MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by musicale | 2025-05-17 03:19:29+00:00
90% of everything is crap (Sturgeon's law), but as I understand both commercial and free software advanced quite a bit in the 1990s: Visual BASIC, HyperCard 2.0, Java, JavaScript, Linux, MacOS System 7-9, TrueType, Windows 95, Windows NT, Photoshop, Microsoft Office, Encarta, Lotus Notes 2.0, MPEG, QuickTime, video editing (Video Toaster etc.), Pro Tools, MP3 encoders/players and WinAmp, Acrobat and PDF software, WWW, Apache, NCSA Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, FrontPage (and other html editors), ICQ and Instant Messenger, video conferencing (CU-SeeMe), various IDEs (Eclipse), etc. Not to mention incredible developments in PC, console and arcade games...
by jongjong | 2025-05-17 03:20:41+00:00
I feel like some articles tend to downplay LLMs a bit too much. It's not just about form, LLMs do bring some substance as well.

When you ask coding questions it can often generate code which refers to your unique variable names. It can take what you give it and solve a unique problem which it has never seen before. Like I could give it many functions I just wrote with some names it has never seen before doing some processing it has never seen and it knows how to call those functions correctly and can even assemble them correctly, even though this particular flow is unique to this situation. There is some intelligence involved in rearranging logic and filling logical gaps which goes beyond just rephrasing ideas.

I feel like the main issue with LLMs is that they don't have long term memory so it's like talking to an extremely intelligent goldfish. The lack of ability to internalize context is what makes it hard for it to meet goals. You need to keep track of the changing state of reality in order to achieve stuff.
by conn10mfan | 2025-05-17 03:21:04+00:00
wild to come across people on HN who don't understand that putting economic scrutiny on scientific studies and questioning the public funding of science will both slow the development of yet unknown useful knowledge, as well as slow down economic growth

the perniciousness of the "we need to economically justify the kind of scientific research we are doing" is that plenty of the research we've had that has been economically beneficial was NOT obvious when it was being conducted

by restricting research to programs that may have economic benefit, you restrict yourself to funding things that we pretty much already know, which is a bit more like R&D and less research

to give two examples

1) Gila monster venom - research in the 1990s on Gila Monster Venom formed the building blocks that would become GLP1 medications, which are likely to be some of the best performing medications of all time, as well as have the huge societal benefit of reducing the obesity load on the health system, when this research was being conducted its implications were not known and could have very well been on the chopping block if we were trying to "justify it to taxpayers"

2) CERN - the study of high energy particle physics at CERN is a classic case of "how useful is this knowledge?" It's pretty easy to look at this and wonder how it economically justifies itself. What difference does it make to the tax payer if we discover the Higgs Boson or not? Well, the entire digital economy is down stream of CERN. The internet was partially developed to facilitate the transfer of large quantities of data from colliders like CERN to be analyzed elsewhere in the world. For fuck suck, the world wide web was invented at CERN by Tim Berners Lee. If we didn't invest that money into CERN, or other research institutions, who knows what the web would look like today, and how large the digital economy would be.

Yes, these are just two examples of how research without clear ROI has had economic benefit and justified itself to tax payers. The crux of the issue is we don't know how valuable what we don't know is, and we don't know what branch of science will have the next society altering discovery, so a random walk through scientific research for the sake of knowing things is valuable, because there are undoubtedly things we don't know that will benefit us greatly.

So my argument is in a way like yours, the science does have to justify itself to taxpayers. But the evidence is that the process of science, and knowledge seeking at a high level have justified the funding of science, going study by study to figure out what will have ROI and what won't is a great way to ensure that we discover less and less, leaving more and more stones unturned.
by username223 | 2025-05-17 03:22:38+00:00
> Does this mean people will be less incentivized to contribute to open source as time goes by?

Yes. I certainly don't intend to put any free code online until I can legally bar AI bros from using it without payment. As Mike Monteiro put it long ago, "F** you, pay me" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U)
by codedokode | 2025-05-17 03:23:53+00:00
> If a component is memoized with `memo(...)`, then a re-render will be stopped if it has the same props as before

This works only with immutable data structures. Am I wrong? Because a modified array will pass the identity test (=== operator). If you are using mutable data structures, you cannot use identity operator to detect changes.

Also if "memo" optimization is that good why does one have to add it manually?

> If your react app is re-calculating the entire tree, you suck at react

The point of UI framework is to do the optimization for me and not require me to use some special style of coding like immutable structures or manually write functions like componentShouldUpdate. What I write is how UI variables depend on model variables and the rest is framework's job. I don't want to use weird patterns like a function with a giant switch that processes update events and clones the whole model graph to change a single variable.

Vue of course has its own set of issues, caused by using proxies (for example when adding on object to the set you must "unwrap" it manually to prevent adding a proxy to the set).
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-17 03:24:12+00:00
> Citation?

https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/7300#issuecomment-24...

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/3e0be1cacef290c99...

Anyway my point was just that it's not as easy as just pushing a patch upstream, like it is in many other projects. It would require a new or different implementation.
by fkfyshroglk | 2025-05-17 03:25:21+00:00
Well, perhaps you're right. I am not a finance guy and it seems to me you can probably pull debt out of any kind of relationship if you squint right. But it certainly is not to blame for our inability to balance the budget, which seems easiest to explain with nearly sixty straight years of cutting marginal tax rates while claiming to be fiscally conservative.
by comrade1234 | 2025-05-17 03:27:07+00:00
I had a brief stint at the Smithsonian conservation analytical laboratory. We were studying the feasibility of extracting ancient dna from Peruvian mummies (yes, it is possible). My boss was joking about one of her competitors/colleagues at another university, a professor that collected barf bags. She turned the news on one day only to see him on (probably cnn?) for having the largest barf bag collection in the world.

This was way back when fame wasn’t the ultimate goal and some things could actually hurt your image.
by meowkit | 2025-05-17 03:27:14+00:00
> Once we have a universal automated judge that can judge any kind of human research output then sure your statement is true,

If you've noticed, most LLM interfaces have a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" response. The prompt may provide novel data. The text generated is synthetic. You don't need an automated judge, the user is providing sufficient feedback.

Same thing goes for the other disciplines.
Best AI editor for local models?
by rocketbro | 2025-05-17 03:28:48+00:00
Currently editing in Cursor, using agents heavily as I'm a solo dev with limited time. Been exploring running models locally and looking into Zed & Void (https://voideditor.com/). Anyone have opinions on these? Downloading both to try but wondering if the free plan on Zed is doable for full time software engineering, mostly working on next.js sites & native mobile apps in Swift/Kotlin
by krapp | 2025-05-17 03:29:00+00:00
The art is fine, no complaints. I don't know how well the hand works as a cursor since it doesn't tell me when I can pick something up, and I don't know what the gestures are supposed to do in terms of game mechanics. I found it confusing and difficult to know what to do next. And none of the text really helped. I may just be dense, though.

If I had to sum up my opinion of the game in a sentence it would be too much style, not enough substance.
by McGlockenshire | 2025-05-17 03:30:09+00:00
> Phones are bigger than ever

If you want to experience what your app is really like for the vast majority of real world people, go get a cheap monthly prepaid phone and try it out. Using the modern web on them is a complete nightmare. The screens are physically small and low resolution. The phone I had to use for a year and a half is 800something by 500something, which is literally first generation Android era resolution from over ten years ago. Information density matters. Huge buttons that get in the way are not merely frustrating, they are a design mistake and a demonstration that the designer is out of touch with reality, just as you seem to be here.

Please, get a crappy phone, get a crappy chromebook, make sure your app isn't frustrating to use for people that can't afford new, fast things.
by zafarali125 | 2025-05-17 03:30:34+00:00
Shilajit is trending in Canada, but how do you know which brand is truly worth it?

The market is full of bold claims, vague sourcing, and overpriced jars. Whether you’re new to Shilajit or looking to upgrade to something purer, the challenge is the same: finding a high-quality resin that’s authentic, safe, and effective.
by guyfhuo | 2025-05-17 03:32:15+00:00
> Maybe you are not that great at using the most current LLMs or you don't want to be?

I’m tired of this argument. I’ll even grant you: both sides of it.

It seems as though we prepared our selves to respond to llms in this manner with people memeing, or simply recognizing, that there was a “way” to ask questions to get better results early on when ranked search broadened the appeal of search engines.

The reality is that both you and the op are talking about the opinion of the thing, but leaving out the thing itself.

You could say “git gud”, but what if you showed op what “gud” output to you was, and they recognized it as the same sort of output that they were saying was repetitive?

It’s ambiguity based on opinion.

I fear so many are taking part each other.

Perhaps linking to example prompts and outputs that can be directly discussed is the only way to give specificity to the ambiguous language.
by malloryerik | 2025-05-17 03:32:27+00:00
I find LLMs fail and fail hard at what might be the most imaginative form of writing: poetry.

Before sending this comment I pecked around the net for examples of gleaming LLM verse.

A few articles claimed human readers preferred AI-brewed poetry to the human stuff. I checked the examples. Clearly most of the people surveyed were underliterate -- the human poems were excellent and the AI poems just creepily bad and simplistic -- so the articles turned into sad and unwitting testament about the state of our culture.

Maybe if you expertly LLM prompt your way to a highly abstract poem, over several iterations you might land something that has some actual feel to it, but even then that might owe more to your prompting talent than the LLM's skill. You could do the same with dice and a dictionary. (Is prompting is essentially editing?)

Please, show me otherwise. If faced with strong contrary evidence, I will be forced to change my mind.
by rdtsc | 2025-05-17 03:32:40+00:00
> His movies may be "artsy" but he had a big influence on cinema

Of course, that's why all the movie directors and actors and people who are into film like him. But take a person off the street and put in front of a Malick movie and don't be surprised if they walk out. Someone in the sibling threads said that much.

But yeah, I watched The Thin Red Line in the cinema twice when it came out, but also acknowledge that I am probably in the minority.
by krapp | 2025-05-17 03:32:48+00:00
I've been messing with SDL3 and LuaJIT for a while, and I think it's a qualitative improvement over SDL2. People should also check out the test folder in the repo[0] for more interesting stuff and of course the Discourse forum[1].

[0]https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/tree/main/test

[1]https://discourse.libsdl.org/
by fkyimeanit | 2025-05-17 03:35:04+00:00
"Text to SQL", "text to regex", "text to shell", etc. will never fundamentally work because the reason we have computer languages is to express specific requirements with no ambiguity.

With an AI prompt you'll have to do the same thing, just more verbosely.

You will have to do what every programmer hates, write a full formal specification in English.
by gus_massa | 2025-05-17 03:35:22+00:00
In the video, they use a Electric Fly Swatter. I vouch for it. It's incredible useful. Buy one asap.

From a comment:

> Rather than spotting them It should zap them directly using a powerful enough laser, and that I would buy.

Someone posted a project like that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28793660 but I'd be very nervous to use it.
by rurp | 2025-05-17 03:36:38+00:00
Remember way back in Feb 2025 when a bunch of people were claiming that Elon and Doge were going to fix the national debt?! I recall a lot of skepticism from some to the notion that Elon had zero interest in reducing the defecit and wasn't even trying.

> Moody’s said it expected federal deficits to widen to almost 9 per cent of GDP by 2035, up from 6.4 per cent last year, owing to increased interest payments on debt, entitlement spending and “relatively low revenue generation”.

Yes, and this was extremely predictable. Hopefully once the disaster gets a bit more clear more people will see what's happening.
by rayiner | 2025-05-17 03:38:25+00:00
Our deficit is $1.8 trillion last year. Closing the carried interest loophole would only save $1-2 billion annually. https://taxpolicycenter.org/fiscal-facts/tax-treatment-carri...

Explicit fuel subsidies are only $3 billion: https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-proposals-to-red.... (Implicit subsidies are arguably much more, but anything that would make energy more expensive is an economy killer and would tank revenue.) What’s lost to corporate tax havens?
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-17 03:38:45+00:00
I mean imagine Linear least squares on a 2D graph.

I have a best fit line. Then I take random data on that line to train a new line.

I pretty much get the same line.

From an intuitive perspective... it doesn't get worse. At worst it stays the same.

Now imagine something a bit more complex. I have a best fit curve that's very close to a line.

I use random data from that curve to train a new best fit line.

I get something different now. Not necessarily worse.

I mean literally just take all your ideas of ML and just imagine it on the 2D plane doing curve fitting. If retraining new lines from generated data doesn't necessarily make things worse.
by js8 | 2025-05-17 03:41:10+00:00
That's exactly how I meant it. Another alternative to Java at the time was Smalltalk, with different syntax. Choosing C++ syntax for Java was clearly a marketing move (as it was for C++) - we shouldn't underestimate network effect of familiar syntax.

I think Java succeeded for the same reasons C++ succeeded - built on familiar syntax, reasonably free and "supported by" a large company. Java being a decent language is a consequence of its success more than of its original design.
by rybosome | 2025-05-17 03:41:15+00:00
I have far more ideas about this than time to execute it, but for a long time I’ve had this fantasy about a robot bandmate.

The idea is I’d go on stage singing and playing guitar with a looper and some samples, then bring a robot toy and introduce the robot “controlling” the looping and sampling as the bandmate.

It’s a gimmick that’s been done before, but with LLMs driving verbal interaction and now I could use this to animate a robot…it becomes pretty compelling. I’d plug the LLMs into the audio feed so I could banter with it and get responses then have the robot avatar animate accordingly.

If only my full time job saw value in this project.
by agentultra | 2025-05-17 03:41:37+00:00
Have you read the book if I told you what it was about? Knowing what Crime and Punishment is about is different than reading it yourself. There’s no royal road and no shortcut to knowledge.

Read How To Solve It by Polya. The frustrations, dead ends, and trials are all a part of the process. It’s how we convince ourselves of truth and reinforce our understanding. It develops our curiosity and creativity.
by protocolture | 2025-05-17 03:42:07+00:00
As early as the last Trump presidency I was seeing people with good opsec doing the following.

1. Backup your device to the cloud (a different cloud than the default if possible)

2. Erase your device

3. Provide your empty / near empty device for inspection.

4. Load the backup after the airport checks.

It might be wise to update this with some basic changes, like creating fake accounts that are auto signed in on your device. Blank twitter account, blank gmail account etc.
by oivey | 2025-05-17 03:42:29+00:00
Suppose you write a program that computes the sum of two input numbers. Suppose the two inputs are 1 and “a”. If it returns “1a” or 12 or whatever, the program is incorrect. Its correctness does not hinge on type safety. A untyped program could detect that one of the inputs is unexpected and correctly raise an error. Typing may make it easier to detect this error (or not). Fundamentally, adding type information does not make the above program “more” correct. It’s either correct, or it’s not.

You can write a sorting algorithm in assembly, and it can be correct. Rewriting in Haskell won’t make it “more” correct.

There’s an undercurrent of people espousing strictly types languages (not accusing you) who believe that somehow programs written in them are better. They’re not. They either serve their purpose, or they don’t. Strict typing is a tool. Sometimes it’s enabling. Sometimes (example: horrible polymorphism in most strictly typed languages like C++/Java/copy cats) it’s a hinderance. Strictly typed languages aren’t strictly better than non-strictly typed ones.
by hardwaresofton | 2025-05-17 03:43:56+00:00
> There is Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter.

I am not a practitioner, but instead someone that looks at the ecosystem from time to time and has been waiting for a while, because I dont see the stack + DX/UX that I want yet.

Zigbee never reached critical mass and requires a hub. Z-wave seems to be the same. Thread over wifi (IIRC different protocols/transports are just fine) is what I think will be the future.

IMO Thread wins out, support gets put into routers, and I can just have a thread enabled router which MAY have other

I don’t want to buy an IoT hub. Many IoT devices I want to control are powerful enough to run Wifi, and I want to control them with a standard networking stack with high adoption and familiar tooling. Thread seems to fit this use case the best.

Please feel free to rip apart the above opinions, they’re loosely held. I’d love to learn how wrong I am today!

> If you want to go a step further, look for devices made for ESPHome or devices made by Shelly. Both have local APIs and are very hackable.

Thanks for the recommendation! Appreciate the disclosure and apologize for the blast of relatively uninformed opinions.

One more side question — why is it so hard to get a simple IoT button that runs local Wifi (really hoping for no base station) only and is battery chargable?

Buildable with an ESP32 clearly but I just want to buy this.
by mempko | 2025-05-17 03:44:03+00:00
People forget that every transaction has two parties. Someone's debt is another's asset. The national debt is mostly owned by Americans. That means the national debt is an asset to the private sector. This is the way all money works because money IS debt.

The real crisis is high debt loads in the private sector, not the government. Why? Because the government owns the currency it's debts are denominated in. There is zero risk the government couldn't pay it's dollar debts if there is still a US government. The only reason to downgrade is if there is a real risk the US government will collapse and cease to exist for political reasons. There is no fiscal risk.

The deficit hawks don't understand how money works. The real concern is private debts, not government debts. But you never hear about that in the media.
by eru | 2025-05-17 03:46:46+00:00
> But if you propose to taint every coin that has ever passed through a major exchange, that's pretty much all of them.

All new ones. You can buy 'fresh coins' from miners directly.

You could also exempt some 'honourable' miners (ie a whitelist) from the taint.

All kinds of conventions are possible, depending on what people want to value.

The convention that all bitcoins are equally valuable is just that: a convention. And it's not even strictly adhered to, because some bitcoins are already more valuable than others.
by 112233 | 2025-05-17 03:47:25+00:00
Thank you for this, it illustrates an important distinction. (Your example would be clearer if you used a pointer instead of a reference)

Address of variable does not depend on it's value, and can be known and used before the variable is defined. At no point in your example value of "x" is used before the end of initialization.

However, in order to allow that, the language goes and allows the use of uninitialized value too. That is just plain horrible design.
by rurp | 2025-05-17 03:48:35+00:00
I think you're directionally correct that military spending could be much lower and more effective but the notion of relying on a single sub as a deterrent is far too extreme. In that scenario an enemy only needs to compromise a single sub and your entire deterrent is gone. That's not a stable equilibrium.

The whole principle of a triad is based on the expectation that an adversary could compromise your retaliatory ability to a high degree so you need to mantain robust options.
by balloob | 2025-05-17 03:49:18+00:00
Maybe not exactly what you are looking for, but check out the Shelly BLU Button1. It's a BLE button with a long battery life.

It sends out BLE packets when pressed, which can be picked up by Home Assistant via a Bluetooth adapter or using a Bluetooth Proxy. You can make the latter with any ESP32 and https://esphome.io/projects/?type=bluetooth
by eru | 2025-05-17 03:49:57+00:00
> I'd like to introduce you to Monero, [...]

Hence my restriction to crypto that is 'like bitcoin'. Yes, you can use some tricks like zero knowledge proofs to make untrackable crypto-currencies. But as far as I can tell, they aren't all that popular. For currencies that offer both stealthy and 'regular' transactions (I think like zcash), the vast majority of transactions are of the latter kind.
by spacechild1 | 2025-05-17 03:50:14+00:00
It's memory safe, but it's not necessarily free of race conditions! It's not only C extensions that release the GIL, the Python interpreter itself releases the GIL after a certain number of instructions so that other threads can make progress. See https://docs.python.org/3/library/sys.html#sys.getswitchinte....

Certain operations that look atomic to the user are actually comprised of multiple bytecode instructions. Now, if you are unlucky, the interpreter decides to release the GIL and yield to another thread exactly during such instructions. You won't get a segfault, but you might get unexpected results.

See also https://github.com/google/styleguide/blob/91d6e367e384b0d8aa...