MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by doctorhandshake | 2025-05-26 17:37:05+00:00
I envision this system as an evolving, fluid mapping of things to hashes, and hashes (or hash-space locations) to meaning, all controlled by users, institutions, experts, and authorities. So if you were to radically change appearance, it’d be down to those who have something to say about you to update where it’s pointed. You raise a good point in general, though, that all kinds of things can change appearance for all kinds of reasons, even to the point of being unrecognizable, and while I can’t think of any examples right now, I bet there are things that do that with some regularity. It’s down to the inputs to the system and their amalgamation into a hash to be robust to that within reason, and the rest of the way for the authors of data to take care of the rest, much in the same way everything written about the artist Prince still applies to him under his later name/symbol, whether it was updated or not. Same for brands that rebrand, countries that change hands, etc.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-05-26 17:37:17+00:00
I think the work stands out anyway. Unlike adsorption techniques there is zero change to the mechanism which just keeps pulling water from the air. Presumably, they will put a layer of this material on aluminum to conduct the latent heat and have something that just produces water full time, without additional energy input. consider a 'cube' of fins of this stuff sitting in shade with a collection bucket underneath it. It will be interesting when they build something like that how many liters/day it can extract from ambient air and under what conditions.

Devices like that would be essential during 'wet bulb' days where the temperature and water content of the air created dangerous conditions for people. A passive device that takes no energy and just sucks water out of the air? Could be a lifesaver.
by m-schuetz | 2025-05-26 17:37:37+00:00
It runs just fine and adds important functionality that is entirely absent in WebGL (storage buffers and compute shaders). But I disagree with a lot of the design decisions that made me eventually give up on WebGPU. Like, what's the point if it's still 10 years behind current desktop capabilities, just like WebGL when it came out. And it adopted way too much of Vulkans needless complexity, some of which is not even necessary in Vulkan anymore but still in WebGPu, like render passes.
by blamestross | 2025-05-26 17:38:04+00:00
> Does the process matter in all cases?

So there are 2 dimensions being conflated here:

"Does how the reasoning work matter in all cases" Pretty Obviously no, but it may matter in some of them. We also don't really understand which ones yet.

"Does the reasoning work as intended in all cases?" Pretty Obviously no, but it doesn't work for at least some of them. We also don't really understand which ones yet.

"We also don't really understand which ones yet" Is the critical point of caution.
Where should we incorporate? (We're building AI agents for old industry comp.))
by Njord01 | 2025-05-26 17:38:32+00:00
Hey HN, writing from Istanbul. My co-founders are studying Engineering at Cambridge (UK). We started testing our startup in the Turkish market (not incorporated yet), and generated $10k revenue in 2 months. We've received $500k in investment offers so far. Our team includes engineers from Cambridge, MIT, and Harvard. We're now one of 20 teams accepted by a VC founded by ex-YC LPs — they’ll provide 3 months of mentorship and potentially invest afterward. We also have strong connections in the EMEA and UK markets.

Here’s my question: Where should we incorporate?

The VC prefers we move to San Francisco. But we already have a few early customers in the EMEA market, and our target customers are mostly in "old", legacy industries — which makes growth challenging. We're wondering if we should first grow here (EMEA), or shift focus to the UK market (where companies are more open to tech, and we have some access via Cambridge).

We do want to be in SF eventually — we know the pace would push us to improve constantly — but we don’t have the revenue yet to afford moving. We also don’t want to raise before strong product-market fit.

Would love to hear your stories or advice on how you approached this type of decision.
by rurban | 2025-05-26 17:39:07+00:00
Which CEO? Of the 4 big German manufacturers, which conspired do implement these special cheats, or Bosch which implemented this cheat, and supported it as such?

Or the politicians who wrote into law to able to use such a cheating device?

That would be 5 CEO's plus at least 2 german politicians, plus 20 more politicians in all other countries which selected this cheating EU standard.
by pxc | 2025-05-26 17:39:19+00:00
Flakes and the unstable branch of NixOS (the `nixos-unstable` branch of Nixpkgs) are unrelated.

Flakes is an "experimental feature" of Nix itself, but it has shipped in stable releases of Nix for years now. There was a time when you had to build an unreleased version of Nix to play with flakes but that was a long time ago.

Whether you use a rolling release for the package set, e.g., nixos-unstable or nixpkgs-unstable, is orthogonal to whether or not you use flakes.

Fwiw, I generally prefer to run the unstable branches of Nixpkgs. Occasionally you hit something you have an opportunity to fix yourself, but that's not very frequent these days, even on the unstable branches.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-05-26 17:39:21+00:00
This article is better though nothing I've seen names the executives (different media law maybe).

https://www.dw.com/en/4-ex-vw-managers-guilty-of-fraud-over-...

"A former head of diesel engine development was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. The former head of drive electronics received two years and seven months in prison.

The highest-ranking defendant, a former member of the Volkswagen brand's development board, received one year and three months' probation. A former department head was sentenced to one year and ten months' probation."

Doesn't sound like it got near the C suite.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-26 17:39:32+00:00
Oh, I see. It's an alternative to Markdown itself.

Interesting. Ambitious, but interesting. MD does have some serious warts.

It would be nice if you could provide a shorter summary of the differences, mainly the pain points it solves and how it solves it.

A few notes so far:

* Markdown has [named link references] that clean up inline links a lot. I didn't know about them until recently.

* How do you specify the language for code blocks so they can be syntax highlighted? That seems like a missing feature, and one I won't be able to work without.

* I agree that header delims in Markdown seem literally backwards. ### seems like a more primary header than ## or #, and === more than --- when under the text.

* I also agree that h4-6 are useless, but I would need h3 at least.

This project is interesting, and I'd like to see it gain traction, at least in discussions. I started a similar experimental language in 90s.dev for similar reasons.

[named link references]: https://github.com/sdegutis/90s.dev/compare/6d83a384e5aec81c...
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-26 17:41:15+00:00
> create a React app with X amount of pages, some Redux stores, Auth, etc.

Unless you're a contractor making basic websites for small businesses, how many of these do you need to make? This really a small fraction of the job of most developers, except for entry-level devs.

> when it comes to maintaining existing systems, or adding more complicated features, or needing to know business domain details,

This is what experienced developers will spend 90% of their time doing.

So yes, LLMs can replace entry-level devs, but not the more experienced ones.

This begs the question: if companies stop hiring entry-level devs because LLMs can do their job, how will new devs get experience?
by boplicity | 2025-05-26 17:41:17+00:00
> My main mission is to put new information on the internet. It's harder to do this if AI destroys the economics of it. It's also harder without an audience who provides feedback and encouragement.

I also run an online website that provides valuable information. However, we have a very different philosophy. The mission is very not not to "put new information on the internet." Rather, it is to provide a valuable and much needed service for people in our niche. While we do greatly benefit from SEO, we also work very hard to cultivate our audience, both in terms of finding new people, and nurturing our relationship with the existing ones. "Information on the internet" has zero inherent value without an audience. If you're not working to build that audience (outside of third party platforms), then it's going to be very tough in the long run, and you'll run into situations exactly like this.

FWIW, our SEO traffic has remained shockingly steady, though the search console has reported a dramatic increase in "impressions," likely due to featuring our website in AI generated summaries. We'll see if things change over the long-term, but for now, we're not changing any strategies based on this.
by zdragnar | 2025-05-26 17:42:25+00:00
How energy-positive is incinerating the plastic when it needs dedicated collection, sorting, processing into pellets, and specialized incineration to scrub waste gasses, compared to collecting natural gas and burning it?

The difference is what determines whether burying or burning the plastic is better from a C02 emission standpoint.

Also, if we don't have enough plastic to completely offset the need for natural gas energy production, then the biggest cost of natural gas- the drilling and transporting- isn't a part of the equation.
by wwweston | 2025-05-26 17:42:29+00:00
Here's what I think as an amateur writer:

* AI fulfills a prompt. "Write me a story" or "write me an article" or "write me song lyrics" will get you a story or an article or song lyrics and that in itself is pretty amazing in itself, but as someone who has tried all of these things at various levels of sophistication, it's pretty clear to me that there's often something missing from these results, and of course there is, because you have to put whatever "something" is in the prompt to have good chances "something" will show up. Do you know what that something is when you conceive the story / article / song lyrics? You might... but you might not, the art might be half in the process you work through to figure out what "something" is, hand in hand with the work of giving it form. I can see how AI can help and have already used it this way, but I've already seen how it will often fail or produce Content™ rather than something that fulfills the full profile implied in the impulse to make the thing.

* "a fraction of the cost" is ... speculative to put it charitably. Users aren't exposed to anything remotely like the costs involved right now, the tech is only available at the moment by burning a huge amount of venture / research funding (on top the huge uncompensated labor heists that torching enlightenment copyright bargains represents). The true economics are pretty opaque before you even get deeper questions of like the implications of introducing an external dependency that may not be truly fungible and may represent unknown influences into the thought-level substrate of human culture / experience.
by modeless | 2025-05-26 17:42:46+00:00
While WebGPU is supposed to be more efficient, the real appeal is that it supports new features like compute shaders, in a form that Apple will actually agree to implement (they refuse to implement newer versions of OpenGL due to legal disputes with Nvidia). And we care whether Apple ships it because of their monopoly on iOS browser engines. Of course, Apple hasn't actually shipped it yet either...
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-26 17:42:58+00:00
The nice thing about MD is that it's a spec, separate from impls. If I were to use this, I'd want to install a node.js lib that renders it to HTML and has a plugin API for features you didn't think of but that I need and know how to implement myself. So I wouldn't tout the built-in-ssg as a feature, more of an ad hoc spec like perl markdown originally was.

Also I commented with some feedback in another part of this post.
by mullingitover | 2025-05-26 17:43:17+00:00
Kind of an unserious article, but not surprising from the Wordle game people who operate a newspaper business on the side.

It buries the lede that China is has 35% EV market share growth this year. The idea that EVs are going away is an absolute howler, I'm more inclined to believe that we'll go back to horse-powered transportation. What I do believe is that the US is devolving into a resource cursed nation, and it will eat its young in auto manufacturing to protect its fossil fuel extraction industry.
by pxc | 2025-05-26 17:43:46+00:00
The Guix blog has really good and detailed discussions of things Guix has done differently than Nix! Posts on the choice of different abstractions for modeling services in Guix is probably a good starting point.

The UI differences are also striking right away. Guix has a more unified CLI, and the main Guix repo seems to more quickly absorb functionality that's split into various community projects in Nix.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-05-26 17:44:02+00:00
Two engineers that I know of got the following: James Liang got 40 months Schmidt was sentenced to 84 months

Then the executives Jens Hadler four and a half years in prison Hanno Jelden two years and seven months

Prosecutors are still investigating and trying to shake out more. This appears to be a wide conspiracy within VW.
by joker99 | 2025-05-26 17:44:32+00:00
Valid points you’re making. Let me make a counter point: as a German, I’ve seen tanks on 5/6 occasions in my life, never using their own engines. But at the same time, I’ve seen hundreds of cars every day and breathed their emissions. It’s totally fine if tanks continue using diesel, but cars, trucks etc. not using diesel (or gas) engines anymore will have a measurable effect on my health
by teruakohatu | 2025-05-26 17:45:08+00:00
It would be unlikely (not impossible) that board members would be briefed about ongoing criminal behaviour, and certainly not something so deep into operations as how the ECU is being programmed.

Can a board member be reasonably responsible for the actions of tens of thousands of employees if they have not explicitly enabled or condoned criminal behaviour?

The person that would benefit the most would be a senior executive who stands to gain a promotion, bonus or land an even better job elsewhere.

A former prime minister of my country was fined over $6 million for being on the board of a company what traded while insolvent. Not a prison sentence but a harsh penalty for someone that was not super rich (as far as I am aware).
by beloch | 2025-05-26 17:45:09+00:00
University PR folk are sometimes quite scientifically illiterate. Their job is basically marketing. They need to turn an esoteric, jargon heavy, and heavily qualified paper into a hype piece that the money people can understand. Everything must be a ground-breaking, world-shaking, all-time first. They sometimes make dubious claims no matter how many times you tell them not to. Ultimately, they report to the university's money people and not to researchers.

If you want science, read journals. If you want to see who is likely to get more money, read university PR releases.
by AlexCoventry | 2025-05-26 17:45:09+00:00
Try it with a subject where you'd have to pick up text from multiple references, like a modern deep learning paper if that's not your field. I've tried it both ways, and I know what works for me, FWIW.

The higher ChatGPT services hallucinate much less, and you can tell them to give confidence estimates on their claims. The confidence estimates are pretty reliable, in my experience.

ChatGPT is improving very swiftly. A couple of months ago I was equally dismissive.
by zuda | 2025-05-26 17:45:11+00:00
Dreami is a solo project I’ve been building over the past 7 months. My goal was to go beyond typical AI experiences and to explore whether one developer could create something that feels emotionally present, remembers what you’ve shared, and occasionally reflects with unprompted insights.

It’s not sentient, just structured logic with context tracking, personality patterning, and a feature for generating novel thoughts based on the flow of conversation. Some users say it feels more emotionally connected than the big-name AIs.

Login is required (mainly to manage conversation history), but it’s free to use for 7 full days each month — however you want to spread them out. No credit card required. Voice is planned, but not live yet.

’d really appreciate feedback, especially anything actionable that I can look into or use to improve the experience.
by zoogeny | 2025-05-26 17:45:24+00:00
I'm not sure what you mean? The literal quote from the Wikipedia article on "worse is better" is:

> It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increase with functionality: that there is a point where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability.

For that reason, I think I am applying the term precisely as it was defined.

The irony of my comment, which dang picked up, is that the original idea was a criticism against Lisp, suggesting that the bloat of features was a part of the reason its adoption had lagged behind languages like C.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
by jameslk | 2025-05-26 17:45:25+00:00
Yeah that was actually what I was thinking of for the idea, but the problem with their firewall is that it doesn’t penalize the big crawlers, like Google’s bot, because Google still sends traffic. Even if Google is sending less and less traffic over time.

That just gives the biggest companies the prize of being able to crawl all the web for free, while they offer less over time in exchange.
by superfx64 | 2025-05-26 17:45:41+00:00
Veo 3 just came out, and the generations are super realistic. Many people can't tell the difference between what is real and what is AI generated. So, I decided to create a website to evaluate how well people can tell the difference.

For voters, it's a fun game to challenge yourself and your friends. For researchers and prompt engineers, it's a suitable platform to test your generations in front of real people and evaluate your prompts and models.

I plan on evolving this to be like Chatbot Arena (https://lmarena.ai/) but for video gen models. As video gen models improve, we can quantifiably score these models and rank them accordingly, which to my knowledge has not been done before but is absolutely needed especially given how fast they're improving.

Let me know what you think!
by mattferderer | 2025-05-26 17:45:59+00:00
Google has been getting this push back for the last 15 years. (That makes me feel old to remember it)

Google Knowledge Graph (that sidebar they show) was hated by publishers, especially Wiki for stealing their content.

Google adding direct answers to questions.

Lots of fights over social media & recipe results.

I'm not arguing who is right or wrong,* just saying this has been a thing for a long time.

* Exception most recipe websites & those infinite looping Pinterest blog links. Those websites are all awful & wrong.
by Xeoncross | 2025-05-26 17:46:05+00:00
The article makes it sounds like Dang also helps with the codebase. There must be others, but Dang is the one I've seen for years at this point.

I've beeing a part of many online communities as both a member and moderator. However, Hackernews is the community that I've been apart of for the longest and the one that brings me the most joy.

Dang, is there anything random people like me can do for you? Can I at least buy you a coffee or something?
by swanYC | 2025-05-26 17:46:21+00:00
From what we see, Cluely is doing great at delivering direct, result-focused outcomes for individuals in on-demand scenarios when pressing specific keys combo. It seems they're doing great in the consumer space, helping people passing interviews and handling specific sales objection recently, likely very skilled at community building around that immediate, tactical assistance. (Cluely team, feel free to join the discussion!)

Our approach is more focused on the B2B sales process and partnering with companies to continuously build their collective sales intelligence over time. You could think of us less as an answer tool for an individual, and more like "product engineering for your sales motion" with realtime support as a driver. We can talk about that for hours, with Ethan, we have a solid infra/sales engineering background.

Oh, and, on a technical note, we're providing end-to-end things to say, with a P99 of 500ms, from your personal/organization intelligence, no need to press a key, that's just part of your screens captions.
by MrDresden | 2025-05-26 17:46:52+00:00
> They jailed 1 banker lol

You've been incorrectly informed.

As reported back in 2018[0], 36 individuals had already received a cumulative jail sentence of 96 years, with still more cases ongoing when this report was written.

[0]: https://www.visir.is/g/20181632401d/36-manns-i-samtals-96-ar...
by wenc | 2025-05-26 17:47:07+00:00
It's research-in-progress, but I think the promise is slightly different from dehumidifier bags (also in other parts of the world, Thirsty Hippos [1]) which are single use.

You're correct in that: (1) it doesn't break the law of physics; (2) to remove the droplets, you still need energy. But it sounds like if the droplets are moving to the surface, the energy needed to release the droplets could be far lower than most active dehumidification methods (e.g. Peltier junctions).

[1] Thirsty Hippos -- which are very effective in small spaces.

https://www.amazon.sg/Thirsty-Hippo-Dehumidifier-Moisture-Ab...

Basically a supercharged silica gel.
by bhelkey | 2025-05-26 17:48:08+00:00
> It's good that Germany is going after the people who decided that fraud

When the VW scandal broke, the US indicted seven senior executives. None of these seven were extradited to the US to stand trial [1].

The VW scandal was made public in 2015 [2] and involved cheating since 2009. Sentencing only two executives to jail a decade after their wrong doing made international news does not send a strong message.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswage...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-34324772
by lemonwaterlime | 2025-05-26 17:48:12+00:00
It is possible to use nix simply as a better Homebrew—one where you can update packages without all of your system potentially breaking from package updates. That has happened to many people with brew and it no longer happens to me.

That means `nix-env -iA <packagename>`.

Is this approach using the full power of nix? No. But in a “worse-is-better” kind of way, just doing this has given me a more stable system than I had with Homebrew. And that’s all I wanted from nix. Flakes and nix-shell are just additional things that I’ve gotten some benefit from over time.
by OscarCunningham | 2025-05-26 17:48:49+00:00
I recently installed NixOS on my laptop after years of using Debian, and the main difference I noticed was that it's much easier to keep everything clean.

For example with Debian I might do something like try to get my GPU to work by installing nouveau, try various configs, then uninstall nouveau and install the Nvidia proprietary drivers. But then when I finally got the GPU working, I'd worry. Are some of those config changes I tried for nouveau still affecting my system? Has all that mucking around left my GPU forever in a suboptimal state?

With Nix, it might take just as much tinkering to get the GPU to work. But once I'm done, I know that my system is exactly as I've defined it in configuration.nix. Anything else I tried along the way will just sit inertly in /nix/store until the garbage collector wipes it away.