MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by viking2917 | 2025-05-13 23:58:45+00:00
coincidentally, posted this over on Show HN today. OCR workbench, AI OCR & editing tools for OCRing old / hard documents. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43976450. Tesseract works fine for modern text documents, but it fails badly on older docs (e.g. colonial american, etc)
by aristofun | 2025-05-13 23:59:30+00:00
(Not an economist, but physicist by education) I suppose on such a large macroeconomic scale accuracy of professional economists answers are not much closer to the truth (or to longterm outcomes) than any couch expert. This is why there are so many fierce debates and opinions all over the spectrum around it. We can’t possibly calculate such a huge dynamic system with any certainty on any meaningful distance (like years).
by ianhowson | 2025-05-14 00:00:21+00:00
I think the proposal suggested an orbit where the solar panels are always in sun and always properly aligned and always clean due to space gophers.

But more seriously, GPU loads are super spiky. Ground-based power grids and generators and batteries have trouble keeping up with them. You can go from 1MW idle to 50MW full power in 10ms. Unbuffered solar cells are right out.
by tough | 2025-05-14 00:00:34+00:00
SRLCG: Self-Rectified Large-Scale Code Generation with Multidimensional Chain-of-Thought and Dynamic Backtracking

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00532

IterGen: Iterative Semantic-aware Structured LLM Generation with Backtracking

https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07295

ROCODE: Integrating Backtracking Mechanism and Program Analysis in Large Language Models for Code Generation

https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.07112v1
by thenaturalist | 2025-05-14 00:00:35+00:00
You obv. can't cause that would be a considerably easier and hence not a payoff worthy bet than the inverse of picking winners from an aspiring group of people trying to do something new in the world.

For all the financial inefficiencies of that - objectively - we get to benefit as humanity from the (expensive) mistakes of others.

So here's to whatever this is leading to much better insights about computing in space at best!
by GWBullshit | 2025-05-14 00:01:26+00:00
Also, just out of curiosity, when you say, "Your submission history suggests that you jump to conclusions as a chronic habit." ... can you clarify how you yourself infer that from a small series of submissions, only 2 of which has anything to do with "drawing conclusions", both of which clearly suggest the establishment of some sort of system to methodically reach conclusions?

Because otherwise you're just debasing yourself by not only engaging in ad-hominem attacks, but making up the basis for doing so.
by divbzero | 2025-05-14 00:01:32+00:00
> So, there you have it: "all you have to do" is deploy a few hectares of radiators in space, combined with heat pumps that can dissipate gigawatts of thermal load…

Starcloud’s whitepaper suggests a 4 km × 4 km radiator. For comparison, the James Web Space Telescope has a sunshield measuring 21 m × 14 m and the International Space Station measures 109 m × 73 m.
by lucb1e | 2025-05-14 00:02:32+00:00
> It's very likely you are in the global 1%.

Somewhere around the average income in the country you speak of is the global 1%. You don't need to additionally have a beach resort for that!

I'm somewhere around that 1% global income level figure as well, due to no fault of my own. Born into a country with a good currency, high income level, a decent-enough brain to get an above-median income in that job market... I've been incredibly fortunate to be alive in this place at a time of peace and decent healthcare. (I'm living below means and considering what the best thing to do with this wealth is, fwiw. I'm not the sort of wealthy that can wave a hand to fix world problems, but it's also not like I don't want to contribute back)
by 8thcross | 2025-05-14 00:02:45+00:00
building knowledge graphs (GrahRAGs) are obsolete from a acamedic and technical point of view. LLMs are getting better with built in graph networks capable algorithms like SONAR and knowledge embeddings. like someone said - just use Notebook LM instead. But, they are useful in corporate setup when the infrastructure,teams and skills are lagging by years.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-14 00:03:11+00:00
One of these days, a project will catch on that's vastly simpler than any memory solution today, yet solves all the same problems, and more robustly too, just like how it took humanity thousands of years to realize how to use levers to build complex machines. The solution is probably sitting right under our noses. I'm not sure it's your project (maybe it is) but I bet this will happen.
by rockemsockem | 2025-05-14 00:04:25+00:00
I think there are a lot of in-depth trades that can be done to show specifically when nuclear is appropriate vs solar, and I'm sure solar will win a lot of those, but I'm just going to reach for the easy ones here.

Radio telescope on the dark side of the moon, using solar would require long transmission lines. Autonomous vehicles on Mars (already use nuclear energy via RTGs). Any deep space mission where building a nuclear reactor and launching it is lower effort than complex energy beaming.
by anyfoo | 2025-05-14 00:06:08+00:00
> If the timers draw from different distributions then it is going to be much harder.

Again, I'm an amateur, but I think you just need to know that distribution, which I guess you usually do (open source vs. closed source barely matters there), law of large numbers and all.

Anyway, looking through literature, this article presents some actual ways to circumvent timers being made corse-grained: https://attacking.systems/web/files/timers.pdf

In that article, the "Clock interpolation" sounds vaguely related to what I was describing on a quick read, or maybe it's something else entirely... Later, the article mentions alternative timing sources altogether.

Either way, the conclusion of the article is that the mitigation approach as a whole is indeed ineffective: "[...] browser vendors decided to reduce the timer resolution. In this article, we showed that this attempt to close these vulnerabilities was merely a quick-fix and did not address the underlying issue. [...]"
by t-writescode | 2025-05-14 00:06:47+00:00
What does citizenship actually buy you?

If you're bringing these US Citizens into your country to get their skills, you want them working in jobs where they'll use their skills; or, you want them creating a startup where they can use those skills.

Requiring a job or getting an approved startup idea are both viable routes in the vast majority of countries in the EU, to my knowledge.

And, if memory serves, most people can get citizenship in those aforementioned countries in 5-6 years if they play correctly; and, many countries allow the US equivalent of a green card in a couple.

It's already pretty easy to move to Europe for knowledge workers.
by Retric | 2025-05-14 00:07:09+00:00
The kind of releases you’re talking about is 8+ orders of magnitude smaller than in your prior example and again without burning it’s lighter than air and just going strait up. Right now T2 is ~$30,000 / gram hell even D is ~13,000x as much as hydrogen. This just isn’t the kind of thing you’d let escape in meaningful quantities in day to day operations.

When people talk about how safe fusion is they aren’t kidding, even breathing in a significant amount of T2 isn’t particularly dangerous radiologically as density is really low and you will quickly exhale it. Huge quantities would be a larger suffocation risks but then you’re talking multi million dollar accidents simply from lost fuel.
by gerdesj | 2025-05-14 00:07:13+00:00
PDF is a display format. It is optimised for eyeballs and printers. There has been some feature creep. It is a rubbish machine data transfer mechanism but really good for humans and say storing a page of A4 (letter for the US).

So, you start off with the premise that a .pdf stores text and you want that text. Well that's nice: grow some eyes!

Otherwise, you are going to have to get to grips with some really complicated stuff. For starters, is the text ... text or is it an image? Your eyes don't care and will just work (especially when you pop your specs back on) but your parser is probably seg faulting madly. It just gets worse.

PDF is for humans to read. Emulate a human to read a PDF.
by caterama | 2025-05-14 00:07:17+00:00
Comments on your resume:

1. First line is "Using Cursor, Claude 3.7, and OpenAI every day". You can't win with this. You don't take weekends off? Red flag. You do take weekends off? Then the first line of your resume is a lie and I wonder what else isn't honest.

2. #1 skill is Vibecoding? Red flag. Your resume would look better without the left column of skills. None of your experience backs up those skills.

3. The experiences listed are all 1-2 years, with the longest one being your self-employed one. Why are they all so short?
by onecommentman | 2025-05-14 00:07:46+00:00
Umm, if you’re not getting an “uncanny valley” vibe from the response, you should probably make a working assumption it’s a person and not AI. How would you change your response to the comment in one case or the other? Both can lie, manipulate, tell half-truths, etc. The only difference I can see is if you believe you can prevent a living person from making or continuing to make a big mistake by responding, then spend some time on the response. If it’s a bot, you don’t. You submit interesting relevant factoids regardless because the non-bots (TM all rights reserved) might like them.

BTW, using stylistic features in writing to ID bots might be low-yield. Style changes are trivial to implement in any automated system, and they can be used to stylistically “blackball” particular human contributors. “I’ve heard that using ‘grey’ instead of ‘gray’ is a sure sign of a bot!” That sort of thing.
by parpfish | 2025-05-14 00:08:01+00:00
But one big difference is that if an employee screws up, the company can prevent subsequent similar damages. Fire/retrain the offender, and it won’t happen again.

If the AI screws up, what do you need to fire/retrain? It seems like eventually the ai would get wrapped in so many layers of hard coded business logic to prevent repeat offenses that you may as well just be using hard coded business logic.
by Clubber | 2025-05-14 00:08:29+00:00
Google is certainly a monopoly in several sectors, search and YouTube come to mind. Amazon is a duopoly with Walmart and both need to be dismantled, but the damage to main street was done a long time ago. I'm not sure where Apple is a monopoly. People argue the App Store but only for the iPhone and iPad, but I feel that takes some mental gymnastics since it's somewhat niche and other stores for other phones exist.
by dnautics | 2025-05-14 00:11:34+00:00
There isn't a real one yet, but to scratch an itch I tried to build one for Zig. It's not complete nor do I have plans to complete it. https://github.com/ityonemo/clr

If zig locks down the AIR (intermediate representation at the function level) it would be ideal for running model checking of various sorts. Just by looking at AIR I found it possible to:

- identify stack pointer leakage

- basic borrow checking

- detect memory leaks

- assign units to variables and track when units are incompatible
by Clubber | 2025-05-14 00:11:48+00:00
>We're five years into remote work being way more common than it ever was before, and it hasn't broken that stranglehold of concentration yet.

That's partially because big companies decided WFH was now verboten. Part of it was because execs in that area didn't want their personal property values to go down, I suspect. I'm sure there was also governmental pressure as well to protect the auxiliary businesses like local restaurants, protect tax revenue like property tax state income tax, etc.
by timewizard | 2025-05-14 00:11:52+00:00
> Cost of cyberattacks globally[1]: O($trillions)

That's a fairly worthless metric. What you want is "Cost of cyberattacks / Revenue from attacked systems."

> We're really bad at measuring the secondary effects of our short-sightedness.

We're really good at it. There's an entire industry that makes this it's core competency... insurance. Which is great because it means you can rationalize risk. Which is also scary because it means you can rationalize risk.
by notnullorvoid | 2025-05-14 00:12:43+00:00
The general idea seems very promising, I had been hoping someone would do something like this since seeing JSON schema structured outputs for LLMs.

Need to dig in a bit more on the implementation, but I was surprised that the paper didn't mention hooking into existing language service/server. There's more than types that an LLM could leverage from existing language tooling. Auto imports is a good example, it is handy for the human developer to keep a linear writing flow, something a LLM needs even more.
by igouy | 2025-05-14 00:13:17+00:00
fwiw There are a few naive un-optimised single-thread #8 n-body programs transliterated line-by-line literal style into different programming languages from the same original. [1]

> a single digit multiple

By which you mean < 10× ?

So not those Java -Xint, PHP, Ruby, Python 3 programs?

> interpreted

Roberto Ierusalimschy said "the distinguishing feature of interpreted languages is not that they are not compiled, but that any eventual compiler is part of the language runtime and that, therefore, it is possible (and easy) to execute code generated on the fly." [2]

[1] https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

[2] "Programming in Lua" 1st ed p57
by ajross | 2025-05-14 00:13:33+00:00
FWIW, I think a lot of that is an echo chamber distortion here at HN. In the real world, frankly the best AI-enhanced search provider[1] is... Google. And honestly it isn't really very close. Have you tried asking questions at the Google search prompt recently? My sense is that most HN commenters don't, on principle.

[1] And yes, I work there, but on boring firmware and wouldn't know a transformer if you hit me with one. I'm just a consumer who's recently learned that typing detailed questions into the search prompt gives shockingly great summary answers with references.
by throwanem | 2025-05-14 00:13:47+00:00
This SO answer does a good job covering the reasons why, or all the reasons at least that I recall learning it was a bad idea. There may be more, but I'd probably have to go spec diving to find them.

Offhand these days I would expect asynchronous loading and rendering both to pose additional concerns. You may not be able even to guarantee whether or not the element you're trying to reference by ID exists at the time of reference. Oh, you can synchronize on DOMContentLoaded or something like that, but that's not going to do anything good for performance. And for that matter, you'd probably have to toggle a TypeScript compiler option I've never heard of, to get this sort of thing to even sort of fly - and there again, the API methods dating from this millennium will be mostly the ones where the type system is able to offer some guarantees.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/24606307
by junon | 2025-05-14 00:14:20+00:00
Guard pages do not require physical pages, no. Just a page table entry.

All pages are aligned by 4kib (except for esoteric CPUs perhaps). That's what a page is.

Unless the guard page is on another page table boundary, no additional physical pages are required.

Further, TLB cost means nothing if it's a guard page. It shouldn't be accessed in any normal path barring a bug.
by eru | 2025-05-14 00:15:51+00:00
Yes, branches are just mutable pointers. The commit history is an immutable tree and has a garbage collector to clean up.

Funny enough, this is more or less exactly the architecture some of those Haskell-weirdos would come up with. It's essentially a copy-on-write filesystem.

(Haskell people are weirdos compared to good old fashioned operating system people who use C as God intended.)
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-05-14 00:15:54+00:00
> So while AI may be a nice productivity booster, it's not like there's unlimited demand for more productivity. Companies only need so much work done. If your employees are made 4x more productive by a new tool, you can lay off 75% of them. And forget about hiring, because the tools are just getting better.

Many companies are also way overstaffed, IME (thinking non-software/"tech" F500s here)

Having worked as a consultant with various F500 companies over the last few years, there's loads of people that do very little work, and much of the work is low value--myself included; I make no claims I'm above any of this.

I've encountered countless project managers that do nothing other than move Jira tickets around.

Me: "Hey I'm blocked, can you get me in contact with $TEAM that owns this stuff"

PM: "Uh no, ask $PERSON"

How many of this person does any company need?

Even developers--I've worked with loads that take a week to set up some Angular project or cloud resources, and the even darker part of all of that is the whole project is destined to fail, cause the sales org sold em on some "modernization" thing that'll never get off the ground, that they don't have the staff to maintain, and they don't have the organizational will or discipline to integrate.

I've been on countless projects like this, there's piles of excess people doing low value (or no) work at all, saved only from unemployment by the sheer complexity of byzantine, bureaucratic organizations.
by lmpdev | 2025-05-14 00:16:38+00:00
I’d argue this exists for public companies, but there are many smaller, private businesses where there’s no doctrine of maximising shareholder value

These companies often place a greater emphasis on reputation and legacy Very few and far between, Robert McNeel & Associates (American) is one that comes to mind (Rhino3D), as his the Dutch company Victron (power hardware)

The former especially is not known for maximising their margins, they don’t even offer a subscription-model to their customers

Victron is an interesting case, where they deliberately offer few products, and instead of releasing more, they heavily optimise and update their existing models over many years in everything from documentation to firmware and even new features. They’re a hardware company mostly so very little revenue is from subscriptions
by manithree | 2025-05-14 00:17:27+00:00
This one is higher quality (https://content.instructables.com/F84/WG7G/K2XU5LKV/F84WG7GK...) and it's all kinda pointless without the "machine" https://www.instructables.com/CARDIAC-CARDboard-Illustrative...

I didn't get mine until about 1979 or 1980. Still have it, though.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-14 00:17:57+00:00
> The trust issues around overemployment

I don’t think it’s really trust issues. Even If a candidate was fully honest that he’s planning to work two full time jobs, employers would still be against it. Even if the candidate was fully honest AND could somehow guarantee that his output would be 100% and he’d never miss a meeting, employers would STILL be against it. Full time white collar employers just feel entitled to exclusivity, that other kinds of employers just don’t seem to care about.
by socalgal2 | 2025-05-14 00:18:35+00:00
My apartment wanted to use some 3rd party service to do ACH transfers for my rent. I just wanted to type in my bank's routing number and account number but this 3rd party service only worked if you gave it your bank username/password. I was like NOPE! And sent them a paper check. My guess is they had some permission from the bank to also suck down all your transaction history.

I'm too lazy to look up the service but it's a famous/popular service along the order or plaid or something
by VirusNewbie | 2025-05-14 00:20:27+00:00
Ok, let's say you were making the standard amazon 160k salary and you got another 100k a year in stock or something.

If by year two, you saw that for the next three years you were getting 75k in stock, you could have (in theory) gone to GCP and snagged an offer for ~160k+100k (your original 'market value').

I mean, obviously it's not quite that simple and we've both been through FAANG interviews and they move slow and all that, but I'm just saying, in theory if your stock value had dropped low enough, you could have started interviewing elsewhere, and if the reverse happens, it's all upside.
by peterldowns | 2025-05-14 00:21:27+00:00
Vanguard on Web supports Passkeys for 2fa, but the iOS app seems to only support text-sms 2fa.

Robinhood supports passkey login on iOS app but doesn’t seem to require it for 2fa, email+password succeeds with no further prompts. But on Web it doesn’t support passkey at all, and email+password requires you to confirm auth via an in-app notification.

Both Robinhood and Vanguard support FaceID biometric auth for their apps.

All I want is passkey auth everywhere and/or email+password with options for passkey and TOTP for 2fa.

Ugh.
by causality0 | 2025-05-14 00:22:16+00:00
Reasonably fluid, but not when it comes to heavy web pages with a lot of 3D. I have an S24U I use in DeX for most of my day but when I do have to switch to my ten inch 6800u laptop it absolutely demolishes the DeX experience. There's still a fractional second of lag that Samsung hasn't done away with yet.
by Animats | 2025-05-14 00:22:39+00:00
It's like reading "A Discipline of Programming", by Dijkstra. That morality play approach was needed back then, because nobody knew how to think about this stuff.

Most explanations of ownership in Rust are far too wordy. See [1]. The core concepts are mostly there, but hidden under all the examples.

- Each data object in Rust has exactly one owner. - Ownership can be transferred in ways that preserve the one-owner rule. - If you need multiple ownership, the real owner has to be a reference-counted cell. Those cells can be cloned (duplicated.) - If the owner goes away, so do the things it owns. - You can borrow access to a data object using a reference. - There's a big distinction between owning and referencing. - References can be passed around and stored, but cannot outlive the object. (That would be a "dangling pointer" error). - This is strictly enforced at compile time by the borrow checker.

That explains the model. Once that's understood, all the details can be tied back to those rules.

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch04-01-what-is-ownership.htm...
by remram | 2025-05-14 00:22:51+00:00
I built a simple OSS tool for qualitative data analysis, which needs to turn uploaded documents into text (stripped HTML). PDFs have been a huge problem from day one.

I have investigated many tools, but two-column layouts and footers etc often still mess up the content.

It's hard to convince my (often non-technical) users that this is a difficult problem.
by eru | 2025-05-14 00:23:13+00:00
I don't think its value 'has increased faster than an average dwelling in the vicinity': the Pinnacle is very close to the city centre. I live in a shop house around the corner. These are even more expensive. And so are the condos nearby, too.

But in any case, I brought up the Pinnacle as a short-hand for a nice looking HDB, not to say that it's affordable. The city centre is very much not affordable.

You are right that further out, you can get much cheaper flats. Like in almost any city on the planet.