MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SamBam | 2025-05-06 17:14:51+00:00
Like others recently, I've been extremely impressed by LLM's ability to play GeoGuessr, or, more generally, to geo-locate random snapshots that you give them, with what seem (to me) to be almost no context clues. (I gave ChatGPT loads of holiday snapshots, screenshotted to remove metadata, and it did amazingly.)

I assume that, with enough training, we could get similarly accurate guesses of a person's linguistic history from their voice data.

Obviously it would be extremely tricky for lots of people. For instance, many people think I sound English or Irish. I grew up in France to American parents who both went to Oxford and spent 15 years in England. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if a well-trained model could do much better on my accent than "you sound kinda Irish."
by boleary-gl | 2025-05-06 17:15:25+00:00
Our plan is to be a superset of Cline and Roo's features (we already have all the major features from both) [0]

We also have our own provider, which means no need to bring your own API keys (you can if you like, but it is batteries included by default) and we're not charging anything on top of the API pricing. Instead of monetizing on individual developers, we want it to be free for them and make money eventually off enterprise contracts [1]

[0]: https://blog.kilocode.ai/p/roo-or-cline-were-building-a-supe... [1]: https://kilocode.ai
by dr_kiszonka | 2025-05-06 17:15:39+00:00
Funny. But you know, with multimodal models perhaps someone will finally crack when it is appropriate to interrupt someone with a relevant suggestion. I think I would like a personal assistant that would be able to say, "Hey, you have been debugging this one function for 5 hours and you still have 3 more to fix by EOB. Would it make sense to pause for a bit and see if other fixes could be done quickly?"
by skydhash | 2025-05-06 17:15:53+00:00
> Any Mac user knows the truth well, the web has been a more reliable runtime than native since Mojave

And we've got Sketch, Things 3, Bear, Omnigaffle and the whole Omnigroup suite, cleanshot, Alfred,... I'm not trying to defend Apple's ecosystem, but if opensource can deliver Libreoffice, calibre, VLC,... on all platforms, there's little defense for others to burden users with Electron.
by lytefm | 2025-05-06 17:16:03+00:00
I'm not surprised. Apple ID seems completely broken to me, even when I just tried to set up a new MacBook 4 weeks ago:

Create an account via the settings page? Had to contact support because my phone number + email got stuck in some "halfway activated but can't log in" state.

Sign into the App Store + downloading some software? Got stuck in some broken form that wouldn't let me enter payment information. Had to crawl through reddit threads about how to work around this mess, just to be able to use the App Store.
by lutusp | 2025-05-06 17:16:24+00:00
IMHO a better model would take into account both ends of the temperature spectrum. There are days in the southwest so hot that one wouldn't think of going outside -- just as though it were rainy and/or cold.

In fact, because of climate change, on days when the so-called "wet-bulb temperature" gets to 35°C (95°F), people who dare to go outside will simply die. That day may arrive sooner than people think.

Imagine this: Phoenix, AZ, a day with a wet-bulb temperature at or above 35°C. Everyone is cowering inside near their air conditioners. Then the power fails. This might also happen sooner than people expect.
by mberlove | 2025-05-06 17:16:40+00:00
I know I'm not alone in maintaining a strong feeling that we've "gone the wrong way" with tech in a lot of ways, as the meme goes, and forgotten (societally) that tech is there for us rather than the other way around. I like your approach - take a light touch using technology; use tech where it helps and ignore it where it doesn't.

(The challenge of course is when you can't or aren't allowed to ignore it, its own challenge).
by Tainnor | 2025-05-06 17:16:43+00:00
Depends on what you mean by "defensive". Anticipating error and non-happy-path cases and handling them is definitely good. Also fault tolerance, i.e. allowing parts of the application to fail without bringing down everything.

But I've heard "defensive code" used for the kind of code where almost every method validates its input parameters, wraps everything in a try-catch, returns nonsensical default values in failure scenarios, etc. This is a complete waste because the caller won't know what to do with the failed validations or thrown errors, and it's just unnecessary bloat that obfuscates the business logic. Validation, error handling and so on should be done in specific parts of the codebase (bonus points if you can encode the successful validation or the presence/absence of errors in the type system).
by RhysU | 2025-05-06 17:16:43+00:00
My point is that "well informed" and "misinformation" are dog whistles implying the speaker presumes they're superior, they know absolute truth, and clearly the unwashed masses are too stupid to understand their own best interests. They must be saved from themselves. Etc.

"Informed" and "falsehoods" serve perfectly well. Inform people don't fight misinformation. Correct falsehoods don't well-inform the public.
by johnpdoe124 | 2025-05-06 17:16:56+00:00
I haven't used Zoom extensively, so I cannot comment on its performance. I just had a meeting this morning on Teams using video, and my MBP battery went from 95% to 49% in about 25 minutes (it normally lasts for about 5-6 hours under normal workflow). That was after I had to restart Teams the first time I picked up the call, because it hung and didn't display the conference window.

I find Teams performance atrocious for modern standards. It's not great on W10, but on my Mac is horrible. The conversation buffer is abysmal, having to refresh a million times if you need to scroll up in the conversation history.

Most of my peers use windows, and have constant crashes, incorrectly identified input devices like mics and cameras, sluggish performance when sharing screens, etc...

Just a data point.
by daxfohl | 2025-05-06 17:17:33+00:00
And it is continually improving. Rust borrow checker is an example of this.

But as far as jumping into the deep end of dependent types, that's a whole other ball of wax. Like, imagine (or try!) writing leetcode solutions in Lean or Idris, with a type that proves they are correct and (bonus points) run in the specified time complexity. Even defining the hypothesis is non trivial. It's all doable, but takes orders of magnitude longer. But with dependent types you have to do it because the next function you call may require a proof that the leet function returns the thing it's supposed to.

That's just for algorithmic leet problems. Now imagine having to write proofs in a complex multithreaded system that your code is not accessing out of bounds arrays or leaking memory, and integrating libraries that each have slightly different semantics for doing the same, or they use unsigned types that make all the proofs incompatible, etc. At that point, you have to basically give up on your borrow checker and fall back to using runtime checks anyway. And even if you did get your system into a fully proved state, that only applies to that one binary; it makes no guarantees about distributed interactions, rollouts and rollbacks, or any of the other things that are the more frequent cause of bugs in production systems. In fact, it may encourage more 'distributed spaghetti" just to work around having to prove everything.

There's an analogy with how checked exceptions work in Java: cool thought, but mostly get in the way of what you're really trying to do after a while, or break things when new types of exceptions get added to the function, so everyone ends up just wrapping them with unchecked exceptions anyway. This is what would end up happening with full dependent types too, except it would pervade the entire type system and every function you write. The eventual outcome would likely be everyone just works around them (every single function, even fairly trivial ones like divide, would return an Option that the caller would have to handle or bubble up), and the actual code would be even less type safe than it would be with a simpler type system.

So, ultimately the way Rust is going, where some key things like borrow checking, are built into the language, seems to be the better approach.
by dd_xplore | 2025-05-06 17:17:40+00:00
But it cannot think on it's own! Billions of years of evolution couldn't bring human level 'AGI' to many many species, and we think a mere LLM company could do so. AGI isn't just a language model, there's tons of things baked into dna(the way brain functions, it's structure when it grows etc). It's not simply neuron interactions as well. The complexity is mind boggling
by freedomben | 2025-05-06 17:17:59+00:00
Agreed.

I think Apple is actually one of the few companies that you should anthropomorphize because they have shown a long history of making decisions based on long term strategy rather than short term profits. They also react emotionally sometimes. Best example coming to mind is Steve Jobs on Accessibilty, "I don't care about the bloody ROI." I of course cheered that attitude, and still do for a11y, but that is a very human-like thing to do. Also lets not forget his hatred toward Android and vengeful attempt to kill it. Hence I don't think Apple is a lawnmower. They're more like an elephant with it's objectives and they know they're going to squash a lot of lesser life in the process but "you can't have an omellette without breaking a few eggs."
by Aurornis | 2025-05-06 17:18:18+00:00
> I wrote "appear to have it" because a blood test for Borrelia returns negative. However, just two weeks ago a doctor told me that Borrelia can evade a blood test by infecting the nervous system.

The theory of persistent infection hasn't really held up. There were a few researchers who claimed to have some evidence, but it hasn't really been replicated. It's largely been dismissed from mainstream research.

Sadly, it's still a favored theory in many alternative medicine communities. It's also a really contentious topic. There's a long history, including Lyme researchers leaving the field after receiving death threats following publication of research that didn't agree with the alternative medicine theories.

> That was news to me so I found this from NIH in the USA. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8870494/ Borrelia can cross over to the CNS. Lovely.

To be clear, that article is about CNS penetration of the infection, not persistence of the infection.
by gs17 | 2025-05-06 17:18:22+00:00
> Regardless, it does seem that there’s at least some interest: A uniformed employee in charge of protecting the Orb tells me that about 30 eye-scanning appointments have already been booked out of 200.

Does that sound like significant interest? I thought they were paying people to do it (to be fair, it's a pretty small amount for SF IIRC, but that sounds like it has the opposite of hype).
by alex1115alex | 2025-05-06 17:18:36+00:00
Mentra here.

The Nordic MCU they use isn't actually the limiting factor, rather it's the glasses' firmware. For bitmaps from third party apps (like AugmentOS), they enforce 194 byte chunk sizes and do not support RLE. Their first-party app does not have these limitations. We're stuck with this problem for the G1, but we're working with hardware partners to make sure future glasses don't have these issues.
by serial_dev | 2025-05-06 17:19:24+00:00
A couple of years ago I had about 10 tick bites and one of them resulted in the signature bull’s-eye rash. Thankfully, I was aware of the ticks and I was checking for the bull’s-eye rash to appear and it got treated with doxycycline.

Many people face symptoms months after the bite or they might not remember getting bitten by a tick so it’s common that it is misdiagnosed and they get all kinds of ineffective and / or unnecessary meds, so I added it to my “list of illnesses to check” in case I ever get unexplainable neurological issues, fatigue and joint problems.
by reginald78 | 2025-05-06 17:19:34+00:00
I spin up a whole linux VM with a passed through nvidia GPU for these and I still spend the majority of the time fighting the python and figuring out the missing steps in the setup instructions.

Glad for this thread though since it looks like there's some tricks I haven't tried, plus since it seems a lot of other people have similar issues I feel less dumb.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-06 17:20:23+00:00
I thought I should reply separately to your comment, but I do not see how he got to the conclusion "in other words, if your goal is to write a (say) safe implementation of the DOM that can render real-world web pages while efficiently using memory on a general-purpose computer, Ada is probably the wrong tool for the job.". My only "issue" here would be its verbosity, which is why I choose C still quite often.
by registeredcorn | 2025-05-06 17:20:58+00:00
> I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape.

I obviously can't speak for a level of acclaim something like The Simpsons, but more broadly speaking: creating something is fun but being sentimental and treating projects as precious is something that is increasingly burdensome with each day that passes.

Let's say I do the following:

1) I take a photograph of a flower

2) I remove dust spots, adjust saturation and a few other settings in post-production

3) I crop and resize it

With each step, copies of the image are made.

After that, I export to several file types.

Then consider that one photo shoot might have 15 photos of that same subject alone, with minor or small "in camera" settings changed. Then add different angles + in camera setting changes. Then add all of the other subjects I shot that day.

Should I keep everything from every change? Would anyone truly, genuinely care about seeing some...particularly unremarkable image of a flower captured by a complete "nobody"? I'm not Ansel Adams after all. Most people probably don't even care about the finished product. It feels arrogant to presume that anyone would be that into my work. The whole idea of having a fan base just feels...preposterous. I might be okay, or even good at creating some specific sort of thing, but retaining high resolution, originals is just kind of insane. Unless you've got some kind of public validation by way of taking in millions and millions of dollars, or you're a household name with a team of people assisting you, it just feels almost humiliating to think that anybody would be clamoring to see your work decades later.

Maybe other people who do creative things feel differently. I just tend to assume that even with something as time intensive as animation, in the heat of the moment, someone like Matt Groening thought that people probably wouldn't remember The Simpsons decades afterward. There's a kind of secret hope in creation, in hoping that maybe others will enjoy it, but it feels pompous to entertain the notion that you should treat it like some kind of artifact.

To put it in developer terms, suppose that someone would be interested in combing through the archives of our GitHub repos for some random side-project we worked on 20 years earlier. "Wow! Version 0.2.44! This was before he took out all of those crazy comments talking about the famous bug. It's so cool to be able to see this code in its original state!" It just doesn't happen. Maybe some other professionally-minded person glances at some iteration because they are trying to discern why or how you did some specific thing, but it's not like we expect our software to be beloved the way someone might think of a world-renowned film. It'd be amazingly gratifying, but what are the chances?
by HenriNext | 2025-05-06 17:21:57+00:00
Same experience. Especially the "step" comments about the performed changes are super annoying. Here is my prompt-rule to prevent them:

"5. You must never output any comments about the progress or type of changes of your refactoring or generation. Example: you must NOT add comments like: 'Added dependency' or 'Changed to new style' or worst of all 'Keeping existing implementation'."
by Stiopa | 2025-05-06 17:22:26+00:00
Awesome work.

Only watched demo, but judging from the fact there are several agent-decided steps in the whole model generation process, I think it'd be useful for Plexe to ask the user in-between if they're happy with the plan for the next steps, so it's more interactive and not just a single, large one-shot.

E.g. telling the user what features the model plans to use, and the user being able to request any changes before that step is executed.

Also wanted to ask how you plan to scale to more advanced (case-specific) models? I see this as a quick and easy way to get the more trivial models working especially for less ML-experienced people, but am curious what would change for more complicated models or demanding users?
by liam-hinzman | 2025-05-06 17:22:58+00:00
We hid it because the UI wasn’t maintained.

I joined recently, and live-streamed myself designing and shipping the new search frontend in 5h32m

https://x.com/LiamHinzman/status/1911244983291514941

Added a link to it on our homepage, thanks for pointing that out!
by panick21_ | 2025-05-06 17:23:44+00:00
The whole 'military explains everything' point isn't really accurate. Many US troops stationed in Europe were paid for by Europe.

Most US military spending was on things other then Europe. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afganistan, non have anything to do with Europe.

Lots of military spending was needed even if the US had been by itself. And the US made lots of money selling military equipment to Europe.

Depending on what nations you compare it to, the difference during the cold war was a few % of GDP. Not enough to explain all the difference in social and other state programs. As the difference in spending is often 15-20%pt or more.

So the real difference is clearly willingness for taxation and social programs. And of course nations like Finland and Sweden were never part of NATO.
by marcosdumay | 2025-05-06 17:24:07+00:00
I'd say the systemd interface is worse¹, but cron was never really good, and people tended to replace it very often.

1 - Really, what are the people upthread gloating about? That's the bare minimum all of the cron alternatives did. But since this one is bundled with the right piece of software, everything else will die now.
by hanson108 | 2025-05-06 17:24:31+00:00
I found this valuable—especially the part about shifting to weekly billing. That one change helped me rethink how to scope projects as valuable milestones, set expectations, and build trust faster with clients.

I also appreciated what he said didn’t work: long, detailed proposals and “homework” for prospective clients. I used to default to that too—until I learned a model at Stanford that emphasized one-page scopes focused on outcomes, not tasks. Since then, I’ve seen much better traction. His point about prioritizing momentum over polish really landed.

Highly recommend this read if you’re consulting —or perhaps more importantly if you’re starting to see signs that it might be a path worth exploring.
by chris_va | 2025-05-06 17:24:55+00:00
I bet you are right.

I had a forensic linguistics TA during college who was able to identify the island in southeast Asia one of the students grew up on, and where they moved to in the UK as a teenager before coming to the US (if I am remembering this story right).

From what I gather, there are a lot of clues in how we speak that most brains edit out when parsing language.
by leptons | 2025-05-06 17:25:07+00:00
>Feels like premature optimisation to me.

To me thinking about how CSS loads is task #1, but I probably have some unique needs.

We were losing clients due to our web offering scoring poorly on page speed tests. Page speed being part of how a page is ranked can affect SEO (depending on who you ask), so it is very important to our clients. It's not my job to explain how I think SEO works, it's my job to make our clients happy.

I had to design a whole new system to get page speed scores to 100% on Google Lighthouse, which many of our clients were using to test their site's performance. When creating a site optimized for performance, how the CSS and JS and everything loads needs to be thought about before implementing the pages. It can be pretty difficult to optimize these things after-the-fact. We made pretty much everything on the page load in-line including JS and CSS, and the CSS for what displays "above the fold" loads above the HTML it styles. Everything "below the fold" gets loaded below the fold. No FOUC, nothing blocking the rendering of the page. No extra HTTP requests are made to load any of the content. A lot of the JS "below the fold" does not even get evaluated until it is scrolled into view, because that can also slow down page load speed. I took all the advice Google Lighthouse was giving me, and implemented our pages in a way that satisfies it completely. It wasn't really that difficult but it required me changing my thinking about how to approach building websites.

We were coming from a system that we didn't control, where they decided to load all of the CSS for the entire website on every page, which was amounting to about 3 to 4 MB of CSS alone, and the Javascript was even worse. There was never an attempt to optimize that system from the start, and now many years later they can't seem to optimize it at all. I won't name that system because we still build on it, but it's a real problem for us when a client compares their SEO and page speed scores to their competitors and then they leave us for our competitors, which score only a bit better for page speed.

If performance is the goal, there is no such thing as premature optimization, it has to be thought about from the start. So far our clients have been very happy about their 100% page speed scores (100% even on mobile), and our competition can't come anywhere close, unless they put in the work and start thinking differently about the problem.

I actually tried the tool that is the subject of this post on my sites, and it wouldn't work - likely because there is nothing to optimize. We simply don't do any HTTP requests for CSS, and the CSS we need "above the fold" is already "above the fold". I tried it on one of the old pages and it did give a result, but I don't need it because we don't build pages like we used to anymore.
by thekaranchawla | 2025-05-06 17:25:29+00:00
This is the exact strategy I'm using for the real-time voice agent I'm building. Livekit also published a custom turn detection model that works really well based on the video they released, which was cool to see.

Code: https://github.com/livekit/agents/tree/main/livekit-plugins/... Blog: https://blog.livekit.io/using-a-transformer-to-improve-end-o...
by Stratoscope | 2025-05-06 17:25:29+00:00
Guilty as charged! This brings back a memory from around 1980.

I ordered an animation cel from Original Animation Art (Starshine Group).

You had to mail them a check and a description of what you were looking for, and hope for the best.

The first one they sent me was a little bit better than Scratchy's arm, but not by much. I returned it and asked for something with the entire character in it.

They sent Daffy Duck nearly off the edge of the frame with a nasty scowl. Not fun to look at.

For the third try, I asked if I could please have something with the character smiling and in the center of the frame. And they sent a wonderful cel of Porky Pig from A Connecticut Rabbit in King Arthur's Court!

It looks very much like this one, but only Porky and not the background:

https://www.comic-mint.com/chuck-jones/a-connecticut-rabbit-...

That cel must have been from the same scene as mine, as some elements of it are identical, particularly his right hand holding the torch.

Many years later I bought the DVD of this movie, stepped through it and found the exact frame with my cel. Too cool!