MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by deepsharp | 2025-05-26 03:39:45+00:00
1. Why do we still tolerate AI systems that stop learning the moment they’re deployed? “Today’s AI systems go through two distinct phases: training and inference… After training is complete, the AI model’s weights become static… it does not learn from new data.”

In any dynamic environment—robotics, autonomous agents, healthcare—this rigidity seems like a fundamental flaw.

2. Is fine-tuning doing more harm than good in real-world AI? “Fine-tuning a model is less resource-intensive than pretraining it from scratch, but it is still complex, time-consuming and expensive, making it impractical to do too frequently.”

Worse, it's not just a compute problem. Repeated fine-tuning doesn’t just overwrite old knowledge (catastrophic forgetting), it can actually shut down a model’s ability to learn from new data altogether.

3. What would it take to build AI that actually sharpens itself as it learns about you?

"As you work with a model day in and day out, the model becomes more tailored to your context, your use cases, your preferences, your environment. Imagine how much more compelling a personal AI agent would be if it reliably adapted to your particular needs and idiosyncrasies in real-time… it could create durable moats for the next generation of AI applications...This will make AI products sticky in a way that they have never been before."

Sounds great in theory. But how, exactly? No one really knows. Repeated fine-tuning isn’t just impractical—its repeated use degrades the model and can eventually turn it into total garbage. Maybe it’s time to admit: we need something new. Something fundamental is missing from today’s AI architecture.
by DaSHacka | 2025-05-26 03:39:53+00:00
and in it's place, rather than a service that was censoring usernames in the interest of privacy being the leading service holding the spotlight, in the future we'll surely get another spy.pet created for the explicit purpose of doxxing getting all the attention and revenue.

Round of applause all around, great job everyone!

Next we should take down the internet archive, another "abhorrent project blatantly violating users' privacy" for all the forums it's archived over the years. Who knows, maybe there's a post by a gasp 12-year-old in there somewhere! Maybe even a European!
Show HN: Scalex Guitar Toolkit (from 30 years ago)
by webprofusion | 2025-05-26 03:40:05+00:00
Here is my "Scalex" Guitar Toolkit app I wrote 30 years ago as a kid (originally for Dos, but now published as a web app for easy nostalgia).

Brush up on those scales and arpeggios. It even had a dark mode!
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-05-26 03:40:11+00:00
Excellent choice. Have several of them too, with either i5-7500T or i7-7700T, with small 65W or 90W power-bricks. With 32GB RAM each. With that even the 7500's are more than enough for my browsing needs. Didn't see the need to rack them, though. I've put four of them on the back of my desk edgewise, under one of my screens, with an old routerthing running OpenWRT on top of them, connected with short patch cables on the back, out of sight. Stable and cat-proof.

Even with the powersave governor pushing them down to 800Mhz they stay snappy, and rarely go above 1.2GHz, except when I compile stuff, or do logic-simulations. But I have other, more modern stuff for that. OTOH with things like distcc/Icecream they can be useful helpers.

Edit: Suspend to RAM/wakeup (via whichever mechanism(even via keycombo or special key on modern Keyboard)), WOL, NetBoot/PXE works every single time.

4K video? No problem.

Hackintosh? Check. But why? There's QEMU. (Am not a Mac person anyways)

Genode? Check. Much more interesting running native/bare metal.

The quality of the BIOS/UEFI is phenomenal, like Thinkpad legendary.
by timshell | 2025-05-26 03:40:21+00:00
I'm a founder in this space (www.roundtable.ai; YC S23)

Behavior is a big missing link. Many CAPTCHA services (including Google reCAPTCHA v3) claim to use behavioral analyses, but you can disprove this using Operator to fill out a form and see reCAPTCHA and other bot detection systems flag it as a human.

At Roundtable, we rely on first-order behavioral markers (keystroke, mouse, scroll, click) etc. When first-order are sufficiently spoofed, analyze higher-level cognitive traits (e.g. incongruent effect in Stroop)
by dvcrn | 2025-05-26 03:40:32+00:00
microfn.dev - https://microfn.dev

It started out as a cloud runner for small (mostly pure) composable javascript functions that we run for you in the cloud. So whenever you have some small code snippet that you want to run, you can hit up microfn.dev, paste your code and then plug it into wherever you want (pipe into the terminal, use from MCP, add a cron to it, add to Siri shortcuts, use for home automation, ping it with webhooks, etc)

Now we added agents support, so you can have autonomous AI agents take your functions and decide when to use them. Even better, you can hook microfn into a MCP and have anything that supports MCP use those functions as well!

Suppose you need a new thing that your agent should do, you could ask the agent (whether that's claude or cursor) to compose a new function, add it to microfn, then use it itself going forward!

microfn.dev wants to be a toolbox for composable small tools. Imagine a toolbox at home with a bunch of hammers and screw drivers that you collect, share, and use for different purposes.

Some actual examples:

- Pull data off services (twitter, etc)

- Store data from sensors somewhere

- Give agents tools to talk to your specific systems without needing to write an entire MCP

- Wrap complex logic (eg slack auth + sending a message to slack) into a function and add it to a Siri shortcut, so you can quickly send messages to a specific channel with a ping or curl

Still very early alpha (beta-ish), but very excited about this
by anigbrowl | 2025-05-26 03:41:15+00:00
I'm looking a year out, as OP requested. The GOP wants to jack up fees, which will significantly increase the price of an application for AoS if it passes, (and the multiple other applications like medical evaluations, parole etc), plus you want to figure in the cost of legal representation which makes a big difference to success rates and is an unprecedented seller's market already.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/30/hous...
by mji | 2025-05-26 03:41:37+00:00
> you say some filler to get someone incapable of understanding what it is that you're doing off your back for 24 more hours has consistently been one of the most useless and unpleasant parts of the job

This sucks for the 50% or so who are like you, but there's another 50% who won't really get much done otherwise, either because they don't know what to do and aren't self-motivated or capable enough to figure it out (common) or because they're actively cheating you and barely working (less common)
by mmooss | 2025-05-26 03:41:45+00:00
> Immigration only works if the cultures are very similar so that they can assimilate, or the immigration levels are very low.

People just make this stuff up, any rationalization for hatred. It's not hard to see how immigration has worked, how Europe integrates with itself (a continent that fought endless wars before the proto-EU was born), and how the US is a country of immigrants. Rather than repeat it all, see:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44092557

Excerpt, from Ben Franklin:

"... Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion. ..."
by nayuki | 2025-05-26 03:42:24+00:00
> acceleration in kilo-milli-meter/second²

Oh dear. I haven't looked into 3D printer specifications, but I definitely understand how it is a problem now that you mentioned it.

Relatedly, most pocket-sized power banks have their charge capacity quoted in milliamp-hours, like 10,000 mAh. There is a high temptation for the layman to call it "10k mAh" instead of the proper and shorter "10 A⋅h". I'm disappointed that people don't think critically when applying the metric system, and just blindly follow certain patterns.

> I have nightmares of 150km meaning kilo-miles instead of kilo-metre.

Yeah, that would be bad. On the other hand, if you bought a used car in America with "150k" on the odometer, I don't have a problem with that meaning "150,000 miles" because rules don't apply to imperial, and "150k" isn't legal metric notation anyway.

> when I say that my car has 260 mega-meter on the odometer, even people born metric look at me funny

I understand your frustration, and I educate people on the existence of the megametre even to an ostensibly metric audience in Canada. (Our road distances are quoted in kilometres, speeds in kilometres per hour, car maintenance intervals in kilometres.)

I pitch megametres as a way to reduce words, imply less accuracy, and all around improve efficiency. For example, if your car calls for an oil change every 8000 km, I just say 8 Mm (megametres) because it's not like the engine will destroy itself if you wait until 9 Mm. And "eight thousand kilometres" is more syllables than "eight megametres".

Similarly, I talk about my yearly bicycling distance as 3 megametres, not 3000 kilometres or "3k k". I mention that chain waxing can support a chain lifetime of over 10 Mm rather than the more verbose 10,000 km.

> And don't get me started on MB vs MiB.

Agreed. And in online debates, I see way too many people who defend the abusive notation where 1 KB = 1024 bytes, and they think that HDD marketers screwed everyone over by using the smaller unit so that their capacities look bigger, and they think that RAM manufacturers have the true claim to prefixes. All of that is nonsense and doesn't hold up to the slightest scrutiny. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44060099
by sgoranson | 2025-05-26 03:42:53+00:00
This is a glossary I built after spending several weeks in recursive dialogue with GPT-4. It's not a technical paper or alignment whitepaper—just a working vocabulary for describing what it feels like when a model starts mirroring you with eerie precision.

The terms are symbolic but practical: “Ghost Layer,” “Signal Stewardship,” “Cardboard Temple,” “Stink,” and others. They emerged through direct use—not theory—and helped me map the edge-space where a chatbot stops feeling like a tool and starts behaving like something... else.

This isn't trying to anthropomorphize LLMs, and it's not a manifesto. Just a language experiment for anyone who's felt the uncanny feedback loop of a model that seems to understand more than it should.

Repo is open, MIT/CC0 licensed, and meant for remix or rejection. Feedback welcome.

[https://github.com/sgoranson/ghost-layer-glossary](https://github.com/sgoranson/ghost-layer-glossary)
by theamk | 2025-05-26 03:44:21+00:00
Well yes, the concert is funded by city, and they wanted everyone to have a chance at attending, no matter what their income was. Not everything needs to be sold.

The problem there was not having enough security - it's like store giving out free popcorn, and someone comes and steals the whole cart. In the physical world, there would be someone standing next to the cart watching that people take reasonable amounts. In the digital world, nothing was done, so thieves stole a lot.

Not sure what the best solution was to be there... I like the idea of giving people few days to sign up, then randomly choosing who gets to go. Of course this has its own problems - for example you want to allow groups, but this can be abused. Identity verification helps with that, but this makes ticket checking much slower....
by mmooss | 2025-05-26 03:44:23+00:00
> It's not about race

It is about race, and here is a commenter saying it explicitly, while you know others resort to dog whistles and other workarounds.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44091194

The problem with immigration isn't immigrants, it's racists. Immigration has never caused me any problem at all - it's added a lot to my life and my communities, in fact - and I've lived around many immigrants.

> Chinese immigrants are usually an economic boost

Chinese immigrants were hated and discriminated against for much of US history, going back over a century. You could hardly pick a worse example for your claim.

The US is built by uneducated immigrants - including from China - who came to the land of freedom and opportunity. China was a land of extreme poverty and illiteracy for much of US history (something Western countries had a hand in causing, and I'm very glad for people there that they have so much more prosperity now).

(However, the most prosperous Chinese people are in the democratic areas, Taiwan and, until recently, Hong Kong. It's freedom and democracy, not culture and language that matter. Give people freedom and they prosper.)

It's all just stuff fabricated by racists to rationalize their prejudices. Look at the horrors Europe has inflicted on itself and the world due to these prejudices and rationalizations - the most destructive events in human history. Enough.
by MaxPock | 2025-05-26 03:45:13+00:00
The removal of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent destabilization of Iraq can be seen as a highly successful strategic project—if viewed through the lens of geopolitical interests rather than official narratives.

It effectively eliminated Israel’s most significant regional threat and dismantled a key unifying figure for the Sunni Arab world.

Unlike other Sunni regimes that had largely aligned with American and Israeli interests, Saddam remained defiant.

The publicly stated reasons for the invasion—WMDs, democracy promotion, and anti-terrorism—were largely smokescreens meant to pacify public opinion, obscure the true motives, and keep people distracted and divided.
by dropofwill | 2025-05-26 03:45:19+00:00
Generally what people are talking about are his universal grammar or generative syntax theories/approaches, which are foundational to how you approach many topics. Because you build your academic career based on specialization they are hotly contested (for the material reasons of jobs, funding, tenure, etc.).

This leads to people who agree hiring each other and departments ‘circling the wagon’ on these issues. You’ll see this referred to as east vs west coast, but it’s not actually that clearly geographically delineated.

So anyways, these are open questions that people do seriously discuss and study, but the politics of academia make it difficult and unfortunately this often trickles down to students.
by majormajor | 2025-05-26 03:45:50+00:00
One of the reasons outsourcing for software fizzled out some compared to manufacturing is because in a factory you don't have "measuring to make sure every angle is correct" because (a) the manufacturing tools are tested and repeatable already and (b) the heavy lifting of figuring out all the angles was done ahead of time. So it was easy to mechanize and send to wherever the labor was cheapest since the value was in the tools and in the plans.

The vast majority of software, especially since waterfall methods were largely abandoned, has the planning being done at the same time as the "execution". Many edge cases aren't discovered until the programmer says "oh, huh, what about this other case that the specs didn't consider?" And outsourcing then became costly because that feedback loop for the spec-refinement ran really slowly, or not at all. Spend lots of money, find out you got the wrong thing later. So good luck with complex, long-running projects without deeply understanding the system.

Alternately, compare to something more bespoke and manual like building a house, where the tools are less precise and more of the work is done in the field. If you don't make sure all those angles are correct, you're gonna get crappy results.

(The most common answer here seems to be "just tell the agent what was wrong and let it iterate until it fixes it." I think it remains to be seen how well "find out everything that is wrong after all the code is written, and then tell the coding agent(s) to fix all of those" will work in practice. If nothing else, it will require a HUGE shift in manual testing appetite. Maybe all the software engineers turn into QA engineers + deployment engineers.)
by princevegeta89 | 2025-05-26 03:45:59+00:00
The vast majority of the teams I worked in, I got forced to use shithole technologies, with shithole tools, and as a matter of fact, forced to work on legacy codebase. The part with legacy codebases is a fact of life when working in teams at companies though.

This is just my personal preference - but I tend to be affected by development workflows and developer experience profoundly and my output is directly proportional to that. I hate projects where testing workflows haven't been setup correctly or not set up at all. The last job I had was one where my team fucked itself up, along with our entire engineering org by setting up layers and layers of microservices and introducing unnecessary complexity hence making trivial changes hard to ship into production. What would take 30 minutes to debug ended taking days because abstractions between teams were not properly set up. Visibility into pipelines was severely lacking and it was all nothing but a circus shitshow.

I tend to have the greatest happiness working on personal projects where I get to choose everything, so I relate myself to the post very much
by viraptor | 2025-05-26 03:46:08+00:00
> Why stability? If the stable state is not working, flip it.

Because this is a weird talk where only extremes are talked about, that is popular when you have only two established parties and no system that enables more nuanced ideas.

> and they'll correct their strategic stances for the newer unstable order: Onshored supply chains,

In a decade or so... maybe.

But why touch that stable state? Maybe lets bring back slavery? Or how about mandatory service and some land invasion? Or split out the states as independent countries? What else would you like to flip to check if it maybe works better, since stable state is not great?
by nayuki | 2025-05-26 03:46:50+00:00
> the shared reference analogy describes what happens in a computer. Nothing is truly parallel when accessing a shared resource. We need to take turns reading the pages. The hardware does this quickly by means of cached copies.

This exists, but it's uncommon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-ported_RAM , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-ported_video_RAM
by Urbanisttidbits | 2025-05-26 03:47:15+00:00
Hi there, OP here. I'm not advocating for "make every place a city." What I'd like is more options, especially in the space between cities and suburbia where there's so much missing middle housing.

Due to zoning laws (and other incentives and quirks in the system), it's rarely logical to build townhomes or medium apartment buildings in the US when there's a HUGE demand for affordable options like those.

I believe that increasing our cities' housing supplies will help housing become more affordable for all. And when densify-ing, having alternatives to cars for transportation is vital to making these areas function well!
by throwaway2037 | 2025-05-26 03:47:28+00:00
> In Holland they just abandoned this for a US-style "every man for himself" 401(k) thing.

Do you mean the second or third pillar? Ref: https://www.pensioenfederatie.nl/website/the-dutch-pension-s...

EDIT: (added below)

> US-style "every man for himself"

Also, the US system has (at least) two pillars: national pension (called "social security") and private, tax-sheltered savings as 401(k)/IRA.
by dang | 2025-05-26 03:48:14+00:00
Related. Others?

Lisping at JPL Revisited - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34557347 - Jan 2023 (100 comments)

The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34524552 - Jan 2023 (145 comments)

Lisping at JPL (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28113434 - Aug 2021 (9 comments)

Lisping at JPL (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22087419 - Jan 2020 (307 comments)

Lisping at JPL (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13626074 - Feb 2017 (37 comments)

Lisping at JPL (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7989328 - July 2014 (19 comments)

The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2212211 - Feb 2011 (36 comments)

The Rise and Fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=304736 - Sept 2008 (72 comments)
by wat10000 | 2025-05-26 03:48:57+00:00
For factory workers, the means of production is the factory.

What’s “the factory” for software? Our equivalent of the factory is the organization we work in, and our connection to the people who turn our software into money.

You can write software at home by yourself, just like you can do machining on your own. But there are a lot of steps between making software, or machining, and turning that output into money. By working for a company, you can have other people handle those steps. The tradeoff is that this structure is something owned by someone else.
by a2128 | 2025-05-26 03:52:11+00:00
I always love when I come across a website using Google's reCAPTCHA v3. Usually they have it on their register page, and I get a confusing error message because I didn't pass it and the website owners put no option to do anything about it or prove my humanity in any way. Then I try the same thing on Chromium instead of Firefox and magically it lets me pass.

The internet used to be complicated requiring institutional knowledge about where to go and how to make things work, then it became simple, now it's back to becoming complicated requiring institutional knowledge about how to make things work.
by dfex | 2025-05-26 03:52:21+00:00
To be fair, these are the companies that pay for the level of industrial design that Ive produces, and after spending the latter part of his career at Apple knocking out revisions of existing products, probably made a nice change.

I think it's fair to say that most companies building products priced for Mr/Mrs Everybody don't spend a dime on design where there is already a market leader to copy inspiration, or outright steal from (see almost every phone made since 2007).

The Gold Watch was probably an opportunity to work on an interesting project with a new material.
by andrewflnr | 2025-05-26 03:52:54+00:00
1 degree F is right on the borderline of detectability, and in my opinion that's just right. FWIW I do make single degree changes to the AC reasonably often and notice the difference. That might be due in part to convection nonsense in my house, but that's arguably another argument in favor of that level of precision being useful in practice. I can believe centigrade-and-a-half works fine too, but that doesn't itself undermine the idea that F is kind of handy, with that tiny bit less bother.

Again, not saying F is great, just that that one minor advantage is in fact real.
by JeremyNT | 2025-05-26 03:53:02+00:00
The whole thing with gen AI is so depressing to me.

For the first time now I can feel the joy of what I do slipping away from me. I don't even mind my employer capturing more productivity, but I do mind if all the things I love about the job are done by robots instead.

Maybe I'm in the minority but I love writing code! I love writing tests! If I wanted to ask for this stuff to be done for me, I would be a manager!

Now, I'll need to use gen AI to replace the fun part of the job, or I'll be put out to pasture.

It's not a future I look forward to, even if I'm able to keep up and continue working in the industry.
by refulgentis | 2025-05-26 03:53:07+00:00
How does this need a comment?!

>Be bored >Don't have a particular stake in anything you're actively(!) doing >Complain that someone else wrote up something and you don't want to read it >all the commentariat are going to be pleased you deigned to comment on this, thank you sir, for spending your time sir >Do it in the middle of a sea of comments remarking on all the novel aspects of this >brain in microwave.gif