MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xmodem | 2025-05-15 20:45:14+00:00
> You want to be able to ask them where they are.

Through what presently-existing technology, exactly, is this idea supposed to work over distances greater than at best a couple of miles with say LoRA?

> The reason you don't see these on the market is because the people that fund products want to sell location data.

I'm not equipped to analyse their claims in detail, but Apple claims the design of their find-my network is end-to-end encrypted, and presumably it would be a huge scandal if this turned out to be a massive lie.
by jonhohle | 2025-05-15 20:46:10+00:00
Gold is considered to have relatively consistent value over time.

Median home price in 1940 Boston area was $3,600 or 180oz gold. Today the median home price is 215oz of gold in the same area (or $670,000). In terms of gold, house prices are up 20%. In terms of dollars, 18000%.

A new car still costs around 13oz of gold.

Real inflation of fiat is easy to obscure for political reasons. That’s much harder to do with the market value of gold.
by shadowgovt | 2025-05-15 20:46:22+00:00
Gene therapies are pretty incredible. Some of them are still making a button-hole with a machete, but that's relative to the previous medical intervention of a button-hole with a tank's main gun.

One of the treatments for sickle-cell involves switching off the gene that makes the malfunctioning red blood cells, but of course that's not sufficient; you'd stop making red blood cells completely and you'd die. So it's combined with a modification that switches on a gene that all humans express pre-birth that causes your body to make "super-blood": red blood cells with significantly more binding points for oxygen. This is necessary because a fetus gets oxygen from its mother's blood, so the increased binding affinity is useful for pulling the oxygen towards the fetus at the placental interface. After birth, expression of that gene is disabled and regular RBC genes switch on.

So the therapy doesn't "fix" sickle RBCs; it disables the body's ability to make them and re-enables fetal RBCs! I have seen no literature on whether having fetal RBCs in adulthood has any benefits or drawbacks (besides changing the affinity ratio for their fetus if the patient gets pregnant, I imagine increased-affinity RBC could help for athletics... But I also imagine it requires more iron to generate them so has dietary impact).
by ceejayoz | 2025-05-15 20:46:50+00:00
The Fords don't get "full SPY-6". It's a modular radar, made of 2x2x2 foot modules; the Burkes have 37 modules, the Fords have 9.

https://www.rtx.com/raytheon/what-we-do/sea/spy6-radars (see "A closer look at the SPY-6 variants")
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-05-15 20:47:15+00:00
"The 2025 TLA⁺ Community Event was held last week on May 4th at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. "

Damn. Happened a 10 minute drive from my house and I didn't even know about it.

TLA+ is on the infinite bucket list for me. I'm sure like many others, I know the value of learning and applying formal verification, but it feels impenetrable knowing really how to jump in.
by skissane | 2025-05-15 20:48:00+00:00
> Let's just say "Harvard" is a third declension noun because why not.

Given Harvard maintains the tradition of Latin addresses (the Latin Salutatory), I’m sure they have an official position on what their name is in Latin. Wikipedia cites this article but not sure if it is online: Hammond, Mason (Summer 1987). "Official Terms in Latin and English for Harvard College or University". Harvard Library bulletin. Vol. XXXV, no. 3. Harvard University. pp. 294–310.

I spent a year as a student at the University of Sydney (Australia). I roughly remember how to say in Latin “University of Sydney Library”, because they stamped it on all their old library books (something like “Bibliotheca Universitatis Sidneiensis”)-I expect old books in Harvard’s library may be stamped in Latin too
by AdhemarVandamme | 2025-05-15 20:48:30+00:00
I don’t see why the grammatical cases of Latin and German matter in the interpretation of these abbreviations.

The Latin prepositions cum (with) and sine (without) are always followed by the ablative case. German has grammatical cases too, but no ablative. The German propositions mit (with) and ohne (without) are followed by the accusative case.

So c.t. = cum tempore = mit Zeit = with time (or with some delay), and s.t. = sine tempore = ohne Zeit = without time (or without delay).
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-15 20:48:33+00:00
They roughly have the same meaning in the languages they were borrowed from, Latin[1] and Greek[2] respectively.

Yeah it's random, but established at this point. The radio bands aren't much better[3] with their Very High Frequency (VHF), Ultra High Frequency (UHF) and Super High Frequency (SHF) and Extremely High Frequency (EHF).

[1]: https://www.etymonline.com/word/super-

[2]: https://www.etymonline.com/word/hyper-

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_spectrum#ITU
by nico | 2025-05-15 20:48:36+00:00
I’ve had this in different ways many times. Like instead of resolving the underlying issue for an exception, it just suggests catching the exception and keep going

It also depends a lot on the mix of model and type of code and libraries involved. Even in different days the models seem to be more or less capable (I’m assuming they get throttled internally - this is very noticeable sometimes in how they try to save on output tokens and summarize the code responses as much as possible, at least in the chat/non-api interfaces)
Show HN: I Built an AI Security Tester
by Adeeb0123 | 2025-05-15 20:48:45+00:00
I Built an AI Security Tester to test out your web apps for vulnerabilities (sqli, xss, csrf, insecure headers, etc), Business logic flaws, or exposed credentials (You won't believe how many "vibe coders" are exposing their API Keys )

Each test initiated is completely unique in how its carried out, adapted to the target website + Gives a security report.

On the backend, it runs with the help of 29 agents which are invoked on demand. The main testing agent functions in an isolated Kali linux machine - spawned for each test.

Feedback appreciated, and would love to answer your questions about it.

https://peneterrer.com
by tcgv | 2025-05-15 20:49:18+00:00
> Humans aren’t just a step on a ladder to “pure logic,” nor are machines soulless automatons.

Nope. Machines are soulless automations. LLMs are algebra at scale, there’s no solid evidence to suggest otherwise.

The capacity LLMs have to mimic human reasoning should not be mistaken for actual human reasoning (which, to be fair, we don’t even fully understand).

PS: I’m considering a definition of “soul” that includes anything spiritual, emotional, or conscious.

PPS: I’m open (and eager) to change my view based on solid evidence :)
by agilebyte | 2025-05-15 20:49:20+00:00
Markdown format with a comment saying what the file path is. So:

This is src/components/Foo.tsx

```tsx // code goes here ```

OR

```tsx // src/components/Foo.tsx // code goes here ```

These seem to work the best.

I tried diff syntax, but Gemini 2.5 just produced way too many bugs.

I also tried using regex and creating an AST of the markdown doc and going from there, but ultimately settled on calling gpt-4.1-mini-2025-04-14 with the beginning of the code block (```) and 3 lines before and 3 lines after the beginning of the code block. It's fast/cheap enough to work.

Though I still have to make edits sometimes. WIP.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-05-15 20:50:14+00:00
The application joins are (soon to be were) done in Rust service that's side loaded with the node server.

Also, this is an old quote. Databases didn't all support things like JSON at the time, so joins and subqueries presented an N+1 problem and could balloon data fetch requirements fairly easily. Being a GraphQL-focused ORM originally too, this made some sense.

The default is now being changed and correlated subqueries, JOINs, & JSON aggregation will replace the old approach unless explicitly toggled.
Ask HN: How would you fund a tech cooperative owned by workers and users?
by prrada | 2025-05-15 20:50:44+00:00
I built a marketplace for therapist friends (sana.so) and we're trying to turn it into a proper cooperative. Inspired by David Graeber's anarchist ideas, I want to create a tech tool that's genuinely owned by both users (therapists) and workers, with direct voting rather than committees (Voting in committee members doesn't feel democratic enough for me). What models or examples should we investigate for funding and governance?
by ianburrell | 2025-05-15 20:50:53+00:00
The problem with the distributed battle groups problem is that there is minimum capability that is needed to be viable warship. The LCS are a failure partly because they were designed for low intensity conflict. They only have point defense and not medium range air defense. The Houthis have shown in Red Sea that higher level of defense is needed against cheap anti-ship missiles and drones.

The other part is that ships provide interlocking sensors and defense. The carrier's AWACS cover a long distance. The long range missiles mean that the destroyers can spread out and cover large area.
by jotux | 2025-05-15 20:51:01+00:00
An emotional analogy I've often made, related to EE, is automatic gain control. When you experience long periods of emotional stability without significant highs or lows, your brain applies a form of gain control. This makes the threshold for something amazing very low and something awful very high. As a result, people can feel overwhelmed by relatively trivial issues. Many self-help books, religions, and philosophies emphasize appreciating past experiences or considering how situations could have been worse. I see this as a way to counteract the brain's natural tendency to adjust its gain control.
by mrngm | 2025-05-15 20:52:01+00:00
I've had one side of the same university campus observing the academic 15 minutes, while in one course on the other side did not... after the lunch break. So at 13:30 we started walking towards the other side of the campus (the class was "scheduled" at 13:30), but did not receive a warm welcome 10 minutes later, because the lecturer had already started at the "scheduled" time.
by os2warpman | 2025-05-15 20:52:19+00:00
Do people, in general, form opinions of others based on reddit posts?

That seems... odd... to me.

For example, I work in a very, extremely, small and specialized subsector of the aerospace industry. Everyone knows everyone else, or close to it.

If I'm going to work with Alice and I don't know Alice I can be assured that Bob knows Alice or at least Charlie, Bob's and my Director of Engineering, knows Alice. Maybe she's new? Doesn't matter, Alice works for either Charlie, Dan, or Erin.

If I was directed to a reddit post about Alice not only would I not read it, I would be instantly suspicious of the person who wrote it (What kind of dickhead goes on Reddit and complains about a coworker? A huge dickhead, that's who.) and the evidentiary weight of any discussion that would be forced upon me (because I wouldn't read the post to begin with) regarding Alice would be so low as to be irrelevant.

You can see how (edit: incredibly) dumb all of this is, right?

When I read "My full statement regarding DOOM Eternal (2022)" I thought it was going to be about egregious bugs or something, not bullshit People Magazine drama.

All of that being said, if Frank writes a reddit post about Alice, and Alice responds with a FOURTEEN THOUSAND, FIVE HUNDRED, AND TWENTY-THREE word essay that I'm tricked into reading, my only thought is "wow, Frank and Alice are both apparently dickheads".
by K0balt | 2025-05-15 20:52:47+00:00
Flying it the high limits of the atmosphere reduces sonic boom intensity due to both the extremely low density of the air and the distance from the ground. Ultimately, sonic boom is a sign of wasted energy, so if (big if) we can make aircraft that conform to the required aerodynamic ideals for efficient hypersonic flight, they will be relatively quiet.

Just like with regular air travel, though, I would expect a few decades of practical application for specialized service before it was commodified to be really useful for large amounts of passengers.
by genewitch | 2025-05-15 20:53:01+00:00
> Consistent with previous decennial censuses, changes were made to criteria classifying urban areas following the 2020 Census. Key changes to the Census Bureau’s urban area concept and criteria include:

> The use of housing unit density instead of solely population density. The minimum population threshold to qualify as urban increased from 2,500 to 5,000 or a minimum housing unit threshold of 2,000 housing units.

> The jump distance was reduced from 2.5 miles to 1.5 miles for 2020. Jump distance is the distance along roads used to connect high-density urban territories surrounded by rural territory.

> No longer distinguishing between urbanized areas and urban clusters. All qualifying areas are designated urban areas.

We agree (i think), i'm just quoting the census bureau document.
by lxgr | 2025-05-15 20:53:10+00:00
Logging and retroactive auditing seems like the very least they should do. Even asking the customer service agent to first provide identifying details of the customer they can't easily know or guess by themselves doesn't seem excessive, given the sensitivity of the information.

It won't work for 100% of all calls (what if the customer is locked out themselves etc.), but those calls can then be handled by even more closely monitored agents.

"Less than 1% of monthly transacting customers" means up to 1% were accessed – that seems very high, i.e. much higher than the number of customer service contacts I'd expect.
by bumby | 2025-05-15 20:53:24+00:00
First, go read the HN guidelines and understand why your post should be reframed.

>how would you even know you had a condition and werent just a lazy ass?

If you are not able to know, how on Earth do you expect the professor to know you aren’t just lazy or unmotivated?

I’m all for giving people grace. But it strikes me as a weird take to expect people to go around assuming people have some grave condition that they don’t even realize to excuse them from all manner of aberrant behavior.
by skribb | 2025-05-15 20:53:30+00:00
This has also been extended to evening events (dinners, balls, parties) in student towns. There “dk” stands for double quarter, so for example 18dk means that an event starts at 18:30, but you may show up from 18:00. And the time between 18:00-18:30 is used for mingling.

It’s a good convention.
by reverendsteveii | 2025-05-15 20:53:45+00:00
POSIWID: He tells them it'll be a miracle, he'll have it done by the end of the sprint and it's gonna be perfect first time out the gate. They give him the mandate. None of his promises come true because of course they don't. So he goes back before the committee but this time he's already got the mandate to do this for SSA, he can't quit now because everything will go to shit if he quits (or so he says) and so they let him continue for however long it actually takes. Then it's established that part of what DOGE does is overhaul entire other arms of the government, they take as long as they need to take and they get whatever resources they need in order to make this happen. It doesn't matter if he fails because he's not there to succeed, he's there to steal.
by thomascountz | 2025-05-15 20:54:30+00:00
I scrolled too far down to find this... Perhaps it's selection bias, but surely there are others that see it this way?

I do have empathy for the people in the room who expected to have 10 more minutes for there meeting, and I'm not a pedantic rule follower, but I expect some grace and self awareness here.

Yes, your meeting was unexpectedly interrupted, but my meeting was unexpectedly delayed. Your problem was caused by a system that—however unfair or inscrutable—we all have to conform to. My problem was caused by ignorance, accident, or malfeasance on your part. If I show respect and empathy in this situation, I expect you show some respect and humility.
by nico | 2025-05-15 20:54:47+00:00
4o and 4.1 are not very good at coding

My best results are usually with 4o-mini-high, o3 is sometimes pretty good

I personally don’t like the canvas. I prefer the output on the chat

And a lot of times I say: provide full code for this file, or provide drop-in replacement (when I don’t want to deal with all the diffs). But usually at around 300-400 lines of code, it starts getting bad and then I need to refactor to break stuff up into multiple files (unless I can focus on just one method inside a file)
by tzs | 2025-05-15 20:55:11+00:00
Also from the CNBC story [1] on this:

> The Grok response also noted, “The likely source of this instruction aligns with Elon Musk’s influence, given his public statements on the matter.”

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/15/grok-white-genocide-elon-mus...
by ianbicking | 2025-05-15 20:55:20+00:00
"Does AI finally enable truly humane interfaces?"

I think it does; LLMs in particular. AI also enables a ton of other things, many of them inhumane, which can make it very hard to discuss these things as people fixate on the inhumane. (Which is fair... but if you are BUILDING something, I think it's best to fixate on the humane so that you conjure THAT into being.)

I think Jef Raskin's goal with a lot of what he proposed was to connect the computer interface more directly with the user's intent. An application-oriented model really focuses so much of the organization around the software company's intent and position, something that follows us fully into (most of) today's interfaces.

A magical aspect of LLMs is that they can actually fully vertically integrate with intent. It doesn't mean every LLM interface exposes this or takes advantage of this (quite the contrary!), but it's _possible_, and it simple wasn't possible in the past.

For instance: you can create an LLM-powered piece of software that collects (and allows revision) to some overriding intent. Just literally take the user's stated intent and puts it in a slot in all following prompts. This alone will have a substantial effect on the LLMs behavior! And importantly you can ask for their intent, not just their specific goal. Maybe I want to build a shed, and I'm looking up some materials... the underlying goal can inform all kinds of things, like whether I'm looking for used or new materials, aesthetic or functional, etc.

To accomplish something with a computer we often thread together many different tools. Each of them is generally defined by their function (photo album, email client, browser-that-contains-other-things, and so on). It's up to the human to figure out how to assemble these, and at each step it's easy to lose track, to become distracted or confused, to lose track of context. And again an LLM can engage with the larger task in a way that wasn't possible before.
by dekhn | 2025-05-15 20:55:29+00:00
If they could get complete delivery to the liver stem cells, then the change could be permanent, although this is making many simplifications.

Organs in your body usually keep some very old cells (formed in the embryo) around which act as parents for all the new cells in an organ. Any cell can only divide a limited number of times, so they typically maintain a "tree structure" where the old cells create children and grandchildren (etc) that then differentiate into the organ-specific cells that do the actual organ work.

If you modify only the differentiated cells, eventually they die, and are replaced by descendents of stem cells; if those stem cells didn't get modified, their descendents will not have the fix, and the treatment efficacy reduces over time.
by dTal | 2025-05-15 20:55:43+00:00
I disagree, it's a very insightful comment.

The problem is that any information about any internal processes used to generate a particular token is lost; the LLM is stateless, apart from the generated text. If you ask an LLM-character (which I agree should be held distinct from the LLM itself and exists at a different layer of abstraction) why it said something, the best it can do is a post-hoc guess. The "character", and any internal state we might wish it to have, only exists insofar as it can be derived anew from the text.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-15 20:55:59+00:00
You’d bootstrap, and then have future employees buy into a restricted share class (you could also take on debt to fund and personally guarantee until you can pay it back with future revenue, or find someone wealthy to write an investment check [1]). You're aligning incentives and sharing in the economic success, but using share restrictions to prevent, broadly speaking, shenanigans that are not aligned with your desired outcome. You wouldn't want shares transferred without board approval, for example. Craigslist was a cautionary tale about this [2], make sure your agreements are drafted to withstand potential adversaries. The culture should be clearly communicated about this when hiring and onboarding.

Check out Certified EO [3] [4], they can help you. Maybe reach out to DHH or Jason Fried on this too, 37signals is a similar model of staying small and and profitable [5] [6].

[1] https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/the-deal-jeff-bezos-got-on...

[2] https://www.delawarelitigation.com/2010/09/articles/chancery...

[3] https://www.certifiedeo.com/

[4] https://www.certifiedeo.com/why-employee-ownership

[5] https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1887964677344489574 | https://archive.today/dZwKz

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=171325
by Aurornis | 2025-05-15 20:56:25+00:00
> Gold is considered to have relatively consistent value over time.

Not really. It has fluctuated a lot. You can pick starting and ending points a few years apart and come up with very different results relative to actual inflation.

> A new car still costs around 13oz of gold.

Now take this idea and average it across a large number of different items and you arrive at inflation statistics, which are better than using 1 commodity or 1 purchasable item as a benchmark.
by smcleod | 2025-05-15 20:57:07+00:00
GPT 4o and 4.1 are both pretty terrible for coding to be honest, try Sonnet 3.7 in Cline (VSCode extension).

LLMs don't have up to date knowledge of packages by themselves that's a bit like buying a book and expecting it to have up to date world knowledge, you need to supplement / connect it to a data source (e.g. web search, documentation and package version search etc.).
by codethief | 2025-05-15 20:59:29+00:00
Sounds like transpiling Typescript to JavaScript, except that you translate to a vastly different language, thereby making you, the programmer, largely unable to reason about the performance characteristics of your code ("Can the transpiler optimize this Python loop or nah?"), and you also throw in the indeterminism of LLMs. Oooof, I'm not sure I'd want that.
by renjimen | 2025-05-15 20:59:57+00:00
Xarray is great. It marries the best of Pandas with Numpy.

Indexing like `da.sel(x=some_x).isel(t=-1).mean(["y", "z"])` makes code so easy to write and understand.

Broadcasting is never ambiguous because dimension names are respected.

It's very good for geospatial data, allowing you to work in multiple CRSs with the same underlying data.

We also use it a lot for Bayesian modeling via Arviz [1], since it makes the extra dimensions you get from sampling your posterior easy to handle.

Finally, you can wrap many arrays into datasets, with common coordinates shared across the arrays. This allows you to select `ds.isel(t=-1)` across every array that has a time dimension.

[1] https://www.arviz.org/en/latest/