight feedback loop. for instance, we were working on a sales & marketing ai tool before this and iterating was so hard because the agent frameworks are finicky, and rolling our own multi-agent orchestration means we are locked into a single provider. on sim studio, you can switch providers and tools instantly without any switching cost
by bigyabai | 2025-05-21 17:36:55+00:00
Your 2019 Macbook also uses a different chassis, designed by Jony Ive. Apple knew it throttled the chips they used but shipped it anyways, presumably because Ive liked his thinness even when it results in a bendgate.

You'll note that Macbooks don't quite look the same after Ive left and his influence went away.
by pipo234 | 2025-05-21 17:37:01+00:00
Still, US was instrumental in a couple of cases. Supplying evidence against and apprehending suspects in case of ex Yugoslavian culprits and one or two African dictators, but I could be wrong...

The 2002 withdrawal was clearly to sidestep prosecution for the lies that led to Iraq's invasion.

US was okay with ICC until those human right high horse stuff could apply to US...
by roughly | 2025-05-21 17:37:04+00:00
Jobs, for all his enormous character flaws, was a humanist - he believed in people and he wanted to make beautiful objects that would enhance people's lives. He was also an enormous asshole and constitutionally incapable of masking his disdain for solutions he didn't feel measured up. Ive can make a visually beautiful object, but he's shown he doesn't have the feel for the actual user, and Jobs' humanism is the half of that partnership that made it work.

Altman's got none of that (well, except the asshole part) - no vision, no taste, no concept of what a user would want, no real belief in humanity or desire to make things for humans. Ive and Altman together is going to be a disaster.
by vasusen | 2025-05-21 17:37:10+00:00
This is the key issue. We are over-regulated.

We rebuilt our house in the SF Bay Area in 2022 and went fully electric, no gas line anymore. It was really sad that I couldn't resuse any of my previous 12 kwh solar panels that were fully functioning and had another 10-15 years on them as they wouldn't match the new regulations.

I tried to get them installed on a separate area in my own backyard for off-the-grid charger just for my car, but you are not allowed to have a big off-the-grid system unconnected to PG&E. No electrician was willing to help with risk of losing license. The author was lucky that his dad could help with electrical.

Due to similar issues, I couldn't find anyone to take them for free as well. Demo dad was a truly sad day to watch these perfectly functioning solar panels being destroyed by a crane.
by gopher_space | 2025-05-21 17:37:10+00:00
Intelligence has nothing to do with this. Humans are universally unique in their point of view. We're filtering reality through limited but specific senses and making arbitrary classifications of the data, and we're doing it on this planet after centuries of building on top of earlier concepts.

> > If you have an undergraduate degree (or a high school diploma from last century) you've taken classes on this specific subject and forgotten what you've learned.

> I'm ignoring the ad-hominem attack in this sentence.

It's not an attack, there's a hole in your thinking because you've forgotten part of your education and I'm letting you know about it. Your initial assumptions are off base due to this.

Unfortunately this format doesn't really lend itself to this kind of conversation, which I've been enjoying quite a bit. We need a whiteboard and some coffee.
by slipnslider | 2025-05-21 17:37:53+00:00
I think a lot of people on here have heard enough stories about how Sam Altman behaves when the cameras aren't looking and dislike him and thus his company.

Also its normal backlash - when something gets so popular so fast, you are going to naturally have some haters.

Lastly actions speak louder than words. OpenAI used to talk about AGI and Super AI and nuclear launch codes and national security. Now they are buying VS Code forks and ad companies.

The AI race is more than heating up and Sama knows it and he's throwing some hail mary's in hopes to keep OpenAI near or at the top.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-05-21 17:38:05+00:00
Although “you” is often used to refer to a specific person or persons (e.g., “How did you get to work today?”), in many languages, it can also be used to refer to people in general (e.g., “You avoid rush hour if you can.”).

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2010939117#:~:text=Alt...
by lolinder | 2025-05-21 17:38:07+00:00
This is a bet that's as insane as the Apple car. They're going to try to get people to buy a specialized device from a company that isn't just a software company but really a B2B API company—the only successful consumer-facing product they have ever released was an accident, a tech demo that went viral.

And what exactly is that device going to do that the iPhone (and smartphones in general) can't already do with at a minimum a few small tweaks to the existing flagships?

In the right context vertical integration can make sense, but hardware is a big stretch for OpenAI right now. They haven't even really pinned down the consumer software angle yet.
by gleenn | 2025-05-21 17:38:16+00:00
That's my point, the type errors being reduced isn't that interesting, I usually find and fix those extremely quickly. What I don't find but am most interested in is the actual logic. So I must write tests. And when I write tests, I get the type errors covered too. So why should I spend my precious time modeling inside a type system when the ROI is minuscule and the cost is I have to litter my codebase with types. Just write the tests.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-05-21 17:38:34+00:00
You're committing the same fallacy that many do which is to lump them all under "gods" and then make it a problem of distinguishing which of these possible beings exists.

But this fails to distinguish between a being and Being. You and I are beings, beings among many. The pagan gods, personifications of various natural phenomena, were like us, in this sense: they were beings among, only more powerful. Being, on the other hand, is the verb to be. You exist, I exist, all the beings of the world exist. The pagan gods, I submit, do not exist, save as fictions.

So how do you relate to your existence? We all exist, so it isn't particular to you. And you are not the cause of your own existence, here and now. Rather existence is something prior to any particular existing things in the order of causes. This cause, this existence, this Being itself, is God, and you can know quite a bit about it, analogously, through unaided reason and without appealing to authority.

> What has the spiritual ever done for us?

That question is premature for you.