MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bossyTeacher | 2025-05-18 15:59:44+00:00
> becoming a parent will lead to some sort of change in worldview or who you are, and that’s not always compatible with the friends you had

This is it. Parenting drastically transforms you (your behaviour and values) for the next 18 years at the very least. In purely behavioural terms, you become someone else. Expecting people to hang out with a stranger (behaviourally speaking) of the basis of shared memories is odd. You share memories with your 19 year old self who would most likely be more interested in hanging around with others around his age than with you. No different for friends
by strangecasts | 2025-05-18 16:00:24+00:00
In the case of this and the earlier "white genocide" replies, it is way more likely someone changed the system prompts than that someone tampered with the training data, considering the conspiracy theory was brought up unprompted in wildly unrelated situations [1]

[1] As one example, https://bsky.app/profile/jdcmedlock.bsky.social/post/3lp6eal...
by ModernMech | 2025-05-18 16:00:24+00:00
One has to wonder, why would there be any bugs at all if the LLM could fix them? Given Kernighan's Law, does this mean the LLM can't debug the bugs it makes?

My feeling is unless you are using a formal language, then you're expressing an ambiguous program, and that makes it inherently buggy. How does the LLM infer your intended meaning otherwise? That means programmers will always be part of the loop, unless you're fine just letting the LLM guess.

Kernighan's Law - Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
by danielbln | 2025-05-18 16:00:36+00:00
Big fan, it's my daily driver for mobile HN access. I just wish for two things: - show up vote count on comments - allow me to jump to the next root level comment (and also back up to the top) when I'm deep in some multi nested comment thread. Right now I'm playing curling on my screen to get where I need to go, but it's not exactly efficient.
by nico | 2025-05-18 16:00:36+00:00
Yeah, that "for each" needs to be code instead of prompt. Ideally you want to only use the LLM for the first time you run the task, but after "figuring out the path", you want to run that directly through code

So for the example above, the user might have to do: "do this for this website", then save macro, then create template, then run template with input: [list of 10 websites]
by pierrebrunelle | 2025-05-18 16:00:48+00:00
I like PocketFlow. You beat me on the # of lines of code! But does it provide parallelization, caching, orchestration, versioning, observability, lineage, multi-modal support?

As you just showed, building an agent SDK is easy, so what's interesting to me is tackling:

- Infrastructure Sprawl: Juggling separate systems for vector search, state tracking, multimodal data handling, and monitoring leads to fragmented workflows and high operational costs. - State Management Nightmares: Reliably tracking agent memory, tool calls, and intermediate states across potentially long-running, asynchronous tasks is incredibly difficult. - Multimodal Integration Pain: Integrating and processing images, audio, video, and documents alongside text requires specialized, often disparate, tooling. - Observability Gaps: Understanding why an agent made a decision or failed requires visibility into its state and data lineage, which is often lacking.

And doing all of that while finding the right abstraction layer to leave all the application and business logic to the dev/users so they don't feel limited. It's difficult!

Besides, I don't know where you see a commercial offering? Everything is Apache 2.0/Open Source from A to Z.
by parsabg | 2025-05-18 16:02:22+00:00
In a way this should be a core feature of any browser and if this project accelerates/improves that by 5% I will be very happy!

The fact that Chrome and Gemini are, at least for now, owned by the same company raises huge privacy and consumer choice concerns for me though, and I see benefit in letting the user choose their model, where/how to store their data, etc.
by Aloha | 2025-05-18 16:03:02+00:00
I think one of the problems of modern society is the level of risk people deem acceptable - its now near zero, instead of "reasonable risks".

Aside from that, culturally the value we impart on a single human life has also changed too - death used to be much more common, infant death in particular - its not uncommon to go to an old cemetery and see a single family having buried three or more children, with another 2-3 having survived to adulthood. This was not something limited to the lower classes either, Calvin Coolidge had a son who died of sepsis from a blister while he was president.
by pcthrowaway | 2025-05-18 16:03:23+00:00
Given the standard practice in lab experimentation using mice (which is to "dispose" of them after their usefulness for a test is done) I'm extremely troubled by the idea of gene editing experimentation using mice to make them more intelligent (their standard intelligence would already be surprising to many people).

While I already think it's unethical to use animals the way we do, the idea that we're experimenting with how close we can get to bestowing them with human intelligence before killing them is saddening.
by rybosome | 2025-05-18 16:03:31+00:00
Agreed. I wonder if this is somewhat revealing of the mental processes of the creators.

To me, if my cursor is a few lines away from another line, the easiest way for me to get there is by either using h/j a few times, or looking at the absolute line number and doing that with gg.

Relative jumps are only useful to me in macros. Calculating a relative jump myself would 100% pull me out of the flow state where I just want to go up/down a few rows.

I have no proof of this, but I’d guess that the creator of this pattern didn’t feel the same way.
by fsmv | 2025-05-18 16:03:47+00:00
I've also felt that real numbers aren't real ever since I tried doing algebra in floating point numbers and finding that some formulas that can be reversed in math cannot be reversed on a computer.

In the real numbers there exists a number that encodes the answer to the halting problem for every number, it's provable and also provable that you cannot write a program to print the digits.

Of course it's a computer scientist doing this. I'll have to read his papers. I wonder if he has anything about rational differential equations.
by eugenekay | 2025-05-18 16:04:30+00:00
I was just the Teenage intern responsible for doing the PDU Cabling every time a new rack was added, since nobody on the Network or Software Engineering teams could fit into the crawl spaces without disassembling the entire raised-floor.

I do know that scale-out and scale-up were used for different parts of the stack. The web services were all handled by standard x86 machines running Linux - and were all netbooted in some early orchestration magic, until the day the netboot server died. I think the rationale for the large Sun systems was the amount of Memory that they could hold - so the user name and spammer databases could be held in-memory on each front end, allowing for a quick ACCEPT or DENY on each incoming message - before saving it out to a mailbox via NFS.
by webdoodle | 2025-05-18 16:04:39+00:00
One of my last posts on Reddit before my account was suspended and all my 15 years of posts, comments and private messages were deleted without my approval, was about memetic chaining. I've reposted it on Substack for those interested:

https://webdoodle.substack.com/p/memetic-chaining-and-the-ne...
by dang | 2025-05-18 16:04:40+00:00
This is not relevant to your point but I want to say that's an entirely third party project and we didn't even know about it for a long time. We don't publish data to them except in the sense that we publish it to everybody: https://github.com/HackerNews/API.

I think their page gives a misleading impression that the project is somehow official, when it's not (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43850991).
by ebiester | 2025-05-18 16:05:47+00:00
However, if I miss a bill at my credit card because of some missed email, I can call them and get it fixed up. If I miss a bill at my bank, I can call my bank and we will get it fixed up. And those are a bit too big for my comfort compared to a credit union.

The problem is if something goes wrong with amazon, google or apple, you can get locked into a giant hole.
by pierrebrunelle | 2025-05-18 16:05:48+00:00
It all started with https://github.com/pixeltable/pixeltable which is the core project we are actively working on and the problem space of working with video and frames for Computer Vision teams who struggle with the explosion of data and maintaining lineage and versioning for frames of video.

The same problems arise with LLMs for Documents and Chunks, Audio and Samples, etc.

If you are into that:

- Object Detection on Video Frames: https://github.com/pixeltable/pixeltable/blob/main/docs/note...

- Text and images similarity search: https://github.com/pixeltable/pixeltable/tree/main/docs/samp...

LLM is just a function call. We are agnostic to whatever framework, library, and data format are used; we are focused on solving the data plumbing issues (mulitmodal storage and orchestration) with a simple python sdk: https://github.com/pixeltable/pixeltable.
by bawolff | 2025-05-18 16:06:00+00:00
Well its not "free" money, you have to install some solar panels.

Subsidies are just an indirect way of paying someone to do something. Its no more free money then if you like your job, your job is free money.

Its true though, if demand is high it probably means you are overpaying and could get the wanted result while paying less.
by adrian_b | 2025-05-18 16:06:44+00:00
In general Renesas offers more modern microcontrollers than all the other vendors of MCUs, which have decreased a lot the rate of new product launches during recent years, but unfortunately they are also among the most expensive.

I have also not seen Cortex-M85 except from Renesas. Cortex-M55 is seldom an alternative to Cortex-M7, because Cortex-M55 is smaller and slower than Cortex-M7 (but faster than the old Cortex-M4 or than the newer Cortex-M33).

Cortex-M55 implements the Helium vector instruction set, so for an application that can use Helium it may match or exceed the speed of a Cortex-M7, in which case it could replace it. Cortex-M55 may also be used to upgrade an old product with Cortex-M7, if the M7 was used only because Cortex-M4 would have been too slow, but the full speed of Cortex-M7 was not really needed.
by ta1243 | 2025-05-18 16:06:56+00:00
If you want to change it to a BBC subscription fee, then you're just changing the BBC into Netflix. The whole point of the BBC is that everyone pays and everyone can benefit - same as the NHS, or libraries, or roads.

I think the only way that change could work while protecting the BBCs editorial independence and maintain its public service remit would be to have it as part of council tax. A £160 a year charge on a band D house (with appropriate discounts for Band A-C and excess for E-H). The default amount would be set as the license fee is now.
by hansvm | 2025-05-18 16:06:59+00:00
There's value in "being able to master that stuff," and there's value in "having mastered that stuff." The latter lets you trim a lot of possible designs from your search space nearly instantly, letting you focus on routes which are actually viable. The former is only of similar power when you know the design in advance or there aren't many possible solutions.

For a simple example, suppose you need to operate on `n` permutations of an enormous collection of data (far more than fits in RAM or disk), and you need those permutations to be re-usable.

One simple solution is to shuffle the indices `n` times and store the results in your cluster, but even the shuffle process is slow with normal techniques because of inter-machine random-access bandwidth issues. When using those shuffled indices for anything, you're again bandwidth-limited if the task doesn't require access of every index.

With just a tiny bit of a math background, you'll recognize that an O(1)-state shuffle is possible, where you can create some `Permutation` object with a `permute()` method, taking in an index and outputting the corresponding index in your hypothetical shuffle. That permutation will be CPU-bound rather than bandwidth-bound.

The problem with "being able to master stuff" is that your search process in the design space is slow. If I went and told you that an O(1)-state shuffle existed and would be good for the problem, sure, you'd be able to go code that up without issues. What's the chance that you'd even know to try though?

> wide range of esoteric topics ... prepares you for a lifetime of learning

That's part of it, but each of those esoteric topics also give new ideas something to latch onto. Our brains are associative, and being able to look at a new thing and tie it to a few esoteric concepts is a bit of a superpower, even if the association is weak. The difference between knowing nothing other than how to learn and knowing what's vaguely potentially possible or not is weeks or months of research. It's the difference between having to do the dumb, slow thing and being the person promoted for saving $1m/yr fixing whatever you wrote. You can get by for a long time, maybe your entire career, just making shit work, but if you're looking for more money or prestige then there are better routes.
by jaredklewis | 2025-05-18 16:07:01+00:00
Maybe I misunderstood something, but I can't find anything in your comments that identifies a flaw with the underlying data model of Anki. It seems your issues are mostly about Anki's data management?

So I would strongly suggest your check out anki-connect (https://git.sr.ht/~foosoft/anki-connect) which provides a REST API for CRUD operations on Anki notes, cards, decks, and media attachments.

Or maybe if you can share in a little more detail on what you are studying, the format of the data, and the exact way that your attempted workflow is breaking down with Anki, I'd be surprised if no one had suggestions for making it work.

Edit: also, to answer a question in your initial post, is there a better SRS tool out there? I've never found anything. For all its warts and flaws, Anki is good where it matters, extensible enough to support pretty much all use cases, and has excellent data portability.
by qazxcvbnm | 2025-05-18 16:07:40+00:00
For those who are not aware, knowing how to count the number of structures is (nearly) the same as knowing how to encode said structure as an integer (space-optimally) (the naive general algorithm would not have good time complexity); to convert to integer, simply define some ordering on said structures, enumerate until you find your structure, the index of the structure is the integer encoding; conversely, to decode, simply list all structures and pick the structure with the index of the integer.
by anonfordays | 2025-05-18 16:07:52+00:00
>Nobody is going to leave an inside job for an outside job.

>At least not a meaningful amount of people.

I would say this is true, or generally true, if the pay for the trades stays where it is. If plumbers start making $80k+ out of school, and master plumbers start making $200k+, etc. many would leave their inside jobs for construction.

Americans are not going to leave AC and a nice office for $18 an hour.
by jms703 | 2025-05-18 16:08:12+00:00
Why was this 4 year old article posted with no additional context?

Lots of red flags here on the author's part. This seems like a case of someone not following through on their tradein, missing a payment due to a changed bank account, and then ignoring Apple’s emails about the issue.

The author makes it sound like Apple acted out of nowhere, but the reality is they gave notice and took action only after the author failed to respond. If you don’t return a trade-in and your card goes past due, it makes sense that Apple would revoke access to services tied to that purchase. Framing it as Apple “holding accounts hostage” feels misleading—it looks more like the natural result of missed obligations and poor follow-up.
by sebastiennight | 2025-05-18 16:08:22+00:00
As a marketer with a couple of decades of experience I can tell you that there is way more financial incentive in "slightly persuading [consumer] to tilt towards [product] in their next purchase, and spend more and earlier" than there ever will be towards "next-level unbiased tutor in anything".

The "super tutor" stuff that is always mentioned as the utopian outcome (along with "cures for cancer") is, unsurprisingly, never something being worked on by the person or lab quoting these examples.

I guess anything goes in B2B settings, but there is a valid reason to be cautious about these advances when it comes to mass-market consumer-facing applications.
Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure
by brig90 | 2025-05-18 16:09:01+00:00
I built this project as a way to learn more about NLP by applying it to something weird and unsolved.

The Voynich Manuscript is a 15th-century book written in an unknown script. No one’s been able to translate it, and many think it’s a hoax, a cipher, or a constructed language. I wasn’t trying to decode it — I just wanted to see: does it behave like a structured language?

I stripped a handful of common suffix-like endings (aiin, dy, etc.) to isolate what looked like root forms. I know that’s a strong assumption — I call it out directly in the repo — but it helped clarify the clustering. From there, I used SBERT embeddings and KMeans to group similar roots, inferred POS-like roles based on position and frequency, and built a Markov transition matrix to visualize cluster-to-cluster flow.

It’s not translation. It’s not decryption. It’s structural modeling — and it revealed some surprisingly consistent syntax across the manuscript, especially when broken out by section (Botanical, Biological, etc.).

GitHub repo: https://github.com/brianmg/voynich-nlp-analysis Write-up: https://brig90.substack.com/p/modeling-the-voynich-manuscrip...

I’m new to the NLP space, so I’m sure there are things I got wrong — but I’d love feedback from people who’ve worked with structured language modeling or weird edge cases like this.
by 05 | 2025-05-18 16:09:23+00:00
Because realistically none of the hardware used even supports deep sleep correctly and will drain the battery using their high quiescent current LDO regs, pull-ups, LEDs and vBat dividers. Also latency and energy cost of getting back on the network, waiting for hass server to connect (in esphome protocol devices are servers, not clients) and going back to sleep is only going to work for some weird edge scenarios where you don't care about latency or polling rate.
by david_allison | 2025-05-18 16:09:25+00:00
Given users were self-selected SuperMemo users who needed to use GitHub to upload exported stats, it feels a low (FSRS benchmarks average ~70k per user, filtered to a random selection of users with > 10k reps).

I wasn't involved in the benchmark, and don't know whether `SM16-v-SM17.csv` is a full export. Didn't see any reviews before 2020, and it may only be an export of a subset of reviews.

https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/srs-benchmark/#dat...
by watwut | 2025-05-18 16:09:55+00:00
It is not a human failing. A human who has huge amount of free time on Sunday, but comes home from work super tired on Monday did not failed anything. And from the other side, there wont be any difference between you revising a card after 89, 90 or even 95 days.

A human who had a lot of time to learn during January, because his job workload was easy is not failing anything if his job related workload becomes high in March and April. But, all that January effort will be punished by super high workloads in March and April in Anki.
by toast0 | 2025-05-18 16:10:05+00:00
> fixing the font does not help those that downloaded the font and won't get the new version. it also does not prevent malicious code from replacing the font on your machine with a version that has the ligature.

Fixing the code doesn't help users that downloaded code and don't get the new version either.

Malicious code that can replace a font can replace a lot more too.
by MostlyStable | 2025-05-18 16:10:17+00:00
I created a python script that checks my anki deck for the cards that I'm scheduled to review the next day and asks an LLM to generate new sentences for the cards, so that every time I see them, I see them in a new context.

I did this because I realized I was hitting an issue where I theoretically "knew" a word (would get it always correct on the card), but wouldn't always recognize it in a novel context.

I'm hoping that having the context be variable when I'm learning it will help fix this issue.
by dkarl | 2025-05-18 16:11:19+00:00
> it turns out its not really a silver bullet

One thing that bothers me about SRS is that it doesn't get enough attention from people who understand the difference between memorization and language acquisition. It gets a ton of attention from people who are doing test prep or who get intrinsic reward from their memorization accomplishments.

Memorization is not my goal — I want to get better at reading Spanish and French — but I find that drilling on vocabulary and example sentences helps a lot. I compare it to using scaffolding in construction. Scaffolding is not a building. Scaffolding doesn't serve any of the purposes a building does. But if you need to build, expand, or refurbish a building, sometimes building scaffolding in and around it can speed things up a hell of a lot.

I wish there were better guidance for using memorization to assist in language learning, but the world seems to be split between people who are satisfied with memorization as their goal (for test prep or intrinsic satisfaction) and people who dismiss memorization entirely because it isn't their goal.
by joshstrange | 2025-05-18 16:11:45+00:00
On one hand, I want to reply "duh, you didn't pay your CC" but at the same time Apple is _horrible_ about messaging things like this.

I had some random Apple charge not go through (IIRC it was my monthly iPhone Citizen One bill that was paid on my Apple Card but the Apple Card rejected the payment???). And it fouled up things in odd ways that were not clear at all from any UI I could access.

In the end I had to keep clicking a "retry" payment in some obscure corner of Apple's account management with zero info on if it worked or not then wait a few days to see if I got another scary email from Apple. It ended up working out without my needing to call support so I don't know if they would have been helpful.

I will say, my experiences with Apple support have been largely positive to amazing. Their business support (ABM) is so good I felt like I was getting away with a massive heist getting the amount of help I got as a single-person LLC. Almost instant answer of the phone, clear audio, easy to understand support person, incredibly knowledgeable (used all the right industry terms), and gave me the info I needed to go smack AT&T (read more about here [0]). 10/10 experience.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39154315
by wlesieutre | 2025-05-18 16:11:54+00:00
Technically works but not well enough to move past “experimental”

> This experimental firmware has been available since December 2022. Through extensive testing, we have found that although it works in some circumstances, it has technical limitations that lead to a worse user experience. We now do not recommend using this firmware, and it will be experimental for the foreseeable future. Instead, we will focus on making sure the dedicated Zigbee and Thread firmwares for Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 deliver the best experience to users.

https://www.home-assistant.io/connectzbt1/
by anta40 | 2025-05-18 16:12:00+00:00
The magazine I meant is Mikrodata. It's an Indonesian IT magazine, which was was closed few years ago. Until 2000-ish, the magazines came with CDs which has code archives from practically all Mikrodata contributors.

I started learning programming in 2002 with VB, so it felt kinda amusing looking at 90s DOS stuffs (Turbo Pascal 7, QB, TASM) etc