MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by linksnapzz | 2025-05-19 01:06:57+00:00
We got the first E15000 outside of Sun when I was at SDSC; engineers from down the street at Towne Centre Drive came by to set it up...It was running Solaris 8 w/ a very specific kernel patch to make it boot; and the driver for the chassis fan control had never been completed, so they were running at 100% once the system powered on. It was like standing next to a Harrier doing a VTOL takeoff.

Also, when the system disk on the boot drawer failed, I discovered that it wan't a standard Sun FCAL or SCA-80 hdd, but a 68-pin scsi drive mounted to what appeared to be a custom-made drive cage that was unlike anything else we had on the floor. It was a real factory prototype.
by degamad | 2025-05-19 01:07:31+00:00
There is already significant investment from AOM, Videolan, and FFMPEG funding the development of dav1d. Is there a reason that that investment is not relevant?

From what I can tell, way more than $20k has been invested into dav1d, and that investment has generated many performance optimisations already. Ostensibly, that's what this rav1d bounty is competing with.
by II2II | 2025-05-19 01:10:08+00:00
> However this sort of self-assembly of PCs has long passed us by.

How so?

From my recollections, building a Pentium-era PC was very similar to building a PC today: case, PSU, motherboard, CPU, RAM, video card, and storage. Most components could be upgraded independently. Granted, any meaningful upgrade of the CPU is probably going to involve the motherboard and RAM as well. That is pretty much the same as today. There were a few hiccups along the way if you wanted a smooth upgrade path, mostly with respect to the transition from PCI to AGP to PCIe for video, but that sort of thing is happening on different fronts today.

It was a slightly different story in the 486 era and earlier. There was far less I/O built onto the motherboard, but even then your computer was probably retired with the same I/O cards that it started with. The main exceptions were modems, sound cards, and some sort of controller for a CD-ROM. Yet that had more to do with online services popping up and multimedia titles becoming popular. Gamers may upgrade their sound card and a tiny fraction of people may upgrade their disk controller. So there wasn't a huge difference there. Pre-486 was slightly different since it was more common for peripherals to come with an expansion card, yet even then there were often alternatives that didn't require an expansion card.

The biggest change I can think of is the rate of progress. Performance and capabilities were exploding at a mind-boggling pace, and the only way one's wallet could cope (while keeping up) was to upgrade piecemeal. On my end, my last fresh PC build was in 2012. It has been progressively upgraded, and still has some of it's original parts. In other words, I have been upgrading that machine for 13 years, which is roughly equivalent to time-span between the introduction of the IBM PC and the introduction of the Pentium processor.

Perhaps the second biggest change is that is used to be cheaper to build. But that hasn't been true for a very long time either.
by empressplay | 2025-05-19 01:10:12+00:00
When I had a Timex Sinclair 1000, I wanted a VIC-20.

When I had a Radio Shack MC-10, I wanted a Color Computer 2.

When I had a Commodore 64, I wanted a Commodore 128.

When I had an Atari 130XE, I wanted an Atari ST.

When I had an Atari ST, I wanted an Atari Mega STE.

When I had an Atari Mega STE, I wanted a 486.

I now have all of these!
by djoldman | 2025-05-19 01:12:34+00:00
This is just the story that keeps on getting written and won't go away.

Yes, students are going to cheat, they always have. If you are a college professor and you don't want to reward cheaters, make large percentages of a student's grade come from in person tests with no electronics allowed. Simple.

Tell the students up front at the beginning of the course. They're almost surely 18 year olds at least and legal adults.

What a college shouldn't do is outsource "detection" (much less in-source it), which is impossible to accomplish at an adequately low False Positive rate.
by makeitdouble | 2025-05-19 01:13:02+00:00
There's some aspects that make it a more nuanced situation:

- you won't see angry letters in the news about services sticking to open source after they chose to move in

- the reason the CNLL can point the finger at Poytechnique is because there are explicit directives. Not even having those would be way worse.

- "Most of the public money" : Open Source contracts won't be in billions of euros most of the time, especially as a lot of the money will go to internal hiring and only a slice to external contractors.
by amluto | 2025-05-19 01:13:40+00:00
Posterior cortical atrophy:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posterior_cortical_atrophy

PCA can cause simultanagnosia and other problems with visual perception.

Have you ever seen an elderly person drive directly at you in a parking lot, at low speed, and appear to be completely unaware of your presence? This could be why.
by 1659447091 | 2025-05-19 01:14:02+00:00
And to add: Your "hot wallet" being bank issued credit cards for everyday purchases or emergencies that you are prepared to lose/surrender the moment someone tells you to hand over your wallet.

Later log into the accounts, flip the toggle to stolen/lost and mark unauthorized purchases if there are any. Then sleep peacefully knowing new credit cards are in the mail and you are only out the cost of the physical wallet holding the cards that were stolen.
by nineplay | 2025-05-19 01:14:45+00:00
I was helping my young teen with her English homework recently and I kept thinking that I might given her more feedback a few years ago. "Maybe you could clean up this sentence...". Now I think it's good that the writing looks unpolished. It's going to stand out among all the elegant perfectly worded essays with LLM tell-words like "delved" and "seamlessly".

I don't know where this ends up.
by danpalmer | 2025-05-19 01:15:23+00:00
I'm interested in why C++ was chosen for this? Browsers are notoriously hard to secure, they're effectively mean to be RCE vulnerabilities! Securing C++ binaries is hard and has in recent years been called out by numerous organisations and companies as being the root cause of many classes of security vulnerability. With languages like (but not limited to) Rust, we now have better options.
by somat | 2025-05-19 01:15:34+00:00
Those huge CRT vector consoles with the light gun are amazing as well.

And, and, (I really am unable to contain my glee here) each one come with a cigarette lighter and ashtray. I love it.

Growing up My father enjoyed classic cars and at one point we had a 1962 Cadillac, and yes, it did have the infamous Cadillac fins, not as majestic as the 1959 models(peak fin year) but they were there, it looked like a four door bat-mobile. Anyway, the other thing I remember about it was that it had 5 ashtrays and lighters, one for each kid. Truly peak luxury.
by Loughla | 2025-05-19 01:16:12+00:00
A couple of things from inside the belly of higher education.

Students have always cheated, yes, but the barrier is UNBELIEVABLY low now. Take a picture, get the answer. This has never been a thing on such a large scale. No one knows how to deal with this.

In person testing is a solution for most issues, but not all. First off, class time is precious. I shouldn't have to waste incredibly valuable instruction time doing the actual test. We should be reviewing the test and learning things. Second, on-line classes are massive for many if not all schools. Requiring students to show up physically is both inconvenient, and (depending on which accrediting agency you are accredited by) not allowed.

It's not that simple. No problem of this scope will be simple.
by josephg | 2025-05-19 01:17:01+00:00
> Brains forget for a reason, roam doesn't

I think this is the key mistake in Roam's design (and in many ways, obsidian and friends). They appeal to a dream some people have that maybe if you never forget anything, you'll get smarter forever. (Or something like that).

The problem is that there's many benefits to having a mind which forgets things. That property lets us grow and change over time - and move on from old ideas or old ways of thinking. Not necessarily because they're bad; but because we become a different person from the person who had that thought.

Trauma is an extreme case of this. Its essentially a disorder of memory; where we etch some old memory in stone. Because we don't let ourselves forget it, we inevitably build structure / thought patterns around that memory. "This one time __" - "As a result, deep down I believe that I am fundamentally ___ (unsafe / unworthy / stupid / unlovable / ...)". Trauma work is in many ways a slow process of learning to unclench your mind from those past experiences, to allow yourself to "move on" from them. (Ie, forget the emotional impact they have today.)

Its also kind of obvious in software or architecture. You can't just keep adding to an old structure forever. Software gets harder to build the bigger it gets. Same with buildings, books, teams and more. If everything new needs to fit with everything that has come before, its an O(n^2) job. Of course roam suffers from this too. The default "remember everything forever" default is naive and silly. Our brains don't work best like that.
by ggm | 2025-05-19 01:17:10+00:00
I would like to see a reasoned defence of why this is "programming error" rather than bad training. To the extent information comes in, some kind of process surely has to exist which applies weighting criteria (for want of a better word) to veracity. Asserts inside the document to it's correctness, evidence, weigh against external ground truth.

If the system is designed to be somehow "neutral" to world truth, it's a giant machine designed to believe birds aren't real.

I wouldn't for a minute deny that "but that isn't true" has equally as many risks of being distorted, but the absence of any kind of control on things like holocaust denialism is pretty concerning.

So, if this IS said to be "programming error" what kind of error was it?

I used to think "post truth" was just a fad phrase but I am beginning to think the conversation about diverging views about the facts are now substantively a massive problem. There's no basis to agreement if people simply dispute the input. If there are no axioms, what does it even mean to try and discuss a disagreement? If the holocaust can be denied plausibly, then so can e.g. the existence of Iceland, Napoleon, Chlorophyll, Germ Theory...

Timing wise, to the horrors of WW2 we're in the decades of the last survivors who can state personal experience. That AI can now plausibly fake live video, means the entire Shoah memory project can presumably be put down to "thats just AI, that never happened"
by kevincox | 2025-05-19 01:18:17+00:00
This is why I quit paying for premium as well. The ads were less obnoxious but they were still there. Ads for channel stuff, ads for YouTube premium features, ads for channel memberships and whatnot.

I now pay for Nebula and it is a world of difference. I love that there is nothing but the video. I wouldn't mind comments but there are no related videos and nothing else. I just follow via RSS, click, watch video and leave. No fuss, nothing trying to grab my attention. It is just so relaxing compared to other platforms.
by garrinm | 2025-05-19 01:18:39+00:00
I played around a bit with SNAFU a couple of years ago, but I'm haven't worked deeply with the library so there might well be some features I'm not aware of.

I think SNAFU is more like a combination of anyhow and thiserror into a single crate, rather than Stack Error which leans more heavily into the "turnkey" error struct. Using the Whatever struct, you get some overlap with Stack Error features:

- Error message are co-located.

- Error type implement std::error::Error (suitable for library development).

- External errors can be wrapped and context can easily be added.

Where Stack Error differs:

- Error codes (and URIs) offer ability for runtime error handling without having to compare strings.

- Provides pseudo-stack by stacking messages.

Underlying this is an opinion I baked into Stack Error: error messages are for debugging, not for runtime error handling. Otherwise all your error strings effectively become part of your public interface since a downstream library can rely on them for error handling.
by Loughla | 2025-05-19 01:19:09+00:00
Working with other people is an important skill to learn. That's why they do that.

If someone isn't carrying their weight in college, you rat them out to the professor. If the professor won't do anything, you go to the department head. It's not high school. You don't have to try be cool anymore. You're there to learn skills for your life, not worry about whether or not the thump dick that isn't doing the work will like you or not.
by landr0id | 2025-05-19 01:20:39+00:00
I had the same thought. The project's description:

>secure HTML/CSS engine

No offense to these folks, but I see no evidence of any fuzzing which makes it hard to believe there aren't some exploitable bugs in the codebase. Google has world-class browser devs and tooling, yet they still write exploitable bugs :p (and sorry Apple / Mozilla, you guys have world-class browser devs but I don't know enough about your tooling. Microsoft was purposefully omitted)

Yeah, very few of those bugs are in the renderer, but they still happen!
by renhanxue | 2025-05-19 01:20:54+00:00
These days the manuscript is quite conclusively dated to the first half of the 15th century; the parchment it's written on is definitely from that period, since it's been carbon dated to 1404–1438 with 95% confidence. The general style is also consistent with that dating. For example, medievalist Lisa Fagin Davis writes in a recent paper: "[t]he humanistic tendencies of the glyphset, the color palette, and style of the illustrations suggest an origin in the early fifteenth century" [0].

Edward Kelly was born over a hundred years later, so him "being at the right time" seems to be a bit of a stretch.

[0]: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/keynote2.pdf
by alihkw_ | 2025-05-19 01:21:51+00:00
Kscale engineer here: I'm honestly not sure what you mean by "the robots don't know their own positions". We have 2 fish eye lens cameras on the K-Bot, and an IMU, which allow the robot to estimate its 3D position(s) quite well.

The actuators also have encoders that allow you to read all of the joint positions very precisely.

PS: If the last time you saw the robots was last year, we encourage you to visit us again! Kscale robots improve fast :)
by Zambyte | 2025-05-19 01:21:58+00:00
I'd be interested in a case against AGI now. Can you define "general intelligence" in a measurable way (even subjectively) that includes things usually considered to have general intelligence (at least humans) but doesn't include existing AI systems?

People seem to have this idea of AGI that it is an all knowing oracle of truth that is perpetually beyond the current capabilities. This is useful for convincing VCs that you need more funding, and fear mongering the government into regulating away competition. A simple and reasonable alternative conclusion is that AGI has been here for years, and that reality just isn't quite as exciting as sci-fi.

Will AGI capabilities increase? Sure, as we build out more tools for AGI to reach for, and as the intelligent agents themselves mature. Fundamentally, it is here.
by decGetAc | 2025-05-19 01:22:02+00:00
That task seems perfect for a junior dev. It's open ended but low risk and not interacting with multiple teams as directly

It's different from the one described above

> talk to them and propose a solution that aligns with our different requirements. Possible directions are X, Y, Z.

I'm sure some junior devs could do this but the majority wouldnt be able to
by conro1108 | 2025-05-19 01:23:19+00:00
In my experience, the problems given to juniors are often open ended “improve this” or “fix this” type projects, but smaller scope or lower priority things that more senior devs would just never get to.

I will say though, needing to socialize across other teams to understand the problem and drive the correct solution does strike me as more mid/senior level work.
by christiangenco | 2025-05-19 01:23:46+00:00
I'm a big fan of Mochi[1] (also unaffiliated) after getting frustrated with the clunkiness of Anki.

Mochi has great native apps on macOS and iOS (and maybe more?), the cards are formatted in markdown so I can generate them with LLMs with a custom system prompt, and I just found out today they have an API so I might try my hand at getting an LLM to push new cards on its own via. an MCP server.

1. https://mochi.cards/
by brig90 | 2025-05-19 01:23:47+00:00
Totally — I love that kind of sideways thinking. Earthquake prediction feels like one of those massive, noisy systems where patterns might exist, but they’re buried deep in complexity. I’ll admit, I know absolutely nothing about seismology, so I have no idea how realistic that kind of modelling would be — but yeah, it feels like one of those domains where structure might be hiding in what looks like chaos.

Appreciate the nudge — always fascinating to see where people take this kind of thinking.
by MichaelMoser123 | 2025-05-19 01:24:23+00:00
> I seriously think I'm going to stop posting on the internet for good.

I had similar thoughts, but it would probably not make a difference, at this stage. What is there stays there - either online, as in the case of HN, or as part of some collected dataset.

In hindsight: the world changed in so many ways, from the world I knew some twenty years ago, and I am not even talking about politics or technology: the attitudes and perception of people seems to have changed in many ways. Back then I thought it would be of benefit to be open and upfront about things. Now that is no longer a common perception.

Enough said.
by dottjt | 2025-05-19 01:24:38+00:00
Maybe not quite related, but I remember as a teenager dreaming about building the ultimate modern gaming PC, because the PC I had kind of sucked. But now that I'm an adult and can more-than afford it, I simply don't want to spend the money. I mean, I still would love to have my dream PC, it's just not worth the value in my mind.
by mountainriver | 2025-05-19 01:25:09+00:00
I generally disapprove of any sort of testing this done this way. In the world, you have access to technology, the smart people use it well.

If college is designed to make you a productive member of society then they are woefully failing at it.

I don’t write my papers on a typewriter or use the Dewey decimal system to find books. Colleges need to get better at accelerating with the speed of society
by ramses0 | 2025-05-19 01:25:28+00:00
There was a guide that mentioned "scrabble tile" movement. `fj` is quicker than `fe` because J is way less common than E.

Once you get "near", then zeroing in on your target (eg: `fj`, `Fa` for "adjacent") can be the fastest/most accurate way to get to where you want to go.
by garrinm | 2025-05-19 01:26:07+00:00
Thanks for the insight, I wasn't aware of `track_caller`. I'll definitely be looking into this. I was scratching my head trying to figure out how to make file and line number usage consistent and customizable, this looks like the answer!

You're also right that this will pretty much eliminate the need for macros.

That's also a very key insight about Display vs. Debug printing. I'll be looking into that as well.

Thank you for the thoughtful reply.
by speff | 2025-05-19 01:26:08+00:00
Aligns with my experience as well. Way back when I got my MSEE, there was a guy in the group that did literally no work towards the final project. Tried asking the prof for help, but crickets. Turn-in time comes around for the report and we leave the guy's name off of it. I get heavily peer and prof pressured to put his name back on after some sob story comes out. Got some pretty valuable takeaways from that class and none of it was related to the course material.
by grues-dinner | 2025-05-19 01:26:08+00:00
> They also had difficulty using power point for basic slides.

To be fair the best lessons and then lectures where you actually learned were always the ones when the lecturer used the black/whiteboards. The ones where they just read though prepared PowerPoints were deathly dull and completely lacking in engagement.

I am extremely grateful that I managed to get through the primary/secondary school system before PowerPoint, digital projectors and "smart whiteboards" took education by the throat, and that it hadn't completely subsumed higher education either (but it was beginning to go that way).

Of course, you can be a dreadful teacher and be unable to use PowerPoint or any other teaching method, but you could also plausibly be one of world's best educators and have never touched PowerPoint.
by bdbenton5255 | 2025-05-19 01:26:39+00:00
Theologically speaking, there is an important distinction between magic, or sorcery, and mysticism. Sorcery is an attempt to twist or subvert the divine while mysticism is an attempt to uncover it.

For example, Hildegard von Bingen is a mystic while Heinrich Faust would be considered a sorcerer. The distinction is important as mysticism is considered a holy activity while sorcery is considered to be a profound sin.

Meditation and esoteric study would fall under the realm of mysticism, while things like divination or the dishonest manipulation of belief would be considered sorcery.
by vijucat | 2025-05-19 01:27:00+00:00
Thank God I got over my tendency for gravitating to such bike-shedding [1] projects! While I appreciate that such pet peeves may result in a net benefit to the world, right now, I am in a place where I would cringe at even taking the risk of upgrading a piece of software that is working fine (like how often has upgrading Pylance or vscode resulted in something breaking? Every single time). The real, actual work is so so so difficult. Sitting down and starting (after attending to family obligations, eating, showering, changing clothes, commuting, et al). Getting into a productive flow state. Not getting interrupted. Not getting distracted. Just choose one thing, anything (OneNote, Evernote, whatever) and get to the real work, I beg you. Productivity + don't mess with success.

https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/bikeshedding
by swyx | 2025-05-19 01:27:25+00:00
hi OP! i run the AI Engineer conference which is coming up soon and was pleasantly surprised to see this here :)

HOWEVER this link: https://www.tech.tickets/event/ai-engineering-world-fair-a9a...

links to the WRONG conference!!!! it is at https://ai.engineer/ and tickets are at https://ti.to/software-3/ai-engineer-worlds-fair-2025

discounts do exist for loyal latent.space listeners and ainews subscribers but i wont make them that easy :)

(for those who are between jobs and just getting into AI Eng, here's a good one for you: HNEXPO - we put all talks up on youtube on a delay: https://www.youtube.com/@aidotengineer but really the value is the live interactions/hallwaytrack )
by Animats | 2025-05-19 01:28:51+00:00
Traditionally, yes. That's for the people who inherited a mansion, retainers, and trusts. Now there are family office concierge services. "Luxury lifestyle as a service" is available.[1] That's for people who made a lot of money all at once and need guidance in spending it.

(The people I've known with serious money made most of it themselves, and didn't need a family office. Except for one married couple who blew through 8 figures and went broke.)

[1] https://www.maisonbenjamin.com/familyoffices
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-19 01:29:40+00:00
Some body fat is absolutely helpful in protecting from drowning [1]. You see a similar curve when mapping life expectancy and mortality risk against BMI—the optimum is a bit thicker than our guidance suggests. (Saying this as someone who has to fight to keep weight on.)

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28915131/