MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by snowwrestler | 2025-05-31 13:35:51+00:00
The enabling technologies of the World Wide Web economic explosion were the web server and the browser. Both are now broadly available for free. The money is made in the applications enabled by them.

I think it will be similar in AI. The AI will be free or cheap; the money will be made in its application. I won’t be surprised if my kid looks back on Anthropic and OpenAI the way we look back on Sun and Netscape.
by yusina | 2025-05-31 13:37:31+00:00
> understand the work

LLMs don't understand. It's mind-boggling to me that large parts of the tech industry think that.

Don't ascribe to them what they don't have. They are fantastic at faking understanding. Don't get me wrong, for many tasks, that's good enough. But there is a fundamental limit to what all this can do. Don't get fooled into believing there isn't.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-05-31 13:38:49+00:00
I think that's the most interesting part! From the article:

> Every part of his process is intentional because he doesn't want the images to look like miniatures. The focus stacking helps him avoid the typical aesthetic of macro photography by reducing the amount of background blur and focal compression. Creating an image that looks like it was taken with an ultra-wide-angle lens also results in leading lines we associate with normal-sized things, like streets and buildings, which tricks your brain into thinking the subject is not small. He also uses lighting to make it look like the sun is shining down, emphasizing the feeling that you are standing inside something.
by gus_massa | 2025-05-31 13:38:57+00:00
> Scrolling

Chrome on Windows 10, nothing fancy. I move pick the scroll bar on the right with the mouse and move slowly down, perhaps to the middle and try to find a empty range, and when I release mouse it goes back near the top. As a guess: Have you tire to scroll at the ame time that other player is solving puzles in the same section? Try section 1.

> requires no backtracking

I have more background in Math Olympiads and plain Math. You can do backtracking to find a unique solution if you write all the options and discard all-1 of them. It sounds fancier if you call it "Reductio ad absurdum" :) . It's an usual trick, and my recommendation is that if you are in the middle of a problem that ask to fill a board and you have two(or more) options, first copy the board as many times as necessary and intermediately fill the two(or more) possibilities, to avoid forgetting one of them.

For games like minesweeper, sudoku or nonogram, my personal criteria is that if I can run the backtracking in my head, it's "thinking", but if I have to draw the two(or more) boards it's "backtracking".

For me it's probably only two options in a square, no further branching and only two or three steps deep before the contradiction. (If your name is Magnus, everything is "thinking".)

(By the way: Nice game implementation!)
by drankl | 2025-05-31 13:40:28+00:00
Women's rights are human rights. Have you considered this?

Any eligble female athlete should be allowed to compete in the female category, regardless of identity. Coincidentally, to answer your question, there is a good example from women's boxing in the 2024 Olympics: Hergie Bacyadan, a female boxer who identifies as a man.

Sports governing bodies are, thankfully, moving away from flawed identity-based policies and back towards recognizing male physical advantage as the excluding factor for the female category. So athletes like Khelif and Semenya are excluded. But athletes with CAIS, for example, may be permitted to compete as if they are female.

It is your choice if you don't wish to converse further about this. I expect others will recognize your contribution for the drive-by scolding that it was.
by JoshCole | 2025-05-31 13:40:36+00:00
You're doing this thing again where you say tons of things that aren't true.

> An LLM only learns through input text.

This is false. There already exist LLM which understand more than just text. Relevant search term: multi-modality.

> It doesn't have a first-person 3D experience of the world.

Again false. It is trivial to create such an experience with multi-modality. Just set up an input device which streams that.

> So it can't execute physical experiments, or even understand them.

Here you get confused again. It doesn't follow, based on perceptual modality, that someone can't do or understand experiments. Hellen Keller can be both blind, but also do an experiment.

Beyond just being confused, you also make another false claim. Current LLMs already have the capacity to run experiments and do so. Search terms: tool usage, ReAct loop, AI agents.

> It can understand the texts about it, but it can't visualize it, because it doesn't have a visual experience.

Again, false!

Multi-modal LLMs currently possess the ability to generate images.

> And ultimately our physical world is governed by physical processes. So at the fundamentals of physical reality, the LLMs lack understanding. And therefore will stay dependent on humans educating and correcting it.

Again false. The same sort of reasoning would claim that Hellen Keller couldn't read a book, but braille exists. The ability to acquire information outside an umwelt is a capability that intelligence enables.
by NoTranslationL | 2025-05-31 13:40:38+00:00
This is a tough problem. I’m working on an app called Reflect [1] that lets you analyze your life’s data and the temptation to draw conclusions from charts and correlations is strong. We added an experiments feature that will let you form hypotheses and it will even flag confounding variables if you track other metrics during your experiments. Still trying to make it even better to avoid drawing false conclusions.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...
by mark_l_watson | 2025-05-31 13:40:53+00:00
I basically agree with you also, but I have a somewhat contrarian view of scaling -> brick wall. I feel like applications of powerful local models is stagnating, perhaps because Apple has not done a good job so far with Apple Intelligence.

A year ago I expected a golden age of local model intelligence integrated into most software tools, and more powerful commercial tools like Google Jules to be something used perhaps 2 or 3 times a week for specific difficult tasks.

That said, my view of the future is probably now wrong, I am just saying what I expected.
by Elaris | 2025-05-31 13:40:56+00:00
This immediately reminded me of my experience in school. At that time, the teacher encouraged us to take notes in class, and I would desperately copy down what the teacher said, especially the “key points” written on the blackboard, for fear of missing them. But the interesting thing is that I was not “listening” at all at that time. My attention was all on copying, and as a result, I didn't remember what was actually said. After class, I almost never looked at these notes again, they just became a pile of papers in my schoolbag that made me feel guilty. Later I found that this way of learning was not suitable for me. Instead, I can remember content that has stories, pictures, and emotional resonance, rather than copying word for word. So I think that even if “handwriting” is helpful to some people, it does not mean that it is equally effective for everyone. The real challenge may be to help us find a learning method that suits us, rather than forcing a “optimal solution”.
by HDThoreaun | 2025-05-31 13:41:36+00:00
I disagree. In my experience the best art is almost always created or at least masterminded by a single person or small team. AI will allow these visionaries to create high fidelity content without engaging with the Hollywood machine. I view it as an incredible democratization of art that will allow the best ideas to rise in conjunction with apps like tiktok that are quickly able to find the most entertaining content posted by anyone and share it widely.

In music I think its similar to the claim that people using samples arent real musicians. Its a take many will have, but many others will have no problem enjoying stuff created with the help of AI.
by perrygeo | 2025-05-31 13:41:50+00:00
Take this paper with a grain of salt. They compare global gridded datasets with on-the-ground population surveys from dam construction projects. Gridded datasets do indeed underestimate population in these areas compared to global grids. But the authors use this as evidence that the global grids are biased against all rural areas.

Given that these regions were clearly valuable real estate - valleys with waterways near urban centers - it's very hard to make the case that these 307 flooded valleys represent all rural areas on earth. It seems like the authors conveniently skip the bias they themselves introduced. A few hundred dam sites are not representative of rural land on earth, and this paper is sketchy AF for trying to make that claim without supporting their assumption.

Furthermore, and this might be more a chip on my personal shoulder, they fail to outline their methods or do adequate sensitivity analysis. The vector footprint of the reservoirs and the raster population grid are disparate data models and there are many different approaches for determining their overlap. Do you include the center of the cell? Only 50% coverage? Any coverage? 100% coverage only? How are the data reprojected to align spatially? And given the coarse resolution and spatial arrangement (fractal coastlines, high perimeter:area), those details are not just GIS nerdery, they have massive impacts on the results. At least the code is available so it could potentially be reviewed.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-05-31 13:42:11+00:00
Roger.

Can't access the article without some other browser, however keep in mind that business risk is in essence a completely different factor than potential return on investment, or what turns out to be actual return. Three fundamentally different things each composed of way different variables.

Regardless, they go hand-in-hand when investment is involved, the attitude at one extreme is to avoid risk as much as possible, while the other extreme will tolerate or even seek out the riskiest of ventures when they feel they will have good fortune in pursuit of unpredictably better returns which sometimes can not be achieved any other way.

One thing that influences relative cost that doesn't seem to be well-represented by those using equations, is what is the source of the energy to begin with?

It's too obvious.

In one respect, nuclear and solar are at the same end of the spectrum where the "fuel" is so long-lasting that it virtually drops out of the equations compared to so many other things.

But virtually zero may not be close enough to true zero when you consider the cost of the fuel itself plus costs to get that fuel ready for harvesting the energy it has to offer.

Once everything else is in place except for actually getting the fuel into a state of readiness from how it is found in nature, few other options compare to the zero cost that solar, wind and a few others will always have in their equations. This number for solar will never go up regardless of scale, and fuel is such a major consideration it is completely tied to production as strongly as anything can be.

IIRC, zero is quite a number.

In a simplified way there are a lot of businesses that don't actually make money until after the initial capital expenditure has been recovered, a point of zero debt is achieved, and until another capital expenditure occurs, performance results from profits in excess of ongoing expenses.

Surely the most convincing financial structures would be dependent on the most dis-similar accounting tactics, since diverse fuel sources can be nothing like each other even though they will always be tied to production, so it must not become possible to do anything but compare apples to oranges :\
by neom | 2025-05-31 13:42:28+00:00
No employees accomplish anything on their own in the real world, all employees are part of a team. That's why I designed a business strategy and analysis layer (over half the system, in fact), with web tools and connections to all of the insights systems (like mix panel). I built the exact same thing I build at digitalocean but instead of humans I defined them with code, digitalocean runs just fine, so does my LLM system. The whole system I build is self learning, insight gathering and refinement. Competition is for losers, the best teams win via the best insights.
by whynotminot | 2025-05-31 13:42:49+00:00
Sure! You asked for it, here’s my speech:

I’m a software engineer so for work I use it daily. It doesn’t “do my job” but it makes my job vastly more enjoyable. Need unit tests? Done. Want a prototype of an idea that you can refine? Here. Shell script? Boom. Somewhat complicated SQL query? Here ya go. Working with some framework you haven’t used before? Just having a conversation with AI about what I’m trying to do is so much better than sorting through often poorly written documentation. It’s like talking to another engineer who just recently worked on that same kind of problem… except for almost any problem you encounter. My productivity is higher. More than that, I find myself much more willing to take on bigger, harder problems because I know there’s powerful resources to answer just about any question I could have. It just makes me enjoy the job more.

In my personal life, I use it to cut through the noise that in recent year has begun to overwhelm the signal on the internet. Give me a salmon recipe. This used to be the sort of thing you’d put into Google and get great results. Now first result is some ad-stuffed website that is 90% fluff piece and a recipe hidden at the bottom. Just give me the fricken recipe! AI does that.

The other day I was trying to figure out whether a designer-made piece of furniture was authentic despite missing tags. Had a back and forth with ChatGPT, sharing photos, describing the build quality, telling it what the store owner had told me. Incredible depth of knowledge about an obscure piece of furniture.

I also use the image generation all the time. For instance, for the piece of furniture I talked about, I took a picture of my apartment, and the furniture, and asked it to put the furniture into my space, allowing me to visualize it before purchase.

It’s a frickin super power! I cannot even begin to understand how people are still skeptical about the transformative power of this stuff. It kind of feels like people are standing outside the library of Alexandria, debating whether it’s providing any value, when they haven’t even properly gone inside.

Yes, there are flaws. I’m sure there’s people reading this about to tell me it made them put glue on their salad or whatever. But what we have is already so deeply useful to me. Could I have done all of this through old fashioned search? Mastered Photoshop and put the furniture into my apartment on my own? Of course! But the immediacy here is the game changer.
by AnonC | 2025-05-31 13:43:51+00:00
This article from August 2021 on Arstechnica, titled “A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps” still seems relevant. [1]

Google doesn’t seem to have any control over or change in its internal politics and “promotion led new projects” culture (which later get replaced by the same tricks they employed).

If you were to ask someone, even people in Google, which app is Google’s official messaging app, they’d have a tough time figuring it out. It changes by seasons.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...
by ck_one | 2025-05-31 13:44:02+00:00
In many fields there is no moat. It’s an execution battle and it comes down to question: can the startup innovate faster and get to the customers or can the incumbent defend its existing distribution well enough.

Microsoft owns GitHub and VSCode yet cursor was able to out execute them. Legora is moving very quickly in the legal space. Not clear yet who will win.
by smitty1e | 2025-05-31 13:45:41+00:00
Sites like Stack Overflow are a DMZ[1] where one can solve problems and build skills.

Conceiving of them as a teaching/recruiting market might be a way to help matters, but keeping the focus on the strategic mission of developing people, instead of the tactical goal of maximizing profit, is the gnarly part.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demilitarized_zone
by like_any_other | 2025-05-31 13:47:05+00:00
> The budget’s fastest-growing line item isn’t defense, or healthcare, but the interest on our debt. Even if this $3.7 trillion middle finger to future generations doesn’t pass, net interest payments on the debt will total $13.8 trillion over the next decade.

Isn't it funny how an entity that can print money needs loans? Oh well, at least those lending to it are making a profit, whoever they are.

> Key to my ability to access this path was affirmative action, specifically Pell Grants.

I've never heard financial assistance for the poor described as "affirmative action" until now. In fact such assistance predates the term.
by susam | 2025-05-31 13:47:59+00:00
Typically, when we photograph small objects at very close range, only a narrow depth of field is in focus. The rest of the image appears blurred. The further other parts of the scene are from the focal plane, the more they blur. This shallow focus helps us to understand scale and depth.

However, in these pictures, the artist has cleverly avoided the blurring effect by combining multiple pictures taken at different focal distances into a single image. The resulting pictures look crisp and clear throughout, and as a result, lacks the usual depth cues we are accustomed to in macro photography. That's why these pictures resemble photographs of large halls!

A similar effect can be observed in ray tracing as well, where we are free to construct entirely imaginary scenes. While defining a scene that we want to be perceived as small, we need to remember to add focal blur [1] carefully. If we forget to do so, the resulting scene can produce the exact opposite impression, that of a vast space.

[1]: https://github.com/susam/pov25#focal-blur
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-31 13:48:21+00:00
Im more impressed by red dead redemption 2 or baldurs gate 3.

There is no “basis” other my gut feeling. Unless you can get quantified metrics to compare that’s all we got. For example if you had lines of code for both, or average IQ. Both would lead towards the “basis” which neither you or I have.
by codeforafrica | 2025-05-31 13:48:30+00:00
work out what it’ll take for the country to not need it and try to get there

I moved to Africa to get a better understanding of this and related questions. What is the actual situation of developing countries? What does it take to make things better? What can I do as an individual with no resources other than the income I get from work?

I am still at the beginning. I have only been here for two years. What I have learned so far is very limited but my observations so far suggest that:

The exploitation of natural resources (oil, gold, minerals, etc) need to be done in a way that the money flows back into the countries. The countries then can/should invest that money into the improvement of local infrastructure (health care, better roads, trains, water, electricity where it is still missing...)

Education needs to be done in a way that doesn't disrupt local culture. Currently schools are based on colonial models, and I don't feel they are a good fit. Children are forced to live away from home in boarding schools and get a western style education that ignores or changes their culture. Poor families can't send their children to school because they live off their farm and can't even get the money to pay for the school uniform or the materials.

On the other hand, just giving them those things creates exactly that dependency that we don't want. What is needed is an education system that remote villages and nomadic tribes can implement on their own without being forced to send their children away and change their lifestyle just to be able to afford the costs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUNDAEC is a potential example of how that could look like.

What can I do as an individual? I am still figuring that out. My approach is to try to hire local junior developers to work on my projects. I am not paying them a western salary. That may sound unfair and exploitative, but with the average income being so low, western salaries would only create a few rich people and depend on trickle-down-economics to make that money work. I feel that instead giving multiple people a decent local salary would accomplish more. On top of that, a single local salary can be funded easily from anyone working in IT in developed countries. You don't need to run a business to be able to do that. Besides that I am also trying to sponsor a few children to help them pay for school. This is not a big project. The families are friends I made along the way, and it's more of a boost for a few kids down on their luck. Kids who lost one parent or both and are living with relatives who are struggling to feed their own kids.

There is a lot that I am still missing. And I don't even know if the things I am doing so far are right or effective. Only time will tell.

Btw, I am looking for work. If you want to support my efforts, please reach out.
by bheadmaster | 2025-05-31 13:49:06+00:00
Hah. Good observatoon.

I often get in arguments about how I tend to avoid brands that put too much into marketing. Of course, theoretically, the amount of money a company puts into marketing doesn't automatically lower the quality of their products, but in my experience, the correlation is there. Whiskas, Coka Cola, McDonalds, etc.
by tocs3 | 2025-05-31 13:51:16+00:00
I have been thinking about this for a long time. Thanks for the link.

The biggest advantage of character-based encodings is that they can be decoded by humans (as opposed to dot-based encodings), which means that you don’t need a camera or a scanner to recover the data.

This is an interesting point. In our post apocalyptic future scholars will be using their quills to translate archives of these (in my imagination anyway). Of course they would have to translate into binary and then into human chars.

I can imaging they will be sad they cannot listen to the mp3's.

Adding color allows on to code more information per dot (3x more with three colors).

Is this right? Wouldn't it be base-3 encoding? Three bits of binary can count to 8. Three trits of base three can count to 27. Color has all sorts of disadvantages but maybe a much greater payoff (unless I m mistaken).
Show HN: AI Peer Reviewer – Multiagent system for scientific manuscript analysis
by rjakob | 2025-05-31 13:51:16+00:00
After waiting 8 months for a journal response or two months for co-author feedback that consisted of "looks good" and a single comma change, we built an AI-powered peer review system that helps researchers improve their manuscripts rapidly before submission.

The system uses multiple specialized agents to analyze different aspects of scientific papers, from methodology to writing quality.

Key features: 24 specialized agents analyzing sections, scientific rigor, and writing quality // Detailed feedback with actionable recommendations. // PDF report generation. // Support for custom review criteria and target journals.

Two ways to use it:

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The system is particularly useful for researchers preparing manuscripts before submission to co-authors or target journals.

Would love to get feedback from the HN community, especially from PhDs and researchers across all academic fields. The project is open source and we welcome contributions!

GitHub: https://github.com/robertjakob/rigorous Cloud version: https://www.rigorous.company