MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eru | 2025-05-08 23:31:33+00:00
I have a few more topics we could cooperate on, if you are interested.

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/62d0d742-3316-421b-9a7b-d... has a 'very static' visualisation of sorting algorithms. Basically, we have a 2d plane, and we colour a pixel (x, y) black iff the sorting algorithm compares x with y when it runs. It's a resurrection (with AI) of an older project I was coding up manually at https://github.com/matthiasgoergens/static-sorting-visualisa...

I'm also working on making https://cs.stackexchange.com/q/56643/50292 with its answer https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/171695/50292 more accessible. It's a little algorithmic problem I've been working on: 'simulate' a heap in O(n) time. I'm also developing a new, really simple implementation of soft heaps. And on my write-up for the solution to https://github.com/matthiasgoergens/TwoTimePad/blob/master/d...

> I actually read that post on the alias method just the other day and was blown away. I think I’d like to try making a post on it. Wouldn’t be able to add anything that link hasn’t already said, but I think I can make it more accessible.

If memory serves right, they don't do much about how you can efficiently support changes to your discrete probability distribution.
by nly | 2025-05-08 23:31:40+00:00
> And then, evolution found a way to add a "notch filter" such that despite increased attraction to closely related individuals, most animals (including humans) are repulsed sexually by their parents and siblings.

Not being attracted sexually to close relatives is likely the result of early imprinting when growing up under one roof, and not genetics. Indeed there is some evidence relatives separated at birth etc who meet later are more likely to unwittingly be attracted to one another.
by daseiner1 | 2025-05-08 23:31:54+00:00
taking ideas and making them, i.e., translating said ideas and said "makes" into consumer-ready and profitable products at high quality and massive scale, is not exactly running a lemonade stand and certainly isn't just a flick of the magic wand.

sure, he wasn't John von Neumann. fine. certainly one hell of a visionary and one hell of an executive, though, and a sharp and insightful person. for anyone here who hasn't yet seen it, check out "steve jobs: the lost interview". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m68auPIPRk&t=1s

jobs wasn't a charlatan and he was certainly no slouch.
by jonfriesen | 2025-05-08 23:32:07+00:00
Thanks! We're really excited about Qcontrol and what it will be able to provide! The rules in that doc are powered by our Rulekit project https://github.com/qpoint-io/rulekit if you're curious about seeing more.

As far as log sinks, we have stdout right now. We have been working on Fluentbit and will eventually add a bunch more. If you have a request, drop them here!

We also have a services concept which support an "event store" and "object store", where the object store handles artifacts that may contain sensitive data and don't need to be indexed for search/aggregation (this is an S3 compliant store). The event store handles all of the events from connection audit logs (these cover the ip protocol level) to individual http request/response pairs. The event store is a custom API we use and need to write some proper documentation for, stay tuned!
by belorn | 2025-05-08 23:32:19+00:00
If we want to talk messy reality, then the only realistic way to prevent critical point in global warming is to build everything that is non-fossil fuel, that being renewables, nuclear, experimental storage and so on, while at the same time utilizing market forces and use risk-benefit analysis for each government intervention in order to spend government subsidies as cost effective as possible. Everything is needed in order to do as much as possible to reduce emissions.

For EU regulation that requires lower emissions and environmental issues with hydro power, the messy reality is also that the cost of breaking the law and paying the fines are currently cheaper than the economical and political costs of complying with the law. So that is what the Swedish government are doing. The Paris Agreement is just a goal and clearly there is a lot of voters who see it as incompatible with modern society.

It is also the messy reality that many current governments in EU got their votes in the last election because they bailed out the citizens when the power crisis happened and paid the power bills through taxes, causing major harm in the market and further inflated prices. Building out more natural gas power plants will reduce the cost of the next crisis, which is also the stated goal of the new one that got built in Sweden.
by aurizon | 2025-05-08 23:33:37+00:00
Yes, after the test ban treaties, there was a huge push into exploring mathematical emulations of all aspects of fusion, and all assorted bombs, as well as laser ignition of pellets with these large lasers using inertial confinement of the pellet as the laser impacted it - analysing the fusion by observation of emitted neutrons. xrays etc. They issued reports from time to time(sanitised), and probably used the secret data to fine tune emulated weapons with fact points. The pellets were composed of potential fuels, various Hydrogens and Lithiums, varied in composition to explore the ignition space. A number of pellets performed well in terms of gain, but were far-far from useable fusion when the LL labs costs were factored in. I think they determined it could not ever work as a fusion energy source, but it provided data. They still mine data from it with various elemental mixes making up the pellets.
by zmmmmm | 2025-05-08 23:34:01+00:00
This seems superficial and doesn't really get to the heart of the question. To me it's not so much about bits and parameters but a more interesting fundamental question of whether pure language itself is enough to encompass and encode higher level thinking.

Empirically we observe that an LLM trained purely to predict a next token can do things like solve complex logic puzzles that it has never seen before. Skeptics claim that actually the network has seen at least analogous puzzles before and all it is doing is translating between them. However the novelty of what can be solved is very surprising.

Intuitively it makes sense that at some level, that intelligence itself becomes a compression algorithm. For example, you can learn separately how to solve every puzzle ever presented to mankind, but that would take a lot of space. At some point it's more efficient to just learn "intelligence" itself and then apply that to the problem of predicting the next token. Once you do that you can stop trying to store an infinite database of parallel heuristics and just focus the parameter space on learning "common heuristics" that apply broadly across the problem space, and then apply that to every problem.

The question is, at what parameter count and volume of training data does the situation flip to favoring "learning intelligence" rather than storing redundant domain specialised heuristics? And is it really happening? I would have thought just looking at the activation patterns could tell you a lot, because if common activations happen for entirely different problem spaces then you can argue that the network has to be learning common abstractions. If not, maybe it's just doing really large scale redundant storage of heurstics.
by TheFreim | 2025-05-08 23:35:08+00:00
Literacy is a great gift which shouldn't be squandered: much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more. To try to make knowledge of ones spiritual heritage out to be "fetishization" is inappropriate in my estimation. This reminds me of a story told by Dr. Scott Hahn, a Catholic biblical scholar, about an experience he once had (closely paraphrased):

Questioner: "Why do we need to know all of this [bible study, theology, etc]? I can just think of the medieval peasant who is illiterate and thus disqualified from any and everything that you're talking about."

Dr. Hahn: "I think the best response to your question would actually come from the medieval peasant himself, because if you could imagine him standing here next to me he would look at you and say, 'You're using me as an excuse? You have books, you have literacy, you have access to these resources, and you're using me as an excuse to not take advantage of them?'"
by hanson108 | 2025-05-08 23:35:14+00:00
Republicans killed internet access for poor kids. Even basic homework submission now requires always-on connectivity. Most textbooks are digital. Khan Academy, Duolingo, Google Classroom - the entire education infrastructure is online.

Republicans voted to kill this off for millions of students. Every single homework assignment these kids miss, every college app they can’t submit, every opportunity they lose - Republicans engineered this failure. They looked at a system and decided poor families don’t deserve to participate. Republicans don’t know how technology works, but they sure know how to break it for the kids who need it most.
by metalman | 2025-05-08 23:36:01+00:00
the other side of the coin is theres deleets and then there's deleets, mine keeps the cat, but removed the failed, wildly expensive , complicated, and impossible to service at home "emmisions" stuff, no smoke, no noise, runs nice, gets a bit better milage. You can notice the nox smell a bit when its cold, but it cleans up after a few minuits, and stays good all day. What you will hear true gear heads say comes out of the exhaust pipe, is "nothing but heat", and its true, with a realy well tuned diesel making lots of power, you can see it, mass heat ripples coming out of the pipes, you will see the same thing from aircraft exhausts, the other thing true gear heads will say is that "all noise is proof of ineficiency and wasted power" just saying
by stshank | 2025-05-08 23:36:17+00:00
Progress toward net fusion energy is critical for delivering fusion power on the grid. It's not the only progress required — the rest of the machine has to be economical to build and operate. Most of the fusion machines in this paper are scientific projects, but as commercialization progresses, fusion machines with power plant needs in mind should arrive.

(I work for one startup in the field, Commonwealth Fusion Systems. We're building our SPARC tokamak now to demonstrate net energy gain in a commercially relevant design.)
by shagie | 2025-05-08 23:36:23+00:00
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/262080/ has a data point in time when it could have been done...

> How much traffic do the questions that get duped to something bring? Especially the (currently) 410 questions linked to the Java NPE question. You get the couple of FGITW answers on it and the answer is over there, and closed to keep more people from trying to answer it (I hope the dup hammer is helping)... but now it's a closed question with 0 score, 100 views after a year... and five answers (one of which was accepted)... and no one will ever find it.

That was in 2014.

---

There are some misaligned incentives. There are probably people who dup vote to try to boost their reputation for some reason.

The problem (as I saw it) was that the tools of moderation and curation had too much friction and limits placed on them.

As the number of questions grew faster than the people who would curate them did, and the tools to curate them were diminished... you've got the problem of "there are two tools to curate and moderate left. One is to close the question. The other is to be a jerk to try to disincentivize the person from doing that again." I wrote about the second bit... a few years ago. Rudeness – the moderation tool of last resort -- https://shagie.net/2016/09/16/rudeness-the-moderation-tool-o...

Things like making it harder to not see low quality questions, or close them, or delete them...

> Thus rudeness and the attempt to drive an individual away because other moderation tools have run out or are ineffective. Rudeness is the moderation tool of last resort. When one sees the umteenth “how do I draw a pyramid with *” in the first week of classes on a programming site – how does one make it go away when the moderation tools have been fully exhausted? Be rude and hope that the next person seeing it won’t post the umteenth+1 one.

With respect to Stack Overflow, I believe that they've exhausted the people capable of doing moderating without rudeness and are now employees trying to moderate the core group rather than the core group empowered to moderate the site. Eventually, there will be no more left in the core group.

Other sites, with a narrower focus (e.g. GitHub discussions) are more able to handle the better focused questions and smaller user bases.
by aclatuts | 2025-05-08 23:37:13+00:00
This makes perfect sense for a headless CMS. An editor might upload changes or a new article a few times per day/week into a database through a headless CMS. A webserver could make a request to the headless CMS/database for every web page load, but if the content doesn't change then the webpage can be computed and served statically. The web server can compute just the changes per page or regenerate the whole site on any change on the backend.
by meesles | 2025-05-08 23:37:33+00:00
Is that final number really that crazy? With a well defined goal, you can put out 5-8K per day by writing code the old fashioned way. Also would love to see the code, since in my experience (I use Cursor as a daily driver), AI bloats code by 50% or more with unnecessary comments and whitespace especially when making full classes/files.

> I spend a lot of time setting Claude code up for success.

Normally I wouldn't post this because it's not constructive, but this piece stuck out to me and had me wondering if it's worth the trade-off. Not to mention programmers have spent decades fighting against LoC as a metric, so let's not start using it now!
by boznz | 2025-05-08 23:37:51+00:00
Totally agree. As I have got older I found that it is important for me to spend more time on writing blog posts and real books rather than just throw away, sometimes un-thought-out, comments on random web sites. (yes I see the irony here!)

I doubt many people will every read what I write but It is building up a history of who and what I am, and while he world may not appreciate me now, who is to say a future generation or ASI might not find me fascinating and insightful.
by jbellis | 2025-05-08 23:39:23+00:00
Love to see it!

Wonder how to reconcile the description of almost-negligible admin overhead with this description of a similar effort that warns, "We wanted to keep costs extremely low, so we had parent volunteers do all admin for the school. It's going really well, but it's an insane amount of work."

From my experience both teaching kids and organizing things, that seems like a much more likely outcome.

https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1917287461027459239
by socalgal2 | 2025-05-08 23:39:49+00:00
I don't know if any of these are good, but there are 100s (1000s?) of examples of high density UIs here

https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues?q=label%3Agallery

So you don't have to dig, 3 examples

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/6f62b5ca8579543a1f59eceed...

https://private-user-images.githubusercontent.com/13691253/4...

https://private-user-images.githubusercontent.com/14961870/4...
by trhway | 2025-05-08 23:40:28+00:00
In this article you can see a typical and a "broken" "visual to amygdala fear shortcuts" (the "broken" is MRI of the famous climber Honnold)

https://assets.nautil.us/10086_6412121cbb2dc2cb9e460cfee7046...

https://nautil.us/the-strange-brain-of-the-worlds-greatest-s...

(the path is from the back of the head (V5?) where the visual nerve comes into brain)
by jwmcq | 2025-05-08 23:40:36+00:00
Growing up to Scottish and Irish Catholics in England, I remember talking to a bunch of Ulster protestants as a teenager when the topic turned to religion - I said "Well, I was raised Catholic but I'm not really a believer of any kind" and the response was "Ah, so you're one of THOSE Catholics!".

Turns out there are a lot of 'those' Catholics.
by EasyMark | 2025-05-08 23:40:44+00:00
I know some desperate system design (big picture, not networking) people who are freaking out now because the parts for their designs are going to increase for some 2 fold, essentially killing their projects if something doesn't change. Years of work and coding going down the shitter because of one man's pride and a fearful do-nothing Congress that refuses to do their first and most important duty, to protect the Constitution from tyranny
State-Tracer – Visualize Recoil and Jotai State Dependencies
by apple-yagi | 2025-05-08 23:41:29+00:00
Hi HN,

I’d like to introduce state-tracer, a tool for React developers using Recoil or Jotai for state management. state-tracer helps you visualize the relationships and dependencies within your state, making it easier to design, understand, and maintain complex state architectures.

Features include:

- Generating clear dependency graphs for Recoil atoms/selectors and Jotai atoms

- Supporting state design by revealing data flow and component interaction

- Facilitating comprehension and refactoring of existing codebases

You can find the project and documentation here:

https://github.com/apple-yagi/state-tracer

I’d love to hear your feedback and ideas!

Thanks!
by Affric | 2025-05-08 23:41:35+00:00
Steve: what would this product be like if it were magical?

Engineer: I don’t think we can build that with our current technology.

Steve: I don’t give a fuck. You’re a nerd who is meant to like inventing. Do it.

It’s really easy when we live in the world of the Mac, and the iPhone to say “Ah it was inevitable” but Steve’s approach to product is what got us here. He made sure that the GUI was computers, that capacitive touchscreens were smart phones.

Being arguably the greatest product guy and salesman of all time is some feat.
Ask HN: My company is forcing 1 week sprints. What should I do?
by mcsolid | 2025-05-08 23:41:41+00:00
The leadership of the company I’m at is forcing all teams to do 1 week sprints instead of 2 because they believe that they can get more out of the teams and get better visibility into progress. We’ve debated for months that teams aren’t getting enough upfront time to plan while still taking on the same meeting load as 2 week sprints basically every week. All the engineers, leads and product leads want to as well. I don’t know what to do anymore. All the teams are getting burned out from meeting overload and not enough prep time. Any advice?
by Maxatar | 2025-05-08 23:41:55+00:00
Just keep in mind, the kernel trick is a way to transform a data set so that "linear things work better"... although that's very vague I mean sure it's passable but it's also different from what was originally posted... the kernel trick doesn't transform your data into a space where that data becomes linear. It transforms your data into a space where it can be separated by a line/plane. The data is almost always non-linear in that transformed space but it's transformed in a way that a plane can cleanly separate that data.

Given that the kernel trick is pretty specific jargon used mostly in a specific circumstance, it's in your interest to use that term in that specific context. If you're interested in the more general term of making things work with respect to some function, which can be linear or Gaussian or some other form the term is "feature transformation".
by onesociety2022 | 2025-05-08 23:42:08+00:00
I'm not sure if it would pan out like how your half-brother wants it to be. Let's assume the manufacturing jobs return here and you are getting paid American wages. But if you try to turn around and spend it on anything, it will just be more expensive because everything else you want to buy is also being made in US factories and those workers are also getting pay similar to yours? You might have a manufacturing job finally but now you are paying $350 for a Nike shoe that used to be $150 when it was made in China. You want to buy a new TV? It costs more now. You want to upgrade your old iPhone? It costs more now.

So will the American manufacturing wages actually translate to living wages or will you just be getting paid more on paper but you still feel poor because the things you want to buy are all more expensive now?
by johnisgood | 2025-05-08 23:42:44+00:00
I wish some psychiatrists knew that. I had a recent conversation with at least two who do not. One of them is around 35 years old (so quite young).

These days they call hobbies (like drawing) a "distraction" or go as far as call it an addiction. They are so out of touch with the literature and science with regarding to psychiatry, it is wild.
by gruez | 2025-05-08 23:43:07+00:00
>The UK is in a fairly unique position where its GDP per capita has been stagnant for decades. Which means it's slowly sinking under inflation.

No it's not. The charts showing "stagnant" GDP have already adjusted for inflation, which means it's not "slowly sinking under inflation".

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
by ToDougie | 2025-05-08 23:44:34+00:00
If (big if) income taxes are significantly reduced (eliminated for tax brackets at $200k or less, and graduated meaningfully above $200k), then the tariffs will be palatable, while giving investors and industry the time to rebuild. The rebuild will not be possible without intensive deregulation and upheaval of some entrenched regulatory institutions. It is hard to believe that any of what I have listed is possible, but in my lifetime I have seen this country do all kinds of wacky things.
by kevinsync | 2025-05-08 23:46:28+00:00
My hot take is that what some people are labeling as "emergent" is actually just "incidental encoding" or "implicit signal" -- latent properties that get embedded just by nature of what's being looked at.

For instance, if you have a massive tome of English text, a rather high percentage of it will be grammatically-correct (or close), syntactic and understandable, because humans who speak good English took the time to write it and wrote it how other humans would expect to read or hear it. This, by its very nature, embeds "English language" knowledge due to sequence, word choice, normally-hard-to-quantify expressions (colloquial or otherwise), etc.

When you consider source data from many modes, there's all kinds of implicit stuff that gets incidentally written.. for instance, real photographs of outer space or deep sea would only show humans in protective gear, not swimming next to the Titanic. Conversely, you won't see polar bears eating at Chipotle, or giant humans standing on top of mountains.

There's a statistical probability of "this showed up enough in the training data to loosely confirm its existence" / "can't say I ever saw that, so let's just synthesize it" aspect of the embeddings that one person could interpret as "emergent intelligence", while another could just-as-convincingly say it's probabilistic output that is mostly in line with what we expect to receive. Train the LLM on absolute nonsense instead and you'll receive exactly that back.
by planck_tonne | 2025-05-08 23:46:56+00:00
I also like reading about old engineering solutions.

The way I see it, though, that kind of thing still exists today: the "cheap modern memory card" probably contains many "exciting carefully engineered features". They got teams of people working full time to make these thing as fast, reliable, cheap, low-power as possible.

But the engineering feats are likely much more niche (and thus harder to understand). Not to mention, secret.
by honk | 2025-05-08 23:47:02+00:00
You may know this already, but both Olin Foundations are good examples, actually. I believe the John M. Olin foundation dissolution plans were specifically in response to the Ford foundation's drift. The F. W. Olin foundation (John's Father) coincidentally dissolved in the same year, but that was due to largely accomplishing their original goal of endowing engineering buildings at colleges, and pivoting to founding a new engineering college entirely.