MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Xss3 | 2025-05-11 15:02:07+00:00
Yes there is plenty of evidence that carnivorous plants die in alkaline or neutral soil conditions.

Read literally any book about caring for them. They like acidic soil. Rain water is slightly acidic.

It might take a year or more to kill a plant by slowly draining its soil of acidity. Just like it can take a year to kill a big plant via inadequate lighting.
by mistrial9 | 2025-05-11 15:02:57+00:00
there might be insight there, but.. too broad brush. As "everyone knows" Silicon Valley started as a dot-mil fab but California invented the personal computer and sold it. Hey wait, just California?! yes, mostly.. See the West Coast Computer Fair .. shout out to Byte Magazine from New England too.

"avoid politics" was true for some stripes of participants and completely not true for others.. It is true IMHO that consumer gear generated a lot of success and was largely apolitical.
by mapt | 2025-05-11 15:02:58+00:00
> The report somehow fails to mention the bit where the Silicon Valley VC and executive crowd worked their backsides off to elect Trump and several of them sat in the front row at his inauguration. Then they were actually surprised when the leopard ate their faces too.

Many of these people are still running the Trump Administration from the shadows. Elon Musk turns out to just be one example of the billionaire to right wing brainrot lunatic infohazard funnel.

It mentions the Semafor story. Here's Adam Conover covering that - https://youtu.be/3_PKKUFxRyk?feature=shared
by jparishy | 2025-05-11 15:03:08+00:00
IMO the best innovations tend to happen when someone has their hands bound and has no other choices but to figure out a new way or die. Now seems like an incredible time for new models and startup paradigms.

To me I think VC's figured out a way to market a very specific way to build companies and convinced a lot of people it's the only way for 20-ish years. Then there was this sort of shift to selling to enterprise, I think because B2C got harder and easy money was the goal. By then a lot of enterprise design makers were probably in the networks of the people selling. There's a meme about YC-of-late being mostly companies that sell shovels to each other.

But when you optimize for enterprise, I think you end up losing a lot of diversity of opinion in where the value comes from, which leads to top-heavy companies.

My main issue is that after the ZIRP era I don't believe the money is gone or unavailable. It just seems to be hoarded for some reason. There is astronomical wealth out there that could be used for trying new economic models that compete with the last generation of VCs. But it isn't happening.

Maybe the next era of VC decision makers, the ones who themselves were funded on big bets, just don't have the same appetite for risk? Or maybe the era of "developing your brand" has made them not want to share their success? I'm not sure but it's weird to me.
by motohagiography | 2025-05-11 15:03:31+00:00
interesing view, my memory of the launch of the euro currency, schengen area and the coordniation of policy in brussels was sold as a peace plan to prevent future wars.

where I think they are about to cause war is the EU's (and now UK's) attacks on farmers and cynical mass immigration together are creating the conditions for popular revolt in several countries. hate speech laws are to prevent people from organizing popular resistance to these policies.

that we have the tech to make hate speech laws unenforcable means the EU will have shown its undeniable malice toward europeans while demonstrating its own weakness. it would be forfeiting moral authority during an attempt to destroy these national cultures with draconian speech laws, and I would bet against it surviving the popular counterpunch. this counterpunch scenario is the war I would foresee being a likely result.
by immibis | 2025-05-11 15:03:59+00:00
Didn't they say this about LLMs but we still only have highly advanced slop generators, highly advanced autocomplete, and highly advanced search?

While they're impressively good in each of the aforementioned three fields, they're still not the world-changing technology they were supposed to be, right? (At least, not by themselves. When a very powerful human ties themselves to a slop machine, believing the output to be real, this can change the world)

The main achievement, besides search which is a very useful application, has been in how effectively we can get real people to believe total bullshit.
by ashishbagri | 2025-05-11 15:04:17+00:00
Thanks for taking a look! 1. The current implementation is just for clickhouse as we started with the segment of users building real time analytics with clickhouse in their stack. However we already learned during the way that streaming deduplication is a challenge for other destination databases as well. The architecture of our tool is designed in a way that we can extend the sinks and add additional destinations. We would just have to write the sink component specific for that database. Do you have a specific DB in mind that you would like to use?

2. Again, we started with kafka because of our early target users. But the architecture inherently supports adding multiple sources. We already have experience in building multiple source and sink connectors (from our previous project) so adding additional sources would not be so challenging. which source do you have in mind?

3. Yes, running the tool locally on a macbook pro M2 docker, it was able to handle 15k requests per second. We have built a load testing infrastructure and happy to share the code if you are interested.
by cduzz | 2025-05-11 15:04:20+00:00
But, are you looking at what's going on, with the on-again / off-again tariffs announced on discord or whatever, and thinking, "oh, lordy, I can finally rebuild my dream factory in Missoula!" are you?

If I had a specific domestic product to protect and foster, I imagine I'd probably be somewhat more nuanced than whatever this process has been.

Over my life, I've seen car assembly leave the Los Angeles area, I've worked in machine tool manufacturing plants, I've seen modest electronic manufacturing companies fail in Massachusetts, I've seen C Beams glitter off the shoulder of Orion, etc. Now I work a bland service sector job managing kafka clusters.

The infrastructure elsewhere was developed by thoughtful and focused government effort to foster the industry domestically. I don't see what's going on now, in any way, focused or thoughtful. I don't see a plan, just arson.

So, I won't speak for you, but I can't imagine anyone looking at the current US Governments' policies and thinking "I'm going to pull assets from elsewhere and build there because that looks really stable and thoughtful and they've got my back."
by jeltz | 2025-05-11 15:05:57+00:00
If the issue had been as simple as government spending we would not have seen the inflation in countries which did not have the same government spending the US had but we did. Maybe it contributed but I doubt it was the primary cause since inflation happened all over the world and not just in countries with generous stimulus packages.

Plus a lot of the inflation was caused by increasing energy prices in 2022, totally unrelated to government spending.
by dmit | 2025-05-11 15:06:31+00:00
> I don't think zig best-practices are written in stone yet, but I would expect ReleaseSafe to be the default in production.

Which profile is the default for the Zig compiler itself? What about Bun? TigerBeetle was the only one of the three to use ReleaseSafe by default last I checked? (Edit: in fact, they outright ban ReleaseFast and ReleaseSmall because they care about correctness.) ZLS suggests ReleaseSafe in its README too, if you count it among the prominent Zig projects.
by firejake308 | 2025-05-11 15:06:40+00:00
You have an interesting argument here. It sounds like you're saying that once you've proven safety in Phase I trials, and you can skip to the large, post-market Phase IV studies to do the dose-finding and efficacy-proving that would traditionally be done in smaller Phase II and III trials. As long as the drug is not dangerous, which can be proven by the Phase I trial, there is no need for the masses to wait for slow Phase II/III trials because in the worst-case scenario, the drug is safe but not effective, which is an acceptable outcome. So far, I find this pretty convincing.

However, I would raise two objections.

1. Without a Phase III trial that proves effectiveness, payers do not have sufficient motivation to purchase a drug that may or may not work. One solution would be to have the producer of the drug offer the drug for free/cheap until it demonstrates effectiveness, but that becomes a lot more expensive when you have a larger cohort. This is admittedly an implementation detail that could be sorted out, but it's a very important detail that would have to be addressed for this plan to work in the real world. The bigger problem is:

2. The best way to prove that a drug works is a large, randomized controlled trial. Your proposal is definitely an improvement over current trials in terms of making them larger, which would help to improve statistical power (and also get potentially helpful drugs into the hands of patients, of course). However, without the "ritual" of a Phase III trial, you lose randomization and you lose the placebo control. These are big losses that make statistical interpretation of results very hard because they open up the door to many potential confounders. As you mentioned, Bayesian signals can try to control for some of these confounders, but you can never be confident that you've considered every possible variable, whereas randomized placebos can eliminate almost all confounders.

So ultimately, I think that Phase III effectiveness trials are necessary in order to prove effectiveness because the statistics with post-market Phase IV trials will never be as "clean" as an RCT. And if we were to delete Phase III trials and skip straight to Phase IV, we would never again be able to confidently say whether or not a drug works. Thus, the ethical cost of making patients wait a few years for the Phase III trials to finish is outweighed by the benefit of being able to say with confidence that the drug works for the rest of eternity.
by quantadev | 2025-05-11 15:07:18+00:00
Yeah, the debate about which framework is best is like debating which programming language is best, in that they all have pros and cons, that can be debated endlessly.

However, in general, whatever's most popular is a strong signal (like a crowd-sourced signal) that it's probably indeed "the best" all around, which are two words that can also, of course, be debated endlessly based on one's personal definition of "best".
by oizys_throwaway | 2025-05-11 15:07:28+00:00
> it looks like Hephaestus wanted to leave a "way back" to the org 100% sure no on that one.

> Who is the CTO now, you or Koalemos? Technically - neither. He's "Head of tech" but people have started skirting him and going to me directly instead because he always says he doesn't know and has to talk to me on essentially every topic.

> I'm not surprised Koalemos did it their way. Unless there was a really strong reason about not doing it, why that person cannot do the job their way? From my understanding because it did exactly what Hephaestus foresaw - things breaking.

> What's bad about it? Another option could have been to reset the password for the old CTO and then occasionally check their inbox.
by hello_computer | 2025-05-11 15:08:53+00:00
exactly! red hat is a huge “contributor” to the “linux ecosystem”, but those contributions are mostly regressions. as the article states, gnome circa 2010 was stable and complete. gnome today is one breakage after the next—even if your vision is 20/20. don’t even get me started on wayland! or pulse. or systemd.
by latchkey | 2025-05-11 15:09:25+00:00
If this was part of reducing operational overhead, why not implement something functionally like GCP Cloud Tasks [0]?

Since this is part of Rails, all you would need to do is implement regular http endpoints, no need for workers/listeners. Submit a "job" to the queue (which itself is just a POST) and the message details: the endpoint and some data to POST to said endpoint.

The queue "server" processes the list of jobs, hits the specified endpoint and when it gets a 200 response, it deletes it. Otherwise, it just keeps retrying.

[0] https://cloud.google.com/tasks/docs
by hollerith | 2025-05-11 15:10:06+00:00
There's a huge difference between wanting the Russian invasion to succeed and judging that the US's opposing it is not worth the cost (in Ukrainian lives and US money) or the risks (of the Kremlin doing something desperate or vengeful if the invasion turns ugly on them, like helping the Iranians and North Koreans obtain ICBMs capable of hitting US cities).
by DanHulton | 2025-05-11 15:11:06+00:00
This is honestly kind of hilarious. I fell briefly in love with SSE last summer and started to write a chat/game web server using them, only to step on every rake the author describes and attempt nearly every band-aid solution the MCP protocol implements, only to throw my hands up at the end, disgusted with the mess I made, and embrace WebSockets instead. After about a day's refactor, I had about three-quarters less code that was _much_ easier to reason about, and didn't have several key limitations I was uneasy about in my SSE implementation.
by NarimanN2 | 2025-05-11 15:11:19+00:00
In this video, we will build an AI-powered podcaster that converts text to speech using Kokoro, LangChain, and Streamlit.I’ll show you how to set up Kokoro’s text-to-speech (TTS) model, use LangChain to optionally summarize the text with Ollama’s Deepseek LLM, and build a simple Streamlit app to create a fully AI-generated podcast. If you’re curious about how to run text-to-speech models locally or want to learn how to use Ollama, LangChain, and Streamlit together for real-world applications, this tutorial is for you.
by nine_k | 2025-05-11 15:11:47+00:00
AFAICT, there are native connector implementations for ClickHouse and Kafka, so it's plug and play with them specifically.

OTOH for deduplication you mostly need timestamps and a good hash (like SHA512), you don;t need to store the actual messages, so a naive approach should work with basically any even source; all you need is to look up the hash, compare the timestamps, and skip the message if the hashes match. But you need to write your own ingestion and output logic, maybe emulating whatever protocol you're using if you want the whole thing to be a drop-in node in your pipeline.
Show HN: One-liner CLI for batched PDF-to-Markdown at $1 per ~6k pages
by monatis | 2025-05-11 15:12:32+00:00
Extracting clean text from PDFs is still a mess. Tools like dockling and marker do a decent job—but they’re slow and resource-hungry. pymupdf4llm is fast, but it’s AGPL-licensed, which means you'd need to open-source everything that talks to it—even over the network.

Gemini Batch Prediction gives you blazing throughput and unbeatable pricing—$1 for 6,000 pages. The catch? It’s a pain to use.

That is, until now. We wrapped it up in a few friendly CLI commands—simple enough for your grandparents to enjoy.
by yubblegum | 2025-05-11 15:13:35+00:00
> I agree, which is why I want us to separate the baseline components from more powerful abstractions, leaving the former for the machine (the framework) and the latter for us. Does the limited scope of HTTP by itself mean we shouldn't be able to provide more semantically appropriate interfaces for services? The real issue is that those interfaces are hard to standardize, not that people don't make them.

We're likely in general agreement in terms of technical analysis. Let's focus on the concrete metric of 'economy' and hand-wavy metric of 'natural order'.

Re the latter, consider the thought that 'maybe the reason it is so difficult to standardize interfaces is because it is a false utopia?'

Re the former, the actual critical metric is 'is it more ecomical to create disposable and ad-hoc systems, or, to amortize the cost of a very "hard" task across 1 or 2 generations of software systems and workers?'

Now the industry voted with its wallets and blog propaganda of 'fresh engineers' with no skin in the component oriented approach in early '00s. That entire backlash that included "noSQL" movement was in fact, historically, a shift mainly motivated by economic considerations aided by a few black swans, like Linux and containarization. But now, the 'cost' of the complexity of assembly, deployment, and orchestration of a system based on that approach is causing information overload on the workers. And now we have generative AI, which seems to further tip the economic balance in favor of the late stage ad-hoc approach to putting a running system together.

As to why I used 'natural order'. The best "Lego like" system out there is organic chemistry. The (Alan) Kay vision of building code like nature builds organisms is of course hugely appealing. I arrived at the same notions independently when younger (post architecture school) but what I missed then and later realized is that the 'natural order' works because of the stupendous scales involved and the number of layers! Sure, maybe we can get software to be "organic" but it will naturally (pi) present the same perplexity to us as do biological systems. Do we actually fully understand how our bodies work?

(Just picking old professional scabs here)
by Nauxuron | 2025-05-11 15:13:36+00:00
> 4.5/o3 doesn't seem hugely more intelligent then 3.0 -- it hallucinates less [...]

This is not entirely true, or at least the trend is not necessarily less hallucination. See section 3.3 in the OpenAI o3 and o4-mini System Card[1], which shows that o3 and o4-mini both hallucinate more than o1. See also [2] for more data on hallucinations.

[1]: https://openai.com/index/o3-o4-mini-system-card/

[2]: https://github.com/vectara/hallucination-leaderboard/
by cduzz | 2025-05-11 15:13:47+00:00
Every ten years I fiddle around with DNS and look for these weird names where the top level domain resolves to an actual address.

It's funny to refer to these as "dotless" since you still need a dot, on the end, to "canonize" the name and tell your DNS recursor 'hey, stop appending domains to see if you can find this.'

And, our recent history has "Canonized" a new pope, and you could (maybe?) look it up against one of the few dotless global DNS entries, but it's still going to need the trailing dot to tell your recursor that it's a canonical name...
by jeffreyrogers | 2025-05-11 15:14:44+00:00
It's a little hard to say for sure because companies can stay private longer and in some cases don't need to go public at all, but it seems that the last wave of huge successes were founded pre-2015 and since then the industry has been looking for the next wave, first with crypto, now with AI, and there are some tentative pushes into manufacturing/defense.

AI actually seems like a great fit for the VC business model, much more so than most SaaS companies are. Successes are likely to make a ton of money and they can't self finance or finance with debt because they need to spend a huge amount of money.
by rfl890 | 2025-05-11 15:15:17+00:00
What about damage control? I would argue your "anonymous, immediate disclosure" to the public (filled with bad actors) would be rubbing salt in the wound (allow more people to exploit the vulnerability before it's fixed). That's why nobody publishes writeups before the vuln is fixed. Even if corporations don't fix vulns in time, I can only see harm being done from not privately reporting them.
by eadmund | 2025-05-11 15:15:26+00:00
> the scientific opinion is that there are no safe amounts of alcohol consumption

That is incorrect. For it to be true, a single drink in one’s life would be an unsafe amount — and that is clearly nonsense.

Alcohol and tobacco have positive and negative mental, physical and spiritual effects. Abused, they are terrible. Employed properly, they are key factors in a balanced, pleasant, meaningful and rewarding life — a healthy life.

I do acknowledge that the balance may be much less than folks commonly use. I hope that weekly use of alcohol and tobacco is safe enough, but fear that daily use may not be. I will not accept that yearly use is negative.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-05-11 15:17:11+00:00
To add to this, the main ML parts, as I understand it, are for the initial unrolling of layers, and for the detection of ink vs. no-ink (the position of the 'splotches'). Both of these are trained and calibrated from human observations.

All interpretation of ink as Greek letters is done purely by human inference. This may lead to errors, especially in parts where the ink is preserved especially poorly or where the text is totally different from expectations, but it would be classic human error instead of AI hallucination.
by devmandan | 2025-05-11 15:17:53+00:00
I'm less interested in the theory and am more interested in the practice. I own a printed copy of the 2015 version of the spec, but don't find the insights I get from it have much to do with its ability to scan as compared to taking my phone out and scanning a QR code does.

In practice, I mostly I find that the corners are the most finicky part. However, that is just my current opinion.
by egl2020 | 2025-05-11 15:18:04+00:00
When I worked at Google, Ian Lance Taylor was in the pool of randomly assigned code reviewers. He was polite, firm, and informative. It speaks well of Taylor and the project that he was doing this kind of review--- it's a version of the YC advice about founders doing customer support.

And maybe I'm shallow, but it was a thrill to see his initials show up on my code reviews. Thanks for all your work on golang.
by mpweiher | 2025-05-11 15:19:14+00:00
Your history is also a bit off:

in 1948, when partition of the last remaining sliver of the mandate regions was announced, with the vast bulk already having gone to the Arabs, the Jews weren't happy, but immediately accepted. Because their goal was to have a Jewish state.

All the Arabs had to do to gain a Palestinian state (in addition to Syria and Jordan, the other mandate regions) was to also accept.

Peace.

Instead, the Arabs immediately attacked from all sides in a war of annihilation against the newly formed Jewish state. And despite the overwhelming odds the Arabs lost that genocidal war of aggression. And rebranded their own war of annihilation as the "nakba" supposedly perpetrated against them. "Woe is me".

Because the Arab goal never was "a Palestinian state". The Arab goal was always "no Jewish state". And of course for the rest of the Arabs the Palestinians are just the useful idiots who do their bidding and suffer the consequences.

But this is slowly coming to an end. Egypt recognized Israel a long time ago. So did Jordan. A bunch of the emirates also did recently (the Abraham accords). The new Syrian government has indicated that they will also recognize Israel. Saudi Arabia was also close to recognition and economic cooporation when their regional rival Iran used their proxies Hamas and Hizbollah to throw a violent spanner into the gears of peaceful diplomacy.

Because a Saudi/Israeli alliance is as much a nightmare-scenario for the Mullahs as it is a dream for the region.

This was a last ditch attempt that ultimately failed: Saudi Arabia has indicated that their plans are only delayed, Iran's proxies Hamas and Hizbollah have been all but destroyed, their ally Syria (land-route to their proxies) has fallen and wants to recognize Israel and their non-proxy attacks on Israel backfired so massively that it was embarrassing to watch from the outside.

After the direct Iranian attacks, Israel demonstrated that they have complete and total air superiority over Iran, took out their main air-defense just as a demonstration and then left. So Iran is in no position to do anything.

Without their backers, Hamas will not be able to resume their usual terror regime.

It won't happen overnight, but there is hope that the nightmare situation in the Middle East is slowly drawing to a close.