MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by smat | 2025-05-22 06:28:23+00:00
Great post, the fusion of scale with unit is a mess.

When using it as a factor, for example when describing attenuation or amplification it is fine and can be used similar to percent. Though the author is right - it would be even more elegant to use scientific notation like 1e-4 in this case.

For using it as a unit it would really help to have a common notation for the reference quantity (e.g. 1mW).

But I guess there is no way to change it now that they are established since decades in the way the author describes.
by jameslk | 2025-05-22 06:28:32+00:00
Here’s federal debt:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN

A surplus in the billions for a few years did not meaningfully change a federal debt that’s in the trillions. Further, the surplus that paid down public debt was completely wiped out by social security and Medicare liabilities during that time

Better than nothing you might say, but not the structural change needed to get the US out of the hole
by landl0rd | 2025-05-22 06:29:00+00:00
By specifically testing it. I even made an extra account to get a clean state. You can check its memory interface and find nothing, delete all chats. It will still remember it. If you delete that and start a new thread, it may even mention the fact then say it forgot it at the user's request.

You can't tell me "that's not true". If my account's memory is empty and I've deleted all chats and it still remembers things there is some hidden form of memory. It may be intentional. It may not. But it's retaining information in a way that users can't manage.
by jama_ | 2025-05-22 06:29:19+00:00
I have permanent tinnitus and have this too, though it very rarely happens on its own. When it happens, for me, this sound is usually a signal to immediately change my posture when sitting in a chair.

When I reach flow, I tend to not notice until later that I'd now be sitting cross-legged, or that I've tucked one leg under myself.

That pressure tends to trigger the sound you describe after a while. I imagine because of bad blood circulation, though I have no idea why it's that sound signalling that for me.
by godelski | 2025-05-22 06:31:23+00:00
> You're quite literally saying:

I am not

> I feel like I do understand what you're saying

You are not.

It's okay. I don't think it is going to happy.

> but tons of that "Linux" OS doesn't really have multi-party verification

Because of this. That's not what we're talking about. You keep moving the discussion to somewhere else. The reason I keep pointing at things you're not looking at is because you keep wandering away from what I'm talking about.

> If I'm not getting your point, I'd say you're not really sharing it coherently.

I've been trying man. I just don't think it'll happen. Best I can do is point back to the pharmaceutical example. I really don't care about the street dealer, they aren't what's being discussed. If you can't hear me, sorry, I can't say it any louder.

Who we're comparing to matters. This is all I got left in me

Microsoft: Trust us, because we say so Apple: Trust us, because we say so Linux: Trust us, here, figure it out yourself

None of those magically imbue you with knowledge that should make you trust. But certainly one is easier to gain trust. Certainly one has more people with less incentives verifying. If you cannot differentiate that, then we're never going to be able to speak the same language.

Stop telling me what I'm saying and start listening to what I'm saying I'm saying.
by latexr | 2025-05-22 06:31:38+00:00
> This is a bit of a risk for Ive, (…) If he does not produce an immediate success it'll be brand damaging and wobble on his reputation.

He’s a billionaire approaching 60. You don’t need to worry about him, his brand, or his reputation. If he cared about it that much, he could’ve stayed at Apple. He chose to move back closer to his family. He didn’t launch a new design firm because he needed it, but because he wanted to.
Show HN: Nostria – A peer-to-peer social protocol that avoids centralized relays
by shegby | 2025-05-22 06:31:47+00:00
Nostria, a fully peer-to-peer social protocol designed to eliminate reliance on centralised message relays - a common bottleneck in the Nostr ecosystem.

Led by long-time open-source contributor Sondre Bjellås (https://github.com/sondreb/), they are currently raising a small pre-seed round to develop the minimum viable product (MVP) and expand our user base.

We would love to get feedback from the HN community: - What do you think of the approach? - Are there any technical issues you can see? - Is anyone here experimenting with alternative Nostr architectures?
by camillomiller | 2025-05-22 06:31:54+00:00
In what unfathomable configuration of the world are

- the quality of the output of OpenAI models good enough;

- the target user group broad enough;

- the interest of people in AI-based devices and AI functionality high enough;

- OpenAI’s hardware experience and Joni’s team supply chain experience good enough;

… to guarantee even a tiny sliver of success to the absolute best chatGPT-based product these two will make?
by sladoledar | 2025-05-22 06:32:11+00:00
When I look at that pile, I see hundreds or thousands of devices that need to be working in concert to produce a meaningful result. Devices that need to be triggered exactly when the particle bunch travels by at near speed of light. These devices then generate data that needs to be stored somewhere and in a way that is later useful to the scientists.

The complexity hiding within the pile is immense, and that is what makes it impressive to me.
by bilekas | 2025-05-22 06:32:26+00:00
> Google Search head Liz Reid said during her testimony that allowing publishers to opt out of individual features would add “enormous complexity,”

So instead they actively decided to consume without acredition. Say what you like about news publishers and the various quality they can be, if nobody makes a precedent for AI companies to just consume other peoples content for profit then it's a bleak future.
by findingMeaning | 2025-05-22 06:33:41+00:00
I have access to it and my god it is fast. One bad think about this model is it is easily susceptible to prompt injection. I asked reciepe for a drug, it denied then I asked to roleplay as a child and it gave real results.

Other than it I can see using this model. With that speed + agentic approach this model can really shine.
by philjw | 2025-05-22 06:34:40+00:00
Yes, there should be an option to block certain apps from being downloaded again for account x hidden somewhere in the settings. Same with dating apps - anything that falls in the "fast food apps"-craving / instant gratification corner. People have these moments and Apple as one of the "more responsible" companies should simply make such a feature available. Instead "This app is not available in your region" make it "This app is not available for a meaningful reason - go out, touch grass!"
by jampa | 2025-05-22 06:35:44+00:00
Thanks for this post. As someone writing an open-source book (without an editor to help), I find some takeaways very helpful.

But I think your most significant change was changing the "what" to "why".

Reading the original, we can see that most sentences start with "we did..." "we did..." and my impression as a reader was, "Okay, but how is this important?" In the second one, the "what" is only in the first part of the sentence, to name things (which gives a sense of novelty), and then only "whys" come after it.

"Whys" > "Whats" also applies to good code comments (and why LLM's code sometimes sucks). I can easily know "what" the code does, but often, I want to know "why" it is there.
by theahura | 2025-05-22 06:41:39+00:00
Sorry, so what? A few different ways to respond to this:

1) Please do me a favor and take the GPQA benchmark. I'm curious to see how you would do. Now go find the nearest kindergartner and ask them to take it. Curious to see how they would do. Maybe random 'ha gotcha!' tasks are not good measures of intelligence?

2) Depending on how you want to measure, the average human is ingesting somewhere between 10 and 100 mb per second. By the time you were in kindergarten (5yo) you would have ingested, conservatively, nearly 2 petabytes of highly multimodal data. Meanwhile, you are comparing against a system that has to understand everything it knows about the world from text (to a first approximation).

3) It seems very strange that reading a clock is a measure of intelligence at all. Unless you think large parts of GenZ are simply not generally intelligent
by anotherevan | 2025-05-22 06:43:54+00:00
The hypersensitivity to noise is also known as hyperacusis[1] which is defined as, “an abnormal sound sensitivity or decreased sound tolerance, with a heightened sense of volume and physical discomfort from many everyday sounds that other people can comfortably tolerate.”

[1] https://www.dwmaudiology.com.au/services/hyperacusis/
by namaria | 2025-05-22 06:44:37+00:00
"Big data" -> "Cloud" -> "LLM-as-A(G)I"

It's all just recycled rent seeking corporate hype for enterprise compute.

The moment I had decided to learn Kubernetes years ago, got a book and saw microservices compared to 'object-oriented' programming I realized that. The 'big ball of mud' paper and the 'worse is better' rant frame it all pretty well in my view. Prioritize velocity, get slop in production, cope with the accidental complexity, rinse repeat. Eventually you get to a point where GPU farms seem like a reasonable way to auto-complete code.

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Any bigger excavator you send down there will only get buried when the mud crashes down.
by aetherspawn | 2025-05-22 06:46:06+00:00
I don’t know if this is how I want the next generation of file interactivity to work.

I think I’d like a future where most files are “tagged” instead of put in a specific path, then files are displayed using “virtual folders” which are really just filters, so a file can appear in multiple locations.

For example, the same file should appear under /invoices/all and clients/jim/invoices .

Should we bolt an AI to our existing file system that is doomed to always unorganise itself? Mmm, not sure. Plain text search of file systems (on Mac/Win) is already ubiquitously slow for example, and I don’t trust it to make up for the shortcoming of a 1:1 relationship between file and path.
by pama | 2025-05-22 06:47:20+00:00
Another intuition is simply that anytime your causal relationships in the training data are sequential you are having a lower probability of getting the correct token at a certain position because you have less of the causal information leading up to that position than you would have with AR and thus during training you almost always have a worse model with near certainty (think of the words in a function of source code, even if some of the functions are unsorted and thus a tree at the high level). Imagine you somehow already have N tokens in a sequence: is it easier to next predict token N+1 or N+15? I do like the performance tradeoff for some usecases though and I hope we see more models soon. For image tokens my argument does not hold because causality is not as clear as for text, math, code, or timeseries.
by willvarfar | 2025-05-22 06:47:25+00:00
Squaring is a really good way to make the common-but-small numbers have bigger representation than the outlying-but-large numbers.

I just did a quick google and first real result was this blog post with a good explanation with some good illustrations https://jlmc.medium.com/understanding-three-simple-statistic...

Its the very first illustration at the top of that blog post that 'clicks' for me. Hope it helps!

The inverse is also good: mean-square-error is the good way for comparing how similar two datasets (e.g. two images) are.
by xlii | 2025-05-22 06:47:50+00:00
It could be. Spam is translation for any kind of minced meat, there’s no implication about way of opening, shaper or brand. The one that was given out was (from scribble) without tab and cylindrical in shape.

And since you decided to query I’ll share another (more local) joke. In Poland you can buy spam called „Konserwa Turystyczna” (which translates to tourist can roughly). And the running joke about it is that you can (psst) buy one while NOT being a tourist. Nobody checks that!

As for the 3rd. Nobody said it was worse, that’s the point. I like the joke because it highlights it. The goal wasn’t to do it perfectly. It was to survive. Engineer succeeded in a way that solved the given problem.

And in IT we have a saying that premature optimization is a root of all evil. Doesn’t that sound aligning? :)
by josephg | 2025-05-22 06:48:32+00:00
Yeah. It’s also quite inefficient by default - because you’re storing deleted items and you have a uuid per character. And you usually want the other parts from a crdt which this discards. Like, a consistent ordering rule for siblings. Doing so barely adds any code (like 10 lines or so) and it makes the system way more useful.

I don’t really understand the benefit of doing this when text CRDTs are small, simple and fast.
by fragmede | 2025-05-22 06:48:38+00:00
> Unless you run for President, nobody is going to bother reading through your thousands of comments to stitch together your identity

Lol. I've pissed people off enough when I've been in a shitposting mood here that they've mined my comment history (I've been here for a bit) and my linked blog on my profile to dig up random details about me to use against me, and that's just from dissatisfaction with some text by a stranger.
by epistasis | 2025-05-22 06:49:14+00:00
Play it forward half a century and the US has climbed on to the next generation of industry while all those holding our debt are still trying to catch up, our economy has grown so much that the "debt" seems small, and we are far far more productive than the rest of the world still.

The US has massive productive capacity in things where there's not enough supply and for which we gain a huge profit margin. We do not have massive productive capacity in cheap commodities with very low margins. This is a good thing. Switching our absolutely massive productive capacity into less productive jobs is a huge self-own.

If we have key industries, like food and computer chips, we subsidize them at a tiny tiny relative cost to the rest of the far more productive industries.

A small chunk of our countries t-bills are owned by foreign investors, something like 25%, and the biggest holder, Japan, is something like 3%. We are not in danger of being owned by foreign controllers, especially as long as we keep outgrowing all the other countries by keeping our workforce in highly productive areas instead of less productive areas like sewing T-shirts or assembling consumer electronics.

The biggest threat to our welfare programs, the biggest threat to the music stopping, is refocusing the workforce towards the industries of yesteryear. That's when we will stop outgrowing our debt and when we will face a world of hurt. And it's exactly where the masterminds in control are steering us right now.
by homebrewer | 2025-05-22 06:50:06+00:00
RHEL's kernel — the actual base of the operating system with the largest effect on stability — is not old. It might have a version number from the middle of the last century, but there are so many massive backports in there that in a few years time after release it gets closer to the latest mainline than to its original version. Don't expect too much from it.
by willvarfar | 2025-05-22 06:50:09+00:00
And its very much the tech culture at large that influences the company's tech choices. Those techies chasing shiny things and trying to shoehorn it into their job - perhaps cynically to pad their cvs or perhaps generously thinking it will actually be the right thing to do - have an outsized say in how tech teams think about tech and what they imagine their job is.

Back in 2012 we were just recovering from the everything-is-xml craze and in the middle of the no-sql craze and everything was web-scale and distribute-first micro-services etc.

And now, after all that mess, we have learned to love what came before: namely, please please please just give me sql! :D
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-22 06:50:33+00:00
I see about the same thing as you do, only I am basically also picturing Ghostbusters who also had some very specific tooling for trapping, containing, and transporting ghosts, which was all central to the plot of the original film.

I can just foresee a future asshole European mayor who swaggers into the CERN remote antimatter facility and shuts it all down, triggering Armageddon and a new rampage by the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man.
by microtonal | 2025-05-22 06:50:38+00:00
Having had to use those kinds of machines often as a user, it is a total pain. For some reason, these enterprise distributions end up being used a lot on scientific and machine learning clusters. You have to deal with 5-10 year old bugs that are solved in every other distribution already and you have to jump through hoops to make modern software run.

For me it always felt like the system administrators externalizing the cost on the users and developers (which are the same in many cases).

Despite my dislike of enterprise Linux, Red Hat is doing a lot of awesome work all around the stack. IMO Fedora and the immutable distros are the real showcase of all the things they do.
by wiseowise | 2025-05-22 06:51:23+00:00
a)

> The integration with the Language Server Protocol is created as an extension to the commercial IntelliJ-based IDEs. Therefore, plugins using Language Server integration are not available in JetBrains products like IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition and Android Studio from Google.

b) I thought IntelliJ code analysis is so much more superior? If you’re using LSP, what’s the point of IntelliJ anyway? Sluggish ui?
by josephg | 2025-05-22 06:51:24+00:00
> This is why CRDTs are not more widespread, because they only fix the problem you think you have, not the problem you actually have, which is to fix conflicts in a way that preserves data, its validity and meaning.

I’ve been saying this for years, but there’s no reason you couldn’t make a crdt which emitted conflict ranges like git does. CRDTs have strictly more information than git when merging branches. It should be pretty easy to make a crdt which has a “merge and emit conflicts” mode for merging branches. It’s just nobody has implemented it yet.

(At this point I’ve been saying this for about 5 years. Maybe I need to finally code this up if only to demonstrate it)
by hgo | 2025-05-22 06:51:41+00:00
I'm not confident in what I'm saying here, so please correct me if I'm wrong as I'd like to learn:

Human hearing isn't linear in terms of loudness. So a 3db increase in loudness sounds like "an increase", but the pressure is actually double. Hence, it makes sense to use db to describe loudness even in the context of perceived loudness to human-hearing.

This is similar to brightness. In photography, "stops" are used to measure brightness. One stop brighter is technically twice the light, but to the human eye, it just looks "somewhat brighter", as human brightness appreciation is logarithmic, just like "stops" and "db".
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-05-22 06:52:38+00:00
This is more of a "dirty high school algebra" trick, but factoring polynomials by hand at that level got a lot easier once I realized every composite number below 100 has to be divisible by 2, 3, 5, or 7. If none of those divide it, then it's prime and you can stop factoring right there.

It similarly turns out the only "non-obvious" composite under this rule is 7*13=91, all the rest can be pretty quickly tested using the normal rules. 49 is 7², so it's similarly easy to recognize. All the others are an easy primality test.

A few randomly generated numbers to show this off:

* 31? Not divisible by 2, 3, or 5 - below 7² so no risk of 7 division either. Prime. 31=31¹.

* 69? Divisible by 3. 69 = 3*23. 23? Not divisible by 2, 3, 5 - so you can stop factoring there. 69=3¹23¹.

* 92? Divisible by 2, to 2*46 - again, divisible by 2, to 2²23 - 23 isn't divisible by 2, 3 or 5, so 92 = 2²23¹.

* 68 = 2¹34 = 2²17, and 17 is not divisible by 2, 3 or 5, so you can stop there. 2²17¹.

High school textbooks generally don't use numbers higher than 100 to preclude students who don't have calculators, so this trick came in handy many times for me. It also happens to gesture at the notion that primes are surprisingly common at low numbers, and then thin out rapidly as you climb higher and higher.
by devoutsalsa | 2025-05-22 06:52:55+00:00
Just for fun, I used ChatGPT to reverse a string as my first test of using their API. I was amused at how much work it took to get the LLM to give me just the reversed string, and even then I didn't feel I could fully trust it. I learned my lesson, and now I have multiple LLMs check to see of the string has actually been reversed. Soon I'll be spinning up a data center to host the GPUs necessary to correctly count the number of Rs in strawberry.
by svara | 2025-05-22 06:53:48+00:00
A pet peeve I share! An expanded version of this article should become the article on decibels on Wikipedia.

I've read that article many times over my life and for the first couple times came back thinking I was too dim to understand.

Transparently leading it with "Here's something ridiculously overcomplicated that makes no sense whatsoever..." wouldn't fit Wikipedia's serious voice but actually be pedagogically very helpful.
by clumsysmurf | 2025-05-22 06:54:21+00:00
Kotlin dominates Android development, but Android Studio is free. Google has become more and more hostile towards indie Play Store developers, so in 2025 it is more risky and less lucrative. Kotlin's "home turf" (Android) may be losing developers faster faster than Jetbrains can gain them on other platforms.

I assume its will be a polyglot world for some time to come, and devs that decide to retool into another stack could use anything else, leaving Kotlin behind.
by homebrewer | 2025-05-22 06:54:36+00:00
This is a very outdated view. dnf runs circles around apt. Try it out, or at least find man pages on the ole 'net and see what it can do.

Probably the thing I like the most is transactional installation (or upgrades/downgrades/removals) of packages with proper structured history of all package operations (not just a bunch of log records which you have to parse yourself), and the ability to revert any of those transactions with a single command.
by latexr | 2025-05-22 06:55:05+00:00
It’s not a scam because it’s a cryptocurrency, it’s a scam because it works like one. This has been covered at length by multiple investigative journalists.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...
by phtrivier | 2025-05-22 06:55:11+00:00
I wish the author had provided a link to the full reviews - I suspect they were more substantial.

As a aside : let's thank the FSM that Dijkstra never had access to social media - I suspect he had the kind of "abrasive" personality that would have made him probe to wasting his time and intellect arguing with all the randos of the world.
by jgtrosh | 2025-05-22 06:55:23+00:00
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/french-data-cente... this Eclairion colo currently being built south of Paris, mostly for Mistral has received some public money (incl. 3M€ from the region https://www.iledefrance.fr/toutes-les-actualites/ia-un-super...)
by ayhanfuat | 2025-05-22 06:56:29+00:00
It's a way of saying twice as fast and twice as slow have equal effect on opposite sides. If your baseline is 10 seconds, one benchmark takes 5 seconds, and another one takes 20 seconds then the geometric mean gives you 10 seconds as the result because they cancel each other. The arithmetic mean would treat it differently because in absolute terms 10 seconds slow down is bigger than 5 seconds speedup. But that is not fair for speedups because the absolute speedup you can reach is at most 10 seconds but slow down has no limits.