MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lukeschlather | 2025-05-25 22:20:55+00:00
> No human can, or would, flush their entire brain to use every single neuron as working memory for chess.

We don't know what this means. Each neuron connects to thousands of synapses. I would assume that there is some quantity of information encoded in each pairwise connection of synapse-paths through a neuron. I would assume this is more than a bit, and also that it has something that might be described as a lossy fractal compression with each pathway adding or subtracting from whatever structures store information so that each path can use the same physical things - though not with perfect fidelity.

But the nuts and bolts are somewhat beside the point. The point is that if you look at Leela zero it only needs like 3GB of RAM to run and we have no evidence this is more memory than human grandmasters use to play chess. Yes, humans have imperfect recall but that's not relevant because neural net based chess engines do not work based on perfect recall.
by harisund1990 | 2025-05-25 22:20:58+00:00
YugabyteDB a distributed postgres database.

Think of it as a true drop in replacement for postgres that runs on multiple nodes. It internally does replication, sharding and leader election. Just add more nodes and you get to increase both read and write scale.

I personally am working on a few things like online major upgrades, async replication for DR, enhanced backup/restore/pitr/clone capabilities, and more recently supporting DocumentDB extension which provides a true Mongodb API.

Being a startup I also get to talk with large customers, help with marketing content, and participate in database conferences.
by nlh | 2025-05-25 22:21:08+00:00
I'm a tech guy turned rare coin & currency dealer -- this is my world:

https://rarity7.com

The retail site is 100% custom code built in Crystal (server) and Svelte (client). The only part that isn't running my own code is our checkout flow -- I let Shopify handle everything after "Add to Cart".

Our system backend is a separate Crystal app which handles inventory management, pricing research, and price prediction. I've developed an ML model to do price prediction and it kinda works?

What I'm actually working on: This is my full-time gig and probably 60% of my time is spent running the business (going to coin shows, buying coins, photographing new purchases, etc.) and 40% is spent writing code to make the 60% run more efficiently :). It seems I have an infinite list of things to do -- improvements to our retail site; Improvements in how to efficiently go from coin to retail listing (turns out you can send just photos of coins to Claude and with the right prompt it will actually give you a reasonably good description that doesn't sound toooooo AI slop-y); Next "big" project is adapting our ML model for paper currency. The taxonomy is similar but not the same and there's a whole world of notes out there that need to be priced.

Always happy to talk about this stuff so always feel free to email with any numismatic (or tech-numismatic) questions. noah@rarity7.com.
by cycomanic | 2025-05-25 22:21:43+00:00
I don't understand this sentence:

> Instead, it elected to send a “mirror feed” of telemetry from the STARS servers at N90, traveling over 130 miles of commercial copper telecom lines, with fiber optics to follow by 2030.

This does not make any sense. If they would really transmit data over a 130 miles copper line (which I doubt even still exist, especially not commercial ones), we would be talking rates in the low Mbit/s. I suspect the situation is that the "last mile" of the center is served by copper connections, not good either but by far not as bad as a 130 miles copper connection.

EDIT: I should add if they really would have a link running on copper lines it would have repeaters, which would be sitting in datacenters. In New Jersey there would by 1000s of km of dark fiber floating around, so it would be trivial to convert at least the majority of the link to fiber.
by weakfish | 2025-05-25 22:22:07+00:00
https://github.com/weakphish/yapper

A block-based TUI note/task application using the Charm tools. I know there’s a billion note apps out there, but none fit my mental model, so just hacking my own.

Goal is to have a system of dumping info in and letting organization naturally rise from tagging.

Each tag has its own page that aggregates all blocks tagged with it, and can have a custom page layout depending on the defined “type” of the tag I.e. a person, project, etc.

Tasks are also first class citizens and can be aggregated with dependencies on other tasks.
by dale_huevo | 2025-05-25 22:23:02+00:00
This is great.

Until now I thought CUPS drivers had to be written in C in order to link against its internal APIs.

Most inexpensive Chinese thermal printers ship with blatantly GPL violating drivers and they are precompiled binaries. Which means half the time they won't work in your situation, assuming you trust their probable malware in the first place.
by coro_1 | 2025-05-25 22:23:11+00:00
A web UI that enables collecting of the dollar amount of the local major utility providers monthly bills (Before engineering I worked in marketing research). I am concerned about the data collecting part, not because the local consumers don't seem okay too provide it (there's outrage) but because I'm not working and don't feel confident in publishing anything live. State government only publishes the annual yearly rates. There's no transparency on the rest.
by YokoZar | 2025-05-25 22:23:57+00:00
Healthspan in Denmark, who just raised the retirement age, went up from 67.6 to 71.0 from 2000-2019. (+3.4 years) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/healthy-life-expectancy-a...

Contrast this with Denmark's lifespan growth over the same period, of 76.8 to 81.4 (+4.6 years) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?time=2000...

So from the data, prior to covid-19 Danes had gained about 3 and a half years of healthy life, and an additional year of unhealthy life.

It makes sense that Healthspan and lifespan are well-correlated, as most of the ways we have of extending lifespan do so in a way that makes you clearly healthier (such as preventing chronic diseases).

That said, it is true there is a bit of an increasing gap. This isn't just in Denmark, it's global - lifespan rose by 6.4 years from 2000-2019 while healthspan only increased 5.3 years. https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/mortality-and-globa...
by Amezarak | 2025-05-25 22:24:19+00:00
At least in the US, the SSA projects current 30 year old men to live another 48 years, putting them dead around 78. 30 year old women are expected to die around 82. [1] A quick Google shows life expectancy is about three years higher in Denmark, not an extraordinary difference, and some of that number is probably lower infant mortality.

Barring some revolutionary technological breakthrough, we aren't going to be living, on average, into our 90s.

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/NOTES/as120/LifeTables_Tbl_10.html
by kelsey98765431 | 2025-05-25 22:24:32+00:00
i lead our ai products team at io.net, come get some free credits (1m tokens per model per day). contact us if you like the service, our api is openai compatible and we have deepseek, qwen3, and llama 4 maverick along with lots of other neat models. hope to have more cool stuff out by the end of the quarter, thanks.
by Alex-Programs | 2025-05-25 22:24:48+00:00
I'm working on https://nuenki.app. It's a browser extension that translates sentences at your knowledge level into the language you're learning, so you learn through immersion as you go about your day.

I've been doing a lot of experiments evaluating LLM translation performance, and I used what I learnt (that LLMs make mistakes, but different LLMs make different mistakes, and they're better at critiquing translations than producing them) to make a hybrid translator (https://nuenki.app/translator) that beats everything else.

And I was invited to do a talk about that to a company, which was really cool! I'm 19, doing this in my gap year before uni.
by brynet | 2025-05-25 22:25:09+00:00
Making rent this month so I can unslack.. help appreciated. :-)

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

But seriously, I'm looking for "no-strings" sponsors, if any companies (or individuals) would like to help support me so that I can focus on open source full time. Feel free to email me: https://brynet.ca/
by tmilard | 2025-05-25 22:25:16+00:00
Working on a 3D-Editor that transforms photos of a place into an FPS game. - Editor : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEsqp93sq3w - FPS Example : https://free-visit.net/fr/demo01

This has been my WE project for a long time. But it's only working really now.
by stevenhuang | 2025-05-25 22:25:55+00:00
You are right, but the field is moving too fast and so it is forced to at least try to confront the problem with the limited tools and understanding available.

We can only turn the knobs we see in front of us. And this will continue until theory catches up with practice.

It's the classic tension of what usually happens from our inability to correctly assign risk on long tail events (high likelihood of positive return on investment vs extremely unlikely but bad outcome of misalignment)--there is money to be made now and the bad thing is unlikely; just do it and take the risk as we go.

It does work out most of the time. Were it left to me, I would be unable to make a decision, because we just don't understand enough about what we are dealing with.
by kegs_ | 2025-05-25 22:26:06+00:00
2 hours in and this thread is already stacked, but I'll bite since I am stuck on this problem and need help. I am working on a language learning solution that involves llms. The way I am branding it is "Anki meets Ai" because it combines a flashcard-esque method of generating complete exercises such as multiple choice, cloze, etc. with the tried-and-true SRS methodology.

I think it works great! The problem is, I think it works great. The issue is that it is doubly-lossy in that llms aren't perfect and translating from one language to another isn't perfect either. So the struggle here is in trusting the llm (because it's the only tool good enough for the job other than humans) while trying to look for solid ground so that users feel like they are moving forward and not astray.
by BSTRhino | 2025-05-25 22:26:17+00:00
https://easel.games

A game engine that lets you code multiplayer games without coding the multiplayer! My idea was to put multiplayer into the fabric of the programming language itself. This allows the engine to automatically turn your game into a multiplayer game, without you needing to learn anything about networking or synchronization. I imagine there are lots of people who have the talent and creativity to create a multiplayer game but don't have the interest or patience in learning how to code multiplayer, and so that's who this is for!

I've been working on this for 3 years and there were lots of tricky parts rolling back and deterministically executing a whole programming language, but it's working now! My next phase is to increase the breadth of features so better games can be made with it!
by jdietrich | 2025-05-25 22:26:38+00:00
>How do they do it, I wonder!

It's easy to have really good health outcomes at really low cost if you just fabricate the data. It's easy to export lots of doctors if you force them to work abroad, force them to pay most of their salary to the government and hold their families hostage to ensure compliance.

https://academic.oup.com/heapol/article/33/6/755/5035051

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/07/23/cuba-repressive-rules-do...
by krackers | 2025-05-25 22:26:39+00:00
Restricted to linguistics, LLM's supposed lack of understanding should be a non-sequitur. If the question is whether LLMs have formed a coherent ability to parse human languages, the answer is obviously yes. In fact not just human languages, as seen with multimodality the same transformer architecture seems to work well to model and generate anything with inherent structure.

I'm surprised that he doesn't mention "universal grammar" once in that essay. Maybe it so happens that humans do have some innate "universal grammar" wired in by instinct but it's clearly not _necessary_ to be able to parse things. You don't need to set up some explicit language rules or generative structure, enough data and the model learns to produce it. I wonder if anyone has gone back and tried to see if you can extract out some explicit generative rules from the learned representation though.

Since the "universal grammar" hypothesis isn't really falsifiable, at best you can hope for some generalized equivalent that's isomorphic to the platonic representation hypothesis and claim that all human language is aligned in some given latent representation, and that our brains have been optimized to be able to work in this subspace. That's at least a testable assumption, by trying to reverse engineer the geometry of the space LLMs have learned.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-05-25 22:26:58+00:00
What is 1925 standards? All organic food? Mostly tailored clothing? Custom fitted shoes? Only one spouse working? Brand new, incredibly high tech cars being made affordable to the average factory worker? Incredibly high tech entertainment centers? They even had washing machines. So are we talking giving up a dishwasher, a clothes dryer, and only having 1.5 baths in houses? Or are we talking the affordable city workers' hotels where man/women mingled, that enable people to live affordably with dignity in the city center, and actually have a life?

What does '1925' mean? No more shein plastic semi-disposable clothes that fall within what 1920's would consider sci-fi dystopian, universal basic income disposable clothes? Or hormone/chemical saturated 'food' that they wouldn't recognize as such? Or huge McMansions made of literal urea board and plastic extruded chemical 'luxury vinyl' floors? Brand new technology such mass produced cars, affordably available to the average person?
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-25 22:27:05+00:00
It’s actually seldom a Theory. In fact, I’d be surprised if scientists were eager to form “Theory on the Formation of Jupiter” [or Venus or the Moon] because those are already quite specific subjects that should be derived from generalized theories.

We’re thinking of hypotheses and proposals and extrapolations here. A few scientists analyzed and compared existing data, and they estimate things and interpolate and ... guess ... And the narrative develops as they give facility tours and answer questions for journalists, 8-year-olds, and 8-year-old journalists.

Theories are hypotheses which were tested and survived falsification attempted against them. You cannot adequately falsify “800 million years ago, and 12 parsecs away...” but you can enjoy your colleagues’ version of the story over drinks with a jazz band.
by static_void | 2025-05-25 22:27:41+00:00
A card game in Ruby on Rails, with an emphasis on deep reaction trees, and where the resolution order of action trees depends on whether actions resolve before or after their triggers.

Its real purpose is twofold: I enjoy data modeling, and doing just enough Rails work to regain fluency after a gap.

https://github.com/alexnyeoverride/causality-rails/
by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe | 2025-05-25 22:27:59+00:00
indeed I have not been specific enough: I meant "at therapeutic dosage". Thank you for keeping me in check!

Acetaminophen indeed has a shitty therapeutic index and cannabis in any (natural) form has basically no acute toxicity.

But i'd take 1g of acetaminophen daily for the rest of my life starting at age 1 instead of taking 1 cannabis joint equivalent every day. And that's even if we're talking edible form or vaping (i.e. not considering tars).

What about you?
by luminaAnonima | 2025-05-25 22:28:32+00:00
This project is part of a larger ethical design framework called The Fabric of Light, but it stands alone as a self-contained evaluation tool.

The Alignment Engine uses YAML to define ethical rules, and outputs radar charts that score systems across seven principles: scale coherence, reversibility, intention, feedback sensitivity, and more.

I recently used it to analyze global capitalism ("The Sweet Lie") and the military-industrial economy ("The Weapon Economy"). Both were scored and visualized, with full reasoning provided: https://github.com/luminaAnonima/fabric-of-light/blob/main/a...

What interests me is whether this sort of model could be useful in AGI alignment, civic design audits, or long-term systems thinking.

Main engine (YAML + rule descriptions): https://github.com/luminaAnonima/fabric-of-light/blob/main/a...

Full framework (ethics, philosophy, appendices): https://github.com/luminaAnonima/fabric-of-light

Curious what others think — especially those in systems design, safety, or AI policy.
by recsv-heredoc | 2025-05-25 22:28:42+00:00
From our observations on why - you need to have an extremely tight validation loop on everything you do for AI agents to be useful. They also need a ton of highly specific instructions and context. This requires a deep understanding of the platforms and tooling or a highly standard way of working (coding).

This is why tools like cursor work so great, they’re able to work in a super tight feedback loop with the compiler, linter and tests. They operate in a super well-known, documented environment.

If we can replicate the same thing on business systems… that’s when the magic happens - just very hard to do without deep knowledge of those platforms and agentic AI because everyone does stuff differently in each org. The overlap of people with skills in both AI and specific business ops areas is absolutely tiny.

An example of where we’re using this is in a fully AI native CRM (part of SynthGrid - see https://mindfront.ai). We don’t even have any way to interface with it outside of AI, but we’d also never want to do so again anyway because the efficiency gains are so huge for us.

The Pareto frontier will continue to inexorably advance forward, dragging even the complex or non-standardized domains in with it. For those tightly integrated business systems, we’ll probably see huge gain in utility, if not function, from the improved underlying models combined with the excellent tools. Be sure to try out Claude 4 Opus hooked into some systems if you haven’t already!
by jampekka | 2025-05-25 22:28:55+00:00
Cuba, Vietnam and Albania have way lower tax-to-GDP than Denmark. They are way below OECD average. Care to share your tax statistics on USSR, Yugoslavia, North Korea and pre-2000s China?

The Nordic model was created by socialist and labor movements in the 20th century. Finland, a tiny homogeneous Lutheran population, even had a brutal civil war over this. Nothing to do with religion or ethnicity.
by layer8 | 2025-05-25 22:29:29+00:00
> However, it's cleaner to have a field in your header that states where the first sub-chunk starts; that way you can expand your header as much as you like in future versions, with old code being able to ignore those fields and jump to the good stuff.

That’s assuming that parsers will honor this, and not just use the fixed offset that worked for the past ten hears. This has happened often enough in the past.
by bachmeier | 2025-05-25 22:29:29+00:00
> I will pay more than €600000 for this “retirement insurance” over my entire career. So with 30k/year pension and living under the bridge at 70 I must have superior health to break even at 90

Let's see. If you pay 15000 euros per year for 40 years, and get 5% interest, that's 1,800,000 euros at retirement. Even if you held that in cash, a 30,000 euro/year withdrawal would last you to 130.
by Alex-Programs | 2025-05-25 22:29:43+00:00
Hey, I happen to have run into a similar issue with my project!

I've documented a lot of my research into LLM translation at https://nuenki.app/blog, and I made an open source hybrid translator that beats any individual LLM at https://nuenki.app/translator

It uses the fact that

- LLMs are better at critiquing translations than producing them (even when thinking, which doesn't actually help!)

- When they make mistakes, the mistakes tend to be different to each other.

So it translates with the top 4-5 models based on my research, then has another model critique, compare, and combine.

It's more expensive than any one model, but it isn't super expensive. The main issue is that it's quite slow. Anyway, hopefully it's useful, and hopefully the data is useful too. Feel free to email/reply if you have any questions/ideas for tests etc.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-05-25 22:29:45+00:00
I'm talking about labor theory of value vis-a-vis this comment

> Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique

Ie "capitalists" are not rewarded for deploying capital and mitigating risk but for extracting as much from the labor as possible. And yes Marx is absolutely the "originator" of these ideas and yes absolutely you ask any orthodox economist (and many random armchair economists on here) they will deny it till they're blue in the face. In fact you're doing it now :)

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

Edit: it's the same thing that plagues the rest of American civil society: "voting against your [communal] interests because someone convinced you that your exceptional". Ie who needs unions when I'm a 10x innovator/developer. Well I guess enjoy your LLM overlords then Mr 10x <shrug>.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-05-25 22:30:04+00:00
Inviting discussion through underspecified warnings or appeal to feelings of superiority, safety/caution or "best practices" is a very pervasive issue in software.

I admit I did not read the article. But I have done so before I guess, I remember the headline.

The headline is enough to provoke thought. See

https://world.hey.com/dhh/merchants-of-complexity-4851301b

And after clicking, I see, this article is very recent. Strange...
by pilingual | 2025-05-25 22:30:41+00:00
In that instance they had a one way entrance and exit, so I drove out the entrance. My policy now is to drive through an ALPR, mark it on OsmAnd, then go a different route.

Google street view is helpful, though these things are going up at an alarming rate. There's also a website that has a list, though it isn't maintained (e.g. there are hundreds of these near me but none are on that website).
by samirsd | 2025-05-25 22:31:11+00:00
working on an app that lets you take multitrack “voice memos” by plugging your phone into an interface. then the audio is automatically synced to the cloud, akin to a primitive dropbox for audio. there’s a simple mixer to adjust levels for local playback. for now i use it to get hi fi recordings of band practice and shows.

https://carnyx.ai
by aag | 2025-05-25 22:31:24+00:00
I got tired of using Markdown and Org mode for writing web pages last year. They're so limited, and so full of odd gotchas and limitations. Instead, I started writing raw HTML, but with a post-processing step to add titles, headers, footers, and CSS, and to do macro-like things, e.g. insert pull quotes and YouTube viewers. But raw HTML is not great, either. I'm now working on an editor that lets me use Emacs-style commands and key bindings (e.g. character, paragraph, sentence, and word motion, deletion, and transposition; Emacs-style undo/redo; incremental search; and case conversions) to edit HTML in a WYSIWYG view. The new editor does it all in a Webkit-based HTML view built with Tauri. Editing this way is so much more pleasant and more powerful. I plan to publish it under an MIT license once it's good enough.
by pasta67 | 2025-05-25 22:32:41+00:00
The article is not radiating original narrative and some mistakes can be made, but it is missing very big issue that modern game developers are able to solve with live games. All the old games became popular because they were heavily pirated. Sometimes that was the only reason. Up till 2010s I only played pirated games - even when they were on steam. The only reason why some of those games are in my steam/gog account now is because I had played those games as pirated copies. Not all of them were good games, though, but at least I can launch them and try again.