MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tialaramex | 2025-05-21 02:11:44+00:00
No, in order to win a war, it must have a clear objective which can be successful. The US is terrible at this because the objectives of war by a democratic country will be set by politicians, who've never seen an objective which couldn't be made vaguer. Operation Iraqi Freedom had so many sub-objectives key military leadership didn't even agree what the goals all were - and even then some of those goals are nonsense, predicated upon false narratives spread by politicians who wanted a war and needed some sort of justification. Remember the Weapons of Mass Destruction your army was sent to find? Never existed. Terrorists they were sent to eliminate? More were created than had existed previously.

Battles may be won on logistics but you can't win a war without a clear and achievable objective. Corporate had a clear objective. Overlord had a clear objective. Take Desert Shield, to give an example of a US-led operation with clear objectives. If you turn up and the Iraqis all say "Fuck this, I'm off home" freeing Kuwait that's success. If you kill half the Iraqi population but they're still occupying Kuwait when your funding runs out that's failure. That's what you need if you want to win a war, clear objectives.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-21 02:13:05+00:00
It's pretty clearly a talking point.

Consider that a bus has six to ten tires that each weigh around ten times more than a typical car tire. This is presented as the alternative to cars, is it even any different? Not implausible that it could actually be worse, especially if the bus isn't at full occupancy at all times.

Meanwhile the weight difference between EVs and petroleum cars is emphasized in the complaints, even though it isn't very large, while the much larger weight difference between any cars and buses is ignored. Because the point isn't to complain about tires, it's to complain about EVs.

And if the point actually was to complain about tires then you still wouldn't be talking about EVs, you would be talking about tires and how to make them shed less or construct them out of lower toxicity materials etc.
Show HN: Interactive AI vibe analysis and edit agent for connected data
by nikhilpil | 2025-05-21 02:13:21+00:00
Nexus is the Cursor for your data — no more uploads for tweaks, no more downloads for edits. Just seamless, AI-powered collaboration to build and analyze your connected data. With Nexus, you can do in-depth analysis, focused edits, and selective analysis all through simple prompts.

We've also launched on product hunt today, so would appreciate everyone's support there!: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/nexus-12
by owenversteeg | 2025-05-21 02:13:25+00:00
Yeah, in theory, but the vibes are different.

Let’s say you have a problem and the only way to solve it is with a thingamabob. The thingamabob doesn’t exist, so you need to make the first one. Unknown to everyone, the military, the O&G/mining industry, and the rail industries all try to build one at the same time. Do you think they all cost the same? What about the time to design and build them?

The oil and gas people will call up some machinists and engineers the same day. Time is money and they need the problem solved. It doesn’t need to look pretty. I don’t think anyone would disagree that they would be the first with a thingamabob. First one might break, they’d get Bob on a Cessna from the nearest machine shop with a replacement.

The military would have some meetings, which would spawn more meetings, and eventually put out some requests for proposals. They’d review the proposals and ten years later they’d have their thingamabob. No doubt it would be the most expensive.

The rail industry… the modern, passenger rail industry in wealthy western countries? There might be proposals, or designs or prototypes with large amounts of money spent, but I think it is reasonable to say the thingamabob would never actually be built and used. Look at CAHSR or Stuttgart 21 or Turin-Lyon.
by FreezerburnV | 2025-05-21 02:13:27+00:00
Because training costs are sky-high, and handling an individual request still uses a decent amount of energy even if it isn't as horrifying as training. Plus the amount of requests, and content in them, is going up with stuff like vibe coding.

If you want to know more about energy consumption, see this 2 part series that goes into tons of nitty-gritty details: https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2024/08/18/is-ai-eating-all-th...
by angst | 2025-05-21 02:13:45+00:00
tried out google/gemma-3n-E4B-it-litert-preview on galaxy s25 ultra

loads pretty fast. starts to reply near-instant (text chat mode).

doesn't answer questions like "when is your cutoff date"

apparently answers "may 15 2024" as today date so probably explains why it answered joe biden as answer to who is US president
by unsupp0rted | 2025-05-21 02:14:03+00:00
All the comments arguing “it’s not really novel because…” when if a fully human team had done the work, the response would have been “okay good progress” and a slap on the back.

This is the threshold when these “okay but it’s not special” comments still make sense. 15 minutes from now it’ll be impossible to argue with a straight face that the ideas aren’t novel and full of potential.

I’m excited- I’ve been waiting for this moment almost my whole life.
by ggm | 2025-05-21 02:15:24+00:00
Most of the complications can be learned after you get comfortable with a basic model. It is entirely true things have got more complicated but the key concepts and most importantly (to me) the language of what disks are comes from their history. The whole block/sector/inner/outer and cache/written and addressing models, comes from the realities of spinning objects. We didn't inherit very many concepts from mercury delay lines in the longer term, but we did from core memory because addressing models "made sense" in the X/Y plane model they exposed and we carried some of that into the future, and into disk sector/block models.

Shingled, SMR, CVR, checksums, RAID, RAM backed, the impact of VM models, L1 and L2 cache, unified file buffer caches.. its all addons which assume you have the basic language around disk "concepts"
by LorenPechtel | 2025-05-21 02:16:16+00:00
The problem here is with the assumption that the problems can be solved by throwing money at them. Typically they can't.

To a very large degree what schools turn out is based on the students that come in. It's the home and the neighborhood far more than it is the schools themselves. You get a better result if you put students with other students of like ability and motivation. This works pretty well at the university level, but historically it was used to discriminate and thus doesn't get done earlier. And, likewise, we are very focused on equality even when it comes at a detriment to the students. (Once again, legacy of it being used to discriminate.)
Ask HN: Are AI Agents a Lie?
by David1238 | 2025-05-21 02:17:15+00:00
LLMs awesome. They’ve changed how I code (Cursor), search for things, take notes, brainstorm, write emails, etc. (ChatGPT).

But I don’t use any AI agents. My friends don’t either. I haven’t even heard of any company building AI agents outside of the annoying customer service ones.

By AI agents I mean an LLM that does things in the background without needing constant feedback. Like booking a flight or scheduling a meeting.

The only useful “agentic” quality I’ve seen is basic file or web search to better answer my questions, which doesn’t feel like an agent.

Am I missing something? Why is there so much hype? Am I just understanding agents wrong?
by natmaka | 2025-05-21 02:18:18+00:00
> File earthers

Whatever they believe or not isn't impeding others' lifes.

The underlying point is about how much renewables and how much nuclear may we build in order to tackle current challenges (climate, pollution...), one of the criteria is waste and renewables win hands down.

> ocean disposal

AFAIK no expert now states that ocean disposal is OK, this is a settled matter since at least 1972 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Convention_on_the_Preve... ), therefore a bunch of assessments of the current situation for stuff dangerous for at least hundred years doesn't seem pertinent to me.
by cebert | 2025-05-21 02:19:49+00:00
I hadn’t heard of Gail Wellington before, but I read her more detailed bios that tomhow posted. I wish I could have met Gail, she has an incredible story. I can’t imagine how challenging it would have been for a woman to pursue engineering, take time off to form a family, and then return and rise like she did at Commodore. It’s evident that she possessed a lot of grit.
by epistasis | 2025-05-21 02:19:57+00:00
It is utterly baffling to me that some Americans see the massive amount of free goods that they get as part of being the reserve currency with trade deficits, and somehow think "hollowed out manufacturing" rather than all that cheap stuff we get.

The rest of those countries that are manufacturing things are far far poorer, and desperate to switch to industry higher up in the value chain, where the US is.

And a half-analysis of the situation, and a halfwit in charge of the country that thinks the trade deficit is like a budget deficit, and the US is throwing away the heart of its economic powerhouse over half understanding of the economy.

It's truly breathtaking. Like watching Brexit on repeat. Just utter economic suicide disguised as strength.
by thepryz | 2025-05-21 02:20:07+00:00
I disagree. Amazon disabled the ability to download and transfer kindle books in February of this year, adding an additional barrier for individuals who commonly download and strip the DRM from the kindle books they "buy" from Amazon. When that news was communicated within a number of online communities, there were a lot of people who learned for the first time that they didn't "own" their kindle books. More importantly, they also learned about the tools to help them strip DRM and regain the ownership they thought they had.

People are slowly beginning to learn that their perception of digital content licensing and ownership is wrong. The more it is called out that they are licensing rather than purchasing content, the more we're able to explain why that is a bad things, the sooner people exert pressure to change the business or enact laws to do so.
by pedalpete | 2025-05-21 02:22:24+00:00
I was considering that, but then I was also wondering what sources I'd be linking to, and what would people actually read.

The point isn't SEO, we're trying to get people to change their thinking around how we approach sleep.

There is links to research in slow-wave enhancement on our website, but the entire post "could" links to references.

But I take your feedback, and I'll be more conscious of adding links to references in future posts.
by gpt5 | 2025-05-21 02:24:38+00:00
I saw a video today [1]. Millions of views, ten thousand comments, not a single commenter mentioned that it's AI generated.

If you look at the shadows in the background, you can see how they appear and disappear, how things float in the air, and have all the AI artifacts. The video is also slowed down (lower FPS) to overcome the length limit of AI video generator.

But the point is not how we can spot these, because it's going to be impossible, but how the future of news consumption is going to look like.

[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@calm.with.word/video/750583708327412...
by natmaka | 2025-05-21 02:25:25+00:00
The bar is the comparison with the other set of pertinent electricity-generating equipments: renewables.

The LNT debate isn't settled, effects of added background radiation is difficult to assess. Moreover the dust escaping from a nuclear plant may be inhaled, ingested... ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committed_dose ).

A "large portion" isn't all, and at Fukushima the nuclear accident-triggered evacuation officially made around 2200 victims.
by mrandish | 2025-05-21 02:25:30+00:00
> Had a number of things gone differently Commodore might have been Apple.

As a die-hard Amiga owner and fan, I've pondered this for many years but have come to the sad conclusion the mythical "handful of things" which, if done differently, would have meaningfully changed the fate of the Amiga simply never existed. The key reason is that many of the same things which made the Amiga so extraordinary in 1985, like custom graphics co-processors and designing the system around analog video standards also made the Amiga uniquely problematic to migrate to a RISC architecture like Power PC in the 90s. At the end, Commodore's unannounced (but in progress) plan was to migrate the Amiga platform to an HP RISC CPU, abandon analog video timing for 1280 x 960 digital RGB displays and run old Amiga software via emulation. I'm highly skeptical any such emulation would have worked sufficiently well to be considered "an Amiga." Even today, the authors of the incredibly advanced WinUAE Amiga emulator are still discovering subtle timing issues after 20 years of development. If the "new Amiga" platform couldn't run at least 90% of 68K Amiga games at 100% speed then it's not really an Amiga and instead a new and different computer platform. And if it's pretty much a new platform anyway, why not consider the PC or Mac?

Apple only barely managed to survive the 90s transition and the Mac was nearly a 'plain vanilla' platform (no custom co-processors, no brilliant analog timing hacks, etc) so it was much easier to emulate on a RISC platform than the Amiga would have been. In 1993 a 68020-based Amiga could emulate a 68000-based Mac entirely in software and run PageMaker at nearly 100% speed, whereas a 1992 68020 Mac emulating an Amiga in software would have been unimaginable.

So, we're left with a Catch 22. If we go back in time to the 80s and change the things about the Amiga platform necessary for it to survive the 90s industry transitions, we're also undoing the things that made the Amiga so special when it launched. Surviving the apocalypse of the 90s required surviving three separate 'extinction-level' asteroid impacts: 1. CISC -> RISC, 2. Analog video -> Digital video, and 3. Vertically integrated computer company -> Ecosystem of component vendors (mid-90s PCs had multiple vendors competing to be the CPU, operating system, graphics card and sound card). Neither Commodore nor Atari could have survived all three of those 'planet killers'. Even Apple WITH Steve Jobs, more money, a bigger, better brand and an emergency bankruptcy-preventing $150M loan from Bill Gates - barely survived. The first asteroid also took Motorola themselves out of CPUs (even Intel almost didn't get RISC-emulating-x86 CISC microcode working in time) and the third asteroid changed the entire playing field, causing even IBM to retreat from desktop. (and some would argue Apple only existed on life-support with the candy iMacs keeping the lights on until the iPod/iPhone really put the company back on its feet.)
by numpad0 | 2025-05-21 02:25:53+00:00
I came across some online threads sharing LoRA models the other day - and it seemed that a lot of generative AI users seem to share models that are effectively just highly specialized fixed function filters for existing (generated)images?

The obvious aim of these foundational image/movie generation AI developments is for these to become the primary source of values at cost and quality unparalleled by preexisting human experts, while allowing but not necessitating further modifications by now heavily commoditized and devalued ex-professional editors at downstream to allow for their slow deprecation.

But the opposite seem to be happening: better data are still human generated, generators are increasingly human curated, and are used increasingly closer to the tail end of the pipeline instead of head. Which isn't so threatening nor interesting to me, but I do wonder if that's a safe, let alone expected, outcome for those pushing these developments.

Aren't you welding a nozzle onto open can of worms?
by drewbitt | 2025-05-21 02:26:10+00:00
It adds complexity. Instead of being forced to do things the Deno way, now users don't migrate at all from node code and then (not unreasonably, due to their mission of node compat) complain when they don't work. A large amount of feature work stalled due to the node compat work for over a year. Even now, in 2.3.0 over 30% of all listed changelog items are node compat. They started pushing you to use config files to better integrate with your dependencies as a new default. etc
by throw234234234 | 2025-05-21 02:26:31+00:00
Many people lost their livelihoods though in each transition. I find each life valuable but that's just me - yes we are better in aggregate long term but in some ways it is paved with their sacrifice.

If we can find a way to support those displaced even that would be a much better start. e.g. re-education funds, training schools/government run apprenticeships on projects, etc. Especially if the scale of the displacement is large. We all only have the one life IMV - its about giving those lives the opportunities to pivot. Ageism, and gatekeeping will stop many from changing careers.
by AsmodiusVI | 2025-05-21 02:26:34+00:00
They are not a lie but useful agents that can take actions are still relatively rare. At MS Build this week I saw one that can write notion summaries of GitHub issues. I also saw one that actually resolved GitHub issues assigned to it. There’s lots more out there and little by little you’ll see them show up. The addition of MCP will help here as it gives “agents” the ability to connect to things and take action but within limits, therefore less likely to break stuff.
by trelane | 2025-05-21 02:26:41+00:00
> Then you cannot claim that Linux works out of the box. It doesn't if you need to select hardware for it

That is not what that means. At all.

> Your usual Linux laptop OEMs like System76 and Tuxedo just buy better combinations of the whitelabel stuff.

This is not what System76 do, actually.

> Many drivers today have quite proprietary user-space side. You'll get none of that from any laptop manufacturer.

Not with System76

> You may say you don't care about those and you're okay with 10 - 20% power loss.

I'm not. That's why I stopped buying Windows hardware and started buying Linux hardware!
by coolcase | 2025-05-21 02:27:18+00:00
I want to hear the perspective of someone who lost 100kloc and had to rewrite it all!

There is a lot of value in code. It works in prod. It is continuously regression tested by its load, so when there is a problem you figure out a tiny delta to fix it.

If you rewrite from memories you'll get a lot of bugs you need to fix again.

Code being worthless and "must keep PRs small" seem to be in tension.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-21 02:28:03+00:00
Outright bans are a non-starter because it requires an infrastructure transition. You couldn't possibly replace every car with an electric one overnight, we can't make them that fast. But if you price carbon then it would cause every new car to be electric, or at least a plug-in hybrid that runs in electric mode 95% of the time. And the people who drive a lot of miles would switch to electric first, which would make a big difference right away.

Meanwhile the people with a 10 year old car they drive 5000 miles a year will keep it until it's a 20 year old car, at which point they'll buy another 10 year old car, but by then that one will run on electricity.

Then you could theoretically ban it, but by then do you even need to?
by teleforce | 2025-05-21 02:28:44+00:00
> unprecedented and comprehensive look at how much energy the AI industry uses

Not sure about comprehensive claim here if end-to-end query chains were not considered.

For example the mobile wireless node (that're being used by the majority of the users) contribution to the energy consumption are totally ignored. The wireless power amplifier or PA for both sides of users and base-stations are notorious for their inefficiency being only less than than 50% in practice although in theory can be around 80%. Almost all of the current AI applications are cloud based not local-first thus the end users energy consumption and contribution are necessary.
by al_borland | 2025-05-21 02:29:13+00:00
The author spent a lot of time trashing the idea of 8 hours of sleep, but at least that is something actionable people can do. I can’t set an alarm to wake me up when I’ve had enough spindle activity for the night. 8 hours is given as a benchmark, because that’s how long it takes most people’s brains to adequately do the things mentioned.

If an article is telling me to throw out the rule book on sleep, it needs to offer new and actionable rules. Otherwise, I’m not sure what the point of this was, other than means to harvest email addresses.
by happyopossum | 2025-05-21 02:29:50+00:00
> Why, on Earth, would Apple ever want to solve the problem of Apps taking up more space?

To make their devices more pleasant / less frustrating to use.

They’ve got a long track record of introducing features that reduce app size, speed up installs, and reduce storage use from infrequently used apps - there’s no reason to believe they’d stop doing that except for cynical vitriol.
by qingcharles | 2025-05-21 02:30:03+00:00
This is an excellent point. Anyone who has been locked up knows to quickly self-censor themselves, lest they become a target of the jailers. Lots of modern facilities suffer from this since they read all the outgoing mail and listen to the calls.

edit: sometimes though, if you're willing to face the consequences, it allows you to write things about your jailers knowing that they are forced to read it. I remember a US federal 1st Amend. case where the prisoner had written that the mailroom lady was fond of sex with her cat. Said maillady refused to deliver the mail and it became a protracted law suit and therefore brought much more attention to the maillady's alleged proclivities.
by jc4p | 2025-05-21 02:30:10+00:00
Hi! I have a WIP of this over at https://talktrainer.app/ -- I just added Dutch to it.

It uses OpenAI's realtime API to simulate either a tutoring session (the speaker will revert to English to help you) or a first date or business meeting (the speaker will always speak the target language)

You can see the AI's transcriptions but not your own, limitation of the current OpenAI API but definitely something I can fix.

The prompts are like this: https://gist.github.com/jc4p/d8b9d121425ec191d62602d8720eeed... and the rest of it is a Nextjs app wrapped around the WebRTC connection.

I'm not fully in love with the app so I'd love any feedback or hearing if it works well for you -- It doesn't have a lot of features yet (including saving context) and if you bump into the time limit just open it up in incognito to keep going.
by JohnBooty | 2025-05-21 02:30:42+00:00
There are many ways to give back to society

Right, but ultimately what (nearly all) people want is frigging jobs. Or to be even more specific: steady, dependable income.

because it locks people in that status and heteronomy

Yeah there's so many incorrect assumptions here.

I can tell you that here in the US, my somewhat upper middle class aunt used to clean homes part time. Husband was an engineer, she was a housewife, kids were away at school. Not the type of person with hobbies and such. Was a bit bored.

Not sure of the specifics but I think she pulled in a couple of grand a month cleaning. Pretty handy when you're putting two kids through college. Or so I thought. Thanks to you, today I learned it was all "a lie." ((giant eye roll))

It's not an uncommon side gig for bored suburban housewives. There are a few women in my middle class town that do it.

I don't think full time housekeeping, which seems more common in other countries, necessarily locks anybody into anything. Anecdotally I think it's a fairly common thing to do when getting an education. I also don't know that it's always low-paid, either, especially if it includes nanny duties etc.