MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by metalman | 2025-05-12 17:30:24+00:00
The quote was given to me by my uncle Kieth, who was the chief librarian in charge of periodicals at the main, central branch of the New York Public Library, long before the internet, there was more to the quote....in that the reason to kill the librarians, which they did a lot of durring the cultural revolution, was to eliminate those that understood the filing system, and was done as a part of the wholesale eliminating of discourse in western languages,philosophys, and systems. Dig a bit deeper, perhaps in chinese language books on Mao, but the quote does fit what was done. Edit. They kept the books though, and the card catolog of what is in.the Chinese national archives is rather astounding..
by grumpy-de-sre | 2025-05-12 17:30:51+00:00
One of the very few places in London that I ever felt truly at peace.

I think the heavy maze like structure was incredibly effective at blocking out the sound of the city and the water features / conservatory made it an amazing place to chill out for a relaxing lunch.

Not quite cyberpunk, not quite solarpunk but somewhere in between and utterly unique.
Ask HN: How should we version our models?
by joshdavham | 2025-05-12 17:31:02+00:00
AI companies have been notorious for inconsistent model versioning schemes, but this still begs the question: how should we be versioning our models?

For traditional software, we have SemVer which is relatively straightforward. But for models (AI, statistical and otherwise), it's not as simple. When it comes to modelling, it is possible to improve upon a model without a) making backward incompatible changes, b) adding new features or c) fixing a bug... so how should we go about naming our models when we've improved them?
by bpfrh | 2025-05-12 17:31:21+00:00
Not really in the sense that the owning company has managed to survive without the state stepping in and give them money.

Most reactors are old and in need of repair, most of these earlier than planned afaik.

There is also the bigger issue that some reactors are shut down in the summer because cooling water would leave the reactor so hot that it would be a danger to the animals living in the river.
by qingcharles | 2025-05-12 17:31:45+00:00
That's the spec, for sure! The domains are converted to punycode, but the usernames? I have no idea what happens to them. My tests showed some providers delivered them, some didn't. I'm sure there are a bunch of people out there using accented characters and CJK etc in their usernames and wondering why it's not going so well...
by MinimalAction | 2025-05-12 17:32:25+00:00
I identify myself with this problem too. Namely, accumulating a lot of browser windows to sit and read plethora of interesting articles and follow them back to HN comments section to gain insights. These windows stay open for days and rot in my double-digit open tabs on mobile or Mac.

However, I completely disagree that the solution should be a push-based notification system (through Telegram). As is notifications are annoying, especially when you're in the middle of deep work. Many a times, random email notifications from irrelevant entities push me off the concentration ladder. What's more, I often put my phone in DND mode, so these kind of notifications are thus useless.

What's probably helpful is to be mindful of how much time can I legitimately spend on reading interesting things across internet. All so that I can produce interesting content some day.
by kergonath | 2025-05-12 17:32:33+00:00
> It's good you do it, thank you, and people run at the opportunity to show everyone they are doing the right thing (creating an illusion of popularity), but I can tell you from having seen the stats - essentially nobody does it.

I believe you, really. I still prefer that than people profiting off me without my consent.

There is hope, there are some media who manage with strategies ranging from complete paywalls (like Nebula, though I would be very curious to know how profitable it is for the uploaders) to the opposite (like the Guardian, who seem to be getting enough money despite very little friction to get to the articles).

Thinking about good old-fashioned newspapers, most of the readership did not pay, either. There is no reason why a combination of subscribers, non-invasive advertising, and sponsorship could not accommodate a certain number of freeloaders.

> Nebula, which you mention, has about 700k subscribers. Yet they host YouTube videos for creators who collectively have over 120M subscribers...that is a 0.6% conversion rate.

Nebula has a chicken and egg problem, and YouTube has an infinitely broader reach. It certainly is not perfect. That said, I don’t think Nebula needs to make as much money as YouTube, just enough so that people can make a living producing good stuff instead of slop optimised for ads.
by setr | 2025-05-12 17:32:41+00:00
>because the current state is the sum of all previous states

I don't think that's true, except for the server? From the client's perspective, the current state is whatever the hell the server thinks is the sum of all previous state. So you generally don't need lossless message passing; you just need to be able to resync periodically, and trying to resend on lost messages is probably a waste of time if you can sync straight to current state

If the client/server were deterministically simulated -- thus every event must be fully represented on both sides to be in sync -- then sure, but I'm fairly positive no MMO does that
by jabl | 2025-05-12 17:33:12+00:00
For everyone complaining about tricycles, one thing I've seen here and there in Europe being used for inner city deliveries is what I learned is called "Velove Armadillo", a 4-wheeled cargo bike

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAaVXKBamd0

You can even hook up a trailer to it for even more cargo.
by simonw | 2025-05-12 17:33:17+00:00
Related documents aside, technical documentation benefits from really great search.

Embeddings are a _very_ useful tool for building better search - they can handle "fuzzy" matches, where a user can say things like "that feature that lets me run a function against every column of data" because they can't remember the name of the feature.

With embeddings you can implement a hybrid approach, where you mix both keyword search (still necessary because embeddings can miss things that use jargon they weren't trained on) and vector similarity search.

I wish I had good examples to point to for this!
by gruez | 2025-05-12 17:33:24+00:00
>In the case of Copyright law, no provision means it will fall in "forbidden" land, not in "allowed" land.

AI companies claim it falls under fair use. Pirates use the same excuse too. Just look at all the clips uploaded to youtube with a "it's fair use guys!" note in the description. The only difference between the two is that the former is novel enough that there's plausible arguments for both sides, and the latter has been so thoroughly litigated that you'd be laughed out of the courtroom for claiming that your torrenting falls under fai ruse.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-12 17:33:38+00:00
> Under current law OpenAI, Google, etc. have no right to cheap training data, because someone made that data and may have the reasonable interest in getting paid for their efforts.

That's the thing though: intuitively, they do - training the model != generating from the model, and it's the output of a generation that violates copyright (and the user-supplied prompt is a crucial ingredient in getting the potentially copyrighted material to appear). And legally, that's AFAIK still an open question.

> Like all businesses, those companies would ideally like the law to be unfairly biased towards them: to protect them when they charge as much as they can, but not protect anyone else so they can pay as little as possible.

That's 100% true. I know that, I'm not denying that. But in this particular case, I find my own views align with their case. I'm not begrudging them for raking in heaps of money offering generative AI services, because they're legitimately offering value that's at least commensurate (IMHO it's much greater) to what they charge, and that value comes entirely from the work they're uniquely able to do, and any individual work that went into training data contributes approximately zero to it.

(GenAI doesn't rely on any individual work in training data; it relies on the breadth and amount being a notable fraction of humanity's total intellectual output. It so happens that almost all knowledge and culture is subject to copyright, so you couldn't really get to this without stepping on some legal landmines.)

(Also, much like AI companies would like the law to favor them, their opponents in this case would like the law to dictate they should be compensated for their works being used in training data, but compensated way beyond any value their works bring in, which in reality is, again, approximately zero.)
by thomassmith65 | 2025-05-12 17:33:48+00:00
Trump constantly touts his own business genius. It may be the largest pillar supporting his self esteem.

The tariffs could lead to a stock market crash. This prospect likely has haunted Trump relentlessly for the past few weeks, even if he puts on a brave face.

No president, let alone a self-described business genius, wants a Great Depression named after them.

If to avoid another stock market crash it took eating a bag of worms and handing Alaska to China, Trump would probably do it.
by int_19h | 2025-05-12 17:34:03+00:00
The CRT has been an OS component on Windows for a decade now:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/porting/upgrade-your-c...

MinGW does not provide its own CRT. Historically, it used msvcrt.dll, which is the old and outdated CRT for VC++ 6.0 that was included in Windows a long time ago. These days it can also use uCRT, and that is indeed the new default:

https://github.com/mingw-w64/mingw-w64/blob/master/mingw-w64...
by polalavik | 2025-05-12 17:34:21+00:00
If a new HDL language doesn’t have simulation capabilities baked in its next to useless. See: hardcaml and amaranth.

The hard part has never been writing HDL, it’s verifying HDL and making the verification as organized and as easy as possible. Teams spend something like 20% of time on design and 80%+ on verification allegedly (definitely true at my shop).

Edit: I see it’s tightly integrated with cocotb which is good. But someone needs to take a verification-first approach to writing a new language for HDL. It shouldn’t be a fun after thought, it’s a bulk of the job.
by michaelteter | 2025-05-12 17:34:55+00:00
Not excusing this is any way, but this app is apparently a fairly junior effort by university students. While it should make every effort to follow good security (and communication) practices, I'd not be too hard on them considering how some big VC funded "adult" companies behave when presented with similar challenges.

https://georgetownvoice.com/2025/04/06/georgetown-students-c...
by ben_w | 2025-05-12 17:34:57+00:00
> Except in this case, we already have the equivalent of "laws about oxygen consumption": copyright.

Copyright laws were themselves created by the printing press making it easy to duplicate works, whereas previously if you half-remembered something that was just "inspiration".

But that only gave the impression of helping creative people: today, any new creative person has to compete with the entire reproducible cannon of all of humanity before them — can you write fantasy so well that new readers pick you up over Pratchett or Tolkien?

Now we have AI which are "inspired" (perhaps) by what they read, and half-remember it, in a way that seems similar to pre-printing-press humans sharing stories even if the mechanism is different.

How this is seen according to current law likely varies by jurisdiction; but the law as it is today matters less than what the law will be when the new ones are drafted to account for GenAI.

What that will look like, I am unsure. Could be that for training purposes, copyright becomes eternal… but it's also possible that copyright may cease to exist entirely — laws to protect the entire creative industry may seem good, but if AI displaces all humans from economic activity, will it continue to matter?
by rcoveson | 2025-05-12 17:35:25+00:00
Assigning blame doesn't do anything for safety, even if you're right. Where I live, by far the safest thing to do is to drive ~4 mph over the limit on all non-residential roads. If you drive below or even right at the limit, you will be tailgated or passed with far greater frequency. That behavior is out of your control, at least on the road. You can push for more consistent enforcement while you're not driving (I'm inclined to do so myself), but while you're behind the wheel, the only behavior you can change is your own.
by echelon | 2025-05-12 17:36:13+00:00
> If self driving cars do nothing better than on par with alert and sober human drivers, that might cut half of those deaths by itself.

Self driving probably fixes the fatality rate entirely once most people use self driving modes.

Self driving will be the US' economic superpower. We've got so much vehicular infrastructure and it's practically sitting latent waiting for this opportunity.

When most of everything transits this way - food, goods, packages, people, instant fulfillment - it'll be one of the biggest unlocks of the century.

Anything we lost due to underinvestment in rail will be dwarfed by the returns from self driving.
by 0_____0 | 2025-05-12 17:36:14+00:00
I don't think that the 'shiny object' allure applies to industrial tools to the same degree as with consumer goods. Every machine shop I've ever been in, save for maybe a couple, is stuffed with used machine tools, plenty of them older than anyone who works there.

There's a healthy market for machine tools at auction, they're just not things your typical homegamer would need/want/be able to use (example: $200 for a 240/3ph drill press)
by axus | 2025-05-12 17:36:22+00:00
The evidence presented by the BBC in 2020: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-53597137

And apparently Australia had already released their report and investigation of their own behavior: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-55088230

But only the whistleblower and one other were tried and convicted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brereton_Report
by Alex-Programs | 2025-05-12 17:36:34+00:00
The current status quo seems to be

[Model name]-[Major version]-date-[minor variant/feature flags]

E.g. [Claude Sonnet] [3.7] [2025-03-02]:thinking

with a few differences based on the specific company.

Aside from some silliness (e.g. OpenAI's naming schemes; Anthropic deciding to go with "New Sonnet 3.5" rather than "Sonnet 3.6"), I think it works reasonably well.
by jimnotgym | 2025-05-12 17:37:06+00:00
>During WW2, Bell Labs reversed engineered and improved on the British Magnetron within 2 months.

Reverse[d] engineered with the benefit of the drawings and technical documents! It is not that complicated a device to reverse engineer anyway, the genius step was inventing it.

> invented an acoustic homing torpedo

Co-invented

> proximity fuzes,

They might have got it working effectively, but they didn't invent them

> echo-ranging SONAR,

A scientist on leave from Bell Labs did very important work on an invention from 20 years earlier

> pulse code modulation

Not that either

>the first anti-aircraft missile (the Nike)

The first guided anti-aircraft missile

>and the klystron.

...was invented at Stanford

Not a great article...
by xPkcUCBpILu | 2025-05-12 17:37:12+00:00
Hi, thanks for your very helpful comments! I just updated the website so you can't choose dates before today, and I also added a delete function. Now if you're the creator or have the password, you can delete the event. Otherwise, you can't delete it.

For the minute-level time selection, I agree it would be very useful, especially for busy people. I'm thinking about the best way to implement this meanwhile keep a clean interface.
by aaroninsf | 2025-05-12 17:37:16+00:00
I'll take a moment to comment on this, after reading the responses which challenge your conclusion.

This criticism is entirely justified for a narrow read of your point, that the specific and relatively-widely-disseminated papers/projects, themselves, represent specific progress towards e.g. take-off or AGI or SI.

But it's also unjustified to the extent that these particular papers are proxies for broader research directions—indeed, many of the other comments provide reading lists for related and prior work.

I.e. it's not that this or that particular paper is the hop. It's that the bunny is oriented in the right direction and many microhops are occurring. What one chooses to label a hop amid the aggregate twitches and movement is a question for pedants.

Meanwhile the bunny might be moving.
by secalex | 2025-05-12 17:38:14+00:00
Agreed. I've been doing this for 25+ years and personally know a dozen people who have been threatened and several who have been sued or faced potential prosecution for legitimate security research. I've experienced both situations!

That doesn't make it right, and the treatment of the researcher here was completely inappropriate, but telling young researchers to just go full disclosure without being careful about documentation, legal advice and staying within the various legal lines is itself irresponsible.
by stefanoco | 2025-05-12 17:38:51+00:00
This thread is becoming huge and so searching through the comments is not easy. Nonetheless it’s my impression that little or no attention was directed to the regulatory compliance needed for vehicles to be marketed under the rules of UN (known as UN/ECE Regulations and approval scheme) and similar approaches worldwide. Which means that roughly speaking that the security and safety of the car being sold today rest assured until I don’t change (upgrade) the software governing its functionalities. It’s totally unclear how it might be possible at least in Europe to upgrade major parts of vehicles software without breaking its approval. Comments on this?
by tlogan | 2025-05-12 17:39:07+00:00
This is something that should be governed by legislation (law) —passed by lawmakers, as we've seen in California - not by executive agencies. The FTC, as part of the executive branch (kinda independent but heavily influenced by the administration in power), shouldn't be in the business of creating new laws.

But I get it now: when Biden directs the FTC to act, it's considered legitimate use of executive power. When Trump directs an agency not to act, it's authoritarian overreach.
by baptiste-genest | 2025-05-12 17:40:00+00:00
Hi, I'm the first author of the article. Thank you very much for your interest in the method!

For the 2 spheres, it's as you wish ! It depends on where you place the uv system in the CSG tree, if it is above a single sphere then it will remain on it, if it's above the union, the field should extent on both.

The main interest of the method is the fact that the output remains implicit so one can easily plug it in a CSG pipeline.
by reissbaker | 2025-05-12 17:40:01+00:00
On this issue there is no difference between the previous admin and the current one. The FTC voted 3-0 to postpone. Even though Trump fired two of the original five, if those two had both voted against postponing they would have still lost 3-2 and the same decision would be reached — and I don't think there's much evidence that the two he fired would've voted against postponing, anyway.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-12 17:41:21+00:00
Brexit was Steve Bannon, Cargyll and other US companies. So if you are saying Steve Bannon is russian agent that i do not have problem with. But he works from USA. Cargyll because they wanted to get rid of European unions regulations and buy distressed UK companies. Check Cargylls economic data /news before and after brexit / vote.

Brexit was successful because tools developed for USA was used / tested on UK. USA writes in English. UK writes in English. Facebook (US company) was fined for brexit. Cambridge analytica, is gone? Lessons learned, Facebooks price up.

Also US individuals and US companies paying to distort results of sociological surveys done / published in European countries is well known at this point.

Germany reliance on russian gas was measure for transition towards renewable sources, it was cheapest energy after renewables, even then, so why pay for other fossils? Directive 2010/31/EU, Green deal, and many other were part of post 2008 US financial crisis efforts to make Europe sustainable (not eco nonsense, but economically, these efforts were accelerated after 2019/2020. Where US scientists working in Wuhan.. just joking, or am i ?

USA for example California got inspired all the time be example of Germany in all sorts of regulation. emissions on vehicles even before 2000s... Texas is second biggest deployment of PV and batteries in west. florida (red, trump state) is state with highest ratio of fully electric homes....

Soft power is very strong with this one. (US) Darth Vader: [1:55:54] The Force is strong with this one. ( "Lucas HATES europe with all his might". Which you can google and see for yourself, how strong force is with this one. )
by porridgeraisin | 2025-05-12 17:41:25+00:00
Yep... I've been in a meeting where we were shown the result of moving a cancel button's position on the page to a more crowded place so it would be noticed less. It actually works people click on it less. I couldn't believe it. Thankfully, the feature got vetoed and cancelled (the end result was really visually horrendous).
by ihaveajob | 2025-05-12 17:41:45+00:00
In bike-friendly places like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, it's super rare to see a helmet. A bike helmet offers reasonable protection in a solo fall, but it has nearly cosmetic effect if you're hit by a car.

But one thing you don't see in those places is huge, flat-front trucks with poor visibility and worse pedestrian impact safety. Until the US mandates pedestrian safety measures, we won't see a reversal in this trend.

Edit: I mostly bike places here in California, and I do wear a helmet 99% of the time, but I don't judge those who choose not to, because the biggest factor in bike safety is having other bikes on the road.
by tallowen | 2025-05-12 17:41:58+00:00
I think this is great to think about however I think many of the same lessons may still apply and can and should be applied now in a forward looking way:

From the article:

> Whereas the Netherlands clearly differentiates roads and streets — as do Germany, Spain, and France — the US is known for having “stroads,” roads where cars reach high speeds yet must also avoid drivers entering from adjacent businesses and homes. The majority of fatal crashes in American cities happen on these “stroads,” and impact pedestrians and cyclists in particular.

I think this will be _more_ important with autonomous driving. We've developed a built environment where car through traffic and destinations are co-mingled which leaves very little room for people to actually experience their destinations when they get out of their vehicles.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but my expectation is that the problem of "stroads" will only become more apparent if less focus is placed on getting from point A to B and more on where a person is trying to go which is my current long term expectations of the impacts of autonomous vehicles.
by godelski | 2025-05-12 17:42:16+00:00
> The OECD's total GDP per year is ~50 trillion. So 1 percent is roughly 500 Bn on research.

Is the number big because percent or absolute value? I'm just trying to figure out what you were trying to communicate here.

> have you ever seen places offer part time work for something and then allow people to research what they want in the other time ?

This is what academia is sold as. I mean I can go make 3x as much money in industry as academia. I'm saying I'm not going to take that pay cut to not have the freedom. I would though if it gave the freedom.