MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Flamentono2 | 2025-05-23 08:56:09+00:00
> ... but it's not like the discovery of the steam engine or electricity.

completly disagree. People might have googled before but the human<>computer interface was never in any way as accessable as it is now for a normal human being. Can i use Photoshop? yes but i learned it. My sisters played around with Dall-E and are now able to do simiiliar things.

It might feel boring to you that technology accessability drips down like this, but this changes a lot for a lot of people. The entry barrier to everything got a lot lower. It makes a huge difference to you as a human being if you have rich parents and good teachers or not. You had never the chance to just get help like this. Millions of kids struggle because they don't have parents they can ask certain questions required for understanding topics in school.

Steam Engine = fundamental for our scaling economy electricity = fundamental for liberating all of us from day time internet = interconnecting all of us LLM/ML/AI = liberating knowledge through accessability

> 'There hasn’t been a real breakthrough in over two years.' DeepSeek alone was a real breakthrough.

But let me ask an LLM about this:

- Mixture of Experts (MoE) scaling

- Long-context handling

- Multimodal capabilities

- Tool use & agentic reasoning

Funny enough your comment comes before claude 4.0 release (again increase in performance, etc.) and the Google IO.

We don't know if we found all 'low hanging fruits'. The meta paper about thinking in latent space came out in February. I would definitly call this a low hanging fruit.

We are limited, very hard, on infrastructure. Every experiement you want to try consumes a lot of it. If you look at the top x GPU AI clusters, we don't have that many on the planet. We have Google, Microsoft, Azure, Nvidia, Baidu, Tesla and xAI, Cerebras. Not that many researcher are able to just work on this.

Google has now its first Diffusion based Model active. 2025! We are so far away from testing out more and more approaches, architectures etc. And we are optimizing on every front. Cost, speed, precision etc.
by dudeinjapan | 2025-05-23 08:56:10+00:00
I think “confabulation” is the best term.

“Hallucination” is seeing/saying something that a sober person clearly knows is not supposed to be there, e.g. “The Vice President under Nixon was Oscar the Grouch.”

Harry Frankfurt defines “bullshitting” as lying to persuade without regard to the truth. (A certain current US president does this profusely and masterfully.)

“Confabulation” is filling the unknown parts of a statement or story with bits that sound as-if they could be true, i.e. they make sense within the context, but are not actually true. People with dementia (e.g. a certain previous US president) will do this unintentionally. Whereas the bullshitter generally knows their bullshit to be false and is intentionally deceiving out of self-interest, confabulation (like hallucination) can simply be the consequence of impaired mental capacity.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-23 08:56:29+00:00
Care to elaborate in detail? I think the term "expats" and "brain drain" are two distinct groups that even though are often used interchangeably, can have little overlap. All brain drains are expats, but not all expats are valuable brains who's draining is worth anything.

For example, it's one thing to import a math/physics Olympiad winner from India/China/Romania prioritizing to move to the hottest place in tech funding and cutting edge R&D, and another to import an unemployed standup comedian seeking to move to the most hipster city for raves and parties where he can tweet form his MacBook how happy he is he left Trump's "fascist" America.

In my case, I also see a lot more American expats where I live here in my European college town, but when I talk to them about their jobs/careers, most seem to be net drain on our system (au pairs, dog walkers, under the table English teachers, etc) who moved here for the chill life and free healthcare, rather than some highly ambitious well paid engineers or scientists who are gonna boost our economy to overtake the US. Most valuable brains are met here still seem to come from Balkans, Eastern Europe, India, Iran and Asia in general. Do you see my point?

Edit: please see my grandchild comment below for detailing on my thoughts on this
by gspr | 2025-05-23 08:57:40+00:00
> Given that Debian doesn't give the user any indication of the fact that it even has modified an upstream piece of software

Debian also doesn't give any indication that we haven't modified an upstream piece of software. Modifying software is a central thing to do in the FOSS world. If the user wants to know if anything was was modified, and if so what, then the source is of course freely available.

> it's obviously perfectly possible for them to insert themselves without you even knowing it.

They didn't "insert themselves" anywhere! You, the user, inserted Debian!

> And in that case, according to the developer, even introduced subtle bugs.

Of course, any software modification can introduce, alter or fix bugs. Or all three.

> So you can run buggy software as a consequence of some maintainer thinking they know more than a developer

That can happen. And sometimes you run less buggy software as a consequence of "some maintainer" knowing more about the system as a whole than the software's original developer. Or caring more about safeguarding the user's freedoms or privacy.

> and not even know it because you have no practical info about that process.

"Practical info"? What exactly would you like, beyond a changelog and the the source?

> This is of course not a "choice" in any meaningful sense of the term.

Of course! You chose to run Debian. Debian is entirely upfront about this!

> Nobody ever actually wants to use a buggy php library maintained by debian over a functioning one maintained a by developer

I can't speak for PHP myself, I don't use it at all, but I'm almost always extremely grateful to the maintainers of the packages on my Debian systems for the (often very tiresome!) work they do in adapting upstream software to fit Debian Policy and the Debian Social Contract. (Disclaimer: I am a DD myself.)

> they very likely just never even were aware that that is what they were served.

Would it help if the Debian install guide hade a note saying "be aware that a Debian package may not be exactly the same was what was shipped by the software's original developers – Debian aims to build a coherent universal operating system centered around our Social Contract and Policy"?
by ChocolateGod | 2025-05-23 08:57:51+00:00
I use NixOS and Flatpak I found is the easiest way to install and update applications. The Nix model is great for system software, but not an ideal way of updating and installing desktop apps.

The only problem I've had is fonts installed system wide not being available in the sandbox, but this is due to how NixOS exports fonts and can be solved by telling NixOS to publish fonts in /usr/share/fonts.
by aqme28 | 2025-05-23 08:58:58+00:00
You make me feel like a cliche...

Left for Berlin in 2021 and do not regret it one bit.

Edit: I had a choice between a masters program in the US for about $30,000/year or in Berlin for €700/year. It was obvious which choice was not only cheaper, but also more interesting in terms of life experience.
by Propelloni | 2025-05-23 08:59:55+00:00
> Running an exe shouldn’t require decades of maintenance. It shouldn’t be that complicated. It doesn’t have to be.

What do you think is all that stuff in C:\Program Files, C:\Program Files (x86), c:\Windows\System, C:\Windows\System32, C:\Windows\SysWOW64, %USERPROFILES%\%APPDATA%\Local and %USERPROFILE%\%APPDATA%\LocalLow or the seven versions of the C/C++ VS Redistributable you have installed?

EDIT: typos
by ownagefool | 2025-05-23 09:00:14+00:00
Honestly, I think there are no "best practices" here, there's simply "patterns I've seen work before".

If we put people over processes, you might actually find you can manage a much bigger org. Like if the standup is really killing large parts of the week, you might find killing the standup to be the preferable option. The fact that that's sacrilege and constantly evokes the no true Scotsman tells you all you need to know about people over processes.
by cess11 | 2025-05-23 09:03:16+00:00
That's implicit in the blocked/not-blocked. If I care about the state machine I'll flag that I'm blocked and ask if I can help, if I don't then I don't want to hear about it unless you want help and preferably first in a group chat where I can drop in when it suits me and we can share snippets of code and data directly while figuring things out.

Things like planning, ETA:s and the like that management roles are nervous about should be handled in another setting, because these are open-ended activities that might take one minute or thirty and making those decisions requires preparation that should absolutely not, ever, be done during the meeting. This takes discipline on the part of the manager, who has to figure out a clear purpose, who is a relevant participant, ask them individually when they have time, reserve the room or equivalent, write the invitation with agenda, send it out.

Commonly it's more done like 'we have a problem', 'ok, we'll meet after this', and then people waste half an hour doing a defective version of that process as an unnecessary group exercise.
by ChocolateGod | 2025-05-23 09:04:48+00:00
> It still isn't possible to package Tailscale or anything that creates a virtual interface as a Flatpak because there is no permission for that.

It's possible but not ideal. The application could use flatpak-spawn (to get out the sandbox) and then polkit-exec (to ask user for root perms for arbitrary use) to get root privileges on the host, but you're removing nearly all sandboxing.
by Flamentono2 | 2025-05-23 09:05:03+00:00
Written language is very powerful apparently. After all LLM can generate SVG, python code to use Blender etc.

One demo i saw with LLM and code use: "Generate a small snake game" and because the author still had the Blender MCP tool connection, the LLM decided to generate 3D assets through Blender for that game.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-05-23 09:05:09+00:00
I stopped[0] using RIL and Firefox almost at the same time - when it was "bundled". Kind of never returned. I wish RIL survived w/o getting bundled into Firefox or rather Firefox kept steadfast at browser work.

Later I also realised that for someone like me a RIL is like the IMDb Watchlist - never to be acted upon and just for accumulating even though I save bookmarks as well [1]. Now I add URLs to Reminders app as a TODO, when I have to do it; and I do it rarely but when I do I act on it (sooner).

[0] (Firefox use change: stopped as in from the "only browser anywhere" to maybe once in a week or few times a month usage on desktop").

[1] (Is there a bookmarking tool/app that triggers a Internet Archive save or checks whether it's saved upon "save bookmark" request?)
by hitekker | 2025-05-23 09:05:36+00:00
You’re right; this happens a lot.

The SQlite folks, half of Linux, and other maintainers have encountered the same kind of zealotry. Dealing with language supremacism is annoying and I don’t blame ffmpeg for venting.

In fact, I’d even say that twitter thread is informative, because it demonstrates out how big tech fund their own pet projects over the actual maintainers.
by varjag | 2025-05-23 09:06:38+00:00
> The speed of cryptographic function such as ciphers and hashes are quoted in cycles per byte.

That's called throughput, and denomination for it absolutely doesn't matter. You can measure it in megabytes as well as in MarketingMegabytes.

> If the CPU is 800 MiHz (never heard of that term, lol), then it processes 800 MiB in 1 second.

Plot twist, your 800MHz CPU oscillator would never run at 800,000,000Hz sharp for any substantial stretch of time. And clock specs are typically rounded numbers. That's why this whole example is ridiculous.

> No, I'm pointed out that the industry has already splintered into two.

No shit it did. My point is that it did it for no advantage at all. You could measure storage megabytes in same normal sane megabytes as before, just couldn't lie about it to the customers.

> If a byte is not derived from fundamental SI units, then it should not take on SI prefixes.

Kilo is a Greek prefix, not SI prefix. You can split hairs that it should mean sharp thosuand but it does not exist in terms of computer architecture. Kibi however is completely made up shit used by noone else and it sounds like a wannabe cartoon character.

> It is certainly feasible.

It is not feasible, that's why they aren't ever gonna be made.

> Also, if you have a computer and put in a 4 GiB stick of RAM and a 2 GiB stick, then you have 6 GiB of addressable memory, which is clearly not a power of 2.

It is not a power of 10 either, you should really think this through.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-23 09:07:00+00:00
One of my basic philosophies, when I ran a team, was “No regularly-scheduled meetings.” Every meeting needed a specific goal and need.

But I worked for a Japanese company, and they take meetings very seriously.

One of my employees suggested daily standups. I tried to support my employees, when they suggested new stuff, so I said “let’s give it a try.”

The Japanese Liaison really liked the idea, but it needed just a little tweak…

In a short time, we were having hour-long meetings every Friday at lunchtime.
by poulpy123 | 2025-05-23 09:07:33+00:00
Linux has the worst software distribution model towards the general public of all OS. The one of windows (and probably MacOS but I don't know much) is also full of issues, but is still infinitely better than linux. When you compound the number of distributions, the number of their versions, the number of software, and their versions, you realize that having the distribution managed by the distribution or the software authors is unsustainable. In comparison, windows and mac only require at most 2 versions of the software each to reach at list 90% of the users.

I don't know if flatpak or appimage or whatever are a solution, and I cannot propose one myself. But I really think that at one point the linux model will completely fail if it doesn't improve

BTW I'm not saying that the linux model is always inferior. Actually it is often superior: in the server world were professionals take care of things, in the embedded world where the resources are scarce, the possibilities to configure and select everything to the smallest detail make it great.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-05-23 09:07:38+00:00
I used and liked Pocket.

The main reason I stopped using it was that I found myself less often in offline spaces, which is when I used the reading part to catch up on interesting long articles.

Once planes, trains, countryside, foreign countries etc had good enough and/or cheap enough connectivity it mattered less to have offline reading material.

On the other side, competitors for those offline spots arose like Netflix letting you download episodes.

My dedicated ebook reader, which I had Pocket installed on, suffered similarly neglect. Phones got bigger and better enough.
by alkonaut | 2025-05-23 09:08:29+00:00
Maybe a contrived example but shouldn't Qt6 be answering with a compatible answer if a Qt5 app asks it what the theme is? And shouldn't the app be asking what the "theme" is, rather than what the Qt5-theme is? It seems like a fundamental issue with compat between apps built for different versions of Qt more than a problem with flatpak?

And is the sandboxing perhaps going a step too far if apps can't access the things they need from the environment?
by QueryThyself | 2025-05-23 09:08:45+00:00
This project was (I assume) now taken down after widespread backlash from Discord users who never consented to having their messages scraped, indexed, and published. The opt-out system was not "one click"—it required navigating a server where users were mocked and dismissed for objecting to their inclusion.

While the developer claimed to be protecting privacy, the system displayed usernames and full message content from community spaces that were never intended for public indexing. The burden was placed on users to remove themselves from something they never opted into.

Discord’s own Developer Policy explicitly forbids scraping or mass data harvesting. This wasn’t innovation—it was exploitation dressed in pseudo-academic language. If you can still search by channel + user ID, that’s traceable content. That's not “privacy preserving,” that’s thinly veiled exposure.

The developer's status message (extremely concerning and very inappropriate) and behaviour during take-down tickets further emphasized the lack of empathy behind the project. This wasn’t a public service—it was a boundary violation, and the shutdown was well-earned.

I also want to challenge the idea that this tool “solves the problem of not being able to easily search Discord servers.” That’s not a problem—that’s a design choice. Discord isn’t built for global indexing on purpose. Private communities, support groups, fandoms, and sensitive spaces rely on that separation to feel safe. Treating the lack of global search as a bug instead of a boundary shows a complete disregard for how real people use the platform.
by nlitened | 2025-05-23 09:09:14+00:00
> the human brain, of which we don't have a clear understanding of the compute capacity

Neurons have finite (very low) speed of signal transfer, so just by measuring cognitive reaction time we can deduce upper bounds on how many _consecutive_ neuron connections are involved in reception, cognitive processing, and resulting reaction via muscles, even for very complex cognitive processes. And the number is just around 100 consecutive neurons involved one after another. So “the algorithm” could not be _that_ complex in the end (100x matmul+tanh?)

Granted, a lot of parallelism and feedback loops are involved, but overall it gives me (and many others) an impression that when the AGI algorithm is ever found, it’s “mini” version should be able to run on modest 2025 hardware in real time.
by frederikvs | 2025-05-23 09:09:21+00:00
Removing the brown ones from a bowl of M&Ms is a 5 minute job that can be handled by anyone. I would expect a lot of people would go "well that's a bit eccentric, but if it makes the band happy, why not".

I doubt the band would say "you didn't redline this weird but inconsequential request, we can't work together.

If they wanted to be sure the redlining process worked, they should have put in something like "remove all fire extinguishers from backstage".
by vectorisedkzk | 2025-05-23 09:10:34+00:00
Having used vectorDBs before, we're very much not there yet. We don't have any appreciable amounts of context for any reasonable real-life memory. It works if that is the most recent thing you did. Have you talked to an LLM for a day? Stuff is gone before the first hour. You have to use every trick currently in the book, treat context like it's your precious pet
by jccalhoun | 2025-05-23 09:11:10+00:00
If the slave issue was secondary is seems weird that so many of the states explicitly mentioned it:

>"Following the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, the seven states that would constitute the future Confederate States of America before Fort Sumter was bombarded began the process of seceding from the Union. Those states were South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. All of them formed "conventions of the people" to adopt ordinances severing the tie with the Union. (2) Five of them--South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, and Texas--commissioned delegates to their respective conventions to draft public documents detailing the reasons behind the secession. (3) Historians call these documents "declarations of causes," a phrase used in the titles of several of these documents. Although, for reasons unknown, Florida never officially completed its declaration, a draft of it exists in the Florida state archives. All of the declarations are explicit: maintaining slavery was the reason for secession. For example, the Mississippi declaration begins, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery--the greatest material interest of the world."

https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+cause+of+the+civil+war+ac...
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-05-23 09:12:19+00:00
> Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased in 48 states and the District of Columbia

> Personal income, in current dollars, increased in all 50 states and the District of Columbia in the fourth quarter of 2024

These are from your link. Where did you get the idea that red states are the only ones that grow?

GDP growth is higher in red states in that link, but red states also received something like 80–90% of the funding from the trillion dollars or so passed by the Democratic Congress and President.

Also to see how this actually plays out, compare CA to TX. gdp Growth in TX is much higher. But personal income growth in CA is much higher than in TX.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-05-23 09:13:08+00:00
>Every day has 86400 seconds during which a human brain constantly adapts to and learns from external

That's not even remotely true. At least not in the sense that it is for context in transformer models. Or can you tell me all the visual and auditory inputs you experienced yesterday at the 45232nd second? You only learn permanently and effectively from particular stimulation coupled with surprise. That has a sample rate which is orders of magnitude lower. And it's exactly the kind of sampling that can be replicated with a run-of-the-mill persistent memory system for an LLM. I would wager that you could fit most people's core experiences and memories that they can randomly access at any moment into a 1000 page book - something that fits well into state of the art context windows. For deeper more detailed things you can always fall back to another system.
by somat | 2025-05-23 09:13:33+00:00
This is a perpetual problem in computer science, people want a hash function, then decide that the random function very nearly does what they want. then use the random function as a hash function and are dumbfounded that it turns out there is no hard specification for how it works internally. The random function has no guarantee of result across versions, system, time. Hell I would even be harsh enough to say that any reproducibility in random is an accident of implementation. random should always be considered the non-deterministic function, hash is the deterministic function.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-23 09:14:39+00:00
Something to question though: does the A/B test system generate a changeset when an engineer flips a feature flag or changes the cohorts or percentage it’s rolled out to? Those are very safe changes generated by a template and with easy (maybe even automated) rollback, so they can happen all the time without really risking downtime.

There’ll still be plenty of changes made by humans. But some of those 1145 per day are so low-risk that they’re almost better off making more of them.
by flobosg | 2025-05-23 09:14:48+00:00
> Could once is not the same as can predictably first of all

I was merely addressing your claim in the previous post.

> Second, how can they possibly know this fold isn't actually in the ENTIRE PDB? I doubt very much that the can. The PDB is enormous.

There are well-established fold classification databases (such as SCOP and CATH) where you can query newly solved structures using several structural comparison algorithms (DALI, TM-align, etc).

The Protein Data Bank might be enormous, but there is an enormous amount of structural redundancy as well, from which reduced datasets can be (and are) derived. Protein structure is, after all, much more conserved than sequence, mainly due to the physicochemical principles that govern folding and stability.