MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lapcat | 2025-05-22 16:45:57+00:00
> I feel like federated social media platforms are not going to be the answer in the end -- and although its adoption has grown in the coming years, I think it's always going to lag behind others.

Agreed, although as a user that doesn't bother me. I'm satisfied with Mastodon's current size.

> I think reddit, to some extent, can be considered a success story here

I've never considered Reddit to be particularly "social". I'm a daily Reddit user, but I don't have any friends on Reddit. Maybe I'm using it wrong? Unlike some other Hacker News commenters, I don't have a particularly high opinion about the level of discourse on HN, but still, in general it seems well above many areas of Reddit. (Of course that depends crucially on the subreddit.) I think that downvoting, for example (which exists on Reddit and HN), is an inherently hostile, nonfriendly action that's not conducive to being social.

> although as it approached its IPO it did indeed start to enshittify

For example, killing third-party Reddit clients that users loved.

> Imagine you had a platform that asked you how you wanted to pay to use it: with your data, with advertisements, or with a membership of $XXX/month, amongst other options.

Well, X basically has that now. I find it interesting that the "Premium" subscription is only "Half Ads", whereas a Premium+ subscription for $395 per year, out of the price range of most users, is required to be "Fully ad-free", which is still a bit of a lie, because it comes "with occasional branded content in less common areas." The problem is that unless a service is fully funded by subscriptions, the advertisers are still going to make severe demands on the service, and the advertisers don't like it when the service removes user eyeballs from their ads.
by skydhash | 2025-05-22 16:46:05+00:00
There’s a reason we have formal verification as the highest guarantee for software. To ensure that we have a complete assurance of what the program can and can not do, the semantic of each of its components needs to be known. Recursively.

A minor change in one token can change the meaning of the whole software. Programming is just trying to enforce semantics on instructions (how well is that done is software engineering’s realm)

An algorithm like merge sort is just semantic constraints. Which is why most books go with their own notations as code does not really matter.

At most, LLMs and diffusion can be regarded as fancy searches. But, what you actually want is semantics and that’s why you can design lots of stuff on paper. But we do it with the code editor because feedbacks are nice and libraries’ documentations (if they exist) lie about their semantics. And we read code because there’s nothing more complete about semantics than that.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-05-22 16:46:08+00:00
It's not rocket science, these people aren't even all that clever. It's going to be some kind of camera (maybe lidar) and microphone, there's nothing else it can be — you need to put something into AI to get something out of it.

It'll probably be some goofy 180/360 degree camera — phones aren't really designed to be omnipresent so the form factor isn't ideal for the always-on nature of AI they're trying to reach.
by MoonGhost | 2025-05-22 16:46:25+00:00
There is, audio nerve can be surgically cut, but this means complete hearing loss in one ear. The whole inner ear can be removed. You don't want it without a good reason.

From what I've rad tinnitus can be caused by a) shift in small transmission bones, can be age related. 2) inner ears sensors mess up, can be from loud sound. 3) something else, like infection, inflammation, inner ear pressure build up (may be Ménière's disease).

Hope technology develops fast, some sort of implant talking directly to the audio nerve. I think they already exist or are in development. This can give in theory ultra- and infra-sound sensitivity too, as a bonus.
by least | 2025-05-22 16:46:32+00:00
> Most of the soy sauce you encounter in the US has wheat, while in Japan (and seemingly South Korea) there's no wheat added.

This is incorrect with regards to Japan. Shoyu is made with wheat. Tamari is not. Their production process is different.

Kikkoman is the most popular brand in the West AND in Japan, which is a koikuchi shoyu, which is the "standard" shoyu type in Japan. It is made with wheat.
by cvwright | 2025-05-22 16:46:37+00:00
Having tried (and failed) to build a more privacy friendly social network, I can confidently tell you that the big players in this space do the shady things they do solely because users reward them for doing so.

Trying to grow a new product is super hard. Trying to move into an established market is even harder. Trying to do that while also foregoing all the dark patterns is … well I won’t say it’s impossible but ugh it would take a huge head start in terms of name recognition, funding, or something else truly extraordinary.
by bigyabai | 2025-05-22 16:47:29+00:00
Why do they have to be dialectical in the first place? What is your reason for trying to categorize either career? Do you have any supporting evidence for your claims?

We can't meaningfully discuss these questions without more context. Your title is a loaded question; most people don't try to label each archetype because they can be radically different people. By presupposing that they exist in different worlds, you're already making this question hostile to interpretation and response. Please, if you have to beg the question like this, at least illustrate your thought process so we can understand what you're trying to say.
by pcurve | 2025-05-22 16:48:11+00:00
Good question... I think they're pretty different in taste and how they're made (which is why they taste so different)

Miso and "dwen jang" taste very different because miso is usually mixed with soybean and rice, whereas dwen jang is all soybean. They are also aged differently. Miso is packed into more air tight container, whereas dwen jang is shaped into a block, hung outside to air dry.
by mos_basik | 2025-05-22 16:48:13+00:00
Short answer to a pretty broad question: Yes

More color: I was happy running Arch on a 2012 vintage Dell Latitude (Intel, integrated graphics) for several years. I'm currently quite happy running Arch on a Lenovo Thinkpad T14s (gen2, AMD, integrated graphics).

Arch wiki does have many pages about arch-on-a-particular-model to help once you get a short list of models you're interested in, like this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo_ThinkPad_T14s_(AMD)_...
by lesuorac | 2025-05-22 16:48:19+00:00
If you don't do _actually_ every single block then you have Huffman Coding [1].

I imagine if you have a good idea of the data incoming you could probably do a similar encoding scheme where you use 7 bits to point to a ~512 bit blob and the 8th bit means the next 512 couldn't be compressed.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding
by devilbunny | 2025-05-22 16:48:34+00:00
I would have thought an isolated farm would have had propane on site - likely more than one tank.

I don’t worry about outages much in my current home because the main line to ~1000 houses goes right past me, and I’m fed straight from it. If I’m out, it’s a very high priority line. Worst ever was about two days. It helps that our worst storms are usually in spring, so weather is mild.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-05-22 16:48:35+00:00
I live in Vienna, and am quite familiar with the regions you’ve routed. Zagreb and the surrounding area, in Spring, is just delightful.

I just want to say, take your time on this journey. This region you describe have joys in all the nooks and crannies!

Memories of a place such as Ljubljana in the sunshine, it felt like what it must be as a figure on a cake .. the food and wine of Hungarian villages, outrageous parties in Belgrade, and the Adriatic, if anyone wants to go for a swim, it is all proper lush.

Summer, though, folks. In Winter, it can be a bit of a drag.
by msp26 | 2025-05-22 16:48:45+00:00
> Finally, we've introduced thinking summaries for Claude 4 models that use a smaller model to condense lengthy thought processes. This summarization is only needed about 5% of the time—most thought processes are short enough to display in full. Users requiring raw chains of thought for advanced prompt engineering can contact sales about our new Developer Mode to retain full access.

Extremely cringe behaviour. Raw CoTs are super useful for debugging errors in data extraction pipelines.

After Deepseek R1 I had hope that other companies would be more open about these things.
by camtarn | 2025-05-22 16:48:56+00:00
I have no idea what you mean here. Exotic containers? I'm talking about something like a measuring cylinder or a straight-sided glass or mug.

This StackOverflow answer probably does the subject more justice than I can: https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/14587/what-...

but I'll try and explain it succinctly:

What you're measuring is the volume of rain falling per unit area in a given time (usually 24 hours). If you're collecting rain in a vessel, you divide the volume collected by the area of the vessel's mouth to get the volume collected per unit area. And in order to measure the volume in the container, you measure the height of the water and multiply by the area of the vessel's bottom.

If the bottom and mouth have the same area, those cancel out and you can just specify the rain height regardless of the size of the container. That is, if you have 1ml of rain falling per square mm over 24 hours, it will produce the same height of water if you set out a big container or a small container, as long as the containers have straight walls.

If they don't have the same area, then you can't use the handy mm unit.
by jsheard | 2025-05-22 16:48:59+00:00
> He suggested the $6.5 billion acquisition has the potential to add $1 trillion in value to OpenAI, according to a recording reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Not sure if he's high on his own supply or just lying through his teeth, but it's one of those. You're going to get value comparable to owning half of Google from acquiring a small hardware design team? Really?
by eggbrain | 2025-05-22 16:49:34+00:00
I agree both with you and the OP comment here.

Ideally, I think if we could, we'd only get content from the creators or people we care about -- but that content runs out eventually, and yet our minds still want to be stimulated.

To bring it back to your food analogy, if I had a personal chef that made delicious food whenever I wanted it, I'd probably not indulge in fast food very often -- but if I needed a quick bite to eat, I'd probably still jump into a McDonalds.
by prewett | 2025-05-22 16:49:51+00:00
He retired at 94, which is exceptional on several accounts... If you date the "founding" of Berkshire Hathaway as when his fund bought the then textile manufacturer in 1965, he worked at the company he founded for 60 years! (If you consider the company that he founded to be the initial investment fund in his twenties, then he ran the company for over 70 years.) At 94, he's basically run Berkshire his entire life, which is hardly the get-rich-and-play sort. (In fact, he still lives in a small house in Omaha and is not known for spending lots of money.) Furthermore, he's pledged half his fortune to charity in his lifetime, and most of the rest after his death. He may have been responsible for the giving pledge, but if not, I think was instrumental in such success as it's had.
by minimaxir | 2025-05-22 16:49:52+00:00
That Google IO slide was somewhat misleading as the maintainer of Gemini Plays Pokemon had a much better agentic harness that was constantly iterated upon throughout the runtime (e.g. the maintainer had to give specific instructions on how to use Strength to get past Victory Road), unlike Claude Plays Pokemon.

The Elite Four/Champion was a non-issue in comparison especially when you have a lv. 81 Blastoise.
Show HN: Breakout Game – Smash a Brick, Read a Post
by _tqr3 | 2025-05-22 16:50:26+00:00
Hi HN,

I was already building a breakout game[1] just for fun, but then I thought—what if the bricks were news? So now, every time you smash a brick, you get a post and have to decide: read it or toss it.

The idea came from realizing I skim through news way too fast, often skipping things that don’t immediately interest me. This was my way of slowing down and giving those overlooked posts a fighting chance.

Give it a try!

I also wrote a short post [2], detailing the physics behind the game. I spent quite a bit of time just fine-tuning the bounce logic: adjusting angles and adding random variations to make sure the movement feels just right.

[1]: https://github.com/neberej/breakout

[2]: https://nabraj.com/blog/breakout-game-physics/
by castillar76 | 2025-05-22 16:50:42+00:00
Whoof — this brought back memories of endlessly typing things like...

kkk kik kik k,k k,k jjj juj juj jmj jmj hhh hyh hyh hnh hnh

...on a lovely, bangy, ink-scented IBM Selectric in typing class. Which at the time felt like a meaningless exercise, but absolutely strengthened the ability of my fingers to find the right keys in a hurry without looking at the keyboard.
by vidarh | 2025-05-22 16:51:15+00:00
Unless your JIT can analyse the full code, a transition between byte code and native code is often costly because the JIT won't be able to optimize the full path. Once your JIT generates good enough code, it then becomes faster to avoid that transition even in cases when in isolation native code might still be faster.

EDIT: Note that this isn't an inherent limit. You could write a JIT that could analyze the compiled C code too. It's just that it's much harder to do.
by int_19h | 2025-05-22 16:51:32+00:00
Respect is something humans do. A large enough company is an entity in its own right, separate from the people that comprise it, and that entity is literally incapable of respecting you (more generally, it is incapable of empathy). One can be lucky enough to never end up in a position where it is felt personally, but make no mistake, it is there.
by red-iron-pine | 2025-05-22 16:52:20+00:00
> more rigorous degrees with higher likelihoods of stable pay (e.g. medical/engineering)

this is the dumbest thing ever. first off, they already chased degrees that paid better -- they went STEM.

secondly, things change a lot in 4 years. the 2020 college freshman is now getting screwed for choosing STEM right now, today. 4 years ago it was a good choice, 2 years ago it was shaky, and now it's a mess.

medicine is also certainly not a solution, as programs are extremely competitive and take 8+ years to complete from undergrad through residency. and not all medical fields are magically lucrative or in demand.
by Bostonian | 2025-05-22 16:52:21+00:00
From the WSJ story on this at https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/senate-vote-end-californ... :

`The GOP-led Senate voted Thursday to take away California’s ability to set its own tailpipe emissions standards, effectively killing the country’s biggest driver of EV investment.

The vote was 51-44. The move nullifies a measure, enacted by the state in 2022 and later adopted by 11 other states, banning the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035. The House already passed the same resolution. Now it heads to President Trump for his signature.

U.S. carmakers and auto dealers argued that keeping in place the waiver—which permits California to set stricter emissions rules than the federal government—could cripple the industry by forcing sales of cars the public doesn’t want in mass numbers.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) called the waiver “an attempt by the Biden administration to impose an electric-vehicle mandate across this country.” Thune said it would have a devastating impact on the U.S. economy if not overturned.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and other supporters argue that California, which has long struggled with some of the nation’s highest rates of air pollution, has a right to impose regulations that help improve air quality. The California Air Resources Board, or CARB, a state regulator that sets the auto mandates, said the rules provide ample flexibility to enable car companies to meet them. The rules were set to be implemented in phases starting in 2026.

“This is a huge setback, and not just for California, but for all the states that have adopted California clean-air standards,” said Sen. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.). “It means we’ll fall further behind other countries in the adoption of new EV technologies.”

EV demand isn’t close to what it was even a few years ago. Discounts are sparser, charging stations can be hard to find and Congress hopes to do away with incentives that have long juiced demand. EV sales, which make up about 7% of the U.S. car market, fell 5% in April, while the broader market grew by 10%, according to estimates from research firm Motor Intelligence.`
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-05-22 16:52:49+00:00
> It's still 40.

Is it, though? If the important parts of the code are new, does it matter that other parts are older or derived from older code? (Of course, I think this whole line of thought is pointless; what matters is not age, but how well it works, and tesseract generally does seem to work.)
by hbcondo714 | 2025-05-22 16:52:53+00:00
> Every SQLite Cloud database comes with the sqlite-vec extension pre-installed. sqlite-vec is currently built and optimized for brute-force vector search. This means there is no approximate nearest neighbor search available at this time[1]

Darn, ANN would be awesome to have on the edge.

[1]: https://docs.sqlitecloud.io/docs/vector
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-05-22 16:53:00+00:00
People already carry around a smartphone plenty capable of accessing AI, whether in the cloud or increasingly local. Smartphones, with screens, are not going away because people have plenty of uses for screens from photos to videos to texting, etc.

The WSJ article says this proposed device can either sit on your desk or go in your pocket, so it's basically either an Alexa in-home device or a bigger pocket-bound Humana pin, or some worse-than-either fits-in-your-pocket compromise.

Not sure what Altman was thinking in paying $6B for an idea that seems bound to fail, unless it is indeed part of a plan to help him cash in on OpenAI, even if that means throwing $6B of stock away.
by tbihl | 2025-05-22 16:53:30+00:00
Similarly, but in a very different context:

I have to teach non-engineers C programming for an undergrad course, which is basically trying to teach very explicit attention to punctuation (among many other things). "Watch those double quotes!", "single quotes, not double!", "where's your semi-colon??", and so on.

Then, three weeks into the course, we're passing values by reference with &, and I get the question, "isn't that scanf missing the and-sign in front of the string name?", and I'm forced to answer, "that punctuation doesn't matter, this time," because the C standard makes & do nothing in front of a string specifically because so many people were confused about that fact that a string's variable name is already passing by reference.
by uludag | 2025-05-22 16:53:51+00:00
I'm curious what are others priors when reading benchmark scores. Obviously with immense funding at stakes, companies have every incentive to game the benchmarks, and the loss of goodwill from gaming the system doesn't appear to have much consequences.

Obviously trying the model for your use cases more and more lets you narrow in on actually utility, but I'm wondering how others interpret reported benchmarks these days.
by ModernMech | 2025-05-22 16:53:53+00:00
I don't find this true at all in my experience, you and I apparently have very different perspectives when it comes to the research we consume. The things which you say are not cited absolutely should be, and if they are not that's a problem. In the papers I read, I'm often encountering citations to specific versions of libraries, specific industry created operating systems, industry created programming languages of which there are many, specific commercial lab equipment which were used. My friend in grad school used to do research on x86 machine instructions and he had a giant instruction manual on his desk at all times, which was cited thoroughly in his work. This is all part of doing good research.

Either way my point stands. Since they are citing the research as foundational in their papers, then we should take them at their word. The idea you put forth that they're only doing so as a matter of show puts a terrible light on them if true. They shouldn't be citing research as foundational if it really isn't. So I will choose not to believe your characterization, because I think very highly of the industry researchers I know, and that doesn't seem like something they would do.
Ask HN: What makes a programming language great for code generation?
by keithasaurus | 2025-05-22 16:54:13+00:00
At the moment, it seems programming language popularity might be the best indicator of whether an LLM will be proficient at generating working code (e.g. Python, JavaScript, Java, C). However, it seems plausible to me that languages which require the least amount of extra reasoning (and/or tokens?) could allow LLMs to produce working code more often. For instance, I would imagine immutability to be easier for an LLM to "reason" about than local mutability. The same could be said for strict formatting, explicit types, concise syntax, etc. By that reasoning I might expect functional languages to be particularly good targets.

Is there any evidence supporting these ideas? Should there be (or are there already) languages developed with LLMs in mind? Will we see developers pushed more toward languages that LLMs are more proficient at?
by Doohickey-d | 2025-05-22 16:54:13+00:00
> Users requiring raw chains of thought for advanced prompt engineering can contact sales

So it seems like all 3 of the LLM providers are now hiding the CoT - which is a shame, because it helped to see when it was going to go down the wrong track, and allowing to quickly refine the prompt to ensure it didn't.

In addition to openAI, Google also just recently started summarizing the CoT, replacing it with an, in my opinion, overly dumbed down summary.
by goranmoomin | 2025-05-22 16:55:05+00:00
> Extended thinking with tool use (beta): Both models can use tools—like web search—during extended thinking, allowing Claude to alternate between reasoning and tool use to improve responses.

I'm happy that tool use during extended thinking is now a thing in Claude as well, from my experience with CoT models that was the one trick(tm) that massively improves on issues like hallucination/outdated libraries/useless thinking before tool use, e.g.

o3 with search actually returned solid results, browsing the web as like how i'd do it, and i was thoroughly impressed – will see how Claude goes.
by poulsbohemian | 2025-05-22 16:55:19+00:00
Maybe not on a per-acre basis, but when you consider the acreage needed for commercial farming, it's untenable for the "family farmer." As a real estate agent, can I find you a generic alfalfa field that might kick off some vacation money? Sure - $11,000-15,000 an acre. Why is wine $500 / bottle? Because that farm ground is $70,000 / acre in some cases. You want to produce wheat, potatoes, canola, legumes? Now you are talking somewhere between hundred and tens-of-thousands of acres to actually be a player and make any money, so even at $15,000 / acre you are talking millions of dollars just to get in the game before you buy that $500K+ harvester, etc.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-05-22 16:55:25+00:00
I can't think of more boring than marginal improvements on coding tasks to be honest.

I want GenAI to become better at tasks that I don't want to do, to reduce the unwanted noise from my life. This is when I'll pay for it, not when they found a new way to cheat a bit more the benchmarks.

At work I own the development of a tool that is using GenAI, so of course a new better model will be beneficial, especially because we do use Claude models, but it's still not exciting or interesting in the slightest.