MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by em-bee | 2025-05-30 01:11:52+00:00
Whether or not something exists has zero to do with whether someone accepts that it does

i didn't make such a claim. the existence of god has nothing to do with free will. he either exists, or he doesn't. your or my belief in the existence of god however is governed by the freedom to either believe or reject his existence. if god exists then rejecting him does not make him go away, nor does believing in god make him appear if there is no god.

my argument was that free will is the reason why god did not reveal himself in a way that everyone would immediately recognize him without a doubt. it was not an argument about his existence.
by _heimdall | 2025-05-30 01:11:56+00:00
Oh I wasn't actually trying to say we should expect people to be altruistic, expect them to be selfish. Selfishness just bleeds over into community at a small scale, I'll help a neighbor not because I'm supposed to but because I appreciate their company and like knowing that others in the area may be similarly willing to help me if I need it later.

Central planning for housing hasn't worked well, at least in the US. We either over develop poor quality housing or over regulate and drive prices up. Occasionally we try to make affordable housing to help those in need, but the combination of where we build those projects and the bar we try to define for who can use it leads to bad results more often than not.
by epistasis | 2025-05-30 01:13:01+00:00
While that's an interesting proposition, that could at most reduce our rates by their profit rate, which is not nearly enough.

We need systematic changes to fundamentally lower costs to more reasonable rates, like what other smaller municipal utilities deliver in California, which are 1/3-1/2 the cost.

The problem is not profit, but how profit is established. PG&E takes a fixed rate of profit of the total cost, so they are incentivized to make everything as expensive as possible. This is in contrast to most market based systems, where a new competitor with lower costs gets to directly take the lowered cost as profit. We instead use regulatory boards, Public Utility Commissions, to determine which investments utilities can make and what prices they can charge customers. This is highly regulated, but the outcomes have been terrible. Even Arizona, whose equivalent of the PUC has been disastrously corrupt, or places like Ohio, which has sent state legislators to prison for their corruption on utility matters, have far lower rates than we do in California.

We have bad regulation in California. That's the fundamental problem. Gavin Newsom, and all the governors who came before, have failed us on our electrical grid. That said, clearly high electricity prices are not a huge problem for our economy, and the high cost of living from high housing costs is clearly a driver of expense for everything a utility does, but we fundamentally have not had the right controls on the grid to keep costs reasonable. We have not set up a system where PG&E profits from delivering lowered costs. Our regulation prevents us from achieving what Marx calls the "falling rate of profit" as we would usually see with a market. Something must change, but simply eliminating PG&E profits won't do it, it's not enough.
Show HN: Flux Kontext
by chengzeyi | 2025-05-30 01:13:53+00:00
FLUX.1 Kontext is a new image editing model from Black Forest Labs. It is the best in class model for editing images using text prompts, and the latest addition to the FLUX.1 family.

In our tests we’ve found Kontext to give accurate and brilliant results. It’s better and cheaper than OpenAI’s 4o/gpt-image-1 model (and there’s no yellow tint).

There are three models, two are available now, and a third open-weight version is coming soon:

FLUX.1 Kontext [pro]: State-of-the-art performance for image editing. High-quality outputs, great prompt following, and consistent results. FLUX.1 Kontext [max]: A premium model that brings maximum performance, improved prompt adherence, and high-quality typography generation without compromise on speed. Coming soon: FLUX.1 Kontext [dev]: An open-weight, guidance-distilled version of Kontext.
by kccqzy | 2025-05-30 01:14:33+00:00
> less price sensitive

As a business traveler I actually want the price to be as high as possible while satisfying the company rules on airfare. The fare is fully reimbursed, so a higher fare means I get more points on my credit card.

Now the company rules on airfare will probably reference something like the least-cost logical fare. So it is in a business traveler's interest for all airlines to raise prices simultaneously.

Business travel is weird.
by Tainnor | 2025-05-30 01:15:00+00:00
> Any axiomatic system will have true statements that are unprovable.

Any effectively computable axiomatic system of sufficient strength.

The "effectively computable" condition is probably uninteresting (if we couldn't effectively decide if something is an axiom we wouldn't be able to check proofs), but the "sufficient strength" part matters. There are interesting theories that are complete (i.e. for every sentence P, either P or not(P) is a consequence), such as the theory of the natural numbers with addition (but without multiplication).
Ask HN: Management wants to talk to my Datalake. What's the best way to do this?
by GaiusCoffee | 2025-05-30 01:16:45+00:00
We’ve inherited a lot of data, now neatly organized in a Dremio Data Lake. Most team members use Excel or Power BI to access it. With all the excitement around AI, management (especially non-technical business units) are now asking for a chat-based interface to interact with this data and generate charts on demand—similar to the AI demos you see everywhere.

I’ve pointed out that Excel Copilot offers some of this, but they’re looking for a more conversational, dedicated chat experience.

Requirements/constraints: - Needs access control and auditability - Preferably integrates with OpenAI-like API - We’re an Azure shop with existing Microsoft contracts

Has anyone dealt with similar requests? What kind of approaches, tools, or architectures did you consider? Any pros/cons you’d highlight, especially in an enterprise context?

PS. English is not my first language, the question was made with deepseek. I hope it didn't butcher it too much.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-30 01:17:04+00:00
In general markets are pretty good at arbitrage. If you can get a $50 discount for a product by doing X, someone is going to set up a service whereby they do X for you, resell the product for a $45 discount and put $5 in their own pocket. At which point nobody would pay full price to the original seller and the convenience fee for not doing it yourself is $5 instead of $50.

The problem comes when the original seller doesn't want their price discrimination scheme to be thwarted by efficiency-improving arbitrageurs and takes measures to prevent that, because that's rent-seeking behavior and shouldn't be tolerated.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-05-30 01:17:26+00:00
The torque curve per gear is so cool to see... Back in the days I did record my car's engine accelerating on a flat street (and I did it both ways) and then used a fast Fourier transform to find the engine RPM from the recorded sound.

I then plotted that torque curve (it requires knowing how many cylinders, gear ration, wheel size and a few other things and there are a few approximation [like tires deforming with speed, loss, ...] but it's doable) and, sure enough, the resulting curve was very close to the one given in the car's official book.

Yup, back in the eighties car manufacturers (at least some of them) would give you a book with the gear ration and torque curve nicely plotted.

IIRC you only need to record the acceleration over one speed (say the 2nd gear) and then with the gear ratio you can plot all the gears.

It was my first Java app with a GUI! I probably still have the code somewhere on obscure backups.
by nyrulez | 2025-05-30 01:17:29+00:00
Amazed at all the negative rhetoric around coding with LLMs on HN lately. The coding world is deeply split about their utility.

I think part of that comes from the difficulty of working with probabilistic tools that needs plenty of prompting to get things right, especially for more complex things. To me, it's a training issue for programmers, not a fundamental flaw in the approach. They have different strengths and it can take a few weeks of working closely to get to a level where it starts feeling natural. I personally can't imagine going back to the pre LLM era of coding for me and my team.
by simonsarris | 2025-05-30 01:17:29+00:00
I'm (very) skeptical too, though if you were going to use this device (app) heavily, and it wanted to be always on, and power hungry, it needs more permissions than "an app" might allow, and it needs more battery too. Most likely it would still connect with the phone, but it would be like external GPS is for digital cameras - does one-ish function and does not drain the battery of the main device.

So maybe what they'll really get everyone to do is walk around with a second battery that bypasses some permissions, in terms of always listening or always using a camera. "Just an app" can never do that.

Funny enough people stopped buying external GPS for digital cameras because... your phone can do that now, as an app
by drivingmenuts | 2025-05-30 01:19:15+00:00
They’re trying to end birthright citizenship, which basically would allow them to deport, well anybody who disagreed with them, even if that person’s has no other country be deported to.

For example, I am an American citizen, born and raised. I have never lived outside of the United States. My father, now deceased, was from Nicaragua, but he was an American citizen also. However, by ending birthright citizenship, I can can be deported simply for being liberal, if the Supreme Court allows this.
by dabraham1248 | 2025-05-30 01:19:22+00:00
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but in case you're not... From https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/ai-with-90-error-rate...

"UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges" Also "The use of faulty AI is not new for the health care industry."
by fluorinerocket | 2025-05-30 01:19:39+00:00
What I'm interested in seeing if this could be used for multidisciplinary design optimization. Currently it is possible to do coupled aero structural optimization of wings and the like but of course you have to deal with all the mesh stuff and make it deformable as wing changes shape. And then get the gradients out.

Very curious to see if it might be possible to greatly simplify the problem with this method
by lesuorac | 2025-05-30 01:20:37+00:00
> [1] xAI was founded by Musk on March 9, 2023

> [2] Elon Musk completed the acquisition of Twitter in October 2022

xAI would've just been an AI division of Twitter if Musk wasn't worried that Twitter was going to go bankrupt and take the company (xAI) with it (Twitter). It's extremely suspicious that Grok was available to paying X subscribers and not some other arrangement.

"Separately" funded is pretty thin. It's the same group of people funding xAI [3] as Twitter acquisition [4].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XAI_(company)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#2022%E2%80%93present

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XAI_(company)#Financial_histor...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...
by andrekandre | 2025-05-30 01:21:45+00:00
> the conversational interface, for some reason, seems to turn off the natural skepticism that people have

n=1 but after having chatgpt "lie" to me more than once i am very skeptical of it and always double check it, whereas something like tv or yt videos i still find myself being click-baited or grifted (iow less skeptical) much more easily still... any large studies about this would be very interesting...
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-30 01:21:57+00:00
Mass and volume both count, in an aircraft, don't they? And many oversize humans present logistical and safety challenges:

- Taking up more than one seat with girth, needing a seatbelt extender.

- Fitting through narrow passages, tight turns, limited headroom

- An unconscious person may need to be lifted, and transported somehow

- Toilets and life vests and other safety equipment, rated for your "standard average man size"

- Total mass of passengers/cargo, and its distribution on the aircraft itself

Elevators in the US have a maximum weight and maximum occupancy rating.

Arguably, if obesity is a disability, then appeal to the Americans with Disability Act or similar regulations, but from a standpoint of safety and the common good, it does not seem unreasonable for airlines to charge extra to cover their expenses above.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-30 01:22:27+00:00
Really good coders (like him) are better.

Mediocre ones … maybe not so much.

When I worked for a Japanese optical company, we had a Japanese engineer, who was a whiz. I remember him coming over from Japan, and fixing some really hairy communication bus issues. He actually quit the company, a bit after that, at a very young age, and was hired back as a contractor; which was unheard of, in those days.

He was still working for them, as a remote contractor, at least 25 years later. He was always on the “tiger teams.”

He did awesome assembly. I remember when the PowerPC came out, and “Assembly Considered Harmful,” was the conventional wisdom, because of pipelining, out-of-order instructions, and precaching, and all that.

His assembly consistently blew the doors off anything the compiler did. Like, by orders of magnitude.
by autumnstwilight | 2025-05-30 01:22:44+00:00
In most cases the cost of fabric itself is a pretty minor part of the garment price- you're paying for someone to design the clothes, assemble them, ship them, and operate a store that sells them, and those costs are pretty much the same for small and large sizes. Adjusting the price based on the amount of fabric used would probably end up being a dollar or so for the things most people wear on a daily basis.

Unusually large or small sizes can end up more expensive (and/or only manufactured in limited quantities) because they're not commonly bought and they take up space on the shop floor and in inventory which could be used for things with higher turnover. (Edit: Also at the extreme ends of sizing simply enlarging or shrinking the pattern won't work well, you have to redraft it so it sits correctly on a petite or plus-sized frame).
by fc417fc802 | 2025-05-30 01:22:46+00:00
> Eventually you may hit trademark protections. Reproducing a brand-name keyboard may be as difficult as simulating a celebrity's likeness.

Then the law is broken. Monetizing someone's likeness is an issue. Utilizing trademarked characteristics to promote your own product without permission is an issue. It's the downstream actions of the user that are the issue, not the ML model itself.

Models regurgitating copyrighted material verbatim is of course an entirely separate issue.
by Aloisius | 2025-05-30 01:22:58+00:00
Why would retail prices triple? Tariffs are on wholesale price.

Prices are definitely higher for products that didn't have a lot of inventory already in warehouses (mostly new models of higher priced goods, DJI, Lenovo, etc.) - that is when they're being sold at all. Quite a few products are simply out of stock now.

For cheaper things where there's still warehouses full of them, prices remain the same.
by YorickPeterse | 2025-05-30 01:23:00+00:00
The most recent release has the ability to generate basic debugging information (see "new experimental dbgfile and dbgloc directives. " from the release notes) as Hare needed that (and IIRC a Hare contributor added it). Unfortunately, there's no documentation on it, and last I checked to see how to use it I had to go spelunking in the Hare source code.
by munificent | 2025-05-30 01:23:47+00:00
There is also https://stitch-maps.com/ which semi-pictorially shows the effect of a knitting pattern on the shape of the resulting fabric.

I haven't tried writing a knitting interpreter, even though that it extremely within the Venn diagram intersection of my interests. I have spent some time thinking about trying to formalizing knitting pattern notation. Right now, it's, like mostly there, but every pattern tweaks things in ways that are often arbitrary and confusing.

Knitting patterns are an interesting programming language. Ignoring the resulting fabric for a moment, one way to think of them is that they are an encoding of a linear series of steps the knitter is supposed to perform.

As any programmer knows, there are a whole bunch of possible programs that produce the same output:

print(1) print(2) print(3) print(4) print(5)

Versus:

for (i from 1 to 5): print(i)

One of the challenges of designing a knitting pattern is coming up with a good encoding for the series of stitches to be created. You might think that the shortest encoding is best, but what you're really trying to optimize for is how easy is it mentally keep track of where you are.

A knitting pattern that, say, has deeply nested loops, can require the knitter to hold multiple indexes in their head (or using external counters) and increases the odds of making a mistake. Unrolled some of those loops manually might be more verbose but less error prone. Or not! Maybe the extra verbosity of the long list of stitches makes it easier to lose your place.

Even things like choosing where to place stitch markers can have an effect on how user-friendly the pattern is.

It's an interesting design problem. You're trying to design a set of instructions to produce a good object, but you're also trying to design a set of instructions that yield a good experience producing that object.
by klabb3 | 2025-05-30 01:25:22+00:00
Pareto is about diminishing returns.

> but each succeeding iteration seems to be more disappointing

This is because the scaling hypothesis (more data and more compute = gains) is plateauing, because all text data is used and compute is reaching diminishing returns for some reason I’m not smart enough to say why, but it is.

So now we're seeing incremental core model advancements, variations and tuning in pre- and post training stages and a ton of applications (agents).

This is good imo. But obviously it’s not good for delusional valuations based exponential growth.
by ben-schaaf | 2025-05-30 01:26:58+00:00
Frankly I disagree that LLMs value is immediate. What I do see is a whole lot of damage it's causing, just like the hype cycles before it. It's fine for us to disagree on this, but to say I'm burying my head in the sand not wanting to accept "the future" is exactly the same hype-driven bullshit the crypto crowd was pushing.
by sloaken | 2025-05-30 01:27:19+00:00
Not rocket science, but ...

I used ChatGPT to adjust what exercises I am doing. I asked what exercises impacted what muscles (primary and secondary), put it in a spreadsheet, so I could visualize the overlap. Then asked what muscle groups am I not addressing. Finally what exercises would address those neglected muscles.

End result is my workouts are more productive.
by igorbark | 2025-05-30 01:27:23+00:00
not sure if you will still see this 7 days later, but the claim "we work more hours than medieval peasants did" jumped out at me so i looked into a bit and am curious if you have more thoughts on it!

i found this lively criticism of the video on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/16y233q/histori....

my brief takeaway was that the claim might be true if "work" means "working for an employer for wages", but not if "work" includes "necessary labor for shelter, food, clothing, survival".

but it's an interesting thought though so i'm curious if you have other related resources to dig into.
by OutOfHere | 2025-05-30 01:29:31+00:00
That's completely missing the point. The LLM score substantially higher than the clinician. Statistically this means the clinician will have many more misdiagnoses.

The point is that clinicians don't really get sued most of the time anyway for misdiagnoses. With AI, all one has to do is open up a new chat, tell the AI that its last diagnosis isn't really helping, and it will eagerly give an updated assessment. Compared to a clinician, the AI dramatically lowers the bar of iteratively working with it to help address an issue.

As for drug prescriptions, they are to be processed through an interactions checker anyway.
by lesuorac | 2025-05-30 01:30:14+00:00
They do show up in searches [1].

They're upset because they show up in a search _below_ the "AI Overview" which means people do not click through to their site. The search result still occurs; nobody wants to read it in addition to the AI Overview.

Feel how you want about a company making revenue from not intended to be free labor but it's not a shadow ban.

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=travel+lemming+visit+peru
by roxolotl | 2025-05-30 01:30:26+00:00
I’m the same way. Drink coffee daily because I like it for breakfast. And I love espresso with dessert after dinner. When I’m away I typically consume 0 caffeine for 1-2 weeks and have no noticeable downsides. If anything I get less sleep but am more active on vacation because I’m doing more.

I suspect I’m a fast metabolizer but no way to know really.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-30 01:30:42+00:00
It changes what you have to do in order to fix it. The problem isn't the parking spaces, the parking spaces are the symptom. The problem is that medium and high density housing construction and mixed use zoning are heavily restricted, and the cause is zoning boards captured by incumbent homeowners who want housing prices to go up instead of becoming more affordable.

You can't win if you're fighting the wrong fight.
by hn_acc1 | 2025-05-30 01:30:45+00:00
With VS Code and Augment (company won't allow any other AI, and I'm not particularly inclined to push - but it did just switch to o4, IIRC), the main benefit is that if I'm fiddling / debugging some code, and need to add some debug statements, it can almost always expand that line successfully for me, following our idiom for debugging - which saves me a few seconds. And it will often suggest the same debugging statement, even if it's been 3 weeks and in a different git branch where I las coded that debugging statement.

My main annoyance? If I'm in that same function, it still remembers the debugging / temporary hack I tried 3 months ago and haven't done since and will suggest it. And heck, even if I then move to a different part of the file or even a different file, it will still suggest that same hack at times, even though I used it exactly once and have not since.

Once you accept something, it needs some kind of temporal feedback mechanism to timeout even accepted solutions over time, so it doesn't keep repeating stuff you gave up on 3 months ago.

Our codebase is very different from 98% of the coding stuff you'll find online, so anything more than a couple of obvious suggestions are complete lunacy, even though they've trained it on our codebase.
by ZoomZoomZoom | 2025-05-30 01:32:21+00:00
> Tbf, there's a phase of learning to code where everything is pretty much an incantation you learn because someone told you "just trust me."

There really shouldn't be. You don't need to know all the turtles by name, but "trust me" doesn't cut it most of the time. You need a minimal understanding to progress smoothly. Knowledge debt is a b*tch.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-05-30 01:33:16+00:00
I think the long term solution is P2P search where the client is configured to know who you trust. So if you search for waffles, and you trust somebody who trusts somebody who published a waffle recipe, that'll probably be one of your first results. If you get an untrustworthy result, revoke trust in whoever caused you to see it.

It's not exactly on the horizon but I think it's possible to build a web which rewards being trustworthy, rather than one that rewards attention mongering.