MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bronlund | 2025-05-25 00:30:23+00:00
I see where you are coming from, but reading other peoples research is also research. And what you say about bias, is most likely true for a lot of academic research as well. And a lot of people actually do their own research.

I once tried to find the article which explains how CO2 is the cause of global warming. I read through all the IPCC reports, I read through all the referenced articles, and I read through all the referenced articles in all the references before giving up. One would think that such an important article would be easy to find, but as far as I know, it does not exist.
by deater | 2025-05-25 00:31:57+00:00
I still find it nearly impossible to get good video captures from my Apple II for demoscene purposes

the best I can get is an old composite->USB capture device which mostly does a good job but struggles with lo-res graphics (grey ends up being closely spaced black/white lines)

I have a retrotink 2 but to capture things I have to run it through an additional HDMI->USB capture device and that's not the best and I can't get the sound to sync up that way. (I'm doing all of this with OBS/Linux which probably isn't helping things)

not sure if getting an even more expensive retrotink 5 would help
by machinate | 2025-05-25 00:35:11+00:00
In Steins;Gate (VN/anime) a fictional CERN is the main antagonist https://steins-gate.fandom.com/wiki/SERN

Just a shot of the LHC though, no other scenes with their facilities.

Apparently CERN also appears its sister series Robotics;Notes, but I might play it someday so I won't spoil myself on how.
Show HN: Speak Chinese characters on the clipboard automatically while learning
by C-Loftus | 2025-05-25 00:35:54+00:00
I am learning Mandarin but found that I often want a free, offline, and fast way to hear the pronunciation of Chinese characters I don't know, regardless of what app I am in.

• I was surprised this didn't yet exist on Linux so I created https://github.com/C-Loftus/Mandarin-Clipboard-Speaker

• It uses the same free, offline Piper models as my audiobook generator which previously gained some popularity here: https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook

The solution at the moment is quite simple but I wanted to share in case it would help others or there are other cool Mandarin learning tools you know of!
by kristopolous | 2025-05-25 00:38:04+00:00
I was coding a chatting bot with an agent like everyone else at https://github.com/day50-dev/llmehelp and I called the agent "DUI" mode because it's funny.

However, as I was testing it, it would do reckless and irresponsible things. After I changed it, as far as bot communication, to "Do-Ur-Inspection" mode and it became radically better.

None of the words you give it are free from consequences. It didn't just discard the "DUI" name as a mere title and move on. Fascinating lesson.
by AngryData | 2025-05-25 00:38:23+00:00
Sure making high quality gasoline is difficult, but making shitty gasoline or fuels that can take the place of gasoline with a bit less power is not some crazy technology. Gasoline engines, if tuned to do so, will run off naptha and ethanol mixtures. And if you are creating it fresh, like from the existence of a place called gas town, it will allow you to use more volatile but higher octane fuels mixed to make decent octane gasoline, it just won't last sitting around for very long. And methanol is fairly easy to produce from heating up nearly any organic matter up in a dry still. Diesel engines will run off nearly any oil that will burn.

I mean sure, fuel refining knowledge isn't super common, but plenty of people still know enough about it and chemistry to less efficiently produce fuels as long as they have a source material, be it an actual oil well or enough organic materials, with some basic tooling. Tooling which we would already know exists by the fact that people are maintaining a fleet of vehicles. And you also have to remember that Max himself was alive and working in world pre-collapse, it isn't a world 10+ generations into an apocalypse, only like 2 maybe bordering on 3 generations of apocalypse with some people still remembering the old world, albeit in a decaying state.

There are hippies that process wood into usable liquid fuels you can find on youtube. If we wanted to be more realistic, they would be driving less, and have a far higher percentage of diesel vehicles because diesel is so much easier to make and the engines are easier to run on even garbage fuels. But Mad Max isn't like 200 years post-apocalypse.
by npteljes | 2025-05-25 00:38:55+00:00
This is the same thing I realized when being a "game master" of the shooter matches we used to hold on my previous project. The end goal of that play was fun, not to determine who has the most technical skill. After realizing this in my head, and also implementing it as additional rules for the game, the game sessions became much more enjoyable for everyone, participation, enjoyment, and desire to return for another session was through the roof.

That said, both kinds of play has its place, in my life at least. Staying on the topic of shooters, when I play online in ranked, it's all out for me, and I enjoy that as well, in a different way. But when playing with my wife, it's never all out, always friendly.
Show HN: I made a OSS alternative to Weights and Biases
by LakeeSiv | 2025-05-25 00:42:13+00:00
Hey HN!

I made a completely open sourced alternative to Weights and Biases with (insert cringe) blazingly fast performance (yes we use rust and clickhouse)

Weights and Biases is super unperformant, their logger blocks user code... logging should not be blocking, yet they got away with it. We do the right thing by being non blocking.

Would love any thoughts / feedbacks / roasts etc
by sphars | 2025-05-25 00:42:25+00:00
> The problem is hard because examining every possible Boggle board is unfeasible. There are something like a 20-digit number of them and scoring every one — even at Vanderkam’s pacy 200,000 boards a second — would take 800mn years.

> It took 23,000 CPU hours on a high-end 192-core machine in the cloud — time worth about $1,200, across five human days.

Pardon the pun but the sheer amount of possible boards is mind boggling. Impressive how he managed to cut it down by magnitudes.
by KennyBlanken | 2025-05-25 00:42:53+00:00
Doing one minute of almost anything will not cause adaptation or any improvement in your fitness - or a very minimal improvement and then nothing further whatsoever. We're talking 'you are almost completely sedentary, this might help.' You know what else is good? Going for a walk, and you don't need a stupid app to help you do it (also there are no shortage of youtube videos and subreddit routines, all for free, no personal/device data collection, nothing.)

This "you can work out in 1 minute" is just another version of the 80's/90's "crunch your abs /air box / step your way to this beach body!" crap.

The studies are bunk - done on college-age people whose bodies are already in pretty good fitness.

Exercise is work.

It's hard.

It's supposed to be.

There are no shortcuts.

You need to get lots of low intensity exercise, a moderate amount of...well...moderate intensity, and a bit of very high intensity exercise. Ideally in that order - establish a "base" over weeks if not months before you dip much into the latter two.
by kurko | 2025-05-25 00:42:59+00:00
> I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.

Paul's point would make sense if his case was about greater verisimilitude, which might sound like splitting hairs, but is an important phenomenon in philosophy. Many dictators have sounded good but their core messages were abhorrent.

In the same vein, there are thousands of fiction books, some more brilliantly written than others, but nothing in that spectrum makes any of their stories any more real or true.

> I know it's true from writing.

Well, some things just appear to be true. I admire Paul's writings and I believe his honesty in trying to get to the truth, but in this specific essay, it seems like what he's alluding to is the appearance of truth. Good writing makes core ideas look more true, but it can't objectively have a relation to truth itself, only with our description of said idea.
by cobertos | 2025-05-25 00:45:11+00:00
A friend's relative was detained at the border and had their phone searched on political grounds. There are multiple videos of people being whisked away by masked police and government. Not to mention all the other screws that have been turned on academia that I've heard in countless stories from people in my circle.

The media is not doing us any good, but the fear is not imagined.
by defrost | 2025-05-25 00:45:24+00:00
> If you as a coding genius had to develop a program without any internet access, how far would you get?

As an engineering student transferred to applied math in the early 1980s I was able (with no real substantial internet access, literally getting floppy discs by mail, etc) to write an OS, an original commercial event tracking system for fleet management of mining vehicles, a real time marine seismic capture, storage, view and analysis system (basic PC, real time OS (that a friend wrote), Window Manager, dedicated hardware, lots of assembler, signal processing, etc).

And a whole lot more. (Bit of work on a sheep shearing robot, lot of early GIS mapping routines)

(Oh, some interesting stuff for CAYLEY/MAGMA that has recently been used to break quantuum encryption candidates .. odd just how long some fundementals last)

It seemed normal at the time to be able to do this, both a circle of friends and myself had a ball building stuff - much of it based on books, talking in person to others, and just diving in and playing about.

It's perhaps easier to get by without AI and real time always connected internet than you seem to think.
by disqard | 2025-05-25 00:45:39+00:00
My personal theory is that tech folks are often under-educated -- in the sense that they've specialized so much, that they missed out on a well-rounded human education.

This makes it easy to hijack the "ooh look! shiny/sexy technology" part of their brain, to work on Palantir-type stuff, whereas anyone with a more liberal, broad education would go "wtf! I don't want to help build that!"
by tptacek | 2025-05-25 00:46:03+00:00
I don't think I reach the deeper questions here, and pretty much just get back to "if it was cheap, Apple would have killed it already"; in that set of circumstances there can't be viable public exploits (or broad workable bug classes to fish from) to work with.

Sucks if you're part of a public jailbreaking community, but, of course, good if you're a user.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-05-25 00:46:04+00:00
Post-silicon debug of flip-chip parts is sometimes done by shining a laser on the chip at a very specific spot and detecting backscatter from the laser spot to determine if a transistor is on or not. If you turn the laser power up, you can switch specific transistors open or closed. Semiconductors in general are pretty sensitive to light, which is why they are usually packaged in a way that keeps them dark during operation.
by paulryanrogers | 2025-05-25 00:47:38+00:00
VR doesn't have smell. Yet it can render visually things you cannot possibly see in real life. Watching a dinosaur approach and stomp overhead is quite a sight to experience in VR, even more intense than 3D glasses.

The way the view tilts and moves with one's head, combined with the audio alignment, creates a surreal experience.

Whether IRL is better or worse than VR is entirely subjective.
by mattnewton | 2025-05-25 00:48:58+00:00
> The laws haven't changed.

But the interpretation of how to enforce them certainly has changed with this administration, that much is undeniable? I don’t remember prior admins kicking out all foreign Harvard students or sending masked plainclothes ice agents to arrest US citizens protesting outside detention facilities?

This isn’t just my opinion - this administration is actively defying a 9-0 Supreme Court decision finding it acted unlawfully, and ordering Noem to return around Mr Garcia no later than April 7th. To say that because “the laws haven’t changed” that it’s all a media invention is crazy to me.
by robwwilliams | 2025-05-25 00:49:08+00:00
True, not much data yet, but a cery real day to day factor for conference organizers. We have had two Canadians skip a US conference last month due to the dramatical worse general climate. Zoom instead. This is NOT just about immigration and passport control. It is the new ugly American zeitgeist that changes enthusiasm.

We will probably be skipping the US for two international conferences I have helped organize. Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec, Halifax are all great alternatives for larger meetings from 2027 ti 20??.
by XorNot | 2025-05-25 00:49:18+00:00
The better answer is just "I don't care".

Because I definitely don't care. Energy expenditure numbers are always used in isolation, lest any one have to deal with anything real about them, and always are content to ignore the abstraction which electricity is - namely, electricity is not coal. It's electricity. Unlike say, driving my petrol powered car, the power for my computers might come from solar panels, coal, nuclear power stations, geothermal power hydro...

Which is to say, if people want to worry about electricity usage: go worry about it by either building more clean energy, or campaigning to raise electricity prices.
by tptacek | 2025-05-25 00:49:32+00:00
It happens to me every once in awhile, but I'm not sure why I would care. I usually set it off on some question and go tab away to something else while it flails. When I come back, I have a better-than-average shot at a workable solution, which is a science fiction result.

When I first began programming as a teenager, one of the mental hurdles I had to get over was asking the computer to "too much"; like, I would feel bad writing a nested loop --- that can't possibly be the right answer! What a chore for the computer! It didn't take me too long to figure out that was the whole point of computers. To me, it's the same thing with LLMs spinning on something. Who gives a shit? It's not me wasting that time.
by mbrumlow | 2025-05-25 00:49:48+00:00
I think about this a lot.

Like. 20, 30, 40 years from now will we still just have Android and iOS ran by the echos of Google and Apple?

I would like to think with the spread of tech, and now maybe AI we could end up with 100s of hardware manufacturers, with dozens of OSs, some open and some close, all interacting with each other over well defined APIs.

I think the first step to that is solving the server problem, and or the addressable problem.

Today we are locked into these streams because it’s. It easy for normal people to get a server to handle receiving messages and notifications of generic sort and direct device messages are not possible because we don’t have a free and open way to register my device is on line.

I don’t have any real solutions for any is these problems as they all often require a constant source of funding.

The one I think will probably allow us to break free in some sort of p2p mesh overlay that allows messages to safely be relayed by untrusted devices.

Thoughts?
by gjm11 | 2025-05-25 00:51:44+00:00
I think either they changed it or there's some A/B testing thing going on. For me too, the title is "The age of dumb phones is here".

(I think the "question" version of the title is correctly answered by Betteridge's Law, and the "statement" version is wrong if it's understood as claiming that a lot of people are choosing dumb phones.)
by jfengel | 2025-05-25 00:52:32+00:00
He's not referring to the scientists. He's referring to a large subset of supporters of the present administration, stereotypically lower middle class white men. They have seen other groups (women, black people, Hispanics, gay people, etc) gaining rights over the last half century or so, while they are no better off and often worse off.

This group also has a grievance against scientists, whom they see as complicit because of their campaign against climate change, among other things.

The present administration is heavily weighted towards supporting the backlash from this group. This weighs heavily on scientists, and is seen as a win for the former group.
by roxolotl | 2025-05-25 00:54:20+00:00
The parent is saying the status wound is being experienced by those doing the firing and detaining.

Another way to state this is that those in power today are out for revenge because they feel as though the past ~50 years has been punishing to them. So they are lashing out against those who’ve gained in that period of time. Science and intellectualism in general is one of those gains.
by mjevans | 2025-05-25 00:54:31+00:00
The 2nd, and supposed to be final, term of the current US President is scheduled to end on Jan 20th, 2029.

I am hopeful that my fellow Americans will elect a responsible, intelligent, virtuous leader in 2028 to be sworn into office on that day.

I know I'm asking a LOT. However that's one of, if not the most, important jobs in the world. We all deserve to have someone at least that qualified there.
by rendx | 2025-05-25 00:55:08+00:00
One option that I not see discussed in the blog post: Collecting user signals locally and using those access patterns (mouse movement, clicks, IP/site browsing history) to discriminate between "standard" site usage and bots; so like a "reCaptcha lite", not trained across many sites but trained specifically on the target.

For a ticket platform like pretix that can be run self-hosted alongside the main site, this should give you enough signals to discriminate between normal users and bots, unless they are specifically targeting that site, or am I mistaken? Even just pure web server access logs may be sufficient on smaller sites so this might work even without JS?
by dinfinity | 2025-05-25 00:58:27+00:00
I never said that VR can provide everything real life can and more. I said that it can provide experiences that real life can't and nothing in your example refutes that.

Now, I do agree that real life can provide things that VR can't. Many, many things even. That was not the subject however; it was: "Why would anyone want to give themselves motion sickness for a VR game?"
by brailsafe | 2025-05-25 00:58:53+00:00
I like what nntwozz is doing and how it's framed, but I'd add that I've been exactly in your position, first in 2020 and now periodically since then, with the exception that I've been playing retail instead of Classic. I think people tend to resent how much time they've spent on MMOs and go in the complete opposite direction, which I definitely did for about a decade and it helped me get my life on some sort of course in my early adult years. I think there's nuance to consider though, and WoW specifically has helped me keep engaged mentally with something that's intense and incrementally rewarding, especially during the winter months, when the real mountains don't call for me as much, and times when I've been between jobs for more than a year. Burnout happens to me when I lose agency over my work, something bad happens in life, I become disconnected from the reward system of work, or all of the above. It can happen if it's just day-to-day emergencies with no tangible improvement and nobody giving much of a shit what you do, but it can also happen when you're just not able to pull yourself out of work and do something pointless and fun for yourself.

WoW helps me pull myself out of work and gives me something intangible to grind on for a bit, which maps nicely to maintaining the spirit for a remote programming job game loop.

So I don't think you need to move on unless it's truly an addiction. These days, I'll play a season of retail in a semi-competitive but mostly casual capacity, and usually unsubscribe in spring to enjoy hiking and mountains and climbing and a bunch of other things. It's the variety that keeps me enjoying each one of them, and it's the act of enjoying them that lets programming remain the slightest bit fulfilling.

Additionally, I do think it's been silly to try and replace gaming with things that are arguably more productive, like working on a bike or a side project, at least on a permanent basis, and as long as I can choose how I spend my time, I don't see how it's an inherently bad way to do it. I like working on electronics projects, bikes, and doing all sorts of other stuff that's great for my health and well-being, but they're all happening as well as gaming, because they're all different types of fun and engagement. No I'm not spending 10 hours a day on it, but it's a hobby like anything else.
Show HN: Manifold is a platform for workflow automation using AI assistants
by Art9681 | 2025-05-25 01:00:13+00:00
Hi HN! I'd like to show an early version of Manifold. This is a flow based UI (think ComfyUI) for designing automated workflows using language models. This is a passion hobby project and not intended for production use. The idea behind it was, can we create "the last tool"? A platform that can create any other computing tool or execute a process by designing workflows visually, and having AI assistants generate the necessary code or data with each run? Here is a list of some of the more notable features:

- Supports public endpoints such as OpenAI API, Google and Anthropic completions, as well as any OpenAI API compatible local backend.

- Integrated RAG solution that leverages PGVector for semantic search as well as an inverted index (keyword search) with multiple document merge modes. Option to retrieve full documents or chunks.

- ReAct Agent with access to configured MCP servers. If no suitable tool is found, the agent is instructed to generate their own in a secure code sandbox.

- Integrated web code editor that runs code in a WASM sandbox with support for JavaScript, Python or HTML previews.

- CodeRunner node that supports third party libraries in a local container sandbox. Python, JS and Golang are supported. Libraries are automatically installed.

- Nodes to control the execution flow of your workflow. Run concurrent agents. Jump to nodes. Execute for each loops on assistant outputs. Combine context. Publish and subscribe to topics to teleport context around your workflows.

Documentation is non-existent but I am working on that before a formal 1.0 release. Expect bugs. Manifold is 99% a solo developed project with the help of a very much appreciated contributors.

This is an open source project. Given the scope, I am sure I have overlooked many important things. Feel free to reach out to me if you have suggestions, or if there is a glaring issue that needs to be fixed.

The README has multiple images of example workflows for your viewing pleasure. Hopefully those give the community an idea of what is possible when creatively combining the nodes.

The repository is located at https://github.com/intelligencedev/manifold.

I appreciate any constructive feedback and contributions.
by mjevans | 2025-05-25 01:02:10+00:00
We're pretty rapidly nearing the end of transistor scaling with currently widely used technologies and materials.

Something's got to give, from a device manufacturing point the thing _consumers_ need the most is probably cost. Keep the feature size, slash the cost so they can be sold more transistors.

Size doesn't even really matter that much anymore, but power consumption for work absolutely does. Possibly better interconnect technology and integration into larger physical packages (smaller overall footprint since all the big wires got taken out).

Who knows if someone wins a lottery of scientific discovery for either a more cost effective way to do stuff we already know how to do other ways, or for something completely new that breaks open space for new ideas.
by t0lo | 2025-05-25 01:02:36+00:00
"The victim told the police Woeltz and the other man beat him, shocked him, hit him with a gun and pointed it at his head, and dangled him from the top of the five-story home, threatening to kill him. They also cut his leg with a saw, he said, threatened to kill his family and forced him to smoke crack cocaine, the New York Daily News reported."

That's not a fun experience.