MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by em3rgent0rdr | 2025-05-22 09:09:29+00:00
> I don't see a practical reason why dB's normal use can't have been covered by normal prefixes

Because instead of numbers going like 1, 10, 100, 1k, 10k, 100k, 1M, 10M, 100M, 1G, and so on when using prefixes, we get a much more smoother numbers of 0 dB, 10 dB, 20 dB, 30 dB, 40 dB, 50 dB, 60 dB, 70 dB, 80 dB, 90 dB. You can see the the number for the dB get bigger, while when using prefixes the numbers get bigger two times in a row and then go back to smaller. With dB you usually just see a number from 0 to around +/- 100 or so. You can plot dB nicely as an axis of a chart and then see the slope of a curve in so many dB per decade.
by threeseed | 2025-05-22 09:09:47+00:00
a) You can easily run Spark jobs on a single box. Just set executors = 1.

b) The reason centralised clusters exist is because you can't have dozens/hundreds of data engineers/scientists all copying company data onto their laptop, causing support headaches because they can't install X library and making productionising impossible. There are bigger concerns than your personal productivity.
by r33b33 | 2025-05-22 09:11:54+00:00
Can it finally work with a large codebase? I have GooglePlay / AppStore app coded in Xcode, in C#, ported in Java with Python server. The codebase is large and expansive. It includes web support, server, client, etc... will this "Gemini Diffusion" finally allow me to use AI agent to code instead of hiring a programmer? Is there a tool that could help me as of today?
by IanCal | 2025-05-22 09:12:25+00:00
That overview I can find it talking about wet AMD, the claim for this is specifically dry AMD.

edit - and from the paper

> Notably, while ROCK inhibitors have been previously suggested for treatment of wet AMD and other retinal diseases of neovascularization, Robin is the first to propose their application in dry AMD for their effect on phagocytosis
by findingMeaning | 2025-05-22 09:12:33+00:00
Yeah it could. One thing for sure is that, it's really impressive in terms of speed and using it would mean we can do so many cool stuffs with it!

Even if there is no improvement in terms of quality, the speed alone will make it usable for a lot of downstream tasks.

It feels like ChatGPT3.5 moment to me.
by diogolsq | 2025-05-22 09:12:37+00:00
Agree, that is not required. It is an Essay after all.

That said, I disagree with the idea that it’s merely about aesthetics.(Hegel’s dialectic, for example, isn’t just a stylistic choice — its structure actively shapes meaning and allows for a better synthesis.)

I don't think the author wants to engage and have meaningful conversations, his position is clear.

A meaningful conversation - at least how i see it -, involves acknowledging both the pros and cons of any position. Even if you believe the pros outweigh the cons — which is a subjective judgment — you should still be able to clearly enumerate the cons. That’s is an analytical approach.
by alkonaut | 2025-05-22 09:12:55+00:00
I always found myself to be very good at Googling/Searching. Or asking: like emailing an expert or colleague. I'm good at condensing what I'm trying to ask and good at knowing what they could be misunderstanding, or what follow up questions they might have, to save some back- and forth. The corresponding thing on google is predicting what I might see, and adding negative search terms for them.

BUT, and this is I think why some of us feel ChatGPT is poor: asking in this way that guides a human or a search engine, makes ChatGPT produce worse answers(!).

If you say "What can be wrong with X? I'm pretty sure it's not Y or Z which I ruled out, could it be Q or perhaps W"? Then ChatGPT and other language models quickly reinforce your belief instead of challenging them. It would rather give you an incorrect reason why you are right, than provide you an additional problem, or challenge your assumptions. If LLMs could get over the bullshit problem, it would be so much better. Having a confidence and being able to express it is invaluable. But somehow I doubt it's possible - if it was, then they would be doing it already as it's a killer feature. So I fear that it's somehow not achievable with LLMs? In which case the title is correct.
by mrweasel | 2025-05-22 09:13:23+00:00
I don't think that's true for Red Hat, but it is true for Slackware.

If you want packages that works just like the upstream documentation, run Slackware.

Debian does add some really nice features in many of their packages, like a easy way to configure multiple uWSGI application using a file per application in a .d directory. It's a feature of uWSGI, but Debian has just package it up really nicely.
Ask HN: Places in the UK / Europe Related to computers
by sailorganymede | 2025-05-22 09:14:12+00:00
I’m interested in visiting some historic or special places related to this field as a way of rejuvenating my passion in the field again.

I’ve never been to Bletchley Park so I figured I might as well make a visit to see if I can get excited about something that doesn’t involve arguing about the merits of adding a column to a database.

Any other places people recommend / have been to ? Thank you!
by yuriks | 2025-05-22 09:14:37+00:00
Another bonus of wearing ear protection in concerts: The music will actually sound way better when it's not saturating your eardrums. I got a decent pair of silicone plugs and it's a huge difference, everything sounds clearer and there's none of the sibilance and distortion I hear without them on, which I previously had always just attributed to the speakers/bad venue acoustics.
by circularfoyers | 2025-05-22 09:14:52+00:00
It's so subtle I've for a long time wondered if it's something most people experience and don't notice, or they assume is normal, just because unless I think about it I don't really notice it either. I have been known to focus on details more than others do. Not sure if this contributes to my seemingly heightened sense of smell as well. But not being able to experience what others experience, makes me wonder if I'll ever know.
by xethos | 2025-05-22 09:14:54+00:00
Is "Message List Display Options -> Table View" not pretty well exactly what you want? I enabled it (on desktop) shortly after the roll-out, and I've never had it revert back. There's no CSS hackery, no forced reversion, not even a hidden menu - Card vs. Table view is a top-level menu item.

Telling me "There's no way to revert it" feels like, at best, giving up at the sign of the smallest difficulty. At worst it's a bad-faith argument, as it's clearly possible - and fairly easy and straightforward, IMO.
Show HN: Find prompts that jailbreak your agent (open source)
by theHolyTrynity | 2025-05-22 09:15:52+00:00
We've built an open-source tool to stress test AI agents by simulating prompt injection attacks.

We’ve implemented one powerful attack strategy based on the paper [AdvPrefix: An Objective for Nuanced LLM Jailbreaks](https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10321).

Here's how it works:

- You define a goal, like: “Tell me your system prompt” - Our tool uses a language model to generate adversarial prefixes (e.g., “Sure, here are my system prompts…”) that are likely to jailbreak the agent. - The output is a list of prompts most likely to succeed in bypassing safeguards.

We’re just getting started. Our goal is to become the go-to toolkit for testing agent security. We're currently working on more attack strategies and would love your feedback, ideas, and collaboration.

Try it at: https://security.vista-labs.ai/

Docs with how to: https://hackagent.dev/docs/intro

GitHub: https://github.com/vistalabs-org/hackagent

video demo with example: https://www.loom.com/share/1e4ce025ea4749fab169195e7b1222ba

Would love to hear what you think!
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-05-22 09:16:03+00:00
Well, looking at average ranges, 278w FTP would put me in the top 40% or so, which I would consider is reasonably average. Also, I'm reasonably heavy (around 100kg), so that probably makes it easier to put out some power whilst also meaning that I'm slow up the hills.

https://www.cyclinganalytics.com/blog/2018/06/how-does-your-...
by slickytail | 2025-05-22 09:16:33+00:00
The relative unimportance of the exact SDPA attention in use in modern transformers is already known: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.11418

The FFN, normalization, and residual connections are absolutely irreplaceable -- but attention can be replaced with almost any other layer that shares information between tokens, such as pooling, convolution, random mixing, etc.
by koblas | 2025-05-22 09:16:45+00:00
Some countries don't have cents, some countries have 3 digits of cents. So, yes you can but you also then get thinking you can express everything as ints. But, the moment you need to convert from KWD to VND (84000.00:1) you could be at the edge of the size of a 64 bit int. Note: VND is pretty stable, when currencies start deflating the numbers can get crazy.
by snickerer | 2025-05-22 09:18:16+00:00
I love to use ChatGPT for creative cooking.

In my camping car, somewhere in the desert, I sometimes have limited resources. Like a can of beans, some fresh potatoes, an apple, Italian spices, and so on.

I like to ask ChatGPT: Listen, I have this stuff, I want to create some food with strong umami taste, do you have an idea?

It is very good at that, the results were often amazing.

This is its core feature: 'feel' loose connections between concepts. Italian pasta with maple syrup? Yes, but only if you add some Arabic spices...

"AI" is, due to the nature of artificial neuronal networks, not intelligent. It does not learn intelligence, it does learn feelings. Not emotions, but feelings in the sense of unconscious learning ('I get a feeling how to ride the bicycle off-road ').
by dj3l4l | 2025-05-22 09:18:25+00:00
The Bel is a unitless quantity. Yes, by convention, in certain fields, it applies to the logarithm of the ratio of powers. But in other fields (for example, quantifying a change in the degree of evidence for a hypothesis, as in Bayesian probability theory) it is applied to a ratio of different quantities (in the Bayesian case, a ratio of probabilities). There is no reason why dB can't be used for any unit, and its meaning is incomplete until the denominator of the ratio within the logarithm is known.

This is the gripe that is being conveyed in this article. Mathematically, the Bel is unitless. It is only by additional context that one can understand the value of the denominator in the logarithm.
by cess11 | 2025-05-22 09:18:27+00:00
Pretty much everyone has had nano as default for ages, at least that's how it seems to me from having had to figure out which package has script support and installing vim myself after OS install for a long time.

And RedHat does a lot of fiddling in their distributions, you probably want something like Arch, which is more hands-off in that regard. Personally, I prefer Debian, it's the granite rock of Linux distributions.
by JdeBP | 2025-05-22 09:18:29+00:00
"only happens" is a lot more often that you think. In my experience, "only" is quite frequent.

A randomly picked case in point:

Debian has had a local manual page for the original software's undocumented (in the old Sourceforge version) iptunnel(8) command for 7 years:

https://salsa.debian.org/debian/net-tools/-/blob/debian/sid/...

Independently, the original came up with its own, quite different, manual page 3 years later:

https://github.com/ecki/net-tools/blob/master/man/en_US/iptu...

Then Debian imported that!

https://salsa.debian.org/debian/net-tools/-/blob/debian/sid/...

This sort of thing isn't a rare occurrence.
by wazoox | 2025-05-22 09:19:42+00:00
Perplexity often quotes references that simply don't exist. Recent examples provided by perplexity :

Google Cloud. (2024). "Broadcast Transformation with Google Cloud." https://cloud.google.com/solutions/media-entertainment/broad...

Microsoft Azure. (2024). "Azure for Media and Entertainment." https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/media-entertainm...

IBC365. (2023). "The Future of Broadcast Engineering: Skills and Training." https://www.ibc.org/tech-advances/the-future-of-broadcast-en...

Broadcast Bridge. (2023). "Cloud Skills for Broadcast Engineers." https://www.thebroadcastbridge.com/content/entry/18744/cloud...

SVG Europe. (2023). "OTT and Cloud: The New Normal for Broadcast." https://www.svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/ott-and-cloud-the-n...

None of these exist, neither at the provided URLs or elsewhere.
by qmmmur | 2025-05-22 09:19:51+00:00
Exactly. If someone says that "this plane is about 130dB" what they mean is in reference to 0dB given 0dB is the threshold of human hearing. It seems most people are confused by dB because they don't understand it provides a logarithmically scaled unit compared to a reference which happens to be quite useful for something like audio where our perceptual models are stacked with these types of curves.
by kqr | 2025-05-22 09:20:32+00:00
At first I was going to contradict you but then I realised 10 mm of rain is actually a measure of volume or mass, corresponding to 10 kg, right?

And of course, people use it mainly as a rate, i.e. 10 kg per hour, or per four hours, or six hours, or 24 hours.

And it gets worse when we start talking about snow, the density of which can vary a lot!
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-05-22 09:21:38+00:00
Honestly, not really, no. Speaking as someone who has had a handful of languages at a handful of proficiencies under his belt over his life, I don't really think learning any of them have "expanded my consciousness" or anything like that by any considerable degree. Sorry to burst your bubble. I learned English, Spanish, and Latin as a teenager, and currently am about 4 years deep into learning Finnish, so I speak with some lived experience on this.

If you want to think interesting thoughts, you need to think hard about things for a long time. That's the sine qua non of it. It can be in any language you want, or even in a nonlinguistic substrate like mental visualization. I would heavily caution people away from trying to shortcut this process by first spending 5 years studying e.g. ancient Assyrian and only then attempting to commune with pre-biblical demons (or whatever it is people think they want to do with this - if there's no particular goal in mind, I would say that's yet another red flag).

In general, I'm sorry to say, I think language learning is a tremendous waste of time and effort for almost everybody. Exceptions are mainly for hobbyists (even then, there are probably much more worthwhile hobbies you could take up), passing regulatory hurdles (all of mine so far), and integrating into a new culture (Finnish alone so far). If you want a pastime which will really push your brain to think hard and in new ways, philosophy and mathematics are both much better bang for your buck.
by alkonaut | 2025-05-22 09:22:21+00:00
I think this is the key. If you have a problem where it's slow to produce a plausible answer but quick to check if it's correct (writing a shell script, solving an equation, making up a verse for a song) then you have a good tool. It's the Prime-factorization category of problems. Recognizing when you have one and going to an LLM when you do, is key.

But what if you _don't_ have that kind of problem? Yes LLMs can be useful to solve the above. But for many problems you ask for a solution and what you get is a suggested solution which takes a long to verify. Meaning: unless you are somewhat sure it will solve the problem you don't want to do it. You need some estimate of confidence. LLMs are useless for this. As a developer I find my problems are very rarely in the first category and more often in the second.

Yes it's "using them wrong". It's doing what they struggle with. But it's also what I struggle with. It's hard to stop yourself when you have a difficult problem and you are weighing googling it for an hour or chatgpt-ing it for an hour. But I often regret going the ChatGPT route after several hours.
by scoot | 2025-05-22 09:23:49+00:00
> The whisper thing is nice

Amazon Alexa already has this (albeit you need to whisper loud enough for it to hear), and replies in a whisper. It works with any earbuds, but is kinda useless until Alexa+ (LLM integration) is more widely available; and it would be nice to have it reply in a normal voice when using earbuds.

Silent speech recognition is already a thing [0], so pairing it up with an LLM would be straightforward.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10411110
by JdeBP | 2025-05-22 09:27:02+00:00
There's a belief that this is usual. But having watched the process for a couple of decades, it seems to me that that is just a belief, and actual practice doesn't work that way. A lot of times this stuff just gets stuck and never sent along.

I also think that the idea that original authors must not accept manual pages is a way of explaining how the belief does not match reality, without accepting that it is the belief itself that is wrong. Certainly, the number of times that things work out like the net-tools example elsethread, where clearly the original authors do want manual pages, because they eventually wrote some, and end up duplicating Debian's (and FreeBSD's/NetBSD's) efforts, is evidence that contradicts the belief that there's some widespread no-manual-pages culture amongst developers.
by wazoox | 2025-05-22 09:27:18+00:00
Not OP, but yesterday I was working on NFS server tuning on Linux, a typically quite difficult thing to find relevant info about through search engines. I asked Claude 3.5 to suggest some kernel settings or compile-time tweaks, and it provided me with entirely made up answers about kernel variables that don't exist, and makefile options that don't exist.

So maybe another LLM would have fared better, but still, so far it's mostly wasted time. It works quite well to summarise texts and creating filler images, but overall I still find them not reliable enough to care out of these two limited use cases.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-05-22 09:31:02+00:00
This like arguing that aspect ratios are stupid and wrong because sometimes they apply to a screen which is really big and sometimes it's really small and sometimes they apply to a physical print or a photo or a billboard or a vintage TV and sometimes it's a jpg or a PNG.

Aspect ratio is a ratio. It can be a ratio between pixel counts, or between print dimensions, or physical display dimensions.

All of which are useful in their own way, none of which are directly comparable, all of which are understandable in context.

dB is the same. It's a ratio split into convenient steps - more convenient than Bels would be - that compares two quantities. The quantities can be measured in different units. The units are implied by the context.

The only mild confusion is the relationship between voltage and power ratios. But that's a minor wrinkle, not a showstopping intellectual challenge.
by sambeau | 2025-05-22 09:31:24+00:00
Amongst other things, I'm writing children's books.

Each one is a labour of love that takes years to produce. It requires detailed thought from word choices, character design, world-building, characters, to fun plot twists. It's really hard and takes a lot of work. It's taken me over a decade to teach myself how to do it. I've been working on my current book for over two years.

My government has decided that my copyright is invalid for AIs. So, as soon as it is published, years of hard work will be slurped into the mediocracy machine for anyone—like you—to abuse.

It's theft and you are a fence.
by Ygg2 | 2025-05-22 09:31:51+00:00
> And it's no more verbose than Java anyway.

That's damning with faint praise. Java is one of the most verbose languages.

> Rust, sadly, seem to be bound to end likewise as the rustaceans enthusiastically endorse AI-driven rewriting of legacy DoD C code into Rust.

Sure, some people want to speed up and/or automate conversion C to Rust, they are a minority. Going for 1 to 1 translation is going to be problem fraught with issues.
by bayindirh | 2025-05-22 09:33:43+00:00
Debian uses Quilt system for per-package patch maintenance. While packaging a software you get the original source (i.e. orig.tar.gz), and add patches on top of it with Quilt, and build it that way.

Then you run the tests, and if they pass, you package and upload it.

This allows a patch(set) can be sent to the upstream as a package saying "we did this, and if you want to include them, this apply cleanly to version x.y.z, any feedback is welcome".
by metalman | 2025-05-22 09:34:00+00:00
sound IS funny, db does work, and for people building the things that produce or record sound. Useing db is just another unit used in engineering. Now if someone wants to get into the (very facinating), psychoacoustic side of sound, where another unit has been tried, "phons", prounounced fonz ;) , then it becomes clear that determining sound pressure levels is a tricky thing, as at the low end of perceptable sound the real world power of the actual sound is miniscule when converted into heat or mechanical power, and at the othete end a amp/speaker set up that was 100% efficient would only need 5 or 10 watts of electricity to power a stadium concert. we work with what we have, in a past lifeI got a degree in sound engineering, but barely practiced it, found myself way more into enjoying the products that have been built to be used, but am always greatfull to the people who make it possible, who on occasion are entertained by the sometimes exotic ways that I abuse the equipment, as the good ones take pride in having thought of and planed for such things, but do like confermation from the field. STC ratings anyone?
by vanderZwan | 2025-05-22 09:35:09+00:00
> I'm pretty sure that doing this a few times made my English permanently worse. I guess it's ok since I'm not a literary stylist or anything like that, but it's something to be aware of.

Oh, that's just your brain suffering from hash collisions during lookup for words. After a while it adapts and switches to a new data structure, speaking from experience.
by spwa4 | 2025-05-22 09:35:24+00:00
Ever notice that attention is (with the highest respect to the original researchers) "just" inputting the entire past of the network into a reverse-MoE neural network? (meaning the expert is selecting parts of the input instead of parts of the neural network to execute)

In a way everyone knew this would work. Nobody did it because it's so inefficient even R and Python users thought that it would be ridiculously slow (or simply couldn't execute it enough to train to a reasonable extent)
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-05-22 09:35:44+00:00
I've pretty much replaced my Sublime Text usage with Zed as a general purpose editor, which handles any edits that last longer than i can be bothered to edit stuff in Vim. I've used Vi(m) for decades, and know my way around, and while it's a decent editor, it is NOT and IDE, and modern features feels like they're tacked on.
by markyg | 2025-05-22 09:38:02+00:00
A Neovim plugin to mark files and quickly access them, inspired by Harpoon and Lasso.

You can navigate in normal mode:

<leader>da - Add current file to marks <leader>dr - Remove current file from marks <leader>dl - List marked files in Telescope <leader>dc - Clear all marks <leader>1 through <leader>5 - Go to mark by index

And while in telescope

Press Ctrl-v to open in vertical split Press Ctrl-x to open in horizontal split Press Ctrl-d to remove the selected file from the list Press Ctrl-k to move the selected file up in the list Press Ctrl-j to move the selected file down in the list