MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by permo-w | 2025-05-20 14:54:05+00:00
my friend I responded to your initial point by pointing out that even if this really is what you care about, what you're describing is clearly an issue with the current enforcement strategy, not the thing itself. quite clearly directly engaging with your argument as made

-- your response entirely ignored that engagement entirely besides taking a quote out of context in a weak and obvious attempt to draw moral outrage, more or less proving my point that you were simply using women's rights as a way to produce outrage and scare people into agreeing

to be honest perhaps I was a little quick to judge your motivations, and if you hadn't replied like this, perhaps you might have a leg to stand on, but instead you proved the point for me

whether or not calling it a tax was a rhetorical gambit or not, when pressed, it was instead a "non-voluntary charitable donation", and yet, is watching live TV not a choice? are you so unable to tear your eyes away from the 800th repeat of the Botswana special on Dave? is it "charitable" if the person who "donates" is provided with a consumable product?

can you avoid taxes by simply not letting the taxman in your house? can you avoid taxes by simply living in a house with someone who does pay taxes? can you avoid taxes by simply denying that you earn money?

and then you just started to make childish personal attacks about literacy. boring
by sidewndr46 | 2025-05-20 14:54:35+00:00
I obviously don't have a in depth knowledge of Finnish rail, but have you ever looked at rail in the US? I can show you tracks with completely missing ties. Tracks that move vertically by a foot when the train goes over them. Tracks that visually snake all over the place. The difference is made by slowing down the train. Derailment at 3 mph rarely matters. The biggest risk is the conductor doesn't know it happened & continues to drag the car along the tracks
by triceratops | 2025-05-20 14:54:42+00:00
Fruit vendor: You like these apples? That'll be $2.

Buyer: Yeah I want them. But Fort Knox doesn't have enough gold yet, so I don't have the dollar bills right now.

Fruit Vendor: No problem. Bring me an IOU from your bank that says you're good for it.

(The Invention of Paper Money)
by srean | 2025-05-20 14:55:06+00:00
The title, as it stands, is trite and wrong. More about that a little later. The article on the other hand is a pleasant read.

Topology is whatever little structure that remains in geometry after you throwaway distances, angles, orientations and all sorts of non tearing stretchings. It's that bare minimum that still remains valid after such violent deformations.

While notion of topology is definitely useful in machine learning, -- scale, distance, angles etc., all usually provide lots of essential information about the data.

If you want to distinguish between a tabby cat and a tiger it would be an act of stupidity to ignore scale.

Topology is useful especially when you cannot trust lengths, distances angles and arbitrary deformations. That happens, but to claim deep learning is applied topology is absurd, almost stupid.
by lisper | 2025-05-20 14:55:07+00:00
There are two problems with using LLMs for writing code. The first is that when the code they produce doesn't work (which is most of the time) I still have to debug it, and now I'm debugging someone else's (or someTHING else's) code rather than my own. The second is that the work I do is very specialized (custom ASIC design) and LLMs are utterly useless.

But yeah, if all you need to do is build a vanilla app then an LLM is probably an effective tool.
Show HN: Astra – a new js2exe compiler
by qwertycodepl | 2025-05-20 14:55:25+00:00
Hi everyone I'm new here and i wanted to introduce my project i've been working on. Astra is a simple but powerful node.js to exe compiler. It uses esbuild and Node SEA. It uses postject to inject your code to nodejs binary. It focuses more on compiling cli and Servers like pkg or nexe (express) than fullstack applications like electron or tauri. It has rich ESM and typescript support. It has good DX and cli UX. I made it bc i didn't like using pkg or nexe, they cause a lot of problems with esm.

LIMITATIONS: Now it has problems compiling projects with depencides containing binaries (e.g. bcrypt, rcedit), and it compiles only for Windows but i'm working on it

If you like it, leave a and comment what you think about it!
by iggldiggl | 2025-05-20 14:55:34+00:00
Yes, those kind of track relaying machines exist, and they could most likely be adapted to work for the gauge change (one end of the machine would have to be set up for broad gauge and the other end for standard gauge), but they still manage only a few kilometres of track per day, and they're comparatively rare and expensive – basically there are only enough of them around for the amount of track relaying required during routine maintenance.

So repeats of the famous 19th century gauge change by converting large swathes of the network in just a few days (thousands of miles of track as in the US in 1886, or even just the 177 miles west of Exeter in the UK in 1892) remain rather unlikely.
by soulofmischief | 2025-05-20 14:55:35+00:00
We're talking about stone in general. Volcanic stone is one type of stone, which does not cover all of the applications of stone as used in buildings, masonry and other industries today. I also specifically addressed volcanic stones in a sister comment.

Some rate of formation is not enough to satisfy the commonly held definition of renewable resources. Google "is stone a renewable resource" for a jumping off point.
by toss1 | 2025-05-20 14:56:42+00:00
>>Most scientists aren’t trying to mislead anyone, but because they face strong incentives to present favorable results, there’s still a risk that you’ll be misled.

>>We also found evidence, once again, that researchers tend not to report negative results, an effect known as reporting bias.

>>But unfortunately, the scientific literature is not a reliable source for evaluating the success of AI in science.

>> One issue is survivorship bias. Because AI research, in the words of one researcher, has “nearly complete non-publication of negative results,” we usually only see the successes of AI in science and not the failures. But without negative results, our attempts to evaluate the impacts of AI in science typically get distorted.

While these biases will absolutely create overconfidence and wasted effort, the fact that there are rapid advances with some clear successes such as protein folding, drug discovery, &weather forecasting, leads me to expect there will be more very significant advances, in no small part because of the massive investment in funds and time to the problem of making AI-based advances.

For exactly the reasons this researcher spent his time and funds to research this, despite his negative results, there was learning, and the effect of millions of people effectively searching & developing will result in more great good advances being found and/or built.

Whether they are worth the total financial & human capital being spent is another question, but I'm expecting that to be also positive
by seabird | 2025-05-20 14:57:06+00:00
The last thing Michigan/Detroit needs is our housing market blown up by tech workers with exorbitant salaries/buying power, and our industrial legacy supplanted by tech grift. There isn't a place for so many of our people in that cycle.

The gravy train may have dried up, but with some realignment (realignment meaning putting off your new boat for a bit so you can pay your skilled machinists, fabricators, etc. more than $22/hour) we can tap back into what we've always been good at, with the resources we have, with the people we have and the resources they have, as long as we do it before everybody who still remembers how to do it dies.
by hedora | 2025-05-20 14:57:30+00:00
There’s plenty of demand for manufactured goods. They can just sell to other markets. US foreign policy is causing demand spikes everywhere.

For instance, I read 300M people are projected to starve to death this year. I’m sure China will happily send some of them any excess food, especially since it’s not going to sell it into US any more.

I think you mean there are not enough US dollars in those markets. There are at least two easy solutions: (1) Intentionally tank the dollar to increase the relative purchasing power of other countries (which they have probably been doing - someone is, but the “who” is a bit opaque). (2) Stop dealing in US currency entirely and switch the world economy to a new reserve currency. I suspect that the Euro and/or Yuan will win that war, though some argument could be made for crypto.

I agree Trump may as well be running around naked at this point. It wouldn’t affect most people’s opinion of his competence or professionalism (domestically or overseas).

Anyway: To answer the question that is the article title: Because the US is (was) rich, and has (had) a high but sustainable standard of living.
by lukehollis | 2025-05-20 14:59:26+00:00
Update: sorry google maps 3d tiles aren't displaying!

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXS9sNcDLJU

The Google Maps 3d Photorealistic Tiles are returning 429 Error too many requests Looks like will need to build in the ability for people to bring their own Google Maps API key. Fix up shortly
For AI agents, what's the bigger problem: context sharing or prompting?
by exclusivewombat | 2025-05-20 14:59:36+00:00
Been building with LLM-based agents lately and keep running into a few recurring challenges:

1/ Prompting - making sure agents behave how you want without overly long, fragile instructions

2/ Context sharing – passing memory, results, and state across time or between agents w/o flooding the system

3/ Cost – tokens get expensive fast, especially as things scale

Curious what others think is the real bottleneck here, and any tips/tricks for solving this. Are you optimizing around token limits, memory persistence, better prompt engineering?

Would love to hear how you’re thinking about this or if there’s a smarter approach we’re all missing. ty in advance!
by fwn | 2025-05-20 14:59:41+00:00
> China is definitely digitally fenced-off and you don't see it having these issues.

China is the textbook example of this problem. Political power in China routinely uses infrastructure to suppress or punish those who deviate from approved positions. This is precisely the risk that the article raises.

And obviously, if the ICC were to switch to Chinese infrastructure, it would just be trading one leverage for a more active one.
by koolba | 2025-05-20 14:59:52+00:00
> Out of all the many industries out there, I don't understand why we keep glorifying and romanticizing manufacturing and trying to "bring it back."

It’s a matter of national security. Look what happened during Covid when we couldn’t produce basic medical necessities at scale.

If you go to war, do you think your adversaries are going to supply you with tanks and medicine?
by ogogmad | 2025-05-20 15:00:22+00:00
I beg to differ. It's complete hyperbole to suggest that the article said "it's the same problem as something in physics", given this statement:

It seems that the bottleneck algorithm in GPT-2 inference is matrix-matrix multiplication. For physicists like us, matrix-matrix multiplication is very familiar, *unlike other aspects of AI and ML* [emphasis mine]. Finding this familiar ground inspired us to approach GPT-2 like any other numerical computing problem.

Note: Matrix-matrix multiplication is basic mathematics, and not remotely interesting as physics. It's not physically interesting.
by hackeraccount | 2025-05-20 15:00:33+00:00
When the summer rolls around that's not super uncommon for me. Go for a run in the morning - take a shower. Take a walk in the evening - take another shower. It gets hot n' humid in the Summer where I live though.

That second shower is pretty quick though. Just enough so that I'm not sweaty when I go to bed because who'd want that?
by mdaniel | 2025-05-20 15:00:43+00:00
In the context of this submission, one will want to exercise caution because they and their forgejo friends are using forks of nektos/act, with all the caveats of both "act" and "fork"

https://gitea.com/gitea/act -> https://gitea.com/gitea/act_runner

https://code.forgejo.org/forgejo/act -> https://code.forgejo.org/forgejo/runner
by NHQ | 2025-05-20 15:01:04+00:00
Deno ought to become an engine for the innovative development of web browsers. That is what we need, and what it could very well offer. Better permissions, protocol choices, simpler extensions, all around more options and control.

Business wise turn their deploy system into a resource for the browser base, for instance app store, for instance flash compute/rendering, for instance agent hosting services.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-05-20 15:01:24+00:00
> It's naturally easier to look ahead from the optimistic standpoint.

It is similarly easy to look ahead from a pessimist standpoint (e.g. how will this bubble collapse, and who will pay the bill for the hype?). The problem rather is that this overhyped optimistic standpoint is much more encouraged from society (and of course from the marketing).

> There's also the other category who are terrified about the consequences for their lives and jobs, and who are driven in a very human way to rubbish the tech to convince themselves it's doomed to failure.

There is also a third type who are not terrified of AI, but of the bad decisions managers (will) make because of all this AI craze.
by tiffanyh | 2025-05-20 15:01:27+00:00
Nationalism

I'm surprised to not see nationalism talked about. The topic of trade deficit seems to be less about economic reasons and more about a political movement towards nationalism.

This can be seen in Europe right now, as well as India and Brazil - where those respective governments have taken actions that strongly favor local/in-country based companies over foreign.

And it appears the current US administration is taking a similar approach.
by atoav | 2025-05-20 15:02:02+00:00
Yeah, only that if you spend more per capita on health care than comparable national, not less. So the argument of "We can't do $A like other countries do, because of $B" doesn't really fly if you spend more to get a worse outcome.

The problem the US has in regards to healthcare, that the goal of its system isn't to supply its population with the best quality healthcare for the lowest amount of cost — the goal instead is to allow all kind of market actors and middle man to make a profit without the population revolting.
by triceratops | 2025-05-20 15:02:24+00:00
The entire NYC subway, the busiest system in the country, has 660 miles of track. NYC has a GDP of $1.3tn and the subway system has a big hand in making that possible. So that's actually a pretty good RoI. It'll go a lot further (haha!) in a less expensive city.

But that also goes back to the original comment about spending the surplus wisely.
by sensanaty | 2025-05-20 15:02:25+00:00
That first PR (115733) would make me quit after a week if we were to implement this crap at my job and someone forced me to babysit an AI in its PRs in this fashion. The others are also rough.

A wall of noise that tells you nothing of any substance but with an authoritative tone as if what it's doing is objective and truthful - Immediately followed by:

- The 8 actual lines of code (discounting the tests & boilerplate) it wrote to actually fix the issue is being questioned by the person reviewing the code, it seems he's not convinced this is actually fixing what it should be fixing.

- Not running the "comprehensive" regression tests at all

- When they do run, they fail

- When they get "fixed" oh-so confidently, they still fail. Fifty-nine failing checks. Some of these tests take upward of an hour to run.

So the reviewer here has to read all the generated slop in the PR description and try to grok what the PR is about, read through the changes himself anyway (thankfully it's only a ~50 line diff in this situation, but imagine if this was a large refactor of some sort with a dozen files changed), and then drag it by the hand multiple times to try fix issues it itself is causing. All the while you have to tag the AI as if it's another colleague and talk to it as if it's not just going to spit out whatever inane bullshit it thinks you want to hear based on the question asked. Test failed? Well, tests fixed! (no, they weren't)

And we're supposed to be excited about having this crap thrust on us, with clueless managers being sold on this being a replacement for an actual dev? We're being told this is what peak efficiency looks like?
by srean | 2025-05-20 15:02:48+00:00
Bethe ansatz is one. It took a toure de force by Yedidia to recognize that loopy belief propagation is computing the stationary point of Bethe's approximation to Free Energy.

Many statistical thermodynamics ideas were reinvented in ML.

Same is true for mirror descent. It was independently discovered by Warmuth and his students as Bregman divergence proximal minimization, or as a special case would have it, exponential gradient algorithms.

One can keep going.
by ty6853 | 2025-05-20 15:03:04+00:00
>Imagine having to tell the economy it can only grow as fast as a specific rare metal is mined for money to continue to make sense

This is only the case if you have full reserve banking.

Under gold-backed fractional reserve there is no requirement that there be enough gold to back all the notes in circulation promising gold.

There are certainly problems with fractional reserve banking but gold backing is not a fundamental weak point here. Even IRL if everyone demands real dollar notes there is not enough in the banks and the FDIC reserves to pay it all out on demand if everyone recalled their deposits, they could not even run the money printer fast enough to cover it.

Yet somehow world trade still goes on, despite there being more value of goods in trade than currency than can back it.

Side note for completeness: theoretically all trade of any size happen with even a single gold coin by increasing velocity of money.
by perlgeek | 2025-05-20 15:03:10+00:00
In my head, I just substitute "AI" with "machine learning" or "statistics".

> and I feel the AI boom is driven by hypothesis that general models eventually outperform specialized ones given enough size/data/whatever.

I think in the sciences, I'd generally put my money on the specialized models.

I hope that the hype around AI makes it easier (by providing tooling, platforms, better algorithms, educational materials etc.) to train specialized models.

Kind of a trickle-down of hype money :-)
by frollogaston | 2025-05-20 15:03:20+00:00
I can only testify to oos being common in the Mac version of the original game, and I've heard it happening in the og Windows game. In DE under Windows, I've never seen it happen, so I'd be concerned if you're still seeing it occasionally.

Also, "gold" should mean that it works by default, not that you have to patch in a DLL. The only place the site even says "playable with tweaks" is in a tooltip if you hover over the gold symbol, right above a separate list of details that doesn't mention tweaks. I didn't even know until now.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-05-20 15:03:23+00:00
I don’t understand the motivation. The cooling and radiation resistance on orbit make satellites a very challenging and expensive place to deploy computing. Can they even use standard server chips for this? Or does it have to be something more exotic?

They state it reduces reliance on ground based computing, but it’s not obvious what would make use of this computing power other than ground based systems. Is this for processing sensor data prior to downlink? Is this for censorship of a starlink style internet constellation? Is there some military purpose?
by bwfan123 | 2025-05-20 15:04:40+00:00
nice expose of human biases involved, need more of these to balance the hype.

1) Instead of identifying a problem and then trying to find a solution, we start by assuming that AI will be the solution and then looking for problems to solve.

hammer in search of a nail

2) nearly complete non-publication of negative results

survivorship (and confirmation bias)

3) same people who evaluate AI models also benefit from those evaluations

power of incentives (and conflicts therein)

4) ai bandwagon effect, and fear of missing out

social-proof
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-20 15:04:56+00:00
Thanks!

Explaining stuff is so hard! In fact, this entire article is just me trying to explain what this is in the shortest way possible.

Maybe the shortest version is: 90s.dev is an API around a 320x180 web canvas, designed specifically for making games and game maker tools, with sharing capabilities built-in, and an innovative GUI for making game maker tools quickly and easily.

No, that's still too vague. I give up.
by bawolff | 2025-05-20 15:05:00+00:00
> The arrest warrants were rushed, brushing aside valid concerns (the court later decided it was unlawful)

Which valid concern specificly do you mean?

Do you mean Israel's juridsictional challenge? The prosecutor wasn't the one who decided that. It really wasn't brushed aside, there was just an ambiguity in the court rules on at what stage is the appropriate time to raise such a challenge. Initially the court said it was too early and that Israel had to wait until after the suspects were aprehended and the trial starts. Israel appealed, won the appeal, and the appeal court just said no point in waiting, we should just hear the challenge now. Either way the prosecutor wasn't the one deciding this, and it was largely procedural; Israel would get to make their challenge either way, it was just a fight about when they were allowed to make it.

I'd agree generally that the sexual harrasment case is pretty embarrasing for the ICC generally, and the office of the prosecutor especially.

However, even if they were rushed or the prosecutor did a bad job, i don't see how that matters. Its the judges who decides if the prosecutor has provided enough evidence to show reasonable cause, not the prosecutor. If the warrants were rushed that would benefit the accused, as presumably that would mean the prosecutors presentation to the pre-trial chamber was rushed and not as good as it could have been (and indeed we did see the prosecutor push for a few charges that were rejected by the pre-trial chamber (extermination and the mode of liability for attacks directed at civilian objects). If the theory is that he rushed it, the most likely conclusion is the accused benefitted by not being charged with those things the pre trial chamber rejected)
by mjburgess | 2025-05-20 15:05:04+00:00
Are you talking about reasoning in general, reasoning qua that mental process which operates on (representations of) propositions?

In which case, I cannot understand " true reasoning is expressed in terms of probabilities, not axioms "

One of the features of reasoning is that it does not operate in this way. It's highly implausible animals would have been endowed with no ability to operate non-probabilistically on propositions represented by them, since this is essential for correct reasoning -- and a relatively trivial capability to provide.

Eg., "if the spider is in boxA, then it is not everywhere else" and so on
by dcchambers | 2025-05-20 15:05:39+00:00
I respect and admire all of the work you put into this site Dang, so please don't think I'm being disrespectful. But you should consider adding something to the official guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And to be fair, I don't think me sharing the same comment across three separate HN posts (two of which are flagged, so invisible to users unless they search for it) counts as spamming duplicate content though.
by onlytime2tell | 2025-05-20 15:05:49+00:00
prompting can be annoying and fragile, but at least it’s deterministic. eg you tweak, you retry, you get something. context sharing is trickier because it breaks down coordination between agents and over time. you either have to a) constantly refeed everything, which burns tokens and latency, or b) build some brittle external memory system that doesn’t really map to how the agents think.