MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saghm | 2025-05-04 17:00:05+00:00
> "A democracy is a form of government where the three branches of government, the legislative, the executive and the judicial branch are separated and the legislative branch is in the hands of representatives elected by the people."

This seems like it's overfitting quite a bit to the American political system; I've never heard of a definition of a democracy that required exactly these branches before, and it's hard for me to agree with the idea that something with two our four branches (or the division between the branches being slightly different) is somehow impossible to be a democracy by definition.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-05-04 17:01:00+00:00
It feels, to me, like the Linux desktop has become an overly complicated behemoth, never getting anywhere due to its weight.

I still feel the pinnacle for modern OS design might be Horizon, by Nintendo of all people. A capability-based microkernel OS that updates in seconds, fits into under 400 MB (WebKit and NVIDIA drivers included), is fast enough for games, and hasn’t had an unsigned code exploit in half a decade. (The OS is extremely secure, but NVIDIA’s boot code wasn’t.)

Why can’t we build something like that?
by bryceneal | 2025-05-04 17:01:15+00:00
Going back all the way to the '60s, if you listen to interviews with Paul McCartney of The Beatles he states very plainly that he knows no music theory, and can't read music.

I suspect this is true of many great songwriters, maybe even most of them. I would even argue that studying music theory may even make you a worse songwriter, because the most innovative songwriters don't seem to follow some clearly established rulebook, but rather they bend/break the "rules" unknowingly because their focus is on what they are feeling/hearing rather than something more analytical.
by dyogenez | 2025-05-04 17:01:19+00:00
Thanks for the comments! You hit on a lot of why our app is structured the way it is. I agree too, we could've put those investments into Next.js rather than migrating to Rails. The difference was with Rails I could envision what the endpoint looked like (codebase, costs, caching, dev env, deployment, hosting options, etc). If we were to invest that time Next.js, some of those answers were (and still are) unclear. Agree we could still get there, it just wouldn't be as clear a path.
by seabrookmx | 2025-05-04 17:01:23+00:00
I loved slime volleyball (and all the offshoots, like slime water polo, tennis, etc) back in the day!

This version is more cutesy but definitely captures the magic of those original games.

The originals were all java applets. I have the class files for them and always wanted to get around to finding a JS emulator so that I could host them on my personal site again. If anyone has some recommendations please comment!
by sunrunner | 2025-05-04 17:01:48+00:00
I don't disagree regarding "listened to with pleasure" and I only remember actively listening to atonal music as part of a required syllabus. I do think it's perhaps a useful lens to use to look at 'traditional' tonal music through however, even if just to re-affirm that _some_ kind of order and structure is an important part in making something palatable to the ears (or the brain).
by wjnc | 2025-05-04 17:01:56+00:00
As a child of a scientist and teacher from the ‘40s and ‘50s I think there is some romanticism in your opinion. Can’t argue with your personal situation, but I know for a fact that writing notes, copywriting, stenciling, multiplying and distributing were all tasks my parents were very happy to see replaced by technology during their careers. They were early adopters of digital typewriters, pc’s, word processors and the internet and otherwise very much not technically inclined. Those were mostly chores. (I agree with your point, as an economist ;), that the average value of a word is higher when the cost are higher.) The one thing my mom did teach me very early was a zettelkasten-like system. Never appreciated that trial (unsuccessful, alas) enough until I read about zettelkasten.
by sofixa | 2025-05-04 17:02:07+00:00
> When a company loses money year after year it goes bankrupt. The company disappears. The workers lose their jobs.

If the company operates in such razor thin margins that it can't provide for sick leave for employees, something is terribly wrong.

> It is important for a company to earn a profit. You'll find companies like google and facebook, who are making fat profits.... pay fat salaries to their workers

And you'll find that most companies pay as little as they can get away with. Google and Meta need to compete to get a limited (until recently) amounts of top talent.

A railway couldn't care less about the employees.
by notahacker | 2025-05-04 17:02:20+00:00
> Ironically, a successful populist movement becomes the new elite and creates an opportunity for other people to be populists.

Generally the first part is the defining feature of a populist movement: a leader or faction that seeks to insist that the only solution to elites or other hated minorities or purported threats is to assume that anyone trying to stop them accumulating more power is an agent of the elites. Naturally this rhetorical style suits people that want to accumulate a lot of power and wealth and don't want to give too many straight answers to questions about what they're doing with it.

That's why Maduro, an oligarch who's been in power for over 12 years and decides exactly who is and isn't "elite" in his country is characterised as "populist" because his rhetorical style is all about claiming that he's on the side of the poor against [what's left of] the middle classes, whilst a civil war or coup which usually leads to elites being deposed may not involve populists at all.
by RhysU | 2025-05-04 17:02:54+00:00
> well informed

That's a hell of a dangerous phrase. Usually, it means that the speaker is frustrated that the broader public is not curatedly informed in a way that makes them vote how the speaker wants them to vote.

The great, and terrifying, thing about democracy is that everyone can be informed however they're informed and usually we don't literally burn everything all the way to the ground.
by mcphage | 2025-05-04 17:03:03+00:00
> These kinds of "predictions" are really a signal that the story doesn't belong on Hacker News.

Maybe, but we’ve had articles for years posted on HN claiming any minor slight is an attack on free speech. And now that we have actual attacks on free speech occurring, there’s no way I’d accept HN closing their eyes. Sorry if you don’t like reading these kind of stories, but that’s too damn bad.
by falcor84 | 2025-05-04 17:03:15+00:00
> things would happen on the platform, that would be bad PR

They literally had (allegedly) significantly contributed to inciting a genocide [0]. PR doesn't get much worse than that, but it seems that we as a society, just don't care about these things that much any more. I really can't recall any case of any individual or organization going down because of PR issues, except for people in the entertainment industry; for some reason, we only expect good morals from our actors and comedians.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_co...
by seanhunter | 2025-05-04 17:03:25+00:00
V-VI-I is a plagal cadence. It's most definitely not classically wrong. Take any old hymn, Bach corale etc if they do a big "Amen" that will be a plagal cadence.

https://www.musictheoryacademy.com/how-to-read-sheet-music/c...

For some reason, people who don't know music theory say things like this about the Beatles because they think because they haven't heard something before it must be new.
by globnomulous | 2025-05-04 17:04:14+00:00
Classical Athens offers a fascinating example. It was a radical democracy of citizens who certainly understood what they were doing, and it became the most imperially ambitious, expansive, destructive, and exploitative polis of the classical period. They put an entire city to death for refusing to join the 'defensive' alliance that they led and massively enriched themselves at the expense of member states.
by jsphweid | 2025-05-04 17:04:16+00:00
As other posts point out, leaving out the third takes away the major-ness.

It's also worth mentioning the way Kurt often played power chords, using his index for the bass note and barring the rest with his ring finger. This often leads to major chords when the root is on the A string and non-major ambiguous-sounding chords with the root is on the E string. It's obvious as early as the 3rd chord in the intro to Teen Spirit; it has the notes Ab Eb Ab Db (NOTE: Db, not C). It's inconsistent in Kurt's playing (edit: whether or not his strumming makes that 4th string, 4th interval sound come out), but the subtlety is a signature part of Kurt's guitar sound.

Also some of the chord analysis in the site (ex. In Bloom verse) is just flat out wrong.
by junto | 2025-05-04 17:04:23+00:00
After self teaching myself BASIC and Pascal as a kid, Modula-2 was the language we first learnt at university in order to teach us programming fundamentals. It was a nice move from Pascal for me but I preferred Delphi.

Although the keywords in Modula-2 weren’t case sensitive and weren’t required to be in upper case, it was preferred (guidance from Niklaus Wirth) and that was just annoying.
by varjag | 2025-05-04 17:04:34+00:00
While I couldn't find an explicit declaration of this in the linked article, the tunnel system likely has something on the level of an SBC (think raspberry pi) rather than a microcontroller.

I'm the author of that article. It runs on a SOM which is quite downspec from RPi (single core, arm32, 128Mb RAM) but yes it's a full featured system rather than a microcontroller.
by lurk2 | 2025-05-04 17:04:35+00:00
Then you go after their insurance company like in the OP. If they don’t have insurance you may be able to go after the owner personally, though that’s likely to be much more costly than the dollar value of your damages.

Honestly, why are you guys so committed to this idea that contractors are these criminal masterminds who will thwart your every attempt to sue for damages? Small Claims is an incredibly routine and straightforward process, and pretending that it isn’t only serves to dissuade people from making use of it.
by John7878781 | 2025-05-04 17:05:18+00:00
In the Twitter thread the article mentions, LeCun makes his claim only for "high-resolution" images and the article assumes 1024x1024 to fall under this category. To me, 1024x1024 is not "high-resolution." This assumption is flawed imo

I currently use convnext for image classification at a size of 4096x2048 (definitely counts as "high-resolution"). For my use case, it would never be practical to use VITs for this. I can't downscale the resolution because extremely fine details need to be preserved.

I don't think LeCun's comment was a "knee-jerk reaction" as the article claims.
Thoughts on AI Agents and Tools
by cshou | 2025-05-04 17:05:29+00:00
AI agents that can call external tools look a lot like workflow engines. Both move work from “Step A” to “Step B.” The difference is in the steering wheel: a workflow engine follows hard‑coded lanes, while an agent can improvise. Tell the agent to “summarize this report and email the highlights,” and it decides which tool to grab next—no rigid flowchart required.

That’s why the agent‑vs‑tool debate often gets messy. Take Google’s A2A pitch versus the earlier MCP pattern. A2A tries to label “agents” as entities that plan and reason, while MCP casts those same capabilities as just another layer of tooling. In practice the boundary is more marketing than material—the moment a tool chain makes decisions, it’s wearing an agent’s hat.

So how do you ship something useful without vanishing into taxonomy debates? Start with one agent in charge of a well‑chosen toolkit. You can validate prompts, error handling, and observability before unleashing a flock of agents and the orchestration headaches that come with them.

When should you graduate to a fleet of specialized agents? Think cognitive load. People fumble when their to‑do list mushrooms; a single agent’s reasoning also degrades as its context window fills with unrelated tools and divergent tasks. Once your “kitchen‑sink” agent juggles customer support, data cleaning, and infra ops, it’s time to spawn new agents dedicated to each domain. Smaller, purpose‑built agents keep context tight, reduce hallucinations, and make troubleshooting saner.

Bottom line: Begin with one agent plus many tools. Split the work into multiple agents when the variety—not just the volume—of tasks starts tripping the original up.
by loremm | 2025-05-04 17:05:44+00:00
I think there is a lot of hope because, in a purely research setting, this is extremely routine. The field of genomics is vast but the protocols are somewhat cheap and well understood. It's always hard to do a trial, and the tools are still often aimed at scientists (who are willing to spend months doing a single novel analysis), not point and click for a clinician. But even some relatively low hanging fruit will be extremely effective I think

Not viral/bacterial but human mutations but this is an inspiring study --- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31019026/ , https://radygenomics.org/2021/13-hours-rady-childrens-instit...

A child is born with potential rare genetic disease. They sequence their DNA within 13 hours and come back with a diagonsis in some proportion of cases (they give lots of stats, it's small sample size, maybe 1/4 improved outcomes, maybe 2/3 have immediate change to their care)
by leptons | 2025-05-04 17:05:51+00:00
I abandoned Express when I moved to Lambda. Express was just handing the routing, which I didn't need anymore with Lambda, API Gateway handles that now. My front-end also calls most Lambdas directly using Cognito for auth.

The only time I have problems with Lambdas growing too large is when I try to include a really big payload that includes something like Chrome for headless screenshots, or FFMPEG, or other large binary programs. But for normal Lambda functions I don't have any size issues. Recently when trying to get headless Chrome working in Lambda, I had to boot up EC2 running AWS Linux, and create a .zip file there with library files that were missing in Lambda, then .zip up everything and upload to S3 and then import the .zip into Lambda. After this, I can modify my .js files locally and have my toolchain upload the changes to Lambda to update the Lambda. But this time the payload was too large for importing into a Lambda, and too big for a Lambda layer. The solution was saving the .zip file with Chrome in it to an S3 bucket, and when the Lambda machine starts up, it first downloads the .zip file to /tmp, unzips it, and now the Lambda has the Chrome binaries in the /tmp folder. This bypasses the size limits associated with Lambda. It's rare that I need to do this, and it's not fun, but there are always going to be some edge cases like this with Lambda and getting large architecture specific binaries running in Lambda.

I actually put many different functions into a single Lambda, and I call the Lambda with a specific action parameter to perform a specific function.

Local development... when I create a Lambda function I may add some functionality so I can also run it on the command line if I'm still early in developing a complex function. But most of the time I just use my self-built toolchain which watches my local code for changes, then creates/updates the Lambda in AWS, which takes about 2 to 5 seconds typically. Then I test the code as it runs inside AWS. If I didn't have internet access, then it's impossible to develop in this way, but that's almost never the case.
by ooterness | 2025-05-04 17:05:58+00:00
When you say "hand track", you're not kidding.

I was expecting something with motors controlled by a person, but this is literally picking up the dish and pointing it by muscle power.

Back of envelope, a 1 meter parabolic antenna at 1.7 GHz gives about 12 degree beam width (FWHM), which is what makes this practical. Very clever.
by dbonteq | 2025-05-04 17:06:30+00:00
Location: Northern California

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Figma, Adobe: Illustrator, Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere Pro, Canva.

Resume: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ABEpzzvX8CwLPduty3sMs_M9...

Email: dbonteq@gmail.com

Hello! My name is Daniela and I am a visual designer with a focus on graphic design, UI design, and photography. I love bringing ideas to life, and I am always looking for ways to make digital experiences more enjoyable.
by ivraatiems | 2025-05-04 17:06:37+00:00
These scams must work, or they wouldn't continue happening. The cost to send them is probably quite low, such that one in one thousand people being willing and able to send money is sufficient.

But it's hard for me to imagine. What's the Venn diagram of overlap between people who a) would think this is real, b) would be able to figure out how to pay the scammer, and c) care enough about this sort of thing being exposed that they'd be willing to do so?

I also think, in this day and age, there are better things to accuse people of to get them to pay out. But then I am probably not in the target demo for the scam.
by financetechbro | 2025-05-04 17:07:33+00:00
This is a large volume of text. And honestly feels a bit lazy to expect people that are experts in these areas to spend their free time reading a very long AI thesis so they can fact check it for you. I don’t think this is how you nurture genuine discussion with the use of AI. You’re outsourcing both the creation and analysis of the material. I’d be surprised if you even read it yourself.
by mdaniel | 2025-05-04 17:07:46+00:00
I suspect this was prematurely published to HN and was in fact just someone's weekend project

https://github.com/Foreseerr/TScale/blob/aa2638c53c74dd33280...

https://github.com/Foreseerr/TScale/blob/aa2638c53c74dd33280...

and I struggle to think of what would lead one to the urge to implement a key=value config file parser in 2025 https://github.com/Foreseerr/TScale/blob/aa2638c53c74dd33280...

On top of that, people who do $(git add . && git commit -myolo) drive me crazy https://github.com/Foreseerr/TScale/blob/main/logs/125m_1T_f...
by dyogenez | 2025-05-04 17:08:33+00:00
> Sure, some use-cases might warrant the flexibility that GraphQL uses. A book tracking app does not.

I agree! If you're in control of the experience, then I wouldn't choose GraphQL for a limited experience either.

The project started because Goodreads was retiring their API, and I wanted to create something better for the community. I have no idea how people will use it. The more we can provide, and the more flexible it is, the more use cases it'll solve.

So far we have hundreds of people using the GraphQL API for all kinds of things I'd never expect. That's the selling point of GraphQL for me - being able to build and figure out the use case later.

But I would never want to create a GraphQL API from scratch (not again). In this case, Hasura handles that all for us. In our case it was easier than creating a REST API.
by reaperducer | 2025-05-04 17:09:22+00:00
While we're naming and shaming: VIP Mayflower in Los Angeles.

I moved from the west coast to the east. VIP sent my stuff to Idaho, where it sat outside unprotected for two weeks while the driver did another load that was of a higher priority than mine.

When I finally got my stuff, nearly two weeks after the delivery window, none of my tables had legs. They had been removed and somehow lost in shipping.

I got enough money from the extra moving insurance and from the payout for the delivery being so late that, in effect, the move was free. But it wasn't anywhere near enough to cover fixing and replacing what was damaged.
by saghm | 2025-05-04 17:09:23+00:00
> the problem comes, however, when the minority decides it wants more than the constitution provides

Or when the majority decides this? If the system is defined to put checks on the majority power as well as the minority, there's no reason that the majority might not decide to try to push the boundaries of the system with similar incentives. I think there's a reasonable argument that this sort of boundary pushing is more responsible for the erosion of constitutional norms historically compared to when the minority wants more rights; we have headlines literally from this morning talking about how the American president claimed that he doesn't know if he needs to follow the constitution due to the mandate of his election[0]:

> WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump, asked during an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker,” whether he believes that he needs to uphold the Constitution during his presidency, responded, “I don’t know.”

> The comment came as Trump remained adamant that he wanted to ship undocumented immigrants out of the country and said it was inconceivable to hear millions of cases in court, insisting he needed the power to quickly remove people he said were murderers and drug dealers.

> “I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it,” he said.

> Pressed on whether he still needs to abide by the Constitution, he said, “I don’t know.”

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/05/04/trump-nbc...
by rcxdude | 2025-05-04 17:09:36+00:00
I think this idea generally doesn't bear out, at least as described in the book. For the most part, the kinds of jobs that are potentially actually mostly bullshit, are generally not considered it by those who do them, while those that he would characterise as just "shit jobs" will generally have a high percentage of percieved bullshit by those who work them.

I am amenable to the idea that there is a lot of wasted pointless work, but not to the idea that there's some kayfabe arrangement where everyone involved thinks it's pointless but pretends otherwise, I think generally most people around such work have actually convinced themselves it's important.
by phkahler | 2025-05-04 17:10:07+00:00
Yeah I came to quote this:

"All tests for infection came back negative and it was assumed she had an autoimmune condition."

They never confirmed the autoimmune hypothesis but tried to treat it. What about the hypothesis of "it's some other infection our tests don't catch"? Antibiotics are a fairly simple thing to try. She got cataracts due to that mistake. Now that eye doesn't have dynamic focus.
by perrygeo | 2025-05-04 17:10:17+00:00
Mainly a point of clarification - I don't think DuckDB represents anything new in geospatial. It represents a new paradigm for data management and data architecture. Understanding the difference isn't optional.

DuckDB handles floating point numbers too - is DuckDB the most important thing in floating point data? Of course not, the data types and operators haven't changed. The underlying compute environment has. That's where the innovation is. I'd simply appreciate if technical writers took two seconds to make this vital distinction - being precise isn't hard and I don't know what we gain by publishing intentionally muddled technical articles.
by williamdclt | 2025-05-04 17:11:30+00:00
> punk and metal band uses predominantly power chords, without any real care in the world as to what the progressions are

Somewhat true for punk, mostly incorrect for metal. A lot of metal is very analytical, deeper in musical theory than most popular genres (rock, pop, rnb…), they care _a lot_ about it. Metal is often very technical, it bred some of the top musicians in the world, it’s no surprise they give a shit about it: it’s their craft and a hard one.

In fact I remember the singer of Gojira in a French interview, saying (iirc, surely not quite remembering his point) that metal is in many ways closer to classical than rock, as it values composition so much more where rock is all about interpretation (closer to punk)