MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway13337 | 2025-05-23 17:14:19+00:00
It's absolutely true that in that future vision, the agents will then be marketed at.

And that's great.

In that world, those agents will sift through the noise. And the one that does that the best will win.

The end user experience then becomes uniform and pleasant.

It's the difference between talking to a personal secretary and a customer service representative. No one should have to endure the latter.
by asimpleusecase | 2025-05-23 17:14:31+00:00
Harvard has more than $50 Billion in their endowment. So they don’t really need US grants or contracts.

As far as visas go, this seems to be part of the escalation over the past couple of months. Both Harvard and the US administration seem to have read the same book on negotiation - Never Split The Difference.

I suspect that there is a path to a deal , but we will see if anyone is willing to do that.
by quantadev | 2025-05-23 17:14:37+00:00
We can now build the Semantic Web. All we have to do is create a tiny protocol (as an optional extension to MCP) for how organizations can share their SQL Table Create DDL as a static file that MCP apps can read, to understand data, and then, using the already-existing tools for AI/LLM function calling to SQL, that would become a Semantic Web.

That would fill the missing link that always held back the Semantic Web which was the lack of any incentive for companies to bother to use a standard "Data Type" rather than all proprietary data types. Once we have an MCPQ (MCP with Queries), suddenly there's an incentive for organizations to collaborate at the data structure layer.
by kieranmaine | 2025-05-23 17:14:46+00:00
I listened to a podcast titled "Taming the hydrogen hype" [1] that suggests things like nuclear power plants and wind turbines don't follow the same cost reductions as solar and batteries because they can't be fitted in a shipping container:

> So, most industrial things have big economies of scale, right? There's this imaginary world where, "Oh, I'm going to shrink down the cost, but the cost per unit is also going to go down." That requires magical thinking. It requires making it so small that you can make it in a factory and ship it in a shipping container.

Based on what I read on the site the turbine components can be transported using normal lorries. However, it would be interested to know:

1. If they can be shrunk even further and be transported in a container.

2. Would this help reduce costs.

1. https://open.substack.com/pub/davidroberts/p/taming-the-hydr...
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-05-23 17:15:13+00:00
I'm not the guy you were arguing with. But let me take a stab at defining "US".

To me, the US isn't just a geographic boundary. It's not even a collection of people. It's primarily the Constitution, and the limited government that flows from it.

If in 2029 we have a Constitution that is still theoretically in force, but in practice is ignored by the government, does the US still exist, or not? To me, even if something with that name exists, it's not the same US that existed in November 2024.

So I think that, if you're going to do this bet, you have to define the boundary conditions very carefully. Something with the "US" name will most likely exist in 2029. But will it be a zombie, or will it still be the same entity as it was before? And if it's a zombie, which of you wins the bet?
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-23 17:15:20+00:00
It's SI that caused some of this weirdness in the first place by discouraging "same unit" ratio units like m/m or kg/kg and then intentionally disallowing those derived units to be individually named. On the one hand, there is a sort of "clean sense" that km/km cancels out and disappears, but on the other hand there are too many "unitless quantities" in SI that are very formula-specific that a ratio unit would better explain and help save the wrong thing from being plugged into the formula. It's enough of a need that scientists found themselves using worse tools like deciBels for some of these "same unit" ratio formulas just to have "some unit at all" to avoid accidental unit-less mistakes.

Some Scientists and Mathematicians would rather use random log_10(x) functions than allow units like km/km in their formulas. It's wild, and SI has been a part of those decisions all along.
by kragen | 2025-05-23 17:15:26+00:00
Yes, so it's puzzling that the small windmills (necessarily designed for low wind speeds) cost less per peak watt. You'd think getting more power per square meter higher up would reduce the cost per peak watt. Wind speeds are more consistent up there, too.

The wildlife concerns are completely specious. The main reason you don't use them in the UK are that the wrong sort of people have political power.
by gen220 | 2025-05-23 17:16:10+00:00
Having thought about this a good amount and collected anecdotes over the years... I think the prioritization order should be (1) live in a location in which the parents feel their most authentic/happy/self-actualized selves, (2) send your children to the most geographically proximate school where they won't be (overly-)bullied for their identity (inclusive of class) one way or another.

Relative school quality (performance on standardized tests, admissions to fancy schools), and public/private are proxies for these more fundamental issues. Too many parents discount the value of (1) to zero, with the idea that they're "sacrificing themselves" "for their kids".

An example of one good reason to not send your kids to private school: Burning yourself out on a series of high-stress job to afford sending your middle-class kid to an upper-class private school will traumatize them. If not for their education/social experience at school, then for your lack of calming and positive influence on their emotional/relationship-forming lives.

I don't think it's necessarily "wrong" for some people to send their kids to a "narrow-lens" school, even if it's often wrong. It can be right for somebody else and wrong for you.
by rubitxxx15 | 2025-05-23 17:16:23+00:00
It’s a great speech, but I’ve listened to this “chase your dream” thing for decades. I took career and personality tests but nothing in them fit. I don’t fit. I’ve gotten seriously jaded and live with crippling mental health problems and constant stress because I feel like I failed to find my people and now I just hide from my people.

So, as an older adult, I think maybe we need to be teaching more responsibility to kids today rather than this Disney fantasy. If people just focus on trying to do the best they can, that’s good enough. And spend that extra time improving your home, volunteering, and working on your finances like people did in the mid-to-late 20th century.
by trehalose | 2025-05-23 17:17:05+00:00
> We've probably all had the experience where the model is going off the rails during the thinking process but somehow spits out the right answer at the end. Apparently the reasoning doesn't even need to be correct during training?

How do we know if the reasoning was correct or not? Do we have more information about what the model was thinking besides just what it says it was thinking?
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-23 17:17:17+00:00
Catholic education is sort of going crazy right now with everything else. Here are a few inside facts.

First, nobody is surprised about Harvard and the struggle with the land-grant universities. Conservative Catholics have been sounding alarm bells about higher education for decades. Why? Because the Church invented the university system, and it's got away from us, and American academia has more money than Croesus and doesn't feel beholden or subjugated to any higher power except themselves. Harvard will bow down to no pope or king, but perhaps to many gods.

Now in terms of K-12, the Church set all that up, even in Canada and especially for the indigent and marginalized populations. Catholic schools used to be illegal in some places. But some Catholics feel that parochial schools have sold out [to Vatican II, or Democrats, and/or Beelzebub] and are unfit to educate Catholics. This is a natural progression because for centuries, they've been taking in atheists and heretics and anyone who pays, and forming them with Catholic values and giving really top-notch educations and forming leaders. Katy Perry and Lady Gaga are in charge now!

So Catholic educators has been busy setting up non-parochial schools. Independents, charters, "secular" schools that teach liberal arts and Great Books. There's a whole patchwork of non-parochial Catholic education at this point, and the bishops are nervous about that. Parochial schools are closing from lack of support, staffing, and enrollment.

Catholic parents are also leaning into homeschooling -- everyone knows this open secret. I am sure that other faiths are also homeschooling. The seeds of distrust of public schooling are bearing significant fruit.

So with School Choice and vouchers and fungible tax money for schooling, there is simply a huge fragmentation of the "market" for primary education at this point. Every single election, my district is hit with a gigantic bill in terms of bonds and overrides, for the public schools to try and tread water. But if our bonds and overrides and staff and student populations are being sliced away with school choice and public schools can't stay afloat, and teachers can't stay employed or even live in their district, then there's a real education crisis across the board.

This is fine. :-D
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-23 17:17:25+00:00
Parent was a bit over-confrontational and defensive, but I think it suffices to say that there can be many types of art.

Géricault, Mondrian (early and late), and Standard Highway Signs [0] are all art, but with different goals and paths to getting there.

That an author chooses florid prose doesn't make them superior or inferior to others, aside from the skill with which they wield language.

Some people prefer stop signs. Some like The Raft of the Medusa. Plenty of room for everyone.

[0] https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/kno-shs_2024-release-status/index...
by nancyminusone | 2025-05-23 17:19:04+00:00
Too few divisors of place values. The idea you would pick something that isn't evenly divisible by at least 3 or 4 was a mistake.

This one isn't metric's fault to be fair. That's just what you get for inventing numbers before inventing math.

Makes me wonder what would have happened if 'French numbers' in base 12, 36 or 60 were introduced at the same time.

People got used to working in octal.or hexadecimal in the past for computers, doesn't seem like it would have been as big of a change as you think.
Show HN: I made Amazon Profit Calculator, Visual Tool to Estimate Amazon Profits
by dannyelo | 2025-05-23 17:19:08+00:00
I made a profit calculator for Amazon sellers that breaks down FBA fees, ROI, and net profit per unit.

You plug in your product price, shipping, and costs. It gives a full breakdown of gross revenue, Amazon fees, taxes, and final margins. Everything updates live as you type.

It runs in the browser, no signups, no tracking. Just a tool I needed and ended up putting online.

https://www.monkeycalcs.com/amazon-profit-calculator

Happy to answer questions or improve it based on feedback.
by glenstein | 2025-05-23 17:19:36+00:00
I understand this and this is a common take and there is a virtue here. I also think it overlooks some very specific things about like informational logistics that can spread the capacity to, say, manufacture 3D printed weapons, or any other forms of mass destruction that might become increasingly conveniently accessible to the layperson.

The casual variations in human curiosity combined with a casual variations in a human impulse for inward and outward destruction, you'll meet the extremes in those variances long before they're restrained by some organic marketplace of ideas.

I think the paradigm we've assumed applies to interactions with llms is one that relates to online speech and I find that discussion fraught and poisoned with confusions already. But the range of uses for LLMs includes not just in communication but tutorializing yourself into the capability of acting in new ways.
by briffle | 2025-05-23 17:19:45+00:00
I like that I can run this remotely with the vscode ssh extension to my remote systems. But compared to dbeaver, I miss some of the features of dbeaver. Like showing an estimate of large each table is, and seeing how many rows in the 'properties tab'. And being able to see the ERD graphics for individual tables (to show foreign keys, etc).

Also like with dbeaver that you can take the results and export them in many different formats. like directly to excel for some of my co-workers who live and die in excel.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-05-23 17:20:19+00:00
im curious about your use case -- it seems weird (to me) to use it in an open source project unless its some kind of turnkey full app -- is there a way to just release it and encourage people to bring their own oban keys? that way it looks good for the elixir ecosystem that it has found a way to support hybrid open source libraries and expands the obam ecosystem
by conductr | 2025-05-23 17:20:24+00:00
As self appointed arbiter, they actually aren’t too different from one another. Looks like a little bit prettier PIP effects, the multiple window navigation, are main visual differences that look better but don’t actually changes the experience imo. The introduction of title screen transitions was nice, videos like these the best thing you can do is organize by topic to make it somewhat scannable. People finding the videos from search or whatever aren’t wanting to watch a 25 minute video, they’re looking for the part that solves their problem or discusses it at least. If you can, and maybe you have and it’s not showing up on mobile for me, is adding descriptive chapter names to the videos
by CharlesW | 2025-05-23 17:20:40+00:00
> At their scale they will never be able to use anything else than a cloud solution.

That's definitely not true, and there are many companies doing higher volumes at a fraction of the cost-per-query.

Although scale doesn't force companies into public-cloud database systems, considerations like capital, time-to-market, and business strategy often do. In this case, OpenAI is trading a significantly higher per-query cost for benefits like improved agility, turnkey compliance, etc.
by shreyas00719 | 2025-05-23 17:21:22+00:00
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Any one here wants to try it out for your projects ? we are offering 5GB storage and bandwidth for free. Check out the pricing calculator on the landing page to estimate your savings.
by handsclean | 2025-05-23 17:22:15+00:00
I don’t fully understand the algorithm, but no, to my understanding it’s much more general than that. In each tick a cell’s state is solely determined by its immediate neighbors, which means the simulation has a “speed of light” of 1 cell/second: to look N ticks into the future, you need only consider cells within N cells of the area you’re computing, no matter what’s outside that. So, for example, if you want to skip a 10x10 area 100 ticks into the future, you consider a 210x210 area centered on your 10x10, compute it once, then in the future use that 210x210 area as a lookup key for the 10x10 100 ticks into the future. I think HashLife is also somehow doing this on multiple scales at once, and some other tricks.
by bambax | 2025-05-23 17:22:19+00:00
Here's a completely random anecdote: my mother often told me that her father, my grandfather, born in France in 1899, sculptor, draftsman and general maker of things, had a strong dislike of the metric system. He complained continuously that anything with round metric ratios was "ugly" and that beauty could only be found in more ancient measuring systems.

He died when I was 4 so it's not a first hand account, I'm not sure how much of it is true or what he really thought, but somehow it feels right.

The metric system is incredibly useful and practical (of course) but there's something rigid and unpleasant about it.
by dang | 2025-05-23 17:23:07+00:00
> We only want positive thoughts now, I guess.

Not so! Check out the next sentence: "Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm sorry you felt targeted and promise you it's nothing personal. It's that we're trying for curious conversation, which the rigid-and-generic sort of negativity annihilates. There's not much room for curious response when a comment insists that the world is nothing but a "dog eat dog slugfest".

Btw, I believe that the deeper problem is that it's hard to tell how one's comments are going to come across. Most people underestimate the negativity they're contributing by a good 10x or so, which leads to quite a skew in perception. That could explain, for example, why you felt like I must be telling you to only do happytalk.
by remram | 2025-05-23 17:24:02+00:00
As a Frenchman living in the US, my favorite Imperial units are the hand (3 hands to a foot) and the poppyseed (4 poppyseeds to a barleycorn, the shoe-size unit; 3 barleycorns to an inch). 10cm and 2mm.

People stop asking me to convert to Imperial pretty quick.
by jolmg | 2025-05-23 17:24:06+00:00
> There's nearly nothing you can buy today for less than a dollar.

Aren't most things in the fruits and veggies section under a dollar? What's a carrot or a lemon cost?

Looking at the weekly ad at Food4Less, tomatoes are 2lb/$3. I think that's like 50 cents each tomato. Onions are 89 cents/lb.
by godelski | 2025-05-23 17:24:53+00:00
> Asimov never called it alignment

He also never said "super intelligence", "general intelligence", or a ton of other things. Why would he? Jargon changed. Doesn't mean what he discussed changed.

So it doesn't matter. The fact that someone coined a better term for the concept doesn't mean it isn't the same thing. So of course it gets talked about in the way you see because it has been the same concept the whole time.

If we're really going to nitpick then the coined phrase usage was not about killing everyone, aligning with human values. Much more broad and the connection is clearer. It implies killing, but it's still the same problem. (Come on, Asimov's stuff was explicit "aligning with human values" it would be silly to say it isn't)

So by your logic we would similarly have to conclude that Asimov never talked about artificial super intelligence despite multivac's various upgrades, up to making a whole universe. Never was saying ASI in "The Last Question", but clearly that's what was discussed. Similarly you'd argue that Asimov only discussed artificial intelligence but never artificial general intelligence. Are none of those robots general? Is Andrew, from Positronic Man, not... "General"? Not sentient? Not conscious? The robot literally transforms into a living breathing human!

So I hope you agree that it'd be ridiculous to make such conclusions in these cases. The concepts were identical, we just use slightly different words to describe them now and that isn't a problem.

It's only natural that we say "alignment" instead of "steering", "reward hacking", or the god awful "parasitic mutated heuristics". It's all the same thing and the verbiage is much better.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-05-23 17:25:07+00:00
I went to a poverty level school, my partner went to one of the most elite schools in the US. My friends are also stuck in poverty or the lower-middle-class while my partner's friends seem quite conventionally successful. But several of my partner's friends are quite frustrated with their career choices. They feel like they were hemmed into high-prestige careers. A lot of them are not particularly successful in their careers because they don't feel the passion to succeed and feel like their choices were taken away from them. Many of them have very anxious memories from school of perpetually feeling like they were failing because of the high pressure of the school.

There are many aspects of my low-income schooling I would not want to pass onto a child but there are also aspects of my partner's schooling that I wouldn't want to pass either. I don't really know what the answer is, but I feel like being at either end of the normal distribution of schools here isn't good.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-05-23 17:25:14+00:00
That’s historically inaccurate

My masters thesis advisor Ben Goertzel popularized the term and has been hosting the AGI conference since 2008:

https://agi-conference.org/

https://goertzel.org/agiri06/%5B1%5D%20Introduction_Nov15_PW...

I had lunch with Yoshua Bengio at AGI 2014 and it was most of the conversation that day
by bohanoai | 2025-05-23 17:25:31+00:00
Speaker here — Bohan from OpenAI.

Our application has hundreds of endpoints, which makes sharding non-trivial. We've already offloaded shardable workloads—particularly write-heavy ones—from PostgreSQL. What remains is primarily read-only and would require substantial effort to shard. Currently, the workload scales well on Azure Database for PostgreSQL, and we have sufficient headroom to support future growth.

That said, we're not ruling out sharding in the future—it’s just not a near-term priority.
by brudgers | 2025-05-23 17:25:51+00:00
For me, the skeuomorph of a knob is very much not a knob, because it cannot be operated solely by touch.

The knob on the MXR phaser directly connects my fingers and my ears. Once I have to use my visual cortex, it's a book.

And the skeuomorph knob is a terrible skeuomorph because it replaces rotary motion with linear motion...and that linear motion moves the cursor away from the point of interaction and the point of interaction strongly suggests a point graphically because it is a circle.

I guess I will keep going...if the sweet spot on the MxR is 1200, then why not make the pedal a musical preset and get rid of the knob altogether? OK...everyone isn't into the Unix philosophy and phasers have rhythm. But still there is a question whose main answer is marketing.
by withinboredom | 2025-05-23 17:26:33+00:00
> Also, "clearly" is not an argument.

As in your assertion is literally self-evidently false. It is on you to provide a burden of proof here; especially since there are instructions that can load more than a single bit of memory.

> How can you access a piece of memory without issuing an instruction to the CPU?

Let me rather ask you this: where do the instructions exist that are running? That is right: in memory. However, just because instructions exist in memory doesn’t mean they’re accessed. There is not a relationship between the number of instructions and the amount of memory accessed/used.
by jeeyoungk | 2025-05-23 17:26:55+00:00
Yes, they tried to avoid the cliche by pointing at the cliche, but they weren't able to refute Our Incredible Journey.

Though, this was a real product, with almost 10 years of operation; very few products last this long, and the product wasn't immediately shuttered after the acquisition, so it is unfair to categorize them into the same OIJ bucket.
by kibwen | 2025-05-23 17:27:25+00:00
> In that world, those agents will sift through the noise. And the one that does that the best will win.

The existence of agents capable of learning to cut through the enshittification also implies the existence of agents capable of learning to enshittify all the more effectively. It's an arms race, and there's no reason to suspect that the pro-consumer side will win over the pro-exploitation side.