MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by krosaen | 2025-05-18 16:39:07+00:00
GM will take responsibility for accidents with super cruise if it was being used as intended [1] - and that includes eyes on road, hands free driving. Hands free means a very bad bug where it jerked off the road with no warning seems like it falls in that bucket. I wouldn’t consider my inability to grab the wheel instantly in that scenario stupid. With comma, in that scenario, it would still just be, hey, you are running open source software you installed at your own risk, right?

Comma could come installed with open pilot and some limited liability, but it puts it all on you having you install it yourself. That is making less and less sense to me as they mature. I would think they could take on some liability, and still have the ability to defend themselves in cases where an accident was due to reckless use (e.g circumventing eyes on road tracking) or improper installation.

[1] https://blog.moseleycollins.com/will-gm-take-responsibility-...
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-05-18 16:39:11+00:00
So, yeah, the linked article is half a decade old by now and would best be flagged as "HN is not Apple customer service", but there is something worth salvaging here.

Which is: sure, you're a tech company wanting to change the world. And, sure, this will ruffle some feathers and break a few eggs by design, but: the least you can do is stand up for your customers, right?

So: if your actual customers want to urgently talk to you about, ehm, things, how do you enable this? And, how do you communicate the outcomes to the wider world?

Bad examples abound. But how would you do better?
by allenu | 2025-05-18 16:39:18+00:00
You're right about the data model. I built my own flashcard app [1], so I've had to understand the database schema that Anki uses and a lot of it seems very inelegant, but on the other hand, I can see how it was purpose-built and probably grew over time and things were tacked on. (For instance, there's one table that has a single row, where several fields are simply JSON dictionaries.)

On the other hand, how templates work and how cloze deletions work are really nice. With the flashcard app I built, I didn't have templates, but did have a very basic cloze deletion system where you could mark text to be "hidden" on the front. It was very limited in that you'd only ever get one front/back combination. You could hide multiple bits of text, but they'd all be hidden at the same time. With Anki, you can create multiple groups of hidden text, so that you end up with multiple flashcards from the same note (i.e. you hid three separate groups of text, so you now have three different cards to test with).

I've been working on an update to my app to incorporate templates and cloze deletions like how Anki does it, so now I appreciate that aspect to it.

For my own database, at least in the new version I'm working on, I've ended up creating a schema where the individual attributes for each card are thrown into their own tables, but this is mostly because I needed to support updating individual attributes separately since I use a very simple journaling system to sync across devices. With Anki's schema, I can see why sync was complicated (at least in earlier versions) since it wasn't really built for it.

[1] https://www.freshcardsapp.com/
by throwaway713 | 2025-05-18 16:39:21+00:00
I saw that Reddit post a while back. It’s interesting, but I wonder how much it really applies to all of the super wealthy. There are certainly billionaires and centimillionaires who reject that lifestyle out of hand (I know I certainly would). The average person doesn’t know their name and they prefer it that way. Even the local billionaire near where I lived for a while was pretty modest, all considered (his kids not so much). I was surprised to see him and his family sit down next to mine at a restaurant one day. Could overhear him talking about the local farmers market and commenting about the tomatoes of the season haha
by michaelbuckbee | 2025-05-18 16:39:39+00:00
In general, this is the "wheeling and dealing" and "quid-pro-quo" and "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" of creating new laws.

The sponsor of the bill starts with a clean, straightforward version of their solar bill...but they don't have enough votes. So they start adding in causes from other legislators who want to pass other things (crime, etc.).
by hpcjoe | 2025-05-18 16:39:42+00:00
I recall that while I was at SGI. Many of us within SGI were strongly against the move to sell this off to Sun. We blamed Bo Ewald for the disaster to SGI that this was, the lack of strategic vision on his part. We also blamed the idiots in SGI management for thinking that only MIPS and Irix would be what we would be delivering.

Years later, Ewald and others had a hand in destroying the Beast and Alien CPUs in favor of the good ship Itanic (for reasons).

IMO, Ewald went from company to company, leaving behind a strategic ruin or failure. Cray to SGI to Linux Networx to ...
by roenxi | 2025-05-18 16:39:53+00:00
Sure. So what is the benefit here? Will this protect the city against solar storms somehow? I haven't heard of such a thing and it looks like these people are living in low income houses that could potentially be given 2x as much money at no cost to taxpayers.

This looks like lending for non-commercial project; there are guaranteed to be better uses of the money than this scheme even if it is going to end up as welfare. They could even end up with more money for these people and still get solar panels installed by deferring the purchase for 10 years.

A much better alternative plan is ban coal, wait until electricity prices jump so high that the panels generate a 5-8% rate of return, then install them. Which is a terrible plan, but better than what they seem to be doing here based on one admittedly rather detail-light sentence.
by beyarkay | 2025-05-18 16:40:01+00:00
(author here) This is an interesting point. I hadn't considered it, but I agree. Or maybe to be more specific, I think the novice has some prior that their idea will work, and hearing an expert's disagreement will update their prior somewhat. If the novice has a high respect for the expert, that update will be large enough. But sometimes the novice just has to experience the pain firsthand in order to truly appreciate why something is a bad idea.
by brig90 | 2025-05-18 16:41:11+00:00
Great question — and you’re right to catch the assumption there. I did assume left-to-right when stripping suffixes, mostly because that’s how the transliteration files were structured and how most Voynich analyses approach it. I didn’t test the reverse — though flipping the structure and checking clustering/syntax behavior would be a super interesting follow-up. Appreciate you calling it out!
by biimugan | 2025-05-18 16:42:27+00:00
That's fine, but allegations in a law suit aren't prima facie evidence of anything. Especially when the text of that law suit is filled with political invective (calling protesting students and faculty "uncontrolled antisemitic mobs" and so forth).

There's a very easy determination to be made here about which students are or are not being victimized. If my knowledge of current events is still accurate, not a single pro-Israel student has been extra-judicially kidnapped and imprisoned. Pro-Israel Jewish students very well may feel victimized or scared. But put into perspective, I can imagine that pro-Palestinian students feel it much more so.
Ask HN: Is It Possible?, Gemini's Long Context Moe Architecture (Hypothesized)
by deazy | 2025-05-18 16:42:45+00:00
Gemini's Long Context MoE Architecture (Hypothesized):

Sharing how I think (hypothesis) Gemini models achieve their 1-10 Million long context window. With details to clues to support the same.

Ensemble of Expert (EoE) or Mesh of Expert (MeoE) with common/shared long (1-10M) context window

Gemini's 1M+ token MoE likely uses "instances" (active expert sets/TPU shards) sharing a common distributed context; individual active expert groups then use relevant "parts" of this vast context for generation. This allows concurrent, independent requests via distinct system "partitions."

The context is sharded and managed across numerous interconnected TPUs within a pod.

For any given input, only a sparse set of specialized "expert" subnetworks (a "dynamic pathway") within the total model are activated, based on complexity and context required.

The overall MoE model can handle multiple, concurrent user requests simultaneously.

Each request, with its specific input and context, will trigger its own distinct and isolated pathway of active experts.

Shared context that can act as independent shards of (mini) contexts.

The massively distributed Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, across TPUs in a single pod, have its the long context sharded and managed via parallelism, and with ability to handle concurrent requests by part of that context window and independent expert pathways across a large TPU pod, also it can use the entire context window for a single request if required.

Evidence points to this: Google's pioneering MoE research (Shazeer, GShard, Switch), advanced TPUs (v4/v5p/Ironwood) with massive HBM & high-bandwidth 3D Torus/OCS Inter-Chip Interconnect (ICI) enabling essential distribution (MoE experts, sequence parallelism like Ring Attention), and TPU pod VRAM capacities aligning with 10M token context needs. Google's Pathways & system optimizations further support this distributed, concurrent model.

og x thread: https://x.com/ditpoo/status/1923966380854157434
by Projectiboga | 2025-05-18 16:43:12+00:00
True, I didn't state that clearly. What I meant was our sun fuses Hydrogen, whereas I feel Aneutronic fusion using Boron-11 will be better here on earth.

From, https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Nuclear_fusion_in_th...

The overall process of proton-proton fusion within the Sun can be broken down into several simple steps. A visual representation of this process is shown in Figure 1. The steps are:[4]

Two protons within the Sun fuse. Most of the time the pair breaks apart again, but sometimes one of the protons transforms into a neutron via the weak nuclear force. Along with the transformation into a neutron, a positron and neutrino are formed. This resulting proton-neutron pair that forms sometimes is known as deuterium. A third proton collides with the formed deuterium. This collision results in the formation of a helium-3 nucleus and a gamma ray. These gamma rays work their way out from the core of the Sun and are released as sunlight. Two helium-3 nuclei collide, creating a helium-4 nucleus plus two extra protons that escape as two hydrogen. Technically, a beryllium-6 nuclei forms first but is unstable and thus disintegrates into the helium-4 nucleus. The final helium-4 atom has less mass than the original 4 protons that came together (see E=mc2). Because of this, their combination results in an excess of energy being released in the form of heat and light that exits the Sun, given by the mass-energy equivalence. To exit the Sun, this energy must travel through many layers to the photosphere before it can actually emerge into space as sunlight. Since this proton-proton chain happens frequently - 9.2 x 1037 times per second - there is a significant release of energy.[3] Of all of the mass that undergoes this fusion process, only about 0.7% of it is turned into energy. Although this seems like a small amount of mass, this is equal to 4.26 million metric tonnes of matter being converted to energy per second.[3] Using the mass-energy equivalence, we find that this 4.26 million metric tonnes of matter is equal to about 3.8 x 1026 joules of energy released per second!
by accrual | 2025-05-18 16:44:01+00:00
Indeed, that and missing a pretty serious sounding email from Apple.

I 100% commiserate with the author and have missed important stuff before, but yeah, this article reminds me of the importance of making a habit to read the emails from my "important" accounts each morning. I setup some guardrails to help save myself from my own humanity, e.g. monthly "pay CC" calendar events.
by Izkata | 2025-05-18 16:44:40+00:00
Early 2000s to early 2010s here... I agree with GGP that we have more content than ever, but I don't agree that it's better. There definitely seems to have been a fall off in quality the past 10 years or so. The few good shows nowadays end up standing out even more than they did back then not because they're better but because the average has dropped.
by perrygeo | 2025-05-18 16:45:05+00:00
When TV came to American homes in the 1950s, it was a revolution in our national shared consciousness (for better or worse). Obviously there are problems with this - it gives the advertisers and businesses enormous unchecked power to shape society. But we've likely never seen so many people so deeply in sync with the dominant cultural messages.

When streaming became the norm, that dynamic was destroyed. We lurched back to private media consumption (for better or worse). There is no shared cultural narrative to tune into at 8:00 each night. There's millions of disparate voices, screaming into the void 24/7. More freedom and diversity for sure, but nothing coherent you can point to as a culture.
by HardCodedBias | 2025-05-18 16:45:20+00:00
I really like this post since it shows how very little there is for the wealthy to buy other than status goods.

The life of the rich, other than status, is very much like the life of upper middle class. The same phones, the same digital entertainment, the same appliances in their homes.

We have very few items for the rich to buy. Honestly, it is a problem it breaks incentives and it drives the rich more towards status goods which help no one since they are zero sum.

We should have expensive products which actually improve lives.
by zem | 2025-05-18 16:45:37+00:00
these are two different issues. supporting django involves adding a special-case module that essentially replicates its code generation and then adds that to the type-level view of the code. pyrefly or ty could do that and would still be just as fast. my guess is that once they have the basic python type checker as close to 100% as they can, they will start looking at custom modules for various popular metaprogramming libraries, or add enough of a plugin framework that the community can contribute them.

source: spent several years working on a python type checker
by brig90 | 2025-05-18 16:45:39+00:00
Yep, that’s exactly right — the words like "okeeodair" come directly from the EVA transliteration files, which map the original Voynich glyphs to ASCII approximations. So I’m not working with the glyphs themselves, but rather the standardized transliterated words based on the EVA (European Voynich Alphabet) system. The transliterations I used can be found here: https://www.voynich.nu/

I didn’t re-map anything back to glyphs in this project — everything’s built off those EVA transliterations as a starting point. So if "okeeodair" exists in the dataset, that’s because someone much smarter than me saw a sequence of glyphs and agreed to call it that.
by djeastm | 2025-05-18 16:45:40+00:00
>But somewhere over the years, I must have burned out of my dopamine reserves or something, because apps like Anki feel now actively off-putting, in the sense that I lose all energy just looking at them

This resonated with me. I think the decline in excitement towards learning, that we used to do without thinking about it, happens naturally with aging.

Evolution doesn't reward older humans that much for learning so most of us don't feel that same excitement. Compare this to when we're young and need to learn fast, so the dopamine rewards are off the charts.

Consider all of the retirees who spend hours at slot machines (or virtual ones like Candy Crush) to get that dopamine fix as easily as possible.

Maybe a more tasteful gamification balance can be found.
by pron | 2025-05-18 16:45:47+00:00
FFM is the recommended alternative, but JNI is not being deprecated. There are some things that JNI can do that FFM can't, in particular - initiating calls from native code to arbitrary Java methods. FFM only supports upcalls to Java in the form of Java callbacks that are passed to the native code. However, this is enough for the vast majority of Java-native interactions, so FFM should be preferred in new code (it's much easier to use than JNI).
by ouija | 2025-05-18 16:45:55+00:00
I think my problem is that I'm not using the system as intended. I learn new vocabulary mainly by reading texts or watching videos in the target language and use spaced repetition to keep track of my progress. If I can't remember a word (as indicated by SR), I'll reread the text/rewatch the video where I've first encountered it. I don't want to keep reviewing the same word in my spaced repetition program, especially not in the same session.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-05-18 16:46:03+00:00
You know, I wouldn't short what AI can do in the future, even if not trained on lots of art. It does not seem far out to me to think an AI could be trained to identify in images concepts like structure, balance, contrast, composition, narrative, etc, and then to pursue generation of such in procedural, iterative loops of drawing/painting using test time compute and a prompt for an objective.
by lurk2 | 2025-05-18 16:46:04+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnibus_bill

> Many legislatures may have a tradition of extensive deliberation and debate prior to the adoption of laws, which can postpone passage of necessary legislation. Thus, in order to pass all desired laws within a reasonable timeframe, they are consolidated into a single bill and voted on quickly, typically near the end of a legislative session.

> Because of their large size and scope, omnibus bills limit opportunities for debate and scrutiny on the actual final bill. Historically, omnibus bills have sometimes been used to pass controversial amendments. For this reason, some consider omnibus bills to be anti-democratic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_(legislation)

> In legislative procedure, a rider is an additional provision added to a bill or other measure under consideration by a legislature, which may or may not have much, if any, connection with the subject matter of the bill.
by gorfian_robot | 2025-05-18 16:46:16+00:00
for those seeking a curated experience trying listening to new orlean's fantastic WWOZ online

https://www.wwoz.org/listen/player/

I also used to listen to McMurdo Station's radio (AFAN) but it seems offline now

KLAP from Gerlach NV is also good if Jeff has it up and running (lol). https://streema.com/radios/KLAP
by brig90 | 2025-05-18 16:46:56+00:00
Great points — thank you. PCA gave me surprisingly clean separation early on, so I stuck with it for the initial run. But you’re right — throwing UMAP or t-SNE at it would definitely give a nonlinear perspective that could catch subtler patterns (or failure cases).

And yes to the cross-cluster reference idea — I didn’t build a similarity matrix between clusters, but now that you’ve said it, it feels like an obvious next step to test how much signal is really being captured.

Might spin those up as a follow-up. Appreciate the thoughtful nudge.
by beyarkay | 2025-05-18 16:48:28+00:00
(author here) I think there's something to be said for having both (if I allow myself to imagine an unrealistic utopia).

Imagining the distribution of how much benefit novices get out of a scenario, only having the watercooler interactions probably has a high maximum benefit (i.e. there's some expert that loves teaching and puts loads of time into helping novices) but probably also a very low minimum benefit (i.e. there are no experts at the company, or the experts couldn't care less about helping out). So it's the risky scenario, with a high variance.

Only having formal teaching doesn't have nearly as low a minimum (even a lecturer doing the bare minimum is better than no lecturer), but also doesn't have nearly as high a maximum (a high-effort lecturer simply cannot pay attention to each of the 300 students in a lecture hall, no matter how hard they try).

So having the formal teaching raises the minimum, ensuring the worst outcomes are not that bad, and adding in some watercooler interactions raises the maximum, ensuring that high-effort experts are able to converse with interested novices.
by Gys | 2025-05-18 16:48:30+00:00
I found it a little annoying that SRS is immediately explained to mean Spaced Repetition System, but then the F is added without explaining what it stands for. Most references of the article do neither. Except https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/The... which says the F means Free. Seems a little too easy? I found nothing else. Chatgpt says it means Flexible, which actually makes more sense? Anybody else can chip in?
by skydhash | 2025-05-18 16:48:47+00:00
Vim is a fine editor, but emacs has better tooling. I got in touch with Emacs while learning Common Lisp, and I got hooked by the extensive capabilities and customization available. Vim is fine for extension, but you have to build most of them yourself.

I tried evil mode, but it clashes with other keybinding in some places and I got unhappy with it. There's a philosophy conflict there. With vim, you're expected to have a command for an action and then bind it to a key. Your editing workflow is to compose those keys.

But with emacs, you're more expected to have a view and then a set of actions for that view. The power of emacs comes with how easy it is to integrate all those views together. For a programming workflow, you have the file explorer, the symbol explorer, the search result (single file and all files), the version control, the docs, the compilation|build window, the shell, the project tasks,... all together in the same place and linked to each other. With vim, you have to compose all those with a multiplexer and other tools (with conflicting bindings) to get there. Vim is still better for editing, but Emacs is better for workflows.
by grep_name | 2025-05-18 16:49:19+00:00
Thank you, the pass / fail addon will help a lot I think, in addition to the FSRS features included in the article. I'll come back to this comment for setting up my settings before starting up again with Anki.

If I'm planning to learn several topics at once (I'm never preparing for anything I will be tested on or hit a deadline for, this is not for a school, work, or travel program), is it better to treat the decks as one big combined review do you think?
by Alex-Programs | 2025-05-18 16:49:28+00:00
> What's worse for motivation than taking longer?

Many things. I think HN is a bit of a bubble here, but you'll find a lot of people prefer something enjoyable but slower to something efficient and faster, even if they won't admit it.

See the popularity of Duolingo vs Anki as an example! Or Quizlet vs Anki. Or the scores of students who revise by half-watching dopamine-ified youtube videos rather than doing past papers and flashcards. If you ask people, they'll often say they care for efficiency, but their revealed preferences say otherwise.

Doing large amounts (hours) of Anki day in day out is truly miserable, particularly when the alternatives can be quite enjoyable. And if you burn out before you achieve your goal, is the "efficiency" really worth it vs going slower but eventually getting there?

Plus, a lot of people want to learn e.g. a language because they enjoy the process as well as the end result. Making the process miserable in order to get to the end result faster isn't always a good tradeoff.

Which is what it's about. It's a tradeoff. I'm a big proponent of flashcards, but I think it's important to recognise that you're trading enjoyment for speed in most cases.