MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BizarroLand | 2025-05-15 22:30:56+00:00
Elon is what you get when you give the person who truly believes they are the smartest person in any room they walk into too much money.

The money is used to validate the idea. It's propped up by people who think they are the same as him, and any person who has the integrity to tell him his ideas are wrong is envious of his money and prestige.

Take that person, and give them the keys to the kingdom. He's used to thinking, "I am the boss, what I say goes" and snapping his fingers while his horde of sycophants and wagies (no matter how well paid, it's a valid term) rush to do his bidding lest they incur his ire and lose everything.

He says, "fix a system that has been undergoing continuous improvement for 70 years in a couple of months" and they break laws, violate the trust of Americans, and destroy decades of hard work from passionate and talented people in order to achieve his will and come up short.

They can't do it.

The system is too large.

There are so many edge cases, almost one for every human in the system.

But Daddy Musk will be sad if they fail, so the only option left is to completely destroy the system and try to rebuild it from the wreckage.

They fail.

Now thousands of people will suffer and quite possibly some will die while they point fingers.

Government isn't easy.

It's not convoluted because of power hungry Illuminati, it is convoluted because it is assembled from a core of a good idea and enough duct tape, paper clips, and spray foam to lock the heavens and the earth into a single nearly homogeneous manageable ball of goop.

No one can make Elon understand anything anymore.

And the one person with the power to stop him is a person who is deserving of every negative epithet I can think of. I wouldn't expect a failed baby-brained billionaire convict president or his man-child toadies to understand that.
by MarcelOlsz | 2025-05-15 22:30:56+00:00
I love the top down tracker UI. For some more you can look at Aphex Twin using PlayerPRO [0] and Hitori Tori using Renoise [1]

[0] https://vimeo.com/223378825

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnJY5u6cC7A

Both are mindblowing.
by greazy | 2025-05-15 22:31:22+00:00
Backbone refers to the cloning plasmid.

Plasmids are grown inside of bacteria which have their own genome with all sorts of oddities like transposons.

Transposons are 'jumping' bits of dna that can insert themselves (given the right criteria is met).

So a transposon(s) from the E. coli genome inserted itself into the plasmid.

This causes all sorts of problems for people who use them to clone (insert) dna into them.
by degamad | 2025-05-15 22:31:29+00:00
The request is not to transfer the burden onto the 90%, but to design a system where the 10% are able to participate without impeding the 90%.

For example, if students enter from the rear of the room, then delayed students can join without disrupting the on-time students.

If we start the design process with the awareness that some students will be late, then we can design systems which support all students.
by vector_spaces | 2025-05-15 22:32:04+00:00
Underestimation of the problem space is why foodtech is a tarpit for tech companies. Many have tried and failed to solve these very problems over decades. I don't blame you, to a green outsider the food industry seems like it would be simple, but the devil is in the details. I'd love for you to prove me wrong though

None of this is to say that LLMs have nothing to offer here. There would still be value in being able to tell an agent "Here's my list, get this ordered for me". But being able to say "find me a recipe for dinner that my guests will like and have the ingredients delivered in time for me to make it" without getting burned every other time is actually a much harder problem.
by recursive | 2025-05-15 22:33:02+00:00
> The cookie spec RFC 6265 section 5.1.2 defines the host name in a way that makes it ignore trailing dots. Cookies set for a domain with a dot are valid for the same domain without one and vice versa.

Well... that's not what the browsers do. If you're logged in to HN, try it now. Add a dot to the host name. Cookie is gone. Remove the dot. It's back.
by gjm11 | 2025-05-15 22:34:15+00:00
sieve[i] is nonzero precisely when 2i+1 is an odd prime or i=0 (because it's initialized to all-1 and nothing ever zeros the first element).

So np.nonzero(sieve) is all the indices for which i=0 or 2i+1 is an odd prime.

Except that the behaviour of np.nonzero is a bit weird: it returns a tuple of arrays, one for each axis. (So, e.g., if you feed it a 2d array it gives you (a,b) such that the nonzero elements are at positions (a[0],b[0]), (a[1],b[1]), etc.) That's kinda reasonable behaviour, but it means that for the simple case of a 1-d array you get a 1-element tuple.

So np.nonzero(sieve)[0] is actually all the indices i for which i=0 or 2i+1 is an odd prime, and now you know why I didn't write "all the indices i for which ..." above.

The case i=0 would correspond to 1 being prime, which it isn't considered to be. So we throw that one out.

So np.nonzero(sieve)[0][1::] is all the indices i for which 2i+1 is an odd prime.

And so 2*np.nonzero(sieve)[0][1::]+1 is all the 2i+1 for which 2i+1 is an odd prime; that is, all the odd primes.

I don't think I've encountered np.r_ before, but it's pretty obvious what it's doing: prepending 2 to that array, so now it's "2 followed by all the odd primes" or, more simply, all the primes.

(Obviously, in the above phrases like "all the primes" mean "all the primes up to the limit defined by the size of the array".)
by johnsmith1840 | 2025-05-15 22:34:51+00:00
I'm positive they are pushing users to cheaper models due to cost. o1-pro is now in a sub menu for pro users and labled legacy. The big inference methods must be stupidly expensive.

o1-preview was and possibly still is the most powerful model they ever released. I only switched to pro for coding after months of them improving it and my api bill getting a bit crazy (like 0.50$ per question).

I don't think paramater count matters anymore. I think the only thing that matters is how much compute a vendor will give you per question.
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-15 22:35:40+00:00
The irony of implicit connections in training data is funny.

I.e. even if you create an explicit Tiananmen Square massacre-shaped hole in your training data... your other training data implicitly includes knowledge of the Tiananmen Square massacre, so might leak it in subtle ways.

E.g. how there are many posts that reference June 4, 1989 in Beijing with negative and/or horrified tones?

Which at scale, an LLM might then rematerialize into existence.

More likely SOTA censorship focuses on levels above base models in the input/output flow (even if that means running cut-down censoring models on top of base models for every query).

Would be fascinated to know what's currently being used for Chinese audiences, given the consequences of a non-compliant model are more severe.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-05-15 22:35:48+00:00
Yep, believe it's a direct result of Atwood's iron-fisted no-bullshit policy. To some extent it is great... don't want it turning into Yahoo Answers, do we? I think folks forget about that part.

But, as you mention they just went too damn far with the medicine.

No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/
by daveatwork | 2025-05-15 22:35:59+00:00
I'd go a step further.. The prof was expressing empathy for the students that made the effort to be on time. They made it.

If you know you're late all the time, then make allowances. 8 hours not enough sleep, go to bed earlier. 1 hour not enough time to wake up, set your alarm to give you 2 hours.

This isn't related to knowing you're sick, just knowing you're late often.

It always makes me wonder when I hear "empathy, tolerance, flexibility" pointed at a group of 30 or more, who need to work around one persons inability to do the same.

I had a co-worker who was always late. I told her she was lying when she said she'd be there at 2. She got miffed. I replied. "You're late so often, do you expect you'll be on time. I know you'll try, but do you really believe you're not going to be late." She paused. "If you know you're very likely going to be late and tell me you will be somewhere at time X, then you are lying."
by Terr_ | 2025-05-15 22:36:06+00:00
> I’m pointing out how strained your “movie-script” (your words, not mine) comparison is. [...] the limited, immutable nature of real scripts [...] a screenplay whose pages are fixed in advance.

You are confused and again attacking an idea nobody else has advanced.

Even in my very first comment starting the thread, I explicitly stated that the "movie-script" is mutable, with alternate phases of "contributing" and "autocompleted" content as it grows.
by sundarurfriend | 2025-05-15 22:36:59+00:00
I was more curious why they chose F# among the many many languages out there, and this kind of list unfortunately is not very useful for that - similar lists exist in pretty much every awesome-$language page out there. They don't give us any idea of how robust or featureful the ecosystem and support is, which are the things that would differentiate "this too supports it, kinda" (which is every major language out there) and "this is really well-supported and ergonomic".
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-15 22:37:08+00:00
Color me skeptical. That missile has to be actively guided in using external systems. The US has extensive defenses in-depth designed to defeat systems that work this way. The Soviets were doing it long before the Chinese were. It is a threat but I don't think the US Navy is losing sleep over it. The US deprecated systems with similar guidance models a long time ago because of their intrinsic vulnerability to defenses.

Also, it can't credibly "destroy" a carrier. The warhead is much too small. You could launch dozens, at high cost, but this is where the attackable single point of failure of these missiles start to become a problem.
by zahlman | 2025-05-15 22:37:42+00:00
> This tallies with my memory of feeling that site moderators had gone on a power trip by closing legitimate questions.

Respectfully: outsiders like the author of this piece are not the ones entitled to decide whether a question is "legitimate", or "valid" (another term I see used all the time by people who have no understanding either of Stack Overflow's standards or its goals).

Reference reading:

What is Stack Overflow’s goal? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770)

How much research effort is expected of Stack Overflow users? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592)

Question Close Reasons - Definitions and Guidance (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476)

How long should we wait for a poster to clarify a question before closing? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263)

A satirical answer to "The rudeness on Stack Overflow is too damn high" (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262791/_/309018#309...)

What is the point of closing questions for details and clarity, debugging details, needs more focus, or very low quality? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405519)

Why should I help close "bad" questions that I think are valid, instead of helping the OP with an answer? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808)

Why is the rate of positively scoring questions and answers steadily declining? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/393032)

When is Stack Overflow going to stop demonizing the quality-concerned users who have made the site a success? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366858)

Is ChatGPT and LLM killing Stack Overflow (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430994)
by lavezzi | 2025-05-15 22:37:45+00:00
> I have been receiving regular spear phishing calls from these guys, or someone who bought the leaked data, with classic tactics like claiming that I need to confirm a potentially fraudulent transaction.

And how long has this been at an increased level? Because i'm not buying the coinbase narrative that they thought this was a systemic issue until they were contacted by the 'cybercriminals'.
by const_cast | 2025-05-15 22:38:50+00:00
Right, what I'm telling you is that the right explicitly does not want to make it more accessible.

They won't even admit there is an accessibility problem, let alone propose any solutions.

Why? Probably because the lack of accessibility is not a side-effect of the law, but rather the sole goal of it, as it has been every single time it's been implemented in the past. But, your guess is as good as mine.
by dinfinity | 2025-05-15 22:39:05+00:00
> This, in turn, leaves "AI" implementations with no new human content to feed off of. Now what?

You seem to be under the impression that AI needs more than all recorded human knowledge up until 2024 to reach the same level as an average SO contributor. It doesn't. Because none of the average SO contributors did.

It is unclear what algorithmic improvements are required to leverage the available data to get AI to AGI, but a lack of data is definitely not the bottleneck.

One could say that these AI systems aren't sharing their solutions (or questions) with other AI systems and that the world would benefit from it if they did, though. Perhaps it's a good idea to have some shared space for AI systems where they share the validated solutions they synthesized.
Show HN: SpeedSketch – Practice figure drawing with timed sketches
by fdf515 | 2025-05-15 22:39:26+00:00
Hi HN,

I built SpeedSketch, a free online tool to help artists practice gesture and figure drawing through timed sketch sessions.

It started as a weekend project when I couldn’t find a distraction-free, lightweight tool to simulate life drawing sessions. SpeedSketch shows a sequence of figure reference images for a set amount of time (30s, 1min, etc.) to encourage rapid sketching and improve visual memory – similar to how art classes run warm-up sessions.

There are no accounts, no ads, no tracking – just open and start drawing.

Try it out here: https://speedsketch.co.uk

I’d love any feedback, especially from artists or anyone interested in learning to draw!
by lupusreal | 2025-05-15 22:40:20+00:00
The term has been in use since the 1940s, pretty much as soon as it was sensible to think about making something that can go that fast. Does your modern perception of "hyper" being a cool word reflect how the word was perceived 80 years ago, or does your perception of the word being cool come from the way the word has since been used to describe such extreme things?

Maybe it was considered cool back then, but I wouldn't be sure of that. Maybe it was just an obscure latin term nerds used. I guess you could search comic book archives for clues. In any case, really fast things are cool, but only figuratively speaking.
by quickthrowman | 2025-05-15 22:42:08+00:00
Bank transactions are reversible, crypto transactions are not.

Also, people do point guns in people’s faces and force them to pay them via Venmo or Cashapp. Google ‘Venmo robbery’ or ‘cashapp robbery’ for plenty of examples. Pointing a gun in someone’s face for $4M in crypto is a lot more lucrative.
by SpecialistK | 2025-05-15 22:42:16+00:00
It's pretty obvious that AI code generation is not up to snuff for mission-critical projects (yet? ever?) - it can prove handy for small hobbyist projects with low stakes and it may provide time-savings and alternative perspectives for those who subsequently know how to sniff out BS.

But even airliner autopilot systems, which are much more mature and have a proven track record, are not trusted as a replacement for two trained experts to have final control.

The overall trend I've seen with AI creations (not just in programming) is that the tech is cool and improving, but people have trouble recognizing where its suitable and where it isn't. I've found chatbots to be fantastic for recipes and cooking advice, or banal conversations I couldn't have with real people (especially after a drink...) and pretty shoddy for real programming projects or creative endeavors. It isn't a panacea and we'd benefit a lot from people recognizing that more.
Show HN: Switchpoint AI – Cut LLM Cost and Improve Performance with Auto Routing
by hmichaelson20 | 2025-05-15 22:42:44+00:00
Hi HN,

We’re building https://www.switchpoint.dev – a drop-in replacement for OpenAI’s API that reduces LLM cost by smartly routing across models (e.g., Claude, Gemini, GPT-4) depending on subject and difficulty of the task.

Why we built this: LLM costs are spiraling—especially for products doing retrieval, agentic reasoning, or even just high-volume chat. We were frustrated with paying GPT-4 rates when most queries didn’t need it. So we built a router that:

- Starts with cheaper/free models (like Llama 8B, 4o-mini, 2.0 flash) - Streams responses and upgrades on failure - Acts like a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint For enterprise, you can define fallback logic and some custom routing logic as well. It’s plug-and-play.

Designed for agents and RAG systems: We’re exploring integrations with open-source coding agents and autonomous frameworks. If you maintain one or use one, we’d love to collaborate, or even just get your thoughts on whether this would help your stack.

We’d love any and all feedback—features, bugs, edge cases, your use cases. Would this be useful to you? Is it solving a real problem?

Thanks for checking it out!
by eftepede | 2025-05-15 22:42:47+00:00
+1 to this. I was using Fastmail and it was very good, but since I'm already paying for Apple One, I decided to switch my e-mail (in my own domain) to iCloud+ to.

The only con I see is: there is no way to add separate 'mailboxes' to it. I can register multiple addresses, but it's still one account, thus one mailbox.
by natesales | 2025-05-15 22:43:47+00:00
An attacker would need to compromise our build pipeline to publish a backdoored VM image [1] and extract key material to forge an attestation from the hardware [2]. The build process publishes a hash of the code to Sigstore’s transparency log [3], which would make the attack auditable.

That said, a sufficiently resourced attacker wouldn’t need to inject a backdoor at all. If the attacker already possesses the keys (e.g. the attacker IS the hardware manufacturer, or they’ve coerced the manufacturer to hand the keys over), then they would just need to gain access to the host server (which we control) to get access to the hypervisor, then use their keys to read memory or launch a new enclave with a forged attestation. We're planning on writing a much more detailed blog post about "how to hack ourselves" in the future.

We actually plan to do an experiment at DEFCON, likely next year where we gives ssh access to a test machine running the enclave and have people try to exfiltrate data from inside the enclave while keeping the machine running.

[1] https://github.com/tinfoilsh/cvmimage

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.04575

[3] https://github.com/tinfoilsh/cvmimage/attestations
by rstuart4133 | 2025-05-15 22:43:52+00:00
> Maybe you're confusing Microsoft's old original interest in browsers - to block a competing app runtime to Windows, with their and Google's current browser interest - as a channel to funnel all users to their services mainly Google (search) and Bing.

Your right - I hadn't considered that aspect. However, on everything bar Android users have to manually install Chrome and set it to the default. You can do that without owning the browser - just publish an extension. To say it again, even if the ban was implemented it looks like it would be ineffective. It's possibly good to remember at this point Apple does not allow Chrome on iOS.

As for splitting the other bits of Google up, I suspect it's going to be so hard it will happen in name only. At the retail end, people don't choose Google products because of things like network effects, they choose it because it's the best or close to it. That's true for Search, Youtube, GMail/Contacts/Calendar, Maps and their ad platform off the top of my head. Android is the exception - it's firmly entrenched because of network effects. But for the rest, if you build a better one the people would come, eventually.

The insurmountable barrier for building a competitor isn't the deep pockets needed until people discover you. People can and do build other mail clients (which is possibly the easiest to do). It's Google's engineering talent. The odds of it being substantially better for the length of time require for those people to arrive must be close to 0. As one example, Bing hasn't been able to pull it off after decades, and Outlook remains a mess. As a current example Gemini consistently ranks at the top of lmarena.ai

At the infrastructure end the situation is worse. Google has built the world's best, most secure infrastructure. Their modus operandi seems to be buy stuff, transplant it their infrastructure and engineering processes, and hope the weed grows into a monster. It normally doesn't (and famously gets killed), but when it does the advantages of transplantation and googles infrastructure tend to lead to world domination. Your watching it happen again right now, as Google develops and deploys the only large scale competitor to NVidia's platform for AI.

To me, a software engineer, breaking youtube, search, gmail or whatever away from Google's infrastructure (and that monorepo) would be decade long and hugely expensive project - if it's possible at all. And if you don't Google gets to charge what they want for using it, keeping most of the profits, and god help us build replacements.
by Syzygies | 2025-05-15 22:44:10+00:00
Yes. The article ran through this point as follows:

"In 1964, a mathematician named Vadim Vizing proved a shocking result: No matter how large a graph is, it’s easy to figure out how many colors you’ll need to color it. Simply look for the maximum number of lines (or edges) connected to a single point (or vertex), and add 1."

I keep wondering why I ever read Quanta Magazine. It takes a pretty generous reading of "need" to make this a correct statement.
by godelski | 2025-05-15 22:44:13+00:00
Dealing with metrics in high dimensions. As you increase dimensionality the variance decreases, leading to indistinguishablity.

You can get some help in high dimensions when you're more concerned with (clearly disjoint) clusters. But this is akin to doing a dimensional reduction, treating independent clusters as individual points. (Say we have set S which has disjoint subsets {S_0,...,S_n}, your new set is now {a_0,...,a_n}, where each a_i is an element representing all elements in S_i. Think like "set of sets") But you do not get help with interrelationships (i.e. d(s_x,s_y) \in S_i \forall x≠y) and I think you can gather that when clusters are not clearly disjoint then we're in the same situation as trying to differentiate inter-cluster.

Understanding this can help you understand why these models (including LLMs) are good in broader concepts like differentiating between obvious things but struggle more in nuance. A good litmus test is to ask them about any subject you have good deep knowledge in. Essentially test yourself for Murray-Gelmann Amnesia. The things are designed for human preference. When they fail they're likely to fail without warning (i.e. in ways that are not so obvious)
by josephcsible | 2025-05-15 22:44:33+00:00
> Car parks of hospitals in prime locations are not just attractive to hospital patients and visitors. They're also attractive to other users, such as those working in the city or sightseeing. High parking fees deter these users, ensuring spaces are available for hospital users.

> High prices prevent hospital users from overstaying. This prevents them doing non-hospital activities (such as shopping) after their hospital appointment or visits and before returning to their cars.

So the problem is that other places in the city don't have enough parking, since if they did, people doing non-hospital activities would park elsewhere even if hospital parking were free. I wish all businesses had to provide enough parking to accommodate all of their employees and customers.