MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-05-04 17:53:10+00:00
> You're arguing for active assurance of truth, assumedly forced on people,

No, this is the opposite of what I'm arguing for. I'm saying that if a community agrees on a definition of what truth is (the old consensus was "something arrived at via a process mostly like <this>"), then "truths can exist" within that community. By contrast, if they do not agree on a definition what truth is, then no truths can exist within that community.

I'm not using references to Foucault to talk about what I think about defining truth; I'm making those references because that's what the public intellectual underpinnings of the alt-right relies on. Personally, I think that some of what Foucault had to say is insightful and interesting, but the extension of his observations to knowledge in general is unsupportable. And not just unsupportable - utterly destructive of a consensus about truth-generating processes that in turn is vital for functioning (democratic) communities.

> You're arguing for the need for society wide consensus in belief

No, I'm arguing for a society wide consensus about how we choose between beliefs. Societies in the past have had this and still accomodated different beliefs. Most of the time this is resolved by noting that the beliefs can't be resolved via evidence. For example: what is the correct role of the state? There is no truth-generating process that can provide an answer to this question, but there can still be multiple different beliefs about the right answer.

> anyone who wanted to ban such debate

The issue is not "ban such debate". The issue is unwillingness to tackle in good faith the debate that has already taken place. No truth-generating process can involve an ever-present willingness to endlessly discard things already accepted as true. Clearly, it cannot refuse to ever reconsider either. So the actual path followed is a compromise between these two: if you don't have radically divergent and NEW evidence or data explanations for something considered settled, you'll have to wait a while. We're not going to relitigate whether the earth is round or not unless someone comes along with either major new data that is incongruous with our current "truth" about this, or someone finds incongruities within the data/"truth" we already have. That doesn't mean "debate is shut down" - it's a reflection of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary whatnot to be worthy of spending any time on".

I don't think anyone serious claims to know the cause of autism; I don't think anyone serious claims it is vaccines, which is in turn a reflection of what the the truth-generating process (the one we had consensus about until recently) says about that.
by ryukafalz | 2025-05-04 17:53:43+00:00
That's still an important skill! You might think that everything that can be digitized has been and is easily available online, but that's not the case. Especially so for more obscure books and publications that are mostly relevant to your local area.

When I moved to my current town and visited their library, I very quickly found some books written about the local area for which not much info existed online. It's a great way to spend some time if you're into that kind of thing!
by Scantubeai | 2025-05-04 17:54:24+00:00
Let me start by saying, I’m no dev. Just vibe coding my way through the many ideas that pop into my head.

This one started because I’d often find myself watching YouTube videos and spotting something interesting, a grinder, maybe a coffee machine I hadn’t seen before (I’m a bit of a coffee nerd). And then I’d go down the rabbit hole trying to figure out what that product was.

So I built ScanTube to solve that itch. It scans YouTube videos, reads the video header/description and uses AI (in the back) to identify products, it then spits out direct amazon link of said products for those of us with acquisition syndrome.

Since it runs on AI, there’s an underlying cost involved. I wanted to keep it free to use, so the most natural way to offset that was by generating affiliate links instead of doing the whole sub model. That way, users don’t pay anything extra, and I can keep it running (hopefully)

Check it out: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/igbkefccdbflmhmmfhc...

Tell me what you think, interesting, lame, feedback, tips on improvement - anything at all.

Right now its only published for US, UK and Canada.

Cheers!
by rayiner | 2025-05-04 17:54:31+00:00
> many politicians characterised as "populist" do want this upon getting into power

Your statement makes no sense. The elected politicians are the ones who are supposed to be deciding the political issues.

The problem is that, throughout the western world, judges and bureaucrats are not staying in their lane. The New York Times did a good podcast on how the immigration system we have is one that nobody ever campaigned on or voted for: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi.... The immigration system has been created through litigation and bureaucratic action--e.g,, taking an asylum system enacted in response to Jews fleeing genocide and applying the eligibility criteria so broadly that it covers general unrest in a country, or even just crime and gang violence.

Don’t forget, the judicial system is quite consciously an anti-democratic check. judges were put there to make sure that voters don’t vote themselves other people‘s property. That’s a legitimate function, but you have to keep an eye on it. The more and more issues you have decided by judges the less and less democratic your system becomes.
by dheera | 2025-05-04 17:55:40+00:00
To be fair, shared libraries have been problematic since the beginning of time.

In the Python world, something wants numpy>=2.5.13, another wants numpy<=2.5.12, yet Python has still not come up with a way to just do "import numpy==2.5.13" and have it pluck exactly that version and import it.

In the C++ world, I've seen code that spits out syntax errors if you use a newer version of gcc, others that spit out syntax errors if you use an older version of gcc, apt-get overwrites the shared library you depended on with a newer version, lots of other issues. Install CUDA 11.2, it tries to uninstall CUDA 11.1, never mind that you had something linked to it, and that everything else in that ecosystem disobeys semantics and doesn't work with later minor revisions.

It's such a shitshow that it fully makes sense to bundle all your dependencies if you want to ship something that "just works".

For your customer, storage is cheaper than employee time wasted getting something to work.
by orbital-decay | 2025-05-04 17:55:45+00:00
I guess variance is a better word for this. Creativity is a pretty loose term, for example most people will describe R1 as creative in RP/stories for its tendency to derail everything in an unhinged way, but it still lacks variance like every other modern model (kill the reasoning chain and look at logprobs to get what I mean). The bitter lesson is not some threshold and can't be violated, it describes a curve of diminishing returns. As long as you're on the easy part, it's fine.

But the bigger problem is that the concepts are expressed before they're decoded into the output distribution. You can steer them to a degree by hacking the autoregressive transport, but if the model itself learned that this concept corresponds to that particular concept, not a set of concepts (and RL tends to do exactly that), fixing it with sampling is usually hard to impossible, you'll just lose accuracy/make it dumber as you basically force out-of-distribution outputs.
by AmVess | 2025-05-04 17:56:48+00:00
I bought a cellular GPS tracker for my PODS. It worked fine, and being able to track it every step of the way added a bit of stress relief.

It also came in really handy when the driver claimed his truck broke down and he wouldn't be able to drop it off on schedule. I told them I could physically see the container in the storage yard and would like it delivered on the agreed upon date. They dropped it off 20 minutes later.
by holowoodman | 2025-05-04 17:57:06+00:00
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S152659001...

> textbooks at the time taught that [open heart] surgery [...] ‘‘could be safely accomplished with only oxygen and a paralytic’’ 69(p.580) when performed on infants.

Textbooks isn't "some doctors errorneously believed", it is what most doctors believed, taught and practiced.

> infant surgery routinely conducted with no or minimal anesthesia well into the 1980s

"Routinely" isn't a few isolated cases, that's the word for "this is the usual thing to do".

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20608214/

> The study by McGraw (1941), although badly designed, convinced the vast majority of clinicians that infants do not feel pain and do not require analgesia. This theory, reinforced by the fear of using opioids in young children, dominated medical thinking for more than 30 years.

"Vast majority" and "dominated" also doesn't sound like just "some cases".

https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/17/opinion/l-why-infant-surg...

> surveys of medical professionals indicate that as recently as 1986 infants as old as 15 months were receiving no anesthesia during surgery at most American hospitals.

We can discuss the definition of "kid" and "newborn", but I would no longer call them "newborn" when they start walking. Also "most American hospitals" means the practice was very widespread even in 1986.

I think the whole situation is one of the medical community failing to recognize and admit their own mistakes. Instead, the obvious barbarism of the whole situation is played down, diminished and belittled. Thereby protecting their own feelings and standing at the cost of the victims' right to the truth. And thereby paving the way for a repetition of such gruesome mistakes. At which point I would argue, it might even be a little callousness or even intent...
by RainyDayTmrw | 2025-05-04 17:57:07+00:00
There's a concept in economics called the winner's curse[1], which says that, in an auction with uninformed bidders, some fraction tend to significantly overbid, and whoever wins tends to have significantly overpaid. Having briefly lived in San Francisco, in particular, and worked in the early-stage startup scene, I'm inclined to believe that working for most early-stage startups is a winner's curse. Too many of your peers overpay with their time and energy for too high of a price (too low of a rate). The only way to get in is to overpay.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner%27s_curse
by dzink | 2025-05-04 17:57:38+00:00
Feedback accepted and acted upon by those in power is what any country really needs. Uncertainty for those in power means they would take feedack. Democracy give each person over a certain age a vote and a stake in the outcome. Populism promises anything, including the impossible to draw in votes. Fascism herds the voters by scaring them away from the opposition - an easy benchmark is to check if you know anyone directly who has been impacted by the "scares" they promote. Autocrats accept feedback by only those who pay them with political or financial favors. They may use any of the above methods to gain power and then use violence and complete control of media to retain it.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-05-04 17:58:41+00:00
> This sounds smart and could 100% be something I would say too, but it is not true at all. People benefit greatly from phones (and in some sense, social media). The way to test it is to give up phones for some time.

I know quite a lot of people who gave up their mobile phone for some time, and their experience was very positive. For all of the applications, you can find better alternatives.
by WalterGR | 2025-05-04 17:59:02+00:00
Pretty incredible!

I’m on mobile right now so I can only comment on the demo that runs automatically, which I understand isn’t the _point_. :)

More about the demo: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=89435

(For those unfamiliar with “demo” in this context, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene)

I look forward to checking out the features you mention on a proper computer.
Ask HN: What really happened to Cruise self-driving cars?
by eh_why_not | 2025-05-04 17:59:23+00:00
Now that plenty of time has passed, I'm wondering if someone here had an inside track and is willing to share their insights.

Rough summary of the available public information:

- They had an accident in 2023 injuring, by not stopping instantly, a passerby who was hit by another car.

- They were investigated and then California temporarily suspended their license to drive around.

- By the end of 2023 there was a massive layoff, including top executives leaving. There were claims that the operation was too human-dependent / required too much human interventions.

- In 2024 there were some news that they were starting up again (outside CA maybe).

- In Dec 2024, GM dropped their funding altogether and gave up on self-driving / robotaxi, refocusing on driver assistance instead. Some analysts claimed that was in part (in addition to finances) due to politics and them not wanting to face off with Tesla under the new administration.

It always seemed to me that something was missing from the overall picture:

- While second to Waymo, they still seemed already far ahead from others; maybe they were, say, 90% there.

- Others, like Tesla, had many accidents, including fatal ones. But for those the gauntlet was not thrown that quickly. It is expected that self-driving cars will have accidents as they continue to improve; why would one such incident, that wasn't even fatal, have such a dramatic response?

- Sure it's possible that Cruise was just a row in a spreadsheet to some finance higher-ups at GM, and it was dropped like that because it wasn't making them money yet. But to drop such a multi-year investment has to have been something else, a deeper problem:

- E.g. Did they realize/decide that the technical architecture was somehow flawed and there was an unbreakable barrier that prevents them from achieving that remaining 10%?
by ale_jacques | 2025-05-04 17:59:25+00:00
I use Fastmail for my personal domain. The service is great. They don't have a desktop app. I use macOS Mail (which sucks) and, sometimes, I give Spark Mail a try but they are not there yet.

Fastmail do have web and mobile clients. On web and iOS, both are a "webapp" disguised as an app (my guess Android version is the same).
by LorenPechtel | 2025-05-04 17:59:27+00:00
Where is there any indication of hoarding in this situation? The company contracted to provide certain services but wasn't staffed to actually do so, nor well enough equipped to actually accomplish it (lack of packing materials.) How much stuff is being moved is completely irrelevant to this.

The thing is movers have little in the way of repeat business, thus little incentive to treat the customer right.
by ronnieboy493 | 2025-05-04 17:59:35+00:00
To further add to that, many states do closed primaries. If a voter isn't registered with one of the two ordained parties, they realistically cannot participate in primaries at all.

If there would six parties to choose from, for example, I think it would be hard to argue that closed primaries are harmful. But since we have a duopoly, they exclude a significant portion of the voting population from participating until late in the process.
by quantadev | 2025-05-04 18:00:11+00:00
I went out of my way to say it's only my preference to use React, but that Vue is fine too. So the thing I have a "hardline stance" (your words) on, if anything, is that a framework should be used for any interactive web app.

Having been a web developer for a quarter century, I know how tempting it is (yes, for small projects) to try to just wing it and do everything without a framework, and I know what a tarpit that way of thinking is. If you disagree, then you were certainly welcome to share you own opinion.
by divan | 2025-05-04 18:00:19+00:00
The book I still have open is actually by Sidney Dekker - "Restorative Just Culture in Practice: Implementation and Evaluation". A quote:

> In 1066, with the Norman invasion of England, William the Conqueror and his successors brought into existence a legal system that gradually replaced the church and local systems of conflict resolution. For the nascent state, the legal system turned out to be useful for exerting influence and extracting money. Crimes were seen not (just) as violations of a community’s mores, or the victim’s rights. They were seen as infractions against the state, and against the ruler, the king, as a disruption of the ‘King’s peace’. Fines benefited the ruler economically and often politically. The state and the offender were the primary actors around whom the justice was organized, and the victim played a lesser role.
by al_borland | 2025-05-04 18:00:50+00:00
They spent years actively avoiding letting the software do its thing in several ways. In many cases putting forth more effort to avoid letting the software make their life easier. Their rejection of technology is what led to the struggle.

For example, I clicked a button 16 years ago for face detection, and in 16 years they didn't do that and didn't want to. I use iCloud photo library so I have access to all my pictures everywhere, while they have fractured libraries on various hard drives (that I don't think are backed up anywhere else).

Turning on face detection any time in the last 16 years and keeping their library together, solves the problem and creates less work. And sure, I end up paying $2.99/month for extra storage, but that seems cheap when factoring in the time they spend trying to avoid it, not to mention the calls I've gotten when they think a drive isn't working and they are crying, because they think they just lost everything. I'd pay the $3 for them if it meant never getting a call like that again, where I'm bracing to hear someone died, because they are crying so much they can't get the words out.

Several times when I pulled up pictures they have asked me how I'm able to do it so quickly. It's not exceptional organization or effort on my part, I'm simply using the software. I took 10 minutes, one time, to play around with the new Photos app when they revamped it, instead of just complaining that it changed, like most of the internet. There is no magic. Learn how the tools work, and use the tools. When you do that, the organization can often take care of itself.
by floernt | 2025-05-04 18:01:12+00:00
I guess you pointed out the buzz about ai & automation. I'm laughing when I read " ai will automate low value tasks" As you mentioned, a hard coded tool chain existed before LLM go public and we don't need Llms for that. But LLM are great to make dynamic decision and it's where the magic happens. Thanks for sharing some tips on how for building agent.
by holowoodman | 2025-05-04 18:02:34+00:00
Yes, any, male or female, genital mutilation is life-changing.

What I meant is, it is "minor" as far as surgery goes, as opposed to "major". The distinction is about the risk to the life of the patient, the kind of anesthesia you need (local vs knockout), the setting you do it in (walk-in vs stay at the hospital) and the amount of aftercare required (change the bandage vs. medication+monitoring+hospital).

And those studies are BS, done to prove a preexisting point. Any properly done study by independent researchers without an agenda doesn't show any kind of effect from circumcision beyond the resulting sensory problems, deformation, nerve damage, erectile dysfunction, scarring and adhesion.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-05-04 18:02:35+00:00
If you take the ratio of amount of time I play my piano to the TCO of my piano, I am expecting to spend something like $2-5 TCO / hour of entertainment (without considering resale value in ~30 years) over my life. That is a ratio that is better than most forms of entertainment. It rivals computer games, which are also pretty good on TCO / hour of enjoyment.

That is even the case with a very high-end instrument. Perhaps more people should have things like pianos.
Show HN: VoltAgent – Open-Source Observability-First TS AI Agent Framework
by omeraplak | 2025-05-04 18:02:41+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm founder of VoltAgent, a new open-source TypeScript-based framework for building AI agents.

We know there are many frameworks out there. Our short story of why we built VoltAgent goes like this:

We were developing an AI application ourselves. Initially, we tried existing frameworks. We also explored different flows using no-code tools.

We noticed something interesting: the visual approach of tools like n8n made AI workflows much clearer and easier to understand. Building flows visually was neat and provided great visibility.

However, we quickly ran into problems with no-code tools: we felt locked in by their limitations, particularly the inability to customize deeply or integrate custom code the way we wanted. So, we returned to framework solutions.

While frameworks gave us code control, we missed the clear visibility that visual tools provided. To achieve observability, we integrated standard AIOps tools (like LangFuse and LangSmith), but they didn't quite replicate the step-by-step execution clarity we'd seen in tools like n8n for understanding the flow itself.

This gap led us to build VoltAgent for our own use. We shared it with developers in our network, received positive feedback, and decided to release it open-source.

What VoltAgent Offers:

- Core Building Blocks: It provides essential components for agents like tools, memory management, and state handling out-of-the-box. It's also LLM agnostic and supports multi-agent setups.

- Visual Debugging Console: This is a key feature we built to address the visibility problem. You can connect it locally to your running agent (your data stays on your machine) to visually trace how the agent thinks step-by-step. You can inspect messages and see the execution flow, similar to how visual tools like n8n show workflows, but designed specifically for debugging agent execution written in code.

You can find the code and documentation here: https://github.com/voltagent/voltagent

We're actively developing VoltAgent, and our public roadmap is available here: https://github.com/orgs/VoltAgent/projects/1

We'd love to hear your feedback, suggestions, or any questions you might have.
by sh34r | 2025-05-04 18:03:12+00:00
Well, we networked all the computers together around that time, and it turned out that all the 1337 performance hacking that people did back then had severe unintended consequences. You’re talking about an era in which the NX bit would not be utilized by Windows for another ~7 years. “Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit” was contemporary work.

It’s not rocket science to eke out oodles of performance out of a potato if you don’t care about correctness or memory safety.

Word 97 will only delight you if you use it on an airgapped computer, as a glorified typewriter, never open anyone else’s documents with it, and are diligent about manually saving the doc to multiple places for when it inevitably self-corrupts.

But at that point, why not be like GRRM and write on a DOS word processor? Those were historically a lot more reliable than these second-generation GUI apps.