MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ftth_finland | 2025-05-31 19:17:25+00:00
> When French nuclear plants get shut down for months at a time for maintenance what happens?

You reconsider your life choices and hire the Finnish to run your nuclear power plants instead.

> The reason why batteries and pumped storage and syngas arent popular is because they cant beat the economics of gas for peaking capacity.

It’s not even just the economics that rule out batteries and pumped storage. Where are you going to put all that pumped storage? Where are you going to get all the batteries you need? Not that many batteries are produced compared to the world’s energy needs.

The jury is still out on syngas. So far it’s expensive and inefficient. But it’s still early days.

> the fact its a horrible peaker

Why on earth would you run a nuclear power plant as a peaker? That’s inefficient and wasteful. You run a nuclear power plant at full tilt, all the time. Then you divy up any excess demand to other sources of power.

> So yeah, exorcising nuclear seems like a pretty fantastic idea, for cost, environmental and pacifist reasons.

This seems to be a wonderful idea, as long as you assume nobody lives above the 60th parallel and don’t mind on relying on CO2 producing power sources.
by jgraettinger1 | 2025-05-31 19:17:40+00:00
> Microsoft owns GitHub and VSCode yet cursor was able to out execute them

Really? My startup is under 30 people. We develop in the open (source available) and are extremely willing to try new process or tooling if it'll gain us an edge -- but we're also subject to SOC2.

Our own evaluation was Cursor et all isn't worth the headache of the compliance paperwork. Copilot + VSCode is playing rapid catch-up and is a far easier "yes".

How large is the intersection of companies who a) believe Cursor has a substantive edge in capability, and b) have willingness to send Cursor their code (and go through the headaches of various vendor reviews and declarations)?
by sfpotter | 2025-05-31 19:18:37+00:00
Cool post.

The Lipschitz trick here relies on the assumption that the gradient has magnitude 1 everywhere. Evaluating the SDF in a box and using the Lipschitz property lets you get some quick estimates on the range of the SDF over the box.

This is a close cousin of the monotonicity interval inclusion: e.g., if f'([a, b]) > 0, then f([a, b]) is a subset of [f(a), f(b)]. Rounded interval arithmetic makes this rigorous on a computer; you can also do it in multiple dimensions, with higher derivatives, successively tightening inclusions for lower derivatives, etc.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-31 19:19:45+00:00
>The article is talking about functions whose changes over an displacement dx are not just bounded by K |dx| for some K,

It is also talking about functions which do not have a derivative at all and therefore could not possibly have that property. The point of Lipschitz functions is that they need not have a derivative.

>So it's not the same thing as the Lipschitz property in analysis, although I guess it's inspired by it--but as a result it's concrete and useful for algorithms.

That is just some arbitrary scaling. Only relevant to have the math look nicer. E.g. if f is Lipschitz for L=10, then f/10 is Lipschitz for L=1.
by johnea | 2025-05-31 19:20:24+00:00
I didn't see in the article, or anywhere in these comments, the reasons that Stack Overflow became a "read only" resource for me.

The article did center around user's as moderators, but I felt there was a sudden increase in moderation around the time the company was sold.

Previously I had been able to enter a question, or an answer relatively easily. But there was a sudden and sustained increase in the need to have a high enough "reputation" to be able to do either.

It seemed like the site became centered around people who spent a lot of time there, honing their points. And anyone who wasn't doing this just became unable to post questions or answers.

At that point, I would just use the site to refer to answers already in place, and no longer posted at all. From then on, there was a slow degradation of new and relevant posts.

It does still occasionally come up in a search on a technical question, and I still use it when that happens.
by c0redump | 2025-05-31 19:20:46+00:00
This was true up until pretty recently. CS has come to be seen as a “prestigious” degree, and SWE as a “prestigious” career. Lots of kids who, 10 years ago, would have studied law, medicine, finance, or hard sciences, are studying CS. At my alma mater, CS is the largest major by a huge margin. The result of all this is there is a massive supply of smart and capable American citizens with formal training trying to break in to the job market, with limited success, due in no small part to the labor oversupply caused by immigration.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jamesfobrien_tech-jobs-have-d...
by yusina | 2025-05-31 19:20:58+00:00
I agree with your description, but the pizza place case is even simpler: Statistics don't guarantee future single sample properties. 70% fail in the first year. So, 30% don't. Why would it be surprising to see one that didn't? It would be surprising to see none that didn't fail. So, it's expected to see lots that don't fail, Pete's being one of them.
by cschmidt | 2025-05-31 19:22:26+00:00
Yes, they were concurrent work. (Co-author of BoundlessBPE here). A sibling comment describes the main differences. Our paper motivates why superwords can lead to such a big improvement, by overcoming a limit that pre-tokenization imposes on current tokenization methods. The SuperBPE paper has a wonderful set of downstream evaluation runs. So if you're interested in either, they are quite complimentary papers.
by scrubs | 2025-05-31 19:23:50+00:00
@codethief Let's stipulate to all of what you write ... now per OP (to take one example) you'll need to cross the rubicon and fork git, or write your own SCS ... you're not using off the shelf.

What do you do? How do you successfully argue for the funds and time to do it then move all the poly repos into it?

Because until that's happened the problem isn't engaged in any meaningful way.
Ask HN: Would you use a platform that deploys Docker Compose apps?
by jsbroks | 2025-05-31 19:24:07+00:00
The idea is simple: you upload any docker-compose.yml, and the platform sets up a full production environment automatically including HTTPS, autoscaling, etc.

It would also work out of the box for open-source apps that use docker-compose so you can deploy tools like Ghost, Umami, or Plausible with minimal setup.

Would this be useful to you? What features would you want for your use case?
by WillAdams | 2025-05-31 19:25:08+00:00
Aren't there logs at your end you could examine? Or why not try this prompt yourself?

I will note that I had a similar result with a far simpler prompt....

Or, let's turn this around --- could you provide a page which documents a successful prompt/project? If you'll let me know the link of that, I'll try it, then once I know this works for my credentials, will try again with the effort I was making.
by ivape | 2025-05-31 19:25:22+00:00
Why do you think this is so hard, even for technical people here, to make the inductive leap on this one? Is it that close to magic? The AI is rendering pillars and also determining collision detection on it. As in, no one went in there and selected a bunch of pillars and marked it as a barrier. That means in the long run, I'll be able to take some video or pictures of the real world and have it be game level.
by yusina | 2025-05-31 19:25:39+00:00
If 99.9% fail and you see one that didn't, then would it be surprising that it didn't? No! It's not 100%, so there must be some example. For that one it's not surprising.

More precisely, it's not surprising that one exists. It may be surprising that this particular one survived, just as it wouldbe surprising that it's my neighbor who wins the lottery next week. But it's likely that somebody will, so if somebody has won, it won't be a surprise that somebody did.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-31 19:25:42+00:00
It did, in fact, bother policy makers (or, at least, it bothered their constituents enough that the constituents bothered the policy makers), which is why there are (e.g.) laws requiring pay in cash or cash equivalents; this is directly prohibition on the practice of pay in company scrip. Many other features of the company town practice were also the focus of direct legislative restrictions and prohibitions.
by quinnjh | 2025-05-31 19:25:47+00:00
Interesting question. I ran some quick numbers on Google, take last years profit for uber ($10B) and naively distribute it between all drivers (est 7M) and it comes out to a raise of 1,428. Most drivers would probably be enticed by that, but it’s not going to radically alter their situation. Also, Ubers board and investors are compelled via profit, as the purpose of a company is generating profit for its shareholders.

Would be great to see something like you suggest take off and gain national appeal, but I suspect that VC money helps with getting billboards/ newspaper ads/ etc. You would need to craft a new sort of coop model that can generate enough profits at the top to be an attractive investment but also share some. AFAIK this works best in small teams doing high value work.
by bubblethink | 2025-05-31 19:25:55+00:00
Cool project, but with this sort of power and area budget, can't we use chip scale atomic clocks ? Also, the quartz accuracy is listed as 1000 seconds to drift 1 millisecond. So that's 31 secs a year ? That's less than HAQ quartz watches (+- 5 secs a year) and definitely less than Citizen 0100 (+-1 sec a year).
by AyodeleFikayomi | 2025-05-31 19:26:35+00:00
Hi everyone, I've released an open-source project called QuantumAccel which is built around a symbolic logic engine that transforms traditional logic gates like AND, XOR, and Toffoli into optimised quantum-inspired operations, all within a constrained mathematical space.

Features:

Ultra-fast logic compression using sparse attention

Evolving symbolic gates that simulate Hadamard, CNOT, XNOR

Memory-efficient operation (as low as 4 KB for massive input)

Reversible logic operations for feature extraction, pattern recognition, and error detection

Use Cases:

Quantum simulation

Edge AI with kilobytes of RAM

Memory compression & logic acceleration

NLP/vision feature extraction without neural nets

This is part of a larger symbolic AI framework I'm building. Would love your feedback or contributions! Let me know if you're interested in symbolic computation, quantum logic, or memory-efficient learning.

Demo benchmarks and documentation are available in the repo. Apache Licensed.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-05-31 19:26:37+00:00
I think more people take a soft line. Taxation isn't theft, but too much taxation is theft.

I don't know that I've ever heard this rationally articulated. I think it's a "gut feel" that at least some people have.

If taxes take 10% of what you make, you aren't happy about it, but most of us are OK with it. If taxes take 90% of what you make, that feels different. It feels like the government thinks it all belongs to them, whereas at 10%, it feels like "the principle is that it all belongs to you, but we have to take some tax to keep everything running".

So I think the way this plays out in practice is, the amount of taxes needed to supply everyones' basic needs is across the threshold in many peoples' minds. (The threshold of "fairness" or "reasonable" or some such, though it's more of a gut feel than a rational position.)
by cschmidt | 2025-05-31 19:27:37+00:00
That's in interesting point. While your correct, of course, it is so common to consider a hash table lookup a O(1) operation, it never occurred to me. But in this case, the loops are actually really tight and the hash table lookup might be a significant part of the time, so it might well behave more like O(n L^2). I'll update the docs and paper.
by sublinear | 2025-05-31 19:27:59+00:00
I think paper is perfectly fine for most people who do not have certain medical problems, given a few prerequisites.

The main one is diet. Eat enough fiber so it's not a mess in the first place. This has many other benefits too. The next in priority is wet wipes. I strongly prefer them, and they are portable unlike a bidet. They are super useful while away from the toilet as well. After that there's technique. I am confident that the people who complain about paper and wet wipes are simply wiping way too hard causing chafing or even fissures. I don't want to get too graphic, but you also need to "relax" a bit down there for the most thorough job instead of just a surface level wipe. Normal paper first for removal of the "bulk material" and wet wipes for the residue.

That's it folks! If you do all this right, washing your hands afterwards shouldn't need so much effort either.

Bonus tip: why not just carry a little atomizer bottle filled with water so you can make your own wet wipes in a pinch? The spray is gentle enough to not completely saturate and ruin even the thinnest and cheapest toilet paper you find in the wild, and such a spray bottle is again very useful away from the toilet.
by lolinder | 2025-05-31 19:28:23+00:00
> I prefer llamacpp because doing things "seamlessly" obscures the way things work behind the scenes, which is what I want to learn and play with.

And that's a fine choice, but some of us actually just want to hack with the models not hack on them. Ollama is great for that, and SSHing into my server to reboot the process every time I want to change models just doesn't work for me.

I'd rather wait a few weeks for the newest model and be able to alternate easily than stay on the bleeding edge and sacrifice that.
by moffkalast | 2025-05-31 19:28:26+00:00
That's pretty cool, but I feel like all of the LLM integrations with ROS so far have sort of entirely missed the point in terms of useful applications. Endless examples of models sending bare bone twist commands do a disservice to what LLMs are good at, it's like swatting flies with a bazooka in terms of compute used, too.

Getting the robot to move from point A to point B is largely a solved problem with traditional probabilistic methods, while niches where LLMs are the best fit I think are largely still unaddressed, e.g.:

- a pipeline for natural language commands to high level commands ("fetch me a beer" to [send nav2 goal to kitchen, get fridge detection from yolo, open fridge with moveit, detect beer with yolo, etc.]

- using a VLM to add semantic information to map areas, e.g. have the robot turn around 4 times in a room, and have the model determine what's there so it can reference it by location and even know where that kitchen and fridge is in the above example

- system monitoring, where an LLM looks at ros2 doctor, htop, topic hz, etc. and determines if something's crashed or isn't behaving properly, and returns a debug report or attempts to fix it with terminal commands

- handling recovery behaviours in general, since a lot of times when robots get stuck the resolution is simple, you just need something to take in the current situational information, reason about it, and pick one of the possible ways to resolve it
by dataflow | 2025-05-31 19:28:41+00:00
Nobody said local anywhere though, right? You just said the statement was nonsense where it clearly makes sense at least globally.

But now that we've moved the goalposts to local: what about f(x) = x^(3/2) sin(1/x), f(0) = 0? It's differentiable yet not locally Lipschitz-continuous on (0, 1]. (Taken straight from Wikipedia)
by marojejian | 2025-05-31 19:30:09+00:00
>genetic effects contribute up to 54% of the variability in music reward sensitivity, with 70% of these effects being independent of music perceptual abilities and general reward sensitivity.

Hat tip to Nautilus for the article that led me to this: https://nautil.us/weve-got-the-beat-in-our-genes-1211821/

While this heritability seems high, my indirect impression is that most behavioral categories show similarly high measures in twin studies, though this is likely driven by massive numbers of genes. Welcome more informed folks to update this impression.
by ryao | 2025-05-31 19:30:18+00:00
Last year, I took the time to read through public documents and estimated that their annual production was limited to ~300 wafers per year from TSMC. That is not Nvidia level scale, but it is scale.

There are many companies that sell tokens from an API and many more that need hardware to compute tokens. Cerebras posted a comparison of hardware options for these companies, so evaluating it as such is meaningful. It is perhaps less meaningful to the average person who cannot afford the barrier to entry to afford this hardware, but there are plenty of people curious what the options are for the companies that sell tokens through APIs, as those impact available capacity.
by turkeytotal | 2025-05-31 19:30:37+00:00
> Today we show that our AI designed new molecule, synthecin, stops drug-resistant S. aureus MRSA in mouse model

> We created synthecin w/ SyntheMol-RL, our new RL generative AI. All open source.

https://x.com/james_y_zou/status/1924506075312894253

https://github.com/swansonk14/SyntheMol
by bitwize | 2025-05-31 19:31:42+00:00
Thinking again about the essay in OP, for whomever is still reading this, I'm reminded of Patrick Farley's The Guy I Almost Was, in which the protagonist buys a Hermes 3000 manual typewriter instead of a computer to rebel against the self-serving consumerist futurism he used to embrace (and also, incidentally, because he cannot afford a computer). In short, the typewriter was a component of a form of cosplay, the garb of the sort of beat-generation intellectual with the sort of authenticity he aspired to have. (I'm convinced that fellow Hermes user William Gibson has spent a career cosplaying as a beat poet, which is why his fiction has an urticating effect on me.)

As it happens, I also own a Hermes 3000 typewriter. I bought it for a different reason: because it's really, really cool. Like all of the modern, sophisticated computers I own, it's a fascinating piece of information technology, precision engineered to do what it does very well. There's a minimalism about it I admire: it's a machine for augmenting the writing process that doesn't even need electricity.

So again, some people use certain tools because those tools are simply a joy to use. And that's fine too.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-31 19:31:59+00:00
It's not a problem of interpretation or visualization or charts. People are talking about it as if it's deception or interpretation but the problem is deeper than this.

It's a fundamental problem of reality.

The nature of reality itself prevents us from determining causality from observation, this includes looking at a chart.

If you observe two variables. Whether those random variables correlate or not... there is NO way to determine if one variable is causative to another through observation alone. Any causation in a conclusion from observation alone is in actuality only assumed. Note the key phrase here is: "through observation alone."

In order to determine if one thing "causes" another thing, you have to insert yourself into the experiment. It needs to go beyond observation.

The experimenter needs to turn off the cause and turn on the cause in a random pattern and see whether that changes the correlation. Only through this can one determine causation. If you don't agree with this, think about it a bit.

Also note that this is how they approve and validate medicine... they have to prove that the medicine/procedure "causes" a better outcome and the only way to do this is to actually make giving and withholding the medicine as part of the trial.
by Animats | 2025-05-31 19:32:38+00:00
Organized labor doesn't seem to use those terms.

There's a bill to provide some relief for poultry processors, but despite bipartisan support the bill hasn't gone anywhere.[1]

The dairy industry in the Northeast has managed to get into a strange situation. The dairy operators are suing their own cooperative for creating a monopsony and holding down raw milk prices. Milk is a shrinking market, but dairy farmers have a lot of political clout, which leads to some very strange situations.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/150...

[2] mhttps://vtdigger.org/2022/08/02/lawsuit-accuses-dairy-farmer...
by nosianu | 2025-05-31 19:34:13+00:00
Okay... so I'm going to do some nitpicking on the non-essential fringes of the argument if that's okay?

> Your body has replaced all of its cells several times already in your lifetime

Not true. Cells like neurons, heart cells, skeletal muscle cells are permanent (with minor caveats).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_cell
by ivape | 2025-05-31 19:34:30+00:00
"... what about the jobs that aren’t given?"

I guess I would have had to have paid a CGI studio to have made this for me once upon a time:

https://streamable.com/xsiip5

Or at least a freelancer. So that's one person that's out of a job. That took about 5 minutes with Google Whisk. In fact, if you know a thing or two about 3D/compositing, let me know how much time and effort this would have cost in 2018 please.
by godelski | 2025-05-31 19:36:30+00:00
That felt so wrong AND someone is cheating here. This felt really suspicious...

I got to the graffiti world and there were some stairs right next to me. So I started going up them. It felt like I was walking forward and the stairs were pushing under me until I just got stuck. So I turned to go back down and half way around everything morphed and I ended up back down at the ground level where I originally was. I was teleported. That's why I feel like something is cheating here. If we had mode collapse I'm not sure how we should be able to completely recover our entire environment. Not unless the model is building mini worlds with boundaries. It was like the out of bond teleportation you get in some games but way more fever dream like. That's not what we want from these systems, we don't want to just build a giant poorly compressed videogame, we want continuous generation. If you have mode collapse and recover, it should recover to somewhere new, now where you've been. At least this is what makes me highly suspicious.
by nosianu | 2025-05-31 19:37:19+00:00
There is not much to discuss. It's not like the universe forces you to use one particular definition for some word. You can decide to use whichever you want for "same person", and somebody else may use another one. There is no higher power to make one of you more right. Human power helps (if you control the books and the lesson plans and the grading of tests, you kind of win).
by quuxplusone | 2025-05-31 19:37:30+00:00
Here's a reverse example: Nonogram #18,950,614 (in section 759) is "21-1-12-21-12+4-21-1-3-11". If we fill in every cell that absolutely must be filled in based only on the data shown in a single row or column (plus the Xs that the JavaScript shows us), we get to this point:

2 1 41131 1 2 ___#_ 2 1 ##x#x 1 2 #__#_ 1 #xxxx 2 1 _#_x#

I believe at this point the tactic of "just find a cell that must be black based only on data from its row or column" fails. We can continue only by "using our heads" (i.e. "backtracking"), or by starting to mark cells that must be empty based on data from only their row or column. The cell with the capital X below must be empty because of data in row 3. But the JavaScript didn't auto-mark it with an X. Maybe this is just a logic bug in the JavaScript?:

2 1 41131 1 2 ___#_ 2 1 ##x#x 1 2 #X_#_ 1 #xxxx 2 1 _#_x#

And from there we can solve column 2, row 1, row 3, and row 5, in that order.
by oblio | 2025-05-31 19:38:02+00:00
> What's annoying is plenty of us (researchers) predicted this and got laughed at. Now that it's happening, it's just quiet.

Those people always do that. Shouting about cryptocurrencies and NFTs from the rooftops 3-4 years ago, now completely gone.

I suspect they're the same people, basically get rich quick schemers.