MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2025-05-22 03:03:22+00:00
I'm from the UK originally. On one of my first trips to California I was up on the cliffs in Marin County and a squadron flew by and I was amazed by them - and the Californians I was with were like "yeah, you see them all the time".

Now I live in California and I still can't believe I get to see them here. They're absurd - they don't look like they should be able to fly at all. They're also incredibly pretty, especially in their breeding plumage.

I live in Half Moon Bay, just south of San Francisco, which turns out to be home to the second largest mega-roost of the California Brown Pelican (my favourite kind of pelican) in the world.

We've even rescued two of them (injured birds, we got them in a carrier and took them to the animal rescue place).

They make for a fun theme for all sorts of different AI experiments.

They're also very photogenic - I had a bunch of photos I've taken on my PyCon poster recently (you have to zoom in quite a bit to see them though): https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/poster-full-siz...
by jpmattia | 2025-05-22 03:03:51+00:00
Back in graduate school, I TA'd an electrostatics course. We were going through the details of the basic parallel-plate capacitor, and so Prof. Peter Hagelstein (of the project you listed above) used the example of how much energy was stored in a football-field sized set of parallel-plate capacitors with oil as a high-breakdown dielectric.

The students were dutifully copying the lecture while I was sitting there with my mouth agape realizing that he was working through a simplified example of what energy storage was required for the X-ray laser. IIRC Those guys had their own substation, and would charge the capacitors. The switch would get thrown and the sublasers would shoot at the molybdenum target, which would laze in the X-ray spectrum (and the molybdenum would vaporize, I think.)

Afterwards, I asked him how on earth the energy was transferred from the caps to the sublasers: He just smiled and said "very carefully".
by lolinder | 2025-05-22 03:07:20+00:00
Does Nvidia have integrated memory options that allow you to get up to 64GB+ of VRAM without stringing together a bunch of 4090s?

For local LLMs Apple Silicon has really shown the value of shared memory, even if that comes at the cost of raw GPU power. Even if it's half the speed of an array of GPUs, being able to load the mid-sized models at all is a huge plus.
by ivape | 2025-05-22 03:09:22+00:00
Anyone that has ever done spec work has already faced just how demoralizing this will all be. When you do spec work for design, it's basically everyone just submitting their designs for the buyer to decide which one to pick. All the designers copy the designs that are getting the "this is going in the right direction" feedback. The average person will now be able to just say "make me something just like that" for free. It's basically the end, and only a world war will reset things. Best of luck all.

I'll add one other thing about war:

Humans are not exactly a peaceful bunch. A bunch of people with nothing to do start gang wars, often on a national scale, country versus country, or country-men versus counter-men. It's a hot-take for sure, but, we're trending towards war and that's especially true if AI can easily be used to rile each other up with ease.
by Waterluvian | 2025-05-22 03:09:45+00:00
I think that transformation is difficult to appraise from within. In the future we’ll have a much more clear sense of how we feel about the invention of the automobile.

I think that the calm, more disciplined take of “the sky is always falling, it’s never falling. There’s other, probably better ways to be creative” is the one.

Today my eight year old sat at the PC for hours using Scratch to make what was essentially a Flash animation. He had PS5 access, Switch access, iPad access. Nope. Wanted to bash his head against loops and timers for hours.

The craving to be creative is insatiable. It’ll continue to take on new forms.

With apologies to the farriers of today.
by lbourdages | 2025-05-22 03:09:46+00:00
I'm in the same boat for the most part. Always had tinnitus, for as long as I can remember. Doesn't bother me at all.

However, for the past 3 or 4 years, during spring, I get much worse tinnitus in my right ear for a couple weeks. It appears to be caused by some kind of blockage in my inner ear due to the inevitable viruses we catch during the winter. It's louder and a lower pitch (around 3 kHz, unlike my 10+ kHz normal one), and even though it's not the first time this happens by now, it's still extremely annoying. It's harder to just ignore, and my mind immediately starts thinking "what if this lasts forever?"

So I can imagine that for those who develop tinnitus at adulthood, it can cause a lot more distress, because they lived the "before".
by Tostino | 2025-05-22 03:10:52+00:00
This is something I have been thinking about integrating into a sampler for standard autoregressive LLMs. The idea is to buffer N context tokens from the ongoing autoregressive generation. Then, every K tokens, a section of this buffer (or perhaps the whole buffer) could be processed by a diffusion model, guided by one or more specific commands to operate on that buffered text.

One application I envision for this kind of sampler, leveraging the diffusion model's capabilities, would be to detect and potentially correct instances of post-hoc reasoning within the buffer. The diffusion model could then help ensure that proper causal reasoning chains are established in that segment before the autoregressive model continues generating. You could also allow for slight, controlled backtracking or revision within that buffer window if the generation starts to go off-track, again using the diffusion model to smooth or adjust the text before committing it and moving forward.
by adamwk | 2025-05-22 03:14:17+00:00
Yeah I’ve had that in various forms through my life. I’m now in probably my best state. One thing that helped was switching from vyvanse to concerta. I don’t know why but vyvanse didn’t really help. It just made me hyper focus on anything but work.

Another is starting a new job. I don’t think I realized how bored or burnt out I was until I left and joined a new company.

Other than that all the basics: sleep, food, and exercise.

But it’s hard when it gets bad. The only other advice is have a good therapist and psychiatrist that you trust.
by osigurdson | 2025-05-22 03:15:43+00:00
It is always tough to predict the future. Two years ago I would have agreed but today it seems that we are on the asymptotic part of the curve - waiting for another breakthrough of some sort. AI helps a lot but is nowhere near replacing anyone (for coding at least).

It seems that should be able to replace 1st level support for a bank or something like that but those industries move very slowly so even that could be years away still.
by bitwize | 2025-05-22 03:16:32+00:00
Everybody making a Japanese fighting game in the 90s read the same ridiculous over-the-top martial arts manga, and saw the same Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan movies, and everybody ripped those off, while adding a lawsuit-avoiding twist to create characters and moves for the games.

There's a character in King of Fighters named Benimaru Nikaido. Nobody at SNK called him that internally. Some staffers may have forgotten he had that name. The developers called him Polnareff, the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure character he was shamelessly based off of. Like, Guile may have had Polnareff's tall hair, but Benimaru had his whole vibe, including the tight-fitting effeminate tops that somehow made him even more masculine.

The title ship of Space Battleship Yamato had a powerful main cannon called the "Wave Motion Gun" or hadouhou (波動砲). When designing moves for Street Fighter, Capcom doubtless drew inspiration from the coolness of this weapon, especially its much-copied "sucking in energy before unleashing a bright blue beam of fury" animation, and just changed the final character for "gun", 砲, to one for "fist", 拳, yielding the Wave Motion Fist or hadouken.
by hedora | 2025-05-22 03:17:07+00:00
I should also add: Trump 2 inherited a stable economy with massive investments in US manufacturing.

Early indications suggest he has already ruined it with tariffs, erratic jailing of skilled laborers and gutting of the government programs and agencies that were supporting the investment in the first place. The dollar has dropped 10% since inauguration day, inflation is way up and the deficit is ballooning.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/C307RC1Q027SBEA

https://www.exchange-rates.org/converter/usd-eur
by jimmyl02 | 2025-05-22 03:17:10+00:00
I think there is no way to tell and we can only see with more research and time. One nuanced part that might not be clear is the transformer was a huge part of what made traditional LLMs scale.

With the diffusion transformer and newer architectures, it might be possible that transformers can now be applied to diffusion. Diffusion also has the benefit of being able to "think" with the amount of diffusion steps instead of having to output tokens and then reasoning about them.

I think it's hard to tell exactly where we are headed but it's an interesting research direction especially now that it's somewhat more validated by Google.
by medhir | 2025-05-22 03:18:15+00:00
I got tinnitus in my right ear after the second round of mRNA vaccines for Covid in May 2021 that never went away, equally do not recommend.

If you’re going to concerts / loud venues regularly, please for the love of god invest in some decent earplugs. They go for $15-30 on amazon and come with a carrying case usually, it’s a simple habit that will save you lots of heartache down the line.
by pfdietz | 2025-05-22 03:18:28+00:00
Also, the amount of antimatter storable in a Penning Trap is limited such that its mass energy is comparable to the stored magnetic energy of the trap, which is small compared to the energy released by the same mass (as of the trap) of high explosives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-neutral_plasma

(see discussion of the "Brillouin Limit")
by DocTomoe | 2025-05-22 03:18:51+00:00
There was a time that was said about nukes. They didn't really make sense. We were only able to make minuscule amounts of U-235 / Plutonium at very high cost... and had we wanted evil bombs, we had a thousand ways already to make them.

Didn't stop people then. And it won't stop sufficiently criminal governments today.
by mrbungie | 2025-05-22 03:19:00+00:00
> It seems that should be able to replace 1st level support for a bank or something like that but those industries move very slowly so even that could be years away still.

Klarna is similar to a bank and they tried replacing 1st level support with a chatbot. Spoiler: it didn't work for them, so I wouldn't keep my hopes so high for banks.
by afavour | 2025-05-22 03:19:19+00:00
> Guys we all know this. Follow the trend lines. Where is AI going?

This assumes constant progress. I remember during the early days of self driving cars we were told the same: look how far we’ve come already! We’ll all be in self driving cars within 5 years. And yet, here we are.

I have no doubt we will see a ton of progress. I also have no doubt AI will take over a lot of the tedious, basic coding work people do. But replacing coders entirely? I remain skeptical.
by necovek | 2025-05-22 03:19:21+00:00
We've given AI self-driving 15 years, and we still don't really have it. And nuclear fusion, what, 75 years?

And possibly never might.

Sometimes, there is a cap to the capability, and maybe we've already reached it. Yes, there will still be small, incremental improvements. Yes, we can change the "rules" to make new tools more valuable (eg. introduce communicating roads and vehicles to make it easier for cars to be self-driving; or introduce some forms of orthogonal resiliency into software that allows us to live with the slop from LLMs).

And yes, possibly you are right too, but there is nothing definitively confirming that.
by teruakohatu | 2025-05-22 03:21:59+00:00
> I do not know why concerts have to be SO LOUD. Loud, sure. Permanent ear damage loud, why

I have often wondered this. So it’s non-deafening loud at the back? I was at a concert recently that was way too loud. A sound guy came to check and stood in front of the speakers. I thought finally it’s going to be turned down … nope … clearly his hearing had already gone which would explain why it was so loud.

I think my hearing has been damaged in the past and so I now always have either AirPods at the very least or earplugs on hand. If anything loud, like heavy construction next to a bus stop, is happening I put them in. I can’t undo the past but I can prevent future damage.
by brookst | 2025-05-22 03:23:09+00:00
POTUS used to be done by AI, in the sense that a large bureaucracy of specialists filtering up through domain-specific experts and summarized by deeply experienced, large-context politicians produced results that were mostly actionable as-is.

Huge investments were made to ensure the highest quality at all layers of the gigantic org, with the more-or-less correct belief that it would improve outcomes.

The president was largely ceremonial day-to-day, and only determinative to the extent they were also head of the majority political views, which mediated the outputs of the bureaucracy.

I’m sure this sounds crazy to anyone under 25 or so, but the era of a YOLO populist autocrat who shapes the bureaucracy to be a giant vanity mirror really is a new thing.
by dgfitz | 2025-05-22 03:23:10+00:00
I didn’t have a say in the matter of OS choice, it doesn’t matter how well-publicized Ubuntu’s stance is, it’s wrong. I don’t care if it’s not an LTS, keep the fucking repos open and advertise you’re using an insecure OS. Let me, the user, make that choice. Don’t pretend I’m stupid and need some kind of benevolent dictator to make choices for me, or handicap me because they’re smarter than me. They’re not.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-05-22 03:23:39+00:00
Mixed results. It can produce a generic piece of art, but people don't want a generic piece of art, they want their exact character with all markings and colors exactly correct. It also produces a very distinct style that everyone will pick up on and call you out on.

You also won't be allowed to share your AI generated piece on most furry websites or group chats.
by bastawhiz | 2025-05-22 03:24:25+00:00
Apple is under no obligation at any time to maintain your subscription because they too have the right to terminate the contract for iCloud and your Apple ID. If you get to the end of the billing cycle and they don't want you as a customer, they have no legal requirement to continue billing you and providing you service. Imagine how outrageous it would be to live in a society where sellers were prohibited from terminating contracts with customers who didn't pay them.

Moreover, you sign a contract when you agree to the terms of the purchase, as well as the trade in. None of this is a surprise.

Across the board, the author didn't read.
by ab5tract | 2025-05-22 03:25:05+00:00
And I bet you consider yourself scientifically minded. Depressing.

Do a bit of research on ADHD. Maybe look into mortality rates between medicated and unmedicated ADHD. Consider for a moment why stimulants are prescribed for ADHD in the first place, and not for anything else.

If you do the above and still can’t see how a simple test like this is more accurate and scientific than a subjective quiz that can be studied against, then I hate to inform you but you are not as objective a thinker as you might expect you are.
by simonw | 2025-05-22 03:26:25+00:00
You may well be able to do this on-device right now. The latest local models are all capable of tool calls and summarization, which is what this demo needs.

A decent sized Qwen 3 or Gemma 3 might well do the job. Mistral 3.1 Small is great too.

(Personally I'd be happy to pipe my email through an LLM from a respectable vendor that promises not to train on my inputs - Anthropic, OpenAI and Gemini all promise that for paid API usage.)
by ggm | 2025-05-22 03:27:29+00:00
I volunteer with seniors helping them with online problems. The lack of clear guidance what is and what is not an active element in a web view, responsive to touch, is their biggest cognitive burden. They really struggle.

Seniors make up 4-5% of the online population. As a cohort they're growing. Cognitive decline, visual acuity, memory all fade. So these are otherwise competent people who made good livings, now struggling with design choices with consequences for them.

There is simply no single abiding rule. It may be a red box, or a yellow circle, it may be words or a logo or a skuomorphism in cartoon sense.

I would suspect toddlers are the same. Who knows?

Gov.uk is exemplary for understanding this problem.

Material design isn't orthogonal in this, because it's flat aspects de-emphasis any clear distinction where prior coding models tended to have a gui look to buttons which lay outside this design imperative.
by arp242 | 2025-05-22 03:27:52+00:00
I worked at a computer shop at the time. Few consumers wanted the Linux versions: they all chose Windows. I'm not sure the license was free, as the Windows machines were more expensive with the same hardware.

Either way: people wanted what they knew, which was Windows, and they paid more for it. I wrote about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41431733
Show HN: I made an AI video edit website that works
by EmilyJohn | 2025-05-22 03:28:05+00:00
I created EasyVideo (website), a comprehensive video editing solution that helps content creators, small businesses and individuals transform their videos with three powerful AI-powered features. After seeing how challenging it was to enhance video quality, remove unwanted elements, and create professional-looking content, I built something that ACTUALLY delivers studio-quality results.

What it does: - Professional video enhancement: AI-powered upscaling to 1080p - Smart watermark & date stamp removal: Clean up videos without affecting the content - Video background removal: Create professional effects for creative storytelling - High quality output across all features

User groups and their needs: Content Creators: - Enhance video quality for better engagement - Remove watermarks from stock footage - Create clean backgrounds for professional content

Business Users: - Batch process marketing materials - Clean up customer testimonial videos - Create professional product demonstrations

Personal Use: - Restore old family videos to HD - Remove date stamps from old recordings - Create creative family memories with background effects

By leveraging state-of-the-art AI algorithms, our platform handles a complete range of video editing needs - from enhancing old family videos to creating professional content for social media. We've made professional video editing accessible to everyone, whether you're a pro or just getting started.
by zackify | 2025-05-22 03:28:48+00:00
Ollama breaks for me. If I manually set the context higher. The next api call from clone resets it back.

And ollama keeps taking it out of memory every 4 minutes.

LM studio with MLX on Mac is performing perfectly and I can keep it in my ram indefinitely.

Ollama keep alive is broken as a new rest api call resets it after. I’m surprised it’s this glitched with longer running calls and custom context length.
by strogonoff | 2025-05-22 03:29:52+00:00
It’s interesting how in music the same application of ML swamps companies like Suno in trillion dollar lawsuits, yet in graphics and text no one cares, even though graphics and text fall victim to the same sleight of hand.

It feels like a big tech company can just ignore the law, unless another big company stands up against it (and hopefully helps the average Joe as a side-effect).
by andsoitis | 2025-05-22 03:30:37+00:00
> what he and Altman are indicating, through words, and subliminal marketing, is that we are building the next Apple.

don't fall for it. these are stories concocted to influence your evaluation of their product, giving it a sheen of expected futuristic utopia, fueling your willingness to part with your dollars.

when you zoom out far enough, you notice their business is branding that is the facade to a commodity (generative AI). their company value lies in the value of the brand because that drowns out a large majority of competitors (of the commodity) by drawing their potential customers' dollars, which is oxygen to the dragon.

openai's business is in their ability to craft a brand story that convinces the world that they are the purveyors of a safe passage into the post-human-intelligence (Alien Intelligence), making us willing and eager to contribute to building the bridge.

don't be seduced.
by zackify | 2025-05-22 03:30:37+00:00
M4 max 128gb ram.

LM studio MLX with full 128k context.

It works well but has a long 1 minute initial prompt processing time.

I wouldn’t buy a laptop for this, I would wait for the new AMD 32gb gpu coming out.

If you want a laptop I even consider my m4 max too slow to use more than just here or there.

It melts if you run this and battery goes down asap. Have to use it docked for full speed really
by notaharvardmba | 2025-05-22 03:32:52+00:00
Tl;dr would be nice, as others mentioned. I could see using a variant of the concept to visualize code changes. Have a circle divided into pie slices that represent however you organize your microservices, packages, components, modules or classes. Then distance from the center represents time or reverse time. You could then quickly see changes over time, which areas of the codebase is affected, etc.
by bolechen | 2025-05-22 03:32:55+00:00
Rushiwowen.co is an innovative platform that leverages AI to make ancient Buddhist scriptures more accessible to modern readers. The site offers a comprehensive library of sutras, allowing users to explore and understand Buddhist teachings through AI-assisted reading and interpretation. By combining technology with timeless wisdom, Rushiwowen.co aims to bring clarity and insight to those seeking spiritual knowledge in today’s digital age.Currently only supports Chinese, we will consider adding other language support.
by zackify | 2025-05-22 03:34:33+00:00
It’s because MCP return types are so basic. It’s text. Or image. Or one other type in the protocol I forget.

It’s not well thought out. I’ve been building one with the new auth spec and their official code and tooling is really lacking.

It could have been so much simpler and straight forward by now.

Instead you have 3 different server types and one is deprecated already (SSE) it’s almost funny
by thebeardisred | 2025-05-22 03:34:57+00:00
Hi! I'm sorry this has been your experience. I'm one of the Red Hatters who's been working behind the scenes to get this over the finish line.

I do say my genuine thanks for your earnest expression. The version and ABI guarantee is not for everyone. At the same time some folks around these parts know that I'm "not an apologist for running an out of date kernel". I can assure you that everything shipped in the forthcoming P550 image is fresh. GCC 15. LLVM 19, etc. It's intended for development to get more software over the finish line for RISC-V.

Conflict of interest statement: I work for Red Hat (Formerly CoreOS), and I'm also the working group lead for the distro integration group within RISE (RISC-V Software Ecosystem).